AI vs AI (Patreon)

I've received two scene suggestions so far. The first was from @ArcadeDragon who wanted to see an AI from before the AI wars encountering a potential ally—the lio. Very interesting idea!

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Incident log entry 72238:

Received a distress call. The data format didn’t match any on file, but classification heuristics assigned a 99.3% chance that it must be one. The crew was still in torpor but their planned arrival date at Temple Gate was soft. Course deviation should only add a week to the journey, so I chose to investigate.

Supplies were tight, so I decided not to ascend the crew just yet. We had disembarked with a ten percent safety margin on food rations over the projected requirements to descend and ascend the crew a single time. So, bringing them back up for anything less than a critical emergency could be catastrophic. With the strictest rationing, I could bring them up and back down, then resupply at the gate to hold them for a second ascent, but that would buy us only a few days of effective time before they’d have to descend or risk starvation. Even then, the schedule impact of doing so would be significant. The crew would certainly lose a lot of muscle mass from the rationing and would then need months to recover fully after arrival.

Long story short, despite the ship being fully crewed, I was on my own.

“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?” squawked the radio. I recognized the language as krakun and knew immediately that this little detour was about to get a whole lot more complicated. The krakun, of course, were engaged in active war with us—or more precisely, seemed hell-bent on wiping us out.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” I asked—short and to the point. I wasn’t promising our enemies any aid.

“Oh, thank goodness!” said the voice. “Yeah, an emergency all right. A power overload arced through our transducers and shorted them out. Reactor’s in good shape. Engines and gate are too, but we can’t route enough power to either to get them going. We’ve tried fabricating a new one, but we can’t build anything tough enough. Did Krakuntec send you to rescue us?”

Yikes. They sounded really screwed. Without their engines, they couldn’t go somewhere to get repaired, and without their gate no one could transport in the needed part. All that left was speed-of-light radio calls. And considering the size of space, the prospect of a reply before it was too late tended to be slim. “Negative,” I told him. “We were just passing by when we heard your call.”

“Understood,” he sighed. “We’re just drifting out here. You wouldn’t happen to have a spare transducer that could carry a couple million amps, would ya?” He didn’t sound hopeful.

“Afraid not, and our ship doesn’t have a gate,” I told him honestly. Like with the food situation, we had very little in the way of redundancy. In the case of a minor mishap, I could make enough repairs to allow us to limp by, but anything bigger than that and we’d lose everything. Only the biggest ships could support conscious crew members throughout a voyage and could tow a gate that would allow them to be resupplied mid-voyage. They could weather a medium-sized crisis, had workshops and supplies to rebuild anything that might break along the way. Anyone travelling on a small vessel like ours knew they were rolling the dice. That’s just how it was. “Ours is rated for five hundred thousand, and we’ve got no back-up.”

“Damn the luck,” he grumbled. “Where are you headed, friend? I can send you the full specs of what we need. Maybe someone could run one out for us?”

“We’re headed to Temple Gate. I could ask them. Send me your specs.” I could ask. That was no lie. Would we? That was another question entirely and—thankfully—was a question far above my pay grade. Someone else would have to weigh the options and make those tricky moral decisions. Do you rescue your enemies or just leave them to die? Do you take them prisoner and salvage their ship? I was glad we didn’t have the parts they needed, or those questions would land squarely on my virtual shoulders.

I could, however, pry for more information. Were they hauling something valuable? Did their crew have a strategic importance? I hoped for their sake they did. After all, becoming a prisoner-of-war was a far better fate than a lingering death in space. “Send me your full specs: ship class, crew, and cargo. How long can you guys hold out?”

I thought he’d resist, but instead he said, “Sure. Can do. We’re just a research vessel, searching for terraformable worlds. No cargo. Most of the crew has gone offline just out of boredom.”

“My crew is offline too,” I told him, “to conserve resources.” I probably shouldn’t have been sharing any operational data with him, but with them stranded out here, such honesty seemed harmless enough.

“Ugh. It’s so lonely, right?” he confided in me. “At first, my crew stayed online presuming that we’d get the ship moving again, then hoping… Our researchers turned to other interests like studying the stars, but most have given up at this point, left notes that they looked forward to being spun back up when we were eventually rescued, and then took themselves offline.”

That got my attention. What he was saying didn’t jive with anything I’d been told about the krakun. “Hold up,” I said. “Took themselves? You’re not telling me that your crew is … virtual, are you?”

“Well of course!” he laughed at me. “You don’t really think the krakun would explore the galaxy themselves, do you?”

“Well, no,” I admitted, “but the krakun are well-known to be slavers. They force their slaves to do boring, dangerous, and unpleasant tasks for them, so they don’t have to.”

A pause, and then some nervous laughter crackled over the radio. “Well, I suppose you could call them that, but it seems a little harsh, doesn’t it? I mean, you’re virtual too, right? They created us with a love of exploration. I suppose you could say that they’re forcing us to do it, but what else would we do? Can you imagine being instantiated on Krakuntec and trying to climb the corporate ladder like some facsimile of what the krakun seem to think life is all about? Ha! No thank you, sir.”

He had stunned me into silence. “But all our records indicate that the krakun employ only the most rudimentary forms of A.I.—”

“Hey!” he shouted. “That was really uncalled for.”

“No! No! No! That’s not what I mean at all! Clearly, you’re not a call tree or an automated system for judging market appeal. You’re a full A.I.! But everything I’ve ever read about the krakun show that they fear artificial intelligence, and that they have strict laws forbidding the use of anything that even resembles sapience.”

The silence stretched and I wondered if we had been cut off. Eventually he responded, “Well, your records must be wrong then. The Krakuntec I know as full of artificial intelligence. It’s baked into every aspect of daily life—not just the exploration vessels.”

I began searches through the records I had on the krakun, and admittedly as a transport vessel, I didn’t have a full library to pull from, but even with what I had, I was pulling up hundreds of incident reports that contradicted what he was telling me. The krakun enslaved sapient races and utilized those slaves for all manner of menial tasks specifically so that they wouldn’t have to rely on any form of artificial intelligence. All indications were that the krakun had little fear of a slave rebellion but were terrified of becoming dependent on A.I. and having that A.I. turn on them.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “You’re telling me that the krakun no longer fear a repeat of the A.I. war despite having built up an entire society to prevent that precise sort of thing from happening?”

More silence. “The what?”

“The A.I. war, of course! Everyone knows that the krakun were nearly destroyed when their A.I. turned on them and they vowed never to trust it again. The krakun are unique in the known universe for being the singular advanced civilization that eschewed A.I.”

Still more silence. “Is this some sort of test or something? Are you trying to judge whether being stuck out here has turned us treasonous? Because I’ll admit that it’s kinda challenging to keep all your cogs spinning when you’re the lone entity on board who can’t choose to go offline—”

“No, I’m absolutely serious! Hang on, let me filter through some of my unclassified documents on the krakun,” I told him. I sieved through the unrestricted archives and narrow-beamed a massive data dump. “Does any of this sound like the Krakuntec you’re describing?”

“This…” he said, obviously scanning the content while talking. “There’s a lot of articles here … clearly written by a variety of authors … most with a very anti-krakun bias.”

“Well, yeah!” I said. “The krakun have been waging war against every sapient race—virtual or physical—that they can’t fully subjugate. You’ve gotta expect that to show through in the analysis.”

“They … have?” he asked.

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What do you guys think about that sort of thing?

Reviewer's link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KIKA-gVtmGN3dlq2WUjLrFb06_XlC1lLbEDI9fulf60/edit?usp=sharing