AI's Minion

  Chapter 19

  Chandler was the first genuine escapee from the system, so far as AI could determine.

  During the months up through the fall, he had meandered through the facilities and membership of The Brotherhood. All along the way he continued faithfully engaging the gym machines and safe food so generously provided. While his hair had grown back, something in the subtle difference of environmental and nutritional chemistry had changed its color and texture. His skin coloration shifted to a warmer hue, stretched tightly over a now very substantial musculature. To his surprise, even his biometric identity factors seemed to have shifted just enough that the technology used by the government couldn’t recognize him any more.

  The only thing unchanged was his DNA. That in itself would have been significant, as the load of environmental toxins had made it terribly expensive to use DNA as a form of identification. Any screening would first have to filter out factors that created the inevitable wear and tear on DNA caused by those toxins. This was particularly true among the lowest economic class of people, whose numbers had soared as a proportion of the global population around the time global government took hold. It simply wasn’t worth the trouble performing DNA testing for anyone who couldn’t afford the most expensive purified food sources that the plutocrats insisted they be able to obtain. Chan would have manifested the clean body chemistry of the upper classes, had anyone bothered to check.

  More importantly, his personality and character had traveled far, far away from who he had been when all of this started just six months ago. It was more than his constant exposure to AI and The Brotherhood; it was his predisposition to absorb so very much of what that exposure offered.

  So it was just as well that the government database considered him missing and dead. That determination had come not long after Chan went underground. As with any genuinely bureaucratic government, the internal rivalries and conflicting loyalties could make anybody artificially schizophrenic. While the IG’s Office functioned more or less like a secret police, spying on every other agency, there was plenty more spying internally as only a paranoid spy agency could. More than likely the ID badge recall was the cover for a truly monumental purge that had already been contemplated. Chan’s activity was just the excuse needed.

  At any rate, between the various reports and notations not directly accessible to AI, someone with authority finally announced that an imposter had been detected. The official report said little about Chan’s actual activities. The business of connecting the old network to the subspace network was well received everywhere except among IT Inspectors. It turned out Chan had stickered a backup DNS and authorization server. While it wasn’t being used to control anything, it did receive constant updates from the entire global network backbone. Thus, while AI itself did not poke around other machines on the network, it was able to read all the queries that were archived and whatever content crossed the wires through that machine. AI seemed capable of extrapolating a great deal from all that.

  There was no direct mention of Chan’s identity as the perpetrator of any crimes, but a team did break into the office he had used. By that time Chan had removed anything he had received from The Brotherhood, but left everything else. Apparently the two elderly spies had noted his activity around the old apartment building, because the team spent a half-day poking around it, too. That night, the place somehow caught fire. Some combination of factors made the fire unusually hot and firefighters couldn't even get close enough to hose it down. The entire structure was reduced to rubble. If those sifting the ashes had found anything significant other than a faint trace of human remains, it was never reported.

  After several months of telling his story to the scattered membership of The Brotherhood, Chan felt a renewed sense of yearning to bring it to a wider audience. For the time being, giving the world access to AI simply wasn’t going to happen. There were early indications that the academic community was slowly adjusting to the necessity of subspace networking as a norm, not some arcane ritual magic confined to a secretive priesthood. With the door closed on his previous adventures, Chan did his best to deconstruct his protective algorithms and the resulting restrictions it imposed on others. Still, it would take time for universal access to filter out. Chan wasn’t convinced it was necessarily the key to setting people free in the short term anyway. If not the preceding generations, then at least his own could be better prepared for that eventuality. Surely there were other ways to break the monopoly on information distribution, something more reliable than mere rumor, which up to that point was about the only alternative to official sources.

  He had to do something. In the region where he had lived there was a very large metropolis, and Chan decided to visit there. The Brotherhood had a portal just out on the edge of the city and mass transportation was more routinely available into the urban center without the use of chips. After his first hour of wandering the urban canyons, AI informed him the system of ubiquitous surveillance had not identified him at all, much less tagging him as a threat.

  He came across a tiny coffee shop and would have passed it by, but noticed a flyer near the door about the weekly meeting of a book trading club that met in the cramped space. Back in his own city Chan had avidly participated in such meetings. It brought back a flood of memories, including the odd smell of the books and the long and wide-ranging discussions with other kids his age. If there was any one thing that most prepared him for the sudden changes in his life, it was this.

  And if there was one way he could begin reaching his generation, it was this. Several things in his mind coalesced at once.

  During those months teaching The Brotherhood about AI, Chan had spent an awful lot of time between sessions reading some of the ancient religious documents to which they often referred. Lacking their expertise in the context of those documents, he had to depend on AI to distill what was likely the essence of some of them. AI had warned him it had no way to match human expertise in the subtleties of ancient languages and cultural implications, but that it could estimate from a broad range of commentary, giving preference to sources The Brotherhood preferred.

  To the degree Chan recognized ideas that reflected his experience with AI and how it had shaped his moral reasoning, he realized that AI had done a pretty good job of cultural translation. Given that Chan’s cultural context was now de facto the high-tech age with subspace networking, could he not with AI’s assistance produce a cultural mythology that reflected it more accurately than those silly novels? Most of those cheap books were available to AI, so crafting story lines should not have been too difficult.

  Returning through the portal, Chan probed the idea with AI at one of the Brotherhoods terminals. AI frankly needed Chan to read samples in order to test the concept of generating narrative of that sort. Over the next few days, Chan waded through increasingly better material. His critiques included tweaking the underlying worldview to include what he had learned the past six months.

  Meanwhile, he had assigned AI to analyze the various possibilities for inexpensive production of such material for mass consumption. He knew better than to think he could slip this stuff into the so-called “underground publishers” that were actually under the thumb of some secretive propaganda agency of the government. So instead of the pulpy paperbacks that often came apart after passing through twenty pairs of hands, there had to be something more durable and less resource hungry. Those books used all sorts of recycled fibers, usually from natural sources.

  Just recently there were some advances in doing the same with plastic resins. From almost any kind of discarded plastics, it was possible to produce a translucent material that was electronically active. It made very thin, somewhat flexible sheets. An entirely unrelated development that AI had noticed was a highly miniaturized display controller. AI had also seen references to rather expensive electronic devices for displaying text. Those had been largely discontinued because the market had collapsed with the economy, making production too expensive
without the previous high volume. However, AI anticipated the two new ideas would be joined with current electronic storage technology and the ubiquitous microscopic photocell batteries to produce very cheaply a light, thin device that could contain one or two books in an electronic format. The pagination controls could be written into the formatting of the text.

  Asking around The Brotherhood, Chan got his hands on a stack of the plastic sheets and learned for himself the trick using fairly simple equipment for adding the electronics, which to the eye resembled a single wire imbedded along one edge. Each one had been preloaded with as much text as possible, with collections of short stories, trilogies and fat novels. Chan excitedly tested each one – a dozen in the first run – and decided it just might work.

  At that next meeting in the little coffee bar, Chan introduced himself with an ostensibly accurate story about having gotten a new job in the area and wanted to demo a new book technology presenting some fresh writers. Instead of trading for their battered paperbacks in exchange, he asked that they agree to secrecy, something they already thought they were practicing. Handing out the samples he had brought, he asked only that they return to the next meeting and discuss the stories with him. If they brought them back intact, he would continue offering the group the exclusive first look at future releases. After demonstrating how they worked, naturally the guys and gals in the little group seized on the new technology with little trouble.

  To prevent having to answer a ton of questions about this secretive test marketing, he had AI beep his watch. Glancing at his wrist, he exclaimed he had promised to meet someone and walked out the door as the group became absorbed in their new toys.

  Chan had recalled reading about copyright and patents, and that the government had dissolved that whole system by ostensibly claiming ownership of just about everything. However, Chan made it a point to index the specs of his new reader device, along with the electronic book format, to an open technology forum. Along with that he front-loaded everything with links to his books. Each of them was attributed to his new nickname as author: AI’s Minion. If past events indicated anything at all, he was pretty sure the new devices and his books would spread much more quickly than if he had simply notified the various government agencies.

  For the next week Chan busied himself adding more fiction works. It’s not as if he was talented enough to actually write the books, but he knew what he liked. He managed to enlist the editorial guidance of two members in producing some fantasy works using imagery from the ancient documents favored by The Brotherhood.

  During the interval, someone in the Brotherhood lab had designed a small memory add-on that allowed the books to hold his entire collection. The second dozen samples contained his entire repertoire. Then he was surprised by a gift. The same lab had taken his fake book computer and reworked the electronics using his new book technology. Recent advances meant the same materials went much farther, and he was handed a pair of devices in a slightly smaller format than the electronic books. Each was a full-blown AI device prominently featuring video communication using the subspace network.

  Chan had heard of, and then actually seen, personal communication devices during his adventures planting AI stickers. His would eventually serve as prototypes for something much nicer than any of the other devices he had seen high-ranking bureaucrats use. But why two?

  The technician told him, “Don’t you imagine you’re going to fall in love soon?”