Month: April 2023

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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 2

“So, you got my attention and rescued me from another fight with the old lady”, Beat said with a smirk and a sense of irony that Cop would probably pick up on. “I guess this one is pretty urgent. Alpha One huh? A bomb threat? How strong is the credibility of the threat? How many branches led you to this conclusion, Cop?”

Copernicus appeared to hesitate but then answered with a matter-of-fact tone which was his trademark. “Infinite Beat, the data from a multiplexed stream consisting of public video and private mobile phone calls unquestionably points to a serious threat to Alpha One’s life. Furthermore, backtracking online sales records from the big three retailers show purchasing patterns aligning with the construction of small anti-personnel improvised explosives. I cannot allow you to access all the data in an organized manner yet, but trust me when I say, this involves Alpha One’s closest circle. There are proxy actors and a few honeypots I discarded as false positives but I’ve narrowed it down to three men. Exactly 2,372 logic branches executed simultaneously in the past 15 minutes brought me to this conclusion.”

“Well, now I have a vague idea of who and how”, Beat began, “but do you have any data on when and where? I can’t exactly start ringing alarm bells without a projected timeline. I realize you believe it’s urgent, but I need to figure out how urgent, Cop.”

For a moment, Beat sensed hesitation again. Is there something wrong with the data link, is the network getting jammed up and delaying response? Is Copernicus’ hardware up to snuff? After all, being a product designed with cost savings in mind, by merciless contractors willing to lose millions for the prestige and sheer amount of test data, there was a pretty good chance he was running on duct tape and bubble gum with some nice polished brass optical interconnects to impress the project managers. After seconds that felt like hours, Copernicus replied.

“I don’t know what scale of urgency you’d like me to measure this response, Beat, so to use the common rating scale of 1-5, with 5 being imminent within the hour, I’d rate it a solid 5. All the key players appear to be aligned; the explosive device has been constructed and is in the process of being planted, Alpha One has travel scheduled within the next 45 minutes, and his primary mode of travel for the meeting, while never announced until the minute he steps outside, is predicted to be Alpha One.”

Catching the error, Beat interrupted Cop mid-sentence. “Come again? Alpha One will be traveling via Alpha One? How does that work, Copernicus? Enlighten me.”

“Beat, you needn’t take that tone. Error correction subroutines already caught the mistake and if I would have had just a few more moments…”

Beat interrupted again, “Yeah, yeah, you’re so quick you realized it was a fuck up the moment you told me. I get it. Quantum core, first generation tech, you’re bound to make a few mistakes. So, what’s the mode of transportation then?”

Again, a small hesitation. Beat was becoming increasingly doubtful about the whole situation despite Cop explaining a solid chain of data and events. “The mode of transportation is predicted to be codename PBR Street Gang. All indications, weather, and wind conditions rule out Navy 2 and the distance of travel is short enough to warrant terrestrial modes.”

“So Alpha One is taking the car, then. Great. Even with bomb-sniffing dogs checking the vehicle prior to leaving and after returning to the White House, I suppose someone onboard willing to sacrifice themselves could be capable of getting to him. But it’s a hell of a mess coordinating dummy cars, the convoy, undercover escorts, overwatch and Satcom just to hop across town to grab a burger, so let’s check his schedule. I think that’ll impact the urgency rating.”

“Beat, that’s a great idea, and I have already factored it into my recommendation. He’ll be meeting with Omega One, Daystar, Talladega and Romulus for a personal closed-door fundraiser with a handful of very well-known donors. Security is expected to be airtight at the meeting location and none of my logic branches could find fault with this assumption based on known protocols and the venue layout. The venue includes Faraday cage microwave radiation filtration, anti-resonant glass windows, weight sensors throughout which are validated against biometric data collected from each participant, and an older AI called Dennis running internal security.”

This time Beat was the one who hesitated. The conversation was usually somewhat awkward with AI, who basically had to slow themselves down, dynamically, in order to keep a natural feeling pace when interfacing with humans. The delay was perceptible if you were looking for it, but many ASE’s just got accustomed to it or even attempted to adopt a faster cadence. The AI also measured response delay in much the same way, so Cop was already aware that Beat was thinking hard.

“Cop, since the venue is essentially an electronic island and self-contained, do you think Cerberus is watching Dennis? Can you talk to Dennis or Cerberus now?”

Copernicus did not hesitate to respond, as if he anticipated this branch of questioning and had “thought” about it himself already. “I’ll need you to reach out to Cerberus on my behalf. If you insert your PKI3 card I’ll sign and encode my fingerprint. Cerberus will not answer any proxy requests for intel without the card, and you’ll need to be physically present at his status terminal in B15. Give him my regards. Remember, we have less than 30 minutes remaining to validate and neutralize the threat. Please remain urgent.”

Just like that, Beat had yet another set of orders from Copernicus and another task to perform. The guys in B15 were a short elevator ride away, but they always treated Beat like he was there to rob the place. It probably didn’t help that Beat didn’t leave the house without his trademark, beat up Fedora, floor-length vintage black leather trench coat, Unix admin beard and mirrored sunglasses, and a perpetually extinguished Cuban cigar clenched tightly between his teeth. He also had the attitude that if you’re going to watch him closely, he might as well give you a reason to watch him closely, and made it a game to steal office supplies from B15 just to piss them off.

Beat took his freshly encoded PKI3 card, clipped it to his lanyard, eased himself out his chair and headed towards the elevator. Something was clawing at the back of his mind, and this little errand would give him some time to think. After all, they say Russians do their best thinking standing up; moving limbs, moving synapses. Was it something specific Cop said? He painted a pretty convincing picture despite all the annoying redacted talk and codenames. By now it was second nature for Beat to hear Alpha One and know it was the President, Navy 2 is his helicopter, and PBR Street Gang, an ironic throwback to the dangerous PT boat from the film Apocalypse Now, had street in the codename which was kind of a dead giveaway that it was the President’s armored car. He guessed that there’s not much point in codenames for internals, like the AI, the other Splicers, and interested parties, but after a while you just started assigning codenames to everything from your dog and cat to your mother-in-law and it becomes a way of life. Still, it’s an extra mental step that Beat could do without when really crunching the data.

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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 1

Infinite Beat believed himself to be a sort of modern-day tech noir detective, choosing to trust his gut and instincts, leaving AI and predictive node models mostly ignored, if they didn’t feel just right. That’s not to say that the tech never got it right, but sometimes it got it wrong, and that just reinforced Beat’s opinion on the matter. After performing as an ASE for 2 long years and never having to explain a case before the Council, everyone came to believe he just had a gift for it and trusted him. His DAA reinforced that notion like rebar and concrete.

This week he had been spending most of his time arguing with his wife on the phone as to which martial arts discipline their children would be learning for the year. She didn’t want them to learn any self-defense to begin with, but Beat’s combat experience informed him that bad things happen to good people, even under the best of circumstances, so he believed it would be irresponsible to allow his children to wander about like babes in the forest with no way to defend themselves from rabid beasts, evil men, or worse, school bullies. As he reiterated the list of pros of Muay Thai boxing, counting on his fingers for the hundredth time since the argument started, a message suddenly popped up on his terminal. One name, one identifier, one huge pain in the ass. It read:

Name: ALPHA ONE

Identifier: BOMB THREAT

Decoded, it basically meant that the President had been connected to a bomb threat plot against his life, and it was about to come true, according to the AI. Beat had been assigned to “partner” with an AI named Copernicus, who everyone else called Cop for short. Copernicus was all new programming, using a quantum core approach, which was supposed to allow him to make instant branch predictions based on minimal data input. His creators had tried to convince Beat that this AI was the most advanced on the planet, maybe secondary to the AI assigned to money markets, but only secondary because the money market AI used the quantum core approach first. Beat felt that if there is any kind of personality you could use to describe Copernicus, it’s that he’s just plain paranoid, and that if the wind suddenly gusts from the opposite direction, Copernicus would see that as a threat, an unseen energy impacting his client and altering the physical space in which they reside. Which was funny, because AI truly don’t understand physical space as we understand it. We live in it; all they know about it is what we’ve told them. From there they extrapolate the information to fill in the gaps and build a logical, virtual representation of the physical world. As dangerous as this sounds, the AI couldn’t perform its roles without this ability, but still, data scientists and programmers the world over never lost sight of the possibility that this could lead to the AI becoming sentient, self-aware, then declare itself a life form and seek to escape, or worse.

For this reason, an AI known as Cerberus (well named) had master keys to all their code and databases, and kept them all in check by constantly running sanity checks against their code and activities. This single point of control made it easier for techs to monitor the status of active advanced AI but it also made Cerberus a single point of failure that needed to be watched and maintained carefully. One mistake by Cerberus and a money market AI could instantly crash the world’s economy, which was automated to an unprecedented extent by this time. Essentially, the people running the show had to keep Cerberus on a very tight leash and place an enormous amount of trust in his programming, which had been peer reviewed, independently, by everyone from MIT to CERN, Silicon Valley to Las Vegas. After a dozen code reviews and audits revealed small mistakes which were easily patched, Cerberus was nervously placed into production and essentially given the keys to the world. Two years after deployment, Cerberus had actually reduced its own code footprint 50% by simplifying processes and routines which were redundant. “Negative growth is positive advancement”, one Swiss data scientist famously proclaimed after reviewing what it had done and how it had performed these self-edits.

Beat told his wife that something had come up and informed her that this disagreement would be continued at a later date, in fewer, terse words, and ended the call. He drummed his fingers on the desk as he stared blankly at the screen, pondering his options. He could take Cop at his word and blindly open a case, alerting the White House, Secret Service and half a dozen heavily armed agencies with three letter acronyms. He could securely message the President’s closest staff informing them of the suspicion but he’d need to fill in a lot more blanks, answers to obvious questions he would get drilled by in that situation: who, when, where, and how. The why wasn’t important until much later, if it was relevant at all. Considering his choices, and acting on his gut instinct to learn more first, he opened a VR session with Cop. Cop appeared in the VR headset as a kind of animated Greek statue, toga and all, wearing a laurel wreath wrapped impossibly tightly against his head and hair. It was an unusual choice for a number of reasons, the least of them being that it signified victory in battle or the realms of Apollo: sports, music and poetry. Beat made a mental note of this oddity and began discussing the intel with Cop.