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.