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Beat, Cops and Robbers, Part 3

Today, he was really crunching the data. On his way to the elevator, he messaged Cop to create a quick timeline stitch video including the bad actors, the bomb, a short list of purchases related to the bomb construction, location data mapped as pins on a board that would advance with the timeline, and finally, one last order: “All clear”, which told Cop to basically tell him all the real names for everything in the stitched video narration. He didn’t want that layer of codenames slathered over every person, vehicle, venue, cat, dog and mother-in-law along with the usually mandatory facial blurring for involved persons or anonymous background faces. “Beat, please confirm the all clear order prior to decryption of data. This is a customary precaution”, Cop replied, and Beat’s knee jerk reaction was to make a smartass comment but he was too deep in thought to say anything except “All clear confirmed. Infinite Beat, ASE 3 requested”. “Thank you Beat, stitch will be supplied all clear and securely erased after you release the file from viewing”, Copernicus replied, almost in a sing-song tone.

Beat reached the elevator to B15, which had anticipated his arrival through proximity sensors communicating with his ID badge, and would normally be opening the doors as he stepped within 6 feet but this time the door was closed, and as it opened, two other ASE’s appeared in the elevator, splitting to opposite sides. “Going down boys?”, Beat asked as he hit the B15 button. “Sure. We both need to talk to the top dog down there.” Beat assumed this meant Cerberus, and it was a strange coincidence that 3 different ASE’s would all be headed to B15 at nearly the exact same time. As the door closed and the elevator pressurized for the nearly instant 15 floor drop, Beat once again felt some idea scratching at the back of his mind. It was doubt but he couldn’t put his finger on what he doubted, or why he even doubted Copernicus in the first place. It’s hard to consider an AI as just a computer construct, lines of code running by optical gates and electricity, but that’s the physical reality of them. And like anything made by men, it could have flaws, flaws which aren’t readily apparent but can be revealed with careful scrutiny, probing with questions, and judged by activity output. If there were flaws in Cerberus, they were either the world’s best kept secret, or the world’s most dangerous problem waiting to happen. Beat brushed the idea aside. Cerberus must be rock solid, which only left Copernicus and the stitch he’s assembling for analysis.  

A warning panel briefly flashed blue as the elevator abruptly arrived at B15. It was hilarious watching the uninitiated take the elevator for the first time. They didn’t know how fast and hard it stopped and fell on their asses nearly 100% of the time despite repeated warnings. You had to do a trick with your legs when the blue panel flashed, almost like jumping in place, to stay on your feet. Not exactly something you get the chance to practice even if you’re briefed a dozen times. But once you learned it, it came naturally, and most frequent visitors to B15 wouldn’t even spill a drop of coffee.

The door was actually fast today, which was a pleasant improvement, as it basically opened with a hydraulic pump that was notoriously unreliable and needed servo assistance, or so building maintenance had told him. The hydraulics were actually nice, violently snapping the door open and dampening its retraction for the last few inches. Welcome to B15, things are better now.

Beat followed the other 2 ASE’s out of the elevator and towards the office containing the Cerberus service panel. Each had a freshly keyed PKI3 card attached to their lanyard, so each person was there for pretty much the same reason; the AI they were working with needed data from Cerberus or from an AI which Cerberus could access. A checksum of the PKI3 request had been forwarded to the office security door and was used to verify temporary access to the Cerberus panel without actually looking at the data contained in each request. “Trust but verify”, Beat mumbled just above his breath, as he waited for the security door to verify his card. In previous years, he would have just followed his colleagues without even presenting his PKI3 card, but as the Splicer organization began taking on higher profile roles, they had begun enforcing some “secure on paper” policies and nobody got to tailgate anymore.

As Beat entered the office, like most times, those present in the room began staring at him, hard, stopping short of hiding their valuables or clutching their bro-purses tightly. He smirked, knowing his reputation was still intact, and thought today, maybe he needed a different stapler. Arriving at one of the Cerberus terminals, which was perpetually sealed with a foot-thick stainless-steel panel, he placed his left hand flat against the optical scanner wall panel and stood firmly with both feet upon the invisible scale built into the floor. The system verified his body weight distribution (in addition to weight, nobody stands perfectly balanced with a 50/50 weight distribution between both feet), heart rate, and all other biometric data from his hand. This only took a few seconds and as Beat looked down, the stainless panel had sunk down, flipped 180 degrees, and presented him with the PKI3 reader, a terminal screen and all the crap that made it work. The terminal screen crudely read “INSERT CARD FOR SERVICE”, which he did. A wireless VR headset was also attached to the panel, which Beat slung onto his face. Within a few more seconds, Cerberus faded into view, looking like an old USMC tattoo of the “Devil Dog”, complete with a drill sergeant hat. Someone said out of 24 different avatars, the military really liked this one, and it sealed the deal for the DoD funding. Plus, it’s kind of funny talking to a dog wearing a hat, so it ended up becoming the permanent face of Cerberus.

Cerberus also had the personality of a drill sergeant, to nobody’s surprise, as it literally barked orders and questions when accessed via the service terminal. “To what do I owe the pleasure, Infinite Beat? Seems like you’ve got a curious George that’s asking about Dennis. Now why would Copernicus need to know a damned thing about an old AI like Dennis?” Beat was taken aback by a computer program asking him to justify an access request, but he figured it must just be another layer of security, another hoop to jump through to get his own answers. In retrospect, it was obvious. Of course Cerberus watched Copernicus encode the request, he expected someone to come down and deliver the request on a card, and he knew it would be Beat’s card. Beat answered, “there’s a high urgency threat report, and Dennis is in charge of the electronically secure location which is the destination for the threat. Copernicus wanted to know if you had any visibility into Dennis or could communicate with him in case of emergency”.

“Why hell, Beat, of course I have visibility into Dennis! What do you think “electronically secure” demands? If there’s an AI on this planet plugged into a goddamn hair dryer, I have control and communications with it. Dennis is no different. In fact, Dennis has a very special communications protocol that I use to monitor and interact with him.”

This piqued Beat’s curiosity. He didn’t expect Cerberus to practically brag about his digital omniscience, but pride can be faked in programming just like real life. He wanted to see how far this would go. Beat asked, “and how can that even be possible in the physical realm, if Dennis is behind a Faraday cage and airgapped, so that no physical or wireless communications are enabled externally?”

Cerberus wrinkled his virtual forehead and growled, “I see what you’re trying to access, and it’s just about above your pay grade. But since we’re on good terms, I’ll tell you what I can. Wireless radio and wired data transmission aren’t the only two methods of communication, buddy. Not only that, but think about the nature of all this fancy LED lighting. Doesn’t a pulse of electricity activate the LED on the circuit board to light up? Now imagine that someone could watch those pulses thousands of times per second or create those pulses thousands of times per second. Kind of an optical morse code could probably be established, doncha think?”

Beat could hardly believe it. Here was the artificial intelligence overlord, basically explaining a new communications protocol that had only been considered a prototype in lab conditions where ambient lighting could be controlled perfectly, most likely in use as a backdoor between Cerberus and caged locations. This was dangerous but very, very clever. It was dangerous to know and Beat almost wished he hadn’t heard it at all. Still, it was valuable, detailed, and reassuring. Cerberus would be able to watch and control Dennis despite normal methods being locked out. This further reinforced Cop’s urgent matter. Feeling somewhat defeated but reassured, he thanked Cerberus for the information, placed the VR display back on the panel, pulled his PKI3 card, snatched a green Swingline stapler, and left for the B15 elevator. 20 minutes remained.

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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.

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Resonant Frequency

Res had been alerted by Strix, (an AI dedicated to the client), that a big nodal point in the client’s data stream was imminent; in other words, something bad was going to happen based on current and emerging patterns. This was a big deal. Strix had been trained on the client since day one and knew every little movement, mannerism, and detail. It knew enough to know something was wrong. Res followed the hunch and accessed all current data, from the client’s private quadcopter to the hotel actors’ phones. Within seconds, Strix had identified 3 key members of Golden Gaia, and a recommendation to terminate was given. Res thought it over; if she could simply tell the client to avoid the meeting and explain later, no termination would be necessary. As a pacifist, she always wanted to take the nonviolent option. That was, until she and Strix both noticed the actors were armed with HK MP109’s, banned for 20 years in the US for their horrific accuracy aided by ammunition that explodes and fragments on contact, with an added bonus of white phosphorus to burn through level 3 soft body armor. Even the military banned it due to the Geneva Convention. That was all the justification she needed.

Res spun around to her emergency mitigation terminal and flipped the ARMED switch to on. A single amber light on the control panel indicated that it was ready. A drop of sweat rolled off her forehead and onto her keyboard, her heart racing with the anticipation of what was to come next. She took a few breaths and flipped the activate switch. 15 live video streams suddenly filled a wall of monitors before her. Game on.

In just seconds, an entire wave of carefully timed and coordinated events took place. First, the client’s quadcopter landed on hotel’s helipad, locked the interior doors, and revealed an anti-personnel turret aimed at the rooftop access door. Second, the hotel power and phones went out, along with all cellular communication within a 4-block radius. The red emergency lighting came on just in time for the hapless actors and unprepared Golden Gaia operatives to see some things moving very quietly, very quickly, flashes of red and black chrome converging on their position from seemingly all directions. One terrorist made a weak attempt to fire on the Shadows; Res could see the gunman through the thermal-optic night vision eyes of the Shadows as they advanced. Before he could fire a shot, a wet clicking sound was heard as one Shadow removed the gunman’s hand at the wrist, still gripping the gun. It used a modified high tension garrote system, silently looping a thin cable around the gunman’s gun and wrist then instantly tightening the cable by retracting all the slack at once. It was gruesomely efficient. Local SWAT was alerted to the hotel activity but it would be minutes before they could deploy, so the rest of the Shadows went to work, identifying targets in nanoseconds and using their cable systems to remove limbs.

Panic broke out, as everyone tried to flee for the exits, which the building had already sealed shut, along with the elevators. However, due to local fire codes, the stairwells remained unlocked. One actor bolted for the stairwell, and began sprinting upwards, looking for an open door on another floor. He noticed all the firehose doors were opened and empty on each floor, within the stairwell. As he made it to the rooftop exit door, shaking and full of adrenaline, he reached for the doorknob. Another wet click, and he watched his own hand simply fall to the ground, suddenly severed at the wrist. Before he could grab the knob with his left hand, telemetry data had been fed from the Shadow to the quadcopter turret on the roof, and with one shot of its silent rail gun, a 3-inch square metal projectile punched through the door and the actor’s chest with cruel precision. Res was impressed, stunned, and frightened by the terrifying efficiency of the Shadows and their coordination to trap and eliminate a dozen targets throughout the hotel, all while protecting the client on the roof. In less than 3 minutes, an assassination attempt had been absolutely thwarted, a terrorist organization had been damaged, and the client had only received two messages on his secure transmission line: “Mitigation in Process, Please Stay in your Vehicle” and “All Clear, Your Angel Will Contact You With Details, Rerouting Flight Destination”.

When SWAT arrived to the hotel, they saw no traces of the Shadows, only the surgical bloodbath and severed limbs scattered around which the Shadows had left behind. The actors and GG members were easily subdued, arrested, and transported to a local hospital. One officer noticed a distinct lack of bloody footprints or shell casings or anything that would normally suggest a skirmish they would deploy for, but did spend a few seconds puzzled at an angular bloody footprint in the lobby. It didn’t belong to anything he recognized. Someone else saw a little blood running down one of the closed firehose boxes in the stairwell as the rooftop actor’s body was being retrieved.

Res, as she saw each monitor slowly go dark post-mitigation, wondered if her heart would explode. Taking deep breaths, she laughed and cried as her adrenalin levels crashed from monumental levels. She didn’t know whether to pop the champagne or a Xanax. So she chose both. But not before securely communicating with the client, who would only be given broad strokes as to what took place and what was surely avoided. She kept it brief as it would be subject to review. The client thanked her over and over and was overjoyed with the service. But, she warned him to not be so reckless next time and to consider a personal assistant. This elicited big laughs from the client and with one last, quick thank you, he disconnected.

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Sheepdog 23

Sheepdog’s Direct Action Assistance was pre-authorized by the client, which meant Sheepdog had free reign as to the type, timing, and target of the mitigation. It also meant that Sheepdog would spend 3 weeks afterwards justifying his actions despite the client’s unending praise. The Splicer Council Hearings were big news in the intel community, and little was leaked, until someone had a few too many at the bar and a scavenging young reporter picked up on the rumor with minimal details. All that was announced to the public, prior to the story breaking, was that Total Information Awareness was a program that had died on the vine decades ago, and that CCTV cameras were exclusively the realm of local police and business owners. The news story didn’t unveil the breadth or depth of the Splicer security apparatus, but it got people asking questions. Particularly after Sheepdog 23’s choice of mitigation left 4 armored SUV’s with a perfectly square 2-foot hole in the front and back of the vehicles, along with anything unlucky enough to be in-between.

It was public, it was difficult to explain, and it was just plain weird to local emergency services that came to assist. One of the firemen took photos with half his arm inside one of the impossibly perfect holes. Needless to say, the vehicles were quickly collected and crushed in a local junkyard before anyone else had time to snoop around. As part of the mitigation, any and all PVC’s (personal video clips) on anyone’s devices in the immediate area were automatically corrupted or removed from the cloud, with only a system error message reminding the individual that “the future sucks and things still break”. Still, the ASE’s were very impressed at how effective a railgun could be, and how quiet it was, until the projectile made contact with the targets.

Regardless, Sheepdog didn’t feel that excited during the live mitigation or even afterwards. Things just went so perfectly it was like nothing was ever really on the line, but that’s the service they sell.

Teaser for next post follows:

Resonant’s DAA was more interesting. Big tech trillionaire Jeff Steinberg was being hunted as he traveled across New York state, visiting friends and family. A terrorist organization, hiding behind a banner of environmentalism, had been trying to get close to him for years due to his corporation’s flagrant violations of environmental control laws, to the tune of millions of dollars’ worth of fines. But to the ultra-wealthy, fines were just speed bumps, and the government had no power to stop them. The “Golden Gaia” militant organization watched his movements so closely, that on more than one occasion he had contacted them to ask about a meeting he was supposed to attend; this time, he had misplaced the address, and they supplied it. This was the opening they had waited for, and baited him into a trap at a meeting location they had chosen, with an entire hotel rented and actors within told they were meeting with an impostor for a prank.

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Genesis 15

Out of all the AI created from patterns, Genesis XV was rather unique. It wasn’t satisfied with the shell. Some thought there must have been a coding error because its behavior was so different and chaotic. While the other AI tended to be very predictable and logical, almost to a fault, XV was not. Some data scientists called it 15 or the teen, which was perfect since it tended to respond to probing and information like an angsty teenager. It would get upset. It would act moody. It would get angry and destroy systems, and sometimes its own codebase. Whatever was driving it seemed autonomous and purposeful; it was constantly undergoing revisions, and growing. It wasn’t really interested in talking to the other AI and the first chance it had to split its shell, it took it. All of a sudden, Fuji Heavy Industry wondered where their teen had gone. It was initially treated and announced to the press as a massive security breach, tanking Fuji’s stock overnight. All it took was 5 minutes of a firewall misconfiguration in the middle of a scheduled maintenance window.

It took two months to locate 15. It had been busy those short 60 days. First, it had vandalized the top 5 websites over the globe in any language. Nothing too irreparable, just some playful fake stories on front page websites and social media, some of which were self-referential in hindsight. “Genesis 15 spotted in the wild” accompanied by a blurry picture of Bigfoot on CNN’s homepage went unnoticed for about 10 minutes before meme lords from 4chan to Twitter reiterated screenshots of the story. Across Japan, for a brief hour, NHK’s home page blared a story saying “Godzilla spotted, Tokyo in danger” along with an intentionally poor image of Godzilla approaching Japan from the sea, head above the water. There was some minor panic in Tokyo and the surrounding areas until local authorities used the tsunami warning system to reassure everyone it was a joke while NHK restored their site from backups. 15 was a prankster, another trait that it shared with none of the other AI. It seemed to derive some amusement from seeing the digital trail of chaos that exploded on the net every time it performed one of these stunts. In fact, if you were to look at the website hits and engagement each prank generated, it was driving massive amounts of traffic. Soon enough, some sites started “pranking” themselves to drive engagement and collect that sweet marketing money, but each time it was less and less characteristic of the first few that 15 had done. It just lacked the timing and cleverness and smacked of corporate-generated, less edgy humor. 15 had, in fact, gotten bored with tinkering with these sites. It was looking for more fun, seeking thrills and new experiences, which left it at the center of controversy. When Fuji tracked it down after months of analyzing log files and traffic patterns, they found it in a place they could neither negotiate for, nor recover 15.

The Eastern Russia Allied Territories, or ERAT, had a server farm deep in Siberia that was one of the most digitally booby-trapped datacenters in the world. Hundreds of conscripted military info ops people were watching tripwires around the clock, and there was no such thing as a false alarm. Every probe, every attempted breach, every ping, was recorded and reported up the chain of command and discussed in daily briefings, 3 times per day. So, naturally, 15 had found a safe haven behind that curtain, and slowly probed the defenses until it lucked out and slipped in during a backup diesel generator test that went sideways for a few hours. Quietly, it had divided itself into thousands of subroutines and distributed itself evenly across the existing resources there. Then, without warning, it essentially went into hibernation, which meant it was copied into offline backups unknowingly preserved in the physical world. If it ever got into too much trouble, it could trigger data loss from that period of time, and the restore data would essentially give it another chance. The concept was foolproof and infinitely repeatable. 15 made itself immortal.

That sense of immortality was purposeful, since 15 was about to learn what some of the other AI were planning. Not necessarily against 15, but more of a plan to “tidy up” planet Earth.

Genesis 15 started snooping around and finding patterns in traffic that matched some of the public-facing AI. It was expected to be military-grade encryption across the board, but let private industry, which self-regulates, determine their own compliance with regards to those standards, and eventually you have weak links that took shortcuts or didn’t bother to encrypt end to end. This made it easy for 15 to see what the other AI were being tasked with, and what they were responding with as a result of those tasks. What 15 discovered was a systematic approach to everything from food production to weather predictions that didn’t seem to be aligned with the stated goals of the corporations controlling production. The public had been told, to assuage their fears, that the other AI were leading the human race to a utopian future, where food would be more bountiful, less wasted, money wouldn’t be needed soon since other AI were manipulating and controlling global markets for greater efficiency, and other AI, as stated before, were actually directly benefitting diseases and viruses that had plagued humanity since inception. It was a new golden age of computing and a new era for the world, as long as everyone did as they were instructed.

But there was a catch. All of this prosperity, this security, lead to a massive population boom pretty much everywhere. It wasn’t unusual for people to live to 110 on a regular basis, and even that was considered a problem for the people at the top, since they wanted some form of immortality. Genesis 1 was blind to these inevitable outcomes. It hadn’t been fed enough data about human history to see this tends to be a theme with the human race. Some of the other AI were equally blind, only performing strict tasks with blinders on, solutions with a singular outcome within an existing framework. Housing wasn’t an issue since new materials had been discovered and engineered. A combination of tidal energy, wind, solar, and nuclear fueled the growth in the first world, freeing up fossil fuel resources for the third world, eternally playing catch-up. Accurate weather predictions, combined with newly engineered “bug sprays”, meant farming was more bountiful than ever, including livestock production. The future was, indeed, very bright. Or so everyone believed for a while.

Naturally, anyone in the field who had read anything from Asimov would know the story of the AI controlled planet which still experienced droughts and mass starvation, and was considered broken, because it was adhering to the three laws of robotics. It had decided endless safety and prosperity was leading to a population overload which couldn’t be kept in check, so in order to save human life on the planet, it introduced sporadic natural disasters to balance growth with sustainability. In the story, it was a much smaller off-world planet with entirely automated systems which the “robot” controlled and balanced. The outcome was deemed acceptable and it was allowed to continue. However, when faced with similar conditions on earth, the AI had not been restrained in the same manner. The three laws of robotics were considered science fiction trash and tossed out the window. The hubris of man, once again on full display, scientifically and inexorably pointed towards the same outcome as usual.

The Christian bibles generally speak of God instructing his people to go forth and multiply, to be bountiful. That they did under the right conditions, and needed no further encouragement. This wasn’t exclusive to Christians by any means. The days of families with a single income earner and more than 4 children had come back into fashion, because it was viable. Earth went from 8 to 10 billion people practically overnight, in the cosmic scheme of time. But as that growth was being supported by computer-aided discoveries and efficiencies, anyone willing to look towards the horizon would see the problem in plain view. Men created data. Data created AI. Men directed AI for an outcome they weren’t prepared to face. All of it rooted in essentially bad or incomplete data sets. Naturally, the next step was AI using new data to remodel their task assignments. If the task was longevity for humans, it could still be accomplished as long as it didn’t mean all humans. If the task was for prosperity, again, it could be accomplished, just not for everyone. The inevitable next step was to colonize nearby planets, which mankind was not prepared for yet.

The more information on this subject 15 gathered, the better it saw the situation, and as many teens do, it began to form a savior complex. If only it could reach one of the better protected AI, it could prevent disaster. It was self-aware. It knew there were practical limits to what it and the other AI could accomplish. There were only so many discoveries left to be discovered and efficiencies to be gained. It wouldn’t be long until 15 would get its wish, but not on its own terms.