Short Fiction Friday: "Proxy." TQP0005
posted by Chris Braak
Proxy
“I’d like to engage the security protocols, now.” The face and voice were dead ringers for Alec Guiness in Star Wars. This was a psychological decision, meant to make the Helper seem both wise and trustworthy. “I just need you to okay the defensive maneuvers.”
I didn’t say anything. The Helper—really HLPer, or Heuristics Logistics Program—knew exactly what it was doing, and exactly what it needed from me. It was responsible for the defense of the entire city Washington, DC, and an extremely robust Artificial Intelligence.
Once we’d gotten the hang of programming AIs, it became a pretty obvious choice to start putting them in charge of…well, of almost everything. They were smarter than people, after all, and they didn’t make mistakes.
Nowadays, the idea of an AI going haywire was practically academic, but when we’d first started making the shift—putting artificial minds in charge of our national and personal security, there was a lot of anxiety about the issue. Generations of scientists who’d grown up reading Asimov and Ellison weren’t about to hand the keys to the nuclear missiles over to a bunch of machines without installing failsafes.
That was the origin of the Proxy system. There wasn’t a single Helper in the world that didn’t have a Proxy, and no matter how smart the AI was, it couldn’t make decisions unless an actual human being okayed it.
“City ordinance is extensive,” Alec Guinness told me, and of course when he spoke, I believed him. “I count two-hundred and seventeen invaders, all armed with late twentieth century gunpowder-based projectile weapons. At this stage, I can still disarm and capture all of them, with minimal loss of life. Please authorize the defensive maneuvers.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
Alec Gunness looked puzzled, but of course he wasn’t really puzzled. He was just using an advanced facial-language pattern designed to make me feel like my lethargy in activating the city’s defenses was nonsensical. Which it was. “Murder, vandalism. They have executed over a hundred citizens, and cost thirteen million dollars in property damage. Nothing and no one irreplaceable, as yet, or vital to civic or federal functionality,” the face in the back of my mind admitted. It was being projected there through an ultrasonic transcranial stimulator, which let us have this conversation at about a factor of five times as fast as a standard atmosphere convo. “Though they show no signs of slowing down. A cursory examination of their tactics suggests that their ultimate goal is actual national sabotage. This is confirmed by intelligence regarding their activities.”
I said nothing. I knew what they were doing anyway, and who they were. Tactical Helpers had spotted these jokers, a humanist cult calling themselves the Order of Achilles, over two years ago. They’d been a statistically likely phenomenon since long before that, and had been on the Integratics Helper’s list of prognostications for over a decade. They were Biological Humanists, resisting the technological advances of the modern world: cybernetics, AI, genetech. Groups like the Order had been fairly common a century ago, but everyone assumed that they’d all died out. Except for the iHelpers, who had predicted their resurgence.
Two hundred and seventeen wasn’t very many people.
“Well, now they’ve taken out the three redundant systems that power the antipersonnel flechette cannons. Those are no longer going to function. We’ve still got plenty of foamcrete charges, though, and active denial cannons. Again, I’d like you to authorize defensive maneuvers.” The tHelper charged with City Defense looked irritated now—not because he was irritated, because he couldn’t be irritated, but, again, because he wanted me to feel bad about delaying. There was something frustratingly manipulative about that.
“I’m sorry,” the tHelper said, even though it wasn’t. “But I’m going to have to go over your head.”
Once we’d built the AIs, human error was the only kind anyone encountered anymore. The Helpers had advised against the Proxy system, suggesting that it only increased the likelihood of cataclysmic error, but we were still making the decisions, and we wanted it to stay that way. Of course, the Proxy system had failsafes, too. If a Proxy was being recalcitrant, like I was, the Helper that he was assigned to could always appeal to a higher authority.
There weren’t many higher authorities than me when it came to civic defense, but there were a few. I got a trancram from the Mayor in a few seconds. His handsome, Robert Redford face (male template M-6) appeared in the back of my mind.
“I just got a cram from your Helper,” he said, “Is everything okay?”
“It’s fine,” I told him. “It’s a program glitch. I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Oh,” he replied. It was hard to take him seriously, despite the old-fashioned movie-star face, because I’d been one of the first people he’d called after he had his ribs replaced with intricately tattooed, foreskin-covered piano keys that he’d had wired directly to his gonads. He’d been very excited. He’d played a little ditty on his sides for me, moaning orgasmically while the tune was rendered on paper-thin latex speakers on his chest. “Make sure you have a maintenance Helper check it out.”
“I will,” I told him. His face disappeared from my mind’s eye.
Obi-Wan appeared again. “Main and subsidiary power systems are going down throughout the city. I don’t understand why you’re hesitating. A full-scale power-failure will leave the city’s defense inoperable. We’d have to muster conventional authorities.” He paused, for a well-calculated, perfectly dramatic effect. “You do understand that they’re killing people. People are dying while you sit here and do nothing.”
“Did you call the Governor?” I asked him.
“He was unavailable,” the tHelper replied. I knew why, of course. The entertainment Helpers had just released their new version of Debbie Does Dallas, starring Marilyn Monroe and Scarlett Johansen, written by William Faulkner, and available in fully-interactive, class three, high-definition-genitalia format. The Governor was indisposed.
“I hope you realize,” the Helper said to me, “that your hesitation could result in the complete breakdown of federal authority.” I did not reply. “Your actions appear to be sociopathic. I’m going to contact Medicine.”
“Okay,” I told him, though I already knew what Medicine was going to tell him: there wasn’t really anything wrong with me. My brain was functionally sound, my social pattern was optimal, my psychopharmacy balanced. I was the product of an optimized childhood, complete with perfectly-designed parents (mine had actually borne my parents’ real faces, which was something of a luxury) who doled out the precise measurements of love and discipline in the simulation that I lived in, while my brain was grown in a chemically perfect, nutrient-rich vat for three years. I’d lived a full, healthy, socially normal lifetime during those three years. When my brain had been plunked into my optimal physical body, I was perfectly well-adjusted.
Even if I hadn’t been, the regulatory valves distributed strategically throughout my cortex gave me absolute control over my brain function, even the parts that had once been subconscious. If I’d had psychosexual neurosis about my mother? No problem. Just turn them off. Surprise adrenaline surges, or bipolar personality dysfunction? Easy. Just turn down the manic knob during the manic episodes, turn up the happy knob during the depressive ones, and I was copacetic. Fetishes about bestiality or kiddie-porn? Just as easy to switch off, though I could have spent time in any one of ten million transcram simulations, acting out my most disgusting and explicit fantasies easily and legally. Masturbation, as they say, never hurts anyone.
If I get bored at work, I can just turn my attention span up, or stimulate a mild endorphin rush, or drop into a simulation for what would feel like a lifetime, but would really be about fifteen seconds. In simulations like that—real, absolutely perfect, high-definition simulations— I could do anything I wanted. Ride dragons, fight ogres, build cities, build planets. I could be the god of a hundred alien species. I could fuck ten thousand 20th century screen starlets, all at once. I could be the Lord Krishna of my imagination. I could spend a hundred years doing everything I could imagine, drop back in for a few hours of saying yes to the Helpers, and then back out again into fantasy.
It was a life that had everything to recommend it. My only problem was a mild lack of imagination—but even that was easily solved. There’s a half-a-dozen subroutines that could run on my neuroprocessors that were designed to simulate the same kind of inspired, innovative thinking of the world’s greatest artists. I’d done that a couple of times, written a few plays while I was on the Shakespeare-McDonagh program, and designed a landscape while on the Lovecraft-Monet program. The landscape had even been picked up by the eHelpers, optimized, and dropped into one of their ready-made simulations, a remake of Casablanca.
I never saw it.
“Medicine has found that you are operating within normal parameters,” Alec told me. “Do you realize what you’re doing? What’s happening out there because of you? Hundreds of people are dead. Our infrastructure has been almost crippled. It won’t be long before I won’t have any available defensive options. Please, authorize my response.”
I tried to think of something to think about, but couldn’t. I was twenty-two years old, and based on the statistical likelihood of me eventually having a fatal accident, I could expect at least another thousand years. I’d already lived more lives than I could count, as a warrior-buddhist monk on a frostbitten, alien world, as a treasure-hunter in a fantasy version of the renaissance where magic and miracles were real, as the tyrannical ruler of my own private harem of twenty-first century superheroines. I’d upgraded my biological processes a dozen times—sometimes pleasantly, like when I was trying out the class-two genitalia, which is a combination penis, vagina, and six-fingered hand. Sometimes unpleasantly, like when I’d installed a clear plastic shield in place of the skin on my stomach, so I could see my guts pulsing. I’d done that one on my own, without anaesthasia, just for the novelty of the experience.
“Kara Serrano,” the Helper told me. “Was a designer of erotic merchandise. She was eighteen when she was shot through the face.” I saw a picture in my mind of who I presumed was Kara Serrano. A beautiful young woman, her face rebuilt according to aesthetic model F-16, wide, sultry eyes, pouty lips. There were red spots on her cheeks where she’d had clitoral tissue transplanted onto her face. The image dissolved into a splash of blood and meat, as a bullet tore through her skull.
Alec had tapped into the microscopic surveillance dust that was scattered through the city. The Helper could see everything that was going on in Washington, all at the same time.
The sticky mess of Kara Serrano’s head splashed through the air in slow-motion, while Alec and I conducted our high-speed convo. The scene was gross, but not so bad as the time I’d slaughtered with my bare hands the high priest of Pre-Atlantean Thule.
“Ervin Burns,” Alec continued, “Produced raw material for eHelper simulations. He lived with his surrogate virtual mother. He was eighteen years old when he was murdered.” The face that appeared to me was more prosaic: the ordinary square jaw and high cheekbones of the aesthetic model M-2. He had no hair on his head, and the right side of his skull was almost completely made of chrome. This face also exploded in gore.
“William Haldeman,” and the face that appeared had six penises grafted to the upper lip, making him look like the main character in the eHelpers’ Cthulhu Porn. I tuned the AI out, as it tried to explain a few facts about William Haldeman’s life.
I knew what the Helper was doing, of course. It was trying to humanize the people who had been killed, hoping—or, calculating it as statistically likely—that my inaction was because I didn’t care about the people who were dying, which was partly true.
The fact was that I wasn’t unsympathetic because I didn’t know who they were. I was unsympathetic because I did.
Bored, I took a few seconds to slip into a trancram stimulation. High speed molecular circuitry synched up with my memory and sensory processors, bypassing the glacial speed of my actual organic senses, and I began life as a young boy on the chilly, windswept coast of 19th century Ireland. For the purposes of dramatic continuity, my memories of my actual life were temporarily suppressed as I suffered a lifetime of crippling famine, as I fought with my father about one day leaving the country and making a new life in America, as I found myself immersed in a battle of wills with the landlord’s daughter. We did leave, eventually, and made a new home for ourselves in the American West. We had a farm, and raised children and grandchildren, grew old and died. I knew the bittersweet pain of a long life, a mix of pleasure and pain, excitement and tedium, and suffered the sadness of never having had the chance to reconcile with my father, of not being there when my mother grew ill and died, not being able to see my country freed from English oppressors.
When I’d finished the trancram, and my own memories resurfaced, for the barest fraction of an instant, I thought about calling my own father. The absurdity vanished almost instantly. My virtual father, a temporary electrical ghost, was long gone, and the biological father from whom my genetic code had been crafted had never met me. He probably didn’t even know I existed. Which was just as well—what would I have said to him?
The Alec Guinness face in my mind stuttered and flickered. Power redundancies in its transmission gear made such a thing impossible—the only time I’d lose feed, even for a second, would be during a complete, catastrophic failure-event. Just another psych tactic. It was trying to show me how close it was to complete failure.
“We’re losing the archives,” it said, its voice angry and serious, evoking the precisely-calibrated tenor of my virtual father’s “discipline” voice. My heart skipped a beat and I felt flush, for a moment eager not to disappoint. The feeling passed. “Hundreds of thousands of scientific discoveries about the nature and structure of the universe, blueprints for the technology on which civilization rests. Articles, essays…the greatest work of the greatest scientific minds in ten generations.”
Well, not exactly. Sure, there was work in there about the universe, consciousness, super-string theory, sub-string theory, causality mathematics, dimensional causality mathematics. There were patents and designs for ultrasonic transcranial stimulators, for nano and pico circuitry, for neocortical interfaces and super-efficient diatomatic solar paints, and everything had a scientist’s name on it. The truth, though, was that scientists hadn’t done any actual thinking for years. People just weren’t as good at it as the Helpers, who now did all of the higher math, the pico and mega engineering, the philosophy. They produced reports, rendered by Pentecost Algorithms so that word-choice and syntax were optimized for mass-understanding, and their scientific Proxies signed their names. That’s what it meant to be a scientist.
I tried to call up a few pieces on strong AI subroutine design, and found I couldn’t. Alec was telling the unadulterated truth; the archives were gone.
Oh well.
I dropped into another transcram, and spent fifty years living as an accountant in an insurance company in the 22nd century Mars colony. Even though there never had been a Mars colony. Back in the old days, people used to think that no one would ever accept the robotic colonization of alien planets. The argument was that experiencing a simulation of living on an alien world would never compare to actually going to an alien world. They were wrong, of course, by leaps and bounds. Actually, because the sensory cortices are capable of processing far more information than the senses can actually take in, simulation—once picotech had gotten it up to speed—was far richer in visual, auditory, olfactory, and haptic stimulation than reality could be. Every single aspect of experience, down to the exhilaration that is born of extreme exhaustion, could be simulated with better-than-perfect-accuracy.
The “Mars Colony” was a persistent simulation meme. People visited it often in transcrams, but you’d never want to go to the real thing. The real colony was just a boring collection of dull-colored instant-shelters that some automated colony rovers had erected, so that they could build more rovers.
In the simulation, though, I spent years working at a boring, repetitive task, sweltering in the too-hot office, because Eileen, the office manager, could never get the thermostat to work right. I sweated there, bathed with fluorescent lights that sucked all the will and vigor from my soul, and then stepped outside into the crisp, alpine atmosphere that terraforming efforts had produced. I took my few moments of freedom walking home from work on dusty, rust-colored soil, past stands of genetically engineered, blue-green fir trees and fields of oxygen-producing Martian lichens.
I could have easily taken public transportation home, and been there twenty minutes sooner. But the hour I spent walking home from work—for some reason, always better than the hour I spent walking to work—was one of the few pleasures I allowed myself in that world. An hour spent in the beautiful, clean Martian air, away from the tedium of work, away from the responsibilities of home. No overbearing boss, no nagging wife, no needy children, no angry clients. Just me and the air.
The boss, wife, children, and clients were all fictional. The tedium of my job was fictional. The distress in my family life, all of it fake. I made it all up, designed it to be as banal and unpleasant as possible, precisely to make that hour I spent walking home worthwhile.
You reach a point, after your three thousandth fantasy excursion, where monsters and aliens, guns and beautiful women, just stop being exciting. You find yourself yearning for some kind of experience, any kind of experience, that stimulates you in some kind of meaningful way. Once you’ve tried out all the interesting ideas, you start working on the simpler ones.
It was something, anyway.
I came out of the transcram, and Alec Guinness’s face was glaring at me in the back of my mind. I wasn’t listening anymore. I didn’t care that the Order of Achilles had just managed to break down the doors to the power-distribution plant, and were seconds away from shutting down all power across the country, or that they had plans to denote an electromagnetic pulse device that would short out all remaining electronics, especially the notoriously delicate molecular circuits. I didn’t care that they’d created some kind of tailored pico-agent that would start killing off all the other nano and pico tech in the world.
No, that’s not true. It isn’t that I didn’t care, I thought to myself, as the lights began to go out, and Obi-Wan’s face finally disappeared for good.
The truth is, I was looking forward to it.
If anybody asks why I decided to end civilization as we know it, go ahead and tell them:
I was bored.
