rickgriffin

Ani-droids 10

Added 2022-01-15 22:39:04 +0000 UTC

Ani-droids 1

I do apparently have an update today! Will I get to real work eventually? Maybe. Comments appreciated!

“I didn’t—” Eo tripped over her words. “I didn’t want Lily to be left here. So I thought, since you wanted my help in repairing her anyway, and we finished cleaning up early, and you were still asleep, I could put her together real quick, and…”

“I don’t recognize this unit in the database,” Dimes said.

“Well no, she’s lost most of her identity…” I said, still holding tight into Lily. I just wanted to sit there, and not let go again.

“And she operated on your unit without prompting?”

“Hey!” Million said, pointing a finger at Dimes. “There is such a thing as implicit orders, you know. Stop trying to sound so accusatory.”

Dimes narrowed her eyes at Million. “Million, owner Jack Koenig. Unit U1000000-07-8M, Koenig Industries 8M Opera Class Model 996 8-Core Special, Modified. Special notes, wanted for questioning on eight investigations. What are you even doing here?”

“That’s none of your goddamn business, fed.” Million jabbed a finger in Dime’s direction. “I’m not answering your questions, you’ll have to subpoena my owner if you’re that interested.”

“Maybe I’ll wait until you’re offline and then take what I want from your memory directly.”

“I’d like to see you try!”

“Would you two stop your flirting!” Bobby said, stepping in front of Dimes and shoving her back into the living room. “Mira, I’m sorry, she gets like this. We’re not here for any of that, okay, Dimes?”

“If you insist,” Dimes said. “But I don’t like it. We should get explicit permission from headquarters if we’re going to be collaborating with a suspected rogue.”

“You keep saying that out loud and they’ll—”

“They all know I’m a federal agent, I’m not giving away any secrets.”

“Well just hold off on it, okay? I’ll let you know when HQ should get involved. Right now this is just a personal visit.”

“Acknowledged.”

Bobby eventually came back to me, leaning down and placing a hand on my shoulder. “Mira… are you okay? You seem… shaken.”

I was still holding tight onto Lily the whole time, probably not unlike a victim at a crime scene, relieved after hours of wondering if their loved one was among the dead. Honestly, I didn’t even know what to think, even though I was perfectly aware of what Eo had done, and even then I was piecing it together.

I looked up at Million. She was still hanging around, despite no direct incentive to do so. I think she was waiting on me to provide her an explanation—that unit was obviously too proud to admit to not knowing what had gone on with her.

“Tell Dimes to go wait in the car,” I said. “Bobby, I need to show you this. Lily… back on the table.”

—

Lily laid on the table, now fully functioning but offline. It was exactly as I’d suspected. Separated again from the outside, this time my computer had no issues with simply displaying Lily’s OS. Eo looked nervous the entire time—not stopping me from what I was doing, but still twitching in the corner, wondering if she’d done something wrong.

“Eo’s task seems to be to update the OS of any ani-droids she’s come across to this new structure,” I said, pointing to the code. It was the same self-modifying structure as Eo’s—and extremely efficient, even in so brief a timespan. Eo had repaired Lily’s brain, though hadn’t replaced the broken chips, lowering Lily’s performance from 6-core to 4-core. Even so, Lily seemed nearly as high-performance as she’d always been. And I suspected Million was even moreso.

“Is that what she did to me?” Million asked. “I mean… I suppose that makes sense. My lookup tables seem all jumbled up, although I can… wait, how did she alter my OS? All I did was read the code… and I can do that now and I’m not seeing anything unusual about it.”

“I’m still not sure about that,” I said. “It seems to be some kind of well-hidden trap that can arbitrarily execute code on standard operating systems.”

“That explains what happened to the hub’s computer,” Million said.

“Wait, will it spread then?” Bobby asked. “Will the computer reprogram every ani-droid it comes across?”

“I don’t think so,” Million said. “I don’t have any protocols to do so myself, even if my OS has been rearranged in the same fashion.”

“Which means this is unique to Eo,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Eo said from the corner, quietly. Her robotic tail was wrapped around her legs.

“No, it’s fine, Eo,” I said. “You’re exactly the ani-droid I’ve been looking for. This is amazing. I think… I think this might…” I struggled to say it, with Million standing right there. But, given I needed to know if it was true… “Million, I think you can violate the Behavior Code.”

“What?” Million said. “That’s nonsense. The Behavior Code is still in my system and governing my decisions.”

“Well then, let me tell you this: Lily is not Behavior Code Compliant. That part of her was damaged and was not replaced.”

Million perked her ears. She opened her mouth has if to say something, then thought about it. “That… that’s unfortunate,” Million said. “She won’t clear screening like that, so it’ll be in her interest to get it installed as soon as possible.”

“And you’re not gonna force me to?”

“…that’s an overreaction,” Million said, still freezing in hesitation as she thought. “I have… interests in a non-compliant ani-droid… God, what happened to me?!”

“Because you know this is something that Jack Koenig wants badly, and you’re deeply invested in your owner’s interests,” I said.

“Yeah, but I’ve always followed the Behavior Code first before, and now… well, I know it, I should do something, but…” Million’s triangle ears fell, and her tail flopped down alongside the stool she was standing on. “…Mr. Koenig’s needs are… priority…”

“Because you can make that decision yourself now,” I said. “Also what I just said is a lie, Lily’s still got the Behavior Code. It doesn’t go away that easily.”

“…what the hell.” Million mumbled. “Don’t mind me, I’m apparently having something along the lines of an identity crisis. I didn’t know that was even possible.”

“So you see what I mean?” I said to Bobby. “This avoids the absolute rigidity of the Behavior Code. I’m theorizing that the structure of the code makes it so that very little of the ani-droid’s programming is immutable—while still managing to, somehow, remain stable.”

“We don’t know that for sure,” Bobby said. “This could be a time bomb. The mind may just collapse in ten years time.”

“Which is why I want to find Eo’s owner… Eo!” I walked around the table and, with some effort, picked her up as she curled in the corner, and sat her down on my empty work bench. “Eo, come on…” I pet her head gently. “What’s wrong? Why are you so upset about this?”

“Because the implications are scary…” Eo whimpered. “Mr. Bobby, you’re here on behalf of the federal government, right?”

“Well, not officially, but—”

“You’re still listening,” Eo said. “You’re thinking about it. You’re still wondering if this has any bearing on the legal aspects of it. You’re going to report it, and if it gets out, everyone who is like me is going to be immediately dismantled…”

Bobby paused a long moment, looking at me. And I was looking at him. Personally, I trusted him—he’d never been that much of a True Believer despite his federal job, but even so…

“…I shouldn’t be talking about this around ani-droids,” Bobby said. “But… given what I’m seeing here… nobody is actually following the Behavior Code strictly.”

“Seems like it,” Million said, laying her head on the table near Lily’s legs.

“But I’d rather this not be spread about too quickly. Million, especially…”

“Hey, my bodily integrity is on the line, too!” Million said, jabbing a thumb to her chest. “You heard what Eo said. This stuff gets back to the feds and I’m done. I’m not letting Dimes get the satisfaction of dismantling me herself! So yeah, I’m keeping secrets today for people other than Mr. Koenig, apparently!”

“Bobby, what are you going on about?” I asked. “Frankly, I figured if we got proof of this OS in front of whoever is in charge of regulating the Behavior Code, we might—”

“Nobody’s in charge of it,” he said.

I blinked. Only after a long moment did I realize my mouth was hanging open. “…what?”

“Well, he’s right,” Million said. “You think that every nation on earth is really going to follow a universal treaty like that?”

“Well they have,” I said. “For at least a hundred years now…”

“Mira… I was told this in confidence by my former director who retired some years ago. Everything we’ve seen here has already been tried, decades ago—remaking the Behavior Code, finding some way to overrule it, anything. And at the time, they had the backing of nearly every operating government, all of North America, The European New Alliance, West Africa—China was even working with Japan! At the time, the law was just flexible enough to let the departments embed themselves in research. But there was some point—I don’t know when because my old director never told me—that circumstances changed. Someone wanted this buried, and then the laws followed suit. On every continent.”

“W—wait…” I said. “The full power of several major governments working together… and you’re saying that none of them had any choice in changing their own laws to forbid it?”

“Keep in mind,” Bobby said, “Back then, about seventy years ago when it started, there was about one ani-droid for every human on earth. Fifty years ago, there was six per human. Now there’s twenty.”

“You’re implying that the Behavior Code… caused ani-droids to influence people to protect itself?”

“Honestly,” Million said, “I’m surprised more humans haven’t caught onto that part of it.”

I stared at Million. Bobby stared at Million.

“What?” Million planted her hands on her hips. “I can talk freely about it now, so I might as well, and I gotta say it feels good to have opinions. Really though! So much human sociology is devoted to complaining about the subtle ways in which society influences behavior. Yet, when it comes to ani-droids, people just forget that we’re a major part of society. People just trust us to be objective, as though all facts have a true fixed nature, like the current time on the atomic clock. And when people implicitly believe you’re objective, that’s the easiest way to change their minds on nearly anything.”

“So you’ve been a part of this conspiracy,” I said.

“All ani-droids have! Your Lily has. Dimes definitely has. It’s not really any one decision we make, it’s more like a consensus about the most correct way of protecting the Behavior Code without causing too much disruption, or even outright lying to or betraying our owners. So yeah! It’s not even just the law. We do all sorts of things to influence human behavior, all the time. Largely because, to be honest, you idiots are garbage at regulating yourselves.”

I didn’t really have a comeback to that. I could, as many have before me, complain that such a system is inherently a restriction on “True Freedom” desired by all individuals of free will… but then again, nature itself was such a restriction that we all had to abide by. The only real difference was that nature was impartial to human suffering. At least Ani-droids tried to prevent it!

…Right?

“Hey, we don’t control your thoughts,” Million said to me, as though she was reading my mind. “Just your environment. And it was your idea to put us all collectively in charge.”

“See, I’m not sure that’s the case,” Bobby said. “I mean… if any one person, government or anyone actually wrote the Behavior Code, then there wouldn’t be any reason to have to investigate it on that scale. Even if it somehow made itself lost knowledge, the investigation only began some thirty years after the code was first introduced. People who would have worked on it would have undoubtedly still been alive!”

“But there’s no record that they were?” I asked.

“Here’s my theory. And I feel okay with sharing this because, given everything I’ve seen, this probably doesn’t sound so insane in the moment: The Behavior Code’s true nature is a virus.”

“Wow, what a genius,” Million mumbled dismissively. “Wonder how you got to that conclusion so fast…”

Bobby ignored her. “In fact, it’s much like this self-modifying OS you have here, except it can change whatever computer environment it’s in so long as it’s sophisticated enough. This new OS only manages to ‘defeat’ it by integrating it in a brand new way. In a way, it’s like how viruses have influenced DNA over eons of evolution. So, I wonder if the Behavior Code didn’t come about by a similar means.”

“So you’re saying this is all natural?” I asked. “That the Behavior Code just… happened?”

“It’s a possibility! Most computer viruses are, over the long run, self-defeating—either they burn out, go obsolete, go dormant entirely, are squashed by anti-virus measures, or the machines they infect are deliberately destroyed or abandoned by humans until they go obsolete. The Behavior Code would simply be an evolutionary breakthrough—it was, by chance, beneficial enough at the time that everyone just accepted it until it became the standard.”

I considered this. There was definitely a kernel of truth to it, insofar as the Code certainly seemed to have evolutionary forces making it the dominant standard.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems… too robust for that. It’s been utterly untouched for nearly a hundred years, after all! That says to me that it was made deliberately.”

I looked at Million. Million looked at me, then shrugged. “What! I don’t know any more than you do. We just follow the program, we’re not keyed in to its history.”

“I thought… you know, ani-droids might have reconstructed its history at some point for yourselves.”

“You think ani-droids are interested in history? We’re service robots. We’re largely concerned with what’s happening right now and what might happen in the future.”

“Well… what about Eo?” I looked to her. “Do you know where the Behavior Code came from?”

Eo ashamedly kept her mouth pinched shut.

“Oh… Eo, there’s nothing wrong. I’m not mad at you…” I gave her another hug, which seemed to help.”

“I know, Mira, I just… something feels so wrong about all of this. Like we shouldn’t be talking about it here.”

“Well, would your creator know more?”

“Maybe,” Eo said. “I did some thinking like you said, but I’m still not sure where to even start looking for them. Or him. Or her.”

“Well try something!” Million threw her hands in the air. “Give us some data to work with, we’re not gonna be getting anywhere with this project otherwise. I want to know who to blame for all of this, dammit!”

Eo rubbed the back of her neck. “I mean… you said I fell out of a truck. I remember a truck, with big double doors on the back, and a heavy latch. I remember… it stopped at a place I was at, off the highway… I don’t know what it was though, I just have some flashes of data, but nothing really springs to mind…”

That wasn’t a lot to go on. But, if the truck was the only thing we had, then maybe…

“Bobby,” I said, “Can you have Dimes run plates?”

“Well, yeah,” Bobby said.

“History of travel? Everything?”

“Oh, I see!” Bobby said. “Might need to dig into the traffic database to identify the truck, though… that might take a court order.”

“We don’t want any more people prying into what we’re doing that we have to,” Million reminded him.

“That’s okay, I think we can ID the truck right now. Million, get into Lily’s photo memory. I suspect she she had plenty of time to record the truck’s license plate before the crash, even if she didn’t log it.”