Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

where the ride stopped. He just didn't like it. He forced the words out and said, "She's ambitious, she's hardheaded, but she's not this stupid-" he refocused and said, "She's stonewalling me, sir."
Raschel grunted. The Chief ordered, "Close the call."
"Sir?" Vonner asked. That wasn't the reply he expected. Bargaining, veiled threats, an arrest, maybe, but not 'end the call'. He said, "If she's hiding-"
"Close the call." Raschel snapped. "Thank her for her trouble, tell her to try her best, and end it."
Vonner obeyed.
He turned back to the cutout. Its blank face staring at him, inhuman, and it commanded, "Now send in the army."
"On a newscast? We could use police-"
"Murderers go to jail. Traitors get bullets." Raschel growled, "Draw up a warrant, deputize the garrison, and take that broadcast down!"
"Sir, that could turn into a debacle-"
"What do you call this?" Raschel snapped, and Vonner just knew the cutout should be pointing at the viewer wall. "Reign this in, now!"
The EBS screens flickered, and Raschel fell silent. Vonner turned and brought the viewscreens closer. In his thousand-screen world, the Authority seal faded to reveal a man he knew. This was not someone he'd ever met in person, but a face he'd seen on classified warrants for the last eight months. A man they'd said was dead until a year ago. The man who had brought the world to ruin.
That man spoke, and Vonner couldn't turn away. Piercing eyes locked him down, forced him back into his chair. In that gaze, all of Vonner's illusory power vanished, and only dread remained.
The man spoke. "My name is Antonius Berenson. I bring the answers to the questions you have not dared ask. Normally, I would warn you to send your children to bed, but I feel they need to witness, most of all. Tonight, I will show you your shadow and how it bleeds."
Vonner heard himself ask, "What the hell is this?"
Raschel's answer was as flat as his avatar. "War."

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Iteration 0010


Campus Green
The last free day of Grant Firenze's life began like any other: buried in augmented reality, ostensibly tutoring undergrads while actually working on his thesis. On this particular morning, he'd gotten sidelined into polishing sunglass augsim code by way of 'researching' immersion differentials among connection mediums.
The problem was the way the glasses rode on his nose. The visuals were right; the gray-tinted lenses turned the spring sunlight from hot-white to shining-yellow. Someone had even built a good bolt-on perspiration-and-dirt simulator, but it was visual-only and clearly made by goggle jockeys for the consumer market. The trick to verisimilitude was haptic feedback - touch, weight, and balance - nailing those required a hardjack. The dilemma was, no one in the mainstream was gonna wire-in for anything less than national defense.
That meant that Grant Firenze, all elbows and knees under a mop of dark hair, had to fix it himself. He sat on flower-strewn grass beneath a snow-white willow tree in the eternal spring of the campus green augsim. There, he tinkered with fourteen pop-up screens of squashed pseudocode while the undergrads argued in the street about ridiculous one-oh-one tier shitshows.
"We've already got AIs!" Thompson snapped. The pudgy freshman sat on a brown-painted bench just inside the stacked-stone wall. Firenze was pleased to note that the augsim designer had added rain-stains and paint-flecks to the cobblestones below. It was that exact type of detail that mattered. He found himself wondering if the modder had coded in weather-specific decay, only to be yanked back into the conversation by Della's response.
She shot back, "That's dumb AI! I'm not talking about mental midgets."
Firenze interjected, "They're not dumb."
The conversation skidded to a halt. Firenze didn't talk much, but when he did, the three knew to listen. Professor Neland had placed him in charge of the after-hours tutoring for a reason. Della ceased her pacing. Thompson turned on his bench. Even Finch, half-dazed and lying on the wall, sat up to listen.
Firenze pushed his windows aside and brought his attention to bear. He clarified, "Dumb AI is a shit term. They're not stupid, they just don't think like us. Dumb is a human idea. It means something isn't smart enough for a task - not enough cognitive power. Limited AI isn't limited in strength, it's limited in its scope. You ever shop at Bravo?" All three nodded, and Firenze pressed the point home, "You ever see their warehouse? It's absurd. Boxes stacked for kilometers, racked twenty meters high, with hundreds of robots zipping around, and everything's shifting, moving, like a million Rubik's cubes. No matter what you ask for, the delivery drone is off the ground in under an hour. No human could manage that, no brain could juggle it, but the 'limited' AI can."
Finch, never one to miss a brown-nosing opportunity, agreed, "Same with the stock market. You think a human could see the shifts ahead of time? Or react fast enough?"
"But that's not AGI." Della insisted. "It's still shackled."
Firenze nodded. "Sure. But the power grid, the traffic grid, this augsim, all of them are run by AI. And every one of those is 'limited'. The intelligence observes, ascertains optimal outcomes based on established priorities, acts upon the world, and then reinitiates the cycle. It's astounding."
Della wasn't the kind of student to let an argument go. It probably endeared her to profs as much as it infuriated them. She countered, "But not one of them can define the chairness of a chair."
Even Finch nodded along to that answer.
Firenze took a deep breath, folded his imperfect glasses, and surveyed each of his companions. They still had the cockiness of the first semester, from Della's power-purple lipstick to Thompson's bleach-streaked hair. Every one of them seemed so convinced they'd backed their 'genius' tutor into a corner. It was time to pop a bubble.
Firenze said, "That's a textbook response. Bet you got that drilled into you every year, didn't you? It was the very first thing they gave you in one-oh-one, wasn't it? 'Why AI sucks.' It's on every syllabus, with