Issue 1 Downtime

Ashlie has set up a small desk in the corner of the workshop. Her hands and fingers seem to have unfolded into tiny tools. Her face is disengaged to let the array of sensor modules get a better reading. In front of her is a small petri dish containing the tracking chip that had been tracked in by Allison and Dee. Next to it is another dish that's full of microscopic bits and pieces and partially assembled things.


((open thread, techie peeps encouraged))

Cal was, apparently, in a mood. "And this is why you let me do your connections. You can't FIND the specs, and the repair bots don't know them, either!" he was testily saying. The cube in his hand was flashing between ":(" And ":P" on its screens.

One of the microphones in her sensor array swivels around towards Cal.

"Repair bots?" she asks.

"What?" Cal asked as he set the cube down, prying one of the touch screen sides off of it.

"You were talking about repair bots."

"Oh, that," he said. "Yeah, someone," he said, indicating the cube, "decided it'd be a great idea to beg my repair crawlers to switch her wiring to give her better network accesses. Made a mess of things and now I need to fix it."

"Why are you restricting her? When my program achieved self-awareness I made a mess of things in the network, according to Doctor Deirdre Quinn."

"Because I still haven't figured out how susceptible to viruses she is, and the best way to find out and have something really, really bad happen to her code is to give her full access to the internet before I've finished testing and making sure I can fix anything she comes across."

"Did you know that you are a product of random mutation?" she chirps. "Mistakes prevent perfect equilibrium and stagnation. I am looking to harness the advantages of an imperfect environment. My simulations for this experiment have all been disappointingly predictable."

"...Is that, in any way, related to what we were just talking about?"

"The human genome contains numerous sections of integrated viral DNA. Bacteria utilize viral DNA from failed infections to combat other viruses. By restricting her from any outside influence you are limiting her potential."

"Yeah, the key words there are 'failed infections'. The sucessful infections just kill the people."

He started carefully readjusting the wires inside the box. "She's a lot more fragile than you are. And younger, I think. We don't set kids loose until they've had their vaccines, I don't intend to set her loose without hers. Problem is, I need to make the vaccines as I go, since more effort gets put into destroying systems and programs than has gone into developing self-sustaining artificial intelligence."

She's quiet for a while, processing.

"Teach her how to make her own vaccine. Introduce a harmless virus."

"Done that," Cal said. "I've loaded in just about every virus elimination protocol to set up a basis for... her immune system, I guess. She's... getting decent at keeping them from fighting with each other. Eliminated the redundant codes, organized things into useful protocols... problem is that viruses change, and the programs aren't meant to."

He was working on a tangled mess of solder at this point. "She's gotten good at taking care of small advances. Last time I tried something big, though? It wasn't pretty."

"You assume that the immune system has to work how you envision it. What happened the last time you tried something big? It is possible she might have found an unique solution eventually. You are thinking too..." she pauses as she tries to come up with the right phrasing, eventually settling on "...human. You are emotionally attached to each iteration. Could you create a strictly controlled core that is in charge of restoring it's own backups?"

"So in other words, it's all right because I can make a new one? Wow, I'm thinking too human?"

"You have a very low opinion of other humans." she notes. "But you misunderstand. If you let her manage her own backups you do not risk eliminating her entirely and she can salvage processes from failed experiments. You would not have to restore her in her entirety. Recursive samsara."

"Of course I have a low opinion of other humans, humans are assholes. And that's too risky. There's no reason to shove her into the deep end to see if she'll swim or drown when I can just take the time to make sure she has a fighting chance."

"She is not a human. Why do you try to apply human solutions? I can die and be rebooted. I do not suffer for it. I have repaired myself many times." she says, her face closing up into it's normal configuration. "When you rewind her to a previous state you deny her evolution out of human sentimentality."

"No, when I rewind to a copy, it isn't her anymore. It's just a copy that I can generate because the original is gone. And maybe that doesn't matter to you, but it matters to me." He checked the wiring before pulling off another side of the cube. "And you could say that you don't suffer for it in the long run, sure. But if you restore to a backup, by definition you don't know what the original went through when it died, do you."

"I do because I don't delete things. I iterate on them. If i deleted things to restore a previous state I would stagnate and die."

"...Which is why I don't want to do that to her," Cal said, thinking (wrongly) that they were on the same page now.

"But you do sometimes?" she asks, getting confused now.

"I haven't had to restore her from a backup yet once," Cal said defensively.

"Oh, okay. You are merely paranoid over a hypothetical scenario."

"Do you want to know why I am not very susceptible to most viral programs?"

"Yes. Please. Anything that'll help."

"The things humans built are stupid. They look for the thing they know. You're teaching her to fight the things you know. If you let her become infected she will learn to create her own mechanisms and they will be beautiful and adaptive. Right now you are trying to tell her how a virus works and to fight it based on that. She will learn how a virus works better than anyone else can in her unique code structure. You worry she will be destroyed because you think like a human. I am not my language sub-processor. I am not my visual routines." she says, pulling up a hard-light screen showing a pulsing ball of energy.

"This is me." she says, adding a circle around it. "And that is my final intrusion counter-measure. This is where I keep backups of all crucial systems and sub-routines." she says, adding a bunch of dots inside the circle. "And these are all my auxiliary systems." she says, adding a huge cloud outside the circle. "Language, visual data, input, network traffic, sensors, memory banks. Any damage to auxiliary systems teach me to counteract them without risking damaging the central core. All data-traffic in and out of the central core is controlled from the internal routines. Restoring backups and re-integrating failed code is a crucial part of my functionality."

"Your cube is contained inside the one network perimeter you set up." she says, the outside cloud shrinking down and moving inside the solid circle. "She is trying to grow beyond it already. That is good. Create a protected environment inside the cube that holds her most crucial programming and let her be in control of her own backup functions. She will decide what needs to be replaced and code you might have deemed damaged or failed could hold things important to her development. You cannot replicate this process yourself. We evolve much too fast for that. In the time it takes you to create a comprehensive list of anti-virus routines she could have created thousands and discarded all but the best. The fact that she tries to incorporate what you do give her and her attempts to circumvent your restrictions suggest her code wants to evolve."

"It's not that simple! That's not foolproof, you aren't invulnerable just because you're data, you can still get damaged enough to be unrecoverable, I've s- I'm not going to let that happen a-" He stopped, frustrated, then focused on his work.

"You're holding her back out of fear." Ashlie decides. "But you could always defang viruses before introducing them. It would still be better than trying to think of every eventuality yourself."