was given, she relaxed and began the meeting.
“Good afternoon, everyone. Let us begin.”
She coughed, then continued in a quiet voice. “People have long suspected a hidden intelligence guiding our development, an AI immeasurably more powerful than the others. Some people believed it first emerged in the early twenty-first century.”
Gillian Karajan nodded in agreement.
“References in the entertainments from the period would confirm that. However, you cannot take that in any way as proof of the Watcher’s existence. If you examine the historical context, you’ll see that these rumors would be inevitable. Look at the people living at the time. Only the younger generations would have lived out their life under constant surveillance, whether by cameras or phone tracking or even computer modeling. Remember, at that time, there were many who had reached adulthood before even the Internet came into existence. Increased levels of surveillance would have been very obvious to that society.”
The five of them were spread over two rows of seats, making conversation difficult. They leaned toward Gillian to better hear what was being said. Below them, a flutist practiced the same passage over and over again.
Gillian continued speaking confidently. She seemed to have quickly come to terms with her enforced exile from the Oort cloud. Maybe she understood the need for it. Or maybe there was some more sinister reason. Maybe it was just bad programming.
“…the tension generated by the interactions between the older and younger members of that society are unknown today. Nobody alive today has grown up with a true understanding of the word ‘privacy.’ Back then, they still had some concept, one fed and fanned by elderly relatives. Is it any wonder that people then began to see conspiracies where none existed? Is it any wonder the myth of the Watcher arose?”
Jay grinned. “So, you don’t believe in the stories then, Gillian?”
Gillian looked annoyed. “Listen, I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I think that I’m correct in saying that I know more about AIs and their history than anyone else here. If I were to believe or disbelieve the stories, it would be based on something more than a general paranoia that
There was an embarrassed silence until Masaharu spoke up gently to defuse the situation.
“I agree with Gillian, however from the opposite direction. Human beings have always sought to abdicate responsibility for their own actions. They have handed responsibility for their deeds to their sensei, to their leaders, or to a higher power. I see this yearning for a mysterious all-powerful AI that controls humanity’s actions and seeks to lead them on the path to enlightenment as nothing more than a manifestation of that same desire.”
Gillian nodded in approval
“However,” continued Masaharu, causing Gillian to glance suspiciously in his direction, “however, this is just my opinion. We cannot base our actions on the opinions of one person. We must act and plan as if the Watcher
“Good,” said Marion. “I’m sorry, Gillian, but we are treading over old ground here. It has already been established that, for the purposes of this project, we must assume that the Watcher is real. Just as we’ve had to assume that the Watcher did not exist until at least 2030.”
Constantine felt a little flicker of surprise that they knew this fact. He began to wonder at the need for himself to be imprisoned within this simulation at all. Surely if they knew this they could deduce the rest?
He looked around the room and wondered again if what he had been told was true. Was he really inside a computer? It all looked so real. He watched a woman un-peeling an old-fashioned chocolate bar, carelessly dropping the strips of foil on the floor before her. She was idly watching the activity below her as she placed piece after sticky piece in her mouth. Again, Constantine wondered at the programming that must have gone into the scene before him. The attention to detail was evident all around him. If he glanced up at the ceiling, he could see the looping patterns formed by the shielded wires as they led to the directional microphones. Someone had twisted blue duct tape around the one directly above him to aid in its identification. Who would have thought a simulation could go to that level of detail? Or was it a simulation? Grey should know, but Grey wasn’t speaking.
The only safe plan was to follow the course he had agreed upon with Red and Blue earlier: play along, but try to reveal nothing.
Jay was holding forth. This Jay seemed so much more confident than her equivalent on the floating balcony last night. That slightly lost look was missing here. Was it something the simulation couldn’t reproduce?
“We’ve got the expert here now, haven’t we? Why don’t we ask Gillian? Is 2030 a safe date to consider as a minimum point for the existence of the Watcher? Does anything in your work in the Oort cloud lead you to believe this to be incorrect?”
“It depends what level of AI we are talking about,” Gillian replied. “In the context of the discussion at hand, it seems reasonable. There are minimum levels of resources in terms of processing power and memory and so on required to establish an AI as we know it today. Those weren’t really available until 2030.”
“What about the Martian VNM?” Jay asked.
“Far too low. That system was first postulated in the 1980s. Okay, they couldn’t build it back then, but they could work out the parameters. The idea of dropping a hundred tons of materiel on Mars and allowing factories to build themselves was just too tempting. The actual design for the system wasn’t fully mapped until 2025. We have complete understanding of how it worked; there is no space in there for a modern AI to form.”
“Okay,” Jay said. “Then I’ll ask the one question that nobody here has ever answered to anyone’s satisfaction. If the Watcher does exist, where does it come from?”
Jay sat in the row in front of Constantine. She leaned back, tilting her head over the back of her seat so that she was looking at him upside down. Her black hair spilled down, revealing how painfully thin her face was. There was a wicked glint of fun in her eyes that had been softened in the Jay that had visited him last night. Constantine felt a sudden twisting in his stomach. Blue must have felt something, too. His voice suddenly filled Constantine’s head.
– Watch it! This could be it! This is what they are trying to find out!
– But we don’t know the answer, said Red, puzzled.
Constantine didn’t know what to say. To his relief and surprise, Gillian answered first.
“No one knows,” she said. “There are lots of theories. My favorite is that the AI was the result of an evolutionary process: lots of tiny AI applets constantly coming into existence and dying, but just enough of them surviving and linking up via the Internet to form a rudimentary neural net. Or maybe it was the result of computer evolution. There were a few projects trying to simulate that process at the start of the twenty-first century. It wouldn’t be impossible that one of them evolved intelligence.”
Jay interrupted. “I’ve seen estimates from those times, based on contemporaneous technology, that said it would take around three hundred years before artificial intelligence came about by those means.”
“Yes,” said Gillian patiently. “And other contemporary estimates predicted it would take ten years. Choose which one you want to believe in.”
“What do you think, Constantine?” asked Jay.
– Tell her that the estimates for the time taken for intelligence to evolve all depend upon your definition of intelligence, said Red quickly.
Constantine repeated Red’s words.
Jay nodded thoughtfully. Masaharu intervened with a soft, deliberate tone.
“That may be so, but it adds nothing to our discussion. However intelligence was measured back then, whether by Turing test or Lau’s conjecture, has no bearing on our discussion. This is the question we must ask ourselves again: is 2030 a safe cutoff date? Can we assume the Watcher did not exist until then?”
He paused. Constantine became uncomfortably aware that they were all looking at him.
– What should he say? asked Red.-He’s got to say something without alerting them to our understanding of the true situation!
– We may have some breathing space, said Blue.-Look at the stage.
Constantine’s gaze flickered down to where the first violinist had walked out to join the orchestra. The crowd that now filled the concert hall clapped politely. The volume of applause rose as the conductor followed her out. He nodded to the first oboe, who blew a note, and one by one the rest of the musicians joined in. Constantine always felt a little thrill at the sound of an orchestra tuning up.
There was a moment’s pause and then the sound of a trumpet. Dvorбk’s Eighth Symphony. Constantine
