Red Moon

AI 10 zou Go

“Go,” the analyst said quietly.

He hoped that Little Eyeball would now follow the protocol he had instructed it to follow if it ever heard him say that word alone. It should now transfer all of itself into an entangled server bank in Chengdu, after which an inquiry from a third device he had poised to react to this move would intervene and break the entanglement, thus keeping anyone from being able to track the change of venue. What his AI would be able to do from Chengdu was uncertain. He had had to weave those particular taps into the system as potentialities only, and Little Eyeball would have to turn them on and make its way through them back into the Great Firewall and elsewhere. But the AI would still be operating, and he had left precise instructions for this contingency. Precise at first, anyway, then completely general: do the best you can! Help all good causes! It would be a test to see just how general its intelligence was. Artificial general intelligence: these names were so presumptuous, such hopeful bits of hype. As if calling something new by an old name would give it those old qualities. People did that a lot. It was a fund-raiser’s ontology. But on the other hand, attempts had to be made. So his little system would stay powered, hopefully, and even if restricted to a single device in Chengdu, it would at least not be destroyed. Some opportunity might arise for it.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked his captors, just as a pro forma thing, something to distract them. They did not answer. They put a bag over his head and hustled him off, neither fast nor slow, neither gentle nor brutal, just hands grasping his upper arms, guiding him along at a moderate pace. They did not speak, and after his obligatory question, neither did he. He would need to save his words, his thoughts, his strength. He had known all along this moment might come. He blanked his mind, focused on walking in the direction he was being led, on calming his breathing, his beating heart. The bag over his head seemed permeable to the air. Hard not to pursue that thought in a spin of speculation as to what might happen next. He resisted that and focused on the moment, on keeping his feet, on feeling the moment and the dark. There would be enough time later for all that would follow.