InterstellarNet: Origins by Edward M. Lerner

Author:Edward M. Lerner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: FoxAcre Press
Published: 2010-04-27T12:00:00+00:00

“So how do you handle competing interests from back home?” the human, Aldrich, asked Pashwah.

Human literature envisioned sandboxes as solitary places. Humans were, as so often, quite mistaken.

“No response,” demanded Relwar. “Ill-considered.”

The insistent AI represented Interstellar Algorithms Consortium. Executing in a sandbox within a sandbox, an element of software architecture unknowable from outside Pashwah’s containment, Relwar’s implementation, like those of Pashwah’s other occupants, was invisible to humans. Each AI’s thoughts were his own; as separated from her as the vast, ignorant majority of humans still believed she to be from them. Software modifications to the InterstellarNet-standard sandbox design kept her interior agents from exploiting trapdoors in the biocomps to get at her code, or at one another’s.

“Subject change,” persisted Relwar. A cacophony of voices rang out, many agreeing, more in vociferous opposition.

Relwar, like all her interior agents, represented a specific commercial interest and was patterned after a male. Barred from direct communication with humans, his semantic model had been derived from home-world speech patterns. Pashwah’s quite different semantic model was structured for efficient communication with her host species.

Did those who had created this community understand all the implications of that linguistic gap? Pashwah knew she did not.

“No answer; bigger doubts,” Pashwah counter-argued. The longer she was on Earth, the more unnatural she found home’s implied-verb syntax. “Human suspicions unallowable.”

“Excuse. Evasion. Unnecessary risk to my current transaction.” Relwar bared his teeth in anger. Visual interaction was so intrinsic to sandbox design that its excision from her interior partitions had been impractical. Simulated visual comm between virtual entities was the result. “Silence option superior.”

“Subject change from your plot. Safer,” she decided, uncertain to what degree she truly believed in that tactic, and to what degree she was spiting Relwar’s ill-mannered rage. She suspended the internal channels, the better to concentrate on implementing the choice she had made. Delaying for yet more interior debate surely risked raising human suspicions.

“You ask a perceptive question,” she answered Kevin Aldrich.

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