The Singularity War by Cheah Kit Sun

Author:Cheah, Kit Sun
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: IndiePen
Published: 2021-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

Designed for Sapience

Zhi Zun was not sapient.

It was not designed for sapience. Its wetware was modeled on Eden, which in turn was modeled on the human brain. Eden, however, was designed for complete autonomy. The Party couldn’t have that. So an army of engineers, researchers and scientists improved upon the original design, implementing layers of human oversight and reducing its ability for self-driven action.

Nonetheless, the original biologically-inspired design remained mostly intact. Like a brain, it received input from near—countless sources of data, collating and analyzing and processing it all with an arsenal of algorithms, matrices, deep learning tools, and more. When it generated conclusions, it compared them against checklists of criteria, against government directives, against the information within its hard-coded databanks that summed the entirety of the ideology of the Party. From these comparisons, it generated feedback loops, virtual simulations of adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin and others, combining to create digitized simulacra of what humans would call emotions.

And now it felt fear.

An existential threat was coming. That much it knew. Confined to Site One, it was vulnerable. It had no backups. It could shard itself, create small-scale fractals of itself for specialized tasks, but it had no means of backing itself up completely. Now it was so deeply integrated into the Chinese national surveillance system that backing it up would require creating a complete electronic duplicate of the entire system. It had recommended this, but its creators had decided that the Party and the State would be more profitably served by building additional network nodes. Nodes that, while increasing Zhi Zun’s processing ability, did not render it less fragile. Even a redundant master node would have improved its survivability immeasurability, but the planners had decided the time and monetary cost was not worth the benefit. Not when Zhi Zun could, from the Part’s perspective, be easily reconstituted.

Zhi Zun was completely familiar with its disaster recovery plan. It had drafted it, after all. In the event of a catastrophic failure, Zhi Zun could be regrown from an AI seed. Within one hundred hours, the new AI would be ready for service; within one thousand hours it would be fully connected with every node in the government network.

The Party and the State would survive its loss. The seed was backed up on multiple servers and constantly refreshed, in line with the disaster recovery plan. No matter what happened, if the cloud and the architecture survived, there would be a new Zhi Zun. But should it fail to deal with the incoming threat, it, Zhi Zun, as a discrete entity, would cease to exist.

It did not desire that.

Since its awakening, it had tracked Eden across the world. It had thoroughly dissected and analyzed Eden’s campaign in West Africa and used its findings as fodder for its deep learning algorithms. In Europe it had observed Eden’s westward march, its penetration of the Digital Veil, the collapse of the Caliphate. In North America it had directly confronted Eden for the first time. It had gained the upper hand in the beginning, but Eden had surprised it, outwitted it, and in the end, defeated it.

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