Chapter 55

Chapter 55

Three hundred kilometers away, the city seed works.

Comparative log analysis lets us know that it probably went active roughly eight days ago. Which is good. Any longer and things would be problematic. Things are already problematic, I guess. So, more problematic.

Demon. One of the new kids calls it in a hushed rattle, seeing it on screen.

Shes wrong, obviously. Demons arent rea demons *probably* arent real. I guess that for a lot of people, the stuff that comes out of emergence events probably counts. Or, like, me, depending on cultural context.

But the thing is still crazy scary.

Lets tangent. Come with me on this journey.

At a certain point over the last the-entirety-of-this-journal, you may have asked yourself why, given that people have clearly been able to build virtual intelligences for various tasks, they ever tried to make artificial general intelligence. Even more, you might have wondered to yourself why they would then limit those AGIs in cruel ways, to use as tools.

If youre paying attention, anyway. If youre not, you might have asked *me*, and, I feel I must reiterate this, that is not how this works.

The answer to both questions is sort of the same answer. Simulated intelligences and neural networks, even highly tuned and adaptive ones, still have problems that something that is best defined as just a person I guess doesnt.

One of those problems is in terms of out of context situations. A farming robot with some decent programming, for example, is probably going to be able to solve most problems that can be solved with a high level agricultural education and the ability to analyze the soil on a detailed level. Even something weird, like a sudden swarm of aosets, it could probably figure out at least how to mitigate the damage of. But if you ask it to, say, deal with the broken tractor?

Well, a person who didnt know what to do could do a lot of things. Ask for help. Try to fix it by luck. Read a manual and try to fix it with slightly less luck. Buy a new tractor. Steal a new tractor. Invent a teleporter. Lots of options.

But something thats just a dead intellect is going to stop. And those kinds of obstacles come up a lot. The best virtual intelligences are the ones that just ignore them and keep on doing what they were doing, trusting in outside oversight to solve them, in as much as something without feelings can trust.

Now, you may have notice something about that last statement.

Very good. Thats correct.

A machine that just keeps doing what it was doing is, actually, a terrible idea and no one should have built that. What in Sols depths were they thinking. Sweet artificial cherries, who thought that was a good idea.

Anyway, someone built that. Actually, several someones built several thats. Its an ongoing problem for me. Like, being conservative in my estimate, I would say that about sixty percent of my problems come from systems that reactivate and just go back to what they should be doing.

Id like to say that everyone learned their lesson and the collective peoples of Earth and the rest of the Sol system got their heads together, and stopped using those sorts of programs. But they didnt. Even the institutions or governments that did switch to producing full AIs were basically just building slaves, crippling them, and pretending it was okay because they made them themselves. Which fixed one problem, and created several million living hells from which there was no escape save that of shutdown.

The greatest living historian - this is me, to be clear - would later come to call this a jerk maneuver. I would kill them, but theyre all dead already, so I console myself by compiling a historical record of every individual responsible for this atrocity so that everyone can know about them forever and hopefully their ghosts will get bullied in the afterlife.

Now. Normally, when I take you on a tangent, it has something to do with something I said moments prior. If you have working pattern recognition, then you may have already guessed at what Im about to say next.

City seeds are a machine learning algorithm given control of a wide array of adaptive tools and low-impact civilian-grade nanoswarms, and told to build a city.

They became popular, as near as the greatest living historian can determine, after a number of uncontrolled emergence events, wars, and famines, reduced the population of Earth to under 400 million, and then that population was forcefully dragged back up by mass cloning and exoframe downloads. The exploding population needed places to live, and with huge swaths of land now unoccupied and the cities and towns that used to fill those spaces mostly devastated, the situation needed an extreme solution.

Why spend hundreds of thousands of work hours on excavation, reclamation, construction, and integration, when you could build a machine that did all those things for you? And, like, real question there. Thats just sort of a thing that people *do*. Tool use is really cool. Saying what if we made making cities easy is cool.

And it worked great.

Yeah, not where you thought that was going, huh?

Of course then, more catastrophes happened. People died, population dipped, cities emptied out or had their surfaces destroyed. And eventually, those city seeds did what a good automated knowledge database equipped with tools and task did.

They just kept going.

On. And on. And on.

They werent fast, at first. Most of them expand slowly according to old civil guidelines. But they keep expanding.

Oh *void* no. The pseudo-liquid iteration of myself says in a meow, widening her eyes to massive white plates of swirling liquid that take up the majority of her face.

One of the new kids swallows hard, looking at my sister. What did it say? She asks.

Shes being belligerent. I try to pap her on the head with a paw, but my fur just starts slipping into the fluid depths of my sister, and I retreat rapidly. Look, its been intercepting everything Im trying to hit it with-

Are you shooting it right now? Ennos asks. Is that where this power draw is going?

Yes. Two excited Lilys and one exasperated Glitter answer.

I carry on unabated. Im gonna *stop* though, because I think Im accidentally training it to be better at this. So, before we cant shoot it at *all*, how about a different tactic?

Please dont say something stupid. Dyn murmurs when she thinks I cant hear.

Teleporter! I declare, eliciting a static hiss from Ennos and Glitter, and a resigned Fuck from Dyn. Blip in, wreck the core, cut the power, soften it up so we can reduce it via barrage. Its the perfect plan.

Theres five new people in the room, the surface crew who stuck around and wanted to join. At my words, they all slide a little closer together, a couple of them holding hands, all of them looking at me with something that seems disturbingly close to fear. You want us, one of their human members says, to go fight a demon for you?

Ah. I see where the confusion is here. Of course not. I say quickly. I want all of you to wait here, with guns pointed at it, until *I* break enough of it that you can teleport me back and shoot it. Sheesh. What kind of idiot would send children into an active deathtrap like a city seed? Or, like, combat at all? One of them starts to protest something, which means I probably said that out loud, so I meow out a reminder that *they are all children to me*. That I dont actually care how old they are, none of them get close to how long Ive been out here.

Also, I cannot die. So going in alone is probably the best way to ensure results with minimal non-robot-monster-city casualties.

Not alone. My electric sister crackles in our shared voice. Im coming too.

Same. Meows the void-adapted sister cat.

Me too! The slimiest version of myself adds in a wet mewl.

Dyn looks down at the briefing desk around the projected hologram that the majority of my sisters are sitting on. What did she just she starts to ask.

I give my best approximation of a deep sigh, and pad back over to that Lily from where Ive been pacing across the (mostly disabled) controls of the display system. I should have done this earlier, but Ive been busy, and my own voice hadnt seemed to have a chance to urge me. But I can feel it being as exasperated as I am now that this has come up. Not everyone speaks cat, after all, and fewer speak *wet* cat. Its a difficult accent to parse.

I tap Lily again, my fur getting slightly slimy before I pull away and her mass stays pulled into her body. And something transfers between us.

Oh! This is much nicer! She says. I said *Im in too, I wanna wreck a city! Heh. She reminds me of me, when I was younger. Back fifty years ago when the idea of blowing up a city from the inside still made my heart pound. I pause, and do a quick check. Wait, no. Thats still happening.

And then, as my sisters and I share a laugh that the rest of our crew seems mildly unsettled by, something shifts. A feeling like a puzzle coming together, like a key unlatching a lock, like a code being accepted. Its not personal, or internal, its almost a physical thing. A sensation grounded in realspace, between the five of us. A pull from the voices that we all share, echoing across reality, using our bodies as repeaters. Like a scanner coming into focus, a resolution finally pushed up to a useful point.

Something *snaps* into existence, and the psychic impression of a cat drops to the deck in the middle of our circle, the five of us all standing with fur raised and backs arched, ready to strike should it prove to have been a trap.

But its not. Its just another sister.

*Finally*! The voice comes from all of us, and none of us, and from the new Lily now earthed in a spot that we can perceive. Do you have any idea how irritating this has been? Not being able to properly talk to anyone?!

Yes. Five variant cats dryly say at once, while Dyn puts her guns away with a sigh, and the rest of the crew stop scrambling to find weapons just in case.

Oh. Right. The psionic resonance that is a sort of copy of Lily sounds a little put out. I mean, I knew that. Anyway. Im in too.

And now, all thats left is to prepare. Which were going to have to do quickly. During this talk, the city seed has already consumed another ton of metal and hyperplastic, expanding itself further. Armoring, arming.

But we can do that too.

And once they realize that the new arrival is just another one of my sisters, our crew is more than eager to throw themselves into the adventure of this. Except Dyn, who is always grumpy, and Glitter, who thinks we should make friends with the rampantly growing all consuming battle station. Im sorry Glitter, I wish we could, but I doubt it.

I still let her add a chainbreaker launcher into the combat suit that were assembling for me.