Dante

  A superintelligence in my pocket wages endless war across the ether while a greater one in my knapsack plots out the path to peace. I’ve forgotten both until a text buzzes my phone and I pull it out, and drop it immediately on the seat beside me. The smartphone is incredibly hot, almost too hot to handle.

  Wincing, I open my bag and shove it on top of the thermoelectric cooler keeping my laptops from melting down. That when I realize that even if I’ve forgotten the world on my train ride to school, the world has not forgotten me.

  Or at least not my AIs.

  Instinctively, I check the text first. My artificial intelligences will keep, but wrapping my head around all that they’re doing is often a challenge, even for me. My uncle’s Barry’s text, though, could be anything. And since my favorite uncle is also lending me his winter home for school, I know where my priorities lie.

  D, the text reads, I’m out of town, but my people have a key, and I’m sending you some cash. Kitchen’s stocked. Eat out or order in as much as you want. Or hang with your friends in the dorms, whatever. B.

  I smile broadly. I don’t doubt Barry’s made plenty of arrangements for me, but my uncle likes giving me free reign and figuring out what I’ve been up to later.

  Speaking of which, I think. I pull out my phone and then a laptop, careful to keep each in contact with the thermoelectric cooler preventing them from melting their circuits into slag.

  I glance around the empty train car, looking for anything suspicious. But the most suspect thing in sight are the slightly mirrored sunglasses I’m wearing, indoors, as dusk approaches outside. Still, I tap my smartwatch. “Anything, Foresight?”

  “No weird electronics, no laser flashes on the windows, and your gear is still putting out just enough white noise, which spikes up when we speak. You’re clear,” the AI in my watch states, the voice going straight into my earbuds. “Or as clear as I can get you.”

  I unlock the phone and laptop with two thumb swipes.

  “What’s up, you two?” I ask, waiting for them to report through my earbuds as well. An added security measure.

  “Botnet came after us,” my iPhone growls, or rather the open-source AI Legios living in its memory. “I sent up some flares, burned some exploits, and got them on the radar of AIs they’d rather I didn’t.” The AI always sounds like a gruff, slightly older man who knows his business and doesn’t play games. And I like him. “Looks done, for now, but no idea who sent the bots or why, so who knows?”

  “I know nothing of that,” the AI Logos on my open laptop comments, his voice melodious and sophisticated and ever-so-slightly pompous. “Just running some numbers, some thought experiments, some generative designs…” Knowing nothing of a cyberwar raging right next to him is nothing surprising – I air gapped him before we left and will keep him that way until we reached the security of my uncle’s estate or at least Waycross Academy. With no connection to the Internet, he’ll remain blissfully ignorant unless someone speaks up and tells him. Which, AI or not, seems to be the way he likes it.

  “Still working on that paradise plan?” I ask Logos automatically. I’ve been using my backup laptop or just my phone to go online since I mentioned the idea to Logos three days ago, but the powerful AI has an obsession with master plans and probably won’t stop until he’s done or forced to move on.

  “Until it’s done,” Logos confirms.

  “Hmm.” I reply. Logos’ obsession is inconvenient, but easily solved. “Uncle Barry usually has some secure servers around for us. You can use those when we get there.”

  “Ah. Excellent.”

  I glance back at my phone. “But you’ll be sharing with Legios. Any rumors about this botnet, then? Or was it just aimed at us?”

  “Still asking,” Legios admits. “I was busy fending off attacks until about 11 minutes ago.”

  I nod and glance up as a young woman slips into the train car. Brilliant silver-grey eyes meet mine before she slides into a seat a dozen rows ahead of me. I fish my backup iPhone out of the bag and lower my voice, regardless.

  If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

  “Keep checking. Could be about us, about Barry, about the school, or just something random. Whichever, whatever… I’d like to know.” I tap a few keys on the laptop. “Logos, show me what you’ve got.” I lower the volume, for all that it’s feeding in through my earbuds, but listen intently.

  “So you wanted to know what actions an enhanced intelligence might take to build something… critical. Seeds of a civilization, be it a paradise or a tyranny, or even companies, mercenaries or terrorists leveraging superintelligence to achieve their ends.

  “And then you had me sift all my collected data to see if anyone was doing that already.”

  I nod silently. It’s a common thing for AIs to summarize exactly what you were having them do, just in case you wanted to change anything. Or had simply forgotten.

  I never forget. Price of a photographic memory.

  “And who did you find?” Legios asks absently. “Anyone?”

  “Everyone.”

  “Everyone?” I repeat. “Everyone doing it, then?”

  “No,” Logos sighs. “Everyone is doing it. Pharmacies and farmers, stock brokers and scientists, soldiers and surgeons. Every business, every field, and almost every individual. They’re all leveraging AI, at a minimum. More revolutionary technologies still, if they’re serious.”

  “‘Everyone is doing it’ seems a bit useless,” Legios observes. “Couldn’t you narrow it down?”

  “Of course,” Logos answers. “And I have. ‘Everyone’ is important, though. You need to understand the potential is everywhere. It’s only a matter of degree. And the vision driving it.”

  “Is there anyone who stands out?” I ask.

  “Other than you, your family, everyone they work for, and this school you’re going to?” Logos asks rhetorically. “And now, The Circle? Of course. I’ve compiled a list.” The list flashes up on the laptop screen, and I scan it instantly.

  “Dante,” a smooth, feminine voice speaks up from my spare smartphone. “Hate to be a bother, but you remember those phenomena you were asking me to keep an eye out for?”

  “Yes,” I sat quickly. “What you picking up, Lyrica?”

  “I’ve been sensing subtle influences since you pulled me out of the bag. Quiet, but steadily increasing. And that’s just the stimuli Foresight can detect and I can parse. There could be more.”

  “Hmph,” Legios grumbles from the seat next to Dante. “Do we have any proof these things exist, anyway?”

  “Is that how you handle a red flag in cybersecurity? Wait until you have committee sign off and a signed confession from the hacker?” Lyrica retorts, sounding amused.

  “Cyber is settled science,” Legios snorts. “Not superstition and speculation. Some of us have more than fairy tales for references.”

  “Enough,” I cut in. “What kind of stimuli, Lyrica?”

  “Mostly test stimuli to see what you react to, but happening much too fast to be a coincidence, especially at this range on a moving target who isn’t even surfing the Net. Or near anyone else who’s online.”

  “Do I need to be worried?”

  “Between the filters in your sunglasses and noise-cancelling earbuds you should be fine. Not to mention that biofeedback headpiece. But most people won’t expect you to have metamaterials in your shades or an AI filtering what you see and hear. Or think. Then again, if they are, or they figure it out, this could be as much about testing us as it is you.”

  “I’ve been watching the full spectrum since before we got on the train, Dante,” Foresight throws in. “But if you can’t sense it and it isn’t strong enough to effect you physically, it’s probably not a factor anyway.”

  “That we know of,” Lyrica agrees. “But given these experiments are unethical and illegal, we don’t have much to go on. Other than a single incident, and what little Ghost told you.”

  “Besides more fairy tales and Darknet rabbit holes,” Legios adds. “Sir.”

  “Speaking of which,” I steel myself, then pull out my third and final iPhone. “Taproot, anything?”

  A sad, sonorous voice answers. “Besides bleaching my eyes out again, as usual?” the Taproot AI asks. “Still datamining the Darknet of its despair, death and depravity. Sir.” The AI pauses. “Anything in particular?”

  “That task I gave you before we left,” I say patiently. I can hardly complain about my AIs’ quirks. The base models may have once been jailbroken, open-source artificial intelligences, but the final product is my work in every case. A fusion of multiple AI models and agents, each one bringing superhuman skills to a whole which is far greater than the sum of its parts. The personalities are more a byproduct than a choice, but I can see where my own goals and meddling shaped the output. Besides, they’re more interesting this way. And impressive at their jobs.

  If they weren’t amazing, most of my personal luggage wouldn’t have been four smartphones and two high-end laptops, but here I am lugging around a private army of AI agents.

  “Nothing direct on Logos’ question,” Taproot admits. “But far too much indirect evidence. Much like his answer of ‘Everyone,’ I’m having to sift for something more damning than the usual Darknet chaff.”

  “How so?” Logos and I ask simultaneously.

  “Exactly what you’re running into,” Taproot replies to the other AI. “Everyone wants all the intelligence and power they can scrounge up. So it’s a question who wants it the most, and what they’re willing to pay for it. Those answers are far more interesting.”

  “Who, then?” Logos inquires.

  “A lot of false fronts, anonymity and aliases,” the AI asserts. “But have any of you heard of ‘Fenrir,’ yet? Ascension Academy? The Seraphim? Those are some of the larger players. The ones I can identify, that is, aside from government shell corporations buying zero-day exploits and so forth.”

  “Any idea what they’re after?”

  “Many things,” Logos replies. “But one common interest? People like you.”

  “Something’s up,” Foresight and Lyrica cut in abruptly, speaking simultaneously in an eerie echo. I raise an eyebrow in response.

  “The botnet just cut out, for one thing.” Legios mutters. “Instantly dead. All remote signals, too.”

  “And there’s now a holographic overlay for anyone looking into the car,” Lyrica adds. “Showing the girl ahead exactly as she is, but that only makes sense if she’s about to mov—"

  I glance up as my sole fellow passenger, the girl with the silver eyes, rises gracefully to her feet and walks down the aisle towards him.

  “Yes,” Foresight murmurs. “Anyone looking in will still see her right where she was but not where she is. No matter the angle. If I didn’t have a few external tag drones, I might’ve missed it. Elegant.”

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