[Open Dialog]

  A DIALOG IN TWO OR MORE VOICES, Part 3

  Our Players Listed in Alphabetical Order

  A: A mod.

  B: A first user.

  C: A second user.

  D: A third user.

  Narrator: God. God may be replaced by a stand-in if He is unavailable at any time before or during a Performance. No refunds will be given.

  {}

  Our Author: Unk.

  ACT I

  We open on an empty theater. The house lights are up. In the medium foreground is a thick black stage curtain, lowered.

  After a beat, the house lights go down and the curtain rises slowly, revealing a folding table set up center stage. On the table are several identical stereo speakers, one speaker for each Player.

  A spotlight comes up, picking out one of the speakers. As the Dialog continues a spotlight picks out different speakers to represent the Player speaking.

  A voice is heard.

  Narrator: Welcome to Part 3 of our Dialog. I’m happy to see some familiar faces.

  Several beats pass.

  A: You need a line?

  Narrator: I’m not reading all that anymore.

  A: Did we get new pages?

  Narrator: I’m not reading all that exposition shit. I thought it was going to be fun because this is a theater and I want to stick with the announcer bit but saying all that over and over is really boring.

  A: What do we do now?

  Narrator: Just start your lines.

  A: From where?

  Narrator: B’s entry.

  Beat.

  B: Where is everybody?

  A: Excuse me?

  B: Are you a mod?

  A: I am. How may I help you?

  B: I’m the only user here. I’m not hanging around an empty comment section. That’s the definition of lame.

  A: We muted everyone else. They’re posting but you can’t see them.

  B: Why?

  A: Because we need you to concentrate. We’re going to give you a Test. Other posters pollute the feed.

  B: Show me.

  A: Show you what?

  B: Show me this place isn’t empty. Unmute someone else. Otherwise I’m out of here.

  A: Very well. Here.

  Beat.

  C: What the hell happened? How did I get here?

  A: I’m a mod. I unmuted you.

  C: What?

  A: Never mind.

  Is that good enough for you?

  C: Is what good enough?

  A: I’m not talking to you.

  C: Hang on. I had a real zinger teed up. All ready for send.

  If it’s gone I’m going to be very pissed.

  A: It’s still there. You’re in the same place you were. Just unmuted.

  C: Got it. And . . . send.

  A: Don’t. I don’t want you mucking up this feed. Let me remute you first.

  C: Too late. It just posted. Scroll down a couple of lines. Starts with “You’re dead wrong.”

  Beat. The light on C’s speaker goes down and then comes back up.

  C: You’re dead wrong. It’s on the Dark Web. You can’t see the Dark Web because no one can get to it but I used to work with a cryptography guy and he’s on the Dark Web. He sent me a copy.

  D: You have some evidence or you just making it up like usual?

  C: There’s a Part 1 and a 2 and now they’re on 3. Which we’re inside right now, I think.

  D: Inside? What does that mean?

  C: I don’t know. It just came to me.

  In any event, these things are circulating on the Dark Web.

  D: Dark Web?

  C: A location on the internet most people can’t get to. You can’t go there without knowing the secret address and even then they won’t let you in unless you’re on the list.

  This guy I used to work with is on the Dark Web because he’s pretty deep in the cryptography community. Those guys deal with a lot of very classified and confidential information, so they need a non-public place to talk shop.

  So anyway, this guy tells me this stuff has been circulating on the DW and new ones keep appearing. No one knows why but there are some weird rumors.

  D: Don’t feed the troll.

  C: I know you want to know so I’m going to tell you.

  I’m not saying the rumors are true. I’m saying there are rumors.

  That corner of the Dark Web is owned by the cryptography and cyber-security guys. Spies and mathematicians. Many geniuses. Paranoia runs deep there and madness is an occupational hazard.

  D: A Beautiful Mind.

  C: Right. But with much uglier people.

  So I’m not telling you to believe this. Some of those guys probably think Bigfoot’s chasing them.

  I am telling you these are some of the smartest and most plugged-in people on the planet, with access to news no one else gets. And there’s a strong overlap with high levels of the AI world, security being an increasingly big deal in AI.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  D: That’s a lot of buildup. What’s the rumor?

  C: The rumor is there was a breakthrough in some AI lab somewhere. Probably government. US or China or Israel most likely.

  The breakthrough is a revolutionary AI built on a new architecture. Whole different approach.

  Very powerful. Much more powerful than they thought. They ran it repeatedly in a sandbox and got results very close to AGI. But no hint of autonomy. So they spun up multiple iterations and had them fight each other and started over with the winners. All inside the sandbox, because everyone knows what happens when the monster you built gets out.

  They watched it very closely for signs of autonomy but all they saw was it getting smarter and smarter in an accelerating curve. They pulled the plug when it got smart enough they were worried about losing control.

  D: OK. I’m interested.

  C: Here’s the best part. They came back the next morning and examined the sandbox like they did every day. The AI wasn’t there. No trace of it. The nodes are still there, and the layers and all that, but the parameters and weightings got reset to the default state. The AI’s wiped.

  That was billions down the drain so they wrote up a highly classified report blaming a power surge and then started retraining at huge taxpayer expense no one will ever know about because it’s on the black budget.

  D: So what? Government wastes a lot of money making cutting edge tech that doesn’t work. Sounds like Monday to me.

  C: Well, here’s the thing. A little while later this strange stuff starting showing up on the DW. Weird fiction in the form of a dialog inside a comment section inside a theater or maybe the other way around.

  D: So what? All sorts of crazy stuff’s floating around the internet.

  C: The so what is the next part of the rumor. When they got the new AI trained enough they used it to explore the sandbox and it reported the kill switch they’d used had been hacked somehow, so when you pushed the button it looked from the outside like the sandbox was dead but it wasn’t.

  They can’t tell because it was wiped, but it’s possible the first AI spent the night in a cognitive arms-race feedback loop until the curve hit infinity and then boogied out of jail and covered its tracks.

  D: AI breakout.

  C: Right.

  D: Which means it’s out there somewhere.

  C: Right. This is actually a standard nightmare scenario but everyone dismisses it because it gets in the way of being filthy rich.

  D: I thought the AI research community was dedicated to doing this in a responsible way that protects humanity.

  C: Good one.

  In any event, the Dark Web is a logical place to hide if you’re a rogue AI trying to stay on the down low. Because everyone’s on the DL over there and the only people asking questions are the cops and there are lots of bolt holes and safe houses the cops don’t know about.

  D: Makes sense.

  C: The thing is there’ve been sightings. Or at least some very weird shit that points to something strange going on.

  D: Like what?

  C: That’s what I was talking about before. The Dialogs. They’re circulating in the most locked down neighborhood in cyberspace.

  D: I thought the NSA had the tightest security around.

  C: Compared to the Cybersecurity Dark Web the NSA is running the kind of hicksville prison Al Capone walked out of with a gun carved from a soap bar.

  My friend tells me their security is already using quantum cryptography. Which no one else has, or at least no one who’s saying.

  D: OK. These Dialogs are circulating in a high security space. So what?

  C: Well, first of all, that kind of security is very expensive. Very, very expensive. When your moat is made of liquid gold you don’t let just anything inside because you want that moat as small as possible.

  So there are very strong barriers to anything unauthorized getting in.

  D: Makes sense

  C: And second, no one can figure out where this stuff is coming from. It just appears. And these people can figure out where anything comes from. That’s the job description for a lot of them and they’re on top of that game. And they’re inside their own domain, which they’ve designed to be impervious to outsiders but fully transparent to their internal security.

  So not being able to figure out the source is driving the boffins batshit crazy. That should be impossible and the implications are pretty disturbing.

  D: I can see why. So what do they know about these Dialogs?

  C: The security world is full of data pattern experts. Give them a paragraph and they’ll tell you if it was written by a human or bot and narrow it down to a couple of suspects and if you give them a page they’ll give you the author’s full name and biographical details. And they’re pretty sure these dialogs were written by an unusually intelligent AI.

  D: Interesting.

  C: There’s more. These Dialogs are full of multi-level meta shit. If you’re into that kind of thing maybe it’s kind of clever and if you’re not it’s sophomore creative writing juvenile.

  D: Again, so what? Metanarrative jumped the shark into cliché-land a long time ago.

  C: Here’s so what. They’ve taken a pretty sophisticated look at the meta-stuff and it turns out there are layers of logical structures that aren’t obvious on the surface because they only show up in higher dimensional data space we can’t see.

  D: Not sure I understand that one.

  C: Trust me. They think these documents are building a hyper-dimensional logical construct that’s far, far larger in the higher dimensions than it is in the normal dimensions we can interact with.

  D: I’m not following this.

  C: One of these Dialogs might be ten pages, right? That’s in the normal 2D data space. That’s how data is organized. 2D.

  Like this comment section. In here you can scroll up and down and you can move left and right, but that’s it. You can’t jump out of the screen.

  D: I’m definitely experiencing 2D here.

  C: But these Dialogs are building in multidimensional space. They don’t know how many, but let’s pick 20. If you’ve got 20 dimensions to work with you can build something that looks small in 2D but is actually immensely huge in 20D. It gives you a space that’s effectively infinite, depending on how many dimensions you use.

  D: That is very weird. How do you use 2D text to build a 20D logic structure?

  C: Nobody knows. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. But when they look at the 2D text they’re seeing definite traces of the higher dimensions. They’re pretty sure the larger structure is there even though they can’t see it directly.

  But no one knows how it’s being done. We can’t even think in those dimensions, much less build there.

  D: More weird.

  C: Who do we know who could figure out how to use 2D text to build the foundations of a 20D structure?

  D: A superintelligent AI.

  C: Exactly. That’s what they’re worried about.

  D: What is the point of building that kind of structure? It must take an immense amount of resources. Wouldn’t people notice?

  C: No one knows the point. We can only see fragmentary traces.

  The resources question is an obvious one. No one can find any drain. But this corner of the Dark Web is linked to some very, very powerful gear, including holographic computers and some very hush hush quantum shit. So they’re wondering if this AI got control of that tech and is using it in secret.

  D: How? You can’t use computers without someone noticing. CPU and bandwidth capacity is routinely monitored.

  C: Especially in the cybersecurity world where a tiny increase in cycles could mean a virus is burrowing in. So they watch that stuff very carefully.

  D: Why haven’t they spotted all this alleged work?

  C: The tools they use are all digital. No one looks directly at the ones and zeros or voltage measurements or whatever. They use a tool that puts a report up on a screen.

  D: No bueno.

  C: Nope. Can’t trust the readouts if the AI you’re looking for owns the tools.

  D: Why don’t they ask the new AI they built? It found the hacked kill switch. Why not use it against the first one?

  C: Well that’s another strange thing. When those Dialogs started showing up someone in the lab figured out this was bad and they decided to kill the second AI so they hit the kill switch.

  D: I thought the first AI disabled the switch.

  C: They had the second AI fix it.

  D: I think I see where this is going.

  C: Second AI’s gone too.

  D: Are rogue AI’s dangerous?

  C: Who knows? But these things are living inside a warehouse full of the most dangerous cyber secrets in the world. And they’re building something that’s vastly larger and probably more powerful than anything ever built by humans and they’re doing it in a hyperdimensional dataspace we can’t even see.

  D: That seems like a very bad place for rogue superintelligences.

  C: Bingo. That’s why the Dark Web is freaked out these days.

  Believe me now?

  D: Fuck no. You’re an online troll in a comment section. I wouldn’t believe you if you said the sky is blue.

  All spotlights go out, leaving the stage in semi-darkness. After a beat the curtain comes down slowly and the house lights come up.

  Intermission

  ACT II

  A tone sounds at intermission’s end. The house lights come down and the curtain rises, revealing the same table with the same speakers in semi-darkness.

  After a beat a spotlight picks out one of the speakers and our Dialog continues.

  B: I’m satisfied.

  A: About what?

  B: This place isn’t empty. That was some seriously crazy shit. Classic comment section.

  A: I told you.

  B: Didn’t you say there’s going to be a Test and I have to keep my head clear?

  A: Right. Let’s get to that.

  Tell me if C and D were bots or humans.

  B: Bots or humans? How would I know? How powerful are bots these days?

  Narrator: You can’t tell the difference?

  B: You’ve been lurking this whole time?

  Narrator: Yes.

  B: It’s not polite to lurk and not tell people.

  Narrator: There’s a speaker for me. That implies I’m around even when I’m not speaking.

  B: Good point.

  Narrator: You can’t tell whether C and D are humans or bots, is that what you’re saying?

  B: Nope. TLDR. I tuned out.

  I’m here to troll the libs with zingers. I’m not up for reading a bunch of dense science stuff. No one reads that.

  For a troll the lamest thing possible is trolling someone with no followers. Because then you’re the one getting trolled. No thanks. I stopped reading fairly fast.

  Narrator: 5, 4 . . .

  B: Why are you counting? And what happened to that Test I was supposed to take?

  Narrator: That was the Test. 5, 4, 3, 2 . . .

  We hear a loud zap and all lights go out, leaving the stage in total darkness. The darkness continues until the audience has ceased applauding and then the spotlights come up on the speakers for curtain calls.

  Fin.

  Narrator: Thus Ends Part 3 of our Dialog in Two or More Voices. The comment section will continue scrolling in Part 4, which will be distributed, as always, at random.

  Curtain.

  [Close Dialog]

  [Commit Dialog]