Brian let them out and blinked at the bright sunshine. “That sounds as though you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t. Not after last night!”

Shelly sipped at her coffee while Brian worked his way through a Texas breakfast — steak, eggs and flapjacks. He couldn’t quite finish it all, sighed and pushed the plate away. Except for two guards just off duty, sitting at a table on the far wall, they were alone in the mess hall.

“I’m feeling slightly less inhuman,” he said. “More coffee?”

“I’ve had more than enough, thank you. Do you think that you can fix your screw-loose AI?”

“No. I was getting so annoyed at the thing that I’ve wiped its memory. We will have to rewrite some of the program before we load it again. Which will take a couple of hours. Even LAMA-5’s assembler takes a long time on a system this large. And this time I’m going to make a backup copy before we run the new version.”

“A backup means a duplicate. When you do get a functioning humanoid artificial intelligence — do you think that you will be able to copy it as well?”

“Of course. Whatever it does — it will still just be a program. Every copy of a program is absolutely identical. Why do you ask?”

“It’s a matter of identity, I guess. Will the second AI be the same as the first?”

“Yes — but only at the instant it is copied. As soon as it begins to run, to think for itself, it will start changing. Remember, we are our memories. When we forget something, or learn something new, we produce a new thought or make a new connection — we change. We are someone different. The same will apply to an AI.”

“Can you be sure of that?” she asked doubtfully.

“Positive. Because that is how mind functions. Which means I have a lot of work to do in weighting memory. It’s the same reason why so many earlier versions of Robin failed. The credit assignment problem that we talked about before. It is really not enough to learn just by short-term stimulus-response-reward methods — because this will solve only simple, short-term problems. Instead, there must be a larger scale reflective analysis, in which you think over your performance on a longer scale, to recognize which strategies really worked, and which of them led to sidetracks, moves that seemed to make progress but eventually led to dead ends.”

“You make the mind sound like — well — an onion!”

“It is.” He smiled at the thought. “A good analogy. Layer within layer and all interconnected. Human memory is not merely associative, connecting situations, responses and rewards. It is also prospective and reflective. The connections made must also be involved with long-range goals and plans. That is why there is this important separation between short-term and long-term memory. Why does it take about an hour to long-term memorize anything? Because there must be a buffer period to decide which behaviors actually were beneficial enough to record.”

Sudden fatigue hit him. The coffee was cold; his head was beginning to ache; depression was closing in. Shelly saw this, lightly touched his hand.

“Time to retire,” she said. He nodded sluggish agreement and struggled to push back the chair.

26

June 19, 2024

Shelly opened her apartment door when Benicoff knocked. “Brian just came in,” she said, “and I’m getting him a beer. You too?”

“Please.”

“Come in and take a look — after all you paid for it.” She led the way into the living room where all traces of the army barracks had been carefully removed. The floor-to-ceiling curtains that framed the window were made from colorful handwoven fabric. The carpeting picked up the dark orange from the curtain pattern. The slim lines of the Danish teak furniture blended pleasantly with this, providing a contrast to the spectacular colors of the post-Cubist painting that covered most of one wall.

“Most impressive,” Ben said. “I can see now why the accounts department was screaming.”

“Not at this — the fabric and rugs are Israeli-designed but Arab-manufactured and not at all expensive. The painting is on loan from an artist friend of mine, to help her sell it. Most of the money went for the high-tech kitchen. Want to see it?”

“After the beer. I better brace myself for it.”

“Going to explain the mystery of your invitation to a Thai lunch today?” Brian said, lolling back comfortably in the depths of a padded armchair. “You know that Shelly and I are prisoners of Megalobe until you run down the killers. So how do we get out to this Thai restaurant of yours?”

“If you can’t get to Thailand, why Thailand will come to you. As soon as you told me you wanted to bring me up to date on your AI I thought we ought to make a party of it. Thanks, Shelly.”

Ben took a deep swig of cold Tecate and sighed. “Good stuff. It all began with a security check last week. I sit in with Military Intelligence when they vet any soldiers to be transferred here. That was when I discovered that Private First Class Lat Phroa had joined the army to get away from his father’s restaurant. He said he had enough of cooking and wanted some action. But after a year of army food he was more than happy to cook a real Thai meal in the kitchen here, if I could get the ingredients. Which I did. The cooks went along with it and the troops are looking forward to the change. We’ll have the mess hall to ourselves after two. We’ll be the guinea pigs and if we approve, Lat promised to feed everyone else tonight.”

“I can’t wait,” Shelly said. “Not that the food here is bad — but I would love a change.”

“How is the investigation going?” Brian asked. It was never far from his thoughts. Ben frowned into his beer.

“I wish I could bring some good news, but we seem to have hit a dead end. We have Alex Toth’s military record. He was an outstanding pilot, plenty of recommendations for that. But he is also a borderline alcoholic and a troublemaker. After the war they threw him out as fast as they could. No trace of him at the address he gave at the time. The FBI has found some records of his employment through his pilot’s license, kept up to date. But the man himself has vanished. The trail is ice cold. Dusty Rhodes’ story checks out. He was conned into it and then left to hang out and dry in the wind. There is absolutely no way to trace the money that was paid into his account.”

“What’s going to happen to Rhodes?” Shelly asked.

“Nothing now. The remaining money they gave him has been sequestered for the crime victims’ fund and he signed a complete statement of everything that happened, everything he did. He’ll keep his nose clean in the future or will be hit with a number of charges. We want to keep this thing as quiet as we can while the investigation is still in progress.”

Shelly nodded and turned to Brian. “You must bring me up to date. Did you ever get that B-brain to work?”

“Indeed I did, and sometimes it works amazingly well. But not often enough to trust very far. It keeps breaking down in fascinating and peculiar ways.”

“Still? I thought that using LAMA-5 made debugging easier.”

“It certainly does — but I think that this is more a problem of design. As you know, the B-brain is supposed to monitor the A-brain, make changes when needed to keep it out of various kinds of trouble. Theoretically this works best when the A-brain is unaware of what is happening. But it seems that as Robin’s A-brain became smarter it learned to detect that tampering — then tried to find ways to change things back. This ended up in a struggle for power as the two brains fought for control.”

“It sounds like human schizophrenia or multiple personalities!”

“Exactly so. Human insanity is mirrored in machine madness and vice versa. Why not? A malfunctioning brain will have the same symptoms from the same cause, machine or man.”

“It must be depressing, being set back by lunatic brains in a box.”