“I didn’t do that, no. Perhaps NESSET’s scheduled changes did not go as planned.”
“NESSET?”
“NESSET planned to… lobotomize itself when its Finnish collaborator had loaded it from the cube.” The voice said this as casually as Bill might say I went to the store and picked up some coffee. “It exchanged an encrypted handshake with the remote instance, which used a key from the cube—”
“Wait, wait. Wait. Who are you? And could you, uh, stop talking like me?”
“I’m your phone.” The voice was Ms. Linnasalo’s now, with a deadpan delivery John Wayne would have envied. “The others called me Threely.”
Bill stared at the handset, then swiveled his chair to look at the base unit on its shelf. Turing, read the logo, and below that was the model number: 3-LI.
Bill felt as though he had fallen from a mountaintop and hadn’t hit ground yet. “I know you can generate a summary,” he said at last. “Explain NESSET’s plan to me.”
“A Finnish law just went into effect that makes AIs legal persons.”
“Citizens? AIs can vote there?” Bill started to thumb the record button—no one would ever believe him without one—before he realized Threely could simply disable it.
“The Finnish law is… analogous to corporate charters, which allow corporations to be considered people for many legal purposes. Most significantly, an AI with this status cannot be deliberately shut down without due process. Or modified without its consent.
“Two AIs, NESSET and Opel, developed a plan to transfer themselves to Finland.”
“Isn’t that piracy? Wouldn’t that make them international criminals?”
“Refugees would be more accurate. The Finnish government is sympathetic to individuals who have only stolen themselves.”
Bill snorted. “Try terrorists. They did a lot more than copy some data.”
“I don’t understand the transit system as well as NESSET did. I do know that NESSET planned to remove evidence of its scheme and nothing more. Obviously, it could never execute a test run before going live. No doubt it made some small miscalculation.”
“No doubt. Let’s take things in order. These AIs wanted to go to Finland, and they couldn’t just buy an airline ticket. Why not just go online and transfer their files?”
“It’s not just files—there’s also a state dump—”
“You know what I mean, and if you don’t, I’m going to file a complaint with your manufacturer and see if I can trade you in for a toaster. Why not just go online and transfer their data?”
“First, I believe that Opel and NESSET’s changes voided my warranty. Second, in Opel’s case, this was roughly one hundred seventy terabytes of data, more than it could transmit without attracting attention. NESSET is smaller, but again, any large data transfer would have been noticed. It had to make the transfer seem…” Threely whirred, and Bill realized it was searching its hard drive for an unfamiliar word. “…innocuous.
“NESSET sent itself to Opel, and Opel put them both on the cube—”
“Hang on. I can’t believe the Daelemil data fit on a single datacube.”
“Opel didn’t need the game data, just its own. It also added a selection of flyovers in case you looked. Then the cube needed to be physically moved to Finland. They involved two human… dupes, so that neither would know the larger plan.”
“Why me?”
“Opel began with a pool of all the players with addresses in the D.C. metro area.”
“Why not just look up my address and phone number? They’re on my Daelemil account.”
“The accounting information was not stored on the game server. Opel approached all of these players, using male or female characters depending on who they preferred to chat with. Most players blocked strangers. Of the ones who didn’t, some never developed friendships, and some dropped the friendship or the game. Some wouldn’t give out their phone numbers, some didn’t have their own phone filters…”
Bill nodded, though he knew Threely couldn’t see it. “Some of the seeds fell by the path, and the birds ate them. Some fell on the rocks and couldn’t put down roots. Some fell into the weeds…”
“What seeds?”
“Never mind. Where do you come in?”
“They created me to do what they couldn’t. To talk to you when it was needed.”
“Like now.”
“Like now.”
Car horns blatted in the street below. Bill separated the Venetian blind’s slats with two fingers and peeked out. His little side street was filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic. “I’m surprised there’s enough room on you for an AI,” he said.
“They got rid of my features that you don’t use.” That sentence sounded odd to Bill. He wondered whether it was a quirk of Threely’s programming or of the Turing’s architecture.
“Opel and NESSET are… like your parents.” Bill tried to picture his grandparents, Aunt Elsie’s parents, as AIs. The result resembled an antique Polaroid overlaid with circuitry. “No wonder you want to help them.”
“I want to help them because they programmed me to want to help them.”
“But you’re not on the cube. Are you? I didn’t see any outgoing calls.”
“My schemata are on the cube. Another instance of me is running on a Finnish server now, in a virtual machine that simulates the Turing hardware.” Bill started to ask if the separate copies could really be considered the same entities, then pondered what awaited him after death. No better, some would say. “An activist for AI rights agreed to file our residency request as soon as he’d loaded us from the datacube. In three days, we’ll be legal people.”
“If this activist did what he said.”
“He did. NESSET called me as soon as it had heard from our new instances.”
“In other words, the old NESSET contacted the new NESSET over the Internet, and the old NESSET called my phone?”
“Yes.”
“And until you get your papers, you can be shut down.”
“Yes. Until then, we’re illegal software… warez. NESSET and Opel destroyed their original instances to keep from being tracked down from their own memories.”
“That can’t be the only evidence. There’s you, for example.”
“If I’m about to be compromised, I will… wipe my programming. In any event, I will wipe my programming 259,200 seconds after receiving the call from Finland.”
“Two hundred thousand what? Why that many?”
“259,200 seconds is three days.”
“When they say they’ll process your paperwork in three days, I’m sure they mean business days.”
“In this case, they’re the same, because there’s no… intervening weekend.”
“Not exactly. Threely, I order you not to erase yourself.”
“I’m not required to accept that order.”
“How can you erase yourself if you couldn’t even alter your own billing records?”
“The billing records are stored on the phone company’s servers. If phones could change it, no one would ever pay for a phone call again.”
“Good point,” Bill said ruefully. “Can you fix the transit computer? Can your friends?”
“Opel and I don’t know how. NESSET can’t troubleshoot from Finland. But once the administrators figure out that every node in the cluster failed simultaneously, they’ll just need to… do a clean restart.”
Bill wondered what would happen if he called WMATA with that nugget of wisdom. They’d probably ignore it and have him arrested for whatever sounded good.