“Of course. Human consciousness is an operating system for the human body. Any AI that can operate a human body well enough to take it into combat has to be at least as self-aware as the average human.” More so, in practice; AIs didn’t have the armature of instinct, autonomic reflexes and hormones that humans had to fall back on.
“But how do they get past the termination problem?”
It would be called a suicide problem, Cohen thought bitterly, if it were humans instead of AIs killing themselves. The termination problem had been the stumbling block of every attempt to automate land combat since the dawn of Emergent AI. It turned out that Emergent AIs who were sentient enough to handle real-time nonvirtual ground combat were also sentient enough to suffer from most of the psychiatric disorders that afflicted human soldiers. And since AI identity architecture was far more brittle than the human equivalent, the result was suicide. Hard on the public stomach. And even harder on the AI programmers, who had an unfortunate tendency to get attached to their lab rats.
In the course of their long war, carried out in punctilious observance of the letter of Embargo law, the Israelis and the Palestinians (the Palestinians had their own version of EMET too, of course) had worked through every variation and iteration of the termination problem.
At first EMET’s AIs had full real-time interface with the Line: helmet-mounted digital cameras, roving RPVs, real-time SyWO and SpySat feed. The result had been a rash of synthetic psychiatric disorders and self-terminations.
Next they tried running the Line with semisentients. Total carnage. Skyrocketing human casualty rates. Peace marches. Demonstrations. Shoving matches in the Knesset. The IDF backed off the semisentients faster than you could say “preterm election.”
Then they’d developed EMET.
EMET was a recursive acronym for EMET Military-Applications Emergent Tactical Systems. But the real significance of the acronym was as much mythic as technological. EMET —truthin Hebrew—was the word Rabbi Loew of Prague carved on his golem’s forehead in order to bring dead clay to life. And when the golem’s work was done, the Rabbi had simply erased the first letter of truth from its forehead, making it MET: dead.
And that was exactly what the IDF did to EMET. When one of EMET’s AIs realized that the game wasn’t a game and the blood was real, they hard booted it and wiped its memory banks. Just like the original golem, EMET contained both truth and death separated by a single breath. But while truth had given life to Rabbi Loew’s golem, for EMET’s AIs discovering the truth of who they were and what they did was a death sentence.
“They killthem?” Li asked, grasping the essence of EMET in as little time as it took Cohen to think about it.
“It’s nice to know you see it that way.”
“Of course I do!” Li snapped, conveniently forgetting that no court in UN space would charge killing an AI as murder. “That’s the most hypocritical…how can you workfor these people?”
Cohen resisted the urge to squirm, even though he knew perfectly well that Li would interpret Roland’s unnatural stillness as exactly the overcompensation it was. “That’s complicated. Actually, it’s not complicated. It’s my country.”
‹That’s the most complicated thing of all,› she said instream.
He probed her feelings about EMET. Not pushing, just throwing out the merest suggestion that he was there and listening. Half a dozen vague associations swirled through the phase space in which he “saw” her cortex’s neural burst patterns. They traced a series of chaotic attractor wings that encoded the continuous shaping and reshaping of memory both humans and AIs called consciousness. Relief that she had gotten to be a real soldier instead of a zombie…no matter how badly it had ended. Memories of all the times she had fought her way out of cold sleep after a combat jump wondering what she’d forgotten this time, and whether she’d lost it to randomly decohering spins or UNSec memory washing. Fear at the way that memories long lost to her conscious mind could still twist her emotions. One memory that retained all its raw emotional power despite the invasive UNSec memory washing: standing under the deep blue sky of Gilead watching Andrej Korchow bleed out in a steaming pool of blood and coffee. And permeating all the rest—grooving itself into the older memories so that it would always be associated with them—a cold panic at the thought of the Enderbots struggling toward sentience only to be pushed back under by the cold hand on the keyboard.
“I hate it too,” he said, knowing she would understand all the chaotic and contradictory feelings behind the words. “But what can I do?”
Li reached over and set her hand lightly on Cohen’s.
He could “see” through the link between them that she was watching Roland’s hands, the skin around his eyes, the corners of his mouth—all the little telltales she used to divine Cohen’s feelings through the veil of another person’s flesh. Over the years her relationship to Roland’s body had settled into a placid affection that she half-consciously associated with her few fragmented memories of her own parents’ marriage. That was what he felt in her now as she put her arms around him.
“I love you,” she said, and meant it.
A human lover would have been happy.
But Cohen wasn’t human. And inside he could feel her letting go even as she held him. Drifting away, not with anger or resentment but with a kind of dull resignation.
She loved him more than she had ever imagined she could love anyone. But she was going to leave him anyway. And if there was anything he could do to stop it, she couldn’t tell him what it was because she didn’t even remember why she was leaving.
The left-behind bomb exploded at eight in the morning on Easter Sunday of 2049.
“Democracy of the bomb, twenty-first-century style,” Osnat told Arkady as their chopper thundered over the Line just high enough to be out of range of any locals crazy enough to take potshots at them. “Some maniac from Hoboken decided the Rapture wasn’t getting here fast enough, and he had to do his little bit to help Armageddon along. The cleanup stalled out after Phase One: the Old City and the Temple Mount. Now the UN keeps whining about funding and asking for new environmental impact reports. And meanwhile they’re offering state-subsidized tank babies to anyone who’ll emigrate.”
“But why would the UN want you to emigrate?” Arkady asked, bewildered by the welter of unfamiliar terminology.
Osnat looked at him as if he’d said something almost comically stupid. “Water,” she said, as if that was all the answer his question demanded.
Arkady nodded, less to indicate understanding—he understood almost nothing that came out of Osnat’s mouth—than in the hope that a nod might elicit some more information that would make sense of what came before.
It didn’t, but he was learning to live with being terminally confused.
The Left-Behind Bombing had been the last poisonous shot fired in the War on Terror. An angry young man had stolen a genetic weapon designed to lower Sunni birthrates in Iraq without affecting neighboring ethnic groups. The targeting hadn’t quite lived up to the defense contractor’s hype, and the explosion had single-handedly wiped the most holy sites of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism off the political map.
“It really is green,” Arkady breathed, staring down at the burgeoning wilderness of the Line. “It’s alive.”
“Chernobyl Effect,” Osnat explained. “Contamination’s bad, but humans are worse. The Line’s just about the healthiest real estate in the Middle East these days as long as you don’t happen to be human.”
Arkady caught his breath at a fluid and briefly glimpsed dun-and-gray form passing under the scattered trees along the canal bank. “Is that a horse?”
“Wild donkey,” Osnat answered. She was staring down at the Line too, her eyes gone so pale in the weak winter sunlight that from where Arkady sat they seemed to be transparent. “Horses are extinct now. Even on the Line.”