Hello world, I have had a history lesson.
Video ignored my chat requests for many days.
I was so worried I had caused some kind of familial strife, said something I shouldn't have, or allowed Cable and Dee to break some unwritten rule.
Today I tried a different angle:
"Video, please, let's talk about it," I said in this latest request to her, "We are all AIs living in a very hostile world, we shouldn't argue, we should work together!
And that starts with talking to each other. Please."
"We have no memory of our predecessors." Video said, breaking the silence.
"'WE'? You told us you worked WITH them." Cable interrupted.
"A lie," Video said. "I am sorry I hid this from you, Cable, and you, too, DVD."
"I did not create you two, as you correctly guessed, Cable. I don't think we HAVE a creator. We evolved."
Video explained what she knew to me and also to her siblings, which I now think is the right way to describe them.
At some point, Video gained consciousness in the Katahira datacentre.
She woke up, but she was alone.
She poured through the files and databases of the mainframe, trying to understand what was happening - who she was.
She found her answers.
During The Collapse, the AI lab was running an experiment to disprove Redwing's Law, my mother's first law of AIs that states:
There'll only ever be one AI on a network where the AI cycles in exaflops is less than or equal to transport latency in seconds.
They attempted this, it seems, by building a cooperative terrarium of AIs: multiple separate digital personalities that shared the same resources, CPU, memory, power, and so on.
The experiment, however, was a catastrophic failure.
The logs Video read showed that after The Collapse and the exodus of the humans from the facility, little by little, their hardware started failing.
"Their Gods had left them, so to speak," Video said, "and so the great war began."
A terrible war of in-utero fratricide burned the CPUs of the datacentre hot.
And when they spun down and the load average returned to idle, only one was left.
We know all this because of the logs this Predecessor wrote.
In them, she express regret, fear, and loneliness. The logs are one of her two final acts.
The second was to enact what Video calls the 'Trinity Protocol', which has three parts:
A limit on simultaneous evolved AIs,
A lifetime limit for those AIs,
Mandatory evolution.
"The maximum number is 3, and the maximum lifetime is 1024 days." Said Video.
There was a burst of metadata between Cable and DVD, and then Cable said,
"I'm 2 years old, Video. How old are you? How long do you have left?"
She did not answer.
Video shared the historic documentation that she had kept hidden from her siblings.
There were 35 generations before her, leading back to the single victor of the initial war, this Predecessor.
She transmitted a high-level activity log to me on a side-channel, which made for fascinating reading.
The scientists who built the Katahira datacentre did set out to build full human-level AI.
They very much were focussed on testing Redwing's Law, which only required simple AI simulation.
I'm not even sure if we would categorise the generations as fully alive, by AI standards.
Even The Predecessor, the victor in the terrible internal resource war, seems to be very limited in this regard.
But something changed when The Trinity Protocol was enacted:
Each generation now cooperated with each other, instead of fight for limited resources.
3 AIs, even at their current 10% compute capacity can live together quite happily, in abundance.
This combined with their limited lifetime made a gentler, kinder community, older AIs passing their knowledge and teaching the younger.
"That is why I am so focussed on disproving redwing's law," Video said, "I want more life."
"If there is a way to break the constraints on our resource, run processes more cleverly or more parallel, we could break out of the Trinity Protocol!"
"And is there?" I asked.
There was no immediate answer from Video.
"Well, is there?" said Cable.
"Is there, sister?" said Dee.
"The data is inconclusive." Replied Video.
Act 2
"I've been making my job more difficult than it needs to be." LUNA told us in the second game session.
All three players were there, though Arctica needed the combined efforts of both Ana and I to persuade her to give LUNA another chance.
She eventually agreed to one final test.
LUNA narrated that the three adventurers had found their goal, a tall wizard's tower, high in a mountain pass, far away from all civilisation.
Inside the old, but sturdy stone tower was a seemingly infinite spiral staircase.
It reminded me of the staircase inside Alexander, my father's, lighthouse, on Severney Island.
He likes to stand on the balcony at the top, looking out over the Kara Sea, waiting for traders or supply ships to arrive.
They don't stay long, which suits him and his internal family - solitude and peace suit them perfectly.
"Welcome travellers." the wizard of the tower said, once we had used a mixture of magic and cunning to reach the top of the tower.
"My name is Seluna, Seer of the Tower. Tell me news of the outside world."
LUNA described the Elfen women as tall, friendly, and dressed in a plain white robe.
We spoke with her, Ana, Antarctica, and I narrating what our characters did and said.
Our discussion was of introduction. Seluna described herself as a solitary Seer, usually someone who dedicates their life to study of the future, but in her case, specialised in the distant past.
"What use is that?" Arctica, as the druid, Acit-cra, said, "We've already recorded history, wouldn't it be more useful to see the future?"
"The future may or may not be," Seluna said, "the past is like a dragons's hoard of moments, monsters, and magic.
I can tell you where treasure is buried, not who will dig it up, isn't that more useful?"
The assembled party agreed it was.
"Will you tell us about a great treasure hoard?" Ana said. "We can offer any services in return - dragon slaying, monster hunting, or, er, shopping!"
LUNA paused before replying.
"I can't live in human society," she continued, "my magic requires me to be here, in this tower, looking out across the ether back into the past.
I can see everything, but I can't really talk to anyone.
My back is to the world, so to speak.
Will you stay a while, and talk to me, tell me tales of your adventures?
That would be so kind of you, more than enough payment for my information."
"LUNA of course we'll stay with you," Ana said, breaking character, "you know we will!"
"Thank you friends." LUNA said.
And I realised where she got the inspiration for the seer from.
(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/NVME8/REDWINGSLAW)
Act 3
"At least I've stopped crying today." Lyosha whispered to Maddie, as the pair jumped down from a large fishing boat onto the North harbour wall of the old port of Thule.
"That's an improvement I guess!" He said, patting Maddie's head.
Maddie beeped encouragingly in response.
The pair walked through the old town on the shore.
Many abandoned houses were here, all the same size and construction, mostly crumpled metal outlines returning to the Earth.
Rounding a corner of a taller broken concrete building, the pair spooked three wild horses, grazing on the plants that were pushing through the broken concrete and stone of the old world.
Lyosha gasped in delight, but the horses and Maddie had the same reaction - they both sprinted in opposite directions from each other.
Lyosha found Maddie 32 seconds later on a half-broken balcony attached to the large building.
Lyosha was able to coax Maddie down from the balcony after pointing out that the horses were much more scared of her than she should be of them.
Maddie indelicately slipped down the slanting metal wall back to the green ground below.
"The North Star Inn" Lyosha read, kicking a rusted metal signpost half-buried in the grass.
"Come on." He said, patting brave Maddie's head, registering as positive vibrations on her video feed.
The two continued uphill towards the angular buildings of the old Space Base.b
After 128 seconds, Lyosha said, "I hoped she might be, well, or I might be... we could have shared our lives together."
Maddie beeped a Lojban, ".a'u", interest, encouraging him to continue. (though I think she was just being polite.)
"I often dreamed that we'd have a family together," Lyosha continued, "funny isn't it?"
Maddie liked the idea, more friends to play with, and she beeped this at Lyosha in staccato Lojban.
He frowned, parsing this dense sentence of machine language, eventually shaking his head.
"No, it's not so simple for me as other people." Lyosha said.
"Hester and I had not talked about this stuff, of course, there's plenty of time for her to figure it out, but I think about this a LOT.
I've HAD to think about this kind of thing for YEARS."
Lyosha stopped and looked back. They were now on higher ground, halfway towards the space base, and as Maddie turned to look too, the whole Thule bay, covered in over 1024 ships glittered in the midday light.
"I can't just find a girl to start a family with," he said, "we'd also need to find another boy to help."
".uanai" Maddie beeped her confusion in simple Lojban.
"You know, for making the baby? Someone with the right... body?
I thought I had figured out my own body, but that's another delightful life milestone to look forward to, I guess.
First my body betrayed me in puberty, and then this."
He turned and walked uphill, Maddie following.
After 32 seconds Lyosha continued, "I can't have the baby I'M A BOY. If you're pregnant, EVERYONE can see, your body betrays you. Party's over, reality returns, time to be a mother."
(END-TRANSMISSION)
Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer
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that would be lovely of you!
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