The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) Read Online Free Page B
Author: Daniel Keys Moran
integration with their Images; and finally, in the year 2069, Tytan Labs had shipped the NN-II, an experimental nerve net designed to offload biological thought processes into the nerve net – making its recipient smarter, able to think faster; Trent had had one installed in late ’69. For ten years the biochip nerve net had been growing inside his skull, making ever deeper and more intimate connections with Trent’s neural system. It would have killed him to remove it; but even so:
Stopgap measures on the way to the Promised Land. The problem was that there was an absolute limit to the speed at which protein-based neurons could process information.
Trent had solved the problem.
For most of the last five years, Trent the Uncatchable had been a replicant AI.
THE STORM OF data that struck Trent was similar to what he remembered of the Crystal Wind, of the InfoNet upon Earth. Once the process of splitting had been strange to him, even frightening, but he had grown used to it by now; he cut his slow biological component out of the loop and uploaded himself into the Black Beast.
The boundaries of his informational universe expanded by eight orders of magnitude; the speed at which he thought improved by five orders of magnitude. It took less than a second of Realtime; to the living Image of Trent the Uncatchable, the process took well over a day. He had time to watch as the holocams mounted in the main drop shaft swiveled to track the PKF Elite, who had brought their lasers alight and were attacking the airlock that led into Corridor C, time to touch the emergency databases assembled in the back of his memory, let the data spill into him and see himself grow to encompass it.
When he was done, he was the largest, fastest, most complex intelligence in all of history.
He tapped into copies of the code that controlled the battle computers at the base of the Elite’s skulls: code obtained from dead Elite during the rebellion four years prior. So far as Trent was concerned, it was the only good thing to come out of that rebellion; he had learned more about the Elite from disassembling the Elite control code than from all the information ever published about the Elite since the Elite were created. The Unification did not know that Trent possessed that code; it meant that, put into dangerous situations, the Elite would react according to programming that Trent understood better than the Elite themselves.
A message for the Elite, first, something to slow them down. A holograph appeared floating in the middle of Corridor C, in French, in flashing bright red type; the Elite would see it the instant they cut through the doorway.
Warning! Warning to all PKF Elite! This corridor has been booby-trapped in multiple smart and tricky ways. Any Elite foolish enough to try coming down this corridor will end up looking Wicked Silly – if lucky.
Trent did not bother with threats; the Elite knew, better than practically anyone, that Trent was not going to try and kill them. Trent activated the room’s one service robot, instructed it to insert five 600-terabyte infochips into the backup slots, and began spooling data for download to the infochips, and then requested access to the Ceres microwave antennae, had it granted: he encoded and began beaming, toward the Vatsayama , the Hosea 8:7 archives. There was no danger in that; Trent knew that he could not have decoded that file without the required passwords, and he did not expect better from the PKF DataWatch, if they intercepted it. He ranged the Vatsayama as he beamed: they were en route to Ceres, but would not arrive for another nineteen minutes.
He tapped the Elite radio packets, and began typing them against encryption schemes he knew the Elite preferred; it would take time, since he needed a minimum sample of the radio packet communications before he could begin decoding it; and then called up a schematic of the colony, examining accesses in and out of Level Three. The four Elite
Stopgap measures on the way to the Promised Land. The problem was that there was an absolute limit to the speed at which protein-based neurons could process information.
Trent had solved the problem.
For most of the last five years, Trent the Uncatchable had been a replicant AI.
THE STORM OF data that struck Trent was similar to what he remembered of the Crystal Wind, of the InfoNet upon Earth. Once the process of splitting had been strange to him, even frightening, but he had grown used to it by now; he cut his slow biological component out of the loop and uploaded himself into the Black Beast.
The boundaries of his informational universe expanded by eight orders of magnitude; the speed at which he thought improved by five orders of magnitude. It took less than a second of Realtime; to the living Image of Trent the Uncatchable, the process took well over a day. He had time to watch as the holocams mounted in the main drop shaft swiveled to track the PKF Elite, who had brought their lasers alight and were attacking the airlock that led into Corridor C, time to touch the emergency databases assembled in the back of his memory, let the data spill into him and see himself grow to encompass it.
When he was done, he was the largest, fastest, most complex intelligence in all of history.
He tapped into copies of the code that controlled the battle computers at the base of the Elite’s skulls: code obtained from dead Elite during the rebellion four years prior. So far as Trent was concerned, it was the only good thing to come out of that rebellion; he had learned more about the Elite from disassembling the Elite control code than from all the information ever published about the Elite since the Elite were created. The Unification did not know that Trent possessed that code; it meant that, put into dangerous situations, the Elite would react according to programming that Trent understood better than the Elite themselves.
A message for the Elite, first, something to slow them down. A holograph appeared floating in the middle of Corridor C, in French, in flashing bright red type; the Elite would see it the instant they cut through the doorway.
Warning! Warning to all PKF Elite! This corridor has been booby-trapped in multiple smart and tricky ways. Any Elite foolish enough to try coming down this corridor will end up looking Wicked Silly – if lucky.
Trent did not bother with threats; the Elite knew, better than practically anyone, that Trent was not going to try and kill them. Trent activated the room’s one service robot, instructed it to insert five 600-terabyte infochips into the backup slots, and began spooling data for download to the infochips, and then requested access to the Ceres microwave antennae, had it granted: he encoded and began beaming, toward the Vatsayama , the Hosea 8:7 archives. There was no danger in that; Trent knew that he could not have decoded that file without the required passwords, and he did not expect better from the PKF DataWatch, if they intercepted it. He ranged the Vatsayama as he beamed: they were en route to Ceres, but would not arrive for another nineteen minutes.
He tapped the Elite radio packets, and began typing them against encryption schemes he knew the Elite preferred; it would take time, since he needed a minimum sample of the radio packet communications before he could begin decoding it; and then called up a schematic of the colony, examining accesses in and out of Level Three. The four Elite
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