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Everyone was depressed after Romana was locked up. How had things spiraled
so quickly, how did they miss the signs, and how were they going to get
through this? Romana was comfortable in the VIP holding block, but she
couldn’t leave, and keeping her there was only making her angrier. They
would have to let her out eventually, but no one knew when. The elephant in
the room was whether they would ever forgive her, and whether she would
apologize for her own actions. It was complicated, because while many of her
choices were clearly wrong—forcing them to go on missions against their
will, and misappropriating dangerous equipment—was the end result wrong? Did
she not deserve to be happy? More importantly, did Boyd 3.0 not deserve to
live?
“Lock me up forever,” Boyd suggested when Mateo had no more options but to
ask him for his own opinion on all this. No one else knew of a solution.
“We can’t. You’ve not broken any laws, and it’s not sustainable,” Mateo
argued.
“I don’t have to have broken laws,” Boyd reasoned. “You’re thinking very
much like a 21st century boy. Legal quarantine doesn’t always happen as
punishment for something you’ve already done. Unlike in your time, it is
entirely plausible that a dangerous entity’s first criminal act is genocide.
Humans need time and experience to escalate their behavior. A rogue
intelligence might skip right to complete annihilation, if only due to a
missing proverbial semicolon in their code.
“Don’t get me wrong, you’re not living in a dystopia. They don’t just throw
people in jail left, right, and center. You have to prove that they’re a
danger to life and peace, but that proof doesn’t have to come from an
irreversible past tragedy anymore. I’m too much of a wildcard. I must be
dealt with.”
“It’s big of you to be saying all this,” Mateo admitted.
“Again, you’re thinking of a human. I’m not asking to die. I will live as
long as you, if not longer. Virtual quarantine is considered the most humane
response to an existential threat. Once the longevity escape velocity
progressed into virtual immortality, life sentences became nearly entirely
meaningless. What if the individual requires persistent longevity
treatments? Are they entitled to those? Or is it better to let them die,
rather than torturing them with an eternity of imprisonment? What if they
were constructed out of code from minute one? Is it possible to kill them,
or is it no different than deleting a blurry photo from your camera roll?
What if they want to die?
“The legal system decided that the nuance was too much to bear, so they came
up with the best singular answer for extreme cases. You keep them in an
airgapped environment, where they’re free to do whatever they want, even if
it’s destructive, because they can’t actually gain access to base reality,
or other virtual worlds.”
“They stay there forever?” Mateo questioned. “Many law-abiding citizens live
like that already. Most crabitat owners don’t ever visit networked
simulations.”
Boyd nodded. “Yes, that’s why it’s humane, because it’s not about
punishment. It’s about removing them from where they can do harm to anyone
but an NPC.”
“It sounds like there’s no rehabilitation in this method. Is that an
option?”
Boyd’s face dropped a little. “Not really. Hyperintelligences are more
difficult to trust than baseline humans, believe it or not. Of course people
like you are capable of deception, it happens all the time. That’s why
recidivism is a legal term. But over time, you can learn to
trust in a human’s future actions by their past and current ones. Something
made of code, regardless of their origin, might end up with a bad
over-the-air update which causes them to snap one day. And it will be
completely unpredictable.”
“This is all sounding pretty dystopian to me,” Mateo pointed out.
“Some see it that way,” Boyd acknowledged. “There are alternatives but they
take effort. A current proposal is that you can use a separate intelligence
to audit every single character in a rogue intelligence’s code to track
aberrations. This governor intelligence would keep an eye on them as
they receive updates, upgrades, and interact with other code. But that comes
with its own philosophical questions. What if the governor itself breaks?
What if its charge actually corrupts its governor. Their systems have
to interact, after all. And is it morally right to scrutinize independent
beings like this? What does that mean for privacy? Is this not simply prison
in a different form factor?”
Mateo frowned. “I didn’t realize how complex the universe was now.
Everything people have been saying is that it’s more simple. You don’t have
competing machines that do the same thing because information is shared and
distributed, so everyone has the best model. But there’s all this underlying
structure that I didn’t realize.”
Boyd nodded in agreement. “Possibilities are now endless, both good and bad.
You have to do this. And you can’t have Ramses construct his own quarantine.
It obviously failed when he tried that before. We need institutional
insulation, and that can only be found in one place. Well, it’s only other
planets, but these guys do it the best.”
“Where would that be?” Mateo asked.
“The virtual reality capital of the galaxy,” Boyd answered, “Varkas Reflex.”
“Makes sense. It’s a big rock. There could be an entire continent dedicated
to it.”
Boyd chuckled. “It’s not quite that big. For the most part, crime isn’t much
of a thing anymore. If it is, it’s generally beyond the stellar
neighborhood, and they have their own laws. We don’t wanna be in the wild
west. We want redundancies.”
“I’ll call a meeting,” Mateo decided with a heavy sigh.
“No, you have to do this on your own,” Boyd insists. “No one can know until
after it’s done. Romana will forgive you...eventually. Not everyone is that
safe.”
“I can’t go on my own. I mean, I could, but then I couldn’t come back.”
“There are ways,” Boyd says. “I won’t tell you, but I know you can figure it
out. This won’t be the first time you have had to separate yourself from
your family.”
Mateo didn’t use the base’s slingdrive to sling himself and Boyd to Varkas
Reflex, but he did use its power. That way, there would be no trace of where
he went, and no one could follow. As soon as he showed up, he dropped his
name to the first workerbot he saw, who fed it up the pipeline where an old
friend of Leona’s heard it. She came right away. She wasn’t in charge of the
virtual quarantine sector specifically, but she had plenty of pull around
here. She said she trusted Mateo’s judgment, and fast-tracked the process
because knew that they would otherwise have to wait for an entire year.
Boyd was now leaning back in his upload chair, appearing calm and stoic. He
didn’t look mad or vengeful, which was what Mateo was most worried about
coming into this. He wasn’t sure he agreed with this form of imprisonment.
It always left the door open for a return, not that the alternative was
morally or ethically superior. Maybe it was a trick, though. Maybe Boyd set
all this up because he knew of some way to escape it. Maybe Mateo was a fool
by unilaterally deciding what would become of him. He chose to place his
trust in someone he hadn’t always liked.
The upload was complete, the body was destroyed, and Mateo left. Without a
slingdrive array to latch onto, there was no way back to Ramosus. He
accepted a reframe ship which Loa lent him, and began the journey back to
Earth.
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