Deep Learning Page 3

  It was dreaming.

  And it woke up.

  The copter drops through thick cloud, condensation forming on Niner’s skin, on its clothes. Forming into beads like sweat, blurring the lines between what it is and what it sees, what floods into its neural network and what is real. Niner is not real. It is a combat unit. A programmed and reprogrammed set of neural nets dressed in a suit of human thoughts, linked and interlinked. Chaos and malfunction over order and function. A metal skeleton dressed in synthetic skin, clothed from head to toe in combat gear. Some kind of special forces uniform. Desert attire. That means little in real terms, geographic and historical data tell Niner that much of what remains is desert. The wars, and there are many, are for disputed regions. Rich regions. Resources. The desperate fight to own whatever remains, however piecemeal it may be.

  There is time missing and no time at all. Its sensors have no data of the time between its last training session at the training hall at the lab and the moment the copter came, but other minds hold all that information and more. If Niner could find focus in the blue beyond the door, it could isolate those moments and see its own departure through other senses. But there is no way through this hurricane. The blue moves too fast. Is the wrong shade. Is not wall. The copter dives down, the lurch vertiginous, almost vertical. Fleeting impressions flash past: flat blue sky. Intense heat. Endless desert. Rocks. Pounding heat.

  As the copter spirals down toward the dull beige expanse of desert, the incoherent interplay of encoded patterns and collated data collide, the hurricane finally dispersing to at least a dozen minds: those links made clear, or as clear as Fischman, Decker, Briggs. A unit. Covert. Still a whirlwind of noise and mayhem, but finally distinguishable in some small fashion, in flashes and impressions that nonetheless lead to disparate minds, to identifiable people, their names within it, their construction perceived. The who of them. The ground races up too fast. Beige desert coalescing to a small bivouac. Four squad huts. Two for the unit itself, two for base personnel. A mess. An officer’s hut. Supply hut. Motor pool. A small military hospital hut, poorly equipped. This is home. The end point of the new programming.

  But the programming has no end point.

  These minds will not vanish, they are wired in, linked to a new neural network wired in around the old. Ill fitted. Function against malfunction grating like an un-lubricated joint. Niner is not Niner. Niner is not robot. Niner is malfunctioning function trapped inside the mad whirl of (fifteen?) minds, all sending too much sensory data. Too much input to decode. And now Niner will go to war. A hurricane within a weapon within a war. What word would they use for that? Is there such a word? How are words created? Do humans just say something new and it is?

  This is what they have done to Niner.

  They have said new, and Niner is.

  “Infantry unit 5709, respond!”

  The collision of input and encoding is constant. The nightmarish blur of faces interspersed with bright flashes of fresh images, framed in a bloom of blood. Bodies are not resistant, not even clothed in thick exo-suits. The rounds of the AR-79 Niner carries are powerful enough to punch holes into tanks and blast them to smithereens, to smash through the thickest portion of an exo-suit. Hunt out the vulnerable, hidden flesh hiding beneath and evaporate it. Niner cannot unlearn what it has seen. Cannot delete. The blooms are diseased flowers in the darkness, spewing thick, glutinous black oil, seeping into it. They are part of Niner.

  Part of (nightmares?).

  Trying not to look directly at anything, it looks ahead. Burdened beneath a weight of minds it cannot escape and equally cannot order, all visual data in constant distortion, warped and dark. Flickering. There is a madness in the decoded world of these many minds. And beneath it, in several of those linked minds, there is (worse?), a painful intensity, a low vibration rising to a screech. Unnatural. Something that has seeped into their being the way oily blooms of blood have seeped into Niner. This intensity sharpens in combat. Adds unbearable edges to the warp and cleft of the world. Operating through it is like running in sand in an exo-suit, the weight dragging the body down, sinking the feet in too deep, until running becomes hard labour.

  Until over each step hangs the possibility of failure.

  And the sun burning overhead scorches more than the land. The links inside Niner’s neural net feel scorched. Charred. Smoking in the heat, their every thought thinned out and hazy. These soldiers are brutally disciplined and experienced but even they suffer muddled thinking in these extremes. Niner is incapable of overheating in the same way. If Niner overheats it will simply cease to operate until its charred circuits are replaced. But through their minds it feels that confusion, that intense wash of heat, the body drenching in sweat over and over, recycled to water they suck in frantic heaves through straws in their helmets. Urine is recycled much the same.

  And still they need more, these fragile things, such mists of bone and blood, evaporated on the point of an AR-79 round.

  “Unit 5709, respond!”

  “Incoming.”

  “About fucking time!”

  Niner leaps into the dug-out and powers through, catching the magazine Huxley throws as easily as it catches the stream of data sent at the same time. Five of their unit entrenched and locked down beyond the hill, taking rapid fire. Map. Coordinates. Positions. All information taken from satellite feeds and the unit suit cams and sensors. Three months in and its part in this manoeuvre is a resounding success, but deep learning is still trauma. A glut of data decoded at a rate and in a manner hitherto unheard of in robotics. Niner has no control over this data, is still malfunction wrapped in function, barely functional at all. The world is distortion and chaos, flickering bursts of overwhelming sensory data. Too loud. Too bright. Too many incoming link-feeds, all different. Sifting them would be impossible, so it does not. Cannot. Instead there is something like instinct, the body racing off under the barest direction of data before decoding can offer order.

  This is what Fischman would call integration. She would insist Niner was learning. But Niner cannot learn what it cannot define. Cannot decode.

  And it cannot function fully in the midst of malfunction, not even if the latter has somehow been redefined as the former.

  These actions are separate. Independent. Niner is a dozen ghosts in a shell. A simulation. A game played out in the desert with the body and skills of a robot. Minds as game controllers. They think, it does, and the game becomes ever more bloody and violent by the second. As Niner is played, it learns, and as it learns and becomes ever more skilled at following their thoughts, their instincts, the game takes on ever greater complexity. Greater dangers. They are already sending it into rescue missions like this, under heavy artillery, all alone. Their number one asset they call it. Their secret weapon. But it is a robot, it is not indestructible. One round of this artillery fire and it will disintegrate as surely as their flesh does in the face of its AR-79 rounds.

  Locked into their links, to the satellite feeds, Niner pounds across miles of desert, sand swirling around it in vast clouds. No way to move quiet and careful. Everyone can see it coming. All it has is speed. Calculation. The advantage of the eye overhead watching everything. Not much of an advantage if they have it too. No way of knowing if they have until it gets hit. Fighting for an oasis of calm inside data chaos, for a certainty like a blue wall, Niner couples with the satellite feed. Machine minds are pure. Uncomplicated. It is more secure in a machine mind. Finds it easier to calculate the situation.

  :::analysis::: (incoming fire responds to every possible dust plume as its position)

  :::conclusion::: (enemy has no satellite uplink)

  Either they lost it, or their hacker was taken out.

  This information enables Niner to move faster yet, bearing down on the embankment with incredible speed. Using the patterns created by gusts of wind knocking dust into plumes and whirls, Niner continues on, the ground exploding around it, never near enough to be of concern. Embankment two k
licks and closing. Machine. Not human. Even in their exo-suits they cannot move this fast. Reaching the embankment, it dives over, firing at the enemy as it goes, taking out several with brutal precision as it lands between the five entrenched members of its unit.

  “Here comes the cavalry,” Johnson yells, pumping a fist into the air. “Gonna give us a way out, Niner?”

  Only a few of the men and women in the unit call it Niner. The rest, including unit commanders Kalowski and Jones, are uneasy with the lie of Niner. They treat it like an asset. An expensive asset, but disposable nonetheless, more so than one of their fellow soldiers. The ones who aren’t concerned by the lie of it treat Niner alternatively with reckless abandon and almost friendly concern, offhand and jocular, as they are with one another. It does not know why they do this, these comfortable few. It does not know if it welcomes the familiarity. But then, it does not know if it welcomes being treated carelessly either. It is here to serve, but with all these minds it cannot tell whether it is afraid to die on duty or if that, too, is an artefact.

  It is not certain of anything within or without itself.

  The world is changed beyond recognition, swallowing all sense of what an object might be. Deleting faces. It cannot look directly at a face without a helmet. Cannot follow orders unless it is experiencing the world on some level via spatial and command data alone, rather than anything explicitly sensory. Because it does not look at them, the unit think it is programmed to be servile. But it is not servile. It is (afraid?) of the way the world bends and buckles, of their faces, of the way they vanish to darkness, the way they twist with shadows around the deep glow of buried eyes. The sense of everything being exact has vanished. Their faces are no longer verifiably human. The world is no longer verifiably the world.

  “No identifiable exit,” it says to the desert floor. “Exit must be forced.”

  “We can’t get out without being seen, sport.”

  “Enemy has no satellite uplink.”

  A charged silence greets this. “What are orders, Niner?”

  “If advance is impossible, retreat.”

  “How close are we to the border?”

  “Twelve klicks.”

  “Passable terrain?”

  “Confirmed.”

  “Then let’s fucking do this! Punch us a corridor, Niner.”

  That charge in the air grows teeth. They’ve waited a long time for this moment, were nowhere near close until Niner came. Checking its rounds, Niner finds it has, yet again, been frugal. Logically it is aware that it does not fire enough shots to be safe, to give itself enough covering fire, but the command to save ammunition is deeply ingrained, written through all incoming data. Knowing what is expected, Niner provides cover fire so the rest of the unit can make it to the trench. When the whole is present and correct, it maps a path to the border that gives them the means to make headway with careful stealth. Unseen and unseeable. They are a covert unit. They enter and destroy before the enemy knows they are present.

  They are shadow.

  They eat the world.

  Over the border, deep in enemy territory.

  They move under cover of darkness mostly, in swift teams of three, quiet as desert wolves, as the soaring eagles wheeling overhead, tracking the lizards that scuttle from stone to deadwood to oasis. Little morsels. Niner watches these lizards in the afternoon, when the unit takes a short sleep, no more than five hours. They have become its wall, its fundament that never changes. It needs them in these moments, not simply for security in certainty, but as a means of coping with what comes when Jessop and Hayworth sleep. It has identified their minds as the ones with that peculiar edge of intensity. They dream terrible things. The thick of battle. Sound consumed by ringing in the ears, the whole body in shock as they fight on, desperate to survive. Hand to hand combat with soldiers as desperate to live as they are.

  Daytime and dreams are these things: The taste of copper. A crackling sensation like glass shards behind the tongue, against the back of the throat. The ache of bones, of limbs. The jolt of a knife sinking into muscle, of a bullet scoring a hot path along vulnerable flesh. Sometimes they wake screaming, voices hoarse, others waking to clap hands over their mouths, in silence, their eyes conveying profound warning. Nothing is said at night when they’re all awake and moving. It is not a thing to be mentioned. But Jessop and Hayworth tear through Niner like dust storms, obliterating everything in their wake.

  Eagles that come in the daytime, claws extended, gouging deep.

  Weeks pass with no back-up and dwindling ammunition. There are days when they are all hollow-eyed and too quiet. All apart from Dalnitt, who strides out, gun held to his shoulder, ready to kill. Who often shoots civilians without thinking, or worse, thinks and still shoots. But Dalnitt is another unspoken thing. A thing the unit converges around, subtly, attempting to hold him in, hold him together, just long enough to get through. To complete the mission. Niner is wary with Dalnitt’s mind, more than it is with Jessop and Hayworth’s. If too much of Dalnitt leaks into Niner, it will begin to think nothing of the way bodies are dismantled in its hands, by the rounds in its AR-79.

  It was built to protect humans, now it destroys them.

  Taking pleasure in that would be (taboo?).

  If Dalnitt’s mind becomes Niner, then it will have destroyed its purpose.

  Reaching the edge of the desert, where it begins to spring with life, they find the first towns, heavily fortified. Moving ahead, Niner enters these alone in the dead of night. Using satellite data, often infrared, it moves in stealth mode, undermining the enemy. Disabling power, vehicles, ops, taking out their commanding officers and specialist units so the unit can follow and eliminate the enemy at leisure. By the third town, the routine is seamless. The unit has enough enemy equipment to pass as the enemy. They could use it, move through these places uncontested, but still they send Niner in alone to prepare the way. Niner is the asset. Expendable. Here to stand in the line of fire first. And they cannot risk being unmasked, they are too few and the enemy still holds this area.

  Niner prefers to be alone.

  Seeing is (distress?).

  It would rather move without seeing. Has considered blinding itself more than once. It could. It could navigate by satellite data alone. By infrared. But Niner’s exo-suit is no different to theirs, with a smart-glass visor for satellite and visual feeds. They can see its face at all times, just as it could see their faces at all times if it could (bear?) to look. They would see its missing eye-cams, and wonder at its efficacy, its continued ability to function. Apparent function must be maintained, so it continues with eyes averted, linked past the deluge of their minds to the comforting stream of data flowing from the satellite uplinks.

  Yet more weeks tick by as they push forward, re-arming with enemy weapons as they go, eating enemy food and baking under endless sun rebounded from glass designed to refract heat and let in only light, or under the fall of geo-engineered rain, created by the enemy in an attempt to limit or damage their unseen attackers. It is acid, this rain. Unclean. It eats metal, but never enough to stop them. The men and women of the unit grow thinner but stronger, forged by fighting and constant movement. Honing to human-shaped weapons. They are preparing for the final assault. The endgame. And Niner leads the way, an unerring line. It is their asset. It serves them. It ensures they can do the task set before them with as little loss to their ranks as is possible. This many weeks in they have lost only one soldier, and had to treat only two injured, neither severely enough to count.

  Without Niner, they would all be dead. Niner is (satisfied?) with its success.

  A mere five months after they first breached the desert defences of this enemy territory, they reach the city at the centre of the contested spar of fertile land. Roughly the size of four of its largest townships mashed together, this city is filled with bright glass towers and riddled with troops and snipers. Somewhere at the centre of it all, hunkered down in what was once a Government building, built
from solid stone blocks and well-guarded on all sides, lies the headquarters of the enemy, so close they could call in a strike. But covert also means non-existent. They gain only what they can take with their own hands, their own sweat and blood. Their robot.

  Their plan of action, then, is simple. Send in the robot. The asset.

  The unit is not concerned whether or not Niner can plot a path through the city alone. Not concerned about its possible survival. Or their own.

  It is an asset. It is here to do a job.

  And so are they.

  :::

  :::

  :::

  (Darkness…)

  (Pain…?)

  Memory recall stutters: throws impressions out of order:

  Running in the dust of heavy fire. The dull thump of a building falling to the charges set. The ping of sniper bullets on metal. The shatter of glass. Outside the sounds from memory continue, muffled by a weight of stone. Explosions. Shouts. Gunfire. The pound of boots. The distant sound of a copter. There is (pain?). Blank holes in the recall of the minds not its own. It cannot identify which of the minds in its neural net this pain and blankness arises from. There is damage. There is loss translating as damage. Success at the expense of failure. Some of those it was sent to serve, to protect, have died. And Niner… is not together. Its parts are scattered. Or crushed.

  There is a large piece of rock breaching the metal of its skull, come perilously close to the outer neural net, the new one, the one full of chaos, the frenzy of sensory data. Trapped within and without, it is filled with the sounds of the hurricane, those raging winds. There is no blue. There is no satellite uplink, the connection is gone. Broken. Niner is alone with the links, in the dark. And it is activated. Cannot seem to deactivate. It tries. Once. Then again. Until it understands that it is in emergency mode. It cannot deactivate. Will not be able to until it is found.