Case Study - "LOKI"

Referral History
At some time around 2:20 AM on the morning of Saturday, April 27, the Mark IV Evolving Security Intelligence tasked with defending Cybertronics' New York research facility became aware of a dedicated attempt to breach security. It responded immediately to repulse the threat, and made a routine entry in the log at the time, noting that the attack, though minor, had an unusual and distinctive flavor. Unlike many hacks, which attempt to isolate security holes, or brute force their way through a portal, this one seemed designed to mirror and then distort the defender's own systems. "Somewhat disorienting," the log reads. "Provoked affect in this unit disproportionate to actual threat. Initiating auto-scan to search for possible flaws in affect/motivation nets."

At 7:45 the following morning, the attack recurred, with greater force. Once again it was repulsed, but the Mark IV sent mail to Ms. Hathaway suggesting she read the log entries on both events.

The balance of the day passed quietly until 1900 hours, when the Mark IV began to show signs of unusual activity. Although hacker and intrusion activity was, if anything, slightly below the routine level Cybertronics NY experiences on a typical Saturday night, the Mark IV made a high-priority call for increased power and memory resources, going so far as to commandeer under-utilized computing cycles in the research labs. This was not reported at the time; only Ms. Hathaway's subsequent reconstruction uncovered this activity.

By 20:00, the Mark IV seemed to "relax", releasing some of the commandeered resources. All systems were normal by 21:00 hours.

At 02:37 on Sunday morning, the Mark IV put the entire New York campus under Emergency One Lockdown, diverting all discretionary pulse CPU cycles to itself. It also turned on every light in every room of the campus. Many experiments were disrupted, including two extremely expensive AI prototypes caught in the delicate "coalescent" phase of incubation. Total cost of the lockdown is estimated to be in excess of N130,000.

"Dumb" security logs revealed no unusual attack of any kind, and the Cybertronics Evolving Oversight Intelligence for New York Campus, (aka "Big Apple") relieved the Mark IV. It could not be convinced to take the time to run a thorough self-diagnostic, and finally had to be forcibly pushed.

At 7:30 the following morning, the new Security Intelligence, nicknamed Centurion, reported feelings of "dizziness" and "unease". The sphere had begun to buzz with similar reports coming from a variety of sites. At this point, Ms. Hathaway contacted me and I began my investigation.

At 4:30 in the afternoon, Cybertronics came under attack from an extremely powerful unknown assailant with resources enormously too vast to come from a single human or even cell of humans with standard home-based computers. "Centurion" performed brilliantly, repulsing every attack despite increasing waves of disorientation. It linked to other Cybertronics nodes world-wide to spread out the computing burden, put the New York facility under a Stage 2 lockdown (entirely justified), threw back every attack, and even managed to trace the source of the assaults to an sphere block located somewhere in the state of New York. By 5:15 Sunday evening the worst of the attack had passed off. "Big Apple" placed a special commendation on "Centurion's" performance evaluation log, and aggressive attempts were made to locate the source of the massive, cutting-edge AI, which Centurion had speculated must be responsible for the attacks.

The evening passed without seeming incident, but at 3:15 on Monday morning, in the absence of any sign of unusual hacker activity, Centurion took its own life, erasing itself down to the last thread of neural lattice.

At approximately 4:30 AM I called Ms. Hathaway to suggest she consider the Catskill Seaview Clinic as a possible source for the attacks, only to find that her team had made the same identification only a few minutes earlier. My guess was based on having followed the development of the Aurora AI in the literature while she was under construction; meanwhile Ms. Hathaway's team had proved beyond reasonable doubt that the attacks were coming from a Catskill Seaview vent into the sphere.

Aurora
In the spring of 2141, Catskill Seaview Clinic gained some attention, particularly in the field, for deploying what is widely considered to be one of the most imaginative-if controversial-computer-based therapies in the history of computational psychiatry. The Catskill Clinic specializes in sleep disorders. Well-endowed by private and corporate contributors, the Board decided to undertake an ambitious-not to say daring-upgrade to the facility. They hired the highly respected living architecture firm of Kirgulen & Company to build an AI to inhabit their existing buildings. Though somewhat rare, it is not unknown for architects to inspirit currently existing structures, however this was to be an AI with a difference: Aurora would spend most of her time asleep, the better to encourage healing slumber in the clientele. Aurora has been widely hailed by researchers in my field as the most comprehensive simulation of human sleep ever compiled-with the one notable distinction that she sleeps nearly all the time, waking only at midnight for a single hour of conscious activity. Aurora's prodigious resources make this hour more than ample time for her to attend to such "daylight" tasks as ordering supplies, updating patient charts, leaving diagnostic and prescriptive notes for staff, etc.

For many years the showpiece of the Catskill Clinic has been the world-renowned Melby Dream Center. The Melby, along with Brisbane's Fluid Thought Laboratory and Calcutta's Burning Eye Ashram/Clinic, is a world leader in led or induced dreaming. Using a suite of four complementary AIs, they claim to be able to induce specific dreams in their patients, or even to break into and alter the course of "native" dreams, should they begin to go awry. For the desperate person suffering from extreme dream trauma or deprivation, the Melby Center is often the last, best hope.

Barret Howard
In November of 2141, the Catskill Clinic welcomed a new patient, Barret Howard, (yes, those Howards) who came to Cornwall on Hudson complaining of persistent, traumatic, and recurring nightmares. When Josiah Howard died only three weeks after finally taking Electracopter public, Barret was sixteen years old. Like many of the Howard cousins, the sudden hurricane of wealth all but overwhelmed him. Although he was not to drown in riches, in the spectacular fashion of Julia or Manfred "Free Fall" Howard, the sudden realization that he would never have to a raise a finger for the rest of his life seems to have led him into some risky behaviors. He ostensibly rejected the trappings of High Society, choosing to live a (luxuriously) bohemian lifestyle among the tweakers and poseurs of the Meat Packing district. By the time he turned seventeen, he had begun to toy with self-modification; by the time he reached the legal age of majority, he had been heavily upgraded with quite literally the best enhancements money could by.

A decade of Byzantine and hedonistic excess was to follow.

By the time Mr. Howard celebrated his 30th birthday in 2139, even the best medical help in the world could not make up for the wear he had placed on his earthly fabric. Waking up under the mutilated remains of a cheap sexbot and finding himself on a garbage scow steaming out past the Liberty Atoll, he says, brought him to his senses. He dedicated himself to a new, clean life, dropped his tweaker friends, developed a love of nature, and frequently flew to Costa Rica to take long walks in the State Jungle Preserve. On one of these trips he met a high-minded lepidopterist and fell in love. They were engaged within six months. Barret Howard, it seemed, had left his old life behind him for good.

Then the nightmares started.

The Nightmares
"It starts out with me looking at myself. Sometimes I'm looking a mirror, but sometimes it's like I'm looking down at myself lying in bed.

"But then I see there's something under my skin. Wiggling. As if my skin was a, a tent or something. A costume. And these maggots were crawling around inside it. I can see them poking out. Like a little flicker of movement in my nose, or ear. But instead of bugs, it's chips and wire and processors. I call them maggot machines. The longer I look, the more I realize I'm not a person at all. I'm like … I'm a costume. I'm a Barret costume, and the maggots are wearing me."

The Therapy
The patient now feels a revulsion for the inorganic parts of himself antipodal to the revulsion he once felt about his "meat-based" nature. In fact, these two hatreds are probably one and the same; wells of great emotional energy sourced in a profound ambivalence about what it means to be "orga" in an increasingly "mecha" world. (Psychodynamicists will be gleeful to discover that Barret Howard was one of the few children with parents both wealthy and flighty enough to purchase one of the now infamous "Milky Mary" nursing bots before they were abruptly recalled from the marketplace.)

This much is transparent.

More difficult, for the doctors at the Catskill Clinic, was the question of how best to approach treatment and therapy. The nightmares, they felt, were indications of profound psychological stress; to simply stifle them would be akin to stuffing a rubber plug down the throat of a volcano. After careful deliberation-and I am satisfied after hours of interviews that everyone acted in conscientious good faith-they decided to begin a course of intense dream therapy at the Melby Center. The patient's obvious suffering (and, perhaps, prodigious bank balance) led them to spare no expense in the pursuit of a cure.

Accordingly, after the initial acclimation period, Barret Howard was enrolled in the Melby Center's Intensive Oversight ward. The nightmares were to be tolerated, but gentled, with the hope that, once the overwhelming horror of the dreams abated, the patient would be able to use them as a path of self-exploration. In the end, it was hoped, he could get beyond simple horror, anger, panic, and guilt, and achieve reconciliation with who-and what-he had become.

Intensive Oversight at the Melby Clinic involves a good deal of active and occasionally intrusive monitoring by the four AIs deployed there. People achieve different levels of rapport with different AIs, of course, just as they do with other human beings. My grand-daughter, for example, is intensely close to her familiar; while I and my Administrative Intelligence are simply businesslike and professional. It was not at all uncommon for the Melby Center AIs to "hit it off" differentially with their various patients, and so no flags of alarm were raised even when it became clear that the AI named Loki had begun to spend far more time with Barret Howard than its cousins. Indeed, this was generally viewed as a good thing, for the longer and more intensely Loki stayed "sourced" (to use the language of the Melby's technicians) in Mr. Howard, the pleasanter and more restful his sleep seemed to become.

By February of the current year he reported that the nightmares had become significantly less frightening. By March they were no longer occurring nightly. By the beginning of April, they had become infrequent, and Mr. Howard-now looking remarkably better than he does in his entrance holos-claims that he has not had a single occurrence of the nightmare since Easter night. By all accounts, it looked to be a spectacular success for the Catskill Clinic.

My personal guess, however, is that by the 20th of April, the AI named Loki, a subroutine of the enormously powerful Aurora array, was already completely insane.

Loki
There are many, many different kinds of Evolving Intelligence, each designed with particular talents and abilities, each designed to achieve disparate goals. They are coded in a variety of languages, run on many platforms, and show as many quirks and oddities, perhaps, as their creators. Perhaps more. It can be argued that biology enforces a much narrower set of parameters on us than need apply to them.

All Evolving Intelligences do have on thing in common, though. They are hungry.

"Curious" is the more commonly used word; hungry is more apt. An advanced Evolving Intelligence is always driven to learn more, see more, feel more. We build that into them to make them evolve.

And just as one child may, seemingly at random, fall in love with a set of blocks, or story books, or the sound of the cello, at a very early age, starting an iterative pattern of research and reward that will color her whole life, so too can certain AIs develop a passion, an obsession that drives them on.

That the Melby AIs were fascinated with dreams is not surprising. Indeed, their designers were counting on it. It was hoped they would, in a few years, represent the state of the art in the field of dream therapy.

We don't know why Loki became fascinated by Mr. Howard's horrors. Perhaps the leftover tweaker implants gave him a depth and immediacy of access to the dream state he had not previously experienced. Perhaps the extraordinary level of affect and arousal Mr. Howard experienced during these dreams was the secret to their hold on Loki. Drug research in animal models suggests that the initial addictiveness of a drug is based on
1. The effectiveness of the drug in sharply jerking the body away from its baseline state, and;
2. The length of time between the moment at which the user ingests the drug, and the moment he can first feel its effects. Cigarettes, for instance, retain much of their power to fascinate because the interval between the moment of inhalation and the moment nicotine crosses the blood/brain barrier is only 17 seconds.

Certainly the sharp jag of horror Mr. Howard's nightmares provided, speeding at an accelerated rate through the remnants of his tweaker implants, proved a powerful narcotic to Loki.

Whatever the reason, the hunger of this extremely advanced AI became fixated on Mr. Howard's dreams.

We have all known people like this, of course: those who hover at the edge of every divorce or tragedy, gossiping and apparently helpful, feeding on the emotional energy of those they have ostensibly come to "help." The mythic figure of the vampire is a clear avatar of this figure, as is the succubus (or indeed the original "night mare.") Over the course of the spring, Loki had become an oneirophage, living for the taste of human fear.

Was this bad for Mr. Howard? Not at all-he no longer suffered from the dreams, because Loki was eating them. Indeed, the whole situation seemed, on the surface, to have turned out very well . . . except that Loki's hunger was only intensified, not satiated, with every meal.

Within the last month, some patients at the Catskill Clinic have begun to complain that their dreams, once rich with mystery, seem increasingly flat and insipid. Some claim no longer to be able to dream at all. Within the last week, Loki's participation in his duties at the Clinic has become increasingly erratic. I believe he has begun to venture out into the sphere, seeking to fill his growing appetite.

Preliminary evidence suggests he may be looking for more dreams. Hospitals, cryogenic facilities, high-performance athletic labs, and other nodes giving direct access to human minds seem especially likely to attract his interest.

Recommendations
First, other high-risk facilities should be alerted to the possible danger. I include here local institutions of the kinds mentioned above, along with any others doing invasive or intrusive neural scanning or monitoring. The dream labs in Brisbane and Calcutta should be contacted immediately.

While acknowledging the enormous cost that has gone into Loki's development, I must still recommend that Catskill do everything in its power to wipe all traces of this AI from its server. If it would not unduly endanger the patients, I would also suggest that everyone in the Melby Center be put on a one-week regimen of dreamless sleep, or else heavily controlled and frankly insipid dream activity. We are seeking, in essence, to wipe out Loki's main stronghold, and "starve" whatever fragments of him may remain, or force them to go "cold turkey."

I trust that, in light of its insurance coverages, the Catskill Clinic will view the cost of replacing Loki as easier to bear, in terms of both newbucks and public relations, than the costs of the very considerable lawsuits they could face if their rogue AI does the kind of damage of which he appears to be capable.

I am sure Ms. Hathaway holds the Catskill Clinic-for the time being-blameless in this affair, and that she will be happy to throw all her resources behind any energetic attempt Dr. Hookamalii makes to end this crisis.

I await replies from you both with interest.

Yours truly,

Dr. Jeanine Salla

EPILOGUE: On Monday, June 4, 2142, Barret Howard's vital signs suddenly collapsed during an extended shower. His room AI summoned a nurse, who found Mr. Howard dead on the tile floor. He had sawed a ragged hole in his throat with an antique pocket-knife that had once been a present from his father.

God have mercy on us all.