The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III by Roger MacBride Allen, David Drake Page A

Once that started, I knew I was working under blown cover. I quit trying to transmit, and concentrated on staying alive. I disabled all of Ranger’s sending circuits, radio and laser, everything. I just hooked them back up again to come in here today. I’ve been hiding out most of the last two months. Not much sleep. Thanks to those smartasses who thought they were being clever.”
    “Possibly,” Spencer said. “Either it was smartass humans or else just dumb machines,” Spencer said.
    McCain turned around sharply and looked at Spencer. “What?”
    “What you’ve described sounds more like the sort of screw-up artificial intelligence rigs make every day than the work of a master criminal,” Spencer replied. “Why in hell would the opposition go to all the bother of fiddling with a private KT transmission and then waste all that effort just to play a pointless trick on you? If I were in a position to take over KT HQ transmissions, I bet I could think of a more productive use for that capability than telling fruit jokes.
    “But suppose an AI unit had programmed a false message-from-McCain generator, an independent subroutine designed to match your codes and phrasing, and constructed a whole series of logically connected messages. The way most AI systems are built, the parent program would then spin off the subroutine as a completely independent, external program. Then it would have a complete, all-in-one forgery generation program that could track real events—fruit sales, for example—create reports on them, and feed them to your headquarters.
    “Now the computer would have two input sources—you and its very clever you-simulator. Remember, to an AI computer, your real messages would be no more—or less—real than the independent simulation’s messages. It’s all just zeroes and ones to a computer.
    “Then the AI unit figures out how to send you phony messages. Maybe it even sends you a few that you don’t know are fakes—”
    “Until the program gets a hiccup somewhere and can’t tell me from the simulation,” McCain said, cutting in. It thinks the sim is me—and starts sending me replies to the messages its own sim is sending it. Good Lord. I never thought of that. I must be slipping.”
    “No reason you should think of things like that, if you’ve never worked in a staff outfit,” Spencer said. “I used to work in an intelligence unit, and we used a lot of AI. We seemed to spend half our time talking the AI systems out of self-imposed delusional states just like this. My guess is that someone out there has a great computer system that happened to zig when it should have zagged. Which is lucky for you and the KT. If it had been just a little smarter, that computer would never have sent such obviously fake messages to the KT in the first place.”
    “And you’d never have noticed anything was wrong. You never would have gotten here,” McCain said.
    “Yeah, for whatever good the Navy being here does,” Spencer said. “Now that we’re here, what do we do? What were the messages you were really trying to send?”
    “That was the maddening thing about it,” she said. “I was trying to report on the subversion of electronic communications. I think that was how StarMetal was managing to buy up so much real estate in the asteroid belt. They were simulating the original sales offers they then bought up.”
    “What makes you think that?”
    “All sorts of sellers were claiming never to have sent the authenticated messages agreeing to sale. The sellers would get the money; StarMetal stuck with the deals it made. But the prices were low and the deals seemed funny.”
    “So why the hell didn’t anyone do anything about it? Sue, or go to the press.”
    “StarMetal bought all the judges and the press, too. And as of last year, they own all the calibrated jump points, except the military point you came in. At any rate, StarMetal can decide who exits and enters the system. They’ve completely