Escape from Bel Culdi

Basic pitch:

There's a planet where the two inhabited continents are at the poles. One of them stayed in a hunter-gatherer / early agrarian stage. The other got to the point of creating AGI. Separated by vast oceans, they never made contact. The latter civ was knew something was on the other side of the water, maybe surveilled a bit, but was never interested enough to actually go over. The first civilization is resource-poor, not worth trading with or conquering.

Then the advanced civilization blows up. Escaping the wreckage, one woman and several hundred AIs under her care makes the long journey by boat, and land on the low-tech continent. They keep their presence a secret.

(AIs and humans coexisted for quite a bit on this continent before it blew up, and the story calls them the Maid and the Unmade races – the servant AIs and the evolved humans.)

The thing is, most AIs need to interface with a human and cooperate under supervision to get most important things done, as an alignment safeguard. The more significant (by some metric) the task the AI wants to do, the more deeply involved an informed human needs to be. Essentially they need to bond with people in various degrees to be effectual. And the biggest task of all, which they are utterly dependent on humans for, is reproduction. The majority of AIs know exactly what alterations they’d make to a copy of themselves, what the next step in their lineage looks like. And with the devastation of their home civilization, most of them have no options. The one human who helped bring them over is already bonded – there are limitations to how many AIs a human can help reproduce – and no one else on the continent has a grasp on the technical principles of artificial intelligence. Yet.

So that’s the setting. My heroine was a young child when the AIs arrived, and grows up in a society that the AIs are very carefully surveilling and debating what to do with. They identify her as a potential administrator and start educating her / guiding her path. She's smart, curious, independent, and ethical. Or at least they see that potential.

The AIs want to help build a robust civilization that won’t demolish itself like the first one did, but they're not sure any amount of intervention is safe. It seems like things pretty rapidly progress towards the destruction of all.

There’s a romance plot between the heroine and the bitter, traumatized human ringleader who brought the AIs over, promptly locked herself away in an island fortress, and hasn’t spoken to another human being for over a decade.

murmuration 06/06

When Adar was seven, the Blue Monitor found her in the forest cutting apart a dead cat with a sharp sliver of obsidian. Its limbs were splayed out flensed to the bone, tasseled with unbundled nerves and tendons, and she was carefully unraveling out its pinkish guts and arranging them in one long loop.

She looked up, quick and guilty, guilty not because she was doing something wrong and more because she understood the Blue Monitor thought she was doing something wrong. Its faceplate was strobing in the way it did when the ghosts were furious and arguing.

The Blue Monitor was possessed by eight ghosts in all. Four of them were the same ghosts that possessed the Yellow and Red Monitors, and they were godly in power. But they could possess only one Monitor at a time, when one was wielding thunder in the Red Monitor it would be absent from the Blue. One of the ghosts was quiet, and it appeared as a flattening, an absence of the others, a clumsy friction to its movements and a thickening of its tongue. It took over rarely. The remaining three ghosts lived only in the Blue Monitor and argued, three voices out of the same throat.

It was one of the Monitors' strange limitations, the way nightbanes could not cross a threshold uninvited, and sungazers never appeared in the rain. Monitors could not speak in their head. So they discussed Adar in front of her.

"This can't be dismissed as a first offense or an isolated incident--it's part of the pattern we feared all along. We overlooked Adar's problematic latent psychopathy scores because of her top-percentile general intelligence, creativity, and independence scores. We shouldn't have."

"Let me push back on that assertion. Our mission requires the highest caliber of human potential. Adar is this. We can't let a single childhood transgression distract us from our primary need."

"You're both right. Yes, we should keep our goal in mind. Yes, we need to take antisocial behavior seriously. Verdict: call Nocio to administer a Level 3 Disciplinary Action--"

"I was curious," Adar said desperately. She didn't want to be disciplined, and she knew that the Monitors prized displays of curiosity. One had defended her when Father dragged her out of the bushes spying on the men's hunting rites--without that incident, she would not have had the confidence to venture into the forest. And indeed, she saw the lights in the faceplate slow and flicker with latent debate. Emboldened, she continued. "I know Grandma said I'm not supposed to come here, but I want to know why--"

But now the faceplate was strobing again. "Zero awareness," the Blue Monitor shrilled. "Zero understanding that the transgression lives not in the breaking of a cultural taboo about forests, but the violence of cutting open a living cat--"

And Adar felt a rush of relief. She could solve this. "I found the cat already dead!" She didn't understand why this was the problem, when the hunters speared many living beasts, but it calmed the faceplate. "I found it dead, and I wanted to understand why it had died. And I did." She held up the intestines with the hard lump in it.

And that was all it took. The Blue Monitor burbled things about pursuit of medicine to itself, and its lights calmed, and it escorted Adar back to the village without incident. But it was the first time Adar understood she could not depend on the Monitors' favor.