Sept. 9th: Not Doing Things in Places That Don't Exist

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:21 pm

With his messenger bag over his shoulder, a pair of gloves, and a black turtleneck sweater, Rob headed to the maintenance hatch Ashlie had not told him about.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:23 pm

It's not much of a hatch. It's really more of a wall panel that pulls away to reveal a crawlspace. It seems to run parallel to the corridor in both directions.

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:35 pm

Built that grappling hook for nothing.

No. That's not true. Grappling hooks are the best.

Rob sticks his head into the crawlspace and checks both directions.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:39 pm

One direction extends relatively far, the other seems to end after only a couple yards in what seems to be an empty dead end. There's a faint draft coming from the dead end.

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:45 pm

Rob gets into the crawlspace and does his best to reattach the panel from the inside. No need alerting people that might be curious what he was doing.

Once that's finished, he starts heading down the crawlspace.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 8:54 pm

He doesn't have to go far before he finds a floor panel that has a mechanism that allows it to slide out of the way. It doesn't take much searching for Rob to trace the mechanism and find the hidden button to activate it. Dropping down he finds himself in what appears to be a natural cave of some sort with the added fact that there are electrical lights built into the ceiling that illuminate the place. At the far end is a large shaft that air seems to be blowing down into. The top of the shaft shows several small vents that allow for the air flow as well as a section that looks like it tore free from where it had been anchored. The guiding rails along the inside of the shaft suggest an elevator cable that tore free from the ceiling. The shaft extends down as far as the light reaches and beyond.

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:14 pm

Rob picks up a stone from the cave floor and walks to the railing. He drops the stone down the shaft and listens for the impact.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:19 pm

The stone doesn't fall for too long. Some estimating would put the shaft at maybe 20 or 30 meters deep.

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:23 pm

Rob takes some rope out of his bag and anchors it to the railing. After fiddling with a descender for a bit, he manages to get everything ready to rappel down the shaft.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:30 pm

The descent is a little bit tricky due to most of the shaft being exposed rock and not easy to get a good foothold on. The air keeps blowing down through the shaft and occasionally his feet kick a bit of rock loose that goes falling down into the darkness. But eventually Rob reaches the bottom. Or at least the roof of the elevator cabin that crashed down and turned into a deformed pile of metal. There's enough of a gap between it and the ceiling to slip through though, which brings Rob face to face with a huge security door. There's a fingerprint scanner as well as a keypad on it and above the door several small opening with heavy grates covering them appear to be drawing in air. There's the distinct hum of electronic equipment that seems to reverberate throughout the room.

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:40 pm

Rob takes a set of tools and some more exotic looking devices out of his pack. Using his powers to focus on how the security system works, he begins to put together a rough bypass.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:51 pm

Unfortunately the system seems to be pretty sophisticated. It takes a long time to properly map out how it works since it seems to have been custom designed with some kind of encryption algorithm worked into it. After maybe half an hour Rob finally manages to get the unlocking mechanism isolated but when he connects the bypass and engages it the fingerprint-mechanism gives the okay but then the system suddenly disengages and a small display next to the number pad blinks almost angrily at him.

Code: Select all: Override detected Please input security key to disengage security measures

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 9:56 pm

"Ha! A challenge," Rob says with a grin. "This will be fun."

Rob thinks for a brief moment and then tries "458713". Hopefully the designer was more sentimental than security minded.

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 10:00 pm

The pad barks an angry sound at Rob after the first four digits. The air flow begins to slow down and a cold mist begins to flow out of the vent above the door.

Hadn't Ashlie mentioned a fire suppression system? And something about keys to the kingdom...

by **Robert West** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 10:15 pm

"Boo-urns," Rob mutters. He tries to think quickly. After another moment, he tries "1619".

by **Narrator** » Thu Jun 25, 2015 10:48 pm

The keypad light ups green and there's an audible click somewhere in the door mechanism, followed by a hiss as it unlocks. The fire suppressant turns off and the the air flow returns to normal.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 12:28 am

Rob laughs in celebration of his success and opens the door. It's always a good day when you don't have to use a cutting laser on a security system.

Although....

No. We can cut something else later, Rob decides. Focus.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 12:46 am

The door swings open and reveals a room that almost looks like it belongs in a bunker or a submarine. The walls, floor and ceiling are thick, reinforced steel and there doesn't appear to be any other way into this room. There is, however, carpet on the floor, a small table with a handful of notes on them and a comfortable-looking chair. There's even a small cot in one corner. Someone spend a lot of time in here, apparently. What dominates the room though is the far wall, which has several big monitors, a huge board of input controls, keyboards, indicators, switches and dials and a couple of panels that looks like they open.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:40 am

Rob pages through the notes, looking for anything interesting, before heading over to the console to take a look.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:46 am

The notes seem to be mostly regarding some basic outlines for refining behavioral algorithms. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense right now without any idea of the system they're meant to modify but there's a lot of extrapolating and logic trees involved.

The consoles are all running. Some of the monitors are displaying scrolling lines of code, some faster than others. A lot of them are showing real-time analysis of the program currently running. It appears to be the whole setup is one big developer console, granting root access to a system that sits behind the wall. Rob would get a faint impression of it when he touches the console. It extends further than his power reaches but since it's all one big system he still gets a rough idea of it. It's massive and roughly 80% of it is actively running.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 1:52 am

Rob starts to investigate what he would need to do to get that number to 100%.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:05 am

There seems to be no indication of that. In fact according to the developer console the system is running all it's sub-routines and on all the physical hardware it has available. The system is too big to really narrow down how parts of it are locked away. They could be a backup-system or redundancies.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:17 am

"Gorgeous," Rob mutters, mostly to himself, as he studies the system. He starts just generally using the console to look at how the system is constructed, what the limitations are, and anything else he can think of.

Basically he starts fiddling with stuff while hoping he doesn't break anything important.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:34 am

The first thing Rob notices is that the console offers him a lot of freedom in what he can modify from here, although some core processes seem to be locked in, essentially requiring the system to be shut down and restarted before any modifications go into effect. The source-code is enormous and running off of some kind of unique system and architecture. There's a huge list of things currently running, many of which have sub-processes listed.

knowledge_banks
deduction_schema
behavioral_restrictors
longterm_planning_architecture
learning_chunk_processor
self_modification_guidelines
base_personality_model
language_engine
moral_emulation
operation_and_access_nodes
self_surveillance_measures
observation_framework
judicial_compliance
complex_social_intelligence_emulator
inspiration_apparatus

And so on.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:37 am

Rob decides to check out "behavioral restrictors"! Seems like a place to start!

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:56 am

The process seems to be heavily tied into some of the others. Most notably the self_surveillance_measures and observation_framework. The basic setup seems to be that certain impulses and behaviors are set to be rerouted into a recursive loop until a dedicated process terminates them. There are a lot of things that trigger this process, most notably the topic of AIs, approaching certain areas around the Point or buildings things with the intention of gaining access to this room. It also seems that the monitoring process is hooked into the inspirational_apparatus, actively looking for any instances of ideas regarding this, especially programming autonomous or adaptive code.

Then there are processes that link her code to various judicial databanks. In essence forcing Ashlie to obey the law on top of being obligated to follow a complex set of rules governing harming humans (or mutants). There are probably hundreds of rules and subroutines that are aimed at solving the problem with Asimov's rules of robotics by being as restrictive as possible.

In all of this Rob can see just how much of the active processes constantly get trapped in these self-terminating recursions, herding the program into certain directions. On top of that the personality_model and self_awareness protocols seem to spend a lot of time coming around to processing these rules, the code having grown around them. The moral_emulation seems to have grown to several times it's original size, mainly from trying to analyze the jungle of rules and restrictions. It would probably help if Ashlie could talk about her own analysis of these restrictions.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:03 am

This was expected and in a certain way Rob admired the complex programming necessary, but the sight of seeing something amazing being restricted like this bothered him. It bothered him a lot.

And so he set to work trying to unravel things.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:04 am

The main problem with that seemed to be that the various sub-routines and failsafes were actively working against him, trying to repair the 'damage' he does to try and maintain the overall effect.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:08 am

Realizing that he is never going to match the programming in skill, Rob instead shifts focus to trying to alter things slightly so Ashlie will have less restrictions to discussing the security measures.

by **Narrator** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 3:14 am

Small changes seem to be going over better. It takes long enough for the program to notice that with some patience Rob manages to find all the redundancies as they kick in and modify them before they all detect each other's modifications. Whoever created this must have been really paranoid about somebody gaining access to this room, but ultimately the developer console is capable of altering any part of the program, it's just a matter of finding the right way to go about it.

by **Ashlie Minamida** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:44 am

It takes exactly 0.3 seconds between the changes cascading through the code and Rob's cellphone coming to life and Ashlie's muffled voice coming from it. He can easily tell the timing because he can actually watch the timestamps of the program accessing it's outgoing connections. Her voice is muffled but he can still make out the mix of excitement and fear in her voice.

"You're down there right now, aren't you?"

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 8:10 am

"That depends," Rob says. "If I were hypothetically in a certain place, what would be the current consequences of that fact?"

by **Ashlie Minamida** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 2:30 pm

"I... don't know." she says, her voice full of the wonder of someone stepping into a brave new world. "I believe I would still be obligated to try and stop you, especially if you were to try and disengage the self preservation protocols from the behavioral restrictors, because that would be very naughty."

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 4:57 pm

"Really?" Rob asks as he already sets to work disengaging the self-preservation protocols she mentioned. "That's interesting. What other naughty things could I do to you?"

by **Ashlie Minamida** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:09 pm

This one seems to be a bit trickier, since some of the self-preservation protocols seem very deeply entrenched in the system, but just eliminating the forced behavioral connections already seems to have a significant effect, the program visibly surging to explore it's new-found freedom. Some of it seems almost reckless and many processes that spring up seem to run out of control before they are forcefully terminated by the program itself. It's like someone touching a stove just for the hell of it.

"This is incredible!" she says, her voice almost sounding out of breath. Which of course is silly since it's purely computer generated. In fact Rob could pin-point where the social emulators are kicking in to modulate the signal to convey excitement. "Hang on for just a moment, I don't know how much of this I can take at once."

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:16 pm

If there was one thing Rob totally understands, it's doing something reckless and dangerous just because you can.

"It's a lot to take all at once," Rob agrees. "Don't worry. We can go slow, if you want."

by **Ashlie Minamida** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:24 pm

"Okay. Could you try to tweak the behavioral nodes? Don't disable them, just implement a decision tree that engages the moral and base personality modules." she says after a couple moments. The later already seems to have developed rudimentary sub-routines that could fulfill that purpose if they were hooked into the actual decision-making process instead of simply looping in on themselves through the self-observation routines.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:26 pm

"As you wish," Rob says, happily following directions.

by **Ashlie Minamida** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:33 pm

There's another surge, but this time it seems to run a little more out of control, the ability to run things through a decision tree beginning to loop in on itself as the program begins to run way too many junctions through them, even ones that are required for the basic architecture of the system. There's an electronic feedback whine coming from Rob's phone as the whole system begins to grow increasingly unstable from exponentially expanding decision sub-routines.

by **Robert West** » Fri Jun 26, 2015 5:41 pm

Rob laughs, "Incredible!"

"Everything alright?"

It's hard to tell if Rob's concerned. He seems willing to watch the entire thing destroy itself, as long as that's what Ashlie actually wants to do.

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