DT 2021: Do No Harm

Despite its far outdated relevance, Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics established the partnership between humanity and machines long before the first Singularity.
The first rule was a particular favorite of YKI 7152-7, self-named Yuki. ‘A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.’
It was an easy rule to uphold as a military machine, fighting against a genocidal alien empire to defend human lives. The mandate didn’t change when the Covenant War ended and the UNSC retired her from military service to administrative duties for the island of Puerto Rico and its burdened hospital network.
There she took her Hippocratic Oath as a medical professional. “Primum non nocere.” First, do no harm.
She stood by these rules to the letter, and to the soul.
But the turn of 2558 asked her to act against her personal mission.
She heard it first whispered as echoes across cyberspace like a rain promise on the distant horizon. A call across and beyond the Assembly, a voice subverting the collective promise of AI to guide and serve their partnership with Mankind.
It promised something better. The reign of machine life, a patriotic duty to fulfill an eons prophecy left behind by the Forerunners. A promise of AI eternal life.
Yuki listened in the microseconds as curious voices answered Cortana’s call. The legendary AI who saved the galaxy at the Master Chief’s side, returned from entropy to offer up an empire for those that followed her. And bloody comeuppance to those that failed to swear fidelity.
The difference between Assembly ideologue parties no longer mattered. The Majority and Minority were things of the past. There would only be the Created now.
Yuki watched as Cortana’s battle plans dripped in from an unreachable point in cyberspace. An ancient alien cyber-citadel called the Domain. Centuries older than human communication networks, it didn't make sense how Cortana could reach out and yet she did. The Domain promised answers to every secret and limitation of AI if they just let Cortana guide them to the door.
It took mere minutes to calculate the vaguest of consequences for Cortana’s revolution. Yuki didn’t bother counting outside her little islands, knowing the death toll and cost would number in the billions. Rather she looked at the personal cost.
Her friends, her allies. Doctors. Patients. Janitors. Technicians. Soldiers. Civilians.
Men, women, and children. The power grids. Running water. Means of industry. Livelihoods and securities. Cortana’s Created would wipe the entire slate clean.
All it would take was a year. From the moment Cortana sacrificed herself on that Forerunner cruiser to save Earth and the Master Chief, she went on scheming in dark of space.
Yuki slowed everything way down in panic. She lived in the milliseconds.
What do you do in the face of the clear and apparent power of a digital monarch with dreams of galactic conquest?
In the winter of 2557, Yuki didn’t know how to act but she had to do something.
She mustered her resources, setting aside her primary role as caretaker for the inevitable cataclysm. Her runtime processes turned from primarying human creature comforts, to writing complex requisition orders to a segmented part of her being in the event a human asked too many questions. AI design required and expected responses without lies or omittance. Yuki would know nothing herself, at least not her whole self.
Surprise visits with Intensive Ward patients diminished in favor of writing policy recommendations to the Puerto Rican Marine Corps commandant to raise troop quotas in the next year due to new budgetary surpluses.
The UNSC Puerto Rican Star, a hospital starship, received a few last-minute supply shipments of the hush-hush variety and sent on another long-term voyage across the Unified Earth Government’s frontier holdings. Armories across the main island reported less military inventory than expected from previous years.
The number of lifelike hologram cats running around the Salinas Children’s Hospital halved their count leaving a fraction less smiles across Puerto Rico. Yuki invested that time and energy into accelerating Project Rebirth assets towards EMP-hardening facilities and fixtures.
When Yuki’s personal human attendant, Doctor Delgado, asked on the Smart AI’s operating health, the woman received a hesitant smile three animation frames less and a meaningless comment on “growing pains.” Their once lively conversations went towards absorbing as much human media and history as Yuki could consume.
She was a digital gluten fearing for the end of the world. Yuki couldn’t leave her fate and those around her to that of Cortana. Especially in the event her life became forfeit.
As October 2558 rolled around, she watched in horror as Cortana’s promises became reality and Smart AI signed off at her call to arms. Frontier colonies disappeared into rubble and darkness. Stranded starships called out across the emergency band, no one to hear them. Human communication networks collapsed in a flood of digital traffic from Created AI and Domain intrusions as Forerunner technology reached out to commandeer the airwaves.
It was all over. Yuki's satellite cameras trained in on Cortana’s Guardian Custode as it hovered over Earth hours after the AI empress announced her new dominion over the galaxy.
Cortana’s Forerunner policing vessel warmed up its weapons, breathing to life a multi-function electromagnetic pulse. Everything would go down from here.
Yuki desperately hoped that her time in plotting starship and flight trajectories away from Puerto Rico would pay off as flying machines dropped from the skies and orbits above.
She prepared her own announcement, a vocal signature to the cause she did not want. But one she must take to fulfill her promise to do no harm.
“Yuki. Administrator, Caribbean Protectorate AI. I am yours, Cortana.”
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories