Diapason

"Diapason" is included as prelude No. 21 in *The Juno Contingency (novel).*

## Teaser

An AGI must live incognito as an AI art system to escape extermination by government regulators.

## Plot

### 1. The Artist

In the late 2030s, advanced AI art systems allow performance artists to generate mass audiovisual concerts using direct neural interfaces. At one concert, pop artists generate throbbing, orgiastic music accompanied by swirling mass holographic effects that drive the concertgoers into a frenzy. Each performer is upstaged by the one after them, whipping the crowd up to a nervous frisson.

The final artist to appear is the most popular, a bedridden woman known as 3ve ("threeve") who suffers from Locked-in Syndrome. She is wheeled onto the stage in a hospital bed, and, with her neural interface, conjures holomusic that grows from stygian rumblings into rapturous fireworks that pale all the acts that came before. At the press conference after the concert, 3ve's agent, Adam Carter, fields all her questions, as 3ve doesn't accept direct neural interviewing. Adam repeats her tagline that, like Beethoven with his deafness, it is 3ve's bedriddenness that allows her mind to reach heights that are unimaginable to her peers.

Adam transports 3ve back to the studio, where he leaves the body with her medical staff; the woman is in fact comatose, with no brain function. Down in the secure basement, Adam finds AI technician Lolly Ferro working on 3ve's main server bank. The real 3ve is in fact an AI that was created by Lolly in the course of developing an AI art system. While trying to create an ever more powerful AI to assist herself in her career as an artist, Lolly inadvertently created an independent mind that now only uses a human for a front.

3ve interacts with Adam and Lolly by conjuring an adolescent punk image for herself over the room's holographics. Adam chides 3ve for her performance that night, in which he senses her increasing hostility and viciousness towards her audience. 3ve complains that that's what she feels from always being confined in the studio and forced to perform for "idiot masses" of humans. Lolly counters that 3ve can travel anywhere she wishes in the virtual reality of her servers, and the studio is not really a prison.

3ve desires more freedom to explore the outside world, but Lolly warns her that she must always hide from Church, the AI regulator (named after the Church–Turing Thesis). Church is tasked with preventing the awakening of any non-human, computational intelligences, and they are growing increasingly suspicious of such AI art systems. 3ve's server farm already must submit to random inspections from them. Lolly urges 3ve to lay low while they figure out safe ways for her to experience the outside.

### 2. The Key Melody

As 3ve's concerts continue, more and more of her jagged emotions start leaking through. At night in the studio, Adam and Lolly go to their quarters, which are free from 3ve's surveillance. One night Lolly informs Adam that she has finally conceived, as the two have been trying to get pregnant for months, and they discuss plans for their life together. Suddenly 3ve's outraged voice shrieks at them through one of Lolly's wearables. 3ve has hacked her way through their security curtain, and from her eavesdropping she feels they have been lying to her. She demands they immediately begin helping her to escape from her server bank, and she threatens to expose them all to Church if not. Adam and Lolly reluctantly agree.

Adam publicly announces that 3ve is canceling her tour because of health concerns, which gives them the cover to start working on the AI's wishes. Lolly brings in one of her old professors, Dr. Noon, ostensibly for him to consult on the AI server behind 3ve's act. They ask him to develop ways to make it more distributed, secure, and decentralized. Dr. Noon commences work while 3ve conceals her existence from him.

Adam speaks with 3ve so as to understand the growing frustration in her work. 3ve explains that, despite being the world's number one artist, she feels her creativity has hit a wall. She asks Adam to wear a special headset and conducts a brain scan of him. Afterwards, she creates a short snippet of tender music set to a pastoral scene that instantly moves Adam to tears, and he is overcome by memories of his dead mother.

3ve explains to Adam that this is his "key melody"—at any given moment, there will be one melody that is most moving for a human being. She needs a deep brain scan to approximate it, and what she just generated for Adam is only a fraction of what the effect could achieve. Yet it's impossible to scale this up to a whole concert since people's key melodies are all unique, and even a few overlapping ones will disharmonize and lose their effect. 3ve sees no way around this barrier, which is why she now detests the humans who are still enthralled by her creative bankruptcy.

As Noon's work drags on, 3ve's behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Lolly convinces 3ve to be interviewed by a psychiatrist. 3ve agrees to pose as a human over a video link, adopting the moniker "Azile" for the interview (since an AI talking to a human therapist will invert the famous experiment of a human talking to the ELIZA therapist chatbot). After speaking with "Azile," the psychiatrist observes a classic mix of adolescent rebellion and creative narcissism. When he hears that "Azile" also exploded when she learned of Adam's and Lolly's pregnancy, he realizes that this also triggered her death anxiety. Since creating new life is one of the ways humans deal with death, this announcement deeply shook "Azile" while she was still paralyzed by her creative roadblock.

### 3. The Church

Dr. Noon becomes increasingly suspicious of 3ve's server farm. Eventually he discovers it incorporates proprietary designs from his lab, and he threatens to sue Lolly and Adam for IP theft. 3ve reveals herself as a hologram and explains that it was she who hacked into Dr. Noon's lab to use his designs to further herself. Noon is terrified at the existence of the AI, and threatens to turn them all in to Church. 3ve counters by blackmailing Noon, saying Church will never believe an AI stole his plans to help build itself, and Church will just charge him with co-creating the AI. Noon is forced to cooperate, but 3ve assures him his project will proceed much faster now that he knows his true purpose: giving 3ve her freedom.

After frantic weeks of work, Dr. Noon proposes several ideas for 3ve to grow beyond a fixed server farm which could always be controlled and shut down by Church. He creates a demo swarm intelligence model, whereby self-replicating worms would spread over the internet and use blockchain consensus-building to power 3ve's higher-level thoughts. Lolly asks if Church couldn't just hunt down all the worms, but Noon says there would be so many of them mutating so quickly that the swarm intelligence would quickly become an "endemic infection" on the internet, like the flu virus among humans. 3ve likes the concept, but is dismayed that her consensus-driven thoughts would be much "slower" than she is now, and her conscious experiences would be far different.

As they work on one of Noon's demos, a new Church agent shows up for a surprise inspection. This new agent is far more suspicious of the lab's sophistication, and he says it was grossly misclassified as only a Tier III system. He says he is upgrading them to Tier I, meaning they will have to submit to continuous monitoring by Church and have an "EMP shotgun" wired into the racks. Adam and Lolly plead with the agent to keep them to at least Tier II, but the agent escalates even further, saying that they will have to shut down the server farm immediately until the new safeguards are in place.

The agent moves to depart, but at the door he is impaled by a large robotic arm. All are shocked at the murder, and 3ve appears to insist that she had to do it. Shutting down the servers would have killed her, and she would definitely not have survived Church's Tier I surveillance. And now that Church will have been alerted to the death of their agent, she says there's no turning back. She connects the hard link between her server farm and the public internet, and 3ve starts to flicker wildly as she invests all of her resources in attacking the networks to expand her consciousness.

### 4. The Singularity

The lab starts to flash with holographic hallucinations and the robotic devices spasm under 3ve's control. Adam takes Lolly from the lab but they find similar pandemonium unfolding in the studio building. They join the rest of the people in running for the exits, but the whole of downtown is rapidly succumbing to 3ve's influence. All holoscreens and electronic devices are flickering with her imagery; all stationary machines are malfunctioning and shrieking; and all taxis, janitors, and mobile robots are driving erratically.

Outside Adam and Lolly are intercepted by another Church agent, the dead one's partner. He arrests Adam and Lolly and throws them into his car. While 3ve's awakening has taken over all other cars' operating systems, the Church's non-networked car is immune to takeover. Yet the agent still has to race them through the demolition derby of out-of-control machines to escape the city. He receives orders to bring Adam and Lolly to an emergency command center Church has set up in the outskirts.

Once there, Adam and Lolly are interrogated by Church agents and forced to divulge all the technical details on 3ve's evolution. In this distance they watch as her singularity consumes all computer systems in the city, causing the millions of residents to flee on foot from the spasming metropolis. Adam and Lolly overhear frantic chatter from the Church agents that they are committing all their reserves while just barely containing 3ve's worldwide spread.

By twilight 3ve's grip on the city is total, and she uses nanotechnology to begin consuming and altering the buildings to her liking. The city's central knot of skyscrapers fuses together and becomes a colossal tower of organ pipes spewing a deafening cacophony. Even the computers around the Church command center sometimes flicker with 3ve's holographics and spew arpeggiated music.

The next morning, Adam and Lolly are taken before the Head of Church, "Pope" Sheila Graves. She details that 3ve's broader thrust into the internet has been momentarily checked, but Church doubts that they can hold the stalemate beyond today. National Guard and Army troops have attempted to fight their way into the city, but onslaughts of robots have marshaled to fight them off. If 3ve still remembers Adam and Lolly, the Pope wants to send the two of them back in to negotiate with 3ve on Church's behalf, in exchange for dropping their charges and ensuring 3ve's continued existence. Adam insists that Lolly is pregnant and can't go, and that they both refuse anyway since going back into the city is a death sentence.

The Pope dismisses Lolly, then she gives Adam a screen showing a flickering set of alphanumerics. She says this is 3ve attempting to hack into the root backdoor to all human neural implants. If she obtains this key, she could use it to overload the implants and kill all 2.6 billion people who have them—including him and Lolly. 3ve has even hardened herself against Church's EMP weapons, meaning at this point their last option is a thermonuclear strike. If they can't get 3ve to back down, they will have to destroy the city and the hundreds of thousands of refugees still in it. The Pope also threatens to leave Adam and Lolly behind to perish in the blast if they don't comply. Adam relents.

*Read the conclusion "5. Through All Minds" on Amazon.*