Daybreak Zero Read Online Free Page A

Remember I don’t have the tools to do what I used to do. No web to crawl, no bots to crawl it with if there was one, no ESCARR to analyze the data with if I had that, no big blazing fast supercomputers that could run ESCARR if a copy of it survived. So I did what you do when you have no way to analyze the data you don’t have. I just took a pretty good stab at setting things up to maximally offend Daybreak.”
    “And the point of that is—”
    “Well, it’s putting together several likely guesses into a complete SWAG. The analysis team thinks the moon gun was built by robots or nanos smuggled onto the Iranian-Chinese expedition of 2019. We’ve confirmed Daybreak existed long ago enough to do that, and we know it infiltrated thousands of organizations and movements well before 2020. The moon gun is less than eighty miles from where the lunar manufacturing experimental module landed, after all.
    “We’ve established experimentally that the moon gun shoots at every big stationary radio source eventually, but if there are symbols for Daybreak sucks woven into it with enough frequency, it shoots sooner and uses a more intense EMP. So in the experiment before the last one we sent Daybreak sucks as the common interpretant of all the hundreds of different representema—”
    “Uh, slow down, Doctor Yang. All I ever got through was quantum physics and relativity. Explain it so my tiny mind can grasp it.”
    He laughed. “Do you have any idea how good it feels to be talking to someone who wants to know? Instead of just demanding ‘Have you proven the liberals in Olympia are all sissies yet, and what should we blow up?’ or ‘Have you proven the nuts in Athens are warmongers yet, and how soon can we start rebuilding the interstates?’ ”
    “Let me see if I do understand, Arnie, without getting into the vocabulary, okay? So two shots ago you broadcast pure news and entertainment, hardly mentioning Daybreak, and the moon gun didn’t fire for almost four days, as if it were conserving its resources—whatever those might be. Last shot you had a shitload of little bitty ‘Hey Daybreak, eat shit’ messages—almost that obvious—and it hit us earlier than it ever had before, like it was scrambling to nail us no matter what the cost. So you’ve proved that whatever controls the moon gun can tell the difference between one message and another, which means it’s either a real smart AI on the moon, or a bunch of smart guys in a cave on Earth with the remote for the moon gun. Right so far?”
    “Perfect. So the material we’re broadcasting in tonight’s experiment will look much more anti-Daybreak to a human being, because we aimed much more elaborate versions of Daybreak sucks at known human hot buttons. But an AI will interpret it as much less hostile, because it contains a tiny fraction of the gross count of keywords and triggers that I used last time.”
    “For example? If I know you, and I’m starting to, you have an analogy.”
    He shrugged. “Sort of. Suppose you were trying to find out if it was me or a clever AI reacting to a racist rant, by how much effort we put into killing you for it. The AI would count every time the words ‘slant’ or ‘slope’ occurred—even if it was slanted news or a ski slope. I’d react to references to laundry, buck teeth, bad driving, and ‘Yankee got five dollars for good time?’ even if they were less numerous and didn’t use the common vulgar terms. And if you checked to see how fast we punched your bigoted nose, that would be different between a racism-detecting AI and a real-life Asian.
    “So these last two experiments were calibrations of Daybreak’s response: how does it respond to Daybreak-neutral versus Daybreak-sucks messages? This experiment is to see which response a phrased-for-humans version of Daybreak sucks triggers. If it shoots back hard and fast and damn the expense, probably there are people holding the remote on the moon gun. If it shoots back at