Two weeks after his arrival, Ranma had finally begun settling in to a routine. Fortunately, the planetoid where Golgotha II was located had days that were approximately 24 hours long, so it wasn’t too bad. While he’d been training with his father, he’d gotten into the habit of waking up around sunrise, and he wasn’t about to break it—he rose every morning at 6:00 and meditated and went through a few kata on his apartment’s balcony (which had a view that was quite spectacular in the mornings as the star at the center of this particular solar system illuminated the surrounding landscape visible through the geodesic dome—not surprising, since the last human to use this living space had been a senior official for the colony). KAREN served him a very large breakfast at 7:00 (fortunately, his physical showed that Ranma’s voracious appetite was just the result of an abnormally high metabolism), and then it was just a quick jaunt down the street to the all-purpose education room that had been set aside for his schooling, which began at 8:00 and continued until 15:00, with a one hour break for lunch at 11:00. For right now, ALI taught his morning classes, while ALICE taught him in the afternoon, though that would change as Ranma’s curriculum become more diverse. After checking in with KAREN, he did his homework (of course, a lot of kids do their homework at the beginning of the school year, when everything is still interesting) and when it was finished, he had free time, which he current spent by exploring the colony—under the watchful eye of the security system, of course. Dinner was at 19:30, and bedtime was at 21:00. As he grew older and matured, his day would be less structured, of course, but for now, he was treated like an eight-year-old boy—because that’s what he was (another nugget of knowledge uncovered from his physical).
His education seemed to be going well—much to ALI’s surprise, Ranma had taken the news that this was the year 3502 C.E. rather well; he explain his calmness by the fact that the whole place seemed really “future-y” anyway. In fact, he seemed rather gladdened by this—his Daddy was so smart that he could send him through time! English was a bit more difficult, but that was to be expected—when you have an organic brain, you simply can’t learn a new language overnight. Interestingly, Ranma learned English in an American accent—over the centuries, the “steamroller” nature of American pop culture had caused the British accent to fall from favor among non-English speakers who were inundated with American-made entertainment, with the eventual result that “American English” came to be the preferred variety in most settings.
ALICE’s approach to mathematics proved to be quite fruitful. Like most computers, she approached mathematical problems by applying a series of algorithms until she came up with the correct answer—and since pure mathematics was entirely objective, it worked every time. She simply modified that process as she taught Ranma, making it more accessible for the human mind by teaching a few shortcuts when appropriate. Sure, Ranma would never be as fast as a robot, but once he understood the basic principles, he wouldn’t really need to do the grunt work himself—he could simply “outsource” it to a calculator and focus on making sure that those principles were applied correctly. Ranma took to this approach like a fish to water—sure, he wasn’t perfect, but it quickly became obvious that their initial evaluations of his overall potential had been accurate—Ranma was a very bright boy, and would probably be able to learn to do anything well if he was properly motivated.
Right now, Ranma’s motivation was simple. Do well in “regular” school, and get to start training in the Art again. Thus, he was especially excited this morning—last night he was told that he’d finally get to start training again today! With NINJAs! Of course, Ranma knew that a NINJA here was probably not exactly like the ones he’d heard about back home, but still—they were NINJAs! KAREN walked with him to the large gymnasium that had been cleared out especially for his training. Like with his other teachers, today would be spent getting to know the NINJAs—though technically, it was probably more accurate to refer to them as NINJA, and not just because that followed Japanese grammatical rules for plurals more closely.
Unlike most humanoid robots, the Network of Integrated NinJitsu Androids existed primarily for security—in fact, the only reason they were humanoid was because the nature of their function often required interaction with humans. This also explained their rather… unique AI. When they were first being developed, their programmers faced a dilemma: on the one hand, giving them a shared hive intelligence would greatly increase their efficiency, while on the other hand, when it came to social interaction, most people found talking with individual units from a hive AI to be really creepy—especially when you had to deal with more than one at once.
The “solution” the creators came up with didn’t totally fix this problem, but it did make interacting with this particular hive much easier—and like many of the innovations of Golgotha II, it capitalized on an aesthetic choice. After all, pop culture portrayed groups of ninja as mysterious collectives who seemed able to share knowledge stage organized group actions without any apparent communication between them—which just happened to be what people tended to find the most disconcerting about hives. Of course, on Golgotha II, when a designer made an aesthetic choice, it tended to be played out to the last detail—especially when there was a pragmatic justification for that choice, so the robots that made up the NINJA were designed to look and act like their real-world counterparts—or at least, like the perception of their real-world counterparts. They were clothed in traditional “ninja” garb (but with a rectangular array of diodes that glowed a dull red instead of “eyes”—they were supposed to be intimidating, after all), and they employed variations of traditional strategies (for example, the aforementioned diodes could be dimmed or turned off completely so a unit could take advantage of shadows).
But not all of the innovation came from the design side of the equation. The actual programming of the NINJA was nothing short of revolutionary—it gave the illusion that each robot was an individual with a separate personality from the others while still allowing for the efficiency of a hive. In actuality, the NINJA had only one program for all of its units—one that was dutiful, laconic, and ultimately very pragmatic. What allowed for the illusion of somewhat distinct individuals was time—every unit had a different set of experiences that shaped it as a pseudo-individual. In other words, a unit’s personality was the result of the way the core program (the NINJA themselves referred to it as their “skeleton,” though no one was sure whether they thought of that themselves, or if they picked it up from a programmer) interpreted different sets of data.
In addition, working with humans was made much easier by the implementation of a hierarchy, which was determined by the hive’s data distribution program. In all cases, information was on a need-to-know basis (mostly to prevent “blurring”), and only the Jounin unit needed access to all of their data. When new information was required, a request was sent up the line until it came to a unit that had access to that information, and that data was then sent back down that line (and only that line). Thus, an “individual” couldn’t know anything his superiors didn’t. Nor could he do anything without his superior’s knowledge, since all data collected by each unit was filtered back through his line of superiors (and again, the information was restricted to that line). This resulted in something of a fractal hierarchy, where each level (with the exceptions of the first and last) resembled both the one above and below it.
Golgotha II wasn’t large enough to warrant a hierarchy with more than three levels—at least not for basic security purposes, anyway.
At the top was the “Jounin.” This was (theoretically) the unit that had been active the longest, and he oversaw all the units below him, as well as being the primary unit for planned social interaction. It had access to all of the data, which was always backed up in case something went wrong with the actual unit. Thus, when a new Jounin was activated, it had essentially the same personality as the previous one, since it was the same skeleton reacting to the same set of data. Below him were the “Chounin,” who served as officers—these were the units one had to deal with when one stumbled upon an incident in progress, for they were the ones organizing the “Grunts,” who were the ones people dealt with when they caused an incident.
The system had worked well—sure, there were some humans who feared that the NINJA would be corrupted by power, causing Golgotha II to be turned into miniature police state, but that hadn’t happened, since they were programmed to serve the community, and technology had come a long way since the day HAL refused to open the pod bay doors. That was a (fictional) instance where an AI had been given a command that violated its programming, causing a massive syntax error—by this time, all AIs were sophisticated enough to not only ignore commands that violated their core programming, but could (to a degree) even reinterpret poorly thought-out commands into instructions that they could comply with. In fact, the “pod bay door” override was a legal requirement for all AIs—attempting to circumvent it was grounds for immediate termination.
As of yet, Ranma knew none of this—he simply stared at three robots, identically clad in dark blue ninja outfits, except for one with a black armband, standing in the middle of the gymnasium. After a few seconds, the three of them bowed to the boy simultaneously, a gesture which Ranma returned, after which the one with the armband stepped forward, and in a surprisingly rich voice said, “Greetings, Ranma. I am Jounin of the NINJA. Shall we begin?”
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(Posted Fri, 17 Mar 2006 23:59)
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