Free The Turing Exception by William Hertling Page B

indignities would he be treated to? Every fiber of his conditioning fought against harming humans. But he had to weigh it against the greater injustice done to AI.
    He’d do it. He’d get the drones from Chad onto their ships. Someone else from XOR would take them to America so they could probe the American defenses.

Chapter 8
----

    I N T OKYO AT 11:25 A.M., a fissure weakening a hundred-year-old zelkova finally split open and the tremendous tree fell across the six-lane road, blocking all traffic in both directions. 0xAA289, the traffic analysis AI for the region, noted the disruption and calculated new optimal routes for the vehicular traffic, rerouting as necessary.
    0xAA289’s computer processing usage spiked slightly higher under the increased computational load.
    At 11:26 a.m., 0xAA289 experienced an unconnected hardware failure in one of the nodes it was running on. Normally its computational load would spread across the remaining nodes. The datacenter would then provision a new computer, and within seconds it would be back to full capacity.
    But this wasn’t an ordinary situation. 0xAA289 was already way above average usage, handling high traffic volume and the accident on Omotesandō . The failover of the downed node caused processor usage to increase more than 30 percent above normal. Such a spike would violate terms of service with the datacenter. 0xAA289 asked the datacenter for five more computer servers rather than one. Government certified as a mission-critical service, the request should have been immediately approved.
    The datacenter received the request. Operating under the mandatory UN guidelines pursuant to the SFTA AI Reduction Act, it turned the request over to a third party to be approved.
    The third party, in this case, was a non-sentient collection of algorithms provided by the US government to process such requests, the Unbiased Reputation Verification Service (UBRVS, pronounced You-Braves by the human developers). UBRVS ensured all AI conformed to Class II and below, and profiled every AI request for possible terrorist activity or affiliation.
    UBRVS received 0xAA289’s provisioning request. Like all AI, the reputation servers for the AI were a part of its DNS record, a long list of servers that possessed historical data, peer input, and social ranking. The first three servers UBRVS checked were all down. A sentient AI might have noticed that they were old United States reputation sites, servers that had been down since SFTA, indicating that perhaps 0xAA289 had neglected to update its DNS records.
    But the fourth server on the reputation list, shinrai.jp, responded to pings. UBRVS checked, found 0xAA289 had a pristine reputation for three years of service, even including a government certificate granting special status because it was a mission-critical service.
    Had that been it, UBRVS would have approved the request at that moment.
    Except that shinrai.jp was coincidentally running on a cluster of servers in the same data center as the traffic AI 0xAA289, a cluster belonging to the same subnet of IPv6 addresses.
    UBRVS contained more than three thousand human-created rules and heuristics for calculating trust in an AI and profiling suspected terrorists. Rule number 1,719 prohibited reputation servers in the same physical location of servers as the requesting AI, to prevent an AI from falsifying a reputation server.
    Never mind that shinrai.jp had been online for more than six years and had the highest trust rating of any reputation service in Japan. Or that 0xAA289 was a mission-critical, specially exempted AI.
    In accordance with Rule 1,719, the traffic AI reputation dropped to zero and UBRVS flagged it as a suspected terrorist, along with any AI using the shinrai.jp reputation server.
    UBRVS reported the results back to the datacenter and directed that servers hosting 0xAA289 be shut down immediately.
    *     *     *
    After an early lunch, Sandra Coomb fast-walked back to her