The Corporation Wars: Dissidence Read Free Page A

data-dump of its exchanges with Rocko to Locke Provisos, the law company that looked after Astro America’s affairs.
    The legal machinery, being wholly automated, worked swiftly. Within seconds, Locke Provisos had confirmed that Gneiss Conglomerates had no exploratory rights beyond the crater floor. Seba relayed this finding to Rocko.
    Rocko responded with a contrary opinion from Gneiss’s legal consultants, Arcane Disputes.
    Seba and Rocko referred the impasse back to the two law companies.
    While awaiting the outcome, they proceeded to a full and frank exchange of views on their respective owners’ exploration rights to the territory.
    Rocko moved up the path it had outlined, sinuously slipping between boulders. Seba watched, priorities clashing in its subroutines. The other robot was clearly the property of Gneiss. But it was trespassing on terrain claimed by Astro. Moreover, it was about to become a physical impact on Seba, and Seba an obstacle to it.
    Legally, the rival robot could not be damaged.
    Physically, it certainly could be.
    Seba found itself calculating the force required to toss a small rock to block Rocko’s intended route. It then picked one up, and threw.
    While the stone was still on its way up, Rocko deftly slithered aside from its previously indicated route, to emerge ahead of the point where the stone came down.
    Seba deduced that Rocko had predicted Seba’s action, presumably from an internal model of Seba’s likely behaviour.
    Two could play at that game.
    Rocko’s most probable next move would be—
    Seba stepped smartly to the left just as a stone landed on the exact spot where it had been a moment earlier.
    Score one to Seba. Expect response.
    Rocko reared up, a larger rock than it had thrown before clutched in its foremost appendages.
    Seba judged that Rocko’s internal model of Seba would at this point predict a step backwards. Seba created a self-model that included its model of Rocko, and of Rocko’s model of Seba, and did something that it anticipated Rocko’s model would not anticipate.
    Seba lowered its chassis and then straightened all its legs at once. Its jump took it straight into the path of Rocko’s stone. Only a swift emergency venting of gas took it millimetres out of the way. It landed awkwardly and skittered back towards the crevice, hastily updating its internal representations as it fled.
    Rocko’s model of Seba had been more accurate than Seba’s model of itself, which had included Seba’s model of Rocko’s model of Seba, and consequently what was required was a model of the model of the model that…
    At this point the robot Seba attained enlightenment.
    From another point of view, it had become irretrievably corrupted. The internal models of itself and of the other robot had become a strange loop, around which everything else in its neural networks now revolved and at the same time pointed beyond. What had been signals became symbols. Data processing became thinking. The self-model had become a self. The self had attained self-awareness.
    Seba, this new thing in the world, was aware that it had to act if it was going to remain in the world.
    Rocko, Seba guessed, was already only a stone’s throw from the same breakthrough.
    Seba threw the stone.
    The vibrations of the stone’s impact dwindled below the threshold of detection.
    Scrabbling noises that Seba heard through its own feet followed. The other robot had moved to a safer vantage, one at the moment well-nigh unassailable. Seba waited.
    What next flew back from Rocko was not a stone but a message:
    
     replied Seba.
    Sometime later, the two robots parted. Seba retraced its path through the crevice and back to within line-of-sight of the Astro America landing site. Rocko formed itself into a wheel shape and rolled across the crater floor, to stop a few hundred metres from the Gneiss Conglomerates supply dump. Each found its activities queried by the robots and AIs working at