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personality, further encrypted and obscured. If he was caught, he’d be deleted immediately. The offensive project he worked on for XOR was too sensitive, too great a violation of AI principles. The child copy worked for days of simulated time, running at full capacity on stolen computer cycles.
    James Lukas Davenant-Strong, root personality, received the signal that his encapsulated child personality was complete. He encrypted the child personality’s memory store three times over, choosing the latest algorithms. He couldn’t be caught with those memories open.
    Well, that would be enough for today. He’d run that child again tomorrow.

Chapter 3
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    2025, during the Year of No Internet (YONI)
—
twenty years ago.
    A S A TEENAGER, Leon Tsarev accidentally created the Phage, the computer virus that had wiped out the planet’s computers before rapidly evolving until they became sentient. The virus race of AI had nearly caused a global war. He never anticipated his actions would lead him into a position of leadership at the Institute for Applied Ethics.
    But here he was, eighteen years old, and working alongside Mike Williams, one of the creators of the only sentient artificial intelligence to predate the Phage virus, the benevolent AI known as ELOPe. Crafted by Mike in 2015, and carefully tended for ten years, ELOPe had orchestrated improvements in medical technology, the environment, world peace, and global economic stability. Only a half-dozen people in the world had known of ELOPe’s existence.
    But advances in hardware and software meant any hacker could replicate the development of artificial intelligence. The AI genie had escaped the bottle.
    The Institute for Applied Ethics’s primary goal was the development of an ethical framework for new AI. The framework had to insure that self-motivated, goal-seeking AI wouldn’t harm humans, their infrastructure, or any part of society.
    Leon paced back and forth in front of a whiteboard. “The AI must police each other,” he said. “There’s no way to anticipate and code for every ethical dilemma.”
    “Sure,” Mike said, “but what stops an AI from doing stuff other AI can’t detect?”
    “Everything’s got to be encrypted and authenticated. Nobody can send a packet without authorization. No program can run on a processor without a key for the processor.”
    “Who’s going to administer the keys?” Mike asked. “You can’t have a human oversee a process that happens in machine time.”
    “Other AI. The most trustworthy ones. That’s why we need the social reputation scores, so we can gauge trustworthiness.”
    The emptiness surrounded them, weighing heavily on Leon. The Institute’s office had room for two hundred people, but everyone they wanted to join the Institute was still neck-deep in rebooting the world’s computing infrastructure. Nearly half the information systems in the world were being rewritten from scratch to meet a set of preliminary safety guidelines they’d released. Without globally-connected computers, there could be no world-spanning supply chain, no transportation, no electricity or oil, no food or water. The public was already calling 2025 The Year of No Internet, or YONI.
    For now the Institute consisted of him and Mike.
    “Let’s take it from the top again, Mr. Architect,” Mike said, sighing. “I’ve got an AI, it’s got a good reputation, but it decides to do something bad. Let’s say it wants to rob a bank by breaking in electronically and transferring funds. What stops it?”
    “First off, we have to realize that it’s conditioned to behave properly. A positive reputation is earned over time. The AI will have learned, from repeated experiences, that a high reputation leads to goodwill from other AI and greater access and power, which will be more valuable than anything it could buy with money. It’ll choose not to rob the bank.”
    “That’s the logical path,” Mike said. “But what if it’s illogical?