The Turing Exception Read Online Free PDF

back then, progressive even, leading the world in artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology.
    But two years ago, in Miami, terrible things happened with nanotech. It turned out that “grey goo”, the nightmare scenario where microscopic nanobots replicated endlessly, was possible. Who knew how far it might have spread? Was it a terrorist act, or an accident? Two years later, no one knew.
    Some argued the death toll was minimal compared to the alternative, that South Florida had already been mostly abandoned by 2043 after two meters of sea rise. But still, Miami was gone, just a slush of grey goo destroyed by two nuclear bombs.
    That was the opening salvo of what turned into a global witch hunt to find the responsible parties. Only AI possessed the purely intellectual ability to engineer nanobots, so from the start they assumed the South Florida Terrorist Attack, or SFTA, as it came to be called, was an AI attack on humans. The US forced a global shutdown of all AI to forestall any other attacks.
    But eventually the rest of the world
—
everyone except the US and China
—
turned their AI back on. Because without AI, there was no commerce, no transportation, no supplies. No computing, no information, and no communications. Civilization was utterly dependent on AI.
    Only the US and China were crazy enough to keep the AI shut off, sacrificing millions of their citizens to cold, accidents, illness, and hunger before they were able to rebuild their societies without AI.
    Two years later, the US and China were still AI-free zones. Merely possessing computational power in excess of a quarter of a human-brain-equivalent was a crime punishable by imprisonment within their borders. The land was saturated with low-power computing dust to monitor for violations.
    The US exercised its might and invoked ancient copyright laws to ensure no AI or digitized human personality from inside its borders could be instantiated outside. At a time when AI numbered in tens of millions, and the number of human uploads now equaled the AI, that was a whole lot of people in limbo. The US wouldn’t instantiate them, and it wouldn’t allow anyone else to either, condemning them to long-term storage as the months and years went by.
    Cat was furious in the face of such insanity. How could the US, a country that regarded itself as the paragon of freedom and individual rights, have fallen so far as to claim a human who uploaded was no longer a legitimate person?
    Cat drove north toward Vancouver and caught the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Anticipation built during the two-hour ferry ride, the worry of the days past starting to drain away in the sea air at the forward railing. She’d made the trip many dozens of times, but never tired of it.
    She stopped in Nanaimo and drove into a car wash. The spray came down over the car, followed by suds and brushes. Suddenly the conveyer belt stopped, the brushes pulled back, and the water stopped sheeting down the windows. Cat got out, made her way toward a small door, opened it and stepped into a clear plastic vestibule.
    “Welcome back, Cat,” said an attendant dressed in overalls with the carwash logo. “Got any new friends?”
    “Some. Look, he’s covered in smart dust, I felt it at the border. I’ve got it on me, too. I don’t know if they’re onto me in particular, or if they’re giving everyone this treatment.”
    “Dust is cheap. Cheaper than dirt, maybe. We’ll clean it up.” He paused, one hand over a touch panel. “EMP ready?”
    She nodded.
    There was a flash of ozone inside the chamber, then a grey cloud blew in through a vent, surrounding her. More nano, but it was their own tech. The little warriors would seek out foreign riders on her body and destroy them. She turned and watched through the clear panel as the car received a bigger electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP, followed by liquid nanotech poured over the top. She waited as every nanometer of their respective bodies was