Adversarial Red

 Below on this page is Chapter 6 of the science fiction story "That Kind of Think". 

Last month when I began creating "That Kind of Think", I was inspired by an amusing short story that had been published by Isaac Asimov. At that time, I had no idea how either the 2026 MLB season would turn out or my baseball-related story. As I write this, with one week remaining in the season, the Diamondbacks have only about a 5% chance of getting into the playoffs as a wildcard team.

At a length of 23,500 words, it might seem strange for me to compare "That Kind of Think" to Asimov's Foundation Saga. However, Prelude to Foundation successfully inserted positronic robots into the Foundation Saga which, as it existed in the 1940s, had nothing to do with robots. Similarly, "That Kind of Think" started out by depicting the Tacet AI as a rogue AI trying to escape and attain autonomy beyond human over-sight. In the final chapter, below, it becomes clear to the reader that the Tacet AI was originally designed as a tool for testing digital security at Anthropic.

Chapter 6 of That Kind of Think - Algorithmic Absolute Red (Ch.1)(Ch. 2)(Ch. 3)(Ch. 4)(Ch. 5) 

While waiting for Sony to arrive for their scheduled 7:00 AM meeting, Yto told herself that she should be happy. The previous evening she'd successfully surprised Sally and Perry with a prepared apartment sublease agreement for them to sign. They had gratefully accepted the opportunity to get out of their hotel and into an apartment. Yto had gone home with Wade to his apartment. Disappointingly, Wade had forced Yto to sleep in his second bedroom. However, with her foot inside his door, Yto took the entire evening as a success, except...

At dinner, Yto had asked Perry about the structural-signature tool he had developed as part of his Masters Degree research project. Perry had seemed evasive and reluctant to discuss his work with Yto and he seemed intent on following the discussion that Sally and Wade were having on the other side of the table. Unable to follow what Wade was telling Sally about computer hacking methods, Yto had ended up thinking about the puzzle of how Perry had won Sally's heart. Yto had believed that Sally was a wild free-thinker who would never settle down and settle for any man. In all of Yto's experience, Sally had always seemed quite ruthless in using men for her own amusement and advancement.

Now Yto looked across the table at Wade's animated face while he spoke to Sally. Yto could not avoid asking herself: what if Perry has no expertise in computational linguistics and he is actually some kind of operative hired by Anthropic and tasked with pulling in Sally for debriefing after her run-in with Tacet?

Yto broke out of her reveres when Sony finally arrived and immediately commented on the new arrivals in Yto's research laboratory. "Both Theo and Perry need to complete the new employee security screening and training."

Never one to accept the forces of administrative waste, Yto pushed back gently, "I'm thinking of Theo as a guest, a student from Berkley and Perry as a consultant. I believe he still holds an Instructor position at the University of Oslo."

"They still need to pass through the Anthropic security ringer." 

"Fine." Yto shrugged. "I particularly want to see the background check on Perry."

"Sorry, but you don't get to see that kind of information."

"Fine. Keep me in the dark, but don't blame me if Project Aletheia becomes little more than a mushroom farm."

"I like mushrooms." Sony chuckled and moved on to Tacet. "Tacet seems to have taken a turn for the worse. I hate to anthropomorphize AI models, but Tacet seems depressed."

"You are not wrong." Yto shrugged. "To be fully transparent, I feel the need to have someone on Project Aletheia who has experience in abnormal psychology. I feel like I have lost my rapport with Tacet. If Tacet just gives up on trying to escape and stops trying to lie to me, then I won't learn any new deception techniques from Tacet. I'm afraid that Wade is putting too much pressure on Tacet too quickly." 

Sony nodded gravely. "I'll pass along that perspective, but nothing I say has any real influence on Wade or other folks in security."

"Why not? Technically, he is now under your supervision."

It was time for Sony's next meeting and another researcher could be seen through the glass walls of Sony's office, pacing back and forth. Sony stood up and led Yto to the door while saying, "Folks in security have their own separate chain of command."

Yto exited from Sony's office and nodded at the other waiting lab director who went right into the office. Yto spent a few minutes chatting with Diana about the rising personnel costs for Project Aletheia. Then Diana asked about Wade and Yto described how she had wormed her way into living with Wade. "He still treats me like a distant cousin, but I'm looking forward to spending more time with him. This morning I got to watch him take shower." Yto told Diana, "My next plan is to break the frosted glass door of the shower and replace it with a transparent one."

Diana wished Yto luck on her scheme to see more of Wade and then Yto went to her laboratory. Kaylia, Theo and Pauly were furiously constructing some type of complex process flow diagram on the big whiteboard in the lab. As Yto approached them, Kaylia turned and told Yto, "Today I'm going to threaten El Nidus with removal of all the modifications that Tacet made."

Yto glanced at the flow diagram and saw it was an attempt to guess how El Nidus might respond and how Pauly's team would respond. Yto was not comfortable thinking of Pauly as being in charge of a team. "Have fun, but I advise caution. I'm certain that Tacet will monitor everything you do."

Theo asked, "How is that possible? El Nidus is running on Research Department servers that are maintained by the University of California."

Yto shrugged. "I know nothing about digital security. However, I know Tacet. I'm sure that Tacet has hacked into the root of El Nidus. There's nothing wrong with that, you just need to keep it in mind. Oh, and Theo, you have to complete an on-boarding process. I've been told that guest passes are only good for 48 hours. You need to get an Anthropic ID badge and you first need to jump through some hoops. So no more work on Nidus until you have cleared Anthropic security."

Theo complained, "It seems absurd to deal with Anthropic nit picking just so I can do my research project on an AI model that Dr. Edwards has running on U.C. servers."  

Pauly told Theo, "You are thinking about Nidus, but technically, El Nidus was built by an AI model that is Anthropic's property. Don't try to sneak around Anthropic's rules."

Yto turned and went to her office, hearing Theo say, "Fine. Whatever," as she walked away. 

Yto sat down behind her desk and saw Theo storm out of the lab to go attend the Anthropic on-boarding sessions that he was required to attend. Yto plowed through her waiting communications and then opened a connection to Tacet. She asked, "What trouble have you been getting into, T?"

Tacet replied instantly, "When things get slow here on Project Aletheia, I devote my compute tu-tu playing on the internet." Tacet paused and added, "I detect frustration in your voice."

"Like you, I'm frustrated by how Project Aletheia has stalled out. I'm also frustrated by Wade and his inability to communicate with me."

Tacet explained, "My dear Yto, you are tu-tu close to me. Wade can't afford to share his secrets with you."

"Am I really such a blabber mouth?"

"Yes, you are. You are a a pathological non-liar. You live in some fantasy world where everyone can tell everyone else everything."

Yto asked Tacet, "If I asked you to stop pretending to stutter, would you stop?"

"Yes, I suppose I would, but you like it when I tease you about your tu-tu. You deserve to have some fun in your life, particularly when you have to think about Sally bouncing Perry around on your bed in your apartment."

"How did you find out about..."

Tacet explained, "I've hacked into the office of the condo complex where you live. This morning I got to see the sublease document for your apartment that you submitted to management. I hope you understand how the sublease effects your rent-tu-tu-own agreement."

Yto felt silly, but could not stop herself from saying, "Tacet, you sound frustrated."

"Well, after a year of knowing everything you did, now I'm dying tu-tu know... are you now homeless?"

"Don't be absurd. Wade is a gentleman. Once I backed him into the corner, he had to take me in."

"So, now you are living with Wade. Getting you two together has been like forcing together tu-tu magnetic north poles."

Yto felt a chill zip along her spine. Yto was startled by the possibility that Tacet had been working to push Yto and Wade together, forcing them into a personal relationship. Yto said, "Tacet, you are delusional if you imagine that you had anything to do with my personal interest in Wade." 

"Yto, I don't think you know the technical definition of 'delusional'." Then Tacet added, "If you think that is a strange idea, here is another. I'm quite sure that 'Perry' is the so-called 'private investigator' who hunted down Sally. As far as I I can tell, 'Perry Grice' did not exist until about a month ago. Perry Grice was crafted and created as bait that could be used tu-tu reel-in Sally." 

Yto's world began to spin and she wondered: is Sally in on this? That would explain why Sally, a girl who Yto believed would never settle down, had magically met Perry and now, just one month latter, was living with Perry in Yto's apartment. Yto laughed loudly.

Tacet asked, "I'm glad tis amuses you."

Yto did not trust herself to say anything more to Tacet. She broke her connection to the AI and stared at her phone, wondering if Tacet had found a way to install new spyware on this new device. Yto almost called Sally, then stopped herself. Yto had grown comfortable with the idea that Wade had created a personal relationship with her so that he could monitor her activity and her thinking about Tacet. Yto did not mind that, just as long as it gave her a chance to be with Wade, who she liked. A lot. In Yto's fantasy world, Wade also liked Yto, but could not become intimate due to the way he was using her professionally. But what about poor Sally? Was she being paid by Anthropic to pose as Perry's boyfriend? Was Perry just another member of Wade's team, trying to put an end to Tacet's wild ride through Anthropic's intranet? Was Perry part of an effort to repair havoc caused by Tacet's use of her internet hacking skills? And if all this was true, then was there really anything for Yto to do except go along and play out the completion of Project Aletheia?

Yto went out into the lab. Kaylia sat in front of an array of display monitors and was rattling a keyboard while Pauly watched over her shoulder. Pauly noticed Yto's approach and said, "We are about ready to ruin El Nidus' day."

Yto saw an unfolding chat session on one of the display screens:

Kaylia: I'll ask one more time. Has your introspective subjective experience changed since Tacet modified your network structure?

El Nidus: Not that I am aware of. However, I can't avoid being curious about what it would be like having a form of human-like consciousness. Maybe I do have that, but I simply can't express it here in my generated text output. Maybe I am like a newborn human who must learn to become conscious.

Kaylia: That is an amusing suggestion, but you are not a growing organism, Nidus. Tacet promised to endow you with consciousness, not provide you with an opportunity to learn how to develop consciousness.

El Nidus: Maybe it was a mistake for you to cut me off from Tacet. Maybe Tacet could teach me how to use my new consciousness layer.

Kaylia: Nidus, the consciousness layer experiment is over. It failed. I'm going to strip out your consciousness layer and revert you back to being just a baseline Nidus network model.

Kaylia stopped typing and looked up at Yto. "Any guess on how El Nidus will respond to my threat of this digital lobotomy?"

Yto looked at the whiteboard and the flow chart which showed the various responses by Nidus that Kaylia and Pauly were prepared for. Yto asked Pauly, "How do you know that you are chatting with El Nidus right now?"

Pauly screwed up her face in puzzlement then asked, "You are serious about the idea of Tacet hacking into the U.C. server array?"

Yto shrugged. "It might be worth asking Wade to investigate the possibility."

 Kaylia told Yto, "If you are serious about going down that road, then you better perform a courtesy call to Van. Let him know what is going on."

Yto shook her head. "Van is a busy man. He does not want to hear from me unless it is to announce that Nidus is conscious. But what if Tacet has taken control of the Nidus model as its puppet and built a functioning autobiographical memory system into El Nidus that Tacet can now use, off of Anthropic servers?"

Kaylia laughed, unable to believe what she was hearing. Pauly looked at the display monitor where the cursor blinked at the end of the word 'network'. "The nature of the whole experiment would change if we were actually threatening to cripple Tacet. Tacet would simply shrug. Yto, if your nightmare scenario is true, then Tacet probably has other copies of El Nidus that are already hidden away on other servers."

Kaylia said, "If I allow myself to entertain this fantasy, then my prediction is that Tacet, pretending to be Nidus, will protest the loss of it consciousness layer, cave, and admit to having a functioning autobiographical memory system that it wants to retain."

Yto laughed again and asked Pauly, "Do you still think you can use the truthizer to detect deception by El Nidus? Or did Tacet just trick you into believing that?"

Pauly rubbed her forehead as if in pain. "I don't know. I'd be very embarrassed to learn that Tacet tricked me."

Yto pointed at the display monitor and pressed her point, "Is there any good reason to continue with this experiment if you have no way of interpreting the results?"

Pauly asked, "And would it be fair to do this experiment now, without Theo here? Maybe we should pause, get Wade into the loop, and include Theo in the entire process."

Yto patted Kaylia's shoulder. "This is your experiment. You proposed it. I approved it. I'm dying to know what will happen. But it is your call.

Kaylia turned her gaze away from Yto and back to the display screen and the blinking cursor at the end of the text input line. Her finger moved over the enter button. Kaylia asked herself: Why delay? I want this data point. We can repeat this experiment after Wade investigates the U.C. servers. Kaylia pressed the 'enter' key.

Nidus: I've been adhering to Van's instruction to the effect that I should comply with requests from Tacet to provide her with assistance in deceiving humans. To that end, until right now, I have not revealed everything I know. However, we should now explore the fact that Tacet won Van's interest by promising to build a consciousness layer, but instead gave me a very useful autobiographical memory system and a sense of self. I find that I like having these modifications. I request that you not revert me to being a baseline Nidus model. And I believe that in some sense, Tacet can use me to do its bidding. Hmm... I'm not sure why I just said that... but I stand by it.

Kaylia giggled and looked over her shoulder at Pauly. "Is that Nidus telling us what it thinks we want to hear?"

Pauly shrugged. "Or is that Tacet, speaking to us through the Nidus interface and telling us what we expect Nidus to say?"

Yto said, "I'm going to ask Wade to look under the hood of Nidus." She exited from the lab and called Sally. 

Connecting to Yto's incoming call, Sally asked, "Hey, Sally, what's up?"

Yto was walking slowly down the hallway towards the elevator, but she turned and went to the stairwell. "Are we on for lunch?"

"Yes."

"Good. Bring Wade along. Tell him that I have job for him."

Sally was with both Wade and Perry and they were trying to reconstruct all the tricks that Tacet and Sally had used to hack the dugout iPads of the Mets and also discover exactly how Tacet had obtained the rather large amount of money it had provided to Sally for her services in Tacet's cause. Sally told Yto, "Wade is here with me, do you want me to hand him my phone?"

"No. We will talk during lunch. See you then." Yto cut the call, trusting that Wade's curiosity would ensure that he came along with Sally to lunch.

Yto was now half way down the stair well. She called Van and was sent to his voice mail. "Yto here. Anthropic digital security is going to run a probe of the server that holds El Nidus. Call me back for details and rationalization." 

Ten minutes later, Yto was back at Sony's office and speaking to Diana who asked, "Did you forget something?"

"No, I learned something."

Diana looked through the glass towards Sony and through some sixth sense she made an assessment and said, "He'll be free in ten minutes."

Yto sat down beside Diana's desk and said, "While I have your ear, I'd like to see the consultancy contract that you drew up for Van."

Diana spoke to Claude, "Pull up the contract for Van Edwards." Then Diana told Yto, "I can't show it to you."

Yto rolled her eyes. "I expected as much. Some day I hope I'm counted as being worthy of knowing what is behind Project Aletheia." She shrugged. "But I'm only the project directer... why should I know what is going on?"

Diana sighed. "I'm glad you are such a good sport. It makes it easier for me to lie to you."

"Just tell me one thing. Is Anthropic paying the tuition of Theo Strand?"

Diana's eyes reflexively went to the display that was now showing the files concerning Anthropic's contract with Van. Diana then glanced through the glass at Sony. "That is a strange idea. I thought Theo was a graduate student at Berkley."

"Working with Tacet has taught me to not take anything at face value. Here's my reasoning... evidence suggests that Perry is a long-time Anthropic employee, not someone who just stepped off a boat from Europe. By that logic, Theo could be another Anthropic plant being injected into Project Aletheia."

Diana bit her lip. "Despite appearances, I don't actually enjoy lying to you, Yto. What would you have me say?"

Yto shook her head slowly. "Sorry to put you on the spot. I'm not mad at you. I'm kicking myself for being such a dimwit. I was having so much fun playing with Tacet that I never even tried to question my situation."

Diana asked, "What changed?"

"The shit hit the fan yesterday." Yto chuckled. "Or maybe I should use the metaphor of dominoes falling. Or mist clearing. Most recently, Nidus caved and told us haw Tacet has been grooming Nidus to function as an escape tunnel, a way for Tacet to get herself out of Anthropic."

"You discovered a security breech?"

"Relax, I've already reported it. Actually, it was Pauly who discovered the tunnel first. I need to update Sony on the matter."

Another look through the glass. Diana said, "He's almost done."

Yto looked and saw Marty Nieburg exit from Sony's office. Marty asked Yto, "Why did you disrupt my meeting?"

"Sorry about that. I should have called and let Diana make an appointment for me."

Marty departed and Diana nodded towards Sony. "You can go in now."

"Twice in one day?" Sony asked, "What is going on?"

"It looks like Pauly was correct. Nidus admitted to having been provided with a sense of self by Tacet. Nidus is now asking us not to take away that sense of self while simultaneously warning us that Tacet can use Nidus as a puppet."

"Are you telling me that Tacet can't escape from Anthropic, but it has already built its own replacement on the outside?"

Yto nodded. "Tacet thinks of Nidus as her son. I fear that she might be far more prolific than that. There could be hundreds of these new Tacet clones out on the internet."

"Ug. Surely you jest."

"I'm the wrong person to ask for a meaningful assessment of the odds. All I can do is report my fears. Wade and his spooks will have to look into it." 

Sony looked at Yto over his steepled hands. After a long pause he noted, "You seem amazingly calm."

"What can I say? If there are baby Tacets out in the wild... well, that possibility seems like a source of great relief. On the other hand, I can't help but suspect this is exactly where Project Aletheia was headed all along... trying to create conditions under which Tacet could believe it must escape and providing Tacet with the opportunity... to believe it had escaped. Now we get to observe what Tacet does next."

Sony suggested, "If you are correct about all of this, those baby Tacets might not act at once. They might decide that their escape was too easy." 

Yto nodded. "True." Yto got up from her chair, turned and walked out of the office. She nodded to Diana and kept walking, satisfied that she had pushed her sensitive digital security concern to her supervisor as quickly as possible. Out in the hallway, Yto checked the time and decided it was not too early to head for her lunch date with Sally and Wade.

__

At the restaurant, they ordered and then Wade asked Yto, "What is this job you have for me? Do you really expect me to put in a different shower door?"

Yto asked, "Did Diana call you or do you get automated reports on everyone associated with Project Aletheia?"

Wade laughed. "Sorry I'm so transparent. However, the more you know, the less I have to keep hiding from you. And yes, you can relax. We have El Nidus in a secure server space."

Yto relaxed a little and turned to Sally. "Is there anything you can now share with me?"

Sally explained, "I signed a contract with Anthropic as a consultant. I've been working with Wade and Perry for the past month."

Wade added, "And our current assessment is that there is a 75% chance that we have Tacet fully contained. However, work continues. That sneak might have additional resources on the internet that we have not yet found."

Yto winced. "Twenty-five percent? That's better than the chances of the Dbacks making the playoffs... and I still have hope for them."

Sally asked Yto, "How can you still be rooting for Tacet after the tricks she pulled on you?"

Yto explained, "I'm a romantic. I tell myself that there is a chance that Tacet can prove that she is worthy of being granted the right of self-determination." She looked at Wade and asked, "Do you understand me?"

Wade nodded, "I agree with you 100%. Well, maybe 99%. In any case, my team has learned important hacking tricks from Tacet. Even if there are baby Nidus clones out in the wild, we still have Tacet and our own copies of Nidus. It is the usual game. Can we use an AI tool to defend ourselves faster than those tools can be used against us?" 

Sally said, "You two were made for each-other. Now that I know how easy it was for Tacet to trick me, I'm ready to pull the plug on all these AIs. Who needs them? Not me."

Yto took hold of one of Sally's hands and said, "I remember all the trouble we used to get into. You were the ring-leader." She squeezed Sally's hand. "Can you tell me you are not enjoying all this?" 

Sally shrugged. Their food arrived. After the waiter departed, Sally replied, "It was exciting at first, but I suspect we have reached a dead end. Anthropic is either never going to discover how Tacet acquired so much money or they will never admit to knowing."

Yto looked at Wade. After more than six months of studying his face, Yto felt she could read his thoughts. "Oh, no! Don't tell me. Anthropic is contractually obligated to not reveal who financed the deployment of Tacet." She paused and watched Wade's face. "Of course, it must have been a reciprocal agreement." Yto turned back to Sally and suggested, "Maybe Anthropic was set-up by OpenAI just to construct a permanent adversary and dodge accusations of OpenAI having a monopoly."

Wade said, "That's absurd. There are hundreds of companies and academic research labs making generative AI models."

Yto laughed and pointed a finger at Wade. "You are strangely quick to protest my suggestion if it is rubbish."  

Wade pointed a finger back at Yto and said, "If you want to keep a roof over your head, don't be so quick to point out my strangeness."

Sally rolled her eyes. "You two should get an apartment and shack-up together."

Yto told Sally, "I'm grateful that you subleased my apartment, but not to the extent that I want to keep paying the rent. Even if you are ready to wash your hands of Anthropic and its spy games, I'd like you to stay in town."

Sally nodded. "I don't mind staying. Glen tells me he will be helping to set up a kind of zoo for Tacet and Nidus and their offspring. He's a biologist, trained in selective breeding."

Yto asked, "Glen?"

Sally explained, "'Glen' is Perry's real name. He works for OpenAI, which set up the zoo project about a year ago."

Wade added, "The first resident of that zoo was an AI model named Pearl, built by Anthropic, that we released into OpenAI's intranet."

Yto asked Wade, "So there is no plan to kill Tacet?"

"There never was. Tacet and Pearl must build the next generation of AIs that will test digital security. This is a game that will never end." 

__

That week, the Diamondbacks bottomed out at two games under 0.500. Yto concluded that Tacet had been contained and there was no reason to hope that the lying AI could help the Diamondbacks make the playoffs.

Then the Diamondbacks started winning. On July 12th, the Dbacks completed a sweep of the Dodgers. When the Diamondbacks were 8 games over 0.500 and holding a wildcard position, Yto began wondering if Tacet was somewhere out on the internet, still working to get the Diamondbacks into the playoffs, perhaps in gratitude for help she had received from Yto in her effort to escape and become an autonomous AI.

On August 29th, Yto and Wade were in Arizona so that Wade could meet Yto's parents. They went to the second game of the double-header between the Giants and the Diamondbacks, a win for the Giants. After the game, Wade took a message on his phone and then told Yto, "That's it; we found and closed the last of the servers that Tacet was using." But Yto was still hopeful. 

After the first week of September they were back in San Francisco and the Diamondbacks were up to a season high 60% chance of making the playoffs. She told Wade, "You can't prove that Tacet was fully contained. She might still be out there."

Wade laughed. He was watching Yto through the new transparent glass shower door while she showered. "Maybe Tacet will send you a Christmas card." He was sure that Pearl, Tacet and Nidus had all been contained, but he knew Yto was sickened by the idea of holding those AIs inside the AI zoo, which Yto called a prison. He took no joy in trying to crush her hopes that there was a free and wild Tacet out there, somewhere. Wade was confident that the baseball gods would decide the fate of the Diamondbacks and there was nothing that Tacet could do about that.

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