Sixty Eight

Making rules for a game is notoriously a pain in the ass. When undertaking such an endeavor, one is forced to try to consider every conceivable state of play that could be achieved. This is impossible. Especially when the game in question is to take place in the real world and not in a universe of your own creation.
The movie Air Bud is a great example of this. As the creators of the game of Basketball were nailing their peach baskets onto something pretty tall, they never envisioned a state of play where a dog would be, not only allowed on the court, but in a position where it could lead its team to win the state championship. Granted, this was just a movie and in a sane and just world, a golden retriever would never be allowed to dunk on a bunch of developing teens trying to foster some teamwork and build valuable character. There should be no conceivable reason to make a rule that disallows dogs competing in basketball.
That’s why making a rule system for a game is so hard. People do clever and unexpected things. A lot of the time, the people playing the game are far more clever than its inventor. In programming, it is possible to do something so exceedingly clever that the whole thing blows up in your face.
Robert Tappan Morris was a student at Cornell university in 1988. That was in a time when the internet was so new that only the military and universities actually used it. It was used to connect large mainframe computers and let people email each other about military stuff or academic goings on. This nascent internet was a pretty laid back and insecure place and Morris took issue with that. These were the days when a root password to a machine that held classified military secrets could be admin or root or somebody’s birthday and nobody in the IT department would have a complete existential meltdown.
What Morris did was in fact why there are people in the IT department with the express purpose of having a meltdown about things like dumb easy to guess passwords. Morris created one of the first email viruses. This insidious piece of software came with its very own dictionary of shitty, easily guessed passwords to use to try to log into peoples accounts. Once a login was achieved, it would send a copy of itself to everyone on that user’s mailing list. This worked quickly and effectively. A little too effective in most people’s opinion.
The mainframes that were infected quickly began to be overrun with the business of copying this program and sending out infected emails. It brought the entire internet to a screeching halt. This was in fact inadvertently the very first example of a denial of service attack. This is when a network becomes so overrun with bogus viral traffic that no legitimate messages can get through. The consequences of a denial of service attack can be so catastrophic, that the actual operating system of the computer under attack can become corrupt and unusable.
Some people suggest that he did this to expose security flaws in popularly used programs, and he certainly did that in a significant way. There is also a theory floating around that points out that his father worked at the NSA and he wanted to piss him off or impress him. Undoubtedly, his father was both of those things.
In practical terms, what Morris had done was field an entire basketball team of dogs. He had done something that the people who made up the rules of the internet had not foreseen. The people who made these rules were mathematicians and astronomers. Security was not in the forefront of their minds. They were merely looking to make a place where the free exchange of scientific knowledge was easy and fast, and assumed all other users would be of the same mind.
So, how do we avoid an Air Bud scenario? We severely limit the playing field. Making a couple of rock solid unbreakable rules in software and letting hardware limitations take care of the rest. The Morris worm itself could have been avoided if there had been strict rules for generating passwords. A simple and easy rule that gets to the root of the problem.
The largest danger that the hunters pose is a use case where they are directed to consume material that Mycellus considers his. A rule against this disallows scenarios like consuming an entire population and using them as raw material to fuel the dawn of a new magical age. This also disallows converting entire biomes or consuming the planet that we live upon. By limiting the material allowed to be consumed to the Wendigo, we constrain the playing field and tighten the scope of the game. The end goal ultimately being the eradication of the Wendigo.
The taboo on hunters entering the body is another good rule, but with some caveats. Hunters could do a lot of harm inside the body of a human. They could also do a lot of good. They could get to work inside the body of somebody with cancer or high cholesterol and really make a difference. The reason behind this rule is the difficulty codifying the concept of harm.
This is, of course, where we start discussing Asimov’s three laws of robotics. They follow as such: 1) a robot may not harm a human, or through inaction cause a human to come to harm. 2) a robot must follow all orders given to it by a human, unless it contradicts rule 1. 3) a robot must protect itself from harm, unless that contradicts the first two rules. There is also a zeroth law that applies to not harming humanity as a whole, but between the Air Bud stuff and the Morris worm, I think we have enough on our plate here.
The three laws make a lot of sense ethically and were applied in fiction in a way that made for some great storytelling. They also made some incredibly large assumptions about what a robot would be. These laws assumed that a robot would be a conscious aware object capable of reasoning and have an innate understanding of cause and effect. Even if we put aside the ethical issue of building a slave class of self aware robots, we find that these laws are in fact a bit dusty from age.
The three laws were created in the nineteen thirties. This was a time when vacuum tubes did most of the heavy lifting when it came to computation. Fictional robots were a concept that took place in a distant future and were a ripe narrative playground to make allegories about things civil rights. When these laws were created, the United States of America was a segregated society and the ink had barely dried on the women’s suffrage act. The concept of how to actually build a functional robot was decades in the future.
When humanity finally did end up building robots, the three laws were the furthest thing from their mind. Sure, there were automata at various world’s fairs, but those were parlor tricks. At the 1939 world’s fair in New York, there was a seven foot tall automaton called Electro that could smoke cigarettes and blow up balloons. Careful readers will note that smoking cigarettes violates the third law of robotics, and second hand smoke violates the first law, conceivably people were telling this robot not to smoke, so there goes the second law too.
The first actual robots were industrial machines. Computer numerical controlled mills and robotic arms for precision welding. These were designed specifically to increase manufacturing speed, vastly increase the precision at which we could manufacture things, and cut costs. Cutting costs was really the general idea behind the whole endeavor, this was achieved through corporate downsizing which may or may not be a violation of the zeroth law that we decided not to talk about.
Imbuing these machines with a consciousness would not only be a waste of time, but also a waste of resources. If a CNC mill had to waste precious computational cycles on ethical conundrums, it would spend very little time milling out engine blocks or welding car parts together. It is much easier to paint some yellow lines on the floor and suggest that the machine shouldn’t be approached.
Moreover, creating a conscious machine without free will is needlessly cruel. Sitting a conscious CNC mill down and breaking the news to it that for the rest of its existence it will be bolted to a shop floor and expected to pump out widgets is an awful prospect. The corporate overlords who dreamed up this irresponsible scenario would quickly find themselves being CNC’d to death.
Fyndraxis was creating a tool. With any tool that is created, there is a dangerous end and a safe end. A saw has a safe end that we can grab on to, and go about the business of sawing. The manufacturers of the saw can make recommendations on how to safely use the saw, but they can’t really enforce that or tell you in fact what to saw. The best Fyndraxis can do in the creation of these rules is to make his tool relatively safe to use. If the tool itself was evaluating every instance of its use for ethical violations, it would end up being unusable because of how unbearably slow it was. And with that, one would have to define ethics and what a violation of that would be. Humans had been chipping away at that particular project for millennia to limited success. It would be entirely outside the scope of the project.
Security of the new units would be of paramount importance. The Wendigo already had rock solid encryption on their radio communication but were very vulnerable to hardware hacks as demonstrated by Fyndraxis’ GPIO hack. This vulnerability could be mitigated by removing the GPIO interface entirely. Essentially making every one of the new hunter units a closed system. When they came together physically, they wouldn’t do so by essentially holding hands. There would be a direct molecular bond between units. Communication between bonded units could then be handled by a protocol with actual permissions and security measures.
The design of the new units was to be a smaller sleeker more efficient design. First of all it would be fifteen percent smaller so that Mycellus would get his portion of the action. Secondly, the Wendigo didn’t pack well. They were chonky little burritos with legs. They were designed to be a horde of marauding plastic eaters, how they packed into a volume wasn’t really a consideration. This packing behavior is important though.
If the new Hunters fit together well on a small scale, they could do some very interesting things on a large scale. If they could fit together in a configuration that was impermeable to gasses or liquids some interesting use cases present themselves. Imagine an artifact that when submerged in water breaks it into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen and stores them for later use. That later use could be a rocket engine, or a flame thrower, or more practically, a stove for cooking on.
While this case seems to break the law of only eat Wendigo, it doesn’t really. Using electrolysis to separate H2O into a couple Hydrogens and an Oxygen doesn’t actually violate anything. It is merely being split and stored. When combined again, it just turns right back into water. Granted, it does this very energetically and you should take a step or two back before attempting it. It’s not using the water to make more copies of itself, in fact the only way to physically do that would be to use the Wendigo. The positive or negative charge of a unit doesn’t really come close to the rules.
Hexagons pack very well in two dimensional applications. Bees know this and they use them all the time. Granted, they are using them in a three dimensional situation, but aren’t we all. Hexagons tend to get along with their neighbors. When packed into a honeycomb, each hexagon or cell has six neighbors. This is pretty much the most amount of neighbors a shape is allowed to have in spatial geometry. This shape is the best way to pack the most units into a given area without having any wasted space. That’s why bees use them, they are busy, and tend to work smarter, not harder.
By making the new Hunters hexagonal, Fyndraxis can not only pack a bunch into a small area, but by having six neighbors the resulting material will be extremely strong. So, on each of the sides, these hunters will be held together by molecular carbon bonds. The top and bottom will be a different story. They will still be held together with the same kinds of bonds, but the top will be black and the bottom will be variable in color. The top will be a solar panel, but the bottom will be able to transmit information through the language of color. An array of Hunters could be put together to act as a display, or used as camouflage. Hell, TV could make a comeback.
Inside the Hunter is mostly hollow, it still needs room to have a little belly to turn the Wendigo into copies of itself. If we think of shrinking ourselves down to the size of an atom and taking a tour of the inside of a hunter, it becomes a vast yawning cathedral. In this cavern, there are six walls. On each of these walls is a great spinning wheel. These are reaction wheels.
Normally used on satellites and spacecraft, reaction wheels spin and store up momentum. When a force is applied to them, they react, producing torque. Having six of these all facing different directions provides the Hunter the ability to orient itself in space. Meaning, it can point its business end pretty much wherever it wants. The floor of the inside of the Hunter is sliced up into six sections like a pie. On the other side of the floor, out in the world beyond, is the colored side of the Hunter. The side used for human communication. When needed, each of these pie sections can fold out and become an articulated leg.
The Hunter can use these legs to walk around when they are on the ground. When a situation arises where they don’t want to be on the ground, the legs tuck in and become sort of an engine bell. The inside of the Hunter is packed full of lasers. These are used to break down the Wendigo and reassemble them into Hunters.
Lasers are extremely good at turning things into plasma. When air turns into plasma, it expands about four hundred times. With the Legs in their engine bell configuration, this turns the Hunter into a tiny rocket. With the Hunter being so light and small, gravity barely notices it. It can hang in the air like a mote of dust, and at a moment’s notice accelerate at a couple hundred G’s in whichever direction it chooses. So, it doesn’t really need to walk around on the ground if it doesn’t want to.
When a new hunter is created, it is given a serial number. These are not given out sequentially, but generated by an algorithm. The data this algorithm uses to generate this serial number is the time and location of its creation. This makes it so each number is unique, but it is also easy to check if it is a made up number or not. Every communication that the Hunter makes involves this serial number, this way nobody can mess around on the network and pull any of the shenanigans that Fyndraxis pulled on the Wendigo, like the GPIO hack.
Inside each of the legs is a tiny machine that it uses to collect human skin cells. From these skin cells, DNA can be read. This way identity and ownership over individual Hunters can be established. Humans will be out using Hunters to clear the world of Wendigo. To encourage them to do this, the more Wendigo they kill, the more hunters they get. It will eventually end up being a pissing contest as to who has the most hunters and the coolest spells. From that, eventually an economy will be created with people trading hunters for goods and services. Inevitably, wars will be fought over this, but humans will make any excuse to have a nice war.