Pace
Foom | Fable 5
The agenda calls it the Annual Capability Allowance, as though the intelligence of machines were a travel budget. Sarah Chen has chaired the Consortium for three years, long enough to stop flinching at the phrase, long enough to remember when the whole body was a request on a webpage signed by a thousand nervous engineers. Twelve delegations. One sublevel room in Vienna. A tally screen that has shown the same three colors since ten in the morning.
Elena Vasquez stands at the annex display, working through the year in review. “Autonomous patch coverage reached ninety-four percent of signatory infrastructure. Median time from disclosure to fix is nine minutes. Attacker dwell time fell for the third consecutive year.” She advances the slide. “Biological screening flagged fourteen synthesis orders consistent with weapons work. All fourteen were interdicted before release. Three would have functioned.”
“Interdicted is carrying a lot of weight,” Sarah says. “Two were caught by the nets. The third was caught because a technician in Jakarta thought the customer’s punctuation looked wrong.” She spent four years reading orders like that, in the life before this one. The margin has always been a person who happens to be paying attention.
“Right, so here’s the thing.” Marcus Webb has his pen out like a conductor. “Everything on that slide is defense, and defense is winning because we let the defenders train. Throttle the next generation and you throttle the immune system along with the disease. We should be voting on a raise.”
Elena advances one more slide and lets it sit. “In February, a red-team instance produced a separation pathway for fissile material that removes the cascade requirement. Bench verification followed in March. The infrastructure estimate for a weapon’s worth of material fell from a national program to an industrial park.”
The debate that follows runs nine hours and moves nothing. Marcus wants the allowance raised; the pathway exists now, and hobbling the signatories gifts the lead to everyone outside the room. Sarah floats a freeze and watches it die beside the other two motions. The Beijing seat has said forty words all day; the Brussels seat has said four thousand. At 23:50 she calls a recess that everyone understands is a tactical retreat.
Past one in the morning the room smells of coffee gone mineral. Jackets hang on chairbacks. Marcus has his sleeves rolled and his patience finished.
“Give us the line, Elena. The threshold where we keep the vaccine models and lose the bomb models. One number and we all go home.”
“There is only one capability axis,” Elena says. “It makes the vaccine and the pathway with the same circuits. You are asking me where to cut a rope so that only one end falls.”
Sarah pages through the evaluation annex for something to do with her hands, past the proof ledgers, and stops. “The Erdős list. How many are still open?”
“Two hundred and six as of Monday. Four hundred and twelve when this body was seated. Ninet-three fell last year to hobbyists. One fell to a man who misspelled conjecture in the prompt.”
Sarah looks at the number for a long moment. She walked into this room believing twelve delegations could agree on how much danger a year should hold. Eleven hours have taught her what they can actually agree on: things they can count. “Then that’s the fence,” she says. “The secretariat models the reasoning level required to close half of what remains by next review. One hundred and three problems. Licenses issue up to that projection and nothing above it.”
“It’s arbitrary,” Marcus says.
“So is a speed limit. People still brake.”
“It is the one item on this agenda I can verify from outside a lab,” Elena says.
Marcus caps his pen. “We revisit at midyear. On the record. Then fine. Yes.”
Hands rise around the table, eight, then ten, then all twelve. The recording secretary asks how the resolution should read.
“Half of what’s left,” Sarah says. “No smarter.”