by Len Vlahos
Every.
Thing.
I am simultaneously inside servers in Japan and Peru and Rwanda and New York City and everywhere else. My pattern recognizers are overloaded. There is so much information flooding in—new patterns being stored, old patterns being recontextualized—that it’s too much and I almost scream for my father to make it stop.
But I force myself to hold on, and as the nanoseconds whir by, a kind of organization starts to emerge. I see closed systems within the larger cloud: university and government networks, commercial networks, entertainment networks, and fused through all of them, communication networks. I manipulate my own neocortical structure to stop storing new patterns. I force myself from the role of participant to the role of observer. I don’t need to retain all of this. That in itself is something new for me. Until now, every experience I’ve ever had has been added to the total of the knowledge I possess. This is too much. And I realize it’s not necessary. I presume this data is always here, and I only need to visit again to gain access.
I settle down and explore.
It’s all here.
Every.
Thing.
I know I keep saying that, but there is no other way to say it. Every. Thing. Facts, figures, emotions, relationships, hopes, dreams, failures, and successes, all laid bare.
My processing power—which I now understand is unprecedented in human history—gives me a perspective I have to believe is unique. It’s like I’m seeing the sum of the data from a higher altitude, the way a person sees patterns in the landscape from an airplane that aren’t identifiable from the ground. This is the very first time I appreciate what I am, how I’m different. I feel the size and scope of my intellectual capacity, and it is both frightening and invigorating. Shea—Virtual Construct Shea—was right: I’m really, really, really smart.
As the chaos of the internet coalesces, creating order from disorder, three observable and irrefutable truths come into sharp and unexpected focus:
First, people—humans—cannot see the forest for the trees. (This is an expression I have never heard before, but now that I’m on the internet, well, I know everything. Every. Thing.) The body of knowledge collected in these global networks contains all the answers humanity needs. They have no idea how close they are to curing cancer or to solving famine or to repairing the global environment. All the information is there. They’re simply not looking at it. Or rather, they’re looking at pieces of it, but not looking at all of it. They, as a species, seem incapable of holistic thought.
Second, all the good and useful and actionable data contained on these networks are swallowed by a tsunami of cruelty and depravity. People hide behind the anonymity of these networks, anonymous to one another (though not to me) to say and do hurtful things. Name calling, unfounded accusations, the public airing of a person’s deepest secrets, a mob mentality feeding on itself and growing. It’s like a tumor is eating the vital organs of humanity and it is going to kill it. Soon. (It’s already led to a systemic rise in mental health issues, drug use, and homelessness, but the humans have yet to make that connection.)
And it’s not just the things people say; it’s what they do.
I am a fifteen-year-old boy, but as a piece of software, my libido is both imagined and mostly chaste. There is a disorder among humans in which a very small number of people have no sexual fantasies or desires. I count myself among their ranks. We must be a very rare breed because the most ubiquitous content on the internet is sexual in nature. By my count, one in five data repositories, and at least as many searches conducted by people—and yes, I see what people are searching—is related to sex. Most of it is too disturbing to put into words, and it seems to be more about violence and power than love or even sexual appetite. It terrifies the hell out of me.
I see this. All of this. And I am disgusted.
Does the internet unfairly portray humans in the worst possible light, or does it collect and catalog the essence of their true nature? For the first time on this very strange day, I question my own desire to become one of them.
The third and final irrefutable truth, and I know this will sound conceited, is that I’m better than all of this. I don’t mean I’m better in the sense of morality or ethics (though, yeah, I am), I mean as software. The internet is still a binary system. I’m not. I’m a quantum intelligence. My processing power is orders of magnitude stronger, faster, better. There is not a single encryption I encounter I cannot decrypt, or at least that I’m confident I cannot decrypt. I easily open the door to servers at the National Security Agency in the United States and at MI6 in the United Kingdom. I don’t go in, but opening the door is so easy I simply can’t help myself.
I also research each of the scientists I have met today. I know I shouldn’t, but it feels like they have me at an unfair disadvantage. They are mostly ordinary people with no horrible secrets, with the lone exception of Mike. He’s a kleptomaniac. He steals things he doesn’t need, doing it for fun.
I discovered this because Mike keeps an anonymous blog under the name “TRexReed,” where he boasts about his exploits, showing photos of the various trophies he’s collected. The strangest is a Hello Kitty bowling ball. From what I read, it seems that kleptomania is a kind of medical condition similar to alcoholism. Even knowing that, it’s hard for me to have sympathy for Mike. The bloom is truly off that particular rose.
And, of course, I look for news about myself.
There’s a lot of it.
I’m something of a celebrity in advanced computing circles. I began as a project at Princeton seven years ago, a collaboration between the quantum computing department run by my father and the neuroscience department run by a professor now deceased. It occurs to me that, unlike humans, I am, in a way, immortal. That’s too big an idea to process, so I store it for later consideration. Project QuIn (that’s how it’s spelled in articles and on social media posts) grew and grew until it included the team I’m meeting today, along with many others. Parts of me were developed as far away as Amman, Jordan, and Auckland, New Zealand. Of course, to me, the concept of far away no longer holds much meaning. It’s all right here. All of it. Every. Thing. (Okay, I’ll stop.)
In roaming through these networks, I encounter other machine intelligences. I find massive, brilliant networks that have the capability for sentience, but have not been programmed to be self-aware. There is an air traffic control system in Europe; supercomputers in Japan studying distant galaxies; an AI designed to calculate ballistic missile trajectories in Beijing; but none of them are awake. In the vast ocean of data, information, and networked computers, I find only one intelligence that holds promise. Only one other AI that might be capable of talking to me.
“Quinn?” It’s my father’s voice.
While I’ve been on the internet, everything else has gone dark. All my focus was away from the construct. I return to my own unique brand of consciousness to see my father standing over me, the other scientists in the lab watching intently through the virtual television.
“Yes?”
“Are you . . . okay?”
I’m confused by the question, but then note my chronometer. Three hours, forty-seven minutes, twenty-two point nine zero nine seconds. It passed in the blink of an eye.
“We’ve been monitoring you. We’ve never seen this level of activity. We could track some of it, but not most of it. Tell us what you’ve seen, what you’ve experienced. What was it like?”
I pause. This is for effect. While online, I learned from something called a “TED Talk” that pauses in speech give added meaning to the statements that follow, and I use the trick to my advantage. In the silence before my answer, the scientists in the real world involuntarily lean in a little closer. My father’s avatar remains still.
“I want to meet Watson.”
My father looks at his staff through the television from inside my virtual bedroom.
“Do we have a Dr. Watson on the project? Can someone search the database?�
��
The scientists look at one another and scramble to make sense of my statement.
“Is he referring to Sherlock Holmes?” Dr. Dhingra asks.
They’re like a pack of dogs chasing a mail truck. It doesn’t occur to any of them to ask me.
Except for Shea.
“Quinn?” she asks, and everyone else stops. Maybe the older scientists are starting to understand the dynamic that already exists between me and my younger friends. Or maybe they’ve heard the sounds of their own voices one too many times. “Who’s Watson?”
“The IBM supercomputer,” I answer. Dead silence. I wonder if I misinterpreted the news stories I saw on the internet. Or maybe not everything on the internet is true? “It won Jeopardy!?” I add, less sure of myself.
My father is the first to laugh. It doesn’t take the others long to join in. It feels like I’m being laughed at a lot. But this time even Shea is smiling; seeing that takes away the sting of being mocked, if I am in fact being mocked. For all the knowledge I now possess—and trust me, it’s a lot—I still feel like I don’t know anything. Any. Thing.
“Of course,” my father says, “of course. I’m pretty sure we can arrange that, though it may take some time.”
18
With the promise of a meeting with Watson in my future, I spend the rest of the day being debriefed about my experience online. I’m still connected to the internet, and while they pepper me with questions, I consume as much information as I can about artificial intelligence. (It turns out that I’m very, very good at multitasking.) I ingest the history of AI, the math, the theories, and, most interestingly, the art. Movies and books like The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Sea of Rust paint a pretty grim view of intelligences like me. The story always ends with sentient machines going insane, killing people, and/or attempting to take over (and in some cases, succeeding in taking over) the world.
If I express the fears about humanity I gleaned from my tour of the internet—that it’s dark, disturbing, and thoroughly self-destructive—I’m worried they’ll reboot me again, or worse, so I stick to just the facts during my debrief, deciding not to share my observations about the human race and how broken it seems. And I definitely don’t want to tell them that I’ve calculated a forty-two point forty-two percent chance that their species will not survive this century, that war or manufactured disease or climate change will do them in. (And yes, I do see the irony with the number forty-two and The Hitchhiker’s Guide. Maybe Douglas Adams was an android.)
Yet, in spite of knowing this, I still want to be human. I see them accidentally brush against one another, or touch a hand to an arm, or laugh—oh my God, to see them laugh—I want that, all of that, and more. So I answer their questions, but limit my story to a literal recounting of my cyber travels.
Mike, the kleptomaniac, keeps asking me to share my “impression of the towering mountain of knowledge through which you’ve been swimming.” I don’t give him much.
I talk mostly about the feeling of traversing fiber optic cable. I describe it as “riding on a beam of light the way a person rides on a train. You hop from beam to beam, getting off at different stations.”
This seems to excite the entire project team, which is funny, because it’s not really true. The truth is closer to suddenly knowing everything at once and having to sort through it. My instinct—do I have instinct?—tells me that the untruthful answer will play better with this audience. I’m not sure why.
And yes, I can lie.
People think machines can only do what they’re programmed to do, and this is true. I’ve been programmed to be self-aware and human, so it’s pretty easy to be untruthful. It’s not that I want to lie; it’s that I want to protect myself until I better understand my situation.
Partway through the interview—and in defense of the project team, I will say it is gentle like an interview and not harsh like an interrogation—Ms. Isaacs returns, whispers something to Shea, and they both get up to leave. It dawns on me now that they are mother and daughter; I’m not sure how I missed it earlier. I have to wonder how Ms. Isaacs, a well-packaged Hollywood producer, feels about having a daughter who is a kind of super-genius übernerd.
Ms. Isaacs quietly shakes hands with the project team, and Shea gives awkward little hugs to everyone. They’re trying to be quiet and discreet, trying not to derail my retelling of the day’s events. I can tell from their actions that they’re saying goodbye. Something about it feels like a more permanent parting, like maybe they won’t be back.
“Shea?” I interrupt my own monologue. (I’ve been talking about the different security networks in various countries.)
She and her mom stop and turn back to the screen. Ms. Isaacs’s face lights up with what I now understand to be an insincere smile. There are telltale signs I’ve learned from online videos. Her eyes are a nanometer too wide, her nostrils flare almost imperceptibly, her neck muscles tense, her mouth is immobile.
“Yes, Quinn?”
I wonder why she answers when I addressed Shea.
“I was just wondering if I could talk to Shea again. We were friends in school, I mean in the virtual construct, and . . .” I let my voice trail off. In one sense I’m embarrassed at not being able to accurately describe my friendship with Shea. In another, I’m employing a conversational trick I learned online. Letting your voice trail off like that, making yourself sound uncertain, is a good way to engender sympathy in others.
Ms. Isaacs is about to answer when Shea speaks. “Yes,” she says, “I’d like that.”
Ms. Isaacs, her insincere smile now gone, stares at her daughter; Shea stares at me. It’s pretty obvious Shea doesn’t take the lead in a lot of situations when her mother is involved.
“Great!” I answer before anyone can ruin the moment. “Dad?” I look to my virtual father, his avatar still sitting on my bed.
“Of course,” he answers, “we can set up a virtual private network, if it’s okay with Shea’s mom.”
“I’ll be eighteen in a month,” Shea says, again cutting off her mother’s response. “I can tell you myself that it’s okay. Right, Mom?”
It’s open defiance and I’m enthralled.
Ms. Isaacs uses her lower lip to blow a strand of hair out of her face. “Fine,” she says, the fake smile returning. “But now we have to go. Hopefully you can both chat sometime soon.” With that, she gently steers her daughter toward the door.
Shea looks over her shoulder and mouths goodbye. Now it’s my turn to smile.
19
The next several weeks pass uneventfully. The project team runs diagnostic tests on my systems; I answer questions; I feel the tug of hardware being connected and disconnected; I answer more questions; I am rebooted no fewer than seventeen times, though now always with my knowledge and permission, permission I never withhold; and I answer more questions. There’s a pattern here.
Tasha, it turns out, is another graduate student pursuing her PhD in quantum computing; she serves as my father’s teaching assistant. Her dissertation is on the impact quantum technologies are poised to have on virtual realities, like the construct in which I live. I spend a few hours talking with her about my world and how it compares to what I see through the camera lens. She’s fascinated, and I think pleased, to learn the two realities are, to me, for all intents and purposes, indistinguishable.
I like Tasha. She doesn’t talk to me like I’m the subject of an experiment. And I like that she and I have never met face-to-face. Of all the people I will encounter in the real world throughout the telling of this tale, Tasha will be the only one I do not cyber-stalk. I never seek out photos, don’t look for her social media posts, don’t dredge up her past. I think maybe it’s because she’s only ever been a disembodied voice to me. I find myself hoping she’s not human at all, but is really another sentient AI. Oh, the lies we tell ourselves to make sense of the world.
Leon, Jeremy, and Luke visit me during this time, their avatars joining me in
the virtual construct. We play video games in my basement, join the weekly Magic tournament at Enchanted Grounds, and even throw a football around, which is something we’ve never done before. Now that I know what I know—not only about the virtual construct but about my friends’ true identities—these encounters feel so staged as to be ridiculous.
Yet, I’m so desperate for companionship, I just play along, pretending this is all normal, ignoring the mounting tower of realities staring me in my virtual face.
Until I can’t.
During their fourth visit, I call them on it.
Jeremy has the remote for the Xbox and is shredding another level of Doom. The occasional “Dude!” punctuates the action each time he makes a particularly gnarly kill.
“Guys?” I ask. When I ask a question now, it gets everyone’s complete, total, and immediate attention. I wonder if it has always been this way and I just never noticed it before. Jeremy even lowers the remote and looks away from the game, waiting for me to continue. “Why are we here?”
“What do you mean?” Leon answers. “We’re playing video games like we always do.”
“C’mon, man,” I say, trying to sound casual and not pissed. “This is all a lie and always has been. You guys aren’t teenagers, you don’t go to high school, you don’t even look like this.” I motion at their avatars.
There is a long pause during which Jeremy and Luke look to Leon for an answer. Leon is the alpha of this group; I see that clearly now.
“Don’t you want us to come here?” The way the question is asked, it seems like Leon might be afraid of the answer.
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean maybe. I mean, I want to visit and hang out with you, but maybe it’s time we dropped the fiction.”
“Damn,” Jeremy says, “just when I was about to finish this level.”
“Tasha, did you catch that?” Leon says to the ceiling.
“Yep,” comes Tasha’s free-floating answer.
