The Beam- The Complete Series

by Sean Platt

  “When you build a system, you have to build controls into it,” said Noah. “Especially with AI. Have you never seen a movie where the machines rise up and take over the world? I’ve already discussed it with this Panel. You approved.”

  They had “approved” because Eli Oldman was the only one among them equipped to understand any of it. The others had seemed glazed, interested in how much money Crossbrace would funnel into the economy, and how they could be first to grab more than their share.

  Colin waved a hand, bored.

  “I don’t see what you’re so worried about, Noah,” Eli said. “So there’s a bit of the East in our machine. We could use some toughening around here. It just means the system will be that much more adaptive.”

  “What if the AI starts to learn now?”

  “I seriously doubt that,” said Eli.

  “Why? Xenia already has its own nanos. They haven’t figured out distributed network processing, but they might now that they have models to look at. The Xenia nanobots are already being used in beta. It won’t be long before we all have them floating in our bloodstreams.”

  Rachel laughed again. Noah was finding it difficult to maintain his patience with the old woman. She was a dominant personality on Panel, and that made her a threat where Noah wasn’t even interested in fighting. It might not be long before she was running the group without an official title. Panel could only handle a few more positions before they’d have to cap membership, adding further members only when a current one died. In a closed ecosystem, a cold arrogance like Rachel’s could wreak havoc.

  “Look.” Noah looked directly at Eli with his matted dreadlocks, “do you remember the nature of the control I wanted to put in place with my AI solution, once I figured it out?”

  Now Eli laughed, finally stirring in his chair. “I recall that just a little bit.”

  “I don’t,” said Audrey. Noah felt his patience snap. Nine fucking days. An eternity with blood in the water.

  “He wanted to raise it as babies,” said Eli.

  “Oh, right.” Marshall nodded. “Now I remember.”

  “Babies?” said Audrey.

  “He wanted them to imprint on him,” Eli said. “Which, as I recall, I compared to you being Hitler.”

  “Hitler wasn’t a revolutionary,” said Noah.

  “Hitler was very much a revolutionary,” Alexa retorted. “He just had some unconventional ideas about what ‘revolution’ meant. Like Noah.”

  “Jesus Christ, Alexa.” Noah stood again, unable to take the chair’s confinement.

  Alexa grabbed a marker from the table and tossed it to Noah. “Here. Draw the mustache.”

  Noah wanted to throw the marker back at her — not to her, but at her — but this was simply how Alexa was. She didn’t believe his proposal was evil. She just liked to poke. Eli didn’t actually think the idea was evil either, but he’d railed in the past about the ways that technology could be (and had been) twisted into the wrong shapes. Eli somehow managed to believe that all information should be free while amassing his own shameless fortune, and to him especially, the idea of the world’s AI seeing Noah as a father was a dangerous proposition indeed.

  “Intelligence will imprint,” said Noah, resuming to his pacing. “That’s how it is. We can either deliberately control it by giving it a model, or we can just toss it out there and see what happens as it takes its influences from the world at large. The latter feels much more risky to me, like hoping a kid will turn out well without any parental role models at all. I told you, if you can find someone else you’d rather Quark use as the imprint, I’d be fine with that. But it must be someone we know so we don’t lose control. Otherwise, there’d always be the threat that we could end up with Skynet.”

  “‘Skynet’?”

  Shannon was a marketing savant, and one of the many things she didn’t understand at all was pop culture — let alone an obscure movie reference from the 1980s.

  “I never got this. The imprinting, I mean.” Clive turned to Alexa, deliberately ignoring Noah. He seemed chafed by his earlier rebuke…and, if Noah was reading the man right, covering his own suspicion that Panel had made a big mistake in not listening to Noah and convening earlier.

  “When a child is very young,” said Iggy, drawing Clive’s attention, “it looks at its caretaker’s face and forms an impression of that face as the center of its world. There’s only a narrow window to form that imprint and forge that bond, and once it closes, nothing will ever influence that child as much, no matter what.”

  “Influence?” said Clive.

  “Or love,” said Noah. Despite himself, Clive turned to look at Noah.

  “That’s a bit much, Noah,” said Eli.

  “By our understanding, maybe,” Noah agreed. “But a facsimile of love has been part of my AI models from the start. Call it ‘strong attachment’ if you don’t like the L word.”

  “So what?” said Clive.

  Noah shrugged at the Englishman. “Well, is it really so impossible to believe that after spending all this time, through thick and thin, with him — ” Noah pointed at the image of Nicolai Costa’s face, “ — that the hovertech nanobots might have come to ‘love’ him in their own way?”

  “You’re too dramatic,” said Alexa.

  “Says the woman who deals with sex so much that she no longer understands love,” Noah bit back. “It’s the oldest emotion, other than fear.”

  “No it’s not,” Audrey said.

  “Shut up, Audrey,” said Alexa.

  “Both of you,” said Noah. “All of you. Just suppose I’m right. Just consider it for a second. What if the bots Costa brought with him have…let’s say ‘some form of disproportionate affection’ for the man. Not just familiarity and love, but also a predilection to respect his authority. The imprinter is God to an emerging intelligence. It shapes everything. It defines how the new being views the world. If that happened, then everything for the bots is filtered through Costa. Now: Maybe Eli is right, and they’ll get lost in the Internet’s deluge as they move into the DZ core. But I’m not so sure. They’ll be part of Crossbrace, like flecks in a stream. And what happens if there comes a point of decision, and they choose to obey Costa’s will and intention rather than ours?”

  That quieted the table. Finally, they seemed to be taking him seriously. All eyes turned to Eli, as the only authority opposite Noah.

  “Okay,” said Eli. “Say you’re right. What now?”

  “He should have been intercepted at the border. Pollination would have been minimal.”

  “Isaac was there to meet him,” said Rachel.

  “Intercepted and brought to Quark,” Noah added.

  “Okay,” Eli said again. “Any solutions that don’t require going back in time?”

  Noah shook his head. “We can’t purge them from the system now. It’s too late.”

  “We could kill him,” said a voice. Noah turned his head to see that the speaker had, unsurprisingly, been Rachel Ryan. Noah felt his blood turn to ice.

  “What?” said Noah.

  “Then his will and intention won’t matter.”

  “We can’t just kill him,” said Morgan.

  “You mean because they might respond badly?” said Eli.

  “Because it’s wrong,” Morgan retorted.

  “Grow up, Morgan,” Rachel said. “Like people won’t die during your economic transition.”

  “They won’t!”

  Noah felt conflicted. Looking at Costa’s photo, the same feeling he’d had since learning of the Italian’s presence in England began to resurface. It had taken Noah a long time to identify the emotion, but eventually he’d suspected it was a twisted form of envy. Noah had nudged AI further forward than anyone before him, and although its use in the upcoming Crossbrace network would be rudimentary, he’d already mapped out the wireframe of Crossbrace’s successor in his mind. Crossbrace was a man-made network, and they’d use it like an incubator for emerging AI, helping it to grow. O
nce the AI was mature enough (and, of course, imprinted upon Noah forever), a new network would be necessary. Quark would build the nodes and install the Fi hubs, but the AI itself would create the connections. The first truly digital society, finally appropriate for human minds to upload and join it.

  But now here was Costa, with AI that had already evolved into what Noah was trying to shepherd, twenty or more years early. Panel’s mistake had seeded that intelligence into the Internet, where it would pollinate, spread, fester, and grow. It had impressed upon Costa as their god, without the man’s knowledge.

  Noah stifled the emotion. He wasn’t the jealous type. He was a thinker and a visionary. His talent was seeing forward, and what he saw on the horizon was troubling. He wouldn’t allow his usurper to be killed just because he’d accelerated the timeline a few notches. There was another way.

  “We can’t kill him,” Noah said. “If that was the right choice, I’d give my vote. But it’s not.”

  “It may be,” said Eli.

  “I don’t want the future Internet obeying anyone.” Alexa shook her head.

  “You mean ‘anyone who’s not you,’” said Clive.

  Alexa chuckled because that was precisely what she meant. Panel sometimes pretended its purpose was altruistic, but the body was mostly honest enough to admit that most in it were out for their own interests. There were a few (Eli, Noah, probably Marshall, Morgan, and Audrey) who felt that the world wasn’t competent to make its own decisions and needed a helping hand for its own good, but what drove Panel was — and would always be — a breed of arrogance that its members had accepted and made friends with.

  “Killing him is too big of a risk,” Noah said. “We have no idea how far and wide that intelligence has already spread. Its growth will be exponential now that it has access to our open Fi. The Wild East doesn’t have a functional air network. Any functional networks, so far as we know. The nanobots use wireless to communicate with each other and with satellite towers, so there’s no question they noticed the Fi once they pulled into Penn’s Landing. Jesus, it must have been like a starving fat man smelling a buffet. I’d guess they were talking to it within a few hours. That’s when the window closed — our chance to pull him into an isolated environment and keep communication down. But we didn’t do it, and now the intelligence and bots are out there, spreading and growing. We have no way of knowing which systems it’s moved into. Hell, Costa’s ‘children’ could be listening to us right now, waiting to see how we decide his fate…and whether or not to cut off our air supply.”

  A palpable shiver circled the table. The conference room was far below ground, in a converted missile shelter. Only the computerized environmental controls were keeping the air in circulation.

  “Shit.” Clive looked upward. Noah allowed the smallest of smiles to crease his lips. He wasn’t the gloating type any more than he was jealous, but it was nice to see the arrogant media darling humbled.

  “The point is, we have no idea how that intelligence — and any new intelligences that have spawned from it — would react to Costa’s death. Even if his death were accidental and we had nothing to do with it. He’s the only father they’ve ever known. He was their world not just for their entire lives, but for the entire life of their species. If they had human emotions, I’d call their probable attachment ‘holy.’”

  “Ridiculous.”

  “Well, let me ask you something, Alexa.” Noah put his palms on the smooth table and leaned forward. “Let’s say it’s the year 1800 or so, and someone finds God. Just finds him and shows him around to the world, who all thank him for being their Lord and Father, and for creating them. Then they kill him.”

  “I think they already did that once,” said Iggy. “Turns out it was some guy named ‘Hey-soos’ all along.”

  Noah stood and shook his head. “Only a handful of people believed Jesus was the son of God. We’re talking about an entire society.”

  “Nanobots don’t ‘believe,’” said Eli.

  “AI does,” said Noah.

  “Not really.”

  “But you’re willing to take that risk?”

  “What do you think will happen, Noah?” Alexa asked. “If their ‘god’ suddenly dies?”

  “If they have emotions, they might be superstitious,” Noah answered. “Or some primitive form of superstition. Zealous. Devoted. Again, holy. Reverent.”

  “So…”

  “Panic,” said Noah. “I think they’ll panic.”

  “What happens when AI panics?” asked Clive.

  “I don’t know. But if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s not good.”

  “Shit.” Clive said the word like an exhale.

  Eli still looked unconvinced. “He’s going to die eventually. If there’s a chance of a panic reaction, we should do it now. Their attachment will only deepen if it doesn’t happen until the end of Costa’s natural life, and they’ll only evolve more in the meantime.”

  “And spread farther,” Rachel added.

  “We can’t kill him.” Noah wasn’t entirely sure of that when he’d first said it, but his mind had been rearranging blocks ever since, shuffling the inevitable timeline. Now he was certain.

  “What happens when he dies fifty years from now?” Rachel asked.

  “He can’t be allowed to die. We must protect him.” He looked back up at Rachel. “He’s already in with Isaac. Keep him there. Watch him.”

  “How long?”

  “Forever.”

  “He’s not going to live forever,” Alexa said.

  Noah looked over at Alexa, the blocks in his mind still alive and moving. Once you knew enough, the world was nothing but one big puzzle. Reaction followed action as surely as night chased the day. A careful man could appear to do magic if he knew where to be and what to do and what had to happen next. Truth was, Noah had planned to imprint the AI himself and had thus already noted the small problem of his own mortality. Fortunately, Noah knew he could solve that particular wrinkle before the end of his natural life.

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said.

  “I still think we have to kill him now.” Eli shrugged. “Before things get worse. It’s the only way. We can’t purge the bots or the new AI. It’s part of the fabric. Costa’s our only leverage.”

  “No,” said Noah.

  The eleven others looked up at him. Panel was democratic, and a majority vote always ruled. Ties went to deliberation — one more reason they needed to get to twenty-one quickly and cap membership, so there’d always be a tiebreaker. But right now, no one would argue with Noah. He was a genius among wizards, and in this moment represented a Panel of one.

  Eli sighed. “You’re making a mistake.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You can’t know what will happen, Noah.” Alexa shook her head in resignation rather than protest.

  “No,” he said. “It’s all of you who don’t know what will happen. It’s like you can’t see into the future.”

  Eli chuckled. “And you can?”

  Noah turned his attention to the fat man with the dreadlocks.

  “Wait and see.”

  Isaac found a small piece of paper on the countertop. It was blush colored and had the feel of extravagance. It was certainly nothing he’d seen in the apartment before. It looked old, almost ceremonial. Most paper these days was utilitarian — enough so that it was seldom branded and was sold in packs with labels declaring it to be PAPER as simply and starkly as if it were instead labeled ANCIENT FLATTENED TREE PULP. But this paper was different. It had a soft feel, as if infused with lotion. And when Isaac raised it to his nose and inhaled, he detected a scent. It was Natasha’s perfume, but it wasn’t strong enough for her to have sprayed the paper. The smell was slight, as if she’d rubbed it against her skin.

  The feminine handwriting on the note read: Meet me in the Viazo.

  Intrigued, Isaac set the paper down and made his way through the apartment’s center, through the sunken
living room, and toward his office. Natasha’s door was closed, as it so often was. But somehow, even that closed door looked different now. It usually looked forbidding. Today, it looked mysterious. Almost tantalizing.

  He took a moment to survey her door, wondering if he should knock. But he had immersion rigs in his own office, and whatever Natasha was up to, she’d planned it rather deliberately. The closed door, like the scented note, was part of it. She was a performer to the last. And sometimes — not often recently, but sometimes — her drama could be a good thing.

  He went into his own office, closed the door out of habit, sat in one of the rigs, and took a moment to re-familiarize himself with the machine’s routine. Natasha immersed constantly, but Isaac almost never did. The last time he’d been inside, it had been for his attempted (and failed) vacation booking. That hadn’t ended well, and he found himself looking at the skull cap covered in sensors with trepidation.

  Then he lay back, began the sequence, and surrendered.

  When Isaac opened his virtual eyes, with the rig’s inputs now flawlessly replacing all five of his native senses, Isaac found himself standing on a tile floor, a decorative red curtain hanging beside a set of glass doors in front of him. Past the doors, he saw a dark night past a lit awning. There was a car (wheeled, not hover) under the awning, and as he watched, a valet stepped out. The uniformed valet held the door for a man wearing a necktie (a straight one — something Isaac hadn’t seen since his youth), who then stepped inside.

  Isaac turned, puzzled. Something was very familiar about where he was, but it wasn’t clicking just yet.

  Looking down, he saw himself wearing a classic suit. He seemed to have a cigarette between his lips, unlit. He was wearing a watch. An actual watch. He remembered the timepiece; it had been his grandfather’s, and back in the day he’d worn it only for special occasions and purely as an ornament. He looked at the watch’s face, seeing that it was either noon or midnight. Then he saw how the second hand wasn’t moving, and remembered that he’d worn the watch well after it had broken, for sentimental reasons.