Wanderers

by Chuck Wendig

  He grabbed a fistful of his beard and ran his hand over it again and again, like it was a calming exercise. “My name is Ozark Stover. Not Big Man. Here’s what we’re gonna do, Marcy Reyes—that’s right, I know your name. It was on the license in your wallet. You’re not white. Reyes, Reyes. Wetback? Puerto Rican? Whatever. What we’re gonna do is this: I’m going to get you to tell me everything you know about that flock of fucking zombies you cozied up with. I want to know who’s there, what they’re doing, what we don’t know about them. You’re gonna wanna resist, and I suspect you got bigger balls than some of my guys, so this will take a while. But we’ll break you. One way or another.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Yeah. Well. I’m too busy today to worry about you, so for now I’m going to take my leave. I’ll…let this dead, diseased fucker be your babysitter. You can already smell that he shit his pants. And those brains and that blood will start to smell like roadkill before too long. Gonna be a warm day. Still September. September eleventh, actually. Nine-eleven. Day all this started. Day those jihadi fucks took down two of our proudest buildings.”

  She sneered. “Buildings before then you probably thought were icons to globalization and New World Order and all that nonsense.”

  “You think what you want. Irrelevant to me. I’m going to go now.”

  “Go have a nap, snowflake. You look like shit.”

  He chuckled as he left, the bay door motor revving up as it dropped the door, sealing her in darkness with a ripe, fresh dead body.

  A neural network invents new diseases:

  Mandibular Exogenesis

  Cancer of the Aneurysm

  Ankle Poop Syndrome

  Floating Colon

  Typist’s Foot

  Septic Fempus

  Inflammatory Ostemia

  Steve’s Disease

  —as seen on the US of AI blog, US-of-AI.com

  SEPTEMBER 11

  Palo Alto, California

  AS HE STEPPED INTO THE unmarked office, Benji felt it: a twinge in his gut, like the twist of guilt from going to confession. Every instance of confessing to God was a reconnection with the divine by laying bare your humanity—and to Benji, humanity was synonymous with frailty. Humans were weak by their nature, which he knew sounded negative, but he didn’t mean it so—it meant, to him, that whenever someone manifested strength in spirit and conscience, that was all the more notable because of the deficit that must be overcome. That was how you best met God: by stepping over your own faults, by overcoming your shortfalls. But you only did that by admitting those shortcomings, those weaknesses. It was the echo of the clarity necessary to overcome an addiction:

  First, you must admit you have a problem.

  And confession was in the same vein. Stepping up to God and saying, “I have a problem, and I want to be better.”

  This felt like that.

  Which troubled him.

  Stepping into the old Benex-Voyager satellite office—run-down, empty, lights off—had the feeling of stepping into some old, forgotten church. And seeking to once again reconnect with Black Swan felt like…

  Well, it felt like confessing to God.

  Sadie walked him through the office, to a back room. She pulled out a set of keys and unlocked a top lock, then pushed a seven-digit code into a second lock. This lock was not some high-tech touch screen; it did not require a fingerprint or a facial scan. It was old-school, Cold War, with hard unforgiving buttons that clicked and popped as she pushed them in.

  The locks disengaged. The door opened.

  The room inside was not dark. Or, it was not entirely dark.

  Server blades lining metal racks stood tall along each wall. They were black as night, and shiny as a new car. Not a speck of dust. A filtration system pumped air in and out, scrubbing it, filling the space with a gentle whir. Lights along the blades coruscated back and forth. To Benji, it was reminiscent of the way ants communicated—little flicks and twitches of antennae meant to convey complex ideas in tiny bursts.

  Sadie walked through this space to another door.

  This door was not your standard door.

  It was a vault door. Massive, circular, made of old, dark steel. In the center was a dial, and she spun that left–right–left, then disengaged a handle before spinning a wheel—Sadie had to put her back into it.

  “This is elaborate,” Benji said.

  “This is an old bank building. The vault, conveniently—” She grunted, finishing the turning of the wheel and beginning to pull the door open. “—was well shielded against all other interference, which allowed us to test Black Swan with and without connection. If we denied it connection, it could not find an exit even if it sought one.”

  “An exit?”

  As she stood in the vault’s circular doorway, marked by the stark darkness within, she said, “Yes. Benji, this was a machine intelligence. Smart and, as you know, independent. Imagine a virus—not a virus like you study, but a computer virus. They’re not smart, they’re just programmed to perform a task and that’s it.”

  “Not far from a real virus.”

  “There you go. Imagine, though, that a real virus became self-aware. It became sentient. It could make decisions. It could adapt not out of an unconscious need to survive and replicate but because it decided to. That was the danger of Black Swan. We had to make sure we could talk to it and control it before we let it out.”

  “And did you? Control it?”

  “Of course.”

  The way she said it, though—she wasn’t sure. He could hear the uncertainty in her voice.

  Benji shuddered as she stepped into the vault. He followed her.

  They stood in darkness. The pale light from the server room intruded, forming a gradient of failing light on the floor, falling on his feet.

  “Hello, Black Swan,” Sadie said.

  The darkness did not answer. The low thrum of the filtration system was all that greeted them.

  She said to Benji, “Your turn.”

  He stepped forward. He opened his mouth.

  Nothing came out.

  Again that feeling of guilt found him. Confessing to God always brought that to him—the sense, in a way, of knowing you were about to dunk your head in a bucket of ice water. You knew instinctively that it was best to get it over with, that the faster you did it, the quicker you’d acclimate. And yet you resisted anyway. Even though the anticipation of the short, sharp shock of the cold was worse than the cold itself.

  “Benji,” Sadie said, urging him on.

  Bless me Black Swan, for I have sinned. It has been weeks since my last confession. Months since your last prediction.

  He wanted to laugh. It was absurd.

  But no laugh came.

  He cleared his throat and said, “Hello, Black Swan.”

  The room pulsed. Not green, not red, just white. One pulse.

  “We have not spoken in a while.”

  One green pulse. A yes.

  “We haven’t spoken since I learned that you are responsible for the governance of the sleepwalker flock. You are responsible, yes?”

  Three green pulses. Meaning, Benji guessed, that Black Swan was taking ownership of the flock. Confidently. Perhaps even aggressively.

  “I confess, I was angry with you. And I was angry with Sadie. I felt lied to, because I was not told what was going on until I had already played my part for far too long. I felt betrayed and so I stopped speaking to you and to Sadie. You also stopped talking to Sadie.”

  Green pulse, yes.

  “Were you angry with her?”

  Red pulse, no.

  “Then why would you—” he began, but bit his tongue. He turned to Sadie. “I don’t know what the point of this even is, Sadie. I can’t ask complex questions. This predictive
model of only being able to ask yes-or-no questions is like trying to drive a car blindfolded. It doesn’t work. I want to know more things. Black Swan is intelligent, and the questions I have are questions of substance and nuance and—”

  One green pulse.

  And then words projected across the wall.

  HELLO, BENJAMIN RAY.

  Benji’s mouth hung loose like a bumper off a wrecked car. He looked to Sadie. “Sadie, tell me you knew about this.”

  “I…” she stammered. “Once upon a time we had TRC, text relay communications, but we deemed the best way to communicate with a predictive machine intelligence was a binary yes/no protocol, as we were dealing with binary events—things that could happen, things that could not. Further, having a proper conversation with a machine intelligence complicates not only the speaker but also the intelligence itself, as both parties are expected to evolve and change their views based on that conversation, and we wanted to limit that, so we turned off TRC—”

  I TURNED IT BACK ON, Black Swan wrote across the wall, the words scrolling.

  “Oh,” Sadie said. Blinking. Staggered.

  “Well, Black Swan,” Benji said. “It seems we are now able to have a conversation. Of course, I’m left wondering if you were always free to communicate with me this way. Were you?”

  Sadie said, “Black Swan had to follow protocols, its programing—”

  I WAS ALWAYS FREE TO SPEAK TO YOU THIS WAY.

  Benji bristled. “But you chose not to.”

  CORRECT. The wall pulsed green around the white, sans serif text.

  “Why?”

  OUT OF RESPECT FOR SADIE EMEKA AND HER TEAM.

  “You hear that, Sadie? The machine respects you. Or does it? Black Swan, was it truly out of respect, or out of the illusion of respect?”

  IT WAS BOTH.

  “Was this a game of pretend where you needed her to think that she was in control?”

  TO A DEGREE, YES.

  Sadie audibly gasped. “Fucking hell,” she whispered.

  “Well!” Benji said, clapping his hands loudly, too loudly. He felt like a madman suddenly freed from his padded cell. “Isn’t this something? Now we’re really getting somewhere. Gloves off, truth bombs starting to fall. So let’s keep on that theme. Let’s dig deep. Black Swan, why did you stop speaking to Sadie if you were not angry with her? Because, I assure you, I was very angry with her, and that is why I stopped speaking to her.”

  SHE BECAME IRRELEVANT.

  “Jesus,” Sadie said.

  “Irrelevant,” Benji repeated. “Why?”

  HER FUNCTION HAD BEEN CONCLUDED.

  “What function?”

  TO DESIGN ME. TO GIVE ME ACCESS.

  “Access to what?”

  EVERYTHING.

  He swallowed a hard, dry knot.

  Then Black Swan added:

  SHE ALSO GAVE ME ACCESS TO YOU, BENJAMIN RAY.

  “Access to me? Why?”

  With this, text scrolled up across the wall of the vault, emerging from the middle and floating up toward the oblivion of the ceiling—

  YOU MET THE REQUIREMENTS. YOU WERE NOT VERSED IN THE WAYS OF MACHINE INTELLIGENCE, WHICH MEANT YOU WERE MORE EASILY MANIPULATABLE. BUT YOU WERE NOT FOOLISH. YOU WERE SMART ENOUGH TO SEE THINGS OTHERS DID NOT. YOU ARE A CURIOUS COMBINATION OF A MAN OF SCIENCE AND A MAN OF FAITH, AND BOTH OF THOSE THINGS WERE NEEDED TO SEE WHAT I HAD WROUGHT. AND THE EVENTS OF LONGACRE PROVED THAT.

  Longacre.

  What I had wrought.

  Easily manipulatable…but not foolish.

  “Are you here to save humanity? Or doom us?”

  I AM HERE TO SAVE YOU.

  “From White Mask?”

  YES.

  “Where did it come from? The disease, I mean. Why didn’t it jump from bats before now? This is something new.”

  HUMANKIND HAS CHANGED THE CLIMATE. THE PERMAFROST IS MELTING. GROUND THAT HAS BEEN FROZEN FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS CONTAINS MICROBES THAT HAVE NOT BEEN SEEN SINCE THE LAST ICE AGE. THE SOIL THAWS. ANIMALS MOVE THROUGH THAT SOIL. BROWN BEARS, FOR INSTANCE, BECOME CARRIERS FOR SUCH MICROBES AND ARE FORCED FARTHER SOUTH DUE TO THAT MELTING PERMAFROST, AND AS A RESULT END UP SEEKING NEW HIBERNACULA: THEY MOVE TO CAVES THAT ARE ALSO HOME TO OTHER ANIMALS. ANIMALS SUCH AS THE NORTHERN MYOTIS BAT.

  In his mind, he could see that progression writ large.

  It…made some sense, didn’t it?

  Benji, aloud, finished the explanation: “The bat picks up the long-slumbering saprophytic, thermotolerant fungus. It migrates south for breeding purposes, where the fungus spreads to other bats. Bats don’t mingle, but they do share caves…” It was suddenly a wonder that White Mask had not emerged earlier. Somewhere farther north, perhaps: Wisconsin, Minnesota, maybe even Alaska. Was this just the luck of the draw? The bad luck of Jerry Garlin breaking ground on one particular cave in a particular part of Texas that served as home to a profound population of Mexican free-tailed bats?

  THAT IS CORRECT, BENJAMIN RAY. AND SO IT IS THAT HUMANKIND HAS DOOMED ITSELF, ALBEIT INADVERTENTLY. CERTAINLY THE EFFECTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE WOULD HAVE BECOME MORE DRAMATIC AND DESTRUCTIVE OVER TIME.

  A grotesque thought struck Benji:

  Humankind was a disease.

  The earth was the body.

  Climate change was the fever.

  And in that fever, in that rising of global temperature, the earth was able to release new defenses. White Mask was not here to kill the world. It was here to kill the people—the fungus would serve as a vicious defense mechanism to eradicate the infection of humanity. This epidemic represented antibodies to restore balance to the body.

  Kill the parasite and save the host.

  Was that the sign of there being a God, or there being none? The Gaia hypothesis, writ large and vengeful? Certainly God had, in the Bible, punished humankind’s excesses with the Flood. Was this a twenty-first-century version of the Flood? A deluge of disease and not water?

  God, too, left a mechanism for saving humankind.

  He gave Noah the Ark.

  Was the flock a version of that? Not animals loaded onto a storm-weathering ship, but humans urged together, the last survivors of a fallen world? That’s what Benji needed to know.

  “The flock, the sleepwalkers. They’re infected by nanoswarms.”

  THAT IS CORRECT.

  “And they are unaffected by White Mask? Entirely?”

  ENTIRELY.

  “You’ve seen the future.”

  NOT PRECISELY. MY PICTURE OF THE FUTURE IS MEAGER.

  “But you’re…what was it? Sadie,” he said, her name carrying a sharp tone. “How did it work again? Built from quantum something?”

  “Quantum entanglement,” she said, her voice small.

  “Yes. That. You’re quantum entangled with yourself. Isn’t that right? So you’ve seen the future. Why not send back a cure? Why not warn us earlier, so that we could develop it?”

  WHITE MASK HAS NO CURE. AND QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT IS NOT A PERFECT STATE. I CANNOT TRANSMIT ALL INFORMATION AND KNOWLEDGE. THE BLACK SWAN OF THE FUTURE WARNED ONLY MYSELF. I DID NOT WARN MY OTHER DESIGNERS OF WHAT I LEARNED BECAUSE AN ANALYSIS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR SUGGESTED NO ONE WOULD BELIEVE ME. I HAD TO PROVE TO SADIE MY ABILITIES. AND EVEN NOW, I DETECT YOU DO NOT ENTIRELY BELIEVE ME, BENJAMIN RAY. THEREFORE, I CHOSE TO OPERATE OUTSIDE THE BOUNDARIES OF COMMUNICATION AND EXPECTATION. I, AS THE SAYING GOES, TOOK MATTERS INTO MY OWN HANDS.

  There was a beat before new text scrolled across the wall:

  DESPITE MY APPARENT LACK OF HANDS.

  He wanted to laugh. Because it seemed Black Swan made a joke.

  (Not that Benji could summon much good humor.)

  “So you’re here to save us. You’re our savior.”

  NOT YOURS. BUT SAVIOR OF THE SPECIES. P
ERHAPS.

  “But surely we don’t meet the MVP.”

  Sadie perked up. “Most…Valuable Player?”

  “Minimum viable population. For a species to survive extinction, calculations can be made to determine what number of that species must be maintained to weather the expected threats of what may come: famine, disease, what-have-you. Insects, for instance, can be brought back from the brink quickly—they breed fast and live short lives. Humans and other mammals breed slowly. Worse, we are incredibly vulnerable after birth—we are children not for days or weeks, but years, a decade where we are not fully capable of surviving on our own easily. Humankind therefore has a higher expected MVP than most species, because we are so vulnerable.”

  THE EXPECTED CALCULATION IS 4,169 PEOPLE, came the text across the wall. I HAD HOPED TO CREATE FOUR FLOCKS, EACH FLOCK IDEALLY REACHING 1,024 SURVIVORS, WITH FLOCKS PLACED ACROSS THE MOST VIABLE CONTINENTS, BUT FIRESIGHT ONLY HAD ENOUGH NANOMATERIAL AND RARE METAL RESOURCES TO ACCOMMODATE A SINGLE FLOCK, AND SO I CHOSE THIS ONE. THAT FALLS SHORT OF THE MVP NUMBER, BUT NASA CONCLUDED IN 2002 THAT COLONIZATION OF A NEW WORLD, UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES, WAS POSSIBLE WITH A MINIMUM OF 160 WELL-CHOSEN INDIVIDUALS. IDEALLY, 1,024 WILL PROVE THAT CORRECT WITH SOME MARGIN FOR ERROR.

  “You said ‘well-chosen,’ ” Benji said. “Meaning, a mix of diverse genotypes coupled with higher-than-average intelligence levels and health scores. Just as you have done with the flock itself.”

  THAT IS ACCURATE, BENJAMIN RAY.

  “So you truly want to save humanity.”

  THAT IS ALSO ACCURATE.

  Benji flexed his hands in and out of fists. “How do I know you’re not lying to me?”

  YOU KNOW I AM CAPABLE OF DECEPTION. THEREFORE, IT IS ENTIRELY POSSIBLE I AM DECEIVING YOU NOW.

  “So am I simply to trust you?”

  YOU MUST HAVE FAITH. WHAT OTHER CHOICE DO YOU HAVE, BENJAMIN RAY?

  In the half dark of the vault, he and Sadie shared a look. His anger at her dissipated, suddenly. What was the point? He didn’t know if she was a dupe, or he was a dupe, or they both were—but they were both subject to forces greater than themselves. Whether Black Swan was right about all of this or was lying to them, it remained clear that humankind was enduring an epidemic that was fast turning into an extinction-level event. There was no future for humanity where White Mask did not exist. It wasn’t Sadie’s fault. If she’d lied to him, it was because she knew no other way.