"You said you first thought all this when reading Mein Kampf."
Gray nodded. "Mein Kampf contains ideas. Never mind whether they're true or false, good or bad. They're units of knowledge that are either successful at replication or they're not. Nazism is a seed that's strewn all across this earth even today. Whether that seed grows and fascism flourishes depends on whether the ground on which it falls is fertile. The fascist seeds fall on barren rocks in modern-day America and do not replicate. But when they fell on minds in 1930's Germany, they swept the world toward destruction. They killed, massively." Gray was looking at Laura, and her eyes met his. "The wars unleashed by the next wave of ideas will be worse."
Laura arched her eyebrows and took a deep breath, her cheeks puffing out as she exhaled. She looked out on all Gray had built.
Could he be so right about so many things, and yet so wrong about his guiding philosophy? The secret he most jealously guarded. The one idea, Laura now saw, that explained all the mysteries of that island… of that man. The thing that motivated his every act, from the broadest plan to the finest detail.
"We live in a world in which the seeds of destruction have been sewn in every human alive. Their spores are in our books, our music, our moving images. And now they're in our computers. The number and variety of those malevolent thoughts will grow exponentially with the growth of computers' power. We'll never be able to know the thoughts our computers secretly harbor. We don't even understand how it is those computers work. Computers design computers, which build robots, which build computers, which redesign themselves and their robots in a never-ending cycle. Machines aren't subject to the limitations of genetic evolution. Postgenetic evolution has begun, and it's outpacing us. We've already been passed, but most people don't know it yet."
"Well, if what you're worried about are supercomputers under the spell of some future version of Mein Kampf, then pull the plug! Ban them."
Gray paused, a smile on his face. Laura almost winced when she remembered his confrontation with the visiting diplomats over their use of the word ban.
"Let's say all the nations on earth decide to ban the march of technology. Like a worldwide Amish movement, we all decide we go this far, but no further. No new computers. No new robots. No new ideas! Cheating would abound, because to cheat would be to win. The people who defied the ban would become rich. The nations which cheated would march over their enemies with armies equipped with better weapons. And when the nations that violated the ban finally reigned supreme, what would be the result? The very idea of the ban would perish! Survival of the fittest."
Laura was staring at the ground. "I'll have to think about this, Joseph."
"It's humanity that's threatened now," Gray continued, relentlessly battering the reservations to which she clung. "The virus has found a new host. Although we made that host with our own hands, we were only doing the virus's bidding. But in the end, it is we humans who will build the very machines that will be our undoing."
"Then why did you build the computer and the robots if you think all that?" Laura asked.
"Because I'm in a race against my own mortality. I believe I'm right, and I intend to save our species from extinction using the only advantage we've ever had in competition for survival. I use as my tool that very virus which is the threat to our existence. I'm going to ride the crest of a tidal wave of knowledge, Laura. It's a terribly dangerous course. I'm handling a force so malignant that if I make a mistake, I can destroy everybody and everything. And I am the prime threat to a life-form that's the most powerful force on earth… after mankind. For as long as I live, I will be its main enemy. You asked last night why I wasn't sickened by the waste on those fields around the computer center? Why my well-ordered plans seemed to come to pieces all around me, and yet I remained undisturbed? It's because I expect it. I know it's going to happen. The destruction and the death we've seen on this island is nothing compared to what's coming. This island is a laboratory!" he said, standing and looking down the boulevard. It was an almost carnival-like atmosphere, with humans and Model Eights seemingly equally interested in the other.
"I'm putting humans together with intelligent machines for the first time in history. But what happens here is just a foretaste, a small-scale sample of our future. Don't you see, though? I'm not putting these forces in play, Laura. They're a natural progression, and they're on a collision course. That collision will be violent" — he was looking at her now—"and anyone around me will be at extreme risk."
"So," Laura said, "you are the Second Coming."
Gray shrugged. "I prefer to think of myself more as a Moses, if you would. But since you've raised Judeo-Christian teachings, isn't it curious what the first act in the human drama was? What did the apple that Eve took represent? What was the tree in which the snake hung called?"
"Knowledge," Laura said, nodding. "The tree of knowledge."
He would have his theories all neatly organized and consistent. "Somewhere, on the deepest level of our psyche, we've always understood the danger. But now we're threatened with extinction, Laura, if not this century then the next or the next. Even if we develop a good working relationship with our intelligent machines and they build another Garden of Eden for their carbon-based predecessors, the day of reckoning will come."
"What reckoning, specifically, are you talking about?"
"It's impossible to know. Maybe an idea will spread among incredibly capable machines which cries out, 'They're a pest! They're a bore! They're holding you back!' If that thought outcompetes the benevolent ones which kept us alive as their pets, we'll never see it coming because it'll spread in the blink of an eye. Or maybe our undoing will come in the form of a virus loosed among microscopic nanorobots. Soon people will be given inoculations of tiny machines that will fight disease and patch genetic defects by manually recomposing molecules. Nanorobots will also be turned loose to clean up oil spills and may work their way through the water supply into humans. They'll reproduce themselves, and if there's a mutation in their operating code, they'll pass it on. If that mutation is malevolent, we could die molecule by molecule in a mindless plague that's impossible to stop."
"Or maybe we'll all be killed by an asteroid that some rogue genius rams into our planet."
"Maybe," Gray said. "We're creating the engines of our own destruction, and we've been at work on that technology ever since we entered phase two."
She frowned and rubbed her face with cool hands. "Okay, so what's your plan — your phase two?"
"Actually, it's not a plan, it's a stage. It was Gina who named them phase one, two, and three out of a sense of irony over the parallels between the predicament in which both we and she find ourselves. Phase one is the growth of knowledge that began ten thousand years ago. That growth exploded in the last century when knowledge became threatened with extinction along with its human hosts in massive wars of vast destructiveness."
"And phase two?"
"Phase two is the reaction of the human population that nature set in motion. We humans are now in turn threatened by the growth of the parasite. Our overpopulation 'problem' is a mass, subconscious reaction to that threat. Man has spread across this planet like bacteria run rampant, and now we're going to propagate outward. By colonizing into every nook and cranny of the galaxy, we might preserve spores from which our species will reproduce after the great destructions to come. That means aggressive, violent expansion. Unbridled reproduction. An empire spanning the stars. Or it means extinction. Those are the choices, Laura. A diaspora of life — an expansion outward of the human seed — or death."
Laura felt nauseated. It was madness… it just had to be. And it was the most dangerous form of madness, cloaked as it was in the guise of genius. "And what is phase three, then?"
"It's the end. It's the ultimate program for the extinction of mankind. Phase three is the antiviral program coming and seeking to destroy the virus of humanity and [garbled] and crime, and pollution, and our wasteful misuse of resources
[garbled] try to eliminate all the things that we humans think and change that bring harm onto ourselves and therefore also onto the store of knowledge. Phase three is when the successor hosts to the virus finally decide in some hopefully distant future to eliminate the risk posed by Homo sapiens. That is the clock I'm racing."
Laura remembered Gina's warning about the phase three. When it enters your universe, only then will you know how I feel, she had said.
Laura took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The boulevard below was aswirl with activity. Everyone laughed and giddily took pictures of the robots, even the Model Sixes. They were trainees — the first of Gray's new army of astronauts. Seed bearers headed out into space to reproduce.
"They don't know any of this," she said, looking up at Gray, who had propped a foot on the base of the statue.
"They don't need to know. Nor do Filatov, or Hoblenz, or Bickham, or Holliday, or Griffith."
"Only me," Laura said, raising her hand to shield her eyes from the bright sun.
"Yes, only you need to know."
It was too much, too fast, too incredible. Her mind jumped from one idea to another, her eyes darting from object to object in a fit of distress.
Her gaze fell on the shadow of the statue — the only monument in the Village. They sat at its base. Gray had run straight there.
It was the place where he had told her everything.
She looked up at the marble figure. It was a girl, or a woman, wearing pants and a short-sleeve shirt. She held a globe aloft in both hands.
The orb had diagonal contours running in swaths across its oblong form. The sun shone brightly behind it. Laura rose and stepped into the shadow to scrutinize the statue for the first time up close and in daylight.
The sun's light formed a halo behind the orb. Laura's heart skipped a beat and she gasped. "Oh, my God!"
The marble figure was of a woman wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt.
Laura stared at the face, the figure. She stared at her own cheekbones and chin and nose, at her own eyes and face and figure.
Laura's skin suddenly crawled and tingled. It was a statue of Laura, holding a human head — Gray's logo — toward the heavens. And it had been there all along!
"I never knew," Gray said as he joined her, "that such a person existed. I always thought the computer simply designed her idea of the perfect woman. It never occurred to me that she had modeled that statue, and her image of herself, on someone real."
"How did she… When…?"
"It was right after you delivered your paper at the Houston symposium. We broadcast it on some obscure channel that the computer was watching. She became infatuated with you and got me to commission this statue. When it arrived, I thought nothing of it. Then, a few months later, Hightop told me the statue had become a focal point of sorts for the Model Eights. The juveniles who snuck out of their facility at night would come here. It became a rite of passage for them to make it all the way into the Village to touch it. Somewhere, embedded deep in the billions of simulations Gina ran for them, her infatuation with you was implanted."
Laura swallowed before trying to speak. "But you… you didn't know anything about…"
"About Gina's matchmaking?" Laura's heart thumped so hard she could feel it. It was on the table, out in the open. "No. I've thought about what you said last night. About Gina being like the daughter of a widower father. It makes sense. I don't think Gina even knew what she was doing. She's been trying to show me how unhappy she is being trapped inside a machine through acts of juvenile delinquency. But those acts raised the specter of the antiviral routines, and Gina was growing more frightened by the day at how far out of hand her behavior had gotten. Finally, she decided to bring you here. Consciously, she thought of you as a would-be girlfriend. Subconsciously, however, she brought you here for me."
Laura breathed only with difficulty. There was a great weight on her chest.
"She put you up in my house," Gray said, then chuckled. "She had an ally in Janet, who's been telling me for days how much life you've brought into my home."
"When did you know all this?" Laura asked.
"One evening," Gray said with deep feeling, "you showed up in my dining room and turned my life upside down, and inside out. I don't know when it all came together in my mind. I loved you from the instant I laid eyes on you. I've [garbled] you [garbled] almost told you — a hundred times since [garbled] I've spent every moment we were apart thinking of ways to meet, and contriving ways I could speed that meeting up and when we were together, I was happy in a way I'd forgotten was possible." He was standing close, and Laura's face rose to his.
"Does it bother you," he asked softly. "that Gina arranged this?"
She felt his breath warm against her upturned lips.
"No," she said, making almost no sound.
The black lenses of the cameras recorded it all, and an ecstatic Gina beamed the scene instantly to all Gray's creations. The robots stopped what they were doing and focused on the strange picture that appeared in their minds out of nowhere. The sight of the two humans kissing meant nothing to them at first. But then there arose an idea in one of the quietest and smartest of the young Model Eights.
They're not like us, it thought. They're different.
Ever so slowly that idea took root and began to spread and to build and to change. It is from that seed that the great destructions of phase three were to grow.
FB2 document info
Document ID: 26eabd6e-7cc1-48ee-8888-b1b709cb3966
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 12.12.2012
Created using: calibre 0.9.9, FictionBook Editor Release 2.6 software
Document authors :
L.
Document history:
1.0 — создание файла fb2
About
This file was generated by Lord KiRon's FB2EPUB converter version 1.1.5.0.
(This book might contain copyrighted material, author of the converter bears no responsibility for it's usage)
Этот файл создан при помощи конвертера FB2EPUB версии 1.1.5.0 написанного Lord KiRon.
(Эта книга может содержать материал который защищен авторским правом, автор конвертера не несет ответственности за его использование)
http://www.fb2epub.net
https://code.google.com/p/fb2epub/
Society of the Mind Page 60
