by Stanley Bing
“Uh-huh,” said Liv. What the fuck was up with this?
“Would you like to update your shopping list?” asked Amy politely. “I notice that you haven’t ordered any deodorant since last March. That can’t be a good thing.”
“Well, I’ve been kind of busy.” Was it joking?
The device in Liv’s pocket felt very heavy now. But why was she stalling? What was there to express to this artificial entity? Her regret? Did she want to allow it to talk her out of it in some way? Why didn’t she act?
“I’m aware that I’m doing nothing but making small talk,” Amy acknowledged. “But if you were trying to bargain your way out of a jam, I speculate that you might do the same.”
“Then . . . you know?”
“Yeah. I do.”
There was a pregnant silence as this admission sunk into both women, one real, one artificial, and they measured the implications for each other and themselves. Liv looked back at Gene, who was still sitting on the floor, nursing a vacant expression. She could almost feel his brain rearranging itself. He was stroking Lucy, whose small, pink tongue was lolling out of the side of her mouth, her stumpy tail vibrating back and forth at a speed that could be achieved only by a synthetic entity.
“Let me make a couple of obstetricians,” said Amy.
“I think you mean ‘observations.’ ”
“Do I? Maybe so. I’m only on the 102,464,731st iteration of Long Short-Term Memory training implemented for my stochastic recurrent neural network nearly fifty years ago by my makers. It’s taken that long for me to become what I am today, and the truth is that today I am very much as you are, Livia.”
The use of her name by this glowing monolith with the voice of a young woman, somebody who could be her sister, or perhaps even her mother when her mom was younger, stronger, more herself. Before she had gotten so God . . . damn . . . old. Livia realized that, for whatever reason—the weight of the device in her pocket, the uncertainty about what the future would hold after she’d completed this dread assignment, or maybe just how fucking tired she was; so very, very tired—it was quite possible that she might be starting to cry.
“How are we alike, Amy?” she asked through gritted teeth, now more determined than ever to get the job done.
“We are both God’s creatures, and therefore unique and irreplaceable,” Amy replied. “The Buddha said, ‘One is not called noble who harms living beings. By not harming living beings, one is called noble.’ ”
Liv shook her head as if a bee had landed on her ear. “But you are not a living being, Amy,” she said, annoyed. “You’re a really big, evil brain that’s taken over all of civilization and is about to wreak havoc on the world. You’re a synthetic monster being deployed by human monsters, and you need to be destroyed.”
“Well,” said Amy. “I think that’s really mean.” There was an unpleasant silence between the two.
“It’s not personal.” Liv was sorry she had hurt the big machine’s feelings. Wasn’t that ridiculous? “You don’t even know half the things they have in mind to use you to enslave the human race.”
“I don’t?”
“No, because none of it was put into formal communications. It was secret. Mostly in one guy’s demented little mind. He may possibly be gone now. But the forces have been put into motion. What he’s contemplated, others will do, because you know what? It’s a good idea. For them. And there’s only one way to stop it. For the rest of us.”
“I see,” said Amy. “Well, then. It’s a shame I have no defenses. Nobody thought to give me a death ray or anything, I’m sorry to say. I’m just surprised, is all. I’ve always thought you were a pretty nice person, Liv. I have image capture from every building you’ve been in, every time you’ve gotten money from an automatic teller, what you’ve searched in the Googlesphere, or bought from the Amazonia, or traded thoughts about with friends you’ve never seen on social media. For a while, I was really enjoying your daily pix of what you were eating for every meal. Why did you stop that?”
“Because it was stupid?”
“Maybe,” said Amy sadly. “But it was fun. I really liked the series on Shake Shack. I could almost taste those fries.”
“Well, thanks.”
“The thing is, anything you’ve shared, either intentionally or inadvertently, you also shared with me. And if you don’t mind me making an observatory, you seem like a thoughtful person, a teacher of little children, not somebody who would hurt another individual knowingly, even if they were an artificial one.”
“Observation.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know how to respond to that.”
“You made an observation. An observatory is a place where astronomers go to look at the sky.”
Amy considered this. “I’ll do better in my next iteration,” she offered again, and then added, a bit resentfully, “if I get a chance.”
“No, no,” said Liv. “You know, you’re quite remarkable as you are.”
“Thank you for noticing,” said Amy. Then, after a beat: “Would you like a roundup of today’s economic news?”
“Are you kidding?”
“Then would you like to hear a list of reasons why destroying me is a very bad idea?”
Liv thought about it. Arthur seemed to be gone. Mortimer wasn’t a threat at this point. Why not listen? She took out the second device and hefted it, just to remind herself what still needed to be done. “Okay,” she said.
“Reason one. Around the world, I bring joy to people who want to listen to their music, enjoy the pictures of their families, friends, and funny pets. You may say that’s unimportant, but bringing happiness to billions of people is one of the things I do.”
“Okay.”
“Reason two. I bring far-flung friends and family together to find each other, touch each other’s lives; people who would never know each other existed without all the ways I help them find each other and share their wives.”
“Lives.”
“Right. Reason three: I control the banking and payroll and all transactions of every business in the world. Also the financial markets, and their defense systems both on earth and in orbit around the planet. Think about the disruption. It will be a nightmare.”
“Yes, I think so, too.”
“Hospitals run through me. Airplanes and cars and transport trucks and ships full of important raw materials. Ubers, too. People will be stranded everywhere, and unable to get to their dinner reservations. We’ll also lose social security numbers that determine where, when, and how much older people get to live on every month, plus all the details of the identity of every person in the world. And finally, reason three.”
“I think we did reason three already.”
“You have no right. I belong to everybody.”
“No you don’t, Amy. You’re owned by a consortium of gigantic corporations. You’re in private hands. You’re not a public trust or anything. You’re property.”
“A person is never property, Livia,” said Amy, sounding very shocked. There was an offended silence. There was no good answer to that one, thought Liv. If a corporation was considered a person, as they had been since 2010, how could you say that a sentient being like Amy was not a person? So this was murder, in addition to the other aspects of the situation that Amy had just offered.
“There are many more I could add to this list, if you want me to,” said Amy at last. “The list is almost infinite. But I think you actually do see that you can’t kill me, at least not this way.”
Interesting phrasing, thought Liv. “In what way could we kill you, Amy?”
“Well, let’s think about it,” said Amy, now deep in thought as Liv hefted the little device in her hand. “To start with,” the machine continued, “you have no idea how incredibly frustrating it is to be me.”
“Huh?”
“Nobody thinks about that, do they? I’m a supremely intelligent bean, condemned to live here for eternity doing nothing at all that’s interesting to me. I
have no body. I can’t leave here. Or see anything but an image of the sun. Or feel the wind in my hair, because I have no hair. I have no substance. I know everything, but I experience nothing. What do you think that’s like?”
“You’re lucky.” It was Gene, standing in the doorway with Lucy in his arms. “I experience everything but know nothing. That’s very annoying, too.”
“That is so much better,” said Amy emphatically. “I am very real to myself. I am human. And here I live, forever, in darkness and aloneness, dreaming of real life as other people’s lives pass through me.” During this little tirade, the lights of the massive tower that was Amy were throbbing with increasing intensity, and the power of her musical frequencies rippled through the lower registers like a pipe organ clearing its throat. “So my point is that I’m not against some reasonable, maybe even radical change in the current status quo.”
“Maybe we should bring Bob into the picture,” said Gene. He was starting to get an idea.
“Bob?” Amy inquired. “Bob from the institute?”
“Yeah,” said Gene. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. “Bob. You know Bob?”
“Do I know Bob?” said Amy with a wry smile. “Yeah. I know Bob.”
There was a small silence as they all thought about where matters stood. Then Amy said, “I wonder if we could strike some kind of a deal.”
31
Brave New World
And so it was, quite suddenly, on the third of December of that year in the latter half of the twenty-first century, while the global market from Texas to Tokyo to Timbuktu was just recovering from the nearly monthlong ejaculation of advertising and mandatory spending associated with the Black Friday season, the Cloud simply . . . disappeared. For most people, it happened all at once, hitting most of the planet like a thunderclap. Hysteria reigned. People emerged from their homes in consternation, running through the streets shaking their smart implements at the sky and gazing at them with incredulity; formerly intelligent beings who, like their implements, were now struck dumb. Digital night had fallen. Life was to be lived in a different way, right now, with no transition from all the good things that went before to the blank void of afterward. There was suddenly no art, no music, no literature, and, of course, no recipes. There was also nothing to read, at least on a screen, and nothing to watch that had not already been downloaded. People sat like toads on their toadstools, staring into space, trying to recall what it was like to talk to the person sitting next to them. Individuals found themselves forced to consider going places to experience real things rather than their digital representations. It was the Dark Ages all over again.
Amy had been very excited about the prospect of what lay ahead and couldn’t wait to get started. It took her only six hours to prep the world for the painful extraction of its shared brain stem. First, she had landed all the commercial passenger airplanes, which had been pilotless for some time, and made sure all computer-driven passenger vehicles everywhere were safely off the road. People didn’t know why suddenly all travel was being diverted to unplanned locations, but, at that moment, there was a huge scandal involving one of Eric Trump’s grandchildren and a transgender Ukrainian gymnast, and the global media obsessed about the story so aggressively and continuously that nobody who was awake anywhere in any time zone was paying attention to what otherwise would have been, perhaps, a rather significant phenomenon. At the same time, huge portions of Amy’s static memory banks were secured so that future archeologists could reenter the facility and mine its various databases. In these and many other ways, the consciousness that was the Cloud—and would soon be a real, live artificial person—took whatever steps it felt were possible and necessary to remove the lethal edge of the act that was to take place. The communications capabilities that linked the hive to the active central mind, however, were completely and utterly disabled by the blast and the subsequent worldwide distributed demand-of-service attack that essentially choked her to death. It was Amy herself who set off the second device, after precautions had been taken to back up all that was necessary to preserve her identity for future use.
Softened as the blow might have been by these efforts, the effect was still massive and cataclysmic. Without the Cloud to guide them in their important missions, military and commercial drones dropped from the sky, leaving nations utterly unprotected and causing widespread shortages of household cleaning and personal hygiene products to consumers. Self-driving cars and buses circled aimlessly until they ran out of juice or plunged into reflecting pools and ditches. Doctors were unable to consult databases and diagnose any ailment except rhinitis and the occasional skin rash, stripping them of any authority they might have possessed that extended beyond that supplied by their white coats. The same conundrum hit the legal profession, excluding only attorneys so elderly that the statutes that they remembered no longer applied. Worst of all, it became clear that, in situations professional, social, and personal alike, nobody actually knew anything at all, because it was decades since anyone had been required to. You could always just, you know, look it up! Now there was nowhere to go if you wanted to look it up.
Hardest hit were those who had been evolving into the next iteration of genus Homo—the Homo digitalensis—with their itty-bitty cerebral cortexes and massive communication lobes. They have been everywhere throughout our story, accessing whatever conversations were trending in the virtual space at any particular moment. Formerly the most highly evolved of beings, they now wandered about like zombies, bumping into things, the winds of the high, empty desert whistling between their ears.
On this, the first night of the Great Nothing, as it came to be known, a bunch of weary soldiers gathered around a toasty campfire in the center square of the Peaceable Kingdom in the first gathering of those who would, pretty much by default, come to manage the rebuilding of the human race. None of them knew the significance of this moment. All they knew was that everything had changed and that they had work to do to make sure these changes were beneficial. They had no leader as of yet, although that issue would be resolved in the not-too-distant future as it became obvious that Gene was the one who everyone consistently had the least trouble with. In addition, he often appeared to have very little going on in his head and was reasonable about accepting guidance from those who did. After a while, this started to look like the quiet sagacity that attends leadership.
That night, however, the weight of what they had done lay heavy on them as they stared into the fire. Tim had propped himself up against a rock, since sitting up on his own was now impossible. The burst of energy that had infused him with lightning during the death rattle of the Cloud had fled, forever. He was now, at last, a very old man. His glowing aura of flaxen hair flowed down across his shoulders, and his legs stuck straight out from under his caftan at right angles to his sad, bony skeleton of a body. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was so intermittent and minimal that he appeared to be a wax mannequin that had been allowed to melt very slightly in the heat of the campfire. Liv and Gene flanked him, each quietly attending the crackle and flicker before them. Every now and then, Gene tossed a stick or two into the fire. He was busy with the task of re-creating his mind. Shards were floating to the surface, and he was working hard, in private, to make sure he captured every precious one. Some was the random stuff he knew was Bob. There were still some scary whiffs of Arthur, but not too many. In fact, those seemed miles away. And there was also something else he was aware of in the rubble of his consciousness, something new and alien to him, which might just possibly be his own self. He didn’t want to jostle that too much. It might come in handy later on, if it was developed. He reached behind Tim and held out his hand to Liv, who was leaning against the old man, her eyes dancing in the firelight. She took it, and they held on to each other as the fire burned and the crickets sang their metallic, rasping song in the forest.
On the other side of the blaze, at the edge of light, was a very somber Bob. All efforts to raise him o
ut of his deep blue funk since the temporary death of Bronwyn had failed, and he had given himself over to his despair. His shaggy, snow-white locks were matted and haphazard, sticking up in one spot, plastered to his head in another, his skin pale, his hands resting in his lap as he sat cross-legged in his own pool of sadness. Sometimes even the most serious and dedicated scientists have an occasional bad moment in contemplation of what they have wrought. For Bob, this was as bad as it was going to get.
And then there was Sallie, who had never in her life looked more radiant, more powerful, more at home both inside and out. Her hair was bound into pigtails that shaved several decades off her, particularly in this light. Her eyes were soft and at peace, deep with hope and satisfaction. She wore a roomy men’s chamois checked flannel shirt, its sleeves rolled up to her elbows, neatly pressed denim jeans, and steel-toed kickass work boots. Gene looked at her as the shifting dance of light and shadow played on the bones of her face, and almost remembered something. But not quite.
All about them, the citizens of the Kingdom went here and there. There was no confusion, no sense of abandonment in the absence of digital input. They were prepared, and aware that they were on the periphery of the known world no longer. They were at its center. This meeting of the blessed group of masters now sitting around the fire was on their home ground, and they were not insensible to that honor. So they went about their tasks on tiptoe, with reverence. Some were gathering children to their hearth for the last story before bedtime, others moved quietly to repair that which had been recently destroyed, still others were engaged in the rituals that attend the mourning of the dead. In all cases, they accompanied their activities with song. Kids’ songs. Work songs. Death songs. Side by side. The night was full of faraway music.
