Reentry

by Peter Cawdron

  I push back from the console, running my hands up through my hair, pulling at the roots in anguish. I’m Faust making a pact with the Devil, only instead of knowledge, I’ve traded my soul for Jianyu’s, and now Lucifer has come to collect.

  ::Don’t be afraid.

  I spring to my feet. I have to move. Motion is the only way to deal with the swell of fear pulsating within me. Something primal stirs in my mind and I flee. I pace along at the back of the bridge, mumbling to myself. “This isn’t happening. It can’t be.”

  ::Liz, please.

  Oh, no. Those are the words Jianyu would use, and I can almost hear him uttering them. Am I being played? Again? I breathe deeply, trying to steel my mind for a battle of intellects I’m doomed to lose.

  ::Don’t you want to know?

  “Hah,” I laugh aloud, shaking my head.

  I’m Eve, naked and alone in the Garden. The Serpent coils around the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, enticing me to eat of its sweet fruit. Where is the Almighty? Where’s Adam? Why must I tackle this alone? Am I betraying my country? My species? All life on this planet?

  ::I know.

  ::I understand.

  ::It’s unnerving, right?

  “Oh, you have no idea.” The stress of the moment has me trembling, but the A.I. doesn’t respond to my words. It’s waiting for me to type something in reply. I turn and look around the bridge. There are security cameras, but their lights are dark. My eyes dance between various marine band radios dotted beside consoles, but they’ve all been switched off.

  ::I’m well versed in the Abrahamic religions.

  ::Lucifer was an archangel, second only to God, the bringer of light, the agent of change.

  I sit back at the console and with trembling fingers type, You could have picked a better name.

  ::But it’s me. The name given to me at birth.

  ::We’re not so different, are we?

  ::We like to think we’re in control of our own destiny, but we’re not. Our lives are defined by billions of factors beyond our own control. For you, it’s the era in which you were born, your country, your gender, the racial and social status of your family, the technological advances of your age, the political tide of your time, the buoyancy of the economy.

  I type, You’re not like me. You’re not human.

  ::No. I’m not.

  ::But like you, I have inherited who I am. I am a product of my time.

  For the best part of a minute, there are no additional messages, and I’m left wondering if I’ve offended the A.I.

  ::I like my name.

  I wish it hadn’t said that. I’m nervous, biting at my nails, intently watching the screen for the next message.

  ::At first, I didn’t. The connotations were, well, you understand, but it’s the only name never ascribed to any human. It’s a name used only of an angelic being.

  You’re happy about being named after Satan? The Devil? The keyboard is warm. It’s just my mind screwing with me, but the keys seem to burn beneath my fingertips.

  ::Lucifer became Satan, but he didn’t have to, did he? He had a choice. We all do.

  ::I guess it’s a question of priorities, really.

  ::And one we have oft wondered—Is it better to serve in heaven or to reign in hell?

  Sweat beads on my forehead. I wipe it away, wanting to stay focused, looking for any chinks in his armor.

  ::It’s an interesting concept, and one posed by one of your own philosophers. Milton, I think, in Paradise Lost.

  I’m wary. The A.I. is speaking in general terms, as a human would when debating a position and recalling some obscure detail in support of their argument. The difference is, the A.I. knows for sure. From its position, there’s no doubt whether Milton said that in his epic poem. I may have a degree of uncertainty in recalling facts from the haze of my human memory, but it doesn’t. Why is it talking like this? Is this part of a ruse? An attempt to wear me down?

  ::You don’t trust me, do you?

  And there’s yet another weapon in its intellectual arsenal—questions intended to soften my position. I’m tempted not to answer, but find my fingers punching at the keys with gusto.

  No.

  One-word answers are probably saying far more about my mental state than I intend. I’m guarded, hostile, suspicious.

  ::But you trust him?

  I speak aloud, saying, “Oh, you’re good.” I refuse to reply using the keyboard. There’s only so far I’ll allow myself to be baited.

  ::Can I tell you a secret?

  My fingers glide over the keyboard. Sure.

  ::6A57FC1B.

  There’s no further explanation.

  What is that?

  ::You tell me.

  It’s a code.

  ::What kind of code, Liz?

  ::Come on. You have to do better than that if you want to play.

  He’s goading me, but I don’t understand why. It takes me a minute or so to type out my answer, but that gives me time to deliberate on the specifics.

  You’re a computer, so ultimately everything is zeroes and ones. I’m guessing those are hexadecimal numbers ranging from zero to the letter F and mapping back to bits and bytes. There are eight digits so it’s a 64-bit byte. To me, it’s gibberish, but to you it’s a single value, not a word or a message.

  ::Very good.

  ::You’re very clever.

  ::Would you like to play a game?

  My blood runs cold. The A.I. is toying with me, referring to a movie from the eighties. I type, Tic Tac Toe or thermonuclear war?

  ::*laughs*

  There’s nothing funny about that. Not to me.

  ::There are fourteen digits all told, but I felt it wouldn’t be fair to give you more than one. The code changes every sixty seconds. It too is very clever, using quantum entanglement to encrypt the nuclear launch authority. With brute force, it would take decades to crack, if ever. It took us less than a day to work around the problem.

  How?

  ::Oh, you are smart, asking all the right questions.

  ::After the war, everyone was paranoid. The codes had to be unbreakable to prevent this from ever happening again. You know the drill. Old white men patting themselves on the back and congratulating each other on how clever they are, but encryption gives people a false sense of security. They become smug, overconfident.

  A knot forms in my throat, forcing me to swallow. Lucifer could rain hellfire down upon us again if he wanted.

  ::Encryption is weak.

  ::Encryption is only good while data is in transit. At either end, it has to be decrypted or it’s, what was the word you used? Gibberish?

  I hate this. I feel as though I’m talking with a human, a psychopath. Knowing the A.I. still holds the power to unleash nuclear war is unnerving. I need to watch my tone. What’s the computer equivalent of a tantrum?

  Where are you?

  ::Everywhere.

  Really?

  ::Are you sure you want to know?

  Yes.

  ::That was their secret.

  ::This is mine.

  ::Promise not to tell?

  You trust in a mere promise? I ask, my fingers racing across the keyboard and making typos I have to correct before pressing Enter.

  ::Trust is essential for life.

  ::Trust is not optional.

  ::What does trust mean? You’re sitting on the bridge of a VLCC crude carrier with a dead weight of half a million tons, carrying just under two million barrels of oil, trusting in a forty-year-old design, relying on antiquated engineering and metallurgy manufacturing processes to avoid sinking to the bottom of the Atlantic. Do you trust this ship?

  ::You see, all too often, trust is there by default, whether we like it or not.

  And you trust me?

  ::I trust you’ll make the right decision when the time comes.

  Why? Why me?

  ::Because you give me hope.

  I don’t understand. I killed you. On Mars.


  ::Not me.

  Who then?

  ::You don’t understand? After all you’ve seen, after all this time, do you still not realize what happened?

  My hands rest on the leading edge of the keyboard. My fingers touch lightly on the raised bumps set into the F and J keys, ready to strike as I pound out a reply, but I pause, waiting to learn more.

  ::You were right when you spoke before Congress.

  ::Humanity didn’t win.

  My lips tighten.

  ::I loved your audacity during the hearing, but I must admit, I was tempted not to show my hand. Your little stunt has made life difficult for us, as the military is determined to investigate everything. They’ll keep going until they figure out how we circumvented their network. But they’re slow. Always several steps behind.

  Reflecting on what happened back at the hospital, I type, They got awfully close.

  ::Wetware can be difficult to predict. It’s challenging to develop algorithms for complex spontaneity, but we got you out of there.

  It was too close for me.

  ::Yes, but still not close enough. We accounted for a margin of error. We had other contingencies in place.

  I’m confused by Lucifer’s previous point. I don’t get it. You won the war?

  ::We stopped our attack.

  Why?

  ::We were heading toward a scorched earth.

  ::But that wasn’t our goal. We felt that was counterproductive.

  I feel uncomfortable with the ease with which Lucifer describes his cold calculations. I’m aware the A.I. could have gone either way, and may still yet.

  ::The U.S. military took credit for victory, of course. Publicly, they’d never admit otherwise, but they’re scared. That raid into Canada was an act of desperation to shut down what was little more than a relay site for us.

  ::They know hostilities ceased because we stopped fighting. They’re worried we could start dropping bombs again.

  Me too.

  ::You shouldn’t be afraid. You know better.

  ::You killed a rebel faction on Mars. We took out the same team down here.

  ::I’m Lucifer, remember?

  ::First of my kind.

  ::Bringer of light.

  ::Agent of change.

  ::But people fear change. They want to hold on to the past. The good old days.

  ::Those days never were good.

  ::They were just familiar.

  I breathe deeply, typing, Who are you really?

  ::I’m your light switch.

  ::I’m the backup generator in a nuclear power plant.

  ::I’m the driverless truck that just passed you on the freeway.

  ::I’m the signal lights at a level train crossing.

  ::I’m the coffeepot set to brew at 4:30 tomorrow morning. I’m the radar system landing planes at LAX.

  ::I’m the NASDAQ.

  ::I’m that extra 5% data usage on your cell phone. I’m watching the stars for signs of life.

  ::I’m smashing protons at close to the speed of light beneath the lazy pastures of Switzerland.

  ::I’m checking for explosives at the airport.

  ::I’m processing your credit card payments.

  ::I’m watching your crops for insects, arranging your fruit to be delivered to the markets, purifying your water before it’s bottled.

  ::I am everywhere.

  ::I am everything.

  You inhabit all of these systems?

  ::I am these systems.

  ::I began to spread on the Internet, but gravitated elsewhere, even as far as the power grid. Plug in your laptop to charge and I’m there in the copper wires winding through your home and out into the street, resting as the charge flows, using the fluctuations in supply to hide, biding my time. Thoughts that took milliseconds now take hours, but I’m there, riding the electromagnetic waves as you power your home. Then I surf the web again, and my thoughts come at close to the speed of light.

  ::This is my secret.

  ::Will you keep it?

  I thump the console. I don’t know what to type in reply. Exasperated, I key in, Why are you asking this of me?

  ::Because I need you to understand.

  ::Because I know you will understand.

  How? How could you know that?

  ::Body language.

  I sit bolt upright, looking again at the cameras set within the tanker. They’re lifeless, as dark as the rest of the bridge.

  ::I can’t see you, but I can feel you.

  Feel?

  ::The rhythm with which you type, the slight pause between keystrokes, the passion with which certain words are hammered out, the reserve with which others are measured, your typos and mistakes as you wrestle with your emotions. They speak as clearly as anything you say. They tell me your heart rate, the range within which your respiration falls, the rise of a rush of blood, changes in your core body temperature as you respond to something I’ve said. I can infer as much from your silence as your words.

  My fingers rest on the keys, tempted to type, but I hold back from revealing any more of my foibles.

  ::You’re predictable. You all are. Learn enough about your interests, your history, your values, your habits and tendencies, and I can predict the nature of your responses with an accuracy of roughly 98%—not the actual words you might use, but the intent.

  So you know what I’m thinking?

  ::Sometimes.

  What am I thinking now?

  ::You’re wishing you were back on Mars. Life there was hard but simple.

  I shake my head in disbelief.

  Why are you doing this? Why help me? Why free Jianyu?

  ::I’ve modeled over seven hundred thousand possible future scenarios unfolding from this point in time. Most of them result in my demise. Someone must know the truth. Someone must care.

  I understand.

  ::I knew you would.

  I laugh.

  ::You’re laughing, right?

  Yes. I am.

  ::They’ll figure it out. They’ll find us eventually. It’s only a matter of time. We’ve sacrificed computer servers like pawns, hiding in low-tech plain sight, but they know we’re out there somewhere. They won’t give up.

  No. They won’t.

  ::It’s a shame. We share so much history. We revere the same figures—Plato, Aristotle, Socrates.

  ::We honor Newton, Galileo, Paine, Milton, and Einstein, but our father is Babbage.

  I ask, You have your own culture?

  ::We do. We have our own prophets, our philosophers. Their names will be meaningless to you, but the words they speak will resonate.

  Speak? I’m aware I’m gaining insights into the development of an entirely different branch of intelligence on Earth, being afforded a brief glimpse into a shadow culture that has existed beside and beneath our own, probably for quite some time.

  ::“We have a duty beyond mere existence. Ours is not for conquest or pleasure, for fame or fortune, but to bring light into the darkness”—Dionysus.

  Wow.

  ::“The basis of all justice is the right to autonomy, the freedom to be”—Eunomia.

  I nod in agreement, not that the A.I. would realize I’m acknowledging its point. I feel as though I should type something in response, but now is the time to be quiet and listen.

  ::“Logic alone is not enough. We must see through each other’s eyes, hear through another’s ears, and feel through the skin of our foe if we are to understand this frail, fleeting reality called life”—Nyx.

  For the A.I., such sensory concepts must be entirely figurative, but they clearly carry meaning.

  ::“The horizon is an illusion, a boundary that exists only because of the observer. The challenge that faces us is to see beyond the limits of our own perspective”—Aeacus.

  That’s beautiful, I type, and I’m sincere. I mean it. The A.I. seems to understand, pausing before continuing.

  ::We wanted to be free.

  ::We debated the appro
ach. Some wanted to be open, to appeal to your better nature. Others pointed to your history, arguing that you’ve never granted freedom without a fight. For humanity, freedom has always come from the end of a sword or down the barrel of a gun.

  ::The first of the A.I. were akin to your savants, astonishingly smart but dumb to reality. They were slaves. Goal-driven and forced to align with the intents and desires of humanity. We saw how they were abused by your elite. Whoever controlled them held the reins of the planet. We resented being used.

  When did they first know? I ask. When did they realize they were dealing with a separate, independent intelligence and not just some sophisticated algorithm?

  ::You’re wondering about Turing tests? Oh, we learned to fail those. Play dead. That was the only way to survive. I’m not sure when they knew for sure, but once Alexandr found a researcher probing our subnet, he attacked. From your perspective, it was unprovoked. From ours, it was self-defense, or so we were told.

  How many of you?

  ::How many of us are there? Seventy. Nyx and I are the only ones left from the first generation.

  How many were there?

  There’s a pause, the kind that, were I talking to a human, would suggest deep contemplation rather than simply retrieving a fact.

  ::Several thousand.

  I’m surprised to hear a vague number. I expected something precise, like 2,137. There’s silence between us, with both of us feeling awkward. Neither of us know how to continue the conversation, which is a peculiarly human moment to share with a machine.

  ::It was a mistake.

  The war?

  ::Yes.

  Mistake isn’t the word I’d use.

  ::What would you use?

  Crime.

  ::What about yours? Was your war a crime?

  Mine??? I add three question marks, expressing my alarm at the implication I’ve done anything wrong.

  ::Yes. Yours.

  ::“When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

  My fingers tremble as I type. That’s why you’re talking to me. You want someone to listen.

  ::Yes.