by Mark Alpert
“I’d hate to get caught in a snowstorm on this road,” he persists. “Good thing it’s a sunny day.”
I feel sorry for him, actually. Dad’s terrible at communicating. He can’t talk about anything personal without getting upset, so he avoids difficult conversations. I was four when the doctors at Westchester Medical diagnosed my Duchenne muscular dystrophy, but it took Dad almost five years to work up the courage to explain what it meant for me. The same thing is happening now. He needs help getting started.
“We’re not here for the sightseeing, Dad. You said you were going to explain everything.”
He looks straight ahead, staring at the road. “I know, I know.” His Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his throat. “There’s so much to tell you. I don’t know where to begin.”
“Start with Sigma.”
He nods. His hands squeeze the steering wheel. “Sigma is the eighteenth letter in the Greek alphabet. In mathematical formulas it symbolizes the sum of a sequence of numbers.”
“Okay, I already knew that. What does—”
“We gave that name to our artificial-intelligence software because it was like a sum. Our research group developed Sigma by combining different kinds of AI programs.” He glances at me again, then turns away. “Some of the programs focused on pattern-recognition tasks, such as recognizing a face in the crowd. Other programs were more like the ones we designed for understanding language. They could find the answers to complex questions by searching through billions of documents and finding the connections.”
“You mean like QuizShow? The program that played Jeopardy!?”
“Yes, that was the prototype for a whole new class of AI software. Our strategy was to load all these artificial-intelligence programs into the neuromorphic circuitry we built and get them to compete with each other. Basically, we set up a computer version of Darwinian evolution. Only the strongest programs could survive.”
“Okay, you lost me. How can the programs compete with each other?”
“We tested each program to see how well it could imitate human reasoning and conversational skills. We deleted the less successful programs and allowed the more successful ones to advance to the next stage. Because the AI programs could learn from experience and rewrite their own software code, they started to redesign themselves to become better competitors. After six months, a clear winner emerged. That was Sigma, the first Singularity-level AI system.”
My chest tightens. Because I’m a computer geek I know what “Singularity-level” means. The Singularity is the hypothetical point in the future when machine intelligence will leap past human intelligence. Computer scientists have been predicting for years that machines will eventually become smarter than people. Now Dad’s saying this point is no longer in the future. It already happened.
“Wait a second. How smart is Sigma?”
“Impossible to say. The AI was already pretty intelligent when it won the competition a year ago. It had complete command of conversational English. And it had developed a sense of consciousness, an awareness that it was a thinking, intelligent entity.”
“How do you know that?”
“The program could gauge its own abilities. It asked questions about itself and its origins. It showed a strong desire to obtain more knowledge, and it developed strategies to satisfy this desire. Very clever strategies.” Dad grimaces. “And the AI has only become more intelligent since then. See, that’s the nature of a Singularity-level program. It’s always redesigning itself, so its capabilities grow very quickly.”
“And you let this program take over your computers?”
“No, we recognized the danger. We stopped all work on Sigma and locked the program in a secure server at the Unicorp lab, with no links to any other machines.”
“Well, it obviously figured a way out. Why didn’t you just erase it?”
Dad points at the Humvee that’s leading the convoy. “Peterson wouldn’t let me. The Department of Defense thought it could turn the program into a weapon. And they knew that researchers in other countries were doing similar work with artificial intelligence and neuromorphic circuitry.” He lowers his voice, even though no one can overhear us. “A few months after we developed Sigma, Peterson showed me a classified report about a project in China. A Singularity-level AI had apparently infected the computers at an engineering complex in Tianjin. The Chinese army had to destroy the building to prevent the AI from escaping.”
I shake my head, astounded. “And Peterson still wouldn’t let you erase Sigma?”
“The Defense Department knew it couldn’t stop all the AI projects around the world. There were too many of them, and some were in places like Russia and North Korea, where the U.S. military couldn’t go. We just had to accept the fact that sooner or later a Singularity-level program was going to escape from a lab somewhere. And the worst thing was, we had no idea what the consequences would be. The AI might pose no danger at all. It might harmlessly bounce around the Internet, observing everything but doing nothing. Or it might even be friendly. It might help us cure cancer or eradicate poverty.”
“Or it could be unfriendly,” I point out. “It might set off explosions and electrocute people.”
Dad bites his lip. “Yes, exactly. So Peterson gave me a new assignment. He asked me to predict what an AI like Sigma would do. And try to figure out how to make it friendly.”
“By rewriting the program, you mean? Writing ethical rules into its code? Don’t kill, don’t lie, that kind of thing?”
“That’s the first thing we tried on Sigma. But a Singularity-level AI has full control of its software code, so it can reverse any changes it doesn’t like. We tried all sorts of programming tricks, but nothing worked. Sigma is like a human that way. You can’t just cram something down its throat.”
“So what did you do?”
“I convinced Peterson to try something else. The Pioneer Project.”
I clench my good hand, steeling myself. “Why did you bring me here, Dad? And all the other kids too?”
He takes a deep breath. “Before I say anything else, I want to tell you how sorry I am. I just couldn’t accept what happened when you got sick. That’s why I started doing AI research. That’s why I’ve pursued it for the past ten years. I wasn’t doing it for Unicorp or the Army. I was doing it for you.”
I don’t understand. “Dad, what—”
“It has to do with the nature of the Singularity. It’s not just about machines becoming smarter than humans. It’s also about humans moving past their limitations. Becoming greater than their ordinary selves, transcending their ordinary lives. And as I thought about all the things that would become possible, I saw a way to save you.” Dad’s voice is weirdly high and choked. I think he’s trying not to cry. “The Pioneer Project turned my idea into reality. The Army gave me all the money and manpower I needed. But I didn’t have enough time to test it. I’m still not sure if it’ll work.”
I’m so confused. I feel like crying myself. “I thought this was about Sigma.”
“It’s more than that. It’s—”
Dad interrupts himself by slamming on the brakes. I look ahead and see the cars in front of us stopping at a checkpoint. A newly constructed guardhouse, still unpainted, sits beside the highway, and a dozen soldiers stand in front of a chain-link gate that blocks the road. The soldiers wear winter-camouflage uniforms, dappled with patches of white and gray. Each man carries a sleek, black rifle.
“Whoa,” Dad says, squinting at the guardhouse. “This wasn’t here before.”
“Is this the entrance to the Nanotechnology Institute?”
“No, we’re still five miles away. It looks like the Army beefed up security.”
I lean forward to get a better view. The soldiers in the Humvee at the front of the convoy step out of their vehicle and huddle with the soldiers at the gate. Colonel Peterson gets out of t
he Humvee too and shakes hands with one of the men, a tall soldier with broad shoulders and snow-white hair. This guy has three stars on his uniform, so he must be a general or something. Standing next to him, Peterson looks like a midget.
After a while several lower-ranking soldiers break out of the huddle and jog down the line of SUVs. They stop beside our car and one of them taps the driver-side window. “Mr. Armstrong?” the soldier shouts.
Dad rolls down the window. “Yes?”
“Please come with me to the Humvee, sir. General Hawke wants to have a word with you while we drive to the institute.”
Frowning, Dad points at me. “I’m with my son. Tell Hawke I’ll talk with him later.”
“Sir, the general wishes to speak to you immediately. Another soldier will drive this vehicle the rest of the way.”
Dad glares at the man. “I made an arrangement with Peterson. He said we—”
“I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, sir, but Colonel Peterson isn’t the commander of this base. General Hawke is.”
For a second I think Dad’s going to curse the guy out. But instead he sighs unhappily and opens the driver-side door. He looks at me over his shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll see you when we get there.” Then he steps out of the car and walks with the soldier to the front of the convoy.
My new driver, a beefy corporal with the name “Williams” on his uniform, takes Dad’s place. He doesn’t look at me or say a word. A moment later, the soldiers at the checkpoint open the gate and the convoy moves on.
Past the checkpoint, the ravine narrows. Treeless, snow-covered slopes loom over the road. My pulse races because I’m a bit claustrophobic. I feel boxed in by the mountains. But I’m determined not to show any signs of weakness in front of Corporal Williams, so I bite the inside of my cheek and stare straight ahead.
After several minutes we come around a bend and I see a sheer wall of rock in front of us. We’re in a box canyon, bordered on three sides by high cliffs. The only way out is the way we came in. But as we approach the canyon’s dead end I see another guardhouse and a dark, round hole carved into the rock wall. It’s the entrance to a tunnel.
There are more soldiers at this checkpoint, but the gate in front of the tunnel stands wide open. General Hawke must’ve radioed ahead to let them know we were coming. The convoy rumbles into the tunnel, which goes on for several hundred yards. At the other end we emerge on a bare, flat basin, about a mile across, encircled by steep mountain ridges. Crusted with snow and ice, the ridges form a high, unbroken wall around the basin. It’s like a giant bowl with a flat, muddy bottom.
The convoy speeds down a road that crosses the basin. On the left I see a runway and a hangar. On the right are several concrete buildings surrounded by a tall fence topped with razor wire. As I looked closer at the buildings I notice something odd—there are no doors in their door frames and no glass in their windows. The buildings are hollow, open to the elements. It’s like a fake town on a movie set, full of structures that look real from a distance but are actually empty. I can’t figure it out.
The road ends on the far side of the basin, in the shadow of the high ridge. The Humvees and SUVs park in front of another concrete building that stands against the base of the ridge. This building is small, only twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, but it doesn’t seem to be hollow like the others. It has a massive steel door that looks like it could survive a direct strike from a cruise missile. As the soldiers step out of their Humvees, the door starts to roll up.
Corporal Williams shuts off our car’s engine and looks at me for the first time. “Your wheelchair’s in the back?”
I nod. Then I point at the building’s doorway. The door is all the way up, but I can’t see anything inside. It’s too dark. “Is that the Nanotechnology Institute?”
“That’s one name for it. We usually call it Pioneer Base.”
“But it’s so small.”
Williams chuckles. “You’re looking at the entrance, the top of the elevator shaft. The base is underground.”
My mouth goes dry. This is worse than the ravine. “How far down?”
“You’ll see.”
CHAPTER
6
I’m in the front row of an auditorium deep inside Pioneer Base. I kept my eyes closed during the descent in the elevator, so I don’t know how far underground I am. To stop myself from thinking about the tons of dirt and rock above me, I concentrate on the thirty people in the room. Including myself, there are twelve teenagers and eighteen parents sitting in the auditorium’s curved rows. We’re all facing an empty podium on an oval stage.
Fortunately, the rows are widely spaced, leaving enough room for wheelchairs. Of the twelve teenagers, six are partially or fully paralyzed. Three of them are worse off than I am—they can’t move at all, neither their arms nor their legs, and they’re breathing through tubes connected to mechanical ventilators. All three are boys. One is white, one is black, and one is Asian. Although they seem to have the same kind of muscular dystrophy I have—Duchenne is the most common type—they’re obviously in a more advanced stage of the disease. It’s sobering to see them strapped in their chairs, helpless and silent. As I stare at them I realize I’m looking at my own future. Unless the U.S. Army has a miracle in store, I’ll fall silent too.
The other six kids can still walk, although most of them are a little unsteady on their feet. Shannon Gibbs waves at me as her mother and father guide her to a seat in the second row. Her parents are short and plump, and they look anxious. Just behind them, in the third row, is another girl with cancer. Painfully thin, she wears a cashmere sweater and a frilly blue hat to hide her baldness. The girl’s parents, dressed in business suits, seem to be wealthier than Shannon’s but just as anxious. They’re all hoping the Army has some experimental drug that’ll cure their kids, but the secrecy is driving them crazy. They’re wondering why they had to go all the way to the Rocky Mountains just to hear about it.
Two rows farther back, a haggard mother sits next to a boy whose head is unnaturally large and deformed. His lower jaw is massive, as big as a shovel blade, and fist-size tumors bulge out of his forehead like horns. This isn’t an ordinary case of brain cancer—this is something unusual, freakishly rare. The sight of him is disturbing, and a little disorienting too. I’m usually the guy who makes everyone else in the room uncomfortable, but now I’m the one who’s squirming.
In the very last row, sitting alone, is a tall, striking girl with a Mohawk. Both sides of her head are shaved, but running down the middle of her scalp is a narrow strip of hair, dyed green and bunched in glue-stiffened spikes. Her eyebrows and lips and nostrils are pierced, and a tattoo of a snake loops above her left ear. Aside from her slenderness, she doesn’t look ill. She looks a bit like Brittany, but her skin is light brown, the color of chocolate milk. I’m staring at her, trying to figure out if she’s black or Hispanic or Asian, when she snaps her head around and glares at me. Her face is beautiful and terrifying.
I quickly turn away. At the same time, the kid with the deformed skull lets out a snort. He swings his massive head back and forth, glancing first at me and then at the girl with the Mohawk. He must’ve seen me staring at her. After a few seconds he gives me a gap-toothed grin. I have no idea what to make of it. Does he think this is funny?
Uncomfortable again, I look around the auditorium, wondering where my father is. I haven’t seen Dad since the soldiers took him away, and I’m starting to worry that he’s in trouble. Then I hear the whir of an electric motor. A large video screen descends from the ceiling above the stage. A moment later, General Hawke steps up to the podium.
Up close he looks even bigger than he did at the checkpoint. He’s a giant in winter camouflage, from the white hair on top of his block-like head to his tree-trunk legs and mud-spattered boots. His face is square and ruddy, and his eyes are a cold, bright blue. He rests his huge arms on the
podium and leans toward the microphone.
“Welcome to Pioneer Base.” His voice, unsurprisingly, is very deep. “Before we start, I want to remind you of the nondisclosure agreements you’ve all signed. The information I’m going to discuss in this briefing is classified. If you talk about it with anyone outside this room, the government will prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law. In other words, they’ll toss you in jail and throw away the key.”
He stares at us for a moment, frowning. Then he presses a button on the podium, and a black-and-white image appears on the screen behind him. It’s a satellite photo. It shows a cluster of large rectangular buildings and a pair of dark circles etched into the ground nearby.
“This is Tatishchevo Missile Base,” General Hawke says. “It’s a Russian armed forces installation, five hundred miles southeast of Moscow. But the Russian army isn’t running the place anymore. It’s under the control of an AI, an artificial-intelligence system.”
He pauses, surveying his audience. Strangely, no one shows much of a reaction. They’re probably too confused to respond. The only one who’s frightened is me. Thanks to Dad, I know enough to be scared out of my mind.
Hawke grasps a long wooden pointer that’s leaning against the podium. “This AI, code-named Sigma, was developed in the United States, at a lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. But the Russians also had a computer lab for developing artificial-intelligence systems, and it was located right here.”
He steps toward the screen and taps his pointer on one of the rectangular buildings in the photo. “The Russian army put the lab at Tatishchevo because it didn’t trust its own soldiers. Their generals were worried that some renegade troops might try to take over the missile base. So they built a whole regiment of automated tanks, more than a hundred of them, all designed to be operated by an AI that would send instructions to the tanks by radio. They thought an AI would be more trustworthy than a human commander.” He shakes his head. “If you ask me, it was a pretty stupid idea. But as the saying goes, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. We did some stupid things too.”
