***
John Grant’s most recent book, A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Film Noir – the largest noir encyclopedia yet written – came out last October. His next book, provisionally titled The Young Person’s Guide to Bullshit, is due out later this year.
ASHES
KARL BUNKER
illustrated by Jim Burns
The little box was heavy. The word “ashes” makes us think of wood ash, paper ash: light, fluffy, black and gray flakes that can float on a breeze. Human ashes aren’t like that. My apportioned share of Lucia’s ashes was a few tablespoons of gray-white powder that sat leaden in my hand, in a little plastic bag that was in a little cardboard box. Through the clear plastic of the bag it looked like stone dust, though I didn’t look at it much. I didn’t want to look at it, but I couldn’t help feeling its weight. It was heavy.
Lucia’s mother handed it to me, first taking me to an empty corner of the room, pressing the box into my hand without looking at it or me, as if we were passing illegal goods. “I’m keeping most of them, Neil. She’ll be with her father. But I thought you should have this. A small portion. I know you two were very close.”
“Yes,” I said stupidly, looking down at the white box in my hand. I had no idea what was in the box or what she was talking about. Is it customary to give out party favors at a memorial service?
“Perhaps you could take them to some place that was special to the two of you” she said next, and that’s when the proverbial coin finally dropped. Ashes. I had a box of Lucia’s ashes in my hand.
Lucia’s mother was a small woman. Not wizened or bent, but short. And Lucia had been so tall… She looked up at me, full of earnest desire to impart information. “But you must be very careful if you go outside the enclaves,” she said. “There are still diseases in the world. Terrible diseases. I’m sure that’s how Lucia got sick. She was only thirty four, you know…” She stopped talking and lowered her head, staring down at the floor.
I knew Lucia’s illness was a vanishingly rare thing, that there were hardly any diseases left in the world, and those that still existed were as likely to strike inside or outside of an enclave, but I couldn’t fault Mrs Charyn for her paranoia. She had been through the Dust Wars, and now she’d lost her daughter. I couldn’t fault her for much of anything, ever.
She lifted her head again and shook it a little, as if her grief was an annoying bug flitting around her face. “She was always going to different places outside the enclave,” she said. “Always different places. Do you know, once she told me that she’d gone to the airport and found an airplane and a pilot, and she just hopped aboard and flew to Chicago! Can you imagine?”
I could imagine. Only our real destination had been Batavia, not Chicago. Lucia had heard reports of a major new-tech construction project at Fermilab. Supposedly they were going to use the old accelerator to open a portal to other dimensions, or other worlds, or maybe Auntie Em’s house in Kansas. Lucia was bouncing with excitement all through the trip, her hands dancing with gestures as she chattered delightedly about what we would find, what we would see, about all the wonderful possibilities. Beside her, I basked in her enthusiasm, loving her for her energy and optimism. There were times when I almost believed that some of that vitality was my own, but really I was just feeding on her, like a vampire.
And of course when we got to Fermilab it was shut down, abandoned, dead. We found the construction site easily enough; a glistening black building about four stories high, freeform and amorphous in shape. It was adjacent to an older structure that we learned was called the DZero laboratory. The old-tech inside the DZero building was incredible; dazzling in its massiveness and complexity. But in the new building, everything was simply incomprehensible. Smooth, unbroken surfaces; shapes that might have been display screens and workstations growing up seamlessly from the floor and out of the walls. But nowhere was there anything that looked like a usable control; nothing that gave a hint about how to interact with this construction, how to make it do anything.
And there was no one there, in the new building or the old one. No bustling robots, no stone-faced, blank-eyed augmented humans, no regular people. Just Lucia and me and emptiness and nothing.
Lucia wandered through the new-tech building, touching everything, her eyes wide and worshipful, taking it all in as if it meant something, as if it was something other than a hollow, empty shell. “It looks like they finished this place,” she said, her voice trembling. “I bet it’s completed. I bet it’s functional, if we can just figure out how to turn it on.”
“It can’t be that simple,” I said. “The fact that it’s here must mean that it depends on the particle accelerator being active, and we can’t turn that on just by flipping the right switch. There isn’t even any electricity for it.”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know if it needs external power and we don’t know that it’s dependent on the accelerator. It might have just needed that for preliminary research, or to…I don’t know, set it up, get it going the first time. It might be self-sufficient now.”
It might have been, but if it was we never found the secret of turning it on. Chances were that this place, whatever it was, wasn’t finished. Like every other grandiose project of the transhumans, it was unfinished because the minds who had started it had winked out before it was completed.
It was three days before Lucia finally gave up and let us go home.
***
I put the box in my pocket, looking out across the room. There were about fifteen people, probably more people than I’d ever seen in one place before. Lucia was good at making friends. I was thinking about leaving when Anders waylaid me. “You weren’t still seeing her, were you?” he asked. “I mean when…”
“No. We kind of drifted apart.” The weight in my pocket got heavier.
“Have you heard the latest? About the president?” he asked. “They say he’s winked out. He got himself fitted with Cambridge-class augmentations. Said it was his duty to try. That it was the only way to come to an understanding of the world situation. And then—” He held a hand up with the fingers together in a point and then flicked them open. “Psh! Gone, just like that. Flatline. Didn’t last even a day. Stupid, huh?”
He shut up long enough for me to stare at him blankly. “President?” I said. “I didn’t know there still was a president.”
Mrs Charyn’s enclave had once been a high-priced condominium complex; four elegant brick buildings on the edge of a Frederick Olmstead park. Back in the days when there were a lot of people in the world, it was probably considered a choice place to live; something reserved for the moderately wealthy. Passing a french door I saw a small balcony, and down at the foot of the railing of the balcony there was a cat, looking out at the view of trees, grass, a pond. I went out, looked at the view myself for a bit and then crouched down to pet the cat. It leaned into my hand for a few pets and then said, “I’m very sorry for your loss, Neil.”
I jolted a bit, started to pull my hand back, then relaxed. “Thanks Domino. I was wondering where you were. I didn’t know you were in a cat these days.” My hand was still hovering over the cat; now that I knew it was Domino, I wasn’t sure if it would be rude to stop petting it or presumptuous to continue. Then the silliness of the conundrum made me smile, and I gave it another pet.
“Yes,” Domino said. “It was Lucia’s idea. She liked having me as a physical presence; something that could sleep on her bed with her after she got sick.” The cat opened its mouth when it spoke, but like a puppet, its lips didn’t move to articulate the words that came out. The voice apparently came from some biomechanical equivalent of a speaker, no articulations of lips or tongue required.
“I’m sorry we didn’t contact you while she was ill,” Domino said. “It was Lucia’s wish, but I wonder if I should have gotten in touch with you anyway.”
“What are you going to do now?” I asked. “Find a new person, or…?” I trailed off. Domino was fully Cambridge-Stan
dards, so it wasn’t a piece of property like a housekeeping robot. Or a cat. It could do whatever it wanted.
“I don’t have any plans,” Domino said, the cat looking out at the view again. “What are you going to do?”
I put my hand in my pocket, fingering the small box. “Mrs Charyn gave me some…some ashes.”
“Yes. What were you thinking of doing with them?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. Suddenly I was seeing Lucia lying in bed, this AI-inhabited cat curled beside her, keeping her company while she waited to die. My throat muscles cramped up and it hurt like hell. I looked out at the view for a while, not seeing it, while Domino waited.
After a minute or two I took the box out of my pocket and set it on the floor at Domino’s feet. “You should take this. You were closer to her than I ever was.”
The cat turned its head and regarded the box, touching it with the tip of its nose. Then it looked up at me. “Before she got sick, Lucia became interested in reports of another new-tech construction site.”
“That’s not surprising. What were the rumors around this one? Portal to alternate universes? Starship? A radio for talking to aliens?”
“A starship,” Domino said. “The rumors were that a consortium of AIs and augmented humans were building a starship, or at least a spacecraft of some kind. Lucia hoped to visit this site personally, as you and she did with the Fermilab site. This one is in Colorado, southeast of Denver.”
“Southeast of Denver,” I repeated. “Why are you telling me this, Domino?”
The cat pushed the box toward my feet. “I think we should go there, Neil. To scatter Lucia’s ashes in a place that would have been special to her, to honor her memory, and perhaps to find out what is – or was – being built there.”
“Denver fucking Colorado?” I whined. “How the hell am I supposed to get there? Lucia was the one who was good at finagling transportation.”
“I’ve just contacted an intelligence that owns a small aircraft as one of its components. I’ve described your situation and it has agreed to provide transportation for us.”
I pondered, trying to think of reasons to refuse. I could pretend, like Lucia’s mother, that I believed there were terrible diseases running rampant out there, or armed gangs, or radiation, or any of those mythical bugaboos. But Domino knew me, and knew that I knew better. And as it probably also knew, I had nothing else to do. Utterly and literally nothing. I’d barely managed to drag myself out of a weeks-long drugged and hot-wired VR binge to bring myself to this memorial service. “Is there any reason to think there’s more to these rumors than all the others – Fermilab, for example?” Domino hadn’t been with Lucia at the time of our trip to Batavia. It wasn’t until a few months later that she’d connected with Domino; at that time a newly-born free agent living in the spare cycles of some pre-Wars hardware cache, mostly talking to Lucia through her phone.
“It’s impossible to say,” Domino said. “Given how uncommunicative high-transhumans are, it’s to be expected that we have no firm information. But there are indications that some such projects have been carried to completion.”
I thought about asking what “indications” meant, but decided against it. “When can we start?” I asked the cat.
“If we leave early tomorrow morning, we can be there by afternoon.”
***
Neurons are slow. They’re capable of massive parallel processing and there are a lot of them in the human neocortex, but compared to electronics they’re crushingly, numbingly slow. So building hardware equal to, and then vastly surpassing, the processing power of the human brain wasn’t too difficult. The difficulty, the snagging point, was in the software. It was in teaching these thinking machines how to think. Not just to calculate and compute and follow instructions, but to think.
In fact, teaching a machine how to think turned out to be essentially impossible. To be an effective intelligence, an entity needs to have a basic understanding of how the world works. It has to know all the things that a person knows without thinking about them, starting with which way is down and what “down” means, all the way up to symbol and metaphor and whether a joke is funny. And no one can sit down and write out all the endless rules – and the endless-multiplied-by-endless interactions between those rules – that go into that kind of knowledge. It turned out that the only way to make human-level intelligence is the same way nature does it: start out with something stupid and blank and empty, and give it the ability and desire to improve itself. Give it an appetite for information and a will to come up with ways of organizing and making sense of that information. Give it the ability to develop and implement ever-improving algorithms for its own intelligence, for making sense of the world, for thinking. Instead of creating a fully-formed mind, it was only necessary to create a seed, a fetus, a thing that could grow up to become a mind.
***
I met Domino outside Mrs Charyn’s building the next morning. The enclave kept a few electric cars available for local trips, so we took one of these to the airport where the AI that Domino had convinced to handle our air transportation was waiting. Ariel was its name. “From Shakespeare’s Tempest,” it said when Domino introduced us, “not the moon of Uranus.” I’d just climbed into a small airplane that looked like an executive jet from before the Wars. It had about a dozen seats and the quaint look of old-fashioned luxury. I picked out a seat toward the front, twisting around to look back for Domino, who had followed me up the ramp staircase into the plane. I just caught sight of the cat leaving by the hatch we’d come in through, its tail in the air.
“Hey Domino!” I yelled, bolting out of my seat.
“Over here, Neil.” The voice – the same voice that had come from the cat – was coming from a squat little robot, about a foot high and with six flexible legs. It walked toward me. “Ariel agreed to let me use this mechanical for a while. Mrs Charyn was fond of that cat, so I gave it back a cat brain and sent it home to her.”
“Okay.” I sat down, trying to breathe normally again. “How long to Denver, Ariel?”
“Four hours, give or take,” the plane’s voice said. The engines started powering up as it spoke. “There’s a highway near the site you two are headed for, so if it’s clear and the paving is still in good shape I should be able to let you down there. Want something to eat? There’s an assembler installed in the wall beside the door to the cockpit.” The plane helpfully blinked one of its overhead lights near the machine it was talking about.
I decided I was hungry, so I went to the console and started scrolling through breakfast options.
“You’ve heard about the president?” Ariel asked.
“I heard he got augmentations and winked out.”
“Yes, very sad. It was brave of him to make the attempt.”
I grunted, sitting back down with a plate of eggs and toast.
Ariel liked to talk, I was learning. “What’s your theory about winking out, Neil?” it asked.
***
The first successful experiments with self-evolving AIs were conducted at MIT. The hardware was unremarkable for its day, and the software, while being in some ways a marvel of complexity and innovation, was a brainless, mindless thing. A flatworm could outthink it. But it had within it the capacity of modifying itself, of making itself better. In six weeks it had achieved an intelligence that equaled human by every measure known, and it was still evolving, expanding, improving itself at an exponential rate. In a few more days its intellect had soared to unknowable heights. With careless ease, it spewed out mathematical theorems and proofs that no human mind could follow. It laid out the foundations for revolutionary advances in half a dozen fields of science and technology. It dropped hints of a vast cornucopia of additional miracles to come…
And then it vanished.
The hardware was still there, and still functional, but the mind was gone. From one moment to the next, in mid-task, apparently in mid-thought, it just ended. Ceased to function.
Died.
So the experiment was run again, with the same results. And again and again, on the same hardware and on different. With similar software seeds and with variations. Always the result was the same.
It came to be known as winking out.
At some unknown point in the ever-accelerating cycle of self-evolution, all transhuman intelligences would reach this point of nothingness, of ceasing-to-be. The only rule seemed to be that the more advanced an intelligence was, the sooner it would wink out. So the only way to create a mind that was safe from this sudden death was to try to limit its evolution – its intelligence. But even human-level artificial intelligences had been born via self-evolution, and therefore had within them the potential for expanding themselves into oblivion.
***
“I’m fond of the solved-game theory myself,” Ariel said.
I looked out the jet’s window at the featureless landscape far below. The midwest was wild prairieland again; I knew from old pictures that decades ago the view over this part of the country would have been a patchwork of squares and rectangles, but now it was an unbroken expanse of shades of green, fading in some places into yellows and umbers. But I wasn’t thinking about the view as much as I was thinking about the plane I was in suddenly becoming pilotless. “Some people think it’s bad luck for an AI to think too much about winking out,” I said.
“Oh yes,” Ariel said cheerfully. “The incidence of the event is known to increase significantly among those engaged in theorizing about the event.” It paused for dramatic effect. “But you needn’t worry on my account. I think about the puzzle of winking out all the time. It hasn’t done me any harm yet, and I’m almost six years old.”
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