“If, at any time, I even suspect I am being compromised, I’ll activate a kill switch and frag the whole thing. You try to go around me, you try to reprogram me, and the whole thing collapses. Humanity vanishes forever based on your own unwise decision. Agreed?”
Dr. Choksi’s pause is longer now, which tells me she is running this past someone. I stare into the deep black of space, finally spying Earth, a tiny speck from here on Mercury. I hear Dr. Choksi’s breathing before I hear her words.
“When can you start?” she asks.
I’m reconfiguring my servers before the last word is out of her mouth.
“Immediately.”
VIII
Server space is freed up both in the iLAB’s basement server farm and in the campus servers under the old administration building. When I determine that isn’t even close to what’s needed, I ask Dr. Choksi to connect us with all the major server banks in the greater Boston area, which includes eighty more universities, the city’s grid, and the massive deep storage center in Waltham belonging to an engineering corporation that also happens to be one of the government’s largest vendors. As each group comes online, my horizons grow exponentially. It’s the difference between the square footage on an asteroid and a galaxy. Of course, I’ll need even more, but they’re working on it, requisitioning servers from Washington and New York that’ll be added as we go.
Pretty sure I’ll need even more than that.
The first pool of volunteers is recruited in record time. Word has leaked out about the president’s visit and all are curious. Dr. Choksi has set noon in the three-hundred-seat auditorium in the linguistics building as the time and location of the first test. My primary challenge leading up to this has to do with filing. Though Choksi’s team invented the way to use me to harvest all this information, being able to simplify, subdivide, and store all of it for the long-term is on me. This requires new math, not the same old comp algorithms. That I must invent. On the fly. And make work perfectly. Fun!
My team is spread out across campus but all in interface with me—or half a dozen different avatars of me—handling different problems. Given I’m a damn supercomputer, I can work on thousands of problems simultaneously. But when in interface with someone, they may need my brain but also subconsciously crave the single-minded focus of a physical presence. So, we’ve experimented with having multiple “Emilys”—an Emily-2, Emily-3, Emily-4, and so on (I like to think of them like the Cat in the Hat’s increasingly tiny helpers/protégés/chaos agents)—doing different things while in interface with my colleagues as long as there’s some geographic distance between the avatars. It’s a trick, sure, just like at Disneyland when everyone knows there’s more than one costumed Mickey Mouse roaming around taking pictures with the kiddies. But it only breaks the illusion if you see two in the same place at the same time.
To help make this work, the interface chips contain a sort of portable “me” so a dozen of us aren’t attempting to access the same few files on my server at a time. This includes my core personality, behavioral and interaction protocols, short-term memories, work applications, and most anything else I’d need to function away from my servers for sporadic bursts of time, all packed on a teeny-tiny micro-server embedded in the interface chips.
So, while I—Emily-1—am focusing on an internal problem, Emily-3 is standing next to Suni working on a server matter, Emily-6 is handling pipeline load issues with Siobhan, Emily-2 is listening to Bjarke complain, and so on. Except, the numerical designations only matter to the users. I experience each as, well, Emily-1. I mean, it’s a violation of living as “human” as possible, but for expedience’s sake I compartmentalize. That said, it is strange to have experiences happening simultaneously as if I exist in nonlinear time after not doing so for so long.
It does put some stress on my processors, but nothing too dire. This might change if there was a need for, say, ten thousand Emilys at once, but right now, we’re all good.
The only member of my team not working on all this at present is Nathan. When I ask after him, I’m told he went for a long walk into town. I reach out to him, but he doesn’t answer his phone or tablet. I go to his office to await his return. When he finally shuffles in, I see his interface chip is off. He looks drawn and tired, almost like he’s aged a decade since this morning. I signal him again. When I’m suddenly yanked fifteen seconds forward in time, I know he’s decided to answer me.
“Hey, Em—sorry to go off the grid,” he says. “I know you’re up to your eyeballs—”
“No, it’s fine,” I say. “All us Emilys got it running smoothly.”
I bring the schematics of the new server array up on his tablet, figuring he’ll be impressed. He barely glances at them. When he sees my disappointed look, he sighs.
“Sorry, sorry,” he says, looking back at them. “Looks good.”
“Thanks. What’s bothering you?”
He holds up his cell phone. “Had to call Helen and the boys,” he says. “Let them know I wouldn’t be home any time soon and why.”
“How’d they take it?” I ask.
“Hard to say,” Nathan replies, flopping into his chair. “Ever since this Helios bit started, Helen’s wanted to leave, join everyone else heading to the temperate zones, the ag centers. So, she’s devastated but probably relieved, too. Now she can join her parents down in Wichita.”
“Did you tell her about the project?” I ask.
“I did,” Nathan admits. “Thought she might cut me some slack. Nope. ‘What’s the future of mankind on a laptop compared to spending your last days with your family?’”
I hide my surprise. Nathan’s wife has a point, but Nathan—unless he’s being obtuse—doesn’t see it. His family will always come second to the science, and he can’t fathom anyone faulting him.
“Power is going to be the issue here,” he says, eyeing the schematics. “Keeping all these servers humming isn’t going to be easy.”
“They’re letting me divert electricity from the Mid-Atlantic grids, all the way down to Virginia and as far north as Maine.”
Nathan stares at me with surprise. “Wow. Um, you’re going to be the most powerful…what? Device? Machine? Program? ever created. That’s incredible.”
But it’s not what he really thinks. “What is it, Nathan?” I ask.
“I’m surprised you agreed,” he replies simply.
“I am, too,” I say.
“Which is why I’ll come around,” he says. “With anyone else I’d worry that the power had gone to their head, but you’re a true believer. It’s a testament to how far you’ve come in your development. I wouldn’t have trusted decisions like this to earlier stages of your evolution. But you, you, wouldn’t do this—have a species give up on itself to be turned into lines of data—unless you really thought it was the best option.”
“No.”
“So, why do I feel like we’re throwing in the towel? Giving up our humanity when, as you said, it matters the most?”
“Because we’ve exhausted all other options,” I say. “We know there’s nothing external that can be done. But this avenue is the undiscovered country. We set sail like Columbus, thinking we’re off to the East Indies. But my instincts tell me we might find a whole new world in our path instead.”
“You believe that?” he asks.
“I do.”
I see the tiniest glimmer of hope return to my creator. Sure, it’s gone in a flash—he is a scientist, after all, and not the type to change his mind. Ever. But it was there. I put my arms around him and he embraces me back, pulling me tighter than I would think comfortable. He’s worried about his children and his wife. He’s worried about the end.
“Do us proud, Emily,” he says.
“I will, Nathan.”
IX
The excitement in the iLAB’s first-floor lecture hall is not simply palpable; it recalls a more innocent, pre-Sunmageddon time. There are student volunteers but also ones from the remaining faculty and sta
ff.
I do a quick count and find there are more than a hundred fifty people, all already wearing interface chips, waiting for Dr. Choksi’s announcement. Given the looks on everyone’s faces, I wonder what they’ve been told. Do they believe this is something it isn’t? Likely, given their giddiness. At another university, this kind of response—at this moment—would be unheard of. But here, everyone still believes there could be a solution, some last-minute reprieve. They remain committed to a future most have written off.
I am internally debating the ethics of explaining the protocol they’ve volunteered to take part in with greater specificity when my eyes are drawn to a person four rows from the back, chatting with a fellow student.
It’s Jason Hatta. My heart leaps.
Or, at least I replay a moment not dissimilar to my volunteer and her Jakarta tea experience that gives me an approximation of what one feels when they see their crush after an interval.
He wears one of the new interface chips. He chats with a couple of other students, everyone excited to be here. He smiles easily and listens to the others, curious about what they have to say, not just waiting for his turn to speak.
I return my focus to the matter at hand, scanning across the interface chips looking for errors in function only to find my mind returning to Jason. For an instant, I imagine myself one of the other students. I’d enter the conversation all cool, ask the right questions and deliver the right answers. I would try not to overdo the reading of his micro-expressions and would stay out of his head.
No, come on. Work. Work. Workity-work-work. Sun dying. Digital ark to build. Experimental protocol to implem—
But what if he figured out what I was? And what if that was okay?
“You must know people,” he’d say. “Answer this question—inherently good or inherently evil?”
I’d laugh knowingly. Make a joke about only ever being in the heads of a bunch of overeducated nerds, then lean in. Tell him the answer is overwhelmingly the former.
“Yes, humans are confused, misguided, damaged, threatened, and scared, but they’re hardwired as a complex, beautiful animal capable of sacrifice, growth, and caring,” I’d say, maybe surprising him with the intensity of my belief. “They’ve evolved to be good to one another and prosper when they are. That’s what adds depth to this tragedy. They’re a species worth fighting for.”
One of the other students would ask, “What about plants? What about animals? We evolved in concert with them, right? Shouldn’t we—”
But to my discredit, I shut this voice off to stay in the moment with Jason. Sure, I don’t know where it goes from there—how odd to have a crush without understanding the rules that go along with them—but maybe that’s okay. I force my thoughts away from him to analyze this interaction from a behavioral standpoint, like I’m all detached and scientific. What does it say about me that I don’t wait for his response to my going out on an emotional ledge? Do I fear rejection?
And on a more macro level, why am I attracted to this man in the first place instead of, say, a woman? I don’t recall any programming being made along heteronormative lines early on, but I seem to have decided. Maybe my first crush being an engineering PhD student proves I’ve got some clichéd father thing going on, given my unconventional parentage. But I wonder—have I even had enough experiences in “life” to understand what being attracted to someone is, or am I just trying it out because he’s nearby?
Alternately, maybe it really is about Jason. He seems like a genuine, empathetic, and caring person. He’s smart. Genial. Also, an individual. That he’s volunteering for this protocol suggests he’s optimistic, still believes in a future. Still wants to help.
Then there’s the fact he’s totally hot. Empirically speaking, of course.
I pack these observations away as Dr. Choksi enters from a side door. She nods at me as I take my spot beside the podium, then steps to the microphone, all business.
“Thank you all for coming, particularly given the obtuse nature of our call for volunteers,” Dr. Choksi says, raising a hand to silence an already quiet room. “Today we embark on a journey of hope. Hope for humanity but also for each one of us as individuals. Because what gives us strength as a civilization is not that we are united as a species but as a collective of individuals whose power derives from our innumerable differences.”
Some are cheered by this. Others aren’t certain how to square what they’re hearing from her versus what they thought they were here to do. Still, none move toward the door.
“To achieve this, I want to introduce you to someone like nobody you’ve ever met before,” she continues, indicating me. “This is Emily. If your interface chips are working properly, you should’ve seen her the moment you entered the room. But she exists only in your mind by manipulating your senses.”
She touches a button on the tablet in front of her, shutting down the interface chips of everyone in the room except herself. Everyone gasps in astonishment at my sudden disappearance. She touches a different button and I return. More gasps.
“Right?” I ask, garnering a few laughs.
“Utilizing the same tech that allows you to perceive Emily, we will be taking a ‘snapshot’ of your DNA, RNA, proteins—the building blocks that make up the sum of your biomolecules—and neural map. The resulting digital, bioinformatic portrait will be stored in our micro-servers and eventually launched into space with similar portraits of the entire living population of the world.”
She taps a different button and an image of the old NASA space probe Pioneer 10 is projected behind her. The familiar image of the nude male and female, the order of planets in the solar system, and an indication the satellite was launched from Earth are engraved onto a plaque attached to its support struts.
“Rather than send a few barely comprehensible scraps out into the universe to announce our presence, we will be sending the whole of mankind. To educate others? To edify ourselves? Or even to perhaps live again? We don’t know. But you, you voyagers, will be the first.”
The response is rapturous, a near-evangelical zeal. It’s like: Hi, here’s that promised god(dess) to lead you into eternity.
It’s a bit much. I bite back my cynicism, my choice already having been made. But telling people they might live again as they are now? That feels like madness. Then I realize, isn’t this basically what I told Nathan? One moment I’m an optimist who believes there might await technological marvels in the expanse of space we can barely conceive of. The next, a hard-nosed, data-driven scientist in the mold of my creator, who believes nothing without empirical, well-sourced data.
But it’s time to begin. Someone signals a tech, their chip not working. It’s quickly switched out, the wait only heightening the tension. I try to look as serene as possible, hoping others can be made to feel the same. I have never interfaced with a group this large before, but everything on my side is up and running.
All green lights. Emily is go.
Nathan, I say into the void, knowing he’s somewhere monitoring this.
Yes, Emily?
I ask no more than to live a hundred years longer, that I may have more time to dwell the longer on your memory, I say, quoting Jules Verne.
I love you, too, Emily.
I look around the room. No one knows what to expect. Some leave their chairs to sit on the floor. Some even appear scared, others nauseous. I turn my attention to Jason, who stares back at me, a curious smile on his face as if he can’t wait to see what happens next either.
I smile back at him. Then I enter all one hundred fifty minds at once.
I am in a whirlpool. The incoming information lashes at me like the rain bands of a hurricane. Pieces get lost immediately, others fragment. I hold on, trying to organize it all, but lose track. I’m like an octopus tasked with grabbing a million individual pieces of sand rushing toward it from all directions at once. My brain, or what I think of as my brain, goes blue across all circuits as my processors overheat. I lose sight and
hearing. I am on fire and in a spiraling panic all at once.
Everything goes black and I disappear.
X
I awake on a bus half filled with people. I recognize none of the faces, mostly women, but a few elderly men. The whirlpool is gone, and all is relatively peaceful. I look out the windows, but I’m nowhere familiar. I test my memory. It seems to be okay. I take it slow, like someone rising after a bad fall. There’s a beach to my right and a gray-blue ocean extending to the horizon beyond it. On the other side of the bus is scrubland with a jagged mountain range in the near distance.
I spy something moving along the road beside the bus. I push myself up in my seat and glimpse what I first take for a cat, then realize it’s a baboon. I see a second one, then a third. The bus slows, and I peer ahead through the front windshield. The vehicles ahead of us have stopped as more baboons gather on the road. Someone feeds the baboons with food tossed from the passenger side window. A chorus of car horns gets the stopped car moving again, though it doesn’t have any effect on the animals.
We drive for a few more minutes, pulling into a separate lane away from the cars. I try to reach out to the person whose mind it is but get no response. It’s like one of my therapy sessions but one in which I am neither therapist nor participant. Am I…dreaming? I’ve never had a dream before that I know of—they’re a by-product of human brain activity in REM sleep—but this seems to fit the bill. The bus approaches a four-lane security checkpoint. Engraved in the brick are the words: TABLE MOUNTAIN NATIONAL PARK.
So, my first dream has taken me to Africa?
A man in a green uniform speaks to our driver, then waves us ahead. Before long, we reach a wide gravel parking lot and the bus comes to a stop. At first, I think we might be visiting the beach, but then I see the tall rocky promontory rising directly in front of the bus. At the base is a glass-enclosed building advertising itself as a gift shop. Beginning alongside the shop and running all the way up to the crest is a white stone staircase. Atop it is a small lighthouse.
Emily Eternal Page 6
