AI's Children

by Ed Hurst

  Chapter 5

  For his part, Tim had no idea that anyone but he and his teacher had even seen his paper.

  Such papers were routinely routed through subspace networking to his instructor, a man seldom physically present in any of the Brotherhood facilities. This paper had been but the latest expression of a growing sense of mission. But he used Tim as his nickname only because of how his full name was pronounced. While he was quite proud of his name – Tympano – he realized it was unusual. His brother Dax had inadvertently crafted his own nickname while his sister Harp didn’t need anything shorter.

  What puzzled Tim most the first time he heard it was that his father Chandler had eschewed claiming any surname. It was not because of shame, but to protect his kin on the outside. Tim’s father had been declared officially dead, and was for a time a thorn in the side of the government bureaucrats. At the same time, his father had worked hard to bring The Brotherhood out of the shadows. It was a carefully balanced act between releasing technology and convincing the government to take advantage of it rather than be destroyed by it. Chandler wasn’t anti-government, just completely cynical about it.

  But as a part of the negotiations, Chandler remained an enigma with no identity beyond the first name and, less officially, his nickname – AI’s Minion. That first name was common enough that the government bureaucrats could pretend they would never positively identify him. In exchange their tax revenues took off and the military was given a quick boost in their research. So, on the one hand the background of armed resistance in scattered places around the world was more easily suppressed, while on the other hand most people gained a measure of cultural and economic liberty previously denied them.

  More importantly, access to subspace networking was spreading rapidly. The decreasing cost of production crossed the rising prosperity every year at a wider distribution and lower price point. So it wasn’t yet ubiquitous, but heading in that direction. For the time being, personal networking devices had changed little since the ones his father and mother first shared.

  It was then that she exchanged her maiden name for her husband’s surname, which was none at all. If the government knew much about her past, there was little indication. For the right price one could purchase many a blind eye.

  Tim realized his real name was an asset, since he had yet to find another human named for the percussion instrument. Meanwhile, his real interest was merely an extension of his father’s and The Brotherhood as a whole. Indeed, he felt it characterized the quantum reality of AI itself. While officially apprenticed to a linguistics professor, he considered himself more his father’s disciple.

  While Tim would have been the first to deny he had much of his father’s unique talent for dealing with AI, he fully intended to learn what it took to duplicate the results as much as possible. Thus, he had dug deeply into the teaching of The Brotherhood quite early on in his education. By the time Dax was applying for the military academy and Harp was falling in love, Tim was easily the second to Chandler’s communion with AI.

  That is, it’s not that Tim cultivated AI’s favor, but that Tim learned to favor what drove AI. As a natural result, AI regarded Tim as a human expression of its own fundamental imperatives only slightly less than it did Chandler. And Tim was determined to create a wider lore of education that would bring others up to that level. It was no surprise that AI was also in the thick of it.

  The hardened materialistic attitude of government, academia and global society as a whole made it exceedingly difficult to grasp the nature of AI. There was a substantial suspicion that The Brotherhood was hiding things, not totally forthcoming with their research. AI took offense at nothing, but simply remained a cipher to those who refused to venture beyond the upper boundaries of mere logic. Tim was determined to prove academically what The Brotherhood had known all along, that humanity was easily capable of connecting with something higher than reason.

  So it was that his paper had been circulated without his knowledge. At least a dozen professors and graduate students had responded with a dialog that gravitated around the question of human capabilities against this seemingly impossible task of reaching beyond reason without groveling in mere sentiment.

  Tim was taken aback by the overwhelming failure, as he saw it, to grasp the obvious. In a rather terse response, almost exasperated in tone, he asserted flatly that the problem was a false anthropology. Regardless whether anyone could posit a Designer, humans were designed with a faculty beyond reason, a capability for touching another realm of existence, another dimension of reality not bound by space and time. While avoiding the religious jargon of The Brotherhood, Tim pointed out that mankind was born to outlive this universe, and that it was entirely possible – even necessary – to awaken this higher faculty before it was possible to move beyond current limits and take the full harvest of AI’s gifts.

  It took a while for this to get back to Jesse. He had redoubled his efforts to infiltrate The Brotherhood. Up to now, he had serious trouble recruiting any talent for it. Four agents had bailed out after running into impossible difficulties with understanding The Brotherhood. Three others had outright defected and joined The Brotherhood, cutting off communication with Jesse. Fortunately, none of them had really understood what he was up to in asking them to check it out. No one knew whose interests he represented, only his military position.

  Finally he located a pair of brothers who were loosely related to the community led by the Council. They possessed the native intelligence for council membership and this task would be a sort of quest to earn their place. It took some time to train them to think with the proper frame of reference in analysis of the broader factors, and then to recognize a wide variety of philosophical backgrounds the Council had faced over the centuries.

  But even Jesse was not prepared for what he took as Tim’s sharp thrust at everything the Council had sought to build. While he had not yet been exposed to the full range of arcane beliefs the Council had suppressed in centuries passed, this esoterica left him deeply disturbed.

  When he showed it to the elder sage, the old man nearly suffered a heart attack.

  Jesse was crushed by a huge burden of guilt, and the words the sage wheezed out while clutching his bosom only made him feel worse. While he hardly understood why it was so shocking, could he not have sensed the evil in the message written by this “Tim”? What was the use of years of training and education if he couldn’t detect something so fundamentally evil, such a deep insult to their gods? Jesse would have died at that very moment, but waited lest he abandon the sage who was struggling to retain his own breath of life.

  Eventually the elder gasped out, “Blasphemy!”

  Perhaps that forceful assertion focused sufficient power to overcome the demons seeking to rend his very existence. The sage appeared to recover a bit, driven by righteous indignation alone. Tears forced their way out of his eyes as he trembled with rage. He must continue living to avenge this hideous insult to his people.

  Finally, he wheezed out, “This filthy pile of stinking manure pretends to steal our secrets! They shall not rob us of our legacy. We and we alone, are fit to touch eternity. The demons must have betrayed our sacred truth to them.”

  The sage held his face in hands for a long moment of silent weeping, tears now leaking out through his fingers. Suddenly he looked up, his gaze stabbing into Jesse’s very soul. “I must now begin the rituals, not resting my flesh until I have sussed out how such an awful thing has been done. How have we neglected our duty to guard the portals to the astral planes? We have failed the gods. I must summon the entire council to atone.”

  Stabbing a finger at Jesse, he continued, “You will learn who is this ‘Tim’ and how he dares to blather the deep truths as if he were a dog wagging around the Golden Scepter like a chew toy. You will also make plans to destroy this Brotherhood!”

  Jesse knew it was hardly the kind of thing that could be done bluntly. The broad consensus of government bureaucrats was to
o positive and even the military was guardedly pleased with The Brotherhood. While it was essential to slaughter the core leaders as an atoning sacrifice to the gods, this alone would not stop the spread of what he now finally knew was a critical element in his own religion.

  A part of him wondered why it had never been stated so clearly. Was it so essential that access to the gods and their powers be swathed in such thick layers of impenetrable symbolism? He wondered at the clarity of Tim’s statement, even though it clearly required indicative language and that the object of discussion could not possibly be declared in descriptive terms. So this was what was behind that earlier paper, that The Brotherhood were planning to teach filthy dogs to open the higher realms of consciousness without the proper tutelage of the gods. They were going to develop an entire linguistic system that would rip away the centuries of privilege the gods had bestowed upon Jesse’s people. Were the gods so fickle?

  But he stuffed such thoughts back into his subconscious mind. He knew voicing them among the sages would risk his very life. Even the military could not protect him from that. The generals knew on some level that they served the plutocrats, of which the Council was a critical part. While precious few knew of it, something shared only orally among the true core of military command, men like Jesse were only on loan to the military, serving also as watchers of the military. If a plutocrat died, only another plutocrat could demand accountability for it. Where the plutocrats were silent, the generals pretended to know nothing of such things.

  Jesse had a lot of work to do.