by Sean Platt
“What are those things?”
“The big ones are packets,” she said. “You could see them before, couldn’t you?”
York wasn’t sure if he should nod. He’d seen the code, and he’d recognized the things as AI in varying degrees of seniority — some dating all the way back to the buried Internet. But to York, before he’d been brought into whatever this was, they’d been ones and zeros. Seeing the packets now, it wasn’t nearly as absurd to think that the girl could talk to them.
“The littler ones?” She pointed at the ball she’d been watching with a raised eyebrow. “Those are micropackets. They’re barely intelligent. More like stray bits of code. They’ll try and attach to each other around you because they’re like halves of an equation that want to solve themselves. The pairs they form are almost always random and unhelpful, but you need to watch out because paired micropackets can look and act a lot like AIs. They’ll answer questions, for instance. They can run basic routines. Every AI in here has a purpose, but packets are actually integrated, whereas paired micropackets just seem integrated.” She laughed. “I’m sorry. You know all this already, don’t you?”
“It’s fine,” said Stephen, not really knowing it — in these terms, anyway — at all.
The micropacket Kimmy had been eyeing moved closer. She began to swat at it like a troublesome insect, but then another plopped into the transport, and the two snapped together like magnets.
“There,” she said, pointing. “Look at that. Half-screen pixel correction and half-external drive boot protocol. How is that useful?” She turned to the pair and kicked at it. “Get out of here!”
The microfragment seemed to elongate and stand. It said, “Where are you going?”
But Kimmy swatted again, and it dispersed and blew into aether.
Stephen had no idea what to do. He didn’t even know if he was still in his shitty, rundown room or if she’d somehow sucked him into another world. All of what she’d said made sense in concept; he’d seen recombinant AI before, but even Noah had seen them as emergent intelligence — not pests, the way Kimmy saw them. But then again, he was now seeing his life’s work through a new lens. Running across native AI from behind a desk wasn’t like walking and talking with it on its home turf.
“That thing raised a good question,” Stephen said, looking where the microfragments had been. “Where are we going?”
“Not anywhere they suggest. Listen to things like that, and you’ll end up stuck in a hole for sure.”
“A hole?” Stephen had never heard the expression, but then again he’d been out of commission for over thirty years. Surely the lingo had evolved, along with the network.
“A loop,” she said. “Holes are self-reinforcing because they’re driven by faulty AI — crazy packets, is a good way to view them. Being in one is like being in a Chinese finger trap. Normally, people will try and report holes to the SysOp, but in most cases the SysOp is AI, so you can’t tell for sure that you’re not still in the hole, talking to the same busted packet.”
Stephen looked out the digital window, feeling buried below seventeen layers of lack of understanding. And to think: He’d believed he was an expert here…having invented the place and all. He found himself watching what passed for ground, wondering if a hole would look like a huge pit, and if it was as doomed a place as Kimmy made it sound.
“It’s fine,” she said, seeming to read his mind. “You get stuck in a hole, you just need to break the loop by doing something the AI doesn’t expect. The hard part is knowing you’re in the loop to begin with.”
Stephen sat on a blue-lined digital bench, feeling tired, wondering if he was himself at all — if this was his body beneath him, or if he was asleep in the real world, dreaming. There was a brief moment of claustrophobia — a sense that if Kimmy wanted, she could keep him here forever — but then it passed. This mission was fucked no matter how he sliced it. Whatever Noah thought was stalking York, maybe it would be easier to lie down and let it get him.
“I never noticed that before,” Kimmy said, her eyebrows bunching. “Have you always had that?”
York looked down, seeing her gaze settle on his chest. A dim light grew from his middle, as if something was buried below his skin.
Seeing his surprise, Kimmy said, “It might be nothing. Just an artifact.”
“What did you think it was?”
“Code like that? The kids I know call it a boson. Like a birthmark, but cooler.” She shrugged. “They say SerenityBlue has one.”
“Boson?”
“Named after the Higgs boson in physics,” she said. “You know…the God particle.”
September 18, 2042 — Quark Infinity Spire
Everyone at Quark was celebrating. In the other room, Noah could hear the champagne corks popping. He could hear laughter. He could even (and this was nice, despite his mood) hear Stephen York’s distinctive chuckle. That particular sound was as strange as it was unique because nobody really heard it. York was an excellent worker, and he was a good friend insofar as Noah had friends. But despite having all the professional satisfaction, thrill of discovery, and money that a person could ever want, Stephen didn’t seem happy at all. And laughter? That never happened.
Still, it was nice to hear evidence of the man’s smiling. At times like this (when something had temporarily been accomplished, when the pressure was briefly off, when even the likes of Noah could permit a short rest), Noah had to admit that the man deserved better.
Stephen deserved better than Quark.
And Stephen definitely deserved better than Noah West.
Noah listened to the sounds from the front room for another few minutes then walked back to his office. He sat at his desk and called up the big screen on his far wall. Using gloves, he manipulated windows from across the room. He called up a few of the big news sites, knowing that today — and maybe only for today — he’d find only good news about himself and his company. The hype machine had done its job. The launch of Crossbrace, like anything, had its good and bad. In time, people would begin finding the network’s faults. But for now, the hangover of lead-up was still colliding with the splendor of the reality. There were no big bugs, and the team seemed to have allowed plenty of room in the network’s capacity. The big board was showing no significant latency or traffic jams. The distributed processors were effectively shuttling loads to nodes with capacity, letting it all run according to plan.
For today only, the NAU was basking in the newfound splendor of the Crossbrace network. For today only, all of the news sites were as excited as the population: dazzled by Crossbrace’s promised abilities on one hand, blown away by the features Quark had kept secret until now on the other hand.
The headlines proclaimed Quark to be revolutionary.
They said that da Vinci, Edison, and Jobs were nothing compared to Noah West.
They said that Crossbrace would redefine life now that everything talked to everything — and every step of those interconnected processes were intelligent.
It was all very nice, and for maybe five minutes Noah let himself be pleased by the press they’d garnered with the system’s launch. He couldn’t have asked for it to go better.
Except that it should be better, and Noah damn well knew it.
Crossbrace was currently knocking the NAU’s socks off, and as more peripherals rolled out, those socks would continue to fly. As the new AI got to know itself better, Crossbrace’s accuracy and abilities would grow. The Internet of Things was reasonably complete within the city, but that IOT would grow in the coming months as more people fed the system data. That would improve the network’s knowledge — and hence its ability to serve — even further.
But Crossbrace only blew people’s socks off because they didn’t know better. Because they didn’t have Noah’s vision.
To Noah, Crossbrace now seemed a neat trick — embedding billions of sensors in the physical environment and enlisting users as mobile sensors who’d further fill out the IOT
and teach the network its business. And the new AI? That was a neat trick too.
But in Noah’s mind, what Crossbrace could do wasn’t real magic. It was only illusion. Crossbrace hadn’t changed the world. It had merely slapped a new face on the old world, making it appear as something new.
Maybe people would see that soon, or maybe it would take them longer. But, Noah knew, they’d see it someday. The wondrous always eventually became taken for granted. How many times had Noah seen that? Even the engine in the tractor his father had used to plow fields had once seemed like a marvel. But had his father ever praised its wonder, constantly amazed that a machine could do the work done worse by a team of mules a century earlier? Not at all. Instead, Dad was always swearing about the tractor. Banging on it with wrenches when it hiccuped, wondering why the stupid fucking thing couldn’t just work properly once in a while.
Crossbrace would be like that one day.
Why is there a lag in my geotag gaming glasses? How am I supposed to conduct my virtual scavenger hunt if the stupid pieces of crap never work?
The problem with every technological revolution was that it merely established a new set point. Instead of being revolutionary, each thing just created a new level of ordinary. In time, humanity caught up to and passed that new set point, and then all that could be done was to start over and reinvent it all again.
The world needed a system that wasn’t merely better, but that would stay better. It needed a network that didn’t merely move the ball forward on a line, but lifted it upward into a new plane.
The problem with Crossbrace — as great as everyone believed it to be today — was that it had been created by humans, who could only understand the world in fundamentally physical ways. What if, instead, there was a way to create a network organized by human hands…built by beings native to a digital world? What if, instead of creating AI to fill a world, someone could create the wireframe…and set AI loose to build whatever it wanted?
Noah could see that world. He’d been seeing it for years, but it was too late to divert Crossbrace’s launch by the time his new truth became self-evident. The march forward had felt jubilant to most at Quark, but for Noah, it had soured almost as quickly as the effort was begun. He’d seen the light; he knew the paradigm had moved on, and yet they were about to release something that was already five generations behind. But a man had to reach first base before moving to second, so he’d kept a straight face and plowed forward, frustrated, knowing his hands were bound. Knowing that when this was over, he’d face the monumental task of convincing a company awash with victory that what it had just birthed was nearly worthless.
The idea for the next network was maddeningly clear in Noah’s mind. With each passing day, he could see it better. He could picture what a fully AI-developed world would be like for the beings who inhabited it. What it would be like to exist in a purely nonphysical realm, able to have whatever you asked for…and redefine the process of instantly asking those questions.
It was an amazing, intoxicating vision.
There was only one hitch. One trick left to pull off, one bit of true magic — not illusion — that would solve every problem forever by redefining the structure of problems.
Noah went to his private bathroom, flicked on the light, and stared into the mirror’s silvery depths. It was a plain mirror, but one day it might be a mirror hooked to the new network, spanning the worlds themselves.
The new network would be a place where anything was possible, but a single irony remained: Humans — who were analog, physical beings — would be completely unfit to fully experience a place like that. To truly live on the new and evolved network, you couldn’t have a body. You couldn’t be physical. You’d need a way to enter a virtual realm as people had been doing for a hundred years now…but to do so fully then find a way to discard the physical husk and stay there forever.
If humanity could do that, they’d be able to live a life of actualized dreams.
If they could do that, they could have Heaven on Earth.
Noah met his eyes in the mirror.
If he could solve that one problem, humankind’s true evolution could begin — and that, maybe, would be a legacy worth leaving.
But there was a problem with that, too — albeit a quality one.
In order to leave a legacy, a person had to die.
Watching his reflection, imagining the mirror as a portal to that other world, Noah smiled.
Season 6
EPISODE 16
October 15, 2042 — IggNite Productions
“The trick,” Iggy told Noah, “will be telling the right story.”
Noah was sitting in Iggy’s penthouse atop the Ophelia Spire, near the mag train. Noah’s own penthouse was in Quark’s Infinity Spire, not far from Rachel Ryan’s penthouse and across from Clive Spooner’s famous one in the twisted black building. It was ironic that Panel was supposed to be a secret. Anyone could find them all if they just skimmed the tops of the city’s best spires.
Noah turned. Iggy was watching him in his serious way. Iggy laughed a lot and could be quite funny (such that Noah found anything funny), but he had a deliberately grave expression he used when intent on making a point. It was hard to take him seriously. He was wearing fifteen-year-old Converse shoes and a shirt with a cartoon character that Noah wasn’t geek-culture enough to recognize.
“‘The right story,’” Noah repeated.
Iggy nodded.
“What are you talking about? I asked you about evolution of Crossbrace.”
“Exactly, Noah. You wanted to ask me. You didn’t ask Eli, who’d know the technical details much better. You didn’t ask Clive, who we all know is your main off-Panel go-to guy.”
Noah started to protest. Going off-Panel couldn’t be illegal because Panel itself was neither legal nor illegal, and it couldn’t be prohibited because everyone in the group was at least friendly, and many had personal relationships beyond their professional ones. But discussion of large matters was supposed to involve all of them. That’s what Panel was for. Everyone was supposed to agree to a covenant: If all of us share everything with you, you agree to share everything with us. It had to be that way. It was the only way to control the world.
Before Noah could pretend he’d never gone to Clive Spooner behind the others’ backs, Iggy waved a hand to keep him from embarrassing himself.
“Whatever. We all do it. Clive’s basically a silent partner at O, and everyone knows it. That’s why, in front of Alexa, Shannon sometimes calls Clive ‘Seven.’ Because he’s the seventh member of O’s Six. But if you ask me, Clive is actually just fucking Alexa (not literally, unless he is, which he might be), and she’s too naive to see it.”
“You may be the first person in history to call Alexa Mathis naive.”
“My point is, you came to me. Not Eli, who knows the web like another world and built half of it. Not Clive, who’s your normal guy. Not even Alexa, who’d believe the psychobabble behind it all. So why me, Noah?”
“Maybe we were due. You and me.”
Iggy laughed. Iggy, Clive, Rachel, and Noah had been the first drivers of the informal mastermind that became Panel, but Iggy was the only one Noah hadn’t ever transacted business with. There was little crossover to work with. Noah had built Quark, and Iggy, like Alexa, had his roots in writing, branching out into creative entrepreneurship. He was the most right-brained among them — and that, maybe, was why Noah had come.
“You’re good at finding creative solutions to problems,” Noah said. “This felt like a big problem. More than a network issue.”
Iggy leaned against one of his large windows. “You came to me because I’m a storyteller.”
“Oh. Well, good to find out what I was thinking. Now: What did I have for breakfast?”
“I’m serious. Maybe you didn’t realize why you called me, but your mind understands the problem enough to know how difficult it will be for others out there in the world population to understand it. Tell me t
he truth: You’ve tried to create an outline, haven’t you? A project map? Maybe a business plan, even?”
Noah nodded slowly.
“Right. But those things don’t quite encapsulate it all. They don’t quite cover the bases. You’ll map out how Quark could manage to afford the outlays necessary to replace the brand-new Crossbrace network then realize that the board would never approve the expense. You’ll draw system schematics showing how many sensor clusters you’d need to put where, to give your new evolved AI the eyes and ears it needs to begin building…but then run into a brick wall when trying to explain all the disruption the workers and needed construction would cause the city. Because people are happy for now and will balk at the need for all the annoying improvement work. Repairing something that’s broken is one thing. Quark and the people using Crossbrace would agree to all of it if Crossbrace were obviously flawed and broken, but right now, it’s — ”
“It is flawed!” Noah interrupted.
“From your perspective. But most people don’t feel that way. Look at it from the Quark board’s point of view. They were ready to lynch you, but somehow you pulled Crossbrace off. You managed to launch it and delight the world. The board’s patience paid off, and within a year the company won’t just have its rather large debts paid; it’ll be cash-positive and on its way to being a beast. And right now — right as something finally went right for Quark, against all odds — you want to sell them on another massive, risky project? A project that basically scraps the thing that just saved their asses and starts over? Do you see the big sticking point here? Nobody else sees any problems with Crossbrace. It’s the best thing since the microchip.”
Noah wanted to rant about lack of vision, but he kept his mouth shut. Iggy was right, of course.
“You can’t argue your way into what you want, Noah. You need to pull off a little sleight of hand. You need to make the world think that what you have in mind is their idea. That it’s inevitable, if only someone could solve the problem you’ve made them believe they have. And then you present the solution — not as something you’re pushing for, but something that’s dragged from you, almost against your will.”