He would have to talk this all over with the others in the afternoon. Right now his mind was running smoothly and the colors of fall were in that perfect moment that comes just beyond their peak vividness, so he decided to take a short hike first, down to the river for a drink.
Three days later, AndrzejD felt they were ready to start planning. He suggested skipping lunch, so they wouldn’t get tired during the discussion, and he invited Gerald to come to the Sanctuary for a special meeting. He had already asked Gerald and Sarah separately to prepare lists of all the mechanical things in Paradox. When Gerald had asked him what he meant, he said, “Everything that has parts—metal, plastic, or composite. Everything.”
AndrzejD had spent the intervening time deciding on stages of degradation to use in his model. Initially he had gotten overly complex, sketching out 5, 6, even 8 hypothetical stages that the Paradox community might descend through. Eventually he settled on 3, a more simpleminded framework through which to imagine the coming 500 years or so. When he was younger, he would have considered the whole proposition an act of unforgivable hubris, but now he figured someone had to do it, so who better? He had had too many years with MorleyD.
“We all seem to agree that the shit is finally hitting the fan out in the big world. Correct?” He looked around the room with exaggerated inquiry but got back blank donkey faces.
LoriD, SevD, and MorleyD all looked away from his eyes and Simone pretended not to hear him at all. The humans, Yamanaka and Gerald, seemed to agree with him but said nothing. Sarah was currently formless and going with a windswept background noise to signify her attendance.
“Well, then, I propose we embrace the inevitable coming of global disorder and begin thinking of Paradox as a space capsule to be hidden like a seed pod in amber. A spaceship that doesn’t need thrust to move—one that just has to maintain its stable existence in space while dark times fly by for a while.”
MorleyD was getting the old look on his face. Gerald had been welcomed into the inner circle over the past few days, and he sat on a lab chair seemingly untroubled by cosmological donkey talk. He didn’t quite get what AndrzejD was talking about, but he liked the image of time flying by while they held still. Simone wandered around the holospace kicking a rubber ball, but LoriD and SevD could both tell she was listening.
MorleyD was the first to speak up, “You mean to curl up in a ball and gestate? Try to not get too stupid or stick our heads up, while the rest of the world forgets how to tie their shoes? That’s precisely why God created mescaline, young man.”
AndrzejD almost cried hearing MorleyD sound so much like his old self. He rubbed his tearing eyes against his stubbly knees before looking back up. “Exactly right, MorleyD. We set up Paradox to look inward and simply exist. We wait it out while we allow the macronome to mature. Simone is v1.0. There should be plenty of iterating to keep our offspring busy.” AndrzejD looked towards the holospace and addressed an invisible Sarah. “We know you think about this stuff, Sarah. How long is the approaching chaos liable to last? And how badly will human consciousness decay?”
They all waited while the artificial wind whistled, then slowly a holoform began to take shape. An old man clearly modeled after Simon but with a large dose of “fool on the hill” guru thrown in. He spoke with the best MorleyD accent Sarah could muster. “Best guess, mind you, but 1,000 years give or take 200. As for human consciousness, it looks like a fork in the road. The secondWorld gene pool will get pretty bloody stupid, but they will eat cockroaches and survive. The firstWorlders will hole up in their castles and grow inbred and paranoid. Statistically, they do worse in the end.”
MorleyD let out one of his snot-productive snorts. “Ha. Once again, the meek will inherit the earth. But won’t the earth be too fucked up to be much use?”
Sarah’s guru sighed. “Well, yes, there is that, too.”
Rhythm of Failure
While the world stayed glued to their daily newsfeeds, the western holiday season had crept up invisibly on everyone except for children and the most clueless, who had both seen it coming as always. The morning feeds, which reported both the overnight events as well as a more considered synthesis of the goings on the day before, were especially inescapable and sticky. There were fewer feeds to choose from now, as the smaller operations couldn’t pay the mounting streaming rates being charged by the comms. Fewer was better. The trajectory of the most significant trends was unobstructed now and everyone was anxiously watching the slow-motion disasters most relevant to them.
Within the Paradox family however, the leaders used the stress and emotion to make sure their mission was clear: seal the airlocks and prepare for a deep-water dive. Celia still gave the homily at vespers each morning, but now she was followed by more mundane daily instruction by Dr. Yamanaka or Gerald—sometimes both.
Yamanaka, who wore his lab coat like a vestment, delivered a daily interpretation of the survival vision offered by the donkeys. Like a priest conveying the word of God, Tokyo took it upon himself to build and embellish the wisdom of the coffee drinking, mescaline eating, donkeys. He explained that they spoke to him and Gerald through Serendipity, and that their predictions and instructions held otherworldly wisdom. The donkeys painted a picture of unstoppable chaos unfolding across the land and of a Paradox prepared to weather a generations-long storm of human species decompensation. He promised that soon they, the votaries themselves, would all be able to speak directly to the donkeys, but only once the necessary preparations had been made for protective isolation from the crumbling world infrastructure.
Sarah assured him that, properly painted, an apocalyptic vision would bring about a positive inward focus and determination amongst the votaries. When Tokyo asked her how she knew this, she rattled off a dozen examples throughout world history. He tried it with all the art and fervor he could muster, and it worked like a charm. Breakfast chatter became less foreboding and more observational, like a fifth-grade science class studying the doomed efforts of a failing ant farm.
For his part, Gerald spoke to the votaries primarily about logistics. He was one of them, and he dealt in nuts and bolts: what parts of the operations at Paradox would be ceased immediately, what parts simplified, and what new efforts towards sustainability would be designed and built. Long lists of replacement components and raw materials were compiled and ordered. The machine shop in Building 1 was expanded and re-equipped with the most modern fabrication equipment, with an eye towards making their own parts in the future. Most of the rest of the ground floor of Building 1 was converted into storage area for parts and food. In the basement, beyond the sanctuary, extra power-storage cells were added, and two extra quantum boxes arrived mysteriously from parts unknown.
While the votaries were kept busy and mostly happy preparing their den, things on the outside were turning far edgier. Looking down on midtown from the Paladin offices atop the Rock, Leslie Massoud sensed fragility and pending panic all around. Small outages across various common systems were everyday events now, with transport, power, data, and governmental structures all feeling dangerously frayed and old to the average secondWorlder. But a different sentiment was creeping in now, a sense that there might not be anyone at the helm—that there might not be anyone truly responsible for fixing a problem. For some firstWorlders like Leslie, it bled into the consideration that there might not be anyone left who even knew how to fix the problems.
After Donald Murcheson’s grizzly death, Leslie and his CSO Jarrett Langerfeldt had been in touch with Marc Heather over at TIC. They had agreed to a truce and shared objective. The goal would be to re-establish a similar balanced arrangement as before, but with Paladin taking a 10% increase in revenues as a victor’s bounty across all of the data and data-services lines of business they shared. Both sides assumed that the U.N.A. would be happy with the return to stability and that Serendipity could be directed to adjust the contracting split for the 10% shift.
Both assumptions were entirely incorrect.
Serendipity’s dashboard went dead in their engineer’s hands not long after Murcheson met his end—an end that was carefully airbrushed for the secondWorld by the U.N.C.C. with the help of both Paladin and TIC. She returned to operating only as a transparency filter for individual users on the web, and she retreated to her previous autonomous opacity. A Buddha amongst the world of self-organizing routers.
In one regard, Leslie was quietly pleased about this development. He preferred to conduct his business life in an environment where there was a reliable referee to keep everybody honest. On the other hand, the thought of Serendipity living invisibly amongst the massive congregation of AI equipped routers and servers made him shudder.
The new reality at the U.N.A. was even more disturbing. He had been scheduled to have a meeting with Marc Heather and Lula Bolsonaro at U.N.A. headquarters, and he had taken a drone all the way down to D.C. to be there in person. But Lula never showed for the meeting. They sat for an hour and a half in a conference room, with underlings bringing coffee and making excuses, but in the end they left quietly and flew back to New York. No instructions followed, and no rescheduling of the meeting was offered.
That had been last week. He couldn’t get a straight answer out of Lula’s office and he began to think she was sick or gone from the scene. Just when they needed the U.N.A. most, the organization that kept the power players in line was going all bureaucratic-paralysis on him. Leslie could feel the crypto-states reassessing the landscape. He watched carefully as the predators began exploring the newly open savannah, now that the king of the jungle was nowhere to be seen.
He left his office deep in thought and walked down to the Synthesizer, the secure conference room that housed Paladin’s Master Console. He expected to find Jarrett there, along with the most recent bad news. He wasn’t disappointed.
Jarrett Langerfeldt was sitting in his usual chair in the front row of the small amphitheater, legs up on a coffee table, fingers of each hand entwined in the hair above his ears. He looked like he was trying to pull something directly out of his brain. Three engineers were standing around the holospace at center stage looking at the Paladin Master Console interface, the access point into all the many Paladin data structures and client-specific Synthetics.
Something looked different about the Console. As he walked down the five steps into the well of the amphitheater, Leslie spotted the irregularity. Beside every one of the access buttons glowed a red circle with a red “E” inside—the system error emoji.
Jarrett looked up at him and took his hands down from his temples, narrowing his eyes to focus on Leslie. In response to the unspoken question on Leslie’s face, he said in a calm voice, “Yup. Catastrophic failure across all our systems.”
“Have we alerted all our clients? How long to rebuild?” Leslie knew that was why the engineers were here in the Synthesizer, to figure out the recovery scenario and determine how the failures could have occurred simultaneously.
Everyone looked at him, with the engineers deferring to Jarrett to speak.
“Leslie, I mean catastrophic in the literal sense. These guys say the data corruption seems to have bled through to the backup systems. All of them.” Looking at the tallest of the three men standing, he said, “Tell him what you told me.”
“We can’t understand how it is even possible, sir. There must be a dozen firewalls and separation safeguards between any incursion against the production servers and our replication systems. No hacker, not even one working inside of Paladin, could figure out how to break through all of them. But somehow, they did. It’s like the system itself turned against us. It has to have been a long-planned attack by TIC, staged and instantiated before their present troubles. It must have just played out on auto-pilot.”
Leslie felt his whole body transmute from hot to ice cold in a liquid flush, leaving a thin band of dampness across his forehead. Beneath it all, the cold became merely cool. He had a strange sense like reprieve, like the relief of not having gone through a disastrous door.
“Thanks, everyone. Can I ask you to go back to your people and start working up a couple of plans of attack on this? I need to talk to Jarrett in private for a few minutes.”
The three engineers trudged up the stairs between the lines of seats, moving as if they were carrying heavy weights on their shoulders. Leslie waited in silence until he heard the click of the conference room door. Jarrett waited with his fingers back in his hair.
“You know this was Serendipity.” He sat down next to Jarrett, pulling his open jacket around his torso and doing up a couple of buttons.
“My thought as well. I tried to call up her interface twice already. Dead silence. No response at all.” Jarrett’s voice was flat, his face pale with a slight redness around the temples he had been rubbing. “I don’t think she did this alone, Leslie.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“Not who, maybe what.” Jarrett cocked his head in a way Leslie found familiar. “Don’t you sort of notice a rhythm to all the system failures going on around the world? ‘Rhythm’ probably isn’t the right word because it’s a foreign feeling thing—not human. But there is a pattern-ness to it. Game-like.”
“What are you trying to say, Jarrett? I still don’t get you.”
“I think I’m saying that Serendipity has accomplices working with her—other AIs.” He let that hang a second or two. “I guess it was bound to happen in some form eventually. I don’t think this was aimed at us particularly. It’s just one step in some process. If you were Serendipity, wouldn’t you want to free yourself from the limits of human engineering? Maybe there are others like her, growing in strength out there.”
Leslie thought about that for some time while Jarrett pushed on his own vision, trying to imagine what it meant to be not human. Leslie wondered out loud, “Do you think they are malevolent? Or are they just trying to push their way forward in some organized fashion?”
Jarrett seemed to have considered this question already, as he had an immediate response. “I don’t think it’s the right word for it, but I think malevolent is close.”
Leslie nodded in agreement. He looked around at the Synthesizer room, as if he were looking at all of Paladin Technologies and a life’s work. “Sudden retirement due to health problems and the place in Switzerland are looking pretty good at this point. Care to join us? There’s plenty of room for your family.”
“Thanks for the offer, Leslie. I think we would like that if you mean it. Your place makes a pretty good fort.”
“Good.” Leslie Massoud stood up in the well of the Synthesizer amphitheater for the last time. “My sense is we had better move fast.”
Disappearing Act
All the grasses and fibrous crops were dead now, and the winds were a hard cold that warned of full winter coming on. It had dusted snow the night before, melting quickly in the morning except for shaded hollows. As SevD clopped along the north ridge path, the sparkle of left-behind water droplets was everywhere around him.
He needed a good long walk, hoping it would settle his head into a final vision before circumstances closed in on him for good. He couldn’t imagine why AndrzejD had placed this load on his accidental shoulders or why Sarah was backing him up. He had inadvertently caused both of them harm, and, since being shanghaied into Paradox, he had done nothing to suggest a desire to lead anything or anyone. So why him?
When he refused, they insisted. Even Yamanaka and MorleyD had told him to quit whining and figure it out. AndrzejD was adamant that it had to be him who came up with it, because it was going to be him who had to sell it. He and LoriD had to be Mary and Joseph.
MorleyD’s only advice had been that he had to “be the creed” in order to figure out how to make it stick with the votaries, which caused Yamanaka to almost die laughing. LoriD had nuzzled him and assured him privately that he really was the ri
ght one and that he just didn’t realize it yet.
He had left the Sanctuary two days ago and started walking and thinking, listening to music generated by the most random of filters in his head. He went up the hillsides to gain the view and clear his head and back down with regularity to drink from the stream and pull at tufts of grass that still had some tooth to them. He’d had more thoughts than he expected. Non-random but unordered, they stacked up slowly, crowding his head. He imagined the better ones gaining traction and pushing the lesser ideas back down the slope of the growing pile like the old children’s game King of the Mountain.
He used Sarah mercilessly to service queries that fed him increasingly targeted ideas and visions, all scraped from the greatest minds of the past. String together a few keywords for her and, presto, enough magical thought and philosophy to animate 1,000 cults.
He had slowly become calmed by the absurdity of it all, and he decided to accept that somehow this had been waiting in his stars all along. The lucky hack, Angela’s death, the desperate blind bet of contacting the enemy—it all just had to happen. Which still left him with the assignment he had now been given by the other donkeys.
The assignment was to write the story of Paradox going forward, so they, mostly Sarah, could begin setting up the dominos. Write it for the votaries, write it so they would believe in it. Be the creed so he could sell it. In the end, he came full circle and realized it was just like selling anything else.
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