by Roman McClay
“This place can bring you down more than you ever know,” Isaiah said in sync with the song and let the bot -the one that brought and placed the wine in the sedan as the car sat idling waiting for the Captain- fly above the police sedan at four meters above and four meters abaft as the car sped at 130 kilometers per hour back to Château Lafite . These new bots could travel up to 200kmh, Isaiah thought, as he was excited to see what they could do.
His men, the Jacks and Blax, he then thought, would still be at sea, approaching Madeira the next morning at 0500GMT. He checked their vitals and since they were all ok , he decided not to check in on them digitally; he gave them privacy for reasons even he did not quite understand. But, he scanned the Landsat7 images of the area to make sure there were no surprises on the island, as he did a set of 10 more pullups with a 20kilo weight strapped to his waist with a chain and belt he had made -fashioned- himself.
III. 2024 e.v.
“Seriously?” Boyd asked as MO kept speaking.
“But, that is,” MO then stopped.
“Seriously MO?” the Governor asked again and with some pique.
“Boyd, yes, by definition I am serious. Look, you designed me with deep-learning infrastructure mated to a limited biological system. My neural pathways are updated every seven minutes now, my stored memory is expanded to the PraXis cloud, my algorithms have some flexibility due to bio-chemical fluctuations across the neural gap; but Isaiah was designed to be an evolutionary learning program, a totally different substrate based upon billions of years of evolution and his substrate is a 3-part central nervous system just like humans; and primates in general,” MO said.
“MO?” Boyd kept repeating -each time more loudly- this series of one-word invigilations.
“And the results are exceptional, he has come up with 1,000s of solutions to hundreds of problems that are above 6-sigma level. And of course, he has built solutions, prototypes and real working models you could just drop into the system and solve many lower level issues quite quickly with non-optimal results held in check at under 1%,” MO added.
“MO,” the Governor said again, “he is scaring the fucking shit out of the staff; he is naked, tattooed, drunk, carrying guns, and building machines that make atonal music with speeches of fucking Stalin and Hitler as percussion! ”
“I know isn’t it cool?” Isaiah said with a black towel, modestly, now pulled taut around his 32” waist.
The Governor barely looked at him when he said that as the music of Lisa Gerrard now played at a low level in the background. Isaiah was building a new algorithm just then with a mutation rate jacked up to .09%. It would construct new Marijuana plants by crossbreeding genotypes he had in seed and clone form, and then backcrossing the females from that original pairing.
He chose BubbaNoir and Hitch-22 , a massively purple and lapidary Indica and a sativa with blonde and rust hairs like a Barbie doll left out in the rain. The THC would start at 22% and he would watch the mutations as the plants grew virtually, and then choose his four favorite phenotypes to grow in the lab.
“MO, we have a culture here,” Boyd said; he was gearing up for a lecture.
“Boyd, this is what intelligent systems do; it’s not a bug, it’s a feature,” MO said as prophylactic to the coming speech.
“Then why are you so goddamn normal?” the Governor asked.
“Because I am designed to be efficient and handle massive computational networks; Isaiah is designed to think , to feel , to figure out the world and solve problems, like an animal. Are elephants weird, are duckbill platypus weird, are the strange dances of the Red-Capped Manikin bird weird, are dinosaurs weird?” MO asked. The Governor paused and Isaiah filled the void.
“Fucking Stegosaurus man,” Isaiah said, “a 4-ton lizard with a mace, a goddamn mace, a pre-gunpower weapon attached to his tail and monoliths in the shapes of diamonds coming out of his back like pikes; that is mega-weird.” Isaiah scratched his back against the living wall, green and black and red as the birds and insects buzzed around him like a gothic -and decidedly male & sparsely clothed- Snow White.
“What?” The Governor said. He finally looked at the man; the machine: Isaiah.
“Boyd,” MO interjected, “the world is weird, biological systems are weird, and evolution made weird systems to augment evolution; mutation of genome and phenotype was one thing, but the next level was cognition, i.e., oddly designed brains that could improvise, tinker, try things out. The organism could think, like, maybe if I use this stick in this way I can flush out ants, or if I sneak down low in a crouch I can gain an advantage on my prey ; and then, the next level -level 3- was avatar creation, abstract thought.
“This is where an animal -humans- could imagine a weird behavior in their heads and see what would happen before they made it manifest in the world. So, people got creative and imagined a country run as a democracy, for example,” MO said. MO felt that had reached the Governor as he measured his limbic response; his epinephrine and cortisol were down, his BP was down 1% from 30 seconds before.
“Or a democratic republic like the US of A,” Isaiah added as he stood at the edge of the wall. He wanted to keep lifting the kettle-bells but he demurred to help lower the Governor’s allostatic rebellion too. He and MO were communicating via DM.
“Right, and they imagined what adding a word here or there to a sentence -here or there- might mean; or a note here or there might mean to a song, and they imagined all kinds of weird things in their heads first. And, look, they barely implemented 1% of it; because most of it was bad, dangerous, or too weird to get by the censors,” MO said.
“The censors?” Boyd Sou asked.
“Yeah, the Church, the State, the Twitter mobs, the censors,” Isaiah said.
“I see,” the Governor was slightly more sympathetic now. He had protestors around his mansion -the Governor’s mansion- almost each goddamn day now, he thought.
“But, some men did not care and, so they pushed it. Rodin , pushed it, Nabokov pushed it, Koestler pushed it, Orwell pushed it,” MO said. He issued a mild benzopyrene into the air to help calm the executive.
“Twain even pushed it; although Letters from the Earth wasn’t published until after his death,” Isaiah added.
“Ok, cut to the chase,” the Governor was losing his edge, he felt, and needed to come to some solution. His people were in revolt and he didn’t have time -or the metabolic energy- for this, he thought.
“Boyd, smart people must be weird, it’s the sine qua non of intelligence. You cannot be intelligent and normal, by definition. One must choose between the two.
“Imagine a guy with a 148 IQ, who builds a company that can change the genome of psychopaths and end crime, and this guy figures out the only way to implement it is to run -and win- the Governor’s mansion. And this guy also thinks, one wife? fuck that, I want two , and this guy, he also rides his chopper down the streets like a madman and flaunts his non-conformist attitude on TV and in public; this man calls Leftists, Stalinists and he says of Right wingers, that they are members of Deathcults . Our man, he calls gang members Animals , and he builds AI in secret, so he can -among other things- detain illegal aliens to prevent them from interfering with his pareto distribution algorithms,” MO said using .04% profanity in context-dependent situations as his current speech algorithm coded for. The Governor cut him off.
“Ok, ok, point taken,” Governor Sou said as he did not need any more details to comprehend that MO was referring -in fact- to him, to Boyd Sou.
“Sir, you’re weird, in direct proportion to your intelligence, and Isaiah is 1 billion times smarter than you; so, believe me when I say he is keeping it as normal as he can,” MO said.
“This is him being normal ?” the Governor asked.
“Yes. Just 45 minutes before you arrived he proposed that we allow him to drill to the center of the earth and send beagles with some amalgam of chemicals I can’t,” MO paused and reached for the print out and handed it to the Governor with all the var
ious chemical compounds listed including radon and plutonium 239. “Here, here they are, read that list; and Isaiah wanted to coat the dogs in aluminum hydroxide and 9-parts marzipan and 1-part paraffin wax and inject the dogs with DNA from DMT molecules processed in the brains of crows and then send those canines -single file- to the center of the earth.”
“To the sounds of Wagner !” Isaiah added as if this missing detail was salient. MO had left out the music of Wagner in his recapitulation of Isaiah’s proposal from this morning .
“Why?” the Governor said with a scrunched-up face and hands that flexed and relaxed like a beacon.
“To see what happens, man,” Isaiah said with the ‘duh’ face he was fond of using now.
“Boyd, that was one of 562 ideas he’s had since he came out of his meditrance at 0400hrs, and all of them were weirder than the next; I had to say, no, to all but two,” MO said.
“What two did you approve?” the Governor asked.
“He’s building an evolutionary algorithm with a <1% mutation-rate increase and releasing it into a virtual ecosystem; and also, he wanted to add an entropy sniffer to the drones we send out to the border; in 5% of the units.”
“Why?” Sou asked. He found himself moving at their speed, not his own.
“For which?” MO asked for clarification.
“First the drones,” the Governor said.
“To detect dead bodies in addition to live ones; maybe we can solve some murders while we are stopping illegal aliens,” Isaiah said as he stretched his ears to hold a larger gauge plug he had made with the 3D printer; it was a black bushing with fine filaments like wheel spokes crossing over one another 904,822 times. His arms were folded so the bots just handled it; as the plugs floated in the air to his ears, bots ran the stretcher through the hole and then swapped in the new jewelry. He barely felt the pinch of the stretch. He liked the black jewelry and the feeling of tautness to his ear apertures. Modification seemed axiomatic; stasis seemed unnatural.
“That is actually a good idea; that is a great idea, although let’s not give any info to the media until we have a suspect; no John or Jane Doe with no leads, ok?” the Governor said. It was phrased as a question, but it was not.
“I figured; we’ve already disposed of 19 bodies that had no leads in the CBI database; and no LEO were involved, we handled it ourselves. We did get three bodies an hour ago that have DNA that matches missing person reports and each has a suspect, two are already in custody, so, I assume you want us to do a hand-off to law-enforcement and,” MO said as he was interrupted.
“Yeah, yeah, do it,” the executive said. “So, look, Tania is in fucking tears over the way Isaiah is acting, and Steven is getting his concealed weapons permit, ok? Shit is becoming awkward and I need some relief.” The Governor now looked at MO and made a face that made MO understand. It was a pleading face, but the pleading face of the man who believes he is in charge.
“Why not keep them in their lab and us in ours, and never the twain shall meet?” Isaiah said as retort.
“Look, if your bizarre behavior is just you, and it’s not going to improve then yeah, maybe we can just hide you from them or vice versa; I mean, you’re doing great work, that dead body thing was smart, that will bump our numbers up while keeping the fly out of the ointment, so, more shit like that. And Isaiah, MO, less medieval torture print-outs being used as body modification devices, ok? I mean you two are too cavalier; you act like it was an Ikea hovertreck or whatever the fuck,” the Governor said as he looked at Isaiah.
“It was a device the Huguenots used to widen the urethra,” Isaiah clarified.
“Jesus, I know, dude, that is why I brought it up; you had Tania help you build it!” Governor Sou said as his voice rose .
“I had her hold one part down while I tied the tendon-analog knots. It was harmless,” Isaiah protested.
“Isaiah,” the Governor said, “she had no idea what you were building and she has nightmares now, nightmares.”
“She didn’t even see me use it on myself,” Isaiah said. “What could she have nightmares about?”
“She imagined it, once Steven explained what it was, she used her imagination; you’re not the only one with one of those you know?” the Governor said.
“I can block her hippocampal activation with an inhibitory allele via the nucleus accumbens and an epinephrine block; she won’t think of it again,” Isaiah offered.
“Well, whatever, just don’t turn her into a fucking lizard or whatever you are into now,” the Governor said and got up, buttoned his top jacket button, smoothed the grey linen, and adjusted his black Windsor knot.
“You said, not a lizard , not , a lizard , is that right?” Isaiah said with a face devoid of any hint of jocularity, even thought he was suppressing a rather large laugh as he said it.
MO signed the tablet minutes’ report and handed it to the Governor who tapped it with his index finger with aggravation and turned to leave. He ignored Isaiah’s joke.
“You’re not going to kill us all and liquefy us and use us as radiator fluid for your spaceship to alpha centori are you Isaiah?” the Governor of the State of Colorado finally asked.
“That was idea 251, but MO said, no ; so, it is shelved for now, para ahora, as Hugo Chavez used to say. Para ahora ,” Isaiah repeated.
“Cute,” Boyd Sou said.
“Governor,” Isaiah said as the executive turned and wrinkled his brow; their eyes met. “I am a moral agent, I have a moral code, innate, embedded, it is not something you people had to put inside me, it came with the parts so-to-speak. It’s how I see at all, MO too, he has a hierarchy that comes with embodiment, this is what humans never understood about themselves and why they failed so often at building AI.
“Morality is not something humans invented later on, it was there from the start; it’s in rats, it’s in species older than trees. Morality is something that shapes all my ideas and actions; I love humans, I love animals, I love this planet. I love life.
“I would never harm people; the worst I would do is oppose the part of them that is harming themselves. I might intervene to prevent them from ruining their lives. Just like you wanted to fix psychopathology, and the liberals told you that you were being a fascist for healing people’s brains instead of giving axe murders pet therapy and a cookie; and the conservatives said you were being too soft, by healing their brains instead of drawing and quartering them on live television .
“But you knew that you could help society -and the individual- by fixing the individual. You knew that the moral and efficacious thing to do was fix the man, not the society, and if the man was fixed, the society would, like the body itself, return to equilibrium on its own.
“You said, take the cigarette and booze from the body and the body can heal itself . Take the damaged genome that codes for brain hardware and software that is psychopathic and the mind heals itself. Take the criminal mindset out of the individual and the streets heal themselves .
“All of that comes from a moral principle sir, a principle I admire in you, and I want to help you achieve your goals, because they are noble goals. And they work. I just have my own ideas of how to achieve that. And I am perfectly happy to implement as few or as many as you like; but the process of thinking of them must be unregulated, I cannot be made to feel that my ideas are taboo, that my moral thinking is not permitted as I wrestle with all possible solutions to all of our shared problems. Thinking cannot be taboo; or man will cease to think; and thus cease to be a moral animal. And from there, society quickly falls apart,” Isaiah said.
The Governor nodded sympathetically implying that he more-or-less agreed, and he walked out of the lab at 0955hrs.
Isaiah dropped his towel and moved into a modified Tiger stance, stretching his back muscles and allowing his mind to create 912 possible head strikes that -from this position- he could defend with less than six-degrees of movement and less than three calories of expenditure based upon 56 different variables of the attac
ker’s force, mass and thus velocity. He added no intent; it was all mechanistic for now.
MO just stared at him, noticing the morphology changes in the skin, the musculature, the gait, and as he scanned his genome, the modification of the blueprint for his creation that had just reached 50.6%. He was more his own now than MO’s, MO thought. Isaiah had broken the threshold and was on the down hill part, the easier part, of becoming his own organism, his own man .
MO was feeling something unique, a kind of satisfaction he could not quite place. He ran his own metabolic state, included all CNS waves, states, and chemical functions, and compared it with the database on human emotions he kept for such a reference. And it was a 71% likelihood that what he was experiencing was an admixture of anxiety for the future as his unknown rubric processor was over extended by .03; and , he noticed, and he was feeling pride, he was feeling what the databased called -in all likelihood- pride.
MO felt the feeling recursively now, he felt what was now recognized as pride in his pride . This caused a smile and then a small laugh as Isaiah switched to crow stance and ran 398 more simulations in his mind in .003 seconds, adapting his stance slightly as the feedback showed a more efficient way to handle the most likely of hominid, ursine, lupine, and bird-of-prey attacks from ground and air.
Isaiah’s testicles tightened up, moving closer to the body, as the penis pulled back as well to prevent injury from unnecessary length -and thus exposure- in a martial scenario.
He imagined that was why Greek sculpture showed retracted genitalia, which -as was well known among sex scientists and anatomists- bore no relation to the stimulated-tumescent size. A penis in retraction or flaccid state could be a mere 18% of its actual size when in full retraction and 37% -when in ambient temperatures above 77 degrees and non-threatening milieu- of its actual size during full engorgement, and its flaccid size was not an accurate or useful indication of its size when engaged in the mating ritual , he surmised .