[2016] Infinity Born

by Douglas E. Richards

  “With virtually being the key word,” noted Bram. “We’d still be vulnerable. Get hit by a tungsten rod falling from orbit,” he added pointedly, “and medical nanites and self-repairing DNA aren’t going to save you.”

  “Very true,” said Jordan. “Which brings me to the second pathway forward. This one sees us becoming computer/human hybrids. Ideally, combining the best of both worlds. A wetware brain and body augmented by electronics and other technologies. The Borg from Star Trek.”

  Carr made a face. “That’s a pretty horrific future.”

  “Yeah, should have used a better example,” said Jordan. “The show created the Borg to be the Federation’s greatest nemesis, after all. The species was written and designed to be as disturbing as possible, even to the point of having them controlled by a relentless hive-mind. So how about just imagine being yourself, but greatly enhanced mentally and physically with robotics and electronics.”

  Carr thought about this for a moment. “Better,” he said, “but I’m still not a fan.”

  “Then let me hit you with the third possibility,” said Jordan.

  “Whole brain emulation, correct?” said Riley.

  Her father nodded. “You’re familiar with it?”

  “Yes. The transference of human consciousness into an artificial brain.”

  Bram gazed at Riley in admiration. “I knew you were bright,” he said, “but I had no idea you had such a range of scientific knowledge.”

  “When you’re supposed to be a high school dropout just off the farm,” she replied, “you don’t want to come off too scientifically literate.”

  Riley turned to her father. “It’s obvious now,” she said. “You were working on whole brain emulation, even before Turlock, weren’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “I get it now,” she said. “I should have earlier. Congratulations. I guess you can explain your way out of this, after all.”

  Carr was often the smartest guy in the room, but in this room he was barely a remedial student. “For those of us who are a little slower,” he said to Jordan, “could you connect some dots for us?”

  “Of course,” came the reply. “Even before my Savant project, I was working on a way to scan and map a human brain. Once you have a perfect scan in hand, provided you also have a quantum computer capable of emulating every last neuron in the human brain, you can transfer human consciousness into an artificial brain construct. On that day you have true immortality.”

  Jordan’s passion for this subject came through with every word. “Think of your phone,” he continued. “All information you have on it—photos, data, texts, settings, and so on—is automatically saved to the cloud. You aren’t notified when this is happening and never really think about it. But if your phone is lost or destroyed, all you have to do is download your data from the cloud into a new phone, and you’re back in business. You could argue this new phone is now identical to the one you had before in every important way.”

  “I see,” said Carr slowly, rubbing his chin. “So the goal would be to do the same with a person. Stream brain updates to the cloud. If you die, your consciousness gets downloaded from wherever it’s saved and you rise like a Phoenix.”

  “That’s the idea, exactly,” said Jordan enthusiastically. “When I lived in Turlock, I wasn’t even close to developing a quantum computer that could emulate every last neuron in a human brain. Nor was I close to being able to wirelessly upload that much information from a brain into a storage device. But I hoped that one day this might be possible.”

  “And if Savant had stayed in its box,” said Bram, “you’d have been able to make this possible eight years ago.”

  “No question about it. This would have been the first task I had it tackle. But even without the aid of an ASI, I had already been able to perfect nanites that could map a brain. Trillions of smart particles gathering data on the location of neurons, electrical potentials, chemical potentials, memory traces, and so on.”

  “And you just couldn’t wait to use us as guinea pigs, could you?” demanded Riley. “Without our knowledge or permission.”

  Carr felt like an idiot as he finally came to the realization Riley had reached much earlier, probably when her father had first brought up the subject of transhumanism.

  “So what did you do?” continued Riley. “Inject them into us? Drug us in our sleep so we wouldn’t feel anything?”

  Jordan winced. “Close enough,” he said.

  “Assuming they don’t have an expiration date,” said Riley, “that means I have trillions of these things swimming around in my head right now, don’t I?”

  “You do,” replied Jordan. “But so do I,” he added hastily. “And I’ve had them a lot longer. You can argue I should have told you, but I didn’t do this until I was certain they were safe. Harmless. I had them on board for almost a year before I installed them in you, your mother, and your brothers. You can’t even tell they’re there. They go about their business, continually scanning the brain without affecting it.”

  Carr eyed Jordan in fascination. “I’m pretty sure I’ve finally caught up to Riley,” he said. “But let me be sure. When the kinetic round hit Turlock, your nanites were already in place, capturing the consciousness of your wife and sons. But you hadn’t perfected wireless transmission of the data. You needed to access the nanites directly for that. So taking their heads was the only way to preserve their consciousness.”

  Jordan looked ill. “It was my only hope,” he whispered. “If I could perfect an artificial construct that could emulate the human brain, I could bring them back to life.”

  Riley shook her head in disgust. “You may have explained your actions,” she said, “but it’s all so . . . ghoulish. Bring them back to life? They’re dead. You killed them. Even if you could upload their data into a new shell, would it really be them? Or some creepy, warped version of them?”

  She continued before her father could respond. “Besides, this kind of uploading won’t be possible for decades. It’s much too complicated and tech intensive, even for you. You managed to create Savant, but only because you could set up a base state and let evolution do the work for you. Perfecting whole brain emulation is another thing entirely.”

  “You’re right about it being immensely complicated,” said Jordan. “But wrong about it taking decades to perfect.” He arched an eyebrow. “Turns out I can do it today,” he added. “Turns out that humanity is on the verge of immortality.”

  37

  No one spoke for several long seconds.

  Carr had received so many shocking revelations recently that he thought he had become numb to them, but once again, he had been mistaken.

  “But allow me to back up,” said Jordan. “I’ve gotten ahead of myself.”

  All three of his guests were still in partial shock and nodded woodenly for him to go on.

  Jordan fixed his gaze on Riley, who had been decidedly chilly toward him since he had first entered the room. “Think whatever you want about me,” he said to his daughter. “If you think I had a God complex, that my arrogance brought this on, I can’t argue with you. Blame me for everything that happened. You should,” he added, his self-loathing evident. “I certainly do.”

  He paused and his eyes became moist. “But you have to believe that I loved your mother,” he said softly. “That I loved your brothers. That I still love you.”

  He wiped his eyes and gathered himself. “When I awakened after slamming my head into the door and realized the rod had hit, my first thought was suicide. But that would have left you fatherless. Yes, I knew I had to go into hiding and couldn’t be there for you. And I knew that you’d prefer to be fatherless after what I had done. But at least I could watch over you from afar. Protect you. Help to make your life as good as it could be. You were my only remaining child,” he finished as a single tear escaped his eye once again and rolled slowly down his cheek.

  “That’s why Mike O’Banion was so convinced you would die for he
r,” said Carr. “Because you would.”

  “I would. A hundred times over, I would. I’d die a thousand times over if I could go back in time and change things so none of this ever happened.” Jordan shook his head sadly. “But it did happen,” he said, focusing once again on his daughter. “And I finally concluded that suicide would be the easy way out. Instead, I vowed to go on. Vowed to protect you. To someday bring your mother and brothers back to life.”

  Jordan’s lip curled up in horror. “Removing their heads was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he continued. “As you said, this wasn’t Savant forcing my hand. This was me. The only reason I didn’t vomit was because I had already heaved everything that was in my stomach onto a parking lot earlier that night.

  “And as I raced away from Turlock, I made one last vow, the most important one of all. I vowed to protect humanity from ASI. If I could stop others who were attempting to bring computer intelligence into existence, stop them from making the same mistake I made, I could make partial amends for what I had done.”

  Carr wondered if Jordan’s amends weren’t more than partial. If Carr imagined there was a God watching over biological life, the Turlock tragedy might have been necessary to ensure the future of humanity.

  Only a loss of life and devastation on this scale could have set a man like Jordan on the path of stopping all other ASI efforts. Had Turlock not happened in exactly the way it had, another effort might have already succeeded, but this time without a kinetic weapon and walls of graphene to prevent human extinction.

  “So you decided to play God again,” said Riley, allowing herself a wry smile, “but this time, only to prevent anyone else from playing God.”

  “I’m devoting my life to safeguarding a human future,” said Jordan. “To preventing us from creating an evil god, or perhaps worse, one totally indifferent to our existence.”

  “And you’ve succeeded brilliantly,” said Carr. “But how? How have you even identified so many secret ASI programs? I’d think just this would be impossible, let alone stopping them—even for someone with your skills and resources.”

  “You’re right,” said Jordan. “That’s why I made sure I had help. After I left Turlock and established a secure base of operations, the first thing I did was create the ultimate computer assistant. Savant Light, if you will. A computer I call Pock. Short for Apocalypse. A name I chose to remind me of its potential for ill, and the need to keep it in a box.” He sighed. “Not that I needed reminding.”

  “Savant Light?” said Bram.

  “I still had the tablet computer I had taken from my lab. After I fled, I accessed its memory. It had recorded the optimal hardware configuration Savant had achieved. The one that was held steady throughout the final billions of generations of software evolution. I rebuilt the entire system with this configuration. I built it underground, and put it behind enough layers of graphene to stop a dozen ASIs.

  “Then I added a series of regulators into the system, something I should have done the first time around. It was set up to come to a dead stop after every thousand software generations. I inched it toward sentience, conducting exhaustive testing at each stop, and halted its progress well short of consciousness.”

  “Just how smart is your computer?” asked Bram. “This . . . Pock?”

  “Crazy smart. Much, much smarter than a human. But again, still not quite sentient. Still nothing more than an IBM Watson, although hundreds of times more capable.”

  “That doesn’t worry you?” said Carr.

  “Of course it worries me,” said Jordan. “Thus the name Apocalypse. But it’s buried underground, can’t connect to the Web, and is surrounded by graphene. I’m the only one with access. And it’s been invaluable. With its help, I’ve made advances I couldn’t have made on my own in a hundred years.”

  Carr whistled. Given the advances Jordan had been able to make on his own in a fraction of that time, this was truly saying something. “So this explains how you’ve been so effective at crippling AGI efforts,” he said.

  “Yes. Pock has been able to come up with spyware and algorithms that let me easily identify these programs anywhere in the world, no matter how secret they think they’re being. Spyware and algorithms government intelligence agencies would kill for. Along with various means of sabotage that are also extraordinary, generations ahead of the current state of the art.”

  “Tell me about it,” mumbled Carr under his breath.

  He had been sent to find and stop whoever was behind the sabotage. But this was when he thought it was being done to give one party a decisive advantage in the race to ASI, to help them become the dominant power on the globe. But if everything Jordan had said was true, how could he not switch allegiances? Instead of trying to stop Isaac Jordan, how could he not do everything in his power to help him?

  “And this explains how you were able to perfect whole brain emulation so far ahead of schedule,” said Riley.

  “That’s right. With Pock’s help.”

  “And you’re a hundred percent there?” she asked.

  “Not a hundred percent. I still haven’t solved wireless uploading. For the time being, anyone with nanites on board has to be backed up manually.”

  “Backed up?” said Carr. “Like you’d back up your computer? To make sure all changes are saved at the end of a session?”

  “Right. If you died, we could use your last backup to bring you back to life. If you suffered from Alzheimer’s, you could be restored using a backup taken before the disease struck. And this time your mind would never be corrupted.”

  Carr nodded. The possibilities were as astonishing as the philosophical implications were daunting.

  “As I said,” continued Jordan, “I’m still working on the seamless transfer of whole brain scans wirelessly, automatically, like a phone would do. But Pock and I have perfected everything else. An optical quantum computer that can perfectly emulate a human brain and fit inside a human skull. And a 3D printer that can spray individual cells so quickly and accurately, it can literally build a perfect copy of any human body in hours.”

  “Is that similar to bioprinting?” said Bram.

  Jordan smiled. “Not similar,” he said. “It is bioprinting. Just a lot more advanced. Current bioprinting technology can only create organs. It’s gotten faster and more accurate, but hasn’t advanced all that much since 2016, when scientists at Northwestern University managed to print mice ovaries that were indistinguishable from the real thing.”

  Riley nodded enthusiastically. “I remember reading about that when I was a kid,” she said. “When they implanted these ovaries in host mice, the mice were able to conceive and give birth normally.”

  “It was an impressive success,” confirmed Jordan. “Really energized the field. Still,” he continued, “without Pock, what I’m able to do would still be a decade or more away.”

  Carr had a sudden realization. “When your body was found dead after a car accident,” he said, “that was a bioprinted version of you, wasn’t it?”

  “Very good, Lieutenant. It was.”

  “Amazing,” said Carr. “It was you down to its fingerprints and DNA.”

  “With all due modesty, Pock and I have managed some impressive feats.”

  Riley looked troubled. “I’m not sure how I feel about mind uploading,” she said. “It’s hard to believe it’s not cheating nature. Hard to believe that the essence of what makes us human can really be transferred to a new host.”

  “Philosophers throughout the ages have wrestled with this question,” said Jordan. “So have I. At considerable length.”

  “And what have you concluded?” asked Carr.

  “I’ve come to think about it this way: If you replace a bad knee with an artificial one, no one doubts that you’re still human. By the same token, your brain is made up of a hundred billion neurons. If you were to replace a single one of these with an artificial construct that functions identically to the one it replaces, no one would argue that you
weren’t still you.”

  “So the question you’re getting to,” said Bram, “is just how much of your brain can be replaced before you aren’t you anymore?”

  “Exactly. Are you suddenly non-human after replacing ten percent? Half? And what if the replacements were to happen gradually, over years of time, with a hundred percent of your neurons eventually being replaced by artificial ones performing the exact same duties? Wouldn’t you still be human?”

  “I’m not so sure you would be,” said Carr.

  Jordan smiled. “You actually just fell into a trap I set,” he said. “Because this already happens, and you already accept it. You just don’t realize it.”

  “In what way?” said Carr.

  “Your cells are constantly dying and being replaced. It’s a common belief that after seven years every single cell in your body is new. Now this may not be entirely true, but regardless, it’s widely accepted that a large percentage of the cells that make up your body today are replacements, performing the same functions as the ones they replaced. And when it comes to atoms, the facts are completely unambiguous. Not a single one of the atoms currently in your body were there five years ago.

  “I’m sure you would agree,” continued Jordan, “that you’re still the one and only Cameron Carr, even though most of the cells—and none of the atoms—that made up the Cameron Carr of five years ago still exist.”

  “Of course,” said Carr. “And you’re right, I had no idea this was the case. But what’s going on with mind transference still feels different than this.”

  “Because it is,” said Jordan. “Because the cells and atoms in your body aren’t just functionally the same as the ones they replace, they’re physically the same. Also, when this swapping out is a function of biological housekeeping, it’s a gradual process. But what if, instead of taking five to ten years for all of your cells to be replaced, it only took one year? Would you still be you?”

  Carr nodded.