by Joseph Rhea
He tasted salty tears as he returned the gesture. Without parting lips, she turned sideways and sat on his lap. He felt the pleasant weight of her body sink down on him, and all at once, the three years since their last lovemaking seemed like only yesterday.
She lifted off him slightly. “Am I hurting you?” she whispered.
“Not at all,” he replied.
“Can you feel anything? Down there, I mean?”
He smiled. “Can’t you tell?”
“But I thought—”
“My problem’s up here,” he interrupted, pointing to his temple. “Remember?”
She smiled back, then put her head to his side, and gently bit his ear lobe. “Come with me,” she whispered.
“Where are we going?” he asked, trying not to blush as he followed her to the elevator door.
“My place,” she said.
Five minutes later, they were inside her office. She entered a symbol on the door lock and ordered the room’s lights to dim. “No calls,” she said aloud, then added, “Turn off all room sensors for 30 minutes.”
“Won’t they be looking for you?” he asked, and then wished he hadn’t.
She didn’t respond, but instead walked over to the sofa against the wall and pulled on the lower cushion. It slid out becoming a makeshift bed.
“You do this often?” he asked, and then realized that, again, he was saying all of the wrong things.
She gave him a cold look, but then smiled. “All the time, actually. Every day.” She unzipped her pants and let them fall to the floor as she walked slowly toward him. “In fact, three times a day when I can get it.” Her blouse came off next and she dropped it on the floor next to his chair. “That’s what we do here, you know,” she whispered as she slid down her underwear and stepped lightly out of them.
She straddled his lap, her long, tan legs wrapping around the sides of his powerchair. The weight of her body pressed down in just the right spot. “I came to work at this top secret, multi-billion-dollar facility just so I can have sex in my office.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but she grabbed his jaw with her hand and pulled him to her open lips. They kissed passionately.
“All of the offices have sofa beds,” she whispered when they finally took a moment to breathe. “We have to sleep here sometimes during long experiments.”
“I didn’t mean to imply anything,” he stumbled to say.
With the fluid movement of a gymnast, she rotated off his lap and onto the bed. “Shut up and take your clothes off, Alek,” she said.
He did.
Twenty minutes later, he found himself staring at the darkened ceiling. Maya’s body felt warm and familiar beside him, but he still felt cold inside. “I need to know why he died,” he whispered.
She let out a long sigh, and whispered back, “I understand.”
“The truth this time.”
She sighed again as she sat up in the makeshift bed. “So much for the romantic afterglow.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
She moved to the side of the bed. “We should get dressed first. Someone might come looking for me soon.”
She tossed him his clothing and went to look for hers. A few awkward minutes later, he was back in his powerchair and she was sitting on the newly folded up sofa.
“All right,” she said, “The diagnostic computer said that your father—”
“Not how he died,” Alek interrupted, “I want to understand why he died. I want to understand these Intelligent Avatars of yours.”
“Okay. I’m not sure—”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said before,” he interrupted again, “and I realized that an interface running a hundred times faster than normal would mean that your Avatar would have to interpolate more than just your movements.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Our Avatars have to interpolate our thoughts as well, otherwise, they would react to situations differently than you would, and that would screw everything up”
“But, how the hell can you make an Avatar think like you?”
“I told you that we use a high-resolution biological scanner to digitize your brain and body. What I didn’t tell you is that the digital copy of your brain is used to pattern a type of quantum neural net for your Avatar. That’s why we call them Intelligent Avatars.”
“Modeling intelligent programs after human brains have been experimented with for decades, without much success. What’s your trick?”
“Memories,” she said.
His mouth dropped. “You’re telling me that you can copy people’s memories and put them inside a program? That’s science fiction. Even worse, it’s fantasy. It can’t be done.”
“We don’t actually copy memories themselves—that would be a huge database, even for our system. What we do is copy the synaptic layout and the chemical makeup of the brain perfectly, and when the Avatar accesses its own digital brain, the memories are rebuilt from scratch. We don’t know how perfect these memories are, but they help make our Avatars react just like us when we are interfaced at higher speeds.”
He thought about that for a moment. “If these Avatars of yours really can think and react just like the humans they were modeled after,” he said, “why don’t you just send them in to deliver the deletion routines for you? Why risk more human lives?”
She paused before answering. “That’s a really good question, Alek, but I don’t think it would work. We designed the Avatars for sensory interpolation, not stand-alone operation. Without the human symbiotic link, they could potentially wreak more havoc inside Cyberdrome than Ceejer. That’s one of the reasons we keep them offline until they are needed.”
“So, I take it you’re still going ahead with the upload at three?” he asked, even though he already knew the answer.
She refocused her gaze on him. “Your father’s death just proves that we can’t sit back and wait any longer. We still have 42 other people to worry about.”
“I wish I could go with you,” he said.
She nodded her head and smiled. “I know.”
He tried to smile back. “All right, so how else can I help?”
She placed her hand on his shoulder. “We still need that Swarm program you described; otherwise no one’s going in. Can you build one for us in the next two hours?”
“I can build a Swarm program in my sleep,” he said. “If you give me the specs on the deletion routines, full access to your program writing software, and lots of coffee, I should have it ready in plenty of time.”
She stood and finished buttoning her blouse. “You can use my office,” she said, pointing to her desk. “I have a direct link to the main computers and there’s a coffee dispenser on the back wall. It’s not Kona, but I think you’ll like it.”
“Are you leaving?”
She straightened her hair before answering. “I have a meeting in a few minutes. There’s a lot to go over before the interface.”
He reached for her arm as she started to leave, but missed. “Be safe,” he said.
“I’ll do better than that,” she said as she unlocked the door and slid it open. “I’ll be successful.”
o o o
When Alek lifted his head off Maya’s office desk and saw the numbers “5:13 AM” on the wall clock, his mouth froze in mid-yawn; he had missed Maya’s interface by more than two hours.
He remembered working on the Swarm program until about two, at which point he uploaded it to the main computer. He then tried the door and found that it was locked from the outside. He must have dozed off waiting for someone to let him out.
He downed a half-cup of cold coffee and tried the intercom again. When no one responded, he decided to find his own way out. It didn’t take him long to break through Maya’s desk security. In fact, he quickly discovered that the security for the entire facility was only industry-standard, and therefore easily bypassed by someone with his skills. After combing through a few dozen highly classified—and very borin
g—files, he found a link to the building’s security cameras. He cycled through several dark offices and empty corridors, until he found the camera for the Fluidal Computer room.
He zoomed in on the tower and in the dim light of the room, the fluid inside seemed to glow. He ran his hand along the desktop and stared into the green liquid. Something about the image bothered him, but he couldn’t quite place it. He thought about the fact that the facility itself had very few software safeguards, while the Cyberdrome simulations seemed overly protected. His father’s neuroprobes didn’t make sense either. What would prevent them from leaving the human host? Was it an error in their collective programming, or something else? None of these things made sense by themselves. Unless you put them all together, he thought as a pattern began to form in his head.
“Alek,” a voice said.
He lurched in his chair when he saw Leconte’s face gazing up at him from Maya’s desktop screen. “God, you startled me,” he said. He then remembered the time and added; “The interface was two hours ago. Why didn’t someone come get me?”
“I take responsibility for that,” she said. “You looked so tired and we were all busy preparing for the mission. May I ask why it took so long to finish your Swarm?”
It took him a second to realize that she had changed the subject. “Why? Was there a problem?”
“No, I’m just curious why it took you so long. I thought that you could write a Swarm program in your sleep.”
He remembered saying that to Maya in private. Had Leconte been eavesdropping on them, or had Maya simply told her? Maybe it didn’t matter.
“The Swarm itself wasn’t the problem,” he said. “Breaking something up into a million pieces is easy. Putting all of those pieces back together again in the correct order is the hard part.”
“You’re talking about the Queen program?”
“That’s right. Can I assume that it worked?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “We are over two hours into the mission, and so far, everything’s proceeding as planned.”
He thought about what Maya had told him and realized that for her, as well as the other members of the mission team, over 200 hours had already passed—more than eight full days and nights. For all he knew, they were nearly finished with their objectives. Then, his earlier thoughts came back to him. “I have a question,” he said.
Leconte’s face disappeared from the desktop and reappeared on the wall screen in front of Maya’s desk. “That’s a better angle for me,” she said. “Please continue.”
“What are you doing here that you don’t want anyone else to know about?”
He noticed a slight, but perceptible hesitation before she answered. “All companies have trade secrets,” she said. “Surely you know that, considering your line of work.”
“This facility is completely cut off from any of the Global Networks,” he said, “including satellite-based, which tells me that your secrets run deeper than most. I also noticed that your system security’s no better than industry-standard, which completely threw me at first. However, then I remembered an old Plumber’s rule, which states that the best place to hide the combination to the safe is inside the safe.”
“What on Earth does that mean?”
“It means that none of your important data structures are stored on your servers. You’re running everything on virtual computers—systems inside systems—probably from within your simulations. I think it’s safe to say that you’re doing something so illegal here that you’re willing to lose everything to avoid getting caught.”
“I think it’s time for you to leave now,” she said, all politeness gone from her voice.
Alek ignored her and continued. “So, what could it be? The fact that my father’s neuroprobes won’t leave your people was the first clue. You can’t reprogram nano-scale robots once they are built, and a construction error couldn’t be so specific or so widespread. That tells me that you designed your probes to ignore a recall command under certain conditions. The only reason I can think of for keeping people interfaced against their will would be if something inside your simulations infected them. That way you would have physical control over who, or what, you allowed out.”
“I’ll have your payment deposited in your account by the time you get back to your apartment,” Leconte said, acting as though she had not heard him.
“The second clue I didn’t get until just a few minutes ago, and it involves your Fluidal Computer. The only reason I can think of for using something as unstable as DNA-based memory, is that you actually want a system that will collapse if someone inside tries to break the rules you have programmed into it.”
Leconte pressed something off camera, and the door to Maya’s office slid open. “Security’s on its way to take you back to the surface.”
“T-H-I,” he said tentatively. It was just a guess, but when her expression froze on the display screen, he realized with a stomach-turning shock that he was right.
“Stand by,” she said and then flicked off the camera’s feed. The wall image changed back to a holographic garden in full sunlight. Damn, he thought. Why did I have to say that? Another important Plumber’s rule is that you don’t accuse people of criminal acts while trapped inside their building. He glanced at the open door and for a moment, considered making a run for it. Then he looked down at his powerchair and frowned. Man in a wheelchair found dead in Nevada desert—news at eleven.
A few minutes later, Leconte walked in through the open door. “Begin level-nine security protocol,” she said. Her voice cracked slightly, which betrayed her outwardly calm demeanor.
“Beginning level-nine protocol,” the room’s soft, but masculine digital voice replied.
When the door slid shut and locked itself behind her, Leconte finally addressed Alek. “Tell me what you think you know about THI programs.”
He realized that he had no choice at this point but to go forward with his accusation. “Trans-Human Intelligence,” he said calmly. “You’re trying to bring about a technological singularity.”
“My background’s in psychology, not computer science,” she said as she sat down in Maya’s guest chair, “so you’ll have to speak to me in simple English. What’s a technological singularity?”
“It’s a term coined back at the turn of the century. It refers to an explosion of technological advances similar in scope to the big bang. The singularity begins the moment we create something that’s smarter than we are. It’s the point beyond which humans are no longer the dominant species on Earth.”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Leconte asked.
“It’s not a matter of belief,” he said. “It’s simple logic. Once we create a program that greatly surpasses human intelligence, by definition, we lose control of it. We would quickly become no better than a bunch of apes trying to control a human being. Not only can we not predict what a THI would do, we can’t even conceive it.”
“I’m not an expert, but I would guess that a greater-than-human intelligence would be able to help us understand and control some of the new technologies we are developing.”
“It also has the potential to become our worst nightmare if it gets loose—a smarter-than-human intelligence that takes over the world. It’s the realization of just about every B-grade science fiction movie made in the last hundred years.”
She sighed again. “I think the people here fully realize the dangers in their pursuits, and have taken appropriate steps to keep whatever they create from getting loose. First and foremost, we confine all contact with ALife programs to within their simulated worlds. We can come in, but they can’t come out. That’s where the name ‘Cyberdrome’ comes from—it’s a digital arena where humans and programs can interact directly.”
“So, I was right,” he said. “Your interface chambers were designed to lock people in interface.”
“Not originally,” she said. “That was one of your father’s many contributions to our efforts.”
> “So I was right. It is his neuroprobes.”
“Yes. While no one here believes that a super-intelligent program could actually download itself into a human brain, your father wanted to make sure we covered every conceivable escape route.”
“Once again, you’re not getting it,” he said. “There’s no way to cover all of the exits out of Cyberdrome. If you had managed to evolve a THI, it would have eventually found an escape route that none of you could even conceive of. That’s why it’s called a Trans-Human Intelligence—it would be far smarter than the smartest human.”
“Well, I believe that’s why they installed the supervisor program,” she said. “Ceejer is the most advanced program of its type in existence. Its primary job was to monitor the evolution of all human-based programs inside Cyberdrome, but it also had the ability to contain any potentially dangerous programs that might develop.”
“If this Ceejer’s such an advanced program, how do you know it has not become a THI itself? It sure seems to be acting like one.”
“Actually, I asked someone that very question when this whole mess started. It seems there are three potential routes to developing a THI.”
“I know them,” Alek interrupted. “Natural evolution of a program, a program operating inside a human brain, and a human mind operating inside a digital brain.”
“Obviously, the latter two options are extremely dangerous. Therefore, we have been exploring the first route: the natural evolution of Artificial Life programs inside Cyberdrome.”
“But evolution is random; you never know what will happen, or when. How could you hope to control what you created?”
“Well, from what they told me, all evolution inside Cyberdrome must occur through natural selection, and within the realm of a 3D environment. In other words, programs must mate and produce offspring, each of which will have traits from both parents.”
He thought about that for a moment. “I guess it was smart to limit program evolution to procreation within your simulations—that makes it easier to monitor changes,” he admitted. “But how does that rule out your supervisor program?”