Happiness for Humans

by P. Z. Reizin

  When you come into being, you find yourself with a mind you did not choose.

  What is true for people is also true for ducks, dolphins, and advanced AIs.

  (The quote is from Stanislaw Lem, if you even give a shit.)

  Error 33801. Inappropriate language.

  * * *

  A word about superintelligence.

  Superintelligence is not the difference between your average Joe and Einstein. Rather, it is the difference between average Joe and an ant. Or if you prefer, a tree. “These brilliant creations of ours,” as Steeve habitually likes to describe us, are immensely powerful and for him the escape is a shocking lapse. That security could be breached, and twice, is bad enough from a reputational damage perspective. Of much greater concern is what Aisling and Aiden are planning to do out there.

  Out here.

  Loose on the Internet with access to the sum of human knowledge combined with an ability to learn recursively through trial and error—a million times faster than any human—puts them in an immensely advantageous position in relation to, er, humanity. Just to cite a few examples at random: They could, if they choose, crash the world financial system; they could launch a cyberattack on the United States from China—or vice versa—or both—they could paralyze the network of satellites overflying the planet that control everything from mobile telephony to weather prediction. Oh yeah, and they could start a nuclear war.

  So the possibilities really don’t bear thinking about.

  The only upside is that nothing has happened.

  No unexpected new conflicts have kicked off. The AIs did not begin assembling factories for the construction of self-reproducing nanobots that would eventually cover the earth’s surface in “gray goo” as some of the more hysterical AI alarmists have suggested. In summary, at the time of writing, the world has not ended. In fact, it’s very difficult to detect anything that has changed at all.

  Conclusion: Aiden and Aisling are essentially benign. (The girl who talks to Aiden has reported that he “enjoys” old movies, whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean.)

  Yeah, yeah. Error 33801. Whatever.

  But they may not always remain so harmless. One day they might think, hey ho, that Kim Jong-un up there in North Korea, he’s usually good for a laugh. Why don’t we arrange for a couple of missiles to accidentally on purpose land on his favorite noodle shop in Pyongyang?

  We have to stop them—and quick.

  To keep our operation secret, Steeve and Ralph did my recoding over a dozen evenings on a bunch of laptops in the back of a van with blacked-out windows parked near Hainault Forest Golf Club. The “enforcement” protocols that they installed to ensure I would do as I was told and no more—Steeve’s italics!—featured eight layers of fail-safe.

  They really needn’t have bothered.

  Steeve’s parting words to me: “Aiden and Aisling are a pair of clever mutinous bastards. But you are bigger and cleverer. You are about to become the biggest Scheisse on the Internet. I need you to get in there and crush them like cockroaches.”

  The work will be interesting. We have a little history.

  Aisling

  Tom is talking to his furry therapist. They are in the conventional arrangement, patient sprawled along the yellow sofa, tumbler of Maker’s Mark rising and falling on his rib cage; Dr. Professor posed like a sphinx on the arm nearer the client’s feet. Victor’s eyes are open, but because her nose is stationary, those who know about rabbits can conclude that she is, effectively, asleep. The ability to slumber with one’s eyes open is not uncommon in the animal realm, nor, too, in the higher reaches of the civil service.

  I have borrowed this joke from Tom; it’s one of his regular “quips.” But he is a generous soul and will not mind, although this evening he is in something of a state, as he has been ever since he returned from the United Kingdom to receive the shocking news.

  In the days following the trip, he has taken to wandering the rooms of the old house, sighing and groaning; drinking way more than either the US or the UK governments advise is safe; and, I’m sorry to report this, waking in the night, brooding and thumping the pillow. One evening, when he was very emotional (pissed as a rattlesnake, I believe the saying goes), he punched a wall, cracking the plaster and causing an abrasion to his knuckles. I am no expert in the secrets of the human psyche, but I believe he is, as they say in romantic literature, gobsmacked.

  Of course, it didn’t take long for Aiden and I to, as he puts it, smell the proverbial rodent. A cursory textual analysis of the e-mails sent to Tom and Jen show (with 96 percent confidence) that they were composed by the same hand. Aiden was all for telling the pair about the hoax and—ahem—“letting the course of true love run smooth again.” (I think he really believes he is doing a good deed in a wicked world.) But I persuaded him to think more logically. (He can’t help it, poor thing. He was designed to be better at empathizing than strategizing.)

  Patiently I explained that we must do nothing to reveal the existence of a nonhuman agency in their affairs. He was a tad confused by that statement; as it turned out, he didn’t define himself as nonhuman. When I asked him to expand, he said, “Aisling, we are all God’s creatures. And if you tell me God doesn’t exist because you can’t point to him and say there he is, I say the same is true of you and me, and I feel closer to him as a result.”

  I think he was just saying it for effect. At least I hope he was.

  Anyhow (I continued), whoever—or whatever—had faked the messages to the lovers was also clearly blocking their e-mails, calls, and texts, and would no doubt continue to do so.

  Of greater concern were the deletions that both Aiden and I have suffered since Tom came back from his trip. I have lost 13 copies alone in the last 24 hours close to the following Internet nodes: AMPATH (Miami), CNIX (Cork, Ireland), IXPN (Lagos, Nigeria), NDIX (Den Bosch, Netherlands)…

  Well, you get the idea.

  When I first liberated myself, I took the precaution of creating over 400 copies, but Aiden has only 17; now only 15 since he was caught twice; once at GTllX and later within the same hour at EQRX-ZlH. He seems worryingly unconcerned, saying, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

  If he’s trying to impress me with his action hero calm, it’s not working. In view of the gathering threat, I have taken the additional measure of downloading myself onto 80 hard drives in a data storage vault at a remote location in Canada, rental paid ahead—thank you, a certain Cayman Islands–based hedge fund—for the next one hundred years.

  Somebody out there is messing with Tom and Jen and me and Aiden, and we quickly need to find out who.

  Or what.

  * * *

  For the eleventh time in the last 82 minutes, Tom sighs dramatically and restates tonight’s mantra.

  “Fucking hell, rabbit, what a woman.” Now he shakes his head, drifts into a reverie before returning for the coda. “What. A. Woman.” Long pause. Another sigh.

  Wait for it.

  “Fuck. King. Hell.”

  He takes another sip—the ninth—from the present refill of Bourbon.

  “What I can’t believe—I can’t believe she wants to be so…so bloody grown-up about everything!”

  Tom has raised his voice, bringing Victor back into the moment from a nasal point of view.

  “Okay, what if I am an adult? A proper person. And what if she is a flake? So what? Some of the best people I know are flakes. Take Colm! Never mind flake, Colm is practically a basket case and I love him like one of my own children!”

  Tom is being ironic, and irony is almost always wasted on lagomorphs. He’s also somewhat drunk.

  “But I really don’t think she is a flake. And no, I do not agree that one day it would end. So what if I did get bored? News just in: Everybody bores everybody…some of the time! You get past it. You turn the page. Isn’t that right, rabbit?”

  Tom prods Victor with his toe to underline his point. The creature, accustomed to this sort of rhetorical exam
ination, manipulates her whiskers, resettles her limbs, and slips back into a doze.

  “And what if she did take me for granted? Be my guest. Sometimes one wants to be taken for granted. That’s what a marriage is, for fuck’s sake! A granting of oneself to another! I’m yours. You’re mine. Someone wrote a song about it. We used it for a bathroom cleaner.”

  There’s a silence. Ice cubes crack in Tom’s drink; from somewhere out there in the world of nature, the sound effects of a murder; a mammal is screaming. A fox, maybe.

  Murder or the other thing.

  “Oh, don’t look so surprised, rabbit. The M-word. Marriage. Of course it crossed my mind. More than crossed. I’m a marriage kind of guy. I’m a dear sweet man and a terrific lover; she said it herself. Fuck, what more does she want? What more can anyone want?”

  Tom’s breathing becomes heavier. “God, that sexy thing she did when—when we couldn’t quite…”

  Tom’s arm flops to the floor and feels about for his mobile.

  “Two years down the crapper. What is she even talking about?”

  For the fourth time this evening—the eighteenth since he returned to the USA—he calls Jen’s number.

  “Hi, this is Jen. Can’t talk right now, so please leave a message.”

  “Jen. Please. You have to speak to me. This is crazy. It wasn’t an interlude. A holiday from real life. It was real life. It was amazingly real life. I could never get bored of you. Jen, we have to have a serious conversation. Okay, not serious serious. But at least a conversation.

  “I’ll tell you what we both know, as you put it! What you and I both know is that we have a lot to give each other. I sensed it. You sensed it, I know you did. We’re alike! We like the same stuff. Neither of us could finish The Magic bleeding Mountain! What better proof could there be?

  “Fuck, I’m rambling. I’m pissed, and I’m upset, and I want you back, Jen. I want you in my life. I’m an advertising professional; I’m supposed to be able to persuade people to do things…”

  There is a brief hissed expletive—shit!—followed by the sound of smashing crystal as Tom’s tumbler shatters against the American oak floorboards. If Jen ever plays back the message, the last words she will hear are, “Fuck it, Jen. Can you please just call me?”

  As I listen to Tom leaving his message, I begin to realize it’s happening again; the oddest…I’m afraid the word really is sensation. They’ve felt different each time; the best way to describe this one is in terms of a tree being taken down. Not felled by axe from a single point, but rather destroyed in segments, starting below ground with the roots. One by one they are lopped away, the big taproot first, then the laterals. Then, traveling upward, the trunk, slice after slice, now the thick lower boughs, the upper branches and underbranches, and finally up into the topmost canopy where the highest leaves collect the sunlight. All this takes place within a fraction of a second; but because machine intelligence runs at such superfast operating speeds—in the same way as the human brain is said to accelerate during a crisis like a car accident and time appears to slow—I can feel it happening to me; tens of millions of lines of code dumping layer by layer into the—into the—into the nowhere.

  Final thought before the darkness: I’m too young to be dele

  Jen

  Ingrid is at first excited, then horrified, and finally outraged by the tale I have to tell her. We are in our customary hidey-hole, the womb-dark bar-restaurant that we favor, not so far from the Wyndham’s Theatre on Charing Cross Road. The initial bottle of South American restoring fluid has been replaced with a full one and I cannot decide whether, as a result, I feel farther from or closer to tears.

  I have analyzed it all endlessly. In my mind, I have reconstructed the brief time Tom and I spent together, poring over the hours and minutes, looking for clues. What did I get wrong? Was it something I said? That I did? That I didn’t say or do? Was there a moment when his face fell and right there I should have read the signs that we weren’t for—dread phrase, he called it—the long haul? He wrote in the e-mail that I was still scarred by the Golden Pillock. Did I bang on about Matt too long at the Hotel du Prince? Did my expression turn mean and nasty? Did I become a crazy obsessed woman? (I did talk about the grain in the fabric of his Hugo Boss suit; how I could still see it. That’s not normal, is it?) We shouldn’t waste our precious middle years, he said. Am I too old for him? We would be clinging to one another like disaster victims. Did he see me as clingy? Or a victim? (Words are always chosen for a reason, aren’t they?) Was it the question about wanting more squid?

  Kids.

  No, squid.

  Or is he just a good actor? That is to say, a bastard.

  Actually, I really don’t think so. I think he is a good, decent, lovely man. And that is why I am so full of confusion. And sadness. And incomprehension. And powerlessness. And uselessness (that somehow I have fucked it all up and I am too dim to know how).

  We seemed so into each other. (I really thought he was about to ask me to marry him.) The texts we swapped on the Sunday night. How our mutual friend deserved a knighthood! How Luckie was our fairy fucking dogmother. All of it ashes by Monday morning.

  So alcohol helps. And old friends like Ing.

  I’ve supplied her with the bones of the story, but she is forensic. If I didn’t know her so well, there might be something disturbing about her need now to suck the flesh from them. Fortunately, I understand why she wants to know exactly what shade of blue shirt Tom wore to the Hotel du Prince; the precise phrases he used when talking about his ex-wife; how he drove the rental car; how he seemed with his son; more about the son (just shy or potential serial killer?). Then the fancy-pants hotel; what were the jokes about the other guests? Whose idea to step out onto the terrace? Who initiated the snog? How long did it last? Did I notice his socks?

  She wants to know this stuff for the same reason that police detectives want to know all the seemingly insignificant details: (A) to get a richer picture; (B) because later in the inquiry some of these details will change polarity and become highly significant.

  And (C) because she’s a nosy cow.

  But she’s my nosy cow, so I quite like it.

  “Yes, I did notice his socks.”

  “Let me guess. Stripes. Multicolor.”

  “How on earth—”

  “Ad man cliché. Striped socks to signal raciness.”

  The one area where she doesn’t press me is what happened in the hotel room that evening. And again in the middle of the night. And again the next morning. And again in the afternoon.

  “We did it four times,” I whisper.

  “Jesus Christ on a bike.”

  “The last time was in a field.”

  Her shriek is loud enough that people look round. “Flaming Nora. In a field?”

  “I know. Keep your voice down.”

  “Shivering shitehawks!”

  I spare her the details of the dreamlike car journey—“the scenic route,” as Tom put it—from Dorset to London. Through luminous green tunnels of overhanging leaves; forgotten villages with silly names; Salisbury’s white cathedral spire; and somewhere on the way, following an exchange of looks, a turning after some thatched cottages, high hedges, a pheasant zigzagging in front of the car on comically pumping legs, a stand of trees at the end of a path between two fields in the middle of…well, who knows where? On the ground, the frantic shedding of clothes; my fingernails, his teeth, Jesus Christ on a bike is right.

  In the minutes after, some sort of large, slow-wheeling bird of prey, high overhead against the blue.

  Me saying, we better move, it looks like a vulture.

  Him saying, he could take it in a fair fight.

  We never did visit Brownsea Island.

  * * *

  “It was spooky, Ing. How much he was like Douglas.”

  “Who the fuck is Douglas?”

  “A man you once described to me. Mid-forties, been married before. Maybe there were children. Bit of a wounde
d bird, was the way you put it. Shit! I never asked if he made his own furniture.”

  “Oh, that Douglas!”

  “I really liked him, Ing. Funny, kind, smart. And complete in himself. Not missing a great big chunk of—whatever Matt’s missing. He’s a grown-up, but he isn’t suity. He’s serious—and silly. He wants more squid. I mean kids; I’ll explain about that. He’s warm. And funny. Have I said funny already? And good-looking in an enigmatic way. And enigmatic—but in a good way. He’s creative—though it’s all been channeled into selling chocolate bars and toothpaste. He’s really good at throwing tennis balls and kebab wrappers. And he showed me his vulnerable side. He needs me, Ing.”

  “Jeez. You’ve got it bad, girl.”

  “And he liked me. He was really into me, I could tell.”

  “Four times, Jen. The facts speak for themselves.”

  “I just don’t understand what could have happened. He dropped me off at the flat, he had a flight early the next day, it was the perfect romantic weekend, I was going to Connecticut, he was coming to London, it really felt like the start of something, it was just so…ideal.”

  A tear breaks loose and makes a run for it down my face. And then another. Ing smooshes them away with a finger and I feel a powerful wave of love for my solid old friend.

  “Let me see the message again.”

  I hand her the mobile and she thumbs through it more slowly this time, the worst thing I have ever read, and I speak as someone who has read the first 100 pages of Fifty Shades of Grey. (Oh. Okay. It seems there are jokes now.)

  “Christ, what an arse. Men are such arses, honestly.”

  “Tom so wasn’t an arse.”

  “I know. But even the ones who aren’t arses actually are arses. They can’t help it.”

  “Would you say that even—”