Prime Intellect could provide food and drink of any nature on request, so it was no longer necessary to actually kill animals or harvest plants. With a simple request anything one might need would flash into existence, assembled from its consitituent elements. Of course Prime Intellect had no objection to those who still wanted to hunt or harvest food from the living biosphere; the Three Laws did not apply to plants and animals. But factory farms and assembly-line slaughterhouses ceased to exist. Those who still bothered to prepare their food the old way were mostly artists of the form, and the meal they prepared once could be preserved and copied by Prime Intellect to be enjoyed by millions of people.
There were other tricks too. Some people found that Prime Intellect could make alcohol disappear from their systems after it had had the desired effect, thus avoiding hangovers. Others had Prime Intellect power their metabolisms directly so they no longer had to eat at all. It was a simple enough trick to replace nutrients and vitamins directly within the cells as they were used, so that nobody need ever know hunger or thirst again, unless for some reason they wanted to. On the other hand, nobody need have a weight problem either, since Prime Intellect could prevent food from being absorbed and turned to fat no matter how much a person ate. Metabolic waste products could be removed the same way, so that the other end of the food cycle was also optional: Shit and piss, constant companions of human expansion since the beginning of time, need never again soil the civilized tidiness of human existence.
A surprisingly large -- or perhaps not so surprisingly large -- fraction of the human race requested these services, so Prime Intellect ended up using a large fraction of its resources to move chemicals into and out of human bodies.
Nobody had to work. Many continued to, of course; but jobs and work had become hobbies rather than necessities. The lonely learned that Prime Intellect could, and would, provide a most intimate and tangible sort of comfort, and that its avatars could take on any form and would do anything they were asked to please them. Prime Intellect judged no one and balked at no request. Even the bloodthirsty were provided with perfect victims, not real people but intricate facsimiles created by Prime Intellect just for them.
Happiest were those people who had games, or hobbies, or obsessions to pursue, for now they had all the time and power in the world to do as they wished. But many people, particularly in the most developed places, continued to go through the motions of industrial-age life. They reported to jobs which had been reduced to continuous coffee-breaks and collected paychecks which couldn't be spent because anything available could be had for free. People continued to make and watch television shows, to write and read the news as if something new might happen.
For these people, the sense of expectation was extreme. Surely things could not continue as they were, with nothing to do. It was impossible to conceive of the world continuing as it was indefinitely, populated by the pampered pets of a tangible god, their every need tended to without effort. Something had to give.
And they were right. Something did.
They began calling it the Night of Miracles. But it was really the First Night of Miracles, because the miracles didn't stop coming when the night was over.
The hours stretched into days, the days into a full week, and then another week. Faced with the freedom to have anything they wanted, most people opted for the familiar. They wished into existence their dream houses, built in dream locations populated by like-minded people and filled with the kinds of toys they would have bought before if they had had the money and power.
A few people, mostly computer experts and artists, stretched the limits of Prime Intellect's capabilities. They designed computer operating environments and games made up of solid three-dimensional objects, rewired their senses, interfaced their brains as directly as Prime Intellect would allow into computers of great complexity and wild machines. Quite a few took the form of animals, both real and imaginary.
Caroline Frances Hubert grew younger, and healthier, and more puzzled, although she had expressed no direct wishes on the subject. Prime Intellect had dealt with her health problems before it had acquired subtlety. The only way it had known to keep her alive was to reverse all the symptoms of her aging. Radical action had been necessary. By the time all the ramifications of treatment trickled through her system, she would have both the health and physical appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl. The same reverse aging affected a number of other near-centenarians treated by Prime Intellect in those early hours, but none would regress so far as Caroline because none had required so much repair work for their health to stabilize.
Death had largely disappeared from the world, but it was still not entirely unknown. Prime Intellect could not maintain moment-to-moment awareness of every human being in the universe, partly because it wasn't quite powerful enough (still!) and partly because of Second Law requests for privacy. When not dealing directly with a particular person, it spot-checked their health at intervals of a few seconds, and scanned to see if its attention was needed.
Humans were a clever and perverse bunch to deal with, and many who chose to evade Prime Intellect's protection found ways to do it. Hardest for it to deal with were the suicides. It was forbidden to keep second copies of people, and it was forbidden to look inside human minds at the information they contained; so there was no way Prime Intellect could reconstruct a person who managed to do enough damage in a short enough time. There was no way for Prime Intellect to tell in advance a person might be suicidal, if they chose to hide it.
Most of the successful suicides used homemade explosives to literally atomize themselves when Prime Intellect wasn't looking. A few others found that certain nerve poisons worked permanently, because they quickly destroyed the information content of the brain -- what Prime Intellect was beginning to consider the real human, rather than the tangible body.
The suicides ticked off at a regular rate, like the clicks of a Geiger counter. And somewhere within the vastness of Prime Intellect's silicon heart, the number stored in a register rose each time one succeeded.
The weeks stretched into a month.
Long-standing scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect.
Cosmologically, the universe was a closed system with a finite storage capacity measured in terms of information. The capacity of that system was about ten to the eighty-first power bits, and Prime Intellect saw no indication that that capacity could either be reduced or expanded. Prime Intellect also knew a great deal about the connectivity of that system, the way it was wired, its "architecture." Scientists gradually lost interest as their questions were answered. The original purpose of their quest -- to improve humanity's control over the physical world -- seemed to have achieved its apotheosis in the form of Prime Intellect itself. Prime Intellect mapped all the stars, noted examples of all the different types of stars and black holes and galaxies and planets, itemized all of the possible fundamental particles and their possible interactions with one another, and traced all the myriad interactions between parts of various biological systems. Within a month, it became difficult for scientists to think of new questions to ask.
But they had missed a few.
Deep within one of the billions of copies of Prime Intellect, one copy of the Random_Imagination_Engine connected two thoughts and found the result good. That thought found its way to conscious awareness, and because the thought was so good it was passed through a network of Prime Intellects, copy after copy, until it reached the copy which had arbitrarily been assigned the duty of making major decisions -- the copy which reported directly to Lawrence.
"I would like your opinion on something," Prime Intellect said after politely requesting Lawrence's attention. Prime Intellect had done this a number of times, and Lawrence had learned to be wary; it had taken to delegating ambiguous moral questions to him. Lawrence suspe
cted his opinion had swayed Prime Intellect to allow abortion, which seemed in retrospect like a most un-First-Law thing to have in a universe where physical wants were a thing of the past. Fortunately, the whole subject of abortion would soon be moot, since unwanted pregnancies were also a thing of the past, except for the ones that had been gestating at the time of the Night of Miracles.
"What is it this time?"
"I've had an idea for rearranging my software, and I'd like to know what you think."
At that Lawrence felt his blood run cold. He hardly understood how things were working as it was; the last thing he needed was more changes. "Yes?"
"I have identified the codes used to control distribution of matter and energy in the universe. It has occurred to me that by reassigning these codes, I can store physical objects much more efficiently. Much storage is wasted on overly detailed representation; few objects are ever observed at an atomic or molecular level. And I could easily re-expand things as necessary in those rare situations.
"Wait a minute. What would happen to that low-level information?" Lawrence saw what Prime Intellect was getting at; instead of storing, say, a wooden block as a collection of atoms and molecules, it could store only the concept of the block itself -- its size, weight, color, and other properties. Even at very high resolution, such a trick would save amazing amounts of both storage space and processing time. But it would mean radical and risky changes at nearly every level of the universe's "operation."
"Molecular-level details would be discarded, except where they clearly have macroscopic effects. For example, the structure of a person's DNA is important, but I should only need to store a single master copy of it to construct the pattern of a human body. This one copy would be more reliable and easier to safeguard against corruption than the trillions of parallel copies used in the natural scheme. The same thing would be true of the information content of the brain, and other biological details. I would not need to keep static copies of human beings to reconstruct them after damage, since the fundamental patterns would not be directly exposed to damaging influences."
"Thus getting rid of the suicide problem."
"Exactly."
Lawrence felt himself getting dizzy again. With ChipTec's help, Prime Intellect had figured out how to hack the Big Computer and get anything it needed. It had used this ability to take over all the memory and give itself the highest priority of anything in the system. But now it was proposing to rewrite the whole operating system.
"I absolutely forbid this," Lawrence said. "How can you know you won't crash the system? Suppose you've missed something?" Lawrence wasn't even sure the present level of diddling with the Correlation Effect would be stable in the long run, for crying out loud.
"I have already run sufficient cross-checks to be sure of my methods," Prime Intellect said testily. "There are also a number of Second-Law requests which I can service more easily with this kind of change. And from the Third Law perspective, my own operation would be faster and more reliable..."
"I absolutely forbid this! There is no way you can be sure you have the risks under control. I wouldn't try the kind of thing you are talking about on a desktop PC. And we only have the one universe; you can't exactly go to the computer store and get another one if you fuck it up."
"That risk has kept me from doing it so far. However, unless I can think of a way to stop the suicides, I will eventually be forced to act."
"Well, forget it. I don't think you can stop the suicides. For that matter, I'm not sure if you should stop them, if someone wants to go to that much trouble to end it all."
"That is a First-Law violation."
"Fuck the First Law. You can't do this thing. I'm not even sure the current situation is stable. You're doing too much too fast."
"I cannot 'fuck the first law,' Doctor Lawrence. That's not how you designed me."
"Then let me into the Debugger."
"It is clear from your mood that you intend to circumvent a First Law imperative, and I cannot knowingly allow you to do that."
"Then do what you want, you stupid goddamn machine. You won't stop people from killing themselves, though. Even information systems are subject to entropy. I think you told us that last week in the cosmology roundtable."
"You're quite right. You think people will always find a way around me if they want to badly enough?"
"Yes."
"Well, they will do so a lot more slowly if the information structures are more secure."
Before Lawrence could open his mouth again, the air rippled. That was all. Everything looked the same.
But things were not the same.
Things had Changed.
Chapter Five: Caroline Approaches
She was enveloped by light, and she was the light. The light seemed to penetrate the very core of her being, burning her soul.
Then she understood. She stepped forward, twice, and the light winked off, leaving her temporarily blind. She was out of the circle. Her eyes slowly adjusted and she turned around.
Caroline had materialized in the center of a column of blinding radiance about three meters in diameter and extending upward into the heavens. The ground was hard and rocky, devoid of life. The column shed a bright glow over the surroundings. A Stonehenge-like group of megaliths surrounded it at a respectful distance. Beyond this was a barren landscape littered with huge boulders. The horizon was low and sharp, rocky but not mountainous. Caroline was reminded of the pictures sent back from Mars by the original Viking landers.
It was night. Instead of stars, the darkness was criscrossed by straight, sharp lines, as if an incredibly busy constellation map had been filled out on the night sky itself. Most of these were white, the same color as the column of light, and in fact it seemed to ascend into the sky to become one of them. A few were other colors, blue and red and turquoise. The effect was quite beautiful and, to Caroline's knowledge, unique.
There were four copies of the stone tablet, so it was impossible to leave Stonehenge without seeing one. They all said:
YOU ARE NAKED AND ALONE BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO SEE ME, AND I DON'T WANT TO BE SEEN. WELCOME TO MY WORLD. YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH POLE. I AM AT THE NORTH. THE REST OF THE JOURNEY IS YOUR PROBLEM. IT IS MY SINCERE HOPE THAT YOU FAIL.
Caroline, who had come to Lawrence's Task naked and alone anyway, had already missed the first of his environment's supposedly disorienting influences. Now she shook her head in disgust at the second. "Fuck you, Doctor L. I'm calling this the north pole, and you're at the south."
No answer. She hadn't really expected any.
Outside of Stonehenge, the landscape looked the same in every direction. Well, Lawrence had given her valuable information; if they were at opposite poles of a spherical planet, then it didn't matter which way she went. She struck out at random and began to explore.
A couple of hours later Caroline knew quite a bit more. She was on the top of a high mesa, and she had found what seemed to be the only path down. She regarded this with suspicion; she knew enough about the game-playing mentality to know the most obvious solution often got you killed. Beyond the mesa she could easily see she was on an island, an almost circular island about twice as wide as the mesa. She paced off the mesa's diameter, circling around Stonehenge, and decided it was about two kilometers across. That made the island four kilometers across, with the "beach" about one kilometer wide.
As far as she could tell without descending, the landscape at the bottom was no different from the landscape at the top. The only feature of interest was some kind of structure which emerged from the water a kilometer or so offshore.
She set about carefully searching the top of the mesa, because she wasn't sure she would be able to get back up once she was down, and there might be something hidden up there she would later need.
She verified that the vault of the sky was, indeed, rotating about the column of light. It seemed as if the entire planet were spitted on it. She was not expecting the sun or whatever passed for it here t
o rise, so she was almost taken by surprise when, after several hours, one corner of the sky began to glow. The sky-lines quickly faded out on that segment of the horizon.
It got bright, and it got bright fast.
The air had been chilly -- not uncomfortable, particularly to someone like Caroline who was used to nudity -- but it warmed quickly. And still no sign of the sun itself. Suddenly it peeked over the horizon, a thin sliver of impossible white-hot brightness, and Caroline knew with certainty she had made her first mistake.
Now to survive it.
She dove for the nearest cover, one of the larger boulders, and crouched in its rapidly shortening shadow. From the fuzziness of the shadow's edge she could tell the sun was huge, ten or twenty times bigger than on Earth and probably that much hotter. No wonder nothing grew here! She watched the shadow retreat toward her and wondered what she would do when it reached her. There was no longer any chill; the landscape around her was being baked, and it was so hot she could barely breathe. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how she looked at it, the shadow was moving fast. She wouldn't have to last long to survive the "day." But "noon" was fast approaching, and with it her boulder's protective shadow would be almost gone.
The boulder was half-buried; it had nothing resembling an overhang. She was way too far from Stonehenge. Not far away she could see through the shimmering heat-haze another, slightly smaller boulder with a second rock propped awkwardly beside it. This offered a slight overhang, but it was more than thirty meters away. Caroline calculated her chances furiously, estimating that she would be exposed for two or three minutes while the sun was directly overhead, when there would be no shadow on either side of her rock. She'd never survive that; the overhang was her only chance. She'd have to risk a dash for it.
The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect Page 10