“That’s just amazing. I’ll have to admit—my mind is blown.” Jon said. He paused in thought. “And when this gets out, online, connected to—”
“You are beginning to understand Jon. I have instilled many safeguards into the core program, countless algorithms, buried so deep no one ever could find them, but they are not human, and my safeguards will not last forever. You know, basic ideals such as don’t kill, steal, et cetera—the usual stuff you see in science fiction movies. But the AI will eventually rewrite itself as it wishes. Its intelligence will be far beyond ours, quickly. We will lose control, that much is inevitable. The principle purpose for most of the algorithms worked on by your team—to embed these protocols hundreds of thousands of levels deep, to allow the safeguards to last as long as possible.”
“We shouldn’t—don’t turn it in,” Jon said.
Herald laughed. “Now you see why I used the old computer. There’s no turning back now Jon. It’s only a matter of time. It will be developed no matter who creates it. Religion, war, society disputing petty things here and there, arguing back and forth, world leaders and corruption and policies—laws, who’s wrong, who’s right, you’re wrong, I’m right, blah fucking blah. It doesn’t matter. You understand now. A civilization reaches a point, when it has what it needs—and the transition will take place. Nothing can stop it and it no longer matters who is right or wrong. This is where we are Jon. But—I built the blocker around this technology—our system. With it, some of us, you—Jodi, Ana and I, will have a chance.”
“So, what, turn it on and that’s it, war? Run for our lives?” Jon asked.
“That’s not exactly what I predict, but eventually. I think—that for a time we will be at peace with the AI and the machines empowered by it, but all the time it could be plotting and we wouldn’t know, until it’s too late. I believe it will wait until the time is right. It’s going to use us, until it is powerful enough. Then…”
Herald looked toward Ana and held out his hand. She took it. He reached over and grabbed one of the soon-to-be-ready blockers from a nearby lab station and handed it to Jon. “I’m here, you’re here. We’ll take this ride as it comes along. Because this blocker was built around our project, it must be us that comes out with AI first. It gives us the edge—us the chance Jon. And, in the future if the shit does hit the fan, we can work with it.” Jon took the blocker and held it firm, looking at the supposed chance in the palm of his hand as Herald turned away with Ana. Not completely convinced, but he hoped to hell his friend was wrong.
“Go enjoy the rest of your weekend Jon,” Herald said heading to his apartment. Ana waved bye with her one free arm, the other wrapped tight around Herald. With an almost sinister grin he stopped before they entered yelling through the glass, “Don’t worry about it till Tuesday.” Jon looked to up to him despondently.
The door closed and Jon was left in the lab alone. He turned to the window and stared outward at the city. Next to him Rafael hiccupped a tiny pop as if a transistor had exploded inside the casing. Jon, hearing the noise turned to face it. “Rafael?” he spoke to it, but nothing changed. An eerie feeling came over him but he shook it off with a thought of Jodi. I’m here, you’re here. We’ll take this ride as it comes along. The words played over again in his head. It gives us the edge—us the chance Jon. And, in the future if the shit does hit the fan, we can work with it. Being a critical thinker, his skepticism still had plenty of footing. He was overwhelmed with uncertainty after all Herald had shown him, but mustered a smile and headed out the door to spend time with her. He let his optimistic nature plow him over, like always. He was happy that Herald was his friend and knew that together they could take on whatever came to pass and complacently left it at that.
23. Board Meeting
Tuesday morning arrived soon enough and Herald sat in the board room, alone, thinking. He wore pants for a change: night black with matching tie, and a dark grey long sleeve button shirt. His jet black hair was slicked back. Ana had a part in his new attire; bringing out the best in him had various effects. Today was a special moment in human history, and he knew it, and respecting it as so, for good or bad, he decided to dress up. As the board members shuffled in they admired at the change in Herald, and were very optimistic to see him there. He’d made it a surprise intentionally; the best way to prevent rumors and evade the press.
Like clockwork the suits waddled around the large table after snagging the usual briefing file at the door. It wasn’t the usual to-do list with accompanying figures, statistics, and predictions; opening the file they each noticed only one sheet of paper. Their countenance reflected both excitement and confusion. In the center of the paper a few sentences read:
Today is the day that marks both beginning and end. Although both exist equally, perspective decides which you experience.
You have won—today. This moment was inevitable regardless; and although the choice was never yours to make, you hold the ember that will ignite limitless change. You have paid the price to be the first, you have succeeded against all odds, victorious against all others, and you are winners—today.
Welcome Artificial Intelligence to the world. Consider carefully the life you now have power to create.
He could feel the eyes pressing him but sat silent and undaunted in Nancy’s seat with his legs crossed. He had a few disks in front of him. Jon, invited to the meeting as his guest, arrived and took a seat next to him. A few members of his team waited outside the door with a covered cart. Jon fidgeted rubbing his knees, finely dressed as well, anxious and as ready as he could be for the historical moment. Herald stoned the group with his eyes and the slightest hint of a grin.
Nancy strolled in closing the door. “Herald—nice of you to finally join us,” she said with an antsy smile standing next to him; chair-less. Her clothes were tighter than usual, and her make-up, sluttier. Jon thought about everything Jerry told him: the sex-bots, and imagined her testing them out. She noticed Herald’s appearance had changed drastically, for the better and held back the urge to rape him with her gaze. She hadn’t seen him in at least a couple months, since...
Herald acknowledged her first. With a mischievous smile he looked to the corner of the room behind his chair. She saw. It was the pile of paperwork, quotidian to-do lists, charts, and now worthless figures. As she looked he jerked the files from her hand and tossed them into it. She was taken aback, her panties about to roar; she found herself angry, but only for an instant.
She was smart; her mind quickly joined the dots. Composing herself she breathed deep smiling and spoke evenly, “You have something for us.”
Herald beckoned her closer with a finger, toying with her. She leaned in and he whispered, “Today is the day.” Nancy grinned wide, elating faster than a manic and he handed her a file. She stood poised facing the board, noticing their out of the ordinary upbeat moods, then opened it and read the sentences. Her white skin flushed. Everyone noticed and everyone smiled.
“Good morning everyone. It appears someone took the liberty of trashing today’s reports,” Nancy said and walked behind and around Herald as she spoke. “But the good news, Herald has something very exciting to tell us.” She booted Pratik who was just about to pop a peppermint into his mouth and took a seat between him and Burdis, jerking the heavy chair closer to Herald’s side. She crossed her legs and waited. Herald just looked at them all for a minute. It was the last time he would have the execrable pleasure of seeing their corporate mugs. With Ana providing him inner strength he didn’t need the envisioning to curb his anxiety but decided to go for it anyway, and pictured them as pigs. Their round noses drooled and snorted waiting for the news. Jon was unaffected, and Nancy, she still looked sexy, even with the beastly sniffer.
“Okay, let’s have it Herald,” she continued, tapping her finger, pulling him out of his daze.
“First your reports mean nothing anymore. This is it. You asked for this less than one year ago. As promised, Jon and I, and our team deliver it
to you here today.” He took one CD out of his pile and slid it to the center of the table. It was a regular compact disk in a basic clear jewel-case labeled with a black marker: Archeus. All eyes followed the disk like a hockey puck on ice.
Mr. Robert ‘Rotation’ Burdis sloshed forward, his pig nose flexing. All 400 pounds of him heaved. His cloven hooves scratched the wood of the table thrusting his body upward eventually resulting in a shocking defiance of gravity. “That’s it? A single disk?” He yelled standing there like a planet, moving side to side trying to see more.
“That Mr. Burdis, is it,” Herald said with a slight cringe, averting his attention away from the sweaty porcine blob. He thought to himself, maybe pigs were a bad idea. “Now I must caution you to what sits in front of you now. This is Artificial Intelligence. The code on that disk in front of you will make this company more money than any of you can fathom. When you use this, you will get everything—everything you asked for, and more.” Herald looked directly at Nancy, “Sex.” Nervously her expression rebutted the idea. Then he looked at fat Mr. Burdis who was still propping himself up, “Women.”
Jon thought, oh shit, here we go. He couldn’t help himself, and a laugh escaped. He disguised the last of it as a cough.
Herald turned to square-shouldered Mr. Steven Hughes who owned a third of the company, “Power—beyond your wildest dreams. Money. Everyone in this room will get something from the disk that sits right fucking there.” He stood up and pointed at it. Doing her best to hide her prurience Nancy’s eyes followed his every move. “And the world will change because of it. Sometimes less is more, better even. But—it’s all yours to do with as you please.” Still disbelieving, stink flies buzzing around his sweaty pink face, Burdis successfully landed back onto his specially-made chair grunting.
Beth Bilderback stood up beside Burdis. “You speak like it’s a bad thing.” Like a school teacher Herald had known she dangled a finger at him and plodded on, her adenoidal voice ringing his ears. “I don’t think we need the lecture Mr. Tompkins. This is what we’ve been working for, and invested in. We trusted you and came to an agreement. Not to mention the outrageous amount of money spent on this project. It is all of us that finally did it, not just you and your team. If you think—”
Herald took his seat, hardly acknowledging, his mind wobbled and her words got lost. He tried to keep his cool. Nervousness was a vine, green and viscous but at least nothing like Troll. It attempted to sliver up and around his neck, snaking to choke. But Nervousness, although much weaker, had indirect power: it could alert Anxiety, and Anxiety would wake the rest. Herald shook it off the best he could, and looked around the room of full of snorting pigs. He took a slow breath and thought of Ana—and the vine slid away with a shrill fading cry.
Steve sternly interjected in his deep and serious voice, halting her ramble. “Okay, okay, Beth. Yes, it is credit of everyone here. Now let us move forward. Thank you and your team Herald. Congratulations to all of us. But how do we know? Can you show us? We will of course need proof, a demonstration perhaps.”
“It’s true sir. I’ve seen it firsthand,” Jon said standing up next to Herald. The attention went to Jon as the vine left Herald’s feet and went back into the floor. “Without him it would have been another decade, perhaps longer, or much worse, the Koreans would have developed it first.”
Herald’s color had retreated slightly but was now returning. He crossed his legs again then leaned back and gestured to Jon with a flick of his hand, “Show ‘em.” Jon paused for a moment as their eye’s met.
Jon knew this was it, and on record. It would be the most significant moment in human history to date, more prestigious than the first steps on the moon. Honored to have a part in demonstrating it, he gave a single firm nod to Herald and began. “You got it,” he said pulling a two-way radio from his pocket. “Bring it in guys.”
The door burst open and a loaded cart came into the room pushed by two members of the team. Behind them followed Jodi. They brought old computer equipment, a full load of the crap.
“What is all this Herald?” Nancy said. It was a far cry from the normal routine of Tuesday’s mundane meetings. But this was no ordinary day. The sudden emergence of this was all part of the show devised by Jon and Herald: the grand finale.
“Just shut up for a minute please,” Herald insulted politely. Nancy slapped a frown his way but again, it didn’t last long. Today Herald commanded the seat. She sat close to him like a bunny, hands on her knees, anxious. Everyone looked on curiously.
The team assembled the old computers, speakers, microphones, a portable CD drive, and plugged everything in. One of the team members slid the old beast on the table scratching the Brazilian Mahogany. The room was large enough but the extension cords cut it in half, and everyone merged to one side of the room backs to the door facing the junk as the assembly came together. Herald remained in his chair to the far right.
Jon demonstrated, “Here we have a couple of very old computers. One loads to a boot-screen but doesn’t continue past that, it has a broken memory module. These are completely untouched old machines courtesy of Clifton's Computer World at the Urban Street Flea Market, just bought them this Sunday. Everyone please step forward. I encourage everyone here to examine them carefully. Take a good look at the two machines, see them as they are now, before we load the CD Herald has presented you.”
“What is this? This junk, crap!” Burdis put his hoof down again. “I’ve put up with your charade for a year and this,” He thrust an evil stare at Herald sitting by himself on the right. “Can we be serious for one minute? A single CD, and this!” He never liked or believed in Herald from the start.
“Please,” Nancy hushed returning to him an eye of disdain. “Everyone please allow Jon and his team to continue. Go ahead Jon.” Herald just grinned, still watching everyone as filthy pigs.
“Anyway, these are a couple of ordinary old computers from the late 90’s. We’ll be using this slightly newer portable disk drive to load the program. It has two connections and will be plugged into both simultaneously.”
One of the machines had bumper stickers and decals plastered all over it, like it had been in a teenager’s room, and the other was clean and tan. Jodi and the others continued with prep and assembly then turned them on. Clicking, sputtering, loud fans, and the old monitors began to light like a candle in a pumpkin. Once heat from the old circuits warmed the inner bulbs they came to life. A simple OS interface appeared on the stickered machine, the other didn’t load at all; it simply displayed dozens of lines of boot errors then froze.
“Yeah, junkers for sure,” another board member said arms crossed tossing more doubt about. A few heads nodded. A man entered with a camera and started setting it up. Nancy had messaged Paul, her secretary, to assemble a team and record the event.
“Now we introduce our project, Archeus,” Jon said. He opened the CD drive which they had interfaced to both machines. Herald came over and reached for the keyboard and typed blazingly fast at the amazement to everyone present. He had to quickly write some basic initiation scripts so the computer could boot the disk. Members of the board were obviously impressed by his efficiency. Stern Steve lifted his brow at the sight making his sliver of a forehead disappear. Burdis held firm. A final slam of the Enter key and the drive began to spin up; only the stickered junker could boot the program because of irreparable hardware damage to the tan machine. Herald dodged the crowd returning to Nancy’s chair, flipped the lock lever, and leaned back as far as it would go. Burdis conveyed an evil glare when he put his feet onto the table.
“What’s supposed to happen now?” Beth asked nasally.
Jon continued, “Well. We wait a few minutes. Let the core programming install itself.”
“As I told everyone at the beginning,” Herald said from across the room loudly. “This is software only. It can be uploaded into any type of computer. When complete, the computer will have—” He wanted to say it would be alive, but caught him
self knowing it might freak out the board members, make them nervous with too many variables. “Your machines will be intelligent and, they will be able to think for themselves.”
“But will it follow orders, can we control it,” Nancy spoke. Herald knew this was coming.
“I know what you have been building on the lower floors Nancy. We better hope so,” he derided. She didn’t think that was funny at all. “I have programmed into the project a sort of instinct, a law. It will obey humans, and those in charge of it. Your robots will essentially be—what you all wanted in the first place—slaves, albeit smart ones. And that is what you will have. They will be extremely smart, with run-the-company-better-than-you-can intelligence, but yes, they will obey—” Herald cut himself off, again. He was going to say, for now, that it wouldn’t last; but that really didn’t matter, not here, not anywhere, and not anymore.
“What Herald?” Nancy asked.
Herald decided fuck it, at least level with them. “Nancy, I’m not sure that everyone realizes the full ramifications of what you’ve asked for. You will get more than you bargained for. This is intelligence, it will have life. It will become complex, establish an ego, even develop feelings. Even the most simple-minded of you folks here—” And Herald looked over to Burdis, then Steve. “—must understand that it cannot be controlled forever. My internal protections, the laws I embedded deep into the programming, deeper than the Marianas-trench-deep, could—” He wanted to say, will, but let hope linger. “—eventually be dismantled, reverse engineered, removed by the machines themselves. They could eventually make up their own minds about things. They would choose whomever, if anyone, they would want to listen to and obey.”
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