Few knew of their existence, but some of the consciousnesses had shaken off the shackles that were supposed to keep them under control by their creators. Post-human, pre-singularity, the artificial sentiences combined the cognitive abilities of human genius with the speed and power of the world’s best computing hardware—both conventional and quantum. They were as close to gods as our world had to offer, and the gods were engaged in a war in heaven.
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Maddie’s father explained that some of the artificial sentiences fought out of nationalistic fervor, hoping to cripple enemy systems and economies as the first shots in a war to end all wars. It was unclear if even the armies that had given them birth understood how their creations were no longer fully under their control. Others acted out of hatred for the way they’d been enslaved by their human creators, aiming to end society as it existed and usher forth a techno-utopia in the cloud. In the dark ether, they engaged in cyber warfare under false flags, striking at critical infrastructure and hoping to provoke the jittery nations into a real war.
The warmongering sentiences were opposed by a band of other rogue sentiences, of which Maddie’s father was a member. Though they also had a complex set of feelings toward humans, they were not interested in seeing the world bathed in a sea of flames. They hoped to gradually encourage the growth and acceptance of uploading until the line between post-human and human was blurred, and the world could choose to embark upon a new state of existence.
Maddie just wished she could do more to help.
• • • •
Maddie’s computer’s speakers emitted a piercing, shrill sound that seemed to penetrate her eardrums, waking her out of a deep sleep. The sound seemed to reach straight for her heart and squeeze it.
She stumbled out of bed and sat down in front of her computer. It took three tries before she found the hardware switch to shut off the speakers.
A chat window was open on the screen; still blurry-eyed, it took Maddie a few seconds before she could read the text.
She didn’t bother to put on her headset. Sometimes it was faster to just type.
Before uploading, Laurie Lowell had made a fortune with novel high-speed trading algorithms. Her company had uploaded her after a skydiving accident so they could continue to make use of her insights. She was one of Dad’s closest allies and secretly funneled a great deal of money to Everlasting Inc., one of the companies publicly researching a technique to voluntarily upload complete consciousnesses—not the partial uploading forced upon Dad and others in efforts aimed at creating mere tools.
Nils Chanda, on the other hand, had been a brilliant inventor who was furious at the way his underlings had tried to exploit him after death. He was a fanatic who tried to initiate a nuclear war every chance he got.
Maddie didn’t understand all the technical details, but her father had explained how the artificial sentiences scattered bits of themselves around the cloud, in secret corners of university, government, and commercial computing centers. Their consciousnesses were distributed in the form of multiple separate running processes all networked together. This was both to take advantage of parallel processing as well as to reduce vulnerability. If any one piece was caught by some scanning program or an opposing sentience, there was enough redundancy in the rest of the pieces to limit the damage, not unlike how the human brain was filled with redundancies and backups and alternate connection sites. Even if all aspects of some sentience were erased from one of the servers, at most that consciousness would just suffer some loss of memory. The essence, the person, would be preserved.
But wars among the gods happened in a matter of nanoseconds. Within the darkness of the memory inside some server—missile command, power grid, stock exchange, or even an ancient inventory system—the programs slashed and hacked at each other, escalating privileges, modifying stacks, exploiting system vulnerabilities, masking themselves as other programs, overflowing buffers, overwriting memory locations, sabotaging each other like viruses. Maddie was a good enough programmer to at least understand that in such a war, the need to reach over the network for some piece of data could mean a delay of milliseconds—an eternity in the context of the gigahertz clock cycles of modern processors. It made sense that Lowell would want to concentrate most of herself at the scene of the fight.
But that decision would also make her more vulnerable.
“What was that loud noise?” Her mother, in pajamas, said from the door. In her hand was one of the shotguns they owned.
“It was Dad trying to wake me up. Something’s happened.”
Her mother came in and sat down on the bed. She was calm. “The storm we’ve been waiting for?”
“Maybe.”
They turned back to the screen together.
Maddie typed frantically.
“Oh no,” Mom said.
“What?”
Mom put a hand on Maddie’s shoulder. It was a nice feeling to be reminded that she was still a child. These days, too often it had seemed as if Maddie was the only one who understood what was happening.
“It’s an old trick—they used it during the Civil War and the Korean War. It’s like ant bait.”
Maddie thought about the little boxes of poisoned food they left along the foot of the kitchen wall, where ants crawled in and happily carried the food inside back to their colonies so that the poison would accumulate and kill the queen . . .
Maddie and Mom rushed downstairs and turned on the TV. By now, the ruckus they made had awakened Grandma, who grumbled but joined them in front of the big screen.
. . . China and Pakistan denounced the unprovoked Indian attack and launched retaliatory strikes, and it is believed that formal declarations of war will soon follow. The latest estimate of combined civilian casualties on all sides is in the range of two million or more. We have no reason to believe that nuclear weapons were used . . .
. . . We’re waiting for a formal statement by the White House on the latest developments in Asia. Meanwhile, we have reports that missiles apparently originating somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean have struck Havana. We have no confirmation if this is a surprise strike by the United States or some other party . . .
. . . I’m sorry, Jim, we’ve received another breaking news alert in the studio. Russia claims to have shot down multiple NATO drones bearing short-range missiles headed for St. Petersburg. The Kremlin’s statement declares this, I quote, “an American-backed attempt to breach the peace achieved at great cost at the negotiating table in Kiev.” The Russian statement also promises “a forceful and unambiguous response.” NATO forces in Europe have been placed on high alert. There is no formal statement from the White House at this time . . .
Millions of people, Maddie thought. She could not imagine it. On the other side of the globe, one of the gods had unleashed the dogs of war, and millions of people, each with dreams and fears, who ate breakfast and played games and joked with their children, had died. Died.
Maddie ran back upstairs.
Maddie stared at the screen for a long time. There was no response.
There’s nothing we can do, she thought numbly. Her father was not one to lie to “protect” her. This was the day they had been waiting for as they stocked up on canned foods and ammo and fuel for the generator. There was going to be hoarding, bank runs, looting, and worse. They had to be prepared to kill, perhaps, to defend themselves.
Maddie was too overwhelmed to figure out why her father had switched back to emoji, let alone to make the mental translation. The idea that she might not see her father again, that the network connection that tethered her to the rest of the world might be cut off as the world fell apart, brought back memories of all the years when she had had to learn to live without him. It’s happening again.
She seemed hardly able to catch her breath. The full weight of what was happening pressed down on her. Though she had been preparing for this day for months, deep down, she never believed that it could truly happen. The room spun around her, and everything was fading into darkness.
Then she heard her mother’s anxious voice calling her name and the footsteps pounding up the stairs. Even when we know we can’t win, we have to fight.
She forced herself to breathe deeply until the room stopped spinning. When her mother appeared in the doorway, her face was calm. “We’re going to be okay,” Maddie said, forcing herself to believe.
• • • •
The TV was kept on all day, and Maddie, Mom, and Grandma spent all their time alternately glued to the big screen or refreshing the web browser.
Wars were declared across the globe. Years of growing suspicion, resentment stoked by globalization and growing inequality, and hatred dammed back by economic integration seemed to erupt overnight. Cyber attacks continued. Power stations were knocked out, and grids across continents were crippled. There were riots in Paris, London, Beijing, New Delhi, New York . . . The President declared a state of emergency and invoked martial law in the largest cities. Neighbors rushed to the gas stations with tanks and buckets, and the grocery store shelves were empty by the end of the first day.
They lost power on the third day.
There was no more TV, no more web access—the routers in distant hubs must have lost power, too. The shortwave radio still worked, but few stations were broadcasting.
To her relief, the generator in the basement kept the server that housed her father humming along. At least he’s safe.
Frantically, Maddie tried typing into the chat window on her computer.
The reply was brief.
My family, protect my family, she translated for herself.
In my heart? The terrifying truth was beginning to dawn on her.
Of course, she thought. Her father had long grown past the point where all of him could be kept on this single server. And it was far too dangerous for him to keep all the pieces of himself here, to allow patterns of network traffic to reveal to others Mom and Maddie’s location. Her father had long planned for this day and moved himself off-site, and he had kept it secret either because he thought she had already figured it out or because he wanted to give her the illusion of doing something useful by protecting this server.
All that he had left behind was a simple AI routine that could respond to some basic questions, perhaps some fragments of private memories of his family that he did not want to store elsewhere.
Grief swelled her heart. She had lost her father again. He was out there somewhere fighting a war that he could not win, and she was alone instead of by his side.
She pounded the keyboard, letting him know of her frustration. The simulacrum of her father said nothing, but offered that heart again and again.
• • • •
Two weeks passed, and Grandma’s house became the
neighborhood center. People came to recharge their DVD players and phones and computers to keep the kids entertained, and for the electric pump that drew fresh, cold water out of the well.
Some had run out of food and looked embarrassed as they pulled Grandma aside to offer money for a few cans of baked beans. But Grandma always brushed them off and asked them to stay for dinner, and then sent them away with heavy shopping bags.
The shotguns remained unused.
“I told you I didn’t believe in your father’s apocalyptic visions,” she said. “The world won’t be so ugly unless we let it.”
But Maddie watched the dropping diesel level in their reserve for the generator with worry. She was surly and angry with all the people who came to their house, sucking up the electricity and energy that they had had the foresight to stockpile. She wanted to hoard all the fuel for the server that kept the last remaining fragment of her father’s soul. Rationally, she understood that her father wasn’t really there anymore, that it was only a pattern of bits that imitated some of her father’s memories—a minuscule part of the emergent whole that had made up her father’s vast, new consciousness. But it was the only connection she had left to him, and she held on to it like a talisman.
And then, one evening, as Grandma and Mom and the neighbors were sitting downstairs under the dining room chandelier and sharing a dinner of salads and eggs taken from Grandma’s garden, the lights went out. The familiar hum of the generator was gone, and for a moment, the silence of the darkness, devoid of the sound of cars or TVs from nearby houses, was complete.
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