Einsteiner

by V. K. Fourstone

  “There’s no need to hurry with the money, Monsieur Leroy, but nonetheless we have to be ready to carry out the operation,” the doctor concluded, said goodbye and hung up.

  Isaac was trembling, he instantly pictured Vicky so pale, so fragile, so seeking help and sustained by hope only. Something inside of him broke down and Isaac burst out crying. It was painful to realize that he had delayed for far too long, he felt sorry for himself. She could have died as I didn’t even consider downloading till the very end. The intrusion of the dumb-ass terrorist could have taken the lives of both of us. Why did I not come at least a day before? What a fool I was! Worse than any Veggie. The damned Agency!

  “They have everything they need to cure people: the technologies, the methodologies, the high-class specialists – and all of that thanks to sucking creativity out of people like me and Pascal. But no one benefits from it all because the treatment has to be paid for. Until we go to that freaking Agency to sell our creativity, people, our nearest and dearest, just keep getting worse!”

  What was going on? The media were choked solid with praise for Collective Mind. The whole world was rejoicing at the rosy forecasts of a happy future for mankind. Problems were being solved, scientists had been given answers to their questions, and solutions had been found for the technical puzzles. Even the people who became total Veggies after offloading their creativity were happy and looked content. What about those who fell sideways? We have no choice: it’s either Einsteiner or the abyss, right?

  No one paid any special attention any longer to terrorist attacks, like the one Isaac got involved with yesterday. Even the police ignored the feeble street protests. Solitary messiahs, protest graffiti – there were always plenty of mental cases and petty hooligans around. These troublemakers claimed we should be afraid of the power held by Collective Mind. Some opposition scientists claimed that pooled creativity was only useful to make progress on the kind of projects that had some prior work already done. Not even a billion donors, they said, could be helpful to start novel ventures of the future, such as conquering the deep space or curing future viruses. Thanks to Collective Mind, people could accelerate research and bring it to a conclusion more quickly, but without prior developments, pooled creativity was useless. Teleportation might seem like science fiction, but in the middle of the last century, the smartphone was pure science fiction, too. Not to mention the internet, as no futurists could picture its importance in today’s world.

  Last week the Agency announced that it was going to double the pay for those who study quantum physics. Alright, okay, you may think that you guys gotta create and then we’ll buy you out because in quantum physics we have serious gaps, a deficit of ideas!

  Orange Energy sucked out of people would never be able to do what its original owners could – it wasn’t capable of asking a new question, creating a dream, inventing a new fantasy. Only human beings could do that. “Nonetheless,” objected the experts from the UN, “there’s no guarantee that a man who holds on his creativity would make rational use of it by himself. We still have to reap the full benefits of the revolutionary leap forward that the world has made, readjust. Let’s harvest the scores of new inventions that Collective Mind will produce, and deal with the problems later. We’re studying them, but their number is miniscule in comparison with the thousands of supremely important successful new developments that we have.” The success of Collective Mind was well protected by the armor plating of a host of useful technologies.

  “Supremely important,” Isaac spat out angrily. His hand reached out for a cigarette. “But I don’t smoke!” In stressful moments, Isaac’s old reflex of fumbling on the table with his hand for a pack of cigarettes sometimes came back.

  He tried to pull himself together. “The computer could still work out, there’s still time. You can earn the money you need to pay for your sister’s surgery from the V-Rain. Then there’ll be enough for a decent human life too. Use the chance you’ve got! The doctors still don’t have a full picture! Just get on with the work like a grown-up while there is still time! And don't forget: long comas may cause permanent damage.”

  His rage and the pain inside his head made it hard to focus on his work.

  What the heck was going on here? Isaac slammed his hand down on the mouse in annoyance. The plastic cracked, but thank God the mouse still worked.

  “One thing the terrorist was right about was that the people who run the Agency and sit on all these inventions have too much power.”

  “In all of the futuristic films, there always has to be an omnipotent corporation or empire. Essentially that is the model of the future world. Of course, no one ever thought the dragon would emerge from the UN. The more Veggies there are, the more docile the world is. The total elimination of crime has weeded out a whole mass of freedom-loving individuals who were beyond their control. Tomorrow they’ll call anyone opposed to Collective Mind a criminal.”

  All that was left from the rebel Elvis was the small prickly piece of board and a half sane promise to burn it.

  As he tried to focus his mind on his work, Isaac played with the piece, intending to throw it out as he had promised himself to do. After his reflections about Collective Mind, Isaac felt a certain respect for Elvis’s audacity. He had to conserve his own energy and not waste his breath on idle talk and promises, especially if it wasn’t all that difficult to make them into reality. Isaac looked at the piece of board again – it had a couple of microchips and a mini-memory card on it. A mini-card, but with a big memory, and it wasn’t a fragment at all, it was complete and undamaged. Happy to do anything but work, Isaac decided to take a look at what was on it.

  He plugged it into his own computer and saw a mass of folders with files and tables. He opened the first one and froze, dumbfounded. His intuition or maybe it was that special energy of his hadn’t let him down. He was looking at a table of people who had been tested, but had not yet downloaded their creativity. First names, surnames, IQs, creativity ratings, and other data. Isaac leaned closer to the monitor and quickly ran his eyes over the confidential lines.

  “Holy shit! Didn’t that crazy hobo say: ‘Destroy this heart of the devil’? He wasn’t all that far from the truth, that Elvis.”

  The memory card contained a whole heap of incomprehensible information, but the most interesting things on it were the various ratings. This wasn’t the devil’s heart, it was his database! Isaac’s fatigue instantly evaporated. His fingers flew over the keyboard as he avidly devoured the content. “Lord, what do you want me to do with his?” he thought to himself.

  Chapter 4

  Isaac’s hands hovered motionless above the keys. Destroying something was easy, if you knew for sure what actually was to be destroyed. Isaac had come into possession of a database, but what was the right way to deal with this knowledge from out of the blue?

  “What if I search the table for names I know?” thought Isaac, in earnest excitement.

  He opened the file named Human Imagination Tone. First, he decided to try his own name, typed it in and launched the search. “I’m not in the top hundred, but I made the top thousand, marked with 996 that is,” he grinned to himself. His next search was for “Jeremy Link”. There was a lot of empty chatter available on the internet about the professor, but there was no serious open information.

  The search engine found Jeremy Link. Wow! The name was in a separate table with the striking title “Top 50 geniuses”. The genius top list, no less! And these were people who have not donated their energy!

  Isaac ran through the list eagerly: Europeans, Australians, Americans, Asians – talents could be born anywhere. The first two were unfamiliar to him; number three was a well-known Russian mathematician, who worked at MIT. He and Pascal were taught on his books. He cracked complicated theorems like nuts and was famous for always refusing money prizes for his achievements. What had jogged him into filling in a form to sell his creativity? Isaac found the answer to that question in the “Remarks” secti
on, where it said that the mathematician needed to raise money for medical treatment for his child who had a rare brain disease.

  Isaac gritted his teeth at this coincidence. Vicky, dear little sister. Isaac’s fury with Collective Mind overwhelmed him. It would never release him now.

  Vicky was Isaac’s stepsister, but she was the nearest and dearest person he had. No matter how hard Isaac tried, he couldn’t clearly recall the moment when he first met her. He remembered being introduced to a frightened little girl in a blue dress. And that it was a good day, because he was given a radio-controlled car. And a bit later Vicky’s dad – his mum’s friend, as he was introduced at the time – bought Isaac a really great bike. Then he started coming round more and more often, together with Vicky. Playing with someone, even with a girl, was better than playing on your own. On the weekends Vicky’s dad drove them to the amusement park and bought them big ice creams, and there was no reason to be afraid of someone like him. Isaac quickly got used to him and was glad when he came, always with a present, even if only a little one. Isaac was delighted when he and his mum moved into his apartment, where Isaac and Vicky had their own room.

  They grew up like that together, went summer camps and the amusement parks together. Then to school, to the parties at school, and then to the discotheques. He told her about his inventions and the problems he had making progress with them, and she listened closely and encouraged her brother, and wouldn’t let him give up. And Vicky used to laugh and say that he was her very best girlfriend, who wouldn’t even look at the same boy as she.

  Isaac drove away his memories and went back to the data base.

  Isaac saw another famous name, the inventor of the unique search engine “Piquet”. Johnson Pike lived in Beverly Hills and was a very successful man. He got rich after launching his search engine, with a totally new approach to the analysis of results.

  The usual search engines were focused on the amount of site traffic, and a lot of traffic automatically made a site important and ranked it high in the ratings. In the first lines of the located data, users saw the most popular sites, not the reference that they needed. The information they were looking for was either hidden away somewhere in the last pages, or was never even located at all.

  Piquet was better and faster at finding results for given search parameters. The algorithm for the results of analysis was complicated and, of course, wasn’t made public. Specialists assumed that the search engine analyzed all the words on each site found. If there were too many words that meant it wasn’t a professional site. Piquet assigned credibility to sites on the basis of the frequency of the search words relative to the total number and the presence of specific, strictly professional terms and phrases. At least, that was what the manual claimed. Paranoiacs claimed that the search engine also analyzed the files on the computer of the user who launched a search, in order to figure out what he did and rank the results more accurately.

  Apart from everything else, Pike was a superb PR man. In his numerous interviews about the search engine and his company, the inventor frequently toyed with the journalists, only talking about what he wanted and cracking jokes, including dirty ones. At one press conference he put eight penguins in the front row, and he arrived to another wearing an astronaut’s suit. In the first case he announced that he wanted to see a decently dressed audience at the conference, and in the second case that he had been searching for an answer to a very difficult question out in space – and found it. The journalists loved and hated him at the same time. On the one hand, he was rude, but Pike only attacked people in response to an attack, never overstepping a thin boundary line, plus he threw fantastic parties, at which he was always very hospitable and generous. In any case, he was a newsmaker, and no one quarreled with him openly. After all, tomorrow he might block your name in his search engine, and you would instantly be consigned to journalistic oblivion.

  Late last year the extravagant Pike had put on yet another show, in which he jumped off the roof of a skyscraper in Los Angeles—into the sunset—on a yellow hang-glider with “Search in Piquet” written on it. The journalists outdid each other in inventing catchy headlines. A superb banquet was laid out for them on the roof. The next day the wings of the bright-yellow hang-glider appeared on the front pages of all the major newspapers and news sites.

  Everybody was really surprised when Pike announced he had decided to download his creativity. At the test session, to which he invited the press, he said that his creativity level was off the scale and declared emotionally that from now on his imagination would serve the good of society.

  However, before offloading his energy, he was required to hand over the Piquet algorithm to the company’s board of directors and wind up all activities that required intellectual energy. In the table it said that the downloading of Pike’s creativity had been postponed once again. Probably it had just been another of his PR moves, so he could announce to the press how high his level was.

  Isaac clicked the mouse on other tables in the data base. He went into the top 100 of those who had already downloaded their creativity. Among them he recognized the name of a celebrated artist, Andrei Sharov. He was a Veggie now, he didn’t make art any more, but the pictures he had created became world-famous.

  Isaac recalled the story that had been all over the media. The artist, solitary and unsociable, never left his studio, scraping by on occasional sales of his pictures, which were not especially popular. Not a single serious art gallery wanted to take him on. After all, you see, he hadn’t invented anything conceptually new, had he? He burned down the garage containing his unsold works and was one of the first to download. His creativity index turned out to be astronomical. Of course, they wrote about it in all the newspapers. The artist’s works were suddenly noticed, and the rush started. His few remaining works were declared masterpieces, and not a single critic dared to say anything derisive about them anymore. The owner of a tiny local restaurant, who took pity on the artist and used to feed him in return for his pictures, received a lot of money for them. The six works hanging in the dark little restaurant ended up moving to the National Gallery and they even brought the artist to the opening. Only he didn’t care any longer about the fame that had suddenly descended on him.

  Isaac went back to the table that included Link. Where was he now, this professor? Isaac wanted to meet Link face to face and tell him what he thought about him. All about Einsteiner, and the Veggies, and people like Isaac, who were stuck on the sidelines of life. Link probably read the avalanche of ecstatic articles about him, so let him hear a different opinion for a change. Isaac wondered why he had disappeared and why he was hiding. He ought to be held accountable for what he had done, and for what was happening now, and for what it would all lead to in the future. What did he think now that his invention had been at work for seven years?

  The ideal thing would be to make him destroy the system for integrating creativity. If he knew how then he would need to convince him, pressure him or ultimately threaten him. The world was turning into a new goddamned Matrix, only not in the movies, but for real. Isaac recalled the old film with Keanu Reeves. People seemed to be alive, but they were asleep, they lived in cocoons, in illusions, believing that their world was real. What real point was there in being born, living a quiet life, always toeing the line, and dying? In erasing your individuality?

  If Link had managed to build his invention, he would surely be able to destroy it. Destroying is easier than building if one knows what to destroy. The technology was classified and hard to get at, but Link ought to know how to do it.

  Isaac went back to the previous file that mentioned his name and scrolled up and down, then up again. The names of creativity-carriers who, like him, had their levels measured, but haven’t yet been downloaded. And as it happened, there were quite a lot of them.

  Isaac winced at the title ‘Creativity Carriers’, “What kind of crap was that name? They’re just normal people who have not sacrificed their singularity
. They had to realize what Isaac had discovered about Einsteiner. Maybe they have already realized that? Maybe they have known it a long time ago, and Isaac was the only one who had taken so long to see the light? Today they download creativity, tomorrow people’s sense of humor, memory, emotions? The dismemberment of a person’s individuality. The Agency is an obvious evil, Jack the Ripper of the human consciousness!”

  “Let’s take a look,” Isaac said to himself, using the mouse to select a random name from the local list. He stopped at the name Eric Delangle. Just as he thought, there was a page in a social network and a blog account registered to that name.

  Delangle was a biologist, in the very first lines of his resume in the business social network, he had written in large letters: “I’m not selling my identity, and I advise you not to.” Eric moved to Marrakesh.

  “It’s a shame that Morocco’s quite a long way from here,” Isaac thought. “This guy would have been good enough.” Catching himself thinking that, Isaac realized why he was looking at the list. He was searching for fellow thinkers and needed people like himself who were dissatisfied with the present state of affairs. Isaac knew he wasn’t a born leader. But he had no choice; he could only start with himself.

  If there were other groups of discontents somewhere Isaac hadn’t heard about them, but he did have quite a lot of experience in solving complex problems, and he knew where to begin. In principle he had to approach this like any complex problem. Logically.

  Isaac sorted the table of locals by education and age. It would be easier with people the same age as him, he thought. Ran quickly through the names. In a three hours’ time he had a list of candidates sitting in front of him. The next step was finding their whereabouts – unfortunately, there was neither a phone number nor email address shown. By night, ten of them already had either the former or the latter, though. Social networks, company or personal web sites, all this information was available on the Internet, just don’t be lazy and keep searching.