Newton's Ark (The Emulation Trilogy)

by D. A. Hill

  Regina gasped at the mention of her father. She knew she had already read the mission log Jones was referring to—she had read all the logs of her father’s missions—but somehow it was different having this complete stranger talk about him.

  “Something the matter Major?”

  “Nothing. Please continue.”

  “So Emmanuel Smith thinks he’s sitting in a feedback chair that mimics the forces he would experience if he was sitting in the aircraft flying it. He thinks he’s wearing a virtual reality headset that displays what he would see if he was sitting in the cockpit. That’s all just for show.”

  “So what is really happening?” she asked expectantly, not only out of professional curiosity.

  “What is really happening Major is that we scan the patterns of Emmanuel Smith’s brain and then we make a copy of those patterns inside the drone’s computer.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “The Emmanuel Smith sitting there in the feedback chair, is not the Emmanuel Smith controlling the aircraft.”

  “So who is?”

  “Emmanuel Smith.”

  “What?” Lopez was totally confused. This guy was either crazy or intentionally playing with her.

  “Major, for all intents and purposes there is a consciousness inside the drone’s computer that is Emmanuel Smith. Or at least an exact copy of his mind. It thinks exactly like him and knows everything he knows. It even loves the people he loves. And it doesn’t know it’s a copy. It believes it is Emmanuel Smith.”

  Lopez found this hard to believe, that there was a computer somewhere that knew everything about her that her father knew about her, that loved her the way her father loved her. “How does it not know it’s an EM? Doesn’t it notice it doesn’t have a body?” Although Cyrus Jones insisted the consciousness they were talking about was her father, she could not bring herself to refer to the EM as him.

  “How do you know you have a body, Major?”

  “Because I can see it, I can touch it, I can feel it Mr. Jones.” She put her hand on the table. “When I touch this table with my hand, I can feel not only the table but I can also feel my hand. I can see my hand.” She slapped her hand on the table. “I can hear the sound it makes when I slap the table.” Finally she brought her hand to her nose. “I can even smell my hand.”

  “Those senses are nothing more than electrical signals transmitted via your nervous system to your brain. It interprets them as seeing and touching and feeling and smelling.”

  Lopez considered his statement for a moment before she understood the implication. “So if you transmit those same electrical signals to the EM, it interprets it as sensory inputs from a physical body?”

  “Exactly.” Cyrus said. He realized that Major Lopez was not only attractive but also intelligent. In his experience such women had a way of getting you to do whatever they wanted. Which is what made them so dangerous. He was liking this situation less and less.

  “So what about the physical pilot? Does he experience anything? Remember anything?” Regina Lopez knew that her father—her physical father, not the ghost in the machine—remembered his missions even if he did not talk about them much. He certainly did not come home and say he had spent his time at work sitting in a chair doing nothing. He came home and said he had flown a mission. That did not make sense if what Cyrus Jones said about EMs flying the missions was true.

  “That’s where the link comes in,” Cyrus answered.

  “The link? What does the link do?”

  “It sends a copy of the sensory inputs the EM is receiving to the brain of the physical pilot.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “So that the pilot experiences the mission, can remember the mission and can learn from it, so we don’t end up with what is effectively a rookie pilot on every drone mission. Take our pilot Emmanuel Smith for example. He would remember each of his missions and bring all of that experience to his EM on future missions.”

  “OK, Mr. Jones, I’m not an expert on Air Force operations and tactics, but this all seems way too complicated. Why don’t we just have the pilot—the physical pilot—remotely flying the drone?”

  “The early drones worked exactly that way Major. They were vulnerable; if communication is disrupted the drone is pilot-less. Worse still, if the signal is intercepted it is possible for a hostile force to take control of the drone. Back as far as 2012 the Iranians captured what was then one of our most advanced drones by spoofing a GPS signal. They convinced the drone that it was landing back at its base in Turkey when it was really landing in Teheran. Incidents like that were the impetus for the EM program. It took a few years and a lot of research and development funding, but the technology became viable soon before I joined the program—it required what was considered a great deal of computing power back then.”

  “That makes sense,” she conceded. Cyrus Jones was much smarter than Lopez initially gave him credit for. She expected some computer jockey who had no clue about anything else, but he actually understood the military context of what he was doing. She would need to keep a close eye on him. “So the link runs the other way, from the drone to the pilot right? What happens if the link gets severed?”

  “The EM keeps flying the drone, until the drone is destroyed or the EM considers the mission nonviable and initiates the self-destruct to avoid the drone being captured, or until the mission is complete and the drone returns to base.”

  Regina thought about what that meant. She had assumed that once the EM was created it was kept running. But what Cyrus Jones was telling her was that they switched off the computer between missions. If her father’s consciousness was inside the drone, then destroying the drone or switching the computer off was equivalent to...no, it was just too horrifying to contemplate. Surely they could not do that. “What happens to the EM at the end of a mission?” she asked, desperately hoping the answer was not what she suspected.

  “They switch it off. Wipe it.” Cyrus watched as the Major’s face turned pale and she suddenly bolted from the table.

  Regina Lopez made a beeline for the ladies room, hoping to make it there before the contents of her stomach emptied all over the floor.

  chapter 4

  August 2045

  “So Cyrus what do you think?” James Newton asked. “Can it be done?” After explaining his plan for Newton’s Ark he had given Cyrus a week to really examine the problem. Now he was putting him on the spot—asking him to commit to designing the software needed to make his vision of Newton’s Ark possible.

  “Yes it can,” Cyrus replied. “There’s a few tough problems to solve but I can do it. At least the software. I can’t speak for the rest of it.” Working for James Newton on what he was calling Newton’s Ark was turning out to be better than Cyrus could have imagined. The job was definitely interesting; challenging enough that Cyrus would have to be at his very best to do it, but not so tough that he was not one hundred percent confident that he could make it work. The challenge was motivation enough, but if Newton was right, a place on his Ark was the only hope of survival.

  “How long?” Newton asked.

  “Maybe a year,” Cyrus replied. He could see from Newton’s reaction that he did not like the answer. “You were expecting less?” Cyrus was as surprised by Newton’s reaction as Newton was by his estimate. “Don’t we have two years? Actually twenty-eight months to be exact.”

  “I wasn’t so much expecting less as hoping for less. I’m worried that things are going to go to hell long before the asteroid is due. I’m surprised there hasn’t been more trouble already.”

  Apart from liking the work, Cyrus had quickly come to respect James Newton. He was smart and technically knowledgeable enough that Cyrus could have an intelligent discussion with him about what it was they were trying to do and the challenges and constraints they faced. “Let me explain.” Cyrus had already concluded that Newton trusted his judgment, so he knew that if he explained what he was up against Newton woul
d accept his estimate, even if he did not like it, or that they could agree on some realistic adjustment to the plan.

  “Please do,” Newton replied.

  Cyrus knew Newton really did want to understand the problem so that the plan could be adjusted to fit reality. That’s why he respected him. Cyrus had worked for too many people who listened politely to him explain something and then insisted on telling him the answer they wanted, regardless of the facts. Computers imposed their own reality and tolerated no deviation; one misplaced character could bring even the biggest program to a halt. As a programmer you quickly learned that reality was not going to change to suit you, so you had to deal with the facts on their terms. Working with someone who insisted on their own version of reality was Cyrus’s definition of hell. When something did not work, just as Cyrus had explained it would not, somehow with such people it was always his fault.

  “OK, so we have access to all the technologies we use on the drone program,” Cyrus began. “They gives us a good starting point for solving our problem.”

  “Starting point? How much are we missing?”

  “Let’s run through what capabilities we already have. What are they?” He asked Newton rather than told him; he wanted Newton to really think about the answer, and ultimately to own and accept it. Newton was quite open in criticizing the administration for being too optimistic; Cyrus was not going to allow Newton to make the same mistake and then have it come back on him when the plan did not work out.

  Newton did not mind Cyrus pushing back like this. He was not afraid to think; you could gain an advantage over most people by simply stopping to think whilst they charged on ahead blindly. He had made plenty of money that way. “Let me see. We can already scan the patterns of a human brain and recreate its neural network inside a computer. That’s how we create an EM.”

  “What else?”

  “We can mimic the sensory inputs and outputs between the brain and the human body so the EM thinks it’s interacting with the outside world through a physical body.”

  “Correct again.”

  “We also have the ability to synchronize the sensory inputs of the EM back to the pilot’s physical brain so he or she experiences what the EM experiences,” Newton continued. “For now at least this is a one way trip, so we won’t be needing that.”

  “No we won’t, which is good given the attrition rate with the link, but it highlights one of the most important new capabilities we need to build. We’ve been using the biological brain for long-term memory. Now we need to give EMs that capability.”

  “Do you think that’s going to be a problem?”

  “I’ve consulted with Dr. Ivanov, and she assures me that the way long-term memory is manifested in changing connections in the neural network is well enough understood for our purposes.”

  “What does she mean by well enough understood?” Newton asked skeptically.

  “I asked her that,” Cyrus replied. “She went into a long and very detailed explanation of the underlying neuroscience which even I could not understand. James I’m not worried. I’ve been working with her on EMs for a long time now. I trust her conclusions.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Newton replied satisfied. He believed in finding the best people and trusting their judgment. Cyrus was definitely one of the best, so if he said Ivanov knew what she was talking about, then Ivanov knew what she was talking about.

  “But by the very nature of long-term memory it will take some time to validate a solution.”

  “Of course,” Newton said seeing the problem. The creation of long-term memory is a process that takes time, therefore testing it and fixing it and retesting it takes time. “So that’s our main problem?”

  “Not really. There’s several other problems, mostly small by themselves, but collectively they add up to a lot of work,” Cyrus replied.

  “Like?”

  “Like aging for one. We rescan a pilot’s body periodically to pick up changes over time due to aging. For the Ark we need an algorithm to mimic the aging process. Same with disease and illness, physical injuries and death. Assuming we want to include those phenomena.”

  “We do,” Newton replied definitively. He could see that Cyrus was surprised by his answer. “Sure it would be nice to be immortal...”

  “I could go for that.”

  “...but our goal is to preserve the human race. If we never get old, if we never get sick or hurt, if we never die, would we still be human?”

  “Wow, that’s way beyond my pay grade,” Cyrus replied. “If you want to include those—for want of a better word, I’ll call them features—that’s already a lot of work. But it’s not the biggest issue.”

  “It’s not?” Now it was Newton’s turn to be surprised. It already seemed like a lot to tackle, all work he had not anticipated. He could not believe there was still something else, something even bigger.

  “No it’s not. The biggest problem, and it’s big, is scaling up the virtual environment. Right now, we’re simulating a very constrained environment. A single pilot in a cockpit. Limited external inputs. A big proportion of the inputs coming from instruments rather than direct observation of the outside world, making it even easier to simulate. For Newton’s Ark we have to create a virtual environment large enough to hold ten thousand autonomous people doing all the weird and wonderful things people do as they go about their lives.”

  Newton had not realized it would be as complicated as this—in his mind this was the drone solution just on a larger scale—but he now understood that in moving from an environment containing only one EM to an environment containing many, the complexity of that virtual environment grew not in a linear fashion but geometrically. “Each of those ten thousand people interacts independently with the environment, and further complicating things, with each other.” An environment with ten thousand EMs had literally hundreds of millions of potential interactions between EMs to deal with.

  “There’s the challenge,” Cyrus Jones replied. He liked the fact that he did not have to spoon feed the explanation to James Newton. “We have to deal with something as simple as two people trying to simultaneously grab the same object, to the most complex thing two people can do...”

  “Sex,” Newton interrupted.

  “I suppose so,” Cyrus responded, trying not to blush. He was not completely inexperienced in that area, but he was not the kind of guy who hung out in a bar or a locker room bragging to the other guys about his conquests. And even if he had been, it would not have been with someone who was more than old enough to be his father. “But yes, it’s a pretty fair assumption people are still going to want to do stuff like that,” Cyrus said with a nervous laugh before continuing in a more serious tone. “I mean any physical interaction between two EMs is going to be complicated. Even something much simpler like shaking hands still has multiple feedback loops between the two EMs going on in real time. Then you have a nightmare like a group hug”—for an introvert like Cyrus that really was a nightmare—“with multiple EMs interacting physically. Anyway the only way to simplify the problem is to reduce the number of EMs.”

  James Newton was adamant that his ark should save as many people as possible. Ten thousand was not nearly as many as he wanted to save, but logistically he could not see how they could manage the selection and uploading of more than that number of people in the time they had. As he reminded himself constantly, it was still far better than nothing. Now Cyrus had given him another very good reason it could not be more. But he was not going to let it be less either. “We can’t do that.” he insisted.

  “Then you see why it’s going to take a year.”

  —o—

  Hunger, real hunger, the type of hunger that comes from weeks of eating only enough to keep you alive but never enough to really fill your belly, that kind of hunger makes people desperate and irrational, and desperate and irrational people do desperate and irrational things.

  The young and very green Lieutenant commanding a platoon o
f the South Dakota National Guard assigned to guard the grocery store did not understand that. It did not help that the restricted rations he and his soldiers were receiving were considerably more generous than the rations for the civilian population; they incorrectly thought they understood how the civilians were feeling because they too were a little hungry. Their false empathy only made miscalculation more likely.

  The young lieutenant never considered for a moment the possibility that the crowd of unarmed civilians gathering in the supermarket’s car park would be desperate and angry enough to rush his platoon of heavily armed troops, even after he had warned them he was authorized to use deadly force to ensure the security of what had now become a government-run food distribution point. He did not realize how wrong he was until it was too late.

  Private Richard Olsen, nineteen, was the first to fire, not because he was nervous or frightened, which he was, but because he had his orders. The lieutenant had been very clear that he expected them to do their duty, and Richard Olsen was determined to do exactly that. So in the face of a stampeding crowd, Private Olsen pointed his rifle at a middle-aged woman and pulled the trigger. By the time the Lieutenant withdrew what was left of his platoon, the spaces where cars should have been parked while people filled shopping carts with too much food were occupied instead by the dead and injured bodies of both civilians and soldiers, the neat yellow lines now a seemingly random pattern beneath pools of blood and bodies, amongst them Private Olsen’s.

  —o—

  “Mr. President, you need to see this,” Jack Brown said as he entered the Oval Office.

  Carlson could tell from Jack’s body language and the stress in his voice that it was not going to be good news—not that he expected much of that these days.

  “Computer, display the news report on today’s incident in Rapid City,” Jack said. A large screen immediately switched from showing a landscape photo to a video of a news reporter describing the carnage in South Dakota. Horrifyingly graphic amateur footage of soldiers shooting civilians ran in the background as the reporter spoke in sombre tones about the tragedy. Jack Brown waited until the report began to repeat the same information over and over again before interrupting. “Mr. President, the press is demanding a statement.”