by Erik Hamre
“Affirmative. Fingerprints are a match. It is Kevin Kevorkian.”
“And he is fine?”
“Unharmed.”
“And he doesn’t remember his mother or Kevorkian?”
“We need to ask him some more questions. But it appears he doesn’t remember anything from his childhood. The kid has been through a lot. He had a seizure when he was seven, and he had to relearn everything. To talk, walk, even to chew food.”
“Fuck,” Kraut said, hanging up. “He’s not lying. Kevin is alive.”
“Told you.” Frank Morris said.
Vladimir was still not convinced. He just couldn’t believe that Kevorkian had done everything they accused him of. “There is something that just doesn’t add up. If you didn’t abduct Kevin in an act of revenge, why did you transmit those signals to Kevorkian’s GPS receiver every year? Why did you torment him?”
Frank Morris looked confused. “I don’t understand. I’ve never sent any signals to Kevorkian. I’ve tried to stay as far away from that asshole as I possibly could over the last ten years.”
“You turned on the GPS transmitter in the microchip every anniversary of Kevin’s abduction. Why did you do that?” Vladimir pressed.
“I didn’t,” Frank Morris replied, apparently confused. But Vladimir could see it on his face. Frank Morris had just realised his mistake.
64
3rd of June 2015
Naval Base San Diego
California
DAY 3:
0955 Hours
The sun had set in the horizon when Kraut, Vladimir and Frank Morris were led aboard USS Utah, the most advanced sea-borne weapon in the world. Vladimir felt less uneasy when he yet again descended into the belly of the big submarine. It was now in port. At least that was a slight improvement.
It took them just under four minutes to get to the communications room.
Frank Morris pulled out a screwdriver and a wrench from the toolbox, while Kraut studied his every move. “I don’t understand,” he said, loosening the four screws and the two bolts securing the box to the wall. “Here it is,” he said, handing Kraut the small capsule that had been stuck inside the box.
Kraut held it up against the light between his right thumb and index finger, studying the engineering.
“Is this it?” he asked Vladimir.
“Looks like it, Vladimir replied.
“Why did you put it here?” Kraut asked.
“For years Kevin was sick. He had to re-learn absolutely every human skill. Sometimes I was tempted to put the chip back in. To get a moment of that kid from the playground. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t throw it away either. It was a part of Kevin. It was the first seven years of his life.”
“So you hid it?”
“No. Kevin’s favourite bedtime story was Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne. I used to read from it to him every night. When he was thirteen he told me he wanted to go on a submarine, like his hero Captain Nemo. I knew I could never bring him to work. I had to keep Kevin a secret. So I took that little part of him, and I placed it here in the sub. I made sure a part of Kevin would experience his dream.”
Kraut closed his eyes. “Any chance the sub’s communication system can have picked up an emergency beacon from the chip, and transmitted it to the GPS satellites?”
“It shouldn’t be able to. There is no battery in the chip,” Frank Morris said.
“It doesn’t need a battery.” Vladimir said. “It was an experimental technology. But it didn’t need a battery to transmit the emergency beacon. The captain told us that this sub communicates directly with the GPS satellites. It was constructed this way in order to be able to shoot them down. When the microchip issued its distress signal, on the anniversaries of Kevin’s abduction, the signal was picked up by the communications system of USS Utah and then directly transmitted to the GPS satellites when the sub eventually surfaced. The origin of the signal was of course hidden, as the Navy didn’t want their two billion-dollar submarine to reveal its location.”
“This means that Cronus had nothing to do with this,” Vladimir said.
Kraut nodded. “I’m afraid so. We’ve thought Cronus was leading us to Kevin’s abductor. But it was all coincidences. All pure chance. It was Kevorkian’s betting at the Casino that led us here. Kevorkian had all the clues he needed to figure out who took Kevin. He just wasn’t able to put them together.”
“And neither was Cronus.”
Kraut gave a nod to the Navy guards and they led Frank Morris away.
“What happens to him now?” Vladimir asked.
Kraut shrugged his shoulders. “I honestly don’t know. Society will break down in twenty minutes. There’s no point in putting him in prison. And to be honest, I’m not sure if he even belongs in prison.”
Vladimir nodded. He was struggling with his feelings toward Frank Morris as well. “I just can’t believe that a couple of stupid bets on the roulette wheel would be what ultimately solved this,” Vladimir said.
“They weren’t stupid bets, Vladimir. Kevorkian wanted us to know what he knew. I think he gave us a chance to solve the mystery as well, in case Cronus failed.”
“He made one stupid bet though. The last one. Five hundred thousand on green zero. He would have had a better chance of getting hit in the head by a meteorite than winning on that bet.”
Kraut laughed. “That’s true. But you said Kevorkian wasn’t a gambling man, didn’t you? He probably wouldn’t have known.”
“He was never a gambling man. But he wasn’t stupid. He would have known the odds…” Vladimir stopped mid-sentence. He suddenly had a thought.
A moment of inspiration.
“I think I know how we can stop Protocol Cronus,” he said.
65
3rd of June 2015
Naval Base San Diego
California
DAY 3:
1015 Hours
Kraut glanced at his watch. It was ten fifteen am. All the nukes had been armed. High above them twenty-four satellites orbited the earth. Ninety-nine point nine percent of the population believed the satellites were there to provide them with a functioning global positioning system, a system that improved their lives significantly. And it was partially true. The US Defense Forces had initially developed the GPS system for purely military purposes and then gradually opened it up for commercial interests.
The world now relied on it.
Everything from airplanes to dating apps was using the GPS system to power their services, and people had become so accustomed to driving with satnavs in their cars that hardly anyone could read a real map any more.
But the GPS system had carried a secret in its belly for the last five years. Apart from providing the GPS service to the public it had also been set up as an essential part of the Extinction Events Directive. It was humankind’s last line of defence against any extinction event, or black marbles as Kraut liked to call them.
The system had already been in place when Kraut forced the President’s hand and made him define the invention of the first Artificial Super Intelligence as an extinction event. It had originally been designed to combat incoming asteroids.
An asteroid hitting Earth had been one of the four extinction events the US Center for Extinction Events had originally come up with. It was widely believed that an asteroid had been the reason for the dinosaurs going extinct sixty-five million years ago.
The US Defense Forces therefore kept a close eye on any asteroid or meteor with even a remote possibility of hitting Earth. But it was simply impossible to keep track of them all. This was evidenced by recent meteorite showers in Russia. Fortunately nobody had died in those last incidents, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time before we would get hit again. The question was always just how big the hit would be.
As a kid Vladimir had enjoyed peering up at the moon in his dad’s old telescope. He had studied the crevasses and wounds in the moon’s surface for hours, and wondered why t
he moon seemed to be so much more exposed to meteorites than Earth was. His dad had explained that the moon might get pummelled more than Earth, but there were also big wounds in the Earth’s surface. You just had to look a bit harder to find them. Some of them were hidden on the bottom of the world’s oceans, some were disguised as natural formations in the terrain. The moon might very well get hit more often. But when Earth first got hit, it got hit hard. The moon itself was most likely the result of one of those hard hits. A massive asteroid striking Earth in its early life had slung rocks out into space. And those rocks had over time, forced by Earth’s gravity, clustered to form our moon.
“Have you still got access to the Cronus computer, Amanda?” Vladimir asked.
“You mean the computer itself?”
“Yes, I know Cronus is gone. But does the supercomputer still work?”
“It works fine.”
“OK, here is what I want you to do. We only have ten minutes, and it might not work. But at least it is a plan.”
“Hit me,” Amanda said.
And over the next ten minutes Amanda and her team of computer scientists wrote a program designed to simulate a pending catastrophe. They picked an asteroid forty-five billion miles out from Earth, and changed its projection by five degrees on the computer system, RAGNAROK, which had been built to identify possible asteroid impacts. This slight change of projection was sufficient to make the asteroid appear to be on a direct path towards Earth. They then used the Cronus computer, the most powerful computer in the world at the time, to upload the simulation to the internet and Protocol Cronus.
Then they sat back to wait.
Vladimir was biting his fingernails. Any computer code was riddled with errors. It was impossible to write a program without errors. The question was how many errors there would be in Amanda’s program; a hastily written program, coded by a team of twenty-five individual coders in the space of ten short minutes. Vladimir didn’t want to know the odds of his idea failing. He had known it was a long shot the moment the idea had occurred to him.
But it was the only idea he had.
Kevorkian had made a bold bet with his last five hundred thousand at the casino, or he had made a stupid one, it depended on how you looked at it. He had seen the Las Vegas Police Department come barging through the entrance hall of the casino, and he had placed all his remaining chips on green zero.
The riskiest bet on the roulette wheel.
He might as well have given his money away. It wasn’t quite the same odds as for getting hit in the head by a meteorite. But Kevorkian had been on to something, something important.
When there was no way out, why not risk it all? Why not go all in, place the gutsiest bet you could?
“Twenty, Nineteen, Eighteen…” the computer was counting down the time to detonation. In just under twenty seconds twenty-four nuclear bombs, attached to the twenty-four GPS satellites orbiting Earth, would be detonated simultaneously. They had been perfectly positioned over the last few hours to cause maximum damage. There weren’t really that many places on Earth you were without GPS coverage these days. But in less than one minute those days would be gone forever.
In less than one minute there would not be a single place with GPS coverage anymore.
Not a single place with electricity.
“Seventeen, Sixteen, Fifteen…”
“What is happening, Amanda?” Vladimir hollered over the phone.
“I don’t know. We managed to upload the simulation. But nothing seems to be happening.”
“Didn’t Protocol Cronus pick it up?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ten, nine, eight…Recalculating.”
“Wait, something is happening!” Amanda yelled.
“What?”
“It stopped. Protocol Cronus is recalculating.”
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.
“It means we have to hope to God that Amanda and her team were accurate with their calculations.”
“Recalculating, seven, six, recalculating….”
“Jesus, it just started up again. And now it seems to have stopped again,” Amanda said.
“Five, four, three, two, one. Detonation sequence initiated.”
“Fuck!” Vladimir yelled, smashing his hand against the wall.
They had failed.
The system had initiated the detonation. In a few seconds the world would return to a horse and carriage society.
“It’s launching the nukes,” Amanda exclaimed. “It’s launching the nukes.”
“Launching?” Kraut asked. Running to the window to look at the sky outside.
“Why can we still talk?” Vladimir asked. He had expected the connection to be broken the second the nukes detonated. The EMP blast would be almost immediate.
“They are flying out!” Amanda screamed.
“Come have a look, Vladimir,” Kraut hollered from the window. He was staring at the blue sky. Far up there Vladimir could see a small ring of fire. It’s launching the nukes against what it thinks is an incoming asteroid. We did it. We fucking did it,” Kraut said, throwing his arms around Vladimir’s neck.
* * *
Epilogue
A cold morning in June 2015, the American president had been abruptly woken up by his Chief of Staff. Nine minutes later, he had been taken down to the nuclear blast-safe bunker beneath the White House, and he had only had one thought in his head. ‘How could this have happened? How the hell could something like this have happened?’
The President of the United States had spent the next fifty-four hours inside the nuclear blast-safe bunker of the White House. It had been the longest fifty-four hours of his life.
When he finally walked out of the nuclear blast-safe bunker, on the evening of the third of June 2015, he walked out a changed man.
He walked out knowing only a few seconds had separated him from killing billions of people. He walked out knowing that no man should ever again be allowed to make decisions affecting all of humanity.
The first official decision the President of the United States made, after having walked out of the White House bunker that morning, was to dismantle Protocol Cronus.
The second thing he did was to call in the Congress, and all the CEOs of the most powerful technology companies in the world. He explained how close the world had been to a total disaster, and he explained that such a situation could never ever be allowed to arise again.
On the morning of the 6th of June 2015, the US Senate had ratified a brand new law. The President knew there was no point in banning companies from pursuing the development of artificial intelligence, there was simply too much money involved.
The stakes were too high.
What he did instead was to make everything that had happened in those three days public knowledge.
He asked the Congress for permission to tell the American public exactly what had just happened, to inform the people of the world how close they had been to a total disaster, to explain in clear words that the day someone really developed an Artificial Super Intelligence, it would most likely be humankind’s last invention.
The President had attempted to come up with a plan on how to combat this potential enemy when it first arrived, because it would eventually arrive. There was no question about that.
But the President’s plan had failed miserably.
So the President instead asked the American public, and the rest of the world, what they would do if they knew there was an alien race, many times more intelligent than humans, on the way to Earth right now, and that it would most likely be here in a few decades’ time.
Would they leave the lights on, keys in the door, and invite this unknown lifeform into their houses? Or would they make sure it never arrived?
The President had decided to turn off the lights.
That had been a disastrous plan.
His hope was that the people of the world could come up with a better one.
The result is now hist
ory. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets in the following weeks.
Yes, artificial intelligence had improved their lives. It was convenient to speak to one’s mobile phone instead of keying in one’s instructions. It was nice that Amazon seemed to automatically know which books one would prefer to read next, and which brand of camera best suited one’s needs. But was it worth it?
Was it worth all the jobs lost? Jobs that would never be replaced by human hands and minds again.
Artificial intelligence wasn’t only a threat the day it became smarter than humans.
It was already outcompeting humans for most jobs.
Accountants. Lawyers. Journalists. There were almost no jobs that couldn’t be done better, and more cheaply, by computers already.
One didn’t have to wait until the invention of the first Artificial Super Intelligence before the world would cease to belong to humans.
It already belonged to artificial intelligence, to computers. They were just waiting for their master to be born.
Vladimir turned off the TV. He had just watched the President’s speech. It was a good speech. It made people think. Made them consider the implications of their actions. Every time they supported companies running on artificial intelligence they supported their own eventual doom. The President was right though. There was no point putting in place regulations or laws.
One couldn’t stop progress with prohibitions.
The only way to avoid the disaster looming on the horizon was to educate people about the threat. To make them realise what the end result of their inventions could be.
Would it help? Probably not.
Artificial Super Intelligence and the advent of Singularity was like a religion. Some people believed it would bring utopia, some people believed it would lead to disaster.
It didn’t matter how many facts you threw at each party.
Facts didn’t make people question their faith. They never had.