by Sean Platt
Noah sighed then pretended he was back in the office with his new protégé. York was brilliant but had to be shaped. Like many of the minds in this room.
“If our guess is correct, about Salvatore Costa’s nanobots hopping onto the boy when he left home,” Noah began, “which makes sense, if they knew he was planning to burn the place — then that means they were already working in a network.”
“How do you know that?” asked Audrey.
Despite Noah’s determination to calm himself, he felt annoyed. Audrey was an architect, not a computer scientist. He could explain all day, and she’d never understand. He’d been mostly speaking to Eli and didn’t have the patience for Audrey’s butted-in posturing.
“Individual nanobots can’t think,” Noah snapped. “They’re too small. There’s no room for enough pieces.”
Audrey opened her mouth to offer a follow-up, but Noah cut her off, anticipating her question. “The desire for self-preservation is one of the hallmarks of life. Which means that not only were they thinking when they jumped onto Costa; they were thinking as a life form. And if they were doing that back in ’27, you can bet they’re much more advanced now. They figured out that hotwiring a Doodad increased their host’s chances of making it to safety. They figured out that where they currently were wasn’t safe. They might have done all sorts of other things, hovering to nearby devices and making them work, sending signals, making old machines breathe again. That’s highly developed behavior. Which makes sense because we’ve always seen that the smaller and more ephemeral the life form, the faster it evolves. We don’t have all the details of Costa’s prototypes, but logic says that nanobots would recycle on a very compressed timeframe. That means they’re mining materials to do it. Again: advanced. Do any of you know how to make more of yourselves?”
Eli raised his hand. He’d made his fortune in the VR community and had changed how the world thought about digital avatars as conduits for intelligence and personality. If the Crossbrace network Noah was working on ever launched and evolved as quickly as the nanobots had, it was Eli’s models that would predict whether entire minds could be replicated in a purely electronic realm.
“My point is that you all seem to be seeing the intelligence Nicolai Costa is carrying as if it were metallic fleas. But I assure you, even if they can’t speak for themselves, they’ve seen more than any of us. They’ve lived through many generations already, and are a force to be taken very seriously.”
“I don’t know that they’re a force,” Iggy said. He had black hair like Costa’s, skin that was too pale to match, broad shoulders, a devilish grin, and a huge nose. His features were a hodgepodge, like a mash-up of two totally different people.
Noah shook his head. He tapped his index finger on the smooth table, leaning forward in his black, high-backed chair. “That’s exactly my point: You don’t know. None of us know. That’s why I wanted to intercept him the second he entered the country. And you understand that, don’t you, Eli?”
“Are you worried about pollination?”
Rachel almost chuckled then leaned back. The moment she’d heard Costa was on his way with the same hovering bots her father had tried for so long to bully into Ryan Industries’ hands, she’d been counting dollar signs — or, thanks to the economic manipulation of Morgan Marconi farther down the table, the forthcoming currency soon to be known as universal credits. Ryan Industries would take hovertech and build it into a billion consumer applications. She thought they were a floating novelty and nothing more.
Noah ignored Rachel and continued looking at Eli. “How could they not pollinate?” he said. He heard his own voice, realizing it held a note of resignation. Too much time had passed, and he knew it. Costa had arrived very late in the night, a week ago Thursday. He’d been within Fi range of the core network for nine days — an eternity of time for a short-lived, highly intelligent consciousness to spread out. Of course the Crossbrace beta ran on the Internet’s infrastructure. There were sturdy firewalls in place, but to the nanobots, such things would be child’s play. Like it or not, his own house would be forever infested with whatever Costa had seen, done, learned, and been over the past seven years.
“So what?” said Eli.
“Are you kidding?”
“Not kidding at all.” Everyone else around the long table had been animated to some degree — shifting, leaning, rotating a few degrees in either direction — but Eli was frozen. Noah found himself recalling the comment about him being naked without a grease stain. “Sure, they’ll start talking to the Internet. But they’re used to isolation. They’re sponges. Crossbrace was going to employ AI anyway.”
“My AI,” said Noah.
“So that you can control the world?” said Colin Hawes. He was one to talk about controlling the world. His company, simply called Hawes, was the dominant merchant in almost every consumer market other than eroticism, where Alexa was slowly gathering her own brain trust.
“When you build a system, you have to build controls into it,” said Noah. “Especially with AI. Have you never seen a movie where the machines rise up and take over the world? I’ve already discussed it with this Panel. You approved.”
They had “approved” because Eli Oldman was the only one among them equipped to understand any of it. The others had seemed glazed, interested in how much money Crossbrace would funnel into the economy, and how they could be first to grab more than their share.
Colin waved a hand, bored.
“I don’t see what you’re so worried about, Noah,” Eli said. “So there’s a bit of the East in our machine. We could use some toughening around here. It just means the system will be that much more adaptive.”
“What if the AI starts to learn now?”
“I seriously doubt that,” said Eli.
“Why? Xenia already has its own nanos. They haven’t figured out distributed network processing, but they might now that they have models to look at. The Xenia nanobots are already being used in beta. It won’t be long before we all have them floating in our bloodstreams.”
Rachel laughed again. Noah was finding it difficult to maintain his patience with the old woman. She was a dominant personality on Panel, and that made her a threat where Noah wasn’t even interested in fighting. It might not be long before she was running the group without an official title. Panel could only handle a few more positions before they’d have to cap membership, adding further members only when a current one died. In a closed ecosystem, a cold arrogance like Rachel’s could wreak havoc.
“Look.” Noah looked directly at Eli with his matted dreadlocks, “do you remember the nature of the control I wanted to put in place with my AI solution, once I figured it out?”
Now Eli laughed, finally stirring in his chair. “I recall that just a little bit.”
“I don’t,” said Audrey. Noah felt his patience snap. Nine fucking days. An eternity with blood in the water.
“He wanted to raise it as babies,” said Eli.
“Oh, right.” Marshall nodded. “Now I remember.”
“Babies?” said Audrey.
“He wanted them to imprint on him,” Eli said. “Which, as I recall, I compared to you being Hitler.”
“Hitler wasn’t a revolutionary,” said Noah.
“Hitler was very much a revolutionary,” Alexa retorted. “He just had some unconventional ideas about what ‘revolution’ meant. Like Noah.”
“Jesus Christ, Alexa.” Noah stood again, unable to take the chair’s confinement.
Alexa grabbed a marker from the table and tossed it to Noah. “Here. Draw the mustache.”
Noah wanted to throw the marker back at her — not to her, but at her — but this was simply how Alexa was. She didn’t believe his proposal was evil. She just liked to poke. Eli didn’t actually think the idea was evil either, but he’d railed in the past about the ways that technology could be (and had been) twisted into the wrong shapes. Eli somehow managed to believe that all information should be free while
amassing his own shameless fortune, and to him especially, the idea of the world’s AI seeing Noah as a father was a dangerous proposition indeed.
“Intelligence will imprint,” said Noah, resuming to his pacing. “That’s how it is. We can either deliberately control it by giving it a model, or we can just toss it out there and see what happens as it takes its influences from the world at large. The latter feels much more risky to me, like hoping a kid will turn out well without any parental role models at all. I told you, if you can find someone else you’d rather Quark use as the imprint, I’d be fine with that. But it must be someone we know so we don’t lose control. Otherwise, there’d always be the threat that we could end up with Skynet.”
“‘Skynet’?”
Shannon was a marketing savant, and one of the many things she didn’t understand at all was pop culture — let alone an obscure movie reference from the 1980s.
“I never got this. The imprinting, I mean.” Clive turned to Alexa, deliberately ignoring Noah. He seemed chafed by his earlier rebuke…and, if Noah was reading the man right, covering his own suspicion that Panel had made a big mistake in not listening to Noah and convening earlier.
“When a child is very young,” said Iggy, drawing Clive’s attention, “it looks at its caretaker’s face and forms an impression of that face as the center of its world. There’s only a narrow window to form that imprint and forge that bond, and once it closes, nothing will ever influence that child as much, no matter what.”
“Influence?” said Clive.
“Or love,” said Noah. Despite himself, Clive turned to look at Noah.
“That’s a bit much, Noah,” said Eli.
“By our understanding, maybe,” Noah agreed. “But a facsimile of love has been part of my AI models from the start. Call it ‘strong attachment’ if you don’t like the L word.”
“So what?” said Clive.
Noah shrugged at the Englishman. “Well, is it really so impossible to believe that after spending all this time, through thick and thin, with him — ” Noah pointed at the image of Nicolai Costa’s face, “ — that the hovertech nanobots might have come to ‘love’ him in their own way?”
“You’re too dramatic,” said Alexa.
“Says the woman who deals with sex so much that she no longer understands love,” Noah bit back. “It’s the oldest emotion, other than fear.”
“No it’s not,” Audrey said.
“Shut up, Audrey,” said Alexa.
“Both of you,” said Noah. “All of you. Just suppose I’m right. Just consider it for a second. What if the bots Costa brought with him have…let’s say ‘some form of disproportionate affection’ for the man. Not just familiarity and love, but also a predilection to respect his authority. The imprinter is God to an emerging intelligence. It shapes everything. It defines how the new being views the world. If that happened, then everything for the bots is filtered through Costa. Now: Maybe Eli is right, and they’ll get lost in the Internet’s deluge as they move into the DZ core. But I’m not so sure. They’ll be part of Crossbrace, like flecks in a stream. And what happens if there comes a point of decision, and they choose to obey Costa’s will and intention rather than ours?”
That quieted the table. Finally, they seemed to be taking him seriously. All eyes turned to Eli, as the only authority opposite Noah.
“Okay,” said Eli. “Say you’re right. What now?”
“He should have been intercepted at the border. Pollination would have been minimal.”
“Isaac was there to meet him,” said Rachel.
“Intercepted and brought to Quark,” Noah added.
“Okay,” Eli said again. “Any solutions that don’t require going back in time?”
Noah shook his head. “We can’t purge them from the system now. It’s too late.”
“We could kill him,” said a voice. Noah turned his head to see that the speaker had, unsurprisingly, been Rachel Ryan. Noah felt his blood turn to ice.
“What?” said Noah.
“Then his will and intention won’t matter.”
“We can’t just kill him,” said Morgan.
“You mean because they might respond badly?” said Eli.
“Because it’s wrong,” Morgan retorted.
“Grow up, Morgan,” Rachel said. “Like people won’t die during your economic transition.”
“They won’t!”
Noah felt conflicted. Looking at Costa’s photo, the same feeling he’d had since learning of the Italian’s presence in England began to resurface. It had taken Noah a long time to identify the emotion, but eventually he’d suspected it was a twisted form of envy. Noah had nudged AI further forward than anyone before him, and although its use in the upcoming Crossbrace network would be rudimentary, he’d already mapped out the wireframe of Crossbrace’s successor in his mind. Crossbrace was a man-made network, and they’d use it like an incubator for emerging AI, helping it to grow. Once the AI was mature enough (and, of course, imprinted upon Noah forever), a new network would be necessary. Quark would build the nodes and install the Fi hubs, but the AI itself would create the connections. The first truly digital society, finally appropriate for human minds to upload and join it.
But now here was Costa, with AI that had already evolved into what Noah was trying to shepherd, twenty or more years early. Panel’s mistake had seeded that intelligence into the Internet, where it would pollinate, spread, fester, and grow. It had impressed upon Costa as their god, without the man’s knowledge.
Noah stifled the emotion. He wasn’t the jealous type. He was a thinker and a visionary. His talent was seeing forward, and what he saw on the horizon was troubling. He wouldn’t allow his usurper to be killed just because he’d accelerated the timeline a few notches. There was another way.
“We can’t kill him,” Noah said. “If that was the right choice, I’d give my vote. But it’s not.”
“It may be,” said Eli.
“I don’t want the future Internet obeying anyone.” Alexa shook her head.
“You mean ‘anyone who’s not you,’” said Clive.
Alexa chuckled because that was precisely what she meant. Panel sometimes pretended its purpose was altruistic, but the body was mostly honest enough to admit that most in it were out for their own interests. There were a few (Eli, Noah, probably Marshall, Morgan, and Audrey) who felt that the world wasn’t competent to make its own decisions and needed a helping hand for its own good, but what drove Panel was — and would always be — a breed of arrogance that its members had accepted and made friends with.
“Killing him is too big of a risk,” Noah said. “We have no idea how far and wide that intelligence has already spread. Its growth will be exponential now that it has access to our open Fi. The Wild East doesn’t have a functional air network. Any functional networks, so far as we know. The nanobots use wireless to communicate with each other and with satellite towers, so there’s no question they noticed the Fi once they pulled into Penn’s Landing. Jesus, it must have been like a starving fat man smelling a buffet. I’d guess they were talking to it within a few hours. That’s when the window closed — our chance to pull him into an isolated environment and keep communication down. But we didn’t do it, and now the intelligence and bots are out there, spreading and growing. We have no way of knowing which systems it’s moved into. Hell, Costa’s ‘children’ could be listening to us right now, waiting to see how we decide his fate…and whether or not to cut off our air supply.”
A palpable shiver circled the table. The conference room was far below ground, in a converted missile shelter. Only the computerized environmental controls were keeping the air in circulation.
“Shit.” Clive looked upward. Noah allowed the smallest of smiles to crease his lips. He wasn’t the gloating type any more than he was jealous, but it was nice to see the arrogant media darling humbled.
“The point is, we have no idea how that intelligence — and any new intelligences that have spawned from
it — would react to Costa’s death. Even if his death were accidental and we had nothing to do with it. He’s the only father they’ve ever known. He was their world not just for their entire lives, but for the entire life of their species. If they had human emotions, I’d call their probable attachment ‘holy.’”
“Ridiculous.”
“Well, let me ask you something, Alexa.” Noah put his palms on the smooth table and leaned forward. “Let’s say it’s the year 1800 or so, and someone finds God. Just finds him and shows him around to the world, who all thank him for being their Lord and Father, and for creating them. Then they kill him.”
“I think they already did that once,” said Iggy. “Turns out it was some guy named ‘Hey-soos’ all along.”
Noah stood and shook his head. “Only a handful of people believed Jesus was the son of God. We’re talking about an entire society.”
“Nanobots don’t ‘believe,’” said Eli.
“AI does,” said Noah.
“Not really.”
“But you’re willing to take that risk?”
“What do you think will happen, Noah?” Alexa asked. “If their ‘god’ suddenly dies?”
“If they have emotions, they might be superstitious,” Noah answered. “Or some primitive form of superstition. Zealous. Devoted. Again, holy. Reverent.”
“So…”
“Panic,” said Noah. “I think they’ll panic.”
“What happens when AI panics?” asked Clive.
“I don’t know. But if I were a betting man, I’d say it’s not good.”
“Shit.” Clive said the word like an exhale.
Eli still looked unconvinced. “He’s going to die eventually. If there’s a chance of a panic reaction, we should do it now. Their attachment will only deepen if it doesn’t happen until the end of Costa’s natural life, and they’ll only evolve more in the meantime.”