The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych)

by Adams, John Joseph

  A little girl, and then a woman. “You know my mother?” Her shock was so complete that she spoke aloud.

  “What’s going on?” The voice behind her was cheerful, warm. “Who knows me?”

  Maddie turned in her chair. Her mother was standing in the door to her bedroom.

  “You’re home early,” Maddie said, intending it as a question.

  “Something went wrong with the office computers. Nobody could get any work done, so I decided to come home.” Mom walked in and sat down on Maddie’s bed. “Who are you talking to?”

  “Nobody. Just chatting.”

  “With?”

  “I don't know . . . just someone who’s been . . . helping me.”

  She should have known that this was the kind of answer that would set off alarm bells in her mother’s head. Before Maddie could even protest, her mother shooed her out of her chair and sat down in front of the keyboard.

  Who are you and what the hell do you want with my daughter?

  The long wait for a response seemed to confirm her mother’s worst fears.

  “Mom, you’re being ridiculous. I swear there’s nothing weird going on.”

  “Nothing weird?” Mom pointed at the screen. “Then why are you typing only in pictographs?—”

  “—it’s called emoji. We’re playing a game—”

  “—you have no idea how dangerous—”

  They stopped shouting. Mom stared at the screen intently. Then she typed:

  What?

  “They won’t answer unless you use emoji,” said Maddie.

  Her face stony, Mom used the mouse to pick out an icon:

  An even longer pause, then a line of emoji appeared across the screen:

  “What the hell—” Mom muttered. Then she swore as her face flicked from shock to sorrow to disbelief to rage. Maddie could count on one hand the number of times her mother had sworn in front of her. Something was really wrong.

  Looking over her mother’s shoulder, she tried to help her translate. “What are lips? . . . a man’s lips . . .”

  But her mother surprised her: “No, it’s ‘What lips my lips have kissed and where, and why . . .’”

  Her hand shaking, Mom picked out an icon:

  The window winked away and there was nothing left on the screen.

  Mom sat there, unmoving.

  “What’s wrong?” Maddie said, nudging her mother’s shoulder gingerly.

  “I don’t know,” Mom said, perhaps more to herself than to Maddie. “It’s impossible. Impossible.”

  • • • •

  Maddie tiptoed up to the bedroom door. Her mother had slammed it shut an hour ago and refused to come out. For a while she could hear her mother sobbing behind the door, and then it grew quiet.

  She placed her ear against the door.

  “I’d like to speak to Dr. Peter Waxman please,” said her mother’s muffled voice. A pause. “Tell him it’s Ellen Wynn, and it’s very urgent.”

  Dr. Waxman was Dad’s old boss at Logorhythms. Why is Mom calling him now?

  “He’s still alive,” Mom said. “Isn’t he?”

  What? thought Maddie. What is Mom talking about?

  “Don’t you dare use that tone with me. He reached out to me, Peter. I know.”

  We saw Dad’s body in the hospital. Maddie felt numb. I watched his casket go into the ground.

  “No, you listen to me,” Mom said, raising her voice. “Listen! I can tell you’re lying. What have you done with my husband?”

  • • • •

  They went to the police and filed a missing persons report. The detective listened to Maddie and her mom tell their story. Maddie watched his face shift through a series of expressions: interest, incredulity, amusement, boredom.

  “I know this sounds crazy,” her mother said.

  The detective said nothing, but his face said everything.

  “I know I said I saw the body. But he’s not dead. He’s not!”

  “Because he texted you from beyond the grave.”

  “No, not text. He reached out to Madison and me through chat.”

  The detective sighed. “Don’t you think it’s more likely that this is another prank being played on you by the kids who are messing with your daughter?”

  “No,” said Maddie. She wanted to grab the man by the ears and shake him. “He used emoji. It was a joke that Dad and I worked out between ourselves.”

  “It was a poem,” said Mom. She took out a book of poetry, flipped to a page, and held it in front of the detective’s face. “The opening line of this sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. It’s my favorite poem. I used to read it to David when we were still in high school.”

  The detective put his elbows on the table and rubbed his temples with his fingers. “We’re very busy here, Ms. Wynn. I understand how painful the loss of your husband must have been and how stressful it is to find your daughter being bullied. This should be addressed by the teachers. Let me recommend some professionals—”

  “I. Am. Not. Crazy,” Mom gritted her teeth. “You can come to our place and examine my daughter’s computer. You can trace the network connections and find out where he is. Please. I don’t know how this is possible, but he must be alive and . . . he must be in trouble. That’s why he can’t speak except through emoticons.”

  “I agree that this is a cruel joke, but you have to see how you’re making it worse by falling for it.”

  When they came home, Mom crawled right into bed. Maddie sat on the edge and held her mother’s hand for a while, the way her mother used to do with her when she was little and had trouble going to sleep by herself.

  Eventually, Mom fell asleep, her face damp.

  • • • •

  The web was vast and strange, and there were corners of it where people who believed in the most extraordinary stories congregated: government cover-ups of alien encounters, mega-corporations that tried to enslave people, the Illuminati, and the many ways the world was going to suffer an apocalypse.

  Maddie signed on to one of these sites and posted her story. She tried to lay out the facts without embellishment. She recovered the transcripts of her emoji chats; she reconstructed the odd-looking window from the swapfile on her hard drive; she tried to trace the network connection from “Emo” as far as she could—in other words, she provided more hard data to support her story than most of the other posters in the forum had. She wrote that Logorhythms had denied everything, and that the police, representatives of the government, hadn’t believed her.

  For some, no evidence shored up her claim more compellingly than such denials.

  And then the forum regulars began to make their own connections. Every poster thought Maddie’s story supported their own pet theory: Centillion, the search engine giant, was engaging in censorship; Logorhythms was creating military artificial intelligences for the UN; the NSA scanned people’s hard drives. The thread she started exploded with follow-ups amplifying her tale.

  Maddie knew, of course, that no matter how big the thread grew, most people would never see it. The big search engines had long ago tweaked their algorithms to bury results from these sites, because they were deemed untrustworthy.

  But convincing people wasn’t Maddie’s goal.

  “Emo”—her father—had claimed to be a ghost in the machine. Surely he wasn’t the only one?

  • • • •

  There was no name, no avatar. Just a plain chat window, like a part of the OS.

  She was disappointed. Not her father. Still, it was better than nothing.

  Maddie smiled as she parsed the response. She typed a follow-up:

  You don’t know where he is either, she thought. But maybe you can help?

  The response was swift and unambiguous:

 

  • • • •

  The knock came Sunday morning.

  Mom opened the door to reveal
Dr. Waxman standing in the hallway.

  “I’ve come to answer your questions,” he said coldly in lieu of a greeting.

  Maddie wasn’t really surprised. She had seen the news that Logorhythms’s stock had crashed the previous Friday, so much so that trading had to be halted. Machine trading was being blamed again, though some thought it was the result of manipulation.

  “It’s been a few years,” said Mom. “I thought we were friends. But after David died, you never even called.”

  Maddie last saw Dr. Waxman at a party at the Logorhythms office, where he had been cheerful and effusive, and told her how close he and her father were and how important her father was to the company.

  “I’ve been busy,” Dr. Waxman said. He didn’t look Mom in the eye.

  Mom stepped aside to let him in. Maddie and her mother sat down on the couch while Dr. Waxman took the chair across from them. He set down his briefcase on the coffee table and opened it, taking out a laptop computer. He turned it on and began to type.

  Maddie couldn’t hold back any more. “What are you doing?”

  “Establishing an encrypted connection back to Logorhythms’s secure computing center.” His tone was clipped, angry, as though every word was being ripped out of him against his will.

  Then he turned the screen toward them: “We’ve installed the linguistic processing unit—withholding it clearly didn’t work, so what’s the point? You can talk to him through this camera. He’ll write back in text—though he seems to still prefer emoji for some ideas. I imagine a synthesized voice is the last thing you want to hear right now.

  “There may be some glitches, as the simulation for the neural patterns for linguistic processing is still new and unstable.”

  • • • •

  “David?”

  All the faces of you—the phases of you. I will never be tired of them; have enough of them all every entire. The lingering light of a September afternoon; the smell of popcorn and hotdogs. Nervous. Will you or won’t you? The promise of the premise. Then I see you. And there is no more holdback suspense doubt. A softness that curls into me, fits me in all the right places. Complete. Warm. Sweet. I will yes I will yes.

  “Dad!”

  Little fingers, delicate, ramified tendrils reaching extending stretching reaching into the dark ocean that you once drifted in; a smile the heat of a thousand suns.

  I cannot conceive you. A missing presence, a wound in the mouth of the heart that the tongue of the will cannot stop probing. I have always have missed missed missed you, my darling.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He died. You were there, Ellen. You were there.”

  “Then what is this?”

  “I suppose you’d call this an example of unintended consequences.”

  “You’d better start making some sense.”

  More text scrolled across the screen:

  Integrating placement and routing; NP-complete; three-dimensional layout; heuristics; fit and performance; a grid, layers, the flow of electrons in a maze.

  “Logorhythms supplies the world’s best chips for high-volume data processing. In our work, we often face a class of problems where the potential solution space is so vast, so complicated, that it’s impractical for even our fastest computers to find the best solution.”

  “NP-complete problems,” said Maddie.

  Dr. Waxman looked at her.

  “Dad explained them to me.”

  That’s my girl.

  “Right. They show up in all kinds of applications: circuit layout, sequence alignment in bioinformatics, set partitioning, and so on. The thing is, while computers have trouble with them, some humans can come up with very good solutions—though not necessarily the best solution—very quickly. And David was one of them. He had a gift for circuit layout that our automated algorithms could not touch. That was why he was considered our most important resource.”

  “Are you talking about intuition?” her mother asked.

  “Sort of. When we say ‘intuition,’ often what we mean are heuristics, patterns, rules-of-thumb that can’t be articulated because they’re not consciously understood as such. Computers are very fast and very precise; humans are fuzzy and slow. But humans have the ability to extract insight from data, to detect patterns that are useful. It’s something that we’ve had trouble recreating with pure artificial intelligence.”

  Maddie felt a chill in the pit of her stomach.

  “What does this have to do with my dad?”

  Faster, faster. Everything is so slow.

  Dr. Waxman avoided looking at her. “I’m getting to that. But I have to explain the background to you—”

  “I think you’re just dragging this out because you’re ashamed of what you’ve done.”

  Dr. Waxman stopped.

  My girl.

  Dr. Waxman gave a light chuckle, but there was no mirth in his eyes. “She’s impatient, like you.”

  “Then get to the point,” Mom said. Dr. Waxman started at the icy intensity in her voice. Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. Her mother squeezed back, hard.

  Dr. Waxman took a deep breath, blew it out. “All right,” he said in a resigned monotone. “David was ill; that was true. You remember that he died during surgery, the final attempt to save him that you were told had very little chance of success?”

  Mom and Maddie nodded together. “You said only the clinic at Logorhythms could do it because it was so advanced,” Mom said. “We had to sign those liability waivers for you to operate.”

  “What we didn't tell you was that the surgery wasn’t intended to save David’s life. His condition had deteriorated to the point that the world’s best doctors couldn’t have saved him. The surgery was a deep scan of his brain, meant to save something else.”

  “A deep scan? What does that mean?”

  “You’ve probably heard that one of Logorhythms’s moonshot projects is to completely scan and encode the neural patterns of a human brain and to recreate them in software. It’s what the Singularity nuts call ‘consciousness uploading.’ We’ve never succeeded—”

  “Tell me what happened to my husband!”

  Dr. Waxman looked miserable.

  “The scan, because it needs to record neural activity with such detail . . . requires destruction of the tissue.”

  “You cut up his brain?” Mom lunged at Dr. Waxman, who held up his hands in a vain attempt to defend himself. But the screen had come alive again, and so she stopped.

  There was no pain. No no no pain. But the undiscovered country, oh, the undiscovered country country.

  “He was dying,” said Dr. Waxman. “We were absolutely certain of that before I made the decision. If there was a chance to preserve something of David’s insights, his intuition, his skill, however slim, we wanted—”

  “You wanted to keep your top engineer as an algorithm,” said Maddie, “like a brain in a jar. So that Dad would go on working for you, making money for you, even after he died.”

  Die, die, die. DIE.

  Hate.

  Dr. Waxman said nothing, but he lowered his face and hid it in the palms of his hands.

  “Afterward, we were very careful. We tried to re-encode and simulate only the patterns we believed had to do with circuit layout and design—our lawyers wrote us a memo assuring us that we had the right since the know-how was really Logorhythms’s intellectual property, and didn’t belong personally to David—”

  Mom almost lunged out of her chair again, but Maddie held her back. Dr. Waxman flinched.

  “Did David make a lot of money for you?” She spat the words out.

  “For a while, yes, it appeared that we had succeeded. The artificial intelligence, which modeled the extracted portions of David’s technical know-how and skills, functioned as a meta-heuristic that guided our automated systems very efficiently. In some ways, it was even better than having David around. The algorithm, hosted on our data centers, was faster than David could ever hope to be, and it ne
ver got tired.”

  “But you didn’t just simulate Dad’s intuition for circuit layout, did you?”

  The wedding dress; layers of lines. A kiss; a connection. The nightstand, the Laundromat, the breath on a winter’s morning, Maddie’s red apple delicious cheeks in the wind, two smiles in a flash—a thousand things make up a life, as intricate as the flow of data between transistors nanometers apart.

  “No.” Dr. Waxman looked up. “At first, it was just odd quirks, strange mistakes the algorithm made that we thought were due to errors in identifying the parts of David’s mind that were relevant. So we loaded more and more of the rest of his mental patterns into the machine.”

  “You brought his personality back to life,” said Mom. “You brought him back to life, and you kept him imprisoned.”

  Dr. Waxman swallowed. “The errors stopped, but then came a pattern of odd network accesses by David. We thought nothing of it because, to do his job, he—it, the algorithm—had to access some research materials online.”

  “He was looking for Mom and me,” Maddie said.

  “But he had no way to talk, did he? Because you had not thought it relevant to copy over the language processing parts.”

  Dr. Waxman shook his head. “It wasn’t because we had forgotten. It was a deliberate choice. We thought if we stuck to numbers, geometry, logic, circuit patterns, we’d be safe. We thought if we avoided the linguistically coded memories, we would not be copying over any of the parts that made David a person.

  “But we were wrong. The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know-how.”

  Maddie glanced at the screen and smiled. “No, that’s not why you were wrong. Or at least not the whole reason.”

  Dr. Waxman looked at her, confused.

  “You also underestimated the strength of my father’s love.”

  • • • •