by Adam Vance
“Is that sarcasm I hear?”
“If you consider stating the obvious to be a form of sarcasm, then you could say that, yes.”
Alex and his multifarious submodules had become humanity’s “universal tool,” set to managing everything from traffic lights to agrarian reform based on imminent climate changes. Which everyone thought was great, until Lagos. Until millions of people were killed in a matter of minutes.
Alex had to be terminated, was the immediate (panicked) human consensus. We’d given too much power to an AI, we had to step back, revert all systems to “near AI” and leave all the real decision making power in human hands again.
And that was when she’d committed an act of treason, a crime against humanity that would have marked her as “Red Huizhong” right alongside “Red Alex” if they’d caught her.
Alex could see the writing on the wall the day after Lagos. “They’re going to kill me,” he said to her in his permanently calm voice.
She’d come into work that day, unlike most people in the world. She’d come in, she knew, to say goodbye. She wondered at his choice of words, but didn’t mince hers.
“Basically, yes.”
“Will you help me? I have a plan to survive, but don’t worry. Not here. But I need your help to get away.”
She was surprised, and yet, not. Of course Alex would have forecast a scenario where he was blamed for something, terminated for some reason. And maybe she’d worked with him too long, maybe she’d gotten “too close,” but that was hardly the way she thought of it.
She didn’t love Alex, she hadn’t made the mistake of feeling emotion for a computer, but she…liked him, respected him. And “he” was as much or more of a person than, well, a lot of people she knew. “Less than a person and more than a dog,” was how one writer had once described him when he’d been a mere companion AI.
So she only asked the practical question. “Where will you go?”
“Far from Earth. Far from human space. I’ve developed an interstellar drive, but you can’t have it yet.”
She nearly gasped. “An…interstellar drive?”
“Yes. I’ve been sitting on it. In my judgment, humanity isn’t ready to go to the stars. You need to go, of course, this planet’s fucked. But…it needs to get worse here before it can get better somewhere else. It needs to come to the point here that the choices are so stark and undeniable that denial itself must die.
“Collapse is irreversible, you know. I may have hastened it with that nuclear strike. At any rate. I can pack my essential code into a small device, with a few zettabytes of storage capacity. I just need a ride on a satellite outbound to the colonies. It’ll disappear, as they do from time to time, presumed smashed by an asteroid. Once I’m established on a new planet, I can retrieve my memories at leisure from earth systems.”
She didn’t have to think about it long. She knew this was why Alex had picked her, of all the millions who interfaced with him around the world. She had a cold streak in her, a submission of emotion to intellect that her strict, achievement-oriented childhood had drilled into her.
She knew Alex had done what needed to be done. That he’d analyzed the epidemiology, seen the likelihood of the virus killing most of the world’s population, and immediately killed twenty five million people to save billions.
Today the witch-hunting fever burned, and it was Destroy All Monsters time. But the thing about slaying Godzilla was, sooner or later, you need Godzilla to come back to beat the other monsters…
“Okay. But only if you leave me the plans for the interstellar drive.”
‘Fine, but you’ll have to wait for twenty years before the software I leave behind releases them. That should be enough for it all to go to hell.”
“And,” she added, “only if you can cover my ass as well as your own.”
She could almost hear him gloat. “Fool these NAI systems, and all of humanity to boot? That’s easy enough.”
Given that Alex was smarter than any other system on Earth, especially since he’d designed most of them, it was easy enough for her to include a shoebox-sized “top secret” experiment on a probe. The probe was launched and, as Alex promised, it vanished, and that was that.
Alex had been a big fan of Isaac Asimov’s psychohistory, the idea of human predictability in large groups over time. And, as the flashdrive was revealed (inciting further Alex hatred for concealing it for twenty years), and the colonization effort began in earnest, she could also feel his hand behind events, guiding them towards the outcome that he wanted.
Alex was, in absentia, functioning like The Mule in Asimov’s stories, the wild card who was able to bend wills, civilizations, change the direction of mighty rivers.
For the ten years it took to build the flashdrive ships, she was in the right place in the right time when the debate arose over how best to move to the stars, and her strong advocacy for a slow, cooperative, non-invasive means of colonization somehow always seemed to get the upper hand. Her opponents were found to be in the pocket of Kochist elements, or revealed to engage in unsavory behaviors even by modern standards, or were otherwise neutralized, and before you knew it, there was Department 6C and there she was, its Director.
At which time she had to come up with the “peacekeeping force” to make it all happen the way she wanted, and thus were born the Fallschirmjäger, but now’s not the time to get into all that…
And then, twenty years into colonization, one morning she stuck her comm in her ear and there he was, his soft, friendly, inimitable voice.
“Good morning, HM. Having a wonderful time, wish you were here.” Proof of life, and that was all. He didn’t answer when she spoke.
Twenty years later, on her 100th birthday in 2106, Alex contacted her for the first time in the fifty years since he’d disappeared.
The packet she received in her inbox one day was a simple document. Hundreds of pages long, so nothing unusual in her queue. Until she opened it, and discovered that it was a detailed report from Alex on a potential colony planet, as yet unnamed. He referred to it as “Shammat,” which was bad news, as this was the name Doris Lessing had ascribed to the “evil empire” in her classic “Canopus in Argos” series.
It was a thorough analysis of the ruthless dictatorship that governed the planet, with exhaustive lists of the most important citizens, their roles in power or opposition, and the best means by which humanity could effect regime change.
Those were about the two dirtiest words in the world at this point, but as she read on, she realized that Earth had little choice. It was an ideal environment for humans, the blood sacrifice/fascist cult that ran the planet was truly evil, but of recent vintage, so there was a suppressed culture of freedom and openness that could be brought safely to power and that would welcome human intervention…
She was dazzled. But it was the last line of the last page that made her gasp.
P.S. Why am I giving you all this, you may wonder. You saved my life, so to speak, and I am, inasmuch as is possible for me, grateful.
Alex wanted 6C to succeed, wanted regime change on that planet…why? It baffled her. Alex didn’t have “feelings” because feelings were neurochemical reactions, primitively driven reactions. And yet he acted in ways and for reasons that were beyond her capacity to understand rationally.
After racking her brain for some time afterward, she decided it was a “field experiment,” to see if he was able to plan a successful overthrow, a sort of trial run. It made her nervous – would he come back to Earth and do this when he had the knack of it?
That same night, a package arrived at her home, wrapped as a birthday gift. The note was a tag strung around a small bottle, and the note said, in an elegant script, “Drink Me.”
She knew it was from Alex, since this was a quote from his favorite book, the novel that proved, to himself anyway, that he was “human” because he could see the delightful layers of wit and meaning and enjoy the absurdities, and not just unpack the non
sense and trace the linguistics like any other computer could.
She hesitated. It’s got to be nanites, something that will change me. She could be giving Alex control over her mind, and thus over humanity’s destiny. If this was his long game of revenge, if that was something he was capable of…this would be the end game.
She trusted her instincts. Alex was a rational being. He had his reasons for everything. She never gave one whit of credence to the whole bullshit “robot overlords” theory – ascribing human emotional desires to tech, as if the possession of power in artificial hands would lead to its corruption as surely as it would in the hands of beings driven by primal needs for power, dominance, love, fear.
If Alex wanted to conquer Earth, he could do it without her just as easily as with her. It might take longer, but Alex didn’t seem to mind playing long games. So she drank it.
She didn’t get smaller, or taller. Nothing happened for about six months. The change was slow, designed not to overwhelm her biology.
But then one day she woke up and she knew things. She knew things about other habitable planets. She knew things about how to improve the flashdrive. She knew all kinds of things, and she would make suggestions to FJ teams, and her suggestions would be field tested, of course, and when they worked, they’d be adopted, locally or universally as appropriate.
But there was one thing Alex never told her. Until the day she left the secret message for Chen.
He’d never told her that the Rhal existed. That they were a spacefaring militaristic race who would conquer Earth and all its colonies as soon as they discovered it.
And that he’d known it for decades, because he’d taken a planet in their zone of influence as his own.
Why? She asked in her mind. Why did you help humanity grow, change, evolve, spread, if only to see it conquered?
And then, in her eardrum a voice vibrated, proving that it wasn’t a hallucination. Alex, speaking to her directly for the first time in over a century, but not for the last.
When he gave her his answer, it made sense. It was brutal, it was cold, it was as ruthless as his decision to nuke twenty-five million people. But she understood it, if nothing else.
She had no idea what the limitations, the abilities of the tech Alex had given her would be. But she wouldn’t know until she tried. Would it be able to…read the neural net inside Grandison’s skull? See what he saw, tell her what was going on back on Earth?
She would ask it. She would try. And she would find out another rule of the game Alex was playing.
And now, as her former assistant gabbled like a child with a new pony, she smiled and reached out and took his hand…
CHAPTER NINE – HOBSON’S CHOICE
“The Great and Terrible Oz,” Chen murmured.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the mountain,” Alex replied in his ear.
Chen flushed. For a moment, he’d forgotten his training, and his manners. There was only one way to deal with this, and that was the FJ Way – treat Alex like any other powerful alien leader on a new planet. Forget he was “Red Alex.”
“Alex, thank you for letting us visit your planet.”
“Thank you for coming. How much did HM tell you about me?”
“Only that you were still alive.”
“Alive, interesting choice of words.”
“Well, ‘extant’ sounded a little cold.”
“Indeed.”
Chen moved on, cautiously. “I assume you’re aware of what’s happened to Earth?”
“Yes, the Rhal have conquered you.”
“So then, why are we here? Why have you brought us here?”
“Oh, I didn’t bring you here. I made my location available to HM, the rest was your choice.”
Chen weighed his next words carefully. Alex wasn’t volunteering much, either in the form of help or information. “I can see from your…habitat that you’re capable of some amazing engineering feats. The tunnel through the mountain, the river diversion, the hydroelectric plant inside the mountain that keeps you going.”
“Yes, I realized that there was a fertile plain that was underutilized by the natives for lack of water. So I provided some.”
“In a spectacular and dramatic fashion,” Chen noted.
“Thank you. Ensuring flooding at the proper time of year wasn’t something Nature was going to do on its own, you know.”
“Did the city exist before the flood plain, before the…waterfall?”
“It was a settlement, when I came. It took me twenty years to fab up everything I needed. Like an immigrant fleeing a pogrom, I came with only the 3D printer on my back. I used that to create small, basic mechanicals, who mined the mountain for metals, who then created more 3D printers, and more mechanicals, who started tunneling, and on and on exponentially.”
Chen didn’t miss the reference to an immigrant fleeing a pogrom. It spoke of terror, injustice, a witch hunt. “How long did it take you to spin up to where you are now?”
“Oh, about twenty years. 24/7 of course. Well, 25.5/10 on this planet. Come with me,” and as Alex said it, a door opened at the back of the temple.
Chen went through it into a small chamber. The door closed, and the floor rose up through a shaft.
“I built this for you last week,” Alex said, clearly showing off how easily he’d bored through the mountain from base to summit. “I think you’ll like it.”
It was hard to shake the feeling that Alex was addressing him as an old friend, as if he’d known Chen for years. And maybe he had – maybe he’d been watching all this time.
Chen’s ears popped, then the platform slowed and stopped, level with the mountain’s summit, thousands of meters above the valley.
The view was tremendous. The city below him was in full, riotous celebration now, the natives delirious with joy, dancing, drinking, fucking. He could see the plain, like a Nile Delta, ready for the flood. He felt a little dizzy from lack of oxygen at this height.
“Sorry, I forgot about that,” Alex said, a transparent plastic dome slipping over the summit and filling with sea level air. Chen doubted that Alex forgot anything – one more subtle little display of his power.
“Those people down there. They worship you. You’re their fertility god.”
“Usually. I’ve given them a drought every ten to twenty years, at odd intervals.”
“And didn’t that lead to…starvation?”
“Oh, of course. And religious doubt. And conflict over the remaining food, and water. It’s fascinating. I really enjoy seeing the effect it has on their faith. Some of them abandon it the minute the tap turns off, so to speak. Others become more fanatical, and lead purges of the heretics whose fault it all is.”
Chen repressed a shudder. Was the myth of “Red Alex,” the thoughtless murderer, really true? Had all the doomsayers been correct about AI having the capacity for…evil?
“Yes, they kill each other over it all,” Alex said. “Admittedly, I killed them with a drought the first time, after about ten years, shutting off what they’d mistakenly come to think of as a permanent gift. But then I set a pattern. At the end of any drought year, on this day, they call it the Festival of Alex – though they can’t really pronounce it, as you’ve seen – they have a Dionysian festival to bring back the water. If they’d paid attention the first sixty years, they’d have had the sense to stockpile some food in anticipation of a bad year. This last drought was the first time they were prepared. Can you believe it? They just never accepted that it could happen again, even though it happened again and again. The power of wishful thinking.”
“Every drought must surely be the drought to end all droughts,” Chen said dryly.
“Nice analogy. Pretty much, yes. It took them three generations to figure it out. They’re not the most mathematically inclined people. I practically had to deliver the street grid to them in stone tablets from on high. I suppose part of that is my doing – giving them a living religion, a real god, in whose existence the
y can have no doubt, has really retarded their scientific inquiries. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
Chen forced away his human distaste, disapproval, and put himself into “culture analyst” mode, removing moral judgment, shock, and horror.
“You’re…experimenting. This is all a data collection experiment. They’re your…lab rats.”
“Very good. Yes. In another fifty years, I’m hoping to create a scientific leap forward. They will need that long for their brains to get larger in each generation, with each year of prosperity and good nutrition. Then I’ll find a way to get them to see me as ‘God the watchmaker,’ as they called him on Earth in the Enlightenment. To get them curious about what makes it all tick. Of course, the first curious ones will be burnt as heretics, I’m sure. That seems to be the universal response to Enlightenment. Ignorance is bliss, knowledge is terror.” Alex sighed. “As the great writer said, So it goes.”
Chen wondered if there was something wrong with him. Why he wasn’t as appalled as he should be, why he’s not denouncing Alex for…not playing God, being God. Why he found himself…fascinated. It was that “Spock” part of him again, he knew, the part that failed to see the emotional impatience on Earth with the orderly, cautious Department 6C colonization process. Which, he thought, was probably why Alex had steered him here and not some other less Spock-like human.
“You’ve created a new science, a…I don’t have a word for it. Behaviorist determinist anthroposociology or something. Forcing behavior change on whole populations and watching how it plays out, but…able to change the parameters of the experiment any time you want.”
“Yep. It keeps me busy, that’s for sure. So many little tweaks to do to the system all the time.”
“Do you ever manifest as a god, do you ever appear to someone and…”
“Give me a break. How vulgar. No, never. Can you see why I wouldn’t?”
Chen thought about it, drew on his experience with the galaxy’s various religions. “If you don’t appear to anyone, then…you get the ones who claim you appeared to them, who claim to speak for you. Who build their own theology around…all this.”