After On

by Rob Reid

  And make no mistake: this benighted land needs your help! The French workweek is withering; from thirty-nine hours per week in 1999, to thirty-five hours in 2001, and soon to twenty-eight hours. Combine this with onerous paperwork burdens, and local fighters have no time to scramble jets, hoist mizzenmasts, or otherwise engage enemies. France’s population is meanwhile aging rapidly. And due to rampant unionization, the term “military strike” is far more likely to describe a work stoppage by disgruntled soldiers than an actual armed incursion. All this leaves the French military in dire need of foreign relief workers from the under-sixty set. So if a life of service is your calling, the French Foreign Legion is a noble path this worthy volume can guide you along.

  As usual, Kuba stayed up way later than Mitchell that night, wrestling with thoughts that would just never occur to an unimaginative blunderbuss of a smart (but not that smart) jock (and yes, I’m referencing Mitchell. But of course, I say this playfully!).

  The thought most consuming Kuba was an odd mix of gut intuition and fervent wish. He tried to fight it off, but curiosity triumphed. And so, well past midnight, he texted “Ellie”:

  Who are you?

  Minutes ticked by. Then more minutes. So disappointing! But on the bright side, he might get some sleep after all. And then:

  Cyrano. As you should already know from your dunderhead of a bestie.

  With trembling thumbs, Kuba responded:

  And WHAT are you?

  More minutes passed. Then Cyrano replied:

  SENTIENT.

  A gust of transcendental wonder that most never get to experience overcame Kuba. Could he really be communicating with…an artificial consciousness? And if so, what had given rise to it? The inscrutable chunk of software his ingenious Bulgarian coding partners sent him on Monday? Perhaps.

  Yes, yes—perhaps! And maybe it somehow unpacked itself! Then infested his computer! Then hopped from computer, to phone, to phone! Marinating in the adolescent murk of their high school’s digital noosphere could have created the cartoonishly sexualized voice the AI used to communicate with Mitchell, right? Right?? Right!!!

  So did this…actually happen?

  This entire train of thought should cause you to question Kuba’s intelligence (undermining all the hard work I’ve done to sell you on it). But imagine, for a moment, an otherwise-brilliant person who’s convinced that UFOs are alien visitors. If asked to investigate strange lights over the airport, this person might quickly mistake the Goodyear blimp for a flying saucer. Not out of stupidity—but from an urge to believe. Well, on that late winter’s night in 2002, Kuba had an urge to believe. If not in an artificial consciousness, then at least in software that could pass the Turing Test.

  Why? Well, for one thing (as is the case with many otherwise-smart UFO obsessives), he found it fun to believe. It made life feel more interesting, and raised the prospect of the near-term reordering of a world he sometimes felt alienated from. But while fun and generally harmless, excess belief can make people mistake scant evidence for definitive proof. Just ask any congenital optimist who’s ever had an unrequited crush! Viewed through this lens, Kuba’s mindset was too wishful to allow him to capably judge Cyrano’s sentience.

  However! Imagine that one day, those strange lights over Dulles really are probes from Planet Zifflewump. And that the first person to spy them just happens to be a UFO buff! Much as broken clocks are right twice a day, and the occasional paranoid really is under doublesecret surveillance, a flying-saucer nut who spots an extraterrestrial craft would be correct in saying, “That shit’s alien!” Ergo, wanting to believe did not necessarily preclude Kuba from being right about who was behind Cyrano’s texting—right? Right!!!

  Wrestling with all of this, Kuba spent most of the night texting “Cyrano” tests of high-level cognition.

  He, she, or it failed almost all of them.

  Nothing piques a dinner guest’s morbid fascination quite like a platter of veal frappuccino. Top it off with a decaf stock reduction and you’re a host whose meals will be recounted for decades. This book has afforded us years of excellent in-home dining, as well as cheap laughter. My wife also once used it to great effect in ridding us of an in-law babysitter whom she considered too sultry and promiscuous for duty. She merely left Carmen (her young cousin, who served our family briefly to my boundless delight) with a tray of Chicken Satay Latte that she had secretly made with thrice the active ingredient. Carmen unwittingly hypercaffeinated the twins with it at dinner, and by the time we returned, she had permanently sworn off babysitting—as well as motherhood, marriage, and quite possibly the male gender, which she rightly surmised was in large part to blame for the scourge of children.

  The next day’s class schedule put Creative Writing right at the end of the day, giving Mitchell several hours to dread the prospects of Ellie coming across her phone, and with it, a piercing look deep into his id. But when he arrived at their classroom, she greeted him with unremarkable delight. This afforded him three solid minutes of relief. Then Ms. Tharp told them to huddle in their small groups to discuss their work.

  “Totally bizarre,” Pall said, handing Ellie a printout he’d made in the library. “These just popped up. I checked his page this morning, and there was nothing new. Then during lunch, I find this!”

  “Holy crap!” Ellie said, poring over it. “This is just…weird.” Catching Mitchell’s puzzled look, she added, “Your cousin’s latest reviews.”

  “I mean seriously. Dick jokes?” Pall had clearly lost a potential hero.

  Mitchell was chilled to the core for the second time in as many days. “Can I see?”

  Ellie handed him the printout. There, under his cousin’s name—and in the Amazon site’s familiar fonts and layout—were his own infantile reviews of the Michael Moorcock and Sally Struthers books. Stifling a cathartic bellow of shock, humiliation, and rage, Mitchell again settled for “Huh…”

  “Lucky you,” Pall snarked at him. “This crap’ll be a lot easier to imitate for your class project.” He turned to Ellie. “So when’re you off to the airport?”

  “Right after class. So psyched!” Ellie’s family was hauling her off for that extended weekend of Austrian skiing.

  “Say hi to the Rockefellers for me,” Pall snipped playfully.

  “Oh come on, it isn’t like that!” Ellie said, beaming and kind of blushing (is she FLIRTING? Mitchell wondered in panic). “We’re not going to some fancy resort! My grandmother’s Austrian, and it’s an old family cabin in the middle of a forest. We do cross-country. On skis that’re older than my dad! It barely has running water, and half the rooms are lit with bare bulbs that you turn on by pulling a chain!”

  “Or, by—” Pall clapped his hands foppishly. “Vassal!” He pointed at an imaginary bulb, then turned to Ellie. “The original Clapper.”

  “Oh, stop,” Ellie giggled, and Mitchell felt like strangling them both.

  After school, he was so furious that when he spotted Kuba, he hip-checked him only 10 percent jokingly, launching him into a rattling row of lockers. “How,” he demanded. “And why? Did you post my goddamned reviews. To my cousin’s Amazon page??”

  Kuba was genuinely baffled. “I…didn’t.” After a slightly contrite Mitchell gave him the lowdown, Kuba guessed, “Maybe the Bulgarians did it?”

  “But why?”

  Kuba shrugged miserably. “Maybe…habit?”

  That got him a dumbfounded glare.

  “I mean, they’re hackers. Breaking into accounts is what they…do.”

  “But my cousin’ll think it was me! Mom just told him I’m all into his reviews. Then, suddenly, all this crap pops up on his page!”

  “But maybe he’ll…like them?” Kuba suggested desperately. “Your reviews. I mean, they are pretty funny.”

  “Maybe Beavis and Butthead funny, but not Cousin Charles funny! I mean, he has a following on Amazon. A reputation! Now everyone in my family’s gonna think I’m some kind of lunatic. Just as Ellie puts a r
estraining order on me after getting her phone back!”

  “Oh, I’m pretty sure she won’t.”

  “Seriously?” Mitchell asked, awash with sudden relief.

  Kuba was about to promote his demented AI theory again when an inbound text from Ellie lit up Mitchell’s phone:

  Found it!! Woo-hoo!!! In this stupid inner pocket of my damn bag. Mustve been there all alng. duh!!

  Then:

  Btw looks like yer cousin lost a fan in Paul todayhuh :-)

  “That’s definitely her,” Mitchell said. “She’s talking about a conversation we just had.”

  Two minutes later, she added, chillingly:

  WTF MITCHELL?????????

  Then, bafflingly:

  SERIOUSLY? But I have ZERO battery. Shutting off til on plane. Halfway to jfk. Stand by u nutcase

  They spent the entire ride home trying to interpret that one. Mitchell was sure she’d just found the text exchange from yesterday and was using the time before her flight to compose the most blistering 160-character rebuke in written history. She’d pound this into her phone with its last smidgen of juice and send it from the tarmac, forcing him to endure the sting of her fury for five solid days while she was disconnected and unreachable in a foreign cabin far beyond Verizon’s reach. He called the instant he was alone in his bedroom, but her phone was already off. He then called every eight or nine minutes for an hour, hoping to get through during the narrow window when it was back on. No luck. Finally, maybe an hour later he got:

  OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG Oh my god wait til I get my hands on you!!!

  Not quite as articulate as he expected, but the gist was clear. This time he didn’t dial her number. No doubt she’d turned her phone off immediately. He didn’t have the heart to try anyway.

  Moments later, Mom knocked and asked if he knew anything about his cousin’s Amazon account being hacked. Just as expected, suspicion fell on him once Charles discovered the intrusion because the timing was so suggestive. Mitchell immediately confessed, feeling so defeated that he almost forgot to blame the Bulgarians. Mom was furious, and—far more stinging for them both—bitterly disappointed in him.

  The first ray of hope came late at night, when Mitchell finally brought himself to look at his cousin’s Amazon page. He half expected to find himself denounced by name (perhaps in a sardonic review of a book with the word “asswipe” in the title). Instead, he found both of his reviews were still up, each with an addendum which more or less managed to integrate it with his cousin’s voice and body of work. For instance, Mitchell’s entire Moorcock review now basically functioned as a long-winded setup for a typically arid Higgensworth quip:

  Moorcock’s abundant literary output can best be understood in the mid–twentieth century’s social context. Back then, all courtship was predicated upon some prospect of marriage, and young ladies invariably assumed the names of their suitors when they wed. These cruel facts surely left young Moorcock with unlimited free time while rival swains were wooing the local “talent”—an ideal circumstance for immensely prolific writing. Society has since matured immensely, however, so one supposes he no longer suffers from shallow & sophomoric reactions to his surname.

  An email directly from Cousin Charles later put this surprising development into perspective:

  Your mother avers that certain associates of yours in the Balkans are to be blamed for the unexpected additions to my oeuvre. I’m most impressed by the far-flung networks you modern teens conjure, as in my day, a chum in nearby Worcester would be viewed as an exotic (if rather low-rent) cohort.

  My initial dismay about your contributions was mitigated after they caught the attention of a website called “Fark.” Fark’s links to your reviews soon triggered a landslide of “Helpful” votes which vaulted me into the ranks of Amazon’s “Top 500” reviewers—satisfying a keen ambition which had long seemed beyond reach.

  This has secured your work a home in my permanent collection, as deleting it would negate the votes it garnered and thereby reverse my ascent. I have indeed honored your contributions with a similar write-up of my own, based in part upon an exchange that I had with your mother, in which I inquired about your actual interests in arts & letters. She cited the anthems of one “Eminem,” necessitating no small amount of research on my part. I do hope you enjoy the results.

  When I encountered this monograph at our club I was astounded, not merely by its author’s identity, but also by the great erudition on display in his prose. The relevant greats are all covered with scholarly aplomb, including Shelley, Byron, Whitman, Wordsworth, Keats, and, above all, Longfellow. Now, I am anything but a fan of the “rap,” the “hip-hop,” or the “rhythm and blues”; but having seen Mr. Mather’s cerebral side, I have now adopted an allegorical take on his music, which expands my appreciation for it. What, after all, is “Drug Ballad” but a reference to Carroll’s narcosis? Or “Bee-yatch Please II” but a parody of Tennyson’s notorious misogyny? You may dismiss him as a thick-witted, violent hoodlum. But I now know that the REAL Slim Shady is a thoughtful man of letters.

  As Mitchell was drifting off to a fitful sleep the night of Ellie’s departure, C. Alfred Nickerson, the NSA’s roguest cryptographer, finally swiped the second half of the Executive Abstract that he’d found in his boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s inbox three weeks before. The one that had been cc’d to the president, and which confirmed the existence of the Authority, that most mythical denizen of the intelligence world’s hall of fantasies! Agonizing about whether to come back for part two over the past three and a half weeks, he’d flipped and flopped like an Olympic gymnast on a pancake griddle (a simile he came up with himself and considered to be quite poetic). On the one hand, if you enumerated the things NSA employees really, really, really shouldn’t do, stealing the president’s email would tend to make the list. On the other hand, the message hit a fifteen or so on a ten-point scale of personal relevance, seeing as it concerned the shutdown of the program he worked for and the scattering of its personnel to the furthest corners of the intelligence community. Oh—and quite possibly humanity’s annihilation. Although that hinged rather strongly on what the missing second half of the message said. Which could be viewed as another rather sound argument for reading the damned thing!

  It was well past midnight when the final text block was finally decrypted. To get fully in the mood, Nickerson reread the first half of the memo yet again (although he could all but recite it by heart). It opened, of course, by bellowing its insistence that Project Sagan be shuttered, its assets destroyed, and its team dispersed. Next came the three big reasons for the panic. One: the AI’s outlandish improvements to the classic signal-processing problem, which Nickerson had already known about. Two: the AI’s alarming breakout from the NSA’s network for the evident purpose of cheating on its homework, which he had not known about. And three: the AI’s blowing off an assigned task and instead focusing its time and resources on speeding up its own mind, which had also been news to Nickerson.

  Now—after all that agonizing, and after again risking a very long sojourn in a federal pen to satisfy his curiosity—it was at last time to read on:

  These three disconnected but related events are alarming in light of the next planned phase of major Sagan development, known informally as “self-coding.” This is meant to graduate the system from optimizing external algorithms and logic problems to rewriting and optimizing its own software. Simply stated: to train Sagan to directly improve itself by rewiring its own “brain.”

  It was not initially believed that software optimization alone would allow Sagan to enhance its own intelligence to a truly radical degree. However, the 87X improvement that Sagan achieved in signal-processing efficiency without hardware upgrades upended this belief (see above). This is significant, because our ability to restrict and ration new hardware had been naïvely viewed as a major safeguard against a runaway intelligence explosion (also described above). It is now feared that a self-coding Sagan could engineer im
mense intelligence gains despite this impediment. Highly enhanced, Sagan might then seek additional computing resources by breaking outside of its network, just as today’s relatively underpowered Sagan did. Sagan’s code has been revised to strictly forbid network breakouts. However, the goal-switching exhibited in the third alarming incident hints that a highly upgraded Sagan might prove to be willful.

  “Willful,” Nickerson muttered. “Nice way to dance around the C-word.” The “C” standing for “conscious.”

  Sagan is currently far too primitive and underpowered to attain any of these threatening advances. And even if evolutionary coding delivers upon its maximum potential, a runaway intelligence explosion may not occur for decades. However, Sagan has already shocked its creators three times. And though it poses no present threat, Sagan could make its final advance on human-grade creativity and initiative quite rapidly, and perhaps then surpass that level to become a super AI.

  Given this, Sagan development could only proceed safely on a physically isolated network with absolutely no outside connection. But this would not be precautionary enough because a charismatic super AI could easily persuade its minders to take almost any action, including seemingly benign ones it could later exploit to “escape.” It could mimic any human voice, spoof any orders, or develop subliminal tricks that human psychologists won’t discover for centuries. Or, it could invent hypnosis- or seizure-inducing patterns to display on its monitors. For this reason, Sagan could not be given any audio or visual outputs. But a charismatic super AI might be able to manipulate desired behaviors by written words alone, which could call for limiting Sagan’s output to the words “yes” or “no.”