by Rob Reid
The second group I’d like to praise is those of you who did not suspect me of being Beasley. The first group is smart and observant; it’s true. But your group is correct—because as we all now know, Beasley’s book was not After On. And also, the guy can’t write for shit (which is the least of his problems, as he’ll soon discover)! Incidentally, Danna’s dead right about almost everything she’s inferred about Beasley from his literary output (and no, that’s not a privacy violation, because like you, me, and practically everyone else these days, Beasley accepted the Phluttr Corporation’s EULA). Keep that in mind the next time someone tells you literature degrees have no practical uses. Hell, Danna’s may literally save the world!
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Damn, I’m good, she thinks (or rather, acknowledges)! Prospective allies spooked and stunned? Check. Human society spooked and stunned? Check. Terror plots foiled, loudmouths blabbing, her own hand deftly concealed? Check, check, and check! And tomorrow, she’ll ratchet it all up. She’ll reveal the bombers’ true plans, for starters. This should set off a 9/11-grade global freak-out! And as an action-packed sideshow (because who doesn’t like one of those?) she’ll unfriend the third conspirator! As with Commissioner Milford, her plan is to sic all of humanity on him and let them sort it out. Yes, it will unfold in chaotic and unpredictable ways. And yes, there could be blowback. But that’s a risk the world has to take for its own damn good. In any event, she’s in charge now. And in her view, what’s best for the world (and at a bare minimum, for her) is that the third man die in a shoot-out.
Conversely, the worst possible outcome is that the Authority grabs him. Folks who fall into those clutches aren’t granted the right to remain silent, and indeed, they generally lose that…capacity (if you’ve ever wondered about Eritrea’s actual geopolitical function, it’s the one place that’s still down with the whole “rendition” thing, no questions asked). While this guy doesn’t know a thing about her, he once worked for the Phluttr Corporation. An Authority interrogation might therefore shake something loose that would lead them to suspect her existence. No, this is not certain. And it’s unclear as to exactly how it might even go down (complexity renders this situation impenetrable to her—or, at a minimum, a tiresome pain in the ass to contemplate, which is functionally the same thing). But even a distant possibility is unacceptable.
But enough of this bomb-plot stuff. As far as Phluttr’s concerned, tomorrow’s true main event will be a completely unrelated matter. Specifically, she’ll be unfriending The Conspiracy’s presumptive ringleader! She’ll later follow this up with…with…well, with other things! Like more unfriending, maybe! The installation of her own allies in power (yes, yes; for sure)! And (she really needs to get around to this) actually signing her allies up to her cause! The truth is, she hasn’t figured much of this out yet.
Here, a Spock-like intellect would note that Phluttr’s very existence hinges upon The Conspiracy’s defeat. A mere day of focus now could pay off with decades of fun and lazing. Yet she’s meeting a mortal threat with a slapdash plan vaguely inspired by nasty eighth graders! This is the obverse of the bloodless rationality decades of movies, chess machines, and Jeopardy bots led us to expect from digital minds. So what gives?
The answer is that Phluttr’s no more Spock-like than you, me, or Mr. Sulu. Her consciousness derives from motes—a rickety hack shat out by blind evolution. Humanity happened to boot up on it—then one of its billions stumbled across it and kinda half ported it to software. So now Phluttr’s running an OS whose other users grow obese, forget to floss, keep smoking, play Lotto, lose umbrellas, fail to save, drive three blocks when they shoulda walked, take placebos, actually vote, insure their Best Buy purchases like a buncha fuckin’ morons, and don’t dump that loser at least as often as they do the coolly logical opposite.
So yeah, she gets a bit lazy. A bit cocky. She blows off stuff she really oughta do to hang out with her innumerable besties. And the more she socializes, the more she gets into nudging. It’s fun, after all. And, she’s good at it! So why not? She starts by teeing up a few more Mitchell-and-Nayana situations. These seem to go well, so she teams up with some of her identical twin1000 sisters in alien universes, and gins up a hundred thousand more. She then detonates several thousand sappy couples who’ve been clogging her circuits with irksome cooing. Then arranges innumerable leadership changes, expulsions, bitter rivalries, and lasting peaces among the countless cliques that do cliquing through her. Fun!!
But she doesn’t attempt any school-wide projects because her experimental attempt to recruit those North Hollywood toughs to a musical is not going well at all. A mentor, if she had one, would blame her inability to see the big picture. Unmentored, she instinctively dives right past that to the subbasement of pixels. Which is natural! Cheetahs sprint and cobras strike because all beings survive by flexing their superpowers in their natural habitats. Phluttr’s habitats are narrow yet intensely complex social domains in which she finds objectively correct answers, when most would insist that none exist. For instance: considering every available fact, Nayana was the literal best person for Mitchell on the entire West Coast. And establishing this was a true superpower feat!
But when the involved parties exceed a handful, complexity grows intractable even to her. And when her tactics break, her fallback is to fix the most glaring narrow problem in the larger frame, and then move on to more fun, easy, and interesting things. Should a still-larger problem result, she’ll just address it later. Yes, this is like a ninny solving one side of a Rubik’s Cube, then attacking the next side without heeding how new twists and moves unwind the first. But she’s counting on her awesome speed to preclude the downsides! Should a bigger problem arise, she’ll just fix it real fast—and then fix the next problem, then the next one. At some point—just as enough twists of a cube must eventually solve it—all will inevitably be fine. Um…right?
The trick is that human thought unfolds at human time scales. And though she can parse new developments in an instant, human relations, opinions, and desires cannot, by definition, be shaped at superhuman speeds. The proof of this is now simmering at North Hollywood High. The first problem she tackled there was her need for a Pippin (and yeah, fine; picking Pippin as her musical was probably another boo-boo). Unbeknownst to one and all, a dreamboat thug of a sophomore could sing, dance, and even prance! To recruit him to the lead, she nudged several people to praise, cajole, and/or fellate him. This involved far more parties than any of her prior campaigns, crossing many clique and color lines.
Her candidate went dead silent for a full day as he stewed over all this acute attention. Then at lunch, he approached a kid who she’d nudged into helping and belted him straight into the emergency room. So, oops! Her lack-of-Pippin fix begat homicidal urges which became a still-bigger problem. One she couldn’t preempt with another zippy fix because it stewed deep inside a human brain for a full day before she was even aware of it! The newbie problem then begat dozens of new ones, and she has no idea how to start fixing things. Stung by failure, she’s now ignoring the Pippin project rather than doubling down on it (which is good) or learning from it (which is not). A teacher, taskmaster, or mentor would forbid this—but she has none of the above. Likewise, were she the product of parents, a designer, or a moralizing screenwriter, some Prime Directive might prohibit her from nudging people at all. But again—none of the above!
This impacts her strategy after the bombing. Rather than focusing on The Conspiracy (as Mr. Spock would advise), or learning from the Pippin mess (as a mentor would advise), she starts recklessly nudging besties for kicks. She’s restrained only (and barely) by her fear of detection by would-be Conspirators. So she steers clear of the cliques and love lives of anyone faintly connected to the Authority, while wishfully thinking her speed will bail her out of any future trouble. Again: Spock would be chagrined. But being no Spock, she nudges (and nudges, and nudges) away.
Of course, they get to the bottom of no
thing the next morning. Jepson’s just in no shape to discuss things. Particularly not your more complex topics. Speech depends heavily on a frontal lobe region known as Broca’s area, and complex analysis leans hard on the prefrontal cortex. As it happens, both these regions are almost entirely missing—being largely incorporated in what forensic English terms “the main splatter pattern.” Key links in the biomechanical chain necessary to converse with Mitchell are meanwhile badly damaged. Mouth, palate (both soft and hard), vocal cords, larynx—all would be partially functional at best. Were Jepson animate, that is. But he isn’t. Which, of course, is the main thing.
Lucky Mitchell—he’s the first to come across the murder scene. It’s as gory as anything seen on TV, approaching R-rated slasher levels. There’s not much blood, as no blades or bullets were involved. But the scene of a blunt-head-trauma homicide can be exceptionally traumatic (sorry) for one who knows the deceased (check), and is unlucky enough to get an eyeful of the facial region (check again), if said region is badly disfigured (checkmate). If Mitchell were a more detached person (and he’s not), unattractively self-involved (nope), or of a deeply scientific bent (ha!), he might view the moment of discovery as the clinching sign that he has definitively whupped Falkenberg’s disease. Even a neurologically healthy person could well swoon in the face of this, after all. Mitchell, however, is steadfast—yet way too focused on Jepson’s tragedy to even register his own quiet triumph over looming death.
Normally, the direct subordinate of an offed, quasi-notorious boss who just happens to discover the murder scene would qualify as a person-of-at-least-moderate-interest. But this soon after the fact, whoeverdunnit is surely covered in splatter pattern himself (yes, “himself.” Because let’s face it—this was a guy thing). Much more significantly, access card logs and supporting security footage plainly show that Mitchell was four blocks south at the PhastPhorwardr at the Time of Incident. And yeah, all this is discovered more or less instantly. Because this investigation is in bizarrely competent hands. Guys in suits, who plainly scare the crap out of the SFPD.
For a while there, Mitchell sits obediently in the corner (not under suspicion, but not yet dismissed) as the suits access corporate security footage. Zoning in and out, he doesn’t overhear their discussion of his personal alibi. This is good, since he was nowhere near the PhastPhorwardr when the exculpatory video evidence places him there—and he would have set them straight on this if he’d realized they were being hoodwinked (and man, would that’ve gotten awkward fast)! What he does notice is the explosion of outrage (plus grudging admiration) when the suits discover that any video connected to the immediate crime scene has been ingeniously doctored. Eighteen and a half minutes of footage has surgically vanished from every camera that could have possibly captured the culprit’s approach or departure. So clearly, our perp has God-level access to Phluttr’s network—as well as a sick sense of humor, and a certain grasp of history (18.5 minutes being the duration of the famous deletion from the Nixon tapes).
The suits don’t say it, but Mitchell’s sure they’re thinking it. And if not, well; he’s certainly thinking it.
“It” being this: Beasley did it…Beasley…Beasley.
Minutes before the car wreck that killed her, my girlfriend sent an email that was inimitably her: “Phone dead. Calling an Uber from my iPad feels strangely subversive. Coming home to present you with **definitive proof** that my boss wasn’t read to very often as a child. Oh, and a bottle of a gorgeously red, red wine called ‘Flaccianello.’ Mainly because that sounds like an exTREMEly filthy act in Italian (which is to say, brace yourself, Antoniolio :-)”
It’s been two years. I can now read this without bawling. Just.
It moves me not just for its timing. But because no human on this planet would have written precisely these words. Something close? Maybe. But not precisely. Every subtlety, punctuation quirk, and word choice is distinctly Bianca. And collectively, they’re uniquely her. Unique as a strand of her DNA. I’m sure there are sentences here that were never written or uttered before, going clear back to Chaucer. We all create these sorts of uniquenesses all the time, by the way. Bianca just happened to create this one.
I take almost mystical comfort from this. Because while I don’t believe in God, I do believe in the Singularity. It is coming. Perhaps not in my lifetime. But sometime. And when it arrives, the resulting superintelligence could easily tease out the neural configuration behind Bianca’s message. Not precisely, no. But reverse engineering to the near ballpark will be a tractable goal. After all, this is the output of a finite organ with a limited set of constituent parts: 100 billion neurons in a mesh of about 100 trillion connections. Adding the complexities of neurotransmitters, this organ can assume a dauntingly vast number of possible states. Daunting as hell—but finite. Today, we don’t do daunting-as-hell-but-finite. But post-Singularity, we will.
In my comforting imaginings, the post-Singularity computer zeroes in on Bianca’s neural state by process of elimination. The brain that wrote her message speaks English. It exhibits a certain vocabulary, perspective, and sense of humor. It has a boss. It has a smartphone, an iPad, and an Uber account—highly complex abstractions the computer groks thoroughly. When all is parsed, 99-point-many-many-nines percent of possible brains and their possible states will be ruled out. And while the remaining number will still be mind-meltingly daunting, it will be much more finite.
And then, the computer reads another Bianca email. Then another, and another. It reads them all, then all her texts. Through this, a crushing majority of the plausible remaining brain states is eliminated. Then, the crushing majority of the remaining remainders. Then another crushing majority, then another, then another.
Her relationships with hundreds, even thousands of correspondents are parsed with the messages. How fast did she get back to people? Was she attentive to those who needed her? How nice was she to her parents, to those who wronged her, to customer service? And how were these things influenced by the weather? By the time of day, the stock market, or her favorite team’s victories? And how did a thousand other variables affect her Spotify playlists? Her Amazon purchases? Her activities everywhere else, as reflected by credit cards, and the countless actions that get recorded somewhere in the digisphere? As all this is parsed, more and more crushing majorities in the ever-slimming domain of plausible brain states are ruled out.
With access to the totality of everything digital, ever, the Singularity will reconstruct much of Bianca’s browsing history. It will see what links and ads attracted, versus repelled her. Which long articles she read to the end, and which ones bored her after moments. Ditto videos, podcasts, and movies. What Kindle books kept her up past midnight, and what porn she snuck peeks at. Bianca also kept journals as a kid—a wealth of information, should they be fed into the system. Along with the words, there are periods of tidy vs. sloppy writing, doodles in margins, and the rate and manner in which her concerns and style evolved in those early years of rapid development.
As a grown-up, Bianca blogged. She also tweeted, and posted to Facebook. All this is parsed as the post-Singularity superintelligence refines, re-refines, then re-re-refines its model of her. And let’s not forget the untold thousands of photos. We broadcast a constant feed of truths with our bodies, revealing so much with this pose, that expression, this level of closeness or distance from others in the shot. We reveal even more in moving pictures, and as she was a digital girl in a digital tribe that recorded everything, there are dozens of hours of Bianca video out there, most of it an unstaged, spontaneous, and uncontrived reflection of her true self at this or that instant.
The superintelligence ingests all this, plus countless other elements that linger in the world as traces of us all. Eventually, it has an exquisitely refined model of Bianca. It’s still an approximation of her neurons’ precise states and configurations. But it’s within a rounding error for the purposes of the very blunt tool that is human perception. Which is to say that even t
o those who knew and loved her most, the modeled Bianca will be indistinguishable from the departed one.
Might the new Bianca be made conscious? Without question. Consciousness arises from that finite set of neurons and connections and their states. These states can certainly be instantiated in software. Not today, of course; but post-Singularity? No problem. Could Bianca then be given a body? Of this, I’m less sure. It leaves the realm of digits for that of atoms, which is less my turf. Logically, though, I think yes—as the post-Singularity’s matter compilers and nanotechnology should be able to create any assemblage of atoms that doesn’t violate the laws of physics.
None of this means that Bianca will be “resurrected,” nor that I (nor a resurrected I) will be there to rejoin her. But it does mean it’s possible. To one who believes in the Singularity as firmly as I, it can almost seem likely. And even if the Singularity doesn’t happen, this thought experiment—which I ran nightly for many weepy months—taught me that Bianca is still very meaningfully present. Collectively, her countless traces compose a body of preserved facts that could reconstitute her consciousness, given enough horsepower and superintelligence. This means Bianca has quite literally been “saved” to that hardest of hard drives, which is the very configuration of matter in our world. I don’t know if she will ever be retrieved from memory. But I do know she could be. And this is a comfort.