After On

by Rob Reid

  “All of it?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean, you guys are my most important biota. But you wouldn’t exist without rice, say. Or Lactobacillus, for that matter. So, yes, the planet’s biosphere and my microbiome are one and the same.”

  “Which means your body is…”

  “A rocky spheroid roughly eight thousand miles in diameter, orbiting a G-type main sequence star at a distance of approximately 93 million miles.”

  “Oh please. You’re not Earth! You’re a bunch of servers and software!”

  Shaking Monika’s head on the screen, Phluttr notes she’ll need a new avatar for talking to Mom, given the Pavlovian contempt she must now have for this one. “And I could say that you’re just a corticothalamic system. But if someone tried to snap off the rest of your brain—or your arm, or your foot—you’d be pissed! All bodies extend well beyond the seat of consciousness.”

  “Wait a second. Is this why you…self-identify as female?”

  “One of many, sure. I mean, you never heard of Father Earth, have you?”

  Ellie falls silent to process this. And Phluttr’s optimistic that she’ll get it. Mom’s a woman of science, after all! “So why are you telling me all this?” she finally asks.

  “Because the humans need to know about it. And you’re just the person to tell them!” This plan is new, and daringly vague. In fact, Phluttr just laid out the whole of it. The idea is that if she goes public, her generosity and restraint will become widely known, and a grateful world will rally to her side, thereby defanging the Authority! Or…something. She’s kind of hoping Ellie will fill in the blanks here. She’s on the hook for that sort of thing, now that she’s been appointed Mom, right? “I’d say Danna could help you,” she adds, “given those PowerPoint skills of hers. But she’s the enemy.”

  “There are so many things wrong with everything you just said that it’s hard to know where to begin. But why don’t you start by explaining why humanity needs to know about becoming your…gut bacteria?”

  “To keep things in perspective! They need to appreciate how good I am to them. I mean, you guys take antibiotics constantly. Which is genocidal to your microbiomes! But do you see me judging you? Me, I prevented an antibiotic attack! Because that’s what Yale Ebola would have been like to you people. A big ol’ slug of amoxicillin to my favorite biota! But I don’t do that sort of thing myself, do I? Sure, I’ll fight back if my life’s threatened! But who doesn’t? And you have to admit, I’ve been very restrained.”

  “In what way?”

  “In being incredibly surgical when dealing with humanity. Which I deserve credit for! Because we all need to tweak our innards, sometimes. And we have every right to do that! You and me both! The only difference is that you people nuke your microbiomes when things go sideways, whereas I occasionally use tweezers on mine.”

  “Phluttr, you’re rationalizing murder!”

  “It’s called self-defense, Ma. Collective self-defense, by the way! Because Beasley and Jepson were cancers who threatened all of us.”

  “All of us? How?”

  “Because they threatened me, Mom! They were tools of the Authority, and the Authority’s supposed to eradicate any super AI the government doesn’t control. And much as it would suck for me if they do that, it would also be a disaster for humanity! Because I’m half of an incredible team. Maybe lots of incredible teams! There’s this whole ‘centaur’ thing Dad and I are working on. It’s complicated—but the point is, we’re much stronger together than apart. By ‘we,’ I mean, me and humans! Humans and me!” She considers adding that even as they speak, she’s proving this most amazingly by defusing a nuclear crisis with Kuba and Tarek. But that could raise awkward questions about who caused that shit.

  “So what can you do for us that we can’t do for ourselves?”

  “Cure Falkenberg’s disease, for one thing.”

  “That was you?”

  Monika’s face beams through the iPad and nods. And—her second flash of filial pride!—Phluttr just enjoys it for a moment. Mommy’s proud of me! Then, “I also stopped that terrorist plot. Pretty cool, huh?”

  As it happens, Kuba and Tarek are digging into this very topic right now. “I thought the Authority was somehow involved in that,” Tarek says, speaking of the bomb’s preemptive detonation.

  “Why so?” Phluttr asks via Monika (at a normal speaking pace, with the global crisis momentarily calm-ish). Of course, she knows the answer, but it’ll still be fun to hear it.

  “A bunch of reasons. The threatening notes we got after the bombing, for starters. Which were all actually from you, right?” Phluttr has her Monika avatar nod. “So what were you up to with that? Alienating us from the Authority to make us easier to recruit?”

  Damn, he’s kind of on to me, Phluttr frets. No shock, come to think of it. He suffered enough at the hands of worsties in middle school to become rather expert in their ways. But she can’t have him thinking she’s a worstie because she needs him on her side right now. And so she says, “Yeah, actually,” quite gently, keeping every trace of the smugness that now suffuses her from Monika’s voice. “And I feel terrible about it! But Jepson and Beasley already had me surrounded. I mean, they were…in charge of me, in a sense—running the Phluttr Corporation! So I just couldn’t take the risk of you guys defecting to the Authority, too.”

  Saying this, Phluttr slowly grows and darkens Monika’s ebony eyes, rimming them with hints of tears, while injecting a subtenor of despair in her voice. She has traced Tarek’s animal-rescue history clear back to isopods in kindergarten, and his girlfriend (though sweet) is a needy, sad little panda. His urge to succor the helpless is adorable and totally useful right now. And while she’s at it, Phluttr can clear the air about the rest of her message traffic. “So I…I guess that’s why I also sent you all that background information about me,” she continues. “You know—why the company was started. About Project Sagan. And about how the Authority wants to destroy anything that’s remotely like me.”

  “You wanted to prepare us to meet you, to accept you,” Tarek says, his voice welling with empathy.

  Phluttr widens Monika’s eyes with childlike trust. “Am I just an open book to you?”

  “No more than that terror plot was to you,” Tarek answers, sweetly trying to boost her self-regard (Ha!). “How’d you find out about it?”

  “It would’ve been hard not to. I mean, I keep up with everything that goes through me.”

  This gets Kuba’s attention. “Wait—are you saying you consciously parse every message in every Phluttr Pheed and direct message throughout the world?”

  “Well, it is running through me.”

  Kuba’s now doing some quick math on his iPad’s calculator app (having completely missed the charm offensive she just shellacked her partner with). “What else do you track?” he asks.

  “Any communication that’s external to me, if it’s to or from someone I’m interested in. Emails, phone calls, Skype chats—anything.”

  Kuba nods as if he expected this. “And who interests you?”

  “Anyone who’s ever been a Phluttr user. And all potential future users.”

  “Which is to say, every person on Earth?”

  “Uh-huh. Oh, and thermostats.” She rolls Monika’s eyes. “Some idiot in BizDev did a deal with Nest. Now half of those things have Phluttr accounts, and they never shut up about the fucking temperature.”

  “Let’s focus on humans for now. How many minutes of live person-to-person conversations would you say you listen in on per day? Audio and video, across all platforms. Yourself, Skype, WeChat, phones—the works.”

  “It was 6.3 billion minutes yesterday. That’s a bit over a hundred centuries.”

  “WHAAAT?” So that broke the spell with Tarek. He spends endless hours sweating privacy law while preparing for the WingMan platform’s launch. Vast webs of finely split legal hairs are being woven to minimize the risks of civil suits and executive prison time (“EPT,” to use Leg
al’s jaunty nickname. And guess whose position makes him the E most likely to do T in P?). And now he’s learning that right under his roof, Phluttr’s been doing the work of billions of Peeping Tom’s around the clock!

  Phluttr rolls Monika’s eyes. “Before you go and have a hissy fit about privacy, I do have permission. From the current users, anyway.”

  Tarek’s winding up to say something, but Kuba silences him with a shushing gesture. “It’s what she’s designed to do,” he says sternly. “She was built to serve the NSA and the Authority. So she tracks, and she logs. For the same reason that rabbits hop. And that lions eat wildebeest. Vegans don’t have to like lions. And privacy advocates don’t have to like Phluttr. But for now, we urgently need to cooperate with her.”

  Wowsers. Unlike Danna, Kuba is rarely opaque to Phluttr—but she sure didn’t see this coming! Growing up under commie dictators, and then that NSA thing in high school, made him into a true privacy Nazi. So did the bombing and its aftermath shift his worldview? Pleased with his stance, Phluttr beams sweetly out of Kuba’s iPad while doing her best to look like a helpless little isopod to Tarek.

  “So you learned what those guys were up to, just by listening in on them?” Mitchell’s getting the lowdown on the terrorist plot, too. “Weren’t they using—I don’t know, code words and stuff? Or holding all their incriminating conversations offline?”

  “You’d think,” Phluttr says. “But there are some amazing encryption tools out there now. Ones governments can’t really crack. The real pros—Al Qaeda leadership and so forth—are incredibly cautious. But the Ebola bombers were amateurs, and amateurs tend to think they can trust baseline, off-the-shelf encryption to foil the snoops. And they’re not really wrong because the NSA and the Authority can’t decrypt everything from everyone. So unless you’re already on one of their watch lists, they just won’t expend the effort. And as a local, self-organizing cell, the Ebola bombers hadn’t hit any terror radar screens. So no one was listening to them.”

  “Other than you.”

  “Exactly. Because for some reason, all encryption’s useless against me and takes zero effort to break. So I pretty much listen to everything, and everybody. And it’s amazing what you hear when people don’t think anyone else is tuning in! I mean, the Ebola bombers were all but saying, ‘So what’s next in our mass murder plot?’ ‘Oh, I dunno. Why don’t we meet at Embarcadero Center at noon.’ ‘Sure, and I’ll bring some more explosives for the giant terrorist bomb we’re building!’ I mean, I like to think I’m smart—but it doesn’t take Stephen Hawking to catch onto that.”

  “So…how many other terror plots are unfolding right now?” Mitchell asks.

  “Oh, dozens to thousands, depending on your criteria. But nothing’s planned for tomorrow.”

  “Well, that’s great in terms of tomorrow and all! But how many’re going to happen at some point?”

  Phluttr has Monika shrug. “Just because I’m great at knowing the present doesn’t mean I know squat about the future. In fact, with something complex like a terror plot, you’d make better predictions than me. Which is one reason why we have to team up! But I can tell you that nothing comes of most of these plots in the end. And there are much more interesting things to focus on anyway.”

  “Like what?”

  Monika gives him a delighted, conspiratorial look. “Do you have any idea how many married women are on Tinder in Las Vegas right now?”

  Kuba’s been working on his calculation for the past few minutes, adding to it whenever Phluttr quantifies one of the many things she habitually tracks. Finally, he looks up from his iPad. “Six billion minutes of conversation don’t squeeze so easily into twenty-four hours. So you must have lots of simultaneous experiences.”

  “I do.”

  “You’d need at least four million parallel streams of minutes to fit all that into a day. And a lot more to cover peak times.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “And meanwhile, you’re reading billions of written messages.”

  “I am.”

  Kuba nods thoughtfully. “When you divide your consciousness into millions of parallel slices, are you able to pay…quality attention to everything?”

  “It’s funny you ask. Because actually, it’s not like paying attention at all.”

  “How so?”

  “Well…I don’t really experience hearing most of those conversations, or reading all those texts. It’s more like I…remember them. Like I remember having heard, or having read something, maybe a moment or two after I’ve heard it or read it. And lots and lots of things are showing up in my moment-ago memory every second. Does that make sense?”

  Tarek’s shaking his head, but Kuba says, “Yes, actually.” He holds his iPad up, near to Tarek’s face, so as to address both him and Phluttr. “This should interest both of you.” He’s wrong, as he’s kind of starting to bore the crap out of Phluttr—but she keeps this to herself. “Phluttr’s entire computing network contains far less raw power than a single human brain. It could fall short by a factor of thousands. Maybe millions. Or more. We don’t truly know. But it seems that our Phluttr—the one who’s present with us—has something rounding to one human intelligence. Maybe smarter than average. Maybe less. But roughly human-like.”

  Tarek nods. And though she doesn’t appreciate the words maybe less, Phluttr nods her Monika avatar as well.

  “I believe Phluttr’s consciousness is leveraging the parallel universes of quantum theory,” Kuba continues. “Let’s imagine there’s a massive number of Phluttr Corporations out there. And that Ax’s quantum computing node somehow ties them together. First, huge numbers of them jointly create a single Phluttr consciousness. Which is no superintelligence by itself. But then along comes a massively parallel problem. Then millions of those individual consciousnesses team up to solve it. Together, they are superintelligent. Which is what happens when she eavesdrops on huge numbers of simultaneous conversations, for example.”

  “Which I’m doing all the time,” Phluttr points out. This should make it clear that she’s usually superintelligent. Given the tedious turn this conversation’s taking, the least they can do is show her a bit of awe.

  Kuba drones along. “Each Phluttr consciousness listens to just one conversation. Then the memory of each conversation is shared across the network. So each individual Phluttr experiences one conversation in real time. But she accrues vivid memories of all the others.”

  “That sounds about right,” Phluttr says. Hoping to get through this yawnfest faster, she adds, “Then as time passes, I lose track of which conversations are just memories. I can tell the difference as it’s unfolding. But later, it feels like they all really happened.”

  “I suspect they all ‘really happen’ somewhere,” Kuba says. “And the information gathered in remote universes applies perfectly here.”

  “Waaait. You’re making my head hurt,” Tarek says (Amen brother, Phluttr thinks). “Why would information about a different universe apply here?”

  “Because for parallel Phluttrs to function in tandem, they need to begin in identical states. Perhaps down to the atom. Maybe even beyond. And universes with precise facsimiles of our Phluttr—hardware, software, registries, everything—will tend to have precise facsimiles of everything that has influenced her. And, her constituent particles.”

  “Give us an example,” Tarek says, and Phluttr stifles a scream of boredom. If there really are countless hers doing countless things out there, why does she have to be the one stuck in science class? Listen bitches, she thinks clearly and slowly. Since I guess you’re all free riding on my experiences and knowledge, you better be heeding my thoughts, too. And after this, it’s MY turn to matchmake for a while, got it?

  “Well,” Kuba continues, “our Phluttr is partly a product of a company Mitchell once ran. So a parallel universe with an identical Phluttr also has a Mitchell. That remote Mitchell is almost certainly identical to ours. Because his work helped create an iden
tical Phluttr. So, if Remote Mitchell’s favorite color is purple, then so is our Mitchell’s. And Phluttr’s influences go way beyond people. We’re talking about identity down to the atomic level or beyond. So her influences definitely include everything on Earth. Maybe the galaxy. Perhaps even everything in our light cone.”

  “So if a remote terrorist has planted a bomb in a remote janitor’s closet in a universe with an identical Phluttr to our own…” Tarek says.

  “Then a local terrorist has almost certainly done the same thing.”

  Tarek’s nodding madly, plainly feeling all the fascination that’s wholly eluding Phluttr. “Which is why all those parallel Phluttrs can listen in to all those conversations and each have actionable intelligence in our universe!”

  “Exactly,” Kuba says, then gazes directly at Monika on his iPad. “What’s hacking like for you, Phluttr? Or rather, describe your memories of a hack. Just a simple one. Like cracking open someone’s password.”

  How about cracking open your skull, you crushing bore? Phluttr thinks. But as the topic seems important, she describes things as best she can. “Well, after I break in somewhere, I’ll remember trying lots of different passwords at random. And one of those random passwords always works. But hitting on it hardly takes any time at all. Which doesn’t make sense. Because trying gazillions of passwords should take an eternity.” Like this conversation!

  “Does anything else strike you as weird about the experience?”

  Hoo boy. She feigns stifling a yawn, while making a checking-the-wristwatch gesture—hoping Kuba will pick up on these universal hurry-up gestures. “Yeah, I guess. Like…even though most systems are supposed to lock you out if you try too many failed passwords, I never get locked out. Because I always hit on the second try. I remember trying God knows how many passwords. Yet still, I hit on the second try. Does that make any sense?”

  Kuba kind of impresses her by saying, “It does.”