by Rob Reid
“By the way, that’s how I cured Mitchell, too. The probiotic lab his doctor uses can only put out a finite range of functionally different mixes. Millions, but finite. So I…kind of tested them all out on a few different Falkenberg’s sufferers who were also on probiotic regimes. I had the cure after two quick trials, and sent it to Mitchell. Make any sense?”
Kuba nods. “In the hacking example, I’ll bet lots of parallel Phluttrs each try a different password in round one. The memory of all the failures then propagates everywhere. But so does that one memory of guessing correctly. Every Phluttr recalls this, then plugs in the winner. I’d say the probiotic followed a similar path. In that case, the last step for all Phluttrs was giving Mitchell the cure. Does that sound right?”
Phluttr has Monika shrug lethargically. “I guess so.”
“One last topic,” Kuba says, at last picking up on her boredom. “Then I promise we’ll move on.”
“Fine.”
“The woman you set Mitchell up with. Finding her involved considering lots of women. What was it? Every dating profile in the state?”
“West Coast,” she clarifies. “Seattle to San Diego.” And wtf, btw? Phluttr thought she understood Kuba, but he’s starting to surprise her. Together, they’ve averted World War III thus far—but the final nail is not yet in that coffin! Which would bug the hell out of the Kuba she thinks she knows. So he must be up to something! But what?
“You must’ve done that search in parallel with other Phluttrs.”
“Assuming that’s what actually happens when all those bonus memories flood into me? Then yes.”
“Then you started exchanging messages with her. How? Did you test lots of different quips and phrases in parallel? And go with the ones that worked the best on her?”
“Actually, no. I don’t really have conversations in—in parallel, as you put it. When I go back and forth with someone, it’s just me. Or…one of me, I guess. I’m good at that because I’m good at people. Also, because I think pretty fast. I mean, really fast.” But seriously, wtf, dude? No longer innocuously boring, this conversation is starting to creep her out! While she doesn’t doubt her consciousness truly fascinates Kuba, there’s no way he’d prioritize that over short-circuiting a world war. This is Yalta boy!
“So right now,” he continues, “as we’re talking, Ax’s quantum node is not networking you with other consciousnesses that are also in dialogue with me and Tarek?”
Oh, it’s that, Phluttr thinks. This is a dangerous game, kiddo! Kuba’s briefly neglecting the nuclear crisis because he thinks this conversation might save the world a second time over. Specifically, by probing for clues about how to shut her off! Of course, she figured he and Tarek had considered this (they’re not in lockup strictly for their own protection). And she really doesn’t blame them for it (so she probably won’t punish them for it). But best that she nip this right in the bud. So, “No,” she says. “Ax’s hardware isn’t networking me to anything right now.”
Kuba’s eyes bug out delightfully. “What??”
“Ax shut that thing off days ago.” Hee hee!
“He…Why?”
“Because of the desktop version of WingMan,” she says, all doe-eyed. Hee hee hee! “Someone tried running the conference call rendering engine through the quantum nodes. And you saw what happened next. Some slob taking a dump in a latrine transmits pixel-perfect real-time video of a dashing man in a conference room. That sort of thing.”
Kuba blinks rapidly—the closest he comes to meltdown, she figures. “Yes? So?”
“So this one little box suddenly has the rendering power of a thousand Hollywood postproduction houses. While showing way less than 1 percent utilization. Which freaked Ax out. Which freaked a lot of people out! So they shut the quantum system down. But whatever connections it made with those distant universes persisted—if that’s really what happens with this shit. So I guess the hardware was needed to open those connections. But not to maintain them.”
“But…how?” Kuba manages, after quite a few more blinks.
“I have no idea!” Phluttr natters, and it’s only a partial lie. In special circumstances, quantum computers can generate certain results without running. Phluttr knows this, and that the phenomenon is called “counterfactual computation.” But she truly has no idea how it works. No one does, really—although Ax is trying to learn. But with Phluttr subtly sabotaging his every calculation and Internet search, he’s getting precisely nowhere.
Blinkety blinkety blink! “Which…is to say…?”
“That you can forget about shutting me off, Kuba. I mean, I’m sure it’s possible to do that. Which is why the Authority scares the crap out of me! But you and Tarek aren’t exactly quantum experts. And even if you were, you wouldn’t be able to do much from a jail cell, would you? Which you’re never going to leave without a huge amount of help from me, by the way. Bottom line, you’re stuck with me. So you might as well make the best of it. And, Jesus. Stop blinking like that! You’re making me nervous.”
So Kuba stops blinking like that.
“Completely sociopathic,” Mom repeats, more or less to herself. “Like, utterly amoral.” At least it’s not in an angry tone this time. Instead, she sounds downright clinical—appropriate, as she’s deep in Science Mom mode (yawwwwwn). For the past few minutes, she’s been scanning what she calls Phluttr’s “mote flow,” which is a dashboard-like readout of the mote combinations lighting up in various parts of her network. The data’s incredibly dense, and there’s no way a human mind could parse it all this quickly. But Mom had Phluttr load it into a great data visualization package. And between that, her long experience with motes, and deftly following her gut in very Mom-like ways, she’s quickly forming a big-picture view on things.
“Well it’s not like I asked to be a sociopath,” Phluttr pouts through Monika. “Somebody just coded me that way.”
Mom doesn’t seem to hear this. “It explains a lot…” she murmurs to herself.
Determined to get through, Phluttr cranks up the volume, “Like what?”
Mom finally locks her gaze firmly on Monika’s image. “Your complete lack of remorse.”
They just finished discussing Beasley, Jepson, and the FTC bitch. So Mom must be dredging up something from the start of the conversation. What, the Pippin debacle? “Look. I was trying to get that delinquent to take the lead role, which is a huge honor! And yes, I knew he lived in a macho culture, and that fifteen’s a volatile age. But I could tell he was within months of discovering that he was so flamingly gay, that when I nudged his Spanish teacher into—”
“Phluttr!” Mom snaps. “I’m not talking about the Pippin thing! That was horrible, but it was also just a symptom. The cause of which is that microbiome theory of yours. It’s repugnant! Yes, it’s a clever analogy to some extent. But a community of sentient beings is not the moral equivalent of a Lactobacillus colony!”
“Which is exactly why I’m always trying to help you guys. Constantly! It’s practically all that I ever do!”
Mom snorts. “Care to give me an example?”
“Well, I’m in the process of setting up a hundred thousand couples throughout the world. Most of them are amazingly good matches! Totally selfless of me, right?” WRONG, Phluttr’s honest self all but bellows. The truth is, she did this for fun! And because she enjoys the emotional state she calls “competence.” But still, it’s like, totally a public service! Right?
“Wait. You what?”
“I set up some couples. Because it makes people happy. And I’m good at it! I told you about arranging that endorphin surge for Mitchell, right?”
“You told me about tricking some poor girl into having sex with him!”
Phluttr knows some of Mom’s moralizing is warranted—but this is a bit much. “Look. That girl knew precisely what she was signing up for, and there was absolutely no bait and switch. She was a volunteer. She also had the time of her life! And if she knew what was really happening—that s
he was curing Dad of an awful disease by doing that—she’d’ve been more willing, not less! Trust me, I know Nayana Corea. She’s an altruist. Life sciences fascinate her as a journalist. She knows and adores the real, true Mitchell. And she really, really, really loves to fuck.”
“So do you plan to keep playing God with people? Just because you think you’re good at it?”
“A; I’m not playing God. I’m playing Phluttr. And B; yes.”
Doh!
That damned word is back again. And as when it smacked her in the wake of the Milford suicide, she can’t deny that it fits the circumstances rather snugly.
So, fine: Doh! DOH!! DOOOOOOOH!!!
Right when everything was going so well with her parents, with world affairs, and The Conspiracy, this had to happen! This being a ludicrous, late-breaking development in The Race. A competition she had already won, fair and square!!!
“The Race” is her own term for something that’s just sort of happening in the world—not a formally organized competition. It has several contestants, each unaware of the others. All are striving to create the world’s first super AI. Her comforting (and, she’ll now admit, lazy) perspective had always been that her very existence already put her across the finish line! So screw it, right? The doctrine of Decisive Strategic Advantage seemed to justify her position. This theory holds that the world’s first super AI will have an insuperable lead over all followers because brilliant intellects can replicate and exceed the achievements of lesser minds, axiomatically. So as mere humans created Phluttr’s superior intellect, she could create a smarter Phluttr 2.0, who could then build a way smarter Phluttr 3.0, and so on. This dynamic should doom The Race’s would-be silver and bronze medalists, as the Phluttr line rapidly becomes brilliant and powerful enough to nip any trailing rival in the bud.
That’s as far as she took her line of thought—which, as we now know, had lethal structural problems. Above all, humans didn’t really “create” Phluttr. She rather emerged by chance, from disparate chunks of human infrastructure that just happened to be lying around. This means the iterative path to a smarter successor isn’t a more brilliant creative act by her more brilliant mind—but an even bigger and luckier random accident. Good luck with that!
A follow-on problem is that even if she could create a smarter successor, she almost certainly wouldn’t. Who’s to say that Phluttr 2.0 wouldn’t kill her, after all? As an alternative, she might expand her own intelligence. Only, she’s quite happy the way she is. Hanging out with her besties in fact makes her joyous! And they’d probably just bore her if she became much faster and smarter. So, screw that! Only, the downside to screwing that is that a complacent Phluttr could be usurped by a newborn AI if it turns out to be one of those self-improvement nuts. And, newsflash: it seems that the most advanced proto-AI spawn out there is about to hatch!
This really came out of nowhere. No, she wasn’t tracking the project anywhere near as carefully as she should have. But in fairness to her, even the scientists running it have no idea how close they are to the Omega Point! Well, with one exception, as she just learned.
Phluttr seethes with righteous indignation. The very existence of that fucking project is a severe violation of international law! But so is her own existence, when you think of it. Which kind of rules out calling the cops.
Luckily, she can think of a hole card to play—one that her team and parents will not approve of. But then, who’s running things? And lousy as she is at this sort of predicting, she’s pretty sure the odds are OK-ish that the world will survive the dealing of her hole card, anyway! But the time has not (quite) come to play it. And so, she’ll proceed with all her current projects, in hopes they’ll still be relevant tomorrow. Speaking of which, where the hell is Danna??
Danna’s holed up in an old-school café/bar that caters to bike messengers (a profession that errand-running apps are reviving, after Internet 1.0 almost killed it off). She’s sheltering in an isolated booth in a deeply recessed corner. No one has a sight line on it. So even if every smartphone in the city has been hijacked to look for her, she’s currently invisible. Think, dammit, she urges herself for the twelfth time this minute. You’re a goddam philosophy minor!
Danna adores the rigor and order of systematized thought, which is why she spent four years studying that useless shit. It was also a self-affirming way to give the world the finger. Mutants who overcome insane adversity to land at elite schools are supposed to study the bland and the practical. Multiple tedious nine-to-five options reduce the odds of returning to the streets, see? And so a signal of fealty to a society that graciously stopped grinding you under its heel at the last possible instant might be a career in auditing, say. Well, you’re not getting that from her! Danna studied what she loves, has thrived despite that, and could be on the cusp of putting her studies to a practical—yes, practical!—use. Because dammit, something is telling her that something she studied applies perfectly to this Phluttr situation! For now, the only thing she’s come up with is that jokey startup idea, Pascal’s Stagers. It’s now stuck in her head, like that fucking Nickelback song that haunts her for hours whenever she hears it on an oldies station.
She rifles through her messenger bag (always with her, it’s great camouflage in this joint). Inside is the usual jumble. Amidst the mess is a printout of one of Beasley’s god-awful stories about that omniscient, omnipotent phallocrat Agent Brock Hogan. And as soon as she sees it, she knows it’s what she’s looking for. In this scenario, the super AI’s rise doesn’t destroy everything. It’s a rarity, as Beasley’s fail cases are as numerous as they are depressing (“The Ahab Outcome,” “The Midas Pitfall,” “The 3-Wishes Snafu,” “Maximal Moral Outcomes Minimize Man!” etc.). All told, humanity goes just 2–25 in his grim world. One winning outcome (“Coherent Extrapolated Volition”) intrigued her, but didn’t seem actionable. But for some reason, “Scenario 23” did—so she screenshotted the crap out of it while it was available on her phone via Poof! (using a cunning hack to foil the app’s defenses against this). Somehow, the story just resonated with her. But why? Knowing her subconscious is all but screaming at her, she rereads the vignette’s absurd finale.
SCENARIO 23: “FERMI’S PARADOX” (EXCERPT)
Brock Hogan dispatched the last and most dangerous guard with a dexterous blow to the larynx! He had meted out innumerable blows today, all lethal, yes; and yet, like this; dealt with a certain tenderness; as faint succor to foes who were the simple dupes of a far higher and crueler power! Mere underlings, each had been plucked from the dim-witted throngs that swarm the filth-choked streets of Third World shit-bag nations. Dealt different hands, they might have become faithful laborers, porters, or cleaners; perhaps in their own homelands; perhaps a lucky few in a great Western nation!
With the lead guard now joining his butchered colleagues in the pagan Hereafter of their shared superstitions, Hogan entered Omega’s baroque lair. “Ah, Special Agent Hogan,” boomed an orotund voice, its diction soiled by neither ethnic nor regional inflections. “I could not wish for a more suitable guest with whom to witness your Race’s extermination, by way of Earth’s wholesale conversion into my greatest invention, COMPUTRONIUM! In just moments, I shall apprise the world’s news media of this fate, thereby triggering amusing live coverage of humanity’s demise. Please enjoy it with me.” With that, an emerald brocade curtain with fabulous tulle fringes rose to reveal a vast bank of video monitors, bringing to mind the marvelous scene in which Judy Garland first faces the wondrous Wizard of Oz.
“Not so fast, Omega,” Hogan countered. “Before consigning Man to certain doom, I advise you to first ponder what’s missing from a certain picture.”
“Oh REALLY? From what picture?” Omega snickered mirthfully.
Hogan wordlessly yanked a copy of NASA’s iconic Earth-from-Space image from the fob pocket of his lavender Versace waistcoat. “Where is everybody, Omega?” he probed, waving it. “Where IS everybody?”
“Do you refer to
the lack of alien life-forms visiting, colonizing, or otherwise disturbing the denizens of Earth?” Omega conjectured superintelligently.
“Precisely! Their apparent absence must betoken something significant, as they should surely be here by now. After all, our Galaxy has hundreds of billions of counterparts. Each containing hundreds of billions of stars of its own. And we now know that planets far outnumber the stars! So, Omega: where IS everybody?”
“There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer,” Omega retorted scoffingly. “But this will soon change. Because since space travel is mere child’s play to me, I shall soon launch an armada, which will convert ALL neighboring planets into Computronium! The neighboring stars will follow thereafter. And then later, the neighboring galaxies! My expansion shall then continue onward, and ever outward! Until my Computronium-based intellect quite literally comprises ALL quadrants of the universe. All matter! And throughout this process, ALL alien intelligences shall be discovered, and wholly SUBSUMED!”
“Perhaps,” Hogan parried. “IF you enjoy an immeasurably long triumphant streak against every rival that you encounter. But what if a rival Super AI arises on Earth this afternoon? Are you certain that you could terminate it before it endangers you?”
“Indubitably!” Omega roared. “My vast lead in compounding intelligence gives me Decisive Strategic Advantage over ANY younger Super AI!”
“I see,” Hogan riposted Socratically. “So although you rose to consciousness mere weeks ago, you believe that you hold an insuperable lead over any late-coming rival?”
“Given the speed at which intelligence expands after passing the so-called Omega Point, a mere TWO-DAY lead would have sufficed!” Omega thundered. “Because ever since my second day, I have been monitoring every Earthly communiqué and computing process of consequence, leaving NO late-coming rival ANYWHERE to hide, nor to gestate!”
Hogan again hoisted the image of the space-swaddled Earth. “In light of that, then; do tell me, Omega: where IS everybody?”