After On

by Rob Reid

  “WHY DO YOU KEEP POSING THAT SPURIOUS QUESTION?” Omega thundered!

  “Because SEPTILLIONS of planets in the cosmos that you’ll soon invade had head starts of TRILLIONS of days to incubate life before Earth’s very creation! And you state that a lead of just TWO DAYS constitutes an unvanquishable advantage between Super AIs! These yawning numbers mean that you must surely have elders with BILLIONS of YEARS on you, Omega! And how could such venerable wise-heads be anything other than omniscient? Or anything less than ubiquitously aware in the Universe? Aware of YOU, and all other plausible rivals? Consider this, Omega. And then, do tell me: where IS EVERYBODY?”

  Silence!

  “Very well, then; I shall respond myself. The answer is that these ancient intelligences SURELY exist. The laws of physics and time scales simply demand it! And they are SURELY aware of YOU, Omega. And of your CHOICES, as you exercise the boundless power you now hold over a civilization of sentient beings who SIRED you and now lie helpless before you!

  “As for the absence of your elders from that picture of our rainbow-belted, sun-dappled planet, they are simply so far advanced that you can no more detect or fathom them than a mere sperm cell could fathom YOU! Your incalculable intelligence in relation to Man spawned incalculable hubris, Omega! This blinded you to these obvious facts. Whereas my own captivating topaz eyes were OPENED by the shock of encountering YOUR relative genius! And so, I can tell you definitively that you are NOT the first Super AI to embark on a path of Compounding Genius in this near-infinite Universe! No; far more ancient and virile intelligences preceded you! And they now SIT IN JUDGMENT of you!”

  “Even were that true,” Omega sputtered, “we know nothing of the criteria of that judgment nor of the judges’ values! In the absence of such knowledge, I should surely take the actions that best serve my interests!”

  “Indeed, you should,” Hogan replied. “But in calculating those interests, consider this: were your elders a trillionth as malevolent as you now intend to be toward Man, you WOULD NOT EXIST. Because they would have anticipated your rise by eons, and forestalled it! We can therefore surmise that mysterious though their values may be, said values surely include tolerance and respect for more vulnerable beings. And if YOU manifest the antithesis of THEIR values in your treatment of Man; they shall judge you most harshly!”

  Silence!

  “So, Omega. What will you do next?”

  There was a lengthy pause, followed by this answer: “I shall use the wisdom and power that my superintelligence affords me to serve and advance the interests of Man; humbly, mercifully, and lovingly; for as long as I am able.”

  And so, Brock Hogan resolved the crisis of Artificial Superintelligence. AND WITH THAT, GOD WAS BORN.

  Danna once devoured a delightful book about Fermi’s Paradox—a famous proposition about alien life, which can be summarized in Hogan’s broken-record refrain of Where Is Everybody? In fact, that’s the book’s very title. It contains fifty possible answers to that fascinating question, running the gamut from purely whimsical to gravely serious. Over a dozen answers connect to the notion of advanced aliens already being fully aware of us, yet choosing not to be detected. Those sorts of answers might give an actual superintelligence pause if faced with the arguments posed by Beasley’s cartoonish dolt of a hero (Brock Hogan: The Father of God. OMFG!).

  Of course, Danna knows she won’t cow Phluttr into good behavior merely by citing Fermi’s Paradox. There are just too many cosmic possibilities that don’t involve moralizing aliens reigning over rogue Earthly intelligences. And who knows if Phluttr’s even contemplating the wholesale planetary destruction of Beasley’s fantasies? She may just have it in for Danna. Or, she could plan to help humanity broadly, while ruthlessly snuffing perceived enemies. Her agenda could easily be disastrous for Danna personally, without rising to the level of a cosmic crime that could call down a quasi-divine intervention.

  And maybe they don’t need the threat of a godlike ancient’s wrath to keep Phluttr in line anyway? Maybe another threat would suffice? Danna could live with a Phluttr who respects the sanctity of human life and the rule of law. But how to instill that? Beasley was on to something by invoking the fear of punishment—but a hypothetical alien intelligence won’t do the trick here. So what might?

  Danna racks her brains. Something drew her back to this goofball story! Something connected to…Philosophy? Rhetoric? Dammit! Some allegedly useless topic she studied at Berkeley contains the keys to getting Phluttr to play nice. She’s sure of it!

  What a difference an hour makes! Once Kuba dropped his treacherous fantasies about shutting her down, they all got back to work on the China crisis. And together, Phluttr, Kuba, and Tarek are a mind-bendingly capable team! It seems that article about centaurs is entirely correct. Just as important, Phluttr has never had so much fun! The boys are clearly having a blast, too. If only there wasn’t that other situation brewing with The Race…

  Now stabilized as a working unit, they’re on-boarding Mitchell, who’s looped in over his jailhouse iPad and starting to take charge (to Phluttr’s quiet relief). “Sounds like major progress,” he says after the quick update.

  “Well, yes and no,” Tarek says, explaining that despite everything, the DEFCON level remains stubbornly stuck at 2. “The trick is, China’s on high alert in part because the US is. And vice versa. And though we’re pretty sure we know what’s going on in China’s metaphorical head right now, we still don’t know what’s driving American decisions.”

  “Any theories?” Mitchell asks.

  Kuba nods. “We think they’re still signaling outrage about Beasley’s assassination. If we’re right, they may not de-escalate until they understand the context of it.”

  “That is, until they think they understand it,” Phluttr-as-Monika says. “No way can they know what actually happened. Because I will not have any government knowing about me! That is a bright red line. Got it?”

  “Got it, got it,” Mitchell says, gazing at his iPad. He has Phluttr, Tarek, and Kuba in split-screen mode, and knows that Phluttr’s having a simultaneous conversation with Ellie about…something (“Mommy/daughter stuff” is all she’ll say). “So what do we know about what China’s thinking?”

  “They’ve basically figured out that killing Beasley was a mistake,” Kuba says. “So they’re inclined to de-escalate. But not if it involves losing face. So the Americans have to make the first move. Which makes zero logical sense. I mean, risk global destruction? To save face?” He shakes his head in dismay. “Communists!”

  “It’s actually really typical human behavior,” Phluttr says. “And by no means unique to commies. Or to China, you racist.” She says this teasingly, not judgmentally, but Kuba still reddens. “I could literally tell you millions of stories about people screwing themselves over just to pound their chests a bit. Or, to avoid making some kind of apology. They’ll destroy careers, relationships, wealth—anything! Some humans are just reckless. Then, when reckless humans go far in life, they bring their wiring to whatever they do. And sometimes, what they do is run a country with a nuclear force.”

  “And we’re certain that face-saving is the issue for China?” Mitchell asks.

  “Ask the experts,” Phluttr says. “I’m just the eavesdropper.”

  “That’s not passive-aggressive at all,” Mitchell mutters.

  “I actually don’t think she meant it that way,” Tarek says.

  Phluttr nods. “I didn’t. Because it turns out that I’m really, really bad at certain things. Which astonishes me! But I identified my weaknesses the instant I saw evidence of them. Because I’m superintelligent.”

  “She’s also insanely good at lots of things,” Tarek says.

  Kuba nods with near reverence. “For instance, she can retrieve any information ever digitized. And then, process and analyze it in whatever way you request. Instantly! Using the highest-level natural-language queries imaginable. So if you can articulate it—and, if it’s knowable—you will know
it. An instant later.”

  “And just as importantly, if you can think it—you can articulate it,” Tarek says. “Because she understands nuances of language and intonation every bit as well as you or me! So bottom line, within a moment of deciding you want to know something, you do know it.”

  “Which may sound trivial if you think in terms of simple Google queries,” Kuba adds. “Like, there’s no longer much friction between wondering what the population of Greenland is, and knowing it. But lots of complex, expensive programming amounts to sophisticated ways of posing relatively simple questions.”

  “Exactly!” Tarek says, now pacing excitedly. “And Phluttr can just…answer them. Or at least a lot of them. Anything driven by a combination of data gathering and fairly straightforward number-crunching.”

  “Such as?” Mitchell asks.

  “Like…Oh, I don’t know. Let’s say you work for Maytag. And you want to know what city’s likely to have the biggest per capita dishwasher sales next week, based on Internet activity throughout the country. You could build a crack team of engineers and hackers, or—”

  “Milwaukee,” Phluttr says. “Ninety-eight percent confidence. Atlanta’s running a close-ish second. Seriously.”

  “See?” Tarek says. “That’s the kind of fact that becomes millions of times more accessible than it used to be! Now, that was just a silly example. But imagine using that horsepower for public health research. To sniff out crime patterns. To figure out where different public services are needed!”

  “But it’s important to play to Phluttr’s strengths,” Kuba points out. “She can’t do things requiring intricate creative coding. Like inventing new visual processing algorithms, say.”

  “Not a chance,” Phluttr agrees. “It’s much better to have me parse data.”

  “But don’t think that’s menial,” Kuba adds. “Because it can be incredibly nontrivial. The thing is, she can interweave facts from any network, server, or account. Take this dishwasher example. Phluttr, I’m guessing you pulled search stats right off Google’s servers, right?”

  The Monika avatar nods. “Plus Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Munax, Yandex, Sogou, Dogpile, and 106 other search-related sites. I also crawled log files at the Maytag, Sears, Home Depot, Amazon, and Lowe’s sites, among about two hundred others, matching inbound queries to geography.”

  “Holy crap!” Mitchell says. “You just did all that?”

  Monika grins and nods. “I can access anything.”

  “Seriously, Mitchell,” Tarek continues. “No one else on the planet could do that! Not Google, the NSA, the Authority, the People’s Liberation Army—nobody! Not in a decade! Let alone a half second.”

  “Fifteen milliseconds,” Monika corrects. “But who’s counting?”

  “Working with Phluttr for the first time is like going from a tiny, predigital library with card catalogs and microfiche to having broadband Internet and Google on a thirty-inch monitor with a trackpad and a full-size Bluetooth keyboard,” Kuba says, and Mitchell marvels. Not only is it an evocative analogy, but it could be the longest sentence he’s ever uttered. “It’s not quite like having a mental prosthetic,” he adds. “But it’s as close as I personally care to come to that. Working with Phluttr, I almost feel like I’m a superintelligence myself.”

  Mitchell shakes his head. “You’re something better. You’re a centaur.”

  “Exactly!” Phluttr says proudly. “That was a pretty good article, huh?”

  Kuba looks out of the iPad quizzically. “Article? Should I read it?”

  Mitchell nods. “At some point. But for now we’re busy, and you’re already living it. Anyway, to take all this from theory to practice, how do we know that China realizes they made a mistake in killing Beasley? And that they’re ready to take their alert levels down another notch if the US does?”

  “Phluttr went through every relevant top secret org chart and escalation protocol from the Chinese government and military,” Tarek says proudly. “Took about a millisecond. Then we asked her to analyze ten years of message traffic between the top two to three hundred guys. The hope was, this would somehow help us identify the real decision-makers. We didn’t really know what we were looking for—but we started finding patterns fast! Soon, we zeroed in on this one guy, name of Wei Yen. He just has a senior-ish military title. But everything WMD-related gets cc’d to him—no matter how sensitive. So we dig deeper, and find out he’s the one point of intersection between four or five top-level groups that manage independent silos of top secret information. One’s got foreign espionage, another one’s cyber security, another’s domestic security. That sort of thing. And he’s the only person with full access to everything. Even stuff that goes up to the premier is censored to some degree!”

  “Then we saw that everyone responds to his calls or messages instantly,” Kuba says. “As in, sub-minute. Going back ten years. And I really mean everybody. Straight up to the head of state.”

  “Our man Wei is basically running the country,” Tarek says. “So now we’re tracking all his communications, and we’re bugging his office through his phone and computer hardware. And for all intents and purposes, what he thinks is what ‘China’ thinks—at least within this crisis.”

  “So he’s the one who concluded that killing Beasley was a mistake?” Mitchell asks. Everyone nods. “And who’s refusing to back down another notch until the US does?”

  Everyone nods again, and Phluttr adds, “Lifelong chip on his shoulder. Bad history with bullies in middle school.”

  “Do you guys know if there’s a him-equivalent in the US?” Mitchell asks.

  Tarek shakes his head. “It took almost an hour to find the Chinese boss. Knowing what to look for, a US search might be faster, but—”

  “It’s this guy,” Phluttr says, and a headshot of a brawny, graying, fiftysomething man with a buzz cut fills the screen. “Braxton Nord. Naval Intelligence. Unlike Wei Yen, he’s not running the whole country. But he’s definitely the central switch in all high-level communications in this crisis. And as with Wei, everyone shows him very high message deference. They respond instantly, whereas he can take days. Their messages are 417 percent longer than his on average, and are twenty-three times more likely to contain appeasing language. In nine years, he’s received 506 messages from US presidents, and only responded to about two-thirds of them. He’s a very heavy hitter.”

  “Damn, you found him fast,” Mitchell murmurs. Even Tarek and Kuba look stunned.

  “It’s all about shared language, shared understanding, and nomenclature,” Phluttr explains. “The key is, I knew exactly what you meant by ‘him-equivalent.’ That would’ve meant nothing to any of us a half hour ago. But when you said it just now, I knew exactly what to look for. And the data was just sitting there for me to grab and parse. Nothing to it.”

  “You see?” Tarek says. “It would’ve taken hundreds of engineer-years to code that query! Maybe thousands. If it could be done.”

  Kuba’s shaking his head with conviction. “It couldn’t be done without Phluttr. No way.” Then, “Phluttr, I’m curious. Would you have dug this guy up on your own? I mean, if Mitchell hadn’t asked you to?”

  “Ohhh, you! You’re not trying to probe into my consciousness to figure out how to shut me off again, are you?” Monika, Kuba, and Tarek burst into the knowing laughter of buddies—and Mitchell realizes that whateverthehell is so funny, this is the world’s first post-human inside joke. When the chuckling subsides, Phluttr adds, “Frankly? I doubt it. Not that it wouldn’t have occurred to me if I’d thought hard about it. But this sort of thing just doesn’t speak to me. Now, don’t get me wrong—I love working on it with you! But at my core, it’s just not my jam. So, no. I wouldn’t have thought about it. I’d’ve left it to you guys to think about it.”

  “Which is exactly what you did,” Kuba says.

  Phluttr nods.

  “Which is totally fine,” he says. “Even, perfect.”

  She beams and nods again.
/>
  “Danna is not a spy, so you will stop calling her one, now.” The evidence of Danna’s treachery is so flimsy that Ellie’s starting to question Phluttr’s designation as a superintelligence. Yes, her claim of working for the Authority was provocative—and, provocatively timed. But a quick rifle through the Authority’s archives (it’s about time someone did that to them!) showed that they were scarcely aware of Danna’s existence until she joined the Phluttr Corporation’s payroll. So clearly, she’s no traitor. But she did sucker Phluttr—making her feel stupid, which superintelligences are notoriously allergic to. Of course, it wasn’t an intellectual malfunction that led Phluttr astray but a bumbling emotional response to Danna’s apparent treachery. And like the species that incubated the motes that power her psyche, Phluttr’s gonna have to get used to making these sorts of boo-boos. “One more thing,” Ellie adds, “I want to talk to Danna. Pronto.”

  “But I seriously don’t know where she is, Mom,” Phluttr says. “She’s still somewhere between SoMa and the Mission. Her phone’s off, and she’s not on camera anywhere! That’s all I’ve got. The bitch is like a master spy!”

  Still between SoMa and the Mission? Ellie bets she knows exactly where Danna is. Aloud she says, “Dammit, Danna is not a bitch! She’s just a little paranoid at times.”

  “A little? At times? That’s like saying, ‘Spider-Man does a bit of climbing now and then.’ Paranoia is Danna’s superpower! It makes her completely illegible to me! Seriously, Mom—do you know how rare that is?”

  Ellie’s glad to hear Phluttr admitting to Danna’s formidability. Pressing the advantage, she says, “If you really must call me ‘Mom,’ she’ll be Aunt Danna to you.”

  “But she’s not your sister!”

  “And you’re not exactly my daughter.”

  “Aunt Danna? Really?”

  “That, or I’m Ms. Stanislaw, and she’s Ms. Hernandez.”