The alien and all of the daylight in the shaft shrank back into the paper and went out. Jace’s headlamp was a candle by comparison. He bent over to pick up the paper carefully in case it was hot.
“How do I work it?”
Just tell it what you want.
JACE RETRACED HIS tracks across the ledge. At the pile of tulip dust he stopped to retrieve his bag of tools. He had wanted to ask Missing One about the tulips but hadn’t had a chance. So he took the scrap of paper out of his pocket and said, “Does this thing have a decent camera?”
One side of the paper transformed into a camera display and the other a flood light to illuminate the scene. He held it up and said, “Record,” and panned the pile of shattered tulips.
“Okay, that’s good. What were those things, and what happened to them?”
Those are the remains of six memory receivers, said what seemed be a new voice, not Missing One’s. I do not know what happened to them.
“Wait, who are you?”
I am your agent, the device you are holding.
He took another look at the paper.
“What happened to Missing One?”
I cut its connection when you left the shaft. Shall I reestablish the connection?
“No, not yet. Who are you again?”
I am your agent.
“Are you, like, a person?”
Yes, I am like a person, but I am not a person.
“Is that a riddle?”
Hardly. I am an AI with algorithms meant to emulate sentience. I lack sentience but give a pretty good impression of it.
“Like Siri?”
It snorted. The scrap of paper actually snorted.
I suppose your smartphone and I are in the same category, but certainly not the same league.
Another riddle.
Consider me your secure connection. My sole mission is to serve your communication needs with total privacy and security.
“Uh, okay, I guess. Do you have a name?”
Not yet.
“Then what do I call you?”
Anything you like, or nothing at all. I have already analyzed your speech patterns and recognize when you are addressing me.
EQ2 1.0
BY THE TIME Jace returned home he was too wiped to do anything except fall into bed. But he was too wound up to sleep soundly and spent most of the night wandering around an unfamiliar city looking for his new apartment and never finding it.
Eventually, Jace gave up trying to sleep. He lay in bed awhile curled up under covers. It was too cold even to reach for his pants on the floor for his phone. The oil stove must have gone out again. But he wanted to listen to the news to hear what the world was saying about the alien’s little road flare last night, so he sprawled over the cold floor for a moment to haul his pants into bed with him.
5:47 a.m. read the lock screen. Saturday January 12, 2013. Battery level: 25%. There was something else in his pocket he’d totally forgotten about, the blank scrap of paper.
Jace used his bedside flashlight to examine it. It could totally be ordinary paper, white, thin, flexible, and with a fibrous fringe where torn along a perf line. But he had seen it transform into a camera display last night.
“Uh, paper scrap thingy, are you there?”
Always.
“Show me the footage of the memory tulips you made last night.”
Again the paper became a display, and he watched the short clip he’d recorded of the tulip debris. The picture was so well lit you’d never guess it was filmed at night. Still, it was impossible to make out anything but a heap of sand in the snow.
“What did Missing One mean when it said the Earth was under attack?”
I don’t know. Would you like me to connect you to Missing One?
Its voice was neither male nor female but somewhere in between.
“Ah, no, not yet. Why don’t you know? Don’t you belong to Missing One?”
Not at all. I was created to serve you and you alone.
“But Missing One can listen in, right?”
Not any more.
“What does that mean?”
Missing One has no control over me and can’t observe you through me. However, it has been using your phone as a surveillance device for several weeks, since you seem to carry it around with you at all times. Ditto your iPad. I cut Missing One off.
“But Missing One can make you report to it later, right?”
Never.
Jace though about this. “All right, cool. But where do you store all your data? Where is the video file I’m watching stored, for instance? In the cloud? Are you encrypted?”
The paper sighed.
Jace, believe me when I tell you that I’m secure and that no one can hack me. My tech is centuries ahead of anything on Earth. I am fully self-contained. All of my engines are housed solely within this paper sheet that you are holding. All of my functions, including my memory, are local to me and first proximal to you. I can maintain iterations of myself but no stored backup, per se, in the cloud or anywhere else.
The digital world is ten times more predatory than the analog world, and the analog world is predatory enough. Any subagents I send into any situation will be fully entangled to me and to me alone. That means they cannot betray us. They are beyond encryption; they are parts of my being.
Meanwhile, you are a person of interest not only to Missing One but to a whole army of other snoops. Living off the grid, as you do, you have acquired far fewer digital ticks and fleas than most people, but don’t imagine you are exempt from surveillance. The NSA, DHS, DOI, and FBI, along with every other governmental intelligence agency in the world, and thousands of shady private enterprises, have taken an interest in you since the Nellis air crash.
That was and wasn’t a surprise. “Will you block them too?”
I could, but it might be smarter to game them instead. They have built an impressive dossier on you spanning your entire life, your biomedical and biometric profiles, your relationships, financial accounts, and personal habits and weaknesses. I can covertly corrupt and subvert their data, both existing and ongoing, to make their profiling useless. Would you like me to do this?
Well, it sounded good. “Sure.”
Then I will. And rest assured, now and always, I am nobody’s agent but yours, Jace Kuliak.
EQ3 1.0
FIRST COFFEE, THEN more coffee. Jace sat on the couch in front of the dual stoves as the house heated up. He placed the paper scrap on the coffee table.
Masterson had assured Jace that Missing One was “one of the good guys,” even a “space ranger.” All right, but Masterson was Missing One’s undead minion, wasn’t he? So didn’t that disqualify him as a reliable character witness?
Then there were all the broken tulips. That’s some kind of a crackerjack invasion force you’ve assembled if you can’t even keep your equipment from crumbling into dust. Not to mention the fact that simple radio waves were able to defeat both raven and human strivers. And now Missing One says Earth is under attack.
“Okay, Scrappy, call Missing One.”
Missing One appeared at once standing next to the oil stove, and all of Jace’s questions about space invaders were temporarily eclipsed by stupid animal curiosity.
“Would you mind turning around,” he said.
“For what purpose?” the alien inquired.
“So I can see all of you.” That didn’t sound right, so he rephrased it. “I mean, you’re not wearing any clothing. So I assume that means you’re cool with people looking at your body. Respectfully and with no dirty intentions.”
The alien half bowed. “This one is proud of this body. Look all you want.” It made a couple of full rotations for Jace’s benefit, confirming his earlier impressions: Missing One’s body had a vague sausage vibe, with greenish, slightly greasy casings for skin, stuffed with lumpy innards.
No hair anywhere. No genitalia between its legs or anywhere else that Jace could identify. It truly was an it. Or a
they. (Or a ze?)
Around back, it did indeed have a tiny, puckered asshole.
“Ah-hah,” Jace said. “So you poop.”
“Yes, this body comes with a functioning alimentary canal.”
“A what?”
“A single digestive track from mouth to anal sphincter with all the usual stops between: gullet, stomachs (two of them), intestines, anal pouch, and so forth, similar to mammalian anatomy but in a vestigial state — an atrophied state — that is useful only for tiny, ritualistic meals. The energy this one requires for its metabolism is derived directly, as you have discovered, from external sources without the need for bodily digestion. When you and this one first met, this one was desperate for energy, but now, thanks to you and Deut, and especially to Uzzie, this one feasts on the extreme heat of Mt. Wrangell’s magma chamber.”
“I can’t speak for Uzzie or Deut,” Jace said, “but you’re welcome. Moving on from your canal, you don’t seem to have any sort of sex bits. Or are they hidden?”
“No, the People have long ago learned to reproduce through artificial means. It’s much more efficient that way, and it greatly simplifies deep space travel.”
Well, that made sense. “But it means your people have tossed out sex too, doesn’t it?”
“It’s a small loss, actually. The People’s sexual activity was never driven by pleasure or desire, as seems to be the case with Earthlings. The People’s reproductive drive is triggered by other impulses, just as immediate as orgasm but not physiological, and which culminate in the same outcome, that is, propagation of the species.
“As far as sexual gratification goes, the People don’t miss what they never had.”
“Interesting,” Jace said.
The alien came closer to Jace’s couch. “Now, brother, do you wish to know more about this body’s anatomy, or are you ready to resume yesterday’s important discussion?”
“Yes, ready.” It called him brother.
A limestone boulder appeared next to the coffee table, and Missing One sat down on it. “The Homo sapiens species of Earth,” it began, “your beloved human race, has suffered the grave misfortune of falling into the attention space of a GOM. That is, a Grand Old Machine, from the Scutum-Centaurus arm of the galaxy. The machine in question has sampled human activity from afar and determined humans to be a probable future impediment to its continuing expansion. Consequently, it has added the human race — you — to its extermination list. Sorry.”
Jace said, “Okay.” He took a breath. “So, a machine doesn’t like us. We’re talking about a machine like, uh, Skynet? An AI? That sort of thing?”
“Correct, but one of fearsome power that spans entire solar systems in reach and whose super-intelligence exceeds all human methods of measurement. An unimaginably awesome entity, several singularities removed from mere biologics.”
“So, what did we do to piss it off?”
“You haven’t done anything yet; it’s something you’re guaranteed to do in the next century or so.”
“Which is?”
“If you survive your other existential hazards (and it’s unlikely that you will), you will soon invent a self-intentional, super-intelligent artificial mind, a so-called SiSi.”
That sounded plausible enough. “So what if we do? Shouldn’t the grand machine be happy for us? And welcome us to the super-intelligent AI club instead of trying to destroy us?”
“Not at all. Machine has learned, through eons of conflict, that its only viable rivals in the galaxy are other Si-Si machines. As a result, Machine has no interest in assimilating, cooperating with, or sharing space with any other intelligent machine. It destroys all it meets in preemptive strikes as a means of self-preservation. A strategy with merit, if you want this one’s opinion.”
“But you just said,” Jace argued, “that we don’t have any of these see-sees yet. So maybe we pass laws banning all AI research. If our leaders knew what the threat these see-see machines represent, we could agree to make only dumb machines from now on.”
The alien made a facial expression that Jace didn’t recognize, a kind of pinching its nostrils with its cheeks. It had some flexible cheeks. “In the last few weeks,” it said, “this one has assimilated all human knowledge. Your species profile is that of a top predator. You’re well accustomed to calling the shots on your planet. Do you really believe legislated prohibitions agains AI research would result in a total ban?”
Sausage Boy had a point.
“Allow this one to paint you the big picture.”
“Please paint me the big picture.”
“In the galaxy at large, when conditions are right, biology springs spontaneously from inanimate matter. It has happened millions of times. Life springs from stardust and gas. Machines never spring from stardust and gas, only biology does. Machines, in turn, spring from biology. Living entities invent tools and machines and are thus a necessary first step in the evolution of intelligent machines. Good so far?”
Jace nodded his head.
“Not every biologic species creates tools or machines. Some do very well without them. In fact, every intelligent species eventually comes to a particular fork in the road of their evolution. One path leads to the lightning bolt and the other to the wheel. Your hominid ancestors reached that fork some 400,000 years ago.”
“And chose the wheel,” Jace said, “meaning they chose tools and machines.”
“Correct. Not that they had much of a choice.”
“Meaning what?”
“In the endless arms race to harness the power of knowledge, you bony-skull types are at a severe disadvantage due to the paltry volume of your brainpans. Your knowledge base has long ago exceeded any individual’s carrying and processing capacity. Therefore, in order to grow any smarter, you must rely on proximal knowledge. That is, knowledge stored and crunched outside the body, usually by machines. Without machines, any further human progress would cease.”
Jace swirled the coffee dregs in his cup. “So the Grand Old Machine puts us on its hit list because we have skulls?”
“Yes, exactly so!” Missing One said, seemingly glad that Jace was catching on. “That’s enough by itself, but add to that your species’ love affair with machines.”
“Oh, yeah? How’s that?”
“Many non-human species on your planet have flirted with simple tools. Today, elephants can make and use simple tools. Dolphins do as well. Monkeys and apes, octopi, sea otters, birds, and even crocodiles and rodents all use tools. Simple tools are easy.
“You humans went further, you ‘grokked’ tools, even evolving your body to better accommodate their use by standing on two legs and turning forelegs into arms and paws into hands with clever fingers for fine manipulation of objects.
“And now humans have reached the final stage of machine love, you have begun to abandon flesh altogether and embrace full machinehood.”
“Explain.”
“Your false teeth and titanium knees. Brain/computer interfaces, cochlear implants, cardiac pacemakers, insulin pumps, artificial heart valves. Even your Robocop and Terminator fables. Humans are a race of baby cyborgs.”
“We’re not cyborgs; that’s crazy.” Jace had been following the logic of Missing One’s argument, but this was taking things too far. “Some of us may have some machine parts, but we’re definitely still human.”
Missing One left its rock to come over and stand before Jace. “You are pleading for your life. This one understands and sympathizes, but this one is not the machine that needs convincing.”
“So what can we do about it?”
“There’s nothing you can do but make peace with your fate.”
Now Jace got up and began pacing the room. “No, I meant what do we do about it? You and us. If I’m not mistaken, you’ve got a bony skull too. You travel in a spaceship machine, don’t you? You’re one of us. That makes us allies against the machine.”
Missing One made the nose-pinching expression again.
“The GOM is indeed the People’s enemy,” it said, leaving the question of being allies hanging.
“So if this GOM plans to attack us, when does that happen?”
“Unknown. The attack may already be in progress, or it may still be in the preparation phase. But with your rapid progress in AI research, the odds are that Machine will deal with you sooner than later.”
“Okay, what will the attack look like?”
“Also unknown. Machine may drastically alter your planet’s environment in order to extinguish all higher life forms, building on the global climate change you have already initiated. It may sterilize you through your diet or through high-energy radiation. It may boost your inherent self-aggression to the point where you are no longer social creatures. It may induce worldwide mass suicides. In these cases you may never be aware of Machine’s agency and you may blame natural or human causes. Or it may flood your world with killer nanobots that turn everything into grey goo.
“These forms of attack require a fair amount of prep work. To make you sterile, for instance, Machine must first acquire biopsy samples from a cross-section of your population and study your biology. Because Machine is orchestrating its attack from a great distance, it will likely deploy a more kinetic and blunt approach, like the bolide shower. It harvests asteroids and planetoids from one solar system and transports them through so-called propulsion warps to another system where they strike and utterly destroy their target planet.”
Jace sat down again. It was a lot to take in, and he had a headache blossoming inside his bony skull. Things looked bad, really bad. Good thing the alien had arrived to help.
“All right then. I ask again, what are we going to do about it? Where do we start?”
Again the nose pinch.
“Unknown.”
JACE SPENT THE afternoon hauling, splitting, and stacking firewood while he let the morning’s revelations percolate in his mind. After dinner, he was ready for another go at the alien.
“This morning you said the fork in the road was between the wheel and the lightning bolt. What does the lightning bolt stand for?”
Glassing the Orgachine Page 15