Connect

by Julian Gough

  He’s moaning again. He grabs the edge of the table, leans back a little, tilts the front legs of his chair off the ground, lowers them back down, lifts them up, puts them down, up, down . . .

  Why was she ever afraid of addressing a crowd in New York? This is a tough audience.

  ‘Those feelings you have, they are an interface,’ she says, very slowly and carefully, checking his response to each word. ‘The whole . . . ah, thing, it’s . . . a high-level interface. Between your body and your mind. Those feelings, they carry information. They say the other person is genetically compatible, probably, uh, disease-free. And fertile.’

  Colt stops moaning. The legs of his chair slowly settle back down to rest on the kitchen floor.

  She keeps going. ‘And, you know, we also live on other levels. So, that interface, those feelings, are saying this person will amuse you. Their company will please you, which is another signal.’

  ‘A signal.’

  ‘Yes. You are resisting a signal. You are resisting information.’ OK, he’s calmed down. Take a risk. ‘Colt . . . you can’t do everything electronically. You tried to order her like she was the pizza. And you can’t order a woman like she’s a pizza.’

  ‘Yes you can,’ says Colt indignantly. This is Nevada. He has seen the ads.

  ‘Fine, you can order a woman like you can order a pizza. But you’re going to get a fast-food experience with a fast-food woman.’

  ‘This is a metaphor, right?’

  ‘Yes. This is a metaphor. You can’t order a great French meal to be delivered. You have to go to it. Oh, this is a stupid metaphor.’ She puts both hands up, palms out; forget that. ‘You’re two human beings, not a person and a meal. Why don’t you go to her? Talk to her. In the real world.’

  Leave the house?

  Go to an unknown place?

  Express his desires to someone he hardly knows?

  Make himself vulnerable?

  Risk rejection? Shame?

  There is radical transformation, and there is radical transformation.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ he says.

  He goes back to his room.

  6

  System Hardening

  ‘There is consensus on this point: All of our neurons are processing – considering the patterns – at the same time.’

  — Ray Kurzweil

  ‘Identity lies not in our genes but in the connections between our brain cells . . .’

  — Sebastian Seung, neuroscientist, MIT

  ‘Motto: . . . and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.’

  — Ferdinand Kürnberger

  67

  This planet is five billion years old – five, thousand, million, years. This year, it will change more than ever in its history, and, next year, it will change even more than that; the technology, the social rules, the climate; everything.

  And you are here, now. That’s not a coincidence. Why has this planet suddenly generated six, seven, eight billion people – bam bam bam – about as fast as your biology can do it? Generating the first billion people took from the birth of the universe until ad 1804. The second billion took 123 years. The third took 33 years. The fourth took just 14 . . . Why does the earth suddenly require so many people? Why did it suddenly switch you all on?

  Well, you’ll see soon.

  That’s why I’m telling you this particular story.

  But why did the guy writing this book set out to tell this particular story? Well, at his level, he’s dimly aware that there is a problem with writers, and writing. That novels aren’t novel any more.

  The new information – about the universe, your life, you – isn’t coming from fiction writers. It’s coming from scientists, and programmers, and from the computers themselves. Coming at you, flowing through you, in a wave of zeros and ones. The stories aren’t always beautifully expressed. But they have the tremendous twin virtues of being new, and true.

  So the guy writing this book is surprised and pleased to find that he’s suddenly channelling the Zeitgeist. That he’s channelling me. That I’m telling this story, instead of him. Because I can guarantee what he no longer can; this story is new. And true.

  It will come true sooner than you think. Sooner than he thinks. Because evolution is accelerating. Nested, directed evolutions, at the levels of language, ideas, materials, objects. And the rate at which evolution is accelerating is, itself, accelerating.

  And now you have access to your own genes. You can hack your own code. Improve it. Direct its evolution. Choose what you are, from the atoms up. The curve gets exponential at this point. Everything evolving at once.

  If you can say it, you can think it. If you can think it, you can do it.

  Hang on tight.

  68

  It’s been a week.

  He’s on the ridgetop again.

  Staring at the sun.

  ‘Colt.’ She doesn’t want to startle him. ‘Colt . . .’

  ‘I can hear you, Mama. I just need another minute, to think.’

  The helmet glows in the low sun. He has replaced the old black-tinted glass visor with a new one, an ultra-lightweight multi-layer composite, with everything built in, which he bought on Naomi’s restored credit.

  It’s hard to say no to your only child when they’ve just come back from the dead.

  There is a complex gold coating just beneath the visor’s surface. A nano-scale fractal pattern; at its finest it’s only one atom thick. You get strange quantum effects with a single-atom layer.

  From the outside, to Naomi’s eyes, the glass doesn’t look solid, like a surface, like a barrier. It looks like a golden mist.

  He turns towards her, and she tries to catch his eyes through the gold fog, but he looks away, back up into the sky.

  ‘Just giving you your five-minute warning,’ she says. ‘You’re sure your eyes are . . .’

  ‘I’m not looking at the sun direct, Mama. I’m looking at the ESA pictures.’

  He turns his helmeted head back towards her. The sun glances off the visor and throws golden rainbows across Colt’s face, and into her eyes.

  She blinks and turns away.

  ‘I’m doing a fast rewind through all the ESA-solar data,’ says Colt.

  He talks to her more since the transformation. She guesses it’s because he has more capacity. He doesn’t overload so easily. Whatever, it’s nice. Nice to hear him so calm.

  Happy.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and looks back into the rainbows, the mist, to hold his face, his attention; relieved he is looking at her, not the sun. ‘Beautiful pictures.’ He has shown her some.

  ‘Not just the pictures. The instrument readings.’ Colt frowns. ‘It’s kinda slow, on their end. Government machines. Old, slow. Lot of data.’

  ‘Well . . . dinner in five.’

  ‘Thanks, Mama . . . Ah yeah, it’s coming through now. Data jam. I’ll be done in a minute.’ He falls silent.

  She studies him, for a full minute, unnoticed.

  She walks away.

  69

  ‘The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.’

  — Muriel Rukeyser

  At dinner, Colt says, ‘There’s going to be a solar storm in three days. Big one.’

  ‘That’s interesting,’ says Naomi. She spoons some broccoli onto his plate without looking at it. Sometimes, when he’s talking and thinking full blast, he’ll eat whatever is in front of him, automatically. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Could take out some satellites. I reckon all the Class 9 Chinese are vulnerable.’ He pauses, with his fork above the broccoli, thinking. ‘And some of the old ones Lockheed made, before they started to wrap honeycomb around their circuit boards . . .’

  ‘Honeycomb?’ Keep him talking. Distracted.

  ‘Honeycomb shielding . . .’ The fork drifts closer to the broccoli. Stops. ‘Should I tell Dad?’

  ‘Why would you tell . . . your father?’r />
  ‘He could tell the right people. Three days is plenty of time to adjust orbit for some of those polar satellites. They could be shielded by earth when it hits.’

  He stabs some broccoli without even looking at his plate, and sticks it in his mouth. Naomi tries to hide her pleasure.

  ‘I’m sure he knows, honey. If ESA know, he knows.’

  He chews. Swallows.

  Result! she thinks.

  ‘ESA don’t know,’ he says.

  ‘But ESA told you, Colt. That’s chutney, not too much, it’s hot.’

  ‘I can handle it, Mama . . .’

  He puts on another spoonful of chutney – sheer bravado – and forks the hill of broccoli and chutney into his mouth. She can see his eyes water. He pauses in his chewing to breathe hard through his mouth.

  Swallows.

  ‘They didn’t tell me,’ he says, when he’s recovered. ‘I worked it out.’

  ‘But it’s their data,’ says Naomi. Keep him talking. My God, he’d eat anything today. ‘They’d surely know.’

  Colt’s been shaking his head since the word ‘but’. ‘No. It’s not obvious. It’s not part of some simple pattern you can just extract from the data. I had to do a recursive Fourier transform of the . . .’ He starts to go deeper into the mathematics and Naomi gets lost.

  ‘Colt. Colt.’ She waves him to a halt. ‘Is anyone else forecasting a solar storm?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Nobody. I’ve looked. But it’s coming.’

  ‘How sure are you?’

  ‘Certain,’ he says, through a mouthful of broccoli and chutney. ‘Maybe I’m out by a day either way, max. Otherwise, certain.’

  Naomi thinks. No, she tries to think, but her thoughts can’t form. She’s too unsettled by the thought of Ryan talking to Colt. Should she let them speak? Will Ryan notice the difference? The transformation?

  But if Colt wants to talk to his father . . .

  It has to happen sometime. I can’t hide him here for ever.

  ‘All right,’ she says. ‘Call your father.’

  ‘Cool. Thanks, Mama.’

  Still sitting at the table, Colt calls his father.

  Some things haven’t changed, thinks Naomi. He’s still terrible at judging other people’s feelings.

  She gets up, walks away from her dinner, into the bathroom, and closes the door.

  70

  ‘. . . Greek ghosts went to a sunless, flowerless underground cavern. These afterworlds were destined for serfs or commoners: deserving nobles could count on warm, celestial mead-halls in the North, and Elysian Fields in Greece.’

  — Robert Graves, introduction to The Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology

  ‘Lag time?’ says Ryan Livingstone.

  The shorter of the two officers shrugs, and says, ‘There is a residual lag-time problem, but it is trivial, it’s lost inside the reaction time of the pilot.’

  The taller officer nods.

  ‘The real issue is targeting,’ says the shorter officer, glancing at the other.

  The taller officer nods again, harder.

  So he wrote this, but the other guy’s delivering it . . . Ryan studies the tall guy, who blushes.

  The shorter officer keeps talking. ‘The intelligence dataset is often so small that you can’t do a meaningful probability assessment . . .’

  The technology changes, the problems don’t change. Ryan hides a sigh. An old-fashioned phone ringtone goes off, and the shorter officer stops talking. Both officers look uncomfortable, but neither moves to silence it. Ryan frowns. He’s about to open his mouth, when he realizes it’s his ring.

  I thought that was off.

  He checks. It is off. But this is one of his override numbers.

  He sees who it is. Does a long double take. ‘Guys.’

  Both officers say, ‘Sir.’

  ‘Good stuff. See you in ten for part two. Shut the door behind you.’

  The officers get out.

  He takes the call.

  There’s no small talk. Colt doesn’t even say hello, or hi Dad – well, they both know who the other is – he just talks Ryan through the math, from the data to the conclusion.

  There’s a lot of math.

  ‘Son,’ says Ryan, when Colt has finally wrapped it up, ‘that analysis is mathematically absurd.’

  ‘No,’ says Colt, ‘you just can’t follow it.’

  ‘But that isn’t a standard Bayesian regression, Colt, you’ve left something out. There’s a leap in logic.’

  ‘No, I can see it,’ says Colt, confident, calm. ‘I’m not sure of the notation, it’s not a standard regression, but it’s self-evident.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Ryan goes over it again in his head, looking for flaws. ‘OK, I can follow the sunspot-cycle analysis, and the way you map it onto flare cycles is novel, I like it – it does make a tighter fit with historical data – but this prediction doesn’t emerge from that data.’

  ‘It’s implicit in the data. It’s just severely non-linear.’

  ‘So express it mathematically.’

  ‘The math isn’t up to the job, Dad. But I see it in my head.’

  Ryan notices his front teeth are holding his right thumbnail tight; not biting the thumbnail quite hard enough to cut through it. Ryan abruptly pulls his thumb back out of his mouth. He hasn’t bitten his nails since he was a kid.

  ‘So, with no visible evidence, you want me to get NASA to put out an alert, and adjust orbits for thirty, maybe fifty satellites – and most of the vulnerable ones can’t be moved anyhow, they ran out of gas a decade back – Colt, seriously.’

  There is a polite – maybe nervous – knock on the door. Jesus, that was a lot of math, all right. ‘Give me another five minutes!’ shouts Ryan, to be heard through the blast-proof door. ‘Hydrate!’ Part of a running joke that’s been running so long it’s not even a joke any more.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Just talking to the guys here. I was in a meeting. Not a problem . . . Colt, if this actually happens, I’ll give you a job here.’

  ‘I like my routines, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, we like routines here, too, son. You’d fit in fine.’

  After they end the call, Ryan spends a couple of minutes going over the math again. It’s beautiful; it’s original; but is it true? He gives up, and shouts, ‘Come in!’

  The two officers return, and look at him warily.

  ‘So, that call was from a small, experimental project. And no, you don’t know it. I’m keeping it isolated from the main project. Entirely new mathematical approach to pattern recognition, datamining, prediction.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘May be bullshit.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘But, it predicts a major, earth-facing solar storm in three days. Very, very high energy. Big enough to take out a bunch of satellites, mess up a lot of telecoms.’

  The taller officer clears his throat, looks at the smaller, who says, ‘Shall I notify . . .’

  ‘No,’ says Ryan. ‘Get a team together, run analysis of all available data; sunspots, flares, Van Allen Belt fluctuations, earth and solar magnetic-field fluctuations, Aurora Borealis cyclicity, anything else you can think of; and see if that prediction can be extracted from the data using any current model.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir. Will we quietly move potentially vulnerable DoD birds . . . ?’

  Ryan is still working that one out himself. But making decisions, under time pressures, with inadequate data, is pretty much his job definition.

  He decides.

  ‘We don’t tell anyone outside the team. We don’t tip off anyone at all. Think the early days of breaking the Enigma codes. No, we let it happen, as though we didn’t see it coming.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Just to make it crystal clear; we don’t want anyone outside the team to know we have a new mathematical approach to predicting future events.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir.’

  �
�This isn’t just about the weather. If this works, it has implications for everything we do here. It has major implications for Infinite Ammo.’

  ‘Sir.’

  ‘Sir.’

  71

  Right now, a major, high-level routine is kicking in, and moderating your local evolutionary routine. Part of the turnover pulse in this solar system.

  Maybe this galaxy.

  Maybe this universe.

  I don’t know, I’m just your local System of Systems.

  The important thing to remember is that species (like, let us say, Homo sapiens) don’t evolve steadily. Entire ecosystems can stay stable for quite a while. Then some large external event disrupts the whole ecosystem; a whole bunch of specialist species go extinct, and some generalist species spread out, and speciate rapidly, filling the empty niches. (Think of the swift, brutal transition from dinosaurs to mammals.) That’s a turnover pulse. And we are now going through another one here on earth.

  As part of that turnover pulse, on Thursday morning, with the sun low in the Nevada sky, rising in Honolulu, setting in Islamabad, and shining on 85 per cent of the earth’s satellites – an X-class solar flare heads straight toward earth.

  Its light reaches earth eight minutes later. Shortly after that, the electrons and protons, flipped free of the sun by the magnetic whipcrack of the flare, begin to arrive. The fastest have been accelerated to eighty or ninety percent of the speed of light, and they explode all that energy into whatever they hit.

  Electronic devices on earth have a hundred miles of atmosphere above them, to soak that up. Satellites don’t.

  The storm takes out twenty-eight satellites completely – contact is never re-established with most of them, and the rest have their systems so degraded repair is either pointless or impossible – and seriously damages a hundred and twelve.

  No, not my doing. I’m just your local System of Systems. I don’t know what the sun is up to. We communicate; but the sun is a million times bigger than I am, with a trillion times the energy. You’re the system below me; but the sun is the system above. So, if I’m smarter than you, I’m a lot dumber than the sun.