by Julian Gough
Imagine talking to someone with a brain a million times larger than yours, who can think a trillion times faster.
Imagine asking a bacterium living in your gut to explain your life.
For all I know, the sun could be whistling show tunes. The sun could be smoking a cigar. The fact is, the sun sent a jet of ionized gas directly into the earth’s path, and it was deliberate.
When I say everything is going to be transformed, I mean everything is going to be transformed.
72
‘Evolution that is characterized by long periods of stability in the characteristics of an organism and short periods of rapid change during which new forms appear especially from small subpopulations of the ancestral form in restricted parts of its geographic range; also: a theory or model of evolution emphasizing this – compare gradualism.’
— definition of Punctuated Equilibrium, Merriam Webster Dictionary
Colt has so much spare processing capacity, it’s like he’s hungry all the time.
He used to code just so he could play; but exploring the gameworld isn’t enough now. Instead, he explores the world of code.
The code that runs the game.
That is the game.
It’s so clear to him now, how to make the code tighter, better. How to make it flow.
And he doesn’t just tighten it.
It’s often quicker and simpler for him to write entire sections again, from scratch.
Soon, he’s adding so much new code to the game that the community begins to freak out; it’s coming in faster than they can review it. The more paranoid members worry they’re being hacked, and Colt gets asked some awkward questions.
Colt doesn’t want to explain to his community – how can he explain, when he’s still exploring his new abilities himself? – so he backs off. Fakes up identities for a few enthusiastic new coders, and divides the new code among them.
Now it’s being delivered in believable quantities, from several sources.
The questions die down.
But no matter how much he codes, his new mind still has room left over.
Colt explores what that new mind can do, cautiously, but with increasing joy.
*
Eventually, one morning, he asks to come into the lab with Naomi.
‘OK,’ she says warily. ‘Sure.’
Colt doesn’t say a word, all the way to the lab. Helmet on, but game off, because hearing him play the game in the car drives his mother crazy.
He flips on the game, and mapping, as soon as he gets out of the Pontiac.
Instantly, the cars in the parking lot, recharging in the sunlight, are buffalo, drowsily grazing. The olfactory system provides their smell in a warm, evocative burst of perfectly balanced chemicals. Dry grass, the matted fur, manure, all heated by the sun. Nice mapping, thinks Colt, taking in a deep, appreciative breath. The manufactured molecules drift out of the helmet as he walks.
‘What’s that smell?’ says Naomi, walking beside him. But Colt’s set the noise-cancellation on high, and doesn’t even hear her.
She raps on his visor till he switches off the game. ‘Hmm?’
‘OK,’ says Naomi, wrinkling her nose. ‘Seriously. Less beans, more greens.’
In the lab, Colt reads up on Naomi’s research areas. Datamines it.
Finds patterns.
We think with all our neurons at once. And now he simply has more of them. A lot more. Colt can pull in data like a linear computer; but he can crunch it like a human being, running a hundred thousand comparison-checks simultaneously. And, now, five hundred thousand. A million . . .
Soon, he asks to come into the lab every day with Naomi, just like when he was younger and he stopped going to school.
And then he starts to make suggestions . . .
73
Naomi frowns. There is no caller ID.
‘Hello?’
‘I hear the kid’s making himself useful,’ says Ryan, on audio. He’d requested video. Naomi leaves it on audio.
‘He’s doing fine.’
‘Mmmm. I hear he’s reorganized your lab.’
‘Everything’s been approved and cleared.’
‘Yeah, no, sure. I’m not giving you a hard time. But some of the new research you’re doing . . . it’s . . . provocative.’
‘What are you saying?’ says Naomi. She stands, walks up and down the office in a tight circuit.
‘He’s connecting stuff I’ve never seen connected. It’s . . . interesting. What the kid is doing.’
‘We’re working together,’ says Naomi.
She moves towards the window. Colt is outside, in the parking lot, in his helmet, in the sun. On his knees, unselfconscious, staring at a lizard.
It’s good, to see him engaged with the world. Before he went out, he said he might need a favour from her, later. She wonders, idly, what it might be.
‘It’s good for him,’ she says. ‘Keeps his mind busy. I’ve cleared everything with Donnie.’
‘Yeah, look, it’s not a problem. It’s just . . . some of the patterns he’s finding, in old data . . . what he’s doing might have other applications.’
‘He isn’t Superman! He’s a teenager with social difficulties—’
‘—and extraordinarily enhanced abilities—’
‘—in a couple of very limited areas.’
‘Why don’t you bring him out to the base,’ says Ryan. ‘I can book you on a Janet flight.’
She glances out at Colt; kneeling, staring at the lizard. The lizard staring at Colt.
Janet flights don’t officially exist. They leave from their own secure terminal at McCarran Airport (Just Another Non-Existent Terminal; thus Janet) and fly military personnel and contractors to the base, which also doesn’t officially exist. Colt has always wanted to see the base, the test range . . .
‘He doesn’t like his routine upset.’
‘Well, from what I’m hearing, I think you’ve pretty comprehensively upset his routine already.’
Outside, the lizard’s nerve cracks before Colt’s. The lizard darts for shelter under a car, leaving Colt on his hands and knees in the parking lot, in the sun. Naomi turns away.
‘What?’ she says. ‘What are you hearing?’
‘Don’t be so prickly.’
‘Then don’t be a prick. What are you hearing?’
‘I’m hearing you losing it. Maybe I’ll talk to you later, when you’ve calmed down—’
‘—I am calm. I’m just trying to protect Colt—’
‘—Yeah, from the universe,’ says Ryan, and now his voice is getting that familiar angry edge. ‘But he’s got to live in the universe. There’s nowhere else to fucking live. You, letting him think he can live in his own private universe, in that fucking helmet . . . That’s not helping him. What’s he going to do when you die? What’s he going to—’
Naomi ends the call with a gesture that could be interpreted in some cultures as rude.
She looks out the window. Colt is still on his hands and knees. No lizard.
She has no idea what he is doing now, what he is thinking, seeing. Asphalt? Code? Something in the game?
A car, Donnie’s car, backs out of the parking space beside him, swings out wide around Colt, drives off.
She only realizes she’s been holding her breath when she breathes out.
Oh, Colt. You’re going to have to navigate a world full of Donnies. And they won’t always swing around you.
She can’t move past Ryan’s question.
It goes around and around in her head.
Old, familiar, smooth with age and repetition.
No, Ryan didn’t ask it, he just released it. It was there all along, running on a loop under the surface of awareness, pushed down, deep, hard, because it hurts.
What’s Colt going to do when I die?
74
‘You want me to what?’
‘Come on, Mama, it’s really small. It’s easy. The actual connections will self-assemble .
. .’
‘Jeeez, Colt, I’m not going to inject an untested device into your eyeball, come on.’
It’s nice that he’s not ticcing, not stuttering, that he can handle conflict better now; but this is crazy, she’s not going to give in to him on this.
‘Everything in it is bio-compatible!’ he says. ‘That transceiver has been used in biotech for years! The optical fibres are used all the time in implants!’
‘Yeah but they’re not normally glued directly to the rods in your actual eye.’
‘That’s the glue they use for detached-retina repair, Mama—’
‘Colt—’
‘—Seriously, it’s totally biologically inert once it’s bonded, look . . .’
He hands her a small glass of liquid, with something floating, suspended, in it. She studies the incredibly tiny sample implant.
He’s designed it, from available parts. Had it custom-built in Vietnam.
So that explains some of the missing money in her account.
Thousands of ultra-fine optical fibres come out of a very small spherical transmitter/receiver, powered externally, by induction, from the helmet.
She holds the glass up to the light.
The individual optical fibres are too thin to focus on; they form a rainbow blur that sways in the liquid like an underwater plant, as her hand shakes slightly.
‘But they’re too tiny to attach to the rods,’ she says, ‘it’s impossible . . .’
‘It self-assembles, Mama. The ends of the fibres, they’re coated with a mirror-protein that’s attracted to the surface of the rods in the eye. They bond on touch.’
‘But you need your rods for seeing, Colt . . .’
‘Peripheral vision! Who cares!’ He stares at her through the golden mist of his visor. ‘Look, rods just need a few photons to trigger a signal to the brain. They’re perfect. And there are a hundred and twenty million of them in each eye. I won’t miss a few million.’
‘Colt, you’ll just see flashes—’
‘Sure, I’ll have to train my brain to pull out the data. But we do that all the time. That’s what brains do. Come on, rods will work perfectly as a digital-to-biological interface—’
‘There are other ways that won’t blind you—’
‘—What, electrodes?’
‘Focused induction loops . . .’
Colt’s already shaking his head. ‘Too hard to install. Not accurate enough. No. Come on, Mama!’ He swings his arm around, pointing wildly at the lab, at the world. ‘Everything I need is on computers, out there. And I can process it now, my brain can handle it, now; but how do I get the data in, without this? Read it?’
What’s she going to do? Say no, it’s dangerous?
After what he’s just been through?
After what she risked with him?
‘I’ll think about it,’ she says.
75
The next morning, after a good night’s sleep, a hearty breakfast, and a last ritual argument, she drives Colt to the lab, and injects the tiny device into the vitreous humour of his left eye. She positions it well away from the focal area.
He’ll lose a little peripheral vision, but that’s OK.
76
At first, data comes in as an unintelligible blizzard of light; like glimpsing a sparkler held off to one side.
But soon the newer, finer neural networks in his brain (so hungry for information, so hungry to make connections) rewire.
They make sense of it.
Now the data arrives as information. It is intelligible. It can be processed, stored.
Wow. He is no longer the bottleneck . . .
By the end of the week, he’s built an induction system that pumps his head full of a queue of data, all night, at maximum bandwidth, while he sleeps.
The first night, it’s hard to sleep at all, and when he finally does, his dreams are crazy with lightning and explosions. But by the second night, his brain has stopped interpreting the input as light, and just treats it as data. Information. He sleeps fine.
He just needs to get the data in, in any kind of form. It’s only zeros and ones. Easy. The light is on; the light is off. He can decode it later in his brain; that’s simply building algorithms, and running them.
As he begins to think with these new regions, his sense of time distorts. He is thinking twice as fast. Five times.
Colt’s in his mother’s lab. She’s gone to get lunch.
He’s thinking with his new brain, processing a stack of data that doesn’t need any input from his old brain, and his thoughts are running ten times faster than normal. Events outside his mind seem to crawl.
Donnie walks in without knocking, and Colt watches him enter the room as slowly as a cloud moving across the sky.
Donnie says something, but Colt is processing a century’s worth of historical data on trade patterns, knitting it together with data on migration.
In Asia, tiny initial migration patterns – almost invisibly small datasets; a family, their relatives, a second family from the same village – predict trade flow between regions. Interesting.
Donnie’s mouth is slowly moving. Colt moves his attention back to the room, and his old brain takes over, tries to deal with this interruption, and now everything is very slow and bright.
‘What?’ says Colt.
‘Where were you?’ says Donnie. ‘You seemed elsewhere.’
‘Thinking.’ And the word seems like a whale surfacing, then disappearing; so enormous, endless, slow, that he has to say it again, to marvel at it. ‘Just thinking.’
‘Thinking about what?’
Colt tries to explain, but the pattern isn’t obvious.
Donnie nods and nods.
Colt gets an uneasy feeling. It gets worse and worse. He stops talking.
Why does he feel he needs to hide his thoughts from Donnie?
But he does. That’s an urgent feeling, like one of the bad, old feelings, when he felt overwhelmed, threatened by data. No, he doesn’t feel threatened by data any more. But humans . . .
Donnie is staring at him.
Colt is starting to understand people. And that’s really scary.
77
He isn’t in the house.
Must be on the playa.
Naomi walks out, follows the extension cords to the top of the ridge.
She starts to descend the scree on the far side, almost running down the slope, awkwardly, sideways on, hands out for balance, slipping and sliding in her flat shoes.
Halfway down – the taste of the dust she’s kicking up harsh and dry in her mouth – she realizes that she saw no sign of him in her glance from the ridge top.
She stops, awkwardly, using her right foot as a brake, digging the inside edge of her sole into the slope at an angle, almost turning her ankle. Stones skitter free from under her shoe, and jitter and hop down the slope beneath her. From halfway down the slope, she looks out again across the playa, slowly, carefully.
The red sandstone boulder.
The big nothing beyond.
White dazzle of the playa. That’s all. Hard to see anything.
She shades her eyes, and looks again.
He isn’t there.
7
Roadrunner
‘Why should you live in a world without feeling its weight?’
— Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle: Book 1
‘I think it’s important to regard science not as an enterprise for the purpose of making predictions but as an enterprise for the purpose of discovering what the world is really like, what is really there, how it behaves and why.’
— David Deutsch
‘If you think this universe is bad, you should see some of the others.’
— Philip K. Dick
78
Colt wasn’t surprised when Donnie drove up to the house. Donnie had picked up Colt and brought him to the lab before a few times.
‘Nice car,’ says Colt. It is.
‘Yes,’ Donnie says. ‘Get
in.’
Colt gets into the passenger seat. The car smells nice. A brand-new Lexus. Leather and metal and plastic.
After a while Colt says, ‘This isn’t the way to the lab.’
Donnie grunts. Colt would prefer an answer, but he is glad Donnie is concentrating on the road. Donnie hates self-driving cars, even more than Naomi does, but unfortunately he’s also a lousy driver. Naomi doesn’t like Colt taking lifts from Donnie, ever since Donnie got a Texan licence so he could legally switch off all the safeties.
Traffic, maybe. Colt checks.
No, traffic’s fine all the way to the lab.
But this still isn’t the way to the lab.
The Lexus is beginning to bug Colt. He runs a quick analysis in his head of Donnie’s income after tax. His expenditure on housing and groceries and sex and drink.
Colt has previously analysed Donnie’s travel patterns. From a limited dataset, he estimates Donnie used to visit brothels once a week; one of the expensive brothels in Pahrump at the start of the month, somewhere cheaper further out in Nye County at the end, but averaging a pretty good whack of money. Recently, more visits, and expensive all month.
The Lexus pushes it over the edge. He’s got a second, undeclared income.
Colt opens his mind to all the data he has on Donnie, everything. Searches for more data, out in the world. Searches by name; by image; by pattern.
Digs, digs, digs . . .
Donnie’s face, caught in the background of a photo, at a surveillance conference in Chicago that he didn’t officially attend.
Donnie’s name, in an online chat about a bar fight in a town called Rachel, way out in the desert north of Vegas.
Donnie’s new car, on a recent, hacked, Army Research Unit security-clearance list.
Dot
Dot
Dot.
Colt connects the dots.
He’s been spying on us.
Dad is paying him.
Wow.
Colt doesn’t think he is afraid. Not as afraid as he would have been a month earlier. But he’s definitely in emotional territory he doesn’t understand.
He puzzles over the emotions.
There’s a sort of pleasure, that his father is interested enough in Naomi and Colt to spy on them. A sort of comfort in being watched over. His father is thinking of him.