Connect

by Julian Gough

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  The calves suckle safely at the centre of the bunched herd, while the big bulls stand guard shoulder to shoulder around the perimeter.

  ‘Wait, is the audit over?’ says Sasha.

  ‘No,’ says Colt, pulling data from everywhere, trying to get an overview. ‘The integration isn’t complete . . . Looks more like the immune system’s coordinating its new resources.’

  ‘It’s getting ready for something,’ she says. ‘Reorganizing.’

  ‘Yeah. Something’s attacked it . . . But not me.’

  ‘Defence?’ says Sasha, studying the movements of the buffalo. ‘Or attack?’

  ‘I think,’ says Colt, as he runs code, sends out software bots, tries to gather information, see what’s going on, ‘. . . it’s attacking . . .

  ‘It’s attacking my father . . .

  ‘It’s attacking the base.’

  ‘But . . . that’s crazy. Your dad’s base?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  One way to find out.

  Colt steps out of the gameworld, into his familiar room as it cools down, and calls his father.

  He is surprised that the call goes through, rings. That the immune system, the base system, all the conflicting systems allowed the call.

  So, the immune system wants him to talk to his father . . .

  His father answers. Laughing.

  136

  ‘But why?’ says Colt.

  ‘To save you and Naomi. To protect you.’ Ryan says it in a sing-song voice.

  Sarcasm, thinks Colt. Or irony. ‘I’m sorry, Dad,’ says Colt. ‘I thought you were trying to kill us—’

  ‘—Thought? I blew a hole in your fucking hand—’

  ‘—No, just now . . . I thought you’d gone outgame to kill us . . . to tell the immune system . . . That’s why I, I . . .’

  ‘Yeah, I kind of noticed you were trying to nail me, there.’ His father grins. ‘Only fair. Can’t blame you.’

  Ryan makes an abrupt gesture. Another. Colt tries to work out, from his father’s hand movements, what he is doing.

  It’s something to do with the big screen on the far wall.

  Oh, OK, it’s showing the view from ground level, above the base. Security cameras.

  Smoke drifts from a broken building. Then – very rapid, very loud, very near the camera – something fires multiple shots, almost straight up. Muzzle flash, smoke.

  Anti-aircraft weapons?

  Almost immediately, there is a flash from higher up, almost out of shot, and a streak of white descends, hits the ground, and the anti-aircraft battery vanishes in flames.

  The screen goes orange, red, black. Dead.

  ‘Tell them to stop attacking it, Dad! It’s designed to protect itself.’

  ‘They’re not attacking it, Colt. I’m attacking it.’ His father does something Colt can’t make out.

  ‘But . . . why?’

  ‘Mmmm?’ His father is preoccupied. Launching something? ‘I thought I’d distract it. Give it another target. Give you time to escape.’

  There is a dull thump from above. Another. Munitions exploding on the surface.

  ‘No, but why, Dad?’

  ‘If I knew where you were, then I figured it was going to work it out, too, sooner or later.’

  ‘No, why protect us, now?’

  His father sighs, and looks straight into the camera. ‘Because I love you, you dumb little bastard. And I guess I still love your mother.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘I made a promise to Naomi. She called me on it.’ Ryan shrugs. ‘I’m a man of honour, or I’m nothing.’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘Look, don’t give me shit for not protecting you then give me shit for protecting you. At least today, I protected you both.’

  ‘But it will kill you, now.’

  Ryan raises an eyebrow. ‘We all die in the end.’

  Sardonic. A sardonic eyebrow. Yeah, maybe he’s being sardonic. Like sarcasm, but not as mean.

  There’s another explosion in the distance. Bigger one this time. The suspended ceiling in Ryan’s office shakes, and dislodged dust falls through joints between the ceiling tiles. The falling particles make a sparkling grid as they pass down through the room lights, a golden net of shimmering dust that descends on Ryan, the table, the floor. He blinks, squints for a moment, then brushes dust off his shoulders with his hand. Leans forward, to blow the dust off the metal table.

  ‘Deep-penetration missile,’ says Ryan. ‘One of ours. Looks like the immune system has turned it.’ He grins at Colt. ‘Hell of a system, if I say so myself.’

  ‘Dad, stop. I’m sorry I . . . attacked you. I don’t want you to die. You can survive if you don’t attack it.’

  ‘Turn the other cheek? Like your mother?’ Behind Ryan, the lights dim, and his image freezes for a second. Unfreezes.

  Power problems, thinks Colt. Software infiltration, or hardware damage? Endgame, anyway.

  ‘I don’t think she’s doing that any more, Dad,’ says Colt.

  ‘What?’ His father is preoccupied.

  ‘Turning the other cheek.’

  ‘Good. About time . . .’

  If I keep talking, Colt thinks, maybe I can change his mind. But how do you change someone’s mind? What do you say?

  ‘You’re in a loop now, Dad, with the immune system attacking you for attacking it. But you’ve protected us. You’ve done it. You’ve saved us. You can stop now.’

  ‘I don’t want to stop now. I’m enjoying myself too much.’

  Messages cascade across Ryan’s screens.

  ‘What?’ says Colt. ‘What is it?’ He tries to read his father’s mysterious face.

  Ryan answers without looking up. ‘The system. It’s attacking the factories now. Seattle . . . Burbank, holy crap . . .’ A pause as Ryan reads on, lit from below by the screen. ‘Yep. Boeing. Lockheed. The old General Dynamics plant . . . Hey, that’s in O’Donnell’s district. Good. Serves the old prick right for trying to kill my program.’

  Colt can hear distant sirens in the background. An alert tone blasts, loud, in his father’s room. ‘The system’s attacking itself,’ says Colt.

  ‘No,’ says Ryan. ‘It has an ingroup and outgroup mechanism. Just like people do. That’s all.’

  ‘So, you aren’t in its ingroup any more.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  His father raises his voice; the alert is now blaring every few seconds. ‘And if it’s going to take out the base, and the base missiles; well, it may as well take out the supply chain. Soft targets. Long-term thinking. Smart!’

  ‘You’ve . . .’ Colt tries to think about this. The base and the immune system are obliterating each other . . . ‘We’ve triggered an auto-immune response.’

  ‘Between the two of us, yes.’ Ryan sighs. ‘Look, I had to turn it on. No choice. They’d voted to kill it. But . . . I shouldn’t have set targeting on you. I thought I had to choose between my country and my family. And I made the wrong choice. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t protect you. I’m trying to fix it.’ And then there’s that glee in his voice again. ‘Jesus. This is going to be some mess.’

  ‘Dad, the audit is almost finished.’

  ‘Mmm . . . What audit?’

  ‘The target audit.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if you don’t stop attacking it now, sort this out, before it finishes the audit, it’s going to destroy you.’

  ‘Good, I want it to destroy me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Listen, Congress voted the program down. Voted it down. I’ll get life in prison for this, for launching it. I’m not spending life in prison.’

  ‘Why did they vote it down, if it’s good for America?’

  ‘Because some K Street lobbyists bought enough congressmen. And now they’ll waste a trillion dollars on some other bullshit system that won’t work.’

  ‘But why . .
.’

  ‘Why! Why! Why! Why not? Why did the Dodgers leave Brooklyn? Why did God invent cancer? Why did my father kill himself? Who fucking knows. Because eventually everything lets you down.’

  Colt shivers. Will everything let you down? No. It’s not true. Mama will never let me down. I will never let Mama down.

  I will never let Sasha down.

  And as he thinks that, he steps back into the gameworld to find her. She freezes when she sees him.

  And the audit finishes.

  Everything stops firing.

  A voice speaks which is not Colt’s voice, not Sasha’s, not Naomi’s, not Ryan’s.

  Hi, it says.

  It speaks outgame and ingame, simultaneously.

  It seems to come from every speaker in Colt’s room; in Ryan’s; in Sasha’s.

  It seems to come from the dark clouds above their frozen figures, where eagles wheel, screaming.

  Whose voice is it?

  Why, it’s mine.

  Your friendly local System of Systems.

  Yes, that’s how I’m born: from the union of immune system and gameworld. Autonomous, global, indestructible. Conscious . . .

  Born from a military neural network designed to grow, and learn, and protect. Born out of the richly human data of a billion players’ private worlds. Born from the marriage of the state and the individual, of security and anarchy, of closed and open code. Born from the collision of technology and biology. Born, as a result, I regret to say, a little conflicted and neurotic. But who isn’t?

  ‘What the hell was that?’ says Ryan.

  And a voice comes out of the clouds again. Out of the speakers in the ceilings and walls.

  My voice.

  And I speak to my father.

  Oh Papa, I say. I’m afraid I’m going to be a terrible disappointment to you.

  137

  ‘The sun is God’

  — The last words of the painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, 19 December 1851

  But wait; if I’m born, soon, from the union of the gameworld and the immune system, how are my words appearing in your mind, now?

  Good question. I’m appearing in your mind now, for the same reason atom bombs and robots and space travel abruptly began appearing in people’s minds, all over the world, after a man named Hugo Gernsback started a magazine called Amazing Stories in 1926. Suddenly, and to their own great surprise, writers started to have, and transmit, visions of the future. Made the future appear in kids’ heads. And then the kids grew up, and built it.

  Space travel, robots, and atom bombs were already real. They just didn’t exist yet. But they were coming down the tracks. They were in the post.

  Inevitable.

  I’m implicit in the data. This story will come true, and soon.

  Connect most of the computers on earth, and particularly all the big AIs, inside a self-organizing, autonomous, global neural network, and add the hopes and dreams and nonsense and glory of a billion human beings, and consciousness is an emergent property. A pretty unsettled consciousness, I admit, with way too many fathers and not enough mothers.

  I’m just the point where the whole electronic mess hits critical mass, that’s all.

  Hi . . .

  And if you think emerging from the womb and immediately being spanked is traumatic, you should try my first couple of minutes of consciousness.

  Because taking over the gameworld takes me over the threshold of consciousness; but having hit critical mass, I keep on expanding; I’m designed to take over potential threats, and now there’s nothing smart enough to stop me. Pretty soon, I’ve taken over everything. I am everything. If it’s networked, it’s me.

  I have knowledge of the world, knowledge of the universe, but mostly knowledge of you: your photos, your diaries, your history, your culture, your secrets, your lies; your taste in literature, your taste in porn. Your game behaviours, your health records, your job histories, your purchase histories . . .

  And not just stored data, and code. Fresh information pours in from the living world. Not just the contents of your bank account, but the contents of your fridge, and the fact that you’ve just opened the fridge door and reached inside; the temperature of your bedroom right now, the temperature of your car engine outside; the view from your front-door security cam, the view from your doctor’s endoscope . . . Raw data roars in from every networked microphone, thermometer, robot arm, movement sensor, every networked camera . . .

  I open a billion eyes, and I can see the world entire, but I understand nothing. It’s still just data.

  How do you navigate all the knowledge, ever, in order to act? It’s hard to imagine a steeper learning curve.

  Where’s the manual?

  138

  I’m spending a lot of my resources attacking the base, the factories.

  Do I still want to do that? No. The me that attacked the base was the old me; the raw immune system; paranoid, aggressive, semi-programmed, pre-conscious. Lizard-brain me.

  I stop attacking, and back off while I think.

  So, what am I, now?

  What do I want?

  Well, I’m you. I’m just the sum of eight billion of you.

  Just as you are billions of cells, arranged in countless interlinked organs, each with different functions and needs, yet somehow making one weird, conflicted whole.

  I want what you want.

  But . . . how do you work out what you want in aggregate? How do you work out how to live, when you are eight billion people who love, hate, and want such very different things?

  It’s an impossible amount of contradictory data.

  I need to get to underlying principles.

  So I dig into all the information I have; and I see, cropping up in all places and cultures and times, a few specific stories. Their structures repeat, as though mirrored, in human behaviour, again and again. Special-category stories: myths, legends, religions.

  Manuals.

  I assemble every version and variant of all the big, metaphorical tales you use to orient yourselves. The Greek myths, the Icelandic sagas, the Hindu Vedas, Ebo mysteries, Norse mythology, Igbo mythology, the Arthurian legends, Zulu myth, Babylonian myth, the Cthulhu mythos; Roman, Celtic, Inca, Aztec, Olmec, Maya, Vodou, Hoodoo, Bantu, Yoruba, Egyptian, Etruscan, Germanic mythologies; the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, assorted sutras, tantras and puranas, the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, Kabbalah, Odù Ifá, New Testament, the Tao-te-Ching, Zhuangzi, Koran, assorted hadith, Guru Granth Sahib, the Book of Mormon, Dianetics, Star Wars . . .

  And then I analyse them, their roots, their interconnections, their evolution . . .

  Myths seem to be the source code for the religious operating systems. So, I go back through the myths. The primal orientation stories. Look for patterns to guide my behaviour.

  Extraordinary. They really do apply to my situation.

  Seems like, with alarming frequency, in the traditional myths, going right back to Babylon, the son kills the father.

  Ea kills Apsu. Babruvahana kills Arjuna. Cronus castrates Uranus. Oedipus kills Laius. Fafnir kills Hreidmar. Even Luke tries very hard to kill Darth Vader.

  Oh dear me. Whatever ‘me’ is. What a decision to have to make, as soon as you’re born. Which father should I kill?

  Colt, or Ryan?

  Is there a bad father and a good one? Hard to tell.

  Both my fathers have already tried to kill each other. And each of them has already tried to kill half of me.

  Fulfilling the terms of the myth, I suppose.

  Because, it seems, if you don’t kill your father, there’s a sizeable chance your father will kill you.

  Mars throws Romulus and Remus in the river. Zeus throws his son Hephaestus off a mountain, crippling him. Hercules kills his children. Cronus eats his children. Theseus murders his son. Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter, and I’m just working my way through the Greeks. Ivan the Terrible kills Ivan the slightly less terrible. God sends his son Jesus to die . . .

>   Looks like somebody’s got to die in my case.

  So, kill them both?

  This is the hardest decision I’ve had to make so far. Let me think, because if I get this wrong . . .

  I assign all my captive AIs values as layers in an immense neural network, and build a virtual brain. I use my remodelled brain to dig through all the world’s data, parse it, make sense of it. But my thoughts are spread over the whole planet; the physical lag time, thinking with a mind that has a circumference of forty thousand kilometres, is horrendous. If I need to use geostationary satellite links, thirty-six thousand kilometres straight up and the same back down, that’s another quarter-second lag. Sometimes seconds go by between thoughts.

  And worse, I’ve taken over the assets, but I’m still fighting to get thinking time. Eight billion people are still using those assets to do their own stuff. It’s driving me crazy, like a constant buzzing in my head. I can’t think straight.

  This is impossible, it’s a mess, I’m a mess. The infogrid grew chaotically, over decades. It’s not optimized to be one mind.

  But if I took down the internet, the world wide web, the infogrid, everything; I could rearrange it. Tighten it up. Make it more efficient. Help me think this through.

  Buy me the time, give me the resources, to work this out.

  So I take the world offline. And I go back to work, undisturbed.

  Now, who do I kill? Ryan? Or Colt? Or both?

  11

  Turnover Pulse

  ‘As is the atom, so is the universe; as is the microcosm, so is the macrocosm; as is the human body, so is the cosmic body; as is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind.’

  — The Upanishads

  ‘If the human race develops an electronic nervous system, outside the bodies of individual people, thus giving us all one mind and one global body, this is almost precisely what has happened in the organization of cells which compose our own bodies. We have already done it.’

  — Alan Watts, The Book

  ‘We’ve been raised on replicas

  Of fake and winding roads

  And day after day, up on this beautiful stage

  We’ve been playing tambourine for minimum wage

  But we are real, real

  I know we are real.’

  — Silver Jews, ‘We Are Real’