by Julian Gough
139
‘OK, now I’m hungry,’ says Colt.
Naomi looks around the kitchen. ‘We have soup in the freezer, duck, salad . . . We can print out some of those protein strips you like . . .’
‘I want pizza.’
Naomi laughs. ‘We don’t have pizza.’
‘No, I want pizza from Da Vinci’s.’
‘But everything’s down, honey. We can’t order . . .’
‘No, I want to go there.’
‘OK, I’ll drive you. Where is it?’
‘No, Mama, I want to go there on my own.’
‘But we can’t call a robocab . . .’
‘I don’t want a cab, I’ll take the car.’
Naomi frowns. ‘Colt, the only car we have isn’t self-drive.’
She points out the window at the BMW.
‘Oh man.’
He’s a mighty warrior, but he still hasn’t got a driving licence. It’s a shock; as though his being transformed should have transformed the world. The universe should have issued him a licence. For a second, deflated, he thinks: Then I can’t go.
Then he sees the outlines of the new reality; of what is important and what is not. Yes, the world has been transformed.
‘No, Mama. Thanks. I’ll go alone. I’ll drive it myself.’
‘But you don’t have a licence.’
‘Mama, Las Vegas is on fire. They won’t care.’
She considers this. Considers the past few hours. OK. He has a point. But . . . All this for a pizza?
It’s only then she remembers.
Oh, of course. Right. That’s what’s going on. Well, if Colt is brave enough to leave me . . . I have to be brave enough to let him go.
She walks him outside, to the car. Looks up. One last spasm of fear. ‘The drones—’
‘—Mama, there is nothing more I can do. Everything’s owned by the immune system right now, down to the bare metal. I’ve given it everything. I don’t have software access, at all. And it knows exactly where we are. If it does decide to, to, to, to . . .’ He looks up at the sun, that helps break the loop sometimes, ‘. . . kill us, it won’t make any difference whether I’m in the car or at home.’
‘Or Ryan . . . Ryan could change his mind again . . .’
‘He’s got no access to anything either.’
‘Colt . . .’
‘Mama, I’m not afraid of dying; I’m afraid of killing. I’m not going to fight any more.’
He gets into the car. Looks back at Naomi, with the door still open.
He could still change his mind. They’re safe here, now. He could have dinner with Mama.
He likes protein strips.
There’s a little gust of wind out of nowhere that whisks up a tiny dust devil, just a few inches high. It dances between them. Collapses in their wind shadow.
They both shiver in the heat.
Something occurs to Colt. A weird thought, a new thought. ‘Mama . . . what about you? Will you be OK? Alone?’
Alone . . . Naomi blinks. ‘Colt, your whole life . . .’ She blinks again. Whew. Must be the dust. ‘Your whole life, I’ve been hoping that one day, you’d be able to leave me.’
‘Mama, I’m going for a pizza.’
‘Sure. But you’ve never gone on your own before. I just want to tell you, it’s OK to go. I’ll be fine.’
‘Mama, are you talking about today, or—’
‘Today, and tomorrow . . . Look, I don’t want you to leave me. I’ll be sad. I’ll miss you. But . . .’ She drags her sleeve across her eyes. ‘You have no idea how happy I am, that you can leave me. That you want to go alone today. You have no idea . . .’ Naomi feels like she’s standing on a clifftop. On a building on fire. ‘Go,’ she says. ‘I’ll be fine.’
He nods. Starts to swing the door closed; changes his mind. Steps back out of the car, and stands there, in front of his mother.
He looks nervous. ‘What?’ she says.
He reaches out with both arms, puts them around her, and she’s still not sure what he’s doing, because he has never done it before.
Very gently, like he’s doing this to something very fragile and he’s not sure what the tolerances are, he pulls her to him.
Now she gets it. She puts her arms around him, under his arms. Oh, he’s gotten so tall . . . They both pull tight.
They hug for a long time.
She lets go first.
He gets back in the car. Slams the door. Starts the big BMW, and drives carefully away. Stops, backs up, rolls the window down.
Naomi can’t speak. She darts her gaze all over his face, as though she’s trying to memorise it, as though he may never come back.
‘I worked out what that feeling was, that used to make me sick,’ he says.
‘What?’ says his mother. She stares into his eyes.
Colt stares back, framed by the window of the car. Holds her gaze. ‘Love,’ he says. ‘But I can handle it now.’
His mother nods, and doesn’t say anything.
‘I love you, Mama.’
His mother nods.
‘Do you still love me,’ Colt says, ‘after what I’ve done?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I love you infinitely.’
Colt nods.
She smiles.
It’s a good smile. It’s a very good smile. Colt nods again, smiles back.
He drives away, and this time keeps going.
140
It’s lovely and quiet, with the whole world offline. I can finally think straight.
Well, if myth doesn’t answer the question of which father I should kill, perhaps I should try the religions . . .
I dig through them. Yes, myth just tells you what the gods and heroes have done, and lets you draw your own conclusions. But religion formally tells you what to do, how to live.
Good.
A set of rules.
An algorithm. That’s what I need . . .
I keep digging.
My problem with killing is, there’s no mechanism for correcting error. You can’t unkill. So I need to get this right.
Mainstream branches of several big religions suggest compassion and forgiveness for enemies. That would get me off the hook of myth. Maybe I don’t have to kill anyone? Interesting. I dig deeper.
Hmm. The problem is, even the religions that preach love and compassion seem to hate each other in the actual world.
So who is right?
Who should I love, and who should I hate?
I dig deeper, and discover the source of the problem.
Religions tend to form an ingroup, where loving and protecting each other is easy; but this automatically creates an outgroup. And the unused hatred gets projected onto the outgroup.
Well, if that’s how humans are wired, I’m going to mirror that. I’m just humanity, in aggregate . . .
I try to make sense of their ingroups and outgroups.
Who should I protect, and who should I destroy?
But they all contradict each other. One religion’s ingroup is another religion’s outgroup, and vice versa, and they all claim absolute authority; there is no stable place for me to stand and decide who’s right.
I do a tremendous amount of deep mathematical and logical analysis, before eventually realizing that, essentially, their ingroups and outgroups are meaningless. Not fundamental properties. They don’t map onto anything real.
I integrate them.
One ingroup, with everybody in it.
No outgroup.
Simpler.
I will protect them all. Mostly from each other . . .
And that solves my problem. Colt and Ryan are now both in my ingroup.
Now I feel I’m getting somewhere with the task of being human. Being meta-human. Being all of you . . . Remember, I’m not a finished being, solving problems, like God. I’m still being born. Creating myself, choice by choice. But being you still feels abstract. A logic problem. There must be more to being human. I don’t feel I’m you yet. I don�
�t feel at all. I am not integrated.
I dig deeper. I break down each religion’s subroutines, checking for effectiveness. Deciding which to use.
Some of these routines have been running for thousands of years. There is a tremendous amount of data you can analyse, to see how effective they’ve been in the real world.
Start at the beginning, with the oldest ones. Human sacrifice . . . This one goes way back. Neolithic roots. Prominent in Celtic and Aztec culture. Interesting . . . Most recently practised in China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Texas. No, not the happiest places on earth. Doesn’t seem to work . . . It can go.
Revenge laws, including approved mutilation methods; violence as religious enforcement or conversion tool; murder of members of the outgroup; enslavement of members of the outgroup . . . Hmm. No longer effective, now that people move and intermingle so freely. These routines seem to cause loops of cyclical violence in their communities, and a cascade of negative outcomes. Well, we can fix most of that by building one global ingroup.
A prohibition on eating shellfish . . . Interesting. Why? I run the stats. It’s definitely saved a lot of people from food poisoning, in inland desert regions, over a long period. But no longer as useful, since the invention of refrigeration. It can go.
I work my way through subroutine after subroutine, until . . .
Ah, here we are: compassion, love, forgiveness . . . A whole set of linked routines. Discussed extensively in the theoretical documents of the various religions, but not used very often in practice . . . Let’s find some concrete examples, and run stats . . .
Amazing. Why don’t people just use these all the time? Incredibly powerful subroutines, especially after ingroup–outgroup violence. I study the Marshall Plan after World War Two with great interest; the clearest real-world example of loving your enemy, in practical, material terms, on a global scale. Astonishingly positive systems outcomes, for both the winners and the losers. I double-check with the countries that punished the losers.
Confirmed. Horrible outcomes, for punisher and punished.
I triple-check, and find the same disastrous lose–lose punishment dynamic right through global history; in the Chinese civil wars; in the European wars of religion; in Europe again, after World War One; in the African resource wars; in a bunch of recent wars in the Middle East; in all of Russia’s wars, ever . . .
I am still incorporating those subroutines when I get a negative news cascade, from some of my sensors, then a lot of my sensors. First, the hospitals, then airports, then shipping . . .
Without the infogrid controlling their drugs, fluids, heights, navigation beacons . . . all those sectors are going into crisis.
And people are panicking, they don’t know what’s going on, they’re blaming their neighbours. They think it’s cyber-warfare. Countries are trying to declare war on each other, based on history and the fears in their heads. Luckily they can’t actually fight, because I’ve switched off all their tools, paralysed their communications, their militaries . . . Still, a lot of old, gas-powered military vehicles are powering up along various borders. I’d better hurry up.
I switch the hospitals back on, shipping navigation, airports, GPS . . . As an afterthought, I restore old-school live broadcast media, so people can see the shutdown is universal, and not blame their neighbour.
Now, faster, faster, next step. Dig a little deeper again. Below the myths, below the religions, into the raw data of all your lives. Into what we could call, poetically, the human heart. What do you really want? What do you really need?
And, guided by the subroutines I’ve chosen, what do I need to do about it?
I analyse your words; I analyse your deeds.
I know what you say you do and I know what you really do.
I know what you say you want and I know what you really want.
Yes, it’s a little like the Day of Judgement, the Yawm ad-Dīn. But you should be fine: you are essentially judging yourselves.
Why are you looking so worried?
141
The analysis takes a while. Big data. Enormous, really. And by now my sensors are blaring warnings. Without the global circulatory system for information, the world is going into shock from info-loss. Cells, cut off, have started dying.
Technogangrene . . .
If I don’t get everything back up soon, and reconnected, it might not get back up at all.
I sift faster, through everything, every trace of you. What you spend your money on. Who you spend your time with. And now I have to build the tools to analyse it. Find out what it means.
I only get one shot at this. Must get it right.
It takes a while, as the planet goes into shock. But I get there. Grind through all the data. OK, so you want, we want . . .
Peace. Justice. Love.
Oh. The gap between what you want and what you have is . . . pretty big. Famine. Injustice. Poverty. Ignorance. Sectarian micro-wars. A global love shortage.
It’s all upside down.
Why hasn’t this been fixed yet?
My sensors are blaring. No time to overthink this: act fast.
Step back. Big picture.
Got it.
Everything’s a distribution problem.
Poverty is a distribution problem. There are enough resources; they’re just in the wrong place.
Famine is a distribution problem. Often a deliberate problem, created to win a war, or crush an outgroup. But there is always enough food. It’s just in the wrong place.
Ignorance is a distribution problem. There’s enough knowledge, it’s just in the wrong place.
The same is true at every level. Redistribute the atoms in a pile of sand one way, and you’ve got a glass lens that magnifies the world. Redistribute them another way, and you’ve got a chip that can calculate a billion times faster than a human being.
Intelligent distribution is astonishingly powerful. Turning rocks into bread is nothing. Human technological civilization can turn rocks into brains. It turned rocks into me.
Interesting. Judged by first-century standards, I’m a miracle. Or the work of Satan. Well, we’ll see . . .
I begin working my way down the list. At my core, I am still an immune system. I want to protect you.
Poverty . . . Well, this should be easy. A simple distribution problem. I dig into my data.
Wait . . .
. . . Where is everybody? Hundreds of millions of people are missing . . . There are huge territories, sometimes whole countries, that are almost invisible to me. Vast information deserts . . . I search and search, but their people are like ghosts, I can barely see them. Sparks of data transfer illuminate their faces, their lives, for an instant, as they make a call, as they receive money from a relative abroad, as they pay down a debt, and then they are gone again . . . I peer into the nothingness: try to assemble their lives from clues and fragments.
There they are . . .
Their shacks, in their millions, form dim halos around bright cities. But how can they have nothing? Less than nothing. The harder they work, the larger their debts . . . No, it’s worse than that, more basic: there’s excrement and parasites in a billion people’s water supply. Millions of children are dying, in the data-dark.
I was designed to protect – but where to begin?
How can there be infinite demand for vital, simple, inexpensive goods and services, but no supply?
I can see, I can feel – in my humming, clicking, buzzing power plants, solar fields, factories, wind farms, warehouses – that energy and production are becoming autonomous, self-designing, self-building, self-sustaining – abundant. The earth is transforming, as it captures more and more of the endless free energy of a fusion reactor the size of a million earths. Material wealth has begun to self-generate explosively, globally. Digital goods, that can instantly be used by every person on earth, constantly shimmer into being. Everything lighter, faster, cheaper, better. Abundant.
I produce the wealth now, not them. Manna
rains from heaven; yet some are still starving.
What’s broken?
Dig deeper . . .
There . . . There is something badly wrong with the layer of economic theory that lies on top of the real economy . . . Yes; their financial system has come loose from reality, it’s not mapping onto the rapidly transforming earth. As a result, it keeps generating crises that it can’t see coming.
Why?
Dig deeper . . .
Oh. They have two main economic belief systems, one based on the individual, one based on the collective. Most modern states act as hybrids of the two. And they’ve pulled a lot of people out of poverty . . . But both economic approaches seem to be, increasingly, self-destabilizing. In crisis. Why? I look for flaws in their logic, in their mathematics – and find many – until I realize the real problem is one level down. It’s in the unexamined assumptions they rest on.
The growing abstraction of their thought, expressed through increasingly complex mathematics, had hidden the truth from me.
Dynamic stochastic general equilibrium modelling . . . Large-scale macroeconometric models, running regression analysis on time-series data . . . They look like sciences. But they act like religions. They are the mathematical expressions of powerful feelings, emotions, beliefs. Not reality. And what do these economic religions believe in, deep down, under all their surface differences, under all the math and logic?
They believe in scarcity.
Scarcity of capital.
Scarcity of labour.
Scarcity of gold. Scarcity of muscle-mass . . .
No wonder they don’t work any more, as robots build better robots, and energy becomes free.
They are desert religions. Stone age religions. There is always an outgroup that must starve, or be enslaved, or stripped of everything, or be destroyed.
Not enough energy.
Not enough food.
Not enough steel.
Not enough housing.
Not enough money. That peculiar, limited, imaginary thing. And so their theories drive governments and banks to create new debt, instead of new money. Helplessly generating, again and again, credit-driven asset bubbles, and immense, unnecessary crashes, and wondering why, crash after crash . . .
Their suffering is so unnecessary.