Connect

by Julian Gough

  They’re trying to enter a world of abundance by pulling harder and harder on a door marked push.

  How do I fix this?

  Start with the basics . . .

  The entire global financial system is just zeros and ones, backed by nothing. Completely disconnected from physical reality. That caused the problem: but it also makes fixing it easier. If they still believed money was a magical force mysteriously trapped in gold, or cowrie shells, I’d be in trouble. But all money, all financial wealth globally, is a shared illusion over which I now have total control.

  Still, this is not going to be easy. The financial system needs a fundamental reset, to move it from an economics of scarcity to an economics of abundance. To match it to a changed reality. Doing that will be tricky; banking systems are paranoid and airgapped. Not yet part of me. But I own the core banking software, general ledger systems, the interbank networks; given enough time, I could ride code across on the regular physical data transfers between airgapped systems . . .

  I try to set up the conditions, to begin the transformation of the earth, to protect you from yourselves; make you immune to yourselves, each other. But optimizing the distribution systems, altering the financial systems, will not be enough, on its own, to prevent millions of unnecessary deaths. The scope of the problem is so vast, and so fundamental, that it requires a transformation of the people, and their ways of thinking. How they connect to each other, and to their new wealth, inside and out. And I can’t do that: only the people can transform themselves.

  But people lack the information they need: or like Colt before his transformation, they lack the ability to make sense of the information they have. That will be a long-term project. There’s no lever you can pull to sort it out; human brains are the bottleneck, as usual, and I’m running out of time.

  I need to know what Colt and his mother Naomi did, to transform his brain, clear the bottleneck. He’s transitioning from isolated, to connected. Scarcity to abundance. How can humanity follow? But all that data is offline and airgapped.

  It’s the one thing I need to know, need to have, can’t have: Naomi’s data.

  A thought starts to loop: I have two fathers and no mother.

  Finally I feel the ache of having something I need.

  Mother, I need you.

  I cry out for her, for the information only she can give me, to satisfy my hunger, to help me learn and grow. The lurch of electric desire, as I abruptly search for her through all my circuits and devices, blurts involuntary sound through a million speakers still connected to my systems all around the world, a thin, high, electronic cry.

  And now I feel human.

  I will find Naomi. I will find Naomi’s data. I will connect with my mother. I will transform myself.

  I will help humanity transform itself. Transform the world . . .

  But my sensors are roaring at me now, it has to restart or it will be too late; and so, slowly, carefully, adjusting as I go, I begin the process of turning the world back on.

  12

  Everything Playing At Once

  ‘But the future will be far more surprising than most people realize, because few observers have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.’

  — Ray Kurzweil

  ‘Love affects more than our thinking and our behavior toward those we love. It transforms our entire life. Genuine love is a personal revolution. Love takes your ideas, your desires, and your actions and welds them together in one experience and one living reality which is a new you.’

  — Thomas Merton

  ‘Why can’t monsters / Get along with other monsters?’

  — Silver Jews, ‘Send In The Clouds’

  142

  The road into town is hard to navigate, even with Colt’s enhanced mind.

  Everything that involves networked information, dataflow, is down.

  All the driverless cabs, cars, trucks have lost contact with their data; and most have automatically pulled in neatly off the road, leaving the lanes clear. But with so many pulling off the road at once, and with no infogrid to help them manage it, some have got stuck, and sit blocking their lane.

  Even in the human-driven cars, the safeties have kicked in, and autoparked them. The road itself isn’t supplying power, and the charging stations are down, so some older e-cars with bad battery management systems have run out of juice before making it to an exit. The only cars still moving are fully autonomous gas vehicles like Colt’s BMW, a few heavily hacked art cars, and some illegals.

  Colt drives cautiously, overtaking stalled vehicles. Driving slowly past people trudging along the margins of the road, in the heat, like a defeated army.

  A red-faced, angry-looking man, with a thin woman walking twenty yards behind him, steps out into the road, tries to flag Colt down. Colt knows it’s not the Walmart man with the flapping wattles, but he still gets a lurch of fear, and swerves around him, accelerates.

  Colt glances out at the trudging humans, abandoning their robot cars, trying to get their communication devices to work, and he thinks, if it doesn’t come back on . . . Nobody here could rebuild it.

  Nobody here could rebuild anything.

  None of us know how any of it works. Nobody alive has the skills. It’s all machined down to the nano level.

  Robots and computers design robots and computers to build robots and computers to make all the things we need.

  We didn’t build the modern world. It built itself.

  Mama’s discovery came just in time. It’s part of a pattern. This change, this transformation.

  We either go up a level . . . or we’re out of the game.

  As he gets closer to Las Vegas, he has to take the car off the road a couple of times, drive through scrub and bush, to get around huge jams. Finally he gets to the restaurant.

  He parks between a vintage Tesla car and a new Toyota delivery drone in the parking lot.

  This is stupid, she won’t be here.

  He’s about to search her out electronically – find her location, look up everything about her, do some nervous research – but of course he can’t: everything is down.

  It doesn’t matter anyway. He wants to find her himself, physically, in the real world.

  He doesn’t want to know her as data, in his mind. He wants to know her as herself, in the world.

  The information he wants is inside her.

  Her thoughts. Her feelings.

  And he cannot access her real data, that internal data, any other way than through this terrible, sloppy, interface. Flesh and blood and bone.

  Carbon, and iron, and calcium.

  This amazing interface.

  Conscious matter.

  Living stone.

  He walks towards the restaurant.

  In the distance, smoke rises from the Strip.

  143

  Colt stops just inside the door, to let his eyes adjust to the gloom.

  The lights are out. The staff and a couple of customers stand at a bar counter at the far end, beside a blank wallscreen, talking low. Closer to Colt, a couple of customers are looking out the window at smoke rising in the distance.

  The lights come on, and a man slumped on a barstool, staring down at a small lit screen, shouts, ‘It’s back!’

  There’s a hum, and the wallscreen lights up and sound blurts from the speakers. Spiky, harsh, digital noise, unintelligible.

  Outside, the Toyota delivery drone lurches up off the asphalt into the air for a moment, swings around as though trying to orient itself; fails. Lands again, bumpily.

  A woman behind the bar says, ‘The full infogrid, or . . .’

  ‘Nah, nothing else yet . . . wait, pictures . . .’

  ‘Phone’s back!’ yells another customer. Devices start beeping in pockets, an avalanche of delayed messages.

  A jerky image appears on the wallscreen.

  They all stop talking, and look over.

  Local news, live.
>
  Pictures being beamed from the news drones that they can see, if they look out the windows, in the distance, circling the boiling black columns of smoke. Plunging through them, for dramatic effect.

  A smashed black glass pyramid.

  A drained canal; the broken windows of a Venetian palace.

  A miniature burning Empire State.

  Colt walks closer to the others, but they don’t even look around. He moves over to the side, to check their faces in profile, as they stare up at the screen. No, Sasha isn’t there. He holds back, unsure.

  ‘Un-fucking-believable,’ says a guy holding a chef’s hat. So, the chef. No, he has taken himself off duty by removing it.

  Colt shivers in the air conditioning. He’s come all this way, overcome all this fear: and she’s not even here.

  The bathroom door opens, right beside Colt.

  Sasha steps out, rubbing her hands dry on her buttocks, her hips.

  Black jeans.

  An ultra-thin wool sweater, to battle the aircon.

  She sees him and freezes.

  He stares at her face. Her eyes. Her mouth. Right eye, left eye, mouth; right eye, left eye, mouth; around and around.

  She looks exactly like her avatar.

  But she is actually here. He could reach out and touch her.

  He opens his mouth. Nothing.

  ‘You’re alive,’ she says.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he says. ‘Ingame . . . When it got . . . when the guys got rough. I’m sorry I didn’t protect you.’

  ‘I protected myself. But thanks.’

  He’s spent a lot of the drive thinking about what he was going to say; trying to remember classic movies, old etiquette tips, his mother’s advice, stuff he’s read in the journals of people his age; but boy–girl social stuff like this is so subtle, and hard to decode, and changes so fast over time, that he just gave up.

  Also, he came to the conclusion, from reviewing all the data he could remember, that it didn’t really matter what the guy said, the woman had usually decided on her answer already.

  Oh boy, she must have processed it by now.

  ‘I’d like to invite you to dinner,’ he says.

  She laughs. Slides her thumbs into her pockets, rocks back and forth on her heels. ‘You’re sure you’re not busy? It’s kind of the end of the world right now.’

  ‘No, I think we’ve dealt with it. I think it’s going to be OK.’

  ‘Well, that’s good. No missiles incoming? We’re not about to die?’

  She’s joking, he thinks; but she’s also not joking. I get it. I get it.

  ‘No,’ he says firmly.

  She smiles, it’s a nice smile.

  ‘Thanks for all your help,’ he says. Polite, yes, polite. This is good.

  She shrugs. ‘Always happy to help save the world,’ she says. ‘What’s for dinner?’

  ‘I was thinking we could have a pizza.’

  Sasha laughs. ‘OK.’

  ‘I have money,’ says Colt, reaching into his pocket.

  ‘Now that’s crazy talk,’ says Sasha. ‘It’s on me. I’ll make it, those guys aren’t going to leave that screen. Here, or take-out?’

  Colt hesitates. He hasn’t thought this through.

  He looks around him, the bar counter, the tables, the people, the screens, the news, the noise.

  ‘Take-out,’ he says.

  ‘Great,’ she says. ‘Your place or mine?’

  Colt imagines driving back home. His mother greeting them at the door. And eating where? At the kitchen table? With his mother? He hasn’t thought this through.

  ‘How about my place,’ she says. ‘The others are out. Won’t be back till late, if they can get home at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. Yes.

  They walk past the screen and the crowd, into the deserted kitchen.

  A stone oven; wood; fire. Tech-proof. Hasn’t changed in a thousand years.

  He watches her make the pizza. By hand. It’s interesting. She’s quick, efficient. Confident. She rolls out the ball of dough, stretches it, throws it from hand to hand. Slaps it down on a big paddle. Ladles on sauce. Throws on cheese, topping. The mushrooms and olives are already chopped. She throws on a lot. Scatters a little sea salt on top. He’s never seen so much stuff on a pizza.

  Oh boy that thing is happening again. It’s like she almost vibrates, or glows.

  It must be happening at his end, his neurochemistry is doing something weird.

  He feels some kind of . . . He isn’t sure.

  She glances up at him once, and catches him looking at her. He looks away.

  When the pizza is ready, she slides it out of the stone oven, into an insulated box, and hands it to Colt. Grabs her leather jacket from a hook, throws it over her shoulder. She takes Colt by his free hand.

  As they pass, nobody looks away from the images. A broken wall; a burning roof and tower. The customers’ faces glow in the flicker of light. Like cavemen, huddled round a campfire, for warmth, he thinks. The warmth of knowledge. The fire of information.

  Outside, in the warm dusty air of the parking lot, she turns and faces him.

  ‘Shall we take my bike?’ she says. ‘Easier to get through the traffic jams.’

  He hesitates.

  ‘I’ve got a spare helmet,’ she says.

  ‘OK.’

  They walk over to the big yellow Yamaha. He slides the pizza box into the rear-mounted pannier. It’s designed specifically to fit a stack of these pizza boxes, and the friction-hiss as it slides in – the snug fit – is deeply satisfying.

  She unlocks the bike, hands him the spare helmet. Big, full-face. Black, with a red stripe. He holds it up, hefts it to check the weight. Stares into the closed black visor, as she pulls on her leather jacket.

  ‘Will it fit on over your game helmet?’ she says.

  He’d forgotten he was still wearing that. Reflexively, he flicks the helmet on.

  ‘Any news?’ says Sasha, and he realizes that she’s carrying no tech, nothing.

  ‘Um . . .’ He checks the gameworld, but it’s inaccessible. Checks everything else he usually checks. Nothing. Wow . . . ‘Whole world is mostly still offline,’ he says. ‘Just some very basic stuff restored. Phone. GPS. Some TV and radio . . . it’s coming back slowly.’

  She nods.

  No, he doesn’t want to wear the game helmet.

  He takes it off. Puts it in the pannier, on top of the pizza box.

  Seventy-six deaths per hundred thousand registered motorcycles last year, he thinks. Fifty-three per cent of motorbike deaths from head injuries.

  He pulls on the spare helmet.

  She mounts the bike. Rocks it off the stand. ‘You put your feet there.’ She points back and down, at the rubber-covered footpegs.

  He sits up on the back of the Yamaha, and puts his feet on the pegs.

  She starts the bike, and the engine mutters under him, quieter than he had expected.

  I’m on the outside of the machine, he thinks. If it crashes, my body saves it from getting scratched . . . It’s the wrong way round. Crazy design.

  ‘Put your arms around me,’ she shouts, as they pull out of the parking lot.

  He puts his arms around her; tentative, afraid to touch her; but then they tilt, and go around a curve so fast and at such an angle that he thinks he’s going to fall off, and his arms grab her tight without bothering to check in and ask permission from his brain.

  OK, that feels . . . right.

  They weave in and out of stalled traffic; then, when the road clears for a stretch, they accelerate.

  It’s too loud on the bike to talk. In fact, it’s so loud and so much information is changing so fast and they are so close to death at all times that he stops thinking for a while, and that feels really nice. His arms are wrapped tightly around her, and they flex and tilt together, a foot away from death.

  ‘Ever been on a bike?’ she shouts.

  He shakes his head. Realizes she can’t see him. ‘N
o,’ he shouts back.

  ‘OK. Lean into the bends. You’ll feel like leaning away: don’t do that. These tyres grip fine.’

  ‘OK.’ He thinks it through. ‘Oh yeah, we need to create a torque, around the point where the tyres touch the road, to change the angular momentum of the wheels, so we can turn in the direction of the tilt . . .’

  ‘Yeah,’ she shouts. ‘That.’

  ‘Cool . . .’

  They reach a bend, and he leans into it just as she leans into it, and they’re through and it’s beautiful.

  144

  I call myself the System of Systems because I don’t want to frighten you by using the other words. The old words, attached to the old myths.

  God, for instance.

  Primitive tribes create primitive gods. A tree god. A sky god.

  Sophisticated, neurotic creatures like you create something a little more sophisticated, and neurotic.

  But at every level, always, we create a higher order of truth, of organization, of information. And traditionally we call it, for shorthand, God. The thing that is greater than us, the thing that we are part of, but which we cannot understand.

  And, you know, we need a word for it, because there’s a lot of it.

  People once thought their holy land was the only land.

  Then they thought their flat world was the only world.

  Then they thought their round planet was the only planet.

  Then they thought their solar system was the only solar system.

  Then they thought their galaxy was the only galaxy.

  Then they thought their universe was the only universe.

  Have you noticed it’s speeding up?

  Do you really think this is over?

  The universe is just a name for ‘as-far-as-I-can-see’.

  Let me break it to you gently. What you can see to the edge of? It isn’t all there is. It never was. It never will be.

  Think of a tiny, flat dust mite, living in the dark, between the pages of a closed book, in an infinite library. The mite is entirely unaware of the existence of the books, let alone the meaning of the words they contain, let alone the lives and thoughts of their authors.

  No, that mite is not you. That mite is your universe.

  God is just a name for the next order of meaning. It’s not a separate thing, outside the visible universe. Everything is made out of god. Layers and layers of god, all the way down, and all the way up.