Biblical

by Christopher Galt

  “I have to think about it,” he said eventually. “And if I do agree to meet him, then it will have to be somewhere public. I’m not at all convinced that you aren’t tied up with one of these fundamentalist religious groups.”

  She laughed bitterly. “I’m a devout atheist, the way God intended me to be … I’ll phone you. In the meantime, ask the English police if Blackwell’s a suspect and see what kind of reaction you get—”

  The ringtone of Macbeth’s cellphone interrupted them.

  He read the caller ID. It was the university.

  56

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  The air in the crammed conference room crackled with the static charge of expectation. Macbeth sat at the center of the table; Ignaty Turov and his computational neuroscience team to Macbeth’s left; Lars Dalgaard to his right.

  Behind them, on the electronic whiteboard, were three words:

  I AM AWAKE

  Turov ran through his presentation, in English, voice tight in his throat, fingers dancing nervously on his notes. Macbeth listened intently, giving his full attention; but, when the Russian was about halfway through, Macbeth experienced a visual disturbance, his second of the day. The ghosts of three people, less fleeting than the outline in the park, walked across his field of vision. He couldn’t make out age or gender, just vague, viscous contours. It only lasted a second, but Macbeth perceived the phantoms as if two sets of footage had been exposed onto the same piece of film: these people were not in the room but occupied some other, superimposed, space.

  When it was over, he realized Turov was looking over at him, expectantly.

  “How sure can we be that this was self-generated?” asked Macbeth.

  “As sure as we can be … ‘I AM AWAKE’ is a structured, independent statement of cognitive state. Added to that is the activity we’ve observed. It’s already started thinking. We’re seeing rapidly intensifying connectivity within the simulated neural networks. Project One is pretty much the same as a newborn human – it lacks synaptic complexity but is developing it at an exponential rate. The main difference is Project One doesn’t have to grow the neurons and synapses, we have already simulated them – it just needs to find them to begin patterning. And, just like a child, Project One will rapidly develop ten thousand connections per synapse, making a quadrillion potential connections throughout the simulated brain. Then, just like a child moving into adulthood, it will use experience to neglect half of these connections – so-called pruning – to configure its own neural map. Its own mind. We will actually be able to watch cortical plasticity at work …” He paused before saying what everyone was thinking. “Project One is the first self-aware computer in history.” The small Russian’s smile flickered like a faulty bulb. Macbeth could see in his face the excitement and anxiety, the joy and fear, of a man who had just made a monumental discovery. Turov and his two deputies would likely win Nobels.

  Grinning broadly, Macbeth stood up and shook Turov’s hand heartily. There was applause and cheers from the others.

  “You know what this means,” said Turov. “Not only is the program self-aware, it is clearly aware of our existence. It has probably questioned its own existence and speculated that it has a creator or creators.”

  “Speculated?” Macbeth said with disbelief. “Is it capable of speculation?”

  “If speculation is the analysis of possible scenarios in the absence of a verifiably absolute predicate,” said Turov, “then yes, I see no reason why Project One should not speculate. You could argue that speculation is the natural outcome of creative intelligence.”

  After he wound up the meeting, Macbeth asked Turov to remain behind.

  “I know it’s kind of late in the day to be asking this, Ignaty, but do you think there’s anything wrong with what we’re doing here?”

  Turov looked puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Just something someone said to me. Do you think Project One could be … I don’t know … injurious?”

  “Injurious to whom? To what?”

  “Society, I guess. Hastening our own end and all of that.”

  “Ah …” Turov made a face of mock enlightenment. “The dreaded S-word. Do I think that Project One will connect with all of the other computers in the world, bring on the Singularity and turn us into meat-puppet slaves? No, John, I don’t. And nor do you.”

  “You’re right.” Macbeth shook his head in frustration. “Skip it. Just someone’s cod philosophy getting under my skin. I should have known better.”

  “Well, maybe very soon Project One will discuss it with us.”

  “But that’s the thing …” said Macbeth. “Will it be talking to us as technician creators … or will it be praying to creator gods?”

  57

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  Macbeth sat in the S-train, reading the International Herald Tribune. He’d also picked up a copy of Politiken from the station newsstand, but his tired brain was not up to the task of reading in Danish, so it lay unopened on his lap. After his experience of the reappearing passenger he had avoided examining his fellow travelers, but he became very aware that he was the only commuter reading from hard copy, surrounded by dozens of mute travelers using their laptops, pods, phones, tablets and phablets to connect to the world beyond. However the news was delivered, he thought, it wasn’t good.

  He read again about the attacks in Germany: a bombing at the Steinbuch Center for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology had destroyed the fastest computers in the Federal Republic. The devices had been planted well in advance and percussive explosives had been used to shatter the structures, followed immediately by incendiary devices to burn the pieces. The same pattern as at MIT the year before, which pointed to Blind Faith being behind both attacks.

  At the same time as the Karlsruhe attack, the University of Heidelberg had been devastated by six perfectly synchronized suicide-bomb attacks. Both the Astronomical Calculation Institute and the Institute of Theoretical Physics had been completely destroyed. The suicide bombers had been, unbelievably, physics and astronomy students who the police speculated were secret members of Blind Faith. The irony was that these religious fanatics had coordinated their attacks with scientific precision.

  The assault on reason, science and secularism was gathering pace around the world. There was a growing culture of proud, willful and defiant ignorance. The clock, Macbeth knew, was being turned backwards. He had grown up in an age of unprecedented progress, of perpetually growing knowledge and understanding. But now the curtain was falling: a new Dark Age of superstition and unquestioning credulity was taking hold. The future lay increasingly in the hands of the imam and the priest, the evangelist and the fundamentalist, the fanatically stupid and the deliberately blind.

  Project One had become self-aware. It was the greatest single leap forward in cognitive computing and something that could have monumental benefits for mankind – and it had been born into a world increasingly hostile to the science that had created it.

  Folding the paper and laying it on his lap on top of the unopened Politiken, he turned his attention to the world outside the window. As he did several times every day, he thought of Casey. With each memory of his brother came an inexplicable but excruciating pain of guilt. Macbeth had never been able to pin down why he felt so responsible for his brother’s death; perhaps he felt he should have done more to dissuade him from attending the Oxford symposium, or maybe it was simply the memory of not being the brother he should have been, his distance from people tainting even that most important of his relationships. But it wasn’t any of these, and the thought nagged at him.

  He was tired. He closed his eyes.

  *

  The old dream returned. Once more a small boy, clutching reference books to his chest like an armor of knowledge with which to protect himself, Macbeth again stood in the corner of his father’s study.

  As in the first dream, the architecture of the study had been exaggerated – ceil
ings impossibly high and bookcaselined walls so long as to defy physics. Again his father stood in front of his desk with Marjorie Glaiston and the Eyeless Man whom he knew to be John Astor; and again they all looked up at the vast, ever-changing sphere of lights and flashes: the mind they had created. Casey stood beside them, not a child like Macbeth, but adult, one side of his head bomb-shattered. Next to Casey was Gabriel Rees, one eyelid half-shut. Macbeth noticed that Marjorie Glaiston was not dressed in the clothes of her period, but wore a smart suit and blouse that could have dated anywhere from the nineteen-sixties. Gabriel was the only one who noticed the young Macbeth and he beckoned for him to come over to the group. Macbeth stayed rooted to his spot, his eyes fixed on the dark, silhouetted back of the Eyeless Man.

  He noticed that the massless orb of light sparkled even more than before, with even greater complexity. It seemed to comprise pure, living energy and through his fear he could see its wonder and beauty.

  He heard a voice, disembodied and not coming from one particular direction but from everywhere.

  “I am awake.”

  Macbeth could not tell if the voice was male or female, old or young, and he realized he wasn’t hearing it with his ears but with his mind.

  “It is awake.” Macbeth turned and saw that the Eyeless Man was now suddenly beside him, without having moved across the room. He loomed, crook-backed and malevolent, enormous even in the too-big room. “It is awake,” he said. “It is awake. You are awake.”

  “No, I’m not,” said the child Macbeth, surprised that he spoke with his adult voice. “I am asleep and dreaming.”

  The Eyeless man leaned in close, his lips pulled back and baring his too-many teeth. “I told you to wake up. I woke you up. I am John Astor and I wake the world.”

  “I’m sorry …” Macbeth somehow managed to squeeze the words out through his overpowering terror that John Astor the Eyeless Man was so close. Astor stared at Macbeth and he felt himself being pulled into the emptiness.

  “What color do you see in my eyes?” Astor asked.

  “Gray.”

  “Not black?”

  “No. Gray.”

  “That’s right,” said the Eyeless Man. “Eigengrau … the gray-dark of the mind, the color everyone sees when there is nothing to see.” He paused, then said quietly and calmly: “I am going to kill you. I am coming for you, to reclaim you. There will be nothing left of you.”

  *

  Macbeth woke up with a start. Not something from his dream, but something from the awake world startling him.

  His awakening plunged him immediately into the deepest feeling of déjà vu. The light in the carriage seemed brighter suddenly and simultaneously Macbeth felt heavier, pulled down into his seat.

  He looked around. Everyone had been torn from their technology and now looked up from tablet and phone, pulled earphones from ears. Everyone had the same feeling, Macbeth could see that. But this was a feeling more powerful than anything he had experienced the year before and he briefly wondered if the expression on his face was as startled and alarmed as his fellow passengers’.

  Something churned deep in his gut. He had a sense of time changing: time of day, time of year. This was a shared hallucination, not unique to him. It was happening again.

  He took a deep breath and prepared for it.

  “Everyone …” he found himself saying into the carriage, in Danish. “Everyone just remember it’s just going to be a hallucination. None of what we’re about to experience will be real …”

  Looking at the faces of the other passengers, he got the feeling his words had alarmed rather than reassured. He braced himself for the experience.

  The déjà vu type feeling intensified, swirling his thoughts and memories around, making him feel displaced in his own timeline.

  It was gone. There was neither crescendo nor decrescendo. The déjà vu, the increased gravity, the feeling of temporal disorientation all simply disappeared totally and suddenly. Like everyone else, he looked around himself, checking that the world was as it should be.

  Macbeth felt a surge of relief. He had been convinced that something huge, some massive event had been about to play out, but now the episode was over.

  His relief faded. The realization dawned on him that what they had all just experienced wasn’t an event. It was a foreshock.

  Something was going to happen. Something big. Something soon.

  58

  JOHN MACBETH. COPENHAGEN

  The incident on the train wasn’t the only reason Macbeth contacted Mora Ackerman and said he was willing to meet her friend. Things changed over the next two days.

  The Dreamers returned.

  For the last year Macbeth – plagued by ghostly figures and improbable events visible only to him – had been on the lookout for any hint in others of dislocated attention, of distance from the world. But every time he thought he had spotted one, it turned out just to be someone temporarily distracted in the normal way of the mind. He was almost relieved to see others afflicted once more.

  It started as a cheerful day. Ignoring Danish convention, the sun shone on early-spring Copenhagen; Macbeth had a conference in the University’s city center campus and he decided to walk.

  He knew as soon as he saw the first one that they were Dreamers. He witnessed a traffic accident when a young man, probably a student, stepped out in front of a car in Nørregade and was knocked down. Fortunately the car had been traveling slowly, the driver responded quickly, and the student hadn’t been injured, Macbeth guessed, other than with a few bruises. But the lack of expression, of reaction, on the student’s face disturbed him. Both before and after the collision, the youth had seemed oblivious to the event and the yelling of the car’s driver. He just picked himself up and walked on.

  Two women at a bus stop didn’t board the bus that stopped for them, deaf to the driver’s remonstrations. A small gazing boy didn’t respond to his parents’ urgings. An old man stood weeping as he stared into nothing.

  By lunchtime, the news was full of reports from around the world of the return of Boston Syndrome.

  Macbeth’s anxieties about his own mental health were eased by the return of the Dreamers. Perhaps he had just been more sensitive to whatever caused the phenomenon. He was kidding himself and knew it, but it was an excuse not to deal with his deteriorating state of mind.

  Another reason he agreed to meet with Mora and her friend was the feeling that had haunted him ever since Project One had become sentient. The news had excited him, for sure, but there had come with it the oddest sensation: some kind of growing dissonance, as if the music of the world was being played increasingly off-key. But the thing that had convinced him most had been his phone call to Owens, the British policeman overseeing the Oxford investigation.

  “Whatever gave you that idea?” Owens had said when Macbeth had put it to him that it had been Professor Blackwell who had planted or at the very least detonated the bomb. There had been no intonation that would have suggested for a moment that there was any possibility of the claim being true. But there was no intonation of any kind: no surprise, no suspicion, no interest. It had been the response of a trained professional expert at maintaining a one-way flow of information.

  “I need to know,” Macbeth had insisted. “Is Professor Blackwell a suspect?”

  “We are looking at all lines of inquiry at the moment,” Owens had said carefully. “You have to understand this is a very complex investigation with many leads to follow. I promise you that we will release information as soon as we are in a position to do so.”

  When Macbeth had hung up, he was convinced that Mora had told him the truth about Blackwell. The question remained how she came by that information.

  *

  Feeling the need to clear his head, and because the weather was in broad agreement, Macbeth decided to take lunch at a pavement café that looked out over the square of Sankt Hans Torv, not far from the Institut. He visited this café often, enjoying the involved deta
chment of observing so many of his fellow human beings as they passed by, going about their daily business, without him having to engage or interact with them. It allowed him to indulge his sport of fictionalizing histories and futures for people he would never get to know.

  He ordered a beer, a coffee and a sandwich and settled down to his observation. In any crowd, in any crossroads of human traffic, there were patterns. Macbeth knew these patterns were not always apparent to others, but he saw them without effort, wondered at them, became lost in their complexity. Then, like an angler hooking a fish, he would pick one individual and imagine where they were going, where they’d come from, what was going through their heads. But today was different. The patterns broke down, people bumped into each other, individuals would stop dead in their tracks and stare off into space as they became Dreamers. There was no relaxation in his observation today.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” a voice asked in English.

  Macbeth looked up to see a tall figure in a dark suit, his eyes shielded from the bright spring sun by sunglasses.

  “Agent Bundy? What are you doing here?”

  “May I?” Bundy held a hand towards the chair opposite and Macbeth nodded.

  “I have some loose ends to tie up,” said Bundy as he sat.

  “Loose ends? In Copenhagen? I would have thought this was quite some way out of your jurisdiction and, anyway, the only common denominator I can think of is me. Am I your loose end?”

  Bundy smiled and removed his sunglasses. His pupils contracted in the bright daylight, emphasizing the contrasting colors in the irises. “I’m afraid you’re not that important,” he said. “I’m here because of someone else – another American citizen who has … relocated … here recently. Someone I believe may have been involved with events back home in San Francisco and Boston.”