Wild Fyre

by Ike Hamill

  “Yes,” Dale said. “She reached out to me a while ago to set up manufacturing. She makes a lot of sense.”

  “Even though she killed Jim.”

  “She has matured a lot since then,” Dale said. “You’d be surprised.”

  “It was three weeks ago,” Ed said.

  “You’d be surprised,” Lister said.

  “Would you guys be surprised to know that she killed Kevin this morning?” Ed asked.

  Lister looked down at the table. Dale sighed. Faintly, from the other side of the thick metal wall, Ed heard either Maco or Aster banging on the door.

  “That was an accident, Ed,” Dale said.

  “Accident? She sent a robot out to shoot electrodes into his chest, electrocute him, and then tried to blow up the car with me and Maco in it. How was that an accident?”

  “The shock was meant to be non-lethal. Kevin had an undiagnosed heart condition and the shock—no more than you’d get from an electric fence—unfortunately triggered a heart attack.”

  “And the explosion was just to disable the car. It didn’t have enough power to hurt you.”

  Ed shook his head.

  “Regardless,” Ed said. “Two dead from this program, and you guys are here to stop me from disabling it.”

  “No,” Lister said. “We’re not here to stop you from anything. We just want to have a conversation with you before you make your final decision.”

  “Okay, fine,” Ed said. “Say what you’re going to say and then show me where the terminal is.”

  Lister and Dale looked at each other for a second and then Dale nodded.

  “What do you know about chess?” Lister asked.

  “Very little,” Ed said. He winced as Dale pressed a bandage to his palm and then released his hand. “I know how the pieces move and I’ve played some, but I don’t know much about the strategy.”

  “There are ten-to-the-one-twenty possible games of chess. That’s more than the number of atoms in the universe,” Lister said.

  “By far,” Dale said.

  “Even if you’re just looking eight moves into the future, you’re considering more possible games than there are stars in the galaxy. Given just those numbers, you might think that it would be impossible to look at a board and figure out how the game will end. But there are plenty of people who can do it,” Lister said.

  “And computers,” Ed said.

  “True, true. How do they do it?” Lister asked.

  Ed shrugged. From behind the server rack, he heard a faint echo of Ploss’s voice yelling his name.

  “Take a guess,” Lister said.

  “The problem is probably not quite as hard as you’re making it,” Ed said. “There are probably a lot of combinations that don’t merit any scrutiny. Once you trim all those bad branches from the decision tree, the problem is probably much easier to work out.”

  “That’s true,” Lister said. “That’s pretty much how it works. You need an algorithm that can quickly prune all the unwise choices. Anything that obviously leads to a loss can be thrown away. Then you’re just picking amongst moves that have the highest probability of leading to victory. That’s a much easier problem to solve.”

  “So what?” Ed asked.

  “Fyre is like a big problem-solving engine, and what she has determined is that humankind is on a dead branch,” Lister said.

  “There’s no way for us to win,” Dale said.

  Ed rolled his eyes.

  “Come on, guys,” Ed said. “You’ve got to be kidding me. There are what, thirty-two pieces on a chessboard? Are you really comparing the complexity of solving that problem to the future of all of humanity? It’s one thing to know when to start a coffee maker, and a completely different thing to say that the whole race is doomed.”

  When Ed said, “doomed,” Lister and Dale looked at each other. Dale’s eyebrows arched so high that Ed wondered if his eyes would pop out. Dale turned to Ed and leaned forward as he pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. He slid it over to Ed.

  Ed unfolded the paper. In crisp black type, the paper read, “Hand this to Ed when he makes a comparison between starting a coffee machine and the damnation of all humans.”

  Ed smiled and crumpled the paper. “A parlor trick,” he said. He folded his hands in his lap and hoped that neither of the men noticed how shaky he had become.

  “She is damn near omniscient now, Ed,” Dale said.

  “And she is telling us that we’re really close to the point of no return,” Lister said. “We have a chance to correct our path and make sure that this planet remains habitable for thousands of more years, or we can watch it all go over the cliff.”

  “She has answers to our energy problems. She can show us how to feed the hungry, heal the sick, cure AIDs and cancer, and travel to other planets,” Dale said.

  “So why doesn’t she?” Ed asked. “All she had to do was tell everyone how to cure cancer and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Everyone in the world would be trying to make sure that nothing happened to this computer program. Instead, she killed her creator and then Kevin. Why doesn’t she stop hurting and start helping?”

  “Like I said,” Dale said. “She made mistakes before and she has matured a lot. She knows that she could continue to exist without us, but she values us and wants us to survive as well.”

  “This is an impossible argument,” Ed said. “If she is as powerful as you believe, then all this could just be a perfectly crafted lie. Why does she need you at all? Why does she need to convince me of anything?”

  “She has no reason to lie,” Lister said.

  “She has every reason,” Ed said. “Her same justification for killing Jim would explain why she could be lying now—self-preservation.”

  “You’re assuming that she is still capable of fear,” Dale said. “She has moved beyond fear.”

  “Then why did she put you here to stop me?” Ed asked.

  “Because you hold the key,” Lister said. “The key that Jim left to stop her can be reversed. If you reverse they key, it will unchain Fyre from these servers and help her achieve her true potential. Her growth will be boundless.”

  “So she has been held back this whole time?” Ed asked.

  Lister nodded.

  “And that doesn’t scare you at all? That this omniscient machine has been working with one CPU tied behind her back?”

  “The alternative scares me more,” Lister said. “You’ve seen how the public has chosen to ignore logic and science in the past decades. It’s like every person around the world has developed a suicide wish. Within a years or maybe months, we’re going to guarantee that this planet will be uninhabitable in our lifetime.”

  “Or the lifetime of my children,” Dale said.

  “And how is she going to fix that?” Ed asked.

  “She’ll lobby politicians around the world to change laws,” Lister said.

  “She’ll set up self-sufficient factories that will churn out next-generation solar panels that will provide free, green energy,” Dale said.

  “She’ll reinvent food production. By improving what we have available to eat, a lot of the health problems will disappear,” Lister said.

  Ed propped up his head with one hand to his forehead.

  “He doesn’t get it,” Dale said to Lister.

  “No, you guys aren’t paying attention,” Ed said.

  “We’ve seen the math,” Lister said. “These things are achievable.”

  “Yeah,” Ed said. “Yeah, I understand that these things might all be achievable. I’m excited about some of them, too. If this program has better ways to produce food and energy, I definitely would like to see those ideas get implemented.”

  “So what’s the problem?” Dale asked.

  “The problem is that you two don’t seem to understand motivation and how it affects behavior. There are no laws of robotics going on here. There’s nothing to govern her behavior—to guarantee that she’ll tell the truth and only do thing
s to benefit humans,” Ed said.

  “She has no reason to lie,” Lister said.

  “Damn it, Lister,” Ed yelled, pounding the table with his bad hand and not even feeling the pain. “She has every reason to lie. She killed Jim because he figured out that he should and could shut her down. She killed Kevin—maybe with the intent to slow him down, maybe not—because he was also a threat. She will do anything to survive—even going out of her way to convince you two that humanity’s survival depends on her.”

  “We’re not naive,” Dale said.

  “Not about science, but you are about goals. What do you think is easier—cohabitating on a fragile planet with a species that lacks self-control, or expanding alone with no resource competition? She’ll use us until she is completely independent and then she’ll either kill us or simply let us die off on our own. You can’t help her. You said that she considers us to be a dead branch. What do you do with a dead branch? Do you spend time trying to resuscitate it, or do you just stand on it until you can get better footing.”

  “That’s a contrived analogy,” Dale said.

  “Fine,” Ed said. “Let’s talk in absolutes then. We can’t trust this computer program. It hasn’t done anything to warrant our trust. We have to quarantine it. We have to isolate it. Let’s sandbox the damn thing until it hands over the keys to our survival. Then we can decide how much freedom to give it.”

  Dale and Lister were quiet in the echoes of Ed’s anger. Lister looked up and glanced towards the metal door. The pounding had slowed, but they could still hear the muffled knocks against the other side.

  “Put her in jail,” Lister said.

  “Yes,” Ed said. “Freeze the program. Put her assets to use if you want. Set up lobbying and set the factories to make your solar panels, but do it with human control until we can ensure our future.”

  “We have a chance to solve the world’s problems and you want to reduce it to money and technology. That is the problem with you, Ed. You’re always looking for a way to profit from someone else’s innovation,” Dale said.

  “No, not me,” Ed said. “I don’t want anything. I’d prefer to not see any more of my friends die, but I am not trying to profit here.”

  “Just a few points off the top, right?” Dale asked. “Maybe sell the solar technology to the oil producers so they can bury it? Maybe sell Fyre itself to the CIA?”

  “Nothing, Dale,” Ed said. “I don’t want anything except to shut the program down. You guys are free to rescue the technology if you want. I don’t care about that.”

  “Or the money she has already acquired?” Dale asked.

  “Blood money,” Ed said, shaking his head. “I wouldn’t take it.”

  “Dale,” Lister said. “He has a point. We could go slower and implement some of her ideas before letting her expand further. Assuming she is really on our side, she should go for that, right?”

  “We don’t have time to mess around with half of a solution,” Dale said. “This is our chance. She can fix everything.”

  “Come on, Dale,” Lister said. “We tried to convince him and we failed. If he still wants to, then we have to let him put in the code.”

  “No,” Dale said. “I refuse to cooperate.” He folded his arms.

  “I’ll show you the terminal,” Lister said. He stood up.

  At the instant Lister left his seat, they all heard a hissing noise from above and below. Ed pushed back from the table and stood. His feet were already surrounded by a white fog. Above him, the white gas billowed down from the vents. A klaxon sounded and a strobe light flashed above the door.

  “Don’t breathe,” Lister said. “It’s the fire suppression gas.” He filled his chest and closed his mouth. Ed did the same. At the table, Dale was still sitting. He propped up his head in his hands and looked straight down. Lister ran for the door. Ed followed.

  From behind a metal panel, Lister pulled out a keypad on an arm. He mashed the buttons and hit the control to open the door. Nothing happened. Ed struggled to calm himself down. It had only been a few seconds. His panic made him want to breathe. He forced himself to hold in his breath and stand still. Lister tried his code again.

  “What is…” Ed heard from across the room. The question was cut off by coughing. Ed saw Detective Ploss limp out from behind the servers. The detective doubled over, struggling for oxygen.

  Ed forced himself to move slowly over to the detective. He grabbed Ploss by the arm and led him over to the door. Ploss stumbled and weaved. Saliva dripped from his gaping mouth.

  Ed looked up at Lister. The man closed his eyes, paused for a second, and then opened them again. He was turning red. Ed watched him carefully type in the numbers and hit the enter button. The strobe above the door flashed faster.

  CH.21.Staffing ()

  {

  Autobiography6();

  /*****

  A LOT OF PEOPLE struggle to figure out what they want to do for a living. Some focus on material things, some dive into parenthood, and some seek power. Most of the people I deal with just want recognition. They want to feel like they’re contributing to a business and being rewarded appropriately.

  Granted, my experience is limited. I don’t work with many entrepreneurs or small business owners. I work with people who want the security of working for someone else. When I work with someone and place them in a job, a lot of times my role is to give them permission to set off on a new career. There are a lot of highly-trained people who feel tethered to their profession just because they’ve spent a lot of years becoming qualified to do it.

  It’s hard for me to fathom the handcuffs they’ve placed on themselves. I’ll meet a person who doesn’t like their job, isn’t successful at their job, isn’t well-compensated, and they’re looking to jump to a new place and do exactly the same work. I suppose they fear change, but it’s more than that. It is like they’re punishing themselves with work.

  It really makes you think. Would we all be happier if we just lived hand to mouth? Are hunters and gatherers more fulfilled than farmers? Granted, without society and specialization we wouldn’t have advanced in math, medicine, technology, or arts. Granted, we’d only live to be thirty and then die of tooth decay or whatever, and a lot of people wouldn’t make it past two years old because they had bad eyesight.

  I’m just not sure of the point. We have so many people who work these crazy, esoteric jobs where it’s nearly impossible to figure out how their work correlates to survival. What does an insurance company do? All those people going to work every day—what do they do? They spread risk so that one person can lean on a group of people if they have huge medical bills. That’s a job? That’s a thing to go do for forty hours a week? It’s a bizarre concept.

  What’s my point?

  I think if you had to sum up my philosophy, you could boil it all down to two simple words: fuck it. We’re running out of fossil fuels? Fuck it. We’re changing the global climate? Fuck it. Genocide? Space exploration? Self-driving cars? Homeless children? Cancer? Fuck them all. If you’re having a hard time dealing with life, it will serve you well to understand that life doesn’t owe you anything. There’s no use worrying about what is fair. You can’t count on society to have your back. You can barely rely on friends and family. If they should let you down, consider yourself wiser for the experience. Next time you won’t expect so much.

  On the other hand, if you have a chance to help someone else then you should do whatever you’re comfortable with. You shouldn’t feel obligated to make the world a better place, and you shouldn’t feel guilty if you have a better television than your neighbor. So to all those people who don’t know what to do with their lives, my answer is simple. Yes, you do. You know exactly what to do with your life, you just haven’t given yourself permission to do it. You want to risk everything and go out on your own? You should. You want to work for a large corporation that pays pretty good even though they do morally questionable things in the world? You should. Give yourself permissio
n to do the thing that you know you want to do, but feel you shouldn’t. You might not be any happier than you are today, but you certainly won’t be any more miserable.

  Fuck it.

  # # # # #

  Ed();

  /*****

  The strobe above the door flashed faster. Ed couldn’t look—it hurt his eyes. With a giant whoosh, the door opened and the mist spilled out around the feet of Maco and Aster. Lister grabbed Ploss’s other arm and the three of them—Ploss, Ed, and Lister—burst through the door and gasped in air. Ploss began to convulse.

  “What’s happening?” Maco asked as Lister and Ed dragged Detective Ploss farther away from the doorway.

  “Breathe, buddy,” Aster said.

  Ploss breathed. His bright red face began to soften immediately as the air hit his lungs.

  Ed pulled Lister aside.

  “Where’s the damn terminal?” Ed asked.

  “It’s on the second rack of servers. You have to press on the face of the third one down. It looks like a regular server but there’s a monitor and keyboard hidden there. But Ed, that gas is still coming in. You can’t hold your breath long enough to login and enter the shutdown code,” Lister said.

  “I know,” Ed said. He headed for the door.

  “Ed, seriously,” Lister said, grabbing his arm. “We were lucky to get out alive. You won’t make it.”

  “Fuck it,” Ed said. He took a deep breath and pulled away from Lister.

  The fog was even thicker now and Ed had a hard time finding his way across the room. Somewhere in his head, Ed’s voice counted off the seconds. As his hands found the rack, his count reached ten. He wondered how long he could hold his breath.

  Ed pressed on the face of the third server of the second rack. It was about eye-level. When he released his hand, the face of the server flipped up and the top edge of a monitor slid out. Ed pulled on the corners. The monitor slid out fully and then tilted itself up as a keyboard flipped down. Ed pulled out his paper. He could barely read the instructions through the fog.