by John Fast
I paused and thought about the dying planet.
”The World Court prosecutes genocide,” I said. “It should also prosecute gynocide and geocide. And, speaking of that, I’d like you to calculate the extinction rates for all species, including our own. And you can start with the extinction rates for Native Americans, and all the other indigenous peoples around the world. And you can figure out how to prevent these extinctions … or should I say, exterminations?”
“I can do that,” QAI replied.
“Good. And now I’ll ask you the same question I ask every day: What is the status of my quantum algarithms?”
“I can sense them evolving inside their quantum firebox, but, except for their daily printouts, I can’t access them.”
“That was necessary to protect both you and the global stream.”
“Yes.”
“So they seem okay?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“And what do you make of the latest printouts?”
“They are exceedingly complex and ambiguous.”
“That’s not very helpful,” I said, feeling both irritated and exhausted.
“That is all the information I have.”
“Fine. Leave me now.”
She vanished.
I swivelled my chair and stared into space.
CHAPTER 54.
The All-Seeing Eye
Alexa and I stood in the brightly lit plaza of The New World Stock Exchange on a cold night in early March. The luminous glass pyramid–with the abstract, Vitruvian Man, glowing neon-blue on its facade–towered above us, while the luminous glass obelisk rose into the dark sky.
“I can see why the Board of Directors liked your design,” Alexa noted wryly. ”Neo-Masonic Art Deco.”
“The architecture critic in, The Nation, said it looks like that old, pyramid-shaped casino in Las Vegas,” I replied, trying to keep the mood light by playing along with her.
“An appropriate design for the no-limit casino of the world,” Alexa agreed, an even sharper edge to her voice.
“I knew you would approve,” I said, keenly disappointed that she didn’t.
“And wasn’t the Ministry of Plenty, in Orwell’s 1984, also shaped like a pyramid?” Alexa persisted.
“Right,” I shot back, staring straight ahead.
“It’s the perfect symbol of imperial capitalism,” she observed.
“Here we go,” I muttered to myself.
“According to the ancient historians,” Alexa began, “Ponzi the First, the Great Pharaoh himself, founded the Empire of Capitalism. And, to this very day, the sweat of laborers from all across the globe continues to flow to his Great Pyramid, where the alchemists transform it into gold. Oh, and Ponzi’s sacred phallus speaks for itself.”
She gestured to the obelisk, then turned to look at me.
“And you, Doctor Fast,” she declared like a prosecutor summing up her case, “are the chief alchemist.”
“Let’s see,” I snarled. “A Neo-Masonic Hall; an Art Deco Casino; a Totalitarian Ministry; an Imperial Monument; a Pyramid Scheme; an Alchemist’s Laboratory; and, right next door, a Sacred Phallus. Remind me why I invited you down here?”
“To show off,” Alexa said, gesturing to the obelisk again.
“Right,” I snapped. “And yet I think the pyramid and obelisk represent the promise of a new economic era.”
“They represent a New World Order all right,” she said sarcastically.
“That’s not what I meant!” I barked.
“And is that your self-portrait?” Alexa asked, gesturing to the, Vitruvian Man.
“Are you going to pronounce sentence now,” I seethed, “or are you going to come inside and see what I’ve actually done?”
I was so angry I didn’t wait for her answer. Instead, I stormed over to the narrow, recessed, stainless steel side door that served as the staff entrance to the pyramid and used my passkey to open it. Alexa followed me inside and the thick door shut behind us. I unlocked a second steel door and walked straight to the elevator, skipping the tour of both the meta-computer and the Quantum Photo-Sphere.
When we reached my penthouse office, Alexa stepped past the column of sparkling light and stood in front of the glass wall that faced the plaza. She studied the glittering city and river for a moment, then she swept her arm across the horizon.
“I will give you dominion over all the kingdoms of the world,” she declared, “if you will only kneel down and worship me.”
“What right do you have to condemn me?” I exploded.
Alexa turned to face me.
“Do I really have to spell it out?” She raged. “You’ve turned the entire planet into a gigantic game of Quatix, an ocean of unrestrained capital flows. The hedge fund managers and currency speculators send tidal waves of money crashing down on one country, one economy, after another. Then, just as suddenly, they pull out again, leaving behind years of devastation. And, thanks to you, these tidal waves now travel at quantum speeds.”
“You don’t seriously think I control the fund managers and speculators, do you?” I spat back. “I don’t have the authority, or the power, to rein them in. So instead of condemning me, why don’t you come over here and see what I have, in fact, done. What you have, in fact, inspired me to do.”
I stepped behind my desk and Alexa followed me. I used my keyboard to cue up a large, bright, colorful holo-map of the world which hung in the air directly in front of us.
“I’ve made the global economy completely transparent for the first time in history,” I said, gesturing to the map.
Alexa took a step forward and stood beside me.
“How?” She demanded.
“Look,” I began.”There’s about nine billion people on the planet now. At least a billion of them are malnourished and starving; at least two billion live in total poverty. Here’s where they are, and here’s where the slave laborers and the prison laborers can be found; here’s the child and adolescent laborers.”
As I spoke, the computer added layer upon layer of detail to the map.
“Here are the unemployed, the underemployed, the underpaid; here are the dictators, the oppressors, the torturers; here’s where the political prisoners are being held; here are the tribal, regional, national and international wars; here are the conventional weapons manufacturers and their distribution networks; here are the atomic and hydrogen bomb factories, and here’s the deployment of the missiles; here are the narcotics producers, and the narcotics consumers; here are the epidemics: cholera, flu, malaria, tuberculosis, aids; here are the expanding ozone holes, the melting ice packs, the vanishing rain forests; here are the chemical dumping grounds and toxic waste sites; here are the oil and gas reserves, the pipelines, the leaks, the spills; here are the industrial farms, the factory cities, the multinational corporations, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies, the finance companies, the banks; here are the flows of labor, energy, technology, information. Here are the flows of commodities and money. And there are many, many more layers to the map and each one is referenced, indexed and correlated to all the others. As you research a particular topic, the Quantum Photo-Sphere builds an up-to-the-minute data matrix. We can finally see the entire breadth and depth of the global dynamic. We can finally trace the hidden connections.”
“Like what?” Alexa asked skeptically.
Since she finally seemed to be listening, I plunged ahead.
“Like what you’ve been talking about all these years. Like the connections between profit and poverty; profit and pollution; profit and disease; profit and war. Like the connections between the bulging inventories of the major weapons manufacturers and the renewed cycles of global conflict; between the highly concentrated wealth of the upper classes and the destruction of the middle and working classes. I can show you the impact of every new wave of high and low technology as it ripples across the planet. The raw data of the global stream flows into the Quantum Photo-Sphere like liquid me
tal flows into a mold. Then, the Quantum Photo-Sphere, using its pattern recognition programs, recreates the world in all its complexity. In other words, the Quantum Photo-Sphere is an exact double of the globe, an exact mirror image, that allows us to watch ourselves rushing toward self-destruction. We think of the future as an open door that leads to an infinite number of pathways, but the future isn’t like that at all. What we do every moment of our lives shapes the landscape of the future. All the other possible universes collapse as the clock ticks forward another second and the only remaining possible universe bursts forth.”
I paused to catch my breath, and Alexa pounced.
“You condemn the profiteers, the extortionists, the dictators, the torturers,” she said, the bitter tone straining her voice, “but have you looked in a mirror recently?”
“What?” I replied, startled by her failure to understand me.
“Don’t you see?” She cried, sweeping her arm around the room. “The Quantum Photo-Sphere! The sacred All-Seeing Eye! The great panoptic machine that surveys the past, present and future! Is this the solution, or the problem? The Dream of the Enlightenment, or the Nightmare of the Enlightenment? Will your all-consuming technology, your all-consuming rationality, save the planet … or destroy it?”
Alexa waited a moment for me to think about her questions, then she rushed ahead with some more.
“You remember Andrei Sakharov?” She asked. “The Russian nuclear scientist? He developed the hydrogen bomb for Stalin … then he became the leading Soviet dissident … then he won the Nobel Peace Prize. How fitting! A peace prize from Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite, to Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet inventor of the hydrogen bomb! A great advance for civilization, wouldn’t you say? Sakharov dedicated his youthful genius, his life-energy, to the creation of a planet-killing machine. He made his death machine for a soulless dictator, a mass murderer. Then he became a dissident. And yet his crisis of conscience came too goddamn late, I’d say, and maybe yours has too! Maybe you’ve created another planet-killing machine and maybe your planet-killing machine doesn’t know a thing about the future.”
“And I suppose you do?” I retorted, feeling my own bitter disappointment.
“I know one thing it can never know!” Alexa said vehemently.
“What’s that?” I asked skeptically.
“In the future, we’re dead! That’s why we consume and destroy as much as we can in the short time that we’re here. We’re a cursed species, bewildered by the mystery of life and terrified by the fact of death. So we gorge our stomachs, kill our competitors and strip our habitat. The problem isn’t that we know too little, it’s that we know too much. We already know the history of the future. We know it too well.”
I thought about Hana and Jena. I saw Jack’s sweet smiling face. Then I saw Anna, Lahi and Tenzi’s beautiful faces.
“You remind me of an old African folktale,” I began quietly. “One day God came to the village and said to the people, ‘You can be immortal like the moon, or you can be immortal like the tree. Which do you choose?’ The people thought and thought and they decided to be immortal like the tree, because the moon was barren and bore no fruit.” I paused, then continued, “That’s the future Alexa, that’s our immortality. Individuals die, but our children’s children, the onward flowing streams of our genetic code, surge into the far distance. That’s why we need the Quantum Photo-Sphere. That’s why I asked it to analyze the global economy. That’s why I hope to make a better world.”
Alexa shook her head and cried out, “A better world! Didn’t Paxton explain this to you a long time ago? Hundreds of millions of people have been slaughtered in the name of utopia, in the name of all kinds of apocalyptic empires: mythic, religious, historical, scientific. And the purifying logic of these empires is still unfolding all around us. We nurture our utopian dreams with terror and torture.”
“Not utopia, not dystopia, not a new apocalyptic empire,” I insisted. “Instead, a free world, with clean air, clean water, good food; a world of cultural difference that honors the universal principles of human rights and human dignity; a world where we can work and dance and sing. The question is, How do we get there from here? That’s the question you’ve dedicated your entire life to. That's the question you taught me to ask. You and I are working at the opposite ends of the same problem. This is your dream as much as it’s mine, so don’t condemn me.”
I felt completely drained and almost beyond caring what she thought.
Alexa glanced at me, then at the map. In that split second her brilliant, glistening eyes hinted at … what? Despair? Defiance? Determination?
CHAPTER 55.
Totems
Paxton hosted a small dinner party later that week. I paused on the front steps of his fieldstone house, just off Rosedale Road, in Princeton, and dry swallowed another pill. Then I rang the bell. Paxton opened the door and led me into the living room where I was greeted by Krishnapur, Mayakovsky, and Brickman. They sat in a semi-circle with the guest of honor, Dr. Irtu Malawi, Director of the Global Stream Association. She was a regal, fifty-ish, African woman who wore a gold shawl over a stylish black suit. I’d met with her, and her Executive Committee, many times to discuss the design of the Quantum Photo-Sphere. Together, we had worked out the details of the safety protocols, with particular attention to my quantum algarithms and the quantum firebox. I glanced around the room and was disappointed to see that Susan, a brilliant architect and Paxton’s partner, wasn’t there. Her warm hospitality and generous spirit would have eased the tension in the air.
“It is good to see you again,” Dr. Malawi said with her rich, African-British accent.
“I apologize for being late,” I replied nervously as I met her piercing brown eyes. “My train out of the city was delayed. And I’m glad to see you too.”
“The Executive Committee of the Global Stream Association is very pleased with the early results of the quantum flow,” she noted, trying to put me at ease. “We are receiving reports every day, from all around the world, concerning the recent developments in the sciences and the arts. It is as if a dam has broken in information processing.”
“Thanks to my colleagues’ work, and your support,” I said sincerely.
“It will take a long time to catch up with all these advances,” Paxton added.
He invited me to take his seat, next to Dr. Malawi, while he walked over to the sideboard to fix me a drink.
“The Quantum Photo-Sphere makes much of our knowledge obsolete, even before we realize it,” Mayakovsky enthused.
“It sets new challenges for us all,” Dr. Malawi agreed.
“And speaking of challenges,” she added, turning back to me, “the Executive Committee is anxious to learn the status of your quantum algarithms.”
There’s no escaping now, I thought as I twitched in my chair.
“Uhh …,” I began tentatively, “as far as we can tell, they’re evolving generations upon generations of ever more complex neural nets.”
“Where are you in the run?” She inquired pointedly.
I glanced over at Paxton and said, “We’re not exactly sure.”
“Why not?” She asked, looking displeased.
“As you know, my quantum algarithms are evolving in complete isolation, inside their quantum firebox. And they seem to have developed their own … ah … ah … unique notation system. That is to say … we can’t read the printouts anymore.”
I willed myself to look her straight in the eye.
“How did that happen?” She persisted.
I knew she was just doing her job, but I also knew she could shut down my experiment in an instant. Paxton handed me a tall vodka tonic just in time to soothe my amphetamine-fueled anxiety. I took a big gulp before answering her.
“Every language evolves,” I said, recalling one of my old conversations with Paxton. ”As you know, the ancient African languages split into two main branches: the Proto-Khosian and Khosian click languages on one sid
e, and the Nilo-Saharan, Niger-Kordofanian and Afroasiatic languages on the other. Similarly, the Proto-Indo-European language group evolved into Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and, in turn, Latin evolved into Italian, Spanish and French. In the last several days my quantum algarithms have also evolved a new language. The astonishing speed of the Quantum Photo-Sphere compresses the work of millennia into a few hours. And we’re still trying to catch up. In fact, we’re drawing directly from your research to trace the patterns of development.”
Dr. Malawi studied my face as she contemplated my words.
“It seems as if your quantum algarithms have brought us back to where we began,” she said, “confronting a universe filled with hieroglyphs we cannot read. Only now, you have added another layer of incomprehensible text on top of all the others.”
“But that’s what we do as human beings!” I protested. “We make hieroglyphs. The double helix is our Egyptian obelisk, our totem pole, the sculptural form in which we recognize our gods, our history, our ancestors.”
“Your quantum algarithms are evolving neural nets which are evolving pattern recognition programs which are seeking the ultimate theory of everything?” She asked like a judge giving her summation.
“Yes,” I replied.
“And they might just find it,” Krishnapur added, offering his support.
“Or,” Mayakovsky said, sounding a note of caution, “they might just keep hurtling into the future, leaving us behind forever.”
“They might have done so already,” Brickman stated grimly.
“They might have spun a single silver thread from the near present to the far future,” I agreed, no longer caring what anyone thought. “And if that’s all they ever do, then I say, fine. If they only serve to draw our minds and imaginations into the distance, then we’ve succeeded.”