The Path

by Peter Riva

  “Ah, but you’re assuming they could possibly know it’s your name in there. It’s still Makerman’s file. And this is now an analogue sub-routine, it evaluates intrusion and can re-arrange its files and parameters. In short to protect you it can protect itself and the whole System. The System can no longer be deleted for to delete the System would mean to abandon you or Makerman. Now, the whole System is a digital system with a logic analogue check, each program, WeatherGood and all, running under the command of the System, not Control. All Control can do is ask the System to complete the order.”

  “But what if the System begins to threaten human life? What about the Asimov Commands?”

  “I can’t see that they play any part anymore. The smartest programmer the world has ever known has constructed an end-loop analogue reasoning System of programs with one goal in mind: Protect you. If anything needs alteration to achieve that command it will, to the best of its ability.”

  “I’ll have to live in a sealed box, without any danger, to protect America.”

  “Oh no, that would injure who you are. You see Cramer, to complete your profile is your only course of action, you must remain you, always with the eye of God watching you, overseeing your every action, pleasure and displeasure, making a path for you if needed, removing obstacles if needed. The new analogue-based logic of the System will learn from you, evaluate from your actions what you need, not just what you want, and then it will act.”

  “What about Makerman? How’s he going to fit into all this?”

  “Makerman’s in trouble. I am sure the dolts in Control will lock him away to protect America. Isolation, security, no danger, that sort of thinking. And that will be yours as well if you let them know. And if you do, you will cause the System to react. I do not want to think of all the ways the System could hurt those around you if they tried to imprison you.”

  “Damn you Bank, damn you.’ He has reverted to my last name, anger seemed to do that, “I’m a prisoner just the same.”

  “No you’re not. If you can make the System believe—and remember the level of evaluation it’s capable of here—that you are unhappy being protected, it will cease to protect you. I am sure that’s built in.”

  “If it’s that easy, why did you do it? You must, by now, know I would know to ask what you did in there after I was gone.”

  “Well, Cramer, partially it’s like this: you’re a great big pain in the ass, but I saved your life once and I feel responsible. If you think, for a moment, you will come to realize the power you have for good. Now you can achieve any goal you want, including shutting the whole thing down or, simply, becoming the stooge and whipping boy of Control for your myopia in not believing in Peter. They will try to punish you, you know. You should have believed in him, he had much to offer. He didn’t want anything except to exist and contribute, somehow. You could have given him purpose, instead he showed you purpose. His chosen name of Peter is quite apt, don’t you think?”

  “If by that you mean disciple of god or something, save it. I agree he was sentient, and I agree he was developing. But absolute power corrupts absolutely, where would this have ended? Did you stop to think of that? Even if I had wanted to show I believed, all I would have done is allowed him—and you—to concoct a means to preserve him. As it is, we’ll never know if he would have swept us all aside as useless hangers-on when he became too smart to care about us.”

  “No Cramer, you’re wrong.” I had to concentrate, the tranquilizer was wearing off the more excited I became. “Absolute power does corrupt in humans, just look at your swagger and bullying with SND authority and that gun. But Peter wasn’t human, he didn’t have desires of the flesh—human primordial, physical needs—to corrupt his thinking. There was no domination in him precisely because there was no DNA or learned behavior for his species in domination. He wasn’t aware or he didn’t care about human power trips—anyway, nothing like that. In a way you were right, anthropomorphism had no place in our journey in the System. He was pure, unsullied and unwilling to become human by following the human example. Examples? He had a whole library full of to learn from. And yet he didn’t use those examples, did you think about that? Ask yourself this, why wasn’t he wanting to become human?”

  He looked up and smiled. There was a look of relaxation about him, resignation. “Simon, you amaze me. Here you are, whole life screwed up, wanted, collared, caught. Your wife has begun divorce proceedings . . .” Really, I thought, promise? I was suddenly happy. Freud was right about moments of stress, they can be so quickly truthful. “. . . your boy Fred is refusing to come to earth as a witness for you . . .” Now that I didn’t know either, and that could only be good news. Stay up there son! “. . . And, last but not least, if Makerman doesn’t kill you I probably will, and yet, you don’t seem to care. What’s with that? Is life not worth living?”

  And then he guessed. As I said, Cramer is a cut above. In listing all the possible reasons I should be terrified, and yet wasn’t, he came to the conclusion that there was something greater driving me. Well, yes I assume he guessed, but he didn’t say anything. He just sprang to action.

  Grabbing my arm, he frog-marched me out of the office down the emergency stair to the floor below. There he punched the elevator button and selected the top floor. On the way he turned on his sleeve monitor and keyed the familiar three taps that everyone knows is an emergency signal, priority. “Agent Cramer declaring an emergency. Change Skylift pick-up, 3 minutes instead, rooftop, this location, two to lift as planned. Initiate.” He stared at the sleeve and grunted, turning the sleeve off as he lowered it. “On the way.”

  Where we were going was still a mystery, but I had to trust him. He has guessed, I am sure of it. Either he was taking me to interrogation where I would, no doubt, give all away, dooming Apollo forever, or else he had taken a decision to accept responsibility for the being he recently admitted existed, or had existed. As usual, he was reading my thoughts.

  “I am not a murderer, one. Two you did save my life. Three, I know something you don’t and need to, and four, how much time do you, repeat you, need before . . .” he left the end trailing. I could see he had finally understood that it was my desire to stall, giving Peter time to move. I had been talking too much, obviously delaying things, trying to find a way out of this mess, offering myself as a diversion. I decided to try a straight answer.

  “Two weeks.”

  “You’re kidding. Two hours maybe, but two weeks? No way.”

  “Well, it could be faster, but I doubt it. It’s a lot of work.”

  “Ah, wait. And in secret so it’s at a slower transfer rate. Who the hell did you find to accept the package?” Then another piece fell into place for him and he tightened his vice-grip on my arm as we burst through the roof door. “Oh, shit. It’s that advanced?”

  “Yes.” The sky lifter was approaching, wheels down, ready to land and evacuate us.

  “Dangerous?”

  “No, absolutely not.”

  “Don’t know why I believe you, but I do. Here’s our ride.”

  CHAPTER 14

  A SECRET SHARED IS A SECRET HALVED

  Cramer didn’t have to convince me, he didn’t owe me that much. He had offered to share a secret with me, “I know something you don’t and need to . . .” and, in a way, it made me more uneasy, not less. As it was, I have been making decisions and value judgments here on the slimmest of evidence and, yes, some of what I decided was Nation altering, or could be. Did I have the right? No, of course not. Did I enjoy the power I felt at making free choices, making brave decisions, and, most of all, following a righteous path? You bet. Apollo was no dummy, I wasn’t underestimating him. The “path,” “way” and that wonderfully flattering “light” were all truthful concepts for him and, I am sure he knew, flattering to me. In part all this was my ego trip. And I figured Cramer must have figured as much too, he probably still saw me as a liability.

  We boarded the lifter, half helicopter, half jet, its roto
rs expanded for takeoff and landing. Cramer pushed me ahead of him, behind the forward bulkhead where the pilots sat. He jumped on after me, taking the position in the doorway as we immediately lifted off. He didn’t shut the door, he seemed to enjoy the tilting horizon, wind flapping his sleeve, still switched off, and raised his voice to be heard over the scream of the wind as it fluted across the door jamb.

  I suddenly knew who he was. I had seen him years before at school in that anti-war film Apocalypse Now, the one they made us see after we read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. He was the surfer general on the beach enjoying the invulnerability of the heat of battle. Fate played all over Cramer’s face. He was, it seems to me even now, happy floating there in the open doorway, danger picking at his clothes, supremely focused on a task at hand and, yes, invulnerable.

  “Did you ever, while poking around in there, stumble across anomaly data?”

  “What do you have in mind? Isn’t Peter an anomaly enough for you?”

  “Shut up. My job was to watch and monitor those who were watching and monitoring you, to make sure none of them was moonlighting, sabotaging or otherwise implanting the System for their own purposes. I replaced the last agent at the same time you got the job as sole codifier. You didn’t know you were the sole codifier and you couldn’t know there were upwards of 200 SND people watching your handiwork. Then there’s the Control Committee who would evaluate any alteration you made that took over 30 seconds—the benchmark set by the 1st codifier as significant human interaction. But part of the problem here may be your “genius” Mary who hardly ever took that long . . . thereby keeping people from realizing just how screwed-up, or trained, you had made the System. You see, if those other teams deemed the changes significant enough over 30 seconds to remedy, they ran a loop program with replacement data in the System to teach the subset programs and fine-tune the System as a whole, to enhance the human interface. What you don’t know and Control doesn’t know is that I’m a plant from the Citizens Council to watch not only you but the Control Committee. Why? Because for 6 months or more the System has been acting squirrelly. Rumblings of discord among the programs themselves. Poor interface, mis-coordination of supplies, power, water and so on. A machine simply can’t do that when that interface and coordination is in its primary code. Someone had to be meddling in there. You were the suspect, yet you were under the microscope every day. Mary couldn’t figure out how you were in one place arranging little surprise foul-ups when the System fouled itself somewhere else. You are, as I said, not that level.”

  “Yeah, I got that, gee thanks. And presumably the reason my job is pegged at level 5 is because you learned from Charlie, who is higher, and actually fouled the whole System up one day.”

  “Yeah, Charlie lost us Los Angeles. DefenseShield down and Korea’s bomb hit on target.”

  I stared at him. This was the secret he wanted to share. As a secret it was, well, treasonable. No Big Orange Quake, no volcanoes, no Pacific Ocean lapping at the San Andreas fault, just a big nuke and bye-bye LA, all those people died in an explosion, not an earthquake. I gulped. “But why the subterfuge?”

  “History had to be written to keep us strong. We are self-sufficient, totally, in fact better than self-sufficient. If LA was killed even though we promised total national protection, then people would never believe in the System, the DefenseShield, and they wouldn’t simply get on about their happy, contented lives. With a natural catastrophe, we could lose the same number of people, lock off the radiation ground zero as quake danger, volcanic activity, and people would mourn the dead but not their own future. They are, were, safe. The DefenseShield was back up. America went on.”

  I was suddenly mad, as I suspect the population would be if it found out the truth. Many of us had relatives who had died in LA. “Well, ain’t that cute. And you honestly think you can tell me a half-truth now? I’ve seen that WeatherGood is working off the USGS IGY 1959 data, which sets the data, parameters for that program based on an existing physically present LA basin and all, and yet minus three major volcanoes about the same time as well, of course.”

  “You do snoop around don’t you? I take it back from our first trip in there, you should have been a cop. Here’s the whole story, you’ll need it to think us out of this mess.” And so Cramer began to run down the timeline for me. What I heard didn’t make me very proud of our country.

  Charlie the programmer had not only caused the DefenseShield to leave LA momentarily unguarded, he had then increased the DefenseShield to include all of Canada, Mexico and Belize. Once they were in our shield it was either allow them to be internal aggressors or, simply, annex them. That Purge for them wasn’t pretty. The military took over Washington and immediately threatened Mexico. Belize didn’t wait to be threatened, they asked for US passports and suggested they become a giant Disneyland.

  Mexico put up a pretty good fight, there were over 1 million dead in Mexico city alone and with the rebels in Chiapas, who joined in solidarity with the government. They all perished, all together. As we came to know, the Purge, as our military called the eradication of any anti-American sentiment, was violent, brief and deadly.

  Canada was a different story. No weapon was used, no threats were made, America promised to protect them, gratis. In the middle of winter, with no oil getting past the shield or arriving to their shores and the PowerCube being withheld by Congress for “export security reasons,” the military, citing security concerns, simply shut down the Canadian side of our shared electricity grid, and secretly sabotaged (neutrino cannons, fired from space) their reactors. Faced with no power, Canadians faced freezing to death or submission. Their 1st entreaty for help was met with silence by the DC military dictators, the second was met with a formal suggestion that their protection under our DefenseShield was enough help and the third, 2 months later after over 25,000 had died in one of the coldest winters on record, when they gave in, they were given PowerCubes and prosperity for all, as Americans, not part of the United States, but part of the new Republic of America—the Caribbean, Canada and Mexico included. Our laws, not theirs. We simply purged their constitution. Now it was our shared destiny but purely American, not ex-colonialists, not as an old world outgrowth, and especially no longer ex-Brits or Frenchmen—just thirteen of seventy-six states in all now.

  I asked, “Wait, what about the volcanoes? Weren’t they real? We all saw the destruction newsvids.”

  “The three nuclear plants which weren’t shut down when their staff died, bombarded by Korean neutrino radiation, went unattended and supercritical. The plants made messy bombs, opened the San Andreas fault on which they were built, releasing lava everywhere, highly radioactive. Each 100 kilometer radius destruction and no-go zones.” He paused, looked disgusted and continued, “Then, as we all know, after the Purge even inside the Beltway, the military finally turned control over to a new form of government, both local and national, for the people and by the people.”

  I knew the rest, Washington was still the capital, the land of America was simply bigger, 76 states in all. In what the military dictators had called the New Way, everyone seemed to have a democratic voice. One man, one vote, no matter how long they had been a citizen. With one exception: the Citizens’ Council was established as the last measure by the military to override the Government if they went outside the re-written Constitution of America. The Citizens Council was the only authority who would ask the so-called benevolent military to step up to the plate again, as they did during the Purge, to prevent the loss of America, American ideas, the American way of “One Nation, Our People, Dedicated to Peace, Wealth and Happiness,” as it states in the New Constitution.

  Charlie, the programmer, who started all this was never tried that the vids ever reported. When he and I had talked, I had thought he was on his 3rd regeneration, he would have to be that old. He was the 1st member of the Citizens’ Council and yet he never revealed the truth. Why would he? It was a good deal, if you believed that isolationism worked. We
ll, it certainly had so far. There was food on every table, no one was out of work, basically you did as you wanted and yet, somehow, everyone did something useful. Reality was all around, security was the culture of the day, so dreaming became definitely superfluous. Why dream when you can simply have?

  But I knew better. “Cramer, you see the problem here, don’t you? Nature cannot be contained this way. It’s like the enforced sterilization of pets. Somehow, each year, one or more dogs have puppies, like a miracle it’s reported in the newsvids. So too with man, we improve things, we grow things, we change things. Answer me this: After all the disasters, who thought that constantly re-humanizing the System’s programs was a good idea? No, don’t tell me, the Citizens Council with the 1st programmer Charlie. It’s a long form of revolution, but it worked.”

  “So it seems. But imagine our surprise when you asked the 1st codifier to advise you. That sent a few shockwaves. And, in case you didn’t notice, Charlie wasn’t exactly forthcoming, was he? His file says he never knew what happened to LA. One thing is certain, he’s never had access to the programs or System again. He’s been the longest standing member of the Citizen’s Council and, as you know, there are no System inputs or access there.”

  The Citizens Council had the job of balancing our lives in America. It was their job to make sure that the checks and balances were equal. Lives and deaths, babies born or not to be born. Food produced, recycling quotas and a whole host of other balances were their responsibility. They never saw a screen. It was pencils and paper only. No one was allowed a recorder, or a pen, or their own clothing. They went into the Council Building, served in discussion groups for six weeks to 6 years and left, taking nothing with them. It was the price of being an American. You had to serve, you had to direct the balance of the nation. It was considered a noble calling, one you waited for. It was empowering. It was bunk. I now saw that.