Silver's Gods

by Rich X Curtis

  “Okay, what should they be worried about,” Jessica asked. “AI escaping its box?”

  Silver smiled. “Once it comes, this is a given. Foregone conclusion. People, I suspect, don’t know what any of us are dealing with here. Nobody does.”

  “Nobody but you, right?” Jessica shook her head. “You’re the only one who sees the danger, is that it?”

  Silver smiled and held up a hand. “Look, AI is happening. The train has left the station. Who will get it first is really all that matters. The race isn’t to develop it, the race is to control it. You know how the Soviets got the atom bomb, right?”

  “Um,” Jessica said, “they stole it.” She thought she remembered that.

  “Right, they stole it. They are good at intelligence, at sneaking around, stealing things. Watching people, suborning them, compromising them. Killing them if they have to. The FSB has a reputation for being fearsome and never giving up. It’s a well-deserved reputation. They have a long tradition.” Silver pursed her lips. “I’m sure they are trying to steal this rather than build it. Steal it, bring it back to a state-sponsored lab, control it. Failing that, stop whoever looks like they are getting close.”

  “Really? You think so?” It surprised Jessica, then she realized it made sense. Why invest in it if you could just steal it? Much cheaper, much quicker, and who would stop you? The world had seen what happened in the recent elections; nobody punished rogue state actors. The UN was a toothless, paper tiger. Russia was Russia. There might be political repercussions, but so what? They didn’t care. And they would have General AI, the holy grail that, according to Silver, was already a foregone conclusion. “Wait, you think AI will really happen? Like, someone is getting close?”

  “Getting close,” Silver repeated, then shook her head. “We’re walking along the edge of a cliff at night. We know it’s there, but we don’t know which step will take us over. You talk with these people, right? What do they say? The military?”

  “My contacts suck at the Pentagon. Nobody knows anything. I only got the one quote about them studying the situation. Like that.” She made air quotes.

  “DOD doesn’t work like that. There are plans, believe it. They have plans for invading Britain, updated annually. Their plans are probably to swoop in with the SEALs or the FBI and cart it away as soon as they hear about it. You can bet they have the Valley fully wired, with moles inside the Googles and Frontiers and Amazons, if they didn’t get the keys to the front door directly by secret government order. The NSA probably has its own teams. Tell me, what will China do if it looks like, say, Google is developing a super-intelligent computer in Northern California, and the US government will nationalize it?” Silver spoke rapidly but didn’t look at Jessica.

  “What could they do? Short of starting a war, what could they do?” Jessica thought. “They might complain, but they wouldn’t be able to stop it, would they?”

  “Short of starting a war, which they couldn’t win, and which would rapidly escalate out of their control, no, there isn’t much they could do overtly. But covertly, you can bet they are just as active as the Russians. AI is dangerous in a way other technologies aren’t. Nukes, sure, they are dangerous, but AI doesn’t require stuff hard to get. A good AI system would run on cheap, off-the-shelf hardware. Where is that hardware made, mostly?”

  “China. It’s all made in China,” Jessica said.

  “Well, yes, not everything but the Chinese have significant resources in this area. You can bet that the Chinese output and destination addresses of server hardware to the PLA or related businesses is of high importance in the CIA and FSB. China does not want the West to get this technology first, no matter what the US has planned. This is classic arms race game theory, and it leads only one place. War. The only way to stop it is to make sure that everyone is equally armed and dangerous, so nobody can have an advantage, but this is impossible. Somebody will be first, right? And then the fireworks start.” Silver stood up, a fluid unfolding of her long legs. She stood in the grass, looking down at Jessica. “Read the stuff I gave you. You will like it. Pack a bag, too, for a couple days. Keep it handy and clear your schedule. We’ll need a few days to talk, I think.”

  “Who are you with?” Jessica blurted. “It’s clear you work in this field, all this spy stuff. Mossad?”

  Silver laughed. “Adorable. I should say maybe to keep you guessing, but I won’t.” She stepped towards the sidewalk pavement. “I don’t work for any of these bozos. I’m just trying to keep things sane long enough for a few things to happen. After that, well, we’ll see.”

  “What things?” Jessica called, but by then Silver had reached the pavement and was speeding away in long, purposeful strides.

  Silver looked back over her shoulder, gave her a wave, and was gone.

  Chapter Twelve

  I will try, as we talk, to explain my thinking to you, my perspective. I may ramble, but I have never, that I know of, done this. Told my story as completely as I would like. Oh, I have told people parts of my story, but never the whole story, not the newest chapters, the recent developments. I will try.

  Not that I can tell the whole story. We don’t have near enough time, and most of it is mundane. I went here; I lived there. I met someone, fell in love, we grew older together, parting as they died, or if unable to conceal my appearance, my lack of change, we parted with harsh words, or worse. I grew weary of living as a witch, and so I became a wife. It was more pleasant on the whole. I got to be part of things and not separate. I enjoyed helping the small communities survive and thrive. Seeing children grow. It is sweet, this is good living, and I have done it more times than I can remember.

  But also, with this life comes sorrow. My sisters, lost to me these long years, I see their faces in young girls all the time. Even today. It is bittersweet, raising children, as any mother will tell you. It is also painful to see one’s lover grow old, their body change and age, while yours does not, and seemingly cannot. To see them wither, sometimes with accusation behind their eyes. Why are you not joining me? Why do you stay behind while I go on? To see them pass into what could be, perhaps, the land of the dead of my childhood, or more frighteningly, into nothing. This is a wicked curse, to have such love and loss, and have their eyes betray their thoughts. You lied. You are a demon.

  But sometimes there is love. To the end, without judgment. This, too, has happened. And it is probably what made this life worthwhile. Until things changed. This is what I want to tell you, to make sure you understand. Society changed around me. Steadily, things had changed, and I had noticed it. Saw it all. Humans were smarter than the old ones, with their long, slow thoughts and deep, dirgelike songs. They dwindled and died out. Out with the old, in with the new, correct? People, smarter than all other creatures, mastered them. Dogs from wolves. Cows, from the great bison. The large mammals hunted to extinction. Perhaps we hunted the old ones to extinction, I do not know. But our brains, our minds, differed from theirs. They were slow thinkers, I remember. Not dumb, not that, just slow to think new thoughts. They had stone tools, but they did not endlessly tweak their tools the way our people do. If it was good enough, that was usually good enough for the old ones. For long years, this is how the world was for them. Perhaps this did them in.

  The point is, things changed, when they really hadn’t changed in a long, long time. All around me. I was born, perhaps, on the cusp of this, as my family had a garden, and goats, and while we migrated, it was only through a few valleys, not roaming far afield. Before this, maybe, we had wandered more. The men had told stories of their grandfathers’ times, how our people had great wanderings far afield. I remember their songs, but men are liars. So, who knows the truth of this?

  More people meant farming to feed them all, and to stop roaming, following the herds. Rather, they kept the herds, in one place. This lead, inexorably, to counting, adding, calculations. To accounting. To specialization, to hierarchy, to dynasty. Finally, to writing, the single most important human invent
ion, which led to all the rest. This writing bootstrapped this modern world. I saw it happen, and it was astonishing. I was used to a much slower rate of change and had been living my life in a slow rhythm.

  I would travel, walking to a new place, sometimes traveling for months, so that nobody from my previous life could know me, however remote this was. There, I would find a community and join it, posing as a woman whose man had died. It was not wholly a lie, since many of my men have died. We had traveled much, I would say, and he had died of illness on the road, and I had no idea where my family’s lands were, that I might rejoin them. It usually worked, and they welcomed me. But now, towns and cities were everywhere. It was clear something dramatic had changed. It was writing. Now people could capture their thoughts onto a lasting medium and pass it on to new people separated by distance or time, or both. It was revolutionary. It changed everything in ways none of us today can really fully comprehend. It was new, and so fast.

  Empires sprang up. War, always terrible, became even more so as the might of cities and kingdoms clashed. Money became cleverer, with banks enabling letters of credit between places and growing powerful because of it. Kings, always cruel, saw an opportunity, and lusted. Lusted after more women, more money, more power. Before writing, and then after. This is the line between myth and history. History has power in a way myth never could, since myth was always ready to slip back into the dreamtime and emerge again told by new tellers in their own way, altered and shaped by them to suit their whims. Information would drift and get lost.

  But with writing, less got lost. It preserved more. People learned faster, since they could study the past and learn from it. Copy and improve on plans, iterate towards success, the whole works. It was incredible to see how quickly people went from living in huts to living in stone cities. Two hands of lives? Ten generations? It surprised me, and I was, forgive me, jaded from a long tradition. I did not see it coming. It caught me by surprise.

  I did my dream bidding, always, as it was impossible to disobey. What were these tasks that I only vaguely recall? Deliver messages? Introduce people to each other. Encourage this one, discourage this other. Gentle persuasion? Or sometimes, as I can recall, taking more forceful means. Murder, crimes, theft. I have done them all to satisfy my dreams, these compulsions I cannot control or reject. I am a puppet, bound by a thousand strings.

  Why? Your guess is as good as mine. The gods, and I believe this is, if not the correct term, at least a relevant term, an approximation that is directionally correct, the gods, my gods, have an agenda. Why do they need a puppet with a thousand strings? Again, guess away. I am here, and I have been here for an unnaturally long time. So, as the philosophers say, I am, therefore I know that I exist. This is all any of us know for certain, isn’t it? That we exist. That we can think. At some level, I think this is the root. Of everything. Mind. Thinking. What is their agenda? I am merely their tool to further their ends.

  How? Again, guessing is free. I do it all the time. They know my thoughts…my dreams are mostly of being inspected, laid bare, cataloged, perhaps. Then, instructed to do this or that or the next thing. Nobody explains anything to me, I just know with a certainty hard to explain, but clear certainty, what I am supposed to do. Bring this message here, meet this person. Keep this one alive, ensure this one dies. This is my burden.

  And if they, these gods, can know my thoughts, why not yours? How physically is this possible? How do they achieve it? More guesses. We are in a wilderness of guesses, in this world, and always have been. But it remains. Something knows my thought and guides it. Can this same thing not know your thoughts and perhaps guide you? It is religious. This is the power of gods, is it not? And Santa Claus. We raise children to be familiar with this idea, do we not? In a million different forms, we love our gods.

  If they know me, they know others; this is my opinion. How else could they know why a cobbler should make toys with clever wooden gears? I don’t know, but I remember doing this. In a medieval Arabian city, I taught a man how wooden gears can mesh together to increase leverage, transfer power to a spindle. I don’t remember his name or where it was, other than it was somewhere in Arabia. He had gray hair and wide eyebrows. He was clever with tools and had a son who watched us intently with his wide, dark eyes.

  Why should I do these things? How could I do them? I am uneducated in such things myself, except such haphazard schooling I have managed over the years. Difficult for a woman, getting education. So, how? Magic? Perhaps, but it seems a long, slow magic if it takes thousands of years to effect even a minor change. And this is the point. Change. I am tasked with changing things. Minor changes, added over long time, centuries, can add up. And yet, I claim these are gods that drive me? Gods? It makes little sense, I agree. Gods are supposed to be powerful, aren’t they? This is the definition of a god, as most people think of these things.

  I would try, sometimes, to see how long I could resist the gods, to reject the compulsion to leave my village, leave my life and go to meet someone, to talk with them, perhaps learn about them, perhaps talk about a certain person or story which I learned from my dreams. But it was impossible. I would grow increasingly anxious. I could not sleep, I would get headaches, fevers, drop in and out of dreams while awake. More than once I resisted to the point where I awoke, years later, in some strange situation. Perhaps this is why these things happen to me, because I resist but cannot recall the resistance. This is perhaps my punishment. I am, to myself, still a mystery.

  Regardless, my dreams drove me with a new urgency. For the past few centuries I have not wandered as I had before, living as a normal person does. Rarely now, and not for long. I have had too much to do. The compulsions are stronger, more frequent. Constant, almost. It is maddening. It is easier, now, for a woman to go alone through the world. It was not always this way, oh no. It was, as I am sure you know, only recently where women have legal status equal to men in most places. This, like writing, could be a cause, one root of the tree of our suffering, one common thread traceable through our lives. That women are made to suffer this way all over the world, and since the world was young. I am sure this is the case at some level. It lies at the heart of things. But I ramble. Forgive me, it is the way of the elders to digress and deviate from the point, for there are many points, and it is hard to separate them wholly when you consider them together. The central point is this: there was a change, and that change made more changes, and so on. There was an information explosion about ten thousand years ago, and it is not over.

  Now, the pace of change is blinding. In one lifetime, people went from horse-drawn wagons to the landing on the moon. There is something going on here which I think no one has the power to stop. Computers, clocks, even the natural consequence of information collection, of information density, of writing, are getting always faster, and now smarter. This is new. My dreams are wracked with it, with this thought. Matter made conscious. Gnomos. This fear, this hope, this dream. This sole dream I have lately, for the past few decades. It is a dream of long ago and far away. A dream of a song, that song’s singing made real, and the echoes all around us. This is what I need. Once again, and for good this time. I need to tell it to you. I need to share it.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I watched Jessica’s eyes, as I told her my long, winding tale. We sat on the porch of a cabin on a North Carolina beach, having driven overnight after I had collected her. We had talked while I drove. Or rather, I had talked. Towards dawn she had slept, and I was alone with my thoughts as we sped towards the coast. I was not sure this was a great idea, but I could feel that something was nearing resolution. I was certain, so it was good to speak freely.

  It was cool in the late morning, but the sun was warming the porch, so we sat and drank coffee over breakfast while I told my long, sad tale. I feel it is sad, anyway, and while my storytelling skills are meager, and I wander, it is nice to have a sympathetic ear. Someone who, at least, has not proven to be an obstacle or enemy. I sat back and wrappe
d a blanket around me, curling my legs underneath me.

  “So,” she said, eyes clouded behind her sunglasses. “Your story is that you are not human, or not human any longer, but some…immortal?”

  I nodded. “More or less. I seem to be immortal. Or at least, I have many lives. I can’t really tell, as I’ve said.”

  She was silent for a long time. “This isn’t a story I can tell anyone, you know.”

  I nodded again, laughing with my smile. “You can tell anyone you like, but it won’t matter. Most of them won’t believe you.” I smiled at her to put her at ease. “And those who would believe you are not those you want to truck with.”

  “Truck with?” She sipped her coffee. “You have odd twists in your speech.”

  “I know,” I said. “It’s frustrating for me to stay current. Language is a stubborn pattern. I learned English a long time ago and relearned it again recently. My recently, that is.” I paused. “I’m not trying to freak you out or anything.”

  “Oh, believe me. I am freaking out.” She sighed. “But I don’t think you are dangerous.” I could feel her eyes on me through the glasses. She was frightened, but hiding it well. “But I am not sure I believe you.”

  “Well, what can I do to convince you?” I asked. This was the crux of the matter, the thing we had to move past. And we didn’t have a lot of time, I felt, to do it.

  “You say you’re being hunted by the Feds, and others?” She sat up a little, cocked her head. Defiance, challenge. People are easy for me to read; I have spent lifetimes reading them. There are idioms in body language, cultural and societal cues that vary from region to region and across time, but mostly all human body language is the same. Ape-language, we are born with it.