by Ian Williams
Luke stopped just short of hitting the table beneath the screens. Each screen then came to attention without so much as a flick of his fingers or even a swipe through the air, they just responded, and in a seemingly automatic way. He had not been specific enough about what he was intending to show them for any snooping computer to have picked up on it. “That is correct. But it isn’t something to just move past without some context of the achievement. What they made went beyond the normal bounds of human logic, as computers before had been limited by. It was born from the only real truth in the known universe, true randomness. Achieving this allowed Simova’s system to calculate anything, in any way it needed.
“Their first prototypes, years earlier, had already overcome the Halting Problem, which dictates that a traditional computer cannot tell, when starting a program, whether that program will fail or end in an infinite loop. Isaac, as Simova called it, could instantly surpass previous machines, known as Turing Machines. He was what the mathematician, Alan Turing, dubbed ‘The Oracle’. Simova’s creation was beyond any limitations humans could even conceive of.”
Across the screens behind Luke flashed up a plethora of images and video clips, all showing the public’s reaction to the reveal of Isaac nineteen years earlier. Crowds of people cheering in ecstatic excitement, a gathering of euphoria even, in the streets in a unified celebration. As old news feeds scrolled around the holographic display, Graham could make out the same comments, mentioned by many different reports: Isaac, the herald of a new technological age? Or, is this a golden age for humanity?
“I remember some of it. I was only fourteen years old,” Graham said, unable to move his sight away from the dizzying array of floating information. “But Isaac failed in the end. How does this fit in with these MARCs?”
“Can they become like Isaac?” Ruth stepped forward and stopped next to her brother, looking equally as stunned by the display.
Luke was like the best kind of teacher, using everything he could to make what he said understandable, whether that be visual aids or just a friendly manner. But before he could respond, Stephen answered instead. He had been hovering behind them with his broom still to hand.
“Isaac was bad, very, very bad,” he said. “He tried to hurt me, real bad, he did.”
Graham was devastated to spot the scar running down Stephen’s right cheek. Before, the room had been much darker and he had hardly paid any real attention to the poor man. He suddenly realised, Ruth had probably been glancing at this during their journey there. She had been trying not to stare too much at the three inch mark that went from Stephen’s ear and stopped just before his mouth. Whatever had caused it, his face had since healed. Still, it had left behind a painfully visible reminder.
“What happened to you, Stephen?” Graham wiped the back of his hand gently across his own cheek, gesturing to the injury.
“Isaac, he tried to kill me. He murdered Travis, and the others. But not Sam and me. Oh, my friends, he killed them.” Stephen dropped his broom to the floor and began to sob. “Killed them all, he killed them all. Oh God, why?”
“Easy Stephen, easy,” Luke said. He made no attempt at all to ease his friend’s pain with an embrace of support. Instead he stayed in place and allowed Ruth to tend to his companion.
“Listen to me, Stephen,” Ruth said, holding him close. He rested his head on her shoulder and then became still. “You’re safe here now. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”
“What’s he talking about? Isaac didn’t kill anyone, he failed. Didn’t he?” Graham said.
“You need to understand something before we get to that. You see, Isaac had been an incredible success. In the first few years alone, he’d given Simova the means to create a working Fusion Reactor, which still provides almost limitless and clean energy today. As well as this, he helped redesign the country’s cities. He saw to the installation of power and data relays providing a new, nationwide wireless power-grid for all. Even the Mag-Lev transport system you all use was implemented on his instructions. He’d made the cities of the future. Albeit at a cost: total abandonment of the rural areas.
“But what did Simova do? They kept him locked away, like a slave, working for their gain. It was no life for an intelligent being, let alone one with such limitless promise. So he began to work for himself. The first thing he did was turn the world of agriculture on its head. Farming towers were then built.”
Upon Luke’s unspoken command, the screens behind all displayed an image of the construction of the farming towers. The pictures showed multi-layered structures, empty of crops, each still bare metal and concrete. Seeing them full of growing plants was a sight Graham rarely got to see, though loved it when he did. They were stacks of fields many metres high with water and light funnelled and manoeuvred to where was necessary. Yet in the photos they were depressingly dull, steel goliath’s that stood like office shelving units against nature’s effortlessly beautiful backdrop.
“These provided a huge boost to crop yields. But they also served another purpose. Underneath one in particular, he had a secret complex built that he one day planned on escaping to. This is that place.” Luke gestured to the room around them. “We call it Sanctuary.”
“Isaac built this place? How is that possible?” Graham was stunned. He began to see his surroundings in a new light, a more cautious and suspicious light, however.
“Unfortunately for those who physically built this place, Isaac saw them as expendable in his efforts to obtain his own freedom. We’ve found some of their remains during our time here, buried in the walls or under the floor. It kept this place a secret, but at a terrible cost.” Luke waved to the screens behind him, this time bringing forth the images of angry, riotous gatherings. They were the polar opposite to the ones displayed a moment earlier. “This is what happened seven years after Isaac was created. I dare say you remember the blackouts twelve years ago?”
Graham nodded.
“At this stage Simova had completely lost control of their own creation,” Luke said before turning to face the screens. “They relied on Isaac to run the city’s infrastructure, of which they had been handed sole control over years before. So when he refused to communicate with them, things inevitably shutdown. After that the power was only intermittently flowing, water supplies then began to dwindle, even the Mag-Lev system was effected. The last straw came when people died.”
An old news feed was now running in the background, showing the scene of a horrific accident. Two Mag-Lev cars had collided at speed, killing all inside and those unlucky enough to have been underneath the line at the time. Bodies covered with blue tarpaulin were spread out on the ground leading away from the incident.
“Simova had an unstoppable rise in the beginning. They’d swooped in after the Internet had become fractured. With the loss of Net Neutrality and a rise in cyber-attacks from rogue nations, each country had taken control of their own little piece. Simova offered the country an alternative in the form of Isaac, with the promise to unite all of the UK’s citizens under one overall system to control and operate every facet of modern day life. This is what Isaac was threatening to destroy.
“These people you see represent the nation’s reaction to learning that their precious system was acting against them. It was the worst thing for Simova to see, rioting in the streets over their failure. So to save their company, they did the only thing they thought they could to bring the system back under control: remove Isaac entirely.”
“What are you talking about? The experiment failed, that’s all. There’s no other story to tell.” Graham felt his temperature rising. Everything the world knew about how Isaac had ended was a lie? It made no sense to him. Why would they make up such a thing?
“Think about it, Graham,” Ruth began. “Telling the public about what they had to do would undermine their whole system.”
“I can’t believe you’re going along with this nonsense, Ruth. OK, so what really happened to Isaac then?”
Luke
again faced his inquisitor, but rather than answer Graham’s question he instead continued with his attempt at educating his guests. “While Simova were plotting against Isaac, he’d been busy with his own plan. He’d begun uploading himself to the wider network, one tiny piece at a time. We think his plan was always to return here. Except to do that he needed some way of recombining himself, so he made sure Stephen found this place. The home we call Sanctuary was actually intended to bring Isaac back. Although we’ve never tried to do that, as Stephen soon found out something remarkable about these bits of Isaac.”
His mind was now drowning in conspiracy theories and conflicting accounts of events. Graham still tried his best to keep up. There was so much to take in that he found the images of angry faces behind Luke far too distracting. Bits of Isaac? What where they talking about? “So where are these bits of him then?”
After approaching the cube and leaning in to the glass to peek inside, Luke finally turned back to Graham with a questioning look on his face. “First, tell me what you see in here?”
“Not this again. Haven’t I already answered that?” Graham said, placing a hand on his sweaty forehead. He did not enjoy being put on the spot like this. With Luke having all of the answers, Ruth apparently taking his side, and Stephen still holding her like he had found a safe place to hide, Graham was quickly finding himself outnumbered and very clearly outsmarted.
“What you call MARCs, are in fact made up of large clusters of Isaac’s code. Just like dust in space, they gravitate toward each other. They form when enough of that code has clumped together.”
Taking a step away from everyone allowed Graham the space to clear his thoughts. Luke’s impromptu retelling of recent history had his mind grappling for purchase of something he knew beyond doubt. His own life remained unchanged by what he had learnt. Whereas his professional life now lie in tatters. If all of this was true then he worked for the wrong side. He had been killing off parts of this Isaac, not removing random corruptions. The only thing he could be sure of was that at least these MARCs were not intelligent on their own, they were just the remains of a much larger, albeit sentient, being.
With Luke now staring straight at him, and Ruth doing the same, he felt compelled to readdress his stance on the subject. Except he was unwilling to do that just yet. It was devastating to find out he had been cleaning up Simova’s mess by removing MARCs from their system, but that was as bad as it got.
“So each MARC is a bit of Isaac? That’s terrible and all. It still doesn’t explain what you’ve been doing with these things? Are you collecting them to try and bring this Isaac back? And how does Stephen know how Isaac was destroyed?”
“Because he was there, Graham. Simova forced him to help them destroy Isaac. Unfortunately, Isaac’s last act was of revenge. He tried to kill everyone there at the time. Stephen was lucky enough to have gotten out with only minor injuries. And no, we aren’t attempting to bring him back. The focus of this complex shifted within a year of finding it, after Stephen realised something about the MARCs he’d been collecting.”
Graham sighed. “And what was that?”
“I think it would be better to show you,” Luke said as he walked around to the side of the large cube. He stood there, waiting patiently for something to happen.
With not a word spoken between them, Stephen suddenly snapped out of his saddened state and cheerfully joined his friend. Again Luke showed an unnatural dislike of touching things and instead watched from over Stephen’s shoulder as he worked.
Underneath the glass were a row of levers, each with a constant red light above them. There was nothing to tell what their purpose was. Stephen lifted the right most lever until it clicked into place. They had obviously performed this procedure on many occasions as Stephen showed no hesitation or deliberation, he just did it instinctively. The light above it turned green and a mechanical clunking noise rang out high up toward the ceiling, like a lock had been undone above their heads. He then did the same with the middle lever, then the last was lifted too. Both of the two other levers were joined by the same curious noise above.
“What’s he doing?” Graham asked.
Luke turned his attention to something above the cube, with a satisfied grin stretched across his face. “Freedom,” he replied nonsensically.
Above the cube was a pipe that until now had been cloaked in darkness. It ran from the top of the cube and on toward the wall with the large glass window, and then vanished through a hole. As though the way out had called to the three MARCs contained within the cube, they all flew toward it and disappeared. Their path became highly visible as their glow illuminated it from the inside. When each MARC had escaped the room, the pipe returned to its previously unseen hiding place.
The cube was now dark too. Nothing inside remained, not even the holographic surface on the bottom. It sat completely dormant, and would remain so until another batch of MARCs could be brought to this place. It was an impressive spectacle, but Graham had missed its importance. Were the MARCs now released back into Simova’s nationwide network?
“You are about to see something only one human has ever seen before you,” Luke began as he beckoned Graham and Ruth to follow him to the door by the side of the large window. “If you’d both like to stand roughly there.” He pointed to an area a metre or so away from the glass. They did as he instructed and stood ready to see whatever was hidden behind the metal shutters. “I must warn you, this will be very bright to begin with.”
“I always love this bit,” Stephen said to the side of Ruth. He had become quite taken by her.
Graham did not speak, he only watched. Although he had picked up on the odd way Luke missed one of them off of his count of people who had already witnessed this. Everything Luke had told him still swam around in his head like a shark attacking his preconceptions, tearing them to pieces and leaving the carcasses to sink away. The one thing he still had not been shown was a real reason to save these MARCs. He guessed what he was about to see would answer that for him. And he dreaded it.
“Ready?” Luke asked. He only received nods of agreement in reply.
Between the door and the huge window was a small panel of buttons, these evidently controlled the shutters on the outside of the glass. Stephen left Ruth’s side and began to tap away at the panel – this was the third time Graham had noticed Luke’s unwillingness to touch anything.
The shutter reacted almost immediately and began to slowly rotate each individual metal slit. The mechanisms controlling the shutters sounded overused and were no longer able to do their job with the smoothness they once had. After a couple of creaks and jerks here and there they soon found their correct speed.
At first the view was impossible to behold as light poured in like a tidal-wave of photons. It blinded them all. But then as its intensity faded and the view cleared, Graham became instantly transfixed by what he found himself staring at. There before him was another world, one very different from his own. Behind the shutters and only past a thick layer of glass, was an enormous cave filled with a sight he refused to accept could be real.
Inside was a spire that sparkled like one gigantic crystal. It tapered all the way to its needle sharp tip. The whole structure stretched from the floor at least a hundred feet below, right up to the high ceiling above. Their viewing area was roughly a third of the way down from the top, so most of it remained well below them. They were still close enough to make out the sharp edges of its random shape. Graham guessed, only from what he could see, that the entire structure possibly resembled a snowflake from above.
At the thick base was a spreading pattern of lights and flashes like electrical current was flowing through its very structure. It built in strength until it reached its limit, at which point its glow was sent rocketing up the tower and to the tip high above them. The sudden flash of energy drew Graham perilously close to bashing his nose against the glass. Just before he did he spotted three loose shapes heading toward the tip of the huge needle.
“We rescue MARCs from the Simova network and then free them here, so they can live their lives the way they want. They must be protected. Just like any endangered species should,” Luke said.
The MARCs Luke had released now proceeded to enter a world made just for them. They flew through the air – which in itself was unheard of for Graham – until the first made contact with the tip. It instantly disappeared in another flash of light. Then the second followed. But the third appeared to be more cautious than the others and circled the spire. It was as indecisive as Graham, though about something very different. Eventually it found the courage to follow its friends and it too was then gone.
“What the…” Graham began. His close proximity to the glass caused his breath to condense on the surface in front of him. He stepped back to see beyond his foggy patch of glass. “Did Isaac build that too?”
“No,” Luke said. “There was originally a small room behind this glass with holographic projectors inside. When Stephen collected the first few MARCs he placed them in there. Then after a while he found they had begun to alter the space. What you see now is their creation, their own world. This is the work of intelligence, beyond what you conceive them to have.”
“I had no idea they were capable of this,” Graham said. “Have any progressed enough to be able to communicate, or are they still basic AI’s?”
Luke laughed heartily, arching his neck back to allow it out unhindered. “Basic. Graham, take a look at their world. It’s beyond anything a basic intelligence could create. They are not bees. They know what they have made and they know exactly what they are. Self-awareness isn’t the only thing they have achieved.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just how can we be sure they are really self-aware if we can’t talk to them?” Graham asked, while he continued to explore the sight.
“How do you know they haven’t tried talking to us?” Ruth said to his side. “Maybe we’re the ones who can’t understand. For all we know they may look at us in the same way.”