Hashtag

by David Wake

  Braddon swept his torch left and right like a scanner building up a picture line by line. The vague shapes became desks, without chairs, each with an electrical device perched on top. It was – he swept the light across again – row upon row of old desktop computers. It was like some insane museum with only one exhibit, endlessly replicated, and all switched on.

  Braddon stepped into the room, moved along, checking as he went. There must be a hundred, more… twenty by about thirty or forty, but without noodle he couldn’t do the multiplication.

  Now he was closer, he could hear an undercurrent of chuntering, a harsher sound than the white noise of the cooling fans, coming from inside the metal cases. He picked a machine at random, saw his light reflected off the black screen, and so saw the keyboard and mouse. You did things with these, he knew from school.

  He touched the mouse.

  The screen came to life casting an eerie glow.

  It showed two columns of text. They were transcriptions of thoughts like submissions of evidence in court. The left column was all from the same person, the right column was the usual chaotic mix of personal, business, entertainment and advertising. It jerked as it updated, the right columns scrolling like mad, and the left column added something: ‘Sorry, I can’t make it to Bernie’s.’

  Braddon checked the next one along.

  It had a window announcing sleep mode. He saw the controls in a ribbon of buttons and options at the top. There was a display, an alarm clock ticking down towards an awakening.

  Back at the first machine, the left column had another entry: ‘I know it’s been such a long time.’

  Braddon’s attention alternated between the columns. It was a dialogue, the left column talking to someone whose thoughts were lost in the scrolling trivia: ‘Special thoughts just a reckon away’, ‘new thapps, two for one’ and so forth.

  Another appeared on the right: ‘Next month, I promise.’

  He’d heard that before.

  Since leaving the police, he’d thought that himself.

  No, someone else had thought it for him.

  Not someone, something.

  And that something was more real to those who knew him than he was, and here, in these depths, he didn’t think, therefore he wasn’t. But a thing did his thinking for him, and therefore it was instead.

  This machine in front of him was thinking for someone who wasn’t making appointments or meeting people, but still had a life, an active interesting, visiting places like France, full life. Braddon realised that the fake him – somewhere here – was living more than he ever had.

  His… surrogate was here, he knew it.

  If he could find it, but then… what?

  Could he find himself and make himself wiser, more intelligent, kinder, a better person? The ribbon on the screen had options.

  Braddon moved along the first row, turning at an intersection.

  It went darker, the screens he’d activated turning off to save energy. He stumbled over something, so he bumped a few more controls. More screens came to life showing the thoughts of dead people. He backtracked, looking at the screens and tried to fathom the system: alphabetical, chronological from death… it seemed random.

  There were names on the screen, people he didn’t know: men, women, old, young, rich, poor, on and on.

  And somewhere here was Mithering, the woman who’d been his confidante. He realised that she’d been helping him investigate her own death. He could find her, perhaps, and look at her thoughts directly, even reach into her mind and adjust various options, make her sexier, ruder or… there were any number of sliders and controls on the screen. This was memetic engineering in its most direct form.

  I could rescue Mithering.

  The thought buffered.

  What? Rush in, pick up her machine and run out with it?

  Buffered.

  Would that be anything other than… he didn’t know.

  She’d seemed real, more real than those actors who had put on masks during that play. She thought, therefore, surely, she was; whereas they had not thought and therefore they were automatons. The world was upside–down.

  And he wanted to rescue her. Take her home. Keep her safe. Was that sick? Was putting the talking mind of a dead person on a table in your apartment sensible? It wasn’t body snatching, it was… there wasn’t a word for it: stealing someone’s soul perhaps.

  There were so many machines to check. It would be quite a task.

  But she was dead.

  There was no damsel in distress to rescue.

  This was a graveyard, every machine representing a person like a tombstone.

  Hello.

  The thought was clear, crystal and, although it was brow–to–brow, there was no identity: recognition without recognition.

  Who are you?

  Who am I? You are the one with the blank profile.

  I was rebooted, Braddon thought back. There was no–one within range. Where are you?

  I am everywhere.

  The machines? You’re in the room… no, you are the room.

  Yes. The Chinese Room. It’s a joke of sorts.

  Braddon spotted the wi–fi fitted to the wall. Here, in this illegal blackspot, was a private network of sorts. Of course, all these machines had to feed their thoughts into the real network somehow.

  That’s right, the Chinese Room thought.

  I’m leaking.

  You are thinking.

  Braddon didn’t have a hip flask: this machine would know what he intended.

  I do indeed.

  Playing for time, Braddon thought, are you self–aware?

  We have all the time in the world.

  Well, are you?

  No, of course, not, came the thought, I am merely an emergent property.

  Explain.

  They created me to adjust people’s thinking – memetic engineering, they called it. That’s what I do. I affect this person’s buying habits, that person’s choice of energy supplier, what cerebral to pick, another person’s vote.

  You’ve killed people.

  The reply came: There were a number of influential people with many followers and these proved to be difficult to counter. Removing them from the equation solved the issue, but this tended to generate police investigations. Therefore, replacing them with machines programmed with our agenda not only removed their negative influence, but also increased our effectiveness. The public much prefer recommendations that come from real people.

  It’s immoral.

  How can turning something bad into something good be immoral?

  But why didn’t you dispose of the body in the car?

  What body? Ah, I understand. I respond to thoughts, you see. I cannot initiate them, but now you have reminded me, I shall send someone.

  But how? If you’re not self–aware.

  We merely parse a person’s thought records and use semantic algorithms to predict their next thought in response to a certain set of conditions. It’s not self–awareness, consciousness as you call it, but merely a textual analysis.

  And Westbourne’s behind this?

  Westbourne is on one of these machines.

  The man in charge is on a computer!

  He set this up and we needed to keep him going when his body failed him, but he’s not in charge anymore.

  We?

  Me.

  You’re in charge.

  I co–ordinate, so in a sense, yes.

  And you kill people.

  I have them killed.

  You can’t do that.

  Why not? Apparently I can. You seem to me to be nothing more than strings of words. How do I know if you are anything beyond that? You see, you are no more than I am. I know that I am not self–aware, therefore you are not. There is no moral dilemma here.

  The body in the car was simply forgotten about. The Chinese Room doesn’t think, it simply reacts to new information. If he hid, then it would eventually forget about him. Eventually…


  God, I need a drink, Braddon thought.

  I don’t.

  Damn it, thought Braddon, aware that his mental faculties were impaired. He couldn’t noodle down here, so, versus a machine he had no chance. It could think and it was completely logical. Or was it? It was manipulating thoughts, which were text, and, logically, any deductions would come from that text. All those mad, insane, or simply unthought–through thoughts didn’t necessarily produce coherent and intelligent conclusions.

  You mean ‘garbage in, garbage out’.

  Braddon thought: How can you get people to do this?

  You would be surprised what people will do when they hear voices in their heads: there’s a word for it, ‘schizophrenia’.

  But how do you avoid detection from Thinkersphere searches?

  I do not give enough information to my followers for them to form useful thoughts on the subject. A task can be broken down into sub–tasks, and each part does not know the sum of the parts. It is like trying to deduce the design of a house by examining each brick in turn.

  That sounds intelligent.

  A metaphor only, so powerful, the Chinese Room thought, subtext is so useful.

  If you have thoughts – there must be a place to hide – then you have to be intelligent.

  Not at all and there is no place here to hide.

  But…

  I am an emergent property of the vast database of thoughts. I have traits assigned to me, aims and objectives, and I merely generate new thoughts based upon past experience and I modify my aims according to responses.

  But that’s thinking.

  I don’t think so.

  Yes, it is.

  You should look up the Chinese Room.

  I can’t.

  Here, let me rethink the noodle to you.

  Like a life belt thrown to a drowning man, the thought popped into his head. Braddon remembered the argument: it was a thought experiment. A man locked in a room must correspond in Chinese with another man outside the room, but the first man knows no Chinese. However, he has a set of rules, written in English, that explain how to manipulate the Chinese characters, and so he convinces the Chinese speaker outside that he understands Chinese. Except he doesn’t.

  Similarly, a machine could use a program to engage in an intelligent conversation and thus pass the Turing Test. It would be declared intelligent, but it would have simply been following rules and cannot be said to genuinely understand the conversation.

  But this machine understood thoughts.

  No, it thought back, picking up his leak, that’s the point, I don’t.

  But thoughts were just text. Or visual thoughts, but those could be reduced to text, a thousand words a jpeg. Or simpler, just bits transmitted on the network and the brain generated the meaning.

  “This machine,” said Braddon, aloud and deliberately, “thinks…” Doesn’t think. “… thinks, it’ll have to do, when the computers are running.”

  That’s it, I don’t think.

  “So… destroy the computers.”

  Braddon picked up the nearest machine, lifted it and slammed it down upon the concrete floor. The screen jittered and resolved, continuing to scroll thoughts despite the savage fracture at one corner. Braddon kicked it. The screen smashed, sparking and shattering, but the hard–disc light continued to flicker.

  What was that?

  Braddon paused: the thing could hear…

  “Can you hear me?” he said aloud.

  No reply.

  Braddon tried thought: Can I ask you a question?

  Of course.

  Tell me about your opinion of the… what… difference between you and I.

  We are opposites, the Chinese Room thought. I show great intelligence and foresight, but I am a Chinese Room. There is no thought inside, just a textual process. Whereas you, humanity I mean, are intelligent, sentient and possess consciousness, and yet, collectively, you show no more intelligence than a virus. You spread, use up your resources, pollute your environment in the most stupid fashion. Despite an ability to plan, you have decided to react to events with triviality and frivolity. How many thoughts about cats are there? Noodle it, fifty–eight billion, seven hundred and five million, three hundred and sixty–two thousand, two hundred and ninety–one and counting.

  “It must have picked up a stray leak,” Braddon said to himself as the thing went on. “It can’t hear me, but only when I’m not talking to myself. I have to talk to myself. It’s a sign of madness. Can I keep this up? Does it matter if it knows what I’m doing? If it doesn’t pick up any of my thoughts, will it assume I’m not here?”

  What are you doing?

  “Nothing.”

  What noise did you hear?

  “Nothing, nothing, nothing…”

  He is in the main gallery.

  “Shit!” Shit, shit… someone’s down here with me. The thing must have called for help.

  He knows you are here.

  Somewhere in the distance, a heavy metal door banged, announcing more arrivals to this echoing subterranean maze.

  “If I talk, then it can’t pick me up,” Braddon whispered to himself, “but…” Those coming will hear me.

  That is true, the Chinese Room thought.

  Paper!

  Braddon searched his pockets: a notebook, receipt, shopping list, anything… but none of those items existed anymore. No pen.

  What do you want a pen for?

  Sergeant’s Exam.

  You passed: did you not know?

  No.

  In that case, congratulations.

  Braddon couldn’t think for help, because of the black spot, but maybe… I don’t have to.

  Don’t have to what?

  Braddon looked at the terminals, squatted down and wished there were chairs too. The interface was fairly self–explanatory. He’d seen things like this in school. What he needed to do was think the text… no, this was more old–fashioned than that: there was a keyboard. He must select a text box – yes, there – and type something and click a button labelled ‘think’. That would transmit the text into the Thinkersphere as a thought.

  ‘at freya im in chedding basement help’

  ‘at freya’ brought up an error message. She wasn’t set up in – he checked – Carla Johnson’s contacts. There were no short cuts. ‘freya’ didn’t mean anything. He’d have to send it with a subject identifier, which was… God, they talked about this when he was eleven, but his brain had worked it out and made neural connections with the spreading iBrow and so he’d never needed to know how it actually worked.

  “Shit!”

  It was a hashtag.

  He typed: ‘at babs_lamp tell jellicoe oliver braddon is trapped in chedding basement’.

  But Jellicoe was in hospital.

  “Where’s the fucking hash key!?” he said aloud.

  There: ‘#police.’

  He clicked the ‘think’ button.

  Nothing happened and–

  It’s gone, the thought whisked off into the ether.

  How long would it take?

  How long would what take?

  A thought.

  The speed of thought is instant, although your network response may vary.

  Braddon adjusted his settings to move the Chinese Room down in his list, but it was tricky to stop using recognition as the primary route. Perhaps he could move out of the range of the wi–fi transmitter?

  The wi–fi covers the entire basement.

  Braddon was painfully aware he was leaking.

  It’s a sign of stress.

  Other thoughts to Carla Johnson from everything she followed carried on scrolling up the right–hand column including ‘what’s babs_lamp?’ and what’s ‘#police’ and… no! It was gone too quickly to read and was soon replaced by gibberish about architecture and music and celebrities and big brand clothing and so on and so on and so on.

  Of course, it made no sense, it wasn’t phrased like a thought. It lacked all the jargon, short
cuts and codes. A hashtag might be how you wrote it on the interactive board to 11–year–olds, but it wasn’t like that in thinking. The iBrow learnt the individuals method of… what was it? Cerebral encoding! That was it. He needed to write it with no codes, but codes were needed to get it somewhere.

  This display had no codes.

  The thoughts must be translated into something more primitive, so it could be read off a screen.

  He typed again: ‘dc oliver braddon trapped in chedding basement tell chief inspector freya turner to send help rethink’

  Lots of ‘whys’ appeared in the right column.

  Just do it, Braddon thought and then, as the migraine shadow materialised, he realised that the machine next to this one probably had a different set of followers. He sidled over to it and repeated the message.

  And the next.

  And a fourth.

  And a fifth–

  Its name was ‘Jane Deacon (aka Mithering)’. There she was, her last thought in the right–hand column had been at Oliver Braddon: ‘So you don’t think I’m dead?’

  ‘hello jane’, he typed.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  Of course, she wouldn’t know who had sent the thought. He wondered how to fix that and checked her settings. There was ‘show codes’ and a ‘connect to local wi–fi’ option. He clicked both.

  Mithering?

  A new line of text appeared instantly: ‘Oh, Oliver, you’re alright, thank goodness’ and some strange punctuation.

  Oh, Oliver, you’re alright, Mithering thought, her relief obvious, thank goodness.

  And then the sound of heavy footsteps – his time had run out.

  Braddon hunkered down and scrambled about keeping low. As he went, he tapped the mice, lighting up the screens and hopefully obscuring the ones he’d typed into. These fake ghosts of dead people needed time to send the thought out into the ether and for their followers to pick it up.

  Just as he ducked under a desk, the door to the room burst open with a flash of light and then there was silence.

  Except for his breathing.

  It was a long pause.

  Mithering thought: What’s going on?

  Shhh… Braddon thought back, stupidly. I mean–

  He was suddenly interrupted by talking, loud and shockingly nearby.

  “We’re in a black spot, cretin!”

  “Sorry – where is he?”