In other words, they create the substance that leads to consciousness and they’ve only made basic sorts of self-aware operating systems out of it that are very unstable.
“Are you saying you’ve created conscious artificial intelligence?” I asked them.
“Interesting word choice. What is ‘artificial’? The consciousness is artificial in the sense that we are creating it through manipulation of the world, but try to inversely describe what it means to be ‘natural.’ You say a tree is natural, yet the idea of a tree, the experience of a tree and the relating of that experience through whatever form, be it a poem or a photograph, is artificial.”
“Yes but the tree itself is not.”
“Okay, but tell me what is then the ‘tree itself.’ ”
“Okay, let’s just say everything is artificial. Is our consciousness artificial?”
“If our consciousness derives or arises out of the physical structure of neurons, protons and so on, then isn’t it artificial? A mirage? It arrises with a certain organization of material and then degrades and finally disappears as that arrangement entropies, becoming disorganized.”
“Okay. So, what about her? What are you creating?”
“A home for our minds. Not artificial intelligence the way your government and Mannerheim are trying to get to by using human artifacts: The ones and zeros that are at the core of computer technology. It is entirely possible that we are the computer simulation of this human process of building better and better simulations, somewhere in another future or another system. Some think that we are an artificial program introduced either in just this branch of a simulation or at some core level of our generational tree ... or we are spontaneous in the system. A digital evolution. Some say God created this simulation, but many of us don’t see the problem as different either way. If we are not a simulation and somehow not artificial ... organic to the first universe to ever spawn intelligence, what’s the difference? In The Simulation universe you have a cause to believe in a higher power, a god, the creator and you’d be right. That universe was created, built by some hacker one universe up. But we don’t think of that being as God, because it offends our prejudice about God and we get the feeling that someone had to have created the hacker. That the hacker is limited in his universe, however greater than our universe it is. So it’s not the same as a belief in God. God is the originator of all universes and so of us—we are an artifact of God’s creative efforts. We are artificial compared to God. So we are in a simulation, but one created by THE God ... and our faiths are efforts to communicate with and placate and gain favor from that God.”
“Or, this is an organic universe, a universe that is organic to the moment, the first one. If so, then we do not have a God as creator. Just this stuff all came together on its own and is exactly the kind of place you’d expect to find us and so here we are.”
Well, short answer again is that they are creating consciousness as an artifact of their efforts to stay connected with what they assume is the creator of our physical universe and the physical universe of the nano machines that the The AI constructs. The consciousness they create is the portal to this ultimate creator, the Mind Hive, they hope.
In their personal mythology, this is why they are here. Nature, they told me, has selected them for evolutionary advancement and “to carry intelligence to the stars.” I pointed out to them that I thought they were making the same mistake people always make: Connecting the dots of their personal story with a mythology.
“With one difference,” one of The Twins said, I didn’t note which one. “If a human being can have consciousness arise out of the physical structure of the brain and body, then why not the planet or the solar system or the universe? The Mind Hive is just one more iteration of that, a powerful iteration, but not as powerful as the creator consciousness.”
A few straightforward nuggets (headline: 6 Things You Need to Know About The Clans):
1. There are chapters or sects of Clans around the world.
2. Mannerheim kept Celestine as a sex slave when her work depended on him, but then she discovered the Mind Hive and ran away from him.
3. The AI that grew into the Hive got going in one of Mannerheim’s early computing experiments.
4. The feds are holding Mannerheim because at first they thought he would get them access. Then they figured out No. 3 and now know he is a threat to the relationship they are trying to create with Celestine. The STs said they know that their head electrical engineer is a federal agent: Josh Fines. They told me that it doesn’t matter what the feds do now. “They missed their window.” They are either very good at hiding whatever everyone is trying to find or there is nothing for anyone to find and they are just fooling themselves and everyone else. The court order was probably meant to slow us down so the feds could get us to help them surveil a “national security” risk. They are looking for any way to get information about Celestine and how and from where she’s getting her micro-machines, nanties. And yet no one in The Clans seems the least bit concerned about the feds.
5. The Twins straight up told me that they want me on the inside to tell their story as it develops for the sake of their history. (I think you’d call that an exclusive!) They said I’d know why “pretty soon.”
Oh, and I almost forgot! Those two women are Michelle Olivas, the talkative one. Betty Gaines is the quiet one. That’s what they said their names were. I believe them. They have become quite forthcoming.
Okay, I’ll try to call later today after I get some rest.
TTFN.
XII
Adam closed the notes window. Rising on his ever-evolving list of concerns was his young reporter running wild in what was turning into at least a potentially very important story. Everything he had just read could be summed up in the sentences: The student cult was built up around the charismatic figure of Celestine Wallace, who had developed a complicated cyborg religion, one of thousands, that demanded obedience and used methods of thought control. All of which turned out to be a cover for [insert major federal crime here]. No one would care about the specifics of her crazy world view once they uncovered the real story, just like no one cared about the details of Jim Jones’ theology or why David Koresh thought he was the last prophet of the New Testament or how Albert Shine convinced hundreds of parents to put their kids in a makeshift rocket and blast it off into the sky. All they cared about was that these cult leaders had crazy ideas about their own divinity that they somehow convinced others of and then proceeded to get every one of their members killed. Perhaps. Natalie’s reporting could be used to tie Celestine to Mannerheim’s lab, but he already had Mannerheim’s confession. Everything else appeared to be the confused ramblings of young people desperate to accelerate their lives into meaning.
T’was ever so, he said to himself.
One interesting detail did pop out at him as he ruminated: Celestine and Mannerheim had suggested she’d walked away from Mannerheim’s lab with some sort of tech, programing or hardware. If it was classified research, that would certainly explain federal involvement. So, it was all adding up to look a lot like what he had thought: A grand jury was putting the pressure on them both and when Mannerheim tried to get close to Celestine at the party, someone wanted it documented. Adam also had some names for the library to look into, but he didn’t have much hope they would be real. He sent them to library, anyway. Chase every lead.
Library got back to him within the hour. Adam opened the email. The most likely “Josh Fines” showed up in a graduate list from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and then in one inter-departmental note on promotions to the newly created Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center. The note was published on Pinterest, of all places. Someone’s mother was going to be in hot water when this got out. But that’s all they could find on him.
Adam clicked open a web browser to look up that agency. The agency created in 2015 described itself this way: “CTIIC integrates information from the network defen
se, intelligence, and law enforcement communities; facilitates information-sharing; leads community analysis of cyber threats; and supports interagency planning to develop whole-of-government approaches against cyber adversaries.”
That made sense on the face of it. The Clans were clearly into tech and hacking, but why would Josh be in the field, ostensibly undercover, and why would such a high-level agency take an interest in a couple of cyborg nuts?
Then Adam opened the email on the Soccer Twins.
Library found a lot more information on those two, including photos and names on social streams. Once he got in touch with Natalie, she’d be able to tell him if library had found the right two young women. Most of the file consisted of the usual stuff of high school and college students: Photos from foreign travels on social media stream. Betty Gaines attended Caltech, and Michelle Olivas noted Lake Washington Institute of Technology as her last stop in education. That last one got Adam thinking about who he might know at that school. And then the last line of the email blew it all away and he hit on an entirely new line of thinking: Two years prior to Natalie running into them, both had received paid fellowships at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory called the Graduate Fellowship Program. It was a Department of Energy program that trained talented young people in several areas of nuclear weapons and energy technology. When Adam Googled the agency, he hit upon one of the areas of speciality for the scholarship that made the connection to Mannerheim: “Stockpile Stewardship. Fellows work to ensure the Nation sustains a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent through the application of science, technology, engineering, and manufacturing. The central mission includes maintaining the active stockpile, Life Extension Programs, and Weapons Dismantlement.”
Mannerheim’s interest in nuclear energy was well known. The Daily-Record had reported more than a decade ago about his having won a $150 million grant from the DOE to establish a next-gen virtual nuclear testing computer lab. Adam remembered the story because it signaled a major jump in the power of computing: Instead of exploding a nuclear weapon to determine if it and the others like it were viable, these labs were building super computers to run simulations of those explosions and effectiveness of the components supposed to make them happen.
Adam surmised that The Twins had to have met each other in that fellowship and then somehow met Celestine through Mannerheim’s project tied to it. It all made such beautiful sense that he burst out laughing. Several reporters looked at him with eyes that said “I hope to god he is not laughing at something I wrote.” He pinged library via their internal chat program to see if Mannerheim’s DOE lab had ever worked with the PNNL. He knew it had. He just needed the paper trail. Adam believed he knew what was happening. He had it all figured out. Mannerheim and Celestine had put the nation’s nuclear stockpile at risk with their cyborg games. No wonder the Feds were sneaking around. This was some serious leakage that put the entire structure of the nation’s planning and security for those nuclear weapons at risk of god knows what potential catastrophe. He desperately wanted to celebrate with a cigarette and a drink. He grabbed his cigarettes, wallet and coat and raced outside, heart thrumming in his chest.
Out through a backdoor by the loading docks where the papers were stacked onto trucks, he fired up a smoke. Since he didn’t have time for a run to the nearest bar, he dug around in the stacks of old containers of oil and grease in an abandoned corner of the loading bay and pulled up a pint of vodka. The chief pressman, Yevgeny Stetsko, and Adam rotated replenishment of the secret stash. Adam drank and smoked fast. He had to get back inside to make some decisions and push the reporting in a the right direction. He thought briefly about Natalie again. Compromised and inexperienced as she was, he decided, bottle upturned and clear liquid fire cleansing his throat, the story might benefit from her continued relationship with these women even if they co-opted her reporting. He gasped delightedly. His head beginning to swim joyfully. If the story goes viral, her understanding of their bizarre motivations might make for some good copy. First though, they had to get real information—who, what, when, where and why. The cease-and-desist order by itself guaranteed they would print something. Just how far would it reach? How many people are directly involved and how many people will be indirectly involved? Is this a story about a crime that only affects the perpetrators and victims or is it a story about a systematic fraud that shows a weak bureaucracy, careless leadership and a malfeasance of complicity exposing the world to nuclear risks? Whatever it was, he told his internal audience, it’s a great story.
He went straight to Beach’s office, pushed open the door and laid it out for her.
“Okay,” she said, “let’s not get lost amid the inconsequential.” She cautioned him in a quavering tone that said she wanted that story. “One of us wandering through this story aimlessly is enough, right?”
OMG, he thought, trying not to squirm in the slick leather chair, she’s intimidated by the enormity of the story! He calmed himself with slow deep breaths, crossed his legs and leveled out his voice, brushing lint from his upper thigh: “Think I should pull her in?”
“Naw,” Beach said. “Let her go. Might come in handy having her on the inside like that.”
“Just what I thought.”
She waved him out of her office, pretending to look at papers on her desk. Adam smiled and then laughed. He pushed himself out of the couch and went back to his desk.
But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and he had to claw his way through event scheduling and holiday scheduling and story budgets from the rest of the team as well as the city desk’s email box, a chore he adopted as tradeoff for other crap chores his colleagues picked up. He sighed and opened the staff schedule spreadsheet. A little later he saw Robert get up, look wistfully over at Natalie’s empty chair, grab his coat and walk out. Not much later, Carol left too.
“And so it begins,” he said.
Just when he almost had the story budgets for the weekend up to date and dovetailed in with the staff schedule, someone turned up the volume on the main newsroom television:
“This incredible scene began unfolding around daybreak and we’re just beginning to get confirmation from the Department of Energy ...”
He turned back to his work. The national/international wire desk was always getting worked up about something and turning up the television. Every time a bomb went off in the Middle East or ebola broke out on the African continent, they jumped up and watched the television intently, taking notes, like they weren’t going to simply run some hacked up version of whatever story AP or Reuters sent them hours after the world stopped giving a shit. It gave them a sense of pride, he supposed, and something to do while they waited to see what tiny bit of space they were getting in the next day’s paper, cataclysmic world events ranked right down there with mass shootings in America.
“... It’s unclear how many bodies are in there. As we said earlier, reports from the workers who uncovered what appears to be a mass grave put the number at more than half a dozen ...”
“Any idea how long the bodies might have been there?” The television screen flipped to a woman sitting in the anchor desk.
“I haven’t been able to get close enough to see them and we’re watching the forensic teams bring them out in those green body bags you see lined up there ...”
Adam looked up to see the body bags stacked along a roadside. There were always body bags stacked up somewhere in the world. The television camera pointed at some bags just behind and between two brown SUVs, and it took him about a half a heart beat to read the round signs on the vehicles’ doors: U.S. Department of the Interior. A helicopter nearby was clearly U.S. military, but he couldn’t tell which branch. Adam got out of his seat then and joined a group growing in front of televisions around the newsroom.
“Can’t we turn that up some more,” said Brian Russell, the oldest living copy editor in the world.
Evelyn Marconi, food writer, pointed the remote control at the set nearest her.
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“Where is that?” Adam yelled.
“Haven’t you been listening?” Marconi said.
“No. I was asleep in my chair and just now snorted myself awake.”
Laughter. Marconi’s jaw set. She liked to snooze away an hour or two every afternoon after going out to lunch and writing about the food she ate for free.
“Nevada.” A young male copy clerk said.
Adam read the bottom of the screen: “Mass grave discovered at Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, Nevada.”
“You must be kidding. Has to be an old Indian burial site,” Adam said.
“One of the guys on the rig that drilled into the site said the clothes that came up on the drill were modern and some of the material that came up with the drill and the clothes appeared to be, uh, wet,” said Fran Johnson, the online editor.
“I thought they shut that place down?” Sally Jackson, environmental reporter.
“They did. Interior folks have been working on a plan to close the site permanently ...”
“Can you guys go somewhere else to talk. I can’t hear what she’s saying,” Russell cried out.
“Crank up your hearing aid,” Beach said to laughter.
“I guess we know what’s going on the front page.”
“Fran?”
“Yes mother?”
“Is this on our stream yet?”
“I don’t know ...”
“Find out. I want the full treatment here. Call in Franklin and get him on a plane.”
“On it.” Fran left the circle.
Mind Hive Page 7