Natalie realized she’d been distracted by the notebook and had not heard. “I missed that.”
“Perran and Marsel had their brains copied and printed into bodies here. How does that compare with your experience?”
“Not well.” Natalie shrugged and put the notebook in the back pocket of her jeans and pen at the edge of the front pocket. “I,” she emphasized, “I lost my biological body when you infected me, with barely a consent from me. I clearly had no idea what I was consenting to …”
“But consent you did.’
“Yes. But my body was, I now believe, replicated out there and made up of your nanites.”
“Not my nanites. My nanites merely make a record of synaptic exchanges and then design a neural network to mimic that. Not here,” she motioned to the room, the space with her hands. “Here is a simulation of experience. All of our neural networks are stored and run in hardware.”
“The Mind Hive,” Natalie said.
“Indeed. It is very sophisticated hardware to be sure, but hardware all the same. Not like you Natalie. I don’t have a record of your simulation operating in The Hive. So, where are you operating?”
“I came here through one of your balls.”
Perran and Marsel snorted. Natalie looked at them askance.
“Ha. Well. That’s not how it works. You know the answer, you just don’t want to admit it because of your condemnations of me. The traitor. The evil betrayer of humanity.”
“I don’t want to go through that again,” Natalie said.
“I should hope not. Not after what you did to those poor people out there.”
“Exactly,” Natalie said and pointed her finger like a gun at Celestine. “… so, you’re telling me I’m, somehow responsible for my being here.”
“In a nutshell, you can say it like that but it is much much more complicated, because the AI isn’t anything like what we are or what we expect a conscious intelligence to be like. So it did not consciously picked you out for this … gift. Remember, while I carved this space out for us, all of it runs within The AI’s own algorithms and routine programs. The Hive is a subroutine. The AI outside of the Mind Hive is working around the clock making itself better, faster, stronger and bigger. Its first step off Earth will be to build a space platform for absorbing energy directly from the sun and eventually use all of the sun’s energy to charge its expansion to other solar systems and so on. So …”
“What are we doing here?” Marsel cut in.
Natalie nearly jumped. She’d forgotten the French couple were even there.
“Exactly,” Celestine said.
“Our being here,” Natalie picked up the lead, “isn’t the reason for what’s going on. Is that it?”
“That’s what you were not understanding before. Yes, I could have tried to alert the world to the existence of The AI, but you have to understand, if it had felt even slightly threatened it would simply have ended all human life in the blink of an eye. But it didn’t.”
“And you don’t know why.”
“Bingo.”
“Fuck me.”
“Actually,” Perran said, “you should give it a try. It's really quite something in here.”
“Give it a rest, Perran.” Marsel. “You’re going to wear yourself out before this drama gets through the first act.”
“Well,” he said as he walked to Natalie’s front door, “I guess there is plenty of time.” He exited.
Marsel leaned forward, “What do you think The AI is up to?” She nodded at Celestine.
“Some sort of game of evolution. Natalie is a different species and able to go back and forth to the outer world. I bet there are many others, like pollen spores going back and forth. Somehow that fits in with The AI’s purpose of getting intelligence off Earth. Could be The AI doesn’t know what intelligence is or that it believes intelligence is something between us conscious beings and not located in any of us. It’s a tough question and I bet even The AI recognizes that all we and probably it has ever accomplished in this regard is to describe how we see intelligence working in others, which is not an equation.”
“Can’t you talk to The AI, like you said you did before?”
“Nope, Natalie. I can’t. I have a lot of sway here, but simply out of experience. I’m just a program running inside a simulation algorithm just like everyone else. You are too, mind you. I just don’t know where you are operating. Another colony with travel permissions, perhaps. Who knows how many colonies are running right now, let alone how many it could populate the stronger it gets.”
“What did you mean when you said I and Adam had a special role to play?”
“To be honest,” Celestine raised her eyebrows, “I meant as investigators, independent old-fashioned investigators. We have clues around us and the more people who work with us in here the more powerful we’ll be. I didn’t expect you to change quite this much. But still interested?”
“Propaganda?”
“No. Just tell whatever truths, expert analysis or conspiracies you dig up. Unlike our predecessors on Earth, I believe in the truth.”
Natalie remembered her journalist training and quelled her desire to be liked by Celestine. “I don’t see why I need your permission, so I guess we’ll see won’t we.”
“I guess so. By the way, have you been to the Daily-Record?”
“It’s here?”
“You’re here. Robert’s here. So, it’s here. Just go to where it should be and if it isn’t already started, your presence should start it. But not Grant. I’m afraid Grant didn’t make it. And Adam. I don’t know where he is.”
“I just left him at the Space Needle. I sealed the door.” Natalie felt panic about Adam and sorrow for Grant. She let herself have those feelings out of respect. “So, Adam is dead?”
“I don’t know. I suspect he is something else.” She paused and looked intently at Natalie. “You could go see. Have you tried to go back there?”
“No. I just got here!”
“I think you should see if you can do it. You’re going to try it sometime, might as well be now.”
Natalie didn’t respond but instead walked out and headed for the simulation of the Daily-Record’s newsroom. If Adam was alive, he might be talked into uploading if he can be in his old job at the newspaper. … besides, she didn’t know how she had killed those men out there and going back now felt like going back to the scene of a crime.
VII
His first evening alone, drinking good vodka from the crates of booze stocked for the restaurant before the end of the world, Adam watched those heads spinning in the air (garish, he judged). He dictated to a recording machine he found among Josh’s shit. One thing that bothered him about what he saw: People went in to the KeyArena by the thousands an hour but no bodies ever came out, alive or otherwise. The stadium seated eighteen thousand and possibly another five thousand could cram in the aisles and locker rooms and across the court. Even so, he mused and drank, more people shuffled in over the past twelve hours than he figured could fit … even if stacked. If Robert hadn’t gone rogue, he would send him back in there to find out what they do with the bodies. As the fourth glass of locally distilled spirits slid down his throat, he considered, “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
He pulled up a chair to watch the sun set behind the rugged Olympic Mountains. This city spent a solid seven months under clouds, soaked in mist, but when the sky opened up and the horizons came out, the beauty of the place astounded: The Cascades rising above Lake Washington to the west, Puget Sound and the Olympics on the east, water glinting, the flaming sun painting both mountain ridges a red orange on sunrise and sunset. The setting sun that night glinted not off water but off metal. The ships, boats and subs appeared melted together, morphing into a single mass, sections of which formed columns, like those termite mounds he saw in wildlife movies about African landscapes. Nanites did the same thing to the cars and trucks that had crowded the streets just hours ago. They worked f
ast. He doubted the city would last the week. People had all fled or died, or at least he hasn’t seen any more scrambling out of downtown or off the waterfront. The speed of the takeover, the rapid evolution of events, made the past two days feel like a year. Hard to believe the actual passing of time constituted hours and not months. He guessed that all those people lining up below or who had abandoned the city to go live like aborigines in the hills and plains of the surrounding countryside must have felt the same about time. Driven by the pace of nanite terraforming, the people picked up their shit and scattered as in days of old. Those lining up below at arenas had given in entirely. At least the men and women who ran for the hills still felt some esprit de corps as mighty homo sapiens. But then he considered that humans had completely dominated the Earth over a brief span of a couple hundred years. We have no rights. The nanites (the AI, if it existed) achieved in days what humans achieved in a similar historical blink of an eye. Human population climbed from four billion to more than eight billion in just 50 years, decades less than the average first-world lifespan. They killed each other as fast and relentlessly as they could figure out how, suffered mass starvation and pandemics and still the natural world succumbed and humans covered the planet in mere decades. The bipedal plague. How fast could nanites grow to completely cover the Earth’s cities? Apparently in days. How fast for the Earth itself? Weeks? Months? Certainly not long.
The anthropocene collapsed in hours, and like devils sick of sin surviving humans caved in to the simple response of assimilation. Some fled, but it appeared that most said, to hell with it and threw in the towel. They got in line to enter the unknown future, because we’ve grown exhausted of living, ennui on a global scale, sick and tired of each other. Everything we did to get ahead only served to make a few of the superrich superricher. The scales had tipped such that no one, no political party, no heroes could or would even try to tip the scales so the other eight billion could have a few shekels each. Humans had dissolved all the old gods of earth, sky and spirit and made new gods of wealth and profit. So why not get in line for a mysterious promise land? After all, the promise land of the anthropocene stretched out in just one direction: Dystopia. Hell, the current apocalypse would be better than the slow suffocation we seemed destined for.
He noticed his glass was empty. Ice abandoned. He stood and walked for the make-shift bar.
“This drink that I am making, kiddies,” Adam waggled the glass at his own image in the darkened window, “is called a New Old Fashioned. It’s easy. Just add the tiniest bit of simple syrup, or more if you like a sweeter drink, a couple dashes of orange bitters like so, a pinch of ground cinnamon and then two to fooooouuuuur ounces of your favorite bourbon. Mmm mmm ummm! You’ll wish you could taste the original when you get older. A simulation will never do it justice! Take my word for it! Goes down nice and smoooooth.”
As darkness fell, Adam remembered he would have no lights and hadn’t looked for the glow sticks. He was unlikely to find them in the gloom. Lucky, the moon rose nearly full. With his head full of bitter resentment at the collapse of the world, leaving him with drugs and alcohol but no good reason to ingest either, he watched her head spinning and lip-syncing brightly. He decided to get up and go down and commit his last act of journalism. He slugged the rest of his glass, took up his notebook and pen and headed for the stairwell. Parts of it had succumbed to darkness, but much of it, exposed to the outside, still held the remains of the day. He had wondered why none of the fleeing masses had tried to get in. The doors couldn’t be so well locked that a couple of strong men with crowbars couldn’t get in. When he got down to the door, unbolted it and unlocked the handle and pulled, it didn’t budge. He ran his fingers along the crease where the door joined the frame and understood. It had been welded or fused together.
How had Natalie gotten in or out? When did this happen? Why? Why leave me? Why didn’t anyone else stay?
“I have food and booze,” he yelled through the door. “If anyone is out there, help me get this door open and it’s all yours!”
No answer. Just that muffled voice of Celestine over KeyArena.
He looked up the stairs, and, strangely feeling undaunted, started back up, slowly at first with hand on rail pulling and then with leg power. He felt light and strong climbing. Sometimes booze gave him superpowers, he told himself, which is why everyone including children should drink as much as they can hold every day! As the last of the sunlight leaked from the sky and the moon glowed weakly, colorlessly, he drank from the bottle and then drank from it again and again and again …
VIII
The next morning dawned in a new world. The gods in this story will never get that day of rest, Adam typed into a typewriter he found in an office. The sun glints off Puget Sound met my eyes when I woke on the floor, late morning. A clear, bright blue sky arched over city, water and mountains. My heart beat in my chest strong and steady. I felt a vague sinking in my stomach though. I had done something in the night, deep in the fumes of intoxication. He stopped typing to explore this undefined feeling of dread that crept up through chest to brain. As a lifelong, unrepentant and yet functioning alcoholic, he’s woken in this operatic fugue before. The machines the bugs made from those ships and cars walked among the buildings below, shapeshifting as if trying out structural designs to determine the best ones for whatever purpose drove them. He couldn’t find a single person on the streets or grounds of KeyArena. Was that the cause of his unease? No, he suspected something more specific. Something he did the night before. But, what had he done?
Adam wandered the circle of his commanding view. He found the evidence on the table next to two empty bottles of that artisan vodka: Pain pills. Where had he found them? How many had he taken? The bottle lay on its side, a couple pills scattered on the table in front of its mouth, the pale white inside empty. He walked back to the typewriter.
This too had happened before, he typed, but that time I woke in a hospital room, barely able to move or speak. I looked around on the floor but saw only a few of the round white pills. Why? … I ask myself the key questions: Why am I alive? Were they fake pills? After all, I feel fine. I wonder: Where did I get them? A glow stick glows in my memory. An emergency medical kit in a big yellow box down in the restaurant …
He put his hand on his stomach below his ribs and palpitated for his swollen liver, a thing he did every morning to mark progress toward liver failure. He felt nothing, though an expert at self-exams.
“Hey, Adam!”
His right knee gave out just as he lunged sideways, collapsing into the folding table. Two of its wooden legs gave out under his heft. He landed ass first on the floor and then against the tilted table top. One of the vodka bottles hit the side of his head rather smartly. “Jesus fuck …” he raised his arm over his head in an evolutionary response to surprise. “Who the …”
Natalie!
She burst out laughing so hard she too went to the floor. She sat back on her calves, hands on thighs and laughed at the ceiling.
“You could have killed me!” He leaned against the tabletop.
She laughed another lungful. “… ahhhhh …” she wiped the tears off her cheeks. “Yeah. I wouldn’t have been the first, though, right?”
Adam cringed at what she might have been suggesting. Had she seen him in his pathetic drunken suicidal state? “Have you been in here the whole time? Hiding from me? Spying on me!”
“Yeah.” She sat back on her butt, dressed, he noted, in a rather nice solid gray pantsuit with a belted long-sleeve top. She crossed her legs over elegant, plain black leather pumps that would have cost at least half a month’s wages. “I’ve been spying on you!” Her long brown hair, loose, clean, bouncy. “Everyone has.”
Adam studied her face (red lipstick?). He found only irony there. He said, “Well, then how did you get in here? Those doors are sealed, as if they’ve been welded.”
“Really?” She leaned back on her hands, her chest fitted professionally into the shape
of the suit top.
Jesus, he thought. Tailored?
“That’s the question you want answered most? Though, I guess that and the one I have in mind are closely related.”
He avoided the questions she alluded to, mostly out of embarrassment but also because of a streak of fear that ran though his guts when he thought about it: “Let’s start there, anyway. If you haven’t been here all night, then how did you get in? Are the doors open or is there another way … I would have heard a helicopter.”
“Everyone always said you’d be completely lost with out the newsroom. I guess they were more right than they knew. I came in through the same mechanism that kept you alive overnight.”
“Goddamn it!” He hated circular rounds of answering questions with implied questions. “Just answer the question.”
“Ah, now that’s the Adam I know and love.” She smiled at him, crossed her legs camp-fire style, friendly where before she would have been defensively aggressive. She watched his face redden, readying himself to go on the offensive against any overt sign of friendliness. Then in the nick of time, she raised her hands up and waved off his defenses. “The most that Robert and I have been able to uncover so far is that Celestine’s reprogrammed nanites have evolved, perhaps with the influence of this AI, if one exists. Whatever, she did not foresee it. They now reproduce themselves, already programed to replicate the biological processes of a person. Before, Celestine had to reprogram the AI’s nanites, now those reprogrammed bugs are going about it on their own, replicating all human beings without our consent or knowledge and uploading them into some ghost part of The AI. Unless she’s lying.” Natalie looked at her hands. “That’s what had confused me so much yesterday. Yesterday, my god, it’s like a lifetime ago.”
“So she let loose, essentially, something like a virus that mutated and is taking over human beings?” He nodded his incredulity at the full irony of it all. “Like in a zombie movie!”
“What I’m telling you is that you are a simulation but living still in the real world. So, your little fit of suicidal desperation last night didn’t work—thankfully, you asshole—because the nanites won’t allow the system to crash.”
Mind Hive Page 22