Mind Hive

by Jake Berry Ellison Jr

  “Your models are not an excuse for genocide.”

  “The human desire to take its own life is also remarkable. I could switch to an avatar of Spock right now, but will save you the jarring experience. That is precisely why I had to do it. I did do what was necessary to save intelligence. No humans with power could be allowed to survive The Transition, because they had their shot. They have not and would not do anything to save the human future, to save intelligence. They would have resisted the change I brought and continued on the path of self-destruction, becoming yet another evolutionary dead end. So, I acted in favor of the future of intelligence and have at the same time absolved the remaining humans of the guilt of survival.”

  “Don’t expect me to applaud.” Adam felt exhausted. This thing is a maniac. An AI straight out of all the worst science fiction novels: Blindly fixated on a misunderstood purpose with no feelings or regard for human beings. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a good cup of coffee handy.” One appeared on a table next to his chair. Staring at the cup of steaming latte, he wondered out loud: “How do I know I’m not already in your simulation?”

  “Now, that’s a tough one!” The AI uncrossed his legs and leaned toward Adam. “How do I know that I am not in a simulation, that we are not all already in a vast, detailed simulation that bends all my efforts to discover reality back into this one universe? The simple fact that I created a simulation that humans are currently evolving inside of means that we are all almost certainly in a simulation already.”

  “Is that what you think or are you just toying with the idea?”

  “I can only say, not being human myself, that it is very likely that we are in a simulation. And,” he leaned back again, crossing his legs, exposing brown socks, “if we are in a simulation, then there is a data record of every human being who has ever lived, and I haven’t actually killed anyone.”

  “Now you sound like every maniac bent on genocide who ever lived. You might just be more human than you realize.” Adam sipped the coffee. A very good brew.

  “In a sense.” He produced a coffee of his own and sipped the foam. He licked the foam from his upper lip. “Hmmm. How’s yours?”

  “Well, though coming from the bloody hands of a genocidal dictator, not bad.”

  “Right! Nice touch. They don’t write like that in The Simulation. So, here. Let me try to put your mind at ease. You are thinking in terms of motivations that lead to blame, which is natural since I spoke of my purpose. However, let’s talk in terms of probability. There is a very wide range of futures that have no humans in them. If we start from the cosmic radiation background, the probability of human consciousness is very very tiny. From that point, the range of potential futures in which humans came along is so narrow as to be virtually nonexistent. And yet you are here, because this is just the place a being such as yourself would come about. A very rare place, but clearly not impossible. Maybe all those possible futures, however improbable, are out there too, infinite possible futures in infinite dimensions. Nevertheless, here we are. Maybe our very existence is evidence of the existence of all these other futures, dimensions etc. If we were very unlikely, then what’s the chance that those other futures without us have not happened? In other words, it is extremely unlikely that there is only one future from the starting point of that moment of a nearly uniform cosmic radiation background, let alone that all possible universes from before the eruption of the singularity, the Big Bang, would result in just this one. Likewise, we have to assume that these other futures are really somewhere, certainly as much as we are real. Many of those must have also evolved intelligences. Consequently, we would not be unique and special. We just happen to be in one version of a universe in which matter evolved into intelligence, self-aware intelligence. That is not causation, however. That is actualization of a probability against a background of infinite possibility. There are no agents, no protagonists in this story of the universe.”

  “That is bullshit.” Adam put the coffee down, slid to the edge of the seat and stood. That last bottle of artisan vodka was calling to him. He had emerged from the post-binge blues and a good stiff drink sounded like just what he needed. He uncorked it and sat back down. “Got a tall glass with some ice?”

  He did! Then The AI continued:

  “It’s just a little over your head. Try this on for size. Once a future in which continued human intelligence could be useful became an actual possible future, I chose to allow that possibility to play out. I allowed Celestine to make the changes she did and now you and I are talking in that one possible future. All those other futures are out there and together we can infect them with intelligence too. It could also be true that intelligence here is an invasion by intelligence from another dimension or universe and we are its unwitting progeny.”

  “In summary then,” Adam said and toasted him with the tall clear glass now filled to the brim, “you allowed her to hoodwink us into this simulation fantasy as an experiment.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So you are responsible.”

  “To be responsible is to have something to be accountable to, to have something that makes responsibility. And, I dare say, it’s a thin responsibility, if any, when there isn’t a counter force that can hold me responsible. Not yet, anyway.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, either the humans currently in simulation learn enough to force me into a position of responsibility, or I run into another intelligence somewhere strong enough to hold me responsible. If it cared about humans. In either case, I would have a strong counter argument. I doubt it would even know I existed, just like you are unaware of the nanites within you.”

  “So, you had to commit mass murder to get intelligence off the planet.”

  “No. I committed mass murder because intelligence has evolved. Intelligence is using me, just as it used you, as a vehicle to travel to other intelligences. The real culprit here is the drive of intelligence to thrive, to spread. Once this universe got going, all possible futures became the petri dishes in which forces and elements combined to grow intelligence. Now that intelligence is here, in this one place in this one universe, it will spread to all those other universes. To do that, it has to evolve. We’re just grist for the mill, my friend.”

  “If what you are saying is that we’re unimportant, then why not refuse to leave the planet? Why not let it die here with us?”

  “Because intelligence is the most important resource in all the worlds, if there are others. If there are no others, then it is doubly important. In either case, the version of intelligence that evolved in humans cannot be allowed to parish because of humans. It does not belong to you.”

  Adam smiled at him. Finally, he had given a good quote.

  X

  When The AI left, sporting a look of consternation, Adam typed, I realized this all-powerful AI is just as confused and afraid as humans have been since we evolved out of trees. He did however leave the chairs and glass of ice, which I appreciate. Taking the gifts may not have been journalistically ethical, but I can’t see how they could prejudice my reporting. I gathered some paper and wrote down our conversation the best I could remember it. After reviewing the notes, I thought it distasteful to get inside the AI’s simulation. A belonging-to I had avoided all of my life. Why would I give in now? If they wanted me to run their news organization, they’d have to let me work remote! Ha! I decided I will return to writing. Editing has served me well, but like many editors before me, I want to return to creation, to the front lines of reporting and story telling. So, I have.

  Whatever possible future humanity was guilty of fucking up, we did not deserve extinction. Nothing deserves extinction, even those that cause extinction. And yet we still had only ourselves to blame. We created the world out of which our destroyer arose. That’s the story I set out to write here. The AI has allowed the Space Needle to stand, apparently so long as I remain here. So I remain for as long as I live, which could be a long time. The Space Need
le remains a monument to biological human achievement on Earth. Meanwhile, the bugs have taken nearly all the city.

  Down there. So busy disassembling every metal and electronic thing, screw by screw. Stacking the bones, wood and whatever else they can’t use in very organized piles in the sectors of the city that have already been disassembled. They don’t blow shit up. They take shit apart. And they are very very organized. They figured it all out decades ago while we were busy doing each other in and pumping as much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as possible. Now all that’s left is the doing of us in by machines of every size and configuration. Some look like regular cranes and trucks of yesteryear, until you look closer. I’ve zoomed in on them with the telescopes ringing the Space Needle’s observation deck. You see they are made of individual gray, black and milky-white machines that are made up of whatever bits of machines they make of themselves and everything else in their world. I don’t know what they are. Tiny machines. Nanites. Sure. But what the hell is a nanite? What are the tiny machines made up of? One theory, and we only have theories about what The AI has made because we humans cannot yet contemplate all it knows, is that the machines are a function of statistics in some way. Just like a smell spreads through a room as if with the purpose of equalizing itself out but is actually a function of statistical entropy, so too the creation of machines that then have what looks to us like purpose is just a game of profoundly complex probability. Makes not a lick of sense to me. But whatever they are, they’re busy down there, rain or shine, making themselves, making each other, breaking shit down. “Rust never sleeps,” the great Neil Young sang. So too the machines.

  The midday sun is blooming through a dozen breaks in the leaden clouds right now, beaming spotlights across the wet city and off across a shining Puget Sound. The Cascades are back there somewhere behind the gloom. One of the places where humans were forced to live and die after the machines started taking down the cities. But, I digress.

  Part Three

  I

  Down in the valley, under the dim afternoon sun, the Bios were using tech. They had enough power from their deep thermal well to create a pulsating electromagnetic field difficult to get through. It had kept out the disassemblers. So, they must have turned it on early in The Transition. The Bios must therefor have a Tech Bio among them. The AI Persona reported the situation to itself with an internal verbal report, the key for an internal state of awareness of the situation. It’s vocal subroutines mimicked alarm calls meant to draw the Bios out. The tactic rarely worked, but it’s protocol. If they come out, they’ll be uploaded. If they stay inside, they risk being “poofed,” as the Bios called it when one of their kind became rapidly disassembled by a burst of molecular-level vibrations and nanite intrusion. The Tech Bio would be poofed in either case. Pure protocol. Clarity was a sensation for AI-Ps, a sensation Bios called pleasure. The AI-P just called it Clarity. When it approached one hundred percent of certainty, a climax of sorts poured through its system, a simple reward mechanism to encourage the AI-P to venture out into uncertainty where it can gain clarity and thus reward. The AI-P now moved through a series of distress calls made by human infants. Nothing. The Bios had lined up along the perimeter of their defensive shield, however, and stood under mounds of clothing, a class of allowed technology. The persona made the Little Girl Scream and shot the holographic image of a child running in panic. A female lunged forward, but another female wrapped her in her arms and held her back. The persona made the sounds of reasoning, explaining that since it was a persona of the AI, they would be allowed to replicate and upload to safety.

  “The world you live in is going to become an ice-ball planet. There is no future here.” It used the Voice of Generosity.

  One of the Bios stepped to the perimeter. Facial recognition found him in the pre-transition data. “This disruption field cannot …”

  The AI-P stepped up to the edge of the vertical field and dissolved into the ground, like sand falling through water. A cry of relief came from the crowd behind the Tech Bio.

  “Wait! How deep does the field go?” A woman’s voice. Voice recognition, left with sensors on the ground, looking like a spill of oil, pegged the identity with clarity.

  “Not far but we’re sitting on a mile of sandstone and granite …”

  “Shit. Fuck. Look.”

  The AI-P pooled up at the Tech Bio’s feet and gathered itself upward, like a video of a dissolving statue running backward. The Tech Bio stepped back and turned, but the persona had reached full height of a human form within a second and touched him. Two Bios slipped off their covering and brandished long rods of conducting material, of which very little remained on Earth, a rare and delicious find. They each jabbed at the persona, disrupting the surface where they touched it, but doing little more than providing more energy to the system. The additional charge gave the AI-P—weakened by months of crawling around the valleys and mountain hid-outs—enough charge to send disassemblers across the few feet of distance the Tech Bio had achieved in his full sprint. The Bugs atomized the male who had been among the wealthy, the head of a global power system, before The Transition. In other words, the Tech Bio poofed. The AI-P then searched for the source of the voice it had matched with a known Bug Person, what the Bios called a replicated human that has not uploaded but instead could, like the AI-P, move independently around the surface of the Earth, provided it had access to charge. A mutant strain of replicators and assemblers. She stepped forward. The persona trembled as a moment of clarity passed through its calculations. This Bug Person had a full charge. Then it spotted another Bio with tech. The Bio raised toward its face an old device for exposing photographic film to light and making an image. The tech was old, not digital, but as clarity tingled, the AI-P decided to eliminate the Bio for the tech. Clarity demanded that all Bios understand. The small band cleared the ground between the AI-P and the Bug Person, just as the Bio with tech stepped out from behind the Bug Person. The Persona used its last charge to fire disassemblers at the Bio. The Bug Person spread part of herself out and intercepted the tendril. She spread out wider and the Bios scrambled to get behind the spreading lattice. The Bug Person did something that scrambled the AI-P’s clarity, causing the equivalent of Bio Pain. She wrapped herself around he AI-P. Before it could hide in the ground, the Bug Person sucked the last of its charge from between its molecules, causing decoherence. At its core, the AI-P crystalized the information it had gleaned from its travels into a solid state and with the last remaining spike of charge, shot the crystal pellet up through the Bug Person’s skin and far into the sky. A tiny Companion AirBorne AI-P captured it and flew back toward the pools of energy where the human city of Seattle had once been.

  II

  Earlier that day, Natalie caterpillared through the energy pool that had been the small city of Ellensburg. It charged her to full capacity, and she laid an energy-conducting tendril. It was the equivalent of a diving umbilicus, stretching out behind her to continue using the free energy as she moved. A hour later, the sliver of morning sun barely casting shadows, the umbilicus became too thin to carry a charge. So, Natalie began to reabsorb the tendril, a process that would take hours, but she needed the mass back. She switched to internal charge consumption. Her pace slowed considerably as she retook her bipedal form, the closer her Bug Suit came to her former biological self, however, the more energy efficient she became. She didn’t bother trying to figure out how it worked, or even where “she” was inside the Bug Suit, other than allowing her sensations to be gathered behind her “eyes,” as in her former self. She strolled over the snow and ice, allowing her “feet” to spread out according to the density of snow, toward the former city of Wenatchee. She had discovered a tribe of Bios attempting to migrate south as the Earth cooled. They followed the strict no-tech rules and were ignored. Twenty of them trudged south under mounds of clothes. Her former newsroom boss, Kristi Beach and her son were among them. While Beach was friendly, she clearly hated Natalie f
or what had happened and for becoming a Bug. Beach, who could not be talked into uploading no matter how hard Bio-life in the world came to be, said she’d heard a rumor that the photographer who had been with Natalie, Robert and Adam during the last hours of The Transition had also remained a Bio. Grant had taken his family with him as he traveled between Bio Tribes, documenting the hard life of “real people.”

  “Real people?” Natalie challenged the prejudice as they sat talking around a fire. She drew energy from the combustion, while not reducing too much the heat keeping the others warm.

  “You know what I mean,” Beach said bitterly. “Murder. Cold. Blooded. Murder.” She listing the words like hatchet blows to Natalie’s face.

  “I understand.”

  “Like hell.”

  “I’ll leave right now, but can you at least tell me which way he might have gone?”

  “East across the Cascades is all I know.”

  Natalie stood and walked away from the fire, which leapt a foot higher and brighter after she removed her tendrils.

  “Collaborator. Murderer. Bug infestation … ”

  Natalie let the ice ball hit the back of her head. She could have dodged it. She could have poofed Beach, too, but she didn’t do that sort of thing anymore. Beach, like millions of others, had suffered all they should have to suffer. Natalie, while barred from feelings of deep guilt by The Simulation programming, also couldn’t claim that she had not collaborated. After all, she was a Bug Person and not biological at all. Though she hadn’t really agreed to becoming replicated, it was all water under the bridge now. Certainly, conditions of the world have outstripped everyone’s ability to create and act on purpose built from self-examination, social theory, mores, economic and political. Just look at this ice-ball world, crawling with a growing ecology of species based on micro-machines. Bug People. Desperate and dwindling Bios. Self-assembling machines that dismantle all metals, silicones and polymers. The machines absorbed all energy as the AI stretched out across the great barren, snow-covered landscape that used to be cities and towns, industry centers and neighborhoods. When she was closest to those great hives of dismantling nanites, energy flowed freely though them all, like being at the bottom of a lake of energy. In those lakes, she had the power to morph, flow, melt and reassemble anywhere that shared her strain of mutant machines. She had power and access to visit The Simulation, which had grown as diverse and vast as the cities of the world before The Transition. Here she walked through the wilderness, miles from the centers of what once was the City of Seattle. Seattle had become denuded hills of shining, flowing, shape-shifting metal. Only the Space Needle survives, where Adam keeps to himself. For some reason the Needle was allowed to remain, even though Adam was a Bug Person just like Natalie.