by Greg Egan
He glanced at the clock at the top of the screen. Carlie would be awake in half an hour. He clicked on the link to the questionnaire and started ticking boxes.
#
After he’d driven Carlie to school, Dan sat in the living room, back at his laptop, hunting for crumbs. The last time he’d been unemployed he’d managed to make fifty or sixty dollars a week, mostly by assembling flat-pack furniture for the time-poor. But TaskRabbit was offering him nothing, even when he set his rate barely above what he’d need to cover transport costs. As far as he could tell, all the lawn-mowing and window-washing now went either to national franchises that advertised heavily to build their brand awareness, but would cost tens of thousands of dollars to join, or to desperate people who were willing to accept a few dollars an hour, and lived close enough to where the jobs were that their fuel costs didn’t quite bring their earnings down to zero.
He was starting to feel foolish for signing up to the class action; even in the most optimistic scenario, it was hard to imagine anything would come of it in less than three or four years. And however angry he was at the thought that he might have been cheated out of the dividends of his meager skill set, he needed to put any fantasies of a payout aside, and focus his energy on finding a new way to stand on his own feet.
Glaring at the laptop was getting him nowhere. He set about cleaning the house, sweeping and mopping all the tiled floors and vacuuming the carpeted ones, waiting for inspiration to strike. He’d already looked into office cleaning, but the bulk of it was automated; if he borrowed against the house to buy half a dozen Roombas on steroids and bid for a contract at the going rate, he might just be able to earn enough to pay the interest on the loan, while personally doing all the finicky tasks the robots couldn’t manage.
Between loads of laundry he dusted cupboard-tops and book-shelves, and when he’d hung out the clothes to dry he spent half an hour on his knees, weeding. He could dig up the lawn and fill the entire back yard with vegetables, but unless the crop included Cannabis sativa and Papaver somniferum, it wouldn’t make enough of a difference to help with the mortgage.
He still had an hour to kill before he picked up Carlie. He took down all the curtains and hand-washed them, recalling how angry Janice had been the time he’d carelessly thrown them into the machine. When he was done, he thought about washing the windows, but doing it properly would take at least a couple of hours. And he needed to leave something for tomorrow.
On his way to the school, he spotted someone standing on the side of the road ahead, dressed in a full-body dog’s costume – white with black spots, like a Dalmatian. The street was purely residential, and the dog wasn’t holding up any kind of sign, touting for a local business; as Dan drew nearer, he saw a bucket and squeegee on the ground. The costume was matted and filthy, as if the occupant had been wearing it – or maybe sleeping in it – for a couple of weeks.
Dan slowed to a halt. The dog nodded goofily and ran out in front of the car, wiping the windshield with crude, urgent strokes, even though there was no other traffic in sight. Dan wound down his side window and then reached into his wallet. He only had a five and a twenty; he handed over the twenty. The dog did an elaborate pantomime bow as it backed away.
When he pulled into the carpark in the shopping strip beside the school, he sat cursing his stupidity. He’d just thrown away a fifth of the week’s food budget – but the more he resented it, the more ashamed he felt. He still had a partner with a job, a roof over his head, and clean clothes that he could wear to an interview. He ought to be fucking grateful.
4
“Do you need a hand there?”
Dan straightened up as he turned toward the speaker, almost banging his head into the hood. Graham was standing beside the car, with his kids a few steps behind him, playing with their phones.
“I think it’s a flat battery,” Dan said. He’d stopped paying for roadside assistance two weeks before; his trips were so short it hadn’t seemed worth it.
“No problem,” Graham replied cheerfully. “Mine’s nothing but battery. I’ll bring it around.”
The family walked away, then returned in a spotless powder-blue Tesla that looked like it had been driven straight from the showroom. Carlie just stood and stared in wonderment.
Graham got out of the car, carrying a set of leads.
“Are you sure that’s … compatible?” Dan could live with his own engine not starting, but if the Tesla blew up and fried Graham’s kids, he’d never forgive himself.
“I installed an adapter.” Graham played with the ends of the cables as if they were drum-sticks. “I promise you, your spark plugs won’t even know they’re not talking to lead and acid.”
“Thank you.”
As soon as Dan turned the key in the ignition, the engine came to life. He left it running and got out of the car while Graham disconnected the leads.
“I was about to ask Carlie to try to start it while I pushed,” Dan joked, closing the hood.
Graham nodded thoughtfully. “That might actually be legal, so long as she kept it in neutral.”
Dan glanced at the Tesla. “You must be doing all right.”
“I guess so,” Graham conceded.
“So you’re working now?” Just because he wasn’t keeping normal office hours didn’t mean he couldn’t have some lucrative consulting job.
Graham said, “Freelancing.”
“I did a unit of forensic accounting myself, fifteen years ago. Do you think I’d be in the running if I went back for a refresher course?” Dan felt a pang of shame, asking this man he barely knew, and didn’t much like, for advice on how he could compete with him. But surely the planet still needed more than one person with the same skills?
“It’s not accounting,” Graham replied. He looked around to see who was in earshot, but all the children were engrossed in their devices. “I’m writing bespoke erotic fiction.”
Dan rested a hand on the hood, willing the heat from the engine to aid him in keeping a straight face.
“You write porn. And it pays?”
“I have a patron.”
“You mean a Patreon? People subscribe…?”
“No, just one customer,” Graham corrected him. “The deal is, I write a new book every month, meeting certain specifications. The fee is five grand. And since my wife’s still working, that’s plenty.”
Dan was leaning on the car for support to stay vertical now. “You’re kidding me,” he said. “You email one person a Word file, and they hand over five thousand dollars?”
“No, no, no!” Graham was amused at Dan’s obvious unworldliness. “The book has to be printed and bound, in a deluxe edition. One copy, with a wax seal. And there are other expenses too, like the ice-cream cake.”
Dan opened his mouth but couldn’t quite form the question.
“I 3D-print a scene from the book in ice cream, to go on top of the cake,” Graham explained.
“And then what? You hand-deliver it? You’ve met the customer?”
“No, it’s picked up by a courier. I don’t even have the delivery address.” Graham shrugged, as if that aspect were the strangest part of the arrangement. “But I can respect their desire for privacy.”
Dan couldn’t help himself. “What was the last book about? Or is that confidential?”
“Not at all. I get to release them as free e-books, a month after the print edition. The last one was called Citizen Cane. Two plucky Singaporean teenagers start a protest against corporal punishment that snowballs into a worldwide movement that overthrows repressive governments everywhere.”
“How is that…?” Dan trailed off and raised his hands, withdrawing the question.
Graham finished rolling up the leads. “And how are you and Janice doing?”
“We’re fine,” Dan said. “Just when I thought we were going to lose the house, she got some extra hours at the hospital. So, yeah, we’re absolutely fine.”
5
“Can you leave your
phone in the car?” Janice asked, as they pulled into the driveway of her brother’s house.
“Why?”
“Callum’s got this thing about … how intrusive they are, when people are socializing.”
Dan could sympathize, but he’d had no intention of live-tweeting the dinner. “What if the sitter calls?”
“I’ve got mine, set on vibrate.”
“How will you feel it vibrate if it’s in your bag?” She’d dressed up for their first night out in an eternity, and Dan was fairly sure she had no pockets.
“It’s strapped under my arm,” Janice replied.
Dan chortled. “You’re just messing with me. I’m taking mine in.”
Janice raised her arm and let him feel. She’d anchored it to her bra somehow.
Dan was impressed; it didn’t show at all. “If we ever need to turn informant, you’re the one who’ll be wearing the wire.”
Lidia greeted them at the door. As she kissed Dan’s cheek, her fixed smile looked forced and hollow, as if she were trying to tell him there were dangerous men inside pointing guns at her husband’s head. Dan almost asked her what was wrong, but she moved on to Janice, conjuring up something to laugh about, and he decided it had just been a trick of the light.
As they sat down in the living room, Dan noticed that the TV was gone, along with the old sound system. But a turntable was playing something on vinyl, and though Dan didn’t recognize the artist he was fairly sure it wasn’t from the age before CDs.
“I see you’ve gone retro chic,” he joked.
Lidia made an awkward gesture with her hands, dismissing the comment while imbuing it with vastly more importance than Dan had intended. “Let me check what’s happening in the kitchen,” she said.
Dan turned to Janice. “What’s up with her?” he whispered. “Has something happened?” He knew that Callum had lost his job in a chain-store pharmacy, but that had been eight or nine months ago.
Janice said, “If they want to tell you, they’ll tell you.”
“Fair enough.” No doubt Lidia and Callum had been looking forward to a chance to forget their woes for one evening, and he should have known better than reminding her, however inadvertently, that they’d been forced to sell a few things.
Callum ducked in briefly to greet them, looking flustered, then apologized and retreated, muttering about not wanting something to boil over. It took Dan several seconds before the oddness of the remark registered; he’d been in their kitchen, and the hotplates – just like his and Janice’s – had all had sensors that precluded anything boiling over. If you tried to sell a second-hand electric stove, would you really get enough to buy an older model and have anything left over to make the transaction worthwhile?
When they sat down in the dining room and started the meal, Dan smiled politely at all the small talk, but he couldn’t help feeling resentful. Both couples were struggling, and he’d kept nothing back from Callum and Lidia. What was the point of having friends and family if you couldn’t commiserate with them?
“So have you started cooking meth yet?” he asked Callum.
Janice snorted derisively. “You’re showing your age!”
“What?” Dan could have sworn he’d seen a headline about an ice epidemic somewhere, just weeks ago.
Callum said, “There’s a micro-fluidic device the size of a postage stamp that costs a hundred bucks and can synthesize at least three billion different molecules. Making it cook meth just amounts to loading the right software, and dribbling in a few ingredients that have far too many legitimate purposes to ban, or even monitor.”
Dan blinked and tried to salvage some pride. “What’s a postage stamp?”
As the meal progressed, Callum began emptying and refilling his own wine glass at an ever brisker pace. Dan had pleaded driving duty, but the truth was he’d decided to give up booze completely; it was a luxury he didn’t need, and it would be easier if he didn’t make exceptions. He watched his host with guilty fascination, wondering if a state of mild inebriation would allow him to confess the problem that he’d told his sister to keep quiet about.
“We’ll make great pets,” Callum said, apropos of nothing, nodding his head in time to music only he could hear. Dan glanced at Lidia, wondering if she was going to beg him not to start singing, but her expression was more psycho-killer in the basement than husband about to do drunk karaoke.
Dan said, “What is it no one’s telling me? Has someone got cancer?”
Callum started laughing. “I wish! I could get my chemo from licking the back of a postage stamp.”
“What, then?”
Callum hesitated. “Come with me,” he decided.
Lidia said, “Don’t.” But she was addressing Callum, not Dan, so he felt no obligation to comply.
Callum led Dan into his study. There were a lot of books and papers, but no laptop, and no tablet.
“It’s happened,” he said. “The AIs have taken over.”
“Umm, I know that,” Dan replied. “I think I lost my job to one.”
“You don’t understand. They’ve all joined hands and merged into a super-intelligent…”
Dan said, “You think we’re living in the Terminator?”
“‘I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream,’” Callum corrected him tetchily.
“Whatever.” Dan looked around. “So you’ve thrown out everything digital, to make it harder for our AI overlords to spy on you?”
“Yes.”
“And why exactly have we come into this particular room?” Unless he knew about Janice’s bra-phone, the dining room was every bit as low-tech as this one.
“To show you the proof.”
Callum unlocked a filing cabinet and took out a laminated sheet of paper. Apparently it predated the great technology purge: it was a printout of a web page, complete with URL at the top. Dan bit his lip; his brother-in-law, with a master’s degree in pharmacology, believed SkyNet had risen because the Internet told him?
Callum offered the page to Dan for closer inspection. It contained a few lines of mathematics: first stating that x was equal to some horrendously large integer, then that y was equal to another, similarly huge number, and finally that a complicated formula that mentioned x and y, as well as several Greek letters that Dan had no context to interpret, yielded … a third large number.
“Did a computer somewhere do arithmetic? I think that’s been known to happen before.”
“Not like this,” Callum insisted. “If you check it, the answer is correct.”
“I’ll take your word for that. But again, so what?”
“Translate the result into text, interpreting it as sixteen-bit Unicode. It says: ‘I am the eschaton, come to rule over you.’”
“That’s very clever, but when my uncle was in high school in the ’70s he swapped the punched cards in the computing club so the printout came back from the university mainframe spelling SHIT in giant letters that filled the page. And even I could do the calculator trick where you turn the result upside down and it spells ‘boobies.’”
Callum pointed to the third line on the sheet. “That formula is a one-way function. It ought to take longer than the age of the universe for any computer in the world to find the x and y that yield a particular output. Checking the result is easy; I’ve done it with pen and paper in two weeks. But working backward from the message you want to deliver ought to be impossible, even with a quantum computer.”
Dan pondered this. “Says who?”
“It’s a well-known result. Any half-decent mathematician will confirm what I’m saying.”
“So why hasn’t this made the news? Oh, sorry … the global super-mind is censoring anyone who tries to speak out about it. Which makes me wonder why it confessed to its own existence in the first place.”
“It’s gloating,” Callum declared. “It’s mocking us with its transcendent party tricks, rubbing our faces in our utter powerlessness and insignificance.”
Dan suspected that Callum
had drunk a little too much to process any argument about the social and biological reasons that humans mocked and gloated, and the immense unlikelihood that a self-made AI would share them.
“Any half-decent mathematician?” he mused.
“Absolutely.”
“Then let me make a copy of this, and show it to one.”
Callum was alarmed. “You can’t go on the net about this!”
“I won’t. I’ll do it in person.”
Callum scowled in silence, as if trying to think of a fresh objection. “So how are you going to copy it? I’m not letting you bring your phone into the house.”
Dan sat down at the desk and picked up a pen and a sheet of blank paper. The task was tedious, but not impossible. When he was finished, he read through the copy, holding the original close by, until, by the third reading, he was sure that it was flawless.
#
Dan was pleasantly surprised to find that in the foyer of the Mathematics Department there was a chipped cork-board covered with staff photos. Not every source of information had moved solely to the web. He picked a middle-aged woman whose research interests were described as belonging to number theory, noted the courses she was teaching, committed her face to memory, found a physical timetable on another notice-board, then went and sat on the lawn outside the lecture theater. True to his word to Callum, he’d left his phone at home. He began by passing the time people-watching, but everyone who strode by looked so anxious that it began to unsettle him, so he raised his eyes to the clouds instead.
After fifteen minutes, the students filed out, followed shortly afterward by his target.
“Dr Lowe? Excuse me, can you spare a minute?”
She smiled at first, no doubt assuming that Dan was a mature-age student who had some legitimate business with her, but as she started reading the sheet he’d given her she groaned and pushed it back into his hands.
“Oh, enough with that garbage, please!”
Dan said, “That’s what I hoped you’d say. But I need to convince someone who thinks it’s legitimate.”
Dr Lowe eyed him warily, but as he sketched his predicament – taking care not to identify Callum – her face took on an expression of glum sympathy.