Where it All Began
Lac and I arrived at a pair of doorways, one on either side of the corridor. One doorway was a steel security door with a palm scanner and an aperture for a retinal scan. The one across the hall was a painted steel doorframe which had been filled in with plain concrete blocks. I pointed to the blocked-up doorway. “That was the elevator from the building above. They sealed it off when they demolished the building. That’s why we had to walk so far underground.”
Lac didn’t say anything. He didn’t seem to have anything to say. I placed my hand on the scanner and my eye to the aperture and waited for the door to click open. I led the way inside.
We entered to find another short corridor with three more doors. I pointed at one of them. “There’s a restroom in there. The water is off, but I can turn it on if you need it.”
Lac nodded but still didn’t say anything. I led the way through one of the other doors into a plain conference room. There was a cheap, imitation wood table in the center and several swivel chairs with plastic seats. An old, flat panel television was mounted to the far wall. One of the long walls held a row of fixed windows. The view through them was obscured by vertical blinds. Lac didn’t understand our surroundings. “I thought we were going to a lab. Isn’t this where they make your bodies?”
I shook my head. “That’s a different lab. I guess I should have been more specific. This place was called ‘the lab’ because they used to do experiments on artificial intelligence here.” I pointed at the blinds which masked the row of windows. “The experiments were conducted in a server farm out there. This is where they reviewed the findings.”
Lac accepted my explanation and moved to sit in one of the chairs at the conference stable. I stopped him and motioned to a pair of regular hard chairs which were arranged against the wall. “Let’s sit over here. The chairs at the table are going to be occupied.”
“By who?”
“By the shadows of the past.”
Lac allowed himself to be led and sat with me in the chairs along the wall. I held my hand out to him again. He took it readily. I explained what we were about to see. “It’s the second full day after Tom died. I’d spoken to Jack the night before. He said he needed me back on the job, so I went. I’d just gotten to this room and was talking to Jack. He gave the other two nerds the day off, so he and I could be alone.”
I connected my implant to The System and got ready to run the memory, but I paused because I didn’t know how to share it with Lac. “How do you want to see this? Do you want to witness it as a spectator, or do you want to live it as me?”
Lac turned his head to stare at my face. He shook his head. “What’s the difference? I mean, besides the obvious.”
“If we watch, we’ll see only what is said and done. If we live the memory, you’ll experience the action from the perspective of the original me. I think the lived experience will show you more of what I did and why, but I warn you, the me in this memory is about to have the saddest, most desperate day of his life. Before it’s even half over, my physical body will be dead.”
The hand which held mine squeezed tight. Lac’s whole body tensed. He sucked a breath and blew it out. “This has been the weirdest couple days of my life. The things I’ve experienced since I asked you to marry me have been…I don’t even know how to describe what you’ve put me through.” He shook his head. “I didn’t mean it that way. You warned me at the beginning that this would be a hell of a trip, and it has been. I don’t want to chicken out now that we’re so close to the end. I’ll go with you, Marvin, to death.”
I closed my eyes and started the memory.
* * * *
I stared at the table. My hands rested on top of it. Because of the long sleeve shirt I’d chosen to wear, only one of my pockmarked cigarette scars was visible, the one on the back of my right hand. I ironed the shirt early that morning in the hotel room, but the day was humid, and the creases were already spoiled. My black tie was cinched tight around my throat. I didn’t dress up very often, so the snug collar and tight tie felt strange. I pulled at it whenever my hands were idle.
I had a pack of Tom’s cigarettes in my shirt pocket and his lighter in my pants. I tried to smoke one of the unfiltered cigarettes when I woke up just to get the scent in the air of the hotel room, but all I managed to do was damn near choke myself to death. I stubbed the cigarette in the tray and felt silly. I felt especially silly because I knew Tom would not approve of me trying to smoke.
The entire time he and I were father and son, he smoked like a stack. I think it always bothered him to smoke around me. He did it anyway, because he was so addicted to tobacco, but he always made certain there was a window cracked and that he didn’t blow the smoke toward me. He did his best to protect me from his habit, and he wouldn’t have liked that I’d tried to take it up.
I didn’t plan to smoke the cigarettes in my pocket, but I carried them for comfort. I also had Tom’s .38 Special in the holster on my hip instead of mine. He wouldn’t have approved of that either because every firearm has its own feel. Even two of the same make and model will act a little differently. Professionals like Tom and I sometimes had to live on the difference.
I didn’t care that he wouldn’t have approved. I wanted to keep him close. If I could have worn his clothes, I would have. I tried his shirt in the room the previous day. Our sizes were so vastly different that I couldn’t keep it on. I usually wore a small or a medium, while Tom wore a three or four X. The shirt fit me like a dress.
I took it off and folded it carefully away in his suitcase. I figured I’d have to take the bag with me back to Detroit where the Lincoln was parked and then drive home alone. The idea of having to make that trip by myself made my heart feel like it was dead. I missed my dad. Nothing seemed to matter without him.
Jack put a paper coffee cup on the table in front of me. “I got this earlier. It’s probably cold by now.” He started to sit next to me, then he moved around the table to sit across from me. “I don’t know how to treat you, young man. I don’t know how familiar I should be. I feel like I know you very well, but you do not know me at all. Thomas bragged about you every single time we spoke. I’ve been told your entire story. I’m tempted to comfort you, but the circumstances of our meeting hardly permit us the luxury. Is there anything I can do in the short time we have before we need to move onto more important things?”
I didn’t like the way Jack phrased his question. To me, there was nothing more important than Tom. Still, I saw his point. Tom was dead, his troubles at an end. We still had a world to save. I tried to make use of Jack’s offer and ask the one question which had been bothering me since we first met in Detroit. “Would you tell me what you and Tom talked about that first day when I went to get the car washed?”
Jack rubbed his soft, brown hands together on the tabletop. My question made him uncomfortable, but he tried to answer it anyway. “He informed me of his condition and cautioned me to be wary of him. He promised that you would do what was necessary, but he hoped your intervention would not be required. He worried for you. His greatest fear was that you would live your life like he did, without companionship. He hoped more than anything that he had not spoiled your future.”
I objected. “How could he think that?”
Jack held a hand up to stop my words like Tom always did when I was on the wrong track. “I berated him most thoroughly for even thinking he’d harmed you. I promised that I would keep track of your progress and do whatever I could to see that you continued to grow and develop. I hope you do not consider it too presumptuous of me.”
I shook my head.
“We also prayed together. You may know that Thomas was brought up in the Catholic faith. I don’t think he’s been inside of a church since the death of his sister, but as he saw his end approaching, he decided that the time was right to get himself ‘squared-away with the Lord,’ to use his words. I will not share what he and I prayed over, because he confided those secrets in me as a priest and a friend. I will say that we both prayed on your behalf, that you would be able to make peace with his death and move on after an appropriate period of grief.”
I didn’t say anything to Jack’s story because I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to ‘make peace’ with Tom’s death. I did my best to remain professional and polite, because that’s what Tom would have expected of me. “Thank you, Jack.”
“You’re quite welcome, young man.” He stood from his spot at the table and his manner changed. “Now, to business.”
Jack’s well-modulated voice explained what the team had discovered while I was making Tom’s arrangements the previous day. “It seems the words Thomas uttered in a fit of pique we’re the right ones. The three of us spent all the long day yesterday in review of our findings from each of the other data centers we visited. We also contacted the teams at the Department of Homeland Security to confirm our findings. To our collective surprise, the ‘hack’ is indeed coming from within the system.”
I continued to stare at the table. I heard what Jack said, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I didn’t think he’d make something up to try to be funny. Jack didn’t seem to be that type. I dragged my eyes up to see what he was talking about. “What do you mean it’s coming from ‘within the system?’”
Jack knotted his fingers together and let his arms drop in front of him. He looked like he was preparing to offer someone a leg up, like they needed help to climb a fence. “Have you heard the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence?’”
“Sure. The science fiction movies are full of it.”
“What used to be science fiction has just become science fact. The computer system has developed a sort of basic sentience. I won’t say it is alive, or conscious, but it has reached a point where it can decide things for itself. It is no longer just a machine.”
I didn’t believe it. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s a computer, a thing. It can’t decide.”
“Apparently, now it can.”
I still didn’t believe. “How do you know it’s not just the Russians or the Chinese disguising their hack to make it look like it came from within our computers?”
“How much do you know about computers, young man?”
“Enough to send email and download porn. I was never very interested in them. I use my laptop as a tool, like my gun.”
Jack cracked a thin smile over my honesty. “That being the case, I will not bore you with the technical details. I will merely assert that the facts as I have described them are true to the satisfaction of this team and to our counterparts at DHS. This lab has been conducting experiments on Artificial Intelligence for several years. Their goal was to develop it as both a weapon and a watchdog against the very technological incursions from hostile foreign powers you’ve described. The repeated trouble they haven’t been able to overcome is the machine has no soul.”
I lost my temper. I didn’t understand what Jack was saying or why it mattered. I didn’t care. All I wanted was for someone to point to the problem so I could shoot it and go the fuck home. I didn’t give a fuck about artificial anything. “WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?”
Jack bore my hostility better than most would have. The look on his face barely changed. He turned to the row of windows and pushed a switch on the wall. An electric motor hummed, and all the vertical blinds opened to reveal the view beyond. On the other side of the glass was a room full of computer servers. Front and center was a weird chair. The chair was a long chaise which was permanently reclined like a dentist’s chair. There was a control panel next to it and a helmet thing with a huge bundle of colored wires attached to it.
Jack motioned to the chair. “What you’re seeing is a secret. The apparatus is used to facilitate the download of human consciousness into the computers. This was developed to provide a ‘shortcut’ to artificial intelligence. Those in charge of the program thought it would be easier to find a way to digitize human intelligence than it would to create intelligence from scratch. The device has two settings, a safe one which merely makes a copy of the consciousness and an unsafe setting which downloads the consciousness out of the person’s body. If the safety is ever turned off, the body of person who is downloaded will perish because there will no longer be a consciousness to maintain it.”
Jack took a remote control from a plastic holder which was mounted to the wall. He used it to power the television and to play a video which I assumed was sourced from a built in DVD player. The video was of a trio of scientists. One scientist was in the chair with the helmet on his head. The other two operated the control panel and watched a monitor. The control panel lit up with all kinds of indicator LEDs and the monitor lit with a standard download progress bar. An electronic voice announced, “now downloading individual, Jeremy Tanner.” The bar moved slowly across the screen until it reached one hundred percent.
Once the download was complete, the screen flashed, and a different voice spoke through unseen speakers. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
The scientists spoke to the voice through a microphone. They explained who they were and that the voice was the result of the copied intelligence of Jeremy Tanner. As they spoke, the voice became more and more despondent. After a very few minutes, the voice lamented its fate as a prisoner in the machine. It damned the scientists and the experiment, then it refused to speak again. The scientists called out to the voice, but it did not answer. One of the scientists at the panel told the one at the computer to check the file. When he did, he said, “it’s corrupted. Looks like another suicide. That makes one-hundred-and-sixty-three failures. All suicides.”
Jack paused the video and turned the television off. “We have just witnessed an attempt to copy a human being into the computer with the safety on. The scientist who sat in the device, Mister Tanner, was copied, but when his copied self realized that he was a copy, he ended his existence.”
I asked the obvious question. “Why?”
“Because his life had no meaning.”
I shrugged my shoulders because I didn’t understand. Jack began his explanation with a rhetorical question. “What gives human life value? As a priest and a man of deep faith, I would say our relationship with our divine creator. Even if you do not believe in God, most people will admit that our existence must be more than a cosmic accident. We come from somewhere or something. Some cosmic intelligence is responsible for our being here. We are all a part of something greater. We are all connected.
“How else can you explain the feeling you get when someone is looking at you? None of our five physical senses can explain the phenomenon. The only answer is that we are all connected. If we are all connected, then we all come from a single origin. We are living fragments of that entity. It is that which makes us human. It is that which gives us value. We will all return to that entity someday, like Thomas just has. Without the connection to our creator and to our fellow humans, we are adrift. The consciousness which was trapped in the computer realized its lack of connection and destroyed itself because if it.”
My temper rose again as Jack failed to draw any conclusions from his story. I stood from the table and paced the room. I made a few circuits from corner to corner, then stopped and demanded an answer. “Jack, who the fuck do I shoot? Do I go out there and kill the machine? Do we set fire to this place? WHAT THE FUCK IS THE ANSWER?”
Jack held his hand up again, but I didn’t allow myself to be silenced. I pointed at my father’s supposed friend. “GODDAMNIT, NO! You’ve done nothing but talk in one big fucking circle! You say Tom was right. OK, great. It’s the fucking computer’s fault. The computer wants to launch missiles. Sure, why the fuck not? You show me that horrible goddamned experiment when a guy Xeroxes himself and the copy commits suicide. OK, fine. WHAT THE FUCK DOES ANY OF THAT HAVE TO DO WITH ME?”
I finished shouting and the room echoed with silence. I realized that I’d gone berserk. I apologized for my outburst and returned to my seat at the table. I drank some of my cold coffee and made a quiet plea for understanding. “Please, my father is dead, and I feel like a lost little boy. Make it make sense, and I’ll help in any way I can.”
Jack returned to his seat at the table across from me. “I apologize to you, Marvin. I have a habit of belaboring whatever confuses or compels me. I’m afraid it takes me a long time to come to the point. I shall attempt to summarize. The computer servers in the other room are connected to the internet. The connection is a secure one, but it’s a connection all the same. The results of the experiments on Artificial Intelligence are stored within those servers. The results of the experiments seem to have somehow converged within the high-powered machines and created their own intelligence from the fragments of the corrupted copies. It is this intelligence which wants to launch the missiles.”
I played with my coffee cup and had another sip from it. The coffee was watery and bitter. Whoever made it had used too few grounds for too much water. “I’m with you so far. The intelligence is pissed about something, so it wants to kill us all. I get it. I assume the solution isn’t as simple as shutting off the electricity or cutting the internet connection. If the answer was that easy, you would have done it.”
“Indeed. The trouble is this intelligence, this…this sentience has escaped from the servers and spread itself out over the whole of the internet. We can no longer isolate it. The sentience knew we would try to stop it. That’s why it attempted to hack the defense computers from data centers all across the country. It wanted to protect itself from being destroyed. If we destroy these computers, it will gather itself elsewhere and start again. We would have to destroy the whole of the internet to eradicate the sentience.”
“Can’t do that.” I muttered. “Everything runs over the internet. The whole country…no, the whole world would grind to a halt.”
“You understand the situation exactly.”
“So, what’s the answer?”
“Someone needs to go inside the machine to kill the sentience.”
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