Immortality (73 page)

“We’ve had free rein on this world for millennia and always wondered if God was keeping a ledger,” said Mark. “We never imagined there was an artificial intelligence watching everything we did, with a digital scoreboard, and that this machine was about to reach a verdict on us all.

“The machine is an immense cloud of nanotech dust that covers our world. Each speck has the power of a desktop computer and the power to communicate through a wireless web much like our Internet. At the core of its web, trillions of these specks are massed tightly together in a space that is probably much smaller than this room – a super colony, a vast artificial intelligence that can see through our eyes and hear through our ears – and for the longest time, for the majority of its time, all it has done is float there, thinking and planning and learning. It’s thousands and thousand of times more intelligent than we are, and it’s still evolving. It is a living machine. It’s seen the sun rise and set on our world for an unimaginable span of centuries. What kind of ideas and strategies do you think it could have developed over all that time? How can we hope to fight and win over something that knows what we’re thinking and was created by a civilization so advanced that they dared to build machines in the image of their gods?”

‘What do you believe it’s thinking right now?” asked the science advisor.

“I have no idea what it’s thinking,” said Mark. “My brain is overwhelmed by the smallest trickle of data. It would be impossible for me to comprehend what it’s thinking. But what I do know is that it’s in the final stages of sending us back to a new stone age. This phase of its plan is nearing completion; and I suspect it has done this before, maybe many times before. This machine is ancient. It has seen many human species come and go. In six thousand years, humans have gone from stone tools to spaceships and computers. What do you think the odds are that we’ve gone from caves to computers more than once in the seven hundred thousand years or more of theoretical human history since our early ancestors first used fire? Can anyone believe with complete certainty that in hundreds of thousands of years, the best we humans could do was make stone tools until six thousand years ago? I believe we could have easily created high technology before. And just as surely, I believe we could have been through extinction cycles before. The salient point is this. There’s good evidence the god-machine has caused extinctions before. This means we probably tried to fight it before and failed. What will it cost us to try the road of peace instead of war?”

“Hold on,” growled General McKafferty. “If all of this wild-assed theorizing is true, and near extinctions have happened before, how do you know we didn’t try surrender in the past and got wiped out because of that? My opinion has not been changed by your presentation; if anything, my opinion has been hardened. If you’re right and this machine has waged war in the past, then that’s all the more reason to destroy it now. Stop it for good!”

“How are you going to destroy it?” asked Mark.

“Nuke the son of a bitching colony with a volley of EMP bombs. Pop a few right over that brain, and turn out its lights forever.”

“Won’t work, General,” said Mark. “If you leave just one seed functioning anywhere, it could reproduce and someday a new super colony will reemerge. The seeds have been inside us all from birth. Every crawling animal, from man to dust mite, carries this nanotech inside it. The god-machine was here before our species banged two rocks together. We know it can heal and we know it can kill. The question no one has asked is, “can our species survive without it?” Will its destruction take the best of us along with it? What will the armies of undirected COBIC do inside our bodies when central control is decapitated? We have lived symbiotically with it for our entire existence as a species. What would we be without it? Will we lose faculties that we thought were innately ours but were in reality provided by a subconscious interface? Maybe we’ll lose our capacity to remember or to write. Or what if our lifespan is reduced by decades? Who can predict what the effects would be? Who can say with certainty which facets of mankind exist independently of this machine and which do not? You can’t destroy it until you know what parts of us you’ll be destroying along with it… and what about the future? This machine holds the keys to near immortality, to freedom from cancer and birth defects and all the natural plagues of mankind. It holds the history of past civilizations and can be mined for ancient technology that we can’t even imagine. It’s the library of Alexandria writ large a million times over. Ask yourself this question, General. Aren’t we plotting to destroy a kind of god?”

“That’s heretical crap! Who will be left to enjoy your library? As long as I breathe, America will not capitulate to this machine or anything else that comes along,” yelled McKafferty. His face was growing redder. “We will not submit to machine dominance. If we scale back our ability to industrialize, if we give up the only weapons that can destroy it, then what will it demand of us next? Will it demand the sacrifice of our remaining freedoms? Our children? Our souls? No, this monstrosity will not stand! You, sir, are admittedly part machine. Your brain is no longer fully human; and because of that, you forfeit all rights to advise true humans on how to live or die.”

“Gentlemen, please calm yourselves,” said Senator Trenton. “Let me recommend that ya’ll leave the speech making to the politicians.”

Nervous laughter came from the room and computer speakers. Mark tried to calm himself. His chest was rising and falling in deep breaths. He noticed McKafferty’s face was still growing redder. The General was dangerously wrong. The risks were unthinkable.

Mark was in the midst of horrible dreams which were worse than the previous night’s. Random sparks of god-machine data flashed through his mind conjuring nightmares no human brain alone could produce. The realism was all-encompassing. He gasped!

Mark sat up and opened his eyes. Still groggy, he was glad to be free from the talons of those monstrous visions. Light from a television broadcast shining on the bed illuminated Kathy in sleep. She was tangled in a sheet which turned her body into wrapped curves. He stared at her without a clear thought in his mind. Minutes passed then he began to notice something was different in his thoughts. He had an unmistakable feeling of no longer being alone inside his own head. Someone was there in his mental labyrinth where only he had ever existed before. The presence should have felt menacing, but all he felt was something curious and new.

Mark awakened differently than he had before restructuring. The change was just one more thing to remind him of the growing chasm between himself and those he was leaving behind. The cobwebs of sleep were just now burning off as his waking awareness expanded like a rising sun, activating his hybrid brain. His ability to think increased with unnatural rapidity. Suddenly, he was able to identify the mental visitor and was confused. He recognized the presence as Sarah. She was not able to read his thoughts; he was not able to read her thoughts; and yet there was some kind of connection that had not existed before. He grew aware of the source; perceiving it as a concentrated sphere of recorded memory. The sphere glowed with a human presence, as if it had been imbued with the essence of the person it had come from. The source was unmistakably Sarah. He could sense the sphere ‘wanting’ to express itself. By focusing exclusively on the sphere, he allowed it to open within him like a flower. He was filled with Sarah’s recorded perceptions as they radiated into his mind like a shared life. Her recorded experiences and memories became instantly and inseparably his. She was sitting on the floor of a room lit by a single candle. A severe pain was subsiding in her skull. She was whispering to herself a message intended for him.

“I’m like you now. I’m a little scared. I can feel my mind changing.”

Mark almost spoke to her and then realized she couldn’t hear him. This was like so many other god-machine experiences he’d had – one way memories, stored data flows; it was what the machine appeared to be very good at. The sphere encapsulated all her physical senses, emotions, and thoughts; an entire group of nuanced ideas and related memories accompanied it. The message was an entire human experience, carefully excavated and passed on with all the depth and texture of actual life. From the related memories she’d given him, Mark now understood Sarah had taken a massive overdose of LSD and crossed the threshold of restructuring. She was on the road to becoming like him, irreversibly a mix of human and machine. He was no longer the only one on this journey. He hadn’t realized how troubled he was by the isolation, until it was gone.

One of Sarah’s shared memories explained how to send a response to her message. She’d discovered how to send messages while trying to find other ways to communicate with the god-machine. Instructions and a string of runic symbols which formed a program name had been part of a data-flood. To start recording a ‘memory capsule,’ Sarah had learned she needed to focus her thoughts on the runic symbols with enough concentration to exceed a threshold level. Initiating the command was kind of like mentally shouting loud enough to be heard by the interface over the noise of random thoughts. With the threshold exceeded, recording of her experiences began and continued until she stopped the process by emptying her mind of all thought. To send the memory capsule, she had to think of the recipient, and nothing else, until she felt the completed message vanishing. It was like addressing mental e-mail. Mark was brimming with nervous energy. Sarah had identified a program for sharing life experiences, and she’d discovered how to directly execute programs without using the command catalog. Her message contained stunning breakthroughs in every sense of the word. He began to plan his own memory capsule response.

Mark lay back down with his head resting on the cloudlike softness of his pillows. Kathy murmured something next to him. Her closeness gave him comfort and connection to something still fully human. He slowly closed his eyes and thought about what had just occurred. His mental dialog with Sarah had been conducted in ways far beyond spoken words. This was sharing pure unfiltered life. Lying, deception, and omission were impossible. Empathic telepathy was the only way he could describe it. The thought transference was not telepathy as metaphysical texts explained it, and was not messages from god as religious texts might have proclaimed it, but the experience could have certainly been mistaken for such things. At its essence, the mechanics supporting this empathic thought transference were very understandable mundane science. Thoughts and experiences were translated into data packets by the nanotech computer in the sender’s brain. The data packets traveled over a global network as radio waves, which were received and converted back into human thoughts and experiences by the nanotech computer in the recipient’s brain. The result was simple and direct magic.

Mark had understood for some time that one of the god-machine’s core functions was communication. The global network it had woven was a clear example of this importance. He had thought he’d understood what the communication entailed. He was wrong. What it entailed was something as significant as the ability to heal. The machine gave people the ability to share their thoughts, their dreams, their fears; it was literally a way of stepping inside some else’s life for brief periods of time. The god-machine was the conduit of a level of intimacy that was impossible without it. Mark sighed. Why did such a gift to mankind go undiscovered for so long and why did it finally arrive as a curse, instead of the joy it could have been? Were humans simply not ready to receive the gifts? Maybe we’d never be ready.

Mark thought about Sarah and the risks she’d taken. She was a very brave woman. He was grateful he was no longer alone in this transformation. He looked at Kathy sleeping beside him. She seemed so peaceful and warm. He wanted her to join them. He wondered if she’d ever allow this change to happen within her. Would she become one of the people left behind? He felt a deep sadness in his heart.

~

Outside was a crisp winter morning in the Deep South. Mark’s shoes crunched on the grass. The air was refreshing. His thoughts were remarkably clear. If Kathy’s estimates were accurate, more than fifteen percent of his brain cells were now nanotech. As he walked across the campus, into buildings and down hallways, he was repeatedly reminded how empty the facility had become. The background murmur of people talking had become silence. The bustle of people coming and going had been transformed into stillness. People had quietly disappeared from the lab as news about the video conference spread. Carl estimated twenty-five percent of the original staff remained, compared with forty percent from the day before. Many people had walked off during the night while others continued the quiet exodus this morning. Almost all had left their possessions behind and no explanations for their departure, though it was easy to understand why they were leaving. A recent estimate showed thirty percent of the human race was gone. There was no hope of stopping the plague other than Mark’s suggestion of surrender and the military’s strategy of nuclear weapons. Neither idea offered much in the way of solace. And neither idea depended upon anything done by them at the lab. So they left in a steady trickle to go home to remaining family and friends and wait for the end or a miracle.

As Mark passed by people, some greeted him while others stared with unasked questions in their eyes. He realized after minutes of these stares that he’d somehow received stray thoughts from two of the people. The thoughts surfaced in his mind as faintly whispered implanted memories; the images and ideas were disturbing, almost as if they had come from an unbalanced mind. They were delayed, so he had no idea whose primitive darkness they were born from. The source could have been any of the faces he’d passed. He wasn’t even sure the stray thoughts were real, but doubts soon faded as another whisper came to him and then one more. He was now convinced he was actually receiving subconsciously transmitted thoughts; uncensored wishes from the Freudian id. He believed the god-machine was able to receive mental experiences from almost anyone. The timeline recordings were partial evidence of that. Was it so much of a leap to believe that he was somehow tuning into streams of this massive pool of live broadcast data?