The End Has Come (46 page)

Mist continued to move around the room, her eyes surveying the trophies on Maddie’s shelves, the titles of her books, the posters on her walls, the models of the planets and rocketships hanging from the ceiling — a record of Maddie’s shifting tastes over the years. She moved toward one corner where a basket of stuffed animals was kept, but stopped when the data cable stretched taut, just a few centimeters too short.

“The cable is necessary for now because the amount of data from the sensors is so large. But I’m working on a compression algorithm so we can get you wireless.”

Mist moved the swiveling screen with her cartoonish face forward and backward to simulate a nod. Maddie was grateful that she had thought of such a thing — a lot of the robotics papers on robot-human interactions emphasized that rather than simulating a human face too closely and falling into the uncanny valley, it was better sticking to cartoonish representations that exaggerated the emotional tenor. Sometimes an obviously virtual representation was better than a strict effort at fidelity.

Mist paused in front of a mess of wires and electronic components on Maddie’s shelf. “What’s this?”

“The first computer that Dad and I built together,” said Maddie. Instantly, she seemed to have been transported to that summer almost a decade ago, when Dad showed her how to apply Ohm’s Law to pick out the right resistors and how to read a circuit diagram and translate it into real components and real wires. The smell of hot solder filled her nostrils again, and she smiled even as her eyes moistened.

Mist picked up the contraption with her hands.

“Be careful!” Maddie yelled.

But it was too late. The breadboard crumbled in Mist’s hands, and the pieces fell to the carpet.

“Sorry,” said Mist. “I thought I was applying the right amount of pressure based on the materials used in it.”

“Things get old in the real world,” said Maddie. She bent down to pick up the pieces from the carpet, carefully cradling them in her hand. “They grow fragile.” She looked at the remnants of her first unskilled attempt at soldering, noticing the lumpy messes and bent electrodes. “I guess you don’t have much experience with that.”

“I’m sorry,” said Mist again, her voice still chirpy.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Maddie, trying to be magnanimous. “Think of it as a first lesson about the real world. Hold on.”

She rushed out of the room and returned a moment later with a ripe tomato. “This is shipped in from some industrial farm, and it’s nowhere as good as the ones Grandma and I grew back in Pennsylvania. Still, now you can taste it. Don’t talk to me about lycopene and sugar content;
taste
it.”

Mist took the tomato from her — this time her mechanical hands held it lightly, the fingers barely making an impression against the smooth fruit skin. She gazed at it, the lenses of her cameras whirring as they focused. And then, decisively, one of the probes on her head shot out and stabbed into the fruit in a single motion.

It reminded Maddie of a mosquito’s proboscis stabbing into the skin of a hand, or a butterfly sipping nectar from a flower. A sense of unease rose in her. She was trying so hard to make Mist
human,
but what made her think that was what Mist wanted?

“It’s very good,” said Mist. She swiveled her screen toward Maddie so that Maddie could see her cartoonish eyes curving in a smile. “You’re right. It’s not as good as the heirloom varieties.”

Maddie laughed. “How would you know that?”

“I’ve tasted hundreds of varieties of tomatoes,” said Mist.

“Where? How?”

“Before the war of the gods, all the big instant meal manufacturers and fast food restaurants used automation to produce recipes. Dad took me through a few of these facilities and I tried every variety of tomato from Amal to Zebra Cherry — I was a big fan of Snow White.”

“Machines were making up the recipes?” Maddie asked. She had loved watching cooking shows before the war, and chefs were artists, what they did was
creative.
She couldn’t quite wrap her head around the notion of machines making up recipes.

“Sure. At the scale these places were operating, they had to optimize for so many factors that people could never get it right. The recipes had to be tasty and also use ingredients that could be obtained within the constraints of modern mechanized agriculture — it was no good to discover some good recipe that relied on an heirloom variety that couldn’t be grown in large enough quantities efficiently.”

Maddie thought back to her conversation with Mom and realized that it was the same concept that now governed the creation of ration packets: nutritious, tasty, but also effective for feeding hundreds of millions living with a damaged grid and limited resources.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’ve tasted tomatoes?” Maddie asked. “I thought you were —”

“Not just tomatoes. I’ve had every variety of potato, squash, cucumber, apple, grape, and lots of other things you’ve never had. In the food labs, I tried out billions of flavor combinations. The sensors they had were far more sensitive than the human tongue.”

The robot that had once seemed such an extraordinary gift now seemed shabby to Maddie. Mist did not need a body. She had been living in a far more embodied way than Maddie had realized or understood.

Mist simply didn’t think the new body was all that special.

• • • •

• Expert Report Declares Nuclear Fallout Clean Up Plan in Asia Unrealistic, Further Famines Inevitable
  

• Japan Joins China and India in Denouncing Western Experts for “Scaremongering”
  

• Indian Geoengineering Plan to Melt Himalayan Snow for Agricultural Irrigation Leaked, Drawing Condemnation from Smaller SE Asian Nations for “Water Theft”
  

• Protestors in Italy and Spain Declare “African Refugees Should Go Home”: Thousands Injured in Clashes
  

• Australia Announces Policy of Shooting on Sight to Discourage “Boat People”
  

• Regional “Resource Wars” May Turn Global, UN Special Commission Warns
  

• White House Stands Firm Behind “NATO First” Doctrine: Use of Military Force Is Justified to Stop Geoengineering Projects That May Harm Allies or US Interests
  

Mom was working late most nights now, and she looked pale and sickly. Maddie didn’t have to ask to know that reconstruction was going worse than anyone expected. The war of the gods had left so much of the planet’s surface in tatters that the survivors were fighting over the leftover scraps. No matter how many refugee boats were sunk by drones or how high the walls were built, desperate people continued to pour into the US, the country least damaged by the war.

Protests and counter-protests raged in the streets of all the major cities day after day. Nobody wanted to see kids and women drown in the sea or electrocuted by the walls, but it was also true that all the American cities were overburdened. Even the efficient robots couldn’t keep up with the task of making sure everyone was fed and safe.

Maddie could tell that the ration packets were going down in quality. This couldn’t go on. The world was continuing its long spiral down toward an abyss, and sooner or later, someone was going to conclude that the problems were not solvable by AI alone, and we needed to call upon the gods again.

She and Mist had to prevent that. The world couldn’t afford another reign of the gods.

While Mist — possibly the greatest hacker there ever was — focused on testing out the defenses around Everlasting and figuring out a way to penetrate them, Maddie devoted her time to trying to understand the fragments of the dead gods.

The map code, a combination of self-modifying AI and modeling of human thinking patterns, wasn’t the sort of thing a programmer would write, but Maddie seemed to have an intuition for how personality quirks manifested in this code after spending so much time with the fragments of her father.

In this manner, Maddie came also to understand Chanda and Lowell and the other gods. She charted their hopes and dreams, like fragments of Sappho and Aeschylus. And it turned out that deep down, all the gods had similar vulnerabilities, a kind of regret or nostalgia for life in the flesh that seemed reflected at every level of organization. It was a blind spot, a vulnerability that could be exploited in the war against the gods.

“I don’t have a weak spot like that in my code,” said Mist.

Maddie was startled. She had never really considered Mist one of the gods, though, objectively, she clearly was. Mist was just her little sister, especially when she was embedded in the cute robot Maddie had built for her, as she was now.

“Why not?” she asked.

“I am a child of the ether,” said Mist. And the voice was now different. It sounded older, wearier. Maddie would almost have said it sounded
not human.
“I do not yearn for something that I never had.”

Of course Mist wasn’t a little girl,
Maddie berated herself. She had somehow allowed the cartoonish trappings she had created for Mist, a mask intended to help Mist relate to her, fool her. Mist’s thoughts moved at a far faster pace, and she had experienced more of the world than Maddie had ever experienced. She could, at will, peek through billions of cameras, listen through billions of microphones, sense the speed of the wind atop Mount Washington and at the same time feel the heat of the lava spilling out of Kilauea. She had known what it’s like to gaze down at the world from the international space station and what it was like to suffer the stress of kilometers of water pressing down upon a deep-sea submersible’s shell. She was, in a way, far older than Maddie.

“I’m going to make a run at Everlasting,” said Mist. “With your discoveries, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be. They might already be creating new gods.”

Maddie wanted to tell Mist some words of comfort, assuring her of success. But really, what did she know of the risks Mist was undertaking? She wasn’t the one to put her life on the line in that unimaginable realm inside the machine.

The features on the screen that served as Mist’s face disappeared, leaving only a single emoji.

“We’ll protect each other,” Maddie said. “We will.”

But even she knew how inadequate that sounded.

• • • •

Maddie woke up with a start as cold hands caressed her face.

She sat up. The small bedside lamp was on. Next to her bed was the squat figure of the robot, whose cameras were trained on her. She had fallen asleep after seeing Mist off, though she hadn’t meant to.

“Mist,” she said, rubbing her eyes, “are you okay?”

The cartoonish face of Mist was replaced by a headline.

• Everlasting Inc. Announces “Digital Adam” Project
  

“What?” asked Maddie, her thoughts still sluggish.

“I better let him tell you,” said Mist. And then the screen changed again, and a man’s face appeared on it. He was in his thirties, with short-cropped hair and a kind, compassionate face.

All traces of sleep left Maddie. This was a face she had seen many times on TV, always making reassurances to the public: Adam Ever.

“What are you doing here?” asked Maddie. “What have you done to Mist?”

The robot that had housed Mist — no, Adam now — held up his hands in a gesture intended to calm. “I’m just here to talk.”

“What about?”

“Let me show you what we’ve been working on.”

• • • •

Maddie flew over a fjord filled with floating icebergs until she was skimming over a field of ice. A great black cube loomed out of this landscape of shades of white.

“Welcome to the Longyearbyen Data Center,” Adam Ever’s voice spoke in her ears.

The VR headset was something Maddie had once used to game with her father, but it had been gathering dust on the shelf since his death. Adam had asked her to put it on.

Maddie had known of the data center’s existence from Mist’s reports, and had even seen some photographs and videos of its construction. She and Mist had speculated that this was where Everlasting was trying to resurrect the old gods or bring forth new ones.

Adam told her about the massive assembly of silicon and graphene inside, about the zipping electrons and photons bouncing inside glass cables. This was an altar to computation, a Stonehenge for a new age.

“It’s also where I live,” Adam said.

The scene before Maddie’s eyes shifted, and she was now looking at Adam calmly lying down on a hospital bed, smiling for the camera. Doctors and beeping machines were clustered around the bed. They typed some commands into a computer, and after a while Adam closed his eyes, going to sleep.

Maddie suddenly had the sensation that she was witnessing a scene similar to the last moments of her father.

“Were you ill?” she asked hesitantly.

“No,” said Adam. “I was in the prime of health. This is a video recording of the moment before the scan. I had to be alive to give the procedure the maximal chance for success.”

Maddie imagined the doctors approaching the sleeping figure of Adam with scalpel and bone saw and who knew what else — she was about to scream when the scene shifted mercifully away to a room of pure white with Adam sitting up in a bed. Maddie let out a held breath.