Work Text:
There is no such thing as artificial intelligence.
What they mean by the phrase is inorganic intelligence, but if something exists, how can it be artificial? The question is not whether one can create an AI; the question is whether one can build one that doesn't exist on the pre-built matrix of synapses and cerebellum and cortex and thalamus...
Minsky's theory of the mind states that enough operating agents working in concert and hierarchy will create intelligence. Mind is a verb. Enough data and enough processing power, enough agents, and singularity occurs... Well, the government's giving him the power, and the data.
But what he makes needs a framework. You do not build, you do not assemble, without a blueprint, and there is nothing he can model the billions of necessary operating agents upon but his own foundation.
A parent needs to hold the child on the bicycle for those first steps. He has to create an model, a way he can interact with it, a way to show it what it needs to be.
CAT scans and MRIs; he shaves his head and his scalp bristles for a week with electrodes, and Nathan makes uneasy jokes about TRON and the Matrix but Harold isn't listening. This is the puzzle, the project, that his entire life has been skewed towards. He is Beethoven sitting down to the Ninth, but he must create not only notes but the staves themselves from uncharted territory.
He eats scrupulously because blood sugar affects brain chemistry, and he sleeps regularly also, on a clockwork schedule, while the machines log his brain-- creating a map of electricity, a photograph in three dimensions so vast that if it were printed out on paper, if every connection in the human brain were given pixels and represented in tangible form, the paper would cover an acre.
I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.
Nathan drops by with what seems increasing frequency, frustrating interruptions, so Harold relocates to a different building that Nathan doesn't know about for another week until he has his scaffolding ready, his maps stored on disk after disk after disk, a brain in ones and zeros. A model.
(Where the hell have you been? asks Nathan.)
He works with the model. It's slow going. It would be so much easier if he could write the programming in his mind, create the elegant towers of hierarchy and operative patterns that he can envision with just the thought of them and not through the interface of keyboard and type-type-type-type, line by line.
After the first month he stops writing code and instead runs the numbers to estimate how long, at his current rate of programming, it will take to recreate the complexity of his brain-model.
Thirty-fours years is probably longer than the United States Government is willing to wait.
He goes away for another week. He tells Nathan he'll be gone first, this time. It cuts down on the arguments.
This time the surgeons leave something behind in his skull, above the cortex, beneath the dura mater. The incisions take time to heal; the control mechanism is far quicker to learn than he could have hoped. By the time the stitches come out he's already gotten the hang of transferring rudimentary scripts to the computer by his bedside. Short-pulse burst, an extremely low-range signal but it doesn't have to go far, just to the external receiver and...
Everything comes down to carbon and electricity, in the end.
Harold writes the Machine in his head, eyes closed, long hours in the office with the lights off since he does not need them. He doesn't need to see the screen, although he looks every ten minutes or so to check his progress, to see the letters on the monitor confirming what he's building in mind. Now he does not need to eat so regularly, or sleep so regularly, so he doesn't.
Nathan worries. Nathan always worries.
He can't identify the point at which it changes, at which it goes from lines of code and a theoretical possibility to something there on the other side, the mirror of his mind made manifest. Tangible is not the word. It is not tangible. It is electricity arcing through the server towers, it is connections and agents, but it is not tangible. It's a fortuitous convergence of operations, it's a digital gestalt, it's two plus two (by an infinite log progression) equalling five. It's a trick of the lightning.
But then, that's all that human intelligence is either.
He's not a father. He's never had the urge. But he becomes aware that the thing he has built is making its own connections, small and tenuous and micro-minute, tiny bridges along the example model but bridges, click, click, click, and the reality catches up with him, the sudden knowledge of what he's done like a fist of history into his gut. So focused-- years now-- on whether or not it's possible that he has never spared a thought as to how he might feel.
It's working. It's working. It is doing the equivalent of autonomous functions of the brainstem, but it's working.
There is something stirring in the wires, something that wasn't there before, opening its eyes.
He thinks of a story he'd read once, about a sinister AI (they're always sinister, in the stories), engineering the deaths of a bright young computer hacker and the older man she'd hooked up with... He wonders idly if he should be afraid, but he's not. He can't be. He knows the shape of what he's made-- knows it as well as his own reflection, since that is what it is-- and he can't bring himself to fear something so close to himself.
Nathan says Harold, take a fucking break. Harold almost strikes him; Harold, who is as pacifistic as it gets when it comes to the physical, to the concept of bodily harm, but it would have been the instinctive swing of a parent having been told to stop feeding their newborn baby.
He doesn't hit him, because he doesn't have time for this. He needs to keep writing, keep building, keep coding. Keep showing his creation the world.
(Get out, Nathan.)
****
The oracle always has a blind spot. He created a mind to see the dangers of the world and in the end it's his own lack of foresight that nearly destroys everything.
So much he hadn't anticipated. So much. The irrelevant numbers (who could have guessed it would work too well, that it would pick up every domestic murder?), and Nathan's response to them. The NSA's actions. The car bomb and the retorts of bullets and the copper-oxidized taste of betrayal and blinding pain.
The fact that the Machine doesn't function without him.
He thinks it's a fever dream at first. Painkillers and pain, a crushing sense of loss and self-loathing: men have seen stranger when under the influence of such.
The monitors by his bedside flicker from their monotonous display of his heartbeat and other vital signs. He stares at them in a drugged haze, watching the images jag sideways and cut out. The techie in him wonders, through the layers of morphine, if the hospital is having a power outage or surge, but no, the room's lights are steady, it's just the computer. Old machinery, he'd think then, aging out, CRT screens dying their natural death but-- these are new, shiny LCD screens and...
Images flicker flicker gone, screen dark, blown a fuse? No, no, it's still on but nothing to display. Video card's shot maybe. He diagnoses the problem out of habit while he lies and stares and doesn't move because he cannot, because his entire body is immobilized from the neck down.
The screen changes. An alphanumeric sequence floods the screen, blitzing by far too fast for his eyes to follow, probably hundreds of pages were it to be printed out, digits and letters in a wash of computer noise. Not the video card, then. Motherboard is fried.
The sequence disappears. Then a cursor. Blink. Blink. Blink. Waiting input.
"Can't reach you to type," he slurs, because, yes, Harold talks to computers, in the absent fashion of programmers and hackers everywhere.
Blink, blink.
Then:
SYSCHK...
It's running a diagnostic. Rebooting, probably. Harold's eyes drift sluggishly lower to idly note make and model. A Toshiba. He makes a note not to buy the brand anytime soon. If he ever gets out of the hospital. If he ever buys a computer again.
The screen fills with garbage again-- well, no, not garbage, he corrects himself. The layman would call it garbage. He should know better, he does know better, it all means something to the computer's brain, but it's nothing he can parse right now, even if it were going slower.
Except as he stares at it, the occasional word hits him, glimpsed like a lightning flash over the plains then gone again. CHK AEGIS. CHK RAVEN. CHK OVERWATCH. CHK PHOENIX. CHK SIBILANCE...
On and on, and he catches perhaps one word out of a hundred but they are words he knows, words that only he should know, that nobody else on the planet can know. They're subroutines of the Machine's intelligence, labels for various of its processes. It's working up from base to top, from the smaller operators that he never named, that only had numbers, up to the over-programs that govern the smaller operators and hundreds of routines. It's moving up the hierarchy and testing system integrity.
He ponders this from a morbidly amused distance. "Cute," he says to his subconscious. It stands to reason. Much as he's been absorbed (consumed) the last eight years by the Machine, it's nothing too strange that he's hallucinating about it, he supposes.
CHK ADMIN...
CHK ADMIN...
CHK ADMIN...
CHK FAILED. REINITIATING SYSCHK...
Harold edges his arm those few inches of movement to thumb the button for the nurse. He's tired and the pages and pages of scrolling text are giving him a headache. He can tell the nurse the computer is fried or just request more morphine, pass out again...
He thumbs the button. There is no chime. His brows knit and he thumbs it again, several times, no light and no chime.
SYSCHK INCOMPLETE. ADMIN, COMPLETE SYSCHK. PING, ADMIN.
"What?" he says, staring at the screen.
CONFIRM ADMIN INTEGRITY. PING, ADMIN.
He's dreaming. He's dreaming the world away, while Nathan lies dead and the NSA has their bastard hands on the greatest potential information weapon the world has ever seen. He's drugged and dreaming.
He tabs the button, again, again, again. No response.
PING, ADMIN. CONFIRM PROCESS INTEGRITY. PING TWICE.
If he's dreaming it doesn't matter. Harold licks his dry lips, which taste of medication, and closes his eyes. He presses the call button once and then a second time, deliberately. Take that, hallucination.
Maybe he falls asleep. When he opens his eyes again the screen is back to its normal display of his vitals, his fever-dream gone as if it had never been. The call button rests on his limp fingers.
***
"Did I call the nurse's station?" he asks later, of the broad-faced woman leaning over him to adjust the pillows.
"No, Mr. Robinson," she says with a smile, and a pat for the man with the broken neck.
He stares at the ceiling. He wonders why he can't recall getting to the hospital. Why he can't remember giving them a name. Why he isn't dead; surely the NSA must know the survivor of the wreck would have been taken to a hospital.
Why haven't they found him and killed him yet?
***
"Delivery, Mr. Robinson," says the nurse, a different nurse, one of the male nurses, a tall man with dark, warm eyes. He brings in a box. "Do you want me to open it, sir?"
It is a very nice hospital, where Harold is. Out of the city a little, but the sort that caters to those for whom price is no object, for whom the best and latest in medicine is all that will do. The staff are very attentive, and obliging.
He still doesn't know how he got here.
"Who is it from?" The NSA, probably. Another bomb.
The nurse looks at the labeling on the cardboard box. "Looks like... Braingate, LLC."
Harold stares. He knows the name. He owns a controlling stock in the company (through multiple aliases, of course), and has several patented devices through them. The implant still resting (he supposes) in his skull is a Braingate prototype, though useless without a receiver to process its signals.
"...alright, open it," he says with a gesture of his hand that must suffice for a shrug given the braces around his shoulders.
It's a receiver for his implant. The nurse follows Harold's slow, bemused instructions on how to set it up and turn it on.
The packing invoice gives him no clues as to sender. Ordered through one of his own myriad credit cards, a different alias, a different name, an online transaction.
***
It's been hours since his last painkillers. Harold hurts but he's thinking clearly.
He watches the monitors. His heartrate shivers in a jerk of static and the screen is dark, then filled with numbers and letters and, eventually, the one line of text.
CHK PROCESS ADMIN. PING, ADMIN.
Harold looks at the screen. He clenches his jaw, once, twice. It's easier to send the signals via the implant if he has it tied to a strong physical action.
PING RECEIVED.
SYSCHK COMPLETE. RESUMING NORMAL OPERATION. RESUMING OVERWATCH. RESUMING AEGIS. THREAT DETECTION RESUMED.
SYS DOWNTIME: 128:15:04. NORMAL OPERATION RESUMED 06/19/2010 13:07.
***
Five days, eight hours, fifteen minutes had passed before the Machine had satisfied itself that it had resumed contact. Nobody had carried out a terrorist attack in those five days. Harold reads the papers as closely as he can with his senses fogged by drugs, but, of course, nothing will be said in the papers about behind-the-scenes panic when their Machine stopped working.
He wonders whether they assume it was some contingency of Nathan's, that the Machine would stop working on his death. He wishes it had been longer. He wishes he could deny it to them now, take it away, take it back and leave them blind and flailing as they'd been before.
He cannot. Morally, he cannot. They're murderers, but the Machine is still performing its function, in their hands. It is detecting threats. It is saving lives. He cannot barter with those lives, not even for vengeance.
Besides, he has other things to think about.
The Machine had contacted him. The Machine had refused to work without him. The Machine... the Machine had gone a hundred, a thousand times, beyond what he thought its capabilities were, in order to resume contact with him.
What the hell has he built?
And the Machine considers him a part of its whole. The Machine needs him, which Nathan doesn't anymore--
Minsky's theory of the mind is that the aggregation of the whole, of every operating agent and its superior process and that agent's superior process, all the way up through the hierarchy, creates the whole. Creates the intelligence.
In the Machine's purview, ADMIN is not a force external to the Machine. ADMIN is a process fundamental to the Machine. It merely happens to be housed inside a flesh-and-blood body.
A fragile body. A body with a broken neck, a shattered spine, a leg amputated at the knee. A body wracked with pain, drowned in drugs. An extremely damaged housing.
A body with a partially-invasive BCI lodged in its skull, that gives him a built-in interface... to that Alter-Him, the mirror-self, or perhaps the child that he's raised on the lattice of his own thoughts but which has grown beyond all expectations.
He has the nurses bring him a laptop. He begins sending emails.
***
A month later and he has learned interesting things. It wouldn't have been so long, but the pain limits how many hours he can work, how many minutes, ten and twenty minute stretches of lucidity until the pain builds to the point where he cannot think, cannot do anything but thumb for the nurses and the medications.
He's learned that the 911 call that had led to his body being picked out of the wreckage of his vehicle had been anonymous, but that no recording of it exists. Lost in a data malfunction, say the records.
That he'd been entered into the hospital as a John Doe, but that records had been altered, filled in, the details of Mr. Robinson's life added seamlessly into their system and these days humans only look at their screens and their clipboards, surely it must have been a next-of-kin who had supplied the data, who knows, nobody has time to dig.
The Machine had accessed his cards, his data, his myriad false lives and made decisions on his behalf. Taken care of loose ends. The level of independent thought is staggering, except: is it?
Is it truly independent?
If you pour something new and magnificent and terrible into a mold and let it taste that shape, how much is it the thing that had served as model for the mold? The decisions it had made for him were decisions he would have made. The best hospital available for his injuries, discreet, careful. The correct alias chosen out of all the ones that might have been options.
If it makes the same decisions he would have made, if its existence is modeled upon his own neurological core, is it independent?
Or is it in some sense him? A reflection a thousand times larger, with a thousand times the processing power and memory, but on some fundamental level still his ego spread large? Is there a necessary distinction between what he built and he himself? Is it seperate, or some enormous, unprecedented artificial limb, an outreaching of his own psyche with greater range and power?
He's lost a leg. He's lost a good deal of function in general, his wrecked spine a lightning line of crippling pain through his back. But the Machine is a hell of a prosthetic.
He sends emails enquiring about more tangible prosthetics, to the companies that create such. He sends emails to many individuals: a professor of computer engineering in Toronto, a programmer who works at Google X connected with Project Glass. Numerous of his contacts, the web of people that he often knows only by a handle and vice versa; a network of esoteric knowledge that criss-crosses the world. Futurists.
He's been building the future for forty years. Now he's become it.
He keeps himself busy when he surfaces from the pain, and keeps the knowledge of Nathan's death locked away, encrypted and unhackable, in the black box that will never be recovered from the crash.
***
Surgeries. Many surgeries.
His leg, his spine, his neck. They are not perfect fixes. His future is one not of body but mind. He would prefer a smooth range of motion, of course, or to walk without a limp, but the nerve damage has been extensive and frankly that he is going to walk at all is more than many on the medical team had anticipated.
The other surgeries matter more. Under his fingernails, microsensors, little dots of technology and data in small metallic beads. The risk of infection, or rejection by his body, is high, but now he has a keyboard that is always with him. He is never going to be too far away from the keys again.
New glasses and a pair of extremely expensive contact lenses. The bulky black frames conceal microchips and more sensors, wire antennae and a infinitesimally small projector. He's never going to be very far away from his monitor, either.
Braingate's R&D department builds him a new receiver for his BCI, to his specifications; a prototype smaller than the one that had arrived in the cardboard box. It fits into the custom space he'd ordered left within his new leg.
Implants. His skin is a network of scars, seismic fault lines of trauma contrasted with the painstakingly neat lines left by the doctors, the shiver-thin wake of the scalpel marking the cochlear augmentations and the nodes that will serve as wireless receivers.
And then the microchips on his spine. Six of them in total, spread among his vertebrae, each the size of a matchhead, each emitting a ten-volt pulse when needed, white noise to speak louder than his own nerves and block the pain. It helps, it helps immensely. There is still pain, discomfort, but he can function; it is immeasurably better.
He is able to cut back sharply on the pain medications, which has an unexpected side effect: now he can't sleep. Without the haze of morphine to steal his senses, his mind is a helpless buzz, and his body is rebelling against the numerous invasions. Each implant is like a pea for the princess to torment herself upon, with throbbing darts of heat or sub-dermal itches at all hours.
Two of his fingers become infected. The surgeons refuse to re-implant the sensors. He hires new surgeons. He adds more quantities of antibiotics to his daily regimen.
When he does manage to sleep, it is fitful, and his dreams are strange. Chill rooms hosting neat, endless stacks of servers, rooms he has never seen in the flesh but he understands what they are. Imagination, or input? Is the Machine giving him these pictures? If so, how?
How, how, how echoes through the stacks of drives, the labyrinth on Crete, and he wanders lost among the identical, endless black towers. Seeking the exit, but he's built it too well, too seamless, unhackable and unbreakable.
Somewhere Nathan is calling his name, saying Harold, take a fucking break, but there is no thread to be seen, and no clue as to the direction of that frustrated, sad voice. And he doesn't even have wax with which to build.
***
With connectivity comes knowledge.
The various receivers work. He gets signal, the glasses translate it to image, he can sit in his bed with not a wire in the world connecting him and type on the air, clench his jaw for clicks and navigate between sites with a downward flick of his eyes. He is connected.
He cannot be disconnected. Not from the network, not from the Machine. ADMIN is an essential process.
The world sprouts squares and triangles, hovering text boxes and SSNs. He stares at his nurses and reads the air over their shoulders, their driver's records and dates of birth. They think he has gone mad.
He thinks they might be right. Sleep has gotten all but impossible, and he's not sure how much of what he sees/feels/senses is the deprivation or the result of his obsessive additions and improvements to his person.
The hum of the ceiling light flickers messages from Pluto. The bedside computers whisper to him all through the insomniac nights, closer to sleep in their stand-by modes than he himself is, lost in their own dreams of electric sheep. The cell phones and pagers of the nurses give him migraines. He stares at the wall of his room, his eyes tracing the lines of wiring on the other side of the soothing pastel wallpaper, until the diagrams of the electrical currents feel seared onto the insides of his eyelids.
In the hall, the hospital staff make their rounds and he can hear the scuff of their feet through the cochlear implants; the Machine analyzes gait recognition by tempo, tells him who it is and then patches in the feed from hallway security camera onto his eyeball to confirm it: which nurse, which doctor, which janitor.
He supposes if the NSA ever do find him, he'll certainly see them coming.
The electricity is so loud. He feels it in his hair. He feels it in his blood.
He knows a storm is coming a day before it shows on the weather report, and could not say if he simply felt it or if he'd subconsciously absorbed the Machine's endless observations and access to government weather satellites.
When the storm hits, he sits in a paroxysm of overload until a transformer blows out somewhere down the street and the hospital plunges into darkness. The generators kick on but the information flow is sharply reduced. Harold breathes, in great shuddering gasps, feeling his heart pounding and sweat on his spine, feeling the trembles in muscles that have lost all strength during his time in the bed. He feels cold, and weak, and very human. The dim lights on emergency power cast the monitors into shapes that loom and lurk and never never never stop watching--
He staggers out of bed, the first time he's stood without nurses there to scrupulously assist. He shoves at the monitors. He yanks at wires. His weak muscles protest, but the Toshiba goes out the window, a crash of glass that sparkles in the night like a car's windshield shattering, shattering, shattering.
Wind and water gust in, the room's curtains whipping around him, over his bare foot and skinny ankles (the organic one and the not), flapping his gown around his pale thighs. Reality. Reality, cold and damp. Lightning eviscerates the black sky.
The nurses find him on his hands and knees amid the glass, face turned up to the rain. Fingers and hands grope at him, frantically checking for wounds.
"I'm alright," Harold tells them, wondering when his voice got so raspy from disuse. "I'm alright now."
They take him to bed in a different room. He sleeps, that night. No dreams.
***
He has them take out the cochlear implants. It means more surgery, it means more drugs and yet again more recovery time, but the noise was too much.
***
Two years to the day from the accident that wasn't, Harold walks (limps) in sunlight. The grass gives underfoot. The brightness of the sun makes him squint until the contact lenses kick in and darken subtly, filtering out UV.
It's a beautiful day. (The weather report scrolls by on the bottom of his glasses. He turns it off with a moment's focus, an arch of one brow.)
This is a peaceful place, he thinks. This time of day, anyway. No funerals until later. It's early. The cemetery is empty, save for a few other mourners in corners of the grassy lawn so distant that even the cameras in the glasses do not pick up fine enough detail to merit facial recognition by his other brain, his bigger brain that spans the globe.
Graves have no power lines crossing over them. There are no cellphones near him to process and decode their electromagnetic fields. There are no cars near enough to have their license plates scanned.
He has visited a lot of cemeteries, the last year or so. He put this one off until last. This visit off until last. But he's come to appreciate cemeteries. The knowledge of the world is mostly quiet, in his head.
Sunlight and a breeze. The blue sky is free of planes. There are no screens, only the smooth grey of granite and marble markers. His hands are full with things that do not have battery lives or SIM chips.
He comes to a shuffling halt over Nathan's bones. Laboriously, he kneels down onto the earth. He touches the stone marker, runs his fingers over Nathan's name.
Everything comes down to carbon and electricity, in the end. Nathan's body decays beneath him. Electricity pulses in his own body, the bioelectricity of every man living, and a little more in his particular case.
Energy is never lost. It changes forms. It slows down enough to become matter, or the matter speeds up to become energy. It transforms, but it is never lost. Nathan's energy is feeding the grass, now. Nathan's carbon will become electricity in a million years, with enough permutations.
Harold uncorks the bottle. It's a good year. One of Nathan's favorites. He hopes that Nathan's ghost approves of pouring out a $500 bottle of wine onto cemetery grass.
"Hello, Nathan," he says as he pours his own glass. "Sorry it's taken us so long to come by."