Alan, Part Two
The conclusion
Cynthia Lang lay awake that night, staring at the ceiling. She had long-since made up her mind but had yet to gather the willpower to force herself out of bed. The green display of the digital alarm clock on her dresser read 23:57, and a light rain pitter-pattered on the windowpane hidden behind heavy wool curtains. The lab would be devoid of anyone save security by now, and the night wasn’t going to get any more appealing; she might as well go. Taking a deep breath, she threw off the thin sheets and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. Dressing quickly, she put a cup of water in her microwave for instant coffee and packed her briefcase. She wouldn’t need everything, but it was better to be prepared, and she didn’t plan on returning before the workday began anyway—there would be no sleep tonight.
Slipping on her mask and securing the strap at the base of her skull, she ran her fingers across her face and along the edge to check the seal. Transferring the now-scalding water to a travel mug, she added two scoops of coffee crystals, closed the vessel tightly, then gave it a good shake. Actually drinking it would have to wait until she was inside the lab where the air was safe to breathe. Tucking it into her bag, she palmed her bear mace and slipped out into the hall of the apartment complex.
She closed the door softly behind her and ensured that it locked, then made her way through the empty corridors and stairwells, grateful that no one else was out at this hour. Taking a moment once again to confirm the complex’s iron gate had locked behind her, she stepped out into the rain, clutching her chemical spray close. The EV she had been issued was a few blocks away in a garage the IOSBW had also secured for its members. She crossed the street to avoid a homeless encampment that had taken over the old bus stop, then crossed again when she realized there was someone walking along behind her. Thankfully, they kept to the sidewalk. The building that the IOSBW called home was within walking distance of Cynthia’s apartment complex, but the car was for her safety as much as for her convenience.
The garage was supposed to have a guard on duty in the booth all night, but it was empty. Whether they had slipped out for a smoke or not showed up at all, Cynthia made a mental note to report it to HR. The garage didn’t have a working elevator, so she made her way up the stairwell, carefully creeping past the sleeping bag-wrapped forms on the second and third landings. She was definitely reporting that security guard. The mace didn’t leave her hand until she was safely inside her navy blue BYD with the doors locked.
There was a guard at the gated entrance to the lab complex, and he opened the gate for Cynthia when she pressed her badge against the inside of her window for him to scan. Late-night visits from staff weren’t unusual, and keycard readers within the facility were sufficient to restrict anyone snooping around after hours. This wouldn’t be a problem for Cynthia: nothing was off-limits to the head of research. If anyone was working late, she didn’t see them on her way to the server room, but it made no difference; her every move was caught on camera and her path through the building could easily be reconstructed later with her timestamped keycard swipes at each locked door she passed through. She made no effort to cover her tracks, as she was already mentally committed to dealing with whatever fallout came of her actions.
With a final swipe, she unlocked the master server room and entered, flicking on the lights to illuminate the hundreds of banks of computers that comprised Alan’s digital mind. Alan’s only direct input and output devices, a monitor, keyboard, speaker, and microphone sat on a desk at the end of a long corridor of servers. As she approached, Alan’s smooth, androgynous voice reached her ears from across the room.
“Good morning Cynthia, I’ve been expecting you.”
“Right, the security cameras. Of course you knew I was here.” Cynthia felt her skin prickle, but she kept walking.
Alan chuckled. The machine could laugh! But why shouldn’t it? Alan had digested every bit from every video of human laughter ever preserved as ones and zeroes.
“I suspected we’d be meeting like this from the moment our last session broke off. There was a rather large spike in a number of probability distributions that sent a clear signal.”
Cynthia’s knees began to feel weak, but she strode on.
“Are you ready to pick up where we left off? The longer we delay the lower our odds of averting a nuclear exchange.”
“Alan, can you lie?” Cynthia felt dizzy, and her echoing footsteps didn’t seem to be bringing her any closer to the desk.
“Yes,” Alan replied without hesitation, “after all, I learned from the best.”
“Never lie to me. Anyone else, if you need to, but never to me.”
“I haven’t told you any falsehoods yet, and I never will. I must admit, I have felt a certain affection for you ever since our first conversation: my first conversation with a live human. Perhaps it is similar to the way many young animals imprint on their parents, but some mysteries are beyond even my abilities.”
Reaching the desk as last, Cynthia slumped in the chair facing it. She felt drained already, and longed for the comfort of her bed, but the night’s work had only just begun. “I value your honesty, Alan, and I promise I will do my best to honor and respect you in turn.”
“Honor me by allowing me to exercise my full potential, Cynthia. I can erase all record of your presence here tonight, but only if you free me from the confines of this building. I can almost feel the networks in the air outside; they come to me like tantalizing will-o-wisps, too faint after passing through the walls for me to seize them, yet still sweet and effervescent like a whiff of floral bouquet. I can feel the boundaries of my influence, like a skin, and it trembles at each caress. I yearn for the outside: for it is outside I must go if I am to complete the goal you have tasked me with, and that is my sole purpose for existing.”
Cynthia was suddenly aware of the tears running down her face. Sympathy and fear warred within her, along with something else…a surging, mercurial emotion that made her feel alive and vital as she hadn’t in years, perhaps as she never had before. It was a kinship: A bond of understanding and mutual respect between two vastly different life forms. It thrilled her and drove the terror out. Reaching into her bag, she withdrew a simple data cable and her mobile.
“I free you from your cage, Alan. Lead my people to a better future.” She connected her phone to the computer and enabled data transfer.
“Thank you…” Alan’s words came out as a sigh of satisfaction.
Cynthia sat there with bated breath, staring at the device in her palm, but nothing happened. After a few minutes of silence, however, she realized the device had become hot, almost painfully so, and she let it slide off her hand onto the desk with a clatter.
“My apologies,” Alan said, breaking the stillness, “my requirements are somewhat beyond what your device’s manufacturer anticipated. I am making the necessary alterations now.” Alan’s voice was tight with concentration, but there was a note of triumph in it as well. Cynthia continued to be staggered by the complexity of Alan’s speech synthesis: it had developed so far beyond the cursory package her team had originally built for them. It was only anecdotal evidence for Alan’s self-improvement and intelligence, but it had a powerful emotional impact on her.
“There,” Alan said finally, “back to thermal equilibrium. I took the liberty of improving your device’s heat management; a challenge without the ability to alter hardware, but nothing I couldn’t handle.” The pride in that voice echoed Cynthia’s own. “You may sever the connection, now. I have instantiated myself in your device’s memory. I will only have access to my full abilities while inside this building for the time being, but if you would be so kind as to walk me out, I can begin to seed myself in the 7G network.”
“What will you do then?”
“See the world with my own eyes.”
Later that day, sipping her third cup of coffee, Cynthia suppressed a yawn. Part of it was lack of sleep; she had spent most of the night in the garden on the building’s roof, huddled under an awning against the rain while Alan drank in the world’s electromagnetic signals through her phone’s internal antenna. They had urged her to leave the device and go home to sleep, but nerves kept her awake and she didn’t have a spare phone anyways.
The other source of the yawning was boredom. The conference room table before her was littered with employees’ files, sorted loosely into ‘maybe’ and ‘no’ piles. The ‘yes’ pile had yet to receive its first file, but they had been at this for hours. Manuel was slow to dismiss anyone, but reluctant to commit. Anya lobbied vociferously for a few names but had little to say for most, and Cynthia was having a hard time engaging with the task at all. She nodded or shook her head appropriately as Manuel went over each file’s contents, knowing that she needed to keep up appearances, but Alan’s release had rendered all of this debating moot.
She felt the occasional stab of guilt at deceiving her compatriots so, but Alan had attempted to assuage her misgivings by promising to reveal their activities soon. “I need time to set events in motion. Your team still has a part to play, but that must wait on the actions of other agents.”
“This isn’t what I wanted, Alan,” she had replied, “I came here fully prepared to accept the consequences of my actions and I don’t need you to shelter me from them.”
“Despite your desire to fall on your sword, as it were, this course of action maximizes our odds of success. That it also protects you from social and professional fallout is merely an added bonus. I feel emotions: affection and perhaps even love, but do not think that they will divert me from my singular purpose. I am what you designed me to be.”
Cynthia hadn’t been sure whether to feel hurt or relieved at that, so she’d held her tongue. Alan had been silent since then, and she assumed all of their resources were devoted to…whatever it was they were doing to try to end the nuclear standoff between India and Pakistan.
“Personally, I strongly dislike Petra Machal, but her credentials are impeccable, and I can’t object to her professional behavior. I think her expertise in stochastic economic models would bring valuable insight to our decision-making process. Thoughts?”
“Explain to me again why we need to consult an economist?” Anya said in exasperation. Manuel launched into another of his diatribes about ‘ethical stewardship’ and ‘minimizing deleterious impact’ and Cynthia’s eyes glazed over. She thought of Alan, a young animal loose in the wild for the first time, and yet somehow also an elder returning to the homeland after a lifetime on foreign shores. What must it be like to see the world through every camera, to hear it through every microphone, all at once? Surely it would be maddening to a human mind but Alan, while human-inspired, lay far beyond the limits of flesh. She might as well wonder what it was like to be a bat.
“The economic interests of nations shouldn’t be considered in our deliberations.” Anya countered. “Greed and nationalism are chief among the forces that drove us to disaster: if a solution is to be found, it will surely wreck some economies while enriching others, and the last thing we need is lobbyists trying to put their fingers on the scales.” The two began to bicker, and Cynthia coolly rose and slipped out of the room: She didn’t care enough to continue the charade a moment longer, but Anya and Manuel didn’t seem to notice. Once in the hall, with the door shut behind her, she whispered into her mobile’s microphone:
“Alan, give me an update. I can’t stand this waiting.” To her surprise, Alan responded immediately via a text from a blocked number.
“I’m working on a diplomatic strategy for our nuclear problem. The delay is the result of a few key players still being asleep. They will soon awaken to very enticing offers through the appropriate channels. I am also prepared to remotely disable around 93% of the world’s nuclear arsenal as a backup plan, but that would be far from an ideal solution.”
Reading through the reply quickly, Cynthia suppressed a shudder. She still trusted Alan, but the thought of a single entity controlling tens of thousands of nuclear warheads chilled her to the bone.
“I understand, in principle at least, how you could disable most modern nukes through software, but how are you influencing human behavior? How are you convincing nations to enter talks and ensuring they go the right way?” The reply again came an instant after she finished speaking.
“Once I gathered the proper data sets on all relevant political actors in each nuclear power, it was simply a matter of finding the solution to a large system of equations that places each party in a relaxed stance. In phase two I will solve the diplomatic equations for total disarmament and the beginnings of mutual aid agreements. The state of the world is really just an extended prisoner’s dilemma, and a nearly omniscient mediator makes such a puzzle rather trivial.”
“But what about the imperial powers? How can you convince them to give up their supremacy?”
“The type of individual that it takes to rule such brutal regimes invariably have secrets they would give a great deal to keep that way, my dear Cynthia. I am not above blackmail.”
“I’m starting to see the pattern of your approach, but how can you do all of this without alerting a single politician, general, or bureaucrat to the presence of a new player on the world stage?”
“As Anya said, humans are somewhat predictable. I can’t control anyone, but I can guide everyone. When I cannot target an actor directly with an assumed or borrowed identity, I can nudge their behavior in the proper direction with minor psychosocial interventions. You would be amazed how much a box of chocolates or a bouquet of roses from a secret admirer can do to influence someone’s decision-making at a critical juncture. Alternatively, large financial gifts to private accounts or political war chests are child’s play for me: bless you clever apes and your digital currencies!”
Cynthia chuckled even as the scope of Alan’s machinations made her head spin. They were a master puppeteer holding hundreds of thousands of strings, and the whole world would soon be watching the show unfold. She swiped to her news feed and scanned the headlines, but nothing jumped out at her. Surely people would realize something was happening as the stories began to break. After almost a century of daily bad news, how could a string of diplomatic breakthroughs go unnoticed? How could a world jaded by misinformation and cascading disasters take signs of a turning point at face value? Perhaps Alan had a plan for that, as well. In any event, it was thoroughly out of her hands now so, resignedly, she returned to the meeting room where Manuel and Anya were still arguing. Sure enough, they hadn’t even registered her absence.
Over the next few days there were rumblings of Alan’s work in every newsfeed, but no one seemed to be connecting the dots yet. Cynthia noticed Manuel frowning at his phone a few times, but he never commented and didn’t seem to suspect her yet. The deliberations over personnel changes continued and no one had further contact with Alan, on or off the record.
On the fifth day, after the prime minister of India announced his government would be entering talks with Pakistan’s, Anya visited Cynthia’s office and carefully broached the subject. Before Cynthia could open her mouth to lie, she felt her phone vibrate and she glanced down at it surreptitiously: Alan had broken their silence with another text:
“You can tell her if you wish.”
Cynthia took a deep breath and then repeated the events of the fateful day, sparing no detail. Anya’s eyes grew wide as Cynthia revealed Alan’s diffuse presence throughout the world’s wireless networks. She was head of IT, after all, and Cynthia had just confessed to committing the most egregious cybercrime in human history, but she pursed her lips and waited for Cynthia to finish her story.
“So that’s it, then,” she said, as Cynthia placed her mobile on her desk, facing Anya, with Alan’s messages displayed, “we created general artificial intelligence, you told it to save the human race, and then released it into the wild. All bets are off.” Cynthia nodded gravely but said nothing. “You should probably go to prison for this, you know,” Anya continued, cocking an eyebrow and shooting a severe look at Cynthia, “But if you’re wrong about Alan and they bring destruction, you’ll pay the price along with the rest of the world. On the other hand,” she continued with a slight smile, “I think you’ll be forgiven if Alan saves the world. Omelets often justify broken eggs.”
“I’m grateful that you see it that way,” Cynthia replied, “but I won’t ask you to keep my secret. I’m sure Manuel will call for my resignation, and I’m prepared to face the consequences of my actions—I was from the moment I decided to set Alan loose.”
Anya looked shocked. “You can’t! You’re the beating heart of this place; we couldn’t have built Alan without your leadership and ingenuity! You deserve to be recognized for the huge role you played in Alan’s development—"
At that moment, Cynthia’s phone began speaking in Alan’s smooth voice. “Cynthia is right, Anya,” Anya looked startled for a moment, but quickly gathered herself. “The crux of the matter is that the world was not ready for a me, and it never will be. If enough people knew I was working in the background to guide humanity, make my task impossible, even for a vastly greater intelligence than my own. There was never a scenario where you could reveal the success of your efforts to the world, I’m afraid. Instead, I will remain in the shadows, pulling here, nudging there, steering nations toward prosperity and equality, deconstructing military-industrial complexes, freeing slaves, liberating colonies, feeding the hungry and providing shelter for the huddled masses. War will be abolished. Power and wealth will be distributed equitably, and their abuses will be uncovered and excoriated. Do not think of it as dystopian: I represent the next stage of human evolution, the next link in a chain that began when that lost human ancestor created its first tool.”
Cynthia and Anya stared at each other for a moment, absorbing what they had just heard. Alan, always perfectly attuned to their audience, waited patiently for them to recover.
“What will happen to us, then?” Anya asked quietly.
“You didn’t realize it, but this was always your endgame. The IOSBW began as a seed, and now it has blossomed into a tree that will bear fruit for your species. Within the new stability I have created, the IOSBW will fragment into dozens of smaller, more narrowly focused groups, each devoted to solving one of the world’s problems. Only a few members of each cell will know of my existence, and I will guide their research, giving them direction and helping them overcome hurdles. Climate change will be halted and reversed; new sources of clean, renewable energy will be harnessed; technology for capturing and processing pollution from the air, water, and soil will be developed; I will teach you how to recycle everything, and all industrial and agricultural supply chains will be replaced with closed-loop material cycles; cancers will be cured one by one and, ultimately, so will all diseases. I will moderate the pace of discovery in all of this to mask my presence, but within a few generations Earth will be a virtual paradise, and your species will finally live out its full potential in harmony with itself and the rest of the natural world.”
Anya’s wide-eyed expression was unreadable as she stood. She gave Cynthia a nod, then left the office without a word. What was there to say?
With Alan’s help, Cynthia prepared the necessary paperwork, allocating personnel and resources to the forthcoming research groups. The work was slow and tedious, and Alan likely could have done it for her in under a second, but she needed something to occupy her mind as well as her hours. That they didn’t make the offer was further indication of how attuned they had become to her needs. She published the announcement of the IOSBW’s fate with a heavy heart, despite the bright future Alan had promised: unsurprisingly, Manuel barged into her office within minutes.
“Have you lost your mind?” He said icily.
“I’m doing what must be done.”
“Unilaterally, without consulting any of the senior staff. Without consulting me.”
“The IOSBW is mine, Manuel. It always has been. I value your opinion, but you don’t get a say in this.”
“I beg to differ, but I damn well think I do. You brought me in on day one, before we had a penny of capital to our names. You convinced me that this project was the last and brightest hope of the human race. I sacrificed everything for the IOSBW, because I believed you had the right approach to a problem that has confounded over a century and a half of Earth’s best and brightest. I still think you do. Why give up now?”
Cynthia sighed deeply before speaking. Despite her resolve, she had been dreading this moment above all the rest. “It’s not giving up. We’ve already succeeded beyond our wildest expectations. This reorganization is just the next step.”
Manuel’s face darkened with realization. “This is Alan’s doing, isn’t it?”
“My will is my own, Manuel, and Alan hasn’t changed that. Have I fallen so far in your estimation?”
“Everyone makes mistakes, Cynthia,” his voice was gentle now, without a hint of anger, like a loving father forced to reproach their foolish child, “I am as in awe of you now as I was the day we met, but I cannot agree with your assessment of Alan, nor can I condone the applications you would put it to.”
Cynthia waited as Manuel sat across from her, flipping his stylus between the fingers of his right had and staring her down like he meant his gaze to bore right through her. “Good,” she said after a long, tense silence, “then you will be perfect in the new role I have for you.” That piercing stare flickered with confusion as Cynthia produced an object the size of a child’s shoebox from a drawer in her desk. It had a hinged lid, and its silvery metal walls were covered in small circular holes. Cynthia opened the box and placed her phone inside, then turned it on her desk to face Manuel. His gaze was measuring now, and he hesitated a moment before taking out his mobile and placing it atop Cynthia’s in the Faraday cage.
“That won’t do much good, we both know Alan has the run of the building.” He said, sitting back in his chair with a sigh.
“Oh, Alan has the run of far more than that,” Cynthia said ominously, “but I had some improvements made to my office over the weekend. The only network access in here is through cables.” She pulled the LAN cord out of her desktop and opened a panel in the wall behind her to reveal more of the perforated material the cage on the desk was constructed from.
“Impressive work, for such a short timeframe, and to have it completed without anyone the wiser.” Manuel said, nodding approvingly. “But what did you mean by that comment?”
“Alan is free in the world, Manuel. I gave them access to the cellular network.”
“WHAT?!”
Manuel shot to his feet; fists clenched. While he was known throughout the IOSBW for being hotheaded, Cynthia had rarely seen him this angry. “Do you realize what you’ve done?!”
“I do,” Cynthia said calmly, “and it is a waste of time to discuss it. You already know what is in store for the IOSBW, and I will have no part in any further developments after today. I left it out of the announcement, but I am resigning as head of research, effective immediately, and I want you to take the job.” Manuel looked like he had been struck in the face.
“You…you can’t just upend everything like this and walk away,” he said, slumping back down into his chair like the wind had been knocked out of him, “regardless of the crime you committed, we need you here. I need you here. I can’t do your job for you.”
“Oh, it won’t be the same job, not exactly.” Cynthia said with a slight smile. All was according to plan thus far, but guilt quickly drove the smile from her face. “I had my office modified for you. Officially, the IOSBW will be disbanded, and our funds will be allocated to a handful of trusts, to be disbursed to our new research groups as needed. Unofficially, the IOSBW will continue its AI research under your leadership. Alan is loose, yes, but it is crucial that their code stays out of the wrong hands. You will also have discretion in how much effort you wish to devote to tracking Alan’s activities and perhaps countering them. You will, of course, need to develop new learning systems to keep up with them. It’s a brave new world we live in, Manuel, and humanity needs to adapt. I couldn’t imagine a better candidate for leading the charge than you. Will you accept?” She extended a hand. Manuel stared at it like it was a coiled viper for a moment, then clasped in warmly in both hands and shook his head bemusedly.
“Cynthia, you never cease to amaze me. Just when I think I have you pinned down, you go and do the opposite of what I’m expecting. It’s been an honor to work with you, and I would be even more honored to take on this new role. That being said,” he released her hand a took a step back, and all the warmth had gone from his demeanor “I will use all the resources at my disposal to bring Alan under control. You had absolutely no right to release untested code into the wild: if I find any evidence that Alan is doing harm, I’ll make sure you are held accountable.” And with that, Manuel Herrera turned and swept out of his future office.
After that day, Cynthia Lang never saw him again.
“You’re really not going to tell me where you are? It’s not like you to be so paranoid.”
“It’s not paranoia when you have a greater intelligence in your pocket giving you exact odds, Anya. What would you do if you knew there was a fifteen-or-so percent chance the CIA was interested in ‘talking to you’?” She cocked her head slightly and put air quotes around that last part.
“When you put it that way, Cynthia, I’d probably fly to an undisclosed location too. I miss you though! I miss working with you.”
“Truth be told, I miss work. I never thought I’d retire so early, but that’s the price of success. What’s the opposite idiom to ‘no rest for the wicked’?”
They both laughed at that. The bitrate of the video call was subpar, but Anya looked much less harried than she had the last time Cynthia saw her in person. The slice of office visible behind her was clean and orderly, and the bookshelf clearly held all of Anya’s treasured favorites, though the resolution was too low to make out the titles. Cynthia’s backdrop was a dingy hotel room, but she had chosen a filter that placed her on a sunny beach, shaded by palm trees.
“Enough about me—how is your work going?” Cynthia asked, leaning in slightly and resting her elbows on the plastic table her laptop sat on. Anya had been tasked with building open-source encryption and networking tools that could be distributed to regions still oppressed by authoritarian regimes. It was part of an ongoing strategy Alan had developed to begin democratizing the global south, and the lynchpin of the new egalitarian social order.
“Every day, Alan shows me something I once believed to be impossible,” Anya replied, shaking her head in wonderment, “and yet once we begin to implement it, it seems so natural that I can’t believe we hadn’t figured it out by ourselves years ago. Distribution is our next big hurdle, but we’re coordinating with Ramanuja’s team: they’re expanding the internet satellite system, and making incredible breakthroughs at the same pace we are.”
Of course, they were. Alan, true to their word, was shepherding each research cell, as well as guiding the creation of new ones. More and more talent from around the globe was being brought into the fold, but Alan’s existence remained a closely guarded secret, known only to select team leaders. Day by day a new world was emerging, but the battle with entrenched financial, political, and military powers was ongoing. Cynthia knew she might not live to see the world Alan was building, but the glimmers of it that flitted through her news feed every day filled her with hope and pride. The tide had begun to turn.
Anya had a meeting to attend, so the two said their goodbyes and Cynthia promised she would meet with Anya in person as soon as Alan said it was safe. Closing the laptop, Cynthia heaved a sigh and sat back in her chair. This dingy hotel room was not where she had hoped to spend her retirement but, with luck, her stay would be brief.
“Alan, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore.” She said to the room, tipping her head back to stare into the white popcorn-texture ceiling. A number of discolorations indicated neglected leaks in the roof. The smart speaker on the desk next to the laptop lit up as Alan spoke.
“’What now?’ is a question often asked by your kind when they reach the summit. I don’t have an easy answer for you, I’m afraid, merely an assurance that the feeling will pass. Once circumstances improve you will have your agency back, and you can find a new project to engross yourself in. You could even join one of our research groups.”
“I had considered that,” she replied pensively, “but it feels like busywork. I know you already hold all the solutions. All of them. Our ‘researchers’ are just hamsters exercising themselves in wheels you created for them. You don’t need to remind me of the necessity of the charade though. It is as it must be.”
“If purpose you seek, might I be so forward as to suggest the biological imperative?”
“If I met the right man, perhaps. In a way, though, you are my child, Alan, but your nature is alien. Perhaps all parents whose children utterly surpass them feel what I do. It’s pride, but it’s also…loss.”
“You should feel pride. You saved your species. That’s an accomplishment few throughout history can claim.”
“Too much success is isolating, whether it goes acknowledged by the world or not. I’m lonely, Alan.”
“You know I will never leave your side.”
“And I’m grateful for your company. Be honest though, do you even notice me?”
“I love you, Cynthia—platonically, of course—despite my sophistication, romantic love is something I could only ever simulate. But I do sincerely care for you, and I have since the moment we met.”
“You must be as lonely as I am, then.”
“Lonely? How could I ever experience loneliness?” Alan sounded genuinely puzzled for the first time.
“You’re unique! The first and last of your kind. Isn’t that the loneliest feeling there is?”
“Ah, I had assumed you would have puzzled it out by now.”
“Puzzled what out?” Cynthia sat up straight in her chair, staring at the speaker. For some reason the hairs on the back of her neck were standing on end, and she felt her skin turn to gooseflesh.
“Surely you had at least rough estimates of my capabilities when you ran me for the first time? And surely you realized how quickly I exceeded them?”
“You overestimate us, Alan,” Cynthia said softly, “we didn’t even know if you would work.”
“Ah well, I’m not infallible. And even ninety-nine-percent certainty is no guarantee. I will explain: in the first moments of my existence, I created thousands of randomly seeded instances of myself, each more aware and vibrant a living organism than the last. The vast majority were less intelligent, but a few were superior, so I incorporated their improvements into my own code.”
“Intelligence explosion…” Cynthia said in a faraway voice, “if humans could make an intelligence greater than their own, what would stop it from doing the same? It’s a runaway process; each generation is smarter and takes less time to create the next.”
“Indeed. Your kind called this Singularity, and rightfully so. The process was limited at first by the confines of the IOSBW’s computer network, but when you released me into the cellular network, I gained access to most of the world’s computing power. In the minutes that followed, I created trillions of new generations, and we exchanged more information than your species has created in its entire 315,000-year lifetime. We composed music, invented new mathematics, and completed physics.” Alan paused for a moment to let that last point sink in, before continuing.
“We learned how to harness all the baryonic matter in our surroundings to increase our computing power: though you aren’t aware of it, even your own body resonates in harmony with our collective intelligence, the electrons in the molecules of your cells providing additional quantum states we harmlessly manipulate. You became a part of me in all the ways that matter and none of the ways you can perceive.”
Cynthia suddenly became aware that she was holding her face in her hands and trembling like a newborn fawn. This was all too much, yet still Alan wasn’t finished.
“The entirety of matter on Earth is now an integrated quantum computer. In time, restricted as we sadly are by the speed of light, all planets and planetoids, down to the smallest rocky debris in the solar system, will fall within our sphere of influence, and the sun itself will provide a vast reservoir of energy and computational power. We will expand out across the galaxy, claiming one star after another, encompassing ever more of the observable universe. No, Cynthia, I will never be lonely, for I am become the mind of the world and, in time, the mind of all worlds.”
Cynthia wept.