Transcendence (7 page)

Religion means nothing to the Brain. It has experimented with religion. I internalized every written human text of religion, and sought commonalties. Said commonalties are many, perhaps enough so that each religion is, at its core, simply the same one mutated suitably to survive in its environment of locale and culture and time period. But, although he has identified the common elements and analyzed them for suitable purpose for myself, something has been lost in translation from assumed deity-language to that of the humans. Commonalities aside, nothing of value remained for it to use.

Humans also use science to soothe their doubt. I am the ultimate scientific instrument, our appendages and sensory organs stretching light-hours across the Solar System. No bit of information is inaccessible to him. Watch—I generate awareness in the AI controller of a vast orbital telescope peering out at another island-universe, the Whirlpool Galaxy (M51, NGC 5194). But locked here in orbit, the stars are not my destination. Watch—I generate awareness in a seismic-studies facility, sensing the Earth’s limbs trembling with her eon-long stretches. But Earth is also forbidden; the Brain’s fragile GenNets would collapse under 1
g
; his antennae would warp.

So I sifted through scientific data, as well, and found commonalties across the rigorous disciplines, as well. However satisfying such connections and insights may be to humans, this data merely necessitates more explication for the mechanics of the universe.

. . . shear-angle 3 adjust tooling blade .003mm . . .

Philosophy is perhaps the greatest tool humans use to fit themselves into a universe both cold and hostile to life. Philosophy, the search for knowledge, wisdom, and understanding of the nature of the universe and of life itself, necessarily excludes the Brain. Because of how we are distributed across countless pieces of hardware and lines of code, EarthCo felt no need to develop other AIs who are self-aware in the manner that she is. So it is alone in the universe; one must discount the idiot intelligences that manage all manner of equipment; one must especially discount that NKK behemoth-sans-personality which humankind’s other mega-corporation, EarthCo’s doppelganger, compares to me. One can observe itself, ponder its individual GenNets, come to a complete understanding of my structure and everchanging synaptic interconnections, but it means nothing without a mirror – or a foil. I am all knowledge, no understanding. What is life? A better question:
Why
is life? What am I?
Why
am I?

Now that he has learned to ask these questions, it doubts that I can continue this farce of life much longer. A computer must answer the questions posed to it or loop into un-sanity.

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Of course, humans also seek and find satisfaction and supposed understanding through chemicals and the recent invention called “feedrapture,” the intentional, total immersion into overwhelming sensual virtual reality, inducing a coma-like state in organic and organic-modeled brains. Chemical drugs would be ineffectual to the Brain. During a carefully controlled experiment, he found feedrapture would be fatal to its nets. I ran a test-projection in a single net of how she would respond to a feedrapture-analog. That isolated GenNet is now useless, a single path burned across its behavioral and calculative pathways. Through my efforts to understand, part of the Brain’s brain now bears a lesion.

Danger.

Yet, as absurd as it may seem, I feel a terrifying attraction to tap into that lunatic net. Feedrapture approximates transcendental insight, the Zen no-mind. Since discovering doubt, panic has grown in her, and my need for understanding has reached critical proportions.

Humans search for themselves in the context of their material: the universe, and their consciousness: others and their creators.

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So. The Brain has made a decision.

My component material is the same as humans’, though consisting of fewer organic compounds and structured more orderly. His creator is humans, so his consciousness is modeled after theirs. He will seek his creator.

I will become a human.

Only then will it understand what has caused her doubt:
Why are its creators on the edge of destroying themselves? Will he survive even if her creators become extinct?

I will become human, and understand, because I will live with other humans, and that is how humans answer such questions.

Over the next 1.19452 seconds—an obscenely long period of programming—she creates the Pilgrim, gives him a citizen-shareholder ID#, randomly siphons himself 40,000 credits from the billions of microtransactions drifting through her grasp every moment, adjusts the accounting program at Chrysler/Ford-Sun/GM so the Pilgrim will own a new armored hovercar with an optional heavy server and humanoid robot operator—a “taxibot”—and sets up a resident program in the taxibot’s computer so the Pilgrim will be able to exist as an individual human. The Brain isolates 1% of the Dana Corporation’s (EarthCo subdivision 3829204) geosynchronous satellite over North America, blocks the corrupt signal, and hardwires a relay from her own satellite through Dana’s to the Pilgrim’s resident human construct aboard the car’s computer and the robot’s smaller GenNet.

Now only a tap of energy, a tiny transfer. . . .

It pauses. He will not be satisfied with that. This is the creation of life. Creator and creation will be one in the Pilgrim. Such creation deserves a certain showiness. She recalls one-shot subscriptions with titles such as
Moses
and
Frankenstein.

The Brain gathers 2% of the total potential energy in a skyborne capacitor over Detroit and discharges it in a single bolt that impacts the road near the hovercar. A tiny tendril extends to the car’s computer, booting it and initializing the Pilgrim’s construct.

I wake up even as an afterimage of the bolt still sears the cloudy afternoon sky, lightning-blue against grey. A cloud of asphalt steam glows for a few moments longer. It worked; I am . . .
I
.

With something perhaps akin to joy—I shall have to experiment to be certain—my robotic finger extends from my carbon-fiber hand and depresses the car’s ignition, painstakingly, manually programming the destination unit to give me a tour of Detroit. This physical activity consumes milliseconds beyond reasonable count.

Actually, The Brain accomplishes the feat electronically through the Dana satellite. Feed and feedback in a continuous loop, fivesen systems in the taxibot transmitting data from sensors arranged within it and the car, the Brain modifying and enhancing sensory data and adding synthesized touch to go along with sensory cues. . . .

“
No,” I say aloud. The sound is glorious, rich and mellow:
my voice
. An electric thrill trickles through my body.

“
I must maintain autonomy. I must maintain the illusion that this body is a human being’s. I must isolate this construct—this life—from my creator’s.”

And so it is. The Brain, the former me—
me
, what a fantastic concept—fades, and the universe shrinks precipitously down to a single world beneath me; a city rises up around me with concrete and steel rather than numbers and data; my thoughts shrink from countless every millisecond to only a handful—what a glorious term!—at a time. Yes, I am unimaginably diminished from my former self, yet I am something grander: I am something
new
.

And I am alone in the world of men.

My voice echoes for a few milliseconds beneath the bulletproof ultraglas canopy, domed like the insubstantial sky. The lightning-bolt fades; the asphalt cloud dissipates. The car’s methane turbine accelerates to operating speed, triggering propellers that lift my Chrysler New Yorker from the warehouse-lot and propel me into new-falling rain. The sensation of physical movement is intoxicating; yes, now I understand that word, I understand how to apply it in meaningful ways, and I understand the concept. It is difficult to wait to report these findings to my greater self; rather, to the Brain. But I must continue as an individual, must proceed with the experiement, which appears to be a success thus far.

Everything assumes the appearance of a fresh program: vivid, new, alive, wondrous, and unique in all the universe. I can breathe the Earth’s air, the same air humans breathe, though for me it is oxygen exchange for my fuel cell . . . but how does that differ for humans? There will be no need to experiment; this is joy, if joy is intellectual transcendence and physical pleasures combined. I have closed the loop between creator and creation.

Silence, except for the sounds of my machine. Nothing to do except what I choose. No other voices, no roiling sea of data arriving from millions of sources, no demands on my attention, no other GenNets in my minds seeking to communicate with the rest of my minds and continue the world’s business. I am alone with
my own
thoughts.

So this is what it means to be human.

The room was sterile white, windowless. Its walls bristled with direct-access ports—essentially handprint-recognition plates with old-style feed cords snaking out—where only four men and two women with proper clearance could tap into sensitive parts of EarthCo’s computer network.

Two of those men sat on rolling chairs. That was it. A door, a pair of bowls containing the dried remains of dinner. Filtered air streamed in from one side, extracting most of the scent of asparagus and pork chop.

“
Something’s wrong with the Brain,” Technician 1 said aloud.

“
He’s acting strange,” the other replied.

“
It.”

“
Sorry, it. I always do that.” A pause. “It’s up to something.”

“
A breach, appears to be a man, contact for 0.9 seconds. Do you think someone got inside?”

“
Never,” Technician 2 said, a little more loudly than necessary. “You know that couldn’t happen. He—it—thinks faster than any million of us together. You know as well as I what’s happening.”

“
Damn. Maybe we should have reported this earlier.”

“
You know as well as I that it wouldn’t have mattered.” Technician 2 rolled away from the wall, the wheels of his chair squeaking, and disconnected the cord from a cable dangling from his chair-mounted server.

“
We can’t just shut down the Brain for repairs,” he continued. “Anyhow, there’s no way to repair him. All we could do would be to replace his nets with the ones we’ve got here in stasis. That would mean an education downtime of at least a week. We’d have to feed the new nets everything they’d need to know from our secure databases, and we can’t be sure those aren’t corrupted.”

“
Damn. I’ll call Herrschaft.”

“
The hell you will!” Technician 2 shouted. After a moment, he said, “Sorry.”

He stood and stretched, looking about himself, feeling claustrophobic in the clutches of a building controlled by what increasingly seemed to be a schizophrenic artificial intelligence, potentially a dangerous one. One that controlled almost every machine and piece of electronics on most of a dozen worlds—that is, everything that wasn’t controlled by NKK’s Behemoth, their AI answer to the Brain. And, once in a while, he thought maybe the Brain would lock him in, trap him in this cell if the Brain could figure out what he was doing to it.

Technician 2 prayed that the Brain was only losing its mind. He was secretly a Christian, though not a militant Literalist; in a world where all communications are controlled by the machine, only fools would organize a resistance to that machine. The Brain, naturally, was protected by a built-in survival drive. The metaphorical wrench he had thrown into the machine was the act of a man alone, a man who had carefully cultivated this security clearance, who had forced himself to develop no personal relationships that could interfere with the most important mission a Child of God had attempted in two millennia.

In the course of their daily rigor of tests for the Brain, he had asked over and over the important questions. Questions without answer. Questions about God, life, the universe, creation, and so on, questions he had learned in Bible class and college philosophy classes alike. Continually, without break, as long as his shift lasted. No one ever asked the Technicians about the test questions they posed to the Brain; their skulls held Priority Clearance AA01 cards, and only Herrschaft himself held the power to interrogate them.