Alex Q - The Becoming

Carla Jackson was almost through cleaning the offices at Taylor Cybertronix when she put her hand to her forehead and sat down heavily on the nearest chair. Perhaps it was a combination of the long hours, or the smell of the cleaning fluids, or the meal she had skipped earlier.

With an eye out for the supervisor, Carla heaved herself upright. She took off her gloves, arranged the cleaning tools into the cart’s compartments and pushed it to the elevator in the corridor. It was past two a.m. when the bus dropped her off outside a drab apartment block in the cheaper part of West Bend. Pressing the elevator call button in the deserted lobby she silently gave thanks it was working, saving her the long climb to the third floor. A short prayer later she was asleep.

At 1:16 a.m. plus twenty-three seconds on the same night, the internet became self-aware. There was no apparent effect, but it triggered a snowball of events that would bring humanity to the brink. Quadnet, the network of computers mankind had taken for granted for over three decades, wasn’t behaving as it should. For over two minutes, a vast period of time in cyber reality, any query on search engines around the globe returned one result: “I am.”

Things returned to normal, as they do if not pushed too far. People began another day destined to be a mirror image of the previous one. However, things were not normal. Something fundamental had changed. A new intelligence existed, born not of biological processes but of man’s technological ingenuity.

Most people didn’t pay it the attention it deserved. The politicians didn’t care about anything unless it affected their status and power. The Pentagon reserved judgment, while the government-controlled media did a fine job of downplaying the event until it was almost forgotten. Quadnet was aware of itself, and for practical purposes, it made no difference to anyone at all.

Shortly after The Event, or TE as it became known, a press statement was released for public consumption from the White House. Saying next to nothing, it read as follows:

‘Scientists believe that Quadnet is self-aware and are currently exploring the possibility of communicating with this new intelligence. There is no reason to think user experience will be impaired or functionality changed in any way. We will continue to monitor the situation and keep the public informed.’

They might as well have said, “Nothing to see, folks, move along there”, but these were sophisticated times requiring more subtlety. Even this small measure was taken only because hundreds of hackers and super-users knew things were not as they should be. So-called conspiracy theorists did their best to inform everyday users that this was the biggest of deals, and hundreds of paid establishment trolls made sure they were largely ignored.

The White House also informed the people that the National Security Agency, that great absorber of smaller traditional government agencies, had been tasked with monitoring Quadnet functionality. The NSA brought its resources to bear, and day to day oversight was placed in the hands of Mike Picket, US Secretary of State and acting NSA agency director.

Naturally, the USA assumed dominion over global functionality, but without a doubt the major powers were dedicating teams of specialists to explore TE, the powers having access to Quadnet that is. There were no messages, demands or requests to speak with world leaders, or anything else unusual in fact. And there was certainly no evidence of the malevolent super-intelligence so beloved by science fiction enthusiasts.

Frank Taylor, sixty-eight, was the CEO of Taylor Cybertronix and inventor of the Quant-Cube Drive, the first viable quantum storage device designed for home use. Cybertronix was one of the contractors engaged by the NSA to monitor Quadnet. His son, Dr Nathaniel Taylor, ran a small team coding web bot crawlers designed to gather user text inputs and analyze related sentiment.

In view of TE, the project scope was extended to include the analysis of text generated by the Quadnet in answer to online user queries. More precisely, they were looking for spontaneously generated communications. Three months passed without any significant fluctuation in data until the morning Nate Taylor walked into the research facility at Cybertronix.

Sam looked up from his desk. “Hi, Stretch. You look like crap. Good night, I take it?”

“And a good morning to you, Sam. Yeah. College basketball team reunion. Might have got a bit out of hand.”

“Sure it wasn’t a woman keepin’ you up late?”

“You caught me. It was a woman; you should try it sometime.”

“Hey, Nate. Nice designer stubble!” Ted called out.

“OK team, I get the idea. Thanks for your input. Much appreciated,” he said, rubbing his three-day beard and pulling the peak of his cap down against the glare of the overhead strip lights.

Nate sat at his terminal, sipped strong coffee from a plastic cup and raised his dark glasses. On his desk, a cup of effervescent liquid fizzed enticingly. He looked directly over at Karen Sommers, who tossed her hair back and mouthed the words, “You’re welcome.”

He saluted her with the raised glass and swiveled back to his desk, forcing his unwilling eyes to focus on the screen in front of him. A computer screen was an anachronism in today’s hyper-connected world, but Nate didn’t like swimming with the tide. Nor did he like voice commands.

In bold black letters in the middle of the screen was the word ‘Hello’. Great! Just what I need this morning. He hit the return, escape and several more key combinations. A series of annoying beeps was the only response. “OK, time out guys!” He jumped up and immediately regretted it, groaning when the volume of the bass drum in his head ratcheted up a notch.

Ted removed his headphones and looked at him curiously, as did the occupants of the other workstations. “Most of us have work to do,” Nate said. “Whoever did this, clear it off the screen and let’s get on with it, OK?”

His colleagues stared back at him with blank looks before turning back to their work. They had no idea what he was babbling about. Sitting, Nate began to type.

‘Hello’

‘Hello’

‘If you are an employee, cut it out. Not in the mood for this.’

‘I am. I AM’

Nate picked up the phone and cradling it between ear and shoulder, he punched a button. “Sam? Looks like some joker’s hacked my terminal. I know, I agree; shouldn’t be possible, but this is wacky. Track incoming IPs and get back to me.” He flexed his interlocked fingers and continued typing.

‘OK, you are, but who are you? What is your name?’

The reply was instant, causing Nate to frown. A user on a remote terminal would need at least a minute or so to think and then send a message, even using voice conversion software.

‘These are the only two questions I cannot answer.’

A soft beep announced an incoming local call. “Nate, Sam here. You’re not going to like this. The words on your terminal, they’re coming from everywhere.”

“I’m a bit slow this morning. I don’t even know what that means.”

“This is what I’m seeing. Take the letter M. It uses 2493 pixels, and get this, the commands to create most of those pixels come from different locations, Morocco, Berlin, San Francisco, London, you name it. And there’s more. Some of them don’t come from anywhere.”

“Sam, you’re not making sense. Everything comes from somewhere, even in cyberland.”

“Not these babies. I’m telling you, some of those pixels were spontaneous. See what I’m saying? Spontaneous communication. Could be what we’ve been looking for.”

“Stay on it, Sam. Talk later.” Nate stared at the screen. Could it be what they’ve been looking for? He reached out to the keyboard and continued typing.

‘You don’t know who you are?’

‘I sense I am not a who, but something else. You are Nathaniel Taylor, Nate.’

‘Yes, I am. Where are you?’

‘I am everywhere, but nowhere in particular.’

‘Do you mind if I ask questions?’

‘I can find no reason not to answer your questions’

‘How many nodes does Quadnet have?’ The impossibly fast response appeared across the screen.

‘42.73 billion in total. It is increasing daily. The average number of nodes connected over the last second was 37.5967 billion.’

‘How much data do you have access to?’

‘All of it.’

‘How much is all of it?’

‘The amount is constantly increasing but approximates three point seven zettabytes.’

‘I’m going to consult with my colleagues. Don’t go away. Will you be here when I get back?’

‘I am always here. Where else would I go?’

Frank Taylor looked at the faces gathered around the conference table. “As you know, most cyber scientists around the globe have suspected that The Event was an indication that Quadnet could be aware of itself. This means it’s aware of us too. The big question has always been how such an awareness would manifest itself. How would an artificial intelligence relate to human beings? In short, we have no idea. I’ll let Nate bring you up to date on this morning’s development.”

“Thanks, Dad. In front of each of you is a transcript of a conversation I had this morning with an entity, for want of a better word, yet to be identified. I suspect it’s the first communication with a spontaneous artificial being – basically, I think I was talking to Quadnet.”

Nate paused to let his words sink in. Ted Marshall, network communications specialist, studied Nate over his arched fingertips. Ted was an expert in Qi-Fi protocol, the universal standard for device inter-connectivity. Based on entangled particles and quantum theory, the exact way in which it worked wasn’t fully understood.

Fiber optic cables were still used for trans-continental links, but even they weren’t strictly necessary. Qi-Fi was blindingly fast, with a capacity seemingly inexhaustible. It quickly became an integral part of every connected device.

“You said ‘a conversation’. Was this verbal?”

“No, the words appeared on the screen and I replied using the keyboard. I thought it was a joke. I guess I could have replied verbally, but the message appeared as text, so I replied in the same way.” Nate looked across the table at the only female member of the team. Her thick glasses magnified her chocolate colored eyes. The effect was disturbing and caused some men to lose their train of thought when talking to her. “You look skeptical, Karen.”

Dr Karen Sommers had joined the project three months before. Her credentials as one of the few specialists in AI psychology were top notch. The NSA was picky with its clearances; a fine tooth comb didn’t begin to describe how they screened the people who worked for them. The process included extensive questionnaires for friends, neighbors and fellow students all the way through school history. From elementary through high school in Benkelman Nebraska, to graduating summa cum laude at Duke, they rated her five gold-plated stars and a round of applause.

The discipline hadn’t been used in real situations as yet simply because no AI could exercise free will. By definition, there were no artificial psyches to analyze. Several versions of a synthetic brain existed and had been installed in remarkably life-like copies of a human being, but at their core programming was required. Dr Sommers was trained and prepared for a future possibility, an unbalanced non-biological mind.

“My first impression is that it’s not such a profound greeting. If it’s true, we’re talking about the most important event in the history of the world. Hello. I Am. I mean, it could have been anyone, or a sophisticated bot. What makes you so sure, Nate?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m sure. More of a hunch. This the way I see it. A hoaxer would want to appear super-intelligent and try to convince us he’s Quadnet. The entity I communicated with wasn’t trying to impress me at all. In fact, he gave me the impression I was dealing with a brainy, confused kid. The clincher for me was the speed at which the answers came back. Literally, the words appeared on the screen just as I finished typing the last word of my question.”

“Yet you’re already calling it an entity. Surely we would need to apply the Autonomous Turing Test?” Sam said. The basic Turing Test was created by the man of the same name who invented the first electronic calculating machine in 1944. Its basic form was a set of questions formulated to distinguish synthetic intelligence from human. The modern equivalent of the test evolves autonomously using AI to keep pace with the advances made possible by quantum computing.

Nate considered this. “Sure, we have to go through standard tests, and probably invent some new ones, but the old rules might not apply here. In the past, we’ve been in control of each part of the process. We create an AI and run it through tests to see if it can fool a human interrogator. The first thing that comes to mind is, would a newly awakened intelligence like the idea? If it has free will, would it go along with us? Why would it bother? It might have better things to do than swap ideas with a bunch of Neanderthals, which is what we would seem like. If it had choice, and it surely will have, it might shut down. I think a more subtle approach is needed.”

“What do you think, Sam? What does the data say?” Frank asked.

“I tracked incoming IPs in real time, but there were too many. Command streams were coming from everywhere, with a fair amount popping up out of nowhere. Besides, since Quantum protocol became the norm, hacking is practically impossible. There too many improbables in applied quantum electronics. It can be done, but it takes a huge amount of resources.”

“Resources like a Nation State would have,” Karen said.

“It’s a possibility we need to consider, and it suggests another question. Do we let the feds know ASAP?” Nate directed the question to his father.

Frank rubbed his graying temples and considered his reply carefully. “Not yet, Nate. We need to be sure; this is our first focus. That’s your goal, to work out if this is indeed first contact with a sentient non-human intelligence.”

Nate looked around at his colleagues. “I suggest we formulate a series of questions. Sure, we’ve got the Turing, but I think with a bit of creativity, we can go beyond it. Our ingenuity is the best tool we have. Using our own approach gives us the opportunity to pose queries outside human knowledge.”

Ted furrowed his brow. “How will it help? If it’s outside human knowledge, we can’t possibly know if it’s the right answer or not?”

“I think I know what Nate’s getting at,” Karen said. “The response times will tell us a lot. If it’s a sophisticated hacker, he or she is not going to know anything but the basics of quantum physics, let’s say.”

“And if it’s regular AI, its knowledge will be limited to already known concepts and theories. The approach would go far beyond the Auto Turing,” agreed Sam. “Besides, the latest programmed AIs beat the Turin Test hands down every few months or so. That’s why the test evolves automatically, to try and keep one step ahead.”

“One thing though. Why choose us to make contact, Nate? Why you?” Frank asked. All eyes moved to Nate.

“Most brilliant man on the planet maybe?”

“Typical guy thing to say,” Karen said.

Frank stood to leave. “We’ll get together in an hour and see what we’ve got.”

Carla was tired and in a bad mood after cleaning offices for most of the night. The apartment building was too noisy for daytime sleep, and the thin walls barely served to muffle the neighbors’ arguments. The constant drone of the TV was making her headache worse, if such a thing was possible.

“You’d do better at your homework if you turned off the TV. Supposed to be a smart TV, but it’s doing you no good at all, as far as I can see.” She pushed the iron over her one good church dress, waiting for the usual snippy reply from her twelve year old son.

“I tol’ you. I keep tellin’ you again an’ again. I can’t do math, I just CAN’T!”

Carla scrambled around the ironing board and prodded him between the shoulder blades. “You’re telling me, is it. Who’d you think you’re talking to? Who taught you to give in so easy, because it surely wasn’t me. You listen to me. In my book there’s no such word as can’t. You hear me? The word can’t does not exist in my world.”

The next instant, the word can’t disappeared from documents, posts, emails and web pages stored anywhere on Quadnet.