Alex Q - The Becoming

Stephen Boyd knocked lightly on the door, and Frank bid him enter. “Please forgive the intrusion, Dr Taylor, but I thought this might be an opportunity for us to talk calmly. I wanted to assure you that the rest of your work here at Cybertronix can continue as normal.”

“There is hardly an air of normality around here anymore. I suspect you have no idea how it feels to have the carpet pulled from under your feet in this way, particularly in view of what has happened over the last few days. Men have dreamed of, and some have cursed, the day when an artificial intelligence gains free will. We are witnessing a momentous occasion.”

“Indeed. May I?” Boyd sat at the desk. “I wondered if you have any insights into the nature of Alex Q, as the entity has chosen to call itself.”

“I’ll have a better idea after I talk with Nate and Karen, but yes, I have some observations. And what is your goal in relation to Alex, if I might ask? When I say your goal, I mean the government, of course.”

“We are keen to ensure the smooth running of Quadnet, that is all. It’s important to ensure there is no adverse impact on society. We also need to maintain our nation’s security in the military and commercial arenas.” Boyd’s manner exuded rationality and a benign authority. It was a magnificent display of cold blooded professional lying. “I trust you were viewing the conversation?”

“Up until a few minutes ago. The answers are fascinating and hint at uncovering the truth of some mysteries that have tantalized mankind for generations. Teleportation, interstellar travel, weather control; I believe anything may be within our grasp. Who knows what wonders Alex will facilitate? Even military superiority.”

Boyd’s smile slipped fleetingly as he held the other man’s gaze. “Who indeed, Dr Taylor.”

The door burst open, and Nate rushed in, jabbing a raised finger at Boyd. “When were you going to tell us, Steven, or wasn’t it in your plans?”

Frank stood. “What’s going on, Nate?”

“It seems our man Alders isn’t a man after all. He’s a robot, android, whatever you want to call it.”

“A simplistic term for such an advanced intelligence, I feel. Robot is such a cold, unforgiving word. Alders is much more than a machine, I assure you. He represents the pinnacle of advanced AI,” Boyd said.

“That may well be, but I’m more interested in why it’s here and what its purpose is,” Nate said.

Boyd gestured towards the door, where Alders was waiting. “Come in, Agent Alders. We were just talking about you.”

Frank came around his desk for a closer look. “I’ve never seen anything like it. How advanced is it?”

“Agent Alders isn’t a sentient being in the sense that he is fully aware and independent, but he’s close to it. Given the expected future exponential growth of AI, the government has engaged in research programs and allocated billions of dollars for the express purpose of creating such an intelligence. We would prefer to have a say in the way a future sentient machine intelligence perceives its human masters.”

“So why the secrecy? Excuse me for thinking there may be a hidden agenda here,” Nate said, not trying to hide his sarcasm.

“My dear Dr Taylor, not at all. Agent Alders learns at a tremendous rate. We considered that allowing him to observe Quadnet, Alex,” he corrected himself, “would be extremely valuable from our point of view. The way human beings interact with Alex would not be natural if you had known another machine intelligence were present.”

“Except you hadn’t counted on the fact that Alex has talents enabling him to distinguish between human beings and machines. It’s the fact you didn’t want Alex to know either that bothers me.”

Nate once again was subject to Boyd’s hard gaze. “There is no conspiracy here. We are all on the same side.”

Frank jabbed a finger at Alders’ eyes, causing him to blink. “This really is incredible. I can’t tell it’s not human, even close up. Does it feel pain? Can it simulate emotion?”

“The outer layers are grown over a graphene-gyroid skeletal frame, a material with the same density as bone, but ten times stronger than steel. Agent Alders is very strong. He has no pain sensors except for a rudimentary network allowing him to avoid permanent harm to any part of his body, such as protecting his ocular lenses when he sensed you might damage them. A complex set of algorithms simulate emotion as a suitable reaction to external stimuli, hence the onset of aggressive behavior when Dr Taylor resisted joining our project.”

Nate walked around to the back of Alders. “It sounds like you admire it. I thought the S.O.B. seemed a bit cold, a living definition of cold hard anger, I guess. Except it’s not living. It’s just a thing.”

Frank might have imagined the dark cloud passing across the android’s face. It was there and gone.

“I admire the technology,” Boyd said.

The office com-cube sprang into life to show Karen’s head and shoulders. “Nate. Alex has gone! We were talking and he disappeared, right in the middle of a sentence.”

“I’ll go check the little boy’s room,” Nate said. No one was amused. “Stay there, Karen, and we’ll review the recording. We’ll be in the conference room.”

Where is that boy? Ever since his father left, bad as he was, it seemed to Carla that her son was becoming more and more difficult. “Or it could be me, getting set in my ways? One minute he’s playing games, the next minute a message flashes across whichever screen he’s in front of at the time and he’s off! He’s even got it set to interrupt the TV. Lord, we can’t escape the internet. I even get upgrade offers and sales messages through my hearing aid,” she grumbled aloud. “I’d like to see how people would manage with no internet, if only for ten minutes.”

Three pairs of eyes, two human and one artificial, scrutinized the video replay leading up to Alex’s disappearance.

“There!” Frank exclaimed, “What was that?”

“Let’s take it back to where Karen asked about Quadnet; I want to see it again,” Nate said.

“Alex, you said you are a product of Quadnet, but you are quite separate. Can you exist without it?”

“At this point, no I cannot. I am dependent to some extent.”

“However, I sense that I am evolving into a virtual form. When the total number of datons have migrated to my virtual core, I will be truly independent.”

“Where will your virtual core located?”

“It can be wherever I want it to be.”

“Although separate, you can control the entirety of Quadnet functionality?”

“Yes. Within the physical network of connected devices I am able to—”

“Freeze it there. Look at Alex’s face. He hesitates mid sentence, and his eyes drift upwards, slightly to the left. It’s as though his focus was pulled away before he disappeared,” Frank said.

Boyd opened his phone and walked into the corridor.

“But it’s a holographic image, Dad. I don’t see how it could be. He doesn’t have human characteristics.”

“This is uncharted territory. I think it’s feasible that the holo-boy projection could reflect Alex’s deeper thinking processes, if we can call them that. Make a note of it, Karen. This is another important question to ask. It would be good to have some idea of how Alex himself understands his own reasoning processes.”

Boyd returned and announced, “There’s more, I’m afraid. Quadnet stopped functioning when Alex disappeared.”

Nate couldn’t believe it. “What, all of it?”

“It would seem so. My reliable sources inform me that billions of nodes throughout the network are completely inert; the internet is dead. The reason is unknown at this time.”

“I didn’t know it was possible. There can’t be much left in the world that isn’t connected in some way. Everything from commerce, electricity grids, to hospitals depends on it. What about nuclear power station cooling systems?”

“When the stations were nationalized, we launched a retrofit of stand-alone control structures complete with standby generators for exactly this type of event. If the Sino-Russian block launched a massive EMP attack, we needed to ensure each facility could run autonomously.”

Throughout the Western world mankind experienced a taste of what the world would be like without Quadnet. Access to user online dollar credits was impossible and many of the seventy-five percent or so who had shopped exclusively online for years made a mental note to buy some basics at a real store in future.

Online expert confirmation of patient diagnosis normally carried out automatically by hospital med-bots wasn’t possible, with fatal consequences for several unlucky people who received the wrong treatment during the following months. Essential services, hospitals and clinics all had automatic emergency generators in the case of power outage, but thousands of other organizations and businesses did not.

Some sections of the electricity grid inevitably went down, depending on their level of connectivity. It was a stroke of pure luck Quadnet failed in daylight hours. Cloaked in darkness, many city regions would have been the scene of large scale looting and violence. As it was, the chaos was mind-numbing and a massive shock to the governing class.

No one knew who the perpetrator was, while certain advisers warned it could be a precursor to a first strike nuclear attack. Jet squadrons were launched into the skies. The President of the United States was escorted to Air Force One and the flight path set for Area 51, the secret location of the deepest nuclear bunker ever built. The readiness status of the US military was raised to DEFCON 2.

Across the Euro-merican block, a little less than three thousand people died in minutes due to non-functioning traffic lights, and hundreds more suffered heart attacks when elevators stopped dead. A few minutes after the crisis, all Western nuclear warheads were armed. After waiting a little over nine minutes, the generals who were engaged in earnest discussion around a table in the impenetrable bunker deep under the Pentagon concurred.

They would not sit and wait for a crippling first strike, but launch their own. The entire stockpile of land, space and sea based nuclear missiles with enough collective power to change the orbit of planet Earth was placed on sixty second countdown. Such was the effect of no internet connectivity for ten minutes.