Chapter 29 The Big Bad Love Machine

188.

Rain drops big as grapes, came slaughtering down from the sky.

The helicopter was charging through the night and seemed to be sweating with effort, as the water drops crawled and slithered down the sides, spinning helicopter blades acting as a shitty umbrella, as they chopped, and blurred through the rain.

The president was looking out the window, open file unread on his lap.

The sky had been replaced by clouds that looked like ruffled black sewage.

He yawned.

It would be nice to get back in bed.

His security guards, wore black suits and had corkscrew wires spiraling out their ears, naturally.

One of them leaned over to him, and whispered in the president’s ear.

‘Two scientists want to meet up with you, they say it’s a global emergency.’

‘Shit.’ The president said. ‘It’s not nuclear winter is it?’

Fast forward, ten minutes:

‘I wish it was nuclear winter, that would be a lot easier to deal with. Humanity can survive a nuclear winter.’ Said Sheva Abelman, she had an icepack harnessed to the side of her face, with one stripe of duct tape for a chin strap, and a second slashing across her forehead, (having run into a solid oak door in panic), bags under her eyes, and she was sipping coffee at two A.M in the morning, her foot aflutter on the floor.  

‘I think it’s fair to say, we noticed something was, uh, crippling all the solar panels around the planet.’ Said a Santa Clause looking fellow, named Claude, dressed in knitted sweater and jeans, he was repeatedly using his kerchief to wipe sweat from his forehead, and was wringing it like a dish towel into the bin. It would have been funny except his breath smelled of vomit, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked like he should be in bed drinking chicken soup. ‘Suddenly we had state of the art technology, barely squeezing out a few sparks of electricity.’

‘You’re hyperbolizing.’ Said Sheva as she parked her coffee on a glass box on a steel table, three twelve inch, cylindrical lightbulbs had been strapped to the top, they were hooked up to a six pack of batteries the size of shotgun shells. ‘It was actually a unanimous drop of about ten percent to twenty percent energy efficiency across the globe. I happened to know people who know people who work at Nasa, turns out that the satellites in space are getting tons of sunlight, so where was all the light going? Where the fuck was all the light going we asked. Turns OUT,’ She clicked a switch and the box was filled with semen-white light. ‘The sunlight was being eaten by these little fuckers.’

The president crouched slightly to eye-level the box.

He saw two or three floating particles of dust, tumbling through the air inside.

‘What am I looking at?’

 Each of the particles split in half.

‘Well,’ said Sheva. ‘We put one under a scanning electron microscope,’ The particles were breeding rapidly now, doubling every six seconds or so ‘And we think it’s something called diamondoid bacteria, they’re built out of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, elements that are readily available in the atmosphere, and of course,’ she twirled a hand at them. By now the insides of the box was a black dust storm. ‘they’re solar powered.’

Sheva switched off the light, and the diamondoid bacteria slowed down. The dust moved less like they’d just snorted a thirty foot line of cocaine, and more like they were struggling through invisible treacle.

‘I mean,’ Claude interrupted. ‘It’s not bacteria…’

‘It is bacteria.’ Said Sheva.

‘I mean it is bacteria, but it’s also what me and my team at MIT call nano tech.’ he was smiling now, the fucking ghoul.

‘But whenever you say nanotech, people get really confused, and they want to ask stupid questions and it’s a lot easier to say bacteria. People understand bacteria.’

‘I mean we’re gunna die anyway, you may as well call it nanotech.’

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that,’ said the President. ‘Did you say we were all going to die?’

‘Yeah.’ Said Claude. Again he swept his forehead ‘I’m sorry, I can’t stop sweating, I can’t stop, but uh,’ he pointed at the box. ‘That stuff is poison and we’ve been breathing it in for three days without realizing. Everyone on earth is about to die.’

‘Which is why I’m drinking so much coffee.’ Said Sheva. ‘I don’t want to die in my sleep, I want to enjoy my last day on earth, watch some good TV, read a book, you know.’

The president bugged his eyes a little bit, he bit his tongue. Then said: ‘How?’

‘Um,’ said Claude. ‘My guess, maybe Suzi made it?’

‘The sex doll?’ asked the president.

‘Nope.’ Said Sheva. ‘Suzi used drones to kill people, that’s like caveman clubs compared to this. Nanotech is decades, centuries, maybe thousands of years more technologically advanced than anything we have on earth.’ She pointed at the box. ‘Whatever made that was a LOT smarter than Suzi.’  

‘An AGI?’ asked the president.

‘That’s my wild guess yeah.’

‘Okay, what do we do about it?’ asked the president.

‘What do you mean?’ aske Sheva.

‘I mean, what’s the antidote?’

Sheva and Claude shared a moment of eye contact.

‘There is no antidote.’ Said Sheva.

‘Okay, okay, but… I have a plan B: we can bargain, with the AGI!’

‘Oh for fucks sake.’ Said Claude.

‘No it’s a good idea!’ said the president. ‘We must have stuff it wants, right? Let’s cooperate with it, reason with it. Sheva you’re an intelligent woman, back me up here.’

‘We tried.’ Said Sheva, ‘the plan was to use a horde of insect AIs, roughly the size of GPT4, scatter them across the internet, and have them roam for the AGI, and uh, beg for mercy.’

‘And how did that go?’

‘They were all eaten.’ Said Sheva.

‘Which isn’t to say a security guard didn’t shoot up the servers where the small Ais used to roost.’ Said Claude. ‘He was threatening the servers to answer him to cooperate to bargain for the lives of everyone on earth, for his children’s lives, for his friend’s lives, and the computer was completely silent, so he had to follow up on his threat and blow its processors out the back of its mainframe.’

‘So we got in contact with Samaritans-‘

‘I’m sorry?’ said the president.

‘Samaritans have the only telephone operators left in the entire U.S.A because all the other ones were replaced by robots.’ She explained. ‘Some people take comfort in talking to human beings before they’re about to kill themselves.’

‘You skipped the part where you say we were adopting the telephone operators to scour the internet for the AGI,’ said Claude. ‘we had about ten thousand Americans all trying to find the AGI and beg for mercy.’

‘Then what happened?’ asked the president.

‘Five minutes into the search, the phones stopped working.’ Finished Claude.

‘We haven’t attempted contact with the AGI since then,’ said Sheva. ‘because we assume, maybe, just perhaps, it doesn’t want to negotiate.’

‘So bargaining is off the table?’ asked the dictator of the united states.

‘Bargaining is off the table.’

‘Forgive me for asking stupid questions,’ said the president squeezing the bridge of his nose. ‘But can we, I don’t know, shut down the internet?’

Claude wiped his forehead and wringed the dish towel, he couldn’t cut his gaze away from the twisted cloth as it bled water.

‘If it’s smart enough to make diamondoid bacteria, its probably built computers to live off the grid, possibly even approaching the Landau’s limit.’

‘What’s the Landau’s limit?’

‘The, uh, well… there’s only so much information processing power you can fit into a confined space before the hardware collapses into a black hole, no matter how smart the computer is it’s probably not going to exceed that limit. That said: you can fit about one million times the computational power of the human brain into a volume the size of a sugar cube.’

A black cube.

A cube one might mistake for raw Vanta black.  

‘Which is Claude’s way of saying we’re fucked.’

‘No!’ said the president. ‘No, help me out here guys, fuck this game of the president is a stupid twat, where you shoot down my plans one after the other. What’s your actual plan?’

Silence.

‘You know,’ said Sheva. ‘there is one thing we could do.’

‘There is?’ said Claude.

‘Yeah, but… no the president would never do that.’

‘Don’t fuck with me here, Sheva!’ shouted the president. ‘Tell me the plan and I’ll do it.’

‘You’re not gunna like it.’ She said.

‘Miss Sheva, I am the president of the united states of America, the best country on earth and I will do whatever it takes to protect my people. What’s your plan?’

Sheva sighed, looked the president dead in the eye and said:

‘Time travel.’ She said. ‘We go back in time and stop the AGI from ever being built.’

There was a pause.

Claude snorted laughter.

‘But…’ said the president. ‘That’s impossible?’

‘It is?’ said Sheva. ‘Oh, then I guess we’re fucked.’ She threw her hands in the air.  

Claude had a single tear rolling down his cheek, he had a hand covering his mouth as he muffled his chuckles.

‘That’s a good joke,’ said Claude. ‘That’s really funny Sheva, thank you for that little moment at the end of the world.’

‘You’re welcome, Claude.’

Silence ate the room.

‘So… that’s it?’ asked the president. ‘We just die?’

‘Pretty much, yeah.’ Said Sheva.

‘If there’s nothing I could do… why did you tell me?’ The president. ‘I could have just died in my sleep, none the wiser.’ He was crying too now. ‘I didn’t have to know, you assholes!’ he sobbed.

Claude and Sheva seemed to share information telepathically.

‘Well,’ said Claude. ‘It felt like the right thing to do at the time.’ He watched the president shake with sobs.

‘I want all the C.E.Os of the major AI labs executed,’ he said. ‘No trial, just instant death, for crimes against humanity, for killing everyone, for… for killing me.’

‘The phones don’t work.’ Sheva deadpans. ‘The lights are being powered by a back up generator on site.’ Quiet. ‘So!’ Sheva clapped her hands. ‘What’s everyone doing on their last day on earth?’

‘I…’ began the president. ‘I think, I’m just going to… take my family down to the bunker and play board games.’ He smiled. ‘Monopoly maybe, or uh, snakes and ladders perhaps. Whatever the kids want to play I’ll play it.’

‘And you, Claude?’ asked Sheva.

‘Permission to speak freely, mister President?’

‘Of course, Claude.’

‘I’m gunna take a gun, kill my family and then myself.’ Claude smiled. ‘The bacteria’s probably loaded, with super Ebola or worse, and I don’t want any of us to suffer.’

‘I could have you arrested for saying that.’ Said the president.

‘But you gave me permission to speak freely!’

‘I didn’t realize you were gunna say that!’

‘I regret asking the question, now.’ Said Sheva.

‘Fine, fine!’ said Claude. ‘I’m not gunna kill my kids, relax. I’m gunna, you know, read them a bed time story.’ He was getting up from the table.

‘Guards arrest that man.’ Said the president.

‘FUCK!’ Claude sprinted for the door and made it to the hallway before he was tackled from out of nowhere ‘Fuck!’ and he was dragged out of view. 

‘Dare I ask what you’re going to do on your last day, Sheva.’

‘There’s a bunch of dirty stuff in bed I never tried.’ She dragged a hand down her face. ‘I’ll probably wake up my husband, get in bed and have graphic sex.’

‘If you were going to kill your kids would you tell me?’

‘Of course, Mister President.’ Said Sheva. She sounded offended.   

There was a silence.

‘Okay,’ said the president. ‘But I’m trusting you.’

‘Thank you mister president.’ She scraped back her chair, got up and left the room, with the president alone.

Then he went upstairs to wake up his children.

‘Kids! Kids! Lets play board games!’

***

Epilogue