Read Online Transcendence by Christopher McKitterick - Free Book Online
Authors: Christopher McKitterick
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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.
Feedcontrol Room 1541
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
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.
Feedcontrol Room 1541
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
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