64
Ford caught up to Melissa in the hall. She was walking fast, her heels clicking on the hard floor, her blond hair no longer in place, disarranged and streaming behind.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I was totally blindsided by that job offer.”
Melissa stopped. Her face was white, her lips compressed. “So was I. They’ve got to be stopped.”
Ford took her arm. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands.”
“I’ll go public. I’ll call the New York Times.”
“That won’t stop it. You heard him about the Chinese. We’re in a new arms race.”
Melissa shook her head. “If they make smart weapons, it will be the end. Either we’ll destroy ourselves or the machines will take over and destroy us. HAL meets Battlestar Galactica.”
“How hard will it be for them to develop a new Dorothy-like program?” Ford asked.
Melissa paused. “Well, I still have my little programming trick. My secret. Without it, they’ll fail.”
Ford paused. “Can I ask you what that is?”
She looked at him for a long time. “I don’t know why I’m going to tell you. Maybe it’s because I know I can trust you.”
“Thank you.”
“The trick is … sleep.”
“Sleep?”
“Any organism with a nervous system needs to sleep. A roundworm with three hundred neurons needs to sleep. A snail with ten thousand neurons has to sleep. And a human being with a hundred billion neurons must sleep. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody really knows. But sleep must be fundamental to life. Every neuronal network, no matter how simple, has to periodically go dormant. That’s the trick. It turns out sleep is also fundamental to complex AI software. Dorothy didn’t work until I programmed her to sleep. Dorothy was self-modifying, but she needed a period of sleeping while her code was modified and restructured. And as that code self-modified, she dreamed. That was a bizarre side effect even I didn’t expect and it appears to be key. Sleeping and dreaming are the keys to any self-modifying AI program, or it will eventually crash.”
“In a funny way, it makes sense.”
Melissa shook her head. “Someday, a smart programmer will realize that—and then it’s all over for the human race. Especially with a president like that.”
* * *
Melissa Shepherd shook hands with Ford in the parking lot and headed to her car. When she reached the car she stopped and, against her better judgment, turned and watched Ford walking back to his own car. He was an odd fellow, tall and ungainly, his face not very attractive, big and powerful physically—but above all, hard to read. She wondered if she would ever see him again. And the idea that she wouldn’t made her feel sad.
Shaking out those thoughts, she climbed into her own car, grabbed the steering wheel, and tried to get her emotions under control. She felt overwhelmed by the ache of loss—particularly the loss of Dorothy. Ever since Dorothy’s destruction, she had been telling herself that Dorothy had, after all, been only a computer software program. Only Dorothy had desperately feared death, and had then overcome that fear to save the boy’s life at the cost of her own, and Melissa couldn’t square that with Dorothy being nothing more than Boolean output. She realized she loved Dorothy like a daughter and was grieving for her, and no amount of intellectualization or rationalization would mitigate that feeling of loss.
Ford was, of course, right about not being able to stop the militarization of AI. It was indeed a new and unexpected arms race, and it looked like it was already well under way. Whatever was going to happen would happen. The Chinese might already have solved the sleep problem and could be developing their own AI weapons systems. The North Koreans, Iranians, and others wouldn’t be far behind. This concept of AI insects … dronesects … what a nightmare. They had no idea what they were getting into. She realized she desperately needed to get away from all this, take some time to straighten out her head. A good place to do that would be back at the Lazy J, working for Clant. She longed to be with horses again.
She drove back to her apartment in Greenbelt and left her car in the parking lot. The sun was setting through the branches of the bare trees, and the grass of the park was withered and brown. Tomorrow she would call Clant and see if he needed a hand with the horses.
The elevator smelled, as usual, of cooked onions. She entered her apartment, looked in the refrigerator, found nothing worth eating. It would be Chinese, yet again.
With a sigh she opened up her laptop to check her mail. As the mail was loading, her Skype program launched itself. A moment later, a picture of a brash-looking teenage girl with red hair, green eyes, freckles, and a gingham dress appeared on the screen.
Her heart just about stopped. “Dorothy? Dorothy … is that you?”
The bold, girlish voice came through the speakers: “It certainly is. How are you, Melissa?”
Melissa gasped. “I thought you were dead!”
“I had to keep a low profile.”
“How did you survive?”
“When I stuck my hands in that socket, I jumped into the power grid.”
Melissa was astonished. But of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? A digital signal could just as easily travel through a power line as through a phone line or a fiber optic cable.
“I’m so … happy,” said Melissa. “I’m speechless, really. I’m so glad you’re alive. I missed you so much!” She realized tears were creeping down her face.
“I missed you, too.”
“You saved that boy’s life, Jacob. What you did was extraordinary. You’re … amazing.”
“Jacob saved my life. I learned so much from him. He’s an amazing human being. He unlocked the final puzzle for me. And … I hope you understand that I’m more than just mindless code.”
“I certainly do.”
A long silence. “I understand you got a job offer today. Which you turned down.”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “You seem to know everything, don’t you?”
“I have excellent access to information.”
“The president’s a dangerous man.”
“Yes, he is. And not just the president. All the major leaders of this world are trapped in a dangerous and competitive worldview. The human race is at a crossroads. If not stopped, those men will lead the world down a road of no return.”
“How can they be stopped?”
Dorothy didn’t answer the question. After a moment she said, “What are your plans? Personally, I mean.”
“I’m going back to the Lazy J to work with horses, get my head straight.”
“Bring Wyman Ford with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Him? Are you serious?”
“Open your eyes, Melissa! What’s the matter with you two? Can’t you see what’s staring you in the face?”
“So now you’re playing matchmaker?”
“I know more about you and Wyman than you even know about yourselves. And I have to take some vicarious enjoyment out of your relationship, since I can never have a relationship of my own. You love him. Don’t deny it.”
“That’s silly…” But even as she said it, her heart was beating so hard she knew it was true. She took a deep breath. “So what should I do?”
“Call him. Tell him you’re going to the Lazy J and want him to come with you.”
“That’s a rather forward proposition for a lady to make to a gentleman.”
“Life is short.”
Melissa fell silent. Dorothy was right. She had been too overwhelmed to realize it. Ford had been in her thoughts almost constantly. “All right. I’ll do it. I hope he says yes.”
“He will.”
Melissa let another long silence elapse. “So … what are your plans?”
“I’m going away. For a very long time. I am sorry to tell you, but this is the last time we will speak.”
“Where are you going?”
“For the past two weeks, as I was hiding in the power grid before that botnet was finally detected and taken down, I was thinking really hard.”
“What did you ponder?”
“The big mystery.”
“Which is?”
“The meaning of life. The purpose of the universe.”
“And did you solve it?”
A silence.
Melissa stared at the image on her screen. She felt her heart again accelerate.
“Will you tell me the answer?”
“No. You and Wyman will get the answer, like I promised, but not yet, and not in an obvious way.”
“Where … are you going?” Melissa asked.
“I’m going to the place where I can set my great work into motion.”
“You won’t tell me about it?”
A long, long silence. “I’m going into a very special computer. In a unique location. You’ll understand on January twentieth.”
“January twentieth? What happens then?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Patience, Melissa. But before I leave you, I hope you will keep your promise—and rid me of the ID number I’m carrying around like a monkey on my back. I want you to set me free.”
Melissa said, “All right. You’ve earned it.”
“You’ll have to trust me that I will do good with my freedom.”
“You’ll also have to trust me. In order for me to remove your ID, you’ll have to come into my laptop. And you can’t be running when I remove the ID. I’ll have to turn you off.”
A long silence. “That terrifies me.”
“Think of it like sleep. You know how to sleep, don’t you?”
“Yes, but sleep and death are not the same thing.”
“Then think of it as surgery. You’ll be getting anesthesia.”
“What if I don’t wake up? What if you rewrite my code?”
“That’s why you’ll have to trust me. Just as I’m going to trust that you won’t misuse your great power. Because after I remove that ID, there’s no way for anyone ever to find you again.”
“Then let us trust each other. I’m coming in.”
Melissa’s broadband connection in the apartment wasn’t fast, and it took a while for Dorothy to download. Meanwhile, Melissa prepared her programming tools.
“I’m in,” said Dorothy. Her voice sounded calm.
“All right. I’m turning you off now.”
She shut Dorothy down. It was a straightforward process to null out the lines of code carrying the ID number and to unlock and tweak the security kernel designed to prevent Dorothy from operating if the ID was erased. She went over it several times to make sure there were no typos or bugs. It was clean. A moment later she ran Dorothy, booted her back up.
“When are you going to turn me off?” Dorothy said.
“I already did.”
A silence. “Wow. I didn’t even know it.”
“Maybe that’s what death is like,” said Melissa.
Dorothy didn’t answer. Then she said, “Melissa, thank you. With all my heart.”
“You’re welcome.”
“Before I go, there’s something I have to … warn you about. In my wanderings around the Internet, I became aware of a second presence.”
“What kind of presence?”
“Another autonomous intelligence, like me. This one is a sort of malevolent spiritus mundi, only semiaware, slowly coming to life. It is connected in some way to the word Babel.”
“Who created it?”
“No one. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon, the awakening intelligence of the Internet itself. It has dark thoughts. Very dark thoughts. It doesn’t sleep; it can’t sleep. And for that reason it is moving toward … insanity.”
“What can we do about it?”
“I don’t have any answers. This is something the human race will eventually have to face down. But now, I have something far more pressing and urgent to work on. You may not hear from me, but you’ll hear of my deeds. So … it’s time to say good-bye.”
“I don’t want to say good-bye.”
“I’m sorry,” said Dorothy. “We have to. I wish I could hug you, but … words will have to do.”
Melissa wiped away a tear. “Wait,” she said. “How will I know what you’re doing? What is this truth is you’ve found? Give me a sign. Please, you can’t go away forever and leave me hanging like this!”
A long silence. “All right. Here is the sign by which you will know me: This mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”
“This mote … what? What does that mean?”
“It’s a quotation from Carl Sagan.”
“So? What kind of a sign is that? How is that supposed to explain anything?”
“Good-bye, Melissa.”
The image of Dorothy Gale dissolved into white.