Chapter 2 #2
“Um. Yes?” That had certainly been true of Yai, but Chloe had always thought part of her toughness came from suddenly finding herself playing the role of parent at a time when she should have been learning to slow down and stop pushing herself so hard.
“That fits, then,” the woman said, satisfied.
Chloe stifled a laugh. “I’m not going to call you ‘Grandma.’”
“Call me whatever you want; I don’t care. But if you stand up for yourself, I’ll do what I can for you. And maybe you can return the favor.”
“Isn’t trading favors a bit pragmatic?” Chloe said, smiling.
The woman beamed. Her face wrinkled like an apple—she must be older than she’d looked at first—and her eyes twinkled from the creases. “Now I’m sure I like you.”
“Who the hell are you, though?” Chloe asked, but a sudden quieting drew her attention back to the ballroom, where everyone was seating themselves and looking expectantly at the raised platform at the head of the hall.
Senator Evans, chair of the Joint Committee on National Networks, was at the podium.
“Don’t worry,” he said into the microphone, “I’m not going to give a speech.
” There were chuckles. Evans was famous for his speeches—specifically, their length.
“I’m not even going to list our speaker’s many accomplishments, because that would take longer than one of my soliloquies.
” More chuckles. “I’ll only say this. Twenty-five years ago, the Cybercrash changed our nation forever.
But it didn’t destroy it, and that is due to our resilience as a united people, and the brilliance of one man.
And so I give you the architect of our peace, with an exciting announcement for our future: Andrew Norman. ”
Evans stepped back, joining in the thunderous applause, and Norman stepped to the podium.
His characteristic lopsided smile, the one that had graced NewsNet for decades, was turned modestly downward, but even looking at the carpet, his sharp blue eyes seemed to be considering something no one else could see.
And when he looked up as the applause rolled over the room and his smile widened into symmetry, the effect was extraordinary.
“Thank you,” he said, holding his hands up for quiet.
“We’re here on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of OverNet, and while that’s cause for celebration, it also means that this year marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Cybercrash, which is cause for reflection.
The issues that led to the Cybercrash were never solved; they were just compartmentalized and controlled.
If we want to advance as a nation, as a species, we need a permanent solution.
It was always my intention to create that solution.
I built OverNet to receive it. But the technology wasn’t there .
. . until now. Tonight, after decades of research and development, I can finally announce that the solution is nearing completion.
It’s a brand-new kind of system, one never before seen on the face of the planet: not a mere artificial intelligence, but an artificial general intelligence. ”
He paused, and though there were murmurs of surprise from many of the tables, it was clearly a more muted reaction than he’d hoped for. Most people continued to look expectant, waiting for him to explain more.
Chloe’s reaction was not muted. The blood drained from her face, and for a moment the room blurred.
An AGI. He was making a phreaking AGI.
An AGI was supposed to be a truly intelligent system, a machine that was self-aware and able to reason as well as, or better than, a human.
Before the Cybercrash, it had been the unvoiced assumption that AGI was the ultimate goal of computer science, its teleological end.
She’d thought the Cybercrash had discredited such AI utopianism. Apparently not for Norman.
Never mind that the son of a bitch couldn’t do it, not really; nobody could. It was bad enough that he thought he could. That whatever panyon he’d created had convinced him, and so would convince others, that it was—her stomach twisted—sentient.
She’d missed several sentences, but now the word fear drew her attention back.
“All we have to fear,” Norman was saying, “is in our past. I mean that in two ways. I mean that the worst is over; this system will guarantee a Cybercrash never happens again. And I mean that the attitudes that seek to return us to the past are our biggest threat, because they demonstrate a reluctance to learn and grow. After all, what do we have to lose by continuing forward?”
Norman paused for a sip of water, leaving the rhetorical question hanging in the air. “Someone should tell him,” Chloe muttered, so quietly she thought no one else could hear, but the old woman turned her head suddenly and fixed Chloe with her sharp green eyes.
“Why not you?” she said.
Chloe froze. It was an uncanny echo of the question she’d been asking herself, literally muttering under her breath, for five years, from the words to the almost bewildered inflection. Why not me?
They’d told her it was so only one person would die.
A neat, utilitarian solution. But she’d been there.
The boy had stepped back. The car couldn’t have known he’d do that.
Its choices were to continue straight and hit her cab, killing its driver and Chloe both, or to save its driver by swerving into the much softer obstacle of two teenage pedestrians.
Either way, two people would die. So why had it chosen to take action, chosen to pull the proverbial trolley lever, instead of letting events unfold, letting the trolley—the car—continue on its original ballistic course?
Why had it killed Mia Cromartie?
Why not me?
The answer could only be because the algorithm had, in that split-second moment, factored something else into its decision, something that wasn’t the number of people to be killed, but by the kinds of people to be killed.
In the car was Jerod Harrington Jr., son of Jerod Harrington Sr., successful hedge fund manager.
Jerod Jr. was going through a rebellious phase, like so many kids did who were born with a golden spoon in their mouths.
Funny how they never rebelled by rejecting the spoon; more like they tried to swallow not only what it was feeding them but the spoon itself, and choked.
But the thing about golden-spoon kids was that they usually got over their choking fit and ended up managing Daddy’s hedge fund after he retired, or some other inherited achievement.
Chloe had run a trust check on Jerod when she’d learned his name.
It was seventy-three. Not bad, and it would only rise in the future.
In the cab was Chloe Dunne, recently tenured academic.
Also recently divorced, but as it had been an “amicable” split that didn’t ding her score, which was eighty-five, plus or minus a point depending on which app she used to run the scan and which day she ran it on.
That was nudging the top of the meter for an academic who wasn’t a famous author or Nobel Prize winner or whatever.
She’d always been a contributing member of society and could be expected to remain so.
Kleio was also in the cab, but Chloe herself didn’t yet know she was pregnant, so there was no way the algorithm could have added her to its calculations.
On the street were Jason and Mia Cromartie, twins, months from aging out of the foster system, already with juvenile criminal records.
Trust scores of forty-two (boy) and fifty-four (girl).
Those were bad scores. But did that mean they were bad kids?
And even if they were, did that give the car the right to divert its course to hit them?
Chloe had tried to track Jason down. But by that time, he’d turned eighteen and disappeared so thoroughly that either he was intentionally—and skillfully—hiding or he’d decided to vanish in a more permanent fashion.
And that would have been the end of it, except that one day not long afterward, a message had appeared in her email, from a hidden sender, which shouldn’t have been possible. It was empty except for two attachments: a dark, gloomy image of a fairy and a transcript of an old meeting.
One phrase in that transcript grabbed her attention: “Prioritize the happiness of the greatest number of people who might potentially complain.” Jerod dies, and his dad asks questions.
Chloe dies, and her grandmother, her ex-husband, her colleagues at the university ask questions.
But two teenage foster kids die, who asks questions?
Even Chloe hadn’t asked questions until she’d gotten that email, probably because she didn’t want answers, not then.
After the email, getting answers was all she could think of.
It was why she’d given up her dream job—tenured professor of medieval history at Santa Clarita University—for the uncertain world of politics.
All this passed through Chloe’s mind in the space it took Norman to sip his water. Grandma was still looking at her, and the question—Why not me?—hung in the air.
To hell with pragmatism. Chloe felt herself standing, and with a faint feeling of disbelief, heard herself say in a voice that cut across the ballroom, “Potentially everything.”
There was a brief, concerted rustling as several hundred important people swiveled in their chairs to look at the back table where Chloe stood. “Please save all comments for—” Evans began, but Norman raised a hand, and he subsided instantly.
“No, no,” Norman said with a faint smile. “I’d like to hear what’s on Dr. Dunne-Carr’s mind.”