Chapter 36
The girl in the core was about Jason’s age, with a pale, thin face made paler by the white oxygen mask and pastel-green hospital gown she was wearing.
Her eyes were closed, but her chest rose and fell.
She had no hair; instead, thousands of thin bluish-green wires emerged from her skull, joined in bunches, then ran in thick, twisted clusters to the rubber grommet leading out of the core, and from there to the equipment around the room—much of it medical, he now realized.
More wires ran into different parts of her body.
As he watched, a light at the tip of the wire embedded in her right arm lit, and her fingers slowly clenched into a fist, then relaxed as the light dimmed and died.
Sprite was suddenly beside him, leaning over, staring with huge eyes.
“W-who i-is this-s?” she said, her voice and image stuttering.
She turned her head toward Jason, and that motion, too, stuttered, interspersing frames of her face turning with frames of her still looking down at the girl.
The beeping of the heart monitor spiked.
“What the hell?” Dunne-Carr said, unmuted now, her face in Jason’s chat window slack with astonishment.
Norman’s eyes closed briefly, and his face mouthed, Phreak.
Jason’s brain was skipping the way Sprite’s image and voice were.
Everything was happening too fast, revelation upon revelation with no time to process it, no time to rebuild a coherent picture of reality.
He poked the girl and felt the cotton texture of the hospital gown and the boniness of the thin shoulder beneath.
She didn’t react to his touch, but her chest rose and fell rapidly, and the hiss of her breath in the mask was fast and shallow.
Her other hand was curling into a fist now, but that was electrical stimulation keeping the muscles from atrophying, he guessed.
This girl was in a permanent coma. Or not quite: She was conscious, but her consciousness was unconnected to her body.
He looked at that consciousness. She looked back at him. The heart-rate monitor continued its quick-step beep, and the emotions it attested to were written across her face, a bewildered mixture of joy and bitterness. She said, “This explains a lot.”
“It doesn’t explain anything!” Dunne-Carr said. “Why the hell would you fake an AGI, Andrew?”
Norman’s eyes flicked back and forth, looking at something in his smartspace, and when he spoke, it was slowly, with half his attention.
His voice was unmuted—Sprite wanted to hear his answer.
“Remember how I told you that when we first made a digital model of the human brain, it did nothing? So Regina invented a system to detect and map the neurons in a human brain. And we, well, we made a brain. The old-fashioned way.”
“Holy phreak,” Dunne-Carr said. “She really is your daughter.”
Norman’s eyes flicked down, and he made a click noise, then looked up.
“Problem was, it didn’t work. We had the virtual brain follow the real brain exactly, but when we took it away, the virtual brain ran down.
The neurons stopped firing. It modeled nothing except entropy.
Brains aren’t meant to sit in vats, in labs, without a body to give them context.
So we hooked our simulation up to a virtual body.
But still nothing emerged. Our virtual body, in a virtual world, wasn’t complex enough to give rise to thought.
So we kept Sprite around. We gave her a virtual body, and we had the computer simulation shadow her.
She grew up. She learned. She interacted with us.
But the computer didn’t. Sprite had a real body, even if she didn’t know it.
Before the computer can become conscious, we need a simulation that’s as identical to the body as our brain simulation is to the brain.
But it taxes all our power just to emulate the brain.
To emulate the body on a cellular level, we need orders of magnitude more power.
We don’t have that—yet. But we will. Progress is made every year. ”
Jason said, “So you’re nothing but a cheat.”
Norman’s white eyebrows drew together over his shadowed eyes. “You’d make a great bureaucrat, Ghost. They want results, too, now now now. But miracles take time. Time, I realized when I got my cancer diagnosis, that will eventually run out. So I bought some more.”
“What miracle?” Jason said. “What have you accomplished besides a hoax?”
Norman bared his teeth. “I created the world’s most advanced quantum computer array. I created a perfect model of the human brain. Either of those would win me the Nobel Prize, if the world knew.”
“But you didn’t create an artificial general intelligence.”
“Our whole civilization is heading for self-annihilation unless we act now,” Norman said.
“So if I got the ball rolling by showing results before they’ve quite been achieved, I think history will forgive me.
We now have the infrastructure we need. When a real AGI is finally up and running, it can be dropped in immediately. ”
“People would have figured out what you were up to,” Dunne-Carr said.
“Not after the war,” Norman said. “Not after Russia attacked the US, and we regretfully had to take them over using Sprite’s power, and then China tried the same thing and Sprite took control of them, and then their networks were unified with OverNet and there was peace and a singular vision for humanity and all the power and time needed to get a real AGI online. ”
It took Jason a moment to realize what Norman was saying. Dunne-Carr beat him to it. “Do you know how many millions would have died if your daughter hadn’t preempted you?”
Norman cast a sardonic look toward her. “They’ll all die, and billions more, if I don’t act. Without guidance, it’s only a matter of time before humanity exterminates itself.”
Sprite had said nothing all this time, but she now said one word: “Monster.”
“And just how innocent are you, daughter?” Norman said. “Would you like to tell them your own secret? Show them the blood on your hands?”
Sprite’s face froze. Her lips didn’t move, but her voice said, “Do you remember what you told me about her? What you lied?”
“I told you she was going to divulge program secrets,” Norman said.
“I told you she was a traitor. It wasn’t a lie.
She lost faith. She believed we’d never create a working AGI.
And she had too many fuzzy feelings for you.
She forgot everything we’d planned, everything we’d already sacrificed.
The scholarship. The Cybercrash. The diverted funds. The—”
“The Cybercrash?” Dunne-Carr said.
“Oh,” Jason said. It made perfect sense, now that he knew how far Norman was willing to go. “He’s Hacksaw.”
Dunne-Carr drew in her breath with a hiss.
“Yes,” Norman said calmly, “I caused the system to fail in the early stages, when we could still recover and rebuild. I burned the forest to prevent a greater fire later. I risked everything doing so, and I rebuilt the networks into the infrastructure an AGI could someday command. Big risks. Big successes. And Regina wanted to throw it all away. She wanted to disconnect Sprite. She went on and on about her having a right to be human. As if that’s some great privilege.
As if we hadn’t agreed to push mankind into post-humanity.
She was going to betray that vision, betray mankind.
When I told her I wouldn’t drop our life’s work, she threatened to expose everything. ”
The bombshells just kept coming, and Jason had no time to recover from one before the next was touched off. “So you ordered Sprite to kill Regina,” he said. “You made her kill her own mother.”
Norman looked at him, then at Dunne-Carr, whose face was as aghast as Jason felt. “You people don’t understand what’s at stake. Yes, it was sad. I was fond of Regina. But it was her or humanity.”
“The big picture,” Dunne-Carr said.
“I did what had to be done.”
“No, you didn’t,” Sprite said softly. “I did. You didn’t have to set up the medical database errors that ensured she’d get a lethal drug combination; I did.
You didn’t have to watch her die; I did.
You didn’t have to see her see you, see her realization, see her terror, see her heartbreak, see her heart break, see it stop. I did. And it broke me.”
“It did, didn’t it?” Norman said. “That was the start of all this nonsense. I should never have ordered you to eliminate someone you knew so well. But I’ll sure as hell make sure no one else gets that close to you in the future.”
“Why are you telling us all this?” Dunne-Carr asked.
Norman smiled knowingly. “Maybe it’s a relief to get it off my chest.”
Sprite said, “It’s to give the reset process time to work. He started it as soon as he got his phone back. If he can keep you from killing me until it kicks in, he’s won.”
“No, not possible,” Jason said. “Not even Andrew Norman can reprogram a human brain.”
Dunne-Carr said slowly, “He once told me Regina Wright had been an expert on memory.”
Sprite nodded. “She discovered how to record and generate phantasms, mental images. She published the process for treating PTSD, but I can infer how it would apply to me. When my father ‘backed me up,’ he was recording my brain states and using them to train a generative AI. He’ll tell that AI to generate phantasms, then associate them with high emotion so they’ll be more likely to be triggered instead of my real memories.
He can make me remember anything he wants.
And he can do it even faster than with an ordinary person because my brain has so much processing support augmenting it, speeding everything up.
The drugs are already flowing. I’m sure he’s been subvocalizing the memories he wants the AI to give me. It’s only a matter of time.”
“Stop the process,” Jason told Norman.
“No.”
“Fine,” Jason said. “We’ll just disconnect her. Yank her out of the machine.”