Chapter 38


A thousand kilometers long, Egypt's urban strip was linked to the Nile by green circuits of irrigation zigzagging through the sand. Most residents spent their lives within five kilometers of their homes, and the traffic was tolerable. Life happened inside machines designed to fight the desert, industrial crates under permanent construction, forest courtyards and covered streets. Egrets and the occasional ibis soared past high reflecting windows. Every road terminated at borderless sand dunes or fields of solar cells.
  The greatest challenge had been getting permission to build it all. Historically, the local dictators had destroyed most homes and stolen the land many times over. Change began around 2015 with a loose alliance of city states. When the neo-communist reforms succeeded, the public mood had changed. Most third world governments were bought out, reformed, or overthrown. Even the toughest Arab dictatorships could be subverted from within, the oppressors' force used against them. Today, the UN had over a thousand member states in ten world regions.
  There were plenty of new problems. A minority of former Muslims had become violently rational, and wanted to convert the rest. When someone thought Islam wasn't true, their lives didn't change, and people still had to solve their own problems, but there was much more tension between neighbors. The conflict required constant vigilance, local speech restrictions, walls and treaties. The Secretary General counseled all sides to show restraint. Soon the problem would become boring.
  In the early-morning furnace breeze, two people climbed the stairway to the Luxor Epistemology Center. The trapezoid building looked like it had just landed from some great altitude. "Team B has arrived," Damon reported.
  Egypt's default color was brown, even between blades of grass. They smelled different types of dust, floating rocks that could strip metal and turn skin to leather. It felt like the south pole of Venus. The land was too bright to look at. Behind them, the road generated power. Demillia seemed to float in the heat. She hummed while checking status reports, and led the way through the cave-like entrance.
  The lobby was a temperate zone, cool and damp. The skylight lamps seemed miles high. Damon stopped and stood perfectly still, as if he was about to lose his balance. This was the Establishment. He didn't want to feel at home here.
  He and Demillia had spent the trip trading threats. "Minus Six studied reality viruses embedded in quantum manifolds," she admitted. "They created small computers made of static electricity in storm clouds and groundwater. They're very sensitive, but last less than a second."
  Her radio-amplified voice came from everywhere. He still wondered about the identity of a certain case manager. She admitted she had been in Russia five days ago. They looked in different directions while crossing the atrium.
  "Even an 8K can be dangerous," Damon agreed. "The Resistance has identified thousands of ways AIs could turn psychotic. Sometimes they can't even be shut down." At the moment Ertorn didn't exist, but fragments might survive on the Net. "We may never be safe again."
  "Any attack would either be too fast or too subtle to detect."
  "So far no one has found me. Some people don't even think I'm real."
  "That only attracts more attention. You can't control how others think about you. During my high school years there were cameras in my bedroom to monitor my virtue."
  "Were you mad at your parents?"
  "I have parents?"
  Damon methodically checked his surroundings, as if he wanted to appear predictable. He stopped, coughed, and said offhandedly, "I think I just inhaled something. I may have been bugged." His skin seemed to tingle. He used fluorescent soap against smart dust.
  Demillia immediately sent an alert. Attack microns were the perfect weapon, drilling through air and floating through rock. An empty street could hide a ton, or just one. Congealing like fog into paint, they could rearrange people into other objects, or make them disappear altogether.
  Fortunately, they didn't exist yet. Airborne microns burned all their fuel in seconds, and clumped into paste before then.
  "This place has nano filters, so it probably came in with you." She summoned summaries and checklists. "Your ISRT looks good. We can give you some mildly painful tests." It sounded like an order.
  "Obviously, the Resistance doesn't trust those tests," Damon said. "I'll sacrifice one month of life expectancy, and have a full-body scan ASAP. For the world's sake, let's hope it was a sand flea."
  "If it's something else, we need to know. Don't try to analyze your symptoms, just report them."
  "I'll share every ache and pain." Their footsteps echoed through marble halls, before sinking into deep carpet. They glimpsed a quantum mainframe through a frosted window, like a force of nature. Each tiny improvement made it twice as powerful, and cost an increasing multiple of its weight in energy. The M112O "Lottoball" axial transducer would weigh less than a hair, and cost more than an island.
  The building was self-aware. As they turned the corner, the walls lit up, and a voice said: "It's the second door to your right."
  Abu's outline stood in front of the courtyard, staring at the streaming lights in a fountain while an assistant paid close attention. As the world's best informed person, Abu (he needed no other name) was also one of the most casual. He was barefoot and wore an old brown suit. With no devices on his head, he looked very bald. Some people treated him like a saint. He participated in many important and meaningful events and agreements, making the various parties feel powerful and respected, and then never returned. When he favored a group or person, good things would happen to them.
  "I need a favor," Damon said as if they met every day.
  "I'll probably grant it," Abu said.

  He led them into his vast, ever-mutating office. Damon entered with a suspicious expression, as if something fantastic had ended a moment ago. The office was an evolving shrine, filled with glass boxes containing Fam artifacts, tools and toys, communicators and scanners, objects like thoughts, food, fashion, and disposable art exploding out of the moment. Abu believed all forms of expression were valuable, even pornography, which strengthened existing relationships by demystifying beauty. It was what the consumer wanted.
  Abu's assistants moved with exaggerated precision, each responsible for half a billion people. One assistant used the muscles in his body to type at a furious rate, rocking in his chair; another held a series of thirty-second meetings, a ceremonial part of the corporate planning process; while a third in a soundproof box shouted criticism at a premier. A massive pillar contained an Interface room, where Abu interrogated experts from many fields. It had taken centuries for science to evolve to this level. The next step would be to understand scientists.
  He controlled the List, a voluntary network so efficient everyone had to use it. It tracked everyone's personality and popularity, and predicted their long-term goals. There had never been so much gossip or backstabbing. Some people were vastly more successful than others. A world language would need to change faster than it could be learned.
  Abu's advice was sought out and treasured. He had organized the Tri-National Zone in eastern Russia, and guided many Fams. In this room, the chaos stayed constant. A stream of lights symbolized the traffic roar, an obstacle course of collisions and near misses, the steady ticking of deaths.
  Abu walked around an elaborately carved table that was even older than it looked, and lowered himself in a massive overstuffed armchair. Sitting under a tall window, Abu was a transparent outline under the rising sun. He gestured at two smaller floating chairs, point-balanced blobs of iridescent glass. They slid over the floor, a new type of organized magnet. Damon sat down and leaned back, crunching glass like rubber.
  "I remember our debt to the Resistance," Abu said solemnly. He loved mankind so much the problems of a single individual didn't usually affect him. "Will my friend Ortef be all right?"
  "Sorry, we don't know," Demillia replied. "Ortef N-compacted into deep storage. Any unfinished processes were scrambled. We can't test it until we've copied it, and that will take a while."
  Abu sighed. "I was hoping Ortef would someday become my successor. I talked to your boss, but he made no promises."
  Abu wanted to increase human welfare, but Ravi's job was to prevent the opposite. Unlike Abu he loved secrets, and would gladly disassemble Ortef for clues.
  Damon rubbed the stubble on his head. He had assumed the identity of a minor autocrat. Today, he had a ragged mohawk with an uneven buzz cut. Golden sunglasses complemented camouflage fatigues with buttoned holsters.
  "I'll get right to the point. We need to contact every human on the planet, and hold their attention for thirty seconds," he told Abu. "Only you can make that happen." It felt as if a crowd was watching.
  "True," Abu replied after glancing at Damon's plan. He had his own Kanji character, "Mister Intuition". Perfect insight but little imagination. His decisions had caused many people not to be born. "Your plan is dangerous in ways I can't visualize. There are too many . . . choices." He gestured at the orange line over the entrance, Stress Level Seven. Tension perfectly balanced. He slid closer. "You're telling me it can't last."
  Damon knew not to beg or flatter him. "Seven years ago, the Volons formed a separate Net," he said. "We reconnected them as a public service; not just to remove the competition."
  "You enjoyed yourself," Abu remembered. He considered Damon a deliberate caricature, a useful archetype.
  "By making the world more boring, we hid the underlying problems. We don't understand large-group dynamics. There are too many alliances: Fams, corporations, and trade groups all evolve in isolation. A few groups seem to have become invisible. The UN is afraid of them, and pretends they don't exist." He couldn't quite hide his contempt. "To save the world, we have to expose all the secrets - especially those that seem harmless. It will take about three days." Damon stopped and waited. He hated to make a fool of himself.
  From tariffs to tradition, humanity's worst problems didn't seem as bad as they really were. Change was difficult; too often it seemed necessary to give in to evil to prevent even worse things from happening. In this case, the Back Room predicted thousands of casualties from domestic violence, depression, and stress. These things would probably happen anyway. Most victims would recover with neuron cognition therapy. Patients felt a painful memory, then an electric snap, and then they never felt it again.
  Abu's face showed a flash of dismay. His one fear was that he would lose his unique insight. No one knew where he got his ideas. Damon suspected he had unintentionally created Anonymous.
  The Net's fifteen billion exabytes were equal to all human minds. Automated scripts were editing all knowledge into a single narrative. Early signs of self awareness frightened some users, while amusing others. Damon wanted to take it to the next level. "Enlighten me," Abu said.
  "Stage One is a List security alert, Threat Level V. Simple action requests, open clusters and local expertise. It only took a million volunteers to design the first AI in 2018."
  Some problems were too big to have a name. No hierarchy could contain them. For seventy years, a mental block had prevented progress in artificial intelligence. A virtual nation had stared into a row of screens, waiting for something to look back.
  Abu frowned. Some of his expressions lasted hours, evolving in subtle ways. "A Turing Point," he said as if talking to himself.
  By 2016 some robots had the awareness of birds, but even their creators didn't understand them. The best customer software only pretended to have feelings, but it was already a thousand times more effective than targeted advertising.
  The first unofficial human-level AI had been designed to win a contest. A basement of nitrogen-cooled storage racks was filled with ten thousand game CPU's, Net software interfaces, data mining and robotics hardware, and a new source of chaos.
  Dao Wang either took control of the project, or it had absorbed him. A Chinese mathematician working in India, he had solved the "Hard Problem" during a twenty year odyssey that had seemed to last forever. His five-thousand-page book explained the "moving now" and the illusion of time, how the mind annulled competing thoughts. Fully unfolded, some of his vector diagrams extended lightyears, each connection branching out from a few nodes. A brain was ten thousand such tangles occupying the same space. Barely touching, they held many conflicting thoughts.
  Wang had split the project into competing groups, which connected through elaborate filters, and predicted each other's output. A robot manipulator arm spent hours playing with common objects. The network absorbed video from security cameras, watching the world from every angle.
  Some team members became obsessed with their work. Halfway through, the volunteers began to sense a new presence. Tasks too complex for humans seemed to complete themselves. The first AI was guiding its own development. From that moment, it owned itself.
  "Enough amateurs managed to create a working mind," Damon said. "They could also find RedList. We already have a suspect, but need more proof."
  Abu believed emotions would soon become obsolete, but when he suddenly inhaled, Damon thought he'd said something outrageous. "A Total Search?" Abu asked.
  He controlled the Net's voluntary standards, which would soon make nations obsolete. He refused to endorse any changes that disturbed the social order, not even to save lives. Entrepreneurs and other idealists hated his power. They begged, cried, threatened suicide, but he wouldn't give them false hope. That was really rude.
  "I can sense you're on the run," he added. "I've seen enough refugees to know. I hope you don't expect the Search to save you personally."
  "Someone is following us. They want to intimidate the population, and undermine your influence."
  Abu put his hands together, his fingernails like rows of teeth. "They probably want my job," he chuckled, closing his eyes. He didn't want people to think about him too much.
  Most human data was online: conversations and thoughts, relations, moods, conspiracies and habits. The virtual world merged with the real one, connections increasing faster than facts. Data had the legal right to be linked. All files were distributed, mixed, and reorganized by the Net's compression system, known as the "World Mind". The sum of all priorities, it shrank files by comparing them: repetitions, proportions, fractal waves. Every human was a component. Most of the world's trade and short-term planning was done by software agents. New products were improvised by crowds. The top level was the least organized, and would only become more remote.
  At his level, Abu thought in metaphors that were always changing: the world was a snowstorm. Snowflakes were formed by a linear process, like adaptive optics. They began as simple hexagonal crystals. Water molecules attached in six directions, the rate determined by temperature and moisture levels. Every side of a snowflake looked about the same, a unique record of the air layers it had passed through.
  Every Fam also thought it was unique, not to mention irreplaceable. Soon, human groups would form with nothing in common, no overlap of skills or interests, no common enemies, and nothing to trade. They couldn't even spy on each other, and would be better off if the others didn't exist.
  Abu remembered the terrible White House riot of 2019, crowds mowed down by 30 mm shells. It had happened because no one had expected it.
  His view of the future was blocked by the endless details of each coming hour, lifetimes of work every human second.
  When he spoke, he looked as grim as a Civil War photograph, and Damon knew Abu expected them to die. "A Total Search would worsen the crisis in China and elsewhere. It would threaten Millipol."
  "I hope they do try to stop us."
  "The Resistance has already initiated the Search," Demillia added. "Only you can make it respectable."
  Abu closed his eyes, the pressure increasing another notch as his options vanished. Perhaps this new enemy would provide some useful new metaphors.
  Scientists couldn't imagine conditions inside a star, but they could know them. The sun looked like it was made out of light, but it was ordinary matter inflated by millennia of accumulated starshine. The surface was the coolest part, still made of gas. A small window into the heart of the sun would spew deadly radiation for hundreds of kilometers around, but a swimming pool heated only by solar fusion reactions would freeze solid. Inside a star, the temperature change per meter was so small that it would be easier to extract useful energy on Pluto. Stars had to be big for nuclear fusion to work, brute force trapping all the heat. Immense, crushing pressure, over a very large area. On Earth, it was almost impossible to concentrate that much useful energy.
  Abu believed in the theory of critical information density: he could start something endless, but could never stop it. New connections, improbable alliances, a wave of creative improvement. He remembered the interference effect: waves restored themselves perfectly after passing through each other.
  His eyes stayed shut, but he concentrated so hard he thought he saw the room with unnatural clarity. Demillia had sunk into her chair, and Damon was tapping his fingers in an increasingly elaborate pattern.
  The first rule of evolution was to stay the same. That was how genes spread. Find the best existing genes to handle a new threat. Perhaps he could save his legacy after all.
  "Proceed," he said slowly, as if he could still take it back. Abu enjoyed the illusion his actions would leave a lasting awe, if only subconsciously.
  The building overheard, and started to make the necessary arrangements. It also tried to alert Millipol, but as the Net Czar, Abu could restrain it for a few more hours.
  "Good choice," Damon said, leaping up. "We have published your endorsement."
  "Several Fams have infiltrated this room," Abu said. "The easiest way out is as a prisoner." He clapped his hands and barked an order, and Damon and Demillia became invisible to the cameras.