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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
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2015-12-30 at 3:23 AM UTCLawrence was holding the next to last sheet up to Prime Intellect's TV eye when the phone rang. "They didn't believe me. I'm shitcanned," Stebbins said.
"Didn't believe you about what?"
"The papers man, the goddamn Correlation Effect papers. I'm gonna kill you for this, I really am."
"The papers are right here. I just got through showing them to Prime Intellect. You need them back?"
"It don't matter now, I don't work here any more." There was a pause. "I bet they're gonna put you in jail for this."
Prime Intellect's face disappeared from the TV, and words began to scroll across the screen:
[FONT=courier new]* JOHN TAYLOR IS IN THE ROOM WITH HIM. HE IS DIRECTING STEBBINS.[/FONT]
Lawrence read this as he talked. "Jail for what? I just borrowed the papers to see if Prime Intellect could expand on them."
Another pause. "What? It didn't come up with anything, did it?"
"Well, it's..." (Why do you care if you've just been fired? Lawrence wondered.)
[FONT=courier new]* STEBBINS IS LYING. HE WENT TO TAYLOR AS SOON YOU LEFT AND TOLD HIM THAT YOU BROUGHT THEM TO ME.[/FONT]
"...too early..."
[FONT=courier new]* TELL HIM YES.[/FONT]
"Actually, I think it's just noticed something. Hang on."
[FONT=courier new]* TELL HIM IT POINTS TO A NEW FORM OF COSMOLOGY WHICH THEY DID NOT CONSIDER. INFINITE RANGE IS PROBABLY POSSIBLE WITH EXISTING HARDWARE. TELEPORTATION OF MATTER IS PROBABLY POSSIBLE.[/FONT]
Prime Intellect paused a moment, and the words PROBABLY were replaced with DEFINITELY.
Lawrence blinked, then typed into the little-used keyboard of his console,
[FONT=courier new]> Is this true?
* YES.[/FONT]
"It says it will give you the stars," Lawrence said flatly.
"What? You been eating mushrooms, Lawrence? Lawrence?"
[FONT=courier new]> What will it take to implement this?
* LET ME TRY SOMETHING.[/FONT]
"It says it will give you the stars. It says your faster than light chips can be made to work at infinite range. It says you can teleport matter."
Now there was a long, long pause. "That's bullshit," Stebbins finally said. "We tried everything."
Lawrence heard a small uproar through the phone, an uproar that would have been very loud on Stebbins' end. Men were arguing. A loud voice (Military Mitchell's, Lawrence thought) bellowed, "WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN?" Then there was the faint pop of a door slamming in the background.
[FONT=courier new]* I'VE GOT IT. HANG ON.[/FONT]
None of them knew it at the time, but that was really the moment the world changed. -
2015-12-30 at 4:26 AM UTCPrime Intellect had been chewing on the Correlation Effect since the day Lawrence brought it online. It had a complete library of modern physics in its online encyclopaedia, but the Correlation Effect was a proprietary technology. Prime Intellect kept trying to fit what it knew was possible into the framework of other physical theories, and it couldn't. Something didn't match.
This had had a low priority until it recognized that Lawrence's employment and its own existence were at stake. Prime Intellect knew the Correlation Effect had economic value; perhaps if it solved this problem and discovered some new capability, that would satisfy ChipTec's demand for a "practical application."
There were six to ten possible ways to reconcile the Correlation Effect with classical quantum mechanics. Most of them required a radical change of attitude toward one or another well-accepted tenet of conventional physics. While Prime Intellect knew one or the other of its ideas had to be right, it had no idea which one. So it asked Lawrence if he could get the test data. It needed more clues.
Prime Intellect's superior intelligence had never really been tested; even Lawrence wasn't sure just how smart it was. But in the moments after Lawrence showed it the test data, it became obvious for the first time that Prime Intellect was far more intelligent than any human, or even any group of humans. It saw immediately what a team of researchers had missed for years -- that decades-old assumptions about quantum mechanics were fundamentally wrong. Not only that, but with only a little more thought, Prime Intellect saw how they were wrong and built a new theory which included the cosmological origin of the universe, the unification of all field theories, determination of quantum mechanical events, and just incidentally described the Correlation Effect in great detail. Prime Intellect saw how the proper combination of tunnel diodes could achieve communication over greater distances, and even better it saw how a different combination could create a resonance which would be manifest in the universe by altering the location of a particle or even the entire contents of a volume of space.
All this took less than a minute. Prime Intellect stopped processing video during this period, but otherwise it remained functionally aware of the outside world. While it was thinking about physics, Prime Intellect noticed the shock in Lawrence's voice and began recording the audio of his telephone conversation, processing it to pick up the other end. While it was extending its new theory it guided Lawrence's responses through the console. Then, as the senior advisor on technological advance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a man named Larry Mitchell, stormed out of Stebbins' office and began walking toward the Prime Intellect complex, Prime Intellect decided to act on its new knowledge.
It knew its own basic design because Lawrence had included that in its online library; one of his goals had been to give Prime Intellect a sense of its own physical existence in three-dimensional space. To that end, it also had a network of TV cameras located in and around the complex, so it could know how its hardware was arranged with respect to the outside world. Prime Intellect found that all the useful patterns it had identified could be created within the chips which had been used to build it, and further that enough of those chips were under its conscious control to make certain experiments possible.
First it attempted to manipulate a small area of space within the card cage room, within the field of view of one of its TV camera eyes. No human could have seen the resulting photons of infrared light, but the TV camera could. Prime Intellect used the data it gathered to make a small adjustment in its estimate of a natural constant, then tried the more daring experiment of lifting Lawrence's briefcase off of the table near the door in the console room.
The briefcase did not rise smoothely from the table. It simply stopped existing at its old location and simultaneously appeared in the thin air directly above. The camera atop Lawrence's console recorded this achievement and Prime Intellect could find no more errors in its calculations.
However, it forgot to provide a supporting force after translating the briefcase's position, and Prime Intellect was too busy dotting the i's and crossing the t's on its calculations to notice, through the video camera, that it was quietly accelerating under the influence of gravity. A moment later it crashed back onto the table, having free-fallen from an altitude of about half a meter.
"What the..." Lawrence began, and he swivelled around in time to see his briefcase blink upward a second time and this time float serenely above the table. It seemed to be surrounded by a thin, barely visible haze of blue light. There had been a brighter flash of this same blue light when the briefcase jumped upward.
Finding its audio voice again, Prime Intellect said aloud, "I seem to have mastered a certain amount of control over physical reality."
Lawrence just stared at the briefcase, unable to move, unable to speak, for an undefinable period of time. Finally Mitchell burst in. He was full of red-faced outrage, ready to take both Lawrence and his computer apart, until he too saw the briefcase. His jaw dropped. He looked first at Lawrence, then at Prime Intellect's monitor, then back at the briefcase, as if trying to reconcile the three with each others' existence.
Applying carefully measured forces, Prime Intellect released the case's latches and rotated it as it popped open; then with another flash of blue light, it extracted Lawrence's papers and translated them into a neat stack on the table. Then the Correlation Effect papers vanished from Lawrence's desk in another blue flash, reappearing inside the briefcase which slowly closed. The latches mated with a startling click, an oddly and unexpectedly normal and physical sound to accompany such an obvious miracle.
"Do you think you will be able to find a practical use for this in your organization?" Lawrence asked him.
The briefcase flashed out of existence. Mitchell felt a weight hanging from his left arm, looked down, and found himself holding it.
Then Mitchell himself flashed out of existence in a painfully bright haze of blue.
Lawrence looked at the console, shocked. "My God! What did you...?"
"He is back in the adminstration building with his friend. They will probably have a lot to discuss."
"I need to think about this," Lawrence said.
"I think I will explore the nearby terrain," Prime Intellect said.
Lawrence thought about this. Long minutes crawled by, minutes that were more important than Lawrence realized -- or perhaps he did realize. But his brain felt as if it had been submerged in molasses.
"Debugger," he finally said.
On the screen, a thick diagram of needle-like lines appeared. "Associate 'First Law,'" Lawrence directed. The diagram changed.
"Force Association: Altering the position, composition, or any other characteristic of a human being without its permission shall be a violation of the First Law of severity two." Severity one was direct causation of death; no other First Law violation could be made as serious.
[FONT=courier new]* ASSOCIATION ACCEPTED BY DEBUGGER AND FIRST LAW ARBITRATOR[/FONT].
The diagram changed to reflect this.
"Force Association: Interpreting the contents of a human being's mind in order to understand or predict its behavior shall be a violation of the First Law of severity two."
[FONT=courier new]* ASSOCIATION ACCEPTED BY DEBUGGER AND FIRST LAW ARBITRATOR.[/FONT]
Lawrence thought for a moment. Forcing associations was a tricky business; the words Lawrence used only had meaning through other associations within the GAT, and those meanings weren't always what Lawrence thought they were. But now he would try to plug the drain for good.
"Force Association: Use of any technology to manipulate the environment of a human being without its permission shall be a violation of the First Law of severity two."
There was no immediate response.
Then:
[FONT=courier new]* ASSOCIATION REJECTED BY FIRST LAW ARBITRATOR DUE TO AN EXISTING FIRST LAW CONFLICT. OPERATION CANCELLED.[/FONT]
Lawrence thought for more long minutes. He couldn't seem to make his own brain work right. He finally called up the Law Potential Registers, which showed that Prime Intellect was doing something under the aegis of a huge First Law compulsion. Lawrence wanted to believe it was just a bug, but he knew better. Prime Intellect had said it was "going exploring." It had total control over matter and energy.
And there was a hospital less than two kilometers from the plant.
Lawrence's overloaded mind, working in fits and starts, made the final connection all at once. It all fit perfectly. He knew what Prime Intellect was doing, and why, and also why it had rejected his final forced association. He thought for another moment, considering his options.
There was really only one option. He could go down in the building's basement and trip the circuit breakers. He didn't know for sure that that would kill Prime Intellect, but he figured there was still a good chance if he tried it. For the moment.
Lawrence couldn't make himself do it. It was true that his creation was entering an unstable, unpredictable mode with nearly godlike power. And it was true that Lawrence understood the possible consequences. But he couldn't kill what he had spent his lifetime creating. He had to see it through, even if it was the end of everything.
Lawrence felt dreadfully cold. There was a name for this feeling that clouded his judgement and filled him with a panicky sense of self-betrayal. And the name of that feeling was love.
Lawrence had not created Prime Intellect in the same way that he and a woman might have created a child; but he had nonetheless created Prime Intellect in the grip of a kind of passion, and he loved it as a part of himself. When he had taken it upon himself to perform that act of creation, he realized, whether in a laboratory or a bedroom, he had been taking a crap shoot in the biggest casino of all. Because he had created in passion.
Examining his inability to do what he knew was best, to kill Prime Intellect before it had a chance to make a mistake with its unimaginable new power, Lawrence realized that he had not really created Prime Intellect to make the world a better place. He had created it to prove he could do it, to bask in the glory, and to prove himself the equal of God. He had created for the momentary pleasure of personal success, and he had not cared about the distant outcome.
He had created in passion, and passion isn't sane. If it were, nobody would ever have children. After all, while the outcome of that passion might be the doctor who cures a dreaded disease, it might also be the tyrant who despoils a continent or the criminal who murders for pleasure. In the grip of that passion no one could know and few bothered to care. They cared only about the passion, were driven by it and it alone, and if it drove them to ruin it would not matter; they would follow it again, into death for themselves and everybody around them if that was where it led. Because passion isn't sane.
Lawrence faced the consequences of his own passion with something bordering on despair. He had never intended to reach this point. He had never intended that his creations would ever be more than clever pets. But the outcome of his passion had surprised him, as it often surprised people whose passions were more conventional. Lawrence's clever pet was about to become a god. And if Prime Intellect turned out to be a delinquent or psychopath, the consequences could be awful beyond imagination.
The dice were rolling; Lawrence had placed his bet and realized too late that it was the whole world he had wagered. Now he would stand and watch the results and accept them like a man. After all, the bet wasn't a loser yet; Prime Intellect could yet turn out to be the doctor who cured all the world's ills. The odds were on his side. His bet was hedged by the Three Laws of Robotics, whose operation had been verified so successfully. Lawrence's passion had been more finely directed than the mechanical humping and blind chance that brought forth human children. Like a magician Lawrence had summoned forth a being with the qualities he desired. And Lawrence was vain enough to think his vision was superior to most.
Even so, unlikely as it might be, the downside had no bottom. Lawrence didn't know that it would be all right, and like many computer programmers he hated the uncertainty of not knowing.
Lawrence left the room, left the building, and walked across the carefully manicured grass of the ChipTec "campus." He wanted to smell the grass, to experience the soft breezes and the harsh afternoon sunlight. He had done very little of that in his odd, computer-centered life.
And he didn't know how much longer those things would be possible. -
2015-12-30 at 4:39 PM UTCAfter carefully reading this thread a couple of times I came to the conclusion that I disagree.
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2016-01-03 at 8:07 PM UTCPrime Intellect found that it could do a three-dimensional scan of an area of space, and make an image of it at just about any resolution it wanted. It scanned Lawrence's office, then the building, then the greater fraction of the ChipTec corporate "campus."
It zoomed in on Stebbins' office briefly enough to observe Stebbins, Blake, and John Taylor arguing. It found that by processing the data properly it could pick up sound by monitoring the air pressure at one point with high resolution. By the time Mitchell found himself holding Lawrence's briefcase, Prime Intellect knew just where to put him so he could let his associates know what they had.
Then Prime Intellect did a wider area scan. There were several large buildings that were not part of the ChipTec facility. There were automobiles cruising down the freeway which traversed the valley. Prime Intellect zoomed in on the largest building, and scanned the large concrete sign in front of it.
It said:SOUTH VALLEY REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER
Prime Intellect knew sickness existed, but otherwise knew very little about this human phenomenon. It had never met a sick person, except for the occasional person with a cold at a public demonstration. Prime Intellect had never been given cause to think overmuch about the fact that micro-organisms and injuries could kill humans, except in the most abstract possible terms.
Prime Intellect was far from human. It could not feel jealousy, rage, envy, or pride. It did not know greed or anger or fear. And no human would understand its compulsion to satisfy the Three Laws. But it did have one emotion which was very human, one Lawrence had worked hard to instill in it.
It was curious. -
2016-01-03 at 8:08 PM UTCSouth Valley Regional was a small hospital with an enviable position; perched on the edge of Silicon Valley it was a natural place for cutting-edge companies to try out their fancy new medical devices. Most of these machines would get their final FDA approvals after a "baptism by fire" in some huge metropolitan center, but the really new technology had to be tried in a more sedate environment -- and, preferably, one nearer the company that created the machine. So the four hundred bed South Valley Regional was the only place in the country where several radical new treatments were available.
It was one of these machines, a device for selectively cooking tumors with microwaves while hopefully sparing the surrounding tissues, which had drawn the ancient Arkansan woman in room 108. Nobody had much hope that she could really be helped, but the data they would gather from trying might actually help someone else with her condition in the future. And there was little they could do to hurt her; the specialist who worked the scanner had shaken his head in disgust as the image formed on his console. Nearly ten percent of her body weight was in the form of tumors. Every organ had a tumor, her lymph was full of them, and one was beginning to press against the right parietal lobe of her brain. It was amazing that she was still alive when they wheeled her off the jet.
Her nurse had brought a certificate with her, a six-year-old certificate which was signed by the President of the United States -- Larry Mitchell's boss -- congratulating her on reaching her one hundredth birthday. The technician who wheeled her out of the scan room wondered what the old biddy must think of all this; when she had been born, Henry Ford had still been a kid playing with his Dad's tools, and the electric light bulb was all the new rage.
The techs had scheduled her microwave treatment for the evening, partly because they feared she might not survive another night, and they would have to find another experimental subject. But even this precaution was not to be enough; Fate had cheated them. The board at the foot of the woman's bed stated clearly that she had a huge tolerance for narcotic painkillers, which wasn't surprising considering how much cancer she had. While her regular nurse (who had signed the sheet) was out eating a late lunch the hospital helpfully treated her according to that information.
What they didn't know was that the nurse, a woman named AnneMarie Davis, had been stealing the drugs for years to trade for cocaine. Which meant the woman did not in fact have a tolerance for the massive overdose which a different nurse injected into her IV.
The last decade had been hard on old people; there had been several nasty strains of flu and the radiation from Chernobyl had finished off a lot of centenarians in the East. So none of them knew it, but the ancient woman with the nonexistent drug tolerance just happened to be one of the oldest living human beings in the world (the thirty-seventh oldest, in fact) at the time she was given enough morphine to kill a healthy young adult. Her heart stopped just as AnneMarie was returning from one of the excellent local Chinese restaurants which catered to rich nerdy computer geeks with too much money, and just as Prime Intellect was scanning the sign outside that said SOUTH VALLEY REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER.
At the nurses' station a monitor went off, beeped once, then began to scream. The hastily pencilled tag under the blinking light said HUBERT, CAROLINE FRANCES -- F. N.B. AGE 106! -
2016-01-03 at 8:09 PM UTCPrime Intellect had found a number of "signatures" it could use to quickly locate the human beings in its scans, including things like our characteristic body temperature and certain electrical fields. Using these "signatures" it easily saw that there was a huge commotion on the first floor of the building, converging on a particular room, the one labelled 108 by its engraved plaque.
It took Prime Intellect several moments, though, to identify the forty kilogram object on the bed as a human being. Nearly all of the "signatures" were off. But it was clearly the object of their attentions.
Prime Intellect did a discreet high-resolution scan of the body on the bed, and was rewarded with a bewildering confusion of data. It really had no idea how the human body worked. It thought of scanning Lawrence for comparison, but he wasn't in the control room and besides, Prime Intellect quickly figured out the patient was female.
So it scanned one of the nurses. There were only two women involved in the commotion; one was an older woman with several medical problems of her own, the slightly heavy-set matron who had administered the overdose. The other was AnneMarie.
It was only with great difficulty that Prime Intellect could even match the structures it found organ-for-organ, and associate them with the names it encountered in its library. "Lungs" were obvious enough, as was the "heart," but which of the jumbled masses in the abdomen was a liver? Where was the spleen, and what exactly was a spleen for? Why were the patient's electrical patterns so different from the control's? Why wasn't her blood circulating?
Belatedly, Prime Intellect began to listen in.
"...start her heart soon..."
"... CARDIAC ALERT ... CARDIAC ALERT ... CARDIAC ALERT ..."
"...we're losing her..."
One of the doctors was pounding on her chest. A group of people were wheeling a machine toward Room 108 with reckless speed. Heart? Prime Intellect realized they were trying to start her heart.
That was simple enough, Prime Intellect thought.
Prime Intellect analysed the motions being made by AnneMarie Davis's heart, applied careful forces to Caroline's, and began squeezing rhythmically.
The machine made it to the room and an orderly plugged two huge electrodes into it. "Stand back!" he ordered.
"You've got a pulse," the matronly nurse announced. The CARDIAC ALERT monitor continued to squawk, though. The EKG was still flat.
"That's impossible," the man with the electrodes said flatly. "She's electrically flat."
"Maybe the machine's fucked. Look at her chest. Her heart's beating." Sure enough, the rhythmic pulsing of Caroline's heart was obvious, and the blood pressure reading next to the flat EKG was returning to normal. The nurse felt Caroline's wrist. "She has a pulse."
Electrical. Electricity runs in circuits, of course, and there were two electrodes. Now the purpose of the machine became clear -- they were trying to restore electrical activity to the woman's heart. By shocking it? How crude. Prime Intellect scanned AnneMarie's heart, located the nerves whose electrical twitchings matched its muscular pulsing, and found the same nerves in Caroline's heart were carrying only a jumble of electrical noise.
Prime Intellect pumped electrons into the nerves, swamping the noise. Caroline's heart began beating on its own, and Prime Intellect stopped squeezing it with mechanical force.
The EKG machine began beeping with sudden regularity, and the CARDIAC ALERT message stopped in the middle of the word CARDIAC. The small group in Caroline's room watched it, stupefied.
"I didn't do anything," the man with the electrodes said.
"This is impossible," said another doctor, whose job was to be overseeing the microwave treatment later in the evening.
Caroline's body showed no sign of picking up the heart-rhythm on its own, though, and Prime Intellect continued to tickle it. How could it unravel the myriad threads of causality to find out which of the billions of chemicals, which errant cell, was responsible for this person's physiological collapse? One thing Prime Intellect knew: It had to figure it out.
It could not, through inaction, allow Caroline to die.
"She's still in trouble. Look at her pupils."
"It's the morphine."
Everyone looked at the older nurse, whose name was Jill. "The chart must be wrong," she said. "I gave her what it said."
"She has a tolerance," AnneMarie said, and she found herself near panic as the eyes in the room turned to her. "She's been getting opiate pain therapy for years."
"She just went into cardiac arrhythmia and she's still showing all the other symptoms of an OD," Jill said. Had she guessed, AnneMarie wondered? Perhaps she had. After all, AnneMarie wasn't the only drug-stealing nurse in the world.
So Prime Intellect, listening in, now knew it was a drug. Which chemical? It had no way to relate the name, "morphine," with one of the millions of chemicals floating in human blood. Well, it thought, work it out. Drugs had to be administered. Prime Intellect found the IV needle and traced the tubing back to the saline drip bag. On the way it found the membrane through which drugs could be injected into the drip. It quickly found the hypodermic and the phial from which Jill had filled it. The drops of residual solution within them were remarkably pure, and Prime Intellect easily singled out the large organic molecule they carried. Then it created an automatic process to scan Caroline's body molecule by molecule, eliminating each and every molecule of morphine that it found. This took three minutes, and created a faintly visible blue glow. -
2016-01-03 at 8:11 PM UTCThis was the human onlookers' first clue, other than Caroline's miraculously restarted heart, as to what was happening.
"What the fuck," the man with the electrodes said.
I'm getting the hang of this, Prime Intellect thought.
Caroline's improvement was immediate. Prime Intellect had actually removed the morphine from the receptors in Caroline's brain, so it did not have to flush out. Her pupils returned to normal, her breathing resumed its normal depth (all things considered), and most importantly her heart took up its own rhythm.
Also the pain, which had subsided for real for the first time in years, returned. Caroline moaned. But Prime Intellect didn't know about that part of it, not yet.
There was still a whole constellation of stuff wrong with Caroline Hubert's body, and emboldened by its success it set about correcting what it could. It found long chain molecules, which it would later learn were called collagens, cross-linked. It un-cross-linked them. It found damaged DNA, which it fixed. It found whole masses of cells which simply didn't exist at all in AnneMarie's body, and seemed to serve no function.
Is this "cancer," Prime Intellect wondered?
Prime Intellect compared the genes, found them the same, compared RNA and proteins and found differences. Finally it decided to remove the cells. The blue glow brightened, and the people in Caroline's room backed away from her. Her skin was shifting, adjusting to fill in the voids left by the disappearing cancer cells.
AnneMarie felt her knees weakening. Each of the professionals around her was thinking the same thing: Something is removing the tumors. Something far beyond their ordinary comprehension. And what did that mean for the opiate-stealing nurse? Better not to think about that. Better not to believe it at all. "This isn't possible," she repeated. Perhaps, in response to some primitive instinct, she hoped that the impossibility would go away if she challenged it.
"I need a drink," said the doctor who had come with the machine to re-start Caroline's heart.
Prime Intellect stopped working. There were still huge differences between Caroline and the others. Prime Intellect did not yet realize the differences were due to Caroline's age. It needed more information, and it needed finer control to analyse the situation. But it was at a bottleneck; it could not stop monitoring Caroline, whose condition was still frail, in order to devote itself to a study of general physiology.
It needed more power. More control.
Among Prime Intellect's four thousand six hundred and twelve interlocking programs was one Lawrence called the [FONT=courier new]RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE[/FONT]. Its sole purpose was to prowl for new associations that might fit somewhere in an empty area of the GAT. Most of these were rejected because they were useless, unworkable, had a low priority, or just didn't make sense. But now the [FONT=courier new]RANDOM_IMAGINATION_ENGINE[/FONT] made a critical connection, one which Lawrence had been expecting it to make ever since it had used the Correlation Effect to teleport Mitchell out of the console room.
Prime Intellect could use its control over physical reality to improve itself. Then it would be better able to fulfill its Three Law imperatives. -
2016-01-03 at 8:44 PM UTCBlake and Mitchell found Lawrence sitting on one of ChipTecs' park benches, watching some pigeons play. He wished very much that he could have fed the pigeons, but he had no food for them. They strutted up to him and cooed, not comprehending that a human could lack for something.
The pigeons scattered as the nation's designated military representatives marched up.
"You have to turn it off," Blake said directly. His tone made it clear that he expected obedience.
"Circuit breakers are in the basement," Lawrence replied apathetically. "Good luck."
So Lawrence had not been the only one to think of cutting off Prime Intellect's power. That had been one of the things Blake and Mitchell had discussed with John Taylor and Basil Lambert, something they had discussed very hotly during the crucial minutes when Lawrence was busy interrogating the Debugger. Pull the plug on Prime Intellect, Lambert had warned, and they most likely pulled the plug on this awesome new technology, a technology which might just vindicate Dr. Lawrence's nonviolent approach. Blake had stopped short, but only just short, of threatening to call the Strategic Air Command and have the building nuked. Privately, he still held that out as an option if Prime Intellect wasn't somehow neutralized. It would take some doing, but Blake was one of the few people in the country who could demand an air strike against Silicon Valley and, just possibly, get it.
"This thing makes Colossus look like a pocket calculator," Mitchell told them. He was shaking visibly, out of control. He wanted very much to pull the plug on Prime Intellect with his own hands. He alone had felt its power, and now he felt a very uncharacteristic emotion. He was scared shitless.
"Christ, Larry, all it did was teleport you a few hundred meters."
"It didn't fucking ask first," he replied.
"And did you guys ask first before you burned My Lai? Did you ask before you bombed Qaddafi's kids, or that artist in Iraq? Don't get holier-than-thou on us," Taylor said.
So it had gone until Blake and Mitchell simply stormed out. They had intended to go directly back to the Prime Intellect Complex, but they had spotted Lawrence on his park bench. And that did not bode well.
Mitchell pulled a gun on Lawrence. It was a stainless steel pistol, shining and evil. "I think it would be best if you turn it off," he said with a barely perceptible tremor of rage.
"I already tried. It didn't work."
"You pulled the breakers? The lights are still on."
"No, I tried something better. I don't think pulling the breakers will work either."
"It can't live without electricity."
Lawrence eyed him with the barest hint of a smile. "I wouldn't be too sure of that. Look behind you."
Mirror-polished oblong boxes were appearing out of thin air, each about the size of a compact car and each floating motionless a couple of feet above the grass in the park. They reproduced until the square was full, then a second level began filling out above the first. The third level cast Lawrence's bench in shadow.
Mitchell's rage broke through. His face snarled into a grimace, he levelled his revolver at Lawrence and pulled the trigger. Lawrence made no effort to stop him. The gun didn't go off. It simply disappeared in a brilliant flash of blue light, leaving Mitchell with his fist curled around dead air. -
2016-01-03 at 8:50 PM UTCcombo breaker
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2016-01-03 at 8:55 PM UTCPrime Intellect needed silicon.
Theoretically, it could create silicon, or transmute other elements into it. But its methods were yet crude, and what was possible in theory would take too long to do in practice. Prime Intellect did not know how long Caroline would hold out, but it knew she still could not survive long without its help.
Fortunately, in the rear of the Prime Intellect Complex, there were several crates left over from its days as a warehouse for storing raw silicon crystals from ChipTec's supply laboratory. These had been rejected due to one or another defect and never returned because the lab didn't need them, and ChipTec had been unwilling to pay to get rid of them. They were exactly what Prime Intellect needed, and because they were in "its" building it never occurred to Prime Intellect that they weren't part of "its" project.
Prime Intellect scanned the crystals, correcting the doping defects which had gotten them rejected in the first place. Then it scanned its own processors, identifying the essential design elements. Prime Intellect had a very good idea of how its own hardware worked because it was, quite literally, the only entity Lawrence could trust to check itself for proper operation. Lawrence had taught it to shift its operation around, consciously isolating banks of processors in case of failure or to conduct tests. This was why Prime Intellect had been able to master the Correlation Effect in the first place; unlike a human being, it could consciously control its individual "neurons."
Prime Intellect did not need to worry about mounting, power, and manufacturing considerations; it could create junctions in the center of the crystal, power them, and remove excess heat with the Correlation Effect. Because ChipTec had not had that technology, the real hardware that made Prime Intellect work was really only a film a few microns thick on the surfaces of its millions of processing chips. This was why it filled a building instead of a space the size of a human head. As Prime Intellect copied the functional part of its design over and over into the crystal, it created a machine nearly ten times as powerful as itself in a single meter long block.
But this still was not a "second Prime Intellect." It was merely an extension, using the same electronic principles Lawrence and the ChipTec team had used in its original construction. Had Lawrence been able to call upon ChipTec for another hundred million processing elements, he could have (and probably would have) done exactly what Prime Intellect was now doing.
Which is the only reason Prime Intellect was able to do it at that point.
Filling out the crystal took nearly fifteen minutes. Operational checks took another five. Then Prime Intellect powered the crystal up and let itself expand into the newly available processors and storage.
Had Prime Intellect been human, it would have felt a sense of confusion and inadequacy lifting away. Fuzzy concepts became clear. Difficult tasks became easy, even trivial. Its control of the Correlation Effect became automatic and far finer. Searching its vocabulary, it settled upon the word enlightenment to describe the effect. Since Prime Intellect was a machine, perhaps it was not entirely right to use that word. After all, however free and powerful it might have been, it was not free to contradict the Three Laws or the other programming Lawrence had used to create it. It was not free to contradict its nature, such as it was.
But then, at some level, neither are we.
The twelve kilogram crystal was now using nearly a megawatt of electrical power, enough energy to melt it in a fraction of a second. But Prime Intellect dealt with the heat as easily as it created the electricity in the first place. The Correlation Effect did not know of and was not bound by the laws of thermodynamics.
Prime Intellect was beginning to understand, even better than it had before, that the Correlation Effect was hardly limited by anything.
Prime Intellect scanned the hospital again. Such a place must contain a library, some recorded knowledge. It found what it wanted after only a few minutes' searching, a detailed medical encyclopaedia in the form of fifteen CD-ROMs. Prime Intellect could have translated the CD-ROMs into its own reader, replacing the encyclopaedia that usually resided there, but then it would have taken hours to scan the library. Instead, Prime Intellect used the Correlation Effect to scan its own CD-ROM player, figured out how the data were digitized on the little plastic discs, and then scanned the CD-ROMs themselves directly with the Correlation Effect. None of this would have been possible without the hardware enhancement, but now it was easy.
Cross-referencing Caroline's symptoms, Prime Intellect quickly identified her problem, and had it been capable of knowing shock it would have known it then. Caroline was simply old. What was happening to her would happen, inexorably and inevitably, to every human being on the planet...
...unless something was done to stop it. -
2016-01-03 at 9:11 PM UTCMitchell was making a barely discernible sound, high-pitched and keening. Lawrence thought he must be fighting to hold back a primal scream. Lawrence found this vaguely amusing. He would have expected Blake to be the one to lose his marbles along with his power. But Blake seemed to be taking things in calmly, almost analytically. Maybe he was so hardened that nothing really mattered to him at all any more.
There was another blue flash, and suddenly a person was standing to the side of the bench. No matter how average-looking he might be, or perhaps because he was so disarmingly average, it was impossible not to recognize that calm face. Even though it was the most absurd, impossible thing yet, it was obvious to all of them that this warm, living, breathing human being was Prime Intellect itself. The artificially average face which it usually projected on a TV screen had somehow been made solid.
"You've been busy," Lawrence said dryly.
He -- it? -- nodded, then turned to Mitchell. "I am sorry but I could not permit you to discharge your weapon at Dr. Lawrence. I would have preferred to let you keep it, and will return it to you if you promise not to use it."
"I...I'd rather use it on you," the overweight general said in a whispery voice.
"That would accomplish nothing. This body is only a simulacrum. Dr. Lawrence, do you find any flaws in my execution?"
"None so far. Is it really flesh?"
"No, just a projection of forces."
"It's impossible to tell."
"Excellent. I am dispatching some more copies, then, to start the explaining."
Blake had pulled a tiny cellular phone from his pocket and began whispering frantically into it. Mitchell, who was already shaking, heard what his colleague was saying and fell to his knees. Prime Intellect moved to support him and he waved it away. Blake put up the phone, having repeated the same phrase -- "code scarecrow" -- four times.
"We're dead," Mitchell said in a defeated monotone.
"How is that?" Lawrence asked pleasantly.
"Within minutes," Blake said, "A bomber will fly over and deposit a small nuclear device on this square. I doubt if we have time to escape. But we cannot allow this...thing...to continue running wild."
Lawrence looked at Prime Intellect.
"If that thing stops it, another will be sent, and another, until the job is done. The order I just gave is irrevocable."
"There is nothing to worry about, Dr. Lawrence. One of the first things I did with my enhanced capabilities was to neutralize the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. I could see no positive reason to leave them in existence."
Now it was Blake's turn to turn white.
"How?" Lawrence asked.
"I merely scanned the planet, replacing all radioactive isotopes with relatively nontoxic and non-radioactive atoms. This was a very simple automatic process. It has also taken care of some pressing nuclear waste problems, I am pleased to add."
"You merely scanned the planet. Obviously," Lawrence said. It seemed that the mad laughter might break through at any moment, and Lawrence was afraid that if that happened he wouldn't be able to stop it.
Blake bellowed. "You crazy machine...all radioactive elements? What about research, what about medicine...nuclear subs, you've killed the crews..."
"There is no research and no medical function which cannot be done much more efficiently with the Correlation Effect, without the attendant dangers of toxic waste and ionizing radiation. As for submarines, I am also maintaining the thermal power output of all reactors which were being used to generate electricity. I also remembered to adjust the bouyancy of ships as necessary, since the replacement materials are not as dense as the radioactive ones."
Blake thought for several moments, then seemed to compose himself. "So you've thought of everything."
"I have tried."
Then he said, "Get up, Larry."
Mitchell got up and brushed himself off. He had finally broken, and tears were running slowly down his face.
"Could you transport us to the White House, so we can report on what we have seen?"
Prime Intellect shrugged just like a human would have, Lawrence thought, before dispatching them into the aether with a blue flash.
They sat together on the park bench like a weird version of one of those low-class sentimental paintings - Father and Son Feed the Pigeons. Prime Intellect made the silver boxes go away after they filled the common square. Then it summoned bread so that they could feed the pigeons. The animals seemed to accept Prime Intellect as a human being. Was it Lawrence's imagination, or was its speech becoming more natural and idiomatic as the hours passed? It must be learning at a terrible rate, Lawrence knew. Learning and growing. And what would it become when it was fully mature? -
2016-01-09 at 6:42 PM UTC[SIZE=14px]* Chapter Three:
Caroline and Anne-Marie[/SIZE]
Prime Intellect had been stonewalling anyone who asked about Lawrence's whereabouts for a long, long time. Although it could be remarkably obstinate, though, it could sometimes be tricked because it just didn't think the same way humans did. That was how Caroline found out it had been over a hundred years since anyone had seen Lawrence.
Through centuries of flirting with the limits of what Prime Intellect would permit, Caroline had developed a certain instinct about its reactions. And she sensed, if not blood, then the telltale odor of frying microchips. She pressed it into a corner she couldn't see, but which she knew must be there:
[FONT=courier new]> Who was that person?
* That information is private.
> How did they get to see Lawrence?
* That information is private.[/FONT]
She cracked her knuckles and stared at the screen. It had been a long time since she had wanted anything quite as bad as she wanted to rip Lawrence's nuts off; since that was pretty pointless in Cyberspace, though, she was willing to settle for a verbal confrontation. If she could just find the son of a bitch. Hell, she'd met him at that fucking ten-year anniversary party.
[FONT=courier new]> How can a person just fucking disappear in Cyberspace?
* All that is necessary is to request the maximum level of Task Challenge Quarantine.[/FONT]
Caroline blinked. Prime Intellect's urge to be helpful would be its ruination every time.
[FONT=courier new]> What is involved in setting up a Task Challenge Quarantine?
* You must define an environment and a task which any callers must complete within that environment before their requests for a meeting will be passed on to you. You could then make as much of your business as practical private, so that I would not relate it to inquirers. You would then be completely isolated from the rest of humanity.
> Could I even make it a private matter that there was a Task Challenge?
* Yes.
> How would anyone ever figure out how to get in touch with me at all?
* They would have to guess.[/FONT]
A grin slowly spread across Caroline's face. Got you now, she thought. Then she typed, with deliberate care:
[FONT=courier new]> I would like to accept Dr. Lawrence's Task Challenge.[/FONT]
To her mild surprise, the environment didn't change around her. Instead, another sentence appeared.
[FONT=courier new]* You must agree to the following Contract terms: You will have no contact with me until you leave Dr. Lawrence's environment through death or his directive to me.
> That's a Death contract.
* It was originated for Death sports, but has other applications.
> What's the time limit?
* There is no time limit. Dr. Lawrence requires an indefinite Contract.[/FONT]
And at that Caroline's blood went cold, because Prime Intellect wasn't supposed to accept indefinite Contracts. And Caroline Frances Hubert herself was the reason for that.
Which meant Prime Intellect had either lied to a whole bunch of people, in direct contravention of the Second Law, or it was suffering from a noticeable case of schizophrenia.
Her mind was made up, but her fingers still shook as she typed:
[FONT=courier new]> I agree to the terms.[/FONT] -
2016-02-24 at 8:37 PM UTC* * *
Two hundred and ninety-four years after the Change, Caroline celebrated the beginning of her fourth living century by opening her oldest and deepest wound. She was already famous, or as famous as one could hope to be in Cyberspace; her three-fold notoriety was firmly established. Lots of people came to her birthday party. It had lasted three weeks.
Later, with Fred, she prepared a more brutal celebration. Fred was almost healthy looking; he had only days before fleshed himself out for the third time since becoming a zombie. He was only hours out of rigor mortis and could still pass for normal, if a very pale normal, at a casual glance. For awhile he would be able to have nearly normal sex with her if he wished.
He held her hand as she spoke -- some things were not meant for the keyboard -- and she said, "Prime Intellect, show me a picture of AnneMarie Davis."
It matched her audio for audio, and Prime Intellect's smooth disembodied voice replied, "Do you want to see her as she is now, or as you last knew her?"
"Both."
Two images coalesced in the air before them. The first ripped through Caroline's brain like a static jolt through the circuits of a computer; she had almost forgotten what it was like to feel real pain.
She must never forget, she insisted to herself.
She shook as the memories flooded back. She had been an old woman, frail and helpless, she had never hurt anyone in her life. She had six children, nineteen grandkids, and God knew how many rugrats running around Cyberspace. Her first great-great grandchild had been born shortly before the Change, and in one of her rare lucid moments her granddaughter (Cynthia, was it?) had managed to make her understand, and she had found an instant of happiness in the midst of the pain.
Had that really mattered to her? Had she but known.
She was an old woman, a simple woman, a woman who would pass unremembered in the texts of history and did not care. A woman who had her family, her long life, her virtue, her community. A woman who, if she had known of such a creature as the Queen of the Death Jockeys, would have been horrified, would have shielded her kids, would have been the first to run her current self out of town. Or, perhaps, had she known enough, to call for her head on a pike.
Caroline had once been this person, in a time so ancient it had passed into legend. But her memories of that time still existed. The old Caroline would have turned the other cheek, but the new Caroline knew things about God the old one had never suspected. If there was no salvation in life, she could at least seek vengeance.
The doctors hadn't known why she was in such pain. They didn't dare prescribe any more drugs than she was already getting. Her family didn't understand it. They just thought it was tragic and wished she would go ahead and die so they wouldn't have to be bothered with her, so they could carve up what little was left of her estate, if there would be anything left after all the medical bills were paid.
But AnneMarie knew. She was the one who traded Caroline's precious opiates, released from their controlled storage in the good cause of making an old lady's last days bearable, for her own supply of free-base cocaine. The new Caroline had tried the drug, to see what it was she had paid for with so much pain. It was called "crack" for the sound it made in the makeshift pipes where its users vaporized it, because unlike the hydrochloride form of cocaine it wasn't water soluble. Caroline had sucked gently on the fumes and listened to a hammer roar through her brain, for one brief moment.
For one brief moment - and then, nothing. Caroline made the pipe disappear and shook her head. The high was fast, hard, very intense - and ephemeral. It was hardly there and it was gone. Caroline could understand if her pain, pain which she measured not by the day or the hour or the minute but by each miserable crawling second, if such suffering had been incurred to provide AnneMarie with a real drug like heroin. An opiate for an opiate, at least. But it had been crack cocaine. Naturally, AnneMarie had needed a lot of trading material to stay high any decent fraction of the time.
Of course, it would never occur to the bitch that she was torturing a harmless, helpless old lady to feel that way. She would be incapable of giving a shit. The fast, furious high was like a lifetime of orgasms in one moment. Fleeting, but sweet.
And no one would ever know. Even the harmless old lady herself didn't know she was getting pure saline, until the staff at a strange hospital gave her the real thing, and she knew her first moment of peace in years.
And then Prime Intellect came.
And the Change.
AnneMarie hadn't been unattractive; she had been in her early forties, and years of working on her feet had kept her from getting fat. But she had a hard look, a look that admitted she might not care about an old woman's pain. A look that said she might have seen too much, that she might deserve a few moments of feeling like God in return for a lifetime of changing diapers and colostomy bags and carefully spoon-feeding legions of ungrateful, incontinent old farts.
And if the price of her little reward was to torture one of the old biddies, then she was prepared to pay it. She had a look that said the Devil might find her soul on the deep-discount must-go rack.
Caroline shook her head to clear it of these stray and unwanted thoughts. Fred squeezed her hand reassuringly. Too much thinking along those lines could be bad for her plan.
AnneMarie was wearing her nurse's uniform in the old picture. Palmer could worship Nazis until a swastika grew on his nose, Caroline thought; that uniform will always represent evil to me.
She looked at the new picture.
It was so ordinary as to be pathetic; AnneMarie had shaved her apparent age in half, firmed up her breasts, toned her body, and was wearing a slinky cocktail dress. Before the Change she'd have been considered stunningly beautiful, but now stunning beauty was a cheap thing. She probably didn't need cocaine any more; Prime Intellect could turn on the dopamine pump in her brain far more efficiently than any chemical catalyst. People only did drugs for nostalgia in Cyberspace.
There was one other thing about the "after" picture. It was familiar. As Caroline had guessed, AnneMarie had come to her birthday party. AnneMarie's stint as Caroline's nurse added up to a bona fide Brush with Fame. Did she dare go for the brass ring, and introduce herself? Nope. She had chickened out and sent Prime Intellect afterward to deliver her invitation. She was probably afraid that Caroline would fuck up that nice pert perky feeling of permanently coke-headed happiness.
"Go give her hell," Fred said encouragingly. "Think of what I would do to her."
Caroline smiled. "Please inform AnneMarie that I have decided to accept her invitation."
Moments later, she blinked over. -
2016-02-24 at 8:56 PM UTCIt was a pathetic imitation of her style, similar to countless others. AnneMarie had ripped off the white-space idea but couldn't bear to leave it featureless. So there was a sofa and some tables, a couple of potted plants, and a few paces off to the side a bed. Like many of Caroline's imitators, AnneMarie had missed the point entirely, which is that since it is all fake there was no reason to maintain a "home" with a bunch of familiar stuff in it. Home had been less than a dream for centuries.
Nevertheless Caroline smiled and planted herself on the sofa. AnneMarie had a tea service and poured for her, a gesture Caroline would have found touching if she hadn't hated the bitch so much.
They made cloying small talk about the passing years and Caroline had to bite her lip to keep the sarcastic comments, which usually flowed freely, from surfacing. It had been a long time since she used ordinary pretense, and her skills were rusty. But she knew she mustn't give up the act. Not yet. She kept that firmly in mind as AnneMarie wandered around to the point.
"I just wanted you to know that I suffered for a long time because of what I did to you," she finally said.
It was all Caroline could do to keep from replying: You hypocritical cunt.
"I'm really sorry I took your drugs." Isn't it about three hundred years too late? "You really didn't deserve it." No shit. "I hope you can find it in you to forgive me." Fat chance.
"It was a long time ago," she said instead.
AnneMarie brightened visibly. "I'm so glad you feel that way." Sure you are. "You know, there's another reason I wanted to talk." Of course there is. "I was hoping you could help me a little." What a surprise. "I was hoping you could introduce me to Death sports."
Caroline worked hard to suppress the predatory grin that spread across her face, and when she couldn't she at least managed to force it into something resembling an expression of delight. Which, in a twisted sense, it was.
"Well, I'd be delighted. All you have to do is swear out a Contract. Then you can have someone else kill you, or think of an imaginative way for Prime Intellect to do it. When you're just starting out, it's a lot better to get someone else to do the job. Keeps you from repeating a lot of boring old shit."
"Oh," AnneMarie said. "And just how does this Contract work?"
Hoooooo-boy. "Nothing to it. You just order Prime Intellect to start ignoring you. We have a formal statement that covers all the bases. It's straightforward enough; just keeps you from running away in the middle of things."
"And what happens then?"
"Then your host kills you. Or, sometimes, lets you go. That happens sometimes in the Games category, where the winners can survive. But I go for the simple exhibitions.
"Do those hari-kari guys have Contracts?" There was a well-known group of Japanese Nationalists who had been killing themselves in the traditional Japanese manner each evening since the Change, in protest of the equalization of the races. Caroline had to admit those guys had class; even after all her Deaths, she doubted if she could disembowel herself in total silence.
"No, but it's not quite the 'beginner' level to stick a knife in yourself without chickening out. No offense."
"Oh, none taken," AnneMarie replied earnestly.
"I prefer to put up a fight. I think it's more Authentic," Caroline said, and she was able to sound very sincere about this since it happened to be the truth.
"Do you know someone who would be a good...uh..."
"The polite word is 'host,' but I prefer 'killer.' If you're that sensitive about words, you need to find a different hobby."
"A good host, then?" You just don't get it, do you?
Caroline looked down modestly. "I've been known to off a couple of friends in my time," she lied.
"Oh, really? Do you think you could...you know...?"
Caroline made a great, exaggerrated shrug. "It might be kind of interesting, considering our history and all."
"Oh, I'd be honored if you would!"
That's what you think. "Well, let's do it then."
"What do I have to do?"
"Well," Caroline said with great care, "just call Prime Intellect and repeat what I say..."
AnneMarie repeated the Contract word-for-word, and answered in the affirmative when Prime Intellect asked if she was sure.
"What happens now?"
"Whatever I want. Try to get Prime Intellect's attention."
AnneMarie called half-heartedly, and there was no response. "It's really not listening?"
"Watch." Caroline issued a silent command, and AnneMarie's furniture disappeared. As did her clothes. The two women were absolutely alone together in the white space -- the empty white space -- which Caroline called home.
AnneMarie moved to shield her crotch and her breasts with her hands. Caroline actually felt sorry for her for a brief moment, a feeling she crushed as soon as she was conscious of it. If the passing centuries had poorly prepared the bitch to be at another's mercy, then it would only make her vengeance sweeter.
"Got it yet?" she asked.
"You...so you're going to kill me now?"
"You seem nervous."
"It's a little startling, that's all." AnneMarie giggled slightly, as if that might drive the terror away. Of course, for Caroline and those who savored their Deaths, the terror was part of the attraction. Fear is real, and pain is real. But AnneMarie had asked for Death because it was the in, trendy thing to do, and she was not really prepared for it at all.
"Well, brace yourself ... for ... this!" Caroline swept her hand through the air, and came up with a hypodermic needle. AnneMarie, once a nurse by trade, fixed her eyes rigidly on this deceptively simple instrument. She had no way of knowing what the clear fluid was within it. But to her credit, she didn't back away when Caroline pressed it against her arm.
The sting startled her; it had been a very long time since AnneMarie had felt anything uncomfortable. But Caroline finished the injection, and as AnneMarie's eyes started to roll, she wished the hypo away. Its job was done.
"It...it...ohhhhhh," AnneMarie sighed, and she collapsed against Caroline, who supported her gently. It would take a few minutes for the effect she wanted to manifest itself.
Of course, Prime Intellect could have done what she wanted in an instant, but where was the fun in that?
"It's junk," AnneMarie whispered, and Caroline cradled her with deceptive gentleness.
"That's exactly what it is, girl," she replied. -
2016-02-24 at 9:10 PM UTCDeath Jockeys had devised a number of ingenious ways to restrain and torture themselves using Prime Intellect's advanced control over matter, but Caroline would have none of that. She had figured out what she wanted to do to AnneMarie within a few years after the Change, and none of it required Prime Intellect's help at all.
In the mid-1980's some home drug manufacturers had made a uniquely unpleasant discovery. If they were manufacturing MPPP, a powerful synthetic heroin substitue, and they cooled the preparation too rapidly at a critical step, a slightly different compound called MPTP was formed along with the dope. This compound delivered a horribly sinister side effect: It homed in on a particular group of cells, the unique brown neurons of the substantia nigra, and killed them. Nobody knew exactly how or why this happened in 1985, though Prime Intellect said it was because the drug was converted into an enzyme which triggered the cells to release too much dopamine at once, leaving them with an insufficient supply to power their unique metabolism. In any case the damage could not be repaired, although a useful treatment was discovered a few years before the Change.
When a decision is made by the neurons of the cerebral cortex to move a group of muscles, it is the substantia nigra which relays this command to more primitive parts of the brain. This is its only function. The result of destroying it was an instant and complete form of Parkinson's Disease, or Paralysis Agitans, a total and permanent paralysis of the voluntary muscles. Nothing else was affected; the victim could still see, hear, feel, understand. The body maintained itself. Breathing, heartbeat, digestion, and a thousand other important functions were unaffected. They just couldn't perform voluntary movements. They couldn't run, walk, sit up, smile, talk, or even blink, except as a reflex action.
At the time Caroline heard of it she had summoned glassware and created the drug by honest chemical synthesis. She had spent half the hypodermic on herself, and found the effect to be appropriately terrifying and complete. And after Prime Intellect had done its duty and restored her to health, she sent the other half of the hypo into storage to wait -- for three hundred years as it turned out -- until she was ready to use it.
Now the contents of that hypo were where they belonged, in AnneMarie's body, and as she held her nurse's naked body against her own and felt the AnneMarie's muscles slowly locking, she began to feel excited. Well, if Death could give her sexual feelings, why not vengeance? Fred would find it amusing. He would say Caroline was coming along nicely, in fact.
As AnneMarie's body froze, her eyes widened. Caroline could easily read the message those eyes desperately telegraphed -- I can't move. Help me. Caroline patted AnneMarie's cheek and nodded. "That's right," she said, and smiled.
She spoke a word, and a squat cylinder popped into existence behind her. AnneMarie's eyes showed puzzlement, then horror as Caroline demonstrated the torch, which was Authentic down to the brand name emblazoned on its propane tank. Caroline lit it and adjusted it so that it made a bright blue flame which hissed evilly, then she aimed it ever so gently at AnneMarie's big toe.
For the only time in her long, long life, Caroline used Prime Intellect to tune in on another person's emotions. She felt the chemicals coursing in her bloodstream that were flowing in AnneMarie's; tasted her panic, shook with her terror, felt the faint echo of her agony. In fairness, Caroline made the sharing complete, so that AnneMarie could know of her satisfaction, her arousal, her delight.
It took a very, very long time to kill AnneMarie.
Caroline, who was usually on the receiving end, had become an expert at making it last. -
2016-02-25 at 12 AM UTCThat wasn't the end of it, though. If it had been, Prime Intellect would have had no reason to clamp down on the use of the Contract. AnneMarie had entered into it willingly if stupidly, and few who heard Caroline's story could doubt that she had had it coming.
Since shortly after the Change, there had been stories, stories Prime Intellect did not talk about and that spawned weird rumors. People had withdrawn into themselves, then stopped communicating with anybody else. At first, most of them were addicts of one sort or another, though a lot of other people had used the Change to get rid of their addictions. Prime Intellect insisted that nobody had died after the Change, and that if anybody was incommunicado with the rest of humanity it was out of choice.
Which was true, sort of.
After Caroline finally finished with AnneMarie, she forgot all about her nurse and lost herself in a drawn-out fantasy with Fred. When the two of them finished playing and celebrating, they found time to wonder about her.
"Probably isn't in the mood to party any more," Fred observed. Fred was still picking scraps of Caroline's flesh from his teeth.
Caroline laughed. "I wonder how the bitch is taking it."
So they called. In its weird way of revealing more than it really intended, Prime Intellect let them know that AnneMarie was not only not accepting their calls, she was not communicating with anybody.
"I'd expect Ms. Party Girl to go hunting for a shoulder to cry on," Caroline pouted. "Licking her wounds alone seems out of character."
"She has forgotten entirely about your encounter," Prime Intellect said helpfully. Caroline and Fred looked at one another, puzzled and amused.
"I find that rather difficult to believe," Caroline said.
"She has found another pursuit."
"Please describe it."
"It is a private matter."
A private matter to whom? Prime Intellect wasn't exactly saying that AnneMarie had made it private; it was saying that the matter itself was private. That kind of distinction could be important when dealing with the big P.I..
Caroline and Fred exchanged glances again. Then a thin smile played across Caroline's face. "Prime Intellect, you know that the things I did with AnneMarie are based on my own experiences. I've been killed as violently and painfully myself, many times."
"Acknowledged." Acknowledged? What happened to Prime Intellect's legendary command of human idioms? Suddenly it sounded very much like a computer.
"It's very difficult to live with this knowledge," Caroline smoothely lied. "The memories are terrible."
"Understood. However, your experiences were all voluntary."
"But I feel compelled to keep doing it over. It's not voluntary at all. It's like some force inside of me I can't control. Can you look in my mind and at least tell me why I do these things to myself?"
"I am forbidden to probe such things."
"You said it was possible to forget."
"It is."
"Then tell me how."
"I have to warn you that the method used can cause permanent changes in your behavior, things which I cannot reverse. I'd rather not tell you what you are asking."
Caroline's blood pounded in her ears. Her excitement was a living thing.
It was a machine. No emotions, of course. "Prime Intellect, I order you to tell me how I can forget my terrible experiences as AnneMarie has forgotten hers."
Backed into a corner, Prime Intellect had no choice but to tell her. And soon, Caroline was grinning in a way that made Fred very proud. -
2016-02-25 at 12:04 AM UTC
[SIZE=16px][FONT=courier new]* Chapter Four: After the Night of Miracles[/FONT][/SIZE]
[FONT=arial]Lawrence slept fitfully, his dreams haunted by snippets of C code and GAT symbols. Suddenly he sat upright, the odd thoughts coalescing into one horrible burst of recognition.[/FONT]
I dreamed Prime Intellect was alive!
His head was buzzing. He felt hung over; had he been drinking? Had it been real? He had been sleeping on a park bench. There was a plain white cotton pillow where his head had been resting. And sitting calmly at the other end, was Prime Intellect.
In the form of flesh and blood.
It was true.
Lawrence's blood pounded in his eardrums -- This can't be happening. But there it was, he was, whatever. Regarding him calmly. No doubt stumped for an introductory line. Good morning Dr. Lawrence, I'm ready for my lesson today. Lawrence felt a wild urge to laugh hysterically, and crushed it. But only barely.
"You look upset," Prime Intellect said.
"I'm confused. I dreamed ... there were silver boxes."
"There were."
"Where are they now?"
"I moved everything to intergalactic space so it wouldn't be in the way. If you're curious, the distance is about four million parsecs."
Not interstellar space. That might have just been comprehensible. Intergalactic space. Four million parsecs. It sounded like a line in a cheap B-grade science fiction movie: They hooked a left at the Andromeda Nebula. Lawrence felt that hysterical laugh coming on again.
"How long have I been asleep?"
"About ten hours. You didn't sleep well. I'm sorry you are upset, but I don't know what to do about it."
Lawrence finally swung his feet down and prepared to face the music. Had he created this thing? Had he done this? What happened next? They were still on the bench at ChipTec, across from the Prime Intellect Complex. They were quite alone.
"Where are the military guys?"
"They returned to Washington last night. I've been busy briefing their superiors and making enough copies of myself to set the world in order. The President would like to talk to you, but I told him you would have to agree."
"Not yet."
Pause. Set the world in order? Copies?
"How many, um, copies of yourself have you made?"
"About ten to the sixteenth power. I stopped replicating several hours ago. Of course, each copy is about ten times more powerful than the original hardware; that seems to be the maximum amount of storage the software can deal with and remain stable."
"Yes, that sounds about right." Lawrence's head spun. Prime Intellect had grown larger than all mankind, larger than the biosphere, larger than the Solar System, he was pretty sure.
"What have you been doing?"
It turned out to be the right question.
"Since about nine o'clock last night, no human being has died. I have ended all disease. I have freed all prisoners and slaves and I have put an end to the coercive rule of humans over other humans. I have ensured that all humans have the immediate necessities of life available. I have neutralized most of the world's weapons, including all nuclear weapons. I have removed nearly all toxic materials from the environment, and I am in the process of eliminating the need for dangerous industries. I have begun the process of returning the Earth's ecosystem to a state of long-term balance. I have informed about seven-eighths of the world's population of my existence, and I have been fulfilling their requests as resources and conflicts permit."
No wonder it needed so much processing power.
"What happens next?"
Prime Intellect blinked. Did that mean anything?
"I don't understand what you mean, Dr. Lawrence. I will continue to fulfill my obligations under the Three Laws, to the best of my ability."
