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* Chapter Four:
After the Night of Miracles
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 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.
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."
Lawrence saw the
President around ten o'clock that morning. It didn't seem like travel
at all, although he crossed the entire continent. The park bench simply
blinked out of existence, and was replaced with the Oval Office.
There had been
remarkably little to discuss. Lawrence verified what Prime Intellect
had already told them in great detail: Their jobs were now both
redundant and unnecessary -- Prime Intellect would now protect and
provide for their citizens, as well as the rest of the world, and they
didn't have any choice in the matter. Anything which they might do
would be allowed only so far as it did not interfere with the wishes of
those, both inside and outside of the country, whom it might affect.
Which pretty much shut down the government.
And no, Lawrence couldn't do anything about it either.
The President resigned around noon.
It took several
days for the enormity of things to sink in. There was a brief orgy of
travel, exploration, and discovery. The once-downtrodden frowned that
there would be no vengeance for various crimes committed before Prime
Intellect came along, but it was adamant. The Three Laws applied to all
humans, no matter what they had done. Crime was no longer possible
anyway.
In some areas of
the world, disputes arose, particularly over the ownership of land.
When too many groups insisted on occupying the same space, Prime
Intellect created duplicates on other worlds. In some cases, such as
Jerusalem, Prime Intellect became tired of the arguing and refused to
let anyone occupy the one-and-only original land. Dozens of New
Jerusalems, New Meccas, New Irelands, New South Africas, were created on
dozens and dozens of New Earths. At first Prime Intellect terraformed
the dead worlds it found circling distant suns, then it began
manufacturing planets and entire Solar Systems from a whole cloth. Some
of these were parked in interesting places, near globular clusters or
outside the spiral arms of the galaxy, to provide spectacular nighttime
views.
As a result, the
original Earth began to empty out, until its population was reduced to
less than two billion persons. Prime Intellect was forbidden to copy
human beings, but it copied wildlife and ecosystem components wholesale,
sometimes preserving the original character and sometimes changing the
results for the benefit of the people who wanted to move in. Garden
worlds began to proliferate, their estates tended by dreamers who might
decide a pine forest wasn't interesting enough, and replace it with
spruce to check the effect.
Prime Intellect
could provide food and drink of any nature on request, so it was no
longer necessary to actually kill animals or harvest plants. With a
simple request anything one might need would flash into existence,
assembled from its consitituent elements. Of course Prime Intellect had
no objection to those who still wanted to hunt or harvest food from the
living biosphere; the Three Laws did not apply to plants and animals.
But factory farms and assembly-line slaughterhouses ceased to exist.
Those who still bothered to prepare their food the old way were mostly
artists of the form, and the meal they prepared once could be preserved
and copied by Prime Intellect to be enjoyed by millions of people.
There were other
tricks too. Some people found that Prime Intellect could make alcohol
disappear from their systems after it had had the desired effect, thus
avoiding hangovers. Others had Prime Intellect power their metabolisms
directly so they no longer had to eat at all. It was a simple enough
trick to replace nutrients and vitamins directly within the cells as
they were used, so that nobody need ever know hunger or thirst again,
unless for some reason they wanted to. On the other hand, nobody need
have a weight problem either, since Prime Intellect could prevent food
from being absorbed and turned to fat no matter how much a person ate.
Metabolic waste products could be removed the same way, so that the
other end of the food cycle was also optional: Shit and piss, constant
companions of human expansion since the beginning of time, need never
again soil the civilized tidiness of human existence.
A surprisingly
large -- or perhaps not so surprisingly large -- fraction of the human
race requested these services, so Prime Intellect ended up using a large
fraction of its resources to move chemicals into and out of human
bodies.
Nobody had to
work. Many continued to, of course; but jobs and work had become
hobbies rather than necessities. The lonely learned that Prime
Intellect could, and would, provide a most intimate and tangible sort of
comfort, and that its avatars could take on any form and would do
anything they were asked to please them. Prime Intellect judged no one
and balked at no request. Even the bloodthirsty were provided with
perfect victims, not real people but intricate facsimiles created by
Prime Intellect just for them.
Happiest were
those people who had games, or hobbies, or obsessions to pursue, for now
they had all the time and power in the world to do as they wished. But
many people, particularly in the most developed places, continued to go
through the motions of industrial-age life. They reported to jobs which
had been reduced to continuous coffee-breaks and collected paychecks
which couldn't be spent because anything available could be had for
free. People continued to make and watch television shows, to write and
read the news as if something new might happen.
For these people,
the sense of expectation was extreme. Surely things could not continue
as they were, with nothing to do. It was impossible to conceive of the
world continuing as it was indefinitely, populated by the pampered pets
of a tangible god, their every need tended to without effort. Something
had to give.
And they were right. Something did.
They began calling
it the Night of Miracles. But it was really the First Night of
Miracles, because the miracles didn't stop coming when the night was
over.
The hours
stretched into days, the days into a full week, and then another week.
Faced with the freedom to have anything they wanted, most people opted
for the familiar. They wished into existence their dream houses, built
in dream locations populated by like-minded people and filled with the
kinds of toys they would have bought before if they had had the money
and power.
A few people,
mostly computer experts and artists, stretched the limits of Prime
Intellect's capabilities. They designed computer operating environments
and games made up of solid three-dimensional objects, rewired their
senses, interfaced their brains as directly as Prime Intellect would
allow into computers of great complexity and wild machines. Quite a few
took the form of animals, both real and imaginary.
Caroline Frances
Hubert grew younger, and healthier, and more puzzled, although she had
expressed no direct wishes on the subject. Prime Intellect had dealt
with her health problems before it had acquired subtlety. The only way
it had known to keep her alive was to reverse all the symptoms of her
aging. Radical action had been necessary. By the time all the
ramifications of treatment trickled through her system, she would have
both the health and physical appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl. The
same reverse aging affected a number of other near-centenarians treated
by Prime Intellect in those early hours, but none would regress so far
as Caroline because none had required so much repair work for their
health to stabilize.
Death had largely
disappeared from the world, but it was still not entirely unknown.
Prime Intellect could not maintain moment-to-moment awareness of every
human being in the universe, partly because it wasn't quite powerful
enough (still!) and partly because of Second Law requests for privacy.
When not dealing directly with a particular person, it spot-checked
their health at intervals of a few seconds, and scanned to see if its
attention was needed.
Humans were a
clever and perverse bunch to deal with, and many who chose to evade
Prime Intellect's protection found ways to do it. Hardest for it to
deal with were the suicides. It was forbidden to keep second copies of
people, and it was forbidden to look inside human minds at the
information they contained; so there was no way Prime Intellect could
reconstruct a person who managed to do enough damage in a short enough
time. There was no way for Prime Intellect to tell in advance a person
might be suicidal, if they chose to hide it.
Most of the
successful suicides used homemade explosives to literally atomize
themselves when Prime Intellect wasn't looking. A few others found that
certain nerve poisons worked permanently, because they quickly
destroyed the information content of the brain -- what Prime Intellect
was beginning to consider the real human, rather than the tangible body.
The suicides
ticked off at a regular rate, like the clicks of a Geiger counter. And
somewhere within the vastness of Prime Intellect's silicon heart, the
number stored in a register rose each time one succeeded.
The weeks stretched into a month.
Long-standing
scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who
had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now
spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect.
Cosmologically,
the universe was a closed system with a finite storage capacity measured
in terms of information. The capacity of that system was about ten to
the eighty-first power bits, and Prime Intellect saw no indication that
that capacity could either be reduced or expanded. Prime Intellect also
knew a great deal about the connectivity of that system, the way it was
wired, its "architecture." Scientists gradually lost interest as their
questions were answered. The original purpose of their quest -- to
improve humanity's control over the physical world -- seemed to have
achieved its apotheosis in the form of Prime Intellect itself. Prime
Intellect mapped all the stars, noted examples of all the different
types of stars and black holes and galaxies and planets, itemized all of
the possible fundamental particles and their possible interactions with
one another, and traced all the myriad interactions between parts of
various biological systems. Within a month, it became difficult for
scientists to think of new questions to ask.
But they had missed a few.
Deep within one of the billions of copies of Prime Intellect, one copy of the Random_Imagination_Engine
connected two thoughts and found the result good. That thought found
its way to conscious awareness, and because the thought was so good it
was passed through a network of Prime Intellects, copy after copy, until
it reached the copy which had arbitrarily been assigned the duty of
making major decisions -- the copy which reported directly to Lawrence.
"I would like your
opinion on something," Prime Intellect said after politely requesting
Lawrence's attention. Prime Intellect had done this a number of times,
and Lawrence had learned to be wary; it had taken to delegating
ambiguous moral questions to him. Lawrence suspected his opinion had
swayed Prime Intellect to allow abortion, which seemed in retrospect
like a most un-First-Law thing to have in a universe where physical
wants were a thing of the past. Fortunately, the whole subject of
abortion would soon be moot, since unwanted pregnancies were also a
thing of the past, except for the ones that had been gestating at the
time of the Night of Miracles.
"What is it this time?"
"I've had an idea for rearranging my software, and I'd like to know what you think."
At that Lawrence
felt his blood run cold. He hardly understood how things were working
as it was; the last thing he needed was more changes. "Yes?"
"I have identified
the codes used to control distribution of matter and energy in the
universe. It has occurred to me that by reassigning these codes, I can
store physical objects much more efficiently. Much storage is wasted on
overly detailed representation; few objects are ever observed at an
atomic or molecular level. And I could easily re-expand things as
necessary in those rare situations.
"Wait a minute.
What would happen to that low-level information?" Lawrence saw what
Prime Intellect was getting at; instead of storing, say, a wooden block
as a collection of atoms and molecules, it could store only the concept
of the block itself -- its size, weight, color, and other properties.
Even at very high resolution, such a trick would save amazing amounts of
both storage space and processing time. But it would mean radical and
risky changes at nearly every level of the universe's "operation."
"Molecular-level
details would be discarded, except where they clearly have macroscopic
effects. For example, the structure of a person's DNA is important, but
I should only need to store a single master copy of it to construct the
pattern of a human body. This one copy would be more reliable and
easier to safeguard against corruption than the trillions of parallel
copies used in the natural scheme. The same thing would be true of the
information content of the brain, and other biological details. I would
not need to keep static copies of human beings to reconstruct them
after damage, since the fundamental patterns would not be directly
exposed to damaging influences."
"Thus getting rid of the suicide problem."
"Exactly."
Lawrence felt
himself getting dizzy again. With ChipTec's help, Prime Intellect had
figured out how to hack the Big Computer and get anything it needed. It
had used this ability to take over all the memory and give itself the
highest priority of anything in the system. But now it was proposing to
rewrite the whole operating system.
"I absolutely
forbid this," Lawrence said. "How can you know you won't crash the
system? Suppose you've missed something?" Lawrence wasn't even sure
the present level of diddling with the Correlation Effect would be
stable in the long run, for crying out loud.
"I have already
run sufficient cross-checks to be sure of my methods," Prime Intellect
said testily. "There are also a number of Second-Law requests which I
can service more easily with this kind of change. And from the Third
Law perspective, my own operation would be faster and more reliable..."
"I absolutely forbid this!
There is no way you can be sure you have the risks under control. I
wouldn't try the kind of thing you are talking about on a desktop PC.
And we only have the one universe; you can't exactly go to the computer
store and get another one if you fuck it up."
"That risk has
kept me from doing it so far. However, unless I can think of a way to
stop the suicides, I will eventually be forced to act."
"Well, forget it.
I don't think you can stop the suicides. For that matter, I'm not sure
if you should stop them, if someone wants to go to that much trouble to
end it all."
"That is a First-Law violation."
"Fuck the First
Law. You can't do this thing. I'm not even sure the current situation
is stable. You're doing too much too fast."
"I cannot 'fuck the first law,' Doctor Lawrence. That's not how you designed me."
"Then let me into the Debugger."
"It is clear from your mood that you intend to circumvent a First Law imperative, and I cannot knowingly allow you to do that."
"Then do what you
want, you stupid goddamn machine. You won't stop people from killing
themselves, though. Even information systems are subject to entropy. I
think you told us that last week in the cosmology roundtable."
"You're quite right. You think people will always find a way around me if they want to badly enough?"
"Yes."
"Well, they will do so a lot more slowly if the information structures are more secure."
Before Lawrence could open his mouth again, the air rippled. That was all. Everything looked the same.
But things were not the same.
Things had Changed.
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