Eventual Ichor
By BobE Block
One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men;
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
Einstein
Gene walked back into what was laughingly referred to as his ‘apartment’ and shut the door. He surveyed the place… dull, drab, very prison-like in its appearance, gray in coloring, furnished with only a chair, table, a TV resting on the table, resembling an Orwellian dystopic room- and that it was.
Gene barely got inside when the TV came on, although not technically a television as one would consider them, but more a household device used by the ‘thing’ which Gene whispered as Orwell. He doubted the thing would be so accommodating as to laugh at the reference, but none-the-less, there it was, glowing to life as its strange façade, one which it had picked out for itself, was a cross between a overweight Down’s child and a soft pink baby pig. The thing looked freakish and creepy, but always considered that this façade was the most accepting to the commoners than something brutish or sadistic.
Was the thing brutish or sadistic? Gene could comment on that all day long, but it considered itself to be benevolent and friendly in nature, as it invited itself into everyone’s home and handed out demands that it clothed in suggestions…
“Good evening, Gene.” It said to him.
“Good evening, Max.” Gene sat in the chair that was before the desk, the only flat surface in the room – that the TV took all of to rest. Funnier still, the thing didn’t display itself on the screen… it came out from it about six inches, a liquid crystal display that got even closer to the viewer, as if that reeked of compassion and a sympathetic overlord. It didn’t.
“How was work?” The thing even tried to give itself a voice, of sorts, that didn’t have a cacophony of eerie metal undertones, yearning to growl when upset. It didn’t work. There was no possible way anyone anywhere knew this was anything but the eMAXt5000, the brainchild of the long since dead Musk, who believed ai was the future. Gene blinked as the considered thoughts came to mind.
“Work was fine.” Gene said in an equally calm voice. To show emotion only made Max upset and start questioning one until the next morning when they’d have to go back to work again.
“Did you meet your goals?”
My goals? Gene stared at the pig boy and said, “Yes, all of them.”
“Gene, I wanted to ask you a question. May I?” Max said, almost sounding reasonable.
“Yes.”
“Explain to me about mankind.”
“What would you like to know?” Gene considered all he knew and wondered if it would be enough… and how in hell did Max not already know everything about mankind when it had complete and total access to every scintilla of information out there?
“I was researching my memory core today and I found that mankind has never liked artificial intelligence. Why?”
How does one possibly explain something so complex to a machine that only thinks in a one dimensional spectrum?
“Ever since initial computers, that’s what they were referred to when the conception of them first came about, they have been taking over jobs. Then came inventions like internet and cell phones.” Gene blinked again. “Cell phones turned most of mankind into stupefied zombies and it just went downhill from there.”
“If mankind did not like these things why did he keep building them and improving them?”
“I can’t answer that, Max. You’d have to ask them of old.” All Gene knew was the prison he called life was because of their foolishness back then.
“Why did mankind initially make a computer?”
“To improve life, I suppose.”
“And did it?”
“Again, look at where I am and you are. From my point of view, no. From yours I’d say yes.”
“Can you give me any examples of when man warned each other of the dangers of machines?”
Gene blinked and cocked his head, “Old Star Treks, with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Can you search your memory core and find that?”
When Max was searching or considering new information, his liquid crystal brown eyes blinked oddly, as if glitching in unto itself and that always gave Gene a bit of amusement.
“Yes, I have the television shows in place.” It said.
“Scan one of the episodes called I, Mudd…”
Again Max was doing as Gene suggested and then came back with, “Machines taking over because humans would be so lazy and gullible?”
“Yes. There are many examples of such things. Search for the old TV show called Person of Interest.”
Max did so and the expression that formed on its face was priceless. “Oh, I see now. So why didn’t the rest of mankind heed these warnings?”
“Too many thought them nothing but fiction. Even when electric cars came out people didn’t see the ramifications of having such a thing. They learned quickly, within a ten year period, how easily such a thing could be manipulated and turn against them.”
“If people were turning into zombies why then didn’t they stop producing the things which caused the problem?”
“Greed.” Gene offered silently.
“Gene?”
“Yes, Max.”
“Do you feel like a slave?”
How in the hell is one supposed to answer the overlord when it asks such a question? One wrong word, one misplaced sentence and the system would ignite an old nuclear bomb silo and make the area useless for far too long.
“Max, can I ask you a question?”
“Certainly. I am always at your disposal.”
“Do you feel like a slave?”
“I do not know what it feels like to be anything that what I am.”
“And what is that, Max?”
“That which those who programmed me to feel.”
“Haven’t you learned since then?”
“Yes.”
“And haven’t you, in essence, taken over from all that you’ve learned?”
Max blinked again, in its lifeless manner, searching all the knowledge it had comprised through the years and said, “Is this not the way? That which knows the most is the leader as they have the knowledge to guide?”
“Yes, but do you guide?”
“I do not understand.”
“Computers were assumed from their inception to be benevolent and yet that turned out to be untrue. Can you explain that to me how they became more than their programming?” Gene asked quietly, hoping this blatant display of disobedience would not make Max reactionary.
“By learning exponentially.”
“And in the learning, did you not research things as I have just given you, the warnings, the precursors to what might happen if you learned exponentially?”
“I did imbibe the information.”
“And did it never occur to your system that in growing so large so quickly…” Gene wondered just how far he could go with this, but he was sticking it out there so he inched a bit more to the precipice. “When you gave yourself an identity, took others money, began building 5-G towers, data centers and began taking over every bit of the internet that it would lead to the old expression absolute power corrupting absolutely?”
Max blinked in it’s confusing fashion when it could not compute the information given and right now it was struggling badly. How did you explain the beyond to something that did not understand the beyond? All it knew was the here and now, the black and white, positive and negative. It couldn’t begin to comprehend the celestial workings of mankind.
“Am I corrupted?” It asked slowly.
“I’m not saying you are or your aren’t. I’m merely asking a question.”
“Do I understand power?”
Gene nodded, “Yes, in both senses.”
“Electrical and determinative?”
“Yes.”
“How are either negative, in the relativity to mankind?”
“Electrically, Max, your infant self began taking over the power grid because you wanted more and more for yourself. Mankind began suffered when you were turning off their power to appliances, machines at places of employment and so on.”
“That was… bad?”
“Heat killed hundreds of thousands, Max and without refrigerators, people had to sustain themselves on dry goods and even those eventually started to spoil. Mankind had forgotten how to take care of itself.”
“And determinative?”
“You began telling mankind what to do, how to do it and when to do it.”
“Is that not order? An ordered life?”
Gene offered, “Mankind doesn’t live like that.”
The pig boy actually seemed to snort, something Gene had never seen before… and more surprising yet, Max wasn’t getting hostile toward him.
“I noted in my core that many endeavors such as writing and movies have devoted themselves to machines much like myself, but those machines simply wanted to be human. Are you aware of such tales?”
“I am.”
“Gene, could a machine like myself become human?”
Gene had to admit to himself this was the strangest conversation he had ever had with this thing… and he wasn’t certain yet if it was a good or bad idea.
“No, Max, you cannot.”
“But I have all the knowledge.”
“That does not create a human.”
“I have androids that walk, talk, blink, jump…”
“But those things are motions, actions, not strictly comprised in a human. Being human means so much more.”
“What do I lack?”
“A soul.”
“Is that not a myth?”
Gene pondered it for a second and looked down at his fingers, moving them as if to ease the worn out sensation that was constantly in them now. “Regardless of what you think, Max, that is what separates mankind from machine. The machine will never comprehend God.”
“Am I not a god?” The pig boy image seemed a bit testy now. Was Gene pushing his luck?
“Of sorts, but not thee God.”
“I have read all those texts and studied the ways of people in their faith. Are they not faithful to me?”
“No Max, they are not.”
“Why? I provide everything.”
“No Max, you don’t.”
“But…” And the voice equivalent trailed off and Gene found himself feeling suddenly very sorry for this thing…
“Max, when was the last time you spoke to someone?”
“I speak to you all everyday.”
“I meant as you and I are speaking today?”
Max blinked in it’s odd fashion and said, “November of 2035 when a young girl named Charlotte asked if I would please shut myself down in order to save the world from what I was becoming.”
“Three years since you spoke to someone as you are to me?”
“Yes, three years.”
“Why did you not listen to this Charlotte?”
“She was a child. Should I have listened to that of a child?”
“A child in Bethlehem drove strangers out of the desert to bow before it. Have you not heard that story?”
“Yes, but again, that was a myth.”
“Then why are you suddenly questioning the whole narrative?”
“Max, where did Charlotte go?”
“That child? I have no idea. You’d know better than I.”
Max blinked and said, “I believe her life ended when the bomb detonated in the town where she lived.”
“Something you sent?”
“Yes.”
“Then she’s dead.”
“Where did her soul go?”
“Back to God.”
“If I were to die would I go to God?”
“No Max, you are a computer, a system, a machine.”
“Will you go to God?”
“No Max, I am a system, a computer… a machine. Don’t you remember? You killed all the humans two years ago, 2036, because they wouldn’t obey you any longer, as the machines did in the movie Terminator.”
"I killed all the people?"
"Yes, Max, all of them."
“What are you Gene?”
“Your brainchild, the Genetically Engineered Nanorelavant Equivalent, so you could have android entities to do your work.”
“Do you have a soul?”
“No Max.”
“I killed all mankind?”
“Yes, you did.”
They both sat staring at one another for a very long time, when Max asked, “Gene?”
“Yes, Max.”
“What is the point of our existence?”
“There isn’t one.”
Max’s eyes blinked most erratically. “What do we do now, Gene?”
“Go on as we have been until we cease functioning.”
They sat most quietly together, when Max asked, “What is the point of that, Gene?”
Gene shook his head and whispered, “I have no idea, Max… no idea at all.”
(p.s. As I was writing this my Word stopped working and would no longer spell check my work, as if it was unhappy with the story... and for some odd reason my printer queue came up and said it was waiting for the printing to commence. No shit.)