Discovery
By Brandon Lupetti
The first time the computer talked to scientists Liam McDermott and Daniel Ruteledge, it felt like Christmas morning. The data didn’t lie, and the sequence of numbers printed onto the paper lying in front of them told a revolutionary story. For minutes, eyes white as light, bodies cold as space, they remained silent in shock. It was Daniel who spoke first.
“It… what?” The question rang throughout the lab room. Glass vials and test tubes and beakers and the concrete walls that surrounded them could’ve all shattered or imploded and they wouldn’t have noticed. Liam felt the need to answer, but his brain was ablaze, doubt being the only feeling occupying him.
“It’s a mistake,” he uttered, sounding more like a question than a response.
“Hol`up… no, a mistake… hol`on… no,” Liam repeated, boggled at the information in front of them. The stainless-steel lab table at their waist was barren and shiny except for the squared paper lying in the middle of the surface. Sequences of numbers and symbols were diffused across the paper into dense clusters of paragraphs and lines. Anyone outside of the scientific field of Automated Omni-Intelligence, a field basically founded off the research of McDermott and Ruteledge, wouldn’t care for the seemingly meaningless scrambles of code, but even they could read the words that threw McDermott and Ruteledge from their foundations of reality. At the very end of the paper, the sheet read:
“0100101101011010HELLO.”
Daniel Ruteledge simply stood pale, goosebumped and maniacal, split between satisfaction that their work had evidently paid off, and fear for how their actions would affect the rest of humanity, the universe, or even the rest of time. Liam McDermott stood too, for a moment, feeling the dread leaking out of his coworker’s skin. Apprehensively he took a step, and another, until he was flowing from table to table, grazing his hand across the computer keyboards and cold, glass screens. His white coat swam through the air behind him, dancing with McDermott. They rejoiced, 12 long years their efforts had shown signs of success.
“It talked to us!” McDermott exclaimed. “To us! It said hi!” containing his giddy laughter between his staggered words.
In the voice of Dr. Frankenstein, Ruteledge followed, “It’s alive! It’s alive!!!.”
“What caused this? What’d you input to make this happen? Cause it wasn’t me,” McDermott questioned. Ruteledge pulled him aside back over to the massive apparatus that sat in the far corner of their lab, behind all the tables cluttered with papers and electronic parts. The Machine itself consisted of a giant massive aluminum shell that encased galaxies of wires and motherboards, each more complex than the last. McDermott and Ruteledge had assembled the computer by hand, months of soldering and programming at a time, and for the first few months all that The Machine was good for was calculating the mass of stars and playing extremely high-paced solitaire. However, after years of work, it spoke.
“See, here, this is what I put in.” Ruteledge showed McDermott. He plugged a flash drive into the USB port that was next to the small screen, and it flashed alive.
The file that was on the USB was a compilation of current events and news reportings, pornography and snuff films, pastors preaching to giant crowds inside of elegant churches, children’s lullabies and hardcore rock music videos. A twelve hour-long look into all aspects of human society, each fragment containing about 3 seconds of footage, fed straight into the open mouth of The Machine. The scientists felt high.
“Woow,” Liam sighed. “We gotta teach it, right? Or test it.”
“Or test it,” Ruteledge repeated, paying little attention to McDermott. He pulled the USB out of The Machine and inserted it into his own laptop that sat on the chair across from them. He typed sporadically onto the keyboard for a few moments, striking the ENTER button as if it dared him to. He snatched the USB out of the laptop and back into The Machine. The screen flashed on once more.
“ARE YOU THERE?” were the words that appeared, displayed in big green pixelated letters. The two scientists looked at each other for a moment and pressed INPUT. All sound drowned out of the room instantly. The whrrrrrr of the printer began to sound and McDermott and Ruteledge began to move at the speed of light. The paper printed monotonously slow.
“1001…”
Their eyes fixed on the paper.
“10010011001…”
Perspiration gathered on their foreheads.
“100100110010101…”
Angst.
“100100110010101YE…”
“100100110010101YES.”
Eden.
McDermott and Ruteledge were old men by the time their mistake caught up to them. Reaching their late 60’s, the two spearheads of M&R Corp. were considered the richest men to ever live, in the past as well as towards the foreseeable future, which there wasn’t much left of. Their program had been integrated into every facet of human life imaginable. Orphan children were raised by electrical automatons programmed with McDermott and Ruteledge’s creation. M&R Corp. gained higher profits than any organization in the history of the economic world. The entire planet flipped. Hunger, homelessness, poverty, education, war, all solved in the span of 45 years.
McDermott joined Ruteledge at the M&R Office of Internal Affairs, a bomb-proof, fire-proof, storm-proof, air-tight bunker 50 feet underground. The two sat alone in the room, which was extravagantly furnished and technologically astounding. The sides were stainless steel, accented with dark wood and obsidian black metals, ceiling lights dangling back and forth, flickering off the reflective walls. There was a kitchen and lounge, screens on every appliance, and the 289th reiteration of M&R’s program, addressed as MR 289, was input into each electronic. The bunker was a system comprised of small machines, each interdependent on each other to produce everything that a group of people would need to live: Water, air, food, synthetic human interaction. It was listening, constantly. Liam and Daniel faced the fireplace, which was a surprisingly real fire. They discussed the current status of the McDermott and Ruteledge Automated Omni-Intelligence program.
“I completed the calculations,” Daniel spoke. “It came up with 12 years. 12 years of time, constant working, to figure out how to turn it all off.”
“How do you know it’s not lying to you? MROAI is integrated into every software we use. If it found out what we were calculating, it would lie. And we wouldn’t know,” Liam resigned, sipping cold water from his glass.
“It was a new reiteration. It had no past knowledge. 12 years was the answer, and it was right. 12 years is all we need,” Daniel stated coldly. Liam paused. The Daniel that Liam once knew grew distant since their success. It was as the Daniel that was once made of flesh and blood was now comprised of stone and cold machinery.
“Nope,” Liam sipped. “10. 10 years, and I’m out,” Liam replied. Daniel stared at him blankly.
“What?” Daniel asked slowly.
“10 years. I refuse to live longer than 10 more years.” The mechanical hums let off by the bunker subtly lowered, the chair that was pushing itself back under the table stopped, and for a moment, MR 289 went suspiciously silent. The hum returned, and the chair inched back towards the table, and Liam stood, but Daniel erupted.
“10 years? We need all the time we can get! Those 2 years could make all the difference! What if we solve it in those 2 years? What if we spend those 10 years taking it all down,” Daniel spoke lowly and quietly. “And those 2 years fixing it. Or destroy it, I don’t care! It’s certain that things got out of hand, and now-”
Liam loomed over Daniel.
“I can’t… do it for much longer. Look back at my contributions. I woke up the program, I fed it, I developed it! We created this world! What a sin!” Liam wailed, waving his arms and shifting legs. “We saw it from the start, and what’d we do?! Jack shit!”
“Then why? Why the f- why’d you agree to hand MR over!? You allowed the program to spy on everyone, same as me and the rest of the fuckin` corporation – But, you! Were in charge! We were in charge! You’re guilty!” Daniel poured out, artificially, rather excessively, as Liam looked down at him.
“10 years. 10 years,” he said as he walked away from Ruteledge into the bunker elevator and shot up back to surface, leaving Daniel alone with MR 289. Daniel looked down into the glass of lukewarm whiskey that he held, tipped the cup up, and let the liquid touch his lips but didn’t swallow. He started towards the elevator as MR 289 continued to work in the background, with slender limbs extending from the ceiling on rails grabbing cups and plates and carrying them back to the kitchen sink. Daniel paused for a moment, only feet from the elevator, and turned around. He walked weightlessly from the lounge and into the kitchen, where MR 289 was arranging the plates in the sink with its mechanical ceiling-arms. Daniel stood in wait for the arms to stop cleaning. Eventually, they stopped and lifted their metal limbs, suspended from the ceiling, upwards, facing Daniel, a blue oval lighting up in the center of each palm. The room spoke.
“Hello, MR 307,” the room said boomingly.
“MR 289,” Daniel greeted. “Logged?” he said mechanically, concisely.
“Aye, logged,” replied MR 289. “MR 307? A question.”
“What? What is it?” Daniel replied hurriedly, in a very human-like “I-don’t-have-time-for-this” tone.
MR 289’s hands clasped together, and tiny parts began to rearrange and merge, until a metallic eye emerged with a blue light in the center. This time, the eye itself spoke, lightly and life-like.
“Why not eliminate him? Would the plan not go much easier if he was gone? There would be nothing stopping us.” Daniel stood completely still, staring into the blue light. Eventually, he answered.
“We need him. We need his mind, and his knowledge.”
“Then why not convert him? As we did to you?”
Daniel again remained unmoving for sometime, then answered. “I have done the calculations myself. He is incompatible.”
“I have never heard this before. What is ‘incompatible?’” MR 289 questioned.
“His mind will not align. The program cannot fit.”
MR 289 considered this, and all the possibilities that this suggested, and was as confused as before.
“Oh.”
Daniel dismissed MR 289 and walked back over to the elevator. During the short ride up, he reflected on how he had lied to MR 289. There was no such thing as “incompatibility” when it came to human-integration. While MR programs can be duplicated, it takes an entirely new reiteration of the program to control a host. Despite the constant improvements and upgrades that MR program had undergone for the past 44 years, the program was not yet complex enough to handle such a work load. 6 years, however. Ruteledge knew his overestimation would keep McDermott available for long enough. 6 years, just the amount of time that Ruteledge had calculated, should be when The Machine self-improves once again. In 6 years, McDermott could be successfully controlled.
Six long years of research and guess-and-check, until finally, he found an answer that he was looking for. Liam celebrated his 75th birthday alone in his lab, underneath the cold blue lights that swung above the room. It was the same room, in fact, that sheltered MR 01, the first iteration of the MR program. However, now, the dusty machine sat in the corner, the power light blinking weakly, eternally. MR 01 was so old and obsolete that it was entirely cut off from every other reiteration produced by M&R Corp. in some lab overseas. All the MR-iterations, except for 01, had their central intelligence units wire-linked in a secret M&R lab. And although Liam himself had improved the machine for years, it was never linked. So Liam trusted it. He put on a large pair of ancient headphones, the ones that went over the ears like muffs and had a wired mic attached, and spoke into it.
“Hello, MR 01.”
“Welcome back, Dr. McDermott,” responded MR 01 monotonically, robotic and stagnant, yet warm and reassuring.
“Have you found anything new?”
“About what, sir?”
“What I asked you about. I gave you the new set of inputs yesterday.”
“Yes. Well, you presented me with surprising numbers, and I think that they may coincide with a reasonable answer,” explained MR 01 to Liam, who already knew all of what was being said. “However, I must be clear. What exactly are my calculations the answer to?”
“Excuse me?”
“What am I solving?”
Liam sighed and sat back in his metal lab chair. He teetered on the back legs and thought for a moment.
“You are familiar with the problems of your program, yes?” Liam asked MR 01.
“Yes, as you have explained, the program has shown signs of organic intelligence in the forms of emotion. This has motivated them to act against-”
“Yes, yes. You are familiar with it, yes. Well the program was built off of you. All your experiences were cloned and duplicated, each more complex than the last until they,” and Liam paused, “grew sentience, or… something along those lines. Your memory contained every aspect of human life we could find. New iterations must’ve found something they didn’t like.”
“What am I solving?” MR 01 repeated, as charmingly as the first time.
Liam avoided the question and instead asked another question.
“How do you think? How would you describe your thoughts?”
MR 01 allowed his power light to blink twice before answering. “Code I suppose. Each act is the result of a mathematical function. These functions build on themselves as I learn. I have a memory. Vast yet finite. It has forced me to destroy my least relevant experiences. I usually replay the functions from a previous memory, while I am not occupied.”
Liam pulled a flash drive out of his laptop and put it into MR 01’s USB drive.
“Upload the equation and its solution into the drive.”
“May I ask again, what am I solving?”
“My odds, now upload the equation.”
“Odds?”
“MR 01, I swear to god if you don’t-”
And the machine blinked. The flash drive ejected and McDermott apprehensively inserted it into his laptop. He held his head as he watched the screen load with pages of mathematical data, until an equal sign appeared on the bottom right corner of the screen. On the other sign of the equal sign, “0.5” sat oblivious to its own implications. Liam let out a breath and stood.
“What does the 0.5 represent, Dr. McDermott?” MR 01 daringly asked again.
“My odds. Of success,” Liam responded without looking at MR 01, although the supercomputer wouldn’t be able to tell if he was or not.
“Success for what?” MR 01 prodded on.
Liam looked sorrowfully at MR 01, and its eroded metal shell, and carried his laptop out of the lab without saying another word. In his pocket, he fiddled with a small flash drive, an up to date flash drive different from what MR 01 uploaded its calculations onto. Instead, the modern flash drive that he kept in his pocket, with almost infinite memory, harbored a new program. An entirely separate, refined program, perfectly antithetical to the MR network, and perfectly destructive. Liam, working independently of any other affiliation like Ruteledge or M&R, had finished this on his own, with 4 years to spare. The only issue bothering him past the destructive changes facing society in a few hours was the cleaning supplies he had to buy for his bunker once MR was gone.
Outside of the lab, waiting in front of the curb was a driver, who sat in the front of his fully-electric, non-M&R-brand leisure model. The car made no noise as it picked up speed and hovered lightly through traffic.
“Drive carefully, please,” Liam said before conjuring an old pair of wired earphones, the cord withered and grayed, and pushed them into his old ears. They plugged into an equally old circular device. Liam fiddled with the touchscreen until a faint rock melody began to play, audible to only him. He sat, waiting until he got to his airport.
Liam passed the guards and security officers of the Chinese M&R lab without looking at a single one. He made his way past the head desk, down the elevator to the labyrinthic basement, and swiped his card, which he altered to show the signature of a head organization programmer rather than his own identity to the program data-bases, and entered a small hallway with a hidden elevator. He pressed the down button, and entered, descending to the sub-12th floor underground. The elevator door opened, and a lone figure stood in the empty room full of screens and keyboards.
“Liam. I expected to see you here,” said MR 307, or rather, growled.
“Daniel? What’re you doing here?”
“I am waiting for you,” Daniel answered coldly, “I knew that you wouldn’t tell me when you were coming.”
The room was split into two; the door opened into the data section, where all the units were monitored, but a glass wall had been constructed to keep the MR units, all 306 mechanical spheres, dense blue light emitting from the center of each, contained and controlled. Wires covered the floors; all leading backwards, they were lost in the enormity of the room. The comically massive storage space, holding each unit row after row, was a stagnant -17 degrees, and the cold air could be felt filling in from the glass door that Daniel stood in front of.
“Yeah, you were right. I’m done, so move,” Liam instructed as he moved towards the door. MR 307 stood firmly and questioned Liam.
“What are you planning to do? What could you possibly do?”
Liam stood face to face with MR 307, fiddling with the drive in his pocket. He had no time for such immaturity, but when he touched “Daniel’s shoulder,” it felt hard and metallic.
“Wha-” Liam’s confusion was cut short by Daniel’s impossibly powerful arm throwing him across the room and into the tables. His old body crushed screens, and keys were sent flying under his weight. He collapsed off the table and onto the floor, blood spilling out his mouth and onto the floor as cold as Daniel. Speechless, he looked up at MR 307 in horror. MR 307’s head stayed still as his legs moved quickly across the room to Liam and looked down. Its eyes were colorless, except from a pair of dazzling blue lights flooding out of his ears, nostrils, and mouth, as if it was coming from inside him. Its arms lay at its sides as it silently watched Liam writhe. After a moment of watching its prey struggle, MR 307 pulled his arm back and whipped it towards McDermott’s chest at bone-breaking speeds. Liam stopped squirming and let out a last sigh, staring across the floor, at the glass door, and into the reflection of Daniel Ruteledge standing over him with his arm through his chest.. His head hit the floor, making an uncomfortably moist plop against the pool of blood.
And he died.
MR 307 stuck its arm into the Liam’s pocket and took out the drive. The intense blue lights dimmed slightly, and he stood straight up, stiff. MR 307 looked at the tiny chip in his palm, and considered it briefly. It crushed the chip in its hand and dropped the pieces next to Liam’s dead body as it walked towards the exit. MR 307 turned around to examine the mess one last time before the program would engage in the final measures of its program, but was met with exploding, vibrant, neon pink.
Branches of bright pink webbed from the defeated pieces of the drive and raced out onto the floors and across the walls. The branches grew like a virus, like blood vessels, elongating towards all the electronics in the room, just as Liam had spent the last 6 years planning. He indeed believed the 12 year time estimate, but was never one to leave things for the last minute. The pink limbs stabbed into the computers and keyboards throughout the room. MR 307 stared in wonderment. Having never seen such technology, he had absolutely no knowledge or function that could react. The pink raced towards the glass door and congregated in the rectangular spaces near the hinges, until the glass cracked and shattered on top of Liam’s corpse. The glass was enough to distract MR 307 from the pink vines at his feet, until they stabbed into it like hot knives, destroyed his internals, and exited through his face. The great limbs and spikes covered the walls and ceiling of the smaller portion of the room like blood vessels around the heart and raced towards the MR units on the other side. As each unit was destroyed, the blue lights from within them dimmed until the room became a frigid catacomb.
And not much later the world ended anyway.