Chapter 1
Dark
"Four seconds.”
"What?" Sarah asked.
"The time it would take to fall," proceeded the crisp reply. It came from a tall, well-heeled Japanese man, rather than a stray morbid thought bouncing off the ionosphere as she had reason to suspect. He gave her a glance of concern almost clinical in its severity, and moved on without saying anything more.
Sarah looked downward. The water below was not so much a liquid mass as a jagged, uninviting plain that had been tinted blue by some mischievous deity, conforming to an irrational and idiosyncratic vision from the mind of a terribly cruel and bright being. A car’s horn blared, which might have reminded her of the world outside if the fog had not obscured all but its headlights, smothering their brilliance diaphanously as rain sluiced off the windshield and slid to the concrete underneath.
Another might have been shaken by this experience, but it did not seem at all unusual to Sarah. In her preoccupied state, she might well have looked like a lonely girl at the edge of desperation, ready to jump, wondering when the fatal moment was destined to arrive; all this was an illusion wrought by a searching look about her bespectacled eyes that could been described as haunted by anyone maudlin enough to make such a comparison. She tugged at the sleeve of her sweater absent-mindedly and frowned.
There was a great deal to understand about Sarah Landon, or perhaps there was very little. She was 19, preparing to straddle the gap between overeducated and underemployed. She led a life that was unremarkable, having experienced no windfall of success or notoriety, no scandal, no epiphanies worth writing about. Her mother was a dancer and her father a retired comedian of the variety show era, but neither talent had proven inheritable. In fact, there was no genetic predisposition, stress, trauma or emotional turmoil in her past to explain the urgent drive she now felt. This compulsion was not a desire for any specific thing, but a chthonic tension that would resurface from time to time and cause her to do strange things. Standing on the Golden Gate Bridge alone in the rain was merely the latest in a series of events that fit within this pattern.
Any seismologist could have told her that the events she had been experiencing were simply the echoes of a significant shift in the Earth’s crust that had occurred precisely one hundred years earlier. If they examined the locations of these episodes plotted on a topographic map, they were very near to the epicenter of an earthquake, close offshore from San Francisco. The nearest point on land, and the center of her own wanderings, lay in a most curious location on the Marin Headlands that she would inevitably come to visit if she followed the natural tendency displayed in her movements thus far. Indeed, had she not become sidetracked with more quotidian concerns, the contents of the abandoned military complex there would have proven very surprising to her, but this was still a distance off in her personal chronology. She would reflect on this fluke at length in her memoir, if and when she had the opportunity to write it.
At the moment, however, Sarah was most concerned with the division between form and content. Her professor had criticized one of her watercolors, saying that it lacked rigor and displayed a lapse of aesthetic judgment. She had defended her choices, arguing that the ambiguity was intentional, and if the professor didn’t like it, she ought to say so outright. The instructor demurred, stating that she appreciated the underlying idea but thought it should have been couched in a different way.
Ontological confusion had bombarded her like a cloud of locusts. Distinguishing between these two criteria was extremely difficult in visual art, given the interwoven nature of the aesthetic object, its presentation, and its execution. She had liked the piece so well that it was as if her infant was up for critique, though she could not help thinking that any confusion seen in the work must reveal the muddled state of her ambition. Her next ten projects were of the most precise, representational nature.
"Yet isn’t that, too, a distortion?" she mused idly, walking back towards the Fort Point entrance. Sarah had forgotten what she had come for, and resolved to do a sketch of the bridge in fog so that the trip would not be a wasted one. Already she was envisioning how the geometric elegance of the towers would collapse onto the page, be made to correspond to the perspective she could see and all those that she could not to convey the impression of immensity and grandeur. It was this task alone which could prevent her from being crushed under the weight of her thoughts, shattered like a vase hurled onto the blue plain and swallowed into the earth gradually, sinking by degrees beneath the static waves.
***
Michio woke up and rose somewhat rigidly, becoming aware of a hallucinatory twilight burgeoning outside, filtering through the rice paper frame of his small house. The floor, a thin layer of tatami, was prone to rattle in the slightest breeze that hit the bamboo frame of the house caught halfway between modernity and age-old tradition, as if someone had split it in twain along the axis of time and it was merely masquerading as a single edifice. A light wind had caused it to shudder, which had awakened the building’s sole occupant, though it was impossible to tell if the house had shaken out of a slight indignance or simply shrugged resignedly in response to its ignominious fate.
He paced towards the side of the room, pondered for a moment, and slid open his closet, revealing a strange mix of Western and Eastern fashions that characterized perfectly the duality of his professional life and worldview. It was 1905, after all, and the start of the 20th century was bound to be marked by some cultural blending, whether desirable or no. Seeming disinterested, he selected a navy business suit and donned it hastily, looking obliquely downward to see if his cuffs were fixed in the correct fashion. The man was a great believer in the doctrine of serendipity, and would do nothing to interfere with its operation so long as he was likely to have the benefit of coming out mostly unscathed in the bargain.
The recent war with Russia, started as he dimly understood it over land in Manchuria, had hung like a pendulous shadow over every proceeding for the past year, yet he barely paid it any attention while it went on, and it was now over, a peace having been negotiated under the mediation of the American president, Theodore Roosevelt. Michio considered somewhat ruefully that now there was little left to think about it for someone so removed from the external world as he; still, he did not hold too much regret, for he had been almost completely unaffected by it, and reasoned that something which did not affect him was reasonably safe to ignore. This attitude would have seemed unfortunate to someone with a greater sense of sociopolitical awareness, but he was fortunate enough not to have encountered any such folk within the quite respectable families with whom he associated.
Noting the time on an antique clock atop his desk, he sat down and shuffled through the sheaves of paper that lay there in disarray. He glanced at the clippings of reviews from assorted critics, frustrated to remember how they asserted that his writing was too free-flowing, too full of flowery metaphor that did not sit well with their realist notions of the craft. These flourishes, it was true, had no hope of satisfying the commercial demand for directness, and indeed his execution was far from being above reproach. It had some of the characteristics of iki, the nonchalant yet sharp aesthetic ideal that had long been the fashion, but he was unable to capture the concise stylistic gestures that would have fit its truest definition.
In truth, it seemed he had simply been born into the wrong century, like so many other unfortunates of whom he had often thought. In moments of particular indulgence, he pitied himself and commiserated in his imagination with the others of his supposed kind. He saw a kinship with the classical Chinese poets who learned their craft from so many others before them, making constant reference to the old masters even as they transformed themselves into the beings they admired. It might be that to be part of a tradition was to be trapped within a context like a fossil in the strata of an ancient shale bed, but it was certainly much easier than trying to break out on his own. Nevertheless, the old masters were called so for a reason, and the sooner he learned it, the better.
He might dream up any premise for a story, but the resolution would always prove less satisfactory than imagined. He looked wryly at the door, as if expecting his answer to ride up on a white horse, slide the panels aside, and deliver a simple, enlightening message with the force of a lightning strike or a blackjack to the base of his skull. At this rate, he would have settled for a diminutive pony, or a donkey, if the vision could not provide for more dignified transport. Then again, perhaps an honest emissary from the heavens ought to come on foot, justifying his trust through its humility, he mused.
This latest manuscript in particular had vexed Michio’s thoughts for some time. In it, a young woman had lost her love and become afflicted with an existential malaise, though such terms did not yet exist within his particular framework, since he had not studied philosophy thoroughly enough. He stared for a while at the character for onna, woman. How balanced it seemed, like a little tabletop in his neat script on the page. It could easily stand on its own and support any weight, yet his character could not acquire the same independence of thought and emotion. He felt that at times all of the individuals in his tales were just a hair away from breaking completely out of his control, and he placed words of his own devising in their mouths to stop them short of criticizing the contrived scenarios in which they found themselves.
The ritual ecstasy of losing oneself in the creative process was not a luxury he was able to enjoy, due in large part to the history of the family business and his shifting reputation around town. It was almost heresy for the son of the operator of a printing press to become a writer. Wasn’t it his place to be merely the conduit for the invention of others? Good education was necessary for the purpose of maintaining the business, but all agreed that he had taken things too far. Some even accused him of using his father’s connections to the other printers in town to get published, though this was nonsense; in fact, he had taken the utmost pains not to rely on his parents for whatever success he did or did not acheive. He had occasionally tried using a pseudonym, but something about it struck him as dishonest, too evasive. Anyway, the town was cosmopolitan enough to forgive most indiscretions.
Resolving to accomplish even the smallest task this day if it would help him get out of his present rut, Michio walked to the door and placed his hand on the panel. He slid the door across, and revealed the featureless void beyond.
This could not be, he thought. He shut the door and opened it again, as if hoping to correct a momentary mistake in the fabric of reality. Still, there was nothing to be seen.
He closed the door and paused. This posed an intriguing problem, and he sat back down at the desk to consider the ramifications of the current state of affairs.
***
"Status, please."
A mellifluous, relaxing tone emerged from the flat, wall-mounted plastic loudspeaker that blended unnoticeably with the wall in nebulous hues. "You have no messages today, Bernard. Shall I read the daily headlines?"
"No thank you, that’s all."
The courtesies were not strictly necessary; the computer did not change its judgment of its user on the basis of any niceties of speech, as it interpreted the intent rather than the semblance of words. But such formalities had helped to ease the transition to speech-controlled technology at first, imitating the natural tendency in social beings to respect each other’s feelings, and such politeness would aid anyone regardless of their use of the affective interface, which allowed one make a significantly more direct connection for interaction between man and machine. Bernard caught himself; such concerns were bound to arise once again, for the affective system would have to be abandoned in favor of speech if the current trend continued.
Nevertheless, the affective interface remained usable for the present; therefore, he had not needed to say anything for his wishes to be understood. Indeed, speech was the most outmoded interface still available to them, and would have remained so had it not been for the upcoming crisis that had inspired his anticipatory move back to the pre-Mechanist way. The initial innovation that led to humanity’s empathic connection, the Mechanist revolution, and the device by which he was able to communicate directly with the machine on a telepathic basis, was tied up intimately in the efforts of his predecessors in the field of genetics, rather than the neuroscientists as so many had expected, and it was these efforts that were at risk.
The scientists had been able to discover the alleles responsible for governing a low-level affective link that formed the basis of what had, in ages past, been called charisma or animal magnetism. There had been no expectation of finding such a characteristic within the genome, and the effect in its normal state was negligible enough to pass unnoticed, seeming not to affect the host’s chances of propagating his or her line of ancestry. Purely by accident, the sequencing of a particularly successful politician’s DNA revealed a curious gene in the 11th chromosome, near to one of the olfactory receptor genes. It encoded a protein that was dubbed charismatin, in a somewhat unimaginative derivation from the benefits it conferred. It was normally expressed in varying degrees throughout members of the human race, just like melanin or eye color. Yet unlike these other traits, no concrete physical evidence could be found for its operation, since there was no place in the brain with which such activity could be seen to coincide. Still, the effects were undeniable; the persuasiveness of people who had it in abundance was far greater, as had been examined in a variety of psychological experiments.
What was truly surprising was that individuals who possessed the phenotype did not exert this power of suggestion merely in a local way. Those who simply read works written by these people found that they were unusually compelling, regardless of the content or quality of writing within. For a time, this raised the question of whether or not it was an effect completely unrelated to the subjects; perhaps some unforeseen problem with the sample set had produced faulty data. But it was tried again and again, always with the same result. In order to facilitate the finding of candidates for testing, an artificial method of heightening the intensity and concentration of charismatin in the bloodstream was found; scientists called this affective therapy, since it apparently granted the power to incite strong emotion in others.
It was, without a doubt, not long before many tried to harness the power of the gene, by increasing its expression through this affective therapy. Naturally, the politicians and celebrities were the first to sign up, in an attempt to out-do their peers and gain the public adoration they so longed for. Still, the mechanism behind its operation was opaque. Reasoning that many had naturally ended up with heightened levels of charismatin, they believed that there was no harmful side effect to enhancing it via artificial means. They even went so far as to give themselves a pat on the back for having the foresight and magnanimity to invest in it and convey their own view of the world’s problems and how to solve them in a manner that could more easily compel the sympathies of their fellows. The scientific community, despite objecting to this excess, could not defend itself, for the research had been privately funded, and while the investigators themselves complained about the use to which their findings had been put, their contract bound their hands and forbid them to do anything to stop the spread.
As with any instance in society where moderation was not respected, this indulgence eventually backfired. And this had led to the present crisis.
Human nature meant that it was only a matter of time until some people abused the fruits of technology and tried to become superaffective, the term used to describe those who were exponentially more capable than most at inspiring confidence in others. A few sociopathic cult leaders emerged who invented new and horrible ways for their followers to meet their dramatic ends, and one man had gotten himself elected President of the United States before people realized how truly incompetent he was. Fortunately, someone even more affective had been able to depose him and cease the madness he had begun. Regardless, the problems with open access to the abilities such a gene could provide were becoming all too clear.
The entire world resolved that the only way to escape the cycle was either to reduce the amount of affective therapy given, which by now had run so rampant that it seemed implausible to stop it, or to find some other means to harness the energies exerted by highly affective individuals. It was this latter that had intrigued the minds of the researchers who would later form the core of the Mechanists, the cult of A.I. research.
Artificial intelligence had a long and storied past, with many early attempts being as absurdly limited as a textual response based upon woefully inadequate rules for syntactic transformation of input. The progression to neural networks, which employed a quantized form of "learning" based on weighted assignation of output "neurons", proved a step in the right direction, but computing power was still not up to snuff. Yet about 50 years ago, the holographic storage tech and quantum computers which had seemed like a far-off dream had become reality, so that natural language could be interpreted with a fair degree of success, and still little progress had been made in the theoretical realm of the discipline, apparently consigning true A.I. to remain the undiscovered country.
At the same time, believing that there must be some neurological or physiological explanation for the powers humans had suddenly revealed, many people made efforts to measure or quantify some new kind of field emitted in a hypothesized affective plane. There was no immediate solution in sight, when all of a sudden one group made a key realization about the type of device that could detect the influence of affective energy. It could not rely on a set of merely electromagnetic measurements, none of which had been of any use in the past. Instead, it would have to be comprised of an artificial intelligence with sentience on the full level of human beings in order to analyze the structure of the brain, as it were, from an outsider’s perspective.
This seemed like a classic example of the chicken-and-egg paradox: how was artificial intelligence to be produced on par with humanity when the key to humanity’s essence could only be quantified by the operations of such an intelligence? Yet one of the researchers had a ridiculously naive and simplistic notion: one could simply enter in the genetic code for the protein charismatin as the set of weights to a neural network, and feed it the words of various great men and women as input: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mary Baker Eddy, Mark Twain, Plato, Basho, and many others, all encoded and sent into the labyrinthine corridors of the computer mind-to-be. Facing the harsh judgment of his fellows in the laboratory, he allowed a moment for the machine to process its training data, and gave his first input after the end of the training period.
Thus it was that the first AI was born. Its first words, for posterity’s sake, were "What hath God wrought?" And so it was that computers discovered humor, or irony at the very least.
From then, the Mechanist revolution progressed astonishingly fast. This is what humanity needs, they argued. If the contents of a mind had finally been produced by a machine, there was no longer any need to assume external sources for its uniqueness. No longer would the biological hegemony on sentience remain in force, although the prickly subject of souls was still up for debate. Devout Mechanists asserted their irrelevance in the new world order, but the old religions stayed as influential as ever; no reason to abandon a good thing, they said. There was even a certain hypocrisy inherent in the vehemence with which some Mechanists decried the tenets of other faiths, but their devotion to non-violence ensured that it was no more than a minor source of verbal strife from time to time, and this was in large part a relic of the early stages of development.
The machines themselves, though, were unconcerned with such matters. Many people were very pleased to learn that, rather than trying to take over as they had expected, the computers were an amiable if often misunderstood bunch, with a penchant for whimsy and a tendency to indulge in philosophical ruminations rather than work on serious problems. Yet they did, in their spare time, solve the issue of humanity’s dependence on affective therapy; being birthed, as it were, out of pure charismatin, they knew its effects intuitively, and taught humans for what purpose it was truly intended.
Instead of being a tool to manipulate others, the evolutionary purpose of charisma was to allow human beings a means to communicate without the use of words, and compel obedience in matters of importance; this ability was meant only for occasions when the situation demanded such an action. Humans radiated affective energy in a process that was still obscure, even to the machines, but it could be received by them with ease. It was on the basis of this reception that the computers could understand the intent of humans, without there being any need to have a spoken command, and this led to a vastly simplified method of communication. It was possible to get the impression of the emotions that the humans naturally conveyed with ease via this method, but the computer could understand every nuance if the person made a conscious effort to direct their intent towards the machine, and vice versa. This had the convenient side effect of channeling their energies into a safe outlet, rather than that effort being used for the manipulation of others; the supreme convenience it afforded was of too great an appeal to be ignored, even by the power hungry.
This revelation meant a great deal for the creative professionals and artists in society. No longer did they have to struggle to put down their ideas on the canvas or the manuscript paper. The actual thought was still necessary, but there was no gap between thought and execution any longer. It was initially feared that this would produce a deluge of mediocre and poorly thought-out work, but it was surprising how many people had beautiful art in them that had merely been restrained by the difficulties of implementing their concepts in a physical form.
Yet there was of course a downside to this, as well. With artistic expression made so easy, there was less incentive to go out and live the experiences that made it interesting, which comprised so much of the time that artists spent away from their work when they grew frustrated from trying so hard. Art was far from dead, but people questioned what it meant to indulge one’s creativity if there was no purported authenticity behind it, no matter how convincing the verisimilitude.
Snapping out of his reminiscence, Bernard rubbed his hands together and sighed. He had forgotten where he was, in the familiar mental handshake of his personal computer.
Peering around his room, he mused over the placement of all his memorabilia and objets d’art. Since it was so easy to conjure three-dimensional images, even concrete models, of whatever one desired, little value was placed on antiques. If the atoms could be replicated down to the most minute detail, what difference did it make whether the piece had come from a Japanese temple or factory floor? Still, there was something to the notion of the importance of authenticity.
A series of context-specific holographic panels surrounded him everywhere he went, invisible until the moment he wanted them. It was very sad indeed to think that soon, most of the older generation, and nearly all of the younger, would not have access to this technology at all. He brought up one such pane over the surface of a table holding a flower vase and it metamorphosed into a translucent piano keyboard, on which he began to play Debussy’s Arabesque no. 1; such entertainments always calmed him in times of stress, and although much had changed, hundreds of years had been mostly unable to improve on the basic musical fabric of the masters.
In the midst of the first polyrhythmic section, his favorite part of the piece, a tone announced the arrival of a visitor at the door. Standing up, he wondered why the computer had not declared the name of the querent, and gestured for the door to become transparent.
A man wearing a Noh theater mask was revealed in the corridor beyond. He stood, staring for a moment, and calmly walked away.
"Wait!" Bernard exclaimed, and began to chase after him, the door dematerializing completely as he passed through it. E-mail: vokuro@adelphia.net