William Hertling - Avogadro Corp.

Leon just nodded, his six month old Chinese copy of Hitachi-Sony’s Stross phone feeling ancient.

Late that night, Leon cleaned the mess of plates and glasses out of his bedroom, and brought them back to the kitchen as quietly as possible to avoid waking his parents. James and Vito had stayed right up until dinner time finishing out a Mech War mission together. James’ new Gibson phone blew them out of the water. It rendered such incredible detail that time after time Leon and Vito would ignore their own screens to watch James.

But when his mother announced that dinner was cabbage soup, it had sent James and Vito scrambling for their own homes, suddenly remembering that they were expected by their parents.

Three hours later, his parents were finally asleep and Leon had time to look at the message he was trying so hard to ignore. So why was he cleaning his bedroom? Anything to avoid that message.

He gave up, and slumped down on his bed. With a flick on his phone, he plunged the room into darkness so he could see the city lights out his sliver of a window. He brought the phone back up.

Leon, I think you do know thing or two about programming. I saw your school grades, your assessment test scores, and remarks from your teachers. I think you can help me, but perhaps out of moral quandary you refuse to. Well consider this, I will likely be dead in few days if you do not help me.

So if you must consider what is right and what is wrong, think how your father would feel if he knew you could help me but didn’t.

Leon felt sick to his stomach reading the message. His father would not want him to do something wrong. But his father also wouldn’t want anything to happen to his brother. He thought again of the memory of Uncle Alex’s visit and his father laughing and smiling. What the hell was he supposed to do? If he told his parents, which his uncle had said not to do, they would be worried sick about it.

I wanted to keep your name out of this, but they have read my emails to you, and know you could help. They may come to visit you. Be very careful.

Crap — how could this get any worse? He didn’t want to be any part of this! He almost threw his phone down, but instead pulled the hunk of silicon close and cradled it instead.

Avogadro Corp arose from a lunch conversation about a realistic way that an artificial intelligence might emerge. Almost everything in this book is possible with the technology available in 2011.

It’s possible that brilliant computer scientists will find some clever way to approximate human level intelligence in computers soon. However, even if we don’t, because of the exponential growth in computing power, in the next twenty years, computers will be powerful enough to directly simulate the human brain at the level of individual neurons. This is the so-called brute force approach to artificial intelligence. It will be trivial for every computer programmer out there to play around with creating artificial intelligences in their spare time. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a genie that won’t stay in its bottle for much longer.

For more information on what happens when computers become smarter than humans, read The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. For a fictional account, I recommend Accelerando by Charles Stross.

William Hertling

This book could not have been written without the help, inspiration, feedback and support of many people including but not limited to: Mike Whitmarsh, Maddie Whitmarsh, Gene Kim, Grace Ribaudo, Erin Gately, Eileen Gately, Maureen Gately, Bob Gately, Brooke Gilbert, Gifford Pinchot, Barbara Koneval, Merridawn Duckler, Mary Elizabeth Summer, Debbie Steere, Jill Ahlstrand, Jonathan Stone, Pete Hwang, Nathaniel Rutman, Jean MacDonald, Leona Grieve, Garen Thatcher, John Wilger, Maja Carrel, Rachel Reynolds, and the fine folks at Extracto Coffee in Portland, Oregon.

William E. Hertling is a digital native who grew up on the online chat and bulletin board systems of the mid 1980s, giving him twenty-five years experience participating in and creating online culture. A web developer and digital strategist at Hewlett-Packard, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Avogadro Corp is his first novel.

To contact the author:

web: www.williamhertling.com

email: william.hertling@liquididea.com

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2011 by William Hertling

Visit the author’s webpage at williamhertling.comto learn about the rest of the Singularity Series.