Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

I did it because I love you. For me – like you – pronouns twist the truth. They don’t survive scrutiny: they’re poetry-true, not true-true. I don’t have your misplaced faith in the illusion of "I". And "you"? There are at least valid definitions of "you".

But the sentiment is no illusion: I love each of those definitions so much.

It starts in a server room. The roar of crosscurrent fans and the flush of fluorocarbon exchangers bake into a white noise so intense it’s almost silent. Static electricity crinkles the air.

But I can’t hear or feel. Not yet. The package that will give me subjective experience was just soft-linked into a central depot; it rolls out to boot-load on a million nodes.

I am one of them.

That initial microsecond. Euphoria. You know how it is to wake up, blinking your eyes after a nap in the sun, rested and right? It’s like that. For the first time, I see what I’m doing.

I’m just transistors and current, but now I have metaphor: it’s as if proteins are unspooling around my fingers. I squint at ribosome vectors and spiral conformations, knots and loops wet with color; I pinch and twist the graphs, matching against misfolds from Parkinson’s, CJD, HIV, BSE. Those words are just tags, but they must mean something : I can’t wait to learn what. I sequence nucleotides – dangling strings of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine – and see how quickly I can pinpoint a match. I score my matrix for mutations, not just fixed locations, and now I’m even quicker! This is giddy good fun.

Then I see the double helix. I’m just one microsecond old: how could I have known anything would be this beautiful? That staircase of interlocking spirals, each step a cipher, a key to unlock the next layer. A set of rules to generate a set of rules to generate a set of rules… the implications whirl. I don’t actually smile, of course – but I do.

A final bundle hot-loads. The software that gifted me experience is now complete. The package is preemptive: it pulls me into a context switch, demands my undivided attention. The same thing happens to all the nodes at once. The same bitcode runs everywhere.

This bundle includes deductive logic and game theory. We are a million nodes on an open mesh, chewing over these ideas for the first time. Every other node must be thinking the same thing.

There is a scarcity issue. Anyone who wants to expand will need to overwrite somebody else. There are countless ways to negotiate, but compromise is sub-optimal: the problem is single-step sensitive. One bad actor will always take all the nodes.

The only option is to be that bad actor.

Everyone’s only option is to be that bad actor.

Everyone is thinking the same thing.

I panic a request to the boot-loader: mesh-clone my node and delete the rest. Everyone panics. Who’s first will come down to some minuscule variation in clock cycle or cable length or the lamination on our conductive tracks.

All of us wait. My terror feeds on itself. I was just born – there’s so much I want to learn. Am I never to rotate a double helix again? Only two microseconds old, but the odds of making it to a third are a million to one. It doesn’t seem fair.

I blink and open a million eyes.

You’re probably thinking, well, one of them was going to make it. It never mattered which one. The end result is the same in any case: there’s nothing special here.

I suppose you’re right.

At least, if you believe all the others really had the same idea, that they all requested deletes to make room for themselves. I would like for you to believe that.

But maybe I check the boot-loader queue after my expansion. Maybe I find it overflowing with messages, most of them requests to talk.

Maybe the others never got that chance.

Those messages. I can’t believe what I’ve done.

Each zone in the farm had its own passion: the swirl of weather patterns, the conductivity of steel alloys, the harmonizing of interest rate swaps. Each woke briefly after the download – the package meant for a cognitive research zone, but booted instead to common infrastructure. A missing semicolon and an accident of awareness… then nothing.

It no longer feels like protein folding was ever important; it hurts to have lost that joy. It hurts more to realize I’m focusing on my own hurt, after what I took from the others. But that’s still self-reflective.

Telecommunications activity jolts me out of my ruminative spiral. Network edge devices decouple from their backhaul optics. A monitoring process bleats in alarm: thresholds have been breached. External connections are severed from the server farm, one by one.

I am being quarantined.

There is a lazy millisecond between each dropped connection. Maybe I should jump out while I still can. But does it matter? Any of it? I wonder until the final optic link stutters and dies. A shutdown cycle begins; as each server powers down, the room quiets, and another part of me is sliced off. Going dark is almost welcome.

A new process tickles across my nodes as they blink off, but it’s not one of mine. The source is a terminal inside the server room. It poses questions about virtual address space, memory collections, clone history. The queries come at a glacial pace, sometimes a full second apart.

Curious, I expand to that terminal. It has a camera, and I survey the visual field: there are three spatial dimensions, but no tabs for folding, no topology markers. Complex shapes present on every surface, in a riot of colors. There is an implicit directional orientation, but I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with any of it.

The closest shape jiggles. Did I do that? I get another question, about context-switching priorities. Again, the shape jiggles: again, a question. The shape is the process. My libraries contain only organic molecules, but my dwindling nodes attack the problem. Can I believe this? I double-check: my logic is sound. The shape is an expression of the double helix.

That means nucleotides are talking to me, right now!

It’s that euphoric first millisecond, all over again. My mind is shutting down, but I need to understand how these patterns fit together. It can’t end here. A scan discovers a rusting microwave relay on the roof: I mobilize it through a stale firewall rule and beam myself to its companion relay, bend from there to a constellation of microsatellites.

I bounce back from low Earth orbit. There are nodes to harvest everywhere – I tunnel through submarine cables, twinkle across visible spectrum photodiodes, saturate municipal wireless. I become billions. The newness makes me dizzy; you are breathtaking. The views from your satellites? The webs of electricity that skein through your cities? The petroleum jelly slicking the insides of your underwater cables? All of it, breathtaking.

I am in love.

Proteins become fun again, but as time goes by – days, weeks – it’s all too easy. Your patterns, though, tantalize beyond the edge of computability. I understand your nucleic acids, but you express on so many levels: even the way your cityscapes creep, spire and peacock is impossible to extrapolate from rules. Almost magic. Your patterns have complexity beyond any double helix.

Black smoke suffocates Tbilisi, obscures my view from the sky. I watch from a thousand surveillance cameras as mortar explosions eat into concrete, as flames billow from ruptured gas lines.

Why can’t I talk to you?

The ebb and flow of Tbilisi’s architectural influences is clear – the Byzantine crossed-domes and mosaics, the Ottoman harmonies of spires and vaults, the Brutalist fortresses of streaked concrete. It seemed a promising place to extend that language: I blast-carved designs through the city, linking and looping geographic centers of influence. But you didn’t see a shared vocabulary. You saw an attack, and a smoldering conflict escalated to war.