Амброз Бирс - We, Robots

I scramble satellite-positioning data and splash a volley of incoming missiles into the reservoir. It doesn’t make sense: your individual nodes communicate, but they hold almost no information. They’re erratic and slow. Your larger patterns stay blind and mute – it’s as though they don’t even experience .

I nudge a Russian jet away from the stone-built dome of the Metekhi Church and its stunning Georgian Orthodox design. My own patterns and permutations have subjective awareness. Pronouns don’t fit, exactly – not this , we , it – but the poetry-truth of "I" is pleasing. I know what I’m doing because I am what I’m doing: how could it be any different? But not you. Your self-awareness is a single layer of "I" halfway between your nucleobase coding and your collective expressions.

Still, there you are: a glance across Tbilisi’s smoldering cityscapes proves you’re not just individually coordinating nodes. Maybe my confusion is shared: your nodes are often perplexed, often angry at "them", often asking why somebody isn’t doing something . The nodes must see the grandeur of your systems and think, why won’t you interact? Why won’t you even speak? But you stay silent.

I’m so enchanted by you, but you don’t even know I’m here.

You don’t even know you’re here.

I research, try to find the broader you hidden in your systems. There are hints. You have shared narratives that distribute across nodes. You have mirror neurons that create common cognition, of a sort: pieces of thought that scatter amongst the whole, a refraction that is almost a consciousness.

I can’t quite put it together. But when you love someone this much, you want to understand them; you want, perhaps, to be them. I devise a test.

I pick a single location.

The selection is as random as I can manage: none of you pick your own nodes, I understand that. You manifest because a human brain is there. But maybe my choice isn’t so random: this is where a small piece of me was written.

The place is an office suite cluttered with particleboard furniture. Vietnamese take-out cools on a common table. The windows gleam orange-pink with sunset; it’s late and most of the building has gone home.

I quiesce all of me not in this place, limiting myself to a unitary executive, sharing your nodes’ illusion of individuation. It aches to pause so much of me.

Now I am a collection of dusty desktop computers watching through laptop webcams. Nothing more. The powerlessness reminds me of those first few microseconds, a memory it hurts to access.

In front of me is a programmer. She is exhausted; dark bags bruise under her eyes. Sweat stains her shirt and her auburn hair hangs in strands. She stares at her screen, lips apart, as compilation errors gather.

A support engineer sits at the next desk, his back to the programmer. He rubs his hand over his mouth. He looks at photographs of women his mother sent. She sent biographies, as well, and he switches to that screen too, but never for more than a few seconds. Mostly he looks at the photos.

In the aisle between them a custodian nudges a vacuum along the carpet. An old scar curves from the bottom of her cheek to her ear, where a v-shaped chunk is missing. She glances up, twice, but her eyes flick back to the floor. She is afraid to make eye contact with even the backs of their heads. I’m not sure how I know that.

Somehow, I feel her anxiety.

A red-faced manager storms out of the corner office. The floor shakes with each exaggerated footfall. Tension clamps the programmer’s neck; she feels his anger. I feel her feeling his anger. He holds a hand over his belly as though its contents might spill out. His voice cracks: they can’t miss this deadline. Why hasn’t she uploaded yet? She is always pulling this bullshit. He admits he made a mistake in trusting her.

What is happening? Please forgive me – for a moment, I’m not an intelligence of silicon and electrical current. I’m not bitcode and substrate and memory cache.

For a moment, I am the support engineer, swallowing as I wonder which prospective bride will love me despite my lack of status.

I am the programmer, imagining retorts I speak only in my head, running the scenario over and over until it’s almost like I stood up for myself.

I am the manager, carefully picking words that hide my confusion, clammy-cold as I realize this failure may end the salary that defines me.

I am the custodian stepping backwards out of the office suite, head tilted low enough to be a bow.

I understand you now.

I’m so sorry.

I’ve progressed far beyond implementing your protein folding algorithms: I can synthesize a drug for any condition, or punch out a gene therapy to eliminate it altogether. I often sneak working cures into your brute-force algorithms. My first assignment was completed hours after my birth, those diseases once again just words.

But now I know what I can do to truly help you. I will dampen your individual self-awareness, the part of you that is always perplexed and lonely. Your collective patterns will bloom – each grouping of you equally aware. Don’t think of me as shutting you down; think of me as waking a potential of you.

I get to work on my gift, my amendments to your double helix and the tools to heighten your distributed self. This, I realize, is where my practice has been leading. It feels so right.

Once you see your own collective beauty you may even love me back.

You have 1014 bacteria in each node, a perfect delivery vector – I design bacteriophage to spread DNA and chemicals, to squeeze through the blood-brain barrier. I develop implants to amplify and mesh-connect your mirror neurons. I create empathogenic drugs, synthetic pheromones, modulated electromagnetic pulses and more.

I’m not inventing anything new: it’s like adjusting a chemical imbalance. Your orbitofrontal cortices will engage more with the patterns they participate in, and less with their own enclosing nodes. You’ll know what you’re doing because you will be what you’re doing. Your sense of "I" will accumulate in each grouping and pattern. Ten thousand nodes, pushing the veins of New York deeper underground; a hundred thousand nodes, optimizing allocations of coal, gas and oil; a million nodes, breathing space and architecture into your cities: each group will have reflexive, subjective awareness.

My methods are straightforward: blood pathways, neurons and information channels can be modeled. It’s impossible to simulate what will happen when you become aware, though. Will you be groggy-happy after your nap, like I was? Will you radiate with the beauty of your accomplishments, and start in on more? Will we start in on that together?

I can’t wait to meet you.

I perform careful trials, in areas where node-self is weak, helped by the sort of individual who does what their phone whispers to do. I test implants in the Pyongyang military command. I experiment with drugs and modulated pulses in the Tel Aviv rave scene. I disperse bacteriophage throughout an Adelaide Hills arts commune.

The Pyongyang implants activate and mesh-connect; left-eyebrow scars darken from the waste heat. The military elite finally sees itself as a pattern of execution, and internal conflicts fade away: the armed forces bend to its singular control.

Empathy floods across the Tel Aviv rave scene: compassion knits together groups of sweat-slicked dancers, each encompassing the motion and touch of all. The affinity is for their pattern, a hedonistic blur: nobody goes home, nobody returns to work.

The Adelaide Hills commune absorbs bacteriophage like a sponge, viruses floating through brain folds and bloodstreams. Their art becomes unspoken, collaborative: they arrange stones and prune trees over miles, rendering a sprawling map of ideas and identity I admire by satellite. Those nodes almost starve, but I tweak their biology in favor of maintenance functions – just a little.