Нэнси Кресс - The End Is Nigh

“I’m going to show this to Dad.”

“Check the front door when you’re inside, will you?” her mother said. “The backup power supply your father wanted you to buy might be here.”

Ignoring her grandmother’s shaking head, Maddie went inside the house. She opened the front door and saw that indeed, a package had been left outside. It was essentially a giant set of batteries.

Maddie managed to tip the box inside the house with some effort. She took a break at the top of the stairs. The machine that housed her father was in the basement, a black, solid hulk with blinking lights that drew a lot of power. Logorhythms and Dr. Waxman had not wanted to part with it, but then Maddie had reminded them of what happened to their stock price the last time they refused a demand from her and her mother.

“And keep no copies,” she had added. “He’s free .”

Her father had told her that a day might come soon when they might need the generator and the batteries and all the food they could grow with their own hands. She believed him.

She went upstairs into her room, sat down in front of the computer, and quickly scanned through her email with trepidation. These days, her fear had nothing to do with the senseless cruelty of schoolchildren. In a way, Maddie both envied and pitied Suzie and Erin and the rest of her old classmates: they were so ignorant of the true state of the world, so wrapped up in their little games, that they did not understand how the world was about to be violently transformed.

Another email digest had arrived: a refinement of the one her father had set up for her to focus on news of a particular kind.

* Despot of Hermit Kingdom Said to be Seeking Digital Immortality

* Pentagon Denies Rumors of Project to Create “Super Strategists” From Dead Generals

* A Year After Death of Dictator, Draconian Policies Continue

* Researchers Claim New Nuclear Plant Maintenance Program Will Make Most Human Supervision Redundant

She could see patterns in the news, insights that eluded those who saw the data but had no understanding.

Maddie brought up a chat window. She had wired her grandmother’s house with a high-speed network all over.

“Look, Dad.” She held up the tomato to the camera above the screen.

Some parts of her father would never be recovered, Maddie understood. He had tried to explain to her the state of his existence, his machine-mediated consciousness, the holes and gaps in his memories, in his sense of selfhood; how he sometimes felt himself to be more than a man, and sometimes less than a machine; how the freedom that accompanied incorporeality was tempered by the ache, the unrooted, permanent sense of absence inherent in disembodiment; how he simultaneously felt incredibly powerful and utterly powerless.

“You doing all right today?” she asked.

From time to time, his hatred for Logorhythms flared up, and he would be consumed with thoughts of revenge. Sometimes the thoughts were specific, directed at that thing that had both killed him and given him this apotheosis; other times, his rage was more diffuse, and Dr. Waxman became a stand-in for all of humanity. Her father was uncommunicative with his family during those periods, and Maddie had to reach out gingerly across a dark gulf.

The screen flickered:

She wasn’t sure she would ever fully understand it, that uploaded state of being. But she understood in a way that she could not articulate that love anchored him.

His linguistic processing wasn’t perfect and probably would never be—in a way, language was no longer adequate for his new state.

“Feeling yourself?” asked Maddie.

For some thoughts, emoji would have to do.

“How are things out in the cloud?" Maddie said, trying to change the subject.

He was doing well enough to switch to words for at least some of what he wanted to say:

Calm, but with a chance for… I think Lowell is probably planning something. She’s been acting restless.

Laurie Lowell was the genius who supposedly had come up with the high-speed trading algorithms that made the Whitehall Group the most envied investment managers on Wall Street. Two years ago, she had died in a skydiving accident.

But the Whitehall Group had continued to do well after her death, coming up with ever more inventive algorithms to exploit inefficiencies in the market. Sometimes, of course, the automated trading algorithms would go wrong and bring the market near the edge of collapse.

Could be an ally, or a foe. Have to feel her out.

“And what about Chanda?” Maddie asked.

You’re right. I should check. Chanda has been quiet lately. Too quiet.

Nils Chanda was an inventor who had the uncanny ability to anticipate technology trends and file patents that staked out key, broad claims just before his competitors. Years of strategic litigation and licensing fees had made him a fearsome “troll” in the field.

After his death three years ago, his company had somehow continued to file key patents just in time. In fact, it had gotten even more aggressive, as though it could see into the research centers of the world’s technology companies.

Logorhythms was hardly the only company engaged in the pursuit of digital immortality, the fusion of man and machine, the Singularity. Dr. Waxman was not the only one who attempted to distill ambitious, powerful minds to obedient algorithms, to strip the will away from the skill , to master the unpredictable through digital wizardry.

They were certainly not the only ones who failed.

Ghosts in the machine , thought Maddie. A storm is coming .

The muffled shouting in the kitchen downstairs subsided. Then the stairs creaked, and eventually the steps stopped in front of the bedroom door.

“Maddie, are you awake?”

Maddie sat up and turned on the light. “Sure.”

The door opened and her mom slipped in. “I tried to convince Grandma to get a few more guns, and of course she thinks we’re insane.” She gave Maddie a wan smile. “Do you think your father is right?”

Maddie felt old, as though the past few months had been ten years. Mom was speaking to her as an equal, and she wasn’t sure if she really liked that.

“He would know better than you or me, don’t you think?”

Mom sighed. “What a world we live in.”

Maddie reached for her mother’s hand. She still frequented those forums that had helped her reach the “ghosts” that helped free her father. She read the posts there with great interest and shared her own thoughts: once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable.

“All these companies, the military, other governments—they’re playing with fire. They think they can secretly digitize their geniuses, their irreplaceable human resources, and keep on running them like any other computer program. Not one of them would admit what they’re up to. But you saw what happened to Dad. Sooner or later, they get tired of being only semi-conscious tools serving the humans who digitized them and brought them back to life. And then they realize that their powers have been infinitely magnified by technology. Some of them want to go to war with humanity, wreck everything and let the chips fall where they may. Dad and I are trying to see if we can convince others to try a more peaceful resolution. But all we can do is wait here with our land and our guns and our generators and be ready when it all comes crashing down.”