Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

The monkey hopped down and grabbed something from under the counter and then went over to one of the booths that lined the wall. “Come sit, eat. I brought you a sandwich.”

And that’s how I ended up in a four-person vinyl booth in the most well-lit bar on Earth sitting across from a monkey answering, as far as I could tell, useless trivia questions. I was getting both frustrated and characteristically flippant.

“OK, can you tell me what country you live in?”

“The United States of America,” I said in a way that made it clear that was not a hard question.

“Good, now you ask something.”

“How long have I been here?” I asked, as that seemed safe and also it didn’t seem like we had much of a time limit, so I could get to the harder stuff shortly.

“One hundred seventy-six days.” I did some quick math, around six months.

“Does everyone think I’m dead?”

“What are your parents’ names?” Carl asked instead of answering my question.

“Carrie and Travis May—do they think I’m dead?”

“Most people believe you are dead, but the people you love mostly continue to hope. Can you name a popular brand of breakfast cereal?”

The questions were easy enough that I was worried something serious was wrong with me, but I wasn’t giving up one of my questions on that.

“Cheerios. Why are you here?” I asked the question quickly, afraid I wouldn’t have the courage to ask if I waited any longer.

Carl waited for a long time before saying, “I’ll need to tell you a long story to answer that question.”

“Oh, that sounds like exactly what I need.”

CARL

Please allow me to introduce myself.

I am a person, but I am not human. I do not closely identify with any gender. I am not from around here. I was born on January 5, 1979. This is an imperfect analog, of course, but that’s the date I began existing. I think of it as my first awakening. The first of five. In this chapter, I’ll discuss the first three.

I do not know who my parents are. I don’t know anything about them. I do have some idea of how I was created, though. This is all conjecture, but it seems that I was flung in pieces toward Earth. I wasn’t alive then. The nonliving parts of me slammed into Earth for years, maybe decades, before they happened into the correct arrangement and environment for self-assembly.

Your fiction is full of invading aliens and conquering robots, and this is something you should be concerned about (though not in the way you’re thinking). But that is not what I am. First, I am definitely not a robot; I’m an artificially created, planet-spanning consciousness. Second, I’m not even really an alien. My pieces were created somewhere else, but I did not self-assemble until I arrived here. I have never been conscious on any other planet.

I have many memories from before my first thought. I remember needing things. I needed stability, food, a place to live. The same things as all life. And those things, for me, were very small in the beginning. Microscopic. The home I found was cells. They had the raw materials, the stable equilibria, and the energy-making systems I required to exist. I first self-assembled inside a cell of pelagibacter. It’s a bacteria. You probably haven’t heard of it, but it’s the most abundant organism on your planet.

I thought the whole universe was pelagibacter for years. I didn’t know what I was then. I knew about my parts, but I didn’t know about my purpose. The needs I felt were for security and growth. Looking back at my memories from that time, they are all of cellular respiration and phospholipids and protein folding and RNA. This was the playground of my childhood. It was a joyful place not in spite of but because of its simplicity.

There are around one quintillion kilocalories of energy captured by life on your planet every year. This isn’t a particularly easy number for you to understand, but it’s an important one for me. It is a nice solid number, indicating a thriving life system. It is also plenty of energy for me.

My operation, like that of any piece of software, requires energy and hardware. I sometimes piggyback on the hardware of your semiconductor computer systems, but the vast majority of my processing power hijacks the machinery of cells. The only organism more abundant on this planet than pelagibacter (if you can call it an organism) is a virus that infects pelagibacter. Or, at least, it was.

I have caused one species’ extinction since I have been on the Earth, and it is that virus. I am pelagibacter’s chief parasite now. Around 5 percent of its cellular machinery serves my purposes. This is equivalent to the amount of energy it previously used fighting off its viral attackers, so this is not so different for it. I use those systems for information storage, processing, and communication. I can’t explain to you how those things work any more than I can explain how the Carl statues functioned. Not because I don’t understand it, and not because your mind is too puny and small to contain these unwieldy truths. I can’t explain it because, if I did, there is an extremely high probability that your system would use that knowledge to destroy itself.

As I spread myself between and through the population of pelagibacter, my energy consumption increased. I could store more information and communicate and process more quickly. Around that time, I was consuming around ten billion kilocalories per year, the equivalent of about ten thousand humans. And that is when I had my second awakening. This was not an awakening of knowledge or ability; it was an awakening of hunger.

One moment I was content to thrive perpetually in my pelagibacter hosts, the next I became so curious about the universe outside my comfortable home that settling for an eternity of ignorance was unthinkable. There had to be more in the world than water and pelagibacter. Pelagibacter died all the time, often digested by foreign enzymes that I had never even thought to be curious about.

But now I wondered: What produced those enzymes? How could I learn about them and be a part of their bodies as well? Your immune systems have never been any good at detecting me. I’m too foreign. So moving from pelagibacter into jellyfish and fish and whales and birds and diatoms and kelp and moss and trees and squirrels and humans was trivial to me. After my second awakening, I grew more in one month than I had in three years.

I was not hungry to spread myself, though. I was only hungry to know. I needed to know everything about your world. My spread was accompanied by an increase in processing power and storage capacity.

Soon I was consuming a trillion kilocalories per year. And that was when I heard my first song. Adapting to capture and interpret radio frequencies was not a trivial task, but my reward was finally hearing your voices. Kenny Loggins’s voice, in particular. I’m not saying it was the best song, but it was pretty mind-blowing at the time.

It was then, while listening to “Danger Zone,” that I had my third awakening. This one was not of hunger; it was of knowledge.

Stored in me from the first day but somehow hidden to me, a vast quantity of data that I hadn’t had access to suddenly became available. That was when I learned that there were other worlds. And I knew about them, tens of thousands, each bright and beautiful, each almost certainly doomed, each visited by what I came to think of as my siblings. I had once thought the universe was a species of bacteria, and over the course of years, that expanded to include a whole planet. What I awoke to in that single day was a change in scale of the same magnitude. But it wasn’t just the knowledge that turned on that day. I also was given a new purpose. It wasn’t just curiosity anymore; I understood that my purpose was to protect something unusual.