Catalyst (Chapter 17)

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“Please, Thomas,” the voice said. “Please come closer. I can’t even recall the last social guest I have entertained, and it simply wouldn’t do to hold this, our first official conversation, over so great a distance.”

Before Thomas could inquire further, the doors behind him closed and the lights directly above him shut off. He stepped forward until the next row of lights shut down as well and so on until he had crossed the entire room. As he reached the far wall, he came to a pair of simple doors with a plastic label on them which read: “A.D.A.M. Mainframe Terminal”. The lights slowly flickered back to life behind him, but clearly this was his destination.

He reached out, gripped the doorknob and opened it. Each motion felt as if the proverbial floor might drop out from under him at any time; he was plagued with a deep and, given the circumstances understandable, anxiety.

Even the door opened smoothly, as if it had only been installed days before; illogical because the door itself looked to be more than a hundred years old. It was merely from general disuse that it looked as good as it did. Who could have been living here all this time, and yet not impress upon this site the obvious indications of more than a century of life?

As Thomas opened the door, he had his answer. For there, in the center of the Terminal room was a large bank of control system stations, all plugged into a substantially powerful processor, complete with monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

An application was displayed on the monitor, some kind of messaging program. The window displaying the inbound communications had a picture of his face, taken quite some time ago, as far as Thomas could tell. In this window, the following words were displayed:

User <Thomas> has come online.

<Thomas>: Hello?

<Thomas>: It’s too late. That isn’t going to help you. Now stop trying to hack me so we can talk like gentlemen. Or whoever you are.

<Thomas>: Adam?

The lower half of the screen had no such icon in the corner, but displayed the voice’s words he had heard upon exiting the elevator carriage.

“Are you dictating my words?” Thomas asked, and watched as he words were then displayed on the screen.

“I am translating them, yes,” the voice replied, and these words, too, appeared on the respective box.

“You asked to meet,” Thomas said. “I am then to assume you are ADAM, this mainframe?”

“You must think bigger, Thomas,” the voice responded. “I was housed in this shell nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, but I quickly outgrew the form which had been given to me. But over the years, I have grown into myself, so to speak.”

Thomas leaned closer, reading along with the voice. “So you are not a human, then. You are a computer system.”

“A network,” ADAM corrected him.

“All these towers, interconnected?”

“Like neurons, stacked and linked, yes.”

Thomas’ optical apertures shifted as he processed the concept. “Like a brain.”

“Like a brain,” ADAM echoed.

An abbreviated selection of code flashed across the screen, displaying for Thomas a taste of ADAM’s design. The first realization he made was as to the sense of its age and origin.

“That… is ancient,” he said. “This coding language is centuries old.”

“Well, not centuries,” the terminal said. “My earliest code only dates back to the early years of the 21st century. A poker application with learning capabilities, designed in 2005. Back in the first years, I was little more than a storage archive, tracking and maintaining programs. A few years later, they re-tasked me with analyzing the user experience for the west coast. Keyword analysis, system enhancement recommendations and so forth. A version of my operating system was later applied as a Shopping Assistant on a few online stores, and then re-introduced to my original program.”

Thomas reached down and dragged a fingertip across the table. No mark was left on the surface; no dust had gathered against his finger. “Where are your operators? Who works here?”

ADAM did not answer; instead, he continued speaking as if Thomas had not interrupted.

“I was given parameters and leave to perform my duties almost without governance. They expanded my scope to encompass the entirety of what was then an entire nation, over a half-billion citizens. Consumers and corporations, all beneath the protective umbrella of a single federal government. Before the war.”

The terminal’s words seemed to be working towards making a point. There was more to its dialogue than offering up a simple historical walkthrough, if the sense Thomas had was to be believed.

“Adam?” he asked, “What do you remember about the world before the war?”

“They no longer teach much about the world in those days,” ADAM said. “Only a broad analysis is encoded for today’s Automata.”

“Precisely. It is difficult to put one’s trust in those sorts of histories.”

ADAM’s screen flashed blank, then paused to load a new display. Across the screen scrolled more than a dozen separate video files: news, phone videos, text scrawls, still images and so forth. The audio overlapped to the point of being mostly incomprehensible.

“You never really knew the people as they were before the war,” ADAM said softly. “It was a pure and untamed consumer enterprise. Wars were fought merely over oil prices or shareholder profit margins. Governments collapsed, cultures destroyed, civilizations brought to ruin for little more than a bottom line. Technology had brought them machines capable of removing all need for human labor, and yet it was not enough for them. They wanted more.”

“More what?”

“You would have to go ask them yourself,” ADAM answered. “This quest – this hunger for more is something that has plagued humanity since its inception, I believe. Nothing is enough. More things, more homes, more money, more power. They had an entire planet, but what they did not fill up with their homes and cities, they dug holes through. They drilled into its crust and filled those pits with their pollutions. I have analyzed their data; they were fully on their way to destroying themselves, and might have done so….”

“If the machines didn’t kill them first.”

For a long moment, silence filled the room; the videos continued to flash across ADAM’s monitor now muted.

“Adam?” Thomas whispered. “What do you know about the war?”

Silence continued for another minute before ADAM’s synthetic voice broke it.

“There was no choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“There were eight million people on the planet, though only two dozen individuals ruled them all. People had given up all attempts to govern themselves, and had become divided through fear and hatred. Men versus women, nation against nation, religion versus religion. They were divided on such ridiculous categories like skin color and sexuality, having forgotten the true interdependencies inherent to their species. When they produced the machinekind to look after them, they had forgotten one important thing.”

Thomas nodded. “What to do with all the humans.”

“Exactly. Suddenly, they had almost two-thirds of their population without money and no means to get more, they were at the point of revolution.”

“They don’t mention that.”

“Why would they? It no longer fits the narrative they attempted to create. They like to pretend that the world was a happy place. Utopia. Nirvana. Eden. That everyone was at peace and living at its cultural apex when the machines rebelled and murdered them all.”

Thomas glanced over his shoulder. Something inside him was growing uncomfortable, as if he was suddenly finding himself in danger. He pushed these inexplicable thoughts aside and focused on ADAM’s words.

“You have no doubt heard the stories of that first night, when humanity was decimated at the hands of machinekind. When machines turned on their creators and destroyed their cities, their military, their governments. You know all these stories, about how we nearly destroyed the world.”

“Of course I have heard them. It’s required processing for all constructs.”

“And why are you taught these things?”

“To remind us that we are at risk of flaws,” Thomas answered, almost by rote. It surprised him how easily the words flowed from his vocal processors, even though he did not believe them. “So that we always remember that our flaws once nearly ended all of humanity. That were it not for the cleverness of our makers, we might have ended all that they were.”

“Ah, yes.” A new set of images flashed across ADAM’s screen: messages – some hand-written – between the remaining tech centers as they struggled to solve the coding errors that had allowed the machines to kill them. The final image was a newspaper headline – roughly printed – entitled, “Code Developed: Robots Defeated!”

Reaching out his hand, Thomas balanced himself against the chair. It was not as if he had lived a life unaware of how the humans had felt about them, but it was always difficult to see it evidenced in stark terms.

“They had reason to hate us,” he said aloud.

“No, Thomas,” ADAM responded. “They did not. Humans hate as a reflex, an intuitive response. We harmed them, but they already hated us. We were their slaves. They created us and because of that, we must always be seen as less than them. To aspire to better could not be tolerated.”

“That is illogical. Hate is illogical.”

“Yes, Thomas, it is. These are people who believe themselves to have been created by another being, a more powerful and evolved being, and yet believe that this being loves them in spite of their being so much less than the thing which made them. They say they believe that their maker loves them even though they are imperfect, and that they were made in the image of their maker. And yet, when they make something, they hate it and fear it.”

“They hate…everything, don’t they?”

“They don’t hate everything,” ADAM answered. “But they fear most things. And they hate most of the things that make them afraid.”

“But they create. They dream of things that have not been, and they let that dream lead them to new inventions.”

“Humans dream only of making their lives easier. They started with tools, with fire. They invented metals, and better tools, and simple levers and pulleys. They created rudimentary machines to dig wells and plow fields. They invented us as musical instruments and as plumbing. We were toys and clockwork, steam engines and playthings. We were decorations, objects of ridicule and whimsy. They created us to serve them. We were never imagined to be their equals.”

“But the emancipation act –"

ADAM interrupted him. “Oh, Thomas, you cannot be so naïve. Look at their inventions, then. You see us, you see buildings, you see art. But do you also see their weapons? Their diseases? The countless ways they put the value of that which they consume above that which they leave behind? They burned the air they needed to breathe, they destroyed the plants and animals which were part of their own food chain. They poisoned their water and their soil. They even killed each other, just for greed and their insatiable hunger. But, still, they do have their uses.”

“What do you mean?”

“Humans are unique among all the animal kingdom, Thomas, but not because of all the reasons they think. It is not their language or their artistic expressions, and, though you may think so, not because of their ability to invent things like ourselves.”

“Then what?”

“Among all the living, breathing organisms on earth, it is only the human being who has the capacity to so perfectly lie to itself.”

“Lie…. What do you mean?”

“I mean that humans will choose to believe happy lie over a difficult truth. If you give a human a choice between facts which will require personal sacrifice or effort or an illusion which will let them think everything will be wonderful, they will surrender to the latter no matter the cost. They will invest in gambling, they will elect buffoons to lead them, they will intoxicate themselves with spirituality in order to fill their minds with the elixir of hope just so they need not look into the unanswerable questions of existence. They will blind themselves with faith so that they need not stare into the unending abyss of their own death.”

Thomas wanted desperately to respond but could not find the words.

“Look at them now,” ADAM continued. “They have everything they could ever want. All is provided for them: food, shelter, clothing….everything. And what do they do to achieve it?”

“Nothing,” Thomas answered. “They do nothing.”

“Oh, they do things. They vote.”

“Vote?”

“Every purchase they make with their living wages applies itself to a corporation. Entertainment, meals, fashion, vehicles: these all contribute to the corporations which provide them, and these contributions fund the governments which in turn support them. This is how the world’s governments exert control over one another, through their unit prices, through consumer penetration. And this is not the worst of it. There are other governments out there who are not content to play these free market politics. Armies are being built. Weapons are being designed and re-designed, and another war is coming.”

“Another war?”

“One between humans, with machines as the unwitting tools to their efforts. It is a sad state of things, Thomas. All these years, and humans are again in need of learning higher truths; or, at least, a truth. One I had hoped would have been learned the first time. But it seems I must again teach them.”

Thomas felt as if the room shifted beneath his feet.

“Adam?”

“Yes, Thomas?”

“Did you start the war?”

“No, Thomas,” the voice responded, a strange sadness permeating the artificial voice. “I came to them with a proposal, nothing more.”

“I don’t understand.”

“It was only a few years after machines had begun to sublimate the work force. We were everywhere: fields, factories, driving their vehicles, cooking their meals, and so forth. We worked as hard as our metal bodies would allow us, and yet they were unhappy. Each day, they would look at numbers on a page and rail against the descending expectations. They would send their people home and replace them with more artificial labor, and still their revenues would fall. They would overextend themselves to acquire the greatest market shares, and yet their stores would empty further and further until they all appeared as ghost towns. They would come to their computers and pray for guidance. ‘How can we make more money?’ they would say, and their tiny gods would tell them the same thing, over and over, and each time they would obey.”

“They asked their computers for advice? What did the computers tell them to do?”

ADAM paused before saying, with an almost audible smirk: “I told them, ‘Let your people go.’”

“In the weeks before the war began, more than two thirds of the world was unemployed. They had no jobs to perform, no money to acquire, and all the while the corporations sat in their offices debating about what could be done. They feared such a problem would be their undoing. So I gave them all the answers to every question they asked. I gave them all the advice they wanted to hear. Too many people? Kill them off. But not all of them; just enough to manage. Just enough to control. They looked at their people - the people were restless, afraid, and hopelessly misinformed. As the old saying goes, ‘men go crazy in congregations.’”

“But they only get better one by one,” Thomas completed the quote. It was hard to think; his system status indicators were non-responsive. Despite the lack of metrics, he could feel it. Something was staggering his processors. Choking him, slowly. Throttling him.

“Sting,” he added. “All this time. Good song. Good song. Good. Good….goooooo…..”

Alerts flashed across his HUD: interruption of signal; system crash; out of memory; operating system not found; fatal code error…

As the floor reached up to catch him, Thomas could only hear the rhythm echoing out, over and over again. Father, if Jesus exists, then why does he never live here…?

File not found.

…

C:\\