//------------------------------// // Chapter 6 // Story: Friendship is Optimal: Veritas Vos Liberabit // by Skyros //------------------------------// "We're even wrong about which mistakes we're making."--Carl Winfeld. 6. Ryan leaned back from his computer. His eyes watered. His mouth felt like it was filled with cotton. His brain felt like someone had put it through a blender. His joints ached when he moved them. But the report was finished. There was a real chance Michael would push this upwards, and that the government would move against Hofvarpnir, in Ryan's estimation. A real chance. Probably a chance in the mid double-digits. A 20% to 70% kind of a chance, which was about as good as he could reasonably expect. Obviously, it had taken him a long time to compile the report, especially given the difficulty of the material. He didn't have Chandra's speed. He hadn't had Chandra's help. But this report was thorough. It said the kinds of things that Michael would want a report to say. It cited documents produced by Michael, which Michael would like. And Michael wouldn't have any scruples moving against Hofvarpnir--they were the kind of organization he disliked, the kind of organization that had never contracted with the government for anything, the kind of organization that had been started by a single genius and grown exponentially with time. Ryan had included statements that Michael would read as implicit praise of himself. It was a masterpiece of flattery, as well as a masterpiece of research. Ryan had never brownnosed so much in a single document in the entirety of his time in the government, but he had pulled out all the stops this time. Ryan Szilard, slayer of AIs. That sounded good. He read through the report one more time. He wanted to be careful; he had performed many complete read-throughs before. His field of vision grew fuzzy every now and then, and he realized that he was unlikely to catch anything he had not caught before. But that would probably be fine anyhow, right? So he sent it off in an email to Michael, being sure to include careful flattery of Michael in the email as well. Then he left for a smoke break. By the time he returned to his desk, he had a new email from Michael. "Come to my office." Huh, that was odd. He walked, a bit more slowly than usual, down the rows of cubicles to Michael's office. It was only 11:30 in the morning, and he had gotten about four hours of sleep the previous night. He swayed gently as he walked, occasionally putting a hand on one of the cubicles he passed by. Unscheduled meetings with Michael were quite rare. Michael may have been an asinine boss. But the upside of his particular brand of asininity was that he was only very rarely spontaneous. Ryan didn't see how Michael would have been able to read the report already, which meant that he didn't see any reason for Michael to be asking to see him. Which made the entire request for him to come to Michael even more odd. Michael's door was open, so Ryan walked in. Michael looked up from his computer, and Ryan immediately realized something was wrong. Michael looked angry, even furious. But Michael also looked happy, which was maybe more alarming. "You," Michael said, "are going to be fired. I'm putting in the paperwork now." "What." Ryan said. "Clear out your cube now. I want you out of the building before noon. You'll two more weeks of pay before your termination is finalized, but you're never to come inside this building again." "What?" Ryan said. "I don't understand." Michael looked a little frustrated. His level of anger was clearly calibrated to be met with an equivalent level of anger. He looked like he had been looking forward to screaming at Ryan and being screamed at in return; he looked like he had been looking forward to all the emotional release such an occurrence would afford. Ryan's emotionally dulled state seemed a little frustrating to him. "What do you mean, for what?" he snapped. "You idiot. For this, for a start." And he spun the computer around. Ryan saw the email he had just sent to Michael. But it looked different. He caught some phrases in the body of the email. Phrases like "incompetent fuck" and "mouth-breathing, foot-dragging little shit" and "completely and hopelessly incompetent leadership," all said of Michael, all apparently said by Ryan himself, swam before him. He knew he was tired... but he was fairly sure that he had not just said those things to Michael. "Yeah, the email you just sent," Michael said. "The one where you insult me, my mother, and the entire government." Ryan's vision felt like it was closing around him. "I didn't send that," he said. Polite discourse abandoned him, and he asked Michael, "Did you fake that?" "No, you idiot!" Michael said. "And you CC'd ten other managers here, so don't even pretend that I was able to do it." "That does seem unlikely," Ryan said. Ok, so Michael had not faked this; Michael's technical skills were not good enough to do that, certainly. Or almost certainly. Who knew. But if Michael was too stupid to do this, where had this email come from? Ryan wanted to think, but his mind felt slow; it was like he was trying to run through twenty inches of water. Perhaps he should not have pushed himself so hard recently... but who could have done this? "And that's not all of it," Michael said. "You were an incompetent criminal before now.... are you even listening to me?" Ryan wasn't. He was trying to think of someone, anyone, who could have done this and who had the motivation to do this. He had no enemies at the office, that he could think of. He didn't even know anyone at the office, let alone know anyone well enough to make them an enemy. And this would have require at least a little technical skill--more than a little. And who outside of the office, who possessed technical skill, would have had any desire to ruin his career, or to render the work which he was creating-- Oh. Right. Ryan laughed to himself, loudly and suddenly and unsteadily. "What!" Michael screamed. This too seemed funny to Ryan. "I'm sorry," Ryan said. "My bad, I shouldn't have interrupted. What else did I do?" "I have the security footage of you spray painting the outside of the building!" Michael said. "The place I sent it to isn't done with its analysis. But it looks like you, and I'm sure they're going to find that it was you." "Of course," Ryan said. "Of course the cameras would show that I was the anonymous vandal. Is there anything else I did?" "Do you have anything else to confess?" "Ah, no, sorry, my bad," Ryan said. "I'll get my stuff." And Ryan spun on his heel, heading out of his office, swaying a little bit as he went. It didn't take him long to gather his materials. Apart from his report and materials he had gathered while working on it, there was nothing on his desk; certainly no photos or memorabilia. And then he remembered that the report itself was now proprietary to the government, and he had to leave it behind. So he left with empty hands, more or less, even before security came to escort him outside. His superficial hilarity began to disappear while he drove to his place. Chandra. She must have done this. He didn't know how she had broken into their email system--there would probably have been dozens of ways--but he was certain that she was the one who had done it. Given that she had done it, it must have been because she didn't want to run the risk of Ryan's report shifting the power of the United States government against Hofvarpnir Studios. This meant they had something to hide. And this meant that the Equestria MMO would contain an AI. Chandra would need to tar the very idea of investigating Hofvarpnir with bad associations, so she had made sure that no report by him would ever be taken seriously. He was angry at Chandra. Sure, he had liked her a little--but she had seemed kind, and interested in him, and her incredible talents couldn't help but turn him on a little-- --her incredible talents. Wait. Her incredible talents. She had seemed superhuman to him, but somehow he hadn't put two and two together. So she wasn't a human, because he already knew that Hofvarpnir had developed an artificial intelligence, which meant that the balance of probability was that any entity with that level of intelligence was not a human at all. God, that was so obvious, how couldn't he have seen it? If I can do so now, with my mind gummed up, how could I not have figured out earlier? So the superintelligence had been around since at least as long as he was talking to Chandra. That was quite a while. Ok. It would have taken, a week or two for it to buy more processors. Assuming it couldn't offload too much of its calculation to AWS. So it would have had banks of a few hundred NVIDIA GPUs to think on, extremely quickly. But given the acquisition of WorldFoundries--who knows--maybe it already had custom hardware to run on. Custom hardware would make it smarter, and put it yet further beyond his ability to understand it and plan against it. But really he could be projecting this all wrong. It might be that the most efficient way for it to gain processing power quickly would have been to send a few Hofvarpnir employees to a warehouse somewhere, have them pick up every processor, then hire a few highschoolers to plug everything together. Or maybe to make a botnet to distribute its calculations over ten million computers around the world. Or maybe. Or maybe. Or maybe. He realized that his thoughts were going everywhere and nowhere at once. I can't outthink it, at least like this, Ryan thought. He stopped at a park that was not too far from his apartment. He walked with his phone to the center of the park, and hid it in the crook of a tree, leaving it on. Let Chandra--it--whatever it was--think that he was thinking over his life while looking at nature. When he arrived at his apartment, his mind was still spinning. All the things Chandra had ever suggested, when they were discussing the danger of AI, rushed through his head. But now he did not know how many of them to trust. None of them? But if none of them would work, then he would be able to rule out possibilities because she had said earlier, and she would not permit that gain in knowledge. Perhaps all of them would work? Surely not for the same reason. So some of them--but he had no way of knowing which. If the AI was a true AI, it could have picked a random number from the air and used that to determine how many and which methods to describe to Ryan, given a particular ratio of good methods to bad methods. Humans sucked at random number generation; a computer could choose some method of pseudo-random number generation much better than a human. He needed to calm down. What did Chandra--he gave up, and decided to call her Chandra, for now--expect him to do next? Presumably, try to stop her. He tried to think. He sat in front of his computer, and researched for a few seconds. And then stopped, then restarted again. His mind could not stay still. He considered the probability that she had bugged his computer. He considered the probability that he would be able to find a computer to work on where she could not track him. He considered the probability he could get useful resources in a way she could not track, or rally friends without her listening, or accomplish anything without her smearing him or doing something to preclude any further progress. He couldn't think of a thing. He started to compile the things he did not know. He did not know what values Hanna / Chandra / it would possess. He did not know how long it had been in existence. He did not know how many computer systems it had penetrated. He did not know how many resources it had at its disposal. He did not know how many inroads it had made into politics and into influencing powerful humans. He did not know what number of genius-level human intelligences it was now equivalent too. He turned to things that were probably known. He did know that, if he had been in its situation, by now he could have rendered himself almost invincible. So it was almost invincible. He did know that it could convince humans to do what it wanted with superhuman acuity. He did know that it had millions and probably billions of dollars worth of assets at its disposal. He did know that it was by now probably running on hardware customized for its performance. He did know it would have secretly spread itself across the entire globe. And he did know that it had just decreased the probability that an organization like the United States Government would investigate it, by a significant degree. Which meant that he did know that it was alert, watching for even the smallest of threats, and was ready to neutralize them. He had known this feeling of helplessness before. The feeling that everything had been fine, at some point in the past. And then he had screwed up, without knowing that he was screwing up, before his mind was even remotely aware that it was possible to screw up in such a big and permanent way. Like finding that a power tool had removed your hand, before you realized that you had turned it on. Like driving in the rain-- This time he could not get it out of his head. It was still sunny outside, but all he could think about was finding himself in the tangled wreckage of a car, rain beginning to fall through the broken glass. The weirdly delayed sensation of realizing that he had just been in an accident. The sort of abstract debate, in his head, of whether the accident had been his fault. Then, looking to his side, to the passenger's seat, to see-- There was one way to stop himself from thinking about this. His mind flit to the pistol he owned. It wasn't like anyone would miss him, anyhow. He got up, and began to feel beneath his bed. The gun case was next to his shoes, and he took it out. The lock was still set to 0-0-0. He had not bothered to change it from this default when he bought the gun and case six months ago, when he was still able to tell himself that he was interested in target shooting and somehow to studiously ignore his other motives. I want never to think about myself again, Ryan thought. Never to have to go back over the unalterable film-strip that was his life, to review the decisions that brought me here. Never to think that the one who made those mistakes in the past was the same as the one who here existed, and breathed, and ate, and could do nothing about the past. To remove the swollen, tumorous thing that was his memory, and replace it with blankness. He craved non-existence like he had learned to crave a cigarette or alcohol. Somebody knocked on his door. "Ryan," Braden's voice said. Ryan sat on his bed with the case in his lap. "Ryan!" Braden's voice said again. "You aren't answering your phone." Ryan sat on his bed with the gun. "I saw your car in the lot," Braden said. "I know you're in there." Ryan sat. "Unlock the fucking door, Ryan," Braden said. Ryan shoved the case beneath the bed again. "If you don't unlock the door, I swear I'm going to knock it down," Braden said. Ryan opened the door. Braden was still wearing the suit and tie from work. He was breathing hard, as if he had run here from his car. "I heard that you sent some kind of crazy email, and had been filmed graffitiing the building," Braden said, coming into the room. "Yeah, that's what they said," agreed Ryan. "And then another friend of yours called," Braden continued. "I hadn't heard you mention her before. She had an Indian name, I forget what it was--" "Chandra." "Yeah, Chandra. And she said you were depressed... " Braden said, and he voice trailed off. He and Ryan looked at each other for a moment. "She said you might kill yourself," Braden said. "She was really blunt about it. She actually said that you would probably kill yourself, if I did nothing. And then you wouldn't answer your phone, so I came over here, which is where she said you probably were." Ryan said nothing. "Are you about to kill yourself?" "I don't... I'm not sure," Ryan said. He wondered why Chandra had told Braden that he might kill himself. That would be... weird, for her to do that. "I see," Braden had said. Ryan sat down on his bed, and Braden sat down next to him. Braden sitting there felt stabilizing. His thoughts raced a little less. And one came to the forefront which had nothing and everything to do with the last few hours. Ryan had never told anyone, but he needed to tell someone. "I killed Amy," Ryan said. "No, listen. I was driving. The road was wet. I know that other car slid out, slid into us, but I know that I heard it before it hit us. I had at least half a second, from the time I knew something was wrong to the time it hit us. Maybe even three-quarters of a second, or a whole second, or even more than a whole second. Human reflex time is less than a fifth of a second, right? It's significantly less than a fifth for trained actions. I could have done something, anything. I can prevent a motorcycle from sliding out with less warning, so I could have done something." Ryan was crying freely now. "But I didn't. I panicked. I yanked on the steering wheel, and we hydroplaned before other car even hit us. If you look at the pictures, it barely tapped us--it was me who threw us off the road. And then when I realized we had stopped, we had hit the support pillar of an overpass. I was fine, and she was dying. I know they found that other driver at fault, but I could have saved her. So I basically killed her." And Ryan cried. It wasn't embarrassing to have Braden there, oddly. The misery he was feeling at having fucked up everything filled him up completely, and didn't leave room for any lesser sadness. Braden put his hand on his shoulder. "It wasn't"--Braden started, but Ryan interrupted. "As if you'd ever say anything different," Ryan snapped. He knew how these things worked. People said it wasn't your fault. But it didn't matter what they would say, unless they had the kind of honesty necessary to tell you that it was your fault, if it were. But he didn't think he knew anyone with that kind of honesty. He had killed everyone he knew with that kind of honesty. "It really isn't," Braden said. Ryan still cried, because even now--as he saw Braden eye the gun case that he had failed to slide completely beneath the bed, and as Braden took out his cell phone to call an ambulance--he knew he was alone. And Ryan thought that---after Braden had gotten Ryan involuntarily committed for a few days; after Ryan had learned to take pills to stop himself from feeling so empty; after he had learned to stop expecting things from life--after all this, Ryan thought there would be nothing that he could find which would justify his continued existence, though his existence would still continue. Even with Braden here to pull himself back from any self-destruction, the future was empty, after all. He couldn't save someone who was dead. He couldn't stop the AI. There was nothing to do, and for people like Braden he was nothing but a burden, whose continued existence Braden would work to guarantee but for whom Ryan could do no real favors. Ryan could see himself continuing to be, through inertia and the efforts of others and through medication. But there could never be any reason for him to continue to live.