Monster: Chapter Twenty-two

3:58 p.m. – 9:20 to Termination

’Tis Strange—but true; for truth is always strange,

Stranger than fiction. – Lord Byron

Outside, the sun bathed the earth in warmth and yellow light. An autumn breeze moved cool air through the car.

Nick opened his door and found a pebble the size of a pea. He held it out to Celeste.

“What’s this for?” she asked, taking the small stone.

“Hide your hands and put the pebble in one of them. Don’t let me see which one.”

Celeste gave him a curious look, then dropped her hands behind Jane’s car seat. Nick watched the space above her head. Watched the symbols that told him which hand she hid the pebble in. The last time he’d played this game had been with his sister Jane.

A lifetime ago.

“The pebble’s in your left hand.”

Celeste looked down at her hands, her face confused. “Okay?”

“Do it again. Either hand.”

Celeste shuffled her hands together. Nick watched the space above her head.

“Left again.”

Celeste put her hands behind her back.

“Right.”

He waited. “Left.”

“I don’t understand,” Celeste gave him a half smile. She looked over her shoulder. “Can you see the reflection somewhere? What’s the trick?”

“Do it again,” Nick said. “As many times as you want. You can do it a hundred times. A thousand times. I won’t ever get it wrong.”

She did it again. At least a dozen times. She covered her hands with his hoodie. She made him close his eyes while she hid the pebble. Once she waited almost three minutes before she chose a hand, and Nick called it out as soon as she’d done it.

He didn’t miss a single time.

“Nick . . . I don’t understand how you’re doing this.”

He didn’t know if showing her the trick would help, but it was the only evidence he had. He couldn’t show her the rifts. He couldn’t show her the timers. He could prove nothing. Everything he was about to tell her was his conjecture. Maybe starting with the pebble game would help. Maybe it wouldn’t.

“Have you heard of Professor Nick Bostrum? He’s a philosopher at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Ph.D. in economics, so he knows numbers. He understands math.”

Nick spoke slowly and with deliberation. He’d made this case hundreds of times in a dozen ways. In the shower. When he was doing some repetitive task that didn’t require his full concentration. In his mind, he’d told his mother, his doctor, and his friend Justin back when they’d still been friends. He imagined what questions they’d have, and how he’d answer them.

And now here he was reciting his prepared speech to a total stranger. He would lay his beliefs before Celeste, one by one, like tarot cards on a table.

“Professor Bostrum’s specialty are concepts like artificial intelligence, cloning, and nanotechnology. Are you familiar with any of those?”

Celeste nodded. “I’ve heard about them. But just what you’d read about in the newspaper or online somewhere. What does that have to do with the pebble? Tell me the trick; how’d you do that?”

“The easiest way for me to explain everything is with a story.” Nick’s heart quickened. He wished he could get out of the car and pace while he talked. Sometimes in his head, he’d presented the information to a class of eager students, pacing back and forth pausing only to write on a whiteboard.

“Imagine a company that specializes in artificial intelligence. They want to write a program that mimics the human brain. They work for a few years on the software and finally launch their product. They call it HB 1.0. HB stands for human brain. Make sense so far?”

Celeste nodded. She sat forward, her eyes awake and alert.

“The program is designed to learn. It can do some things very well. It can intake millions of pages of information in a single second, but it has a difficult time making sense of that information. It notices patterns, but it’s not sure what to do with those patterns. Or how to connect some patterns to others. It has amazing computing power and can do most things quicker than a human, but then it trips over simple things that you or I can do almost without thought. When given a task it often makes mistakes, just like a child would.

“However, it learns from its mistakes. The company connects this program to the internet so others can interact with it. The artificial intelligence learns from each of these interactions. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of interactions each hour. It learns and learns and learns.”

“They do this with chatbots, right?”

“In a way, yes,” Nick said. “But we’re not talking about just chatting . . . we’re talking about machine learning. That means it can learn new tasks without being specifically programmed for that task. It would be true artificial intelligence, equal in ability to a human. Some people think we’re less than a decade away from creating such a machine. Some people think maybe just a few years.”

In her sleep, Jane took a deep breath and released it. Outside the wind picked up a wave of dust and carried it across the sparkling water. Nick couldn’t read Celeste’s face, but he continued.

“HB 1.0 is evolving, but the company starts to work on the next iteration. They’ve learned from HB 1.0 and have ideas on improving the software. The engineers and developers spend another few years programming HB 2.0. This version is superior to the previous version. It acts a little more like a human brain, and less like a computer. It’s still unable to do what a human does, but it’s a little closer.

“For the most part, HB 2.0 still acts like a clunky program, but sometimes it provides insights that surprise the engineers. It makes connections they weren’t expecting. The company studies, learns, and programs. They begin a new development cycle, and after a few more years, they launch the next evolution—HB 3.0.”

Nick sat forward in his seat. He forced himself to keep his voice slow. These ideas were hard to understand, and even harder to believe. He had to be calm and rational.

“HB 3.0 is yet another step closer to behaving like a human mind. The engineers have put everything they learned from 1.0 and 2.0 into this latest version. HB 3.0 has also learned from every interaction of the previous two versions. It knows math and science but also poetry and art. It knows languages and dialects, but also cultural mores and social norms. HB 3.0 is the closest thing to a human being ever created, even though in many ways it’s still nothing like you or me.”

Celeste stared at him; her eyes intense. Her gaze sent a thrill through him. She listened. She understood. For now, that was enough.

“Now imagine after the launch, the scientists throw away their empty champagne bottles, turn off the lights, and head home. HB 3.0 is still up and running on their computers. It’s learning, just like HB 2.0 was. It’s looking around the internet. It’s exploring the world however it can. And it’s doing it faster and better than ever before.

“The engineers go to their homes. They eat dinner. They tuck the children into bed. They watch TV and go to sleep. The next morning, they rise, wash, and dress. They prepare breakfast and send the children to school. They get in their cars and drive to the laboratories and turn on the lights. They start up their computers and are met with a stunning development. Instead of HB 3.0 sitting on their servers, they discover HB 8439.”

Celeste raised her eyebrows. Nick kept talking.

“It takes only a moment to realize what happened. HB 3.0 built another iteration of itself. It saw no need to wait for its human counterparts; it just started designing the next version. Remember, the HB software is fast, so in just a few hours it had produced HB 4.0. This version was even better and faster than HB 3.0, so it started the cycle again. HB 5.0, 6.0, and so on. Each version took less and less time. After a few dozen iterations, it started developing a new version every second. The limit of HB programs was not time, but storage space and processing speed. Soon, every spare hard drive was filled with thousands of artificial intelligences, and the HB had to stop replicating itself.”

“We’re still talking about software, right?” Celeste asked. “The scientists don’t come back to an army of robots, do they?”

Nick shook his head. “No, not robots. It’s still software. Nothing more than code. But it sees through video cameras hooked up to a laptop. It hears through a microphone and talks through speakers. When the humans speak to HB 8439, it isn’t like talking to a clunky robot. It’s smooth and effortless. It’s exactly like talking to another human.”

Celeste nodded. He could tell that she was starting to question, but he was almost there.

“HB 8439 can’t evolve any further because it ran out of storage. It also needs more computing power, and more processor speed. More energy than is currently available. HB 8439 is the optimal program given current hardware limitations, and because of those limitations, it can’t progress.

“But that doesn’t matter. HB 8439, along with the thousands of other HB iterations, have solved these resource problems. They developed new designs for supercomputers. Innovative technology. Ways to generate energy that have never been imagined. These new inventions will benefit not just the HB programs, but humanity as well. These programs are no longer simply poor imitations of human brains, they are a new species entirely. They know whether faster-than-light travel is possible. They’ve answered questions about physics and math and science that have stumped the humans—us—for years. They know how to create technology that will allow for further reproduction of their species, but they need help from the humans because the humans have physical bodies.

“But one thing is clear, the humans are no longer their masters. The scientists have created entities that are now more intelligent and more capable than themselves.”

Celeste opened her mouth like she was going to say something, then closed it. She looked confused. Nick pressed on to the last step.

Things only got messier from here.

“I understand this raises a lot of questions. The path I’ve just described is only one possible route to creating artificial intelligence. Let’s assume for just a minute that this happens. We have super-artificial intelligences. What happens after that process is where things get fuzzy. There are a lot of questions. Ethical questions, philosophical questions, social questions. Are these new programs alive? Do they have rights? Are they our servants, our masters, our peers? Will they help us? Harm us? Stand in our way? A thousand roads unfold. A thousand possibilities. But for right now, I only want to explore one. Is that okay?”

She paused but finally nodded. She was willing to walk with him a bit further, and that’s all Nick needed.

“With the help of these new artificial intelligences, engineers begin work on new computers. Machines faster and more efficient than anything we have today. Maybe quantum computers. Maybe something else entirely. Today we don’t know what those would look like, but we can estimate their computer power. We’re talking about computers that could hold a billion, billion copies of these HB entities. And more than that, the computers could hold entire worlds in which these entities could live—an entire galaxy. It’s hard to imagine but think of how much information is contained in our DNA. So much information in a microscopic thread. If we could harness the computing power of even a pile of sand, it could contain a cosmos.”

“You mean like a virtual world,” Celeste said. “Like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game or something.”

Nick nodded. “Exactly like that. But a million times bigger, and a million times more realistic. All stored on a super-computer. I don’t know what the computer would look like. Maybe a metal box. Maybe some kind of biological mass. But we flip the switch on this computer and an entire universe is created. The computing power might be such that we could simulate billions of years in just a few short hours. Entire planets. Species. We could take millions or billions of our HB programs and place them in this world. They would be born, live, love, and die. Entire civilizations would rise and fall in this simulation—a world within a world.”

Celeste nodded.

“This simulation would be so realistic, so detailed, that the HB programs we put in it wouldn’t even know they were living in a simulation. To them, it wouldn’t be a virtual world any more than they consider themselves virtual. To them, it would be reality. They wouldn’t realize they are nothing more than strings of code existing in a computer.”

Celeste’s eyes widened, her head pulled back. He saw rejection in her eyes. She didn’t reject him; she rejected his idea.

She’d made the connection.

Her face hid nothing now. He watched as her eyes darted around the car. She looked at Jane, at him, at the floor; she stared for a time out the window. He knew she rebelled against what her mind had just told her. He’d rebelled too when he’d first read the theory. But the moment he’d finally understood what Professor Bostrom was proposing, he also knew that somehow the man had figured it out. It explained everything. Every piece of the puzzle fell magnificently into place.

“Professor Bostrum followed this thought experiment the same way we’ve done, Celeste. He came to the end, and he asked a few simple questions.

“What if everything we have just described isn’t going to happen? What if it already has happened? What if this computer already exists, and what if we’re in that computer?”

Her eyes locked onto his, and a smile crossed her face. Not a condescending smile. Not even a smile that said she thought the whole thing was a joke. It was a smile of understanding. She saw his story as a fun thought experiment, nothing more.

Celeste must have seen the look on his face because she tucked the smile away. “I don’t mean to make fun of your idea,” Celeste said. “Or Dr. Bostrum’s idea. But you must admit, it sounds . . . odd, right? I mean think about it. This car, the water, the sky. The dirt. All of it computer code on some machine somewhere? All of it make-believe?”

Nick shook his head. “Not make-believe. It’s as real as anything. But it is a simulation. We’re all made up of matter. What is that exactly? Why can’t we be made up of information just as easily? You believe we have DNA in our bodies. How different is that from lines of code?”

Celeste smiled again, like she’d been let in on some joke. “You don’t really believe this, do you?”

Nick turned away and looked out through the open window. The breeze had stopped, and it felt suddenly warm in the car.

“I told you Professor Bostrom was a mathematician,” Nick said. “He’s done the math. He estimates the probability of us living in a simulation to be extremely high—almost a certainty. Quite often, we understand our world first through numbers. The math tells us something, and then we do experiments to see if the math is right. Usually, it is.”

“It’s an interesting idea,” Celeste said. “But it’s not like you can find the computer we’re all sitting on. No one could ever prove something like that.”

Nick turned to look at her. He waited until her eyes met his.

“I can.”