Avogadro Corp: The Singularity Is Closer Than It Appears (33 page)

"Leon. Are. You. Paying. Attention?"

Leon looked up abruptly. The whole class was looking at him.

"Can you tell us why the colonies declared independence from Great Britain?"

Leon just stared at the teacher. The teacher was talking, but the words seemed to be coming from far away. What was he babbling about?

The teacher went over to his desk. "Mr. Tsarev, will you please pay attention?" It was not a question.

Leon just nodded dumbly, waited until the teacher turned his back, then went back to the email.

"Mr. Tsarev." Leon looked up, to find the teacher looming over him. "Do I need to take your phone away?"

"But how would I take notes?" Leon asked in his best innocent voice.

"That might be an issue if you were actually listening, but since you are not, I think taking notes is the least of your worries." The teacher walked back up to the front of the room, keeping an eye on Leon the whole time. In fact, he didn't glance away from Leon for the entire remainder of the class.

As soon as Leon could get out of the classroom, he headed over to the corner of the hallway to finish reading the message.

Leon lifted his head up from the tiny screen of his phone, and looked off into the distance. Jesus. He remembered a Christmas when he was young, and his uncle had come to visit from Russia. Leon's father had cried when his brother came into their tiny apartment, and during the days that followed all through that holiday time, Leon's parents were as happy as he could remember seeing them. His parents were so serious most of the time, but he vividly remembered them laughing merrily, even as Leon lay in bed at night trying to go to sleep.

The idea of writing a virus seemed absurd, and the idea that someone would be killed if he didn't seemed no less absurd. What could he do?

He worried about it all through his next class, English. James sat next to him and threw tiny balls of paper at him. Leon just covered his ear, James's likely target, and pretended to listen to the teacher, but he couldn't stop thinking about the email. He just couldn't reconcile the kindly man who had bought him a bicycle for Christmas with the idea of a man who worked for the mob writing viruses. And if there was one thing that Leon's parents had hammered into his head, it was that he had to stay out of trouble. His family didn't have the money to send him to college, which meant that he needed scholarships, and scholarships didn't go to kids who got into trouble.

He hated to let his parents' logic dictate his own thinking, but there it was. And he wanted to become a biologist. That meant going to a great school - he hoped for Caltech or MIT. No, helping his uncle would be a quick path to nowhere good.

Speaking of biology, it was up next. The thought of his favorite subject brought a smile to his face. He couldn't say what it was he liked so much about biology, but it was undeniable that it was the one class he looked forward to every day.

Of everything in school, biology had the most thought provoking ideas. Life could emerge from anywhere. With no direction, life could evolve. Everything people were was happenstance and survival. Life could be tampered with, at the most basic building block level, to create new life forms. The possibilities were limitless and spontaneous.

* * *

Today's biology class focused on recombinant DNA, the technique of bringing together sequences of DNA from different sources, creating sequences not found in nature. At the end of class, Leon headed for the door deep in thought about canine DNA. Suddenly, Mrs. Gellender blocked the doorway.

"Do you have a minute, Leon?"

Leon looked around to see if any of his friends noticed him. It was all clear. He nodded his head yes.

"I'm starting up a new school team. It's a computational biology team. There's a new intramural computational biology league in New York. I think you'd be perfect for the team. We're going to meet after school."

Leon liked Mrs. Gellender. He really did. He loved biology. And part of him was interested, really interested. But man, oh man, how uncool it would be. And staying after school - that would suck.

Mrs. Gellender must have seen the look on his face, because she said, "You've done excellent work in my biology class. The paper you turned in on evolution was absolutely inspired. I loved the way you linked biological evolution to game theory."

Leon felt his face growing red. If there was one thing worse than having to stay late to talk to a teacher, it was having them gush over your work. How embarrassing was she going to make this?

"Just think about it. Please. Being a member of the team would really help you when it came to college scholarships." Mrs. Gellender held out a shiny paper pamphlet.

Leon took the pamphlet, and heard the words coming out of his mouth. "OK, I'll do it."

He walked away from the room. College scholarships. If he was going to college, any college, he'd have to get a scholarship. His mother painted nails, and his father was a graphic artist. They weren't exactly rolling in money.

He finally walked down the now empty hallways of the school towards the main entrance. As he passed through the doors, he was assaulted from both sides. "HAIYAA" came the startling kung-fu style cry, and Leon jumped back.

James and Vito stood laughing. Heart pounding, he said, "You idiots, you're gonna give me a heart attack."

"You want a heart attack, look at this."

James reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an ebony slab. It was the darkest, most matte black Leon had ever seen. When he touched it, it felt slightly warm, like a piece of wood that had been sitting in the sun. Leon turned it over and over in his hands. There was not a seam or mark anywhere on the case. It was the most perfect surface he had ever seen.

"The Gibson," Leon muttered in awe.

James nodded proudly. "I got the delivery notification, and skipped class to run home and get it."

Leon couldn't stop marveling at the hunk of electronics, turning it over and over in his hands, feeling the dense weight of it. The Gibson had the first carbon graphene processor. Two hundred processing cores at the lowest power consumption ever manufactured. Full motion sensitive display. It had taken Hitachi-Sony ten years to perfect the technology.

"OK, give it back already."

As James took back the phone, it came to life in his hands. Each inch of the case was a display, and patterns rolled over it as James swiped at it. "Come on, let's go back to your place and play Mech War. I want to see how this puppy does."

Leon just nodded, his six month old Chinese copy of Hitachi-Sony's Stross phone feeling ancient.

* * *

Late that night, Leon cleaned the mess of plates and glasses out of his bedroom, and brought them back to the kitchen as quietly as possible to avoid waking his parents. James and Vito had stayed right up until dinner time finishing out a Mech War mission together. James' new Gibson phone blew them out of the water. It rendered such incredible detail that time after time Leon and Vito would ignore their own screens to watch James.

But when his mother announced that dinner was cabbage soup, it had sent James and Vito scrambling for their own homes, suddenly remembering that they were expected by their parents.

Three hours later, his parents were finally asleep and Leon had time to look at the message he was trying so hard to ignore. So why was he cleaning his bedroom? Anything to avoid that message.

He gave up, and slumped down on his bed. With a flick on his phone, he plunged the room into darkness so he could see the city lights out his sliver of a window. He brought the phone back up.

Leon felt sick to his stomach reading the message. His father would not want him to do something wrong. But his father also wouldn't want anything to happen to his brother. He thought again of the memory of Uncle Alex's visit and his father laughing and smiling. What the hell was he supposed to do? If he told his parents, which his uncle had said not to do, they would be worried sick about it.

Crap - how could this get any worse? He didn't want to be any part of this! He almost threw his phone down, but instead pulled the hunk of silicon close and cradled it instead.

Author’s Note

Avogadro Corp arose from a lunch conversation about a realistic way that an artificial intelligence might emerge. Almost everything in this book is possible with the technology available in 2011.

It’s possible that brilliant computer scientists will find some clever way to approximate human level intelligence in computers soon. However, even if we don’t, because of the exponential growth in computing power, in the next twenty years, computers will be powerful enough to directly simulate the human brain at the level of individual neurons. This is the so-called brute force approach to artificial intelligence. It will be trivial for every computer programmer out there to play around with creating artificial intelligences in their spare time. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a genie that won’t stay in its bottle for much longer.

For more information on what happens when computers become smarter than humans, read
The Singularity Is Near
by Ray Kurzweil. For a fictional account, I recommend
Accelerando
by Charles Stross.

William Hertling

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the help, inspiration, feedback and support of many people including but not limited to: Mike Whitmarsh, Maddie Whitmarsh, Gene Kim, Grace Ribaudo, Erin Gately, Eileen Gately, Maureen Gately, Bob Gately, Brooke Gilbert, Gifford Pinchot, Barbara Koneval, Merridawn Duckler, Mary Elizabeth Summer, Debbie Steere, Jill Ahlstrand, Jonathan Stone, Pete Hwang, Nathaniel Rutman, Jean MacDonald, Leona Grieve, Garen Thatcher, John Wilger, Maja Carrel, Rachel Reynolds, and the fine folks at Extracto Coffee in Portland, Oregon.

About The Author

William E. Hertling is a digital native who grew up on the online chat and bulletin board systems of the mid 1980s, giving him twenty-five years experience participating in and creating online culture. A web developer and digital strategist at Hewlett-Packard, he lives in Portland, Oregon.

Avogadro Corp is his first novel.

To contact the author:

web:
williamhertling.com

email:
[email protected]

Read
A.I. Apocalypse
, the exciting sequel to Avogadro Corp.