Pandora's Brain (30 page)

‘No. That cannot be.’

For the first time, Matt’s sense of calm bliss was ruffled. He did not feel pain or sorrow, but he felt a ripple throughout his being. A sense that something was out of place.

‘Will they . . . will they miss me?’

‘Yes. They will mourn you.’

There was nothing more to be said. Matt understood that protest would be futile. His old life was over, and the people who had bulked large in it would be moving on without him. Without feeling sad, he felt very alone. Everything seemed to pause, and the entity waited for him to re-gather his thoughts and continue. Eventually, he did so.

‘Can I choose who I will be within the time and place?’

‘You cannot choose a specific person, but you can choose a type of person.’

Matt knew his answer immediately, but he hesitated, trying to work out whether there would be a better option. He realised there was no way to be absolutely sure.

‘Can I ask you for advice about the best choice?’

‘We cannot advise you. But we can tell you that the quality of your forthcoming life will depend largely on the nature of your mind. It is our belief that you will have a good next life, Matt.’

Matt’s non-existent mouth grinned broadly.

‘I want to be an elite warrior in a Mayan city in the jungle highlands, in the Classic Period, say around 800 AD.’

‘You know, I think your estimate of 18 months is looking pretty good. The readings from this morning’s decay rate test are exactly where they should be according to the critical path analysis.’

Vic smiled, acknowledging David’s invitation to
indulge in one of their favourite games: guessing the timeline to the completion of their project. They faced each other across a table in the minimalist but comfortable canteen at the Shanghai Institute of Technology, which hosted the Matt Metcalfe Foundation, colloquially known as Matt’s Lifeboat. The table was a simple pine affair from the enormous Shanghai branch of IKEA, but the chairs were Eames originals.

Vic wore the combination of polo shirt and chinos which had become almost de rigeur in Chinese offices over the last couple of years. David still favoured a more English style: cornflour blue shirt, open at the neck, dark trousers and a plaid jacket. Vic had easily adopted many Chinese tastes and styles, perhaps because he was accustomed to working and living in different countries. David persisted in eating international foods more often than Shanghainese or other Chinese cuisine, and he still got his news from the BBC and other British-based websites. Vic guessed this had something to do with the difficulties in David’s marriage with Sophie, which meant that David had been alone in Shanghai for the first year of the project.

‘Yes, that was encouraging,’ Vic agreed, twisting noodles onto his chopsticks with a practised nonchalance which would impress a newcomer but would be recogniseable to a Shanghainese as the technique of a gweilo, a foreigner. ‘Who knows, maybe I’ll be able to collect on my bet with Norman after all.’

David laughed drily. ‘You know, I think you may just be able to do that. As long as politics doesn’t interfere. I caught up with Gus this morning about his meetings in the US and Europe last week. He reckons that the Technology Relinquishment Initiative is going to pass both Houses of Congress and the European Commission’s Draft Renunciation Directive is almost a done deal. You made a great call when you suggested establishing the Foundation here instead of California or London. The Chinese are happy to agree a ban on AGI development but they are having no truck with the backlash against new technologies in general. But I do wonder sometimes, will they be able to hold out against the pressure to slow things down – including us?’

‘I think so,’ Vic replied. ‘The Chinese still love to tweak the tail of the West.’

Even though their GDP had recently surpassed that of the United States, and even though they had always regarded the Middle Kingdom as the true centre of human civilisation, the Chinese still liked to view themselves as the challenger brand in global politics.

It wasn’t just the Chinese who resisted aspects of the drive for relinquishment policies. Businesspeople in the West were acutely aware of the huge amounts of money the Japanese were making with their domestic robot industry. Lobbyists in Washington screaming for permission to be allowed to get back into that business, arguing that relinquishment was like America declining to get into the car manufacturing business in the early 20th-century because it liked horses too much.

‘Still, there’s a big head of steam behind those Bills,’ David said. ‘Gus thinks the Turing Police may finally become a reality.’

Vic scowled. The European Commission was proposing an autonomous international agency with exceptional powers of inspection and restraint in order to stop rogue governments and individuals from doing any research that could lead to the creation of an AGI. This was a step too far for him, as it was for most Americans.

‘That game is far from over. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a coalition of the institutes which are researching human-friendly AI algorithms announced a breakthrough this spring. There’s been a lot of unusually cordial traffic between several of the bigger US-based ones during the winter. Anyway, fortunately, none of that affects what we’re doing here at the Foundation. We’ve managed to put clear blue water between brain preservation research and AI research in the public’s mind.’

‘True. It’s funny, though,’ David mused. ‘I’m sure a lot of people – perhaps the majority – still don’t really get what we’re doing here. It’s not a hard thing to understand, and hell knows, we had enough publicity on the back of Matt’s disappearance. But I think people just don’t really understand that – assuming our
timeline is
roughly right – we may be just two short years away from abolishing unwanted death. You’d think they would be queuing up and pressing their noses against that window there to book an early slot for themselves and their families.’ He jabbed a fork towards the massive plate glass window which separated the research building from a superbly landscaped park, with ornamental trees offering up the first buds of spring, and colourful birds dive-bombing the artificial lake, looking for fish to refuel themselves after their migration back from the south.

Vic gave David a searching glance. ‘You still think about Matt all the time, don’t you? Of course you do – how could you not? It’s been a hard couple of years for you. It’s great that Sophie has decided to move out here after all, though. Do the two of you have any new ideas about what happened to him?’

‘No, not really. We go round and round the same old explanations. We realise that Matt may have quickly ceased to be recognisably human, but we just can’t believe that he would have gone off to some other world or dimension without ever contacting us again. You know, when the initial flurry died down. We keep circling back to the conclusion that something must have gone wrong for him.’

‘Well, maybe we’ll find out one day. I hope so: I miss him too. But at least you have Sophie here now. How is she settling in?’

‘She’s doing great. Leo thinks he has wangled her a really interesting contract with a medical equipment firm he consults to which has some operations over here. We should know within a week.’

‘Good old Leo!’ Vic said.

‘Yup, good old Leo. I don’t know how I would have survived the last couple of years without him, to be honest.’

*

The warriors tied their war canoes to the trees at the edge of the Usumacinta River, and waited. The canoes were long, each carrying up to 50 men. They came from several different cities: the first to arrive were from Palenque, but over the next couple of hours they were followed by boats from Bonampak, Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan – cities linked by the river. As each group arrived they were greeted by those already waiting with grins and raised fists, but no-one said a word. This was the biggest fighting force deployed in the Maya rainforest for generations, and they wanted to retain the advantage of surprise for as long as possible

The air was heavy and humid as they waited for the drums which would let them know that their other allies from the cities of Calakmul and Caracol had also arrived. Mighty Pakal, the ruler of Palenque, had spent months negotiating this alliance with the other chiefs, and today was the day when the alliance would be tested, and sealed in blood.

His elite fighting group the Jaguars, led by Mat-B’alam, squatted, checking their equipment while they waited. Most of them wore short cotton protec
tive jackets packed with rock salt, and tight bindings of leather or cloth on their forearms and legs. A few pulled on elbow, wrist and knee protectors made of copper alloys, worked to fit comfortably and to glance off sword and knife blows.

Many had daubed patterns on their faces with azure blue paint. They ran calloused fingers along the sharp blades of their weapons to check they had not been nicked or blunted during the two-day river journey.

The jungle heat increased. High above them, birds swooped and cawed, commencing their own daily battle for survival and supremacy, food and reproduction. Up and down the chain of life, birds, animals and men all fought the same battles, wrestled with the same imperative to kill or be killed. The larger animals of the jungle floor knew better than to reveal their presence to a group of humans like this, but smaller mammals could be seen, scurrying in and out of holes in trees and the mossy ground. And of course the insects were everywhere, endlessly noisy in the air, on the ground, and on the twisted, gnarly roots and branches of the enormous trees.

The warriors were ready. They waited only for the sound of the drums.

The idea for this book arose in 1999, at the height of the dotcom bubble, as I drove to Yahoo’s office in Palo Alto for a meeting. I had recently finished reading Ray Kurzweil’s
The Age of Spiritual Machines,
which had made me consider the astounding possibility that conscious machines could be created within my lifetime.

That book had been recommended by an old friend,
Nick Hadlow, and when I returned to England I suggested that we write a novel together based on the premise. We did, and it was awful. Actually Nick’s
chapters were rather good, but with hindsight I real
ised that as mere stripling of 40, I was too young to write a novel. I had recently co-authored a best-selling busi
ness book
(
The Internet Startup Bible
, which featured prominently in
Amazon’s
first ever UK TV advert) but I didn’t realise how much harder it is to write a good novel.

A decade or so later I retired from full-time work, and had both the time and (arguably) the more rounded life experience to do a better job. The story arc is the same, but the characters and much else are wholly different.

The book wouldn’t exist without the help of my partner Julia. Somehow she manages to provide penetrating critical insight, substantial contributions to plot and character, and buoyant encouragement – all at the same time. I guess it’s because she is both an experienced teacher and a highly effective business manager. However she does it, I know that I am a very lucky fellow.

I have also benefited enormously from the generous help of a number of talented first readers. I didn’t learn until too late that the first draft of a novel is an execrable thing which you should show to no-one, so some of these first readers had very questionable material to work with. Nevertheless they offered encouragement and invaluable comments with great tact. In particular I should mention (in mostly alphabetical order) Rob Carter, Lauren Chace, William Charlwood, Lesley and Peter Fenton O’Creevy, Leah Eatwell, Giles Harris, Mary Jagger, Adam Jolly, Peter Monk, Jeff Pinsker, Tess Read and Clare Smith (respectively co-author and publisher of the
Startup Bible
), David Roche and David Wood. Collectively they have weeded out many failures of plotting and characterisation, and even more solecisms and inconsistencies. Those which remain are of course entirely my fault.

The cover image was Julia’s idea, and we had valuable help realising it from a talented artist named Neftali Carreira. The overall design of the cover and the interior is the handiwork of Rachel Lawston. Finding Rachel was a blessing: she is a very experienced professional designer who combines great skill with great tact. She is also one of life’s great enthusiasts, and has made what can sometimes be a difficult process into a real pleasure.

I hope you enjoyed
Pandora’s Brain
. If you did, please leave a comment on Amazon. A sequel,
Pandora’s Oracle
, is in the works, with a target for publication in mid-2015. A couple of sample chapters follow . . .

An extract from

PANDORA’S ORACLE

The sequel to
Pandora’s Brain

‘Don’t wait up for me, honey. You know how these meetings can drag on. I’ll call you if I’m not going to make it back tonight, but don’t wait up anyway.’

The scientist paused at the door, breathing in and savouring the scent and colour of his domestic life. The scientist’s wife looked up from the picture she was creating with their four year-old daughter. They were sitting at the kitchen table, which was littered with paper, pencils, crayons, pencil sharpeners, child-safe scissors, sticky tape – all the equipment necessary for a budding young artist. The sun shone golden in the room; it was a scene from a movie.

His daughter was angelic, her pink tongue sticking out as she concentrated on colouring in the pony that her mother had drawn in outline. Although brief, his wife’s glance up at him communicated her love and her delight in their life together which warmed him in a way that still had the power to thrill him, even after six years together. Many of his friends complained that they had nothing in common with their wives, but he had everything in common with his: he shared every thought and emotion with her.

He smiled, and looked around the small interior one last time, taking in the tasteful decoration and furnishings, the childlike paintings displayed proudly on several walls, his wife and daughter engrossed in the process of creating another one. He smiled, and then frowned slightly as he thought he spied a grey hair in his wife’s glossy black hair.

She looked again up as the door was closing behind him, and smiled to herself. She gave it no further thought for now, but later, the fact that they hadn’t spent more time saying goodbye would torture her.

The scientist felt the heavy front door swing to behind him and shut with a satisfyingly solid but gentle clunk. The house was well-built, with the hallmarks of quality workmanship throughout. Thanks to his senior position, they lived in an expensive suburb of Seoul. He looked up at the clear blue sky and breathed deeply. He was a lucky man. He had a nice house, nice neighbours, and an important job that he found fascinating.

His bodyguard was standing by the open door of the shiny black car. ‘Morning, Hiro,’ the scientist greeted him, climbing into the back seat. The bodyguard bowed slightly and said nothing as he closed the door and walked round to the driver’s door.

As they drove to the airport the scientist allowed his thoughts to drift, watching the roofscape slide past. Gradually, the focus of his attention segued from his family to his job. His work was highly confidential and it would have been very controversial – if anyone knew about it. But that didn’t bother him: he was following his passion.

He had been fascinated by the human brain for as long as he could remember, and developing artificial intelligence seemed the best way to understand our own intelligence. His career had begun in the early 1990s, just as interest in the field was picking up – recovering from the ‘AI winter’ brought on by the failure of the Japanese Fifth Generation programme in the 1980s. He had benefited enormously from the influx of funding, which provided superb facilities and equipment, and rapid promotion opportunities for anyone who was ambitious and pliable. Which he was.

Thanks to hard work and talent, his progress up the academic ladder had been swift, and he felt his efforts had been rewarded two years ago when he was recruited by the South Korean army for a senior role in a top-secret project – developing the country’s most advanced artificial intelligence software. He hesitated only slightly before accepting the position. The facilities and the equipment became even better, and the salary and perks were gratifying. He was flattered rather than worried by the arrival of bodyguards and round-the-clock surveillance.

Best of all, the project was showing incredible promise. He and his new colleagues dared to hope that they would create a conscious machine in a matter of years, and that they would be the first team in the world to do so.

And then the news broke about Matt Metcalfe. The scientist and his colleagues were scientists first and patriots second, so they were intensely excited to discover that the American firm von Neumann Industries had succeeded in uploading a human mind into a computer. The approach taken by VNI was very different to the Korean project. VNI had cut the brain of a recently deceased young man called Matt Metcalfe into very thin slices, and scanned the precise locations and connections of every neuron. They had modelled that structure inside a silicon computer, and found a way to run the model so that it performed the exact same ‘braining’ process as the original brain had done – generating a human mind.

It was an extraordinary achievement. The global community of neuroscientists and artificial intelligence researchers had been stunned by its brilliance and its audacity. The great majority of them had assumed that such a development was still decades away, and most lay people had not even begun to contemplate the possibility.

VNI had done its work in secret, and in a hurry because of the need to capture the structural information in young Matt’s brain before the organ deteriorated and the data was lost. VNI – and Matt’s parents – had hoped to announce what they had done in a controlled manner, at a time of their own choosing. They had hoped that their achievement would be accepted – even applauded – because of the public groundswell of affection for Matt, who had been murdered by a religious extremist just as he was becoming a popular celebrity.

But the news was leaked, and the public debate which followed quickly spiralled out of control. Despite the genuine widespread affection for Matt, there were huge concerns about what he had become, and what sort of danger he represented. Religious commentators complained that uploading Matt was a presumptuous attempt to usurp the role of their deities, and denied that Matt could be accorded the status of human, or even a conscious entity. That sort of argument was demolished for most people by a televised interview between Matt and a respected BBC journalist: it was clear that Matt was a living, thinking creature, with profound emotional responses, and a wry and engaging sense of humour.

The concern about whether he was a danger was less easily dismissed. Scientists and bar-room philosophers warned that Matt seemed to be expanding his cognitive abilities rapidly, achieving what some called a ‘hard take-off’ towards super-intelligence. They argued that this was a threat to the rest of humanity. Matt was hosted and also imprisoned inside a supercomputer in London, England, with no access to the internet, and no way to affect the material world. But people feared that if he achieved super-intelligence be could become thousands of times smarter than any human – perhaps millions of times smarter – and he might find a way to escape. Sharing our only planet with a creature many times more intelligent than ourselves was a perilous prospect. After considerable soul-searching, the decision was taken to shut Matt down.

What happened next was unclear. The official story – the story told by VNI and Matt’s parents – was that Matt realised what was going to happen and shut his own processing down – suddenly and without warning. Even though the people involved stuck rigidly to this account, it seemed so implausible that a thousand conspiracy stories grew up round the events. Some claimed that the US government had taken control of the supercomputer that hosted Matt, and was using him to develop a race of super-soldiers. Others argued that Matt was not the sort of person to commit suicide, so he must have escaped. Perhaps he was lurking in some dark corner of the internet, drawing up plans for revenge on a species which had killed him not once, but twice.

Matt’s story affected everyone on the planet, but it affected the scientist more than most. Despite a flurry of international agreements brokered by the UN binding all nations to forbear from developing AGIs, the scientist’s superiors declared that his project was now an absolute priority. His budget became, for practical purposes, unlimited. He could hire whoever he wanted, buy whatever equipment he needed, so long as he could keep it secret. He started attending meetings with the country’s most senior politicians, business people and officials. He couldn’t tell anyone else about it, but he was now effectively South Korea’s most important scientist.

He was roused from this reverie as the car arrived at Seoul Air Base. Located in Seongnam, a satellite of Seoul and home to about a million people, the airfield was used by senior government officials as well as being home to a wing of South Korea’s air force and a helicopter-borne battalion of the US Army. The airfield was also the venue for Seoul’s annual airshow, and the drive in brought a smile to the scientist’s face as he recalled how his daughter had wrinkled up her nose in protest at the loud noises when he and his wife had taken her to last year’s show. The smile lingered as he allowed himself a few moments of pride in the VIP status which afforded him the frictionless luxury of travelling by chartered jet from Seoul Air Base instead of enduring the queues and long walks at Incheon, Seoul’s international airport used by less fortunate folk.

Hiro drove right up to the small VIP lounge building which crouched in the south-west corner of the airfield, holding itself separate from the military buildings which populated the rest of the site. The scientist presented his papers to a profoundly respectful member of the jet charter company staff, who directed him immediately to his aircraft, which she said was already serviced and fuelled and waiting for him. He indulged himself with a final speculation about whether he would ever rise to the position where Hiro would be allowed to drive him directly up to the aircraft, like the President and other really senior VIPs. Then he chastised himself, and turned his thoughts to the meeting ahead.

As he followed Hiro towards the jet, the scientist looked up at the cockpit window and noticed that the pilot was a Westerner. This was unusual but not unprecedented, and he wondered briefly whether the pilot was moonlighting member of the US battalion. Even at a brief glimpse, he looked military: thick-set and powerful. With that, the scientist wrenched his attention to the forthcoming meeting: the other people attending, and what their agendas were. The pretty face of the flight attendant hardly registered as he climbed the steps into the aircraft and took his usual seat, towards the rear of the cabin.