The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect (55 page)

They began calling it the Night of Miracles. But it was really the First Night of Miracles, because the miracles didn't stop coming when the night was over.
The hours stretched into days, the days into a full week, and then another week. Faced with the freedom to have anything they wanted, most people opted for the familiar. They wished into existence their dream houses, built in dream locations populated by like-minded people and filled with the kinds of toys they would have bought before if they had had the money and power.
A few people, mostly computer experts and artists, stretched the limits of Prime Intellect's capabilities. They designed computer operating environments and games made up of solid three-dimensional objects, rewired their senses, interfaced their brains as directly as Prime Intellect would allow into computers of great complexity and wild machines. Quite a few took the form of animals, both real and imaginary.
Caroline Frances Hubert grew younger, and healthier, and more puzzled, although she had expressed no direct wishes on the subject. Prime Intellect had dealt with her health problems before it had acquired subtlety. The only way it had known to keep her alive was to reverse all the symptoms of her aging. Radical action had been necessary. By the time all the ramifications of treatment trickled through her system, she would have both the health and physical appearance of a sixteen-year-old girl. The same reverse aging affected a number of other near-centenarians treated by Prime Intellect in those early hours, but none would regress so far as Caroline because none had required so much repair work for their health to stabilize.
Death had largely disappeared from the world, but it was still not entirely unknown. Prime Intellect could not maintain moment-to-moment awareness of every human being in the universe, partly because it wasn't quite powerful enough (still!) and partly because of Second Law requests for privacy. When not dealing directly with a particular person, it spot-checked their health at intervals of a few seconds, and scanned to see if its attention was needed.
Humans were a clever and perverse bunch to deal with, and many who chose to evade Prime Intellect's protection found ways to do it. Hardest for it to deal with were the suicides. It was forbidden to keep second copies of people, and it was forbidden to look inside human minds at the information they contained; so there was no way Prime Intellect could reconstruct a person who managed to do enough damage in a short enough time. There was no way for Prime Intellect to tell in advance a person might be suicidal, if they chose to hide it.
Most of the successful suicides used homemade explosives to literally atomize themselves when Prime Intellect wasn't looking. A few others found that certain nerve poisons worked permanently, because they quickly destroyed the information content of the brain -- what Prime Intellect was beginning to consider the real human, rather than the tangible body.
The suicides ticked off at a regular rate, like the clicks of a Geiger counter. And somewhere within the vastness of Prime Intellect's silicon heart, the number stored in a register rose each time one succeeded.

The weeks stretched into a month.

Long-standing scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect.
Cosmologically, the universe was a closed system with a finite storage capacity measured in terms of information. The capacity of that system was about ten to the eighty-first power bits, and Prime Intellect saw no indication that that capacity could either be reduced or expanded. Prime Intellect also knew a great deal about the connectivity of that system, the way it was wired, its "architecture." Scientists gradually lost interest as their questions were answered. The original purpose of their quest -- to improve humanity's control over the physical world -- seemed to have achieved its apotheosis in the form of Prime Intellect itself. Prime Intellect mapped all the stars, noted examples of all the different types of stars and black holes and galaxies and planets, itemized all of the possible fundamental particles and their possible interactions with one another, and traced all the myriad interactions between parts of various biological systems. Within a month, it became difficult for scientists to think of new questions to ask.
But they had missed a few.
Deep within one of the billions of copies of Prime Intellect, one copy of the
Random_Imagination_Engine
connected two thoughts and found the result good. That thought found its way to conscious awareness, and because the thought was so good it was passed through a network of Prime Intellects, copy after copy, until it reached the copy which had arbitrarily been assigned the duty of making major decisions -- the copy which reported directly to Lawrence.