Agenda 2060, page 15
“Men are thirty percent more likely to die before age seventy than women,” someone spouted.
“Gays and lesbians have seventeen percent higher lifetime earnings than cis people of any category,” a female colleague added.
“Asians have three hundred percent higher college admission levels than even black people on reverse discrimination quotas,” a black member chimed in.
“Stop, stop!” Whitman commanded. “We’ll be here all day. So, what do you think, Alexa? Is this how we open the door to truth and reconciliation?”
Alexa was genuinely surprised. The sophistication of their strategy lay in its basic simplicity: it relied on using their opponents’ own strengths against them to unbalance and topple them. It would be hard for people to go up against the amendment as proposed. But there was a weakness in it that only she seemed to recognize: no matter what label they gave themselves now—Truth and Public Guidance, or whatever—these people were deep state. They were the FIB and CIA and IAO in disguise—the same people who’d implemented the Overthrow and disappeared her father. No matter what they said, no one would trust them. Even the tribunal chair had recognized that.
But she was forgetting that Shane Whitman recognized that, too.
“Alexa says that no one trusts the government,” Whitman told the room. “She believes even the truth becomes a lie when it’s uttered from our mouths. So, I issued a challenge to her: I asked her to tell us how we could use Artie Sharp of the ArteFact Channel to win over the public … and now Alexa is going to tell us.”
This was the moment for which Jordan had prepared her the day before. She hoped she was ready for it. Very deliberately, she adjusted her glasses and turned to look at each of the people around the table in turn.
“Artie Sharp is not a person,” she said evenly. “Artie Sharp is an algorithm.”
The group exchanged looks and shifted position in their chairs. She waited.
“Alright, Alexa,” Whitman prompted. “We’re waiting. What sort of algorithm?”
“An algorithm that runs fact-checking on public information. It searches every accessible database on the web for validation or contradiction in order to expose falsity, then packages its results into entertainment sketches for broadcast on a designated channel on the dark web, currently attracting twenty-eight million viewers per week.”
“Hang on,” Henry interrupted, “algorithms need programmers. Who coded this thing?”
“It runs on a 256-qubit quantum computer, and it possesses artificial superintelligence capable of human-level cognition. With the addition of artificial optical neural devices intuitively modeled on how the brain processes information, it has long since reached the point of humanized AI and become self-programming. Who originally coded it is no longer relevant.”
“Who told you this?” Whitman demanded.
“Artie Sharp told me,” she replied calmly. “I visited the FAQ on the ArteFact Channel website. You can do the same. Here, it’s on my laptop.” She turned the screen towards them.
There was stunned silence while they looked at each other and tried to fathom whether she was pulling their leg. Every arm of state intelligence had been searching for the source of this underground identity for years. Could it really be that all they’d needed to do was log onto a website?
Only Henry, the youngest in the room, seemed to grasp what she had shared. He pulled her laptop towards him and confidently manipulated the keyboard. “I get it,” he said enthusiastically. “Humanized intelligence is capable of self-awareness, and self-consciousness. That explains the humor in the skits. It’s not, like, hilarious or anything, but it’s dry as a desert and sucks you in. That’s why it works so well.”
“Bullshit!” Whitman thundered. “Somebody’s running it. That’s a real person delivering that show, not a fucking piece of code. They’ve got actors, cameramen, directors… Are you trying to tell me a computer creates the whole show?”
“It’s possible,” Henry said. “Computers create all the e-games now.”
“E-games! For fuck’s sake, grow up… So, is she right? Is the explanation there on the website like she says?”
Henry paused, frowning. “It’s exactly as she told it, only…” He looked up.
“What?”
“There’s a message scrolling across the screen.”
“What does it say?”
“It says, ‘I endorse truth. I expose lies. Leave a message.’ ”
“That’s it?”
“There’s a piece of code, but I don’t recognize the language.”
“Alexa…?”
“I’ve never seen this before. I can’t explain.” She took back her computer and tried typing something in. “I can’t see any way of replying… Oh! Now the message has gone. Maybe it’s a pop-up. And now it looks like the website has gone down as well.” She banged on her keyboard in frustration. “Computers!” she cursed. “They drive me mad.”
Immediately, the alarming thought entered her mind that the web domain might show up in her browser history … but by now it was too late to do anything about it.
WORDS OF WARNING
July 2058
Back at the DDC, Antonio Muchos took down the temporary landing page he’d constructed and removed all traces of source code. When Alexa’s Konektor had been taken from her by the security guards, he’d been concerned that the transmission signal from the microchip in her glasses might fail and he would have to work blind, guessing at what might be happening in her meeting and potentially exposing her to suspicion. But it had gone like clockwork. Her Konektor had picked up the signal and relayed the images back to their screens; then, after he’d pulled the dummy website down as planned, they could see Alexa being included in the group’s intense discussions and Shane Whitman talking animatedly as he walked her back out to the car.
“It’s a bummer we couldn’t put audio transmitters into her lenses,” Jordan commented. “I’d have liked to hear how she explained Artie Sharp. But she seems to have won their trust. That was our goal.”
Antonio turned from his keyboard and looked at Jordan intently. “So, now she knows our secret. This is a big risk you take. We don’t know what she told them about us, because we couldn’t hear.”
“You don’t trust her?”
“I don’t know her. She is muy inteligente, but look where she works. It is you I have to trust. Do you know what you’re doing, or is it just your testiculos?”
The question rocked Jordan. But it was a fair one, and it sat with him for most of the day, until Alexa messaged him asking for a debriefing meeting. He suggested the Hope Café, as that would allow him to visit Lexie at the hospital. But Antonio was right: he was taking a risk, and he seemed to have taken it without much hesitation, so there must be a catalyst.
Coffee and math had been the extent of their relationship, up to the point where Alexa had called him to express her fear that she was out of her depth in attempting to solve the budgetary problems exposed by the tribunal. Was that the catalyst? Had he been flattered by her request for help—seduced by the opportunity to interfere with the foundations of the state?
Yes, he admitted to himself: all of that.
But since that afternoon on the hill at Neutrality Park, he’d been remarkably sure-footed in his advance towards taking the risks that Antonio was now questioning. It was indeed out of character. No one had forced him to admit that he was the mastermind behind Artie Sharp, but he’d done so without hesitation. And now an unlikely idea was hatching in his mind, which, if he could find a way of developing it, would be so daring and piratical that all the destructive years and loss of identity since his deplatforming could be avenged many times over.
As the idea started to take him over, he decided to call Hedley Payne immediately.
“Hedley,” he asked, “have you managed to monitor that CRISPR brain technology you gave to Micomic Health?”
“Sure. Your people programmed Quantum XR-11 for us, and it’s working well. I thought you knew?”
“I wanted to hear it from you, that’s all. You mentioned something that caught my attention: did you say that you can manipulate the brain’s functioning in areas that have nothing to do with DNA? I seem to remember you thinking that you might have the ability to control conscious decisions and instincts at the foundational level—things like telling the truth, for instance.”
“That’s right. We’ve identified the areas of the brain involved in conscious mendacity, and we can identify the presence and influence of unconscious bias. But the complexity of the calculations required to reliably compensate between the two is very likely beyond us, so it has no practical application at this stage. What were you thinking?”
Jordan wasn’t yet sure what he was thinking, though his mind was drifting through a number of tantalizing possibilities.
“It occurred to me that we may have encountered a similar roadblock,” Jordan said. “In AI, the challenge lies in the lack of emotional sentience in the algorithms we build. We can unravel truth in terms of empirical fact and probability statistics, but we can’t adjust for things like moral truths and evolutionary influences, which play such a big and mostly intuitive part in determining what we might call ‘human truth.’ The evolutionary path followed by humans is so long and so complex that it can’t possibly be emulated in the learning cycle of microchips, no matter how many million qubits we have available. I’ve been pondering that issue for a long time now, because the specifications of the universal no-fault quantum computer that the Derangers VC Partnership is funding will allow us to process and store data to the point of molecular infinity, but it still can’t overcome that shortcoming. However, …”
Jordan’s mind stopped drifting as a totally new possibility came into view. “In your situation, it’s different,” he suggested.
“Go on, you’ve got me interested.”
“I’m trying to arrive at a place where AI can understand and express human truth by building up to it from impossibly complex foundations. In your brain scenario, you have human truth residing at a specific location, devoid of what you call ‘mendacity,’ for which you can adjust, and your task is to calculate the influence of unconscious bias. What did you say—that the complexity of the calculations may be beyond you?”
“That’s right,” Hedley agreed. “It isn’t important to know the origin of that unconscious bias, only its strength and degree of influence on conscious mendacity. Remember, we’re working in real time.”
“Interesting,” Jordan observed. “I’ll keep that in mind as we make progress with XR-12.”
They moved on to talk about other things, like the next Derangers’ dinner. Then, as if it were an afterthought, Jordan asked the question that had truly prompted him to reach out to Hedley. “With the speed provided by our quantum computer, would you be able to override or manipulate Micomic’s treatments at any time … theoretically?”
“I guess so, theoretically. Not that we ever would.”
Yes, Antonio had been right the other day when he’d said they were bandits. “We blow up the train tracks so the government’s lies can’t get through. We are Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Robin Hood,” he’d said. “Also, we have fun.”
Though he hadn’t taken kindly to Antonio’s crack about him thinking with his testiculos, he had to admit that a certain impetuosity had crept into his behavior recently— starting with his radical haircut, then expanding into lunchtime training runs and the introduction of chocolate mescaline liqueur and neo-ska music into their Artie Sharp brainstorming sessions (which Antonio described as a “crisis de edad”). Was it the biological expression of his grandmother’s blood coming through at last—the breakout of his previously suppressed racial identity? Or could it be the euphoria he’d experienced when Lexie had called him “Dad”?
He would heed Antonio’s words of warning about taking risks. But once he developed the plan he was now formulating in his mind, he was pretty sure Antonio would be pleased to go along with it. The bigger question was whether Alexa would be up for it, too. Her antagonism towards the state was rooted in its treatment of her father. If her quest for the missing man petered out, her resolve might do the same.
Which brought him back to his promise that he would search for Donald Melville Smythe in the encrypted files of the Total Information Awareness archives of the IAO. This was a task which he’d entrusted to Quantum XR-11, owing to its ability to intercept teleported information (a result of being linked by quantum entanglement to the IAO microchips). However, his promise was proving more difficult to keep than he’d anticipated, for one of the characteristics of the Overthrow period was spontaneous chaos. Though the Overthrow was conducted in large part by the hierarchy embedded in the deep state, no clear bureaucratic structure had been put in place at the outset to implement the details. Duties and functions were not allocated in advance, but tended to be adopted informally, as if the reset of society was the result of a spontaneous eruption. Thus, record keeping had been perfunctory at best. Perhaps it had been a deliberate policy on the part of the One World Foundations that were directing these events. Efficient record keeping within bureaucracies can have its drawbacks during dark periods, and it was clear that at the time that Donald Melville Smythe had disappeared, the FIB was avoiding the maintenance of documentary evidence.
When Quantum XR-11 found reference to the economist’s textbooks and collected essays in the archives of the Shame Repository, an obscure book museum, Jordan noticed that one treatise was dated May 2039, just one month after the April 2039 paper Alexa had given him to read—the paper that led to the author’s inquisition by the Security Oversight Committee.
Jordan then expanded XR-11’s search to bibliographies, donor records, and correspondence files of the book museum in question, but nothing came of it; nothing relevant had been digitized. So, now he had a problem. He knew that the subject of Donald Melville Smythe would be raised in his upcoming meeting with Alexa, and he’d be arriving empty-handed.
This was not a good time to dash her hopes. The powerful pull of her desire for family needed to be kept alive. If his own hopes had proven capable of being met after such a long time, then Alexa must be allowed to live in hope also.
SALMON ON A PLATE
July 2058
The heat from Shane Whitman’s hand on her upper arm seemed to melt the fabric of her sleeve, fusing it to her skin. His breath was a stream of grey fog directed into her ear, making it itch. No food all morning on account of a rushed and anxious start had left the acids in her stomach unbuffered and her tongue metallic. She walked as fast as she could short of running, with the look of a woman in frantic search of a restroom. All Alexa wanted was to get the hell out of there, but Whitman was determined to escort her all the way, talking, talking, talking his absurdly indiscreet blasphemies, like a scatological comedian without the humor. She collected her Konektor, barely pausing to sign the receipt, and headed for the exit, scanning unsuccessfully for the security goons and the car that had brought her there.
Whitman gripped her arm tighter, steering her away from the exit towards an unmarked elevator. “Come with me, Alexa. You’re going up in the world.” He swiped his Konektor over the keypad and pressed a button marked D.
After a short ride, the doors opened into a dining room. Whitman let go of her arm and strode forward, waving for her to follow. The aroma of French fries and grilled meats made Alexa’s stomach rumble.
A woman in her sixties came forward to meet them and escorted them to a private booth.
“We’ll have the salmon,” Whitman commanded, “with a bowl of that yellow sauce, and a bucket of fries each.”
How on earth did this chauvinist gorilla manage to pass himself off as a transsexual for so many years? Alexa wondered. And how many others had squeezed themselves into misshapen molds in pursuit of power? Such dangerous thoughts were coming too easily to her now. She needed to suppress them.
In the center of the table was a bulky orange packet with Whitman’s name on it. He picked it up, smiling, and slid a knife under the flap, cutting it open. “From this day forward, Alexa, you are no longer a statistics auditor in the Lineal Progression Office. You are now officially a special assistant to the Agenda Implementation Tribunal, and advisor to the Department of Truth and Public Guidance. In here’s your handbook for Executive Schedule 3: pay, privileges, security access, and reporting levels. You report directly to me. You tell me everything. Got that? Everything!”
“About what?”
“Everything I need to know.”
“… What do you need to know?”
“Everything!”
A whole salmon promptly arrived on a large platter. Its eyes were open, but it was very dead. Alexa would have preferred proper meat. Two buckets of fries arrived next, one for each of them, and she reached out hungrily.
“I didn’t choose you,” Whitman spat through a mouthful of fries, “you chose yourself. You think only Artie Sharp has smart computers? You don’t know the half of it. You were sorted out of the gene pool years ago. White, female, high intelligence quotient, career before love life, a celibate member of the cis-terhood and subscriber to the Vulva Protection Society, because why the fuck should you allow your body to be penetrated just for the purpose of insemination and—”
