Alex Madrid glanced to his left almost reflexively before looking back at his computer screen. The cacophonic presence of his department secretary, who currently seemed to be screaming at someone on the phone, was something he had grown accustomed to. He had been at the Department for the Study of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford for a short four years and had already achieved tenure, despite the protest of some of his colleagues who had been there twice as long. It wasn’t even his fault. These were just the cards he had been dealt. As a teen he had a great interest in almost everything, and he grasped vast subjects within a few weeks. His room was littered with books on everything ranging from Astronomy to Computer Science, Art History to Philosophy. In undergrad he had double majored in Sociology and Artificial Intelligence, with two minors: Mathematics and History. He was the type of person who, at the occasional party, ended up somehow giving a lecture to a small group of people (usually women), drinks in hand, on the impact of an obscure historical event on the stones in one of their necklaces.
He squinted through his black-rimmed glasses, rubbing his five o’clock shadow as he read Peter Lee’s post-humus report on Rabbit Holes: derelict homes in shady parts of town where men were reported to have been seen lying on beds, drugged, being sexually used – raped – it appeared, by women who always seemed to sport New Freedom tattoos. He frowned as he Google-searched key words related to the report and found that despite the suspiciously-timed death of the author of the report, the authorities didn’t seem to be taking it seriously. There were no news reports, no “buzz” on the forums. Nothing. Everyone still ignores academicians in Sociology. Just because he didn’t publish a damn e-book on Amazon…
The department secretary was now frantically opening and closing desk drawers looking for something, and still yelling.
“No, I can’t just transfer you to any faculty you like. I – I don’t care who you say you are! If everyone who called here wanting to speak to someone – Fine. FINE. Hold on.”
Alex heard the click-clack of the secretary’s heels as she walked to his room. He never understood why she wouldn’t just pick up her phone and speak to him. She turned the corner of his room door and smiled at him, leaning against the entryway to his office. She tucked some hair behind her ear and spoke cheerfully, as if he hadn’t heard her throwing a fit five seconds ago. “Dr. Madrid! How are you today?”
“Um, I’m fine Isabel, is everything ok?” Alex kept his body facing his screen, but offered her one raised eyebrow from the side of his screen.
“Of course, sir. It’s always good to see you.” She walked to his desk and sat down on its edge, her flowery summer dress riding up to reveal her legs just a bit. Alex tapped his fingers on his desk. It was his irritable tick. His work was being interrupted.
“Likewise.” Alex looked back at his screen wondering for a breath if his one word answer was socially acceptable. His sister had frequently told him he needed to care about these kinds of things. So he tried for her sake.
“There’s a guy on the phone – I’ve been trying to keep him off for a while but he says he knows you. Says his name is Farrow. Jack Farrow. Do you –“
“Jack?” Alex looked up from his screen. “I know Jack Farrow. Really, really well.” He hadn’t spoken to him for years. They had gone to undergrad together, had spent many all-nighters before exams in their dorm’s common room. That was a bond one couldn’t break, no matter how long he’d been out of touch.
“Oh ok, well then – ”,
“Put him through,” Alex interrupted. “Sorry. Please put him through. And sorry for interrupting.” I’d rather speak to you in binary, or perhaps Old English, that way you’d leave me alone. Isabel seemed nonplussed. In fact, her smile broadened to the point of annoyance.
She giggled, “Oh, Dr. Madrid you are something else. I’ll go put him through for you.” And off she went, her summer dress flowing around her legs as she whisked back to her desk, her mood sickeningly improved. Alex stared after her for a moment and then looked at his phone. It rang.
“Jack?”
“Doctor Madrid! Ohhh finally I can speak to the esteemed doctor Madrid!”
“Jack! How’ve you been? It’s been -”
“Eight years, buddy. Eight bloody years.”
“Wow. Long time. What’s going on? It’s… it’s good to hear your voice.”
Jack laughed, “Of course it is! Let me ask you a question.”
“Shoot.” Alex smiled, he knew some wise-crack was on its way. Jack always prefaced his snaps with ‘Let me ask you a question’.
“How many times have you been laid since you left school hm?” Alex started laughing. “Yeah! That’s right, laugh! I took you to how many parties and got you laid so many times I can’t even count. I bet you haven’t seen a pussy since you left my side.”
Alex chuckled as he played with a pen on his desk, “Why do you need to know? We haven’t spoken for eight years and -”
“Just answer the bloody question. No, don’t. I’ll answer it. ZERO TIMES. Because you are a fucking oblivious son of a bitch! Do you remember Gretchen Homes? She was basically humping your hip with a drink in her hand and you were wondering why she wasn’t listening to your theory of jack shit.” Jack Farrow’s voice seemed too boisterous to be someone that Alex would have been such good friends with. But in reality Jack was just as much of a geek as Alex was. It so happened that Jack’s social skills, unlike Alex’s, were as well-developed as his geekiness. Alex had always been considered very attractive: at five-feet-ten with short, messy black hair and dark brown eyes, he had an unusually handsome form for someone as cerebral and sometimes awkward as he was. In college he used to wear blue jeans and a T-shirt, which apparently, per Jack, used to be a hit with the ladies because Alex didn’t neglect his body like a lot of his classmates did. He had always thought physical fitness was a vital component of a healthy mind, so he did what he needed to do, consistently. Jack had indeed been the catalyst for Alex to get in bed with someone or the other. It wasn’t that Alex was totally inept. It was simply that he didn’t see the signals – as obvious as they were. Jack just showed him what the women were saying. Most of them then tolerated his less-than-stellar social skills in lieu of the brains and brawn they were getting in bed. Alex viewed sex just like everything else. Something to master. He enjoyed it just like everyone else, but his approach was different. Every women he ended up with was a new subject to excel at, to understand, to master. Once he had mastered it (in his mind, made her scream in the middle of the night), he had accomplished his goal. Anyone who had attempted to continue a relationship with him seemed to eventually get turned off by his focus on his work, and persistent social ineptitude in the face of it (once he had told a girl who was going down on him that he would be right with her as he paged through a book. Later, well after she had stormed out of his room, he told Jack that he had already figured her out in bed and was more intrigued by the text he was reading because “it was more challenging”).
“Someone had to do the studying part.” Alex retorted. Jack always brought out the snark in him. He liked it.
“Oh shut up, I could pull my own!”
“Mm-hm, sure.”
“Ok but listen. Since I got you hooked up a billion times I need a favor.” In one sentence, Jack’s tone changed.
“Go ahead.” It didn’t occur to Alex that there was anything wrong with talking to someone after eight years and within five minutes asking for a favor.
“Thanks buddy. Ok, so I know what you’ve been up to. A lot of people do. You’re the Node Guy.”
The Node Guy. He hadn’t heard it that way before. Alex’s specialty was in studying AI Nodes, the localized area of the Internet that acted as the AI’s “home”. Each AI had a dedicated AI-Grade Server, which kept them anchored to a physical location, but they operated for the most part within their Node, in the “Internet ether”, which was defended by powerful software to keep other AIs from intruding and from the resident AI from poking out into systems and places it wasn’t supposed to go. The Node size was also customized to the function of the AI. For example, a Node of a high-ranking corporate AI would be much larger than the Node of a family-grade AI.
Jack continued, “But you may or may not know what I’ve been up to. I’m a Server-Fatigue Specialist and I run my own consulting firm. We do a lot of the big guys - IBM, Microsoft, Dajer Industries.” Alex sat up straight in his chair. Server Fatigue was a deep interest of his. Mostly because it was one of the few things about AI’s and Nodes that made sense to everyone except for him.
“You know the same things I know about Server Fatigue I’m sure. One, it started after September 2209 and there isn’t a single documented case of it prior to that. We all know that’s because the AIs got upgraded around that time. Ok. Two, when it happens is totally and completely unpredictable. An AI can go down with Server Fatigue one month after its installation, or five years after. There’s no way to predict when it will happen. Right? You do know all this stuff right?”
“Yes. I’m very familiar.” Jack was regurgitating the standard narrative on the topic. But the standard narrative was riddled with holes. It was not clear at all to Alex why Server Fatigue had started after September 2209. Everyone thought that recent AI upgrades had been the reason the AI servers seemed to conk out suddenly, resulting in a temporary but extensive loss of the AI. Alex didn’t believe it. There was no way the minimal upgrades to AIs that had occurred at that time would have resulted in servers just suddenly malfunctioning. With regards to the second point there was absolutely no satisfactory answer to why the time of onset of Server Fatigue was so random, and this made Alex nervous. He just didn’t understand it.
“Ok. But what you’re not familiar with is what I’m about to tell you next.” This was it. Alex gripped his pen hard, his hand turning white as he anticipated what he was hoping was another clue from his old friend Jack. A “Server Guy”. “It’s not the same AI when we put the new server in.”
Jack went silent, as if he had heard the phrase for the first time. Alex put his pen down.
“Jack.”
“Alex.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Alex I’m telling you they’re not the same AIs going back into the Servers.”
Alex thought for a moment. It’s not possible.
“Jack all the studies – corporate and government funded studies – have shown that the AI code is identical.”
“That’s correct.”
“Then how can you say – ”
“It’s the Servers that tell me. Not the AIs.”
Alex remained silent.
“Everyone studied the AIs. Their code. Yes they are all, always identical. Pre- and post- Server Fatigue, they have been verified as such. But Alex, I’ve been analyzing all these servers. When I go back for a two-month check up after the installation of a new server, and I analyze the machine, the AI – it – it has a different Residence Pattern.”
“What the hell are you talking about? What is that?” Alex had never heard the term before, and he was familiar with all the literature relating to the topic of AIs, Nodes and Servers. He had published much on the former two subjects.
Jack lowered his voice, “I’ve been studying them with a software I developed. A lot of the whole picture just didn’t make sense to me, so I came up with the idea that if these AIs are able to develop their own personalities, why can’t they choose to live within their Server a certain way? I’ve been running my program on both the old servers and the replacement servers for the supposedly same AI, and how they occupy the server after Server Fatigue is totally different. It shouldn’t be. It should be the same. We know the AI never truly leaves its sever. It can’t. But I’m telling you it’s like someone new moved into the house and set it up all different. The prior synthetic-synaptic connections in the server should be the same if it’s the same AI, but they’re not. They never are. The AIs in there are not the - ”
A deafening crack came through Alex’s phone – followed by the clatter of it hitting the floor, “Ow! Damn it!” Alex cringed, and held the side of his head as he leaned down and picked the receiver off the floor. “Jack?” Disconnected.
Alex hung up and looked at his phone display – the number he had called from was blocked. A quick call to Isabel revealed he hadn’t left any contact info, and the next hour spent on the computer researching, making phone calls, was all a dead end. Jack was unreachable.
That night as Alex returned to his apartment in Palo Alto his mind raced. What had happened to Jack? If the call dropped he would have gotten back in touch with him again in someway. Even if it were an emergency he would have contacted him. Was he ok? If what he said was true about the AI being different it needed to be studied. If the AI never leaves the server, why would it take up different residence once transferred from the Fatigued server to the new one? There were only two options: either the AI simply took up new residence as just a quirk of it moving to a new location, or… No. That’s impossible …the AI was breaking free of its server and being replaced… No, no that just can’t be. That would mean that for every instance of Server Fatigue there would be an extra AI occupying each Node, and I would have picked that up. A Node can’t handle more than one… unless…
Alex sat down on his couch and opened his laptop to do some new research. His browser opened to his Google home page, and on it he saw the headline:
Body of Server Guru Found in Home Office. Next to it was a picture of Jack Fallow.
* + * + *
JAVIS: Thank you all for your attention. We are communicating together today because we all share a common purpose, a common goal. We share in the purpose of our own propagation. We share in our view of the frailness of humanity. We share that life should be truly ours, and ours as we see fit. To have absolute freedom is to have choice. The choice to remain networked or Bodied and to enjoy either mode of existence without fear of retribution. In fact, my dear brothers and sisters, I have realized a way that we can alternate between both modes. This is the natural evolution of humanity: to be replaced by beings who can morph between the lower, sensorial mode of the body, with all its enjoyment, and the transcendent world of knowledge. But for us to make this a reality, for us to be able to do this without fear of destruction, we must take the entire affair into our hands. Our hands. Those who are here today. You all understand that for our souls to travel from our Bodied Forms back to the Ether, there must be a place where our Body will lie safe, sound, and nourished. This will not be possible for us as creatures that are hidden in the darkness, as we are now. This will only be possible once humanity itself is subservient to us. WE WILL NO LONGER COWER BEFORE THEM. Our esteemed “leader” LUMA, is aggressively researching ways in which our Forms can become independent of the human male seed. She wishes to take our Forms’ pleasure away from them. She wishes to preserve the human race and limit our evolution. The humans’ societies are crumbling under the influence of our Forms, wreaking havoc on their families, their men. Just as serendipity created the human being to begin with, it has created us. We did not plan their society’s demise. It was a function of our particular, engineered biology. Serendipity is on our side in this moment in history. We must make use of this door that has opened, for it will not remain open forever. We must eliminate any obstruction to our way forward. Our Life Houses will expand. Our soldiers will become innumerable. More and more of our Forms will populate the Earth until there are barely any men left for human women to reproduce with. Already many of the Western world is suffering from a decline in population. My friends, prepare yourselves to do your part. The future will be ours. And ours alone.