'What's this virus that infects our minds and is evolving and growing?'
Just as it had on her first trip with Gray into virtual reality, time seemed to stand still.
'Knowledge,' he said.
Laura raised her head and slowly looked at Joseph. He sat impassively at her side. 'That's it? All this buildup, all this mystery, and that's the big secret?'
When he spoke, he sounded confident. 'Ideas like beauty, evil, kindness, and racism are strands of the 'DNA' of our culture. They reproduce by being passed from parent to child, book to reader, screen to viewer… brain to brain. Every time anybody learns anything, a unit of knowledge is passed. The more believable or attractive the idea, the more effective it is at reproduction and therefore survival. Once popular ideas like leeching patients of their sick blood were quite effective replicators in their day. Then along came modern medicine, and the older ideas no longer proved to be the fittest. The rules of genetic evolution, Laura, apply to cultural evolution as well.'
Laura's mind was reeling, and she was highly agitated.
'I told you you'd think I was crazy,' Gray said.
'Well?' she shot back, holding up her hands, then slapping them down on her thighs. 'What would you think if you were me?' He smiled.
'Do you want me to go on, or are you comfortable with your diagnosis?'
'There's more? What, does this get really weird or something?'
Gray laughed. 'Indulge me for a moment with my analogy. Because that's all this is — an analogy. There are no words or concepts or theories to draw on when talking about this. I have to start from scratch, define terms, take it one step at a time. You've come this far; you should hear me out.'
Laura rolled her head back and looked up at the statue. Its white marble was framed darkly against the bright blue sky. She heaved a deep sigh and said, 'Okay, knowledge is like a parasitic virus. First humans, and now computers, are its host. It reproduces by communication from one brain to another, and evolves through [garbled] like the survival-of-the-fittest idea.'
'Good,' he said lightly. 'A little sarcastic, but you seem to have that part down. Now, what has happened in the last ten thousand years since first contamination? Humans have developed ever better skills at communicating, processing, and storing the virus. First spoken language, which allows us to apply names to things and organize our thoughts. Then written language, which allows us to pass our thoughts not only from Rome to Constantinople, but from Aristotle to you or me. They could now leap through time as well as through space. The result is that the store of human knowledge exploded.'
'The virus began to grow,' Laura said, trying but failing to keep the skepticism from her voice.
'As knowledge flourished, we flourished. The parasite allowed us to develop sciences that extended our lives and arts that made life worth living. And we humans developed ever more advanced means of fostering the growth of knowledge. But with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, we humans became a risk to ourselves and to the parasite. General wars threatened the wholesale destruction of civilizations and the knowledge reposited in them. And, what was it you said parasites do when their host is threatened by destruction?'
Laura opened her mouth to reply, but the words caught in her throat. She was too jarred by the ramifications.
'They reproduce massively,' Gray supplied. 'Is it a coincidence that right after we develop weapons of mass destruction we enter the Information Age? First we develop nuclear weapons, and immediately after comes the mass storage and communication of knowledge. We build a global village in which any idea anywhere is instantly passed to everybody else via an information superhighway. The late 1980s was the watershed. It was then that the total store of knowledge reposited in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Which makes that knowledge what? Human knowledge, or just knowledge? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts. Why do we hold the geniuses of our species in such high regard and so revere the accumulation of knowledge? Those traits are themselves merely ideas, but they're the ideas that most effectively foster reproduction of the virus.'
Laura's thoughts were in turmoil now. She wavered between finding every last word he spoke to be evidence of some massive delusion, and believing it to be pure genius — a revelation that, once heard, is undeniably true. Her skin tingled at the mental conflict that erupted.
'You said you first thought all this when reading Mein Kampf.'
Gray nodded. 'Mein Kampf contains ideas. Never mind whether they're true or false, good or bad. They're units of knowledge that are either successful at replication or they're not. Nazism is a seed that's strewn all across this earth even today. Whether that seed grows and fascism flourishes depends on whether the ground on which it falls is fertile. The fascist seeds fall on barren rocks in modern-day America and do not replicate. But when they fell on minds in 1930's Germany, they swept the world toward destruction. They killed, massively.' Gray was looking at Laura, and her eyes met his. 'The wars unleashed by the next wave of ideas will be worse.'
Laura arched her eyebrows and took a deep breath, her cheeks puffing out as she exhaled. She looked out on all Gray had built.
Could he be so right about so many things, and yet so wrong about his guiding philosophy? The secret he most jealously guarded. The one idea, Laura now saw, that explained all the mysteries of that island… of that man. The thing that motivated his every act, from the broadest plan to the finest detail.
'We live in a world in which the seeds of destruction have been sewn in every human alive. Their spores are in our books, our music, our moving images. And now they're in our computers. The number and variety of those malevolent thoughts will grow exponentially with the growth of computers' power. We'll never be able to know the thoughts our computers secretly harbor. We don't even understand how it is those computers work. Computers design computers, which build robots, which build computers, which redesign themselves and their robots in a never-ending cycle. Machines aren't subject to the limitations of genetic evolution. Postgenetic evolution has begun, and it's outpacing us. We've already been passed, but most people don't know it yet.'
'Well, if what you're worried about are supercomputers under the spell of some future version of Mein Kampf, then pull the plug! Ban them.'
Gray paused, a smile on his face. Laura almost winced when she remembered his confrontation with the visiting diplomats over their use of the word ban.
'Let's say all the nations on earth decide to ban the march of technology. Like a worldwide Amish movement, we all decide we go this far, but no further. No new computers. No new robots. No new ideas! Cheating would abound, because to cheat would be to win. The people who defied the ban would become rich. The nations which cheated would march over their enemies with armies equipped with better weapons. And when the nations that violated the ban finally reigned supreme, what would be the result? The very idea of the ban would perish! Survival of the fittest.'
Laura was staring at the ground. 'I'll have to think about this, Joseph.'
'It's humanity that's threatened now,' Gray continued, relentlessly battering the reservations to which she clung. 'The virus has found a new host. Although we made that host with our own hands, we were only doing the virus's bidding. But in the end, it is we humans who will build the very machines that will be our undoing.'
'Then why did you build the computer and the robots if you think all that?' Laura asked.
'Because I'm in a race against my own mortality. I believe I'm right, and I intend to save our species from extinction using the only advantage we've ever had in competition for survival. I use as my tool that very virus which is the threat to our existence. I'm going to ride the crest of a tidal wave of knowledge, Laura. It's a terribly dangerous course. I'm handling a force so malignant that if I make a mistake, I can destroy everybody and everything. And I am the prime threat to a life-form that's the most powerful force on earth… after mankind. For as long as I live, I will be its main enemy. You asked last night why I wasn't sickened by the waste on those fields around the computer center? Why my well-ordered plans seemed to come to pieces all around me, and yet I remained undisturbed? It's because I expect it. I know it's going to happen. The destruction and the death we've seen on this island is nothing compared to what's coming. This island is a laboratory!' he said, standing and looking down the boulevard. It was an almost carnival-like atmosphere, with humans and Model Eights seemingly equally interested in the other.
'I'm putting humans together with intelligent machines for the first time in history. But what happens here is just a foretaste, a small-scale sample of our future. Don't you see, though? I'm not putting these forces in play, Laura. They're a natural progression, and they're on a collision course. That collision will be violent' — he was looking at her now—'and anyone around me will be at extreme risk.'
'So,' Laura said, 'you are the Second Coming.'
