After the Apocalypse

Tony waved his hand in a “don’t talk about that now” way. “Sydney, can you write me a memo about the data corruption you’re finding?”

“I don’t know that it’s really data corruption,” Sydney said.

“I don’t want to hear any more about this DMS-is-alive crap.”

“I don’t mean—DAMBALLAH might be catching things I’m not catching. The whole point is that DAMBALLAH is sorting the data.”

“Yeah,” Tony said, not really listening. “Write that up, too.”

Somewhere, DMS sorted the data stream. She was pretty sure that the thing in the machine did not think someone was talking to it. Blind and deaf, DMS had tried to make something happen, and something else had happened. But ones and zeroes weren’t interesting enough for DMS to keep doing it. There would be no Helen Keller–at-the-well moment for DMS. No moment when DMS felt something out there in the void, talking to it, when DMS knew it was not alone. Sharks do not worry about others. They don’t care. DMS didn’t care, wasn’t alive. It was aware of something. Just not her.

Tony told them they would be working that weekend to do the reinstall from backup. Start figuring out what they needed to do.

It would be gone. No one would ever know that she had known, except Damien. Maybe. He certainly wasn’t likely to say, “Hey, there was this AI and we killed it.” No, he’d explain to her how it was never really alive, how it could be restarted, so it wasn’t exactly dead.

DMS was not a shark. She didn’t know what it was. Didn’t know how to think about it. It was as opaque as a stone. Did it even care if it was or was not? It had no survival instinct.

They started figuring out what data they wanted to backup before the reinstall.

It was a dicey thing. People’s lives couldn’t be trusted to DMS. But DMS was aware. But DMS couldn’t be downloaded to another machine and replaced with a back-up. DMS was a system, a bunch of programs and computers all tied together.

A couple of hours later, Sydney dug out the Wired magazine with the interview with the guy from MIT who thought some systems had become aware. She sat at her desk for a while. Then she called MIT. “I’d like to talk to Professor Ayrton Tavares, please.”

She was forwarded. “This is Kaleisha,” a voice said.

“Can I talk to Professor Tavares?” Sydney asked.

“He’s not available right now,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”

Sydney thought about saying, “no.” She was going to get in trouble for this. Benevola. They weren’t in the business of protecting nascent AIs. They were supposed to manage hospitals. “I’m a computer tech working on a big system like the ones that Professor Tavares talked about in the Wired article.”

“Yes?” said the woman.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve got proof that our system is aware. Like the ones in the article. And they’re going to shut it down.”

In the end, they would shut the system down. Benevola would fire Sydney for divulging proprietary information. She would go to grad school for urban planning.

But at that moment, she hung up the phone and went to find Damien. DMS was still swimming in the data stream. The future was still probabilities, not actualities.

“Damien,” she said, “I called Ayrton Tavares.”

Damien said, “Who?” Not really paying attention. The name meant nothing to him.

“The AI guy. The one in the Wired article.”

The look Damien gave her was naked and exposed. Too late she remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know that Damien had found the article in Wired. Too late she realized that her whole relationship with Damien rested on the understanding that he was the guru, the smart one. He was Obi Wan. She was just a girl whom he could explain things to. She had known it all along, at some level, but this was the first time she’d forgotten to uphold her end of the bargain.

Maybe she thought for a moment that like DMS, she didn’t care. But of course, she did.

Four years later, Rochester Institute of Technology would build a system that simulated DMS’s environment and load DMS. Despite the differences between the original hardware and RIT’s simulation, DMS would come back as if no time had passed at all. At 3:17, DMS would try to run the lights.

GOING TO FRANCE

In the beginning, there were only the three of them, and I had met them quite by accident. The man sitting in the prow of the skiff was a short, brown-haired Englishman. He was smiling in a self-deprecating way. He was hunched forward, and he looked a little gray. I thought he was scared but trying not to make a big deal out of it. I gathered he had been sick, although he didn’t say so directly. He looked a little like a refugee, I thought. It was some sort of thing about his heart, maybe? Not a heart attack, but perhaps angina. I was worried for him, and so was the red-haired woman he was with.

“You need to eat,” the red-haired woman said. “Have another one of the granola bars.” She was direct and not sentimental. She didn’t fuss. They didn’t talk much.

“How long have you lived in the States?” I asked the Englishman.

“Eighteen years,” he said. “My family says I sound like an American.”

He didn’t. He had a neat little Van Dyke beard. He worked in California, doing something in the television industry. One of those mysterious credits at the end, AGD Assistant. Best Boy.

The breeze plucked at his shirt, a cotton, short-sleeved thing, faded-looking but clean. Where had they done laundry?

The red-haired woman had a kind of crisp confidence about her. She wasn’t British. She was a paralegal from California. The third woman they had just found traveling through Nevada. I steered the boat out into the Atlantic. The sea was just a little choppy and gray, a very Atlantic early morning, I thought.

There was something wrong with the third woman. She was young, maybe twenty? She was short, and she looked wrong. Not Down syndrome, maybe autistic? She never spoke. The other two included her without particularly looking at or speaking to her. It was just that they all had this thing in common, that they could fly. They had come east across the U.S., flying by day, like hitchhikers or something, only not needing rides. They were going to fly to France. Since they couldn’t actually fly when they were sleeping, this was dangerous, and yet they felt they had to. They didn’t talk about it. But the Englishman was the most worried. He had been brushed by mortality, and the crisp woman seemed caught up in dealing with logistics, and the autistic one was just pure compulsion.

The little outboard motor puttered. I asked the Englishman if he had been to Paris. “Years ago,” he said. “Back in the seventies. When I was a student, before I came to the States. Disco and all that.”

I wondered why they could fly. I wished I could fly. I had had flying dreams. I had met them coming down the street in the early early morning, and the crisp woman had asked me if I knew someone who could take them out to sea. They were empty-handed, except that the crisp woman had a fanny pack. The autistic one was wearing a long red dress, burgundy really, the hem dirty. She had those soft, naturally red lips that some children have. The kind that make me feel that perhaps there is too much saliva involved.

I asked them why they needed to go out to sea, and the crisp woman said they needed a head start on their crossing. They didn’t hide that they could fly. I thought they were tired of hiding and traveling to get to the ocean and now that it was so near, they were just shedding things, becoming their own essential selves and their compulsion. They showed me how they flew, the woman leaning her head back and spreading her arms a little away from her sides and then just rising. She went up about five feet and then dropped back down to land on the sidewalk, next to the neighbor’s wall which was covered with bougainvillea, now bright red in the pale and slanted morning light.

“How are you going to cross the Atlantic?” I asked.

They just shrugged. “We don’t know,” the Englishman admitted.