“I am thoroughly confused,” Alex answered. “It was inevitable that nuclear weapons would be created. So what?”
“That was one of two conclusions the artificial intelligence came to. The second was that once the weapons were created, there was a one hundred percent certainty that those weapons would be used. Not just once, as you might be thinking, but in a catastrophic war. The AI showed that, given enough time, it was a certainty that a scenario would arise in which not one, but two leaders would think a nuclear war was winnable. It is not, of course. Not once the stockpiles have been built, refurbished, built, refurbished. There is no such thing as a tactical or winnable nuclear war.”
“Are you saying this happened? That there was a nuclear war?”
Bista nodded. “Not one, but two. That was likely inevitable, too, since the first one wasn’t as disastrous as everyone had projected it would be. Leaders didn’t have the same certainty after the first attack. Our AI made allowances for the fact that it was possible that we would learn from what we had done. We did not. The fact that the first nuclear exchange did not end life as we know it actually led directly to the second conflict. We—our ancestors—were not around for the second war.”
“How’s that?”
“The answer is one man. Janus. Like our Emily here, that is not the name he was born with, but he adopted it when he was very young. As a teenager, he created an artificial intelligence that had the ability to network with every camera feed in the world. That gave him access to literally billions of cameras around the world. Cameras in banks, at red lights, home security, at every street corner.”
“So, this Janus had access to billions of cameras that showed long stretches of nothing,” Alex said. “What good does that do him?”
“I would have thought the same thing. But Janus was a genius like no other. He recognized patterns where others saw only blurs of data. The artificial intelligence he created, which he called Janus II—the man was not without an ego—sorted through that incalculable number of data points and organized it into trends. How many seconds does it take someone to cross a street? Is it different today than it was a year ago, or five years ago? How willing are people to run a red light? Are people going in to get something to eat at a fueling station, or do they go home to eat something healthier? He divided this wealth of information into sections, then compared it to events—wars, the rise and fall of financial markets, interest rates, a thing he created called The Happiness Index. Then he set Janus II to work on making connections. And they were there. Everything is connected.”
“Not in Kragdon-ah,” Alex said. “Here, if you run across a path, it’s probably because something is chasing you.”
Bista smiled. “You’re probably right. There needs to be a certain level of civilization before this kind of information is helpful. If you are worried about shelter, food, and safety, your actions might be predictable, but you don’t need something like Janus II to predict it. But, in Janus’s time, things were more complicated. He found that Janus II was able to successfully predict almost everything, even the completely unpredictable events like massive storms or tornados. More to the point of this story, though, it allowed him to project with better than 99% accuracy, stock and bond movements. You can probably guess what happened from there.”
“He became another one of those rich assholes who thinks he knows everything?”
Bista winced, and Alex made a note of that.
He likes this guy Janus. He’s important to him.
Bista turned to Emily. “While we talk, you should start your work.”
Emily nodded and pulled a large gray rectangle out of her backpack. To Alex’s eye, it looked like it should be heavy, but she hefted it easily. She set it on the ground in front of her and ran her hands over the material. As she did, it changed from a solid brick of material into something more pliable—like clay that has been warmed in an artist’s hands.
Sanda-eh slipped from her chair, turned to Alex, and said, “Can I watch her?”
Alex pointed to a spot on the ground in front of him. Closer to Emily, but not so far that Alex couldn’t reach her if necessary.
Bista returned his attention to Alex. “You are correct that he became rich. First, the world’s richest man. Then, the richest man who had ever lived. Then he doubled and tripled his wealth many times over. His fortune grew so large that he could have tanked the world economy if he woke up in a bad mood. But, for Janus, money was just a means to an end. His creation had been working on a big problem in the background for years. Much more important than amassing his massive fortune.”
Bista paused dramatically.
Alex bit. “What was the problem?”
The others in Bista’s group leaned forward as if they knew how the story turned out, yet couldn’t wait to hear it again anyway.
“When was the end of the world going to happen?”
The other three sat back, satisfied.
“Of course, that’s a very human-centric way to pose the question. Janus wasn’t really concerned with the end of the world, he was concerned with the end of humanity. Janus II worked on this problem for years. More than a decade, actually. When it finally came up with an answer it wasn’t what Janus wanted to hear: that there was an eighty-two percent chance that the world would become uninhabitable for mankind in less than twenty years.”
Bista leaned forward and looked into Alex’s eyes. “Twenty years seems like a long time, doesn’t it? Except when you’re talking about the extinction of the species. Then
