David said a hurried goodbye to Christine, while Mike and Gene waited. She looked worried, and David pushed a lock of hair out of her face.
“Be careful,” she said, hugging herself.
“Don’t worry, hon, we’ll be fine.”
“I wish I could call you.”
“You know we can’t. We just can’t take any chances of being tracked.”
“I know. Just go.”
They kissed quickly, then David grabbed his suitcase and walked toward the terminal. He looked backwards once, and saw Christine watching him with a sad face. David took a deep breath and rejoined Mike and Gene.
Even though they couldn’t imagine how ELOPe could track passenger flight information or credit card transactions, they talked it over the day before, and decided to err on the side of caution. They flew into Washington, D.C.’s Dulles airport, figuring that a flight into Dulles could not easily be connected to their real destination of Brooklyn, NY. Gene had wanted to take the even more drastic measure of driving across the country, but David and Mike convinced him that they didn’t have the time to waste.
Hours later, glad to be out of the plane, David waited in line with Gene for a rental car at the Dulles airport feeling out of sorts. David normally carefully planned everything in his life. Now he was on the opposite side of the country after a spontaneous flight, getting ready to drive to New York. He had never felt so adrift in his life. He thought back to last night, Christine holding him in her arms.
Mike rejoined them, carrying coffees on a tray and the New York Times, interrupting David’s introspection. “Guys, you are never going to believe this!”
“They still print paper newspapers?” David said sarcastically. “You’re right, I don’t believe it.”
“Be nice, kid,“ Gene said. “If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have any news at all right now.”
Mike just ignored David’s comments and went on. “You have to read these stories. On page one, the lead story is about how Germany has suddenly changed their international policy. When was the last time Germany involved itself in international affairs?”
David shook his head. “I don’t know, when?”
“Never. That’s when. Not since World War II. Now, out of the blue, they’re negotiating a disarmament and peace treaty in the Arab world. And they apparently traded away the sum total of their intellectual property to get it. Then on page two, there’s a story about how Germany just adopted Avogadro’s AvoMail. How can no one connect the dots with these two stories side by side?”
David and Gene stared at Mike and the paper, their faces a mixture of fatigue, astonishment, and disbelief. “I just don’t know whether to react with alarm or resignation at this point,” David finally replied.
“Not only that, but it looks like we moved on past floating barges for our offshore data centers,” Mike said, moving onto another page two story. “There’s a sidebar article on Avogadro, saying that in order to support the new secure government cloud services, Avogadro is purchasing a fleet of twenty recently retired oil tankers to use as the floating bases for our new offshore data centers.”
“Great, the bastard will be mobile now,” Gene got out in his usual growl. “Smarter than us, distributed, in control of the communication system, invisible, and mobile. Wars have been lost with fewer disadvantages than this.”
After they paid for and finally obtained the rental car, Gene drove the four hours north to New York City. They were mostly silent. Nobody was in the mood for small talk. Once in the New York area, Gene headed to Brighton Beach in Brooklyn. There, he dropped David and Mike off at their hotel.
“Let me do this by myself, guys. I’ve never done detective work with partners, and the three of us will make folks nervous. I’ll meet you tonight at the hotel.”
David and Mike watched Gene drive off. They were travel-weary but nervous, and decided to get a drink at a bar across the street. The bar looked like the neighborhood watering hole, friendly but plain. David ordered two whiskeys.
“What do you think is going to happen?” David asked, hunched over his drink, staring into the wood bar. “Is it going to be like the
“I don’t know, David.” Mike shook his head. “I know most of science fiction does deal with artificial run amok, but then there’s also been plenty that’s been written about how artificial intelligence and humankind would have cooperative relationships.”
“Really, like what?” David asked, turning to look at him.
“Well, nothing is coming to mind right now.” Mike paused. “I was just thinking about how they turned the earth into pure computronium in one book. The humans had to move out to Jupiter or be assimilated into computing matter.”
“Jesus, I thought you were supposed to be the optimist.”
Mike shrugged.
“I always thought that an A.I. would be more, well, human,” David started. “That it would be something we could relate to. This thing, whatever it is, it’s more like an insect in its intelligence. It does things to promote its own survival, very sophisticated things, but we can’t talk to it or understand how it reasons. We can’t have a conversation about what constitutes good behavior, or a conversation about how we can collaborate together.”
They both mused on that for a moment.
“Remember Isaac Asimov’s Three Rules of Robotics?” Mike asked. “Asimov thought we would give robots immutable rules to safeguard human life. He assumed that creating those robots would be a deliberate, conscious act. We never thought we were creating an A.I., so we never thought through the implications.”
“Yeah, in hindsight, giving an expert algorithm unfettered access to and control over the single most used email system in world does seem to have some risks,” David said wryly.
The two of them made their way back to the hotel room around eleven. They had decided to pay cash for everything in Brooklyn to avoid any credit card trail pointing to their presence there. Their cash on hand was limited, so the three collaborators shared one hotel room. Just after one in the morning, a tired Gene Keyes showed up at the hotel room.
“Anything?” David asked.
“Yes, I’ve got some leads. Please, let’s talk in the morning.” With no more words than that, Gene laid down on the bed, put the pillow over his head, and said no more.
After a glance at each other, David and Mike decided to turn in too.
David hurried down the hallway and opened the first door, only to find a closet. He walked a little further, opened another door, and found another closet. Behind him, he heard the sound of a machine. He picked up his pace, and ran, opening one door after another. Closet, closet, closet. Where was his office? The sound of the machine was getting closer and closer. He ran to another door and opened it. Closet. He was approaching the end of the hallway. The machine was right behind him. “Run, run, RUN!” he screamed at himself, failing to understand why he couldn’t make his feet go faster.
David sat up suddenly, sweating, heart beating fast. In the dim light, the room seemed off, and the smells were wrong. Then he remembered he was in New York, in a hotel with Mike and Gene. He got up, quietly to not disturb the others, and went into the bathroom. Turning on the light, he stared at the dark circles under his eyes, his unnaturally pale face. It was the third time he had that nightmare.
He wished he could say that he didn’t understand the dream, because understanding it somehow just made it worse. He was afraid of ELOPe. In the dream, David always knew that if he could just find his office, and sit in front of his computer, he’d have the power to do something. But ELOPe somehow made him powerless.
David sat down on the toilet and lowered his forehead on the cool porcelain sink. He’d give anything to erase the last two months and do it all over. Oh god, he didn’t want to be known as the monster who unleashed ELOPe on the world. Please, please, God, let them find a way to turn it off.
At six o’clock the next morning, Gene yelled out “Get up. Get showered. We’ve got to go.”
“Huh, what?” Mike replied groggily.
“Come on, let’s go. Wake up lazy boys.” Gene sounded as chipper as could be. “We’ve got ourselves one hour to get to the King’s Plaza Diner. This is where Sean’s parents have breakfast on Saturday morning. If Sean is in
