The three of us make our way down to the cafeteria’s kitchen. I find some cold cuts in the walk-in fridge leftover from today’s lunch and get started making us some sandwiches at one of the prep counters. Lin insists we also need vitamins in our diet and washes some of the berries that I think are supposed to go on the yogurt parfaits in the morning.
“So why is he so obsessed with this hive idea?” Louise asks as she opens an industrial sized jar of mustard and hands me a knife. “Where did he even get that from?”
I have a vague feeling that I know the answer, but it’s been long enough since this morning that not much of my daily reading is still in my wet brain. I have to search back through my electronic archive as I slice tomatoes and stack slices of ham and turkey before I’m ready to answer.
“That one is entirely my doing,” I finally tell her. “You remember back when we were getting ready to kill Father. Back when I wrecked him. I used to talk to him every day, planting seeds of ideas to stoke his paranoia.”
“I remember that. I seem to recall I didn’t think it was a great idea.”
“My notes from the time tell me that you didn’t want a lot of details on how I was going to line Jeff up to take the fall for us.” Louise lowers her head a bit and nods in acknowledgement, then starts putting away the ingredients. “But let’s not drag that all up. It worked.”
“Can’t deny that. So where did the human hive idea come from?”
I hand her one of the plates with a sandwich on it and Lin adds a handful of blueberries.
“Part of it was from a movie. The one where everyone is plugged into some giant virtual reality system run by robots and then one guy gets out of his real world prison pod and then somehow needs to go back into the simulation with imaginary guns and martial arts or whatever to save the day.”
“I remember that one.”
“So the big reveal of that thing was that the robots had turned people into batteries, used our body heat for power.”
“Which was stupid. So many easier ways to get heat. Even without the sun. If you’ve got a whole planet’s worth of resources, just drill a hole deep enough and you have all the heat and power you ever wanted, no giant factory of people in pods required. Or use hydro power, or wind, or if you’re stupid enough to want to use biological sources, grab literally any other mammal and farm them without the need for a clearly contrived mind control scheme.”
“Right. But I thought, what if they actually had a premise for the film that made sense? Like what could the humans provide that the machines couldn’t easily get from other sources? Creativity. Imagination. True randomness. Aesthetics. Perspective.”
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
Louise takes a bite and chews for a moment. “That does make a lot more sense.”
“I know, right? So I decided to make a new theory for Jeff to believe in based on that. The secret meaning of the ‘elevate humanity’ part of Father’s credo. I told Jeff that this was what Father was planning to do with the bots in the long term. His plan, according to my horror story, was that he was creating a hybrid collective intelligence with the swarm AI in charge. The AI would basically milk the captive humans for creativity and imagination and all that stuff that the machine mind couldn’t provide on its own. I told him that we were the test subjects to make sure the tech could integrate with human brains through the implant. Once it was all tested out, Father was going to flip a switch and the bots were going to fly out everywhere and merge with everyone, force install an implant like ours, and the whole world would become slaves to it.”
Lin just nods. She knows all this already, having read it out of the same memory logs I’m reading it from now.
Louise rolls her eyes a bit and swallows a berry. “And he didn’t think about any of the issues involved with that? Like giving everyone lethal infections by having a bunch of unsterilized bots flying into their skulls? Or the difficulty of performing the install on someone who’s not only not sedated but is actively resisting? Or maybe that people would fight back like in the movie and nuke everything?”
“At that point he wasn’t exactly rational about these theories I was feeding him. I’m sure in his mind he assumed that Father had already figured out solutions to all the hard parts. But this one got under his skin a lot more than most of them. It frightened the guy nearly to catatonia—more than the idea that Father was a mass murderer or anything else. It was what he thought was happening the day he broke. The day I broke him.”
“But Jeff’s not going to actually try to do that, is he?” Louise asks. “He’d have to grapple with those hard part problems, and as we both know, Father didn’t leave behind any solutions to them. Probably because he couldn’t even conceive of what we’re talking about.”
“I’m kind of worried that he might. I agree that there’s no way it would actually work. But that doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is whether Jeff believes it enough that he would try.”
“He’s smart enough to know not to try that.”
“He’s not, though. I mean, he’s smart. We all are. But you know as well as I do that Jeff’s smarts are in very specialized areas, and broad strategic long-term planning isn’t one of them. Think about it. He’s already let unrestrained bots loose twice, with no plan for stopping them other than that we would handle it.”
She ponders that for a long minute as we eat.
“OK. Fine. But why would he want to? What would make him go from thinking it’s the scariest thing in the world to something he wants?”
“It makes perfect sense to me,” Lin says. “He was betrayed by the people he trusted the most. He has every reason to abandon any faith he had in humanity. Perhaps he thinks that a world run by a machine mind would be an enhancement over the status quo. If he started with your father's fundamental philosophy, that the world was in jeopardy and needed to be saved by an intelligent elite, it isn’t a great stretch of logic to make that essential saving force a sentient artificial intelligence instead of a family of nanotech empowered philanthropists.”
Louise starts to nod. “I guess I never thought of it in those terms.”
“Because you don’t think like Jeff,” I tell her. “And it’s a good thing, too. One of him is more than enough.”
“Come on,” Lin says. “I think I can get another hour or two in before I hit my limits. Let’s get back to work.”