Jeff’s human hive master plan turns out to be a weird amalgamation of the original hive mind concept, a nanoplague, and the excruciator. The medical bots are supposed to go viral, infecting humans with a specialized version of the implant that connects them to everyone else within an ever-growing mesh network. The implant hooks into the pleasure and pain centers and provides stick-and-carrot motivations to ensure the well-being of everyone in the network. It’s not exactly the scenario I thought it would be, but it’s not too far off either.
“Think about it,” Jeff says, his voice finally indicating some excitement as he explains. “If one person suffers pain or deprivation, everyone receives punitive feedback. If the collective network of humanity is healthy and well cared for, everyone receives a mild pleasure feedback. As the network expands across the world, everyone receives appropriate incentives to ensure that everyone else on the planet is taken care of. The larger the disparity between an individual’s personal well-being and the collective well-being of the network, the more that individual is punished or rewarded. Those least privileged do not receive punishment for their own status, indeed, they would receive a reward for the collective health of the network being above their own. And those most privileged—the healthiest, best fed, most pleasured—receive a greater punishment for allowing others to suffer.”
As he talks, my index triggers and pops snippets from Jeff’s therapy notes, allowing me to interject and express a much greater understanding and agreement than I would be able to on my own. He seems pleasantly surprised that I grasp each part of his concept when he’s only halfway through explaining it.
“And once the human and nanobot network is well established, we’ll introduce a modified version of the swarm AI into the collective. With every human life prioritized as a system input, the collective would optimize for human happiness, equitable resource distribution, and a healthy and verdant environment on this world. We can even preserve the AI’s original intent to provide motivation to extend humanity across the universe. All of the Butler institute’s goals achieved within a single generation. A new golden age for all.”
Honestly, as far as take-over-the-world plans go, it could have been a lot worse. It’s way less bad than some of the ideas he talked about with his doctors. It’s even altruistic. Jeff doesn’t stand to gain anything personally. Not that I really expected anything like that, since Jeff’s not really a king of the world type.
He goes on to explain his implementation details, which are all over the place in terms of feasibility. He’s thought through some of it pretty well, like how to implement the backpressure mechanisms to keep the plague swarm from just consuming everything for resources as it goes. For a lot of the heavy lifting, he seems to have counted on the original bot AI figuring things out, which I don’t know would end well. On some other things, he seems to have just glossed over other important aspects. I figure it’s time to get him believing that I’m fully engaged, so I start asking him the kinds of questions I would if we were really going to build this monstrosity.
“So, how would you keep everyone that gets infected—”
“Added to the network, please,” Jeff insists.
“Fine, added to the network. How would you keep them all from dying from septic infection caused by unsterilized bots flying into their brains.”
“Hmmm. I had not considered that.” He taps his metal fingers on the table by his stool. “This sort of thing is exactly why I wanted a second set of eyes on this.”
“It would be nice if we could bring in Louise. She’s great on the medical side of things,” I say casually. I don’t mention that getting us up to the surface to talk with her would make things a lot easier for what I really want.
“You know that is not an option. As I said, she lacks the moral flexibility required for an undertaking of this nature.”
Worth a try. I consider throwing out some other names from kids in the Doctors class, but Jeff was anti-social enough that I don’t think he knew or trusted any of them well enough that he’d be interested in recruiting them.
“You could just use a dermal implantation instead of getting direct brain access. That solves a lot of the issues.”
“I had considered that,” Jeff answers. “But it seemed that the interface would be too limited.”
“If you can cover the hands, every gesture is an input, and there’s a lot you can do with this. And for output to the human host you can just have the nanobots form themselves into contact lenses.”
“Could that work?” His single human eye widens in surprise. “I had not considered that option at all.”
“We’ve got a few hundred working proof-of-concepts up on the surface if you want to see. We can even use off-the-shelf phones that people already have for the processing nodes. They’re ubiquitous across most of the planet already, and the transistor density on their hardware is a lot better than the bots can achieve. And they can double as range extenders. You could grow the network tremendously faster that way.”
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“Intriguing. Perhaps later on a trip to the surface might be beneficial, once you and I have established sufficient trust.”
“Speaking of that, I’d like to have some additional assurance that those failsafes you mentioned won’t go off while we’re working down here. It wouldn’t do us much good to figure out the details of the human hive only to get back up there and not have enough humans left to set it up.”
“Ah, yes, my failsafes. I was surprised that you were able to come past the one above us so quickly. Impressive resourcefulness.”
“Thanks. So about the rest?”
“Fine for another fourteen hours or so, I assure you.”
His deadman switch fires at noon then. There’s got to be some action that he needs to take before then to extend it another day.
“Well that should be plenty of time to get some work done then.” I look over at the CPP agent’s cot. She looks like she’s been through a lot since the video of her in the SynTech data center. Where in that footage she had appeared athletic and muscular, now she looks malnourished and gaunt. Angry red streaks mark her skin near the edges of the ankle and wrist restraints. “Do we need to worry about your benefactors? The CPP? I take it you are no longer on good terms with them?”
Jeff swivels his chair to face her. “You surmise correctly. Their resources proved useful at some critical stages for me, but their goals and mine were fundamentally incompatible.”
“You’re not worried about them sending someone after her? Or after you?”
“Oh, I have counted on it. That was how I acquired him, him, and him,” he says, pointing to three of his other victims on their cots. “Their organization is well-funded and remarkably adept at certain operations, but quite small in their scope. When you have fled from the might of an entire government, a few skilled operatives seem less intimidating.”
So not all of the guys chained up in here are the results of kidnappings. These three poor guys walked right into his spiderweb. I wonder if their bosses told them what they were up against. Probably not.
“Well, I suppose it’s good not to waste useful resources.”
“Of course not. I am not a monster.” He says it with such matter-of-factness. With his polygraph showing complete sincerity and the rows of what look like tortured prisoners right in front of him, I can barely stop myself from barking out a laugh. He doesn’t seem to notice and goes on. “I could not neglect the opportunity to allow them to give their lives to the future of humanity.”
How generous of him.
“So, our research into the CPP indicated that the solution they wanted out of you was a nanobot scare with a limited scope. Something like a limited nanobot outbreak the size of a city. Is that what you did for your failsafe devices? You wouldn’t have wanted the whole world to go if you had some unexpected difficulty in making it to your deadman switch, right?”
“The swarms released by my boxes would expand until they either reach magma below or oceans to the side. Everything from the polar ice to the tip of South America would be eradicated, but the remainder of the world would continue unharmed. It would be an unfortunate situation, but a fitting monument to the death of my dream. And perhaps it would shock the remaining people of the world enough that they would come up with another solution to this world’s ills. Don’t you agree?”
WARNING! NOREPINEPHRINE/SEROTONIN LEVELS INDICATE MURDEROUS INTENT! THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU KILL ANYONE!
“That seems a little extreme.” I force my face and voice into calmness.
“I understand,” he says calmly. “Perhaps you will come to commit as deeply as I have to the project once you more fully understand it.”
“Of course.”
“But as you indicated, we are in a situation where trust is at a premium. The failsafe devices are necessary since I could not risk that you might rashly attempt to terminate my life. This work is much too important for that.”
“So now what?”
“I assume that you need some time to consider whether to join yourself to my cause. I assure you, I have carefully considered this course of action, and it is the most effective way to achieve our family’s goals of preserving life, ending suffering, and elevating humanity. Indeed, it is the only course that will achieve those ends. I can give you twenty minutes to deliberate. After that, if you agree, I would ask for a gesture of good faith.”
“And if I don’t agree?”
“I certainly could not allow you to remain alive,” he says with casual detachment. “You would attempt to stop me if you were not on my side. I would appreciate your assistance, but I cannot allow your interference. I will complete this project on my own if I must.”
“Fair enough,” I say, as calmly as I can. “I probably would need to put a stop to it, if I weren’t on board.”
I suspect that I could take him in a straight fight. I don’t sense all that many of his bots here and mine have recharged enough that I wouldn’t be hampered by the low energy levels I walked in with. His failsafe devices, though, those are still the problem.
Could I figure out on my own what he does to prevent them from triggering in time? Probably not. Even something as simple as needing a password would stop me for that long, and Jeff is paranoid enough that he wouldn’t make it that easy.
I guess continuing to play along is the only real option. Losing the American continents and everyone on them is probably a worse outcome than just helping him succeed with his crazy plan.
“This gesture of good faith,” I probe. “What is it?”
“Just something to assure me of your commitment. Something that you would not be willing to do unless you were truly dedicated to assisting me with my plan.”
I don’t like the sound of this.
“Specifically?” I ask.
“I would require that you eliminate the two people most likely to disrupt our plans.” He leans towards me. His organic eye joins his metallic one in fixing me with a disconcerting stare. “The two people you might value above our goals for humanity. I would need you to kill Evan and Louise.”