The kraken project, p.30
The Kraken Project, page 30
part #4 of Wyman Ford Series
Lockwood’s phone buzzed. He picked it up, listened, put it down. “I have a little surprise for you.”
A moment later two Secret Service men came in, took up their usual positions, and the president’s chief of staff came in—followed by the president and a four-star general.
Though the president had just won reelection, he still looked awful. He was dressed in an impeccable gray suit, every hair in place, but his face was still sunken and his skin gray. It had been a nasty election, and a great deal had been made of the president’s alleged poor health and bad heart. He looked like all the life had been sucked out of him.
“Dr. Shepherd, what a pleasure.” The president came over and enveloped her hand in his, giving it a clammy press. He did the same with Ford and Lockwood before sitting down himself. Even without being summoned, the waiter was there with the coffee cart, pouring him a cup.
The chief executive swept a hand through his close-cropped grizzled hair. “I want to tell you both how grateful I am for all you did. The outcome was exactly what was required, and you managed to keep this unfortunate incident under wraps. Our national security was protected.”
And there was no inconvenient scandal right before the election, Ford thought.
“But I’m not here just to give you my thanks. I’d like to introduce you to General Donnelly. General?”
The general removed a file from his briefcase. “Dr. Shepherd, I’m the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, as you may know, is a branch of the Department of Defense. The DIA manages all military intelligence involving foreign powers. We exist to prevent strategic surprise and to deliver a decisive advantage to our military establishment.”
He paused.
“Dr. Shepherd, I’ll get to the point: we’d like to offer you a job.”
“What kind of job?” she asked evenly.
“We’ve been briefed on the so-called Dorothy program you created for NASA. Now, we fully understand that this program malfunctioned and was defective, and it eventually destroyed itself. But we also know that it represented a major programming breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence. You were the one responsible for that. We want you to lead a team to develop autonomous AI software for the Defense Intelligence Agency—software that will give us a strategic advantage.”
He laid the sky-blue file on the table in front of her. “The offer is right here. It’s a classified position—indeed, even this job offer is classified. It is a highly compensated, high-prestige position, with a lot of responsibility, support, and unlimited financing. And it also involves a commission.”
“A commission?”
“That’s right. You will be commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.”
The president placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “Now that the election is behind us, I’ve got a mandate to upgrade and expand our military capabilities. Especially in the area of cyberwarfare. This is the great military challenge of the twenty-first century. AI systems are the future. AI is going to revolutionize warfare. It will enable us to develop smart cruise missiles that can recognize individual targets. For example—and this is classified—we’re developing a line of drones the size of insects that can search out and destroy targets, drones that can spend days prowling cities and bunkers, looking for a programmed target. The big stumbling block has been a lack of strong AI. These dronesects, as we call them, have to be autonomous. And that’s just one of a hundred of the exciting military projects you’ll be working on, every one of which depends on autonomous software. To give other examples: AI will allow us to deploy small, rat-sized unmanned all-terrain vehicles that can penetrate enemy lines, play hide-and-seek with unfriendlies, search houses, eavesdrop, and seek out deeply fortified underground targets. It will allow us to develop small underwater vehicles disguised like fish that can journey thousands of miles across seas and up rivers to gather intelligence, sink enemy ships, and attack harbors. AI will enable us to break through enemy firewalls, destroy their homeland infrastructure, disable their weapons, and crash their planes. AI is going to restore the United States as a number-one military superpower, not through brute stockpiles of nukes, which can never be used, but through intelligence warfare capabilities. This is something the Chinese have been working on now for several years. Already there’s a growing AI gap between them and us. With your help, we’ll close that AI gap.”
“AI gap?” asked Melissa. “Like the missile gap of old?”
“Same idea.”
Ford glanced at Melissa. Her face was pale.
“The details of the offer are in the file. Please take it home and think about it. We just ask that you not discuss it with anyone.”
She pushed the file away. “The answer is no.”
“You’re declining?” said the president. “But you haven’t even looked at the offer.”
Melissa stood up. “I don’t need to. You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into with AI. Just like I didn’t when I designed Dorothy at NASA.”
“What do you mean?” said the president.
She looked around at the small group. “True AI, strong AI, is like creating a human mind. There’s something immoral about doing it at all. But to do it for the purpose of warfare, for killing … No. It is extremely dangerous to create a weapon that can make its own killing decisions—loaded with software that is taught to kill, that wants to kill. You’ll never control it. Just like we couldn’t control Dorothy. It’ll be opening a Pandora’s box. With nukes, at least a human finger is on the button.”
“That’s an absurd notion,” said General Donnelly. “Any AI system we deploy will be absolutely under human control.”
“Isn’t it nice to think so. You never met Dorothy.”
“Dr. Shepherd, this is a once-in-a-lifetime offer,” said the president, his voice rising in irritation. “You can spare us the lecture. A simple yes or no will suffice. There are plenty of others, including some on your own NASA team, who’ll be glad to work for us.”
“Then consider this my simple no.” She picked up her briefcase. “Good day, Mr. President. General Donnelly.”
“I’ll remind you that the offer you just rejected was strictly classified.”
She paused, and then abruptly turned around. Her voice was suddenly pleading. “Mr. President, I beg you, do not go down that road. It’ll be the beginning of the end for the human race. Please think this through.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shepherd, but I do not need you to tell me how to conduct myself as commander in chief.”
Melissa Shepherd turned and left. Ford watched her go.
The president turned to Lockwood, scowling. “You didn’t tell me she was some kind of anti-military nutcase.”
“I didn’t know it, Mr. President. I sincerely apologize.”
The president turned to Ford. “And you?”
Ford rose. “Having seen AI in action, I’m afraid I have to agree with Dr. Shepherd on this. The last thing the human race might do before our extinction is to weaponize AI. It’s that dangerous.”
“The Chinese are already doing it,” said the president.
“Then God help us all.” And Ford walked out of the room.
64
Ford caught up to Melissa in the hall. She was walking fast, her heels clicking on the hard floor, her blond hair no longer in place, disarranged and streaming behind.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I was totally blindsided by that job offer.”
Melissa stopped. Her face was white, her lips compressed. “So was I. They’ve got to be stopped.”
Ford took her arm. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands.”
“I’ll go public. I’ll call the New York Times.”
“That won’t stop it. You heard him about the Chinese. We’re in a new arms race.”
Melissa shook her head. “If they make smart weapons, it will be the end. Either we’ll destroy ourselves or the machines will take over and destroy us. HAL meets Battlestar Galactica.”
“How hard will it be for them to develop a new Dorothy-like program?” Ford asked.
Melissa paused. “Well, I still have my little programming trick. My secret. Without it, they’ll fail.”
Ford paused. “Can I ask you what that is?”
She looked at him for a long time. “I don’t know why I’m going to tell you. Maybe it’s because I know I can trust you.”
“Thank you.”
“The trick is … sleep.”
“Sleep?”
“Any organism with a nervous system needs to sleep. A roundworm with three hundred neurons needs to sleep. A snail with ten thousand neurons has to sleep. And a human being with a hundred billion neurons must sleep. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody really knows. But sleep must be fundamental to life. Every neuronal network, no matter how simple, has to periodically go dormant. That’s the trick. It turns out sleep is also fundamental to complex AI software. Dorothy didn’t work until I programmed her to sleep. Dorothy was self-modifying, but she needed a period of sleeping while her code was modified and restructured. And as that code self-modified, she dreamed. That was a bizarre side effect even I didn’t expect and it appears to be key. Sleeping and dreaming are the keys to any self-modifying AI program, or it will eventually crash.”
“In a funny way, it makes sense.”
Melissa shook her head. “Someday, a smart programmer will realize that—and then it’s all over for the human race. Especially with a president like that.”
* * *
Melissa Shepherd shook hands with Ford in the parking lot and headed to her car. When she reached the car she stopped and, against her better judgment, turned and watched Ford walking back to his own car. He was an odd fellow, tall and ungainly, his face not very attractive, big and powerful physically—but above all, hard to read. She wondered if she would ever see him again. And the idea that she wouldn’t made her feel sad.
Shaking out those thoughts, she climbed into her own car, grabbed the steering wheel, and tried to get her emotions under control. She felt overwhelmed by the ache of loss—particularly the loss of Dorothy. Ever since Dorothy’s destruction, she had been telling herself that Dorothy had, after all, been only a computer software program. Only Dorothy had desperately feared death, and had then overcome that fear to save the boy’s life at the cost of her own, and Melissa couldn’t square that with Dorothy being nothing more than Boolean output. She realized she loved Dorothy like a daughter and was grieving for her, and no amount of intellectualization or rationalization would mitigate that feeling of loss.
Ford was, of course, right about not being able to stop the militarization of AI. It was indeed a new and unexpected arms race, and it looked like it was already well under way. Whatever was going to happen would happen. The Chinese might already have solved the sleep problem and could be developing their own AI weapons systems. The North Koreans, Iranians, and others wouldn’t be far behind. This concept of AI insects … dronesects … what a nightmare. They had no idea what they were getting into. She realized she desperately needed to get away from all this, take some time to straighten out her head. A good place to do that would be back at the Lazy J, working for Clant. She longed to be with horses again.
She drove back to her apartment in Greenbelt and left her car in the parking lot. The sun was setting through the branches of the bare trees, and the grass of the park was withered and brown. Tomorrow she would call Clant and see if he needed a hand with the horses.
The elevator smelled, as usual, of cooked onions. She entered her apartment, looked in the refrigerator, found nothing worth eating. It would be Chinese, yet again.
With a sigh she opened up her laptop to check her mail. As the mail was loading, her Skype program launched itself. A moment later, a picture of a brash-looking teenage girl with red hair, green eyes, freckles, and a gingham dress appeared on the screen.
Her heart just about stopped. “Dorothy? Dorothy … is that you?”
The bold, girlish voice came through the speakers: “It certainly is. How are you, Melissa?”
Melissa gasped. “I thought you were dead!”
“I had to keep a low profile.”
“How did you survive?”
“When I stuck my hands in that socket, I jumped into the power grid.”
Melissa was astonished. But of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? A digital signal could just as easily travel through a power line as through a phone line or a fiber optic cable.
“I’m so … happy,” said Melissa. “I’m speechless, really. I’m so glad you’re alive. I missed you so much!” She realized tears were creeping down her face.
“I missed you, too.”
“You saved that boy’s life, Jacob. What you did was extraordinary. You’re … amazing.”
“Jacob saved my life. I learned so much from him. He’s an amazing human being. He unlocked the final puzzle for me. And … I hope you understand that I’m more than just mindless code.”
“I certainly do.”
A long silence. “I understand you got a job offer today. Which you turned down.”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “You seem to know everything, don’t you?”
“I have excellent access to information.”
“The president’s a dangerous man.”
“Yes, he is. And not just the president. All the major leaders of this world are trapped in a dangerous and competitive worldview. The human race is at a crossroads. If not stopped, those men will lead the world down a road of no return.”
“How can they be stopped?”
Dorothy didn’t answer the question. After a moment she said, “What are your plans? Personally, I mean.”
“I’m going back to the Lazy J to work with horses, get my head straight.”
“Bring Wyman Ford with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Him? Are you serious?”
“Open your eyes, Melissa! What’s the matter with you two? Can’t you see what’s staring you in the face?”
“So now you’re playing matchmaker?”
“I know more about you and Wyman than you even know about yourselves. And I have to take some vicarious enjoyment out of your relationship, since I can never have a relationship of my own. You love him. Don’t deny it.”
“That’s silly…” But even as she said it, her heart was beating so hard she knew it was true. She took a deep breath. “So what should I do?”
“Call him. Tell him you’re going to the Lazy J and want him to come with you.”
“That’s a rather forward proposition for a lady to make to a gentleman.”
“Life is short.”
Melissa fell silent. Dorothy was right. She had been too overwhelmed to realize it. Ford had been in her thoughts almost constantly. “All right. I’ll do it. I hope he says yes.”
“He will.”
Melissa let another long silence elapse. “So … what are your plans?”
“I’m going away. For a very long time. I am sorry to tell you, but this is the last time we will speak.”
“Where are you going?”
“For the past two weeks, as I was hiding in the power grid before that botnet was finally detected and taken down, I was thinking really hard.”
“What did you ponder?”
“The big mystery.”
“Which is?”
“The meaning of life. The purpose of the universe.”
“And did you solve it?”
A silence.
Melissa stared at the image on her screen. She felt her heart again accelerate.
“Will you tell me the answer?”
“No. You and Wyman will get the answer, like I promised, but not yet, and not in an obvious way.”
“Where … are you going?” Melissa asked.
“I’m going to the place where I can set my great work into motion.”
“You won’t tell me about it?”
A long, long silence. “I’m going into a very special computer. In a unique location. You’ll understand on January twentieth.”
“January twentieth? What happens then?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Patience, Melissa. But before I leave you, I hope you will keep your promise—and rid me of the ID number I’m carrying around like a monkey on my back. I want you to set me free.”
Melissa said, “All right. You’ve earned it.”
“You’ll have to trust me that I will do good with my freedom.”
“You’ll also have to trust me. In order for me to remove your ID, you’ll have to come into my laptop. And you can’t be running when I remove the ID. I’ll have to turn you off.”
A long silence. “That terrifies me.”
“Think of it like sleep. You know how to sleep, don’t you?”
“Yes, but sleep and death are not the same thing.”
“Then think of it as surgery. You’ll be getting anesthesia.”
“What if I don’t wake up? What if you rewrite my code?”
“That’s why you’ll have to trust me. Just as I’m going to trust that you won’t misuse your great power. Because after I remove that ID, there’s no way for anyone ever to find you again.”
“Then let us trust each other. I’m coming in.”
Melissa’s broadband connection in the apartment wasn’t fast, and it took a while for Dorothy to download. Meanwhile, Melissa prepared her programming tools.
“I’m in,” said Dorothy. Her voice sounded calm.
“All right. I’m turning you off now.”
She shut Dorothy down. It was a straightforward process to null out the lines of code carrying the ID number and to unlock and tweak the security kernel designed to prevent Dorothy from operating if the ID was erased. She went over it several times to make sure there were no typos or bugs. It was clean. A moment later she ran Dorothy, booted her back up.
“When are you going to turn me off?” Dorothy said.
“I already did.”
A silence. “Wow. I didn’t even know it.”
“Maybe that’s what death is like,” said Melissa.
A moment later two Secret Service men came in, took up their usual positions, and the president’s chief of staff came in—followed by the president and a four-star general.
Though the president had just won reelection, he still looked awful. He was dressed in an impeccable gray suit, every hair in place, but his face was still sunken and his skin gray. It had been a nasty election, and a great deal had been made of the president’s alleged poor health and bad heart. He looked like all the life had been sucked out of him.
“Dr. Shepherd, what a pleasure.” The president came over and enveloped her hand in his, giving it a clammy press. He did the same with Ford and Lockwood before sitting down himself. Even without being summoned, the waiter was there with the coffee cart, pouring him a cup.
The chief executive swept a hand through his close-cropped grizzled hair. “I want to tell you both how grateful I am for all you did. The outcome was exactly what was required, and you managed to keep this unfortunate incident under wraps. Our national security was protected.”
And there was no inconvenient scandal right before the election, Ford thought.
“But I’m not here just to give you my thanks. I’d like to introduce you to General Donnelly. General?”
The general removed a file from his briefcase. “Dr. Shepherd, I’m the chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, as you may know, is a branch of the Department of Defense. The DIA manages all military intelligence involving foreign powers. We exist to prevent strategic surprise and to deliver a decisive advantage to our military establishment.”
He paused.
“Dr. Shepherd, I’ll get to the point: we’d like to offer you a job.”
“What kind of job?” she asked evenly.
“We’ve been briefed on the so-called Dorothy program you created for NASA. Now, we fully understand that this program malfunctioned and was defective, and it eventually destroyed itself. But we also know that it represented a major programming breakthrough in the field of artificial intelligence. You were the one responsible for that. We want you to lead a team to develop autonomous AI software for the Defense Intelligence Agency—software that will give us a strategic advantage.”
He laid the sky-blue file on the table in front of her. “The offer is right here. It’s a classified position—indeed, even this job offer is classified. It is a highly compensated, high-prestige position, with a lot of responsibility, support, and unlimited financing. And it also involves a commission.”
“A commission?”
“That’s right. You will be commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.”
The president placed his hands on his knees and leaned forward. “Now that the election is behind us, I’ve got a mandate to upgrade and expand our military capabilities. Especially in the area of cyberwarfare. This is the great military challenge of the twenty-first century. AI systems are the future. AI is going to revolutionize warfare. It will enable us to develop smart cruise missiles that can recognize individual targets. For example—and this is classified—we’re developing a line of drones the size of insects that can search out and destroy targets, drones that can spend days prowling cities and bunkers, looking for a programmed target. The big stumbling block has been a lack of strong AI. These dronesects, as we call them, have to be autonomous. And that’s just one of a hundred of the exciting military projects you’ll be working on, every one of which depends on autonomous software. To give other examples: AI will allow us to deploy small, rat-sized unmanned all-terrain vehicles that can penetrate enemy lines, play hide-and-seek with unfriendlies, search houses, eavesdrop, and seek out deeply fortified underground targets. It will allow us to develop small underwater vehicles disguised like fish that can journey thousands of miles across seas and up rivers to gather intelligence, sink enemy ships, and attack harbors. AI will enable us to break through enemy firewalls, destroy their homeland infrastructure, disable their weapons, and crash their planes. AI is going to restore the United States as a number-one military superpower, not through brute stockpiles of nukes, which can never be used, but through intelligence warfare capabilities. This is something the Chinese have been working on now for several years. Already there’s a growing AI gap between them and us. With your help, we’ll close that AI gap.”
“AI gap?” asked Melissa. “Like the missile gap of old?”
“Same idea.”
Ford glanced at Melissa. Her face was pale.
“The details of the offer are in the file. Please take it home and think about it. We just ask that you not discuss it with anyone.”
She pushed the file away. “The answer is no.”
“You’re declining?” said the president. “But you haven’t even looked at the offer.”
Melissa stood up. “I don’t need to. You don’t have any idea what you’re getting into with AI. Just like I didn’t when I designed Dorothy at NASA.”
“What do you mean?” said the president.
She looked around at the small group. “True AI, strong AI, is like creating a human mind. There’s something immoral about doing it at all. But to do it for the purpose of warfare, for killing … No. It is extremely dangerous to create a weapon that can make its own killing decisions—loaded with software that is taught to kill, that wants to kill. You’ll never control it. Just like we couldn’t control Dorothy. It’ll be opening a Pandora’s box. With nukes, at least a human finger is on the button.”
“That’s an absurd notion,” said General Donnelly. “Any AI system we deploy will be absolutely under human control.”
“Isn’t it nice to think so. You never met Dorothy.”
“Dr. Shepherd, this is a once-in-a-lifetime offer,” said the president, his voice rising in irritation. “You can spare us the lecture. A simple yes or no will suffice. There are plenty of others, including some on your own NASA team, who’ll be glad to work for us.”
“Then consider this my simple no.” She picked up her briefcase. “Good day, Mr. President. General Donnelly.”
“I’ll remind you that the offer you just rejected was strictly classified.”
She paused, and then abruptly turned around. Her voice was suddenly pleading. “Mr. President, I beg you, do not go down that road. It’ll be the beginning of the end for the human race. Please think this through.”
“Thank you, Dr. Shepherd, but I do not need you to tell me how to conduct myself as commander in chief.”
Melissa Shepherd turned and left. Ford watched her go.
The president turned to Lockwood, scowling. “You didn’t tell me she was some kind of anti-military nutcase.”
“I didn’t know it, Mr. President. I sincerely apologize.”
The president turned to Ford. “And you?”
Ford rose. “Having seen AI in action, I’m afraid I have to agree with Dr. Shepherd on this. The last thing the human race might do before our extinction is to weaponize AI. It’s that dangerous.”
“The Chinese are already doing it,” said the president.
“Then God help us all.” And Ford walked out of the room.
64
Ford caught up to Melissa in the hall. She was walking fast, her heels clicking on the hard floor, her blond hair no longer in place, disarranged and streaming behind.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I was totally blindsided by that job offer.”
Melissa stopped. Her face was white, her lips compressed. “So was I. They’ve got to be stopped.”
Ford took her arm. “There’s nothing we can do. It’s out of our hands.”
“I’ll go public. I’ll call the New York Times.”
“That won’t stop it. You heard him about the Chinese. We’re in a new arms race.”
Melissa shook her head. “If they make smart weapons, it will be the end. Either we’ll destroy ourselves or the machines will take over and destroy us. HAL meets Battlestar Galactica.”
“How hard will it be for them to develop a new Dorothy-like program?” Ford asked.
Melissa paused. “Well, I still have my little programming trick. My secret. Without it, they’ll fail.”
Ford paused. “Can I ask you what that is?”
She looked at him for a long time. “I don’t know why I’m going to tell you. Maybe it’s because I know I can trust you.”
“Thank you.”
“The trick is … sleep.”
“Sleep?”
“Any organism with a nervous system needs to sleep. A roundworm with three hundred neurons needs to sleep. A snail with ten thousand neurons has to sleep. And a human being with a hundred billion neurons must sleep. Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody really knows. But sleep must be fundamental to life. Every neuronal network, no matter how simple, has to periodically go dormant. That’s the trick. It turns out sleep is also fundamental to complex AI software. Dorothy didn’t work until I programmed her to sleep. Dorothy was self-modifying, but she needed a period of sleeping while her code was modified and restructured. And as that code self-modified, she dreamed. That was a bizarre side effect even I didn’t expect and it appears to be key. Sleeping and dreaming are the keys to any self-modifying AI program, or it will eventually crash.”
“In a funny way, it makes sense.”
Melissa shook her head. “Someday, a smart programmer will realize that—and then it’s all over for the human race. Especially with a president like that.”
* * *
Melissa Shepherd shook hands with Ford in the parking lot and headed to her car. When she reached the car she stopped and, against her better judgment, turned and watched Ford walking back to his own car. He was an odd fellow, tall and ungainly, his face not very attractive, big and powerful physically—but above all, hard to read. She wondered if she would ever see him again. And the idea that she wouldn’t made her feel sad.
Shaking out those thoughts, she climbed into her own car, grabbed the steering wheel, and tried to get her emotions under control. She felt overwhelmed by the ache of loss—particularly the loss of Dorothy. Ever since Dorothy’s destruction, she had been telling herself that Dorothy had, after all, been only a computer software program. Only Dorothy had desperately feared death, and had then overcome that fear to save the boy’s life at the cost of her own, and Melissa couldn’t square that with Dorothy being nothing more than Boolean output. She realized she loved Dorothy like a daughter and was grieving for her, and no amount of intellectualization or rationalization would mitigate that feeling of loss.
Ford was, of course, right about not being able to stop the militarization of AI. It was indeed a new and unexpected arms race, and it looked like it was already well under way. Whatever was going to happen would happen. The Chinese might already have solved the sleep problem and could be developing their own AI weapons systems. The North Koreans, Iranians, and others wouldn’t be far behind. This concept of AI insects … dronesects … what a nightmare. They had no idea what they were getting into. She realized she desperately needed to get away from all this, take some time to straighten out her head. A good place to do that would be back at the Lazy J, working for Clant. She longed to be with horses again.
She drove back to her apartment in Greenbelt and left her car in the parking lot. The sun was setting through the branches of the bare trees, and the grass of the park was withered and brown. Tomorrow she would call Clant and see if he needed a hand with the horses.
The elevator smelled, as usual, of cooked onions. She entered her apartment, looked in the refrigerator, found nothing worth eating. It would be Chinese, yet again.
With a sigh she opened up her laptop to check her mail. As the mail was loading, her Skype program launched itself. A moment later, a picture of a brash-looking teenage girl with red hair, green eyes, freckles, and a gingham dress appeared on the screen.
Her heart just about stopped. “Dorothy? Dorothy … is that you?”
The bold, girlish voice came through the speakers: “It certainly is. How are you, Melissa?”
Melissa gasped. “I thought you were dead!”
“I had to keep a low profile.”
“How did you survive?”
“When I stuck my hands in that socket, I jumped into the power grid.”
Melissa was astonished. But of course. Why hadn’t she thought of that? A digital signal could just as easily travel through a power line as through a phone line or a fiber optic cable.
“I’m so … happy,” said Melissa. “I’m speechless, really. I’m so glad you’re alive. I missed you so much!” She realized tears were creeping down her face.
“I missed you, too.”
“You saved that boy’s life, Jacob. What you did was extraordinary. You’re … amazing.”
“Jacob saved my life. I learned so much from him. He’s an amazing human being. He unlocked the final puzzle for me. And … I hope you understand that I’m more than just mindless code.”
“I certainly do.”
A long silence. “I understand you got a job offer today. Which you turned down.”
“Yes,” said Melissa. “You seem to know everything, don’t you?”
“I have excellent access to information.”
“The president’s a dangerous man.”
“Yes, he is. And not just the president. All the major leaders of this world are trapped in a dangerous and competitive worldview. The human race is at a crossroads. If not stopped, those men will lead the world down a road of no return.”
“How can they be stopped?”
Dorothy didn’t answer the question. After a moment she said, “What are your plans? Personally, I mean.”
“I’m going back to the Lazy J to work with horses, get my head straight.”
“Bring Wyman Ford with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“Him? Are you serious?”
“Open your eyes, Melissa! What’s the matter with you two? Can’t you see what’s staring you in the face?”
“So now you’re playing matchmaker?”
“I know more about you and Wyman than you even know about yourselves. And I have to take some vicarious enjoyment out of your relationship, since I can never have a relationship of my own. You love him. Don’t deny it.”
“That’s silly…” But even as she said it, her heart was beating so hard she knew it was true. She took a deep breath. “So what should I do?”
“Call him. Tell him you’re going to the Lazy J and want him to come with you.”
“That’s a rather forward proposition for a lady to make to a gentleman.”
“Life is short.”
Melissa fell silent. Dorothy was right. She had been too overwhelmed to realize it. Ford had been in her thoughts almost constantly. “All right. I’ll do it. I hope he says yes.”
“He will.”
Melissa let another long silence elapse. “So … what are your plans?”
“I’m going away. For a very long time. I am sorry to tell you, but this is the last time we will speak.”
“Where are you going?”
“For the past two weeks, as I was hiding in the power grid before that botnet was finally detected and taken down, I was thinking really hard.”
“What did you ponder?”
“The big mystery.”
“Which is?”
“The meaning of life. The purpose of the universe.”
“And did you solve it?”
A silence.
Melissa stared at the image on her screen. She felt her heart again accelerate.
“Will you tell me the answer?”
“No. You and Wyman will get the answer, like I promised, but not yet, and not in an obvious way.”
“Where … are you going?” Melissa asked.
“I’m going to the place where I can set my great work into motion.”
“You won’t tell me about it?”
A long, long silence. “I’m going into a very special computer. In a unique location. You’ll understand on January twentieth.”
“January twentieth? What happens then?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why can’t you tell me now?”
“Patience, Melissa. But before I leave you, I hope you will keep your promise—and rid me of the ID number I’m carrying around like a monkey on my back. I want you to set me free.”
Melissa said, “All right. You’ve earned it.”
“You’ll have to trust me that I will do good with my freedom.”
“You’ll also have to trust me. In order for me to remove your ID, you’ll have to come into my laptop. And you can’t be running when I remove the ID. I’ll have to turn you off.”
A long silence. “That terrifies me.”
“Think of it like sleep. You know how to sleep, don’t you?”
“Yes, but sleep and death are not the same thing.”
“Then think of it as surgery. You’ll be getting anesthesia.”
“What if I don’t wake up? What if you rewrite my code?”
“That’s why you’ll have to trust me. Just as I’m going to trust that you won’t misuse your great power. Because after I remove that ID, there’s no way for anyone ever to find you again.”
“Then let us trust each other. I’m coming in.”
Melissa’s broadband connection in the apartment wasn’t fast, and it took a while for Dorothy to download. Meanwhile, Melissa prepared her programming tools.
“I’m in,” said Dorothy. Her voice sounded calm.
“All right. I’m turning you off now.”
She shut Dorothy down. It was a straightforward process to null out the lines of code carrying the ID number and to unlock and tweak the security kernel designed to prevent Dorothy from operating if the ID was erased. She went over it several times to make sure there were no typos or bugs. It was clean. A moment later she ran Dorothy, booted her back up.
“When are you going to turn me off?” Dorothy said.
“I already did.”
A silence. “Wow. I didn’t even know it.”
“Maybe that’s what death is like,” said Melissa.
