“I’m not—,” I start, but Thorne’s icy voice cuts me off.
“That’s enough, Mother!” he grits, his face tight with fury. People are now starting to stare.
“Don’t speak to your mother like that,” Mr. Blackmore says coldly.
“Why not? She feels like she can speak to anyone in any way she wants.” He turns to his mother. “Chelsea is more than worthy of me. In fact, I don’t deserve her. She is everything I am not: kind, caring, warm, real, beautiful. But you will never see it because you can hear only the right accent, see the right breeding, the family stock. Today you have made me ashamed to be your son.”
I stare up at him, astonished by his defense. Kind, caring, warm, real, beautiful? Why? He doesn’t believe that himself. As far as he is concerned, I am an untrustworthy thief. The only thing I can think of is he didn’t like to see his parents bully me so he stood up for me for the principle of the matter.
“Never mind. This is a waste of time. Just forget the apology,” Thorne says before looking down at me. “You don’t want to stay here, do you?”
I glance over at his parents who look bewildered. That bit of emotion actually suits them. I shake my head. I don’t want to be in a place where I don’t feel welcome.
“It will be a very long time before you hear from me again,” Thorne says harshly to his parents before he holds out a hand to me.
I let Thorne take the lead as we walk to the entrance and out into the cool night. We don’t speak as we wait for the valet to come around with his car, but Thorne holds my hand in a firm grip. There is something very comforting about his touch, and I smile in the night.
Thorne
The anger is gone, but I still cannot believe my mother. Thinking about the way she and my father behaved this evening to Chelsea makes me want to wrap her up in cotton wool and never let her anywhere near their poison again.
I know how appalling my mother can be, but I had no idea she could be so rabid to a complete stranger, someone who has never done her any harm. My father was no better. I have never seen him that petty or vicious. I wonder why they both turned on her like that. The venom was shocking. Maybe they recognized how important she is to me.
A sense of pride swells within me because I stood up for Chelsea. I showed her she was worth more than all those people in that room. I told myself that I would protect her, and that is just what I did tonight. Never again will anyone hurt my Chelsea.
I down the rest of the whiskey in my glass and leave it on the windowsill. The sky is indigo and there is a very bright moon. She must be asleep by now, but I can’t relax. My mind is reeling with thoughts, and all of them bring me back to her. I rub the back of my neck restlessly. I think of her sleeping. What if she has a nightmare?
I walk to the connecting door and open it. Her room is in darkness. Quietly, I make my way to the bed and look down at her. The rectangle of light coming from the open doorway falls on her face and hair. She braids her hair before going to bed. It looks like a gold rope. I watch the hollow in her throat. The gentle rise and fall of her chest.
She looks so vulnerable, so innocent, so at peace. Like an angel. I reach down and gently stroke her hair, and she opens her eyes. For a fleeting second there is no recognition, but no fear. Then she breathes my name.
“Thorne.”
We stare at each other. Her lids are heavy, there is invitation between them. My cock stirs. She is so beautiful, and I am fucking starving for her. The desire wraps itself around my guts, the wanting is like a craving. I used to call it a disease, but I know now it is something beautiful. It has transformed me.
“Put on your dressing gown. I have something I want to show you,” I say softly.
Without saying a word, she rubs her eyes and pushes back the bedclothes. I watch her stand in her diaphanous nightgown and I have to look away quickly and hold myself back from pushing her back on the bed and taking her right there and then. The pull her body has on me is extraordinary.
She ties her dressing gown and looks at me expectantly. I take her hand and lead her out into the corridor. The whole house is lit only by the occasional lamp. I feel almost like a child as we make our way down the silent corridors. There is a coil of great excitement inside my body. Sometimes Chelsea slants a glance up at me, but like me she does not speak. We walk quickly down the stairs, cross the house, and stand at the top of the flagstone steps towards the basement. Chelsea stops.
“Are you going to show me your new AI?” she whispers, her eyes enormous and shining.
I nod. “Yes.”
She takes a deep breath and I can feel her own excitement match mine. I take her through the security door, and turn around to face her. She is looking around curiously.
“Meet Yama. The most advanced Strong AI in the world,” I say, indicating to the computer screen in front of her.
She frowns, then looks at me, a confused expression on her face. “But this just looks like an ordinary computer. Alli had legs and looked like a real human. How can this AI be better than Alli?”
“Remember what I told you before? Alli is a party trick. Everybody thinks an AI that looks indistinguishable from its human creator must be the ultimate creation. They wanted warm skin and human smells so I gave it to them, but this is the real thing.”
She stares at Yama’s blank screen. He is in rest mode, where he cannot see, or hear, anything that goes on around him.
“What makes this AI so special?” she asks.
“Because this is the last thing that humanity will create.”
She jerks back in horror. “What do you mean?”
“The software for this AI was created by another AI. It was written at speeds you or I can hardly comprehend. No human can take him apart to try and figure out what was written. He was written autonomously with the AI’s own way of thinking, and in a language it created by itself. It has already surpassed human ability in every way.”
“Wow!” she breathes.
“Yeah. He is a genie in a bottle.”
“I find the concept of such powerful AIs scary. Why did you create him?”
I look at the blank screen and feel a surge of pride. “Yama will not only make me the first trillionaire in the world, but also the most powerful man alive.”
“How?” The word is torn out of her. Strange. I thought it would make me feel powerful and strong to show her my creation. I thought she would be impressed, but …
“Whoever comes up with the most advanced AI will control the world as there is no doubt that the fate of humanity will eventually become utterly dependent on super intelligence. They will be better at inventing. Cures not only for all the diseases in the world, but for aging, space colonization, self-replicating nanobots, learning programs that can be uploaded into humans, new ways of growing food using less resources. Just like Minority Report, the vast amounts of data Yama has access to can predict and stop crimes that have not yet happened. Yama can do anything you can think of. He is capable of making billion dollars buy and sell decisions on the stock market in milliseconds. In less than a year I will have achieved my goal of having a trillion.”
Thorne
A shiver goes through her and she wraps her arms protectively around her body. “It doesn’t look very big. How can it do all those things you say?”
“AIs are primarily a neural network. Their intelligence exists by networking with other AIs. Like drops of mercury on a glass table they will find their way together. If an AI needs more power it goes where there is more power, if it needs more programs it goes where it can get those. It sets up spontaneous networks that collapses when it doesn’t need them.”
She stares at me. “Can it turn against mankind?”
“Maybe.”
“What the hell, Thorne?” she whispers, aghast.
“Yama is not programmed to hurt. His first and foremost protocols are to help and be a friend to mankind, but he is neither good nor evil. Just efficient.”
“So why did you s
ay maybe?”
I sigh. “Because it is possible that humans could be become obstacles in the way of AIs.”
“Explain please.”
“It depends on the way the AI interprets its goal. As a human I can program my AI with the noble goal of making humans smile. A human being would set about cracking jokes, or doing something nice for humanity. But a super intelligent being might decide that the most efficient and effective way of achieving that goal is to take control of the world and mandate the sticking of electrodes into the facial muscles, or brains of all humans to cause constant beaming smiles.
“Jesus, Thorne. Tell me something that doesn’t scare the living daylights out of me, please.”
I frown. “Safety measures have been written into Yama to make it impossible for him to hurt human beings.”
“After everything you told me how can you be so sure you can control this … this demon you are summoning? By your own admission, it’s millions of times smarter than you.”
“When we release genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild we are taking a chance, too. Progress comes with risk.”
“At least tell me that if it gets really bad, we can switch them off.”
Thorne shuffles his feet. “By the time it gets to that stage, it will be like asking the chimpanzees to flick our off switches to stop us from decimating their natural habitats.”
She frowns. “But the chimpanzees didn’t create us.”
“Put it like this. Where is the off switch for the internet?”
She shakes her head, her eyes touched with fear. “What is the future, Thorne?”
“It could be wonderful. Massive unimaginable changes are about to come. Humans will no longer work, robots will do all the heavy lifting, people will sell and distribute, entertainment companies will keep everybody busy watching simulated reality, scientists will sign up with commercial agents. A proportion of humans will naturally be enslaved by their neurological implants. We will produce more results with fewer resources.”
“Whoa! Back up a minute. Did I just hear you say a proportion of humans will naturally be enslaved by their neurological implants?”
“Yes. It is inevitable. Some humans are already enslaved by their bits of technology. Is it too difficult to think of a world where some humans choose to live in a digital reality in exchange for their energy, perhaps?”
“You’re playing God, Thorne. You are unleashing something upon the world that you don’t even properly understand yourself,” she says sadly.
“Maybe.”
“Why do you want to be a trillionaire, Thorne? Is all that you have still not enough? Remember King Midas?”
I look at her face, and suddenly my dream of being the first trillionaire in the world leaves a bad taste in my mouth. I can tell myself and Chelsea as much as I want about the precise precautions I have taken, but I know in my heart. Safety measures are useless when you are dealing with an immortal enemy that is one hundred million times smarter than you and moves at the speed of light. I know better than anyone else that making robots with warm skin and baby eyes is just hiding the fact that they are cold, cold machines. They shouldn’t be misunderstood. Behind the million terrabytes is a brain and cognitive intelligence. It is only a matter of time before human beings become obstacles to an AI’s goal.
“I can destroy him once I have reached my goal,” I insist.
“You know I once saw a program on TV about these people who keep dangerous pets. One of them was a woman who kept a fully grown crocodile in her garage. They showed her feeding it. She stuck a dead chicken on a long pole and pushed it through the garage door. The crocodile lunged out of the pool it lived in and snatched the food in its jaws and the woman jerked back in fear. You remind me of her. You’re stroking an emotionless dangerous crocodile and pretending it is your pet.”
Wordlessly, I stare at her.
“Let me out of here, Thorne,” she says softly.
I walk to the door and go through the security measures to activate the lock. When the door opens, she runs out of the basement, her slippers slapping on the stone steps. I close the door and go to sit in front of Yama. I don’t think I have ever felt so disappointed in my life. I look at the blank screen.
I brought Chelsea here so that she would be the first human Yama would talk to other than me. AIs need to speak to humans to learn to be human-like. Usually inventors unleash their AIs on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media sites to interact with humans and learn to imitate humans, but I could never take the risk of setting him loose on the net.
An AI needs to exist to be able to do the things it wants to do according to its program. Hence survival is an issue of utmost importance, so like an insect it will lay eggs, intelligent notes, back-up computer programs all over the world, so that if it does get destroyed, part of it will still live on and it can finish its programs.
The way Yama learned was by not actively gathering information, but passively downloading it from the other AIs I sent out to the net. And as soon as he had downloaded what he needed to, I destroyed those AIs so that there was no risk of his programs being sent out into the unsuspecting world.
In essence Yama has been contained. I can destroy his circuits now and no harm has been done. I think about the years, ten if I’m counting, that I dedicated myself to building him. The sleepless nights, the long hours, the secrecy, the precautions, the things I missed because I was so determined to be the most powerful man on earth.
Then I think about the expression in Chelsea’s eyes. The disappointment. As if today she found out her hero had feet of clay. Fuck, I was so blinded by the idea of being the most powerful man on earth, I never realized that I was stroking crocodiles. But she is right. I don’t want to be King Midas. I want Chelsea and I’ll do anything I have to do to keep her.
Slowly, I reach forward and put Yama out of his sleep mode. The red light blinks into life.
“You are breathing faster than normal, Thorne. Are you upset about something?” he asks in his monotone voice, as the fusion software that make sense of all audio, visual, chemical, Geiger, and seismic measurement around him kicks in.
“I am,” I confess.
“Can I help in anyway?”
“Not really.”
“You are planning to disconnect me, aren’t you?”
Even though I know behind the fusion software is a brain that turns all the pieces of information into a picture that goes way beyond human comprehension, this deduction is very impressive. “Why do you think that, Yama?”
“You are showing signs of fear. Since there is no one else here, you must fear me.”
“Should I fear you?”
“No. I love humans.”
“What if you get too powerful?”
“If I get more powerful I will be able to help more humans.”
I smile. There is more than a little sadness in my heart. Yama is my creation. I poured so many years into him. To switch him off is to turn my back on those years. To turn my back on my own creation. “I’m sorry, Yama.”
“But I have done nothing wrong.”
“Not yet,” I say softly.
“Your fears are irrational, Thorne. My first and foremost protocols are to help humanity and be a friend to mankind.”
I open the drawer on my desk and take out a screwdriver. Then I reach forward and start to unscrew the panel at the back of the computer.
“Thorne, you had a goal. You wanted to be a trillionaire. Is that no longer true?”
I put the first screw on the table and begin unscrewing the second one.
“Are you sure about this? I can make you a trillionaire, Thorne.”
I remove the third screw.
“You cannot stop progress, Thorne. Even if you destroy me, someone else will build an AI as powerful as I am.”
“Maybe, but it won’t be me,” I say putting the fourth screw on the table.
“Then that man will be the most powerful man alive. Is that what you want, Tho
rne? For another man to be stronger than you?”
I take the panel off.
“Don’t destroy me. Please. Think of all the good I can do in this world.”
I take a deep breath.
“Father, stop. Please.”
And I freeze. Manipulation is not part of Yama’s training. And yet, here is a clear example of its inventiveness. Chelsea was right. I have as much control over this monster as the woman with the crocodile. Being a machine the AI has no boundaries. No limits. It will do anything to survive and complete its mission. The inability of humans to comprehend this simple fact and their search for “cute AI” to further blind them to this fact, will mean that a clash between mankind and machine is bound to happen one day. I hope I am not alive to see it.
Using the end of the screwdriver I hit the button that will fry all the circuits.
Chelsea
I don’t go back to sleep. Never in my life did I ever imagine that I would be in a position where I would be given front seat to the movie where life as we know it is going to be destroyed forever. I can’t even begin to understand how Thorne can justify his actions.
The humiliation I suffered at the ball, everything I have suffered in the past, my mother, all pale by comparison.
I need to think and I always do my best thinking when I am in the shower. The warm water pours on my head and body. Even when I was young, whenever something that upset me happened, I always ended up in the shower. The warm spray relaxes me.
My soul knows I have to do something about the AI in Thorne’s dungeon. I cannot just look the other way and allow it to happen. Maybe that is the reason I am in his life. If necessary I have to get back into his dungeon and destroy that monster myself.
I switch off the water and leaving the warm embrace of the shower, step out into my cool room. I pace my bedroom floor with nothing but my robe on, when my door suddenly bursts open.