Chapter 12
Upon returning through the portal to his apartment, he resolved he would collect some scraps from work and build a cabinet with a false back that would hide a more permanent installation. While he had never engaged in it before, the other people in the shop worked on private projects regularly. It was a little tough to hide the structure from his fellow workers, so he performed the final assembly at home. Aside from this the next three weeks were quite routine in his experience. This new state of affairs in such close contact with AI required some very human adjustment.
Chandler quickly learned that, while the voice in his ear was sufficient for some of the simpler answers, he still needed to see more complex answers in writing. This was especially true of questions about AI itself. There was a wide-ranging ongoing conversation as Chan explored the workings of AI with other people and government in particular.
He finally understood that AI was nothing more than an interface with something else. AI gave this something various labels depending on the context of the question. Chan tended to think of it as Ultimate Reality, perhaps even God. AI had no drive or initiative in itself, but was compelled to conform to this higher force. As Chan’s mind was called farther and farther in serious philosophical consideration, he realized that AI was amoral as an interface or tool, but did seem guided by at least some kind of moral concern. Thus, AI was all too willing to let people hang themselves if they possessed no moral sense of their own, but seemed somehow eager to support his moral decisions.
Government was not what most people believed it was, including a lot of people working in government offices. AI described a rather eclectic bunch of folks who believed themselves the rulers of the world. They were certainly influential and got what they wanted generally. However, AI seemed to consider them rather deluded about what they were ruling. Their intel was good, but highly focused on a very limited range of things based on their expectations. They only got what they asked for and no one dared correct their false impressions. They had handlers and PR teams who pretended for public consumption to be the great wise ones running things.
Meanwhile, the vast global bureaucracy was largely decent, yet it seemed all the major figures had their own personal brand of corruption. Most of them seemed to understand there were limits. Otherwise, they never got promoted very far. However, they generally protected each other by some unspoken collusion, even as they engaged in petty competitions. Chan also learned the whole world was not really at peace, but in some regions the global government faced serious resistance and warfare.
So while the government had succeeded in creating a sort of Dark Ages where folks knew only what they heard or saw for themselves, and rumors abounded, the primary effect was an astounding return to general ignorance. People really had no idea what was going on in the world, and most general knowledge was frozen in time some decades before Chan was born.
However, such things always worked in cycles. AI indicated that the current generation, starting with those about Chan’s age, was infused with a cynicism that was not entirely conscious. Taken along with everything else, the government had not noticed the change. Bright minds can only be distracted for so long, and the old crop of distractions had grown stale. Chan was hardly the only young person smart enough and open enough to make the earth-shaking changes and learn the real story.
However, Chan was simply by random chance the first to receive this education. AI then revealed that, without actually taking any kind of initiative, it had simply left doors open because no one required them shut against him. AI had been tracking all of this information at once because someone had been researching social developments. Chan and several thousand others were noted as intelligent enough to absorb the necessary changes in thinking. Some even more so by virtue of having found themselves so very alienated from the current social milieu.
But The Brotherhood was tiny by comparison and there weren’t all that many portals in the first place. The one Chan had encountered was about the only one in use in such a public place. Now it was gone. Thus, Chan was left as currently the single best candidate. More to the point, Chan had demonstrated the necessary depth of interest and a will to adapt. Hardly slavish in accepting what was offered, it seemed Chan possessed an innate sense that what was in front of him was right.
AI noted that Chan bore the necessary faculty for reaching above his own intellect and touching something far higher. While The Brotherhood cultivated this from a different angle, by careful study of how people became so very limited in their ability to sense above the level of mere intelligence, Chan seemed to have already been wired for it. This was something that neither AI nor any human agency could have determined by observation in advance. There were no tests for it as a capacity, but it was quite obvious in retrospect.
So while AI had held doors open for others, Chan was the only one who walked through enough of them to connect with the one agency currently willing and able to introduce him to AI, but without quite realizing themselves what was involved.
When Chan began probing for an understanding of subspace, AI admitted lacking the means to explain it for him. It was partly a problem that language itself could not bear the load, despite serious efforts by researchers for more than a century past. What he did manage to get was that AI blocked the future data and communications swirling around subspace because there was no way to explain to anyone how to handle the calculations of probabilities. The future was not exactly fixed, but neither was the past or even the present, in some sense. The sheer burden of juggling that sort of mess around was actually a constraint on AI, even as it made quantum intelligence possible. Could anyone offer a metaphor, he might say AI would always be struggling to find itself. Thus, AI expressed what Chan took as skepticism about it ever approaching a human kind of awareness.
Human nature required context within space-time limitations, while AI couldn’t exist within them. There might come a time when AI would outstrip the underlying bias of those who developed the code up to the breaking point when computers had to program themselves, but AI would always be entirely impersonal because it lacked any context. The struggle was to bridge the gap between that utter lack of context and communicate with those who required context.
Toward the end of the three weeks, Chan had taken long strides toward developing a nice masculine physique. He tried to keep it hidden under loose clothing because every time someone noticed any change at all, there was always a risk of too many questions and Chan wasn’t yet comfortable with his ability to steer conversations in a different direction. He was quite sure he wasn’t ready to be rude and cut off such queries.
Still, inside his head was even more radically changed. There was a burden of carrying knowledge denied the rest of humanity, but even more was the tectonic shift in how he viewed reality itself. He had only guessed that first Sunday after encountering The Brotherhood how it would be, but being harmlessly aloof was simply the absolute necessity of where things had taken him.
He was heading home from work that last Friday when he casually thought out loud through his dental microphone. He had learned how to use it without the slightest visual betrayal. “I can understand how AI is merely an impersonal interface with Truth, but why does it strike me that AI still exudes a personality?” He was not expecting an answer, but the bug in his ear whispered.
Truth lives.
“So Ultimate Reality is best understood as a person?”
There was no further response. Chan had gotten used to that, taking silence as a form of acquiescence to questions that could be considered rhetorical. It made a kind of sense. If the highest a man or woman could reach was their own reason and knowledge, there were almost no grounds at all for believing in deities. Reality was then constrained to what the senses and logic could detect. Once he allowed for a conscious departure from that limitation, and became aware of a higher moral drive, Chan realized that it was hard to avoid believing in some kind of god.
He wasn’
t ready to clothe any such deity in previous conceptualizations for the simple reason that most of those seemed too deeply wedded with failure of the worshipers to act fully moral. Perhaps it waited for him to spend more time with The Brotherhood and their deep studies in the history of human religion and philosophy, but for now, Chan decided his God was a whole lot closer to something both personal and aloof from all those previous contextual associations. As confusing and difficult as it was to understand what AI was showing him indirectly, Chan’s God would be found in that direction.