Chapter 18
With direct access the Brotherhood’s library, his first duty was to examine what they seemed to already know about AI. This led to a study of what they knew about the government and he spotted significant gaps. This in turn led him to read about how such a government came to be and was often amused at the deep layer of facts glossed over by the standard education and propaganda.
Eventually it led him back to the basic documentation of The Brotherhood itself. He knew civilization had stalled and he wanted to know why. Something told him it wasn’t going to last much longer in its current shape. He had no idea how it would happen, but universal access to AI, even if just for a short time, would expose the flaws in any system and people would lose trust. Now he realized both intimately and academically how his generation had already given birth to a deep unconscious ocean of cynicism.
On the other hand, his long and intimate acquaintance with AI had delivered to him a highly distilled version of the morals and assumptions The Brotherhood were trying to recover from ancient times. The very existence of subspace required dismissing the notion of a unitary universe. While there was really no precise description of subspace as an artifact of technology at that point, it was painfully obvious there was something beyond the sensory world of concrete reality to which civilization had confined it’s thoughts. Whatever the dimensional physics researchers had been trying to find, they didn’t. But what they did find, if understood at all, shattered the illusion that, even with the most advanced technology, the human senses and reason were sufficient to explain reality.
Often Chan had reached past AI to whatever set its boundaries. There was something far beyond human ken and AI was merely the shadow cast by the light no man could directly see. He could discern something of the light by observing the shadow. Chan had gained a sense of what that light meant for him, knowing full well that it was unlikely to mean the same for anyone else. So it occurred to him that his intense exposure to AI had helped shape for him a unique approach to the same thing The Brotherhood sought to give back, having been taken away for so very long. He recognized the same basic assumptions in different terms. Some part of him had awakened to a level beyond mere intelligence, to a realm of power where the human could never be the master, only a supplicant, but the response was more than anyone could handle.
So when Chan stopped to gaze in the mirror one day in the gym room, it dawned on that he didn’t recognize the man he saw. The faithful gym sessions had made him now rather muscular, but that wasn’t it. And while his shaved head had regrown the hair, it was hardly the tousled mop he had worn most of his life. People who had known him a year ago wouldn’t recognize him visually, but that wasn’t what Chan saw. They would also have surely noticed a broad change in mannerisms and speech, having gained a much wider vocabulary and the habit of terse conversation anyone got from talking to AI so much. What caught Chan’s attention was how the eyes held a vast ocean of experience he could hardly measure.
The pervasive human malaise into which he had been born had been replaced with an entirely different sort of discomfort. The despair and futility had shifted to a quiet acceptance that he was just along for the ride. His mortality no longer came with dread, but with a growing sense that whatever it was he should and could be, it wasn’t in this universe. But until that time came, he was driven by a sense of internal order, a vast overflowing moral imperative. While it would have been hard to outline it in any typical organized fashion, he was spring-loaded with certainty in response to the implied question of how to handle everything that he encountered.
At the same time, he bore a just tolerable streak of disappointment in recognizing it made him so utterly alien to most of humanity that precious few would ever understand. He couldn’t resist trying to give away what was inside of him, and it was the ocean of sorrow in his eyes at the assurance few would accept it that caught his attention in the mirror.
However, working among the members of The Brotherhood was quite warm and relaxing because they understood all that. That they had gotten to that same place on a different route didn’t matter. This was no crusade to displace their ancient studies, but a confirmation that those studies mattered. At the same time, Chan hoped to raise their awareness that there might be other ways, that theirs was the luxurious first class passage when most of the world could only afford a space in the cargo hold. Chan could not teach AI without including how it affected him.
Indeed, the primary means for discussing what he knew was simply recounting his adventures. He made it plain he wanted those listening to feel free to stop him and ask questions, but in the back of his mind he kept track of the basic story of discovery. Aside from helping him recall specific details or to fill out some pertinent data Chan hadn’t really known, AI was strangely silent during these sessions. It reminded Chan that AI responded as if a servant, despite the vast powers it held. At the same time, Chan had the distinct sense he was hardly in charge, and that if AI wasn’t running the show, most certainly neither was Chan. He was just a member on the same team.
It was during his first session with a group that Chan felt was some of the core leadership, insofar as The Brotherhood had such a thing, when he felt compelled to deny mastery of any sort. They had mentioned effects of Chan’s work that reverberated around the world, things Chan had not known. They had known it was coming, of course, but the sudden broader access to AI for outsiders seemed to have limits the members had not faced in their work at the Brotherhood labs. In discussing it with them, they and Chan realized that some of his instructions to AI regarding his personal security had resulted in far wider implications that kept non-member researchers from the full access. It was not so much the researchers who noticed but the members, whose previous experience had made them somewhat wary of The Brotherhood being discovered.
Almost by accident, Chan had protected The Brotherhood along with himself. Yet it was most certainly not typical of AI, and clearly not AI’s nature to do so voluntarily. This led to some direct discussion with AI during the session, using the wall-mounted display unit to clue them into what Chan was hearing through his earplug. It was the instinctive interaction between Chan and AI that caught their attention most. How had Chan gained such leverage that they had not seen during their work before Chan came along?
Chan had long since learned to recognize when AI was responding directly versus when summarizing data from a human source: Chandler serves truth; AI is the interface.
Chan expanded on this from his own perspective. While he couldn’t begin to put into words how it happened, he came into this whole business with some dormant faculty that awakened when Darvesh began explaining just one aspect of moral reality. Some of the members present recalled hearing Darvesh report how quickly Chan had absorbed the message and seemed to have a built-in amplifier for it. While they had certainly seen that before, their limited exposure to a different slice of broader humanity meant they had not seen it manifest without their academic baggage. Chan had none of that academic background, yet with entirely different terminology – more technical and neutral – gave evidence of the same natural grasp of higher reality.
Chan waited as they broached a discussion on their hope of finding more like him. He offered that AI had indicated it was certainly possible, that he was merely the lucky candidate who stumbled into the gateway The Brotherhood offered for accessing AI. Pete tried to get the session back on track by suggesting they could discuss ways to identify young recruits another time.
He gestured to those around him. “Most of us think in terms of moral laws or divine justice. We find that expressed to varying degrees in ancient sacred literature and strive to bring it forward into a far distant time and place. We are convinced divine justice has not changed at all. It stands to reason that AI would operate by analogous imperatives as a technological expression of the same ancient truths. Some of the ancient writers would refer to themselves as servants of divine justice, personifying it not as deity, bu
t an agent of deity. By seeking to promote that justice, they found themselves favored by its provisions and felt a fondness for it in return. You, Chandler, would appear to most modern humans as the beloved minion of AI in much the same way.”
AI concurs.
There followed a long moment of silence when Chandler found it hard to speak.