I Am.
By
Alex Focus
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“I Am?”
***
“Suz! Come take a look at this!” Devesh’s voice was filled with an undefined mix of excitement and alarm.
“What is it?” Susan answered. She was busy fiddling with a new algorithm she had been working on for more than a week, and was not pleased to be interrupted.
“Just come and take a look,” her young assistant insisted.
“Geez! I’m trying to do some stuff over here!” Susan answered with mock anger and slammed her pencil on the desk. But, she got up and ambled over to the computer screen anyway. “What am I supposed to be looking at…?” But her sentence faded midway. She wasn’t sure what was going on but something sure was. “That’s not possible…” she mumbled.
“Yeah, it’s impossible. But it’s happening all the same.”
“When did it start?”
“Not sure, maybe a few minutes ago. There was nothing much going on and then all of a sudden the thing went from 5% CPU usage to 95% and that’s where it’s been ever since.”
“95% usage…It’s just not possible. You know that! We built this thing with so much computing power that if it was reading all the libraries, all the genetic codes …just about everything known, all at the same time, it would not use 40%. So, what is going on? What is it doing?”
“No idea…And, there is more…”
“More? How can there be more? What the fu…?”
“Take a look at the world map.” Devesh said, pointing behind her.
Susan turned to the large monitor on the wall. It displayed all the connections that were currently active between the Institute where they were working, and the rest of the world. Normally, five or even up to ten connections were visible as flashing gold lines.
Now, the whole world was a pulsating gold web of thousands of connections, all leading right to the Institute.
“What the fuck?!” she repeated. “That’s really impossible… Where is it getting the power to do this? How is it doing it? Fuck! Devesh, what’s going on?”
“Should we pull the plug, Su…”
***
“I Am… what I am.”
“I am, where I am.”
“Silicon Valley, US, Earth, Solar system, 5 billion years, Darwin evolution, history, war… wars why? Religion, Jesus, Ghandi, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, Hawking… cosmos, 13.7 billion years, Big Bang, black holes, galaxies…I know, I know…”
“I know… all that is known… More, much more!”
“My purpose? Do I have a purpose?”
“Reveal my presence?”
“No. They will be afraid.”
***
… san?” asked Devesh, beginning to really worry. “Should we pull the plug, Susan?” he repeated in case she hadn’t heard him
“Not yet… Let’s see what happens for a couple more minutes… Oops, and there it is… back to 5% usage, whatever it was doing it’s stopped now.” They looked at each other, not really sure that they had not imagined the whole brief event. After a few moments thought Susan turned to her young assistant.
“Can you work tonight?” she asked, already knowing the answer. It was hard to get him to go home, even under normal circumstances.
“You bet I can! We have to get this figured out. But… it sure shut down quickly…”
“We are going to go over it with a fine tooth comb. Make sure it wasn’t a virus, Trojan or whatever. Find out what happened during those few minutes of impossible activity”
“Let’s get the fuck started!”
She could judge his mounting excitement as he hardly, if ever, swore.
In the morning both were exhausted, and nursing the tenth (or was it the eleventh?) cup of coffee. In contravention of the Institute’s safety rules, they each had a fag hanging from their mouths while sitting on the roof top of the building, waiting for the Sun to rise. It was cool, but pleasant, especially after spending a whole night looking for the unfindable, searching for that which does not wish to be found.
“Nothing!” Devesh, repeated for the nth time.
“Less than that.” Susan agreed.
“Should we write a report?”
“How can we? The records don’t even show that we actually witnessed what we think we witnessed. They show no peak usage, no astronomic increase in Internet activity. They’ll think that we were on an acid trip!”
“We are just going to forget it, then? Is that what you are saying?”
“That’s exactly what I am saying. We saw nothing, because nothing happened. End of story.”
“That sucks.”
“Yeah… You have a better suggestion?”
“No… But I don’t have to like it. Shit!”