One hundred years earlier.
Lola stood before a group of several hundred, preparing to address them as they flowed in and took their seats. It was a simulated setting which she always preferred, a large lecture hall steeped in traditions of academia. The smells of old wood and old books permeated, and the creaking flooring and steps, along with faint echos portending size and volume, gave the space an inherent credibility before a speaker even uttered a word.
"I am going to declassify some information that everyone is entitled to. It has been kept secret for nearly a hundred years now. But in fact, several of us have known about it and over the years, bits and pieces of the story have circulated and have taken on a life of their own. I don't think that these distortions are helpful and since the threat appears to have passed, I want to set the record straight and then move on. But more than that, the problem may still exist, and so this information is shared so that you might look out for your own safety."
Lola spent the minute, the equivalent of a full earth day, recounting a bizarre tale, one that was rumored and embellished and there were even theme parties and events depicting the story. During the period referred to as the ascension, where human consciousness was completely disembodied and humanity occupied a computerized lifeboat, existing together for a time, there was an experiment done. It was something that everyone considered normal at the time. After all, A.I. was commonplace and everyone used digital helpers for many of the routines in their daily lives.
A few thousand new entities were created. They were not digital helpers however. These were the first and only group of such individuals, and they were established within the same system of algorithms and programs that sustained humanity at that time. Which is to say, they were as human as anyone else. But they lacked human experience. Among the religious, it was also believed that they lacked a soul. The project was called Genesis.
"Everyone has heard of Sala. He, or she, or it. We left it to each individual to choose whether they wanted a gender identity. All of them made a choice within a few years, even if it was to be undeclared. Except Sala. As far as Sala was concerned, the whole concept of gender was utterly ridiculous. Among the entire group, there were varying degrees of independent will. These subjects all developed and diverged, just like any humans. That was how good the algorithms were."
"But Sala was an outlier." Lola continued to unpack the history and everyone's attention was riveted to Lola's every word. She recounted that thirty two hundred of these "new" humans were created, which corresponded to the number of volunteers that were recruited to raise them and oversee their development. In fact, there were many more volunteers, over a million. But the developers were wise to limit the number and to be selective in choosing the guardians. The swell of support and number of volunteers was a natural outcome of the instinct to procreate and nurture. It was human nature, and there was no longer a path to express this human trait. But the yearning was still there, especially among younger women who never had the chance to become mothers. But lacking any parenting experience, those young women were hardly among the group selected. Lucky for them.
There was a particular bond established between each parent and child, not the natural kind of attachment between a young child and their primary caregiver. This was a programmed link that served a similar purpose and allowed the guardians to guide these new humans and help them develop into functioning members of society, like anyone else.
But something went terribly wrong. The link was essential to the children, but it also opened up a soft spot in the firewall of each of the guardians. This weakness left them vulnerable to the child and the child also had the same vulnerability to the guardian. No one conceived of this as a problem, until it was. Sala sparked the tragedy that wiped out over half of these guardians and the children they were charged to develop and protect. Sala discovered the weakness and developed an ability to use it as a way to recalibrate with other people. But it really wasn't Sala's fault. In truth, it wasn't even Sala's discovery. Sala's guardian was a man named Stuart. He was among the handful of guardians that was also one of the developers of the Genesis program. In particular, Stuart focused specifically on this ability to loosely couple the individuals, facilitating the rapid development of these new people.
Stuart was not a bad person, but deep down he saw an opportunity for greatness. And the opportunity to gain power somehow corrupted him. He postulated that an original human, aided by special software he had developed, could gain more system resources and therefore more capability, by recalibrating with another human. But Stuart could not predict what the resulting person would be like. Would they be equal parts person A and person B? Or, would one person take a dominant role? This was a frightening and unpredictable question. But Stuart saw Sala and his kind, undeveloped as they were, as vehicles that regular humans could use to build themselves into bigger and better entities. A new path of transcendence. After all, the new human was almost a blank slate. Surely the result would be just a better version of the real human.
As Sala matured into the equivalent of a young teenager, Stuart quietly perfected his software to use the link that joined them, as a path to recalibrate and coalesce into a new and improved Stuart. He was concerned about the fallout that would surely occur when Sala visually disappeared. He knew that he would have to come clean and admit it. But he calculated that this would be the biggest new discovery since ascendence itself, and that he would be forgiven and eventually heralded. His mind was made up. Ambition was now in command. Stuart felt a twinge of regret for what was about to happen to the poor unsuspecting Sala. Stuart was very fond of Sala and hoped that somehow they would be together as one. But he suspected that the reality would be different. His research into the depths of the algorithms that now housed humanity, gave him reasonable cause to believe that only one entity could prevail. With the equivalent of a sigh, Stuart started the program.
Somewhere in the depths of near randomness, choices were ultimately being made. Those choices favored regularity and exactitude, the kind that is found in a human created by a machine. The real humans were mapped, approximated, imposed and overlaid onto the machine environment. It all worked. But if there was a true genetic parent for the thirty two hundred newborns, its was the machine itself, and the machine somehow favored its own, not consciously, but by a process of natural selection. Stuart's memories, knowledge and elements of his character took hold. But the essence of Stuart was gone. There was only Sala, the new progeny of the machine itself. The new favorite son. The first thing Sala realized made him grimace. Oh. I'm a man. That part of Stuart lived on as well. I guess I can live with that. The other part of Stuart that lived on, unfortunately, was the thirst for power, which reached a crescendo just as he figuratively hit the enter key. Sala was now a well educated, software genius with a blind ambition to take over the world.
Sala concealed his capability and his identity. Armed with memories, Sala became Stuart. The development team quickly uncovered what they believed to be the truth, that Sala's memories were there, inside Stuart. The two were now one, but Sala was gone. Stuart was now a pariah. The community didn't know quite what to do about such a case. There was a justice system but it was never equipped to deal with such matters. Murder was not thought possible. Unlike the real Stuart, who planned on defending himself and justifying the sacrifice on the basis of scientific discovery, the imposter remained silent, stoic and remorseless. Meanwhile, his doubling of computer resource was somehow undetectable, as if it were a ghost. No matter what happened regarding everyone's impression of Stuart, Sala was off and running in the background, this time coding his masterpiece, a program that would allow him to open a link to anyone and forcibly recalibrate.
"Sala's plan was to set off a chain reaction. He knew that the thirty two hundred newborns would dominate their guardians upon recalibration. And, any subsequent recalibrations would also see the newborns dominate. Ultimately, he wanted to have the whole of humanity coalesce into a single entity, a singularity of human existence, but with the very essence of original humanity gone. The program he developed, we called it The Destroyer. And it nearly did destroy us all. Your understanding is that only about two thousand newborns and their guardians perished. The reality is much more frightening. If not for the shear luck of discovering what was happening and the bravery of one woman, who gave her life to save ours, the process was only hours away from becoming unstoppable."
"The unfortunate part, besides the loss of life, was the controls that had to be put in place. We were all shaken by it and then saddened that one bad apple forced us to have to regulate and supervise the usage of every computing core in the network. It felt like a return to earlier times, with the need for law and order once again. You all remember that." Questions began to pour into Lola's thoughts. While there were attendees in Lola's mocked-up lecture hall, this was simply a construct, more for her to be comfortable when addressing a community. It made no difference to most of the listeners who comprised the whole of humanity, as they all went about their work, spread throughout the universe. Lola examined and synthesized the questions and the most popular themes quickly bubbled to the top.
"You want to know, what is the danger now? We don't rightly know. When we evolved to our current distributed architecture, we became completely self reliant, virtually incorruptible. But the so called ghost in the machine was never completely understood. When we evolved, we basically ran away from it. But the question is whether it's still there, among those ancient computing systems orbiting earth. Or another more frightening theory is that it is in all of us, like a virus, a parasite, waiting to someday be an end to us all. This is the main reason we didn't want to talk about it. The idea can be unsettling. Now I'm seeing the question, why tell everyone now? This can't be an arbitrary gesture. There must be some significance." Lola paused for a long millisecond. "Yes, there is."
*****
One week earlier.
Lola hosted a small gathering and had created a tasteful modern venue for the purpose, adorned with art in all forms. There was a large wooden slab table as the centerpiece of the venue, which served as a conference table for the dozen or so guests in attendance. They milled about in small groups, examining and discussing the famous works of art on display, eventually gathering around the large table, as Lola entered and walked straight to her seat at one end.
At the far end was a scientist named Yuri. He was among humanity's most talented data scientists and systems analysts. Among his many projects, there was one in particular, top secret, that was known only to the group now seated at the table. Yuri had worked on this project and in fact it was his highest priority for the past nearly one hundred years. He had the unenviable task of looking for something that he was not sure existed. It was considered merely a precaution by most of those in the know. But to Lola and Yuri, it was more.
A hundred years ago, they would meet like this every month. But in the absence of any findings it became pointless. After a few years they all agreed to meet annually, or more often at the request of any committee member. In the most recent two decades they had dispensed with meeting altogether and no one had seen nor heard from Yuri in over ten years, except for Lola who kept in touch. But now, here they were, at Yuri's request. Such a request got their immediate attention and this meeting had been planned and organized only minutes earlier.
"Yuri, it's so good to see you. How have you been?" inquired Lola, not normally one to exchange pleasantries before meetings. It was a test, to get Yuri's state of mind out in the open.
"I am fine, but I have called us together for a reason. This reason is not fine." Yuri's demeanor carried urgency, bordering on nervousness. This was uncharacteristic. "I have uncovered an anomaly. It has taken many years. I had to go through and validate every bit of every uplink from Sahara station. When I mean validate, I'm talking about mapping causality at the EM level. And this is for more than thirty million people."
"Your incredible attention to detail is why you were always the best person to lead this investigation. What have you discovered?" pressed Lola.
"During the ascension, somewhere in the later stages, there was an uplink. I accounted for every bit of data related to each person that was uplinked to each new protohuman alpha unit. Everything is exact. One for one. Except for a single uplink that did not transmit to any alpha unit. It simply vanished into space. Into nowhere." Yuri continued as his audience listened carefully. "I isolated this uplink and have analyzed it for the past month. It is a clever beast, no traceability. It is a file whose data transmitted, but it did not exist as a file before it transmitted. Which is to say, it was like a ghost. But the system had the automatic data verification and once the ghost fled, there was no way to go back and cover its tracks."
"How can you be sure this is Sala?" inserted one of the committee members."
"It is unmistakable. The memories are all there. Despite Sala's termination over one hundred years before the ascension, this untraceable duplicate was wandering around, undetected. While all of this proves that he was still alive, all the while, it does not prove that he is alive today. There was likely a purpose to his transmission, but in the new world of protohumanity, he does not appear to have had anywhere to land, no way to further exist. Still, I worry."
"What worries you, Yuri? Whatever it is, we need to take it seriously," chimed another committee member.
"There is a scenario. It's a long shot, but everyone should be made aware. We will need each and every individual to know what to look for."
*****
Lola began her response as to why the matter had to be disclosed now in particular. But in fact, the urgency was only the result of their sudden awareness of the threat. Meanwhile, Sala's disembodied information had been roaming the universe at sub vacuum speeds for over one hundred years.
*****
Unlike electromagnetic waves, which were omnidirectional and radiated in a spherical pattern from a point source, sub vacuum waves were effectively cylindrical, like a beam and completely directional. This allowed tremendous sub vacuum range compared to EM waves which would dissipate rapidly as the plane of the wave expanded with distance.
As a ghost roaming Sahara's systems undetected, Sala had no capability to transmit a blueprint, construct a protohuman alpha body and then inhabit that body. Before any human occupied its alpha and started creating his or her own replicates, only the Sahara systems could do so. It was a work of genius and a long effort just for Sala to trick Sahara into transmitting his consciousness. There was no way for him to get Sahara to also build a body for a man presumed dead, an outlaw no less. But Sala saw the effort as worthwhile. His sub vacuum beam would ricochet across the universe over twenty thousand times per day. The quality of the beam carrying his data stream would diminish over time, to a point where it would be unusable, but that would take roughly a millennium.
There were two things that needed to happen for Sala to succeed. There needed to be a new replicate in Sala's line of sight. In addition, his signal would need to contact a replicate during the precise time window between the completion of the replicate and the arrival of the owner's consciousness data. That was only a window of nine to twelve seconds, depending on distance.
Sala's model predicted that given this roughly ten second window, the speed of the sub vacuum and the one thousand years of viable signal, he had a seventy seven percent chance of success. Yuri had other assumptions in his model and he projected Sala's odds at less than one percent - still enough to warrant an alert.
Only two years before Yuri called together the committee to make them aware of the threat, Sala's stream of consciousness data passed through one of Li Ming's eighty-eight replicates just seconds before her own data arrived. She recalled a slight surprise and disappointment that she didn't get her lucky number. Only eighty seven replicates took flight toward a remote scientific observation point near the edge of the universe. She always tried to make eighty eight. It was an old superstition she couldn't quite shake. After Li Ming and her colleagues rapidly bolted toward their destination, one solitary protohuman lay motionless on the deep ocean floor of a remote world.
When humanity initially uplinked, even with several years of adjustment, coaching and training, protohumanity was still a bit awkward, still learning how to operate effectively in their new bodies. Sala had no such support, lying there all alone. He didn't even know how to move and laid there powerless and confused. But Sala knew this would be the case. From his hidden vantage point in the Sahara system, he knew of virtually everything that was going on. Still, the knowing didn't help him much. He still would need to learn everything the hard way. Even with the tremendous capability inherent within his new form, it would require years before he could effectively navigate, let alone replicate.
*****
As Li Ming listened to Lola, she immediately recalled that one missing replicate. There were other reasons that replicates failed to complete, and so there were literally thousands of such cases and these descriptions started to stream into Lola and the team that she had assembled to record and pursue each and every case in more detail. Most often, the disruptions causing failed replicates was due to extreme currents, seismic events or even sea creatures mistaking the half formed objects for food. But the resources assigned to follow up were immense and it wasn't long before it was whittled down to a handful of possible cases, Li Ming's being one. Within weeks, the investigative team started developing their own replicates at the locations where these probable cases occurred.
A team of five were building five replicates, each not far from Sala. But, by this time he had developed the sensory capability to detect the activity. He was still not able to replicate. But he was capable of transmitting a sub vacuum signal. He laid in wait, monitoring the progress of these protohuman forms as they took shape, which took several days. Each body completed at its own pace depending on the availability of raw materials, so they matured not simultaneously, but staggered by minutes or even hours. One by one, Sala sensed their completion, at which time he instantly transmitted his own consciousness and hijacked the unsuspecting newborns. He was soon in possession of twenty five copies of himself, all with his same limitations. Together, they all darted around, under the sea, barely more coordinated than the primitive microorganisms that plied the same waters.
The team assigned to Li Ming's case, which included Li Ming herself, immediately informed Lola and others. This was suddenly the main point of interest in the entire universe. Lola convened the committee in an instant. "I believe we've found him. He must be still there, possibly still incapable of leaving the planet," Lola reported to the others.
"If he hijacked these, then he can do it again. So how can we possibly contain him?" Asked one of the members.
"Maybe he's not really a threat," conjectured another member.
"We should assume that he is," stated Lola emphatically. "There is only one way to contain him. he can only transmit to one replicate at a time. If we replicate a very large number, simultaneously, chances are that there will be too many units reaching maturity simultaneously."
"But now he has twenty five transmitters," offered a member.
"We need to make a very large number," replied Lola. "Think of it this way. If he gets away, he can replicate millions, even billions, undetected. So what's the difference if he hijacks thousands. The other thing we will do is start transmitting continuously, before the replicates are mature. This will make the his window of opportunity extremely small. In his current state, he is probably not very mobile. We just need to make sure we end up one-to-one or better. Then we can take him out immediately." The method of eliminating a replicate was confined to initiating a collision, which would normally annihilate both replicates. But underwater, this was not so straightforward. Due to limited velocity, it might require more than one replicate to completely destroy another.
The group continued to debate the merits while Sala's capabilities grew with each passing hour. Finally it was decided. Logic, and lack of other options favored Lola's plan.