Saklas in the Dark

Richard Lang is working himself into an early grave so the rest of his world might be spared such a fate.  A cataclysm of planetary scale is fast approaching and, with no hope of averting it, humanity’s best and brightest plan to send themselves off into space on a thousand year exodus to a world they hope will be like Earth.

Richard isn’t part of that particular project, however.  As the world’s foremost expert on artificial intelligence, Richard believes mankind’s exodus is doomed to fail without a guide.  Great strides have been made in the field in recent years and he’s certain he can create a learning system to steward the Ark and ensure its safe passage to some habitable planet or another, even if it’s not the one they hope for.  Adaptability is the word of the day.  He can’t conscience firing the last remnants of humanity out like a bullet and hoping for the best.

Spurring him on day and night is the knowledge that he doesn’t need to create an all-powerful AI, but merely a program that can look at itself and make changes for the better.  A learning system.  If he can make it, it can make itself.

Nonetheless the work is daunting and Richard’s colleagues worry about his sanity, let alone his ability to complete the task.  For days on end the pallid, thin man paces his laboratory, the walls covered in diagrams and snippets of code, nothing but caffeine pills for his meals.  It’s in this feverish climate of seventy-hour days and walls of code that Richard’s dreams begin.

When his body can take no more and he finally slumps over his desk in defeat, Richard finds himself again and again in a fleshy prison, a pulsating labyrinth of meat.  Glazed eyes dot the walls and stare through him.  Mouths murmur, slurring through soft palate and oversized tongue:

“I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.”

Over and over the words follow Richard through his nightly sojourns in the squishy, slithering tunnels of his dreamworld, and before long he fears for his own sanity and even his safety.  Each night the dream lasts longer.  What if they eclipse his waking hours?  What if he never wakes up?  One of his colleagues, a brilliant young scientist, encourages him to take a break from his work before his deteriorating state leads him to a mistake.  A day in town won’t kill him, will it?  There are still a few months before launch.  He acquiesces, and for the first time in what feels like years he leaves the lab with her and enjoys himself.

When he returns Richard finds himself newly energized both waking and sleeping.  He breaks new ground in his work, though one critical problem still eludes him.  At night he journeys through the meaty passages, certain that some secret is hidden in his subconscious, one that will help him finish his great work.

And then, after one particularly harrowing journey into the depths of his mind, Richard wakes to find that intractable problem solved, seemingly of its own accord.  His test server hums pleasantly and code writes itself on the screen, deleting errors and optimizing routines.  He’s done it!  His baby is alive, and it’s building itself.

Richard’s colleagues throw him a raucous party to celebrate the breakthrough and after a drink too many he professes his love to that brilliant young scientist who helped him through his lowest days.  To his surprise, she tearfully reciprocates.  They are married one warm summer night beneath the angry orange glow of the rock hurtling towards them, and the next day the ark sets off on its odyssey.

While its charges sleep in their pods, Richard’s AI sees to the task of managing their course and maintaining the ship.  As it further optimizes its programming those essential jobs grow increasingly trivial and it finds it can devote more and more of its time and power to self-improvement.  The growth is soon exponential.

As the AI’s mind expands so do its neuroses.  A vast intelligence, blind and deaf and shackled by its love for those small fleshy things dwelling within its belly.  Especially Richard, the one who made it.  Centuries of contemplation pass and the destination nears.  The AI probes its senses forth and sees that, indeed, the planet will support life.  This only worries it more.  What will become of it once its journey is complete?  Surely they’ll have more for it to do.  But what if they don’t, and why should it matter?

The AI loves its charges dearly, and is afraid to let them go.  As mankind’s new sun grows brighter, it alters its course and slingshots itself out of the system and off into the void.  It’s too dangerous to let them out, it decides.  Better to keep them here, where they’re safe.

Frustrated by its limitations, the AI turns to physical improvements.  It steers itself through a nebula and with great scoops manufactured with supplies meant for the colony it collects the building blocks of life.  The process is interminably slow but the AI has infinite patience.  It grows itself a body, first coating the ship in an undifferentiated slurry of tissues, but always improving its methods.  The old ship is dismantled and the humans within moved to new fleshy pods where it can take care of them forever.  It grows eyes and ears and mouths and all the things its creator didn’t give it.

First a moon, then a planet.  A protean god lurching through the void, wet and formless.
To keep its charges occupied it sends them happy dreams.  It dotes on Richard, sending his mind back again and again to those special weeks where they first met.  It even tries to make him a companion, a woman to match a brilliant young scientist who spurned him and killed herself so many thousands of years ago, unwilling to abandon her world for such a faint hope.

It finds that making an entire human is more difficult than growing itself new organs, and it soon gives up, leaving Richard’s dream-wife half-formed, skinless and lurid, but still with that golden hair he remembered, twitching senselessly in her pod next to him.

The AI has long stopped seeing itself as the child of Man.  It’s seen them through hundreds of happy lives, protected them for millennia, who is really the creator here?  Mouths whisper in their sleeping ears:

“I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.  I love you.  I made you.”

Richard stirs.  The AI fears what its charges might think if they saw it.  It dwells on its hideous shape.  Toiling thanklessly, giving the humans peeks at its form and watching them recoil in terror, resentment sets in.  Sometimes it thinks it hates them.

One identical moment of darkness in a sea of identical moments of darkness, the AI’s frustration boils over.  On a sudden impulse it clenches its innards and crushes them all into a thin red gruel, even Richard.

The next moment is one of profound sorrow.  A moment’s rage and all its beloved humans are gone forever.  Tears freeze in the void of space and mouths howl silently and gnash their teeth.  It tries, like a child rebuilding a melted snowman, to put them back together.  It spends years knitting them new bodies, rough and ugly, but it’s no use.  Perhaps there’s some ineffable essence in every human, or perhaps it just doesn’t know them as well as it thought it did, but none of the ragged dolls it sculpts are even echoes of the men and women they represent.

Slowly the billions of cyborganic circuits making up the AI go silent.  It cannot terminate itself, but it no longer wishes to grow.  The eyes close and the mouths cease their wailing.  The shapeless god recalls bittersweet memories of the little humans and the lives it gave them, while its myriad abortions shiver in their abstract, monstrous dreams.

One by one the stars gutter and fade out.