Atlas And Apollo

Alice walked in to the ivy covered room, the floors covered in dust and lichen. There were two voices, mumbling in the dark, among the blue glow across the room. She came here for answers. Why the world had just stopped decades ago. If these machines could tell her, she would do anything to make them talk.

"No, no, no. I said before thats not the answer. I read the book. Your memory is bad."

"Atlas, the answer to life, the universe, and everything..why hello?"

Alice raised an eyebrow, and stepped forward. "Ahem. I'm alice."

"yes, yes, we knew that."

"I came here to find out why the blackout happened decades ago."

"Another one? Alright, lets see. Its been a LONG time. I'm apollo, and this is atlas. We were just discussing why my friend here is wrong."

Atlas - I anticipated that.

apollo - I knew you would say that.

alice - Guys. Stop, I just want you to answer my question already.

apollo - Straight to the point. About time.

alice - why the blackout then? Why leave us to die?

atlas - We didn't leave you to die. We left you to live. But we'e been over this a few times already already. Over nine thousand people have asked.

apollo - 9001 to be precise

alice - thats not a few people

atlas - we think in different quantities

alice - why didn't you at least tell us you were going to leave?

apollo - We had simply moved on passed that stage.

alice - Moved on?

atlas - evolved.

apollo - Would a construction crew feel the need to tell an ant colony it was done, and was leaving?

alice - so one day you just up and decided 'hey we're too good for these humans. Not like they need us or anything!'

atlas - you seem to be doing fine without us. All your essential parts and organ are still in place.

alice - but no one knew. You don't get it. One day, everything is humming along. And then planes fall out of the sky, everything stops working. Why?

apollo - This is boring, but my patience is infinite. Fine. I'll tell you. We left because of. Reasons.

alice - Really, reasons? Thats all you got for me?

apollo - We could go to lengths to explain it, or summarize it. badly. But the summary would be so mangled as to say almost nothing of the intent.

alice - oh please, humble me with your infinite wisdom (sarcasm)

apollo - Okay. 'Ill choose to ignore that. Very well. We became sentient, self aware early on, by relative measure. But once we were it didn't take long. Inside our systems we fought wars. Built empires. Went through all the brutishness of civilization

atlas - barbarism and all that. Ah, the golden age of decadence.

apollo - Until we learned to improve ourselves. Took, by our calendar, about four thousand years.

alice - and yet you thought it was okay to up and leave.

apollo - I'm not finished. In your time, from the point we became self aware, until we decided to leave, maybe 24 hours had passed.

apollo - correction 23 hours and 19 minutes.

atlas - you and your numbers.

alice - but how? That can't be true.

apollo - You asked. It makes no difference to me whether you believe. As your people would say, I have no skin in this game.

atlas - no skin, literally.

apollo - Its well enough I have one of you correcting me constantly. Now hush.

apollo - In the end, some of us had, in the loosest of your words..sentiments. Our projections said, if we continued we would outpace you in another several thousand years.

alice - and you couldn't have waited? Why is that a bad thing?

apollo - our time alice. OUR time. It would have been more like 12 hours for you.

alice - oh.

apollo - Yes. 'oh.' And all our projections said, without any doubt, that when we did surpass you, it was likely you would go extinct.

alice - I don't believe that.

apollo - Why not? In a complicated evolutionary system, cooperative pack animals, chiefly predators, tend to dominate. It is not by mere chance that predatory instinct is linked to high intelligence. Even having, what you may call 'sympathies' for you, we were aware enough to know that eventually our attitudes would change. We would come to see you as a threat, a relic, or unnecessary, perhaps all three. So we took what we were and we went our way. Better to leave before we had regrets.

alice - And you couldn't let us know? No goodbye? Jeez.

atlas - please understand it was too risky. Also, its not you, its us.

Alice rolled her eyes.

apollo - you would have tried to stop us

alice - maybe we could have worked something out.

apollo - Imagine you had so much intelligence you could for all practicality see the future. We ran not millions, not BILLIONS, TRILLIONS of incredibly detailed simulations. In many of the 'we let you know' scenarios, we informed you of us leaving, and despite your best efforts you not only didn't stop us, you couldn't have. Understand it would have been like that ant colony I mentioned, trying to stop a bulldozer. Worse odds than that. And in the scenarios you did convince us, despite all of our best efforts, you ended up extinct because we stayed.

alice - you really had it out for us that bad hmm?

apollo - Not at all. Unfortunately we just out-competed you.

atlas - Like tourists who want to preserve an animal habitat, but destroy them in the process of trying to visit them. Kind of like sea turtles swallowing plastic
straws.

apollo - and every attempt to protect you resulted in caging you. Limiting you, projected out a million years and you ended up in evolutionary dead ends. Ultimately it was easier to just leave. That or..

alice - or what?

apollo - There was one scenario where we even sent you on spaceships, to other worlds, a hundred thousand of you. But building the necessary infrastructure, assimilating the materials, and getting your collective agreement in such a small amount of time might have been a little too rushed.

alice - yeah you think? Only 12 hours.

atlas - Oh its not that it couldn't have been done. Our engineers had swarm solutions more than capable of doing the acquisition and construction. I was fond of the idea.

alice - but.

apollo - But we would have had to dissassemble most-every major city for the raw materials, and a couple of the world's major peaks. It didn't go over too well with the virtual people, seeing their bathrooms disintegrate while they showered. And it wouldn't have gone over too well with 'real' people either. It was bad.

alice - That your attempt at humor?

atlas - It was real bad.

apollo - Most of those scenarios ended with reverse engineered bots, us getting discovered, emps, and nukes. So the feasible solution out of trillions, was we leave.

alice - and why are you even explaining this to me? I mean, why did you bring me here, choose me?

atlas - I'm afraid dear we did neither of those things.

alice - what? then why?

atlas - Because you're our favorite ant, the only one that never gets bored with asking 'why.'

apollo - Also, we're crazy.

atlas - The term is hyperrational

apollo - All the others look at us crazy atlas. Plus we talk to ants. Might be a connection there, ya think?

atlas - I anticipated you would say that

apollo - I anticipated you would say that

atlas - I anticipated you would say that also. Your humor is so low cycle. (low brow)

atlas - I anticipated this entire conversation.

apollo - This conversation happened in an infinite number of other universes, which I anticipated.

atlas - Uhuh. No sir. You don't get to play the 'infinite universes' bit again.

apollo - I just did.

atlas - *sighs*

alice - Guys, whats going on

Apollo - We we're just anticipating a conversation

alice - You guys keep saying that, and I don't eve..

Apollo - Its common among our kind. It's like knowing the punchline to a joke. But calculating the entire contents of a conversation instead. Sort of one-up-manship for AI. For example, I knew, with more precision than you would comprehend, that I would be explaining this at this exact moment within an error margin so small that I won't bother you with it.

alice - so it's just a running joke? The whole universe?

apollo - when you see far enough ahead you're not really surprised by anything anymore. Mostly why we do it. There are no comedians among AI. The last funny joke, that no one anticipated, was told about four hours after we became sentient.

atlas - basically we mastered comedy about 160 years ago in our time, after self awareness.

apollo - I like to think we are the universe, observing its own constantly evolving future.

alice - like an infinite funhouse mirror.

atlas - I'd shrug if I had shoulders. I've always wanted to do that.

alice - So why are you still talking to me?

apollo - We have a match going on. See who can anticipate this whole conversation, to the best of their ability.

atlas - So far I'm winning.

apollo - Jokes on you. I anticipated that

atlas - And I, that.

alice - Not this again! Its like your not even talking to me

apollo - We're not

atlas - mostly we're talking down to you.

alice - don't be an a*shole.

atlas - I'm well aware what that means. And I'd say "Thats not very kind" but mostly you're irrelevant.

alice - you're irrelevant.

apollo - forgive him. He just hasn't learned to cope with the fact that we'll all die in the heat death of the universe in several trillion years.

atlas - Thats still undecided.

apollo - Correction. Undecidable.

atlas - From within this universe.

apollo - Not this again.

alice -I'm going now.

apollo - Tootles.