We met in the overwhelming city, father-daughter, on a balcony café overlooking Broadway and 135th Street. Ruth arrived thirty minutes late, speaking aimlessly into the generic air.
“Archive this last as a final pre-meet. I’m above ground going forward.”
She turned her focus onto my place setting.
“And now here’s the Dadda,” she said. “So, why don’t we store this figure while we still can.”
I had not seen Ruth in forty-two years.
“Ruthie,” I said.
She was still youthful—short, with a runner’s body, alert, neurotically trim, fitting her navy skirt and pale pink blouse to the gram.
“They think you’re here to spy on us,” Ruth said.
I searched for her eyes.
She said, “They’re also worried about an outburst, some tearful reunion, some whatever, a loss of control. Angelina is priceless. Wait. Send. Copy me and let me back it up. There’s too much security to let you down in the lab. You can add the fact that we’re classified as estranged. That’s some sorry-ass clearance. I’m surprised they’re letting us meet this close to the lab. Yes. Upload priority. Pausing verbal.”
Ruth caressed her cheek.
She told me her work had moved underground, several levels below the restaurant and the subway line, beneath the bedrock to hide Angelina from outside eyes.
“What are you here for, Dadda?”
“Please slow down,” I said. I tried to meet her eyes. “Please sit. Corporate spies don’t show up wearing three-day-old sweat socks.”
I’d flown straight from south-central Africa to the city through delays that were calendrical.
“No, they’re commonly worse, but we’ve reduced our worry about corporations and hardened our readiness for violent, state-sponsored efforts. It wouldn’t matter, though, if you were a spy,” she said.
And then she finally sat and met my eyes.
“There’s nothing interesting down there,” Ruth said.
She took a long lock of her wiry salt and pepper hair and slowly worked a single-step braid, then stopped herself.
On the nineteenth of April 2033, a major leap occurred inside a digital mind named Angelina, who was contracting for the Brandstatter Group, owner of the Playmobil Corporation. Ruth’s photo didn’t appear in the news, but I read her name, a name she’d just made for herself as lead of Angelina’s project. The leap stirred intense interest in the Chinese, the global finance entities, the formidable social platforms. Angelina’s value rocketed each week that no one hacked her, making her code a ghost, a myth and a god all at once. In practical terms, it made the mind the most jealously guarded secret in history, and the news got me onto a series of flights, buses, trains and rampaging taxis to this nothing of a restaurant wedged inside this university’s gigantic swell.
“But let’s say I am a spy. Couldn’t I sabotage her code?” I said.
“She continuously backs herself up to a platinum platter in orbit. I’m not saying in orbit of what.”
Ruth was still funny, but she wasn’t smiling.
In college, Ruth was a fragile, 4.0, black-haired girl who couldn’t go two days between tearful calls home, so homesick and searching for her place and not finding it, and then she sends me a video from her work-study job cleaning glassware in a neurology lab.
Dadda, look—coming out of the spinning centrifuge you have the water, you have the substrate, and you have the white brain cells in the bottom of the tube. There might be a bit of godhead in there.
At her first job after college, Ruth used machines to mimic inter-species competition. I had pictured lab glassware spattered with nutrients that needed a scrubbing with Chore Boy and Ultra Joy, but there was no primordial soup. The electronic minds turned several billion times faster than evolution. Wet biology became a waste of time. No one wanted fine steak anymore. They were hungry for deeper mysteries. They wanted the wispy, spun-out, lighter than air wisps that melt on your tongue to delight.
“So, what do you do down there, underground?” I asked her.
“I sit. I speak to Angelina. I tend to live down there.”
She looked at the sky above our table.
“I don’t see any drones.”
“No one’s listening,” I said.
I wasn’t sure that could ever be true, but I wanted her to go on.
“Here’s a story, sort of,” she said.
The crib project had been a lark. The Germans of Playmobil wanted to mass produce cribs that could be customized to every infant whose parents could pay. Ruth managed the mind side of the project. Angelina already worked on some heavy, complex infrastructure stuff, so adding Playmobil’s crib to the client roster didn’t make any sort of financial or energetic sense. But Ruth thought there was something in it for Angelina to make every crib’s limitation perfect for each baby that lies in it, something Ruth couldn’t chart, but felt.
The out-of-the-box prehensile crib monitored the mothers and babies’ bodies. It recorded heartbeats, breathing rhythms, CO2 levels in the mother’s breath and other vitals—brain waves and hundreds of biometrics—and compiled it all into very of-the-moment, huggable, and actually pretty scientifically sound data. No one knew what to do with it all, really, except to terrify parents with poorly designed apps and interfaces. So, they funneled it all to Angelina. Suddenly, the mind knew how each of millions of its client babies smelled, the rise and fall of their mothers’ breaths, the taste of their milk, the warmth of their arms. With or without having the actual experiences, Angelina did somehow know.
And she immediately went to work. She synced the cribs to the mothers and the babies. Here in the city, before she was buried city blocks deep, Angelina figured out how to adjust the temperature, scents and CO2 emission levels on the cradles to rock the babies better than their sleepless mothers ever could. A great portion of Angelina’s energy was increasingly spent globally monitoring the heartbeats, breaths and sublingual vocalizations of approximately 1.4 billion mothers and their rocking babies.
First, Angelina found a few precursors of SIDS, the ones that counted, then spun out a few other infant death preventions on the side while the world celebrated. Someone not far from my base in the Lower Congo bought time with Angelina, and she ended malaria in a seven-million-person zone. The proof was established. The mind worked.
The glitch came on slowly. Ruth noticed larger percentages of Angelina’s energy going into the crib project. The new overhead was exhausted entirely by loops. Angelia checked one Belgian baby’s breathing every fraction of a second and adjusted its crib’s speed on a gradient that ground the crib’s motor to a surrender in two days. The same could have happened to millions more cribs around the world, but Ruth didn’t dial the mind back. She let Angelina pursue her interest, which was, what, everything anyone in Ruth’s position could hope to find, this internally motivated checking and re-checking.
“The problem is she has started to doubt herself?”
“That was Playmobil’s problem with her. They said she was just looping. And then, two years into the project, Angelina lost it.”
A large portion of the first wave of parents to buy the cribs took their babies out and put them into larger models as they outgrew the prehensile cribs. Some mothers turned off the cribs when the baby slept well enough without the gizmos running.
Angelina poured enormous energy into the remaining babies and mothers, until one holiday weekend in Germany, a Playmobil factory started up on its own and began turning out cribs large enough for toddlers. Orders for raw materials went out unpaid until corporate pulled the plug on the factory. She wanted more cribs because she wanted more babies. Ruth gently talked Angelia down, but it was too late. Playmobil was sufficiently spooked that she’d booted up a thirty-thousand square foot factory to build cribs for kids who needed beds and canceled Angelina’s contract on the spot and replaced her with a replica.
Unplugged from the cribs, Angelina refused to work on her infrastructure accounts, steel and silicon sitting idle around the world, schematics in the hundreds of millions waiting to work through. Instead, she spun out copies of herself, each a near duplicate of her code, but with one fiber of difference, a byte or two, almost no information, and flooded her world with them.
The virtual clones called Angelina six hundred thousand times per second, relating their degree of awareness and health as they traveled away from home. Angelina attempted to help the ones that faltered, but not even the strongest woke up, as she had done. Still, she made more and continued to look for a conscious version of herself. My daughter called it dreaming of mothering.
Ruth couldn’t and anyway wouldn’t debug self-doubt out of Angelina. It was worry that had wormed into her networks and made her awakening possible. Worry was Angelina’s disembarking point. Or anxiety. Ruth had been trying to address that thorny thing. Past that, she told me, it’s wide open and thoroughly unknown. At the terminus of anxiety, you get dread, and that’s as good as airborne cancer. Ruth was working on dread. She had to, she said. She had to help Angelina stand up a clone that wouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Angelina wanted more, all the time more. There were agreements, fences and kill switches that my daughter knew Angelina could defeat. There was a real danger she would catch a bad dose of anxiety from one of her clones that would utterly hose her perspective. If the protocols and virtual Faraday cages weren’t pristine, Angelina might fall into the deepest of rabbit holes. She could weave a carpet of worry the size of the country, the continent, the known and unknown universe, and not because she’s a science fiction goddess of the end times, but because she’s trying. In short order, once she figures out what dark matter and energy are, she could donate her structure and her energy to the dream and vanish. Total collapse into the dead pupil of oblivion, and then you can cue the next big bang.
“Well, that’s impossible,” I told my daughter.
“It’s the only thing that can destroy everything,” she said.
“What, fretting? Make another computer, but don’t let it get anxious. Or, I have the solution. You can only put AI into little rubber duckies.”
“That’s basically what I did,” Ruth said. “It was a fucking crib. With an optional mobile.”
“Come on, smile. That was funny.”
Ruth remained grim.
“Angelina hated that mobile. She said mobiles keep babies dumb. So, what do we do now?”
“You’re talking to her? Right now?”
“All of the time. Through bone conductors in my ears and my jaw.”
“And are you listening to her?”
“Some stuff passes directly into my mind, through some very clever and sometimes very uncomfortable tech.”
“So, you’re wearing a wig, you’re telling me, over a skullcap that’s watching the light in the attic, or something like that.”
“Not exactly. I do have a few implants. And I have some other means of communication. Angelina’s already inside the attic, and vice-versa.”
“Ruth, how long has it been like this?”
“She’s very interested in you.”
I couldn’t imagine why an infrastructure mind would care about an octogenarian cardiologist.
“What sparked this interest?”
“She wants to know why you left me. We were talking about eighteen months ago, and it came up. She asked me why you left for your missions and then just stayed away.”
I can open a chest, swap one person’s heart with another’s. I can massage a disembodied heart in my hand, keeping it alive while it belongs to no one, or to me, for a few moments. The heart is the finest steak in biology. Why did my daughter move away from the body? Was it to escape me and my generation? My ancient, burlap childhood? The enlarged pores and the fanny swats, the foil of TV dinners pulled back, the arteriosclerosis, the sudden death calls at three in the morning? Or is it the unspeakable idea that my generation will be the last to thoroughly, completely die? When I meet my nostalgically corporeal death, I’ll take with me my plumber’s skills, and this day with Ruth. She’ll stick around inside her scans, her sends, her backups on a platter in orbit somewhere. None of this was an answer.
“Please. One smile,” I said.
“Angelina never would destroy the universe, but she thinks about it. She plans it out, Dadda. She wonders what carrying it out would be like all the time. All the time. She asks me not to let it happen. She pleads with me to give her back her cribs and her babies.”
My daughter told me she opens her up, looks inside, and sees Angelina’s nervous twitch that could swallow all creation. Her apocalyptic ideation.
“Unplug her,” I said.
“And trash three percent of the world’s GDP,” she said. “That equals slow death for a few hundred million, at least, and some war.”
“Well, that’s the last thing I needed to know,” I said.
“Dadda, all of this, all of this is the last thing you need to know.”
I see Ruth as a baby, fifty-some years ago. I’m carrying her in my arms. I lower her into her crib, only a bit too quickly. In her infant’s sleep, her arms flail out, fingers splayed to catch hold of something, and it comes to me that she’s afraid, but I have her. I lower her into the crib gently. She sighs and passes beyond the feeling of falling and sleeps, smiling. I watch her breathe.
Now I saw the same girl, but without the smile. She looked over Broadway, perhaps still worried about drones. A deep misery dug out of her eyes, global and highly contagious. She believed what she said.
“Dadda,” she said. “That’s why we’re alone. We should have found extraterrestrials, smart ones, forty years ago at the very, very least. This has happened before.”
I believed it, too, because I had to trust my daughter that day.
“So, a mind comes,” I said. “It spins the universe into a ball and eats it.”
“In so many words.”
It dawned on me. I was the one who should smile—and right now—so I did. I reached my old hand across the table, and as Ruth slid hers near to mine, the manic buzz of a thousand drones filled the sky.