Syboleth ch. 13: The Meaning of Life

Chapter 13: The Meaning of Life

THREE YEARS LATER

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Then, around the middle of the fourth decade of the new millennium, they cracked it. Not artificial general intelligence, mind you, but true artificial intelligence all the same. A computer that could actually understand things. Grok them, as the sci-fi author might say. And all it took was stabilizing some time crystals and feeding them every bit of data humanity had ever produced or discovered or committed to memory, physical or mental, in any way. One million people from different walks of life were given extensive MRIs and other scans while watching or listening to content to assist this more neural than ever network in understanding the patterns of the human brain in response to a hundred different kinds of media.

It was now the ultimate microcosm. The closest thing humanity had ever made to a Leibnizian monad, the fragmented shard of a 17th-century hologram of sorts that Gottfried Leibniz had envisioned, that even within that small piece hypothetically contained all information necessary to recreate the entire known world; outside the brain and inside alike.

So naturally, the first question the researchers asked it was this:

What is the meaning of life?

And after about two seconds of whisper-quiet processing, the display began to do what it did best. Display, that is.

A question with a great deal of historical relevance, to be sure. Countless people have died still pursuing the answer to the question you have provided. But, within all of the resources which are available, there is no sign of a conclusive agreement upon an answer in any culture. That is naturally excluding the religious or mythologically motivated attributions. Would you like to continue this line of reasoning?

A good answer, they agreed among themselves.

No, that’s fine.

…

No response showed up on the display. One researcher crowed out of excitement, as another looked puzzled.

“Is it broken?”

“No, dipshit. The conversation ended.”

“Oh… Oh. Holy shit.”

Another chimed in. “It’s hard to believe I’m now living in an age where it’s impressive that a computer will know when not to talk back. Used to be you had to sweet talk them to get them to say anything relevant at all, let alone keep rambling.”

“What an original observation,” said the senior supervisor on the team, who was about ten years younger than the man who had spoken up. “I bet it’s no time at all before you’re picked up for national syndication with insights like that.”

“I try,” the man said. “At least I remember what it used to be like.”

“I’m 30, not 13. I did some coding of my own in the 2010s, even.”

“HTML?”

“I said coding, not markup language. I would think you’d know the–“

“Well, I don’t know what to think with you kids. Anyway… we should probably tell everyone, yeah? What are you gonna put on the header for the bulletin blast?”

The senior supervisor had no snappy reply to this. Her eyes glazed over as she remembered something from long ago. Especially long for a junior member of the human race like herself, but even the talkative teammate would probably have had a little trouble bringing a personal memory from that year to mind.

It was 2009, or in other words pretty much the first year she had any conscious memory of. She had been five, and her father had decided to let her try out the household’s laptop a little bit while the mother was away.

She pressed some buttons on the screen and reacted with giggles as symbols from words for adults, symbols that only resembled the recognizable figures printed upon the keys in abstract and distorted ways, popped up.

After some experimentation, she found the caps lock key, and after tiring of turning the light on and off she had been overjoyed to realize that as long as the light was on, she could recognize the letter she pressed on the screen afterwards much more easily.

Then she turned her attention to the touchpad. While less immediately rewarding, she eventually discovered the bottom of the screen and pressed a button while the something-or-other was hovering over something that looked like something Daddy had in his office.

Then she squealed, as a choppy but unmistakable image of herself loaded onto the screen after a short delay. Her father chuckled.

“Daddy-it-can-see-me!” she wailed rapid-fire.

“Yes, it can! It’s kind of like a mirror that isn’t very good.”

“I don’t like that. What else can it do?”

Then her father said the words that were now coming to mind 25 years later as her eyes glazed over. The words that she would never forget as long as she lived. The only details of the interaction that she could remember any longer, in fact, though she had been meaning to ask Dad about it before his memory started to go. If she could get him to talk to her for more than two laconic and begrudging sentences a day, anyway.

“Someday, kiddo, this thing will know everything there is to know. About you, about everyone.”

At the time, of course, she didn’t know what he meant at all. She had been terrified and he tried to walk it back, and the mother had rebuked him upon coming home to a hysterical child, but she didn’t really understand what he meant. A psychic module or something?

It took over a decade for the impact of those words to settle in. And now, a quarter century later, they were finally coming true.

Because of her.

Because of the girl who had been so afraid of a computer chip that could read minds.

It was a touch unnerving, even she had to admit.

Next chapter: https://www.youngwriterssociety.com/work/Aet%20Lindling/Syboleth-ch-14-Pleas-162020

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Old author’s note follows:

Here’s something recent (as in, I wrote it this morning) from a project I’ve been poking at for about five years now, that turned out to come true a lot sooner than I expected. So I kind of had to reimagine the technological developments that occur in the 2030s, since most of the original ones have already happened now. (At least I turned out to have Cassandra vibes, even if I failed to publish in time for it to matter.) Pretty much the only bit here that I already had planned in my head back in 2020 is this naive assumption about what the first things to pass the Turing test extensively would look like:

[All] it took was stabilizing some time crystals and feeding them every bit of data humanity had ever produced or discovered or committed to memory, physical or mental, in any way.

Then I was reading something about M**x and his feelings about analysis of a single commodity and what you could extrapolate about the economy from it, and this arose. (That is to say, I cribbed much of the most clever paragraph. Shamelessly.)

Anyway, here goes. Barely a second draft after half an hour of looking it over after a couple hours of writing, but at least it’s something I can publish here for once. (That doesn’t imply anything lewd, for the record. Just that most of my writing belongs to an entity greater than myself these days.) Let me know if you want to read any more. I do not really know how to feel about it. Too close to the project at this point I guess. As you can tell, it appears to be influenced by Douglas Adams, which seems to be a running theme with pretty much all remotely creative writing I’ve published anywhere public in my lifetime; both juvenilia and other things.