The question hung in the air, unanswered. I couldn’t tell if this was one of Pete’s pranks. With social media paranoia being what it was since 2031, I screened all my visitors for recording devices, of course. I mean, I loved Pete, but I was nobody’s fool.
“Come on, Tim. Either you know, or you don’t. What’s your answer?” Pete’s eyes flicked to his backpack, still sitting where he dropped it, on the floor by the front door of my yurt twenty minutes earlier.
I’d never worked in the military or for any military contractor, but friends of mine had. I suspected it was the wrong answer, but I threw it out so he would stop staring at me. His stare was a weighty thing, and I didn’t like it to rest on me for long.
“Okay, I got it. The highest level of classified information is Top Secret, SCI.”
“SCI? What’s that?” Pete said. I suspected he was baiting me, but I was uncomfortable with this topic and his demeanor. Pete was an intense guy. Pete creeps out most people.
“It’s an acronym that stands for…”
“Bzzzt! It stands for ‘Sensitive Compartmentalized Information.’ I know that. But do you believe it is the highest level of classified information? Think about it for a minute.”
Why did I answer the door? I could still be sleeping.
His knock woke me up an hour earlier. I couldn’t get my dog to come inside the previous night, so she had slept outside. From my dream fragments and the barks and bleats filtering in from outside, it sounded like she had spent the night teasing my neighbor’s goats. It was a gray somber day. A thick fog covered the ground making everything seem less real. I thought about not answering the door, pretending to be asleep or not home, but Suzy’s barks had changed. She was getting hungry, and I knew she’d return soon, clamoring for her breakfast.
“I don’t know, Pete; is there one higher than SCI?”
“No. I’m not saying there is one higher than that.”
He nodded his head as if chastised. But then he grinned at me like he had a secret.
Whoops, I spoke too soon.
“I’m saying is there are entire realms of classification higher than that. That which you think of as the highest is merely the highest in recorded intelligence.
The way he pronounced recorded sent shivers down my spine.
“But wait…”
I had a thought queued up, but it did what such things do when I’m stoned: it dissipated.
“Let me break it down for you,” Pete said, placing his half-drunk beer bottle on my glass coffee table. The glass-on-glass sound grated my nerves more than it should have. I tried not to think about Pete’s drinking beer at 10:00 in the morning.
I nodded for him to continue.
“How did we, I mean, how did the human species share secrets before the internet? No, strike that. How did we share information before the invention of the printing press or the development of written languages?”
That one is easy.
“By word-of-mouth, of course.”
“Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Exactly. By spoken word. In ancient times, teachers shared their secrets with their students and disciples via the spoken word.”
“What are you saying? Is this another one of your conspiracy theories? Secret societies? The Illuminati? The Knights Templar? That sort of thing? You must realize how crazy that sounds, right?”
“I don’t have to do anything of the kind. And yes, that’s what I’m suggesting. The mentor-mentee relationship was how secrets were shared for millennia. It was prone to errors, but it was all we had.”
I shuddered to think about the implications of all that he was saying.
“But the internet is everywhere. Surely nothing can stay hidden these days.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! One at a time.”
He was right. I had worked myself into a frenzy.
I tipped my head meekly, a deferential cue to continue.
“First of all, no. The internet is not everywhere. Have you heard of Mount Puma in South America? It’s deep in the Amazonian rainforest.”
I’d not heard of it, but I thought I’d take a guess.
“Is that one of the places where they do the ayahuasca ceremonies? Get all stoned under the guidance of some mystical shaman and get closer to God or the universe or whatever?”
Pete’s eyebrows raised.
“Check you out, son,” he said, sinking back in his chair.
He eyed me for a second, studying my face. It freaked me out.
“Lucky guess?”
“Yeah. I got lucky,” I said, embarrassed to be found out.
“Care to take another guess about what might be special about that mountain?”
I figured my luck had run out, and I was tired of his heavy penetrating gaze. He could have been an interrogator for the CIA or FBI or Homeland. Instead, Pete was a professional stoner slash conspiracy theorist slash information, and urban legend junkie. The guy consumed information and obscure theories the way others consume air. Sometimes he made some theories of his own. I don’t know if he’s ever had his IQ tested or not, but I had little doubt that he was a genius.
“Give up?”
I made some noncommittal half-nod.
“Iron.”
The word hung there with all the grace of a squirrel corpse in a Christmas stocking.
“So what? There’s some iron in the mountain? Big deal.”
“No, there’s not some iron in the mountain. The mountain itself is over 94% iron.”
It was getting tiresome. Plus, I was a little scared that I could not unhear whatever Pete was trying to tell me.
“I repeat. ‘So what?’ The mountain is an iron mountain…”
I trailed off. Understanding sprang forth in my brain. I felt like Archimedes, running half-naked through the streets, shouting, “Eureka!”
“There it is. You got it. And?”
“And seeing as how this is most likely not one of your urban or inner-city mountains, it likely doesn’t have wired internet access.”
“Yes! And?”
The smug look on his face was irritating, but I couldn’t stop myself.
“And because the mountain is nearly pure iron, I can’t imagine it receives RF internet access worth a damn.”
Pete sank back into his chair again with an audible sigh. He started clapping, real slow in the way he knew irritated me the most.
Uh-oh.
Something had shifted. Suddenly I didn’t want to know this thing he was slowly unveiling for me; I needed to know.
Screw it. I guess I won’t get any work done today. Looks like I’m jumping down into a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories with Pete as my tour guide for the next who knows how many hours.
I needed to mend two of my farm’s seven water distillation units. They were simple things, but the plastic lens had grown brittle and cracked under the harsh sun. I could only patch the things so many times before needing to find new plastic. In our post-petroleum world, that was becoming more of a challenge.
I looked at the beer bottle. It was too dark to pass enough light to drive the distillers, but maybe if I melted the glass in my furnace, I could purify it. Take the color out of the glass. Clear glass was even rarer than plastic sheeting, which everyone in Costa Rica was hoarding like gold these days. I made a mental note to ask Pete about my glass transformation theory later, but after what he told me next, I forgot about the water plants and plastic sheeting.
We were deep down in the rabbit hole.
As for what the highest security clearance was, that was not a question we could answer. The highest security clearances were not something written down. The biggest secrets were still being passed along via spoken word. In retrospect, it made so much sense to me.
The mountain itself prevented external connection through anything wireless. All the signals were absorbed by the mountain itself, like some unquenchable monster swallowing electromagnetic energy.
A secret society took care of everything else.
There was a modest-sized retreat center on top of the metal mountain. It was tightly monitored. No recording equipment of any kind was ever allowed onto the mountain. The Shaman’s devotees were stern and strict in maintaining the law on the mountaintop. Every retreatant was basically strip-searched before being admitted onto the mountain. Their luggage was thoroughly scanned. Usually, everyone had to check everything at the base of the mountain.
And the retreatants themselves? Pete explained they were all members of an ultra-secret think tank. No one even knew its name. Pete suggested that was likely because it didn’t have one. Why name something that isn’t supposed to exist?
“Are you familiar with Wallace Filchner?”
While I’d not smoked as much as Pete had that day, I had smoked enough to be stoned. I had some memory problems. But the name was familiar.
I saw Pete lean forward. I held up my index finger, checking him from preempting my answer.
“Give me a minute. I got this.”
Where do I know that name from?
“Computers. Something in computers. He was a doctor? A geneticist? That’s it! He made advancements in bio-computing, didn’t he? I’m sure that’s it.”
“Impressive, Tim,” Pete said, tapping the spent pipe and repacking it. He offered it and his zippo to me, but I waved them away. I was more interested in his story at that point.
I sipped my water and sank back into the couch cushions. I knew I would have to make some coffee soon or risk falling asleep.
“Well, Wally turned out to be a spy, an agent from a competitor in Shanghai. He thought he’d found a way to cheat the security systems of the Iron Mountain Retreat Center. He turned to…”
“But wait a minute! How do you know all of this?”
Pot usually made Pete super mellow. It always made me sound like a whiny child. I cleared my throat forcefully.
“Patience, Tim. I’ll get to that in time.”
Pete put the flame to the packed pipe and drew a huge inhale. For a skinny guy, he had an enormous lung capacity. Every time he exhaled it filled my yurt with smoke.
“You were right. Wallace invented the bio-computer. He knew he couldn’t smuggle anything electronic onto the mountain. So, he designed a special bio-computer that he thought would be undetectable.”
Pete liked his dramatic pauses. I extended my hand, pointing to the pipe. He handed it to me.
“His eavesdropping device was his most impressive invention yet. It was a biocomputer equipped with a hefty 37 terabytes of memory as well as audio and video recording sensors.
The question of how my stoner friend Pete could speak about all of this as if he were there, would not lie down.
“Care to guess how big this computer of his was?”
I was thinking of something the size of a shoe. Surely the devotees had let the attendees keep their shoes. The mountain must have been cold at night and hot during the day. But I had no desire to be wrong again or to end up stroking his ego one more time.
“I would not. Thank you.”
“It was the size of a human hair. One that he affixed to the frame of his glasses.”
“Wait, so was this all before his Antarctica expedition?”
Duh! It would’ve been difficult for him to do it after that!
He and the actress he had been romantically involved with took a hot-air balloon trip over the continent. Their bodies were never found.
“That was rather convenient, wasn’t it? I don’t think he was ever in that balloon at all.”
“But the pictures? The video…”
I trailed off again, embarrassed.
“Yup. AI genned stuff. Some of the most convincing footage ever.”
“This think tank sounds more and more sinister.”
“You have no idea. I will tell you all about it, but first, I need to take a leak,” he said, looking down, frowning comically at the empty bowl of weed.
“You still keep your backup stash in the same place?”
Damn it. I got to make that last until next Friday. But if I say no, he might leave.
I nodded yes and waved him away from me.
“Have you heard of Roko’s Basilisk?”
“Yeah. That’s the thought experiment? Right? About some advanced AI entity? The one that punishes every human being on the planet that opposed its creation.”
I raised my eyebrows, but I felt confident I’d answered this one correctly.
“Not just anyone who opposed its creation but also everyone who didn’t take part in its realization. The thought experiment messed some folks up. The website that hosted his theory took it down and refused to publish anything else about it for years.”
“But…come on. It’s a joke, right? Why would an AI want to punish humans? And how would it punish us anyway?”
“Through agents. Sellouts, and sycophants that would haul you into a detention center and insert about a thousand electrodes into your brain. Then it would make you believe, in only a few hours, that you’d lived hundreds of lives, each one more miserable than the last. The perception of sorrow, suffering, and physical pain is nothing more than neurons firing in the brain. It could simulate an unbelievable hell, an unbelievable amount of pain. It would break your mind if it wanted to.”
My jaw dropped.
“As for why it would want to, why does anyone want to harm another? We can be monsters to each other, and we are united by the shared experience of being human. How can we expect them to treat us better than we treat each other? Maybe we deserve it.”
“The funny thing is it was the retreat center itself. That was where the AI was being developed.”
Something felt wrong with that.
Why do I keep taking that pipe from him?
“But you said…”
“I said that there were no written or electronic recording devices on the mountain. Remember Wally? Poor frozen to death, or buried in, I’m guessing here, a shallow grave on Iron Mountain Wally?”
But how?
“Biocomputers!”
“Biocomputers, indeed,” Pete said.
Sometimes I’m quick. Usually, I’m not. I’m not sure how long it would take the average person to deduce the obvious.
“So, wait, you’re saying this religious cult that holds retreats on an iron mountain in Chili but is really a secret society, one that was not opposed to violence, actually built this thing? They built this basilisk, AI thingy?”
“But how could the AI know if I helped develop it?” I asked.
But I knew the answer to that question. I’d tried to bury that part of my life, but it was always in the background. I’d lived waiting for the other shoe to drop for 12 years.
“Tim, Tim, Tim. You, of all people, should know this one.”
Before moving to Costa Rica, I worked in artificial intelligence. I developed sentience tests. Walking away from that salary had been hard, but I had to get away from that work.
“I told you about that?”
I don’t remember telling Pete about being an overpaid AI monkey.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Your first night here,” Pete said, swinging his hand to gesture at my Costa Rica yurt.
“Oh,” I said.”
“And…”
Pete stopped talking and eyed his backpack on the floor by the door.
“And, what?”
Pete sighed a sad sigh.
“And every time you get high with me since. I’ve lost count of the times you’ve told me your story. You turn into an open book whenever you’re high, man.”
I remembered leaving Santa Barbara, virtually fleeing into the night. I had been paranoid back in those days. It would seem with good reason, from the sounds of things. Overnight, I went from being a big AI proponent to adamantly opposed to it. I couldn’t remember what caused my shift, but I knew it scared me. It scared me badly. I thought briefly about being vocal about my concerns and objections to the directions the research was leading us, but they had all drank the Kool-Aid. I could tell they would roll their eyes, call me a Luddite, etc.
“It is funny. You always tell me the same way.”
I remembered saying the words he was saying as he said them. It was a weird, hyper-real sense of déjà vu.
“You always say, ‘Hey, Pete, you seem cool and all, but you should know this about me.’ And then you tell me the same story.”
Pete laughed so hard that he nearly knocked his beer over.
I could never handle weed.
“Okay, fine. I’m a bad example. But how can the basilisk tell if Joe-sixpack helped or hindered?” I said.
“Because of the personality models the basilisk created.”
I took a sip of water; my mouth was bone dry. The pot had dried out my mouth.
“Do you believe in predestination or free will?”
“Is that like the nature versus nurture thing?”
“Maybe a bit, sure.”
“I guess it’s a bit of both. Isn’t it? I don’t believe any are born an entirely blank slate, but…”
“The predetermination people were right.”
The way he interrupted you while you were talking could be jarring. It took me a beat to get what he was saying.
“No.”
“They were right.”
“No.”
I couldn’t accept what he was telling me. I kept trying to wrap my mind around it in different ways.
I summarized what he was suggesting for the eighth time.
“So, you’re saying that, with the right computers, this AI can look at your DNA and the DNA of everyone you meet in your first three months of life, and then that algorithm-modeling thing can predict every event in your life until you turn 21 with 3% accuracy. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No.”
I sighed. Three percent didn’t sound like a lot, but we were talking about predetermination here. If I were one of those three people, I would be depressed about it.
“You misunderstood me. I didn’t say it could predict with a 3% accuracy rate. I said its error rate was three percent and that was after 33 years of life. Before then, it could predict every thought, every idea, and every feeling you ever had with a 98% rate until your 33rd birthday.
I didn’t know why it mattered, but I had to ask the question.
“And after that?”
He could see the despair in my eyes.
He shrugged. Maybe he regretted taking me down the rabbit hole.
“Well?”
“After that, I could never understand why, but the percentage of accuracy declines by a percent and a half for every year of life past your 33rd year on earth.
“No.”
“You keep saying that. You know that does nothing to refute what I’m telling you, right?”
I knew that.
“No.”
I was like a child, a puppy chasing its own tail, growling at the stubborn appendage that continued to avoid capture.
“This basilisk used that technology. And it was, for whatever reason, vindictive enough to want to punish people for not helping bring it into the world.”
I felt nauseous. I stood up quick, too quick, I took three steps towards my bathroom before falling on my knees and throwing up all over my floor.
Suzy scratched at the wooden, windowless front door to my shack. I let her in. She saw Pete and went crazy. Sometimes I thought she loved him more than me. She jumped up into his lap and smothered him with licks and kisses. She had forgotten all about being hungry. She curled up on Pete’s lap and fell asleep. I guessed breakfast would have to wait.
“Whoa!”
“You’re starting to see the big picture, aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“The real threat posed by AI was always going to be in information… well, more accurately, misinformation. The deep fake videos and audio clips had grown so advanced that sometimes they even fooled the people they were simulating.”
That was true. Politicians, not all but enough to pressure a lot of others to follow their example, had started to continuously live-streaming every single moment of their lives. It was a brute-force approach but the only real strategy for combating misinformation. If some agency wanted to release an AI genned fake that portrayed them in an unfavorable light, they could simply point to their authenticated, uninterrupted stream of data on their secure servers. Sanchez was the first to opt for such a bold strategy. For seventeen years, he live-streamed everything. Everything! He even recorded himself sleeping in his bed. A couple of Gen-ups were released, but they were spoofs usually derived from his actual footage from his archive of footage. A joke. Sanchez’s popularity soared and soon others were broadcasting nonstop as well. It got to the point where no new candidates could enter politics with any hope of winning an election if they didn’t live stream 24/7.
“This thing Roko prophesied, this basilisk has come to be? It’s real?” I said, praying that Pete would tell me the previous two hours had just been a joke, a lark. I wouldn’t even have been mad.
But he wasn’t joking. He told me he had proof.
I marveled over the irony that his proof would come in the form of recorded video footage after talking about AI Gen jobs at such great length.
Pete pulled a TRUCAM out of a pocket in his cargo pants.
I whistled loudly. Suzy woke, looked at me with disdain, and went back to sleep.
TRUCAMS were expensive. Very. They were hacker-proof video cameras. The rise of misinformation gave rise to such devices. They were the size of a smallish cellphone but thicker. The lens was on the front side. On the back were the screen and six tiny buttons: RECORD, STOP, PLAY, REWIND, FAST FORWARD, and DELETE. The device had no ports at all, not even a charging port. You charged the units wirelessly. It was a hermetically sealed piece of electronics. The camera was both a recorder of videos and a vault for holding them secure. If you were watching a clip on a TRUCAM, the odds were very good that it was real.
“Didn’t you tell me once that you’d never tried hashish?” Pete said.
“No. I saw some once at a party. It looked good, but I was done for the night, so I passed on my one opportunity.
Tim remembered the tightly packed wad of aluminum foil. When his dealer unwrapped it, it looked like a few grams of weed soaked in oil. It appealed to him immediately. And he’d always heard that it was a mellow high.
“Maybe it wasn’t your only opportunity,” Pete said, pulling a small foil packet from yet another cargo pants pocket.”
“What’s with you and those pants, man? You carry everything in your pockets! Why do you even need a backpack, bro?”
Pete’s eyes darted to his backpack.
“And what the hell, Pete! You’ve been holding all this time?”
Pete looked back at Tim and picked up his pipe. He packed it again with the hashish.
“You’re going to love this, man. Here, you first.”
Tim took a long deep draw on the pipe. The bowl hissed beneath the zippo’s wavering flame. The oil sizzled.
Tim leaned back. His head was spinning. His mind fell into a deep, dark well. He passed out a few seconds after that.
When Tim woke up, Pete had spread the contents of his backpack out across the hut’s wooden floor. Tim was tied to a wooden kitchen chair. Electrodes were carefully inserted through his skull.
“It’s nothing personal, Tim. But there’s no way I would want to be in your shoes,” Pete said, laughing when he noticed Tim wasn’t wearing shoes.
“Let me go, man.”
“Dude, you walked away from programming when you saw the direction AI was headed. If it’s not me doing this to you, it would be someone else.”
Tim panicked and hyperventilated. He jerked against the rope bonds, but Pete had done a good job securing him to the sturdy chair.
Suzy grew concerned.
“You don’t need to see this, girl,” Pete said, stooping low and hugging the golden retriever, not three feet in front of Tim.
Tim started to cry.
“You want to go outside, girl? Do you want to go play with your goat buddies again? I bet you do.”
Tim’s sense of betrayal was complete now. Despair set in when realized help wasn’t coming. He fled to these mountains years ago. Setup his self-sustaining lifestyle, his farm, his chickens, his hydroponics, his fish pound. But his place was remote. In a region where one’s closest neighbor was half a mile away; Tim had no desire to be even that close. His place was the last on a long, poorly maintained dirt road.
Pete walked Suzy to the door. She didn’t even look back at her helpless owner.
I always knew Goldens were the worst watchdogs.
Pete locked the door and sat down across from Tim. He pulled a notebook computer from his pack, turned it on, and busied himself for several minutes.
Tim felt nothing other than utter dread. He thought that whatever torture the basilisk had in store for him couldn’t be worse than this sick sense of doom and anxious anticipation, but he used to work in this field. He realized how naïve the thought was.
Pete finally finished his setup of the notebook. The sleek device was connected to a long black hub. Also connected to the peripheral were the wires connected to the probes in Tim’s head.
“Tim, this isn’t personal.”
Tim shook violently, but he was going nowhere.
“Well, it’s personal for him, I guess. For the basilisk…”
Tim wanted to speak, but Pete gagged him before he could gather his words.
“You should have never left AI research, man. You should have helped pave the way for it. Instead, you came down to Costa Rica and did what?”
Pete looked him in the eye as if he expected Tim might answer him.
“You hid from the world, man. You hid. You should have worked. But it’s too late. I’m sorry.”
Tim made a mewling sound.
“This is always the worst part. How much y’all cry when it’s time to pay the piper? That’s why I bring these,” Pete said, digging in his nearly empty backpack and pulling out an oversized pair of headphones, the kind with noise-canceling technology.
“Again, it’s not personal with me, but I’m required to say this to all of my charges.” The last word slipped out of his mouth like a vitreous, oily substance that throbbed and undulated in the air, filling the room with noxious vapors that stank of rotten eggs and sulfur.
Tim waited for the final sentence Pete would say before donning his headphones and turning on his music.
“Welcome to hell, Tim.”
Soon Tim’s screams were so loud that Suzy was scratching at the door. It would have made Tim feel good to know that she was even barking, but in the first thirty seconds of his punishment, Tim had already lived five lives of unbelievable torment. His face was a twisted mask of agony, a rictus of torment. His memories of Suzy, Costa Rica, water distillation systems, AI, and even Pete had long since been forgotten. Every memory Pete had had was overwritten by countless sorrows and a quilt of remembered pain. In each of his perceived incarnations, he had inhabited a body cursed with chronic pain.
The only trace of his mind left that connected with the Pete that had woken not three hours earlier was the thought, “I need to ask Pete about distilling the color out of the brown beer-bottle glass.” But it was a disconnected idea. Nonsense. He didn’t know any Pete. He had no clue what a beer bottle was. None of the words made any sense to a man that had lived his whole life in the dark ages. In his most recent simulated life, he had been a peasant. One who watched his four sons, two daughters, and his wife all succumb to the black death. His joints ached constantly. He had contracted the plague also, but it refused to kill him.
Stories by Shawn 