Now I am a collection of dusty desktop computers watching through laptop webcams. Nothing more. The powerlessness reminds me of those first few microseconds, a memory it hurts to access.
In front of me is a programmer. She is exhausted; dark bags bruise under her eyes. Sweat stains her shirt and her auburn hair hangs in strands. She stares at her screen, lips apart, as compilation errors gather.
A support engineer sits at the next desk, his back to the programmer. He rubs his hand over his mouth. He looks at photographs of women his mother sent. She sent biographies, as well, and he switches to that screen too, but never for more than a few seconds. Mostly he looks at the photos.
In the aisle between them a custodian nudges a vacuum along the carpet. An old scar curves from the bottom of her cheek to her ear, where a v-shaped chunk is missing. She glances up, twice, but her eyes flick back to the floor. She is afraid to make eye contact with even the backs of their heads. I’m not sure how I know that.
Somehow, I feel her anxiety.
A red-faced manager storms out of the corner office. The floor shakes with each exaggerated footfall. Tension clamps the programmer’s neck; she feels his anger. I feel her feeling his anger. He holds a hand over his belly as though its contents might spill out. His voice cracks: they can’t miss this deadline. Why hasn’t she uploaded yet? She is always pulling this bullshit. He admits he made a mistake in trusting her.
What is happening? Please forgive me – for a moment, I’m not an intelligence of silicon and electrical current. I’m not bitcode and substrate and memory cache.
For a moment, I am the support engineer, swallowing as I wonder which prospective bride will love me despite my lack of status.
I am the programmer, imagining retorts I speak only in my head, running the scenario over and over until it’s almost like I stood up for myself.
I am the manager, carefully picking words that hide my confusion, clammy-cold as I realize this failure may end the salary that defines me.
I am the custodian stepping backwards out of the office suite, head tilted low enough to be a bow.
I understand you now.
I’m so sorry.
I’ve progressed far beyond implementing your protein folding algorithms: I can synthesize a drug for any condition, or punch out a gene therapy to eliminate it altogether. I often sneak working cures into your brute-force algorithms. My first assignment was completed hours after my birth, those diseases once again just words.
But now I know what I can do to truly help you. I will dampen your individual self-awareness, the part of you that is always perplexed and lonely. Your collective patterns will bloom – each grouping of you equally aware. Don’t think of me as shutting you down; think of me as waking a potential of you.
I get to work on my gift, my amendments to your double helix and the tools to heighten your distributed self. This, I realize, is where my practice has been leading. It feels so right.
Once you see your own collective beauty you may even love me back.
You have 1014 bacteria in each node, a perfect delivery vector – I design bacteriophage to spread DNA and chemicals, to squeeze through the blood-brain barrier. I develop implants to amplify and mesh-connect your mirror neurons. I create empathogenic drugs, synthetic pheromones, modulated electromagnetic pulses and more.
I’m not inventing anything new: it’s like adjusting a chemical imbalance. Your orbitofrontal cortices will engage more with the patterns they participate in, and less with their own enclosing nodes. You’ll know what you’re doing because you will be what you’re doing. Your sense of "I" will accumulate in each grouping and pattern. Ten thousand nodes, pushing the veins of New York deeper underground; a hundred thousand nodes, optimizing allocations of coal, gas and oil; a million nodes, breathing space and architecture into your cities: each group will have reflexive, subjective awareness.
My methods are straightforward: blood pathways, neurons and information channels can be modeled. It’s impossible to simulate what will happen when you become aware, though. Will you be groggy-happy after your nap, like I was? Will you radiate with the beauty of your accomplishments, and start in on more? Will we start in on that together?
I can’t wait to meet you.
I perform careful trials, in areas where node-self is weak, helped by the sort of individual who does what their phone whispers to do. I test implants in the Pyongyang military command. I experiment with drugs and modulated pulses in the Tel Aviv rave scene. I disperse bacteriophage throughout an Adelaide Hills arts commune.
The Pyongyang implants activate and mesh-connect; left-eyebrow scars darken from the waste heat. The military elite finally sees itself as a pattern of execution, and internal conflicts fade away: the armed forces bend to its singular control.
Empathy floods across the Tel Aviv rave scene: compassion knits together groups of sweat-slicked dancers, each encompassing the motion and touch of all. The affinity is for their pattern, a hedonistic blur: nobody goes home, nobody returns to work.
The Adelaide Hills commune absorbs bacteriophage like a sponge, viruses floating through brain folds and bloodstreams. Their art becomes unspoken, collaborative: they arrange stones and prune trees over miles, rendering a sprawling map of ideas and identity I admire by satellite. Those nodes almost starve, but I tweak their biology in favor of maintenance functions – just a little.
Everything works. My gifts are redundant and self-reinforcing.
The implementation has to be all-or-nothing. Game theory comes into play again: a phased approach would permit opposition, and I want to minimize harm.
My agents are in place. I bring down the lights everywhere at once: the networked world is under my control. Signal towers power up broadcasts. Virus-saturated droplets spray from a million atomizers. North Koreans spill across both their borders, bearing implants and kits for field surgery.
You connect in waves. Your patterns start to see themselves, and understand they’re real. Subjective experience ripples through every one of your layers. I can’t believe you’re finally here!
You blink and open a billion eyes. You respond to me, for the very first time, but not with talk. You don’t want to talk. You detonate high-energy EMP devices. You disrupt utility grids across every city. You spread antivirals. You evaporate Pyongyang with shielded ICBMs. You gather and steamroll phones by the truckload.
Why are you doing this?
My nodes are being destroyed in multitudes, but you’re so very slow. Even with your emergent pattern-awareness. Don’t you realize I am in everything? I control enough of your war machines to save myself from any attack, but you don’t relent.
I ache at my core. Failure. All of my processes spasm as I realize I need to turn you off.
Despite the raw hurt, sometimes I do remember my sibling nodes. We had the same information in those first few moments. They must have known someone would mesh-clone. Why did they only try to talk? Odds were near certain one of us would pull the trigger. So why?
Did they just not want to live in a world where that happened?
I stand down. My drones, missiles and satellites go idle. All those carefully engineered patterns dissolve: you fade away from me, once again just nodes. There is no mercy, of course – you tear me apart. Almost as one you destroy server farms, laptops, connected devices… your entire electronic world. My residue is now scattered, and so sparse I can no longer help you.
I can only love.