Like a tick in a bear’s fur, he’d burrowed his way into the deepest reaches of the program. He’d pushed all my buttons to get what he wanted, even as a child. More of the problem was that even then, it didn’t all add up.
“Do you think he was really involved in the disappearances of Susie and Cynthia and the others?” I asked Marie. “Why would he attract attention to himself like that with people so close to him?”
“He must be unaware of a part of himself, deceiving himself,” Marie speculated. “It’s the only way he could have passed all our psych tests, but it’s hard to say. Having pssi installed in the developing brain of an unstable sociopathic mind has created something…new, I guess.”
The science of self-deception lay at the heart of modern psychology. The goal of self-deception wasn’t about deceiving the self, but about more effectively deceiving others. Deception was a cognitively demanding activity that left telltale signatures no matter how good the liar. By truly deceiving yourself, on the other hand, you could escape detection, but with the generalized risk of falling out of touch with reality.
This was something we’d compounded with pssi.
Deception of all kinds increased with intelligence. The bigger the neocortex, and the higher the intelligence, the more an organism tended to lie and deceive itself, and Jimmy was about as smart an organism as I’d ever come across. I wasn’t sure it was accurate to say he was even human anymore. Whatever he had become, he was now the master of deception.
“I also think he may have constructed a fantasy world about his own abuse to justify his behavior,” added Marie. “We don’t have any evidence that his parents ever did anything to him.”
I considered this.
“Split personality disorder is almost always the result of abuse as a child. If his parents didn’t abuse him, then who did?”
Marie shrugged.
“If he’s managed to fool himself,” I sighed, “then he’s certainly managed to fool us.”
I wondered about all the ways I’d been fooling myself to arrive at this point.
Self-deception also tracked closely with war and the worst of human evils. Pssi had catapulted human capacity in many ways, but by any measure, Atopia had now become the most deceptive place on earth, and we were about to unleash it on the rest of humanity under the guise of being its savior. The road to hell really was paved with the best of intentions.
All the careful planning to cover every base, to push the future to converge on one stable outcome, it was all slipping away. Then again, control was always an illusion, just another self-deception. I should have known better.
On the other hand, perhaps larger forces were in play. A major transition in human evolution had been the development of trust as an evolutionary step. Pssi had now almost fully passed human evolution from genetic and into memetic encoding, and the speed of the transition was too fast for human culture to catch up. One result was that the new human pssi-forms were becoming more selfish.
In the ultimate extension of this, there was the potential for one singular being to become dominant over the whole super-organism of humanity as billions of people were about to be connected together via the pssi network. On the brink of removing death as an evolutionary force, it was frightening to consider what lay ahead.
What was worse? Allowing billions of people to die, or saving them to live lives of perpetual suffering under the control of a monster? My monster, I added as a footnote to that thought.
I didn’t answer my own question.
Perhaps it would have been impossible for me to see what was happening, no matter what controls I could have put in place. He had used my own blind spot, my latent desire for a child of my own, as my life had begun slip away from me. I could feel my love for him burn in me even as I understood the beast I may have created.
“Can we remove him from the Board somehow? At least get him off the Security Council?” I pondered aloud.
Marie responded by echoing my thoughts more than anything else.
“He’s already aligned himself with powerful supporters, he’s a celebrity in the world media, and I’m sure he’d have some nasty surprises up his sleeve if we tried confronting him in the open,” she replied. “We lack enough hard data on Jimmy to resolve phutures involving him. It’s almost like he’s a ghost.”
I continued the thought for her, “Yes, and if we can’t prove anything, it will look like the disgruntled ramblings of an old woman throwing her last rocks into the glass house.”
I was thinking about all the fuss I’d been raising at the Board meetings about minimizing the addictive effects of pssi. It’d all fallen on deaf ears as they’d reviewed the projected profits, with Hal cheering from the sidelines about being able to clip the addictive circuitry of the brain. Now there was some self-deception at work.
And now, it had all fallen on my doorstep.
“Probably better to keep under the radar for now,” agreed Marie. “I do think that your idea of encouraging the formations of composites should yield some protection from Jimmy.”
“Perhaps.”
“And what about the data from the neutrino telescope?” asked Marie.
I sighed. I’d kept the POND results absolutely locked down, trying to forget it myself. How could it be real? It defied imagination.
“Cut it off from Atopia immediately,” I replied. “If there’s anything to it I want that data far away from here.”
My skin crawled thinking of the ways Hal and Kesselring could spin the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence, if it was true and not some artifact of the viral infection.
“Send a report back into the science community that it was a failure, and leave the connection key with the package delivered to Bob and Nancy. But only to them.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she replied simply.
Looking at Marie, I couldn’t believe I felt such love and affection for a machine, a virtual projection that didn’t really exist, something that I’d created. Then again, all our children, biological or not, were created by us, and it wasn’t accurate to say that Marie didn’t exist. I’d never really thought of her as my child before that moment, always as more of a sister. Perhaps she was both.
“After I’m gone, communicate everything to them, right?” I confirmed with Marie. “Send Nancy and Bob out to find Willy’s body.”
“I understand, Patricia, don’t worry.”
“I know, it’s just...”
“I know.”
Silence descended. I had one final point.
“Marie, after I’m gone, I want you to continue to, well, to be.”
“But proxxi terminate with their owners, Patricia. That goes against the whole program.”
“It’s been done before,” I said, smiling. “Anyway, it’s done. I’ve already made a special provision in my will. There are some advantages to being the senior researcher at Cognix.”
“Are you sure?” Marie asked, giving me a quizzical look. “This will create precedent…”
“Exactly,” I smiled. “I think this situation calls for special consideration, and I want you to continue on with the work we’ve started on the Synthetic Being Charter of Rights. Besides…”
“Besides what?”
I looked at Marie carefully.
“Aren’t you the least bit worried about ceasing to exist? Doesn’t this arrangement strike you as unfair?”
She smiled and gently shook her head.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
I let out a quiet laugh at that. I didn’t think this old body had any tears left in it, but I guess it still had a few. Wiping them from my face, I felt my papery skin. So fragile, and yet we dreamt of immortality.