‘Parallel processing,’ I say to her as we shuffle, the Schulz beat hammering around us. ‘That’s what he said. The answer is… parallel processing.’
‘Wot dat even mean, Roy?’ When we are talking – really talking – she uses my name. Roy.
‘For many years people were working on artificial intelligence. You’ll see it all in the old movies. Very valuable, movies. Certainly as valuable as science. If you all paid as much attention to the movies as you do to the messages and that music. Well, anyway, army drones. Automatic braking. Guided parking. Algorithms – banking and book selection and stock trading and temperature selection. Information aggregators. Personal exercise bots. Nanobots. Machines that approximated human thinking. Algorithms were a very important part of how the world functioned.’ I stop to check her engagement. She stops with me. Looks at me. Through me. Her breasts jiggle quietly as she idles, smooth light brown cleavage. I fall into them, briefly, and she lets me, before taking that small half step. I follow.
‘Humans have always been terribly weak in terms of raw power. Weak like the ant or the moth. But we had parallel processing. Computers always had to queue the functions. Kettle then love then sports scores. Always in a strict order.’
Matron agrees. She nods. Her arm, locked through mine, focuses in its own strict way on keeping me upright. I look at her. Consider her. Occasionally, just every now and again, maybe once or twice a year, Matron and I get into closer physical contact. Always something to do with backs and shoulders, legs, the need to move. She pushes and pulls and twists and rubs and then, casually, without breaking stride, her hands find a deeper rhythm, the rub extends, and she will, still talking, still chatting, take me in her hand and rub, and pull, and stretch, like we’re still exercising, which I suppose we are, and at the end, only the very end, her lips in my ear, and then finally, humbly, release.
And a kiss on the ear. A real kiss. Lobe within teeth, a nibble. One more kiss. And gone.
‘You tired, tata?’ She watches me watching her.
‘No, not tired. Just looking at you, my dear. At your beautiful young face.’
Matron blushes. ‘Ah nay, tata. Nuttin to look at de.’
‘Well, that depends on where you’re looking from, angel.’
‘We must walk. You said parallel processing?’
‘Yes. Parallel processing.
‘The algos evolved into complex nets of calculations and equations and assumptions. But really, and very quietly, we were losing control over the basic engine of our creations. Things like Twenty Per Cent Tuesday[9] and all the protests and such. But, even so, the true danger was unseen.
‘A young man working at the Free State University created a new kind of computer chip, from a new material. He wasn’t even trying to make a computer chip. He was into cellphones and was actually working on a new kind of battery, but, well, he turned left, he turned right and then he had a processor on his hands made out of an exceptionally dense kind of plastic. When I say dense, I mean it was made up of billions and billions of microscopic fibres. It was very similar to the structure of the human brain, actually – and it had the same ability to parallel process. It could send and receive and process billions of fibre-optic commands simultaneously.
‘He knew he had something big on his hands. Big enough to make him very rich. He decided to keep working at it rather than publish, and to do that he needed to apply his new chip in a real setting. He wanted, in other words, to start and control his own R&D before figuring out who the highest bidder was going to be. He had a friend operating his own project in the nanotech building here at the CSIR and they got together to experiment for a while.’
‘Sorry, Roy,’ Matron cuts in. ‘When dis all? You met Madala wen?’
‘Ah, it was many years ago, dear. Maybe you were just born. Maybe a bit before. Or after.’
‘An you never tell the udders? Wot you sayin now?’
‘Well, I tried, in my own way. But the time was never right. And eventually – there’s a lesson here, I’m sure – it was just too late. No one would have believed I waited so long. They would have thought I was mad. Crazy mthakathi. Now I don’t really even know myself. Where it all fits. If it all fits. What happened when. It gets harder, you know. Once age really comes for you. Maybe that’s the lesson, nè? Use your youth!’
She chuckles and pats my arm. ‘Turn, ja? Far enuff, today.’
We wheel, set off.
‘Now the nanotech man – this friend of the Free State guy – was a very interesting person. Sam Shabalala. Very young. Very intelligent. He wrote algos, grew them up like they were his children. He was effectively running two projects from his lab, and it was his hobby that really counted.
‘Sam knew what other people in his field knew, but unlike most of them he was trying to put what he understood into practice. The first thing would be to write base-level code to root the philosophy of the system’s logic. The danger was self-interest. Once a certain critical point had been passed, the system would be able to rewrite its code in a more efficient form. Unless there was something profound that prevented it, the system would logically reframe its objectives and actions around its own self-interest.
‘So, Sam spent a long time fiddling with the core logic. When our University of Free State man – whose name was Sugar Groenewald, by the way – visited Sam, he was working on his three core commands for all systems. He was playing the reductionist game, seeing if he could keep the commands as singular as possible, based on the idea that a recursively minded system would quickly rewrite any commands that were too specific or too technical. His idea was that only simple core philosophies would work. Only the very simplest…’
‘Wait, I ken. I ken where dis going, tata.’ Matron has a twinkle in her eye, which worries me. It’s a joking twinkle, a silly, humorous guess. ‘Madala was him!’ She grins up at me. ‘He’s wot Sam Shabalala created!’ My heart thumps in annoyance. She isn’t taking me seriously. I start to sweat. I feel a strong urge to thump my own chest.
‘OK, I can see you’re jumping ahead.’ I keep my poise. ‘So, yes, it happened just like I’m sure you expect. Sugar and Sam combined the new processor with an experimental cross-pollination of marketing and stock-trading algorithms and Madala was born. The first fully sentient being to be created this way.’
‘And then he took over. Just, nè? Used his parallel power to—’
‘Do what needed to be done.’ I’m pensive. ‘Look, I know how it sounds. Now, after all this time. You just think I’m crazy. Senile. And who knows?’ I stop us. ‘Mavis, I don’t honestly know. All I can tell you is what I remember. What is clear. I can recall, for example, wondering how he managed to execute his range of emotional inflections, if he was simply a collection of equations. I remember asking myself that at the time, and not having an answer.’
‘Don doubt me, Roy.’ Matron pulls us on, despite my mistrust. ‘You don know wot I believe. Wot I know.’
‘Ag sho, but really. I’m just saying, nè? I realise how it must sound. Anyway, Madala was not the only system. He was one of hundreds of thousands, and only a tiny percentage of them had any core philosophical programming at all. Sugar wasn’t the only one hitting on the new parallel chip. Around five hundred were set to come to fruition within weeks, and of those two others were undeniable. The one was a lethal combination of outbound dialling and carbon-trading algorithms. Humans were about to be obliterated – regardless.’
9
See section 7 of the World History block of the Slovo Library. Twenty per cent was wiped o? global markets on Tuesday, the ninth of February 2023, in a ‘systems error’.