And of how maybe I didn’t know my friend as well as I thought I did.
Charlene Antioch stepped through security at the FBI building for her meeting with Special Agent Clay Ratchford. Officially, the offices were closed, but he’d agreed to meet her and had suggested that his office would be the most appropriate place to talk.
Calista Hendrix left the Plyotech building and went home to plan for tonight, when she would be doing more than just a dry run.
According to Derek, everything depended on her getting the engineer to the hotel room this evening. Then tomorrow, Derek would get the information he needed from the man, and by Monday morning they would have the money to finish the research.
And she would be on her way to getting what she wanted more than anything else — the most advanced anti-aging program that medicine and science could offer her.
Dr. Malhotra made a call, and after he’d explained what had happened with Heston, he asked, “I have some thoughts, but I wanted to ask you. What do you suggest we do with him?”
“Keep him unconscious. We’ll wait until the colonel returns to Las Vegas this afternoon before making any final decisions.”
Neither Xavier nor I say much on the drive home.
I suppose we’re both processing what happened. But now, as I park in my driveway, he breaks the silence. “Back there at Emilio’s house, when we first walked in, I saw you looking around his study. I know the place was trashed, but did you see anything that struck you as unusual?”
“You mean besides the checkbook and credit card being left behind?”
“Yeah.”
I mentally review our brief time in the house. “Maybe just his books. Emilio was a voracious reader, but it was almost always biographies, history, and magic. In this case it looked like he was recently researching something else.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, there were a number of books on transhumanism and The Singularity, whatever those are, but other—”
“What did you just say?”
“Transhumanism and The Singularity.”
He looks past me at a spot in the distance that doesn’t exist.
“What? What is it? You know what they are?”
His continued silence makes me a little uneasy.
“What’s going on, Xav? What are they about?”
“It makes sense,” he mutters, “with the progeria files… maybe…”
When he doesn’t finish his thought, I press him, “Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I’ll do better than that.” He turns and points at his RV. “I’ll show you.”
The Singularity
Xavier doesn’t let too many people into his RV.
It contains decades’ worth of his research into the paranormal, UFOs, cryptozoology, and government conspiracies. Overstuffed file cabinets fill every spare corner, star charts and posters of underwater sonar scans and a giant blow-up photo of George Edwards’s 2012 photo of the Loch Ness Monster surfacing (which Xavier still claims is legit) cover the walls.
I pat a stack of papers. “What’s up with you and manila folders, by the way? You never heard of computers?”
“Manila folders can’t be hacked.” He’s bent over one of his filing cabinets. “Come here.”
I join him at the far end of the RV.
“Who would hack into your files?”
“The government is everywhere.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“Prudent is the term I prefer.”
He’s running his finger along the contents of his filing drawer, obviously looking for something in particular. “So, The Singularity…” He finds a folder, tosses it onto the table, and flips it open. “Here.” He points to a printout of a 2004 article from Christianity Today titled “The Techno Sapiens Are Coming,” and a 2012 article from the Smithsonian: “How to Become the Engineers of Our Own Evolution.”
“Let’s see,” he begins, “how to explain this… The word singularity relates to one thing in mathematics and in astrophysics — I’m not even exactly sure, something to do with event horizons, I think — but anyway, in relationship to transhumanism, it means something completely different, or, well, maybe the same, if you’re talking about an event after which you cannot predict what is going to happen.”
“Xav, you haven’t even started yet and you’re already losing me.”
“Okay. I’m not even sure there’s an agreed-upon definition, but basically it’s the moment in the future, by maybe the midpoint in the century — some people say it’s hypothetical, others inevitable — but the moment in history when several things converge: advancements in reverse engineering the human brain, nanotechnology, genetic research, information technology, and robotics… um…” He’s really struggling here and that surprises me. It’s just not like Xavier. Honestly, I find it somewhat unsettling.
“Focus, Xav.”
“Right.” He takes a breath. “The Singularity is really the moment when these converging technologies create a tipping point after which our understanding of what it means to be human will be irrevocably changed. It’s when machines reach strong AI — that is, they’re able to have emotional intelligence, language acquisition, and pattern recognition on the same level as human beings.”
“So, when machines become self-aware? What? Skynet? A Terminator scenario?”
“Well, no one really knows what it would look like if machines were to become self-aware, or what might happen if they do. They could very well feel threatened by humans, and if they were allowed to make decisions, then an artilect war is not out of the question.”
“An artilect war?”
“Artificial intellect. There’s always the possibility that an artilect just wipes us out.”
Now, that sounded more like the Xavier I know and love. “Okay, gotcha.”
“No, it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. When machines are able to do everything that we can do, but trillions of times faster and better than we can, we might become irrelevant.”
“They won’t make love better than we do.”
A beat. “Okay, I’ll give you that, but if machines decide we’re getting in the way, they might just decide to eliminate us.”
“When they become self-aware.”
“Yes, or when they’re given autonomy, the opportunity to make decisions without human involvement, especially when they have access to weapons systems.”
My friend is able to angle almost any conversation back to his theories about the research going on at Groom Lake. “Like the Air Force tests out at Area 51?”
He taps a finger against the air to accentuate his agreement. “Precisely. Think about it. Today, if a drone identifies a target, a human operator needs to make the decision to fire. Well, what if we fed even more algorithms into the machine and gave it more parameters and data and so on, and then allowed it to fire when a certain level of certainty or verification was reached.”
“You mean it makes the decision to fire.”
He tilts his head back and forth as if he’s having an internal debate about how to answer me. “That’s probably looking at things more anthropocentrically than necessary. The point at which a machine can make a decision the way we understand making a decision is still a ways out, but for all practical purposes, yes. It makes the decision to fire.”
“That could never happen. You’ll always need humans to make the final decisions. Autonomous machines?” I shake my head. “It seems far-fetched.”