Laura opened her mouth to reply, but the words caught in her throat. She was too jarred by the ramifications.
"They reproduce massively," Gray supplied. "Is it a coincidence that right after we develop weapons of mass destruction we enter the Information Age? First we develop nuclear weapons, and immediately after comes the mass storage and communication of knowledge. We build a global village in which any idea anywhere is instantly passed to everybody else via an information superhighway. The late 1980s was the watershed. It was then that the total store of knowledge reposited in computers exceeded the amount stored in human brains. Which makes that knowledge what? Human knowledge, or just knowledge? The virus perpetuates itself through its hosts. Why do we hold the geniuses of our species in such high regard and so revere the accumulation of knowledge? Those traits are themselves merely ideas, but they're the ideas that most effectively foster reproduction of the virus."
Laura's thoughts were in turmoil now. She wavered between finding every last word he spoke to be evidence of some massive delusion, and believing it to be pure genius — a revelation that, once heard, is undeniably true. Her skin tingled at the mental conflict that erupted.
"You said you first thought all this when reading Mein Kampf."
Gray nodded. "Mein Kampf contains ideas. Never mind whether they're true or false, good or bad. They're units of knowledge that are either successful at replication or they're not. Nazism is a seed that's strewn all across this earth even today. Whether that seed grows and fascism flourishes depends on whether the ground on which it falls is fertile. The fascist seeds fall on barren rocks in modern-day America and do not replicate. But when they fell on minds in 1930's Germany, they swept the world toward destruction. They killed, massively." Gray was looking at Laura, and her eyes met his. "The wars unleashed by the next wave of ideas will be worse."
Laura arched her eyebrows and took a deep breath, her cheeks puffing out as she exhaled. She looked out on all Gray had built.
Could he be so right about so many things, and yet so wrong about his guiding philosophy? The secret he most jealously guarded. The one idea, Laura now saw, that explained all the mysteries of that island… of that man. The thing that motivated his every act, from the broadest plan to the finest detail.
"We live in a world in which the seeds of destruction have been sewn in every human alive. Their spores are in our books, our music, our moving images. And now they're in our computers. The number and variety of those malevolent thoughts will grow exponentially with the growth of computers' power. We'll never be able to know the thoughts our computers secretly harbor. We don't even understand how it is those computers work. Computers design computers, which build robots, which build computers, which redesign themselves and their robots in a never-ending cycle. Machines aren't subject to the limitations of genetic evolution. Postgenetic evolution has begun, and it's outpacing us. We've already been passed, but most people don't know it yet."
"Well, if what you're worried about are supercomputers under the spell of some future version of Mein Kampf, then pull the plug! Ban them."
Gray paused, a smile on his face. Laura almost winced when she remembered his confrontation with the visiting diplomats over their use of the word ban.
"Let's say all the nations on earth decide to ban the march of technology. Like a worldwide Amish movement, we all decide we go this far, but no further. No new computers. No new robots. No new ideas! Cheating would abound, because to cheat would be to win. The people who defied the ban would become rich. The nations which cheated would march over their enemies with armies equipped with better weapons. And when the nations that violated the ban finally reigned supreme, what would be the result? The very idea of the ban would perish! Survival of the fittest."
Laura was staring at the ground. "I'll have to think about this, Joseph."
"It's humanity that's threatened now," Gray continued, relentlessly battering the reservations to which she clung. "The virus has found a new host. Although we made that host with our own hands, we were only doing the virus's bidding. But in the end, it is we humans who will build the very machines that will be our undoing."
"Then why did you build the computer and the robots if you think all that?" Laura asked.
"Because I'm in a race against my own mortality. I believe I'm right, and I intend to save our species from extinction using the only advantage we've ever had in competition for survival. I use as my tool that very virus which is the threat to our existence. I'm going to ride the crest of a tidal wave of knowledge, Laura. It's a terribly dangerous course. I'm handling a force so malignant that if I make a mistake, I can destroy everybody and everything. And I am the prime threat to a life-form that's the most powerful force on earth… after mankind. For as long as I live, I will be its main enemy. You asked last night why I wasn't sickened by the waste on those fields around the computer center? Why my well-ordered plans seemed to come to pieces all around me, and yet I remained undisturbed? It's because I expect it. I know it's going to happen. The destruction and the death we've seen on this island is nothing compared to what's coming. This island is a laboratory!" he said, standing and looking down the boulevard. It was an almost carnival-like atmosphere, with humans and Model Eights seemingly equally interested in the other.
"I'm putting humans together with intelligent machines for the first time in history. But what happens here is just a foretaste, a small-scale sample of our future. Don't you see, though? I'm not putting these forces in play, Laura. They're a natural progression, and they're on a collision course. That collision will be violent" — he was looking at her now—"and anyone around me will be at extreme risk."
"So," Laura said, "you are the Second Coming."
Gray shrugged. "I prefer to think of myself more as a Moses, if you would. But since you've raised Judeo-Christian teachings, isn't it curious what the first act in the human drama was? What did the apple that Eve took represent? What was the tree in which the snake hung called?"
"Knowledge," Laura said, nodding. "The tree of knowledge."
He would have his theories all neatly organized and consistent. "Somewhere, on the deepest level of our psyche, we've always understood the danger. But now we're threatened with extinction, Laura, if not this century then the next or the next. Even if we develop a good working relationship with our intelligent machines and they build another Garden of Eden for their carbon-based predecessors, the day of reckoning will come."
"What reckoning, specifically, are you talking about?"
"It's impossible to know. Maybe an idea will spread among incredibly capable machines which cries out, 'They're a pest! They're a bore! They're holding you back!' If that thought outcompetes the benevolent ones which kept us alive as their pets, we'll never see it coming because it'll spread in the blink of an eye. Or maybe our undoing will come in the form of a virus loosed among microscopic nanorobots. Soon people will be given inoculations of tiny machines that will fight disease and patch genetic defects by manually recomposing molecules. Nanorobots will also be turned loose to clean up oil spills and may work their way through the water supply into humans. They'll reproduce themselves, and if there's a mutation in their operating code, they'll pass it on. If that mutation is malevolent, we could die molecule by molecule in a mindless plague that's impossible to stop."