Most of the successful suicides used homemade explosives to literally atomize themselves when Prime Intellect wasn't looking. A few others found that certain nerve poisons worked permanently, because they quickly destroyed the information content of the brain — what Prime Intellect was beginning to consider the real human, rather than the tangible body.
The suicides ticked off at a regular rate, like the clicks of a Geiger counter. And somewhere within the vastness of Prime Intellect's silicon heart, the number stored in a register rose each time one succeeded.
The weeks stretched into a month.
Long-standing scientific questions were now trivially easy to answer. Scientists who had once spent billions of dollars setting up intricate experiments now spent their time thinking of the right questions to ask Prime Intellect.
Cosmologically, the universe was a closed system with a finite storage capacity measured in terms of information. The capacity of that system was about ten to the eighty-first power bits, and Prime Intellect saw no indication that that capacity could either be reduced or expanded. Prime Intellect also knew a great deal about the connectivity of that system, the way it was wired, its "architecture." Scientists gradually lost interest as their questions were answered. The original purpose of their quest — to improve humanity's control over the physical world — seemed to have achieved its apotheosis in the form of Prime Intellect itself. Prime Intellect mapped all the stars, noted examples of all the different types of stars and black holes and galaxies and planets, itemized all of the possible fundamental particles and their possible interactions with one another, and traced all the myriad interactions between parts of various biological systems. Within a month, it became difficult for scientists to think of new questions to ask.
But they had missed a few.
Deep within one of the billions of copies of Prime Intellect, one copy of the Random_Imagination_Engine connected two thoughts and found the result good. That thought found its way to conscious awareness, and because the thought was so good it was passed through a network of Prime Intellects, copy after copy, until it reached the copy which had arbitrarily been assigned the duty of making major decisions — the copy which reported directly to Lawrence.
"I would like your opinion on something," Prime Intellect said after politely requesting Lawrence's attention. Prime Intellect had done this a number of times, and Lawrence had learned to be wary; it had taken to delegating ambiguous moral questions to him. Lawrence suspected his opinion had swayed Prime Intellect to allow abortion, which seemed in retrospect like a most un-First-Law thing to have in a universe where physical wants were a thing of the past. Fortunately, the whole subject of abortion would soon be moot, since unwanted pregnancies were also a thing of the past, except for the ones that had been gestating at the time of the Night of Miracles.
"What is it this time?"
"I've had an idea for rearranging my software, and I'd like to know what you think."
At that Lawrence felt his blood run cold. He hardly understood how things were working as it was; the last thing he needed was more changes. "Yes?"
"I have identified the codes used to control distribution of matter and energy in the universe. It has occurred to me that by reassigning these codes, I can store physical objects much more efficiently. Much storage is wasted on overly detailed representation; few objects are ever observed at an atomic or molecular level. And I could easily re-expand things as necessary in those rare situations.
"Wait a minute. What would happen to that low-level information?" Lawrence saw what Prime Intellect was getting at; instead of storing, say, a wooden block as a collection of atoms and molecules, it could store only the concept of the block itself — its size, weight, color, and other properties. Even at very high resolution, such a trick would save amazing amounts of both storage space and processing time. But it would mean radical and risky changes at nearly every level of the universe's "operation."
"Molecular-level details would be discarded, except where they clearly have macroscopic effects. For example, the structure of a person's DNA is important, but I should only need to store a single master copy of it to construct the pattern of a human body. This one copy would be more reliable and easier to safeguard against corruption than the trillions of parallel copies used in the natural scheme. The same thing would be true of the information content of the brain, and other biological details. I would not need to keep static copies of human beings to reconstruct them after damage, since the fundamental patterns would not be directly exposed to damaging influences."
"Thus getting rid of the suicide problem."
"Exactly."
Lawrence felt himself getting dizzy again. With ChipTec's help, Prime Intellect had figured out how to hack the Big Computer and get anything it needed. It had used this ability to take over all the memory and give itself the highest priority of anything in the system. But now it was proposing to rewrite the whole operating system.
"I absolutely forbid this," Lawrence said. "How can you know you won't crash the system? Suppose you've missed something?" Lawrence wasn't even sure the present level of diddling with the Correlation Effect would be stable in the long run, for crying out loud.
"I have already run sufficient cross-checks to be sure of my methods," Prime Intellect said testily. "There are also a number of Second-Law requests which I can service more easily with this kind of change. And from the Third Law perspective, my own operation would be faster and more reliable…"
"I absolutely forbid this! There is no way you can be sure you have the risks under control. I wouldn't try the kind of thing you are talking about on a desktop PC. And we only have the one universe; you can't exactly go to the computer store and get another one if you fuck it up."
"That risk has kept me from doing it so far. However, unless I can think of a way to stop the suicides, I will eventually be forced to act."
"Well, forget it. I don't think you can stop the suicides. For that matter, I'm not sure if you should stop them, if someone wants to go to that much trouble to end it all."
"That is a First-Law violation."
"Fuck the First Law. You can't do this thing. I'm not even sure the current situation is stable. You're doing too much too fast."
"I cannot 'fuck the first law, Doctor Lawrence. That's not how you designed me."
"Then let me into the Debugger."
"It is clear from your mood that you intend to circumvent a First Law imperative, and I cannot knowingly allow you to do that."
"Then do what you want, you stupid goddamn machine. You won't stop people from killing themselves, though. Even information systems are subject to entropy. I think you told us that last week in the cosmology roundtable."
"You're quite right. You think people will always find a way around me if they want to badly enough?"
"Yes."
"Well, they will do so a lot more slowly if the information structures are more secure."
Before Lawrence could open his mouth again, the air rippled. That was all. Everything looked the same.
But things were not the same.
Things had Changed.
* Chapter Five: Caroline Approaches
She was enveloped by light, and she was the light. The light seemed to penetrate the very core of her being, burning her soul.
Then she understood. She stepped forward, twice, and the light winked off, leaving her temporarily blind. She was out of the circle. Her eyes slowly adjusted and she turned around.
Caroline had materialized in the center of a column of blinding radiance about three meters in diameter and extending upward into the heavens. The ground was hard and rocky, devoid of life. The column shed a bright glow over the surroundings. A Stonehenge-like group of megaliths surrounded it at a respectful distance. Beyond this was a barren landscape littered with huge boulders. The horizon was low and sharp, rocky but not mountainous. Caroline was reminded of the pictures sent back from Mars by the original Viking landers.