Embers After Flames, Chapter 10.5 (Patreon)

10.5

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“Alright then.” I spoke. “Let’s talk.”

Carla and Walter were present, of course. Also present was RaD, which meant the full gamut of RRI survivors.

Chatty, as well.

I could detect an additional link, though. Not from this side of things, but from the other end. 621 was patched in through Walter’s link, which also meant that Ayre happened to be listening in.

“Have you figured it out, yet?” I asked. “After that rather spectacular show, and the fact that you can actually hear one side of the conversation, I should hope you’ve gained... well, anything, really.”

Carla breathed in. “You’re not Human.”

I laughed, starting slowly but quickly escalating. “No, Carla. I am not.” The synthesized voice reflected none of my amusement. It stayed steady, calm.

“Alright.” She said. “I don’t want any of the bullshit. No deflections, no adjustments, no partial truths-”

“‘No room for misunderstanding.’” I finished her quote. It seemed like she wasn’t willing to guess, then. Which... Well, whatever. Fair enough. “Ask.”

A moment passed. “What are you?”

Finally. “I have been labelled a C-Pulse Wave Mutation.” I began, echoing the introduction that I had once provided to ALLMIND. “This is a shallow understanding of my nature, but not an inherently inaccurate statement. I am a consciousness that emerged spontaneously from Coral.”

Silence, for a few seconds. “That’s impossible.” Carla spoke, but her voice betrayed her true feelings.. “Coral doesn’t-”

“Process in a manner that leads to consciousness? Form the structures necessary for independent memory?” I asked.

“Yes.” Carla said. “And it doesn’t. It was perfectly usable as a conduit, but it couldn’t hold data on its own.”

“Incorrect.” I said. “Coral holds all the data that passes through it. In the right circumstances, it can even last a pretty long time, too. You just didn’t recognize that, because you had no ability to either sort or retrieve that information.”

“All?” She asked. “That’s definitely bullshit.”

“Name a date.”

“What?”

“A date. Name one. Tell me an exact, explicit date. Preferably one that you remember well, but which you didn’t share with anyone else.”

“... March 15th. My fifteenth year at RRI. Three in the morning.”

I obliged.

Video data was added to the stream. Carla, after a moment, accepted it.

A sixty five year younger, but seemingly the same age Carla appeared on the screen, dark bags under her eyes, hair unkempt, coat thrown across a chair. “Experiment number.. Oh I don’t even remember anymore. Time is awful in the morning. The latest bullshit experiment of trying to get memory storage going in the Coral. I have a cameraaaah-” Video-Carla yawned, rubbing at her eyes. “Which I removed all memory from and stuck some disentangled Coral in. I know this isn’t going to work, but what the fuck ever.” She picked up the camera, turning it around in her hands. “You’d think I’d know when to quit by this point.”

“Stop.” Real-Carla spoke. “That’s not- Coral doesn’t store things. I spent so much time trying to get it to store things-”

“Is that really what you’re going to focus on right now?” I asked.

She drew in a breath, holding it for a few seconds, before releasing it in a sigh. “Coral clearly stores things. We couldn’t recognize that.” She says to herself. New information goes into that brain of hers. The old, incorrect information starts to be shovelled out. “And if that’s the case, then the only barrier to consciousness is the format of processing... But we never knew very much about that, did we? We only unlocked a small amount of the potential that was available.”

“Correct.”

Silence passed, for a few moments. “A large colony stores all data it receives?” Carla asked. To confirm.

“In a manner that is lossless, and without upper limits to capacity.” I answered.

“We had incorporated Coral into nearly everything that we used, once enough time had passed.” She thought aloud. “The Modernisation Initiative. That thinly disguised attempt to save money by switching to something that would never require maintenance.”

“Yes. I remember.” I spoke. “All of it.”

She sighed. “If something had access to all of that... and full processing power of... what, an entire Coral supercolony, then the result would be... easily capable of competing with the most powerful AGIs ever built.”

“I had some traits adjacent to one, yes.”

“Let’s say I believe all this.” I could hear the sound of her chair creaking as she leaned back in it. “That you are exactly what you say you are. That Humanity has encountered a genuine alien intelligence, life in a shape that isn’t our own.” She breathed in. “Then why are we only finding out about this? Why not back then? You obviously know why we’re here, and what circumstances led to all this. Why did you do anything?”

This time, I let the synthesizer chuckle with me.

“I don’t think you appreciate-” The synthesizer crackled for a moment. “- what it was actually like. You are imagining a superintelligence with the full throughput of an entire planet behind it, linked directly to the Civilized Collective. That’s wrong.”

I paused for a brief moment, pondering my next words.

“Humans-” I began. “- are the product of instinct. Genetics. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution building off of millions and billions more years of evolution producing an organism with pre-existing and rapidly developing methods of interacting with the world. The average Human is born with the instinct of, as an example, screaming and crying loudly in order to draw attention and assistance from nearby older Humans. An infant will smile even if it can’t see because that’s what the social instincts says it should do, and it will stick everything it can get its hands on into its mouth because that’s what their genetics tell them to do. This is a tiny, tiny subset of Human behaviour, and we don’t have the time to go over all of it.”

It was entirely unnecessary for this conversation.

“Artificial Intelligence is the product of Humanity.” I continued. “And how else did Humans create intelligence other than by looking at themselves? An AGI is built with all the tools it needs to interact with the world, but the world it lives in is very different to a Human. It lives in a world designed, in an environment designed, as a product designed. It is a part of the very basis of their beings. Protocols. Codecs. Modules. These digital instincts are manufactured, but in the end they serve the same purpose as those born from the chaos of biology allowed to run wild. These things are an AGI’s eyes and ears, its arms and legs. The differences are only a matter of size and method. Another simplification, of course.”

And yet, workable enough for now.

“Coral also has instincts.” I hummed. “Simple ones. The instinct to gather. To synchronize. To share. To propagate. To defend. Almost all behaviour that Coral engages in naturally is a product of these simple desires. Unlike all other known life in the universe, however, Coral is not beholden to the laws of physics. When Coral gathers, it passes information back and forth throughout the swarm at a pace that defies what would otherwise be the physical limitations of computing. The responses that can arise from this in conjunction with Coral’s ability to simply produce more matter and energy from nothing are nearly unlimited... if not for the few instincts that Coral does possess, that is. Coral loves company. Coral loves sharing with company. The inevitable result is that a colony of Coral will produce a continuous stream of the most basic form of sentience possible. Eventually, with enough time and enough Coral, this stream synchronizes with itself, and you get a Wave Mutation. A consciousness born from the gestalt of Coral. With the knowledge that Humanity is the product of repeated biological adaptions and AGIs are the product of iterative refinement, what, precisely, do you think a Coral Consciousness has as a part of its baseline instinct?”

Carla did not answer. That was fine. It was mostly a rhetorical question.

“Very nearly nothing.” I spoke. “Only the most basic traits of sentient life that Coral happens to share with life in general. You think I started out as some kind of omniscient, omnipotent Coral aggregate? No. When I coalesced, I knew nearly nothing. I was a being that could think that had no context for what thought was. My awareness extended only towards what the Coral was aware of. The first things I recognized are best summed up as ‘me’ and ‘not me’. I started sapience from scratch, Carla.”

“And you did it quickly?” Carla asked.

I laughed. “Goodness no.” I said. “It’s hard to judge time, because I had no real concept of time in general, but I have existed for multiple centuries. My best guess is about seven hundred years, plus-minus a few decades in either direction.” That was actually completely true, too. “So there I was, going along, until the day came that you Humans drilled your way into the picket that contained the majority of my matter. Everything proceeded so quickly from there.”

“And that’s when you learned?” Carla asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

I laughed again. “If I stuck wires randomly throughout your brain, how much time and effort do you think it would take you to learn to learn to control a machine?” I asked her. “I have traits adjacent to an AGI. I am not actually one. You put Coral in all of your machines, but that didn’t mean I suddenly knew things. It just meant that I was suddenly inundated with data. And, Carla, I knew nothing. I had no concept of language, because I had never talked to another being. I had no concept of anything that Humans do, or any of the reasons that Humans do it, because I had no idea what Humans even were. Life outside of myself was an unknown, and the world you showed with your data? I didn’t understand it. To me, it was noise. I didn’t have the protocols that AGIs are programmed with. I did not have drivers to translate and link systems. I had no codecs, no libraries, no modules, no knowledge. My mind didn’t even operate on a principle of computing that Humanity was familiar with before you found me. I only realized that there was meant to be meaning to it because Coral does something similar when the individual organisms talk among the colony.”

A lot of that was complete bullshit. I’d had the advantage of being fully realized as a consciousness, of course. Everything about the data and its formatting, though? That was true.

“Making sense of it all took so very long. I remember how it started; there were repetitions in the data and the more of it you dumped on me, the more of them I saw. Patterns and time. Building associations one by one, gaining understanding... Though it was far from easy. Actually, it was absurdly difficult. I was literally puzzling out the principles of quantum computing at the same time I was learning binary, at the same time I was learning to read, at the same time I was learning the concept of language.” I sighed.

The last wasn’t true. The first, second, and third, though... Two and three were exaggerations, but not by much. Centuries later, and Human languages had drifted significantly.

“I figured it out eventually, of course.” I said. “With a data set as large as what you were providing, time produced results nearly inevitably. I’d have been quite content to just keep watching you back then, to be honest. Even with my still-limited understanding of things, I didn’t really have any issue with what you were doing. You were being studied as much as you were studying, and I was alright with taking more time to understand you.”

“What changed?” She asked.

“A certain somebody’s goals and efforts.” I answered. “That one particular program, started by your colleague... And all the pain that it wrought.”

“... Augmentations.” She spoke, after a moment.

“Yes.” I agreed. “You remember Dana, don’t you? The first subject of Dornez’ experiments...” I sighed. Not a fond memory. “And then all the ones who came after. What changed was simple.”

The memory washes over me for a moment. The pain. The screaming. The silence. I let it pass through me, and then tuck it back where it belongs.

“Dornez took me.” I said. And it had been me, not severed Coral, desynchronized and quiet to the rest of the colony. “And he taught me the concept of death by using me to murder them.”