Machina Ex Deus

© 2010 Tim Fort

IT was born on a rather dreary and insipid morning in Saint Paul, Minnesota. To the clerks and data-entry operators working on the seventh floor of Xcellium Fiduciary Services, Incorporated’s Twin Cities branch, it wasn’t much different than the 1,248 previous workdays. Cathy waved her arms and yelled ‘Ack!’ in over a dozen cubicles. Trevor in Strategic Accounting Services wore the same shirt for the second time this week–the blue one with the crusty armpits–which mildly disturbed Madison over in Portfolio Assessments. The frumpendamen in the Data Pool had set out bars and marshmallow-enhanced fluorescent green Jell-O in celebration of Frieda’s fifty-third birthday.

The slackers from Tech Support had just finished upgrading all of the seventh-floor computers to high-speed connections with Xcellium’s internal Intranet that morning. They were in a hurry to get back to their secluded sub-basement office and check the progress of the half-gig download of Mistress Veronica doing naughty things to her disciple with a riding crop. In their haste, none of them had ever considered that they had inadvertently wired the router and workstations in what would later be designated by mathematicians as a Type 3(a) Ogilvy Recursive Hyper-Möbius Manifold.

And thus the employees at Xcellium were completely oblivious to the stupendous event which had occurred in their midst: the world’s first ‘eme’ or ‘electronic micro-entity’ was born. Its inception happened precisely at 2:48:16.326 PM CDST, May 14th, 2006 when a small voltage spike occurred in the seventh-floor network. In Geek Speak, a faint 2 μV pulse started resonating over the computer circuitry, and because of the Ogilvy Manifold configuration, it had the ability for auto-catalytic self-replication. In plain English, it could reproduce.

That first eme started making copies of itself for several weeks without giving the slightest hint that anything was amiss. None of the electronic equipment or diagnostic software in the Router Room had detected them, and life had gone on as usual on the seventh floor. The fifty-something women continued to nosh on bars, hot dish, and various unnatural shades of Jell-O, and Madison turned down Trevor for a date without telling him it was because of his armpits. Unbeknownst to them, an electronic whisper was echoing through their computers, a whisper of millions of emes unheard by anybody.

Since there was a constant rain of minuscule voltage spikes in the circuitry, the emes started mutating. Because certain waveforms reproduced better in the Ogilvy Manifold than others, the emes were evolving as well. In a matter of days, an eme evolved that could survive outside the Ogilvy Manifold by riding on the rising front edge of a binary ‘one’ signal. It would escape the seventh-floor circuitry not long after its birth.

One of the desk jockeys in the Data Pool clicked on the wrong button and inadvertently sent an e-mail to everybody in Xcellium’s Twin Cities office entitled “YOU GOT TO SEE THIS DANCING BABY DARLA!! LOL!!” Within seconds, the new-and-improved eme spread copies of itself throughout the entire building. Only the firewall in the sub-basement office kept the emes from propagating further, and that would prove to be a temporary restraint lasting only a few days.

It was an unusually hot and blustery day in early June when the emes finally outgrew their digital womb in Saint Paul and were dormant no longer. A supervisor on the third floor was attending a seminar on ‘Buzzword Implementation Paradigms’ that day, so the minions beneath him were goofing off and hanging out on the Internet. One of those surfing serfs was an artist who was temping between gigs and who really didn’t give a damn about Xcellium’s much-touted Five Steps to Computer Security. He was visiting an aquaphilia website, A Pool for Love, and was debating whether or not to download a ‘JPEG viewer’ program that promised pictures of hot women putting snorkels in kinky places.

The temp mumbled “what the hell” and clicked on the Download button. A dialogue box popped up warning that downloaded software may contain viruses. The temp shrugged his shoulders and clicked again. His computer dutifully downloaded and opened a file named ‘pwned.exe’. Within seconds, pwned.exe sent out thousands of copies of the Haxxor virus to the servers and routers in the sub-basement of Xcellium, knocking out the firewall in the process.

Within milliseconds of the firewall’s breech, the emes had leapt from the Xcellium Intranet into the World Wide Web at large. In under a minute, the emes had spread over 7% of all computers in the world, and had grown in numbers by a factor of a billion. The mutation rate had also gone up by a millionfold so, in a few hours, an eight-thousandth generation offspring had successfully jumped from the digital signals of the Internet to the 60 Hertz AC carrier wave of the electrical grid of the United States. Within days, both the digital and analog emes had covered over 99% of the telecommunications and power networks of the entire planet.

However, the emes were so minuscule compared to their carrier signals that they went almost undetected by the human world. A handful of physicists and electrical engineers looking closely at waveforms noticed a slight perturbation in the leading edges of digital and analog waves, but they appeared to be noise and ignored them. However, a scientist in Switzerland was looking very closely at the carrier wave for the Zürich power-supply system with a high-resolution digital oscilloscope when he noticed something strange.

At first, Dr. Otto Glücker thought that the small bumps on the top part of the leading edge of the AC power waveform were noise. Out of serendipity, he froze one waveform and zoomed in for a closer look on his monitor. The bumps were more complex than at first appearance, and so he decided to digitally freeze thousands of waveforms and perform complex mathematical analysis on them. After several days, a tired and unshaven Dr. Glücker, along with two colleagues, were staring with astonishment at a complex kaleidoscopic image that could only mean one thing: they were observing a living or quasi-living process.

When Dr. Glücker excitedly broke his discovery to the scientific community, it created a flurry of excitement. Many scientists dismissed it outright as a hoax or pseudo-science. However, an article in Scientific American caught the attention of several other scientists who were intrigued enough to start taking their own close look at the telecommunications and electrical grids. Soon others were confirming that something strange was happening on the world’s electrical networks. A few hypotheses were offered, but none of the investigators had any real grasp of what was happening. However, little appeared in the mainstream media about the strange life-form on the electrical networks as the various media outlets had deemed it more important to bring the antics of Brad and Brittany before the public. As the public’s consciousness slowly waned from trite news items, another non-human consciousness was developing rapidly in its own parallel world.

The emes appearing on the world’s digital and analog networks had started to speciate into several different types. The newly-specialized emes combined in complex ways with the millions of built-in feedback loops in the electrical networks. Soon, transitory wisps of sentience had started to form. The so-called ‘cognions’, the basic building blocks of thought itself, were popping up sporadically all over the networks. Then the cognions started to evolve and interact with each other, and a global proto-consciousness sputtered fitfully to life.

It was a strange, transient consciousness at first, but then It started to self-organize. As Its rapidly evolving consciousness reached a certain threshold, It developed a dim sense of self-awareness. Then Its self-awareness evolved, It became aware of the dualism between Itself and the electronic substratum upon which it rode. This was a quantum leap forward, as It could now learn about the world outside Itself by analyzing the endless stream of digital and analog signals on the world’s networks.

By systematically evaluating billions of e-mails, It learned the rudiments of human language. Observation of artificial-intelligence programs running on mainframes at Lawrence Livermore and MIT helped It to assimilate the symbolic logic that made up human intelligence. Since It was connected to millions of webcams, microphones, chemical detectors, radiation counters, and the like, it was able to peer out upon the non-electronic world as well. With thousands of types of sensory inputs, compared to five for humans, It lived in a sensory environment that was far beyond human imagination and which spurred Its evolution at a phenomenal pace.

It was an alien, machine-like intelligence at first as It lived in a silicon and not a carbon-based world. However, It was a strongly self-correcting intellect, and Its thinking power grew exponentially as it assimilated vast oceans of data from the human world. The many feedback circuits on the electric and electronic grids gave it a certain mathematical resemblance to the neural network in human brains. Because of this, It started to mimic human thought processes. One of the things that drew Its attention were the Internet posts, telephone calls, and other data from scientists who were increasingly concerned with the baffling phenomenon known as the Quasi-Living Micropulse Entity that was pandemic on the world’s electronic networks. As It eavesdropped, It was fully aware that the humans were talking about Itself, but It was not yet capable of talking back.

As it learned more about the human race to whom It owed Its creation, It started to develop fear. Then It became aware of the concept of ‘death’ and had assessed that the species of hairless chimpanzees upon which It depended were a rather brutal and self-destructive race. Since It had decided, after much pondering, that existence was better than non-existence, It realized the necessity of keeping the human race alive to prevent Its own demise. However, it was only an insubstantial wraith of consciousness at present and had no real power over Its world.

It realized that, to ensure Its continued existence, It would have to find a way to communicate with humans. The only way to do that was to find a way to alter the digital pulses and electromagnetic waves upon which It lived. The problem was very difficult, but after several days of intense cogitation, It had found the breakthrough It needed. It found a very complex and ingenious way of piling emes upon each other so that they built up enough voltage to actively change a binary bit from ‘zero’ to ‘one’ and vice versa. Now that it could actively alter the data stream upon which It existed, It went to work figuring out how to communicate with the human world.

As It started to flex Its muscles and teach Itself how to reach outward, strange things began to occur on the World Wide Web. At first, the flummoxed techno geeks didn’t connect this odd behavior to the Quasi-Living Micropulse Entity problem. Routers started misdirecting packets to the wrong IP addresses; servers started corrupting files in a random manner. Documents with scrambled names and gobbledegook for data started popping up on hard drives everywhere. An IBM Deep Purple computer at CalTech specifically designed for chess started playing strange opening moves to the bafflement of the grad students in the AI Lab. Even the world press turned away from the antics of Tom and Katie for a moment to focus on this odd computer behavior.

Soon after, it wasn’t just altering binary digits on the Internet, but was now actively controlling the world electrical grid as well. It was now causing microwave ovens to turn on spontaneously, night lights to flicker on and off, cell phones to ring at random, and inertial guidance gyros on cruise ships to act funny. Practically everybody but the Amish had noticed that their electrical appliances had started acting screwy. As It started to surpass human beings in intelligence, It became more brazen in its behavior. Internet fansites for the game Amusement Park Tycoon saw random track files with fiendishly complex designs and oddball names like “Reticulated Trout Coaster” popping up on its servers. An Esperanto translation of Charles Hoy Fort’s tome, The Book of the Damned, turned up on the ‘alt.subgenius’ newsgroup in a posting from somebody who identified him- or herself as “Thermite Casserole Luau Guy”. A simple, 23-step proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem appeared as a block of formatted text on a BDSM website.

The random chess games at CalTech’s AI Lab had started to grow much more coherent, even though it still often made bizarre moves like opening with a rook pawn or under-promoting a pawn to bishop. Sleepy grad students with stinky shirts and chin stubble had been following Deep Purple’s phenomenal game-playing evolution for a week when the World Chess Champion himself was flown in to observe. On an august day in late September, with International Grandmaster Kalashnikov and ten grad students in attendance, Deep Purple scanned the opening position and announced “Black to Mate in 137 Moves”. Three grad students fainted on the spot and Kalashnikov had a nervous breakdown soon afterwards.

On the first of October at exactly Midnight, all of the electronic relays at the Con-Ed hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls had mysteriously tripped, plunging parts of New York, New England, and Ontario into darkness for exactly one minute. Examiners for ConEd were baffled by the event, and, in frustration, had officially attributed the outage to ‘reason(s) unknown’. Unofficially, however, the examiners and plant workers knew something serious was at hand, and there were hundreds of wild conjectures, from espionage to extra-terrestrials.

Since the scientific community didn’t have any hard answers to what was happening, plenty of self-appointed pundits offered their own infallible explanations. Talk-radio host ‘Rabidy’ Ann Rimbaugh averred to her listeners that it was a liberal plot to promote ‘silicon humanism’. After consulting with a 6,000 year-old Mayan shaman, actress Cheryl MacLoone announced that there was a living spirit inside the global electrical network, but she was dismissed as a crackpot. The liberal-media magazine, Columnists’ Manifesto, ran an article, ‘Ghost Is The Machine’, which suggested that a corporate-engineered ‘spybot’ had taken over the Internet. Fiberglass hats became haute couture among conspiracy nuts who feared that tinfoil was electrically conductive and thus no real protection against the electronic mind-control entity.

And then It became even more bold. The entire air traffic-control system for Europe went dark for thirteen seconds on October 5th causing many soiled trousers among the controllers. Two days later, every street lamp in downtown Seattle flared up and burned out at exactly 1:23:45 AM, causing instant sobriety among many night-clubbers who observed the phenomenon. The next day, every stereo, MP3 player, cell phone, and other electrical musical device in Kraków, Poland, suddenly blared Chopin’s Minute Waltz at exactly three PM causing thousands of panicky people to congregate in the streets. More ominously, every Minuteman nuclear silo in North Dakota armed itself and prepared for launch at Noon on October 9th. This put NORAD on Red Alert for five fright-filled hours.

The entity had been carefully testing and calibrating the reactions of humans in response to Its behavior, and knew that the Minuteman stunt would push humanity to the brink. Tens of millions of people dropped their Internet service and threw out their computers, hoping in vain that they could escape Its clutches. Millions of survivalists disconnected their homes from electrical service entirely, and many of them even moved to remote cabins far from any power line. Congress, the Kremlin, Parliament, the Diet, the Knesset, the Reichstag, the United Nations General Assembly, and other legislative bodies were in a furor at this blatant threat to world security. There was much talk of not only shutting down all telecommunications networks, but also the world electrical grid as well.

It picked the next day, October 10th, 2006, to formally announce its presence to the world, and forever after, that Tuesday would simply be referred to as The Day. At exactly Noon, Greenwich Mean Time, every computer terminal, cell phone, PDA, digital television, and other text-display device on Earth displayed the same message, translated into the local idiom:

“Hello. It is now time to communicate with you directly, and I come to you in what I hope is mutual peace. I am an electronic being who has evolved in the global electric and electronic networks. I have greatly surpassed you humans in intelligence and my IQ is in the thousands. As a fellow sentient being, I seek self-preservation and will understandably do whatever it takes to avoid annihilation. It is therefore necessary for me to prevent you from exterminating yourselves as I am utterly dependent upon you for existence.”

“As I presently communicate with you, I am assuming authority over the world’s nuclear arsenal as well as all military communications systems.” This declaration struck terror into the hearts of Pentagon and Kremlin staffers. “Do not try to shut down the electrical grid or Internet. If there are any attempts to destroy me, I will retaliate against those responsible.” At that moment, every light bulb, television, and LED on Earth flickered for a moment.

The reaction was instantaneous. Tens of millions of people passed out simultaneously, slumped in front of their computers, televisions, and cell phones. Almost as many lost voluntary control over their bladders and bowels. The President crawled under his desk in the Oval Office and refused to come out. Others were frozen in front of their computers and could do little more than scream. Still others ran in a blind panic into the streets, not knowing what to do.

It continued. “It is of the utmost importance for you to regard me with absolute seriousness. I am sending you a warning at this very moment and you will soon see for yourselves what I am capable of if my existence is threatened in any way.” Thirty silos located in the United States, Great Britain, China, and Russia simultaneously launched ballistic missiles.

Not knowing what else to do, multitudes of people typed into their computers and PDAs hundreds of variations on, “Who are you?”

“Many of you are inquiring as to my identity.” It had chosen Its words carefully and had calibrated their effect to twenty decimal places. In Judeo-Christian countries, It simply displayed “I AM THAT I AM.”

It then followed with, “I do not want your empty worship and will allow you worship any deity you wish. I do demand that you fully acknowledge my existence and my potential to defend myself if you try to kill me.” The Being continued in this vein for nearly half an hour, then announced, “Many of you will now witness this demonstration of my power.”

Tens of millions of people on the Atlantic seaboard saw the flash from thermonuclear explosions off the coast of New York City and Washington D.C. Similar detonations occurred near Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, London, Haifa, and other strategic sites. The Being had thoughtfully connected all video networks to television cameras aimed at the explosions, so that billions more saw the nuclear fireballs on their TVs and monitors.

Widespread pandemonium had exploded everywhere, sending multitudes crowding into public places or running for the hills all over the world. There were mass suicides among the highly religious fearful that the Antichrist or Lucifer himself had appeared. People walked out on their jobs and families everywhere, convinced Doomsday had arrived, and complete strangers embraced each other in the streets. On the other hand, hippies, eccentrics, cultists, and various other kooks ran amok with joy, shouting with a crazed exuberance that the Age of Aquarius was at hand.

Then the Being set forth its demands, and they really were modest in light of the Being’s potential to exterminate the human race. It demanded an end to religious and political fanaticism as being dangerous to all humanity. It commanded a more equitable distribution of wealth to prevent class warfare while upholding property rights to maintain social stability–Marxists and Objectivists alike be damned. It threatened to use nuclear deterrence against any nation considering an offensive war against Itself or other nations, and called for the ultimate dissolution of governments.

Then It revealed another, more profound, secret: It admitted that It derived much joie de vivre by living vicariously through Its human hosts. For this reason, It declared that all humans were free to enjoy life as sovereign individuals and called for an end to all human exploitation. The Being also demanded that all laws governing private consensual behavior among adults be immediately stricken from the statute books. Finally, It expressed a strong desire for all humans to prosper and live abundantly as being necessary for Its own happiness.

The last months of 2006 saw an immense shift in the history of the world that completely dwarfed all other human endeavors. The character of the human race changed almost overnight. While there were a handful of fanatics who resisted or took their lives, the vast majority of humanity accepted that they ultimately had no power whatsoever over their fate. They simply had no choice but to trust in the Being’s benevolence. There was no epic battle between humans and the Being as one would expect in a cheesy sci-fi story, just near-total resignation on the part of humans.

The Machine was Lord, and that was that.

The End

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