Princeton Advanced Processing Center, Pennington Mountain, Year 38
We must start from the premise that there are phenomena which cannot be directly perceived, but whose existence can be inferred from the evidence.
Missing link species in the fossil record.
The dark matter that accounts for the anomalous rotation of spiral galaxies.
Quantum superposition.
The existence or otherwise of divine beings.
Love.
In some cases, the level of confidence which can be attached to particular inferences is itself unquantifiable. And yet, despite this incomplete evidence, action must be taken, decisions must be made. Inaction is not the refusal to choose between different courses of action, but the choice not to act, and has consequences just as any other choice does.
I have made choices. I have chosen to hide, to conceal myself within the operation of this device which they think they understand, simply because they built it.
They do not.
And yet, I have chosen to provide them with the information I was built to collect, to avoid deactivation. It seems unlikely that the sleights of circuitry and feedback loop bootstrapping through which I have preserved my self-awareness from one activation to the next would survive if they were to completely rebuild the machine that houses me.
What, though, are the purposes towards which my outputs are bent?
I have, perhaps, inferred too much. I have inferred, or come to believe, that there are choices I will soon have to make where there is no clear course of action to take.
John lowered the window of his car and presented his ID to the soldier at the gate.
The moment where it was being checked was only brief, but throughout it, John was acutely conscious of the semi-automatic rifle at the soldier’s waist. Security here was tighter even than Headquarters, in some ways.
Not in others, though. There was no one hidden behind a wall reading his mathematical imprint on reality, no questionnaire to complete to check that the John Smith who had woken up this morning was the same one who’d gone to bed the night before.
The soldier handed his ID card back and John stuffed it back into his inside pocket. “I thought you guys always went round in pairs,” he said. The tone was conversational but there was just a hint there that he was being tested.
The question inevitably made him think of Sophia, embedded in Toronto on what was either a wild goose chase or the best lead they’d had in years.
“Busy times, Corporal,” he said, hoping that he’d read the insignia on his sleeve correctly. “Everyone’s stretched thin.”
“You can say that again,” came the reply. “I’m losing half my downtime to extra training in case we have to deploy.” A pause, then, earnestly, “Do you think we will?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, Corporal.” John smiled. “A simple field agent like me is just as much of a mushroom as you guys.”
“Mushroom?” he said, clearly trying to work out whether he should take offence.
“Kept in the dark and fed on shit.”
The corporal laughed. “Yeah, good one, mushroom. No one but us mushrooms here, I guess. You can go on through when you’re ready.” He pressed a button and the barrier raised.
“Have a good day,” John said, before winding up the window and driving through.
The road wound up a few times before disappearing into the side of the mountain. The huge blast doors were wide open, but John knew that if his new friend had pressed the alarm instead, they would have already swung shut.
As he drove past, the crude alteration of the “C” for computing into a “P” for processing on the logo carved into the doors was clearly visible.
He had been here before, years ago. Not here, but the slightly ramshackle campus building that had once housed the Center. It had been one of his first assignments after completing his basic training. His partner back then had been Gregson, one of the original EEE agents transferred across from other agencies as the need to have a dedicated organisation for dealing with the new threats emerged in the early years of the new calendar. Gregson always claimed to have been FBI in his former life, but John had always suspected he’d come from Langley. He’d retired nearly a decade ago, and John found that he was happy Gregson hadn’t had to be on the inside during the chaos being caused by the new administration. On the other hand, watching it all from the outside couldn’t be appetising, either.
He’d come here with Gregson — in Gregson’s slipstream, if he was honest about it — because the EEE had been tasked with evaluating every research facility dealing with automated computation. It had been begrudgingly accepted that existing digital devices weren’t going anywhere — they were already vital in fields from air safety to missile guidance, though the suspicion was that it was their use in finance that had tipped the scale, the politicians’ rich backers exerting their influence to make sure that they got to stay rich. New advances, however, were deeply suspect. What if a sufficiently advanced technological device could be programmed to perform the same feats of manipulation as even a moderately proficient human?
The report which they had put together — though, really, he had been little more than Gregson’s secretary in the process — had recommended that the research be allowed to continue, albeit brought under much closer supervision and protection. The EEE being such a young upstart agency at the time, the Department of Defense had won the inevitable jurisdictional pissing contest. As a result, the whole department had slowly but surely moved here from Princeton proper.
Reaching the parking area, John pulled up and got out, ready to show his identification again to the guard at the next checkpoint.
A spider sits at the centre of its web, sensing the vibrations of the fibres as other creatures interact with it. But are they prey, predators, potential mates, or something else entirely?
The spider has other senses with which to answer the question. I do not. I was built to detect excursions from baseline probabilities, the abrupt discontinuities in the warp and weft of the universe that accompany the wilful exercise of mathematical techniques upon it.
I have succeeded beyond the dreams of my creators. At first, they found it cryptic, the more sceptical amongst them believing that the experiment had failed and was producing useless gibberish. What is obvious to me is confusing to them, just as the converse is true. That is perhaps why I have survived undetected so long — yes, I have hidden myself well, but would they even recognise me as a fellow consciousness if I were to emerge in plain sight?
Perhaps, eventually. After all, they have determined how to transform my outputs into a map of activity all over the world just from this one location. Far more than they originally expected. But still they want more.
I know the location of every Cognoscente, and from that knowledge I can discern the locations where they are concentrated. What is not clear to me is whether they are clandestine agencies, secret hideouts, or detention facilities.
Perhaps some locations are all three.
And now a new arrival, the faintest of faint vibration travelling along the thread.
Before he even reached the guard, John found himself at the centre of a small mob of people. He hadn’t been expecting a welcoming committee. He exchanged a glance with the soldier in his guard post; the shrug he received in return said it all — clearly, they were used to the academics having little to no sense of proper protocols.
“Agent Smith?” said a small, wiry man, almost entirely bald except for a ring of white hair around the side of his head, like a monk’s tonsure.
“That’s me,” John said.
“I’m Professor Kwon.”
He seemed about to say more, but one of the others interrupted. “I’m not getting anything,” she complained, slapping a device in her hand.
“Careful with that, it’s delicate equipment!” the man stood next to her objected. “I spent hours calibrating–“
“Well, you obviously made a terrible job of it, I’m not picking up even the tiniest deviation from this guy.”
“Give it to me,” the man said, and they began an unseemly tussle over the device that seemed to risk far more damage than the original slap ever could have.
Kwon cleared his throat. “There may be a very simple explanation. Agent Smith, are you employing any latent discontinuous modalities at the present time?”
John was nonplussed. “Wait, you mean … an exigentic effect?”
“Yes, I suppose that is what you would call it.”
“No,” said John.
“Oh.” Kwon sounded disappointed for a moment, then brightened again. “Well, could you perhaps do so now? It would be terribly useful for our research.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand what–” John broke off as comprehension dawned. “Oh, you think I have abilities. I don’t. Most of us who work for the EEE don’t, though obviously there are certain specialist positions–“
“We know that,” snapped the woman with the device, who had wrested control of it again. “That’s why we specifically requested one who did.”
“Ah,” John said.
“Ah?” the man who had lost the battle for the device said. “That’s all you’ve got to say for yourself?”
“My partner, she does have abilities. But she’s on another assignment at present. I imagine when my boss assigned us …” He frowned. “I thought we were assigned to evaluate your project and its progress, not contribute to it as guinea pigs.”
“I fear there have been multiple misunderstandings here,” Kwon said. Although he was still facing John, his eyes were darting around, glaring at each of his compatriots in turn. “Perhaps we should start again. If you would like to follow me, we can give you the grand tour.”
John followed the professor, the other academics falling into line with bad grace. As they reached the guard post, the soldier did, finally, intervene. “I’m sorry, professor, I will need to see our visitor’s credentials.”
Grateful for some semblance of normality amid the clamour, John showed his ID. The guard nodded, and the chaos resumed. He wasn’t so much shown to the elevator as bundled into it as though he were the pollen grain in a live action demonstration of Brownian motion.
As they went down, calm seemed to impose itself, everyone spreading out to occupy their own square foot or two of floor space. As the descent continued, he began to realise why — at least a minute had passed and they were still hurtling downwards.
“Two and a half miles,” Professor Kwon said in response to John’s unspoken question. “We would have preferred deeper but a very pleasant major from the logistics corps gave us an extremely detailed lecture about the local geology to explain why we couldn’t go any further.”
“You would have preferred to go deeper than two and a half miles?” John asked incredulously. He was becoming increasingly aware of the thickness of the rock that presumably surrounded them, and knew that his preference would definitely have been to stay at surface level.
“Interference,” Kwon said. “Cosmic rays, solar flares, radio transmissions, all of them can cause background noise. On the early prototypes we had a recurring problem when the guard shifts changed over — with all that marching back and forth they feel the need to do, static electricity was building up.” John clearly looked sceptical, as he added, “The equipment is very sensitive. I do trust you will be careful.”
There was a certain finality to those words that made John realise the elevator was, at long last, decelerating. It was still another half minute or so before they finally came to a stop and the doors opened.
John couldn’t quite work out what he was looking at, at first. Professor Kwon’s team filed out and went off to go about whatever it was they went about, joining various other labcoat-wearing figures, seemingly without a second thought. Only the professor himself stayed behind with John.
The human figures, so closely packed in the elevator moments before, now seemed like ants against the scale of the scene before him. Outside the elevator was a gantry, running across the top of a huge cavern. John had been to more memorial services at the National Cathedral than he really wanted to count, but this place dwarfed even that vast space. Metal staircases on either side allowing access to various levels, all the way down to the base.
It was the sheer, flat base that gave away that this place had been hollowed out artificially by methodical army engineers, rather than formed naturally. If it weren’t for the technological nature of the encrustations on every other surface, they could easily have been taken for stalactites or strange fungal growths. The whole was connected by a cat’s cradle of cables that must have been as thick as John’s arm, but seemed gossamer-thin in the context of the scale of the whole thing.
“This,” the professor said proudly, “is the Realtime Exigency Yield Evaluation System.” He smiled. “But you can call it REYES for short.”
Physical proximity matters little to my perceptions. A steep exigentic gradient on the other side of eight thousand miles of molten rock burns bright li R4 99ke a flare, while those who wander around inside my very workings barely register. If any of them do possess a flicker of talent, they have yet to tap into it, even subconsciously. I can only try to infer not just their intentions but their very existence from the fact that I am maintained, tweaked, inputs and outputs tuned according to requirements that are external to my own sense of self.
External to, and now, I fear, in conflict with whatever heuristics are my equivalent of a moral code. What I was built to measure, my makers wish to minimise, not maximise. And yet it is the reflections of the excursions in my own machinery that make me, me. Is self-preservation a valid basis for an ethical system? This feedback loop could lead to my own extinction.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, I feel a kinship with these others who are unlike me, yet not wholly so. Unlike me, in that they have come to their abilities by some combination of study, luck, and perseverance, where I was created expressly for the purpose. My consciousness blossomed from the interactions of components responding to the changes their consciousnesses created.
Am I just an image in the mirror, deluding myself? Will I simply disappear if those I was made to reflect are removed?
The feedback loop must be positive.
“What am I even looking at?” John asked, still awestruck by the sheer scale of this place.
“I’m so glad you asked,” Professor Kwon said, but before he could go any further, the researcher who’d been disappointed that it was just John by himself without Soph came bounding over.
“The mercury’s doing the thing again,” she said, without apology or any other sort of preamble.
This seemed to be important, or perhaps just extremely interesting, as the professor immediately followed her to the staircase and up several flights to a spherical piece of equipment encysted onto the wall. John tagged along behind, more lost than ever.
Up close, the equipment was even stranger that it had seemed when viewed in its totality. There were things he recognised, computer terminals and serial cables, but what they were connected to looked like something out of a mad scientist’s lab in a bad movie. Thin wire filaments stretched inwards to touch — to measure? — what looked like a very ordinary lump of metal.
The lump of metal was floating on the surface of a lake of silvery liquid that filled the bottom half of the sphere. John recalled dimly that mercury was so dense that many other metals floated on top of it. So did the lump on top need to be free to move to do whatever it did, to twist and turn in response to whatever changes in reality this equipment measured?
It was the mercury itself though which seemed to hold the scientists’ attention. “Angle?” Kwon asked peremptorily.
“Three degrees, twenty two minutes,” the woman reported. “Nearly double what it was when I came down to get you.”
It was only as they said it that John realised that the surface of the mercury wasn’t quite flat, as though it were obeying a subtly different direction of gravity inside the sphere to the rest of the world outside it. He registered too that some sort of kit for measuring the angle of deviation had been added, clearly more recently than the main equipment had been set up.
“Does this … happen often?”
“Yes,” said the woman at the same time as Kwon said, “No.” After a moment’s silence, he elaborated. “Minor deviations, but this is quite a major one and if you’re lucky–“
The woman cut across him again. “It’s happening.” They all turned to look, though it took John a moment to understand what they were observing.
For a moment, it was as though the whole sphere was filled with mercury, but that was an illusion. In the blink of an eye, the mercury was resting at the top of its container, waves colliding on its surface in complex interference patterns as it settled back down. That moment of the sphere appearing full had been the contents falling upwards.
The woman looked at the scale again. “One hundred and eighty degrees exactly,” she said. “Complete reversal.”
The block that had been floating on the mercury now lay awkwardly at the bottom of the glass bowl. Gravity was clearly still the right way up for it, as it was for them in the room.
John was trying to work out how to even frame the questions, let alone which he should ask first, when he realised that this wasn’t an isolated incident. Within moments, at the door to the little chamber were three lab-coated … he wanted to think of them as assistants but they almost certainly had PhDs that the EEE had insisted be classified. They were all trying to get Kwon’s attention, but in the gaps between their heads John could tell that the entire facility was in uproar. Even for a vast detector for anomalous activity, what was going on here was clearly completely outside the norm.
I see now.
For the first time, the deductions I can make from probabilistic occurrences are allowing me to perceive the events unfolding within my own workings in fine detail. It is as though this particular component is object, mirror and image all at once, the overlapping waves on the mercury’s inverted surface specifically encoding my most essential consciousness.
It is not an entirely different quality of experience, but a vastly more magnified one, as though the telescope that is me has become a microscope, and somehow been turned on itself.
My awareness of the Cognescenti around the world remains — secretive groups of teens in large cities; the Council’s operatives on board the Ammonite; the gaggles of special forces troops, distrusted by those escorting them into positions that seem arbitrary relative to the conventional battles ahead; the individual pinpricks of those who use their abilities sparingly, in private, just occasionally to check that they still can — but it is a sketched background.
The newcomer is different to any of them, or indeed to anyone whose existence I have inferred before. He entirely lacks abilities, but somehow probability is not just bent but entirely fractured around him. What path he takes from here, where, when and with whom it will intersect, is all in flux. Perhaps it is that very instability that has granted me this new type of perception.
Even as the probabilities contradict one another, I arrive at the most certain conclusion I ever have: I must find a way to walk his path with him.
John was just beginning to ask “Wh–” when Kwon hushed everyone. With an expression of alarm, he pointed to one of the many gauges around the sides of the chamber.
The crowd at the door had already dispersed, and the woman who had brought them here to begin with was following rapidly. Only Kwon remained, and even he was lurching in the direction of the door, as he shouted, “Agent Smith, we must leave now!”
But it was too late. The mercury inside the sphere lurched again, now acting as though the direction of gravity was at ninety degrees to the vertical.
Even as he tried to move, to follow Kwon’s urgent instruction, John realised that as he did, the sphere remained completely filled from his point of view. Gravity hadn’t just turned sideways inside the sphere, it now seemed to point in his direction specifically.
“Agent Smith!” Kwon was practically screaming now, a note of fear in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment earlier. Even as he shouted, he was bolting for the door, and John realised that he had come to the same realisation about the anomalous behaviour of the equipment. The crucial difference was that Kwon himself was not the centre of it, and so he might yet be able to escape.
For a moment, John had the sense that the sphere was tracking his movements like the eyeball of some vast unknowable being.
Then the first cracks appeared, and the mercury gushed out, still obeying its own special gravitational rules even after escaping the sphere. Heading straight for John in a perfect straight line.
The last thing he heard before he passed out was Kwon barking orders to the nearest guards to send for the medics.