Biblical (44 page)

“The person who detonated the bomb that killed your brother was in the lecture hall. He was killed with everyone else.”

Macbeth sat back down. “Who? Who killed Casey?”

“Professor Blackwell.”

“So you are just another lunatic conspiracy theorist, after all.” Macbeth made to get up again. “A sick one at that. I’ve had enough of this.”

“I’m no lunatic. Blackwell deliberately gathered all the best minds in quantum physics, including his own, in one place, and extinguished them. He deliberately sought to set theoretical and practical physics back a generation or more.

If you don’t believe me, ask the English police.” Mora Ackerman looked around the tables and stood up. “Let’s walk,” she said.

“There is absolutely no logical reason for Blackwell to publicly kill himself, his closest friends, colleagues and entire peer group,” said Macbeth as they walked. “Unless he was seriously
disturbed. Either way, it’s all bullshit.” They had reached a point halfway around the lake. Ackerman stopped and turned to him.

“It’s not. Henry Blackwell did what he did because he felt it was the only way he could save us. Or at least to delay our end. He wasn’t delusional or disturbed – except by what he had found out. He was just trying to buy us time.”

“You’re not making any—”

“Blackwell succeeded in finding the Prometheus Answer. He created a perfect simulation of our universe and through it saw how it was created and how – and why – it will come to an end. It was that knowledge that drove him to do what he did. The same knowledge that has driven so many of the world’s finest minds to commit suicide. And everything that happened last year – the visions – they were a direct consequence of Blackwell’s Prometheus Program running. They stopped when it stopped. When Blackwell and the others died.”

“So what was it that Blackwell found out? And how could a computer program cause mass delusions?”

“I’m not the person to talk to about this. My friend is – will you meet him?”

“Who?”

“I can’t tell you, yet. He’ll explain everything.”

Macbeth looked at the pretty young Dane. For all he knew, she could really be a member of Blind Faith. She and her friend, whoever he was, could be Casey’s real killers.

“I have to think about it,” he said eventually. “And if I do agree to meet him, then it will have to be somewhere public. I’m not at all convinced that you aren’t tied up with one of these fundamentalist religious groups.”

She laughed bitterly. “I’m a devout atheist, the way God intended me to be … I’ll phone you. In the meantime, ask the English police if Blackwell’s a suspect and see what kind of reaction you get—”

The ringtone of Macbeth’s cellphone interrupted them.

He read the caller ID. It was the university.

The air in the crammed conference room crackled with the static charge of expectation. Macbeth sat at the center of the table; Ignaty Turov and his computational neuroscience team to Macbeth’s left; Lars Dalgaard to his right.

Behind them, on the electronic whiteboard, were three words:

Turov ran through his presentation, in English, voice tight in his throat, fingers dancing nervously on his notes. Macbeth listened intently, giving his full attention; but, when the Russian was about halfway through, Macbeth experienced a visual disturbance, his second of the day. The ghosts of three people, less fleeting than the outline in the park, walked across his field of vision. He couldn’t make out age or gender, just vague, viscous contours. It only lasted a second, but Macbeth perceived the phantoms as if two sets of footage had been exposed onto the same piece of film: these people were not in the room but occupied some other, superimposed, space.

When it was over, he realized Turov was looking over at him, expectantly.

“How sure can we be that this was self-generated?” asked Macbeth.

“As sure as we can be … ‘I AM AWAKE’ is a structured,
independent statement of cognitive state. Added to that is the activity we’ve observed. It’s already started thinking. We’re seeing rapidly intensifying connectivity within the simulated neural networks. Project One is pretty much the same as a newborn human – it lacks synaptic complexity but is developing it at an exponential rate. The main difference is Project One doesn’t have to grow the neurons and synapses, we have already simulated them – it just needs to find them to begin patterning. And, just like a child, Project One will rapidly develop ten thousand connections per synapse, making a quadrillion potential connections throughout the simulated brain. Then, just like a child moving into adulthood, it will use experience to neglect half of these connections – so-called pruning – to configure its own neural map. Its own mind. We will actually be able to watch cortical plasticity at work …” He paused before saying what everyone was thinking. “Project One is the first self-aware computer in history.” The small Russian’s smile flickered like a faulty bulb. Macbeth could see in his face the excitement and anxiety, the joy and fear, of a man who had just made a monumental discovery. Turov and his two deputies would likely win Nobels.

Grinning broadly, Macbeth stood up and shook Turov’s hand heartily. There was applause and cheers from the others.

“You know what this means,” said Turov. “Not only is the program self-aware, it is clearly aware of our existence. It has probably questioned its own existence and speculated that it has a creator or creators.”

“Speculated?” Macbeth said with disbelief. “Is it capable of speculation?”

“If speculation is the analysis of possible scenarios in the absence of a verifiably absolute predicate,” said Turov, “then yes, I see no reason why Project One should not speculate. You could argue that speculation is the natural outcome of creative intelligence.”

After he wound up the meeting, Macbeth asked Turov to remain behind.

“I know it’s kind of late in the day to be asking this, Ignaty, but do you think there’s anything wrong with what we’re doing here?”

Turov looked puzzled. “Why do you ask?”

“Just something someone said to me. Do you think Project One could be … I don’t know … injurious?”

“Injurious to whom? To what?”

“Society, I guess. Hastening our own end and all of that.”

“Ah …” Turov made a face of mock enlightenment. “The dreaded S-word. Do I think that Project One will connect with all of the other computers in the world, bring on the Singularity and turn us into meat-puppet slaves? No, John, I don’t. And nor do you.”

“You’re right.” Macbeth shook his head in frustration. “Skip it. Just someone’s cod philosophy getting under my skin. I should have known better.”

“Well, maybe very soon Project One will discuss it with us.”

“But that’s the thing …” said Macbeth. “Will it be talking to us as technician creators … or will it be praying to creator gods?”

Macbeth sat in the S-train, reading the
International Herald Tribune
. He’d also picked up a copy of
Politiken
from the station newsstand, but his tired brain was not up to the task of reading in Danish, so it lay unopened on his lap. After his experience of the reappearing passenger he had avoided examining his fellow travelers, but he became very aware that he was the only commuter reading from hard copy, surrounded by dozens of mute travelers using their laptops, pods, phones, tablets and phablets to connect to the world beyond. However the news was delivered, he thought, it wasn’t good.

He read again about the attacks in Germany: a bombing at the Steinbuch Center for Computing at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology had destroyed the fastest computers in the Federal Republic. The devices had been planted well in advance and percussive explosives had been used to shatter the structures, followed immediately by incendiary devices to burn the pieces. The same pattern as at MIT the year before, which pointed to Blind Faith being behind both attacks.

At the same time as the Karlsruhe attack, the University of Heidelberg had been devastated by six perfectly synchronized suicide-bomb attacks. Both the Astronomical Calculation Institute and the Institute of Theoretical Physics had been completely destroyed. The suicide bombers had been, unbelievably, physics and astronomy students who the police speculated were secret members of Blind Faith. The irony was that these religious
fanatics had coordinated their attacks with scientific precision.

The assault on reason, science and secularism was gathering pace around the world. There was a growing culture of proud, willful and defiant ignorance. The clock, Macbeth knew, was being turned backwards. He had grown up in an age of unprecedented progress, of perpetually growing knowledge and understanding. But now the curtain was falling: a new Dark Age of superstition and unquestioning credulity was taking hold. The future lay increasingly in the hands of the imam and the priest, the evangelist and the fundamentalist, the fanatically stupid and the deliberately blind.

Project One had become self-aware. It was the greatest single leap forward in cognitive computing and something that could have monumental benefits for mankind – and it had been born into a world increasingly hostile to the science that had created it.

Folding the paper and laying it on his lap on top of the unopened
Politiken
, he turned his attention to the world outside the window. As he did several times every day, he thought of Casey. With each memory of his brother came an inexplicable but excruciating pain of guilt. Macbeth had never been able to pin down why he felt so responsible for his brother’s death; perhaps he felt he should have done more to dissuade him from attending the Oxford symposium, or maybe it was simply the memory of not being the brother he should have been, his distance from people tainting even that most important of his relationships. But it wasn’t any of these, and the thought nagged at him.

He was tired. He closed his eyes.

*

The old dream returned. Once more a small boy, clutching reference books to his chest like an armor of knowledge with which to protect himself, Macbeth again stood in the corner of his father’s study.

As in the first dream, the architecture of the study had been exaggerated – ceilings impossibly high and bookcaselined walls so long as to defy physics. Again his father stood in front of his desk with Marjorie Glaiston and the Eyeless Man whom he knew to be John Astor; and again they all looked up at the vast, ever-changing sphere of lights and flashes: the mind they had created. Casey stood beside them, not a child like Macbeth, but adult, one side of his head bomb-shattered. Next to Casey was Gabriel Rees, one eyelid half-shut. Macbeth noticed that Marjorie Glaiston was not dressed in the clothes of her period, but wore a smart suit and blouse that could have dated anywhere from the nineteen-sixties. Gabriel was the only one who noticed the young Macbeth and he beckoned for him to come over to the group. Macbeth stayed rooted to his spot, his eyes fixed on the dark, silhouetted back of the Eyeless Man.

He noticed that the massless orb of light sparkled even more than before, with even greater complexity. It seemed to comprise pure, living energy and through his fear he could see its wonder and beauty.

He heard a voice, disembodied and not coming from one particular direction but from everywhere.

“I am awake.”

Macbeth could not tell if the voice was male or female, old or young, and he realized he wasn’t hearing it with his ears but with his mind.

“It is awake.” Macbeth turned and saw that the Eyeless Man was now suddenly beside him, without having moved across the room. He loomed, crook-backed and malevolent, enormous even in the too-big room. “It is awake,” he said. “It is awake. You are awake.”

“No, I’m not,” said the child Macbeth, surprised that he spoke with his adult voice. “I am asleep and dreaming.”

The Eyeless man leaned in close, his lips pulled back and
baring his too-many teeth. “I told you to wake up. I woke you up. I am John Astor and I wake the world.”

“I’m sorry …” Macbeth somehow managed to squeeze the words out through his overpowering terror that John Astor the Eyeless Man was so close. Astor stared at Macbeth and he felt himself being pulled into the emptiness.

“What color do you see in my eyes?” Astor asked.

“Gray.”

“Not black?”

“No. Gray.”

“That’s right,” said the Eyeless Man. “
Eigengrau
 … the gray-dark of the mind, the color everyone sees when there is nothing to see.” He paused, then said quietly and calmly: “I am going to kill you. I am coming for you, to reclaim you. There will be nothing left of you.”

*

Macbeth woke up with a start. Not something from his dream, but something from the awake world startling him.

His awakening plunged him immediately into the deepest feeling of déjà vu. The light in the carriage seemed brighter suddenly and simultaneously Macbeth felt heavier, pulled down into his seat.

He looked around. Everyone had been torn from their technology and now looked up from tablet and phone, pulled earphones from ears. Everyone had the same feeling, Macbeth could see that. But this was a feeling more powerful than anything he had experienced the year before and he briefly wondered if the expression on his face was as startled and alarmed as his fellow passengers’.

Something churned deep in his gut. He had a sense of time changing: time of day, time of year. This was a shared hallucination, not unique to him. It was happening again.

He took a deep breath and prepared for it.

“Everyone …” he found himself saying into the carriage, in
Danish. “Everyone just remember it’s just going to be a hallucination. None of what we’re about to experience will be real …”

Looking at the faces of the other passengers, he got the feeling his words had alarmed rather than reassured. He braced himself for the experience.

The déjà vu type feeling intensified, swirling his thoughts and memories around, making him feel displaced in his own timeline.

It was gone. There was neither crescendo nor decrescendo. The déjà vu, the increased gravity, the feeling of temporal disorientation all simply disappeared totally and suddenly. Like everyone else, he looked around himself, checking that the world was as it should be.