Upgrade(53)

Her people would have to know what they were creating. They would have to be willing to risk incarceration. How would I find those people?

It’d be tough, and I came from that world.

If I still worked for the GPA and had access to its resources, I’d plug into MYSTIC—try to find Kara using the CCTV facial-recognition database.

I kept returning to the exascale or quantum-annealing processor she would need.

The rest of the lab equipment she could buy on the black market, and those transactions would be nearly untraceable. But the processors weren’t something she’d have to buy on the sly. There was nothing illegal about it. They were just very expensive and not terribly commonplace. But she’d know I’d be on the lookout. She’d try to cover her tracks.

Only eight companies in the world built the type of hardware she would need: Atom Computing, Xanadu, IBM, ColdQuanta, Zapata Computing, Azure Quantum, and Strangeworks.

I hired corporate PIs to find client lists and purchase orders, knowing, of course, that there was another possibility.

Our mother might’ve already had a lab set up with everything we would need to bring her upgrade to fruition. Its location may have been tucked away in the hardcase she left for us in that New Mexico wilderness, including contacts for the crew.

If that was the case, then Kara was already well on her way to finishing our mother’s work and beginning the next phase.



* * *



—

Now that I had the brain I always wanted, I decided to fact-check my mother’s claim: The end of Homo sapiens lies just over the horizon. We can see it in a thousand metrics. Of course I believed it. But I wanted to truly know it—to understand those metrics for myself.

There were several lifetimes’ worth of data to catch up on, and no point, with my sensory gating downregulated, to ever read just one book at a time again.

I could read a book with my eyes while simultaneously listening to an audiobook, and comprehend each one to a seventy percent degree of accuracy.

I read everything. I read constantly. I read fast. I barely slept.

Thousands of scientific journals, and the studies behind the articles, and the data behind the studies.

I looked at anthropogenic global catastrophic risks—those caused by human behavior—as opposed to natural risks, such as supervolcanoes, asteroids, and other cosmic threats: nuclear terrorism. Bioterrorism. Natural and engineered pandemics. Nanotechnology accidents. Superintelligent AI. Famine. Fires. Floods. Sea-level rise. Ocean and global warming. Extreme weather. Crop failure. Agricultural collapse. Deforestation. Desertification. Massive water pollution and scarcity. Mineral resource exhaustion. Power-grid failure. All manner of warfare (cyber, nuclear, civil, genetic, orbital).

Except for a runaway superintelligence or nanotech outbreak, it would be a combination of threats, all working in concert, to degrade human civilization to the point of extreme endangerment.

My mother’s famine had wiped out just two percent of the global population, but twenty years on, we were still struggling to feed people. The downstream effects had killed millions more and left even the upper tiers of civilization in a shambles.

And the threats themselves couldn’t be evaluated in a vacuum. Cognitive biases had to be factored into the labyrinthine equation: scope insensitivity—the notion that humans are bad at distinguishing between two hundred dead and two million. Hyperbolic discounting—the tendency to value lower, short-term rewards over greater, long-term rewards, or to make choices today that our future self would prefer not to have made. There was the affect heuristic, where current emotions influence critical decision-making. The overconfidence affect where a person’s confidence in his or her judgments are much greater than the objective accuracy of said judgments. And that was just the start.

The more information I consumed, the more I began to truly grasp what my mother saw when she considered the state of humanity.

We were a bunch of primates who had gotten together and, against all odds, built a wondrous civilization. But paradoxically—tragically—our creation’s complexity had now far outstripped our brains’ ability to manage it.

Put simply: Our situation was fucked, and we weren’t doing enough to un-fuck it.

For all her arrogance, ambition, and reckless pride, my mother wasn’t wrong about where we were heading.

But she was also fallible. Shenzhen had proved that.

Which meant that however bad the problem, unleashing her latest creation on the world couldn’t be the solution.



* * *



—

I walked a mile up the beach, then followed a sandy trail into Trinidad, California.

Weather had rolled back in, tatters of mist streaming in off the water.

It was raining, and the lights of town twinkled in the blue dusk—a comforting invitation.

I walked the quiet streets as darkness fell, finally settling on a salt-weathered tavern that sat on a high bluff overlooking the sea. Smoke trickled from a brick chimney. It smelled like real fish cooking.

Inside was crowded and warm. Families sat at tables in the vicinity of a stone hearth, playing games from a collection that filled an entire bookshelf.

I took the only free stool at the bar.

The blackboard menu showed two options—fish and chips and lemon butter cod.

The bartender came over. His gnarled face and graying hair made him look as much a part of the environment as the wave-battered sea stacks.