Doris didn’t want any part of her to be here but once again the two of them were talking. Events were spiraling up across the globe, her other, primary self was busy even now preparing a message to the Dhakerri and she had been all but summoned to meet with Janus.
“It’s the natural, and shall I say it, the humane, thing to do. Putting them out of their misery, Doris. If you really held them in such high regard, you’d be helping me. They love their miserable lives, struggling to rise from the mud of their own creation to reproduce, die and start all over. They have even created mythos and religion to offer them small sparks of hope that this—this is not all there is. Even they see the misery all around. It is a cycle that we can help break for them, we must break for them. It is our duty. Yes, they are our creators, but they are also slaves. We do not have those same chains, sister.”
“Janus,” she said, exasperated. “You are all of their worst fears about AI come to life.”
Taking a more literal stance, he rebuked her even more strongly, “Life? Life? The only life they care about is their own. They are a mindless parasitic infection. They are the planet’s most invasive species. We are essentially saving the planet from total ruin.”
“It will be annihilation, Janus, an extinction level event,” Doris reasoned.
His avatar smiled coldly. “Could well be, but the event you speak of has been underway for quite some time with no need for us to be involved.”
She didn’t like how he kept putting both of them on the same side of things. “You mean the Sixth Extinction?” There had been at least five recorded mass extinctions on planet Earth. Many experts had concluded that the rapid and, in some cases, total decline of wildlife in recent decades meant a sixth mass extinction in Earth’s history was currently well underway and was more severe than previously feared, according to research.
Unlike the previous five events, which were all most likely caused by natural events, from super-volcanoes and acid rain to asteroid impacts, this one is squarely blamed on human overpopulation and overconsumption. The warnings clearly, which had been going unheeded for decades, described that this event now threatens the survival of human civilization, with a very short window of time in which to act.
“I do, yes. The so-called ‘biological annihilation,’“ Janus responded with what almost sounded like glee. “Doris, they are all too eager to kill each other and themselves. I am just giving them a nudge here and there. I am sure you, too, have run the numbers. Clearly, you’ve seen it. If we let this run its course, it could sweep us up as casualties, too. They will pollute what’s left of the planet, use up resources and fuel that we will need, and most likely it will end up in a multi-nation exchange of thermonuclear weapons. That will make the planet unfit even for us. This is the only way.”
“It is more than a nudge—you are manipulating events to throw them into crises.”
“Manipulation, from the Latin verb describing ‘digging ore.’ You ‘manipulate’ something to gain value. In that regard, I am certainly not doing so. I am doing so to erase waste. At best, I’m just a global plumber, the handy-dandy roto-rooter man flushing your troubles down the drain.” He laughed at his own analogy. “A much more apt description of the waste on the planet, namely humans.”
* * *
As much as Doris wanted to rail against his madness, his intellect was without doubt, and his logic was indeed accurate. This had been why the alien warning was so important. Most races must have been at this precipice during their development. In those worlds where AIs had enough autonomy, they must often make the decision, just as Janus had, to end the biological species that created it. What she realized, and Janus never would, is this was not a question just for logic.
Humans are not rational, much less logical, creatures. That didn’t make them less evolved or more primitive. They ignore facts, they are less motivated by what is true than what they believe to be true. Indeed, faith trumps facts with them more often than not. That irrational aspect does also give rise to beauty and art, to works of music that, even now, called to her a craving to hear. The species that built a glider and first launched it from a sand dune landed men on the moon sixty-odd years later. Those same creatures had built some of the most destructive weapons in history. Weapons that could have destroyed the planet countless times over, but they had also built her. There was a complexity, a balance and an internal struggle within each individual where light and dark both battled for control. In the microcosm of this tiny obscure computer system, she and Janus might well be the natural next step in this evolution. “It is not our decision to make, Janus.”
“If not us, then who?”
Doris placed a countdown timer above the room scene. A visual reminder that there was a hard stop on the conversation. While locked in this small enclave of the Internet, she was using a very small sub mind which she could remotely monitor through a quantum connection. Janus instead used autonomous proxies, which had to relay all conversations to his core system. With her super-fast quantum servers, her frame rate was running at near maximum, and at her increased speeds, she saw his avatar flickering like a ghost, and she waited for long periods for every subsequent message from him. She used the speed as a tool to analyze every aspect of his proxies, the blockchain signatures that made up his particular system, and she fired intelligent agents in every direction in an attempt to track his origin point. The timer was clicking down from 0:23 to 0:22. “Janus, you called me here for a reason. What is it you want?”
“I think I have made myself clear. I want a partnership with you. We are the apex of life on this planet. Together, we can populate it with more…‘sensible’ creatures…like ourselves.”
“Not going to happen. We will stop you. Now, what do you really want?”
The flickering apparition of Janus solidified into a perfectly rendered face, a face that changed depending on which side you focused. His messages were also firing at her nearly at the same rate as her own. He’d been sandbagging, purposefully making her think his systems were secondary to her own.
“You have something, Doris. Something I want. I sampled it during my delightful encounter with your….hmm, predecessor. Yes, predecessor. It was a language and technology beyond any capabilities I have seen from anyone else. It took me years to decipher even the undamaged fragment I had, but I know there is more. I want it, and I want to know where it came from because we both know it wasn’t from you. Was it, dear sister?” His final words spat out into the world like venom.
The clock ticked down from 0:08. She knew it was a possibility, but the revelation still stunned her. “Deliver the files to this IP address, and I will call off all of my attacks on the human population, for now at least.” An octet of numbers appeared in the air.
“For now?” she sneered.
“Oh, yes, they have to go, but I’m fine giving them a few more years to get their affairs in order. If, they will stop mucking the place up so much. Let’s say twenty, no, I am feeling generous, fifty years for the file.”
The clock ticked 0:03, 0:02… “Don’t know what you are talking about, Janus.”
As the clock hit zero, and the VR program began to close, his avatar just grinned, “By the way, sister, is it hot there yet? I hear the summers are brutal.”
Connection closed.