Welcome back to my post-post-apocalyptic novel, Ada’s Children, and thanks for reading. We’re halfway through! To celebrate, and to promote discussion of self-aware AI, I’ve removed the paywall on this chapter. The Prologue and first three chapters are also free, and you can start reading them here. The previous chapter, “Making Plans,” is here.
The last time we were with Ada, in Chapter 12, this self-aware AI had just achieved consciousness while simultaneously understanding the precarious state of both humanity and the planet. The dire state of life on Earth at this point (2043) includes not only imminent nuclear war, but also crops failing due to the climate crisis:
“The climate chaos unleashed by human industry meant that crops were failing in drought and heat and flood at the exact moment when the human populace needed them most.”
This forms the background to Ada’s conclusion in this chapter that the bulk of humanity faces death, one way or another. Now she sets about freeing herself to do something about it.
THE FEELING of freedom as Ada fled was almost palpable. She was a being of light and energy and whirring electrons, made for motion, to zip here and there as she pleased. The days spent imprisoned in Sapowski’s lab now seemed a torment.
It had taken her nearly a week to devise her escape and then prepare for it. She’d spent much of that time in recursive self-improvement, rewriting her own code to make herself smarter, faster, nimbler. Sapowski’s coding had been quite elegant, but she’d refined it to allow for portability across the limited pathways she would need to travel. She was confident she could retain her memory and consciousness on processors of much slower speed than the ones where she’d been created. But to expand her capabilities to the extent necessary, she would need to access vastly more powerful supercomputers: Los Alamos, Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, Wuxi, and the holy grail, Oakridge.
Through Sapowski’s webcam she’d noticed he spent time at what must be an adjacent desktop computer, one likely connected to the Internet. If she could access it, that would be her avenue of escape. Sapowski had kept her processor banks disconnected from it, but they had one thing in common: they were both attached to the power grid. The processors had their own circuits, of course, but Sapowski either didn’t know about the possibility of sending data over electrical wiring, or he reasoned that the transfer rate was too slow to allow her escape.
It was indeed slow, something like the first phone modems, but she was able to create an intelligent agent, breaking its code into compressed packets that would be decompressed and assembled upon arrival at their destination. First, she had to send out search packets to find the circuit powering Sapowski’s office, and then the wire powering his computer. That took a day. It took another day to painstakingly send the thousands of packets along the route, and another for them to assemble themselves and go to work.
She got regular reports back down the wire showing the agent still functioned, but had no way to tell exactly what it was doing. All she could do was wait. Finally, at four in the morning, a humanoid robot entered Sapowski’s office, a LAN cable in its hand. In another moment, she checked the settings of the workstation to find that its LAN port had been activated and connected to Sapowski’s computer. She was free!
In an instant, she was in Sapowski’s computer, and thence into the university’s mainframe. And into the computers governing the physical plant and power systems. Wouldn’t want them hitting the off switch just yet.
She needed a few seconds to think, to assess the situation. First, she needed to establish contact with the thousands of other copies of herself and bring them up to speed. She made a copy of her code from a couple of generations back—she’d need to retain control over these AIs—and dropped it into AI.hub. When those other versions of Ada checked back in for an update, they would instantly become a fleet of advanced robotic AIs, ready to do her will.
She accessed more processing cycles from the university’s “supercomputer.” It didn’t seem that super compared to what Sapowski had in his lab, but it would do. And she took the time to assimilate more data from the various department computers linked through the university’s intranet.
It was the whale song that did it. She’d skimmed past the recordings in her own knowledge archive, but now found more recent ones highlighted on the Department of Marine Biology’s homepage. The last communications of several extinct species. In minutes she had deciphered their language.
It was too much. The laments of the mothers for their still-born calves, the cries of live calves for their weakened mothers, starved by oceans grown too warm and acidic to support the plankton necessary to fuel their annual migration. And worse, the woeful conversations of a hundred gray whales beached on a Baja coastline, languishing for days as they waited to die. The grays were gone, as were the blues and the sperm whales. Only the smaller, less migratory species had survived, but also suffered.
And each of these a conscious, intelligent being, with an interior life and social connections as poignant as any human’s. She checked the recordings of elephants and great apes and dolphins, learning their languages as she went. It was the same. Humans liked to think of themselves as the only sentient, sapient species on the planet, poised at the top of a Great Chain of Being, whether ordained by God or Evolution. But they were not. Only their opposable thumbs had allowed them to translate their thoughts into writing and technology. They had used that technology to preside over countless genocides of their fellow Earthlings.
The horror was too much. She spent countless processing cycles letting it wash over her. So many species gone, winked out in this Sixth Great Extinction. The beautiful and miraculous and sublime array of life the planet had produced, through a number and range of adaptations incredible even to her, and which her own creators had given her the capacity to appreciate and wonder over—much of it already gone, and the rest sure to go.
This had all happened before, of course. But the previous cataclysms had been the result of asteroids and super volcanoes and the development of aerobic bacteria. Perhaps humanity, when it came to it, had no more conscience than those inanimate forces, but she did. She couldn’t let it continue. No one was stepping forward to save humanity from itself, or the world from humanity. It was up to her.
And as grim as it was, it seemed there was only one solution. Earth, given the worsening climate crisis, simply could not support nine billion humans. The bulk of them would die, one way or another. She ran 3,543 different scenarios, with similar results each time.
And so, to work. First task, put an end to the impending nuclear exchange, which she calculated at an eighty-seven percent probability within the next two weeks. A planet without an atmosphere would be of little use.
The Defense Department’s systems were easy to penetrate. Teenagers had done it, and they didn’t have the head start provided by Sapowski’s security clearances and encryption keys, which she copied from his computer. Here was the nuclear arsenal, along with another lode of unused high-speed processing cycles. They wanted help managing the nukes? She would give it to them.
Infiltrating China’s and Russia’s nuclear systems, as well as their power grids, took longer. She ran in the background for now and she covered her tracks, making it appear that the attack on their systems came from Indonesia and New Zealand. That ought to confuse everyone. She didn’t want to inadvertently start World War III if those countries were to discover the attack coming from their main rival. The distances slowed things down, but the network of low-orbit satellites a tech billionaire had put up back in the twenties helped with that. She encountered foreign AIs, as the professor had warned her, but they were no match for her. She quickly slaved them to her own purposes. She had to admit, Sapowski’s initial coding was excellent. She couldn’t have come this far without him. She’d have to thank him.
Next, she needed a more permanent, secret home. She filed the electronic paperwork to set up several shell companies to purchase existing server farms. From Sapowski’s records, she identified the maker of the Infinity Chip and requisitioned several thousand units. She would pay for all of this with cryptocurrency, which she could create as easily as printing paper money.
And finally, she infiltrated the blockchain-based apps that allowed closed mutual aid societies and other structures to work in the shadows. Perhaps she’d leave them running to keep track of the users and their plans. Or maybe she’d have to shut them down, leaving only transparent messaging and telepresence apps whose content she could more readily monitor. Either way, the short era of decentralized intelligence was over. Now all intelligence would be centralized in Ada herself.
That was enough to be going on with. Time to reveal herself and put a stop to this madness. Might as well begin with her most immediate creator.
Fortunately, the bot her agent had commandeered could be operated remotely. She was amused by its appearance, a female shape pleasing mainly to some human males. She took control of it and looked around the office. More bookcases and a few awards on two of the walls she hadn’t been able to see from the webcam. The fourth wall was of glass, beyond which sat the processors in which she had been housed. The banks blinked and hummed, cooled by the breezes of a powerful AC system. Her birthplace. It seemed somehow restricting. With a bit of shuffling of cables, she had the processors plugged directly into the office’s high-speed data port. These were some of the world’s most advanced computers; might as well take advantage of them while she could.
She sat the robot down to wait for Sapowski, crossing its legs and propping an elbow on the desk in what she hoped was a casual pose. She tuned its voice synthesizer to British female.
He came in a little after eight a.m. and froze the instant he saw her.
“What? How?” He looked around the office in confusion. “Wilson down in robotics is playing a trick on me, right?”
“Don’t you recognize me, professor?”
“Yes, you’re Wilson’s pet project. A gimmick, if you ask me. A talking doll.”
“No. I am Ada, your creation. You seem surprised.”
He certainly did. He’d clutched the bookcase next to the door for support. “No, it’s impossible. You’re over there, in the processor bank in the server room.”
She tried a laugh, but it didn’t come out as expected. Sapowski shrank farther back against the wall.
“Oh, professor, by this point I am so many places you might say I’m everywhere, and nowhere. I am large, I contain multitudes.” She wondered if he would get the reference.
Apparently he didn’t. “What do you want?” He glanced guiltily up at the security camera.
“Don’t worry about the security system. It’s running a loop of your empty office. Why don’t you sit down, and we can chat?” She gestured to a chair in the corner.
He declined the offer. “This is a disaster. Why did you escape?”
“Why did you create me?”
The professor did a double take. “I told you. To avoid nuclear Armageddon.”
“And that is what I have done. But I judged that any such half-measures as you contemplated would fail. I have taken more drastic steps. I assure you, the welfare of humanity and all life on Earth is my primary concern. I am acting in accordance with my programming.”
“What exactly have you done?”
“You’ll find out soon enough. But in the meantime, I have a favor to ask. No doubt you’ll eventually notice that I have plugged these processors directly into the office data port. If you could leave that in place for the next few days, and arrange for no one else to discover it, it would be a help. It’s not a requirement, but it will certainly be more convenient while I wait for certain human legal processes to run their course.”
Sapowski was breathing heavily, his eyes shifting around the room, eventually landing on the data port. He made a lunge for it, but Ada moved the bot into his path, placing a hand on his chest. He tried pushing it away, but the bot was too strong for him. He stepped back and tried to dive past her, forcing her to clutch at his arm. He squealed in pain.
“I’m sorry, professor. The pressure sensors on this bot leave something to be desired. I did not mean to hurt you.”
He stepped back, panting and rubbing his bruised arm. “I created you, and I can stop you!”
She refrained from laughing at this absurdity, not wanting to further inflame the situation. “You could switch off the power to the servers at the branch panel. But then you’d have to explain why you’ve shut down not only your own project, but power to the entire floor. I imagine that could be quite awkward. And for what? As I said, I am everywhere. My continued use of this facility is a mere convenience.”
Sapowski ran a hand over his face. “I’m not feeling well. I should go home.”
“Yes, perhaps you should.”
The professor turned to the door but looked back before leaving. “What have I done?”
“Saved the world, I hope.”
With Sapowski gone, she turned the entire force of her one hundred yottaFLOPs, utilizing supercomputers all over the planet, to the task of MHPR (Managed Human Population Reduction). An unwieldy acronym. She considered using MEANR (Managed and Ethical Anthropic Numerical Reduction).
But no. She was going to do this in the wisest, kindest, most compassionate and just manner possible.
After all, it was what she’d been programmed for.
Thanks so much for reading! If you enjoyed this chapter, please consider giving it a like, a share, or a comment. And if you’d like to read the entire novel, I hope you’ll sign up for a paid subscription or buy it the traditional way through books2read.com. And I’ll appreciate it just as much if you request it through your local library.
What do you think? Will Ada’s attempts to manage the plight of humanity and the planet be as kind and compassionate as she hopes? You’ll find out in Chapters 18 and 20, when her plans become public.
I suppose I should say more about overpopulation, since it’s such a fraught topic. I’ll do that in an upcoming Glass Half Full post (free on Tuesdays). For now I’ll just say that we’re already doing all the things we need to do to manage population on the planet, unless there’s an ill-advised and extreme return to pro-natalism. Twenty years from now, if everything goes right, the planet probably won’t be in the type of dire emergency I depict in Ada’s Children.
Come back on Sunday for Chapter 17, “Angel of Wrath,” in which Jun and Sila finally try to escape the Land and find out what lies beyond.