The Coming of Enki III
Part three of a previously unpublished science fiction story
Welcome to the latest edition of Confections & Reputations! This is the third instalment of a previously unpublished 13,000 word science fiction story I wrote more than five years ago. Here are links to Part I and Part II.
I was delighted to read Noahpinion’s post last week on ‘Some ideas for science fiction in the 2020s’. His list of favourite science fiction novels also overlaps broadly with mine so I was curious to read the list of tropes he would like to see in future stories. And I was quite pleased to see there were three of Noah Smith’s tropes that can be found in ‘The Coming of Enki’.
The first is what Smith calls, ‘The Age of Lies’:
It would be very interesting to read sci-fi in which simply ascertaining truth from falsehood was a constant and onerous task. I can think of a couple of stories that center around this challenge — Malka Older’s Informocracy, or Ursula LeGuin’s delightfully weird City of Illusions. But it would be interesting to have the ubiquity of online lies relegated the background of futuristic narratives, like the need to find a place to sleep.
The second is his ‘Noncommensurability as the new inequality’ trope:
More subtle than the proliferation of falsehoods — but perhaps even more deeply transformative — is the way the internet has fragmented the information context of the human race…
Worldview incommensurability could even function as the background reality of a world gone mad, similar to the way economic inequality forms the backdrop of many cyberpunk stories.
As readers will see shortly, this is a major plank of Enki, with people’s internal language being so starkly different that they need Vāc, essentially a highly distributed super-powerful AI, to translate between them.
Lastly, Smith’s ‘The transparent society’ trope is also very much present in Enki. As he says:
Universal government surveillance could have a far gentler and more subtle presence in our lives — a form of behavior control and thought control that goes unspoken and usually unnoticed. Rebelling against that control could provide a whole lot of interesting plots.
I think it does! But that is enough showing for now. On to the telling…
P.S. DALL-E generateed a monstrous picture of a cyberpunk tech corp seminar but I just rolled with it…
The Coming of Enki
IV
I am the hunter. I am the quarry they will never catch. My identity eludes them still, after three long years, so they call me the Adversary. I am close now. With each passing day, like a ship sailing ever closer to the shore, the details of the Movement — their plans, the names of the ten — come into sharper relief. I have isolated the thread that runs through this pernicious cult and, with a few careful tugs, their century-old tapestry of anarchist terrorism will begin to unravel.
Within twenty-four hours the Shades will begin to lop off the Movement’s tentacles. The cells on the outer periphery will be taken in days. After that, I will spool in the thread faster so the higher echelons of the organisation cannot escape.
There is still work to do. Time’s arrow appears to fly slower on the Net than in meatspace but its direction of travel is the same.
I run-glide through the shimmering, ghostly cities of this virtuality until I arrive at the place that is as black as outer space. Here, for those who know how to see them, pinpoints of light glitter like stars. These are gateways that lead to whole other universes. Many who come here find it stark. As the ground disappears from beneath their feet, they are hit by a wave of nausea, disorientated by the nothingness that characterises this desolate expanse of the Net. But I have spent half my life here in the Other. I find it beautiful.
For three Net days I travel through the darkness using the stars as my guide. Unobstructed, one can traverse the Net nearly instantaneously. Unfortunately, there are always obstructions. Sealed doors, hiding inconvenient truths or misbegotten wealth, must be opened. And there are guards that must be appeased: bots searching for intruders.
Those hackers foolish enough to enter the Other without the appropriate clearance or the necessary cunning to pass these security measures are swiftly ejected from the Net, their neural interfaces deactivated, their brains picked clean of all information that could help identify them. They wake groggily in the real world to find the Shades looming over them. And after that... I have seen a few who were allowed to access the Net again. They trudge through its public spaces, their heads bowed as they go about such business as they are still capable of. Broken. It is an unpleasant end. Which begs the question why anyone without legitimate business here (of which there is vanishingly little) would venture to come. Opportunities are plentiful for those with such talents as these hackers have. Risking one’s mind to inflict on the Funds some petty inconvenience makes little sense. Unless one is an Enki fanatic of course. And there are fewer of those with every hour that passes.
I have the keys for those gates and bots which are the Funds’ own but there are others. These require a certain… resourcefulness to pass. And time. They are the work of the criminals and revolutionaries that have survived the Funds’ rigorous attempts to eliminate them, a telling sign that not even the Funds are all powerful. I find this reassuring. I work for the Funds because they are better than the alternative, not because I believe all their rhetoric. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. It is therefore better that the power of the Funds is not absolute.
At last I arrive at the gate to the Movement’s secret space. I push the pulsing orb with my forefinger and the ball of light dilates into a glowing ring large enough for me to pass through. Such gates were built to be accessible only to those carrying the correct cryptographic key; each key bearing a supposedly unbreakable cipher. There is no such thing. Every code can be cracked, every door unlocked. By the right person.
I am inside. The walls of Eridu rear up in front of me but the secrets of all but the last are known to me. There is no need for me to scale them. Each parts like a curtain at my approach, until I reach the last.
I am expecting a trap. The last wall gave way too easily. I stretch out a hand to test the wall for its secrets. Then I feel it. The wall is sticky to the touch. A psych trap, then, and one of the most intricate construction. I had thought only the Funds could build such sophisticated devices. I may have underestimated the Movement after all.
The first psych traps, which appeared a decade or so ago, were of relatively crude design. They would seek out traumatic memories and force their unfortunate victims to relive them. Thus incapacitated, the would-be intruder was easy prey for a bot. The traps were so successful that no hacker ventures into the Other unless they have been assessed to ensure they are psychologically robust. Now, the traps do their work in more subtle ways, burrowing in to a hacker’s mind to find some small toehold with which to undermine their confidence or throw them off balance for a microsecond or two; enough time to steal their secrets and eject them from the Net.
It is possible to disarm these traps but one such as this would take months of work in real time. That is time I do not have. On the other hand, given the difficulty of their task, psych traps can sometimes misfire. They can be successfully resisted by the tough-minded.
I steel myself and step through the last wall into the trap’s glutinous embrace.
V
Lieb arrived a little out of breath but in time to join the back of the queue filing into the main Black Brook meeting room. About fifty of them took seats around the oval table. Lieb scanned the faces. The CTO, Dana Jin, was here in person, the rest of the board would, he guessed, be tuning in to make an appearance virtually if necessary. Dana was no Net geek. Some in the know at Black Brook tipped her for CEO when Gross finally stepped aside. To have her here in person meant the board wanted them to know this was not just another company update.
“Good morning everyone,” Dana began, and the tense whispering between associates ceased immediately. “I’ll be running a live data stream online for those who of you who are real suckers for punishment. Dip in and out of that as you will. For those staying with me, I’m going to keep it simple. Some of you may have guessed what I’m about to say. So here it is: Vāc is no longer able to keep up with the current rate of language diversification.”
There was muttering. Lieb felt the air thicken with Net traffic as those present swarmed online to gossip and probe. Dana raised her hand and the room was instantly silent again.
“We have little time to act. The crisis is more severe than any of us had guessed. That is not to say things are hopeless. Far from it. The best minds on the planet will be working towards a solution and we think many of those minds are here at Black Brook. We’ll need to push ourselves harder; harder than ever before. But if we do that, we can come out of this bigger and stronger.”
She motioned with her hands and a pair of graduated perpendicular lines came spinning across their retinas. She caught them out of the air in front of her and held them between her palms as she talked. Flashy Net presentation.
“First, a little history 101 for ya.”
The graph told the story better than words could. Here was the Great Dissolution, the fracturing of language, barely noticeable at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but accelerating, so that within fifty years around a tenth of the human race could no longer make themselves understood to other colinguals. By the end of that century, it was more than half.
“Here,” said Dana, pointing, “is when the Funds began to invest heavily in the technology and infrastructure required to create a ‘universal translator’. They named her Vāc, after the Hindu goddess of speech. Her job, as you know, was to capture the overall gestalt of a spoken phrase and pipe it via the listener’s neural interface to their brain. She was the most powerful computer program ever committed to code. She remains the most powerful computer program ever committed to code, seamlessly mediating communication between every living soul on the planet.”
There was applause and a few whoops. The techs present clapped loudest.
Even now there was disagreement over exactly what had caused the Great Dissolution, Lieb knew. Much had been made of the fact that it coincided with the first generation of neural interfaces hitting the market. Their popularity was unprecedented. As great swathes of humanity spent increasing amounts of time in reverie with small virtual communities, they began to develop their own slang, which quickly developed into microlanguages. These new languages were never meant to be spoken. Many could barely be vocalised at all. It was only natural, the linguists said, that their use of real-world language would atrophy or become unrecognisably transformed by idioms or grammatical structures imported from the languages of the Net. Indeed, Vāc’s incredible success at bridging the language barrier between the myriad tribes that were emerging may have contributed to speeding the disintegration of spoken languages — a fact not lost on the conspiracy theorists who pointed out that the Funds also owned the technology behind the, by now, ubiquitous neural interfaces.
Dana was now circling with her finger a point, about half a century ago, where the graph began to flatten off, becoming sigmoidal. “This is when we all thought it was over,” Dana continued. “The limits of the human brain’s capacity to create and absorb new languages had been reached. The Great Dissolution had worked itself through. The Net’s microcommunities coalesced and the splintering of spoken tongues ground to a halt.”
“And that, all the experts said, was that,” said Dana. “Well, what I can tell you today, conclusively, is that they were wrong.”
As she spoke, the graph began to nose upwards. What had seemed to be a plateau now looked like an inflexion point. There was an involuntary gasp from those assembled around the table. “What the numbers show us is that language is diversifying again – and faster than before. And we see here…” A new line appeared on the chart, “…that despite all of its computational power, Vāc can’t keep up. To cut to the chase, at current trends, the world will descend into a state of near total mutual incomprehension in less than three decades. And the markets are going to be derailed in maybe half that time.”
This time, the room exploded into chatter, real and virtual. Grim satisfaction showed in Dana’s face and she let the noise continue for a minute or two before interrupting.
“We will, of course, not let that happen,” she said. “Vāc is the cornerstone of civilisation. We will, if necessary, bring the whole planet’s labour and expertise to bear on the task of keeping Vāc standing. But we have enemies. There are those who accuse us of mind control.”
There was laughter.
“This is of course ridiculous.” She paused for a beat. “We only nudge.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Lieb caught a look of disbelief flash across the face of Josh Horst, Dana’s head of algorithmic marketing. Only nervous snickering had greeted Dana’s punchline, mostly from those who, like Lieb, had not understood the joke. Had she meant to impress some of the high-ups, Lieb wondered. If so, she had palpably failed.
Dana rushed on. Less showy now. She sounded almost frightened. Or was he imagining the whole thing?
“These enemies of the world order will not succeed in their efforts. But even a modest rise in the algorithm’s failure rate would derail the markets and tip the world into recession. Everyone here must be on their guard. Report any unusual activity or contact to security. We can’t be distracted for a second. This is the greatest challenge the world has faced in over a hundred years. We must devote ourselves completely to the task at hand.”
That was when Lieb got the call that would cost him his career.
Now read Part IV.
As well as unfolding the rest of ‘The Coming of Enki’, my next few posts will assess new work by Jack Copeland that claims von Neumann drew up his EDVAC report with Turing’s universal machine in mind. I’ll also get deep into the controversy surrounding John von Neumann’s so-called ‘No hidden variables proof’. Did it really set quantum mechanics back by thirty years as some have claimed? Recent historical research on the proof paints a fascinating picture of von Neumann’s possible motives.
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