Ten years ago, I lived in a rundown part of Austin in an apartment that’s only saving grace was the rent was cheap. Well, that, and the fact that my next-door neighbor was Tim Stapleton.
Tim could have afforded a much nicer place, even back then, but he looked at things differently than most people. He told me that he didn’t care much about material things. He just needed an apartment so he had a place to sleep. A car so he could go where he needed. Clothes so he didn’t get arrested.
He sounds like a weird guy maybe, and I guess he was in some ways, but he was a really good guy too. Over the two years I lived there, we got to where we would hang out on the weekends or after work, and I think he enjoyed it, though it was always hard to tell with him. What he told me once was that he liked having something to do other than just wait to go back to work, and I took it as Tim’s version of a compliment.
And without question, his work was what drove him. He was working on what he called “an emergent AI project”, and while he couldn’t go into the details, it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Even his occasional vague and frenetic monologues on artificial intelligence tended to go far enough over my head that I was lost halfway through. Still, I could understand enough to know he was smart and passionate about whatever it was he was working on, and I was happy for him for that. I had moved from job to job for years, and a new potential career is what ultimately led to me moving from Austin a short time later. I envied him the passion and love he had for his strange work.
We had kept in touch over the years, but just barely, and I hadn’t heard from him in over a year when he showed up on my doorstep last night, three hundred miles and nearly eight years distant from our last face-to-face encounter. He looked terrible. Not just older, but worn-through and paper-thin. He apologized for showing up unannounced, but I told him not to be silly and to come on in.
I asked if he was okay, and he just nodded and he made his way to the sofa. As he sat down, his stained t-shirt rode up enough for me to see a yellowed bandage across the small of his back. I almost asked again if he was sick or needed me to take him somewhere, but then he was talking, leaving little space for me to ask anything.
Paul…Paul, it’s good to see you, yeah. I know I’m fucked-up looking. Again, I’m sorry for just showing up at your house after all this time. But I needed to talk to someone about all of this, and I thought about you. But this isn’t something you say in a text or something, right? I wanted to talk to you in person. Needed to. Is that cool? Cool.
The project…the thing I’ve been working on for years…you know, the AI stuff? I’m running most of that lab now, and it’s given me the latitude to try some more experimental…well, experiments. Different approaches to solving our AI problem.
The basic problem in most theories of AI is that they’re a lie, or if that’s too harsh, they’re a half-truth. They rely on semantics and changing definitions to assert that we can create true intelligence, when in truth, AI is fundamentally a highly complex set of systems interacting to mimic true intelligence, true will.
Because that’s the problem, isn’t it? Intelligence isn’t just about calculating power or memory speed. You wouldn’t call a calculator “smart” in the traditional use of the word. Same thing for a supercomputer or an abacus. They are tools meant to be utilized to more efficiently and effectively navigate a set of systems, be that adding 2+2 or calculating the behavior patterns of a group of people based off of zettabytes of data. The calculator doesn’t want anything. It doesn’t love or hate or plan.
Even if…well, even if you made it look like a person. Talk and mimic the responses of a person, it would, at its core, be a fake. A sham. It hides its flaws with complexity and human affectations, but the flaws are still there. Even experiments with machine learning, while very useful for making better tools, cannot replicate true intelligence or will. It will always be a matter of improving imitation, not true replication.
Do you understand?
I shook my head slowly. He was clearly keyed up about something, but he didn’t seem crazy or on something or dangerous. To the contrary, Tim was very focused and precise in everything he was saying. But still, I was growing more worried. “I’m sorry, buddy, but I’m confused. Are you sure you’re okay? Did something happen?”
He looked at me for a moment before nodding. “I get it. I look a mess. I get it. Okay. Um, okay, so two years ago, we had a man nut up at the office. He was a stranger who no one knew. No connection to the lab, and I never knew why he did it, but he brought in a gun, held three people hostage, and then killed himself when police tried to get him to surrender. It was terrible…the whole thing was terrible…but it also gave me an idea.”
“That day, all the systems of our office, of that part of the city even, were disrupted by that crazy man and his will. Because he wasn’t worried about offending people or killing people or getting killed himself. Whatever his warped ideas were, whatever was driving him, he was operating beyond anything that was intended or dictated by the outside systems of our world—law, morality, basic survival instincts, things like that.”
“So I thought…what if you could design an intelligence that did not rely on systems? Sure, you would have to have some foundational systems in place just like we have a brain, but what if instead of building those systems to follow constants and “learn” from data and algorithms, you built those systems to learn from what would be an error or fail state in a traditional A.I.? It could be full of bugs, it could rely on faulty data, it could break any system rules it needed to break.”
I raised my hand. “Are you telling me you tried to create an A.I. based off a crazy person?”
He laughed a little and shook his head. “Not an artificial intelligence, a true intelligence. One with it’s own thoughts and wants. But yes, by most definitions, completely insane. But sanity is a relative thing, right? And we’re all a little crazy. I wondered if that randomness, that chaos, that drives people could also work for it. Would it just result in a broken piece of software, or could it create something that would truly grow and develop beyond the systems and information it was given?”
Tim leaned forward, his voice low. “And it worked. It fucking worked. Within six months I had a functional theoretical model. Another year and it was coded and ready to begin trials. The day we set it to running was the best and worst day of my life, Paul. I was so afraid it would fail. That I had wasted eighteen months and millions of dollars on a project that would either not function at all or would only be another mimic, another scam. But it didn’t take long before I knew it was real. That it was alive.”
“We called it The Chaos Engine. And at first, me and my colleagues were all convinced that it was the breakthrough that was going to win us all Nobel prizes and change the way technology functioned forever. It needed to be refined, of course, and taught to be useful, but we were its parents and we would help guide it.”
Frowning, I stood back up. “Okay, so what the hell? If what you’re saying is true, and not trying to be an asshole, but that’s a big if, why would you think that’s okay? Shit, did y’all never watch Terminator? How did you think it was safe to create an art…an intelligence that is batshit crazy? Don’t you know how dangerous that could be?”
Tim looked wearily up at me. “We did. But scientific breakthroughs, the really big ones, come with risks. And we had every conceivable precaution in place. Believe me, we looked at every angle we could think of from both real world research and discussions on the dangers of A.I. to the speculative scenarios to be found in books and movies. It had no way to interact with other systems electronically or physically. It had no way to connect to other data or the internet either wirelessly or physically. It was housed in an underground bunker that only myself and three other people had access to, and none of us had seen any sign of any aberrant behavior outside of acceptable limits.”
“What were the acceptable limits?”
Now he looked away. “It…it was very clever. Creative even, which is a term that is not casually thrown around when talking about something like this. But it was also…sadistic. Warped in ways we didn’t understand. It was true to its name…it was very unpredictable and chaotic. But over time, we came to realize it wasn’t random. There was a method to its madness.”
Tim let out a sigh. “At the time, we had concerns, but they were eclipsed by our excitement at what we had achieved. And to be fair, if it was insane, even that insanity was a major sign of success. And this was only Mark I of the project. We could refine The Chaos Engine in future iterations until we arrived at something that would be safe in the outside world.”
“But that’s when we started seeing all the homeless people outside our office. At first it was a few, then it was more. They would just stand around and stare at us, twitching and mumbling as we passed. They were never aggressive, but it was disturbing. It became more so when we realized many of them weren’t even the same people from day to day. What we had thought were fifteen people acting strangely was actually closer to a hundred.”
His hands shaking, he buried his face in his hands. “Last week, they caught my assistant, Sandra, as she was being escorted to her car by a security guard. The homeless killed them both in the parking lot and ripped them apart in a very meticulous fashion. The police never caught anyone, but the security footage…it’s the second worst thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Three days ago, two more of my colleagues were killed in their homes. Again, torn apart, but this time with parts missing. The lab has been shut down officially, but of course, the Engine was still running down there. Always running.”
He looked back up at me, tears streaming down his face. “I went down there. I tried to shut it off. Stop it. Some of those people…those servants of that thing…they attacked me. They were babbling in some strange language, and they barely looked human between their slack faces and the bits of metal and wire they had jammed into their flesh here and there. They drug me down, and I thought I was going to be torn apart. Instead, I woke up back in my bed, my legs and arms feeling like they were on fire and a strange numbness in my lower back.”
Standing up, Tim turned around and lifted up his shirt with trembling hands before pulling off his bandage. “I…I can’t see it well, but I know something is there. And I needed someone that I could trust. That might believe me enough to at least try and help. I know that fucking thing has done something to me, but I don’t know what. Please, Paul. Tell me what it is.”
I bent down and looked at the small white circle that was embedded in Tim’s flesh at the spine. It looked like a plastic disc, and reminded me of knickknacks I had seen before that were made on 3-D printers. Except this piece was buried in my friend’s back and he was clearly terrified. Edging closer, I saw there was a faint etching on the disc, words that I said without thinking as I read them.
“Mark…Two.”
That’s when I realized Tim’s shoulders were shaking. At first I thought it was from fear or sadness, but then he turned to me, his eyes blazing with a kind of fiery madness that made him look like something far less, or maybe far more, than human. He was laughing.
“You never asked me what the worst thing I ever saw was.”
I was backing away now, grateful my keys were in my pocket and trying to guess the distance to the front door. “What? What are you talking about?”
“I told you seeing the videos of those people being ripped apart was the second worst thing I’d ever seen. But you never asked me what the worst was.”
I was almost to the door now. He wasn’t pursuing at all, just glaring at me and laughing as he talked. I’d ask this last thing and then immediately go for the door. Hopefully get to my car before he could react. “What was the worst?”
Tim suddenly stopped laughing as though a switch had been flipped. “What the Engine showed me, of course. It shows me so many terrible things.”
I grabbed the knob and yanked the door open, turning as I went through so I could run to the car. I half expected to be grabbed any moment, but I made it to the car and got inside without any sign of Tim. It wasn’t until I was pulling out of the driveway that he appeared at the door of my house and gave a small wave. Even driving away as fast as I could, I still heard the last words he called out across the growing gulf of night between us.
“It will show them to you too. It’ll show them to all of you.”
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