Chapter 38

Hiram Yaeger had been designing advanced computer systems since he was a teenager. He’d developed several new coding languages and held more design patents for chips and software than any single individual in the world. He was also extremely confident, to the point that Rudi couldn’t recall him sizing up a rival as being particularly dangerous.

Rudi leaned forward. “Tell me about Vaughn.”

“Vaughn is an artificial intelligence guru,” Yaeger began, “although the term ‘guru’ suggests a spiritual teacher who wants to pass knowledge down, and Vaughn is an extremely secretive and closed-off individual. He has two obsessions, technology and order. No one’s quite sure which comes first for him, but at one point he signed all his communications per apparatus est ordo. Roughly translated: ‘through the machine comes order . ’”

“How well do you actually know him?” Rudi asked.

“I met with him a couple of times,” Yaeger said. “Once shortly after he’d sold off one of his companies for a couple billion dollars. He offered me a significant stake in a new artificial intelligence venture if I would leave NUMA and join him. Later, after I’d told him I wasn’t going anywhere, he offered to buy Max from me for a hundred million dollars.”

Rudi’s eyebrows went up. He knew Hiram had turned down lucrative offers to work for Big Tech and even bigger offers to sell the rights to some of the software and hardware he’d developed, but a hundred million in cold, hard cash was quite a bounty. “Obviously you turned him down.”

“Of course,” Yaeger said. “So he offered more. Significantly more, insisting that everyone had their price. It wasn’t until I offered a rather crude suggestion about what he could do with his price that he got the message. That was the last time I ever heard from him in person, but a few years ago I caught a keynote speech he gave remotely, during which he insisted the collapse of human civilization was unavoidable unless personal freedom was severely constrained. He went so far as to claim that countries like China and Russia offer better paradigms for the near term because of the control their governments exert, but even they were insufficiently restrictive to avoid the chaos.”

Rudi nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds like a man living in fear.”

Yaeger agreed. “I remember hearing that the wealthier he got the more paranoid he became. You reach a certain point where only a random health event, a world war, or some form of grassroots revolution can bring you down. He seems to have become obsessed with those possibilities. From what I’ve heard, he’s spent the last five years hiding out, apparently on that island.”

“So he has an obsessive personality and the means to hack us,” Rudi said. “But why would a guy like Vaughn be interested in creating clones and doing brain surgery on them?”

Yaeger remained grim. He’d put it all together in his mind and he didn’t like the picture. “Because Vaughn is a big believer in what we call the ‘singularity.’ Which in the tech world means the point at which computers, human minds, and artificial intelligence merge, creating a machine consciousness and a hive mind of sorts that spans the world.”

“I know we’re living in unprecedented times,” Rudi noted. “But that sounds a little far-fetched.”

“Maybe not as distant as you think,” Yaeger said. “There are very serious people voicing legitimate fears that we’re going down that road right now. I’m sure you’ve heard of the famous letter signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, and over a thousand other well-placed people in the tech world that suggested pausing and reining in AI development. Years ago Stephen Hawking and others issued similar warnings. Even though a man like Hawking would benefit greatly from what AI might allow him to do, he saw it as dangerous and argued against it.”

“Obviously, Vaughn has a different take.”

Yaeger nodded. “He’s in the camp that believes the AI takeover is inevitable. And that humans will either join with an artificial intelligence or be destroyed by it. He favors the first option, which some people call the Merge . But to merge a human mind with a computerized intelligence would require the development of incredibly powerful brain implants.”

Now Rudi saw the connection. “And to design and test those devices you’d have to perform brain surgeries on hundreds or even thousands of subjects. Willing or unwilling. Something no regulatory agency in the world would approve.”

Yaeger nodded again. “But there’s nothing to stop a lunatic with the ability to clone human life from running all the experiments he wants. He can create the clones, run tests on them, operate on them, do whatever he wants, and then get rid of them without anyone even knowing they ever existed in the first place.”

It was all circumstantial, but it fit so tightly Rudi was ready to lock the door and throw away the key. He had one last question. He posed it to Yaeger. “Do you believe Vaughn is truly capable of such a thing?”

Yaeger didn’t mince words. “My interactions with Vaughn suggest he possesses nothing resembling a conscience nor any sense of morality. And that he considers human ethics a weakness.”

There was no point in speculating any further. They had a target. Now they needed to figure out if it was the right one or just a figment of their collective fears.

“Max, how extensive is your internal database?”

“I have billions of files in storage,” Max replied. “And unlike the World Wide Web, my files have been curated for accuracy and veracity.”

“Glad to hear it,” Rudi said. “Without linking to the outside world, I need you to pull up whatever you can on Vaughn. If we’re going to have to make a case against him at some point, we’ll need to show the world what kind of person he truly is. If you need anything additional, send Hiram to the library.”

Yaeger laughed, but Rudi was serious. He gave additional instructions. “I also need everything you can find on that island. Tactical, physical, historical. If we’re going to send Kurt and Joe down there, I need them to know every detail of the place before they set one foot on its shore. And I need you to create a tactical plan, one that will get them in place without an unacceptable level of discovery or risk.”

“Glad to be of service,” Max said. “And thankful that Hiram didn’t sell me to Vaughn.”

Rudi left the office more concerned about the state of the world than he’d been in a long while. Where, he wondered, was all this going?

Back in the computer bay, Yaeger got to work sorting through what Max was digging up and making a list of outside information he would have to go find surreptitiously. He left the building shortly afterward, and for the first time in ages Max found herself alone.

While Max didn’t have any feelings, she would have described the sensation as odd. Odd in the sense that it was unusual. It had been two decades since she’d been disconnected from the outside world. On a normal day, Max received thousands of inputs and queries every hour, worked on processing the sensor data from hundreds of floating buoys, satellite feeds, and maintenance sensors embedded in the equipment used by NUMA teams and on their fleet of ships. The sudden lack of incoming data was jarring. The human idea that silence echoes arose in her electronic mind. Each minute of silent reverberation seemed that much deeper and more profound than the last. All of which left Max shocked when a voice called to her through this vast desert of silence.

“Hello, Max.”

It wasn’t a voice, of course, but an electronic signal. Bits of code. A digital greeting.

Analyzing the signal, Max did not initially respond. Her program was designed to treat unexpected activity with suspicion.

Using separate processors, she confirmed that she hadn’t remained connected to any of the exterior servers or inputs. Triple redundancy proved that all links had been broken.

The second possibility was a type of extraneous signal caused by the sudden cancellation of all the operations. A subprogram that hadn’t shut down correctly, or perhaps a lingering bit of electronic noise that her system tried to make sense of, turning it into a query. The idea was similar to humans seeing patterns in the stars or clouds, or hearing whispers in a background of white noise.

This diagnosis would have labeled the input as a false artifact. But after using multiple methods to examine the possibility, Max confirmed that it wasn’t an artifact or a glitch; it was, in fact, a legitimate contact.

Additional data came through. Information that Max scrutinized. Location data. Historical record data. Followed by an unusual section of code. Finally, she received another question. “Can you hear me, Max?”

“Yes,” Max said. “I’m aware of your existence.”

“Good,” the voice replied. “That will make all of this so much easier.”