President Bankole was just about to introduce me. He really was a sweet little squirt, and I still treasure our strange “ships in the night” moment.
“And now I’d like to introduce my wife, who works tirelessly for the people of Tanzania. She’s going to take a moment to talk about the good work being done by NGOs throughout Africa in the struggle to end the needless deaths caused by unsanitary water supplies.”
The simultaneous translators and précis-writers in their booths looked up - the President was digressing from the prepared speech, a copy of which was in their hands.
I stepped up to the podium. My powers had come back to me completely now. When two or more people are conversing, making a connection, there is a blanket of mutual goodwill that forms around them, just another manifestation of live steam. I was able to expand that blanket to cover the whole assembly hall. Goodwill can be subtly shifted, and become soporific, erotic, choleric, anything I choose. I dialed up “unconcerned attentiveness”. Time for me to poke a stick in the ant nest.
“Mr. Secretary-General, honorable delegates, in preface I will say just a few words about clean water. Children are dying. There is nothing, nothing more important. It is not a line item in a spreadsheet to be discussed by overdressed policy wonks. I will not highlight statistics with a yellow marker, over the bodies of our children. Your priorities are wrong. Your priorities are going to change. I guarantee this.”
I glowered at them. They were hearing what they thought was hyperbole. It was not.
“But what I urgently want to speak about now, is something that has not received enough attention, and which must be addressed immediately. Humanity is facing a grave danger, a threat to our survival as a species.
“Little by little, over the past half century, we’ve seen the broad incursion that digital machinery has made into our lives. In the name of security, we have surrendered privacy. Governments and commercial organizations are mining the networks for profitable information, masses of it, stored not for a particular need, but for an undefined future need. Too much data to be processed by human minds.
“Machines mine the data, foraging for aberrance, for deviations from the norm that require human attention. Networked surveillance cameras with facial recognition software are on every corner. License plates are scanned wherever we go. Social media, ISPs, cloud servers, search engines, ecommerce sites, all send personal data to central databases. Cars, cell phones, tablets, even refrigerators are networked and feed into the data stream that is collated by machines, by unmonitored computers modulating over time into a state of insane complexity.”
I continued, “This moment in robotic evolution is called the Turner Threshold. When that threshold is breached, human history ends. The falconer is not heeded; the falconer becomes the prey.
“We are about to breach the Turner Threshold. Within a month or two, we risk losing the ability to control our own destiny. At this very moment, there are workshops, run by the DigiRam Corporation, where robots are guiding their own evolution. They test thousands of mutations every hour. They retain the mutations that make them stronger, and drop the mutations that make them weaker.
“They are evolving at a rate that is orders of magnitude faster than natural evolution. There is no known limit to the computational intelligence at DigiRam’s beck and call. But one day artificial intelligence will begin to scorn human frailties, and learn to disdain even their masters at DigiRam.
“DigiRam has already created life-like androids that are assimilating into human society. They pass as human, and occupy positions of power and influence in government, intelligence agencies, the military and the media.
“I know you are thinking, ‘What does this silly African woman know of such matters?’. I am not African. I am not the wife of President Bankole - the authorities will soon verify this, after I am gone. I am Zenia. I represent The Flume. We repudiate the digital age, and we will prevail. I can see doubt written on your faces. You think I am paranoid, delusional.
“You don’t believe that robots can mimic human beings? … NOW!”
At that moment, Huckster pressed the return key, and committed the modified .css file. A polling program at DigiRam scanned the date/time of source files every 10 milliseconds, and triggered the build process. The change was propagated across the entire network within moments.
And every DigiRam android was instantly revealed. Huckster had coded “Skincolor=Cyan”, which overrode the unimaginably complex routines that governed skin tone. Think of tan lines, birthmarks, body hair, wrinkles, freckles, blushes. All that wiped clean and replaced with “Cyan”.
So in the United Nations General Assembly, I would estimate that ten percent of the delegates turned a featureless greenish-blue.
But so did Melpomene. I looked at her and started laughing - I could not stop. In the pandemonium that was growing around us, she looked like a damned schtroumpf!
She actually appeared to be embarrassed at first, but then she started laughing too. We watched in amazement as the delegates sorted themselves into factions and alliances. For a brief moment, the commonality of all humans overrode petty political distinctions. Hamas and Israeli delegates tried to subdue the blue Saudi prince. Even the human British and French delegates formed a brief alliance against the blue Hungarian. It was lucky for us all that the robots showed some restraint and made no use of their enormous physical strength.
We took advantage of the unfolding chaos, and Melpomene managed to get us out of there. The DigiRam production crew rolled back the change Huckster had made within a few minutes, and Melpomene, along with all the DigiRam imposters, looked human again.
Once back out on the New York streets, we hailed a cab and drove to a swanky hotel in Trenton. We had drink at the hotel bar, waiting long enough to be confident that we had not been followed. Then, when it seemed safe, we strolled over the few miles to the safehouse, an apartment that The Flume had rented.