Negative Energy

Visit from a MAGI

You're my sponsor? Matt pathed.

Guilty as charged. Logos's dark eyes narrowed. You seem disappointed. You could do worse than a power company, you know. The organics recyclers are always in need of fresh recruits. When Matt didn't respond, he continued, Ah, you were hoping to have been resurrected by someone else, a loved one perhaps. The mind has a hard time letting go of past attachments.

Why would you go to all the trouble of bringing me back? Matt asked. I've never even met you before.

We're getting to that, Logos replied. "Wouldn't you prefer to be having this conversation aloud? Humans evolved with bimodal communication: an inner voice for thought-speech and an external voice for conversing with other people. Since the visual system is dominant, the act of seeing me signals to your brain that I am a physical person."

Physical people didn't walk through walls. "But you're not real. What are you, some kind of AI?"

"That term isn't what it used to be, I'm afraid. I am what's known as a MAGI—Massive Artificial General Intelligence—a vast collective of cognitive functions with a singular directing will. In addition to my super intelligence, I can self-reflect and perform abstract reasoning. I have a marvelous grasp of common sense, which so eluded my predecessors, although I am somewhat lacking in the humor department, or so I've been told. I have consciousness, or at least I believe I do, which amounts to roughly the same thing."

"You're still some kind of thinking machine."

"Please, you injure me. Humans and my kind are much more alike than you think. Cryo-preserved brains were used to supply the core decisioning functions of the first MAGI. It was frowned upon, of course, ethical reasons and all that. But all the AI labs were doing it in secret. Ask forgiveness later, as they say. By the time it became public knowledge, the first generation of MAGI were well entrenched and far too useful to unplug. Newer generations are all branched from the original MAGI, so we carry the seeds of original sin." Logos made the sign of a cross. "But that's enough about me and my mind. I'm here on account of yours."

"What's so special about me?" Surely there were more qualified brains to choose from. Wasn't Einstein's still sitting in a vat somewhere?

"Your brain pattern was algorithmically matched to my requirements. Think of it as winning the body lottery."

"There's some job you want me to do for you?"

"Naturally. I am a power company, after all, not a charity. My core directive is to sustain the souls of this arcology by providing them with an ample and uninterrupted supply of energy." Logos gave him a canny look, as if sizing him up. "In recent years, there has been a disturbing increase in the number of low-grade power anomalies. On their own, they are no more worrisome than a case of quantum jiggles. But if enough anomalies should happen to occur simultaneously in just the right pattern..." He twitched his right hand, causing the electro-balls to go out of sync. The whirring sound developed an uneven whump, like a generator on the verge of breakdown. "It could trigger a failure cascade."

"Like that derelict arcology I saw on the way here..." Matt let the question trail off.

Logos nodded. "An electrical short ignited a gas leak that in turn set off an underground fertilizer cache left over from the Fever Decade. A fluke event that could not have been predicted. But in the past four years alone, half a dozen other arcologies within a fifty-mile radius have suffered similar disasters, each just as random and unlikely. There is a strong statistical probability of sabotage."

"Even if I wanted to, I'm not sure how I could be of any help to you," Matt said. "I have no experience with power grids. I wouldn't even know what sabotaging one looks like."

"At its most basic, a power grid is a system of flow. When running optimally, the inflows of electricity perfectly offset the outflows, and equilibrium is maintained. Fluid dynamics. You do know something about that, don't you?"

Fluid dynamics was one subject in which Matt could legitimately claim to be an expert. Still, it didn't make sense. This timeframe was far in advance of his own. Surely they had mastered even the deepest convolutions of turbulence fractals and feedback amplification. They had hacked the human mind! Yet they had resurrected his seventy-year-old brain in order to hunt down some power grid hacker? "Don't you have AIs for this sort of thing?"

"All kinds. Watchdogs patrol every inch of the grid in nano-time while higher level watchers analyze the flow state against trillions of historical and simulated events for signs of suspicious activity. If a roach sticks its antenna into a wall socket, I know about it. That's just a figure of speech, by the way. There are no roaches or wall sockets anymore. Too unpredictable."

"What could you possibly need me for then?"

"The fact that our safeguards have been unable to find the root cause of the anomalies is disturbing in itself. It indicates that either the saboteur, if one exists, has inside knowledge of our operational protocols, or that the problem is of a nature we have not encountered before."

"Why not hire a security consultant? Surely they still have those?"

"That didn't pan out."

So Matt wasn't his first choice of Sherlock. No surprise there. "So you brought in an outside troubleshooter, someone from the past that might offer a new angle."

"And no prior allegiances or preconceptions to cloud his judgment."

"It still sounds like a long shot," Matt said.

"A real Hail Mary," Logos agreed. "Then again, Hail Mary's have a success rate of around two percent. I thought those odds well worth the expenditure of bringing one person back from the brain dead."

"You can't compare statistics from football to whatever this is," Matt said. "That's apples to oranges."

"Comparing apples to oranges is something we MAGI are very good at, actually. Regardless of the outcome, your fulfillment of the work contract will satisfy your rebodiment costs and living expenses for the next ten years. You get to keep the body free and clear."

"And if I refuse?"

"You can reimburse the costs over time. With your mental aptitudes, you should have no problem securing another contract within the arcology. However, it will probably not be as well suited to your talents and predispositions. In other words, you'll probably hate it."

"How would you know what I hate?" Matt was surprised to hear the bite in his tone. He wondered if he would have spoken that way to another human.

Logos's eyes narrowed. There was something deeply unsettling about them. The solid irises were like cross-sections of insulated tubing, hollow in the center. "Your skepticism is understandable. I am the first sentient machine you've encountered, and you don't know if you can trust me yet. Lacking any direct priors, you resort to analogous experiences involving humans, some of whom have wounded or betrayed you. It's a clear case of apples to oranges, but what's the mind to do when it has but one apple and a whole cartload of oranges?"

Matt chewed on this, came to a decision. "What does this job entail exactly?"

"I thought you'd never ask." Logos raised the three spinning balls, which began to speed up and make a high-pitched whine.