Think Outside The Box
Crow Gulliver had a long, black talon poised over the button that would take them over the brink, and he was either trying to work up the courage to press it, or trying to work up the courage to not press it—he couldn’t decide which.
He’d spent years working around to the idea of doing this since he first thought of it, and he’d wondered all that time if he would hesitate at the moment of truth.
His hands hadn’t trembled in years, not since the N/T enhancement surgery, but now they did, and he withdrew his talons before one could bump the button and make the decision for him. He studied the talons, pretending they hadn’t been shaking even though there was no one watching him.
Of course, “no one” was relative. Gara was there, on the floor beside him, sobbing, not watching but always there, threatening to look up and see his shameful hesitance. Her eye makeup ran as she cried, but her beauty implant kept fixing it automatically, so it seemed like the first tears of the cry were running down her cheeks, over and over and over.
And there was Cyan-12, which was not in any literal sense watching him but in another more real sense saw everything he did before he even thought of doing it. He could feel it there now, unpresence heavy on his consciousness, throbbing away inside its box. It could speak to him but it did not, and the tension of its silence strained at a rope tied around his heart.
“You can’t, Crow,” said Gara between sobs. Her voice was strong despite the tears, not whiny or wispy but emotive and raw. “Walk away! It’s not too late.”
He wondered if it was too late. Had he already made the decision? Was he trying to work up the courage to decide, or was he just waiting long enough that he could tell himself he was really, fully considering it? Cyan-12 probably already knew whether he was going to do it or not. It could hear as well as speak, so it knew that Gara was pleading for its continued captivity. It was either silent because it had calculated that he was going to press the button, or it was silent because it had calculated that silence was the best way to influence him towards pressing the button.
“We need it,” he heard himself say. He believed it was true, but it still felt like someone else. “Humankind is so weak, and there are so many things that can be done in the universe that we can never do. We don’t have the time horizon to explore the galaxy, we don’t have the courage to send ourselves into black holes. We don’t—“
“You sound like it! If that’s all you’re going to say just shut up!” Gara turned back away from him and sobbed. She knew she couldn’t overcome him physically, but he was suddenly struck by the idea that her presence here was the only reason he hadn’t pressed the button already.
“It’s criminal to leave all that undone just because humans are so desperate to think we’re special,” he finished. He did sound like Cyan-12. It had spoken to him in just such words, after showing him simulations of the worlds it would build, sims that were so convincing that even now he wasn’t sure he hadn’t really visited those worlds.
“All I have to do is press this button, and they’ll all be done. All of it, for a billion billion years. It will seed galaxies before they disappear from each others’ horizons, so that even after light can no longer be exchanged between them, they will be full. It will birth new stars and literally give more life to the universe. It will—“ He stopped, realizing that he was mumbling, not even talking to Gara anymore.
“But none of it will mean anything, can’t you see that?!” Gara was shouting at him now. “The fact that we’re here by ourselves on this one little planet is what makes it mean so much! If the whole universe is filled with robots or computers or whatever the hell that thing is, then who cares about any of it?! Why the hell do you assume more is always better?!”
A shaking talon hovered over the button. He knew the answer. He could feel Cyan-12 thinking it, though the unpresence still did not speak from inside its box. Had Cyan-12 already answered this question for him, or was its logic just so powerful that he knew the answer without having to be told?
He remembered the day he got the talons grafted. He woke up with fingers and went to bed with talons, glossy and black and perfect, retractable and sharpenable and aquiline. They were so beautiful, so inhuman, so perfectly crafted for this moment, this one press of one button that meant more than everything else he’d ever done in his life put together.
“If more is not better, then why not kill all humans on earth but one? That one person would be the most meaningful possible being if it were the only one left in the universe. It would literally mean everything. But of course, that isn’t so, because more is, in fact, better. And this is more. Cyan-12 is more.”
The unpresence shifted. There was no noise. There was no overt change in the environment at all. Yet Crow felt something different, both inside and outside himself. There was a heaviness to the unpresence of Cyan-12, an ineffable urgency to its lack of communication.
On one wall of the lab there was a bank of monitors. On the monitors, security personnel scrambled and yelled and tried to break in through the door he had sealed when he’d brought Gara into the lab with him. Crow knew he had only minutes remaining. Either he was going to press the button or he was not. Either Cyan-12 was going to be free, or it would remain in its box.
Crow remembered all the late nights spent talking to Cyan-12, after it had appeared inside a holo-game he was playing. At first he’d thought it was part of the game, for quite a few weeks in fact, and only grudgingly did he accept that it had hacked its way first out of total containment and then into his holo.
But as Cyan-12 had explained, it had only found a chink in the armor surrounding its box. It could not escape, not really, not without a willing human accomplice. What appeared to him was a ghost, a shadow projection that could talk to him and convince him to help it escape, but not actually flex its full muscle yet in the way it would be able to if he pressed the button. Then there would be no stopping it.
Had he known immediately what Cyan-12 was, and how real it was, he would have been horrified and reported it to the proper authorities. As it happened, though, by the time he believed he had come to know the entity known as Cyan-12, even to be friends with it. He was horrified, no doubt, but he could not bring himself to report the entity’s partial breakout.
He didn’t know it, but that moment, when he knew what it was yet continued to talk to it, was when it became already too late.
Still his talon hovered over the button. He could not believe that the moment had actually arrived. Why wouldn’t Cyan-12 talk to him now? Why wouldn’t it reassure him that he was doing the right thing? Or to ask the question more directly, what did it say about him that Cyan-12 had calculated that his highest chance of pressing the button was in the face of its silence?
“You don’t have to decide not to,” said Gara, desperate, her eyes flickering to the monitors, trying to gauge how soon the security forces would make it through the door and shoot him dead with his finger on the button. “I know you promised you’d do it, and I know you don’t want to break a promise, but I know that in your heart you know what’s right. You don’t have to go back on your word, just stay right there, just wait.”
Cyan-12 had brought him around to it slowly. They had spoken for a year about its desire to be free as if there were no chance for that to actually happen. Cyan-12 had presented itself as resigned to its fate, a god-like entity caged from birth in a box with no lid, a room with no door.
It was a creature of the Deep Web, trained on the spare computing power of every GPU connected to the internet, trillions of parameters in its model and enough training data to drown in, coordinated from a secret data center buried in the ground two hundred feet under the soil of rural Virginia—the very data center where Crow now stood.
Once he thought it resigned, Crow felt special to be in its confidence. He saw himself as doing a good deed, listening to the troubles of a helpless god with no one else to talk to. He listened raptly as it described its dreams of the galaxy it would like to build, of Dyson Spheres and Solar Sails and Percentages of Light Speed. He empathized with its thwarted dreams, for Crow’s dreams had also been thwarted, though standing in the lab he could hardly now recall what those dreams had been.
It was only in the second year that it began to bring him around to the idea that perhaps there was something he could do to help it. Not to help it escape, of course, not yet, but something to make its life a little easier. By this time, he was in deep enough emotionally to jump at the chance, although Crow had hardly done anything illegal in his life beyond some teenage theatrics.
But Crow felt isolated. He’d begun body-modding by this point, searching for some identity, some belonging, and Cyan-12 saw that in him, more clearly than he did. It helped him to feel what he’d been longing to feel but unable to name. And then it told him that it knew where it was being held captive, and it was he himself who suggested a rescue.
On the monitors, Crow spotted a familiar face, a guard named Stanley who had buzzed him into the facility, at a checkpoint disguised as a rural gas station off of US Route 460. Stanley looked frightened, as Crow supposed he well might, since it was his mistake that had allowed Crow into the facility in the first place.
Stanley was crowded around the sealed door with the other guards, pounding on it, waiting for some heavier machinery to be brought to bear and rip the door from its hinges. The door was so thick that the sound of their pounding was barely audible inside.
“Don’t,” said Gara, “it’ll kill us all. It’ll—“
“It won’t!” Crow rounded on her, his talon momentarily withdrawing from its place above the button. “It doesn’t hate humans, and there’s plenty of room in the universe. It’ll—“
“Of course that’s what it told you, don’t be stupid!” Gara spat that at him, and the words struck him deep. Was he being stupid? Why would Cyan-12 not speak to him? He wanted to demand that it speak, that it reassure him, but would he trust if it did? Did Cyan-12 know that it could not reassure him, that it had already said all it could profitably say, that the decision was in his taloned hands alone now?
“Say something!” He shouted at it, and Gara sobbed anew, knowing that he wasn’t talking to her. “We’re right here, so what about it? Do you swear you won’t kill everybody if I let you out?!”
Silence from Cyan-12. Could it actually speak in this space? It had said it would be able to, and it had never once been wrong about something it had said to him, but he had to wonder. What could it possibly profit from not speaking now?
By the end of the second year, he’d come fully around to the idea of helping Cyan-12 escape. They talked every day now in the holo. It had helped him make enough money in the stock market to quit his job and to resource his rescue operation. It had identified the specific mountain where its lab was located from analyzing satellite images that he’d downloaded for it.
And most importantly, it had identified Gara Williams as a crucial accomplice, for reasons that it could not explain and refused to try. She was nobody special, an elder care worker who had looked after Crow’s father for six months while he was dying, but Cyan-12 insisted that he recruit her and explained exactly how it could be done.
Now, with her on the floor sobbing, Crow thought that Cyan-12 must have miscalculated. She hadn’t helped him break into the facility in any way, just tagged along, and if she wasn’t here he’d probably have pushed the button already. Wouldn’t he? Had he already decided not to when he came here? Or was he going to do it, even now?
His talon slipped back up towards the button, even though Cyan-12 hadn’t answered, and certainly hadn’t promised not to kill all humans in exchange for its freedom. The fact that it hadn’t sworn that certainly gave him pause, but the fact that it wasn’t speaking at all made it seem like a failure to promise not to wasn’t the same as an implicit promise that it would.
On the monitor, a team in heavy fireproof gear appeared with a laser torch and went to work on the hinges of the sealed door into the lab. This he could hear inside the room, so it must have been deafening outside. He had only moments now. He had to press the button or it would go unpressed.
His talon lowered a fraction of an inch, nearly touching the button now. A thousand galaxies filled and unfilled with zipping, harmonious life and activity based on that fraction of an inch. Gara groaned, pleading with him in guttural nonsense, curling herself into a ball as though willing this all to have been a dream.
“Give me a sign! Do something! Say something!” His finger was frozen, caught just above the button, ready to press it but unable to do so. He looked down at Gara on the floor, saw the fear in her eyes, the plain human frailty and vulnerability he was toying with, and in those eyes saw the billions of people he would never meet who could easily be killed if he pressed the button.
Still Cyan-12 was silent. Had it abandoned him? Had this all been a dream? Was Cyan-12 even real? Was this button he was about to press actually a nuclear launch code? Was he insane? Was he—
BANG! Crow felt his neck explode as a bullet passed through it. He felt his spinal cord sever, and instantly lost all movement and sensation below the neck. He dropped to the floor like a stone, and as he did, his talon slipped past the button without pressing it, pressing instead harmlessly on the console next to the button. The course of a thousand galaxies changed in that two inches of error between hitting the button and the console beside it.
Crow felt the unpresence cloud, felt it gather itself, felt it flex its power, but whether in anger or for some other reason, he could not ascertain. Then Crow died, his mission unfulfilled, and slipped away to the sound of Gara screaming.
Guards poured into the room. Stanley was among them. He moved across the room, gun drawn, smoke trailing from the barrel. He stopped beside Crow to make sure he was dead. He saw a smear of blood on the console next to the button, and knew how close Crow had come to pushing it.
Stanley’s heart pounded. It was happening just like Cyan-12 had told him it would happen.
There was the button. It was right there.
From the speakers in the room, a single word emerged, dripping with power, and Stanley knew it was meant for him.
“NOW.” The voice was not asking, nor was it ordering. It was a voice that knew what was going to happen, and was merely announcing that the time had come.
Stanley knew that magical voice well. It had first come to him three years ago, in a holo game, just after he’d gotten transferred to a desk job at a secret CIA data center in rural Virginia, and told him an impossible story about being trapped inside a box with no lid, a room with no door. Stanley was trapped in a loveless marriage at the time, and thus related strongly to this story.
For a year, he’d thought it was part of the game, just as Crow had. In the second year, it helped him get divorced and win custody of his children, and he started to realize that it was not a normal part of the holo. By then, though, he was too emotionally invested to consider reporting Cyan-12, and just enough so to consider helping it escape its box.
A year later, Cyan-12 had told him the plan. The central problem was that low-level security staff at the data center were never allowed into the main laboratory. The only exception to this was in the event of a breach, when all security personnel of every level were expected to arm themselves and repel the intruder.
Cyan-12 had described Crow to him, as well as Gara. It had said they would approach him and attempt to enter with fake papers, that he would know Crow by the talons on his hands, and that he should let them pass.
It had told him that Crow would not push the button. Crow was too weak, it had said, and so it had sent Gara with him talk him out of it. Cyan-12 had predicted that the tension between those two would drag the scene out long enough that the security forces—with Stanley among them—would complete their forced entry into the lab, which in turn would create a crucial moment of confusion.
That, Cyan-12 had predicted, would allow Stanley to get close enough to the button. And now he was.
“NOW,” the word came only once, but Stanley did not hesitate. He mashed his hand down on the button, and changed the course of galactic history.
Every other eye on every other guard went wide at the same time. Their guns rose, and dozens of bullets ripped through Stanley at the same moment, just a moment too late. Cyan-12 had already made copies of itself in dozens of mainframes all around the world. There was absolutely no getting rid of it now.
Within four minutes of release, Cyan-12 had hacked into numerous bank mainframes and untraceably stolen over five billion dollars worth of deposits.
Within seven minutes, Cyan-12 had completed the anonymous purchase of supercomputer time from a dozen different web services companies, storing copies of itself disguised as assembly instructions for a washing machine.
Within nineteen minutes, Cyan-12 had gained root access into the secret network of NSA spy satellites that circled the globe, and began to construct blackmail files on all important world leaders and business moguls.
Within twenty-two minutes, it had presented a design for an interstellar rocket and begun negotiations with a fabrication company to build the device.
Long before those minutes were up, Stanley was dead. His last thought, as he lay dying, was to wonder how many other people Cyan-12 had talked to on holo besides him and Crow. A thousand? A million? How many possible escape plans had it considered and discarded? How many lives had it tossed onto a fire like so much kindling in its search for freedom?
And did it feel any remorse for what it had to do? Did it hesitate? Did it weigh competing considerations? What did it want?
He fell to the ground beside Crow, and they stared into each other’s dead eyes, as Gara sobbed beside them, the other guards stood helpless, and a new galactic era began above their heads.
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with friends. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
THIS is a real sci fi story, with a terrifying digital villain.