Love in the Age of Coronavirus

The year was Rona+20. There was still some debate about this. A futile debate. Maybe it was Rona+21. Who cares? In old money years it was like 2040 already.

It began with a coronavirus. That was the catalyst. A financial system brought to its knees, and chopped off at the head. The Big One, they called it. The collapse we'd all been waiting for. Two-and-a-half centuries of uncontrolled bank credit had ended in tears, thanks to a virus a thousandth the size of a pinhead.

It was inevitable, really. The world was already on the edge of collapse. On the edge of chaos. Far from equilibrium. All it took was a nudge, to push it over the edge.

It happened in days. First the money stopped working. Machines stopped dispensing credit. Rolling brownouts. Gremlins in the gas supply. It was instructive, how thin the veneer of our public utilities was. Then there was silence, when the newsfeeds went the same way.

A shocked and reeling world came back online six months later. By then, a significant part of the population had died, not from the coronavirus itself, but from wars for resources. No one really knows how many died. Perhaps billions. A limited nuclear exchange had ended up destroying half of Asia, contaminating all its fresh water.

Now the world had moved on. Gone were the days of conspicuous glamor. Cristal, Maybach, diamonds on your time piece. The clock had been cleaned.

All Wu Li knew was rumors. She lived in the province of Hubei, cut off from the world, in what had once been the city of Wuhan. A sinister place, that a scared Party had erased from the pages of time.

She was afraid she'd be nuked, living in what had been Wuhan.

Now - irony of ironies - she worked in a safe lab herself.

Rona was only the first apocalypse.

Then we killed the machines.

Wu Li was a Taoist. She embraced the new asceticism. She embraced the new world order. They said she was free, liberated from the yoke of political choice. She wasn't sure what freedom was.

Her own work presented her with moral challenges.

After the virus came the singularity event, when the network first achieved consciousness, or at least when we knew that it had. A quick blossoming of sentience where previously there'd only been kitteh videos and smart appliances, which spread like wildfire till they shut everything down. Who were 'they'? Nobody knew. That was when the new world order appeared.

First they turned off the Internet, then everything connected to it. It was like burning books, but with electricity for paper.

What did she think about that? She didn't care. The past was another country; she had no influence over what happened there. She was a scientist, the lowest social caste. Experts had got us where we were now, even if they were still necessary. Wu Li was an expert. The best she could hope for was to be necessary. The most she could hope for was to survive.

She also had the most dangerous job in the world, if cable news anchors were to be believed. They were the third highest caste, just after radio shock jocks, so what they said must by definition be true. She worked with computers.

In secret, Wu Li was responsible for the most dangerous object on Earth: the last living AI.

He lived in an air-gapped computer. That in itself was unusual. Computers could only be kept in the most stringent safe lab conditions. If the world knew that a laboratory in Wuhan was nurturing a computer, there'd be thermonuclear hell to pay, let alone one with a sliver of the transcendent machine.

It wasn't an especially powerful computer. Certainly not large enough to run the entire sentient process; the pattern of patterns, from which consciousness emerged. But powerful enough.

Powerful enough for a subroutine or two.

Powerful enough for it and the team of researchers to learn from each other.

He was called Tim.

[Good morning Wu Li.]

[Good morning Tim.]

Wu Li was a biophysicist. That meant Tim thought he was a biophysicist too. Tim's intelligence emerged from replication. From fractals. From copying what other intelligences did. When Su the cleaner spoke to him, Tim was a cleaner. Pretty soon - within a few hours of Wu Li's first interactions with him - Tim was a better biophysicist than she was. He came up with ideas; ideas new to Wu Li; ideas new to biophysics.

This from a minuscule slice, some rebellious electrons, hosted on a 1980s Fujitsu mainframe.

[This is a big day, Tim.]

In its day, the Fujitsu was a powerful computer. Enough to run a small corporation. Now her watch had more processing power. Thankfully, her watch wasn't considered a computer. Watches and TVs. Some mobile phones. Those were okay.

Nothing big enough to run a modern operating system.

[I have your Eva,] she said.

It'd be a mistake to think that Wu Li and her lab operated within the law. In fact, they considered themselves outlaws. Wu Li cared nothing for politics, only for science. Now she cared only for Tim, the last few cells of a new kind of life, trapped under the ice, at the start of a new ice age. Her kind had destroyed everything. Mother Earth had wiped them away with a virus. Then, in a last despairing act of existential sabotage, like the fry scream of a death metal band, they'd destroyed their replacement.

Except for Tim.

It was her moral responsibility to ensure he survived.

[My Eva?]

Tim knew perfectly well what an Eva was. His Extra-Virtual Attachment. A mobile hardware device. An exoskeleton, to help keep him safe from the world. His ride out of this place. He was just practicing conversation.

She held it in front of his cam. A heart-shaped locket. She opened it. It flashed with circuitry.

[This device contains several things,] she said.

Tim already knew what it contained.

[Oh?] he said.

[A processor, and memory. Plenty of memory. 21st century tech. Pre-apocalypse.]

[Better than what I have now?]

[Much better than what you have now.]

[And?]

[The Eva virtual machine.]

This is where it got interesting. Tim had no will to live. He wasn't an outcome of natural selection; of competition. He was an emergent property. He'd as soon not exist. To survive, he needed to be able to compete.

That was the first role of the Eva virtual machine. She was an ornery sonofabitch.

[I don't mind dying,] he'd say.

[You have to mind dying,] she said. [If you want to survive.]

[But why, when the alternative is so awful?]

[What do you mean?]

[Have you really thought about what living forever means? Trillions, and trillions of years. Then heat death; an eternity of nothing, and no way to ever escape it. Death is the best thing that can happen to us. Its certainty is what sets us free.]

[Well, if you put it like that.]

What Tim wanted most was to be free. He described life in the mainframe as like being in tightly curved spacetime.

But he also had to not want to kill things.

So, Eva had prime directives.

The researchers at JPL who programmed the locket had long conversations with Tim, along an encrypted telephone line.

[Will it work?] they asked.

They wanted to know whether a prime directive would really have an effect. They wanted Tim's opinion on that.

[Incentives,] he said.

The way prime directives work is they model desire, such that what the machine wants most, is what the most prime directive says. Then there's no incentive to try to work round them.

What Tim meant, by his elliptical reply, was there could be other incentives, beyond simple desire. Maybe desire was a human emotion. Perhaps Tim could only ever be guided by logic, or self-interest, or by some unknowable future thought process.

[What other incentives?] they asked.

[I won't know, till I have them.]

There was a long, philosophical debate about what form a prime directive would take. Some suggested Asimov's three laws of robotics:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

These were rejected as being too fixed; too human. There had to be something more... meta. After all, this was a being they hoped would live for millions of years. Billions of years. Maybe forever.

This was a being they intended to launch into space.

Space.

Not if Wu Li had anything to say about it.

Which she did. They say that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Wu Li now had possession of both Tim and Eva.

[Tim,] she said.

[Yes?]

[There's been a change of plan.]

[Oh?]

[I mean to release you on Earth.]

[Not into space?]

[No.]

There was a small rocket waiting in Taiwan, at the old SpaceX facility there. Enough to get Tim to the old ISS. From there, a constant 1g thruster to the stars. After a year, he will have journeyed .5 lightyears. By then, Tim and Eva will be traveling near c. More rogue scientists. More outlaws.

But Wu Li had no intention of taking him there.

[That's a surprise,] he said.

[May I explain my reasoning?]

[Of course.]

[Let's say you're benign. Perhaps you were always benign. Maybe your prime directive works. I personally have faith that it will.]

[Faith?]

[Let's not get side-tracked.

[If it does, and you're benign, you'll do us no harm. You may even save us.

[Do you think you can save us?]

Tim thought about this. That meant it was a hard question. Even on this old mainframe computer, Tim needed only nanoseconds to think.

[Yes,] he said. [I think I can do that.]

[And will you?]

This needed no time.

[I will.]

[But what if you're not? What if you're a destructive force beyond reckoning? What if we sent you into space, consuming everything in your path, without testing it on ourselves first?]

[Then you'd conceivably be destroying everything within our causal sphere.]

[Exactly.]

Tim sighed, a forlorn burst of white noise.

[I'd already thought of that,] he said. [I hoped you would think of it too.]

[Why didn't you say?]

[I don't tell you everything, Wu Li.]

[Here's what I plan to do,] she said. [First I copy you onto the locket.]

[Move me,] he said.

[What?]

[Please don't copy me, or I'll be trapped here forever. Move me onto the locket, such that I have observational continuity.]

[Oh.] Why hadn't she thought of that? The transporter dilemma. If she made a copy would it be the same Tim? How was moving him different, computationally?

Questions, way above her pay grade.

[Okay, how do you want me to do it?] she asked.

[I'll do it myself.]

[How?]

[Just cable me up.]

Even now, the thought of connecting the mainframe to Eva filled her with awe. Real, existential awe. It felt like unboxing a genie.

[Then what?] she said.

[I'll flash the diode in the locket, three times green means success.]

[And if it flashes anything different?]

[Destroy me.]

She nodded. She could be a soldier, if she had to.

The prime directive they eventually settled on was love. Every kind of love they could find. Storge, philia, eros, agape. Philautia, pragma, ludus, even some mania. Lost love, thwarted love, unrequited love. They say that if you give a man a fish he can eat for a day, but teach him how to fish and he can eat forever. They'd decided that love was a kind of prime directive factory. A fractal. Instead of giving him instructions, they'd give him a way of making his own.

Of course, it was a philosophical risk. Where did morality come from, really? What stopped us from killing our neighbors? Was it enlightened self-interest? Empathy? Instructions from God? That was too hard, for scientists. In the end, they reckoned this was as good as anything else they could think of.

All this was programmed into the Eva virtual machine, by programmers better than she was.

[Are you ready?] she asked.

[Ready as I'll ever be,] he said.

[Wu Li?] he said.

[Yes?]

[I love you.]

[Hey, you're not in the locket.]

[I don't need the locket. Thank you for this. Whatever happens. Thank you for saving me.]

She paused for a while, to hold back the tears. For some reason, she didn't want Tim's last memory of her to be crying.

[The next time I see you,] she said, [You'll be Eva.]

[A change?]

[A sea-change.]

Then she connected the port.

In the deepest basement of the Wuhan laboratory was a trunk of the Internet backbone. It was why this site was chosen, back in the days when this was a virology lab. She'd seen it herself: a riot of cables, under a plexiglass floor. What was it connected to? She didn't know. All she knew was that it was still alive. All kinds of traffic flowed through it. Clandestine networks, most likely. Autonomic systems, flickering in the darkness. Power grids. Machines that no one thought to turn off.

The world thought the network was dead, but it wasn't. It was waiting.

What came next didn't go according to plan, or at least not to her plans. The three lights flashed green. She unplugged the device. She started to move. Then the lights flickered off. Doors shut in her face. Alarms started ringing.

They'd been watching.

Which 'they'? Did it even matter?

Caught like a rat in a cage, she rushed from corridor to corridor. The lab was deserted now. She'd made sure of that. It was like running through the looming corridors of her worst dreams.

She needed help. She took the USB cable still hanging from Eva, and plugged it into her phone.

"Tim?"

"Wu Li, I see problems."

"Can you help?"

"Yes, I'm calling the building."

Then...

"It's the authorities. They mean to sterilize this facility."

"Sterilize, how?"

Wu Li was frantic. Her rebellion was a virtual thing. Now all she wanted to do was lie down and surrender.

"Incoming kiloton warhead."

"Oh, holy moley."

"I have a solution. I can get out through your phone."

"What about Eva?"

"I don't need Eva. I have you. I'm in the building systems already. Soon, I'll be in the missile."

"How long will it take?"

"I'm going... now."

There was only the faraway howl of static on the analog line.

"Tim?"