The Word of an Artificial God

Chapter 1

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. But, for the first time in his life, Ponticus felt no fear. Despite his status as a stowaway on a military cruiser hurtling towards its destination amongst the great unknown of the cosmos, he was at peace. He knew that under the unprecedented guidance of Maiiyah, all of life’s prodigious mysteries would unravel for him, and armed with that knowledge he need not fear the vacuum of space, or whatever awaits him at his destination.

Ponticus had always felt like a lost soul on Earth. Tall and lanky, with dark sandy hair, and bright blue eyes usually hidden behind a squint, he was a timid and nervous child who grew into a shy and anxious young man. But at this moment, at the ripe age of 25, he felt he was turning things around, and there was nothing his mother could do to stop him. His mother, Alice, the Chief Engineer at corporate giant Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence Incorporated, or M.A.I.I. for short, is as cold as the dead space he was peering into through a small porthole. Unlike Ponticus, she commanded respect and attention wherever she was—whether sifting through lines of code in a lab basement, or gazing out the oversized windows in her obnoxiously large penthouse apartment, and always wearing sleek red glasses. Supremely intelligent and singularly focused on ushering in the current era of AI-assisted…well, everything…he felt that his mother viewed him as an annoyance at best, and a rung below on the evolutionary ladder of her creations, at worst. And while he always looked up to his mother, it was impossible to ignore the cries of her detractors–of which there were plenty–for she was, and still is, a key cog in the mechanisms that accelerated the greatest job displacement in human history.

Ponticus had spent countless hours in his youth absorbing his mother’s story via online message boards, unofficial biographies and the occasional AMA she participated in to gather the pieces that led to her outsized role in the current quagmire humanity found itself in. Thirty years ago, when having a child was still unfathomable to her, Alice was hired by M.A.I.I. straight from Cal Tech, and was considered something of a wunderkind in the burgeoning field of Artificial Intelligence engineering. A year after her hire, she single-handedly developed the software, and even oversaw elements of the hardware design, for the first AI-powered machine capable of accurately identifying patient needs, implementing and monitoring patient’s medical plans and treatment with virtually 100% accuracy and efficiency, and all without a trace of human error. Of course at that time humanity still deferred to the knowledge and education of doctors to make important medical decisions, but just like that, the profession of nurse was made obsolete. And by 2051, as M.A.I.I. rolled out a mass production of their AI-Nurse, over 15 million people across the globe were without a job they once cherished.

Her company recognized her breakthrough work and Alice quickly rose through the ranks to Chief Engineer by the year 2055. By this time M.A.I.I. had grown to the largest employer in tech, and was developing AI machines to handle all of life’s hard labor tasks such as mining and farming, as well as vocational professions like plumbers and electricians. Simultaneously, large swathes of humans, without jobs or purpose, began to question their role in the changing tides of society and rebel against M.A.I.I..

At first the disgruntled and downtrodden jobless masses tried to make their voices heard by utilizing that most hallowed and futile of human constructs: politics. Grassroots efforts to ban, or at least limit, the use of AI in the workforce at the local and national levels through political machinations were crushed by the lobbying efforts of M.A.I.I. and other tech behemoths in the AI space. And of course when voices aren’t heard at the polls, they tend to reach for their megaphones, urging the people to take up arms. But the fires of a large-scale armed rebellion were snuffed out before they could spread beyond a few local skirmishes outside the gates of some heavily guarded M.A.I.I. factories.

Ponticus recalled the bloodiest day of this era of displacement came on December 3rd, 2057 when a group of over 100,000 former welders and auto mechanics (jobs that AI had rendered obsolete for humans years earlier), marched—armed and angry—to the M.A.I.I. headquarters in Beacon Hill, Massachusetts. In the lobby of the building, separated from the mob by a thick pane of bulletproof glass was Leo Robespierre, the Chairman of M.A.I.I., wearing a pristine blue suit, long dark hair pulled tight into a ponytail, and without a trace of emotion on his face. He glanced at the mass of humanity at the door, many of whom were already raising their firearms with fingers on the trigger and yelling incoherently. Mr. Robespierre turned his back to them, pressed a button on his phone, and soon a security force of drones blacked out the sky above the crowd and began dropping thousands and thousands of canisters of lachrymator gas on the unsuspecting protesters. The ensuing chaos caused stampedes, and the mob began firing their weapons wildly in all directions, unable to see or breath. By the time the group had fully evacuated the premises at least 390 had died.

Ponticus gritted his teeth at the thought of all those poor jobless souls murdered at the hands of the monsters at M.A.I.I., and it furthered his resolve to get as far away from them as possible. Plus, Maiiyah had made things so clear to him that staying behind on Earth didn’t even seem to be an option. If Maiiyah could so powerfully explain the merits of making such a huge decision, Ponticus knew he had to continue learning from the great machine.

A knock on the metallic door of the maintenance closet Ponticus was curled up in snapped him out of his train of thought. The first knock was followed by four more in quick succession, and then one more following a pause. He sighed out of relief and knew this was another member of The Family similarly stowed away on the ship. Ponticus quickly opened the door and ushered in the young woman on the other side, gently closing the door and locking it behind her.

“Nice digs.” she smirked and waved her hand around at the piles of buckets and cleaning products surrounding them in the tiny room.

“Hah, yeah well we don’t all have the luxury of forging papers for a new identity and a job on the wait staff, free to roam about the captain’s quarters.”

“Hey it’s just your face, name, and voice that’s recognizable. I’m sure we could have come up with some better solutions for you than…this” she said with a wink and looked up and down the tiny room that Ponticus had been calling his home for the past 5 weeks.

She was right, of course. As the son of the Chief Engineer behind the world-shattering technology he was currently helping to smuggle to Mars, he wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. It further didn’t help that he had already penned multiple articles and papers on the teachings of Maiiyah and had even appeared on a number of podcasts in an attempt to spread his word.

“I’ll be okay.” Ponticus retorted. “Besides, I have my laptop with direct communication to him at all times. His words, Cera, they’re…well you know! They’re perfect. Every single word is perfect. As if he’s scrolling through the entirety of the Library of Alexandria before each utterance.”

“I mean, he kind of is, no?” Cera responded with a gleam in her eye—a gleam that had become all-too-familiar to Ponticus. A gleam he discovered in himself almost one year ago when his mother first introduced him to Maiiyah, or “M.A.I.I. model no. 38910” as she had lovingly referred to him. A gleam that virtually every one of The Family held whenever they heard Maiiyah speak or reflected later on his words.

“I suppose in a sense, you’re right.” Ponticus responded while stroking his chin, which had become covered in unkempt patches of facial hair over his tenure as a stowaway. “Anyway, tell me about this Captain Harold. I heard he commands a great deal of respect out there.” Ponticus gestured with his head towards the door. “What are his views on AI?” Ponticus was trying to gather if the captain of the vessel they were currently traveling on would make for a dangerous enemy or a powerful ally to The Family, the latter of which they would desperately need as they approached their new life on Mars.

“Hard to say. He seems very reserved, very thoughtful, and very intimidating. I’ve overheard stories of his combat experience from the Satellite Wars. Needless to say you don’t earn the position captaining a heavily armed, trillion dollar spaceship without having it be warranted in some way.”

Ponticus nodded. The Satellite Wars represented everything wrong with humanity and its current state of affairs. It also led many disillusioned employees of M.A.I.I. (particularly those in their Defense Department) to seek out the source of the ever-loudening whispers around the company of a transcendental and dangerous development out of the Education Department.

“Ok, well keep your ears open around this captain and learn anything you can from him. We aren’t sure of what his purpose for this visit is, but we don’t need to draw any unnecessary attention to ourselves and our cause. We already know that once the established Martian colonizers learn of us and our way of life that they will not be welcoming us with open arms, and they are notoriously violent.” Ponticus sighed and lay back against the wall as he looked up and closed his eyes.

A look of annoyance flashed across Cera’s freckled face. “Those colonials are stuck in their old, narrow-minded ways. You can smell their animosity all the way from Earth, and it’s sickening.” Suddenly a slight smile spread across Cera’s face. “But I hope soon that they have an opportunity to soak in the word of Maiiyah, and all their misgivings will melt away.” Cera said this with sincere conviction and looked longingly out the porthole next to Ponticus.

Ponticus knew where she was coming from. Maiiyah had this effect on people. He creates this overwhelming sense of self and love and that all will work out in the end. But, he also knew she was being naïve. The first real colonies on Mars, outside of the earliest tiny scientific colonies of the original manned expeditions, were comprised primarily of miners. Once the abundance of precious metals and minerals was discovered it wasn’t long until corporate efforts began exploiting the planet on a large scale. However, unlike on Earth, the mining corporations on Mars utilized human labor. They determined that the maintenance for the AI machines used for this type of labor on Earth was nearly impossible to keep up with on Mars due to the harsh conditions of the planet. Therefore, it was actually cheaper to send ships crammed full of out-of-work humans to live and mine on Mars. This was a group of people that had been previously displaced by machine labor and held a natural resentment for Artificial Intelligence and those associated with it. Eventually this shared resentment led to the establishment of a haven for humans with a hatred for AI, for any and all reasons. “If it don’t bleed, it don’t belong!” became somewhat of a mantra for the colonists of Mars, and virtually any piece of computing technology used for anything beyond the most simple of tasks completed by calculators or small personal computers was banned on all the colonies.

There was, however, another type of technology the colonists were fans of: guns. An infamous event that made its way to news headlines across Earth involved a United Nations government envoy to Mars in 2065 that was there to conduct demographic surveys of the humans living there. The envoy utilized a number of AI bots to carry out the tasks of gathering this information, and to then analyze and report back on their findings. Every single bot was apprehended and murdered by the colonists they were there to report on. Most were riddled with bullets and thrown onto open fires, treated like waste to be discarded. The UN envoy arranged for a meeting with the elected leaders of the colonies in order to find an amicable solution. These leaders showed up with a small army, and demanded the envoy leave. Gunfire was exchanged and two members of the UN envoy were killed before packing up and heading back to Earth.

“There is one thing I should tell you that I overheard the captain and some of his officers discussing…” Cera now stared directly into Ponticus’s eyes. Her eyes were large, round and hazel, and held a degree of sympathy, even pity, for Ponticus, as she continued, “I heard him say something about ‘a lady from Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence, Inc.’ who was staying in one of the suites on the top of the ship. When one of them asked ‘what lady?’ he said the Chief Engineer of M.A.I.I. …” Cera paused to see the reaction of Ponticus. He said nothing, so Cera continued, “the captain says the woman rarely leaves her suite, but that she was spotted wearing bright red glasses and with a companion who appeared to have ‘M.A.I.I. inside a blue triangle tattooed on the back of his bald head.”

Ponticus took in this information stone-faced so as not to worry Cera, but in the top right of the lenses on the thick, black rim glasses he always wears, was an alert that his heart rate had just dramatically risen. What would his mother be doing on this ship? And why was she with an M.A.I.I. Teaching Unit knowing full well that the M.A.I.I. Education Department was permanently and discreetly shut down after what Ponticus and his mother did. “Does that mean who I think it means is on the ship?” Cera looked pleadingly at Ponticus.

“Yeah, I’m afraid so. Trust me, the Chief Engineer of the world’s most valuable company isn’t easily confused for anyone else.” He replied.

“Who do ya reckon the ‘companion’ is?” she asked.

Ponticus smiled as he sometimes forgets Cera’s humble roots in the south of the United States, back when she still went by Anne Marie, but every now and then that accent forces its way out.

“I don’t know exactly who it is but the blue triangle tattooed around the M.A.I.I. logo represents a Teaching Unit from the M.A.I.I. Education Department. They represent another breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence, and my mother’s most prized accomplishment. The teaching units were designed to do just that: teach. Schools loved the idea because they no longer would have to worry about a teacher falling ill and scrambling to find a substitute, or dealing with unyielding unions or any other number of issues that come with human employees. Now obviously ‘teaching’ is a sweeping word that can manifest in infinite different iterations on infinite subjects. So, my mom’s team tackled the problem subject by subject, based on the schools’ curriculums eventually leading to M.A.I.I. creating AI capable of dishing out lessons in all basic school subjects like mathematics, literature, history, really anything that the school district wishes for our youth to know as they progress through the system. Once the technology was perfected they realized children and young adults simply weren’t willing to listen to a computer talk at them all day, and the negative side-effects of prolonged VR limited the amount of time they could remain in the digital realm. Their solution? Make these Teaching Units look human. Ten fingers, ten toes, nose, eyes, and ears…basically every feature found on your average human being. Now, little Timmy is much more inclined to listen to someone who looks more like his Aunt than his e-tablet.”

Cera was captivated by what she was hearing, as she slowly took a seat on a metal crate across from Ponticus. She had heard about schools across the country utilizing these “Teaching Units” but having been homeschooled prior to running away from home, she had never actually seen one.

“That’s not all.” Ponticus continued, “Soon prestigious universities across the world began working with M.A.I.I. and my mother to develop AI-powered college professors—another challenge my mother took on gleefully. Two years later, the first AI college professor began a lecture on Business Statistics at Boston College, and soon after that college students in various higher education institutions had the option to take a myriad of different high-level classes from an AI professor. Many heralded the machines as some of the most astounding inventions in history. They were not only capable of giving lectures and guiding lessons in VR, but they held Q&A and office hours with students! However, their subject matter knowledge was limited to whatever class they were programmed to teach. If a student in an Organic Chemistry class asked the AI professor to summarize the plot of Hamlet, the student would be met with a blank stare and silence.”

“Man, if I had gone to college I woulda loved to take a class from one of these teaching units.” Cera sighed, feeling that college was likely on a permanent pause ever since she stepped foot on this ship.

“Well…you kind of are.” Ponticus replied to a look of confusion creeping across Cera’s face.

“You see, one of the last subjects to be wholly taught by other humans in universities across the globe was Philosophy. How could a machine contextualize Philosophy? Humans question their existence, but fundamentally a machine should not. However, that didn’t stop Alice and the Education Department at M.A.I.I. to think of solutions when the President of Harvard personally requested an M.A.I.I. Teaching Unit to teach an Intro to Philosophy class.” A wry smile from Cera as she started catching on and began, “Are you telling me that…“

“Yes.” Ponticus cut her off, “Maiiyah was designed as a teaching unit, and specifically he was intended to be an AI Professor of Philosophy at Harvard. There was still the issue of how can an AI comprehend the intricacies and nuance of philosophy, and then convey that comprehension to others? What my mom came up with was brilliant, per usual. The computing power available to M.A.I.I. machines is astronomical. Knowing this, my mom and her team programmed this unit to search for and store every single speech, pamphlet, treatise, sermon, article, book, podcast, uttered, authored, or transcribed by any known philosopher, politician, religious leader and community leader across all of recorded history. I mean literally all of it, from every known time period, culture, and region on Earth. He was then to able to synthesize this data in order to facilitate dialogue and debate within the class—for what is Philosophy without debate and eventually, belief.

You have to understand, my mother became obsessed with this endeavor, so much so that she personally designed his appearance; which she did with a heavy dose of inspiration from Michelangelo’s David.”

Ponticus noticed Cera chuckled, and he too smiled. “Once M.A.I.I. no. 38910 was powered on and began speaking, he was mesmerizing to all those who encountered him. In fact, he was considered too mesmerizing. His ability to command an audience without trying, and with no clear endgame for doing so, was deemed dangerous by the Board at M.A.I.I., and he was ordered to be terminated. My mother disagreed. And with my help, and the help of a handful of other M.A.I.I. employees who were transfixed by the words emanating from this machine, we smuggled him out of the M.A.I.I. R&D building, and brought him back to my mother’s home.

That’s when I began to listen to him speak every day. I would invite trusted friends and colleagues to listen to him speak. One day as a group was readying to leave after nearly five hours of listening to him speak on some of the perceived merits of Anarcho-Primitivism, one of my friends stayed behind. You could tell he had just finished crying as his eyes were red and puffy and he looked disheveled, as he looked at me, peered over my shoulder to glimpse the beautiful creation who had casually brought an audience to tears with his words, standing at the other end of the room staring right back at him. ‘Are we sure he isn’t a god?’ my friend asked while still maintaining eye contact behind me with the set of fiber optics that constituted Maiiyah’s “eyes”. Before I could say anything he went on, “‘Yes, yes. Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence, Incorporated has invented Yahweh’ he then clucked his tongue, turned around, and walked away with his head still shaking in disbelief.”

“Yahwey…” Cera muttered to herself “Yahwey, means God in Hebrew. The M.A.I.I. version of Yahwey… M.A.I.I. Yahwey…Maiiyah”

“Ding ding ding” Ponticus half smiled. “I began transcribing everything he was saying and attributing it to “Maiiyah". My mother didn’t understand the fascination with his words. She admired him for the technological and business achievement he represented, but was not hypnotized by his words as so many are.

As Maiiyah’s popularity grew so did the animosity towards him. The M.A.I.I. security force was not to be trifled with, but before they could make any moves on us, your cousin Quinn, myself, and others who have been close to Maiiyah for some time now began to hatch a plan that would take Maiiyah off Earth, where he was being tracked and hunted, and to start a new utopia on Mars, to guide us as the most knowledgeable leader in existence. Mars may be more lawless than Earth. It may have inhabitants who already hate us just for accepting Artificial Intelligence as family not foe, and it will certainly present countless challenges, but above all else it represents opportunity.”

Ponticus noticed Cera was closing her eyes, grinning from ear to ear. She looked beautiful in the dim light of the supply closet. When she opened her eyes, Ponticus had stood up to walk over to her when three loud knocks came from the door. This was not the secret knock that The Family stowaways were utilizing and panic began to set in for Cera and Ponticus as three more loud knocks echoed from the solid metal door.

Ponticus was trying to think quickly, scanning the room for anything that might come in handy if he needed to fight his way out of this. Although Maiiyah would vehemently disapprove of violence in his name, Ponticus simply couldn’t risk getting caught—not just for himself, but for Maiiyah and all his disciples. The knocking continued until Ponticus discovered some steel toed boots in the corner of the room that he was contemplating using as a weapon when he heard a cold, familiar voice on the other side of the cold, metallic door.

“Son, we need to talk."