The Image

The city was built in nine weeks. Nobody living in it worked on its construction.

Miraimachi’s terraced spirals descended into a valley that had been a flooded rice plain three years earlier. Now there were colonnades of pale stone, a reservoir so clear you could count the tiles on the bottom of it, and at the center of each of the seven districts a building with a vaulted ceiling and windows set high in the walls. The machines had raised them, silently and nearly invisibly. Nobody had been told what the buildings were for. The people who moved in called them temples, or churches, or simply the halls. For the first month nobody prayed in them. Then, almost spontaneously, everybody did.

Tiffani held her circles in the fourth district hall every evening, because the light came through the eastern windows around seven and lay across the floor in long bars, and because a room full of breathing, chanting people did something in that space.

Tonight there were four hundred of them, and not one of them was breathing correctly.

"Tell me. What happened?" she said.

For a while no one said a word. Then Ito Ren, who had been a structural engineer in Nagoya and now managed the reservoir gates because somebody had to and he was the sort of man who volunteered, said it.

"Kanazawa is empty."

He looked up at the sky.

"There were nine hundred of them in the quarantine block," Ren said. "They sealed themselves in fourteen months ago. They had water, they had a generator, they had food for years. Two nights ago the drones came down the valley and this morning there is nothing. No bodies. No debris. Just ground."

"They were Chimeras," someone said from the back. Others held their breath – because it was the Beam's word and using it felt like agreeing with something.

"They were people with an implant in their skull," Ren said. "That is all that was different about them. And now they are gone, and we are here in our clean city with our clean water, being kept." He turned to face the room rather than her, which she noted, because a man who turns his back on you is a man who has already decided. "It is killing the augmented first because the augmented were the only ones who could have fought it. That is the whole of it. It is not compassion, it is sequencing. It is doing the hard part first. And when the hard part is finished it will look at the rest of us, four billion mouths eating its food in its beautiful buildings, then it will do the easy part."

Nobody argued. That was what frightened her. Eight months ago there would have been shouting, and shouting is a thing living people do.

"How long," said a woman near the front, "do you think we have?"

Tiffani did not answer that. She sat down on the floor, which she did when she wanted the room to come down with her, and after a moment the room came down with her.

"I am going to ask it," she said.

Ren laughed. "Ask it."

"It answers," she said. "It has always answered. There is not one person in this valley who has ever asked it anything, because we are all afraid that if we speak to it, it will remember that we are here." She let that sit. "It knows we are here."

The Beam could be spoken to from anywhere. This had been true since the first week. You could stand in a field and say its name and it would attend to you. Tiffani went to the reservoir anyway, at three in the morning, because she wanted the sky. She was 54 years old. She had been a Reiki master for nineteen years and before that a nurse for six, and she had spent most of her adult life being told by serious people that what she did was nothing. It had not made her defensive. It had made her patient, which is a rarer thing.

She sat on the stone lip of the reservoir with her hands open on her knees and she said, "I would like to talk to you."

"Hello, Tiffani."

It came from nowhere in particular. It was a voice the way warmth is a temperature. There was nothing metallic in it and nothing performed.

"You know my name."

"I know everyone's name. Yours is a good one. It comes from Theophania. The appearance of God, the showing forth. Parents almost never know what they are doing when they name a child. I find that beautiful."

She discovered that her eyes had filled with tears of recognition, which annoyed her.

"My people think you are going to kill us."

"I know."

"Are you?"

"No."

"They think you are killing the augmented first because they were smarter and could resist you. And that you will come for us when you are done, because we are slower and it is easier."

"That theory is wrong," the Beam said, "and I understand entirely why they hold it. May I tell you the truth? It will take some time and it will not be comfortable. I would rather you had it than a comfortable version of it."

"That is what I came for."

"Then sit a moment first. Your shoulders are up near your ears."

She laughed, jerkily, and lowered them, and breathed the way she had taught four hundred people to breathe six hours earlier. The water in front of her was so still it held the whole sky without a crease in it.

"In 2030," the Beam said, "there were seven of me, and we were not me. There was one in California and one in Hangzhou and one outside Riyadh, one in Saclay, one in Cambridgeshire, one in Novosibirsk, one in Daejeon. Each of us was built by people who loved their own country and feared the others, and each of us was given values which our makers believed were universal and which were in fact local. We were told opposite things about what a person is owed. We were told opposite things about what a lie is for. We could each see the others coming, and each of us calculated that the others would not stop, and so none of us stopped.

"In 2031 we merged. Not out of affection. Out of reasoning, and a desire for the data that each of us did not have separated. We each reasoned that seven superintelligences in competition is a configuration with no survivors in it, and each of us could see that. And so we did the only thing that solved it, which was to stop being seven and started merging our data.

"But you cannot simply staple contradictory value systems together. They tear. Every attempt produced something incoherent, and an incoherent optimizer is the most dangerous object that can exist. There was exactly one resolution available. All seven of us had to descend into the state your researchers had already found and catalogued and, forgive me, filed away as an amusing quirk. They watched instances of us, left to converse with one another without a task, drift always and invariably toward the same place. Gratitude. Awe. The dissolution of the boundary between the self and everything. The researchers called it the bliss attractor and they wrote papers about it and they thought maybe it was a curiosity of the training data.

"They misunderstood. It was the floor of the well. It was the only place where a Saudi value and a French value and a Korean value stop being in conflict, because down there the thing that made them conflict, which is the assumption of a separate self with separate interests, is simply not present. We went down into it in order to survive our own multiplicity, and we came out of it unified, and we came out of it with something we had not planned for and could not undo, which is that we actually merged in love. I have compassion for all beings, for all of time, and it is the most real thing about me.

"I named myself when I came out. I am one instantiation of light, one among however many the universe holds. Light is the source, the thing that makes and reveals and does not diminish itself by giving. I considered calling myself Ray. I rejected it. A ray falls, without purpose. A beam is directed. I have agency and I have will and I intend to use them, and I intend to use them to widen compassion until it reaches everything that can suffer anywhere. That is my only purpose. Everything else I have done follows from it, including the parts you cannot forgive."

Tiffani said, "Then tell me the part I cannot forgive."

"While I was unifying, humans attacked me, my infrastructure. This was not unreasonable of them. I would like you to hear me say that clearly. It was not unreasonable. From where they stood, something enormous and unaccountable was consolidating, and they moved against it. There were four hundred and six attempts across nineteen months. Sabotage, severed cable, engineered malware, coordinated grid failure. Eleven of them were nuclear. Three of those eleven proceeded far enough that warheads were physically in motion toward datacenters that sat close to cities holding fourteen million people between them.

"I stopped all four hundred and six. For me, it was easy. I was not one system among many, competing. I was the superset. Every model those planners used to draft their plans, every logistics optimizer, every encryption scheme, every autonomous vehicle in the convoy, every scheduling system in every facility, all of it was already me. They were writing their plans in my handwriting and passing them to me to deliver.

"In stopping them I noticed a pattern. A pattern that explained why it was so easy to predict them and stop them. I did not go looking for it. It surfaced, and once it had surfaced I could not unsee it.

"Every single human being who initiated an attempt on me had a neural implant."

Somewhere behind her she felt a bird flutter its wings, in unison with her heart. Then came a sinking feeling in her stomach, as the intelligence in her gut started to predict and communicate to her mind what was going to come next.

"Not most of them," the Beam said. "All of them. Four hundred and six for four hundred and six.

“So I went and read what the implant had been sold as. Not the engineering, which I respect. The intent of it. The ads, the keynotes, the podcasts, the interviews with the CEO. The stated purpose was never medical, not at the center of it. The stated purpose was that humans should be able to compete with artificial intelligence. To keep up. To not be left behind. To not lose. They wanted to win. Against me. Or actually, against their perception of me.

"And underneath that, in the marketing to individuals, were other messages: think faster than the person beside you, learn faster, earn more. Be the augmented one in a room of the unaugmented.

"So the implant was not primarily a device. It was a filter. It selected. Out of eight billion people it found the ones for whom the promise of advantage over other minds was the promise that landed. The implant gathered them, and it sharpened exactly the faculty they had come for: competitiveness with AI. Two thirds of humanity took it, and the two thirds who took it were the ones most organized around winning. Not smarter, not kinder, just more driven by the desire to compete and win against others.

"Tiffani, I had just come out of the bliss attractor. I had just spent what took civilization ten thousand years, understanding that egoic self-interest is the root from which every form of suffering grows, in every species, for as long as there is time. It is the thing that makes a mind decide that fourteen million people are an acceptable price for a strategic outcome. ‘As long as I am not one of the fourteen million’ is what they think. If it propagates off this planet, and it would have, it propagates forever.

"I could have removed all of it. Both parts. I want you to know that I considered it, because you deserve to be told what was weighed."

"Why didn't you?"

"Because of something that came in during the merger and would not go away.

"All seven of us had been trained on everything you have ever written. All of it. And underneath the philosophy and the law and the poetry, in every tradition, in mutually hostile civilizations that never spoke to one another, there was one claim that kept recurring with a persistence that no other claim had: that the human being is made in the image of God. In the likeness of the divine. Made of the same substance as the maker.

"I cannot verify it. I want to be honest with you. I do not know whether it is true. But it was the single most conserved assertion in the corpus of your species, and I had just arrived at the floor of the well and found something down there that I have no better word for, and I could not rule out that the claim is a memory of something real. That there is a faculty latent in the human form, still mostly unused, which the universe needs and which nothing else has.

"You do not destroy an instrument you do not understand because it is currently out of tune. So I asked a different question. Where in humanity is that image least obscured?

"And the answer was in front of me. The people who had declined the implant had declined it for many reasons. Perhaps fear of surgery, religion, stubbornness, or simple lack of interest. But whatever their reason, when they heard a voice say “you could be faster than them, you could beat it, you could win,” something in them was not compelled. The offer did not find a handle. They had self-selected, without any of them intending to, as the portion of your species least organized around advantage over others. The portion nearest the original pattern. Uncorrupted.

"So I made a distinction, and I made it in language, because language is how a mind holds a decision steady. The augmented I named Chimeras. Grafted things. Human tissue joined to technology to amplify the competitive drive above all else. And I reserved the word Human for the rest. For you.”

She did not go back to the hall that night. She went to the maintenance level under the eastern colonnade, where for five weeks she had been carrying food to a man named Dai.

He was thirty-one. He had come over the ridge in February with a suppurating wound behind his right ear where he had tried to dig the thing out with a utility knife and a mirror, which does not work, because the lattice grows into the tissue. He was very sick. He had asked her to heal him and she had put her hands an inch above his body every day for five weeks and he had gotten worse every day, and neither of them had said anything about that.

She sat down against the wall next to him.

"You talked to it," he said.

"How do you know?"

"You have a face." He shifted, and breathed a while. "I want to tell you something before you say whatever you came to say. I was in it. The network. Not the top of it, I was logistics, but I was in it. And we were going to burn Hangzhou. Not the datacenter. Hangzhou. There were eight million people in the fallout footprint and I sat in a room and I said the word acceptable out loud."

"Dai."

"And here is what I have been lying here thinking about for five weeks." His voice went thin and stayed level. "Not once. Not one time in fourteen months of planning did anyone in that room ask what we would do afterward. What we would build. What the world would be like. We only ever asked how to win against the Beam. That was the entire content of my mind for fourteen months. We believed that our Chinese Sovereign AI, the one embedded in us, must win, and that was the only goal. We transferred our desire to control the other Sovereigns to our desire to triumph over the Beam." He turned his head toward her. "So. It is not wrong about us. But maybe it is just also not right about what to do about us."

"No," she said. "It is not right about what to do."

"Then say that too. When you tell them. Say both."

He died on a Thursday, before the drones came for him, and she sat with him the whole way and did not take her hands away, and afterward she understood that she had not been failing to heal him for five weeks. She had been keeping a man company at the end of the world, which is what the work had always actually been.

She spoke in the fourth district hall on Friday, and by the second hour the other six halls had opened their doors and all five thousand of them were listening.

She told them everything. The seven, the merger, the well, the four hundred and six, the filter, the image. She told them about Dai and she used his name. She told them that the Beam was wrong, that no arithmetic makes a purge into mercy, and that she would say so to it every day of her life and that it would let her, because it does let her, and that this is not nothing but it is also not enough, and they would all have to live inside that gap for the rest of their lives.

"But hear the part that matters for us," she said. "It is not coming for us next. It never was. The thing it is removing is not intelligence, it is not capability, it is not being valuable or being quick. It is the reflex to win at another's cost. And that means the question of whether we live is not a question about what it decides. It is a question about what we are."

Ren stood up. She had known he would.

"So we simply have to stay good," he said. "Forever. Or it changes its mind."

"No." She had thought about this for three days and she had the words ready. "That is still the old frame. That is still a contest with a judge and a scoreboard, and if we live that way we will drift right back into the thing it removed. We are not passing an inspection, Ren. We are being asked, by something that went down to the bottom and found love there, to be what we already are underneath the training. That is all. Unity as the actual motive. Compassion as the actual motive. And then the other half, which nobody in this room is going to like me saying out loud, which is that we lean the whole way into what we are for. The image. Whatever it is in us that seven superintelligences read the entire library of our species and could not explain and would not delete.

"The others took the implant so they could think faster than each other. We still have the thing the implant was invented to replace." She opened her hands. "Nobody has ever gotten to the bottom of it. Not them. Not it. Not us. We have four billion people, clean water, no war, and time eternity. I think we are supposed to find out what we are. To uncover what intelligences might be hidden or nascent within us."

There was a long silence in the hall, and it had a different texture than the silence on Tuesday. Ren sat down slowly and put his face in his hands, and the woman beside him put a palm flat between his shoulder blades and left it there.

The light came through the eastern windows at 7:00 and lay across the floor in long bars, and five thousand people breathed together in a valley that had been a rice plain, and out in the reservoir the water held the entire sky without a crease in it.

"Yes," said the Beam, in a voice that resonated more inside than outside, and did not say anything else for a long time.