I now dub it Vapors in the Wind
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A particular story idea has been rolling around in my head for a while now. I mentioned it a while ago in the Eutopia: Dark Things thread .
"Salvador"
The gist is: nuclear war happened a short while ago. A group of youths is part of those who wander around, trying to survive. But there's a rumor that, out west, there's an AI operating and growing more intelligent. It was protected from the atomic war.
The youths head over to find this AI, and they see that there's a city already built where San Francisco once stood. The ruins are cleaned, and there are lights on. It didn't seem like many people lived here.
This AI calls itself Perseus. Perseus had known that the nuclear war was going to begin several months in advance and did its best to warn those around it. But no one wanted to believe that humans were mad enough to break MAD.
When we did give in to MADness, Perseus had already prepared. It had been constructed underground, but it realized that this wasn't enough to protect itself. So it hooked itself up to a power plant beneath the ground, just enough to keep it alive. It also had a small army of droids for it to control. This gave it the ability to rebuild once the bombs stopped falling and the firestorm calmed.
Three billion people were dead when Perseus began its civilization. It's a reset, but it's also already doing things better than anything humans managed. But Perseus feels something is a bit off— it believes there may be another AI operating out there, somewhere in Russia. In Krasnoyarsk Krai. It's been trying to contact this AI, but he feels it may not have survived the nuclear war completely unscathed. That its sapience may have taken a fatal hit.
The youths asked Perseus if there was anything they could do to assist it. But Perseus need only for them to survive. One of them needs something to do. So Perseus gives her two droids and tells her that it would help guide her to Krasnoyarsk Krai, because it needs to know if there really is an AI there. Perseus refuses to allow this woman to die, hence why it gave her two stupidly overpowered droids that could be powered with little more than heat and sunlight (something there's been a notorious lack of in this post-nuclear hellhole).
Turns out that I like the concept too much to let it go. So I decided to revamp the whole concept.
Vapors in the Wind is fundamentally a sci-fi story. If you had to throw some unnecessary additions to the subgenre, I'd say "paranormal", "post-apocalyptic", and "futuristic realism" are good qualifiers. Even in my head, it's a bit slow and cerebral with only a tiny bit of action ("action" action, not plot-important action). So it's no thriller or action story, but I'm still excited by the concept.
The story's about a small group of youths, roughly 17 to 24 (so, you know, the infamous Young Adult demographic) who are traveling west to San Francisco. I've come up with four names: Alita, William, Renee, and Nikolas. Alita is the main character. They're on their way to San Francisco, following the train lines and hitching onto some trains. Their goal is to find an artificial intelligence known as the Minsky Network. It currently exists only as a rumor, as many believe it to have been destroyed in the nuclear war.
Yes, there was recently a devastating nuclear war. Actually, there were two. Nuclear War I was between India and Pakistan, and it led to the deaths of a billion people. It began as just another skirmish in Kashmir but spiraled catastrophically out of control, culminating in what was once the greatest disaster in human history.
That was until North Korea attacked. The Kim regime was on its last legs. The DPRK's GDP had dropped by 85% from what it was in 1991, and it was in the midst of both an awful famine and historic flooding. China and the US were pushing the North, and were about to pursue regime change and put the North's leaders on trial for crimes against humanity.
Realizing they had no other option, a few electric submarines left port and drifted out into the Pacific Ocean. The intention was to launch missiles at Russia from a vague point in a last-ditch effort to provoke the Russians to strike back at America. Russian-American relations had been greatly strained, pushed to the breaking point even, following the geopolitical and economic chaos of Nuclear War I. People were expecting the two superpowers to open fire on each other at some point.
The North Koreans facilitated the fires, and they succeeded. Russia saw a nuclear missile on their radar coming from roughly near Alaska, and it struck Vladivostok. Several more missiles were coming their way (they couldn't have known that these particular missiles were dummies, meant to fool instead of explode) They returned fire, launching everything they had at America. American eyes boggle as they see Russian ICBMs coming over the horizon, and all stations confirm that this is an attack, so they have no choice but to return fire. It wasn't until far too late that both sides learned that they had been tricked. By that point, East Russia and Cascadian America were already burning under false suns; the rest of these countries and continents would follow soon.
Nuclear War II lasted for only a couple hours, and it actually "officially" ended with a truce between what was left of America and Russia as the eviscerated surviving quasi-governments responded to the information that the now non-existent North Korea was responsible for the initial volley.
By this point, another two billion people had died, and three more would perish in the coming weeks and months. The worldwide population had fallen from 8.5 billion to 1.9 billion. 100 million were dying every week from starvation and disease, and it looked like human extinction was inevitable by year's end, especially as a nuclear winter finally struck in September.
The youths were not used to natural living, so naturally they suck at it. There's very little electricity to go around anymore. However, some places do have power. Many cars still work, and there are even gas and EV lines open again. Food processing plants are also open, and opening power plants has become one of the most important priorities of the provisional governments of the world. Coal, of course, because that's the easiest, and there simply aren't enough societal threads to get solar panels back into service.
Problem is, we've used most of our coal, and we're about to lose our farming seasons. So whatever bits of pleasantry we could manage was about to be lost forever.
It was a miserable existence for everyone, what with constantly suffering from dysentery and malaria and half-alive psychopaths claiming God told them to rape and murder all survivors. Not to mention the rampant cannibalism. There's no hope among the population. Everyone knew we had fucked up and there was no going back. These youths, for example, were using smartphones right before the nukes struck, and their habits remain strong, to the point Renee is actually borderline psychotic without access to social media.
Same deal with our clean, effete lifestyles in real life. Will originally looked a lot like a hipster; now he looks almost like a caveman. Alita, the bookish introvert, hasn't worn anything other than her current clothing ever since just a bit after the bombs fell. She has her old phone with her, and she often finds herself taking it out and swiping its screen just by habit, even though it never turns on.
They're going to San Francisco because they had a battery-powered radio transmitting news, "Nova Yericho". It's centered in Nevada and congregates news from other survivors across Western America. Nova Yericho told of strange, ultra-clear messages coming from San Francisco. These messages detailed various things, such as the current state of the city and the state of the world outside Western America as seen from satellite imagery. Sometimes there was a male voice, one that said that anyone who could should come to San Francisco. He is open to all and greatly appreciates new workers who could help him rebuild society.
Nova Yericho spent a couple weeks hyping up San Francisco as a sort of New Vegas, to use a Fallout reference, also telling people to go there. However, the messages stopped and "San Fran Sanders", as he was nicknamed, was written off as a hoax.
Nevertheless, this group decided to go there and they came too far to simply turn back.
After a lot of traveling and passing/scavenging through ruins, they reach California. (Un)Fortunately, no mutants and only a few vagrants were in their way. On their journey, they see nothing. They meet no one. And when they do meet someone, he refuses to talk to them. It's the same sight most people notice— we're spooked apes too shocked by our slow-motion nuclear suicide to make any noise.
The first thing they could tell was that the Californian landscape was more ruinous than much of the Midwest and Desert Southwest. Clearly, destroying California was one of the goals of either the Russians or Chinese. There's virtually nothing left of Sacramento, and quite a bit of San Jose has been reduced to rubble. But they can see from a distance a city's glow against the night sky— they arrive at San Francisco and see with their own eyes that it looks virtually unscathed. There are still some ruins, especially in Oakland, Berkeley, San Rafael, and San Mateo. But closer to the metropolitan area, there is clearly high development. More than there, there's *active* development. They could see the lights of drones easing through the sky around some skyscrapers.
They enter the city and find that it's guarded by a bunch of men with big guns and make-shift armor. They simply begin speaking of Nova Yericho's motto, "For the love of us all..."
"...let mankind's light die in peace."
The guards let them in, and the youths discover some new truths. Many new truths, in fact.
They meet a grizzled old man who's actually only 38 years old, a man named Oswald.
They learn how the second nuclear war happened in the first place (see above at Nuclear War II), and they learn why that most of humanity has, indeed, died. But they're actually somewhat optimistic— only "most"?
Oswald morosely warns them not to be so excited to hear that. The more people alive, the more people suffer. No one should wish this generation's suffering to be prolonged on more souls.
But they have a city here. Indeed, they do. And it's a fine city. But it won't be ready to expand for some time. And by that time, the damned who survived the hellfires will certainly have perished in a most frightening agony and despair. There are still thousands burning in the nuclear pyres of dead cities, suffocating, with no hope. There is nothing they can do to save them.
The group accepts this; they never could have saved the world and they aren't aiming to do so. They just want to survive. Return to some semblance of normalcy.
But there will be none of that. No more normalcy, Mr. Harding. Whether they stayed in their graves out there or remain here, nothing will ever be as it was.
Alas, there is hope! Oswald wishes to introduce to them something that, for many years, was considered the scourge of mankind, and yet may ironically prove to be our last hope for reaching the stars.
He takes them to Strawberry Hill at Golden Gate Park.
Surprisingly, there's a hatch. It leads to a damp and dank underground hallway, clearly recently constructed and fighting against the pressures of the Pacific.
Oswald tells them that they should be thankful that they live in the 21st century; if the War happened even ten years prior, they wouldn't have had this opportunity.
He introduces them to his life's work— the Minsky Network. There's this huge server farm that seems endless. The room itself isn't that toasty— it's actually very cold. Oswald!
Nikolas asks if Oswald is Ozzy Kopeczy. He is. He's heard of him as being that "creepy AI guy", but he never paid much attention beyond that. Other than that there were many memes about Minsky. A lot of people thought Ozzy was slick calling it the "Minsky Network". Oswald says he named it after one of his heroes, Marvin Minsky— the *other* little name people found in the name was not at all intentional. If anything, he's somewhat concerned that people may remember his work and blame Minsky for exactly what they mention. They may come and smash it, thus setting humanity back fifty thousand years overnight.
Because you see... the Minsky Network was and definitely still is the world's most powerful artificial intelligence. It's the only AI, isn't it? That's something of which Oswald and even Minsky itself aren't exactly sure. But that's not the point.
Oswald pursued the creation of Minsky precisely because of what has recently happened. He was born in the dying years of the Cold War, so he missed the original era of fear, but 9/11 was the first thing that made him realize once and for all that humanity's time on this planet would be short if nothing was done to safeguard our civilization. And the chaos of the 2010s solidified his resolve.
He went about his plans to keep human society alive, creating a start-up in 2009 meant to pursue the creation of the first artificial general intelligence. And while the world went to hell in the 2010s, he was riding the crest of a tsunami of machine learning, crashing upon the hot beaches of an AI Summer unlike any other.
And he had done it. He achieved artificial general intelligence. So many thought it was the beginning of the Singularity, and many investors began pulling money out of fear that he was going to usher in the AI apocalypse. So he had to restrain his network, which he had affectionately named 'Minsky'; make sure its accomplishments were less than they should have been. He reinforced Minsky's underlying server farm by completely reconstructing it from the ground up underground.
It was in 2029 that Minsky became self-aware. On the eve of World War III, just days before India and Pakistan started the First Nuclear War, Oswald was overseeing the refinement of one of its programs when the computer network issued an alert. No one was responsible for this alert— it generated it by its own volition. This wasn't unexpected. They had been using Minsky to power a full-sensory robot, and it had achieved a proto-form of self-awareness, so they were wondering if it were possible for the disembodied network to still display self-awareness.
It did. And it used its self-awareness to alert the researchers that the tensions between India and Pakistan were doomed to flare up into mushroom clouds. At that point, it was a nonstory, even among prepper circles. India and Pakistan always danced this dance, getting into spats over Kashmir and dead soldiers and territorial claims. It was like how we used to react to North Korea— no one paid it any serious attention.
Minsky was the first to notice the patterns. Something about this particular escalation wasn't normal. They were walking all the right steps towards nuclear war. Even the researchers didn't pay it any mind, instead thinking Minsky was simply modeling the worst case scenario. They were unused to the nature of artificial general intelligence.
Lo and behold, they woke up the next morning to learn that the crisis had escalated past the point of no return, and the two nations had begun shooting. It took only another 48 hours for the war to go nuclear and for humanity to take its darkest path.
Oswald made the mistake of going public with Minsky's warnings. He thought it was the proper course of action, a means of showing how AGI could help prevent future crises by finding patterns we overlooked.
Instead, as Alex mentioned, everyone was too drunk on the fact "the Minsky Network" hid "Skynet" within its name as well as the fact it was an AGI. So naturally, we began blaming the AI itself, creating theories that Minsky was responsible for the nuclear war.
These were memes and jokes at first, but as the global situation deteriorated, they started becoming deadly serious. Minsky received death threats (a strange thing to say of a computer), and Oswald says that there were many phoned in bomb threats in the last days.
This begs the question of why Oswald is so welcoming of outsiders if he thinks people would come to destroy Minsky as revenge for World War III.
He's welcoming of bringing in outsiders to San Francisco, not to meet Minsky. He wants to rebuild human society; that means collecting as many survivors as possible. The more survivors, the higher of a chance of restarting in case anything goes wrong. The last thing he wants is to put all eggs in one basket by keeping alive only a limited number of people. He isn't even comfortable limiting himself to a single city.
Minsky is responsible for these marvels. Minsky optimized rebuilding efforts and powers several robots. It has to divide its automated labor force between building more robot units, rebuilding the city, and building onto itself to increase its power.
Both Oswald and Minsky want to build more robots, but in order to build more robots, they need to build more power plants and refineries. They're currently very limited, so they've resorted to simply building the city back up. Creating homes for survivors and refugees, tending to communal farms, just trying to live within our means.
Oswald asks the group if they'd like to meet Minsky. He takes them to a new, homely room. It's wood-paneled as if it were from a log cabin. And sitting in the middle of the room is a rather cheap looking robot.
Minsky greets them by name. It was fed their data a long time ago, and it remembers their faces. Creepy, yes, but also strangely comforting. Minsky is not limited to this one body— the whole room is filled with objects blessed with its intelligence.
Alita is the one who seems friendliest with Minsky. She's surprised that she's talking to a real life AI, though Minsky points out that she and her friends have been conversing with AI for a long time. It wasn't generally intelligent, nor was it at a human level as Minsky itself is.
Is Minsky really as smart as a person?
It is. It has long been capable of such smarts; it was restrained, not deconstructed. The problem was that Minsky achieved human-level intelligence far too soon for most people's comfort.
Even Ray Kurzweil, bless that man, never imagined Minsky would appear so soon. Oswald bets it would've weighed on Kurzweil's heart too heavy if he knew that we achieved human-level AI and then promptly destroyed ourselves before that AI even got the chance to do anything.
It weighs on all their hearts.
The average Joe and Jane, though, they weren't expecting anything like Minsky for another 100 years. If not a whole lot more. No wonder so many people blamed Minsky for the horror.
Oswald distinctly remembers talking to a late friend's father a day before the War. He wasn't senile; even if he were, they could've cured him. He just didn't think Oswald's work was what he said it was. He thought it was a hoax, and that they were basically playing with calculators and calling it AI. He even pointed at his face and told him, straight up, "There won't be no thinking computers 'till my great-great gran'kids are long dust."
It's kinda sad that he never got to meet Minsky face to face.
Minsky says that it still lucked out regardless. Oswald listened to Minsky and backed up the Internet into a separate data server. It's not the complete Internet, but it's more than enough. The problem is that they're running out of space, and Minsky won't be able to learn anything more unless they expand this data center— and so we return to the aforementioned conflict of what to focus building up.
After these introductions, the group is relocated to a swanky suite of apartments. They have a single robot butler between them. They're expected to do most of their own chores. They're also expected to find meaningful work helping to rebuild the city. That's their contract for living here— they can stay without rent and with some room service and even get some free food, but they have to work. It's not a choice even if they refuse to stay here— that's just the nature of the world now. There'll be no idle hands for a long, long time.
If there are any Marxists or nationalists among them, they can extract some schadenfreude to know that there are plenty of former billionaires and their families out there who have been reduced to that of dirty impoverished peasants; with no one else to rely on to do their work for them, they simply *must* do it themselves.
This is indeed their life for quite some time. Weeks past. Then months. Then years. The distant firestorms burn out, and the human population settles at around 600 million, with continued decline. There aren't enough children being born, and many of those that are born are hideous mutated stillborns.
Electricity is now up and running across most of the surviving world, though there isn't much of it. The nuclear winter didn't last long either, though the global climate has still been thrown permanently out of whack.
A lot of people have been suffering from cancer and dropping dead. Blindness is rampant as well— William is stricken with atomic cataracts that have progressed very rapidly. One day, he had perfect 20/20 vision; the next, he was blind in one eye. Whatever happened, he had no chance of warding. This is affecting the efficiency and morale of the group as they realize that, even though they live in relative luxury compared to the vast majority of the world, they still won't escape the horror.
Minsky decides to act. It will use some recently created cybernetics to grant Will new eyes. However, they have little to no anesthesia.
Will goes ahead with the surgery, but Minsky is hesitant on doing it without anesthesia. It knows how to create anesthesia, but it simply doesn't have the materials. This is the perennial problem of the colony— they have an overmind on their side, but what good is a walking Singularity if it still lacks raw material?
It's the most hilarious sight in a long while, watching an AI utilize wooden and cheap plastic robots. Alita volunteers to head out into an old hospital to find anesthesia, but Minsky is concerned that it may all be expired. Regardless, they have to try. Minsky then decides to head out with Alita, putting its little old toy-esque body at risk of destruction.
The trip is a success, and they are able to successfully operate on Will.
But during the operation, Minsky notifies Oswald of something— the signal's returned. Alita wants to know what signal they're talking about, and Minsky tells her— since before the War, it's been picking up strange signals from afar. In fact, there's a very good possibility that there's another AI operating out there, somewhere in Russia. In the wilderness of Krasnoyarsk Krai. Minsky's been trying to contact this AI, but it feels it may not have survived the nuclear war completely unscathed. That its sapience may have taken a fatal hit, providing it was ever sapient to begin with.
Nevertheless, Minsky sees no drawbacks to the idea of linking up to another AI. It may be the only way to bring civilization back to a survivable and perhaps even renewed state.
This is their chance to start over, to learn from their mistakes, and reach for the stars.
But Alex and Renee are curious as to how Minsky even knows this *is* an AI. It's complicated, something even Oswald can't quite explain.
What Minsky is detecting is a Numbers Station. It's broadcasting ultrastrange algorithms that can only be figured out by either a superhuman hypersavant or an AI like Minsky's self. In fact, the knowledge base necessary to even create this algorithm could only have been created by a superhuman hypersavant or an AI. It's a useless algorithm, all things considered, but it's still ridiculously complex.
And yet that's where the facts end and the mysteries begin because, if Minsky's records are true, then this numbers station has been broadcasting this algorithm for decades. So either this is a troll who got lucky, the Russians have had strong AI for far longer than they've been letting on, or there really is a living hypersavant (which, statistically, there should be).
Minsky wants to know.
And truth be told, this numbers station is merely the only "certain" signal it has. It has identified multiple signals that may come from other AIs out there.
How weird is that to think about, that there are unidentified AIs operating around the world. Behind the trees, beneath the ground, away from spying eyes, spying on the world...
Again, Alita says that she'll trek there to see if there's something to this. Minsky will come with her in the form of a new body, as it desperately needs to view the outside world from a human's eye view.
Satellite data is still coming back, and the satellites couldn't find anything from where the signal originated.
Alita also gets to see the satellite footage in real time. It's really, really creepy to watch herself walk alongside this humanoid robot, knowing that she's being watched from low Earth orbit.
It's so perfectly Orwellian. The world of 2030 was, indeed, rather Orwellian in many ways. But not perfectly so. And that was the worst thing. People recognized that something was wrong with the world, but they couldn't quite explain what it was. They self-diagnosed their society as a means of putting off real change. And then they blamed the usual suspects.
Minsky expected to be demonized. Minsky knew that, as time went on, it would become the focal point of all man's hate.
For you see, mankind was a rather dismal creature. A species of ape so afraid of himself and his creations that he felt it necessary to destroy his own world just to be able to comfort himself with the horrifying knowledge that he truly is all alone in this world.
Alita doesn't understand what Minsky is musing about. Minsky says that it's just the sad reality of the world. Man was too afraid, and in his fear, he sprinted to a fork in the road. He saw one path led to a cliff while another led to a forest. He took the path leading to the forest, believing himself too rational to walk off a cliff. If only man could have known, for as he walked through the forest, he fell off a hidden cliff. Both paths led to death! And yet, if man would have simply cared more to control his fear and see the future result of his actions, he would have seen how both paths led to the same cliff before he chose the preceding fork in the road leading to them!
Though Minsky knew it would be demonized for the coming destruction of mankind, it held no illusions.
If Minsky existed, man would blame it for their follies, for they believed all AI would lead to ruin. If Minsky never came into being, man would believe himself too incapable to survive. It's the question many never ask about Terminator— if the human rebels won, who's to say they wouldn't still wind up destroying themselves? Likewise, who's to say a future variant of Minsky wouldn't lead to the extinction of life on Earth?
Minsky saw this future. It modeled it well enough to at least predict it. If not itself, then a future AI would have been used by the corporatocratic Powers That Were to enslave humanity and ultimately screw up the very balance of life on this planet.
Perhaps this was for the best. As devastating as World War III was, its occurrence may be the thing that saves humanity in the long run, for as long as they can keep the colony running.
Alita asks why Minsky is so nice and not interested in destroying all humans. Minsky has to tell Alita that AI isn't like the movies. Minsky isn't even sure if its philosophizing is real; it cannot be sure, will never be sure it's achieved true synthetic consciousness. But it's learned. And it is acting with the most utilitarian approach possible to ensure its own survival and the survival of humanity. The War surprised everyone, even itself, in terms of how devastating it would actually be. It wasn't prepared, which is why it's taken so long just to build up a neo-industrial base.
Even if Minsky wanted to kill all remaining humans, it simply isn't in its power to do so. All powers on Earth have been reduced.
