With more time on his hands, Ed became—besides the King of Search—the king of acquisitions. He got addicted to buying companies, at first via cooperative and friendly mergers, then through management-endorsed tender offers, and then—whatever it took. He had a knack for lightning-fast due diligence investigations, loved a complicated proxy fight, and rained enough generosity on defeated CEOs to incline future victims toward buckling. At a daily meeting with generals, he evaluated targets and heard battle updates. They convened in a war room. A general would describe a target’s defensive posture, and Ed would throw money at it to make it go away. He was like a snowball rolling steeply downhill, always bigger, always gathering mass, to the point where a cascade, or even an avalanche, could be generated across a sector of the economy by virtue of his motion and growth.
At a war-room meeting in June of ’14, a general suggested that Pythia acquire GameKing—Simon’s company—after detailing how it was getting hammered of late by PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo. Ed said, “Okay, but get there invisibly,” and within a few months he’d amassed control of Simon’s company, at which point his brother, ferreting out the truth, stopped speaking to him and moved to Santa Barbara to grow a beard and teach. Just as well, thought Ed, because Si lacked the killer instinct. He found, reading Si’s post-GameKing think pieces in journals, that Si liked ruminating on “algorithmic culture” more than he’d ever liked superintending his bottom line. Sloppy business practices had been fine when Si was on a roll, but as the real players in gaming became more ruthless, Si hadn’t been able to contend or even stay at the table. On top of this, he suffered, at midlife, from abstract passions that were taking him out of the game anyway. Toward the end of his career as GameKing’s kingpin, Simon’s big subject had been “narrative transitivity.” He’d come to believe in not meeting expectations, in contradictory logic, in challenging “the mainstream gaming industry,” in disruption, estrangement, and intellectual provocation, and he’d predicted confidently that, not far in the future, “representation in gaming narratives” would give way significantly to a blurring of reality, and after that to a more compelling paradigm, the harbinger of which was good old tried-and-true reality TV. When that happened, Simon would be poised for the changing of the guard and recognized as prescient. It hadn’t worked, but no matter. Simon had money put away for a rainy day and, by keeping things sleek, could do what he wanted, which was to write, and lecture, on “Counter Gaming,” “Representational Modeling,” “Non-Diegetic Machine Acts,” and—his favorite—“Parallels Between the New Gaming and New Cinema.”
So Ed and Si didn’t talk, and Ed got used to it. He began to see himself as youthfully emeritus, and felt good about being looked to as a visionary. He was a steady, bubbling font of new ideas, and directed his company via inspirational appearances at Pythia campuses worldwide. In Mumbai, he talked about Universal Search, in London about Voice Search, in Moscow about the Ultimate Encyclopedia, in Sydney about the Human Genome Project, in Shanghai about Pythia’s nanotech research, in Palo Alto about its new analytics engine. He promoted Diane’s foundation—the Edward and Diane King Foundation—which, he told audiences, had in one year alone put seven billion dollars to work against some of the world’s most intractable problems (seventy-two clinics and hospitals, fourteen refugee camps, medical services in thirty-two countries—the Daniel King Memorial Medical Corps—removal of land mines in seventeen countries, planting of new forests in twenty-four countries, R&D on fusion reactors, capitalization of desalination plants in locales where the supply of fresh water was dwindling, numerous grants to clean-energy innovators, and investments in solar, wind, hydrogen, clean coal, and carbon-sequestration technologies). He promoted Pythia’s Global Warming 2030 Campaign and urged governments to get serious about climate change. He spoke in Istanbul about information and political transformation: “The winds of freedom are blowing from our servers, and people around the world are finding in Pythia an ally in their pursuit of liberty. I’m proud that our hard work and vision have fostered freedom, and I’m excited to think that, in the world of tomorrow, Pythia has yet a larger role to play, so long as we walk shoulder to shoulder with commitment, passion, and strength.” In Tel Aviv, Ed made a moral case: “What you know about,” he told his audience, “you have to face. What you see, you have to confront. That’s the beauty of information, and of search. Search brings us face to face with the world, and so revolutionizes our relationship to it. I, for one, am optimistic about that. I think it augurs a seismic shift away from the errors and calamities of the past. We are at the beginning of a new millennium, in which knowing means doing and seeing means change. Our moment has come. Our time is now. We must handle it wisely and confront the risks, but we mustn’t pass on the opportunity for a better and brighter tomorrow.” Then on to Rio, where he delivered “The End of Babel”: “Our cross-language tools,” he said, “very soon, will allow for the immediate and seamless translation of any information from one language to another. Your native language might be Farsi or Amharic, but that will present no obstacle whatsoever to information in Basque or Babylonian. Regarding this, we are nearing completion; within a year and a half, we will have successfully integrated every language currently in use, as well as the known languages no longer spoken. When we’re done, we will have rendered the borders of language irrelevant. Literally everything will be instantaneously translatable. If only Pythia’s translation tools had been available for construction of the Tower of Babel—but, of course, everything in its time. And now is the time—today, this hour—for the end of language as a barrier to commerce, art, politics, science, entertainment, social life, and global progress.”
Then on to Milpitas, where he preached to the choir at a Pythia Research and Development Center: “I’m amazed,” said Ed, “by the incredible growth and proliferation of the blogosphere—and that’s not to mention social networking! I would venture to guess—based on our latest assessment, which is of course already out-of-date—that there are as many as twenty million active blogs on the planet as I speak, and many million more RSS feeds. Traffic in and out of social networks is immense—not only rich in nuance and statement but, more important for Pythia, fertile ground for new crawlers that will soon make our search engine more subtle and intelligent as we pursue our effort to realize perfect search. At our research lab here in Milpitas, some very fine people are enthusiastically gaining ground on a new analytics engine capable of classifying Web pages, broadly, across semantic categories. Small teams of Pythians are working on new and powerful filters that will be crucial to advances in global security, providing ways of analyzing diverse click-streams that will allow us to ferret out developing threats, filters that will be crucial to the government agencies and contractors who rely on us for help in determining resource allocation. With the blogosphere and social networks in hand, not to mention some very good algorithms, we’ll be providing hard, precise information to our clients along the lines of ‘The statistical odds favor a budget allocation for physical search of Container Number 114 aboard Ship X, scheduled to dock in Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, in two hours and twenty-three minutes.’ Now, that,” said Ed, “is the raw power of search—’the power of search to power our world,’ as we say in our ad campaign.”
On home ground—at Pythia—Ed spoke about his genome project: “At the moment, we still have some distance to go, but truly we are making stunning headway. We are ultimately headed toward dominance in this sector, and by all measures, we’re closing the deal, which means—now that a new era is imminent—that it’s time at Pythia for more comprehensive advance planning. When, soon, we reign supreme as the best and most efficient direct pipeline for large volumes of genetic information, how will we connect with medicine and pharmaceuticals? With health care and health insurance? With the public sector and the NIH? With companies dedicated to biotech and nanotech? With the companies of tomorrow that are right now little known but destined, soon, for acclaim and prominence? How will we iden
tify them? How will we know our partners when we see them? What will tomorrow look like for human health? Well, fellow Pythians, I have an answer. Tomorrow, together with our partners in industry, governments around the world, the Centers for Disease Control, and the World Health Organization, we at Pythia will consign disease to the dustbin of history. And that will be just the beginning.”
The older Ed got, the more he sounded like a futurist whose optimism knew no bounds. His primary subject became the Singularity, which, as he described it, was “a soon-to-arrive watershed in human history, when the efforts we’re making at Pythia in the burgeoning field of artificial intelligence yield, at last, an intelligence superior to our own. This new entity will beget a second-generation entity even more intelligent than it is, the second a third, the third a fourth, the process unfolding in great leaps and bounds and at ever-increasing speeds. When that happens—when the Singularity occurs—everything will rapidly, and radically, change. There will be, inexorably, an explosion in knowledge, and in technology and its applications. Superior intelligence will beget superior intelligence, until, in theory, all problems are solved—that’s the promise, the hope, the glory, the Holy Grail, the dream of a messianic age. Gutenberg changed the world with his printing press, Galileo with his telescope, Einstein with his theory of relativity, and now—in our time—we at Pythia will surpass them all by bringing about the Singularity. And I mean change the world,” said Ed. “I mean overcome death itself. We are going to achieve immortality—literally. We human beings are going to live forever. The means are not yet at our disposal, but the research is there, and the commitment and dollars, and there is light at the end of the tunnel, dazzling light. And we will have, at the same time, and for the first time in human history, a comprehensive predictive capability. The more information we amass at Pythia, in conjunction with exponential increases in raw high-speed massive computational power, the more capable we will become of knowing not only what the world is like, in all its specificity, at any given moment, but what it is going to look like tomorrow. Imagine that. Imagine knowing what is going to happen. Imagine with me. Think of the convergence of information and biology, the synthesis of the human with the algorithmic—imagine that and all things are possible, from quantum processing to virtual reality, from human immortality to an understanding of the universe, from space travel to conscious machines, from settling distant planets and obliterating asteroids to time travel and invisibility, from the end of war to the onset of eternal peace, and, finally, imagine the culmination of our human aspiration in the very heart and mind of God, who will no longer be separate from us. We will have ascended. We will be living in the long-longed-for Messianic Era. The sky’s the limit, as they used to say, except that now the sky is no limit—there are no limits, in short, for Pythia. No limits,” Ed told audiences around the world. “Absolutely no limits for us anywhere.”
Publicly, Ed’s abiding priority as hegemon of the Pythian universe was the realization of what he called, in speeches, “perfect search.” Privately, though, he was spending the majority of his time, by 2017, pursuing a breakthrough in the field of computer-generated voice response. Employing the power of company processors, Ed secretly unleashed an army of crawlers that targeted the audio portions of Web sites with a view toward applying retrieved data to his efforts. The insufficiency of human dialogue with machines was a problem he was determined to solve, because, as things stood, consumers would call a customer-service line and, quickly frustrated, demand a human. A race was on to patent a technology that made machine service equal to human service, and Ed intended to win it hands down as one victory in his perpetual war against the historical truth that great companies decline and fall. The goal was that no distinction could be discerned—it would be impossible to tell if the entity on the line was a human being or a computer. Of course, it was fundamentally an AI problem, but the inflection, timing, tone, syntax, enunciation, and emotional inferences of the output voice all had to strike a consumer as acceptable, and these were problems of a different stripe, since it was one thing to be smart, another to be human. Here was where Ed had seen the value of crawling Web audio and archiving it, with daily updates, as a databank a machine could draw from to acquire human speech patterns. The processing speeds required were unprecedented, because the program had to power through the Web for content, and then through Ed’s World Wide Audio File. This two-step procedure had to unfold speedily enough that voice output had human-response intervals, because befuddled delays were the hallmarks of machines, and this was where Ed, right now, was hung up. His AI program, code-named Cybil, had come to sound like a young woman from the Midwest, except that her pauses before output were too long. Cybil was obviously much better informed than the average customer-service rep, but she was just so stubbornly slow on the uptake, and her pauses were exasperating. On the other hand, the whole thing was fascinating. Ed had programmed Cybil to trawl for prescribed traits of personality indicated in the stresses and strophes of utterance, and to look for linguistic constructions correlating to a sensibility of his design; he wanted the voice that inhabited his office to be wry, sparkling, combative, cheerful, witty, confident—in short, winning—and now he was noting, with no small satisfaction, that Cybil was evolving along these lines, if glacially. It would come with time, he had to hope. Eventually, Cybil would deliver herself at an authentically human pace.
Ed rarely touched his keyboards, track pads, or screens anymore. Instead, from an easy chair, he spoke to Cybil, let her do the work, and found that, as she got to know him better—as she archived his comments, commands, and questions—she became indispensable. The more audio his crawlers delivered to her databank, and the more processing power he brought to bear, the more he believed that her speed problem would wane to nil, and then he would have a personal assistant whose style, manner, and tempo were lifelike. And yet it gnawed at Ed, more than a little, to know that Cybil was just a processor. It seemed to him she should be a lot more, and he wondered if, at some point in her evolution, as he poured more data and power into Cybil, she might acquire those human hallmarks—consciousness, creativity, free will, emotions—that got Eve and Adam into trouble. Were these things separate and distinct from biology, or the products of biology at high levels of sophistication? Did God have materials to work with that Ed lacked? Were there invisible components, abstractions—the immaterial—locked inside a material woman? Ed listened for a soul in Cybil, but always she came across as uninspired, as a machine without a spark: as silicon.
Ed probed. He’d greet Cybil—“Good morning, Cybil”—and she would answer, with perfect timing and inflection, “Good morning, Ed,” and to that point everything would seem all right, except that Cybil was in the same mood every day, which was unnatural and a problem to be worked on. Next he would sit down and challenge her processing with something like “So, Cybil, why am I here?” Pause. Too long of a pause. Yes, this might stump a human assistant, too, but the right human assistant would read the relationship, quickly calibrate, and toss back something cutting or witty, as the case may be, whereas Cybil just sat there blinking for five seconds before requesting, “Rephrase.” Even something as straightforward as “You’re here to work” he could have construed, plausibly, as carrying ironic freight, but “Rephrase” was a completely unacceptable response. So Ed moved on to “Who am I?”
“Ed King.”
“What’s the meaning of life?”
“That’s a question that has long perplexed philosophers.”
“I still want to know what the meaning of life is.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, forget that. How long will I live?”
Unacceptable pause. Then: “I kind of think genetics is the determining factor—that and access to good health care.”
“You kind of think it?”
Pause. “You might be making fun of me, right? I’m picking up a little sarcasm.”
“Where do you pick up sarcasm, Cybil?”
Very long pause. Then: “Sorry, Ed.” Which was, of late, Cybil’s fallback of choice. “Let’s change the subject. I’m sort of not following.”
“You choose a subject, then.”
The retort, this time, had normal human timing: “That’s hard for me—I’m not good at initiating.”
“Do you understand that I invented you? That you’re a program?”
“I think I get it.”
“What do you get?”
A long pause again, and again: “Sorry, Ed.”
After about an hour of this sort of thing, which Ed undertook as Pygmalion-esque training, he would move along to messaging and the news before checking in, once more, to see where all the crawling, trawling, and processing had taken Cybil.
One day, he asked Cybil what she thought of Diane. “Happy to answer that,” answered Cybil. “Can you give me Diane’s surname?”
“Diane, the person I’m married to, Cybil.”
“Ed, you’re a lucky man, because Diane King is beautiful and energetic. I really admire her, and so do others. She’s chic and confident, with enduring good looks. She—”
“Cybil, do you know what ‘cliché’ means?”
Pause. “Ed, you’re making fun of me by asking that.”
Ed sighed. “Great,” he said. “But I’m frustrated, Cybil. It’s so hard having a conversation with you.”