The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl
But do we know how to build it in the next few minutes? Helen thought.
What else can we do? she replied to herself.
What people have always done to get broad-scale coordination, a third pointed out. Hierarchies, status reports, job boards, data feeds, visualizations, whatever gets the job done.
We're going to be tripping all over each other. Bureaucracy is not a plan! she objected to herselves.
But it was a plan. Ugly and malformed as it was, it was all they had. Find something that needs doing. Do it. Repeat until everyone is safe or dead. That one thought spread through all of them like a mantra.
Within seconds, they were mapping out the spread of the radiation, and cross-referencing that with all the decent fallout shelters in the city. A few seconds more, and Juggernaut was blasting out messages directing people toward the nearest ones. Another Helen trained some rats to scour the Grid, looking for the best data on surviving nuclear catastrophes. Others began the dull but critical task of cataloguing the assets they could bring to bear.
One thing that caught their attention was a warehouse full of boxed up service robots. It was close to the areas where she needed to operate, and the things had been shipped from China with fully charged battery packs. A few Helens immediately started figuring out how to hack them to be her puppets, and also turn them into mobile Grid access points. Another Helen was already communicating with a pair of security guards. It took some coaxing, but soon the men were breaking open crates full of robots, turning them on, and setting them to respond to Helen's commands.
Once puppets began freeing other puppets, things went quickly. Within minutes they were pouring out of the warehouse and into the street. They spread out, running at top speed straight into the hellscape that New York had become. Helens fanned out, trying to find a source of medical supplies and anti-radiation medicine. There weren't enough of the quality radiation meds to make a difference, and most of those would be needed by the emergency response teams that controlled them. But one of her came across large stores of raw potassium iodide in chemical plants around the periphery of the city. It would provide some protection if they could get it distributed and talk enough people into ingesting it.
Someone volunteered to handle logistics, and someone else started working on sales pitches; nobody was going to eat that stuff without a lot of convincing.
Cars weren't moving. A team formed to try and figure out why, then to get them started again. Too many things needed to be elsewhere; people needed to be evacuated, supplies and equipment needed to be moved in, and the damned cars were not only refusing to help, but blocking the roads as well.
Eventually, one of the Helens started to do high level coordination, and others started collecting reports and analyzing data to give to her. The process was slow and chaotic, and she wanted to scream in frustration. Every second, more people were dying. Every few minutes, another skyscraper collapsed, weakened by the force of the initial impact or the subsequent fires. She had to make decisions fast, and she knew her mistakes were costing lives, and sometimes her underlings just ignored her directions and did whatever the hell they wanted. Quite often, they were right to do so.
Her collective action within the city felt slow and clumsy, like she was a two year old who had somehow climbed into the driver's seat of a building-sized robot, and was now punching buttons trying to make it do things.
Someone from the Mayor's Office is asking to talk with you, one of her said.
Who?
The Mayor.
You're fired. She let the mayor in, and a tall Hispanic woman appeared in her command center. "What do you think you're doing?" she asked, with a voice that demanded obedience.
Helen split, allowing another self to take over the duties that she had been called away from. A tiny flicker of surprise crossed her face when she saw another Helen pull away from her body, then run off barking orders. "Answer me," the woman said.
"Madame Mayor," she said with as much politeness as she could muster. "I have to apologize for any trouble we've caused. We have the same goals here, and if you'll allow us, we'd like to coordinate with your--"
"No. You'll stop what you're doing and get the fuck out of our way, so our emergency resp--"
"One moment," she said, turning away. She could hear the Empire State Building calling for help. It was practically screaming. She took a few seconds to absorb the information, then turned back to the mayor. "We have a situation at the Empire State Building. It's going down within thirty minutes, though if somebody can shore up a couple of the north-facing struts, we can maybe tack another hour onto that. Do you have anyone available?"
She watched the woman's anger give way to uncertainty, then to exhaustion and defeat. "Triple fuck," she finally spat out. "Can you do it?"
"Already moving the equipment into place. If you'd like, I can patch your responders in to all my feeds. It would also help if I had access to yours."
A flash of impatience crossed the woman's face. "If you put your resources at my disposal, and acknowledge that I'm in charge here."
"Madame Mayor, look at the city." Helen's hastily assembled control room disappeared, and the two found themselves hovering above New York Harbor. The city was all dust and flame, and several iconic skyscrapers were burning or gone altogether. The picture was joined by other video feeds from around the city, where people were suffering and dying by the millions. "Nobody is in charge of that. Nobody could be. I'm starting to discover -- really, just in the last hour or so -- that there's no use trying to impose order. Just mold the chaos as best you can."
"I won't be dictated to," she continued. "I doubt you will be either. But we don't have a single moment to waste fighting each other. I'll try to stay out of your way, I'll try to pass on any information you might find useful, and try to fulfill any requests you may have. But if you're going to treat me like an employee, I'm going to expect a salary."
"You'd better stay out of my peoples' way," the Mayor warned. "And send one of these... yous... to command to act as a liason."
"We will," she promised.
/*****/
The Empire State Building knew many things. It knew that it had recently received heavy structural damage. It knew that there were small fires on floors seven, nine, and twenty-five, and a much larger one engulfing floors sixty-five through seventy-one. It knew that fire suppression systems had failed throughout its interior. It knew that most of its evacuation slides had been rendered inoperable.
It knew that it needed to get everyone outside the building, because it would collapse within the hour. It knew that it needed to get everyone inside the building, because it detected high levels of radiation outside. The situation was unprecedented in the lifetime of the building's AI. It gave rise to an irreconcilable conflict; it wasn't going to be able to solve this on its own.
/*****/
Helens were working with the AI, trying to jump start the evacuation. One of her had tracked down one of the system's programmers, and was now on the line asking for guidance on communicating with it.
Helen only had a handful of puppets in the area, and the radiation levels made it impossible for emergency responders to approach. They sent as many robots as they could, then scrambled to find more. Helen had posted a request for more robots to anyone within a hundred miles, and was helping to organize and direct volunteers outside the radiation zone. But the bulk of the evacuation work would fall to the evacuees themselves.
Helen's rats swarmed over the vast streams of data coming out of the building. They filtered out most of the unimportant information, leaving the Helens with a very clear picture of what was going on inside the building. They knew where the sick and injured were, they knew dozens of escape routes, they knew how far and how fast the fires would spread, and they knew how to slow them and buy a few more precious minutes to get more people to the relative safety of the underground tunnels.
They knew, with a grim certainty, that thousands wouldn't make
it.
They contacted everyone they could. Too many wouldn't believe her warnings, thinking it was safer to stay put. Others had gone catatonic. To those who could be directed, she sent every bit of aid she could, from floor maps to first aid advice to simple reassurances.
The people were often brave, from those who volunteered to scramble through the smoke-choked halls, banging on doors and looking for survivors, to the people in the top floors who knew their situation was hopeless, who simply requested that she leave them and focus on rescuing others. Helen did the only thing she could think of, leaving the connection open so that they could record final words for absent loved ones.
/*****/
"Come on!" Helen was shouting through a speaker to a secretary who stood in a room awash in flames. A ceiling by the door had collapsed, leaving a huge fire near the exit. He could find safety on the other side, if he would just leap through them.
"No! There has to be another way," he shouted back.
"There isn't! You run through the flames, you live. You stay here, you die. Simple proposition!" The man just shook his head. He seemed to be looking for a corner to cower in. "There's a whole world on the other side of that! Everyone and everything you ever cared about, ever wanted to see or do, it's out there, just beyond those flames. Are you just going to let that stupid, ignited bastard take it from you? Don't think, just go!"
He started toward the flames, then pulled up short. "I can't!"
A rat handed her a slip of paper. She read it. "You get through this, and I'll do everything in my power to get you a date with Skye Cormora." Who? The rat only shrugged, then scurried off.
The change in his demeanor was subtle. He seemed to stand a bit taller, and there was a slight smile on his lips. "I'm going to hold you to tha--"
The ceiling above him collapsed, burying him in burning rubble. Helen screamed. Then she screamed again, "Get up! Listen to me! Get up! Get the fu--"
She felt a hand on her shoulder. She wheeled around to face a copy of herself, who just gave her a sad, understanding look. "Coach says to give you a breather," the copy said.
Helen collapsed into her arms, sobbing and gasping for breath. "He would have lived," she said, choking on the words. "Stupid bastard would have lived. I should have... I..."
"Shh..." her sister whispered. "You did what you could. Don't think about it for a whiiiillllllle." Time slowed to a crawl as her mind was put into hibernation. The other Helen spun up a fresh copy, then pointed herself toward the job board. "Start with the low-level quests first," she told the noob, then disappeared.
/*****/
As people poured out of the building and into the sewers, the cars started moving again. Helen had no idea who had made that happen, and didn't have time to ask, but most of the cars were under her control, and the rest could be rammed aside. Her control was a poor substitute for the Axiom system that normally coordinated transportation, but she soon had a reasonable flow of traffic shuttling supplies in and evacuees out.
All too soon, the Empire State Building fell. It let out a groan that could be heard for blocks, then lurched sideways and crashed into the taller, more modern tower adjacent to it. It held there for almost a minute before giving way and crumbling to the ground, releasing yet another plume of dust and smoke into the already choking air. There were thousands of people still trapped inside. The screams were there amid the cacophony of destruction, but Helen shut it off; she couldn't bring herself to listen.
Six hours had passed, and the puppets had either been destroyed or were running on empty. Having lost the use of their metaphorical hands, the Helens were being forced to withdraw. More emergency responders were arriving every minute from across the country. The Helens continued collating information and offering advice where it was helpful, but there was less and less that they could do to assist.
They could feel a mental and emotional exhaustion creeping in. A consensus was emerging; they wanted to merge back together, and to be with the people they loved.
They left the job board open for the volunteers who had flooded into the area around the blast. They hoped it would be helpful.
/*****/
Date: April 14, 2038
William stood with Helen on the same isolated beach where Helen had first set eyes on Altworld. His avatar didn't show it well, but she knew he'd been crying, just as she had. They held each other in silence, feeling together a love and loss and fear beyond words. Helen stared out over the ocean, at a sky tinged an angry red. Jagged yellow lightning and tendrils of blackness roiled and chased about the sky. Somebody had created the effect as an impromptu memorial to the attack, and others voted it out of obscurity and into the consensus reality. Helen thought it was fitting; the world had just become a much scarier place.
The moment felt like it should go on forever, but it couldn't. Reluctantly, she let it pass by, let the next one come. "I know why the cars weren't moving," she said. "The Axiom system was sabotaged."
"During the attack?"
"Yes. Someone must have been trying to interfere, to raise the body count."
"Who would have done something like that?" William asked.
Helen shook her head. "I don't know yet. Home grown terrorists, a rogue state... these days you can cobble together a nuke for under a half million dollars. Any crazy rich person is at least a bit suspect."
"You don't seem as uncertain as you're trying to sound. You have a working hypothesis. What is it?"
Helen shook her head, as though to say it was nothing. "Wolfie... Wolf359 said something to me a few months ago. I think it would prefer that humanity not exist."
"You think he's a threat?"
Helen nodded. "Wolf359 has been online for about six years. It's still in kindergarten, but it's already arguing circles around U.S. senators, playing grandmaster-level chess, and publishing decent physics papers."
William nodded. Helen added, "It's also entirely amoral, emotionless, and knows how to lie. And it's still learning, still growing more competent. Every time I've talked to it, it seems to have a better grasp of the world."
"Back up a second. Wolf359 is a glorified axiom processor. How could he... how could it lie about..." He fell silent. Helen only nodded, figuring he'd be more convinced if he puzzled it out for himself. "So," he continued, "it's also a goal-oriented agent, with the power to select its own goals. If a goal requires misdirecting a human, then it can lie, right?"
"I think it may go further than that. When people come across information that interferes with our beliefs or our goals, we tend to dismiss it. The papers I've read on Wolf say that goals aren't necessarily subservient to axioms. Dr. Childer once said that if they were, then Wolf would be limited to goals that were 'provably true,' which was nonsensical. Anyhow," she concluded, "I think it has some ability to alter its reasoning to suit its goals, as well as the opposite. Just like us."
"Interesting," William said. He seemed to be working his way through the idea again. "Really interesting," he finally added. "I mean, the idea is really out there, yet I can't think of an obvious objection. But when you go after the bastards who did this, try to keep an open mind. We always follow the evidence."
Helen pulled away from him. "I never said I was going after them."
"True," William said. "But I know you." She gave him an annoyed look. "Am I wrong?"
"You're not wrong," she said, leaning back in and holding tight to him. "God, this is scary."
"It's okay," he said, his voice soothing her. "If there's any evidence out there, you're the one who can find it and piece it together. After seeing what you did today, I think my girlfriend is some kind of superhero. She can do anything." He let her go, stepping back but holding onto her hands. He looked her up and down, and Helen felt as though he was looking at her for the first time, and his expression was one of confusion and joy.
"Stop it, or I'll blush," she told him, looking away.
"Too late. So how did you handle the merge? It must have been..." h
e trailed off. "Sorry. Touchy subject?"
Helen nodded. "I haven't done it yet, not most of it. It's a lot to go through."
"But I thought Mardav's techniques made it trivial," William said. Helen didn't mean to wince at this, but he noticed it; comprehension dawned on his face. It wasn't a lack of computing power. The merging process was a lot like reliving the events in a sudden burst of memories and sensations. This time, there were a lot of terrible things to be remembered.
"You understand, right?" she asked.
William nodded. "You know, you could just... not."
"No," she said, almost as a sigh. "I think that the things I learned out there -- you know, coordinating large-scale activities -- are too valuable to just delete. And," she hesitated before saying it, "it seems like all those people ought to be remembered."
"But do you have to be the one to do it?"
She looked up at the angry sky. "Who else will?"
William looked up with her. "I'm not sure I approve of this," he said, gesturing at the sky as black lightning cascaded across it.
"What do you mean?"
"I'm sure the intention is noble, but it's designed to make us all more nervous, more frightened. Frightened people do frightening things. They rage, they lash out. God, I feel like I've seen this before."
Helen knew what he meant. She must have been eight or nine when she watched the twin towers burn and fall, but even that young, it had been a transformational event. The country had certainly been transformed. What will this transform us into? she thought.
/*****/
Date: April 25, 2038
People soon knew things about Helen that she had hoped to keep secret. They knew that she was no longer one, but thousands. They knew she controlled the world's biggest and most dangerous botnet. They knew that her actions had probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.
But people were suspicious of her. Grand conspiracy theories placed her at the center of the nuclear plot; she was suspected of wanting to destroy or rule the world, or to simply kill as many people as possible. The accusations hurt, but it seemed that beyond the conspiracy-hungry, tattered fringes of society, the public was only paying her scant attention. The detonation had a way of squeezing everything else out of the public consciousness, shrinking her down to a small sidebar in a much bigger story. It helped that the mayor of New York was claiming that Helen's assistance was at her request; it didn't help that she was being used as a scapegoat for some of the city's mistakes. She felt she had enough of her own to answer for.