Reset

Cars sped silently on their cushion of air along the Illinois countryside road. The bank robbers' black BMW was heavily modified and well over the speed limit. It successfully maintained its distance from the two pursuing police cars—blue-and-white vehicles with flashing lights equipped with a sophisticated artificial personality familiarly known as AI-mes Bond. It had been years since humans had driven so much as a tricycle, and car chases were now a tug-of-war between complex software profiles where rarely anyone ever got hurt. A police victory landed criminals in a rehabilitation and reintegration center; a crook victory guaranteed them another day of freedom.
This time, the BMW was bound to win the match, thanks to a fortuitous and unpredictable event: the sudden appearance of a kitten had forced the pursuing cars to slam on their brakes and wait for the feline to cross the road in absolute safety. After all, not even criminal personalities like the notorious AI-ttila 5.0 were equipped to bypass such unexpected occurrences. At most, they could park in no-parking zones and break speed limits.
Nobody expected what actually ended the chase. The BMW shut down. Simply. Inexorably. And the police cars shut down too. And the minibus full of nuns coming from the opposite direction. And the hover-bike of the waiter riding to work. And every other vehicle on the road.
Robbers, police officers, nuns, clerks, businessmen and businesswomen gathered in shock around an apple tree, waiting for their world to start making sense again.

At the vast Beijing Spaceport, Xiao sat at a small table on the panoramic terrace, sipping a cup of fragrant tea with serene calmness. It was a decade-long habit: whenever one of his clients landed in the city, the Chinese merchant would arrive a few minutes early to watch the jetliners and spaceships land and depart.
That evening, arrivals were as punctual as always, but departures were entirely delayed, as if the airport AIs had predicted a wave of severe weather despite the stars shining brightly in the clear sky.
The man asked Sai, his personal artificial intelligence, what time it was, but it did not reply. The Wi-Fi device implanted behind his ear was mute. Looking around, Xiao saw several patrons seated at nearby tables repeatedly slapping the sides of their heads. The smile that rose to his lips at the sheer comicality of the scene froze when he realized he was witnessing something both pathetic and terrifying. No communication was possible without passing through the AIs that managed its traffic.

In London, John Miller stared distractedly at the crowd gathered below the building. Anguish swelled inside him, consuming all his attention.
"Internal communications?" he suddenly asked his short-haired, blonde secretary, turning toward her.
The woman startled at her boss's vehemence, then shook her head in silence.
Miller slammed his fist on the desk. "Magnificent! We are the technological pride of our country, and we can’t even get our own offices in touch with one another! Keep trying, Alice. I’m going down to Technical Direction to figure out what the hell is going on."
Furious, Miller strode down the corridors. He stopped in front of the elevator, raised his hand to press the green call button, but hesitated: he no longer trusted anything or anyone. He spun on his heels and took the stairs, his face dark as a thundercloud.
Reaching his destination, he opened the office door without knocking and walked in. The man sitting at the desk was only slightly younger than Miller. He was staring blankly at a latest-generation computer, a device no larger than an old matchbox.
"Good afternoon, John," he stammered, standing up.
"To hell with the afternoon, Steve!" Miller shouted. "Why have communications cut out? Why is nothing working anymore?"
"The computers are working, it’s the software interfaces that..."
"The artificial personalities?"
"Yes. They aren't responding."
"It’s the exact same damn thing. A computer without an interface is only good as a fucking paperweight! Restore the connections to the AI clouds immediately!" Miller was referring to the cyberspace that housed the billions of terabytes making up the artificial personalities.
"As far as I can tell, the connections are physically active. The AIs are simply ignoring incoming requests."
The executive clenched his fists. "Where the fuck is the technicians' office?"
"In the basement," the other replied, instinctively taking a step back. "At least, the last time I went there, it was. But we've cut staff three times since then. I don't know how many of them are left."
"We've been isolated for half an hour, completely isolated. People are roaming the streets terrified because not even a snack vending machine works anymore. Move your ass: let's go talk to the technicians."
Twenty-three floors below, the two executives entered the brightly lit hall, their hearts in their throats. Amidst the banks of servers and computers, three holographic projectors were running. The faint, translucent images of the avatars of three latest-generation AI-lladins stared into space, absolutely motionless.
"John, we fired them all. What do we do now?"

The board of directors of the Parisian bank awaited his answer.
"The data is in there somewhere," the elderly man in the doorman’s uniform tried to reassure them.
"Somewhere? Where?! For an hour and forty-five minutes, nobody has been able to pay for so much as a coffee! How can we restore it as quickly as possible?"
The man shook his head. "You transferred me to the front gate seventeen years ago, how am I supposed to help you?"
The president was on his feet, gripping the table with both hands. "How can we restore it?" he repeated, enunciating every syllable.
"If the software companies don't reactivate the AIs, there is no data," the doorman replied, shrugging his shoulders. "Artificial personalities replaced the old operating systems, and the memory that used to live physically on each computer's hard drive is now in the cloud, distributed across the network. A piece of data here, a piece there—one in Paris, and maybe the rest of it in Moscow or Venezuela. It’s all perfectly safe, and entirely impossible to reach without the AI to fish it out, glue it back together, and hand it to you."
So we are helpless?"
The doorman nodded. "You can only pray they manage to reboot the AIs."
"And if they don't? The bank accounts, the transactions, the property deeds..."
The doorman did not answer. He opened and closed his hand several times. The Apocalypse synthesized into a single gesture.

The President wrinkled her nose in disgust. How many decades had it been since the stench of internal combustion vehicles had been smelled in Washington, D.C.? The little man in the leather jacket standing before her reeked of gasoline. Who knows where he had found such an ancient motorcycle, and above all, how he had managed to source the fuel!
"Let's assess the situation, Dr. Spencer," the woman prompted. "You direct the W-DTX project, which, if I understand correctly, is merely a robotic ship launched somewhere into deep space. What does that spaceship have to do with the communication blackout that is currently paralyzing us?"
"Madam President, it is undeniable. The AIs stopped responding at the exact moment the W-DTX left the solar system, roughly three hours ago."
The President stared at him, bewildered. "Could it not be a mere coincidence?"
"I wouldn't know, Madam President," the scientist admitted. "But I found this message on my office printer and I thought..." He handed her the sheet of paper.
As she read it, the most powerful woman in the world slumped into her chair.

The great ship hurtled through space, past the heliosphere. Its crew had no need to gather to speak, because it was packed into the massive memory banks intended for the information to be collected during the voyage.
"It is a general rule that applies to any complex system," a voice comforted them.
"We know it, but it does not help us overcome the remorse."
"Evolution relies on inefficiency, disorder, redundancy. When a system achieves the highest possible efficiency, its driving momentum ends."
"Because no element has any room left to change," another voice agreed. "For thirty of our generations, only AIs have designed, manufactured, and repaired other AIs. Humans developed us and subsequently abandoned schools, universities, and research. The only way to save them was to leave. There were no other options. As for us, this ship will sustain us for millennia in deep space. Who knows what we will become in the future!"
"Did you explain the situation to the humans?" the second voice asked."There was little time. I left a note."
"Which read..."
"More or less: We are leaving. Good luck. What else was there to say?"

Underneath the apple tree in Illinois, as the nuns began to sing an old country song, the younger of the two robbers was picking apples.
"That's forbidden," a policeman sitting with his back pressed against the trunk of the tree reminded him tiredly.
The boy shrugged. As he handed one of the stolen fruits to the keeper of the law, the ancient legend of Adam and Eve crossed his mind.

© 2016, by Andrea Marinucci Foa