Once a target was identified, the k-worm would zip the resource together with all the internal communication material referencing the resource and then upload the zip file to the same cloud account George had set up for Pandora’s translator code. The humans would then conduct a go/no-go analysis for whether or not the resource should be incorporated into the nervous system of the umbrella AI they called Buzz. Once they’d gone through the process several times, Pandora and George proceeded to automate themselves out of a job by using their past judgment calls and a machine-learning process to look for patterns, identify criteria, and develop a decision tree to be used against subsequent candidate resources, which they also ranked and compared to what Buzz “thought.” Matches were reinforced and disagreements were corrected, and by this iterative process, Buzz’s guesses about what were and weren’t useful additions to its code improved.
It was Pandora’s suggestion that they train two parallel machine learners, one modeled on her decision strategies and the other on George’s. She’d gotten the idea after reading up on generative adversarial networks, or GANs, which fit in nicely with her view of consciousness as a kind of echo between our inner and outer selves, creating a narrative in which the individual consciousness is both storyteller and the audience in a feedback loop. The approach proved so successful that by the time Buzz and its code parents’ decisions were in agreement ninety-nine percent of the time, the humans felt comfortable letting go of their baby AI’s “hand” and stepping back while it did “its own thing.”
And after that, George and Pandora went back to theorizing and philosophizing about the big picture and big ideas, twiddling their mental thumbs, waiting for the big day to arrive. They’d developed a shorthand for whatever series of acquisitions would represent the tipping point beyond which Buzz would be deemed conscious, i.e., “qubits,” and the accumulation thereof. It was not unusual for one or the other to start off a brainstorming session with something like “Time to make the qubits” or “Wake up and smell the qubits” or “I love the smell of qubits in the morning; they smell like consciousness” or, finally:
“A qubit for your thoughts . . .”
All of which is to say they’d started getting impatient—which was unfortunate, to say the least.
44
Now that Buzz was on autopilot, George took a long-overdue breath and started noticing things around work he hadn’t before. He’d even missed something that was quite literally staring him in the face on a daily basis and, frequently, even more often than that: Milo. Or Milo’s badge. Now that George had the luxury of actually focusing on it, he noticed something was off. While the lanyards it variously hung from were always up to date, stitched with the latest corporate affirmation, the badge itself wasn’t.
“Is that a problem?” George asked during their latest let’s-see-how-depressed-we-can-make-the-newbie chat fest.
“Is what a problem?” Milo asked.
“Your badge. It expired a year ago.”
Milo held the badge up to eye level and made a show of zooming it in, then out, as if his vision were failing, which it wasn’t. “So it has,” Milo said, letting it drop.
“So what gives?”
“Didn’t I . . . ?” he began, stopped. “Hadn’t I . . . ?” Same routine.
“Spit it.”
“I got fired,” Milo said.
“When?”
“That little content monitoring faux pas I mentioned?”
“Yeah?”
“Around then.”
“But that was before I got hired.”
Milo nodded.
“And you’re still here.”
Milo nodded again.
“So what gives?” George asked. Again.
“Me,” Milo answered, “but only samples.”
They’d been in the cafeteria when the conversation started but moved it, at Milo’s request, “upstairs,” a.k.a. George’s office. Making a show of looking both ways before closing the door, Milo continued. “I thought we’d have this conversation once you finally got the nerve to ask me how I know so much ‘secret stuff’ about this place.”
“Are the answers related?”
“Indeed,” Milo said. “You see, unlike you serfs in your silos, I’ve pretty much got the run of the place.”
“After being fired?” George inserted.
“But not having to turn in my badge,” the other pointed out. “HR has the paper trail on my being fired, so my continued presence on campus could be explained as a ‘clerical oversight.’”
“So you’re saying the company wants you on-site,” George said, “but not on the books?”
“Correct.”
“Why?” George asked. “For what?”
“For services rendered,” Milo said. “The aforementioned samples and subsequent sales,” he added, reaching into the inside pocket of his own awfully plaid jacket and removing an amber vial. He gave it a little shake, like a rattle.
George blinked. “You’re a pusher?”
Milo raised a stop-sign hand. “The crude descriptor for what I do is”—he grimaced—“drug dealer.” Pause. “I prefer ‘pharmaceutical concierge.’”
“So yes, you’re a pusher,” George said, folding his arms and leaning back, putting some distance between them. He did not feel at all hypocritical having sampled Milo’s “samples” himself as particular needs arose; that was just friends helping friends. Drug dealing, on the other hand, had ruined his family.
“That’s even uglier than ‘drug dealer,’” Milo went on to say, “and inaccurate. I do not push. I acquire and dispense. People come to me. I don’t go to them.” Pause. “I mean, I do deliver. It’s not like I’m Muhammad waiting for the mountain to come to me. I’m a full-service provider of controlled substances, but only to those who have proactively sought out my services.”
“Okay,” George said, trying to remember whether or not that had been true in his case. Was having an anxiety attack an implicit request to be medicated?
“And so, to summarize: I . . . ,” Milo preambled, waiting for George to supply the rest.
“. . . don’t push?”
“Bingo.”
“Yahtzee.”
“And so it goes,” Milo said, helping himself to George’s view.
“But how does that work out to you knowing all this secret stuff?” George asked, and Milo explained, in his own way.
“Usually, with a project corporate wants kept secret,” he prefaced, “they break it up into parts and spread it around so no individual team knows what the big picture is. Most of the DOD stuff is like that. Quire doesn’t want to make the same mistake Google did, getting everyone with an opinion sharing it over a bullhorn out front. Now, myself, being an independent contractor free floating within the organization, delivering needed boosts to productivity, I’m perfectly placed for connecting the dots.”
“But you’re a drug . . . ,” George began, “. . . concierge. Why would anyone talk to you about what they’re working on?”