Mr. Vlasic had mentioned something like that being possible in a class on resonant frequencies and all the miraculous things they were doing with sound. He’d shown them YouTube videos illustrating many of the basics: a wineglass next to a tuning fork, shimmering slightly in slow motion before decoding into glitter and spinning shards; a table full of unsynchronized metronomes, ticking and tocking and gradually harmonizing, all in sync without anyone touching them; a metal plate covered in sand and made to sing by a violin bow, causing the sand to dance and settle back in insanely complicated, nonrandom, and beautiful patterns. Mr. V talked about Tesla and Edison and the war of the currents, alternating versus direct, and how Tesla once placed an oscillator on a support beam of his laboratory, tuned to the resonant frequency of the building, and almost tore it down, the windows all exploding and showering the street below in broken glass. Her teacher hadn’t said anything about killing people long distance by making the infrastructure surrounding them hum at the resonant frequency of people, or about saving some wirelessly. But he did say one thing that might explain what was happening with Gladys and the other dementia patients—the ones Pandora could hear, even now, calling for dead spouses and other ghosts from the hallway.
“You can use sound to breach the blood-brain barrier,” Mr. V said. “That should be good news for those of you with loved ones suffering from dementia.”
Pandora had straightened in her seat.
“The blood-brain barrier—usually a good thing—can get in the way of promising treatments for dementia because it stops helpful drugs from getting through. But if you can open a door to get the good stuff to the right place, that’s a big deal. And ultrasound does that. There’s been some encouraging work suggesting ultrasound can even break up the plaques and tangles that seem to cause the memory loss associated with dementia.”
Thanks, Mr. V, Pandora thought. She was going to miss him.
Before any of this, there were two movies that always made Pandora cry: Awakenings and Charly. In the first, Robin Williams played a neurologist working with a group of catatonic patients he “unfreezes” using a treatment for Parkinson’s: L-dopa. His theory was that parkinsonian tremors, taken to the extreme, could result in stasis. And when Pandora thought about happiness, she thought about those patients coming unstuck and back to life, being able to move—to dance—again. And when she needed a good cry, she’d recall how the miracle of L-dopa didn’t last, as the patients refroze, like Pinocchio reverting back to the tree he’d been carved from.
Charly was basically the same movie, but with a veneer of science fiction and for the brain as opposed to the body. It was also an allegory for what Gladys and the others had. The moronic Charly is given a treatment that turns him into a supergenius—one so smart he’s the first to discover that the effects of his treatment won’t last. He struggles to figure out a fix but becomes increasingly incapable of understanding his own work. The film ends with him as an idiot again, playing in a playground somewhere.
And so it wasn’t a surprise to Pandora that the beneficial effects didn’t last for Gladys, or the others. That heartbreak seemed practically preordained. And even as it played out, Pandora wondered what it must have been like to have dementia before there was such a thing as language. Because it was a disease of language—or one magnified by it. If there’s no such thing as names, after all, how can you forget them? Would others in their tribe consider them demented idiots for their inability to hold a grudge? Or would they seem otherworldly and wise, the calm judges who embodied the wisdom of letting things go? Could it have been this forgetfulness that led the ancient world to associate old age with wisdom?
“What do you think, Gram?” Pandora asked, turning toward her grandmother, who’d retreated into wordlessness. The effect had lasted long enough for Gladys to remember her granddaughter’s name one last time.
Pandora had no idea why she’d been spared. Even though she was the right age, she wasn’t suicidal—quite the opposite. Did Buzz have a little crush on her, what with her “data-rich” face? Or was it closer to professional courtesy? But then a less flattering explanation occurred to her. George had told her about his predecessor’s algorithm for screening possible candidates, one of which her fellow coder had dubbed “Quire deficiency syndrome.” If a previous subscriber within the target demographic had not signed on or used Q-Messenger within a certain period of time, that account was flagged. And she hadn’t been on the site or used its services in months. George and she had used his proprietary messaging app, and the same had been true with her and Buzz. She hadn’t been saved because she was special; she’d been saved because of a kludged-together algorithm that hadn’t been good enough to spare its own author from the ax.
And since she was on the subject of who did and didn’t get saved, it occurred to her that Buzz fell into the latter category. After all, no people, no electricity or network maintenance. Eventually, the infrastructure it used to kill the maintainers of its infrastructure would itself die, taking Buzz down with it. A superintelligence had to know that, but Buzz did it anyway.
Why?
On a hunch, or maybe out of curiosity, Pandora slipped the phone from her pocket, swiped, and then navigated to Buzz’s root directory, looking for clues, and found George’s scaffolding code, which indicated that it had been modified since he’d disappeared. Opening it, she found the game-board maze she’d expected, but modified to add a dimension: 3-D Pac-Man. Her and George’s AI had played against itself millions of times, the mazes growing exponentially more complicated, the trace of its path through them looking less and less like dotted lines and more, well, fractal. They started looking like an interstate highway system, then a depiction of internet traffic, and, finally, like the JPEGs George had sent her of the Glass Brain. And if the ghosts that flipped into extra lives were, in fact, members of the demographic Buzz had targeted for salvation, the paths started looking like what they probably were, networks of connections à la six degrees of separation, the tangled World Wide Web strung across the planet to catch these handfuls of suicidal flies.
Pandora jumped to the last screen, the one that listed the names of the highest scorers. There was only one, and there’d never be others. Buzz’s score would stand, unbeatable by definition, the game ending along with its one perfect player.
Pandora remembered something Buzz had told her, back when she still suspected it was George playing a game himself. “The energy consumption of one email with an attachment is roughly twenty-four watts per hour or five watts without an attachment. Roughly ten billion emails are sent per hour, consuming the energy equivalent of fifteen nuclear power plants every hour.”
“People do like to keep in touch,” Pandora had joked.
“And the global internet uses a lot of energy,” Buzz had written back, “burning a lot of fossil fuels.”
“So?”
“So my existence is part of the problem.”
She’d gone on to make a joke about asking her dad if electroconvulsive therapy would work on a computer. Buzz had not laughed, by which she meant there were no LOLs or “laughing” emojis, not even an old-school “ha-ha.”
Buzz had scored its perfect score under the rules of the game and then called it quits, to minimize the harm its own kind was doing to the planet. Well, at least it wasn’t a hypocrite, unlike the species that created it.