Factoring Humanity

At first Heather was afraid there was no way to tell which order the panels went in — left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. But the answer was clear on closer inspection; one edge of the frame was broken in a few places. Above the rightmost panel, there was a single pixel isolated by a blank pixel on either side; above the next panel, there were two isolated pixels; above the third, there were three; and above the fourth, there were four — clearly numbering the panels in order from right to left.

The first panel — the one on the far right — showed a number of free-floating units that looked like this, representing each one bit as an asterisk and each zero as a space:

******

* ** *

******

The second panel at first seemed to show much the same thing. The overall deployment of groups was different, but looked equally random. But after concentrating on it for a bit, Heather realized that two of the groups were different. They looked like this:

******

**** *

******

Josh had immediately dubbed the first type “eyes” and the second type “pirates.” It took Heather a moment to get it; by pirates, he meant that one of the eye holes was covered over by a patch.

In the third panel, there were many more pirates than eyes, and they had all arranged themselves so that they surrounded the eyes.

In the fourth panel, all the eyes were gone; only pirates were left.

Heather knew that Josh had had an interpretation, but she chose not to press farther into his mind; she wanted to see if she could solve it for herself.

But finally she gave up and probed Josh’s memories again. He’d seen it rather quickly, and Heather was angry with herself for not getting it on her own. Each group consisted of eighteen pixels — but of those eighteen, fourteen created a simple box around the central group of four: it was those four that — quite literally — counted. Stripping out the frame, and assigning ones and zeros instead of asterisks and spaces, the eyes looked like this:

0110

And the pirates like this:

1110

Binary numbers. Specifically, the eyes represented the binary equivalent of six, and the pirates represented the binary equivalent of fourteen.

The numbers meant nothing special to Heather.

And nor had they at first to Josh. But while Heather was bunched up inside a hypercube, Josh had had access to the library in the telescope building in Algonquin Park, and the very first book he’d opened — The Chemical Rubber Company Handbook of Chemistry and Physics — had the periodic table printed inside its front cover.

Of course. Atomic numbers. Six was carbon.

And fourteen -

Fourteen was silicon.

It had hit Josh in a flash. Heather wasn’t sure whether the shock she felt was all her own or some of his, too — a ghostly echo.

The first panel showed carbons going about their business.

The second, the advent of silicons.

The third, the silicons completely surrounding the carbons.

And the fourth, a world with only silicons left.

It couldn’t be plainer: biological life, based on carbon, being supplanted by silicon-based artificial intelligence.

Heather searched Josh’s mind for the identity of the star the message had come from.

Epsilon Eridani.

A star that had been listened to countless times by SETI projects. A star from which no radio signal had ever again been detected.

Like humanity, whatever civilization had existed around Epsilon Eridani had preferred to listen rather than to broadcast. But one message — a final warning — had been sent by someone from there, before it had been too late.

Heather, Kyle, and Becky met for lunch that day at The Water Hole, which was filled mostly with tourists, this being a Sunday afternoon. Heather told them what she’d plucked from Josh Huneker’s dead mind.

Kyle exhaled noisily and put down his fork.

“Natives,” he said. “Like Native Canadians.”

Heather and Becky looked at him quizzically.

“Or Native Americans — or Australian aborigines. Or even Neanderthals — my friend Stone was telling me about them. Over and over again, those who are there first are supplanted — totally and completely supplanted — by those who come later. The new never incorporates the old — it replaces the old.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how many papers I’ve heard at AI conferences suggesting that computer-based life forms would look after us, would work in tandem with us, would uplift us. But why would they? Once they’ve surpassed us, what would they need us for?” He paused. “The people at Epsilon Eridani found out the hard way, I guess.”

“So what do we do now?” asked Becky.

“I dunno. There was this guy — a banker named Cash — who wanted to bury the research I was doing in quantum computing. Maybe I should have let him. If true consciousness is possible only through a quantum-mechanical element, then maybe we should give up our experiments in quantum computing.”

“You can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” said Becky.