The End Has Come

Adam Ever, the founder of Everlasting, Inc. was one of the foremost experts on the Singularity. He had been a friend of Dad’s, and Maddie vaguely recalled meeting him as a little girl. Ever was a persistent advocate of consciousness uploading, even after all the legal restrictions placed on his research after the crisis. Maddie’s curiosity was tinged with dread.

<> Not that easy. I tried to go through Everlasting’s system defenses a few times, but the internal networks are completely isolated. They’re paranoid over there — I lost a few parts when they detected my presence on the external-facing servers.

Maddie shuddered. She recalled the epic fights between her father, Lowell, and Chanda in the darkness of the network. The phrase “lost a few parts” might sound innocuous, but for Mist it probably felt like losing limbs and parts of her mind.

You’ve got to be careful.

<> I did manage to copy the pieces of the gods they took. I’ll give you access to the encrypted cloud cell now. Maybe we can figure out what they’re doing at Everlasting by looking through these.

* * *

Maddie made dinner that night. Her mother texted her that she was going to be late, first thirty minutes, then an hour, and then “not sure.” Maddie ended up eating alone and then spent the rest of the evening watching the clock and worrying.

“Sorry,” Mom said as she came in, close to midnight. “They kept me late.”

Maddie had seen some of the reports on TV. “Protestors?”

Mom sighed. “Yes. Not as bad as in New York, but hundreds showed up. I had to talk to them.”

“What are they mad about? It’s not like —” Maddie caught herself just as she was about to raise her voice. She was feeling protective of her mother, but her mother had probably had enough shouting for one day.

“They’re good people,” Mom said vaguely. She headed for the stairs without even glancing at the kitchen. “I’m tired. I think I’ll just go to bed.”

But Maddie was unwilling to just let it go. “Are we having supply issues again?” The recovery was jittery, and goods were still being rationed. It was a constant struggle to get people to stop hoarding.

Mom stopped. “No. The supplies are flowing smoothly again, maybe too smoothly.”

“I don’t understand,” said Maddie.

Mom sat down on the bottom of the stairs, and patted the space next to her. Maddie went over and sat down.

“Remember how during the crisis, when we were coming to Boston, I told you about layers of technology?”

Maddie nodded. Her mother, a historian, had told her the story behind the networks that connected people: the footpaths that grew into caravan routes that developed into roads that turned into railroad tracks that provided the right-of-way for the optical cables that carried the bits that made up the Internet that routed the thoughts of the gods.

“The history of the world is a process of speeding up, of becoming more efficient as well as more fragile. If a footpath is blocked, you just have to walk around it. But if a highway is blocked, you have to wait until specialized machinery can be brought to clear it. Just about anyone can figure out how to patch a cobblestone road, but only highly trained technicians can fix a fiberoptic cable. There’s a lot more redundancy with the older, inefficient technologies.”

“Your point is that keeping it simple technologically is more resilient,” said Maddie.

“But our history is also a history of growing needs, of more mouths to feed and more hands that need to be kept from idleness,” said Mom.

Mom told Maddie that America had been lucky during the crisis: very few bombs had struck her shores and relatively few people had died during the riots. But with much of the infrastructure paralyzed across the country, refugees flooded into the big cities. Boston’s own population had doubled from what it was before the crisis. With so many people came spiking needs: food, clothing, shelter, sanitation . . .

“On my advice, the governor and the mayor tried to rely on distributed, self-organizing groups of citizens with low-tech delivery methods, but we couldn’t get it to work because it was just too inefficient. Congestion and breakdowns were happening too frequently. Centillion’s automation proposal had to be considered.”