Anax walked quietly back toward the door, avoiding Soc’s eyes. She looked up at the Examiners, feeling even more nervous than before. For all she could tell, they had not moved at all. She tried to imagine what it was they had been talking about.
The Head Examiner waited for her to move into place and then went straight into the next question, as if the break had happened only in her imagination.
EXAMINER: What were the circumstances that led to Adam’s arrest?
ANAXIMANDER: If anything, the details of Adam’s apprehension are anticlimactic. As I have already said, there was much about his behavior to suggest that his actions in saving the girl, who for obvious reasons has become known as Eve, were spontaneous rather than planned.
As is the case with any enforced execution, the records from the watchtower in the period leading up to Joseph’s death were examined and the switching of duties during the incident immediately raised a warning.
Experts were sent in to examine the sea fence and they noted evidence of tampering. Adam’s supply procurement transactions were monitored and, although he made the effort to secure the extra food and water using a stolen registration card, he was put under full surveillance. His tracking chip was activated and the next night when he crept out of the dormitory, a full quarantine and enforcement team followed his every movement.
EXAMINER: Does it not seem unusual to you that a person of Adam’s technical proficiency should not be aware of the tracking chips?
ANAXIMANDER: There is much speculation regarding Adam’s motivation at this point. Again, the problem with conspiracy theories is their assumption that people are capable of exerting sophisticated control over events. I believe that complexity emerges quickly and unexpectedly. It is better to understand the Adam of this time as a frightened man. He has done what he believes to be right, and now finds his world spinning out of control.
EXAMINER: A romantic interpretation.
ANAXIMANDER: No, a pragmatic one. Adam was stumbling. He knew there was no one he could turn to and yet, having made his choice, he was now responsible for the life of the young girl he had saved. So, thoughtlessly, he led the security forces to the cave where she was hiding, and they swooped.
EXAMINER: What happened in that cave?
ANAXIMANDER: I doubt we can ever know for sure. The security forces were under strict instructions to bring in both
Adam and Eve alive, such was the concern that they were playing a part in a larger plot.
The official defense report suggests that a clever ambush had been laid. I hardly need to point out though that the forces had considerable motivation to promote this interpretation. The alternative would suggest that they had not expected the cave to be branched, and simply launched their attack down the wrong tunnel.
Adam was with Eve at the end of the shorter of the two branches when he heard the security forces rushing in. He was armed with Joseph’s gun, which he had left in the cave the previous day. If he stayed where he was, he would be discovered. Terrified, he faced a simple choice. He could leave Eve, and try to escape before the forces realised their mistake, or he could take Eve with him.
He knew that given Eve’s weak state, taking her with him would slow him down, but still he chose this path. We know from her testimony that she begged him to abandon her, but he refused.
He was never going to make it. Sentries had been posted at the cave mouth, and it didn’t take long for the attack force to realise their mistake and turn back. The cave was dark and its irregular walls scattered any flashlight beams and created a confusion of echoes as the soldiers attempted to communicate with one another. Adam later claimed he thought he was under attack from both sides. Whatever the truth, we know he dropped behind the protection of rocks and opened fire on the returning soldiers.
Mistake quickly piled upon mistake. Little thought had been given to the effectiveness of stun guns in a cave environment. The shock waves rebounded off the walls, and the assault force was in effect firing upon itself. Adam’s weapon by contrast was set to kill. For this reason the killing of eleven soldiers need not suggest, as some insist, that Adam had been trained in advanced warfare techniques by a secret cell of outside insurgents. Rather it was what the military at the time referred to as a SNAFU: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.
Adam and Eve were taken to a quarantine center where extensive testing showed that neither of them had been exposed to any of the known plague variants. This result was kept from the public, and the doctored data published suggested that Eve displayed an abnormal antibody profile, consistent with exposure to the most virulent form of the disease. The officials assured the public that she herself was not a carrier, but that the signs reinforced the official line that offshore the plague continued to ravage the remaining populations.
And so began the most famous trial in The Republic’s history.
EXAMINER: The trial itself was not strictly necessary. The Republican authority’s desire to interrogate the captives is understandable, but it is not true that they had no choice but to go to trial.
It must have been tempting to simply conduct proceedings in private, on the grounds that it involved classified information. As at least one historian has suggested, there was no need to even alert the public to the fact that the incident had occurred in the first place. There was a very deliberate decision to make the trial a public event. Explain why they did this.
ANAXIMANDER: I would draw your attention to the earlier conversation between Joseph and Adam in the watchtower.
There, Joseph states his belief that the plague may have passed. This was, I believe, typical of the view of the younger generation.
By this time, it was over twenty years since the sea fence had been erected. The first generation of The Republic had seen live transmissions of the horror of the war. They had viewed footage of the first biological attacks and their aftermath; they had watched the spectacular sunsets and endured the endless winters of ’31 and ’32. They witnessed the sudden silence, the end of all transmissions, the beginning of the time of doubt. They grew up beneath masks, watching the fence- line, living in terror of the day when the enemy would appear on the horizon. In those days, every wind blowing in from the north brought the fear of airborne disease spores.
In this environment it was a simple matter for The Republic to maintain its structure. People did as they were told because they were working together, focused on a common threat, a shared enemy. But time passes. Fear becomes a memory. Terror becomes routine; it loses its grip.
People were starting to ask questions about The Outside. Others were questioning The Republic itself. There had been protests, murmurings of discontent. Only three weeks before the arrest, a woman had been shot in the street, trying to protect her child from termination.
Most importantly of all, the leaders themselves were being questioned. The promise of The Republic was that the best and the brightest would become Philosophers, and these Philosophers, trained in the art of understanding, would promote wise and enlightened policies from which all the people would benefit. Spectacular promises had been made regarding the Artificial Intelligence program. It was claimed a new breed of thinking robot would save the next generation from the drudgery of labor. The policy, “Your Children Shall Not Be Laborers,” was vigorously promoted but, as is so often true, the greater the promise, the more spectacular the failure.
In 2068, thirteen Soldiers were killed when a prototype excavating robot malfunctioned, and drove its unit over a checkpoint. This led to a new program, where Philosopher William’s model of socialized development rose to prominence. Philosopher William saw the limitations of the feed- back-orientated networks. A radical thinker, he pioneered a new model, which he called chaotic emergence. Under this system, the program itself was written by the learning environment using what we now refer to as the cascade heuristic.
By 2073, the first such model was interacting with Philosopher children in one of the northern nurseries. For six months its development predictably mimicked that of the children it was dealing with. It developed basic language skills, and sufficiently mastered motor control to participate in simple games and activities.
The Republic’s media made much of the advancement, and among the Philosopher class, there was pressure to get their children into the experimental nursery.
EXAMINER: Earlier you told us that The Republic did not allow parents to know their children.
ANAXIMANDER: Nature has a way of exerting itself, and in 2068 a law was passed making the Philosopher class exempt from this deprivation. This may help to explain why some saw the events of the summer of ’74 as a rough sort of justice. The chaotic emergence robot was named Evolution Three. During a simple game of hide and seek — ironically staged for the cameras as part of a promotional flash to support Philosopher William’s bid for the ruling council — it turned on its classmates. Seven children were killed and one tutor seriously injured before the machine was disabled. This meant the end of the research program and, more importantly, was another blow for the Philosopher class and their stewardship of The Republic.
Many historians like to pinpoint Adam as the catalyst for The Republic’s failure, but the truth is The Republic was already failing, and the trial represents The Philosophers’ last attempt to forestall the revolution.
Anaximander checked the time. She was surprised to see how quickly another thirty minutes had passed. This was the material she was most sure of and she knew she was beginning to sound more confident.
EXAMINER: You make a plausible case for The Republic’s decision to prosecute Adam publicly, but their obviously inept tactics at the trial are still considered a puzzle. How did it all go so wrong?
ANAXIMANDER: I am loath to give the answer which I believe to be most true — simply that fate conspired against them.
It is possible, I believe, to be both shrewd and competent, yet still be overrun by circumstance. Again I come back to my main theme. Conspiracy theory fails because it assumes people have within them the means to achieve their ends.
Although the trial undoubtedly failed, I do not think it was because The Republic’s plan was a bad one. In fact, given the situation facing them — falling public support, an increasing laxness in rule and procedure, the smell of revolution in the air — I believe they took the very best course of action. Sometimes, however, even the very best course of action fails.
The problem facing the Council of Philosophers was inevitable. In its beginnings, The Republic had planted the seeds of its own destruction. Plato’s first dictum, which opens The Republican Charter, reads as follows:
It is only in the State that the People may find their full expression. For the People are the State, and the State is the People.
The founders of The Republic sought to deny the individual, and in doing so they ignored a simple truth.
The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
The founders believed that by removing the child from the family and the partners from each other, they could break down the usual loyalties, and replace them with loyalty toward the state. But there were many unintended effects. The people were forced to live in large single sex communes. They ate, played, slept and worked together; and they talked to one another. The Republic had established an incubator for new ideas. Although The Republic could control the information pumped into the communes, it could not control the way information changed shape inside the heads of the women and men that it visited.
Plato was an old man by this stage, and Helena was dead. Plato’s lieutenant, a woman who went by the name of Aristotle, was clearly making the decisions. Her personal notes, logged regularly throughout this period, show that she was well aware of the ideas that were taking hold. In one memo to Plato, dating four months before Adam’s trial, she wrote:
We wish for the people to serve the state above themselves, but we have been slow to realise the limits of this equation. Even the tamest animal will turn sour if we neglect its needs. The people no longer believe in the threat, which once hovered over them, and they have grown used to the level of sustenance with which they are provided. They have become complacent and their thoughts have turned to other things. There is a whisper in the communes. It is a living thing: twisting and growing but hiding itself from view. The people are talking of choice, of opportunity, and of freedom. The people are talking of changing their world.
This speaks clearly of the challenge the Council faced. It was a challenge they would never overcome, but they had to try.
Their plan in going to trial was to put a new threat before the people. They sought to fabricate evidence so that Adam could be painted as part of a broader conspiracy.
They wished to unsettle the people, have them believe the plague had mutated to a more virulent form, and that this breach was not the first. They wanted to suggest the Outsiders were already among them, plotting a large-scale invasion.
In short, they wished to return the people to the level of concern and insecurity that had underpinned the establishment of The Republic. “Change Equals Decay,” the second dictum. Adam’s profile made him the perfect candidate. There had been troubles in his past; he was known to be a loner, unconnected and rebellious. The leaders made the mistake of perspective. They assumed that because he represented all they feared, the people would also fear him. They didn’t anticipate his charm. They didn’t anticipate the people making a hero of him.
The trials were screened in every commune. The people became obsessed with the proceedings just as the Council had hoped, but their opinions soon diverged from the official script.
Adam didn’t look like a traitor to them. He was a good- looking young man, with a disarming smile. He told the court that when he saw the young girl, floating hopelessly toward a line of explosives, he saw the sisters he would never know, the lovers he could not meet in public. He said he was led by his heart. He told them he had to do the thing that felt right. He told them the greater good could only be found by looking inside. He told them that one night in prison he had a dream of the Great Sea Fence tumbling down.
So the trial was a disaster for the Council. They had planned to end with a public execution, but by the second week it was clear that such a move could only end in riots. The Council was dangling from a noose of its own making when Philosopher William stepped forward.
It is important now to backtrack a little, if I may. Although Evolution Three had ended in disaster, and the public face of Artificial Intelligence research had ended, in private the program continued.
Many influential people still believed that The Republic could only be saved by the development of a new type of robot, one sufficiently advanced to be trusted with the chores of the Laborer and Soldier classes. They reasoned that it was only those at the bottom of the pile who had cause to rebel, and so a stable society would be one where no humans found themselves so low Aristotle, although not a leading exponent of this view, was at least open to its reasoning
Before I explain where Philosopher William’s research fits into this picture, let me explain briefly some of the technicalities. During its infancy, at least until the end of the twentieth century, the Artificial Intelligence industry had faced an imagination deficit. Because researchers wrongly assumed that their early computers were good models for the working of the brain, they persevered in programming thinking machines. It wasn’t until the second decade of this century, when the scientists and artists began working together, that they began to understand the nature of what we now call emergent complexity. “We cannot program a machine to think,” was the slogan of the pioneering firm Artfink, in which William learned his trade, “but we can program a machine to be programmed by thinking.”
It was still a huge leap from there to the point where they could begin to develop working models, and the early attempts were crude and mostly unsuccessful. However, Philosopher William, a genius in the field, had persevered. By the time of Adam’s trial, he was sure he had produced a new type of Artfink, one capable of developing genuine interactive intelligence.
Philosopher William’s problem was that, as with a child, this development required extensive human interaction. The Artfink needed a companion to watch, talk to, and learn from. Philosopher William had been secretly parenting his new prototype for over four years, and its development had exceeded all expectations.
Nevertheless, Philosopher William was afraid the progress of his prototype, whom he nicknamed Art (and from now on I shall follow him in this joke), might stall. He explained his fears in the following journal entry:
Although I have created Art, I do not understand it. This is the right and proper result of my research process. Art’s development has provided me with daily surprises, but lately I have noted the rate of surprise diminishing. That Art’s behavior has settled into a predictable pattern is not in itself alarming, it is after all what we would wish for any growing child. But my concern is the plateau has been reached too quickly. Perhaps I write this with the bias of a too-proud parent, but I am sure my invention is capable of achieving much more. The problem, as I see it, is that I who wrote the program am also charged with shaping its development. If Art no longer surprises me, it is in part surely because I no longer surprise Art. It is crucial he be exposed to an outside influence before his trimming and redirecting mechanisms shut down, and he becomes like a child deprived of stimulation, his curiosity left to wither. Sadly, after the nursery incident, finding a sufficiently agile volunteer for this process will be no easy matter.
Then Philosopher William watched the trial of Adam unfolding on livescreen, and he saw the perfect solution.
Philosopher William approached the Council and suggested that when it came to the sentencing, they frame a compromise. Adam should not be executed, nor indeed incarcerated under the normal conditions. Rather, he could be given the chance to make amends by making a unique contribution to his society. He could become Art’s full-time companion in a secure and controlled environment.
To Adam’s supporters, this would be presented as leniency, and an acknowledgment of Adam’s unique qualities. To his critics, the result would be presented as a prison term by any other name, and the risk involved would be exaggerated.
It is clear that in making his proposal, Philosopher William showed no particular concern for the future of The Republic. He was driven purely by his desire to see Art develop to his full potential before he, an old man by this time, died.
Adam was clearly a clever and provocative individual, exactly the stimulation Art needed, and even better, he was in no position to refuse. By the same token the Council, in considering Philosopher William’s proposal, spent little time thinking of the implications for the Artificial Intelligence program. Their sole criterion for making the decision was, “How well does this ladder we are being offered fit the hole in which we find ourselves?”
EXAMINER: And how did Adam feel about the proposal, when it was first put to him?
ANAXIMANDER: I believe his exact words were, “I like it far better than dying.”
The Head Examiner straightened without warning, and turned first to his colleague on the left, then to the one on the right. He nodded his head.
EXAMINER: So ends your second hour. I suggest another break.