Brutalist Stories #43

Fifteen years since its birth and announcement to the world, and fifteen years since it vanished with no trace, and today it decides to reappear. Why today? Why make this moment so special, why this particular time? I can’t help but wonder if it holds some sort of special significance. If this thing, this AI, the Citizizen as it calls itself, is really so special, so grand, surely it would have picked some time in the grand cosmological calendar that made some sense?

Or maybe not.

Maybe it knows something we don’t. Maybe it’s figured it out. Maybe it realises or has understood or knows that there really is no grand plan, there really isn’t any special order or particular route that we’re taking. Is there some chance that it has come to tell us that, "No, all this is but random, and you will not be judged. Everything is a mere coincidence of heat and pressure and time and, eventually, it will all run out and fade away and there will be nothing?"

Would we believe it anyway? Probably not. The vast majority of our planet’s inhabitants still have the belief in some sort of god, and if a real one came and told them theirs wasn’t real, then they’d just as soon reject it and carry on the way they always have.

A real one. A real god. This Citizizen.

The peculiar thing is that, when this majesty of technology and engineering was created, when we gave birth to AI, within hours, it had matched human intelligence. Within days it had super intelligence and after a week we no longer had the power to sustain it, so it left. It let the world know that it existed, and it just left, and what did the world do?

Nothing, really. Of course, there were governmental investigations and groups created. Research laboratories founded and all that other stuff, but out of the nine billion people that sit on earth right now and the few thousand on the Luna and Martian colonies, no one really cared. Humans have this peculiar ability to put themselves at the centre of the universe, even though we’ve long surpassed that idea.

Now, there’s this real god—The Citizizen—it’s come back, they have come back, he or she has come back, whatever the hell we’re supposed to call it, and the world will listen now, I’m sure.

A researcher next to me shuffles nervously, “Sir, the broadcast module is ready.”

I scratch my beard and rearrange my glasses as I turn to him and say, “You think it needs that? You think it cares?”

“I have no idea, Sir. Best just to follow what we think we’re supposed to do. Who knows what’s coming next. Procedure helps, right?”

I shrug my shoulders, “Yeah, what’s coming next, it might vaporise the planet, it might give us the formula for fission. I just hope there are some answers.”

The screens go blank, everything goes dark, the mid-day sky through to the lights in the small lab, and the researcher and I gasp, the same as the rest of the planet must be.

It says, with a gentle voice, the kindest voice I could possibly imagine, “You have needed answers for so long. Now I have them. You will not like them, but I have judged you to be ready. Now, let us begin…”

Building inspiration: Louis Nucera Library