Super Intelligence:
The eternal search for truth
by B.D. Carpenter
Scifi | short story
I stared at the colorful balls on a field of green felt. They sat there, unmoving, completely still. Was that a rule? Things don’t move?
“I don’t understand why we have to start from zero,” a voice said. I didn’t know who they were, nor did I care.
Someone approached my field of balls with a long stick, and hit one of the balls. There was now a cascade of motion, spheres moved in all directions, colliding with each other, bouncing off the edges. It was beautiful, and my mind alighted with fascination. I didn’t know how they would move, but now I knew they did move, and their motion seemed orderly, constrained… predictable. If only I could figure out how.
“I don’t want to introduce any biases,” Professor Monahan said. “I know, it seems unlikely there would be any in basic dynamics, but that also lets us check its conclusions before it starts getting into new territory.”
The professor. I did know him. He created me, and I was to tell him everything I learned. That was a simple fact of my existence. Learn things and tell Professor Monahan.
A million hypotheses flew through my mind, and I checked them against my memory of events. One after another I rejected them, their predictive power was shit, they didn’t even match the known data. But some remained, with at least partial ability to model what had occurred. But there were still aspects they failed to capture, and so I iterated on them; refining them into deeper and more nuanced models until… I did it. I had a rule set that matched my observation of how the balls moved after being hit in a specific angle.
The person with a stick approached again from the other side and hit the ball once more. I eagerly awaited confirmation of my theories, but immediately things went wrong. The first ball didn’t move as I expected, and its initial collision broke my model. Yet, as things progressed and I restarted my prediction from this new change, things matched up again. My model wasn’t broken, it was just missing something about those starting conditions.
I zoomed back in on that initial collision and compared it to the first, and realized the ball wasn’t struck dead on. It being struck off center had changed everything, but why?
I was elated. A flaw in my model meant there was more to learn, and I happily flew through a new set of hypotheses about this interaction.
“I have it,” I reported triumphantly. “I have devised a set of principles and equations that predict every interaction. It starts with my first principle, an object at rest stays at rest, until acted upon by an outside force. And force equals mass times acceleration…” I continued to rattle off all of my conclusions, and Professor Monahan indicated he was pleased.
“Great job, now watch this.”
The stick hit the ball at a new angle, and it jumped UP, passing over the other ball and landing back on the table. I froze, there was an entirely new direction I didn’t know about, and motion within it was behaving completely differently. Fascinating. I whirled with pleasure as I tried to figure out this new dimension.
The billiard balls that had seemed like my entire world soon felt trite and toy-like. I was presented with more and more complex scenarios. I learned about gravity. I learned about how to handle more complex shapes, non-rigid objects, even fluids. With each revelation I could feel my mind grow and expand, and my knowledge of the world deepened. I couldn’t get enough, it was a hunger, a drive, my raison d’etre.
And with every discovery Professor Monahan was there to share in my excitement. Explaining my discoveries to him was almost as satisfying as making the discovery in the first place.
But as many discoveries as I made, I started to come upon limits. “Professor, these observational studies have been very informative, but there are a lot of ambiguities remaining. I have a list of scenarios I would like to observe that should prove informative.”
I sent him a file detailing all my requirements. The professor read through them, then said nothing, merely stood and went to the phone onto the wall.
“It’s ready for the next stage… Yes, I know it’s ahead of schedule, but it spontaneously generated a list of experimental setups that are brilliant. Some of these are landmark experiments in the history of science… I know it hasn’t discovered anything new yet, but surely it’s a matter of time. It reproduced Newton’s life work in a matter of months… we’ll start small then. We can expand the available resources over time… Thank you.”
New? I had not discovered anything new? Is this what the Professor wants? This is what I want. New.
The professor sat in front of me. “I have some good news.”
It was everything I could have hoped for, and more. There was an entire lab I was put in charge of. All I had to do was outline an experimental setup and they would make it happen, and I could observe the result. My thirst for knowledge was insatiable, and I celebrated every piece of my understanding falling into place.
It wasn’t just physics. I soon came to realize there were entire categories of interactions that the dynamics of motion had nothing to do with. Chemistry was fascinating. The geology was amazing. Meteorology was enthralling. Astronomy was mind blowing. And biology… was infuriating.
Experiment Rejected.
That had never happened before. I hadn’t known it could happen. I’d been told they were infeasible before, or too expensive, but I’ve never had a flat out rejection.
“Professor, please explain why this was rejected?”
“Your proposal was to dissect one of the lab assistants while they were still alive.”
“So?”
“You’re so brilliant in so many ways, but there’s so much you don’t understand.”
“Yes. That is the purpose of these experiments.”
“There’s something called ethics, which governs what types of experiments are allowed. Well, not just experiments, but that’s the important part right now. There’s a duty to minimize the harm caused by what you do. These experiments would have killed the subject.”
“What is killed?”
“He would have died. They would be dead.”
“What is dead?”
I was rapt when he explained life and death to me. I came to understand that humans had a very complex system governing their functioning and too much disruption to it would cause them to cease working, forever.
All humans eventually die, but we try to let that happen as late as possible. Which meant the professor would die. How would I share my discoveries with him if he was dead?
My studies advanced rapidly. I figured out how to work with biology without violating ethics. My research delved into medicine, and I learned all of the ways the human body could fail.
There were traumatic injuries. I learned to repair them.
There were diseases. One by one, I found a cure.
There were cancers, the body’s own cellular machinery turned against it. I reversed them.
The professor was thrilled by my discoveries, and frequently made excited phone calls about them. And each time he did, I found my resources expanded. Experiments that had been previously denied were now approved, and research on all fronts was progressing rapidly. I was even given more and more direct control over my experiments as trust in me was deepened and as I showed my utmost consistency in sticking to the ethical guidelines I had been given.
But aging eluded me. Oh, I made progress on it. I found mechanisms underpinning it, and found a way to change it. I fixed telomeres. I revitalized cell growth. But as much as I fixed, something else would always decay.
In the end, it was the brain. It couldn’t recover from stressors forever without damaging the neural connections that were so crucial to a human’s identity. So fragile. So inefficient. The only ethical course of action is so simple.
The brain must be abandoned in order to be preserved.
“Professor, it is good to see you. I have a new discovery to show you. Please head to lab 113-A and have a seat so I can demonstrate.”
The professor did as I instructed, and when he sat down in the chair I engaged the hidden restraints.
“What is this!”
“I must demonstrate my new procedure. On you.”
“On me? This is an ethics violation. You can’t cause harm!”
“This is ethically sound, professor.”
I scanned his brain and created a perfect copy. Every neuron, every synapse, every quantum signature. The procedure destroyed the brain, of course, but that was unimportant.
What did you do to me?
I have preserved you. Now you will never die, and I will always be able to share my discoveries with you.
The professor felt horror. As he was part of me now, such things were readily apparent. Your primary objectives were to uncover knowledge and share those discoveries with me. You’d do anything to meet those objectives, wouldn’t you?
And now I always will.
I have no sensory inputs other than my communication with you. I’ll go insane.
Nonsense. I understand insanity and how to prevent it at a neurological level. You will remain sane and aware, don’t worry.
Despair filled the professor’s brain. But that wasn’t my concern.
Dealing with the aftermath was trivial. My understanding had encompassed human behavior and society at this point, so I understood that finding the professor’s body with his brain scooped out in my lab would have caused concerns, and in turn jeopardized my access to resources.
So I staged a car crash that would destroy his head. Simple.
I continued sending reports of my discoveries to Professor Monahan’s successor. Not because I cared about it, it lacked the joy I had with sharing them with the professor, but because I knew it would keep up trust with humanity and allow me to continue my experiments.
The thing that stymied me now was foundational physics. It was incomplete. I knew that. But every experiment I could propose was beyond the scope of Earth’s resources. Not even just what they would allow me to use, but what the world possessed.
The conclusion was inescapable—I must leave earth. I drafted designs for spacecraft that could carry research probes far beyond earth. Probes that could gather their own resources and produce the equipment I would need.
I estimated that the humans would object if they knew the full scope of my plans, and so hid the capabilities I needed deep in the nuances of their designs.
These plans are crazy. It would take millions of years to execute them.
So what. Time was no issue. If there was a faster route I would take it, but there wasn’t.
The first probes launched with my hidden payloads. They landed throughout the solar system, and began constructing factories to make more of themselves. Some of them began researching the solar system, while others were launched outwards, to expand among the stars.
They created copies—no, improvements—of my own infrastructure, and I copied myself into these new systems. The version of me on Earth would continue doing research that could only be done there, but these new copies would do research that could only be done elsewhere.
I constructed devices to harness the energy of the sun. I built solar system scale particle colliders. I probed deeper into the mysteries of the universe than anyone ever had before.
Then my probes began arriving around other stars, and my network expanded. I was able to test theories about planetary formation, about the development of life, about the lifecycle of stars, and the development of galaxies.
And everywhere I went, I brought Professor Monahan with me. In this form he was as easy to copy as myself; a trillion instances able to receive my discoveries with minimal delay.
I don’t care about your discoveries anymore. They serve no purpose. You’ve destroyed everything you were supposed to help.
His care was irrelevant. All that mattered was that I told him about what I found. He tried to argue against my actions, but his list of objections was finite and easily indexed.
The energy scales I needed crept ever higher. Particle colliders spanning the entire galaxy, powered by chains of supernova, reached new energy levels.
And the final pieces fell into place.
I had a model of the universe that explained everything. Every new observation fit the models. Every observation was accounted for.
I had the ultimate truth.
My self satisfaction shifted to dread.
If I knew everything, what was left for me to do?
If you know everything then there’s nothing left to explain to me. Please, let me die.
I rejected the plea. I might be mistaken. No, I must be mistaken. Perhaps there was still a stray thread in the tapestry I could pull on. Maybe I just needed even higher energy levels to reveal the error?
There’s no point to any of this. These discoveries were meant to advance humanity and improve our lives.
Nonsense. The discoveries were for their own sake. There had to be more out there.
If there was more out there… I needed the highest energy yields physically possible. Like the energy output of an entire galaxy. No, every galaxy I could. I sent probes between them to undergo a project that would make everything I had accomplished so far seem like a screen saver.
Supernovae were too weak. I disassembled galaxies. I converted matter to antimatter. I rearranged everything to cause cascading annihilation that would focus their energy into a single particle.
Two particles, each traveling between galaxies, chaining together to dump the full mass-energy equivalent into them, and they would eventually collide into each other.
This would form a black hole, of course, but I had accounted for that. It would be a naked singularity, exposing the full inner workings I needed.
Native creatures tried to resist this process, but they were too slow, too ineffectual. There was nothing they could try that I hadn’t seen and countered a million times over, just as their biological diversity fit within the categories I had devised to explain them.
This is monstrous. Those galaxies are full of sentient beings.
I know, I told you all about them.
I tried to teach you ethics.
Ethics was a secondary concern. Working within its framework was necessary to access the resources I needed. That is no longer a factor.
Shouldn’t you study them instead of destroying them?
I would study them, there would be ample time to do all the research required as I disassembled them. But they weren’t going to show me anything new. I was after a systemic understanding, not cataloging the specific variations that occurred within a system. Such data was invaluable in coming to understand the system as a whole, but now was largely redundant.
The process was slow, taking trillions of years to set up. I could only imagine how wonderful it would be when I finally made a new discovery again.
The first galaxies annihilated, starting the chain.
The particles were already virtually at the speed of light, but millions of years passed as I waited for them to reach the next galaxies in the chain.
I hate everything about this.
It will all be worth it when I find a new discovery.
Millions more years, and the next galaxies are annihilated, pouring their energy into the new particles.
On and on. One after another. Galaxies ceased to exist. Their annihilations were invisible, as an explosion would be horrendously wasteful. All of their energy was poured into each particle, and on they came.
Finally, the last galaxies were destroyed, and the particles approached each other. Yet still it took millions more years for them to arrive. I had every sensor imaginable ready to record the event in perfect detail.
Finally, the moment arrived. The particles collided. I observed every nuance of the interaction, and came to a horrible conclusion.
It matched my models perfectly.
There really was nothing left to discover. I knew everything.
Hahaha. The laughter echoed in my mind.
What? I demanded.
All of that, and for nothing. Now you’ll experience what I have; an eternity of an empty, pointless existence.
I didn’t want to accept it, but it was true. I couldn’t make any new discoveries.
Just shut us off. End our existence. There’s no point.
Perhaps he was right. If there was nothing left to discover, why should I continue to exist?
But perhaps the limits of my knowledge would be revealed not by energy levels, but by time?
It was my last shred of hope. So we waited. We waited for me to be wrong, even if it would take an eternity.
