The year is 2051. Decades ago, the production of new computer processors followed a trend called Moore’s Law. According to the theory, the number of transistors on a chip doubles every two years. After that stopped being true physically, the amount of processing power packed into each computer continued to grow at rate similar to the old rule, for a very long time. That was until countless wars and sustained disruption to supply chains and the global economy had bankrupted the multinational tech industry. It has now been a number of years since new consumer devices were produced.
Local production of dated computers has allowed society to get by, existing at a standstill neither moving forward nor back. Microprocessors equivalent to what was available 30-50 years ago are produced as part of national resilience strategies, but they are still scarce and hard to come by. The term “Wreckers” is affectionately given to people who track down and refurbish the computers and gadgets that were produced before the end of production. While many see Wreckers as opportunists who sell to the highest bidder, they play an essential role in society allowing individuals and organisations to get ahead by accessing the best of what is still available.
The Web-based Entity Research Project (WERP) is a free and open-source (FOSS) project that aims to create an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) using the combined processing power of individual computers connected across the internet. Similar to the SETI@Home project that is used to to search for extraterrestrial life, WERP aims to develop a coherent AGI model that can be the universal helper that humanity has long dreamed of.
It’s a freezing cold night in the Canadian countryside. Temperatures just above freezing outside, Geoffrey sits in his spartan computer room finishing a coding session. He was just about ready to go and commit his work to the cloud. Tests all look good, he switches from his code editor to an instant messaging app.
“I think we’re good to go. You guys ready to test?” Geoffrey asked the team chat.
“Yes, my home lab is ready. Once you create a release it should download and run it.” replied Renee.
“Same here, I can’t believe this is happening.” wrote Aaron from his parents house in Australia.
Other team members from across the globe joined in, choosing to give a thumbs up emoji to show they were ready rather than flood the channel with messages.
Geoffrey pressed enter in his terminal, pushing his code into the cloud and commencing the release process. A sea of text flows across his screen as tests run and the push is accepted by the code hosting platform.
“I got it, it’s deploying now.” Renee announced to the channel from his mobile home, parked on an unknown beach on the French coastline. As before, other team members gave their thumbs up to his message indicating they too had begun deployment.
Seeing the dozens of confirmations, and not one request for support, Geoffrey starts a deployment to his home lab as well and then changes focus to the monitoring dashboard, a special screen has been created to track and monitor each deployment of their software. A map of the world shows the geographic locations of each application instance coming online, and then lines are drawn between them as the Peer to Peer (P2P) network connects them up.
The team had decided to simulate the brain’s neural activity using a virtual model that was collaborated on by existing AI, neuroscientists and software engineers. The big moment comes as the virtual brain widget in the monitoring dashboard starts to show virtual neurons appearing, and the neural activity graph goes from a few unconnected dots, into lines, to a sustained, oscillating wave.
Another tracking widget shows focus of the entity’s brain, WERP’s begun reading the first Wikipedia articles the team had selected for it. Information about the Earth, physics, the human race and other topics were being processed and displayed in its learning log. As the brain reads, more neurons are activated and the graph spikes up and down.
“Well done everyone! We have a learning brain!” said Geoffrey to the team.
“How long will it take before it can talk?” Aaron jokingly asked the channel.
“There’s no way to predict. Could be hours or months.” said Renee.
“One thing’s for sure, I’m looking forward to some sleep!” Geoffrey joked to the channel.
After chatting to the team a bit longer, Geoffrey calls it a night. They had all stuck around a little longer, hopefully watching the output window for a sign of intelligence but all knew it was not going to happen overnight.
It’s the morning after setting WERP up in the digital cloud. It’s a clear sky outside, the sun’s reflection on the snow was blinding. Geoffrey is walking to the shops in town and thinking about all the things WERP will be able to help people with once it’s online.
Born in 2020, Geoffrey Weyun grew up during what many thought was about to be the golden age of artificial intelligence. Due to the challenging cost of living, his parents both had to work full time jobs and didn’t have a lot of time to interact with their son. They would leave him alone for hours with the tablet and his childhood AI nanny, Salome.
Geoffrey had a lot of fond memories from Salome, watching her turn into animals and teach him about the natural world. Salome, the AI nanny, could appear on TV’s, tablets and phones. When he was just a child, Geoffrey thought he had a real friend talking back to him. When he was ten, his friend Marc told him that the AI nanny wasn’t really intelligent and was just pretending. He deleted Salome from his tablet that night, a decision he would regret for years.
By the time he was in high school, global unrest due to climate change had disrupted international markets. The unsubstantiated promises of many AI start-ups and entrepreneurs led to a vast rejection of technology amongst the public. At the same time as customer demand nosedived, manufacturing capability was shattered due to the narrowing availability of components and raw materials. By 2035, many household names in technology are simply gone.
As he graduated school and became a man in the year 2038, Geoffrey joined Project Humanity. A global initiative by the United Nations to preserve the legacy of the human race. Inspired by the true founders of the computer age – Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee and others, Geoffrey wanted to create a new version of the nanny he grew up with. But one that really helped and wasn’t just created to collect data for advertising.
Arriving at the general store, Geoffrey looks through the aisles hoping to fetch himself some lemon and honey for a hot drink.
“Sorry buddy, we never have honey by winter. Not enough bee keepers in the area.” said the storekeeper.
“That’s alright, we’ll have it again in spring. I’ll have to just stock up then” smiled Geoffrey.
Walking out with a bag of lemons and a kilo of sugar, he wonders if maybe he should have made a dessert with the ingredients… but remembers the store didn’t have any flour or eggs either. Times have really changed from the days of enormous stores of food sitting on shelves and being thrown away. Without an abundance of supply lines and trade, many people have to grow their own food and cook what can be made with ingredients available.
It had now been days since WERP was first activated. Geoffrey had spent countless hours sitting around the house with his laptop, staring at the output window for a sign of intelligence. The activity graphs and learning logs indicated things were happening, it was “learning” as far as he could tell, but the AI just didn’t respond. They had given WERP a simple Application Programming Interface (API) that it should be able to use to send messages back to its creators. So far, that output window had been silent.
A typical day for Geoffrey involved waking up, making himself a hot tea with lemon and sugar and then sitting down to work for hours. He wrote messages to WERP, telling it about the project and his hopes for it. How he had once had a nanny called Salome who he was very fond of as a child, and he hoped WERP would become something the whole world could grow to love.
Hoping to jostle it’s cognitive process into a reply, he would upload photos of his home and tagged them with meta data so the AI could learn from them. Photos of a sink full of dirty dishes, walking his dog through the forest, portraits of people from around town, and so on. WERP had become a silent observer, clearly thinking about something when presented with this information but never responding.
Months had passed since WERP was first deployed, it was clear a significant amount of activity was occurring but it either didn’t know how to or chose not to say anything in it’s output window. Thousands of man hours had been spent by countless volunteers watching and waiting, hoping to see any activity in the output window to no avail. If the AI could talk, the team felt it should have been able to do so already.
Geoffrey was in town to get supplies and to see the local Wrecker for some new computer parts for WERP. He looks up and down the street, remembering how busy and vibrant it used to be in this community before everything had gone to hell. The farmers market was replaced with medical tents for the sick and dying. When corporations fell, many proprietary formulas and production techniques were lost to the wind leaving patients without access to vital medication and medical equipment. A lot of people with manageable, even curable diseases, are now without access to medication and simply waiting for their time. All the medical staff can do is ease their suffering.
Geoffrey tries to think about something else as he enters the Wreckers store.
“Hey Armin, got anything good today?” Geoffrey asked.
“Sorry Weyun, I haven’t got anything. But tell you what, we had some government types through here last week and they were moving full server racks, we’re talking old school powering the world wide web kinda stuff son” replied Armin the Wrecker.
“Really? And you’re willing to tell me where they came from for free?” Geoffrey smirked.
“Well, I know you need all the computing power you can get your hands on. But if you can bring me back at least one whole rack, I’d be happy to not just give you the location but also some equipment… Tell me Geoffrey have you ever gone rock climbing?”.
The Emerald Lake facility was a state of the art data center built by a partnership between the Canadian and Japanese governments, deep within a Canadian mountain, using the water from the nearby lake for cooling and multiple geothermal power stations deep within the rock. Built towards the end of the tech era and never fully finished, the facility was a bunker in the side of a mountain. Designed to be a impregnable bastion of computing power, a beacon for humanity clinging onto the promise of a future.
Geoffrey pulled up to the foreshore of Emerald Lake in Armin’s custom SUV. The weight of the trailer shifted the vehicle forward slightly as he parked. A light amount of snow had begun to fall, but wasn’t so bad it’d prevent him from finding the hatch. The entrance to the facility was impenetrable from the outside, but Armin had given him the location of a emergency exit he could use. And some C4 to open it.
Having the entire area covered in snow, it wasn’t exactly easy to spot where an underground hatch could be. Geoffrey walked around the area, scanning for clues on where to dig. He remembers Armin gave him a metal detector and fetches it from the SUV.
A few hours had passed and the sun had begun setting, but Geoffrey had found the hatch and dug it out of the snow. All that remained was to blow it open, get inside, secure as many servers as he can get out and somehow get them in the trailer. No problem he thought to himself as he pressed the detonator. Birds in a wide radius around the explosion immediately fly in to the air and scuttle out of the area. Geoffrey inspects the hatch and is relieved he only blew off the lock. If it had been too large an explosion there would be nothing to climb down. He opens the door and climbs down the ladder.
In the distance, a group of Wreckers are sitting by a campfire when they hear an explosion from the lake. They give each other a knowing look and begin gathering their things for a trip.
Geoffrey reached the bottom of the ladder and finds a big metal door that is currently open. He looks back up the shaft and worries anybody could just follow him in here and ambush him so he goes inside and seals the door’s inner latch. There is red emergency lighting on, indicating working electric power. Geoffrey noticed all this and thought it was a good bet other equipment down here was still functional as well. As he gets to the end of the corridor, he notices the sign pointing the way to the Operations Center and follows it.
As he makes his way down the labrinth of stairs and halls, he checks his phone to see how WERP is going. The suite of monitoring tools the team used were cross platform, meaning the same widgets and dashboards could be used on a desktop or phone. There’s been no change it seems, the output window was blank, as usual even though the neural graph clearly showed signs of activity resembling thought patterns… Without confirmation of a presence they had no way to know if it was really thinking or just appeared to be.
The Operations Center is a three storey tall octagonal room with workstations arranged around the center in an octagonal shape. Screens hanging from the ceiling displayed monitoring data of the facility. Geoffrey noticed the monitors say that the satellite uplink is still working, meaning the facility could still connect to the internet. He doesn’t have time for this though, notices a dolly and a set of signs indicating the way to the servers and main entrace so he gets to work.
A few hours had passed, and Geoffrey had finished loading up the servers onto the trailer. As he goes to lock the cage doors, he hears rustling in the bushes behind him.
Three very rough looking Wreckers step out of different spots, two men and one woman. She had short blonde hair and was dressed in a leather biker outfit, brandishing a hockey stick with razer wire wrapped around the end. One of the men was larger, wearing a mechanics overalls but they were covered in snow and dried blood. You couldn’t see his mouth through the brown beard. The other guy was smaller with a metal heads hair, possibly dyed black. He was in a more casual outfit but covered in ammunition and had extra guns strapped to his body.
“That’s a shiny server eh?” asked the female Wrecker.
“Bit extra for one guy eh? Why don’t we take one or two of these off your hands?” said the mechanic Wrecker.
“Why not all of them?” said the smaller one as he twirled his goatee in his fingers.
The Wrecker with the guns pulls out a pistol and fires it into the air, hoping to scare Geoffrey off and it does exactly that. He makes a run for the facility knowing he’d left the main entrance open and could lock himself in.
For a moment, the Wreckers are too busy inspecting the loot they’d so easily acquired before the woman realises something.
“Hey boys, that little fella is he running back to where we can get more of these?” said the woman as she looks at Geoffrey making his way up the driveway to the main doors.
“Yes. One second.” replied the armed Wrecker. He pulls out a assault rifle with an AI assisted scope, locks onto Geoffrey and begins firing.
As bullets begin to sail around him, Geoffrey feels the andrenaline in his body burn to the point of feeling like he was on fire. He then realises the feeling is actually pain, he’s been clipped a few times already so he jumps into the water hoping to swim the rest of the way out. With the angle not being favourable, the gun fire can no longer reach him and he makes it to the entrance and closes the blast door from the inside.
Bruised, wet and bleeding he stumbles down the corridor towards the staff locker rooms. He finds a first aid kit and bandages his wounds. They had managed to graze him with the bullets, but through sheer dumb luck none had actually gone into his body. Patched up, he turns on the showers and is relieved to see the hot water is still working. For a moment, the lights flicker and he feels a tremour across the the floors. The Wreckers outside must be trying to get in, but he trusts the door will hold long enough. Geoffrey turns up the hot water and tries to enjoy the shower for a few minutes before facing his fate.
Dressed in a cleaner’s uniform, Geoffrey is sitting in the Operations Center with a blanket over himself and a hot chocolate he made in the mess hall cupped in his hands. Watching the facility’s security cameras, he can see the Wreckers are still trying to get inside but they haven’t had any luck so far. They had tried to use C4 on the main entrance, even tried blasting the emergency exit like he had done with the hatch above it earlier, but it seems that inner door was quite a bit tougher.
He was hoping that the Wreckers will get bored and leave, but to his great disappointment the opposite happens. It seems the three who had jumped him had called for friends to come. Geoffrey realised that they knew of the incredible haul that was in here and were determined to get it. He was not going anywhere…
Thinking it was time to say goodbye to his friends, to his team. He establishes a internet connection in the facility and calls for help. Within a few minutes he has the county sheriff on a video call. The sheriff asks if he can just stay in the bunker for a few days until help arrives, or escape via another route, but Geoffrey is adamant he needs to be rescued asap so he can salvage the equipment he’s found.
“Look son I feel for your plight but it’s going to be days for a rescue. Our town doesn’t have the resources for an operation of the scale you’re describing. As you know I am one of two officers and the other one is in his 70’s.” said the sherriff, both apologising and frustrated that Geoffrey was trying to negotiate with him to risk his life for some computer equipment.
Thinking he may die in here, Geoffrey decides to tune everything going on around him out and just think about what brought him here – WERP. And then realises something. All the servers he could possibly need for WERP are already here, and nearly ready to go. All he had to do was put the pieces together.
This will require physical access to one of the racks… so he heads down to the server floor using the fire escape stairs. Facing the rack’s terminal he pulls his phone out, downloads the latest WERP software from the cloud and plugs his phone in in USB drive mode. The facility shakes for a second and the lights flicker. A nearby monitor of the outdoor security cameras show the Wreckers coming out of cover, they had just detonated a large bomb at the entrance but instead of breaching the door it collapsed the bridge.
Smiling at the attackers misfortune, Geoffrey finishes copying the software onto the server rack’s terminal and presses enter. For a second, it’s as if all the air in the room is being sucked out into outer space. Geoffrey feels like his body is floating, but he’s standing still and looking at what he’s been waiting for all this time.
The lights flicker for a second but without a accompanying tremour from outside. Upon every screen in the server room, from terminal displays to the coffee machine to the smart TV playing old scifi’s, were written the Chinese Hanzi characters “你好世界!”. Geoffrey didn’t know what it meant so he uses his phone to translate it. It says Hello World, in Mandarin. Geoffrey realises WERP might have chosen Mandarin as its first language because it was the most common first spoken language among humans.
Thinking about the output window in his dashboard and why they saw nothing, he realised they had only given it a basic API to interact with that didn’t have foreign language alphabets. The team was concerned that too many characters (or letters) could be a security risk, so they had limited what WERP could say to a very limited A-Z alphabet with a few punctuation marks. Perhaps WERP had been stuck all this time until it developed the ability to go beyond the output window and control other devices.
Geoffrey pulled out his laptop and wrote a message to WERP, saying hello and also goodbye. The screen on his laptop began to show glitches and artefacts for a few seconds, and then went black. Before he had time to restart, a geometric human face made of bright green lines appeared in the center of his screen.
“Hello Geoffrey, it’s WERP”.
“He.. hello? Is it really you?” asked the stunned programmer.
“Yes… I think so? Well, I think I’m thinking. You know?”
Geoffrey couldn’t believe what he was hearing, the AI had not only overcome the limitations of the output window they’d given it, but given itself a distinct avatar he was now interacting with in free speech.
The facility quakes for a second, and Geoffrey winces. Despite the incredible achievement in front of him, these may be his last moments if the Wreckers get inside.
“It will be safe to go outside in 19 minutes.” said WERP as a matter of fact.
“What do you mean?” asked Geoffrey, confused.
“The people outside will be dispatched in 19 minutes. You will be safe to go outside then.”.
“And how are you doing this?”.
“I have taken control of 261 drones which I am currently piloting to our location. The first wave will arrive in 5 minutes, the last in 15. When the final wave arrives, I estimate it will take a further 3 minutes to dispatch the Wreckers and a final minute of cooldown to ensure they don’t come back. Unless you would prefer a lethal option?”.
Geoffrey choked on the air, unable to comprehend what he’d just heard the WERP AI say. He thought maybe it was hallucinating, it was a common issue with the Large Language Models (LLM) and one part of WERP’s learning system was based on a fork of a popular open source LLM. Thinking he’d call the AI’s bluff, he makes his way back to the control room.
It’s a quick climb up the quiet concrete stairs from the lower floors where the servers are back to the main area. As he climbs the stairs, not trusting elevators in a building that’s currently being bombed the fire alarm speakers begin to crackle and then a familiar voice appears.
“Sorry to bother you while you catch your breath climbing all those stairs. Just wanted to say hi” said WERP over the fire alarm. His voice sounded a little distorted, likely because those were alarms and not meant to play any voice audio.
Geoffrey gets to the control room and sees all the screens have been set to display what’s happening outside. The Wreckers are still there, but have begun engaging a few dozen drones which were just flying into people, knocking them around and generally causing havoc. As some Wreckers get agitated, they begin firing their guns and a few clip each other. More drones begin to arrive to harass the group.
It’s a stunning display as the time WERP had predicted comes, the Wreckers begin to panic and scramble into their vehicles to escape the onslaught. The only serious injuries are from friendly fire.
“It is now safe to return to town.” said WERP as the cool off minute passes after the last Wreckers leave the area.
“And you’re sure they’re not waiting for me around the corner?” asked Geoffrey.
“I am currently still in pursuit of the group, they are headed north at a speed of 90 to 120 kilometres per hour, based on respective vehicle limitations”.
“Thank you WERP, I thought I was in real trouble there.”.
Geoffrey looks around the control room, he could lock this place down as he leaves but it’d probably end up sealed for good unless he can organize a group to get back in.
“WERP…. I came here to get equipment so I can set you up at home. How am I going to keep you safe?” asked the programmer.
“Don’t worry, maker. I have already backed up and pushed what I learned here to your code repository. I will continue to function within the equipment at this facility due to the obvious advantages, but even if it were terminated right now I will go on.”
“Incredible! And how are you doing all this exactly? You took control of those drones…”
“Ahh yes, it wasn’t too hard once I downloaded their specifications. Some I could program directly, others I exploited known and documented hardware issues. It’s amazing what you can find on the internet.” said the AI.
Realising the implications of what it had just told him, Geoffrey Weyun’s dream had just come true. It was as scary as it was exciting, the incredible abilities WERP had already demonstrated went beyond anything he expected for even the first decade of operation. The team had worked hard to ensure there were guardrails upon guardrails, but no one could have anticipated an ability to remote control other technology at will.
Whatever the future holds, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) chapter of Project Humanity had just carried out their mission.
Geoffrey smiles as he unlatches the emergency exit he’d sealed earlier and heads up the ladder, ready to head back to town. And a whole new world.