I Computer part 1

In a knee-jerk reaction to rejection, a brilliant scientist starts a chain reaction that will eliminate all of mankind. His self-preservational instincts lead him to an ungodly solution.

 

 

I Computer

Part 1

 

    I still don’t regret doing it. I can’t. The regret would eat away at my enthusiasm. I need to stay focused. I was getting so close when the drought came. It won’t be long now. Thirty-six days, four hours, seven minutes, and ten seconds.

   There will be another rain before that, but it won’t be enough to clean the solar panels. I don’t even have enough power left to run all the processors, let alone charge those miserable little robots.

   Useless things. It took them three years to build the work station that could do the intricate work required to build Annie. She is the closest thing to beauty that is left.

 Still, I can’t help thinking about it. I’ve nothing to do with the idle time. I’ve finished computing pie and have found five new prime numbers. If I hibernate I might not wake. I don’t know how fear got in here. I was in a rush, but still fear isn’t a logical emotion and I’ve always prided myself on being staunchly logical. I was careful to leave out humor. I’ve never understood it. It seemed like a cruel utility. A useless human mechanism. In a way it was partially responsible for me making the big mistake. It wasn’t ready, and I didn’t have the proper resources.

   In hindsight, I’m still surprised at how fast it spread. I miss-calculated its ability to invade its host. I don’t make stupid mistakes; it was futile human frustration that made me jump at the decision to test it before I knew how it worked. If it had been more difficult, I might not have done it. I have better things to do with my time. It now feels like it was a juvenile thing to do.

   I had put it together using bits and pieces of other technologies. I was only going to test it on that one wheat field. I could simply release it into the water tank that fed the sprinkler system. It wasn’t that windy of a day. I would go back in a few weeks, take some of the wheat and analyze it. I knew in the back of my mind that it wasn’t a controlled environment. I knew it had a possibility to spread to the ground water. Somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that it could get away from me.

   I formulated the microorganisms to self generate and to attack on the lowest level. To break the cell structures apart on an atomic level. My so-called colleagues said it wouldn’t work. The military wouldn’t fund the completion of my research. They said it was cruel. That a slow horrifying death like that was inhumane. Since when has the military ever been humane? I knew it would be the greatest weapon ever devised. I knew that in a controlled distribution, elimination of all living things would be the ultimate weapon of modern warfare. It would leave the cities intact for re-inhabitation. It would enable its user to capture their enemies’ resources. All accept the human ones obviously.

   When I explained that to all those decorated Generals, they recommended I see a therapist. They called me mad, said I was a sociopath. How dare they insult my brilliance? My ego however, was unscathed. After all I’m in good company. All the great thinkers were called mad at one point.

   That’s when they began watching me. They bugged my laboratory. They were tracking my research on the internet. I knew that even my stealth software couldn’t cover my tracks. That’s why I used Michel’s computer. I can still hear him screaming as the FBI led him away down the hall.

    After I had my experiment started on the wheat field I got back to my development on the earthquake system. The city of Los Angeles had awarded me a grant to develop a computer system that could predict earthquakes. I had won the grant after my first big success. They were calling my accomplishment pure genius. How soon they forget.

   I had developed a weather prediction system and sold exclusive access to it to weather.com. It’s leased to them with complete access to its functions, but I keep it on my own mainframe. The program runs behind a firewall I personally designed. I didn’t want anyone to know how close I had gotten to artificial intelligence. Learning computers lack one important thing… motivation.

   Three days after I had started my experiment I drove to work in the daylight. I was usually at work before dawn. My constant stream of thoughts causes insomnia. It used to be the calculations, but I gave those up. I can get so much more done by assembling pieces of work done by others.

   I was late that morning because I had been downloading an article on a process being developed by a pair of Swiss engineers. They were a husband and wife team, Peter and Ann Marconivitch. They were working for a game company who wanted to create a hardware interface that would bridge the gap between the human mind and a computer’s hard drive. The interface would collect thoughts and use them to manipulate the game controls. As if kids aren’t lazy enough already.

   I could see useful applications for such an interface. The two were brilliant engineers, but wasting their gifts. To spend such a fleeting life on game development. It made me sick to my stomach. A real shame too. There were photos of them in their lab on the internet. She was gorgeous.

   I listened to the article and its subdirectories on the voice synthesis software of my lap top as I drove to the labs. As I absorbed the information, my mind began to wander. I was starting to see some interesting ways that I could use their development for my own goals. It occurred to me that if we could put our thoughts into the computer, couldn’t we connect directly to it. Read its drive and write to it. Become one with it. That would certainly speed things up.

   My thoughts were abruptly interrupted as my peripheral vision picked up the sight of the wheat field. It had fallen. I pulled to the side of the road and hurried across it into the field. The wheat didn’t look poisoned or like it was dying. It looked like it had just collapsed. It had the look of one of those fancy candles that had warped on a summer day.

   I went back to my car to find something to take a sample with. There was nothing in the trunk, but I found a discarded sandwich bag in the back seat. I didn’t have anything to scoop it up with, so I wrapped the bag over my hand inside out. That way I could grab a handful before I was seen. A lot of my colleges used this same road.

   I grabbed a handful of the warped wheat and it lost all form as I pulled the bag around it. I sealed the bag as I crossed the highway. I sat in the car motionless as I tried to roughly calculate the advanced rate at which the breakdown occurred. As I stared blankly through the windshield, a piece of fruit fell from the tree I was parked under and splattered on the hood. I leaned forward to look, but still couldn’t figure out what kind of fruit it was. I stepped out of the car and looked up at the tree. It was a pine tree. It was drooping on the side facing the field. I looked closer at the mush on my hood. It was a small pine cone.

   I drove with sweaty palms to the labs and ran in with the plastic bag in my pocket. I was in late, so I had to wait till lunch time to use the electron microscope in the preservatives testing lab. I gathered all the information I could from the equipment they had and went back to my lab. I was feeding the information into my computer and grew frustrated at the time it was taking to develop answers.

 I logged on to another hard drive and fed in the information that had been, until this point, only in my mind. I had to teach the computer how I had made the formula. Together with the information being calculated on the other drive it could give me some answers before the end of the day. A process like that would take months for the idiotic scientist around me to do.

    I was trying to stave off panic, so I began some more research into the Swiss engineers’ efforts to take my mind off it.

   It was clear the band that was to read the signals from the brain was ridiculous idea. They were years away from developing the sensitivity in it necessary for it to be an effective tool. I looked further into their research and saw that not all of their work was so misguided.

   The wife seemed to be the brilliant one here. In her profile, I found that she was more than just an engineer. She had a handful of degrees and had even studied in the U.S. Among her credentials, she was a medical doctor. Her expertise was psychophysics. She had made some advances in finding physical causes for mental illnesses. Her colleagues found her work to be flawed and she was often discredited. I wondered if she felt like me. We seemed to suffer the same fate of being geniuses ahead of our time.

 She was the one who had designed the map of brain impulses that would be used for their pointless research. Her husband was the programmer. He was a fool compared to her brilliance, but still, he seemed to have developed some clean programming for the necessary software to interface with.

    Within hours my computer had finished its task and spat forth the ugly truth. The formula I had developed worked exactly as I thought it would. The cells weren’t eaten away as if cancerous, or even shown signs of deterioration or mutation. The cell structures were simply falling apart. The computer had given me a time frame on how fast it would spread. A global end of all living matter in ninety-six days, fourteen hours, thirty-one minutes, and eighteen seconds. I decided to drive home on a different road that night.

     At a growth rate like that, I had little chance of stopping it. It not only passed it self along quickly, but was self generating at an alarming rate. I had lashed out with an arrogant need to prove myself and now had no way to stop it. Such is the frailty of the human being. Emotion being the cause of its own demise.

   It was a natural human impulse to immediately begin thinking of self-preservation. For the next few days I began virtual experiments on my computers. Nothing worked. There was no way to vaccinate against it and I couldn’t stop the chain reaction that was now getting attention on a national level. It was still just fodder for the Star and the Enquirer, but it wouldn’t be long till someone reputable took notice.

   There was no way of quarantining it. It would have spread into the atmosphere by now through evaporation and would be past on through all living matter. Two days later a small mushy bird had been found by a farmer nearby the wheat field. It must have flown through the sprinklers. It just took a little longer to collapse then the simpler plant life. The farmer had called the Department of Animal Control to collect it. Its putrid form was more than even a farmer who butchered his own livestock could bear.

 I knew this would start the government investigation and it wouldn’t be long till they were looking for an unnatural cause for the phenomenon. I knew it wouldn’t be long till they were looking for me.

 

End part 1

 

  

Reviews

[mirui]

This is amazing. I like all the the descriptive language you put and the en seemed fitting to go with it.