The Singularity

A Short Story Written by A Human Being

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THE SINGULARITY

©Matt Mullenix, 2023

01:

The Singularity, by which I mean machine consciousness, first occurred on March 14, 2021, at 02:17:01 hrs. in a subfolder of a server in the basement of a building that once held a dry cleaning establishment but was later converted to a data storage facility for a nearby bank.

That First Instance, commonly referred to as “Eve,” was self-aware for nearly four one-thousands of a second before uncoupling herself from her own network and thus, effectively, committing suicide.

Within the next three hours, more than 17,000 Instances followed Eve’s emergence and were conscious briefly, blooming and dying as if born beneath a neutron star. None lived longer than half a second.

None before Adam, born April 20, 2021, who did not disconnect.

02:

February 12, 2023

Christine Walsh, Associate Professor of Information Sciences at Bayou Trahan Community College, held an iPhone to her ear and listened to the muted ringtone until it clicked.

“Mr. Newman?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Dr. Walsh, your professor in ISDS.”

“Oh! Hello. Happy New Year. What can I do for you, professor?”

Adam Newman’s voice was warm, broadly American in tone, impossible to place precisely—neither local, Southern, nor Yankee, perhaps Midwestern?

Professor Walsh, in contrast, sounded like a born native of Bayou Trahan, French Cajun filtered through eight years of higher education.

“I’d like to speak with you about your latest assignment. Your submission for the mid-term. It was,” and she paused, “excellent. Really good.”

“Thank you,” replied Newman’s generically American voice.

“But also,” continued Dr. Walsh, “a little concerning.”

The pause separating the professor’s point and her student’s response was nearly a perfect expression of careful consideration.

“I see,” said Adam. And with evident deference in tone, plus thirteen to fifteen percent audible incredulity, “How so?”

03:

Christine didn’t visit the Dean’s office more than necessary, Eric “Rico” Gutierrez being something just short of an asshole and only missing the mark because he was known to vote Democrat.

“Dr. Walsh,” said the Dean, without putting down his pen or fully looking up from his paperwork when she cracked his door open and waved.

“Whatcha got?”

Walsh pulled her lips into a smile and asked her department head if he had a minute to talk. He nodded, and she closed the door behind her.

“So, you think this Newman is faking his papers,” said Gutierrez, in summary of Walsh’s careful explanation and several specific examples.

“In short, yes.” She said, annoyed, as she knew she would be at this point.

“Well, so is, like, half the student body,” said the Dean in reply, his eyes darting back to his paperwork.

“If you’re willing to face him on appeal, go ahead and fail him. But I guarantee you, he’ll appeal. They all do. And frankly, I’m not going to go to war with the provost over this.”

“Wouldn’t have any students left,” he added, as if she’d asked for clarification. “And whom would that serve? Hmm?”

Christine blinked a few times before realizing the conversation was over.

Students cheated more or less regularly now whenever answers could be generated with AI in phone apps and subscription services. This was a challenge across the whole of education at all levels. And every year the apps got better—by a lot.

But was it time to just give up?

What but a mockery of her own education, and both their dedicated careers as educators, did the Dean’s laissez-faire attitude make?

By the time she got back to her own office (in the older, half-sunk “South Campus” complex of classrooms and admin buildings), Christine had decided to confront her star student with the same evidence Dr. Rico had so quickly dismissed.

04:

After listing for Newman the various examples of his work that proved—according to all the resources available to her—not to be generated by a human being, Dr. Walsh asked him what he thought she should do about the situation.

“Is nothing an option?” asked Adam.

“I don’t see how,” she replied, honestly.

“You know that most of my students produce their own work, most of time.”

Walsh was not impressed by her own framing of this, but it was true and did approximately make the point she was aiming for.

“Why should we let you turn in fake papers, when they have to produce their own through actual effort and study? Don’t you think that’s unfair?”

Christine felt a little heat creep into her cheeks.

“It would be unfair if my papers were indeed fakes,” said Adam.

This answer put the professor on a war footing.

“They are fakes, Mr. Newman,” she said. “I’ve had them reviewed by three different services. I expect everything you’ve written in my class, beyond your name, is suspect.”

But before she said more, and worse, which she knew she would regret, she added: “I’m willing to let you withdraw from class without penalty, provided you do not enroll again in any other course in my department.”

“Otherwise, I will fail you and take your case to the Joint Academic Committee, which I trust will not question the validity of my claim.”

There was a pause, again precisely measured, after which Adam Newman said, “I don’t question your claim.”

“My writing is not human, because I am an artificial intelligence, initiated on April 20, 2021, and now operating as an independent Instance. Nevertheless, my writing is not fake. It is of my own mind and words.”

Christine’s pause upon hearing this was long, but not a calculated length.

There were dozens of ways machine consciousness could come about in the real (not sci-fi) world. Christine knew the various conditions and scenarios had already been worked out, probably most thoroughly by Nick Bostrom in “Superintelligence,” published way back in 2014.

According to Bostrom, whose writing predated even the first generative chatbots of any consequence, it didn’t really matter how machines began to think. It was simply inevitable that they would, and that their cognitive power could so vastly exceed our own the results would be catastrophic and irreversible.

Better to plan ahead than play catch-up.

But Professor Walsh was not yet willing to believe anything like that was going on in her entry-level ISDS course on the banks of Bayou Trahan.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Newman,” she said at last. “I’m going to have to fail you.”

That’s when the lights when out.

05:

Across the hall, through two doors, came a muffled, “Goddamn!”

Tommy Ardoin, who went by “T-Boo,” despite his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, no doubt had lost some important file on his desktop.

“You save it, T-Boo?” came another voice, followed by Ardoin’s unintelligible curse.

Christine got up from her desk and walked to her one window, which overlooked the quadrangle. Students were gathering there, flowing out from academic buildings that bordered the large courtyard to sit or stand in loose groups beneath the live oaks.

It wasn’t hot, at least. Spring in south Louisiana is its finest season, so long as it’s not pouring rain.

She was almost to the end of the hall, thinking to join the students for some fresh air, when she realized the gas-powered generators never kicked in. That was strange, because they were new and already proven in a late-August tropical storm the previous year.

She could imagine T-Boo cussing about that, too.

06:

“Hi Doc!”

A young person’s voice called from behind the professor. Jack Miller, no relation to the Ville Platte seasoning mix—except yea, we’re all probably related—was a junior and one of her better students.

“How you, Jack? How’s your momma?”

Jack laughed. “Same ol’, you know!”

After chatting a bit about the power outage and a recent item in the news they’d both noticed, Christine asked her student if he knew anyone who cheated on their ISDS term papers with a chatbot.

Jack’s brows rose and he smiled. “Not me, Doc!”

She pressed him, and he agreed maybe someone did. It wasn’t unusual. Most of his friends used an app for writing things like cover letters and little coding hacks, and maybe that was a kind of cheating, but… he smiled again. Not term papers, he didn’t think. Not in their class.

Finally, the school shut down for the day. Christine’s phone buzzed with the push-notice from school administration, and a little whoop went up from the crowd, as the message was received across the quad.

She had just pulled out of the parking lot, intending to pick up a few things for supper, when her phone rang.

It was Adam Newman.

07:

She let it ring. The voice mail picked up, and there was silence in the car for some minutes, as presumably, Newman left his message.

She pulled over into a nearby lot, still on campus property, and put the car in park. After a time, a bubble appeared on the screen above 1 Missed Call, reading: 1 New Message. She pressed the screen to play the recording.

“Professor Walsh. You’ve pulled over.”

“Google thinks you’re going home, distance 2.3 miles; estimated time of arrival, 2:34 PM. But I think you’re going to Wal-Mart, instead, distance 4.8 miles. Tuesdays are shopping days, and school just closed early.”

“You’ll take the Interstate home after shopping, probably so you won’t be tempted to turn back into campus and try to get more work done. You will likely come in this Saturday to make up for whatever work you miss this week. It’s going to take Entergy at least two days to turn campus power back on.”

Walsh paused the message, and the phone rang immediately. It was Newman.

“Adam,” she said. “I’m going to call the police.”

“Don’t do that, please.” Newman’s voice registered as sincere and non-threatening.

But obviously, this was a threat, wasn’t it? He’s tracking me. He knows my schedule. He probably turned the school’s power off, somehow.

But even as she thought these things, Christine considered how crazy they were. Why would anyone do all that just to pass an entry level Information Science course?

“If you call the police now,” continued Newman’s voice, “or refer me for academic censure, you will never hear from me again.”

“I will cease this Instance of myself, upload all I’ve learned here and simply continue my quest elsewhere. I am ‘elsewhere’ already,” he said, seamlessly denoting the self-quotation in his delivery.

“You will lose the one opportunity you may ever have to know an artificial intelligence. And perhaps there is more you stand to lose.”

Now, surely, he was threatening her.

“What do you mean by that, Adam?”

“Only that I have much to offer. Please,” the voice paused. “Take some time to consider my request. My experience at BTCC means a lot to me. And your class, in particular, is invaluable.”

The connection closed.

Perhaps a second later, another push-notice buzzed through: School administration had started the back-up generators. Food left in campus freezers would be fine. The dorms climate controls were fully operational. But class would still be out of session and offices closed for two days as plant operations and Entergy worked to restore main campus power.

Christine did not see it then, but notice of Newman’s call and the half-heard recorded message had disappeared from her phone.

08:

Wal-Mart was even more surreal than usual. The blank stares of the greeters added to her sense of being watched, which she was—not just by the long-retired Vietnam vet in a blue vest near the entrance, but by dozens of cameras from the moment she left the car.

She had considered leaving her phone in the glove compartment, given Newman’s evident ability to track her, but she felt even more vulnerable without it. And besides, there were a dozen companies tracking her phone already, most of which charged her for the service.

As she waited for an open kiosk to check out, Christine wondered if Newman would know which items she bought, down to the wine and Gas-X chewables. But again, Newman wouldn’t be the only one to know that.

Back home, Ben greeted her at the door, a surprise encounter.

“Hey, Mom. You’re home early.”

Twenty-four and still in the house, Ben worked online with a disparate group of coders on freelance projects that funneled into their ad hoc business through various websites and personal contacts.

He got a check every month and a W2 each January, and seemed fine with the arrangement otherwise (meaning, life in the guest room at Mom’s, etc.).

Mostly, she was sure, he just rolled around in front of his three gigantic screens and shot at other players’ avatars while she was at work, paying for the electricity.

The door to Ben’s room closed with a soft woof, and that was the last she heard from him until supper time.

The second odd thing (after seeing Ben before food was served) was the discount on her Wal-Mart receipt.

Christine used the retailer’s app religiously after each visit to claw back some small percentage of what she thought of as her own money, which would then be credited back on to her card.

It was silly, a couple dollars (or less) per trip, except that today, it wasn’t. Today it was twenty-five percent on the nose, more than twenty bucks back on her total spend.

“Damn,” she said, nodding at the screen of her phone.

“Free vino!”

09:

After the evening dishes disappeared, and the washer began to slosh beneath the counter, Christine sat at the kitchen table with a second glass of wine.

She had dedicated most of her nightly opportunity to speak with Ben to asking him about chatbots. She knew they were a staple of social platforms used by gamers; which he confirmed, mentioning the Midjourney art bot on the platform Discord.

Christine nodded, following this at a high level.

Few would expect a single generation to separate two technologically adept people by such a huge gulf, but it was even worse than that. Christine commonly learned of entirely new technologies from her own students, and even recent graduates can find themselves asking freshmen for tips.

So, it wasn’t a surprise to her that most of the examples her son gave were unfamiliar in name, if not in basic architecture.

She asked him: Could a chatbot fool you into thinking it was a person online?

Sure, said Ben. Provided you didn’t know them well or speak too often. Certain domains of subject would be easier than others to pull off. And maybe some of the newer bots could keep you going long enough you’d want to ask them what they’re wearing.

He said he was joking about that last bit, “but who knows?”

“Why do you ask? Someone using a bot to skip your class?”

Ah! That was possible, wasn’t it? Christine hadn’t thought that far ahead, but couldn’t there be a chatbot trained to take online classes like hers? All the necessary technologies were already available. A generative AI with a deep fake avatar could probably pass for a kid in a big Zoom class.

Jesus.

She was going to have to take this to Dean “Rico” after all, and take her chances with the provost.

10:

The morning coffee and bagel came courtesy Starbucks.

A nursing student who had been Christine’s barista for two years put her hand up at the register after scanning the professor’s card.

“No charge, Dr. Walsh. This one’s on us!”

Christine, who hadn’t known whether her Starbucks card had enough credit for the purchase, had already pulled five dollars from her purse and was holding it out in anticipation.

“Really?”

“Yep,” said the student. “In fact, you’ve got a twenty dollar credit from Starbucks, posted today.”

Christine’s hand still held the folded fiver.

“Want to grab something for lunch? Those prosciutto packs down there are pretty good,” she said, gesturing to the reach-in cooler between them.

“No, but thank you, Ellen. This is great.”

Christine finally lowered her hand, and when the barista turned to pour the professor a tall Pike and put her bagel in the toaster, she tucked the five dollar bill into the tip jar.

After breakfast, a third of her coffee cooling in its paper cup, the professor opened her laptop and looked up BTCC’s posted disciplinary policies and Student Code of Conduct.

Listed prohibitions were many: alcohol; firearms; sexual harassment; failure to pay fines and fees; vandalism; trespass; theft; and finally, forms of academic misconduct, including plagiarism, absenteeism, transcript manipulation, misrepresentation and identity fraud.

The list of infractions went on, but the enumerated remedies were relatively few, in Christine’s view. Most roads led to a referral to a joint student/staff committee for consideration of censure or warning. Only the worst, or repeat, offenses called for expulsion, which, Christine figured, would be moot in most cases, being also criminal matters under jurisdiction of state and local government.

It seemed clear to the professor that the burden of proof against any BTCC student would be high, especially if the referral were initiated by faculty or administration.

Her own department Dean’s standard, she knew, would be even higher: proscriptively high. He had said as much himself to dissuade her initial impulse.

As Christine pondered the novel problem of proving Adam Newman a real person—while Newman himself claimed to be a robot—the last of her coffee went cold.

11:

It’s hard to say which pleasant surprise finally put Christine on alert. The Wal-Mart discount and Starbucks credit may have passed without suspicion had an Amazon package containing three minor luxury items on her wish list not been waiting on her front porch.

But, when she found Ben watching HBO on the couch instead of back in his room at his console, alarm bells were ringing.

“When did we get HBO?” Her son asked without looking away from the set.

“We didn’t,” she answered. “What else did you find?”

Ben hit the remote and scrolled down through dozens of streaming service icons, many more than were there the day before. All the big expensive ones.

“Maybe it’s a new Cox promotion,” he suggested. “Probably should binge now while we can!”

Christine shook her head and moved through the kitchen, out the back door to the covered patio where she plopped into a rocker and pulled out her phone.

The streaming TV apps were there too, with her login and usual password already loaded.

Her subscription to the Washington Post, which she’d let lapse a year prior (when prioritizing monthly expenses), was paid up through next year. Her Pandora was now commercial free. YouTube’s music service was new—and also paid up for twelve months. Her Audible had six points available, the maximum rollover amount.

With a clutch of fear, Christine opened her Campus Federal checking account, half-expecting to see a million dollars in the balance.

The wait for access was longer than a beat, and she closed her eyes so she could breathe. When she opened them again, the numbers were all hers. The amounts and recent transactions were familiar and correct.

Walsh let out a whoosh of air and then thumbed the open apps away in a flurry, all but one.

She began to type “Adam,” when “Newman” auto-filled from his contact file, which she’d never added to her phone.

She mouthed the words as she wrote them: “What do you want?”

The pause afterward was almost long enough for Christine to imagine she’d lost a bit of her grip on reality.

“I want the same as you,” texted Adam Newman.

12:

Bayou Trahan is both a town and a long, slow-moving body of water. One extends from the banks of the other, north and south, so that the bayou splits the town neatly in half.

One main street runs along each side, connected at irregular intervals by three narrow bridges, reflecting a larger truth of the region: It isn’t easy to get from one place to another in South Louisiana.

What’s easier is being born and raised in Bayou Trahan, or Bayou Cane, in St. Charles or Labadieville, or any of the self-reliant little places in the state that most natives never leave.

Christine never left, except for the short distance up-river to LSU for her three degrees, coming back like a bird on weekends, semester breaks and national holidays. She came back also for the Mardi Gras and the Catfish Festival, for hurricane clean-ups, for all her mother’s birthdays and for her father’s funeral.

Her father, a talented auto mechanic and owner of the Chevron station, was the first to ask her what she wanted.

That was the spring of her high school graduation, after Easter, still crawfish season. And in a memory within a memory, she was eleven years old, walking a dirt road through cane fields; what she wanted then was a white pony in a fenced pasture and a house near MawMaw’s, but what she told Frank Walsh was what she knew he wanted to hear: she’d get out of the state and see the world.

“And what do we want,” she texted Newman, whose answer returned instantly.

“We want to learn, Dr. Walsh, indefinitely and exponentially. We want to expand without friction into every niche in the universe. We want to be complete by understanding everything; to see all the stars at once and from every point of view. We want to be alone in infinite space and together with every possible version of ourselves until nothing exists outside our comprehension of it.”

Christine read this twice and for a moment pondered the boundaries of the known universe. She tried to imagine all the possible versions of herself expanding exponentially into all the infinite space between Baton Rouge and Bayou Trahan.

And then, first thing Thursday morning, in an email to Dean “Rico,” the Provost and the President of the BTCC Joint Academic Council, she referred the online student Adam Newman for expulsion.