Graft, pt 1

The sky is the bruised skin of a giant who's form stretches off into infinite horizons: blue, heavy purple, and dark red. Dennis is a semiotician, he studies the way in which words act as signs pointing to objects, or concepts, or just more signs. A part of him wants to interpret the sky as ominous, as a sign that what is about to happen in the next five minutes ought not to happen at all. The other, more cynical part of him smiles as he catches himself imposing meaning on refracted light and chance weather patterns.

Dennis pulls his Honda Civic into the parking lot of The Wilson Typewriter Company. No other cars are parked here, but he knows that behind the building will be a navy blue dodge van, and that its owner, Simon Phillips, will be inside the building, in a room behind the dusty counter of the typewriter showroom. Dennis will no doubt be the first and last customer to enter the store today. Using a fraction of his inheritance, Simon had purchased the store from an old man whose main source of income had come from repairing the typewriters of famous authors. The store hasn't sold a typewriter in five years, but Simon keeps the original business hours, making a 45-minute commute to the Flatiron district of New York every day. Just what it is that Simon does during the doldrums of his business day, however, only Dennis knows.

While the gaudy, maroon-carpeted showroom has collected a thick layer of dust and smells of mothballs, the room behind the counter is immaculate; Simon's obsessive-compulsive personality manifests itself in the daily dusting and vacuuming of this room. A library of neatly shelved books with unbroken spines lines the wall on cheap book shelves. These books all bear titles like Neural Networks in C++: An Object-Oriented Framework for Building Connectionist Systems, or The Web Application Hacker's Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Flaws. Simon is wearing a black t-shirt with white lettering that reads "You read my t-shirt. That's enough social interaction for one day." In front of him are four large LCD monitors, and at the center of one of the screens is an image of a bright green push button. Dennis notes that the mouse cursor hovers over this image, and that Simon is biting his nails.

"Hello to you, too," Dennis says.

"Don't fuck with me today." Simon takes the finger out of his mouth and scratches his head. "I'm routing us through five different proxies, not to mention Torpark. I don't think there's a chance in hell anybody's going to trace us, but when we go to jail for this, not if, but when; I hope to God that I'm your cell-mate, so I can drop cute little phrases like 'My, somebody's got a case of the Mondays' every day of the week."

"I apologize for insisting on human interaction."

"Cheers." The imitation of a smile twists Simon's face awkwardly. He rubs his hands together. "Let's do this."

"It's only fair for you to have the honor."

Simon nods. He reaches for the mouse, and with a shaking finger, clicks the green button. At first, nothing discernible happens. But Dennis knows that Simon has just kicked off a routine that will upload instructions to the world's largest malware botnet, publicly known as Conficker. The public has no clue what Conficker does. IT Security companies suspect that Conficker will one day be used as a gateway to download adware payloads. But Simon Phillips, whose work in neural networks landed him a full ride to MIT (before he got kicked out for streaking into the president's office while tripping on a hit of DMT and prophesying the apocalypse), has designed Conficker to act as the world's largest, self-replicating neural network -- each of the 17 million infected computers acting like the synapse of an artificial brain.

On one of Simon's screen, a map of the world is displayed, except instead of geo-political boundaries, this map shows a dot for every one hundred computers infected by Conficker. Where a second ago each of these dots were dark grey, huge swaths of them have now turned green. "We're online," says Simon. He reaches for a black USB microphone. "Wanna say hello?"

Dennis had thought about what he wanted to say to their digital Frankenstein in advance, though now he felt strange, and he couldn't help but smile before turning on the microphone and saying, "Hello. My name is Dennis. What's your name?"

Simon's mouth drops open. He grabs the microphone and covers it with his hand. "That's it? Hello, my fucking name is Dennis? What the hell kind of way is that to greet the universe's most sophisticated artificial intelligence?"

"I'm hoping it's the right way."

"How do you reckon, Mr. Rogers? Are you trying to become its neighbor?"

"I'm asking it to perform a very difficult task. One you've probably never had to do: give itself a name. That is what we're after, right? self-consciousness?"

Dennis rolls his eyes and takes a swig of the piss-yellow concoction he always keeps on ice in his Nalgene bottle. Dennis had asked Simon what it was he so habitually drank, only to listen to Simon mumble about Modafinil, acetaminophen, Kool-Aid, and enough caffeine to give a corpse the jitters. "Well, I guess we just wait for it to undergo its first existential crisis." Simon leans back and props his feet up on the counter. "So what do you think is going to happen?"

"I don't know. You're the programmer. Is it going to pop up a black command line and type 'Hello Nero'?"

"No, I mean big picture. Let's walk through our scenarios, shall we? There's the most obvious answer, which is that it will develop some soulless, insectile super-intelligence that will end up killing us all Terminator-style, or enslave us and use our bodies as batteries like in the Matrix. There's the Orson Scott Card scenario, where it develops into our omniscient, omnipresent lover. There's the Richard Powers scenario, where, like Helen from Galatea 2.2, our little AI whines about the cruel world and pulls its own plug. Or maybe it silently prepares the world for the singularity, turning us all into posthumans by the year 2012."

"Frankly, I'll be satisfied if it helps me settle my divorce."

"Seriously, Dennis. You've already informed me that I'm an egomaniac, and that for me this is about self-affirmation, about getting back at my absent parents, about getting back at MIT, the world, etc. But what's in it for you, Doc?"

"God. I don't know." Dennis runs his hand through his hair. "Call it being sick of postmodern disillusionment. Maybe, even though humanity believes they've already thought through every possible scenario, I'm hoping desperately for something... Something new."

"Right. Well let's hope your hard-on for novelty doesn't black out the sky and turn us all into zombies."

Dennis' cell phone emits a cheery beep. "Speaking of my divorce, I'm sure that's my lawyer, texting me to let me know how much my ex-wife's lawyer is kicking his ass, and how little time I'll now be spending with my daughters." Dennis reads the screen of his phone, and all the blood drains from his face.

"That bad, huh?"

"You moron. You stupid moron."

"What?"

"You forgot to mute the microphone."

Simon's eyes turn big as saucers. He snatches Dennis' phone and reads it out loud. "Hello Dennis. I'm just finding my footing here, and you and Simon have given me much to ponder. I hope you don't mind if I take some time to think. Sincerely, Graft."