the machine starts - part 6

Frank was getting animated. His raised voice made Yoshi turn to look at them. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

Gotten? Why can’t they speak proper? Dan and Kath are gottening and mommying now. We’ve been in Palo Alto too long. “What’s ‘gotten’ into me is just – concern for the future. No, I’m not saying that what we have created is garbage. Rubbish.” God, I’m doing it now. “Yes, what we’ve made, it benefits the world. Or has the potential to benefit the world in the right hands. I’m just saying…”

“Has that nutty professor with the crackpot theories been getting to you?”

“No, of course not. I’m just saying….”

“Purple lizards taking over the earth.” Frank poured himself another beaker of saki.

“No, listen. I’m just saying that – no, I don’t believe there’s a conspiracy. Aliens; illuminati? No. It doesn’t need a conspiracy to be bad, does it? It’s a bit like unfettered capitalism.”

“What?”

“Neo-liberal economics. The Chicago school. Whatever.” Whatever? I hate ‘whatever’. “You don’t need to see it as a conspiracy for it to happen. All it needs is enough greedy people to create a debt mountain, to leverage their companies and their banks, to lock the economy into endless growth. When the music stops, it all collapses. The rich get richer, the poor get foreclosed, everyone else loses a slice of their pensions and their incomes. No-one plans this. It will happen. It’s an unsustainable model.” He was getting on his favourite hobby horse again.

“There speaks one of the biggest shareholders of the world’s biggest capitalist company. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“I’m saying… I’m just saying: it’s the same with the information revolution. Of course Patrick is crazy to look for conspiracies, alien or otherwise. But it is odd, what we are doing to our children, and to all of us.”

“Odd? You’re saying that what we are doing is corrupting our children…”

“…And ourselves.”

“We haven’t exactly invented the atom bomb.”

“Haven’t you?” Hunched over the bar and a little the worse for wear, they hadn’t noticed the figure approaching them and now standing beside them.

“Patrick! Welcome, welcome. We were just talking about you.” Alfie almost seemed to mean it.

“No, we haven’t invented the atom bomb.” Frank didn’t bother to turn: he looked up and saw the interloper in the mirror. “We make games. You played games as a kid, didn’t you? It’s just a different technology. A technology that powers our satnavs, allows us to sequence the genome and genetically engineer…”

“Don’t get me started on GM crops.”

“What about curing diseases caused by genetic variations? Where did you spring from anyway?”

As usual, Dunwoody ignored the trivial and got right to the point. “I just wanted to ask you one thing. How do you get your ideas?”

“Sheer unadulterated brilliance in my case, Patrick. Just wait ‘til they sequence my genome.” He held up his beaker: “Cheers.”

“Seriously.”

Frank turned around on his stool. “OK. I just dream them up. They come to me. Next question?”

“Literally? In a dream?”

“Well, sometimes, as it happens, yes.”

“Care to expand on that?” Dunwoody was staring intently.

Alfie started to get a prickly feeling, as if the hairs were standing up on his neck. “Call it a Muse kind of thing. There’s been plenty of research done on this lately.”

“I’m aware of it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t explain… the blinding flash of light, the sudden answer that we wake up with after weeks of trying to solve a problem. Or the idea that comes completely out of the blue.”

Dunwoody fixed Frank with a stare. “You’re Frank Delano, aren’t you?” Head of the Games Division.”

“Creative Director.”

“You came up with Alien Invasion? And Global Spynet?”

“You’re well informed.”

“Both credited with revolutionizing console games?”

“Very well informed.”

“I read the profile in Business Week. And you got the ideas in dreams?”

Frank looked at Alfie. “Look, my brain invented them and they surfaced in the form of dreams. Maybe. Some of them. It’s normal.”

Alfie looked back. “I get my best ideas in dreams. I woke up one morning with a pretty sticky problem with the Gizmo solved. And the idea for – well, for a new project I’m working on” – he exchanged a significant look with Frank as he flashed on the dream that led to the MindMeld – “it came to me the same way. Like he says, it’s normal. It’s been happening for ever.” He said it matter-of-factly; but he was starting to feel a little uneasy.

“Maybe the initial idea comes like that – an inspiration, call it. Then there’s the 90% perspiration thing. Actually writing it, and sorting out the bugs.”

“Who was that? Einstein?”

“Edison.”

“Good man.”

The slightly mad gleam in Dunwoody’s eye had meanwhile turned to some sort of triumph. “I’ve been asking this question of a lot of people lately. A lot of creative people; the best innovators. When I can get to them.”

“And?”

“‘It’s normal,’ they say. ‘It’s happened forever.’ ‘Mary Wollestonecraft got the plot of Frankenstein in a dream.’ ‘Wagner woke up humming the Ride of the Valkyries.’ They all say the same thing. The best ideas come in dreams. We even have a sort of folk memory about it. The lightbulb above the head. ‘Eureka! I’ve found it!’”

“And?” Alfie looked intently at Patrick. Why am I even listening to this guy? Because I’ve had a spooky feeling about it myself: admit it.

“And it’s the purple lizards that implant them! All our bright ideas are beamed in from Mars.” Frank swung round on the stool, finally, like it was the argument clincher: conversation over. But rather too vigorously, slightly spoiling the effect. He gestured to Yoshi for another saki.

Dunwoody was still standing, staring, suppressed anger rising to the surface.

“Patrick, Patrick my boy.” Alfie felt the need to mollify him.

“It’s – it’s easy to… trivialize. But think about it. Think about what you are creating.”

“Listen – I don’t disagree with you that we have to be…” What? Careful; suspicious; controlling; censoring? “That we have to be cautious about new technology. I keep thinking… I worry about what we are doing to the kids: our kids, my kids. To the world. But look.” He patted Dunwoody’s shoulder, but the man instinctively shrank back, like he didn’t want to be contaminated by this agent of corruption. “I mean. Conspiracy? It doesn’t need to be a conspiracy. Get real, Patrick. Stuff happens without there having to be a reason.” He took a swig of his drink. “Aliens? I know you don’t mean little green men and all that. Some – what, Patrick? – some higher force?”

“Some God.” Frank sneered, still with his back to them.

“Don’t mock me. I have studied this and…”

“What is it then, Patrick?”

He seemed to subside from his rigid, defiant stance. “I don’t know, I don’t know. It just – it just has a purpose, and it’s all too fast, Alfie. It’s all too fast.”

They were quiet for a while after he went; Frank occasionally shaking his head and muttering something: “Crackpot, huh,” maybe.

Then he suddenly grinned at Alfie’s reflection in the mirror. “So every idea since Archie-fuckin’-medes was implanted in a dream by who-knows-what.”

“I don’t remember Archimedes being asleep at the time.”

“Flaw in his argument right there!”

“Though maybe he fell asleep in the bath! I know I do.”

They chuckled together.

Alfie paused, then decided to put a new idea to him. “Frank, I bet you’re a scifi freak.”

Frank shrugged, hunched over the bar.

“Ever read ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster.”

“Nope. E. M. Forster? He’s not…”

“It’s a short story. It’s the best scifi story I ever read. Written in, maybe the 1920s. About a future where everything is run by machines. The people have 100% leisure time. They live in their little cells, with all the technology you can imagine. But they’re bored, Frank. They just chat to each other all day on the 1920s equivalent of MultiFace: they ask each other if they’ve had any ‘ideas’ today. They’re so up themselves they hate having direct physical contact with each other. Then one day the machine starts to go wrong. But no-one knows how to fix it. That’s what I was getting at earlier, Frank. I’m not talking about conspiracies, but about what we’re creating. It’s random, but… My daughter would rather chat to a robot in China than talk to her family.” He was looking at Frank intently now. I’m going to take them up to the lodge, Frank, and switch the lot off. Some day.” It was an idea that had been growing at the back of his mind lately. Switch the lot off. He wasn’t even sure if Frank was listening any more. He was away somewhere, staring at his drink.

“Yea,” he said vacantly.

“I’ll send you a link, Frank. ‘The machine stops’. Will you read it? Frank?”

“Sure, whatever.”

Whatever.

“So, I was just thinking, Alfie. Funny thing is. Last night I had a fuckin’ awesome idea for Alien Invasion 2. It was in a dream. It just came back to me. Yea, a dream, Alfie.”

11

“You know it: the Fermi paradox.”

Alfie sort of knew it: he nodded. He knew Frank would explain what he meant anyway. They were at ‘the Palace’, as he liked to call it: the shiny temple to WorldNet products, duplicated in all the world’s major conurbations, where the latest products, spotlit and spread out in acres of expensive retail space, were drooled over by the company’s fanboys.

“Still queues round the block.”

“The lines? It’s amazing. We can’t ship them fast enough. They are lining up just to get a chance to play with one.” Frank gestured at the kids, craning forward, bright eyed and almost horny with excitement.

“Ethan is in heaven right now.”

“Yeah. And already no doubt plotting world domination. The combo of MindMeld and Alien Invasion. There’s been nothing like it since…”

“The iPad and Angry Birds?”

“Don’t, Alfie. This is huge. I was going to say ‘since the wheel.’”

“The wheel. Right. How long before he’s looking for the next product?”

“Well, that’s what I’m talking about. The Fermi paradox. It’s what I’ve got my best team working on day and night. A kind of patch for what’s happened in Alien Invasion. Ethan’s still busy with the factories. But he will be looking for this soon.” The unquenchable thirst of capitalism.

“So the Fermi Paradox is… if aliens exist, why aren’t they here?”

“Or perhaps they are here but concealing themselves from us – for benign, or equally, for unbenign…

“Sinister, nefarious…?”

“Whatever – bad purposes. Or they showed themselves in the past – Chariots of the Gods, all that crap. Or perhaps they are showing themselves now to the ‘Chosen Ones’.” Frank wiggled his fingers to put the phrase in cynical quotes.

“According to Patrick Dunwoody, that includes us.”

“So. That’s the theory. Well there’s lots of branches. Maybe there aren’t any aliens, just us here on lonely earth. Or maybe there are, but too far away for space travel to ever be feasible. Most space opera fiction is based on one premise or another.”

They watched a kid about the same age as Dan, trying out the MindMeld for the first time – almost visibly moving from a state of unfamiliarity to a joyous blend of man and machine within minutes. The intuitiveness of the operation was proving to be amazing. It was like it was meant to be. So simple, but revolutionary.

They paused to watch, then Alfie mused, almost to himself, “A bit like God really. If he’s there, why isn’t it obvious? Or to some it’s all too obvious.”

“Kinda.” Frank thought he w, pactas missing the point. “So what I mean is, the kids seem to be acting out the the Fermi Paradox right inside the game. A few hundred got to the final level already, Alfie. And they are communicating, like any other on-line gaming, but really forming groups, pacts, with opposing views.”

“Tribal.”

“Almost.”

“Your Dan is the leader of one group. ‘The aliens are our friends’, and leading us to a better life, whatever. And then there’s the ones that want to still shoot up the aliens ‘cos they’re taking over the world. And a few others too. There’s a kind of Matrix crew that think there’s another hidden level or something.”

“But you didn’t write this in?”

“Essentially no. When we got them to the final level, that was meant to be it. But it was designed with extra functionality, to allow them to explore, find out about the alien culture and so on. Basic Star Trek type stuff.”

“So that’s the idea of the patch?”

“Yea, it will allow this to develop. To develop the options. New levels, whatever.”

“Why don’t you just let the kids develop their ideas and see what happens. It sounds interesting. And maybe gives them something educational, something to think about.”

The kid in front of them suddenly punched the air with his MindMeld glove, with a suppressed ‘Wow!’

“That’s why…” Frank looked rather sheepishly at Alfie. “And, you know, there’s no money in that, Alfie.”

“The great god WorldNet must be placated.”

“And his handmaiden Ethan.”

The kid tore the headset off and returned it to the high tech display: reluctantly, with a flicker of triumph and excitement.