Page 141 of Lone Wolf

Together

Joey had the windows open in her apartment, but still it smelled like a convenience store—candy and soda, the afterglow of microwaved burritos. Dog lay sprawled across his luxury bed, his head flopped onto the floor at a strained uptilted angle as if he were a heron swallowing perch. Except for the regular thwaps of his tail against the wall every time Evan made eye contact, he looked dead.

Evan stood inside Joey’s circular desk beside her gamer’s chair. Scattered across the surfaces were speedcubes solved and half solved, wireless keyboards, Big Gulps at various life stages. Spread across the stacked monitors were the contents of Dr. Hill’s hard drive.

The hard drive itself hadn’t been named. In place of a disk name were emojis of the three monkeys of lore—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Symbols for willful blindness, deafness, and muteness seemed appropriate in the face of the power that the code could unleash.

Deepfakes perfect enough to bend reality.

He and Joey had been at it for at least an hour. Weighing what to do, flip-flopping positions, devil’s-advocating themselves into a Prince of Denmark standoff.

“Who the hell are we to make the choice to hold it back?” Joey asked again.

“As good as anyone else,” Evan said.

“They’ll just re-create the tech,” Joey said. “Someone else’s gonna get it perfect. Youtopia is only a few months behind and from what I’ve seen there are at least three dozen other entities pushing toward indistinguishable skinlifts.”

At Evan’s behest, she’d opened the project, broken it down into its separate components, and readied its release onto open-source repositories across the dark web.

With one click of the mouse, he could send it out into the world.

Or drag and delete the files forever.

He thought about heads of state making declarations of war. Spouses screaming incriminating information. Children stripped down for whatever use anyone wanted to make of them. A perfect deepfake was a genie unbound. It made anything possible.

In the past he’d collided with a Silicon Valley visionary who’d designed a digital conscience able to make decisions to kill in order to remove the moral burden from soldiers—as if the moral burden wasn’t the last damn thing tethering humanity to the cost of killing. Now he’d stared face-to-face men like Allman and Friedhoff who dared to nudge AI into full sentience. Creating conscience and sentience made them—truly—Godlike. But Evan saw nothing in them approximating the wisdom of Gods in any creation myth he’d read from any culture that had survived long and well enough for their origin story to reach him.

Highlighting the software, he dragged it over the virtual trash can.

Hesitated.

“At a minimum, this’ll delay it getting out,” he said.

“What’s the point?” Joey said. “Doesn’t it have to get here and fuck everybody up for anyone to learn what to do about it?”

“Maybe a few years of peace.”

“Months,” Joey said.

“Even so. Maybe, I don’t know…” He laughed.

“What?”

“Maybe humanity’ll get wiser in the interim.”

Joey cocked her head, looked up at him over the bulge of her shoulder, amused. To the side of the mouse pad, her phone chimed, and without breaking her focus on him she reached over and shut it off. “I know, right?” she said. “This shit is weighty, X. Along with the rest of everything else that’s coming.”

“Yes,” Evan said.

“But in the face of it? We can’t only be cynical. That’s just another cheap trick.”

He nodded. “We’ve been here before. Humans.”

“Not here here.”

“Right. But in just as stark a place. It’s not like Hitler had AI technology. Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. And they had their people brainwashed and locked up. To break free?” He shrugged. “It’s the same challenge. No matter the era. No matter the technology. It just comes down to the man.”

“Or the woman.”