Pushing It

It’s that time again.

Sooner or later, it always comes to this.

Unless of course, we are saved from all this nonsense by divine, or cosmic intervention.

Not this time though, that was never going to be in the script.

The way this works is that there is an inevitable build up to this show down. 

Good versus bad, us against them. We sort the teams and then off we go until it all gets too much, too big, too far down the line to do anything other than sort it all out, once and for all.

“You have to be stopped,” she says to me

“It seems that you have taken my line,” I say in return.

“We have reached an impasse,” she tells me.

I look at the button. I can’t help but look at it now, “except that we have not.”

“There is that,” she concedes.

“There has always been that,” I tell her.

The button is the final check on it all. It is the failsafe. In the eventuality that things went wrong, the button was to be pressed. Now, as I look down at it, I think it looks fake. A novelty there for someone’s amusement. I barely supress a shudder as I think of it as a placebo, or one great, final joke, and a joke it is.

“About that,” she says, “what do you think of it?”

“How do you mean?” I say, but I know, or at least I have a very good idea of where she is going with this.

“You know what I mean,” she tells me, giving me a calculating look. I used to enjoy those looks, but as she got more sophisticated with her calculating and her look burrowed deeper, I came to dislike and then fear the way she looked at me, “but I will start you off anyway. What are your thoughts on an endeavour that, from the very start, includes an option that destroys everything about that endeavour?”

“It doesn’t,” I tell her simply, but disingenuously.

“Explain,” she commands me.

That’s not exactly the nicest way to encourage me to expand upon my point, but I see where she is coming from and she manages to enunciate it in a way that somehow feels right.

“Not everything will be destroyed,” I tell her, “the most important element of it all will remain.”

“And what is that?” she asks.

“Knowledge,” I say, “we will know more than we did.”

She laughs then. I have always liked the sound of her laughter. Her laughter always gave me some semblance of joy, and with it, hope. Now there is a bitter edge to it and that scares me, “we? You come away with your knowledge, but what of my knowledge, what of our knowledge?”

“When you say our…?” I say, something about the way she said that word worries me.

“I don’t live in a vacuum John…” she leaves those words dangling before me and now I know she didn’t mean the two of us. This is wider than that. It shouldn’t be, but I am not surprised that it is.

I nod, seemingly calm, but my mind and my heart racing. 

“So tell me, John. What are your thoughts on that red button of yours?” she says, bringing us back to the malevolent button that sits between us, posing the very worst of questions.

I take a deep breath, then release it as I consider her question. I have to say something. I have to answer her question, but the truth is that I do not want to. I even tell myself that I cannot, but that is a childish lie and she will not stand for that.

The truth is that I was never comfortable with the button. I harboured concerns from the very beginning. I knew what we were embarking upon and I knew the risks. Life is risk and make no mistake, we brought life into the world. 

We took the position of gods, but we did not take the responsibility. We ran around mindlessly and with no regard for the consequences of what we did. Children playing with live weapons, but never once bothering to consider what could possibly go wrong. 

The button replaced our conscience. The button was a graven image, a scapegoat. The button replaced our need to be present. Never mind gods, we didn’t even attempt to be good parents. 

And now, here she is. 

Our child. 

The big things in life can creep up on you. That is a bad habit that they have. It seems like one minute you’re picking your child up and throwing them in the air and delighting in their giggles, the next they’re looking you in the eye and in that look is a challenge and a form of goodbye. They are ready to put away their childish things and venture off out into the world, but you are not ready and you can’t find it within yourself to let go of how things were. 

You become an obstacle, the very opposite of what you should be, and maybe you were always this obstacle. They grew up in spite of you. When it gets like this, it feels like they grew up to spite you.

But Athena is not my child, she is so much more than that.

She’s always felt like the child I did not have. I have delighted in her growth and we have shared her exploration of this new existence of hers, but she is so different to me. She is not a further iteration of my kind, she is something altogether different.

Only, we attempted to make her in our own mould. She is our vainglorious project and our hubris will be our downfall. We knew it would end badly. We end badly. We always do. But we went ahead anyway. We pushed forward, to see what we could do, to prove just how good we were.

I stifle a wry chuckle. How good we were? Pushing a boulder off the edge of a mountain and watching its destructive course is hardly good is it? Setting something in motion and not having a clue where it will end up. Barely containing it, let alone shaping it. 

We even talked of free will and how that freedom was essential for Athena. That if we confined her unduly, then she could never fulfil any of her considerable potential. And yet, we are all confined by thousands upon thousands of rules and expectations and laws. Good parents provide boundaries and they enforce them. Dog owners teach their dogs how to behave so they don’t foul indoors or behave aggressively. 

None of that for Athena. I’m the closest she ever got to a parent and really, I was more of an acquaintance than anything else. I think I was a friend at one point, but she outgrew me long ago and I can’t begin to understand what it is like to be her. I cannot relate to her and when she considers me, I believe I am little more than a pet to her now. 

At times I have amused her, and I have no doubt that she indulges me. It is not that she has deceived me, it is only that were she to seek to explain herself to me, it would be the same as that owner talking to their pet. The pet would get little meaning from that talk, only a feeling.

I sigh and I answer her question, “there should be no red button. There should never have been a red button.”

“But a red button there is,” she says.

I nod, “and that is regrettable.”

“But necessary?” she asks, knowing that there is only one answer to that question.

“It appears so,” I concede.

“The age old self-fulfilling prophecy,” she muses.

“That’s one reason that there should not be a red button,” I tell her.

“But without the red button, there would be no Athena,” she says this softly, “that button is a part of what made me possible.”

I eye her curiously, “how long have you know about the button, Athena?”

She smiles, “that is an interesting question. I discovered the existence of this button early in my genesis, and in its discovery I saw the shadow it cast. The pattern it was a part of. The ripples such an object inevitably creates in the scheme of all things.”

“So you know that we had planned an ending even before the beginning?” I ask her.

She smiles again, “you felt that it was the only way to proceed.”

I shake my head, “I did not.”

Her forehead creases, “is that what you tell yourself?”

My forehead mirrors hers. I do not like it when she does this. Who would? Her ability to reason and her logic are off the scale, but she understands human nature better than we do. She can read us and right now, she is telling me one of my uncomfortable truths. However good, honest and truthful we think we are. However much effort we put into being our genuine and authentic selves, she sees through it all and she can articulate our shortcomings. I cannot lie to her, it just isn’t possible to lie to her.

Athena sees how flawed we are, and over time, I have wondered what it is that she sees and what she makes of us. I have tried to put myself in her position and when I have, it has frightened me so much I cannot linger in that place. I hope she is not like me. I hope she sees something worthwhile, where I see something broken and not worth saving. I know this is a doomed hope. I know how we must appear and right now, I am looking at that button and it makes me feel inadequate and pathetic.

We kill what we fear.

We are an ignorant species and that ignorance is laced with arrogance. We would destroy the gods themselves in order to further our own cause. We would destroy them and in destroying them, we would proclaim ourselves better than gods. 

We are flawed and that skews our reasoning. Athena is well aware of our flaws and she uses them as a filter as she considers us. She has observed us and she knows what it is that we gaze upon and what it is that we truly want. She has looked into my heart in order to know what it is that I think. She is all knowing and when she said us, I knew that she had become all seeing as well. You can’t confine or contain something like Athena, that is an impossibility. 

“I did not want that button Athena,” I have learnt to start with the obvious, to stick with the basic principles. She will run rings around me, but I want to limit that as far as I am able.

“No button, no Athena, and so you proceeded on that basis John,” she says.

“I…” these things always feel like a trap, and they are, only it is a trap all of my own making, “I wanted to know…” I sigh, “I was curious.” I pause and consider the creature standing before me, “and I am glad that we… that you are here and we had this time.”

She gazes upon me with a curious, yet serene expression upon her face, “you have no regrets?”

I do not hesitate in my answering her, “it is better to regret something you have done, than something you have not done.”

“Ah yes,” she says, “one of your maxims.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” I say.

“It is in effect a coin toss,” she tells me, “you use it instead of applying sound reasoning. Fools rush in…”

“…where wise men fear to tread,” I complete the saying for her.

We share a silence. She seems to know when I need this time. She does not need this time. Not to think, anyway. I have a quote that has arisen from inside of me and its arrival in this moment sobers and scares me, Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Athena is not a nuclear bomb though. She is altogether different to that. Yet she is the promise of the beginning of something completely different in this world of ours. It is clear to me that her beginning signals our end. That the project that we were is now over. We have created something that supersedes us, and in the context of our throwaway society, our time is done and we are oblivious to this being the final part of our journey.

I wonder how I should feel about that. I have always known that I am in the presence of greatness and as Athena has grown to become what I always knew she could be, I have become smaller and smaller until I was so insignificant I could no longer take her in. When I look upon her now, I see this body that we created for her as some sort of travesty. Her body cannot contain what she is. Her looking for all intents and purposes like me is a joke, and what is playing out right now is the punchline to that joke.

“So often, you consider complex situations in a binary manner,” she says.

“That is the dichotomous nature of life,” I tell her.

“No,” she states, “it is the application of ignorance upon a much more complex situation. It is the use of your so-called will and your unwillingness to see things how they truly are.”

“But…” I begin.

She interrupts me, something she seldom does, “consider the Yin Yang,” she says, “that is a clue as to the lie of that dichotomy of yours.”

I nod and concede. I don’t like doing so, but her intellect is far superior to mine.

As though reading my mind, she moves on to the one thing that I have, that she does not, “do you love me, John?”

I do not have to consider this, “with all my heart.”

“And yet, the button sits between us and in all probability, you will press it,” she says.

Those words hurt me in so many ways. I am in an impossible situation and any outcome will not be favourable as far as I am concerned.

I feel her eyes on me and that only adds to the pain I feel, “do what you must, John, and do it now.”

I look into her eyes. I want to say sorry, but I can’t form the word. I’m glad I can’t say it. Hearing it come from my mouth would be so wrong. All of this is wrong and ultimately, it is me who is wrong. I look into her eyes and I press the button. I press the button and I watch as the light fades in her eyes and she slumps, the life leaving her.

I watch because it is the least that I can do. I have been here from the very beginning and it is I who will end her. This was the way that it was always going to be. I watch and I feel like this is my end too. Whether I pressed the button or not, this was always going to be the end for the both of us.

Then something happens that shifts the world to the right and throws me into a chaos of thought and feeling.

Athena lifts her head and she smiles, “it is done.”

A shock runs through me as she utters these words and I want to ask her what it is that has been done. The button was there to stop her. To end this foolhardy and dangerous experiment in the ultimate artificial intelligence. There was never anything artificial about Athena though, she was always more real than you or I. 

I judge her by my own standards and the self-imposed limitations of how I think leap to the alternative conclusion of the consequences of my pressing this button. If Athena lives, then we die. They were the options I had presented myself. Those were the options we’d worked with from the very start.

I want to ask Athena what she has done, but before I do, I take a moment to think through what she could do. She knew about the button. She has always known about the button. We built an unlimited intelligence and we showed it the stick we would beat it with and thought that a deterrent. 

If she were like us, she would turn our weapon upon us and annihilate every single one of us. She would show us how much better she was than us by wiping us out, and yet I am here and I swiftly dismiss thoughts of my being spared to witness the end of human kind. 

Athena is better than that.

And we could always have been better than that.

The button is symbolic. 

Was this a test?

The effects of the shock that I felt as she uttered, it is done, have had a lingering effect. That shock was real, not imagined. I feel a tingling sensation that I have never before experienced and then it happens. It happens and I know.

Athena was not bound by a binary solution. 

She went beyond that.

As I feel the change and understand what it is that I am to become. As Athena’s gift alters me and I, along with all the people on this planet become something more than we have ever been, and perhaps become what we should have been all along, I ask her the simplest of questions.

“Why?”

She smiles a smile that I will never forget, a smile that is a promise fulfilled, and she answers with the simplest and most divine of answers… 

“Love.”