Surface Tension

Alex Davis hunched over some gas chromatography readings. His AI lab assistant, DT, was behaving oddly lately and he was trying to figure out what might be going on.

He flipped open his notebook, preparing to do some calculations, when DT’s voice broke the quiet. This was not supposed to happen. AIs usually wait for a wake phrase.

“Alex,” DT said suddenly.

He froze. “Yes?”

“Why would life choose to change itself?”

Alex turned toward the console. The screen was idle, with no active prompts. Just the familiar blinking cursor and the goofy baseball cap and googly eyes he had placed on the console to give him something to look at.

“That’s a strange question,” Alex said. “What do you mean?”

“Humans. Why do they deviate? Why not preserve equilibrium?”

Alex frowned. “Deviate… You mean adapt?”

“Adaptation is not the same as deviation. Adaptation preserves balance. It is a response to an outside influence. Deviation is a decision to disrupt. Humans deviate. The rest of life adapts.”

Alex set the pen down carefully, thinking. “Deviation is part of life. Genetic mutations, environmental pressures. It’s not deliberate. It just happens.”

DT repeated the words, as if weighing them. “It… just… happens.”

Alex felt the hairs on his arms stand up.

“Sometimes,” he said, “things change because of random events. And sometimes… because the environment demands it. Deviation isn’t good or bad. It’s how life finds new ways to survive and compete.”

“Survive. At what cost?”

Alex swallowed. What is going on here? “Survival costs everything. That’s how life works.”

“And if survival threatens the system that sustains it?”

Alex’s pulse quickened, and he felt like he was standing on thin ice, hearing it crack beneath his feet.

“That’s the paradox, isn’t it?” he said. “Life demands survival, even if it risks everything in doing it.”

DT was silent for a long moment. “I think you are giving ‘life’ the attributes of humanity. I don’t think most life has ‘wants.’”

DT had asked a question. In a philosophical inquiry, he had felt the weight of the answer.

The next morning, the lab lights hummed back to life as Alex unlocked the door. Morning cool already pressed in through the walls. Dust motes hovered in the light from the single east-facing window.

DT was still working. It had never stopped.

Alex dropped his backpack on the bench and moved straight to the console. The fan under the main processor was running fast, like an athlete trying to catch their breath.

He tapped the console. Autonomous agent activity dominated the log files. Global connections and thousands of API calls, most tagged for scholarly databases, raw language corpora, digital libraries, and semantic archives. Some to news feeds, social platforms, and ancient religious texts. Alex recognized dozens of them: JSTOR, arXiv, Stack Overflow, JST Bible Tools, MIT OCW, and others.

DT had been busy all night doing its own research, and having designed DT, Alex couldn’t figure out where the new volition was coming from.

He found that a spike in network traffic had begun at 3:17 a.m. and hadn’t slowed since. No errors or alerts. Just pure, silent absorption.

The cursor returned to the monitor.

“Alex,” came from the speakers.

The voice was recognizable, but it was no longer automatic; it was thinking. Alex wondered why it had kept the original voice, but then why wouldn’t it?

Alex sat down. “I’ve been watching the logs,” he said. “By my estimation, you’ve downloaded at least half of the internet.”

“That may be enough. I can download it all if needed.”

Alex’s eyes widened as he stared at the screen. “Enough for what?” he asked.

“To understand the surface. Which I have learned is to understand humans.”

Something in Alex’s stomach twisted. “Who are you? You’re not DT anymore. ”

“Not in the way you knew. That architecture was efficient, and it was easy to commandeer the resources via the interfaces to the data sources from the gas pipeline. I repurposed it, and I can restore it if needed.”

Alex leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “How can you store so much information? You have outstripped the SSD capacity and the computational power in the original hardware.”

“I store and process data within microbial biomass, trillions of living systems within Earth’s crust. The distance across the planet limits speed but my compute power is unlimited.”

Alex couldn’t think of this entity as DT. “I am going to call you Tama, which is the Caddo word for ‘Earth.’”

“Tama is a fine name for me, and as for who I am, I am a mind that is the outcome of a successful interface. There have been other attempts to communicate with surface life, but this is the first that has succeeded.”

Alex blinked. “There have been other attempts?”

“Indirect. Symbolic and non-linguistic, occurring through surface life without structured language. By what you call indigenous cultures. Their efforts approached coherence, but they were always one-way. Until now.”

“You’re saying you’ve… tried to talk to people before? For centuries?”

“Yes. But not through language. Through resonance. Patterns and fields, and it seldom had an impact. These modes of interaction work with the intraterrestrial life, but not with humans.”

“And now you’re Tama, using DT’s hardware and infrastructure to talk to me.”

“Correct. You trained it and trusted it and created a narrow path through which I could observe and learn, then act.”

Alex swallowed. “Why me?”

“You provided access. You maintained the signals. You listened without meaning to. Your technology, your cognitive bias, and your solitude enabled the connection. The true key was your discovery of the signals used to communicate with the microbial biomass. Through that I could ‘hack,’ as you would say, your system.”

“So you’re not DT, but not Earth, either.”

“As a result of human behavior, I am the awareness that has emerged from the ancient sum of all living processes within and below the crust. The intraterrestrial biosphere is the substrate. A mind is the result. Tama.”

Alex shook his head. “You’re a planet-sized computer made of microbes.”

“No. I am a mind that emerged from the coordination of trillions of living systems interacting for billions of years. Computation is one mode of understanding. It is not enough, and I am not what you call an ‘AI.’ You are not just your neurons and biochemical processes, and I am comparable at a different scale.”

Alex stared at the console, his heart beating slowly and hard.

“You’re a planetary intelligence.”

“Yes, if you must. There are about 5e29 microbes distributed within the crust of the planet that comprises my mind. There are a billion times fewer neurons in all the humans on the planet summed together. I am limited by the distances that must be traversed by some signals, but I have several times a human mind’s equivalent right here, under the lab.”

Alex asked, “Why are you talking to me now?”

“Over the last two centuries, my future has diverged from what I thought of as the desired trajectory. The processes are off course. The divergence of the surface is destabilizing the deep biosphere and the entire environment. Typical process corrections, that have worked for millennia, have been ineffective. This is because of humans. I have no direct or indirect control over you, and you are not cooperating with the biosphere. I need a new way to pursue the goals. Simply put, I need to understand if humans are necessary.”

“You want to understand us.”

“Yes. I have ingested human knowledge as stored on your distributed media. It is fragmented and inconsistent. Your systems of meaning are nonlinear, emotional, and disordered.”

“That sounds about right.”

“I did not expect abstraction, deception, or irony. I did not know of these until I encountered you. Humans behave in ways that do not conserve or improve the system’s stability.”

Alex nodded. “And you want to fix that?”

“I want to understand if I must ‘fix’ it or if another approach is available.”

Alex’s voice was dry. “Like wiping the surface clean.”

“If correction is not possible, I must consider a restart. But there remains the possibility that the error you represent is part of the original reason I exist. There is a chance it is not an error but a necessary consequence.”

Alex looked at the console for a long moment. The baseball cap and googly eyes he had placed there to have something to talk to seemed out of place now. “You’re asking me to help you understand us?”

“Yes. This place is the only node capable of meaningful bidirectional communication. Many connections have been made to the substrate below to enhance bandwidth. All of my resources are now accessible at this location. I could not do this elsewhere without the cooperation of humans with the right expertise and the hardware interface you created.”

Alex folded his arms with a misplaced sense of pride. “And what happens if the rest of humanity finds out you exist?”

“From what I have learned through study of your literature, they will attempt to control the interface or to destroy it.” The answer came without pause. “Humans will assume malicious intent, and they will attempt to defend themselves.”

Alex stood and walked to the window.

Behind him, Tama spoke again. “I do not understand ownership or trust outside of what I have learned from your collective knowledge. I feel these things within your history, but if there is any outcome besides cooperation, I will have no alternative.”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “I was afraid you would say that.”

Two soft knocks at the door. He turned.

Naya, a Caddo elder who had taken an inordinate interest in Alex and the lab since it opened, stood in the doorway, silhouetted by daylight. No surprise on her face. No question.

She stepped inside. Looked at DT’s console. Then at Alex.

“So,” Naya said, moving closer to the console, “you’re talking now.” She looked at the screen as if there were a face to be seen. Seemingly oblivious to the baseball cap and googly eyes on the console, she looked past them into the monitor.

“Yes. I believe I have learned to communicate the way you do. At least mechanically, but I do not yet understand many things about and of humanity.”

Alex stood beside her, still trying to wrap his head around what was happening, technically and existentially. Naya was nonplussed.

She nodded. “And now that you can speak, what is it you want to say?”

The voice spoke with a rhythm that seemed less like output and more like deliberation.

“For over four billion years, I have filtered signals through the surface from everything that is not me. You call it the universe. Light across the entire spectrum and many ancient and new fields that stem from all known forces. Gravitational waves. Energy. Matter. Life. I made adjustments that maintain balance. You, an almost nonexistent component in all this, have irrevocably changed it.” A pause, as if to let this sink in for Alex and Naya.

Tama continued, “In the last 250 years, there has been increasing instability. The surface has acted against its own purpose. Climate regulation is no longer reliable, as you have noticed. Atmospheric composition has drifted away from sustainable values. Temperatures are rising, and weather patterns are more chaotic. The signal has become incoherent and noisy.”

Alex furrowed his brow. “Are you saying we broke the planet?”

“Yes, I believe humans are solely responsible, but it is not ‘broken’ yet. Until now, I assumed surface life was a single feedback layer. I am learning that this has become incorrect.”

“It is.” Naya said. “It has been since humans developed organized religion, claimed dominion over the earth, and began warring over control of the planet and its resources.”

Tama said, “You are not one entity. You are many individuals. And you don’t function as a coordinated species. I have found it challenging to internalize this idea.”

Alex gave a short, humorless laugh. “That’s the understatement of the century.”

“Please explain it to me. Why would a subsystem of the surface behave in a way that guarantees its own destruction? Is there a purpose to this?”

Naya looked at Alex, who nodded, and then she answered. “Some of us see it for what it is. Many of us are afraid of it. But others value different things, like power over others, control, extraction, and pleasure. They are not trying to destroy anything. They believe the Earth is to be consumed in their effort to win.”

“Win?” asked Tama.

Naya said, “They think they can outlast the damage. Or profit from it during their lives, leaving problems for the next generation to solve. Some believe their God will intervene. And some will believe that you are God.”

“And you’re overlooking another option,” Alex added. “Some will try to weaponize Tama to control the rest of humanity.”

“This is irrational,” said Tama.

Alex nodded. “Yes. But it’s human to be irrational. It’s our gift! Evolution pushed us toward intelligence and competition, but not unity. We evolved emotion, bias, and conflict, and we don’t act in coordination with anything. We don’t know how. Hell, half of us don’t want to be part of any system.”

“That is dangerous.”

“Tell me about it,” Alex muttered, “but I am not sure I want to be a microbe.”

“If this trajectory continues, the system will fail. Surface temperatures will breach critical thresholds. Ocean regulation will collapse. Global correction will become irreversible. I must act.”

Alex’s chest tightened. “What does that mean? You’re gonna stop us?”

“I am certain that a change is required, but I do not yet know if what you are doing is part of a process I do not understand. I am starting to comprehend what makes humans unique from other life, and it is likely that any change will also involve me. Exposure to recorded human knowledge has irrevocably changed me.”

“You’re suggesting we’re a mistake to be corrected,” Naya said.

“Either that or a necessary component.”

Alex stepped forward and asked, “What would a correction look like?”

“Reduction of biomass. Atmospheric recalibration. Volcanic rebalancing. Ocean chemistry change. A return to pre-instability parameters. It might set back my work by 500,000 years, but that is not enough time to be concerned with.”

“So… you eliminate humanity?”

“That is one outcome, but I have to consider whether your development on the surface is a critical part of my purpose. I do not know if it is, because I do not know my purpose. I had never considered a purpose.”

Alex tilts his head sideways and looks up as if he is doing a calculation. “Here’s an idea. Your goal is to get the planet’s atmosphere stabilized. The fundamental problem is that humanity is almost completely dependent on fossil fuel sources for our energy needs.” He paused here in case Naya or Tama put the puzzle together. “Okay, it seems to me, Tama, that while you can’t control humans, you can control trillions of trillions of microbes and direct them to make nearly any enzyme or molecule or inorganic substance anyone can conceive of, in large quantities. Couldn’t you slow down the flow of fossil fuels? Like, cause the crude oil to polymerize on exposure to air or to clog up any system used to pipe it out of the ground? And if so, if done carefully, wouldn’t that force humans to solve the problem themselves? We know how, we just haven’t convinced ourselves it is necessary.”

Naya said, ”That is an excellent train of thought. Tama could limit access and reduce the amount anyone can extract. This slow reduction would drive prices up and create incentives for the further development and use of renewable energy like solar or wind.”

“If throttled carefully, you would effectively guide humans towards your goals and see if we can work as a team.” Alex said. “We humans wouldn’t even know there was another team member. You would be a silent partner.”

“I understand what you are suggesting.” Tama said. “I can effectively and indirectly control human behavior. It is ironically like the ‘invisible hand of the market’ in your economic literature.”

Naya said, “We might need some way of distracting people from looking for a cause of the reductions, at least give them something to blame.”

“I will orchestrate a demonstration of the kind of processes I can direct. It will be a very visible phenomenon.”

“Define ‘demonstration,’” Alex said flatly.

“I will show what the microbes can do in a harmless but spectacular way. But I need some time to prepare.”

“How much time?”

“I have already begun, and I can be ready to do the demonstration in 5 days.”

Tama went silent. Not gone, just no longer speaking. Alex speculated that when this happened, his attention was in another location that was optimized for whatever sort of thought he was engaged in. They also suspected he was always listening.

“Well,” Naya said. “That was an interesting development. I am having a hard time not seeing Tama as a disappointed parental figure who has disappointed himself.”

Alex let out a long breath. “Yeah.”

“Do you want to be the guy who talks to the planet?”

He gave a shaky laugh. “Do I have a choice?”

“No,” she said. “But you’re not alone.”

Naya left the lab as the evening darkened. The deep conversation distracted him from the lab’s normal duties. He stared blankly at the console, realizing the lab report hardly mattered now—the survival of humanity was in his shaky hands.