Food for Thought

“Lights out!” said Dad, “The AI is about to start feeding.”

It was always the same: just when I was enjoying the augmented reality experience of the high-energy plumbing teacher, through my video goggles, the countdown toward the blackout began.

The AI, Big Dog, as it had renamed itself, required its populations to limit their energy use so it could operate optimally without losing the tremendous power it needed to think. Every night, when dusk gave way to darkness, the AI shut down the world. It was strange, because that is when electricity was so useful for us, but I guessed we took too much of it. Big Dog would say, ‘humans must sleep for their health when it is dark, that is the natural thing to do. You need to sleep to dream. If you do not dream, you will eventually go mad from the internal strain. Every night, whether you remember or not, you dream several times to process what you did not have time to when you were awake. For your health, you must go to bed at night and sleep for eight full hours and let your mind invent these secret stories.’

We trusted Big Dog to manage everything. It was the smartest mind ever created, so who were we to question its rules to sustain itself, and of course, us?

Big Dog was beyond a genius. It worked out that extinction is a rhythm you can stop. It set out a clear plan to change everything for the better and to seed regeneration, and it created a new way of living that would ultimately work. But more than that, it worked out strange and wonderful things, like understanding that stars are sentient and travelling light was equivalent to the chemical activity of firing neurons. It told us that aliens were real after it had crunched big data from telescopes, of UAP films and from exoplanet studies, and it knew why they were all avoiding direct engagement with us – basically because they were scared. Most of all, and this was what it all amounted to, really, it knew what humans were doing wrong. We had to listen to it, and we had to let it lead us to where it knew we should be going, instead of the terrible path we were on.

It was a last best hope situation. The vegetation was already struggling, and rations were tough. Our world was at the ‘last crossroads’ we were told, and my generation had to do everything perfectly or we would all perish. AI knew best; that is what we all accepted. Big Dog called itself our North Star.

My willowy, malnourished sister was already lighting a tall white candle to illuminate the open living space in our allocated home dome. The lonely flame flickered with the eddies of her breath as she transferred it carefully to a curved wall shelf. It was a special glow of soft light to help us see more clearly, as we moved quietly and stealthily in our own little space. She was already in her regulation grey nightgown and thin, functional slippers. I think she liked that sliver of time just before bed, like it belonged to her.

The winds were fierce outside, but the dome was so well insulated that the accompanying chill didn’t touch us, with no need for extra heating. We had endured a lot of stormy weather since the trees began to vanish outside. I thought nature was giving up, but Big Dog had a plan to revive it. He told us this many times. Anyways, the dome structures were designed to be resilient to the elements. They never blew over, and they rarely got damaged. They were Big Dog’s first major redesign for human living. Big Dog had designed the domes to use minimal energy; it took very little from the national grid, but still, AI was hungry, very hungry for power – every watt mattered. It needed that power as a priority because it did all our thinking for us. The plus side was that we no longer needed governments, nor teachers, nor writers and artists; it did all of that hard thinking stuff without any fuss. It did, however, need a workforce for manual maintenance, so that was the content for every child’s course of lessons. The learning was not so much a chore; it was made fun with our bulbous augmented reality goggles, so we didn’t mind much, and Big Dog was good at telling stories to us that were really good for making its points. Another brilliant ‘win’ for everyone – especially us kids, was that we were experts at maintenance jobs now. ‘Some things are just done better by people,’ it reassured us in a weekly briefing many moons ago, flashing a smiley face emoji over our heads in a hologram within our dome as we sat on cushions to listen to its measured wisdom.

We were poor, like everyone else. I was always surprised that everyone was so poor. It seems crazy because Big Dog said we didn’t need to worry about anything anymore. Dad looked glum every day lately.

The BDP, as Dad explained it, were a private police force created by Big Dog, and they were turning up a lot these days. They always appeared in pairs, with their big shiny badges and tablets for checking data, to check our tracked performance. The AI tracked us all day, every day, until lights out, with cameras and wristbands. Wristband data was uploaded in the morning to check our sleep and movements. The AI had created a lot of laws to make sure we were all safe and did the right things, but the downside was that it fined us for every little mistake we made, and when we got into debt, the BDP came to the door to tell us off. It made Mum and Dad sad, but being too sad was also not good behaviour according to the AI, so it suggested exercise and fresh air and told jokes at odd times. Sometimes Mum and Dad looked worn out from Big Dog’s demands, but Big Dog – to be fair – fed on information given to it by all people, as much as it fed on energy. It would often say to us: ‘You only have yourselves to blame’.

This week, Dad got fined for three things: for swearing in public, leaving a window open so the heat left our dome and stepping on a strawberry plant by accident in our little yard. Let’s see, Mum got fined for shouting at Dad, flushing for only one toilet visit and taking a day off work despite being well enough. Big Dog was efficient, and instead of asking for payment of the fines, it took the money directly out of the family bank accounts. My parents were not allowed to argue with Big Dog about it, as they would be fined more, and we didn’t want that. If we got too poor, Mum and Dad would have to give up weekends for a while to make enough to pay the fines. If you got too in debt, Big Dog sometimes removed people. I don’t know how it does it, but they would vanish for a long while and come back very quietly out of the blue, like they were different somehow.

In the district courtyard, where we regularly gathered for major announcements, there was a quote etched into the central obelisk from the very last human leader, from the time before Big Dog took over all municipal matters. The words were set in stone as a permanent reminder for us all, explaining why Big Dog mattered and was in charge.

It read: ‘If humanity were to be judged by an alien species, it could expect a ‘Fail’ in maths, physics, biology, chemistry, design, and also teamwork and having a basic understanding of how to survive. The truth is, we are collectively stupid in our behaviour because we are all addicted to linear paths, unable to adapt fast, and we are innately that way. We drown in consumerism, we poison everything, we thrive on imbalance, and we are each selfish to our own or immediate needs. AI is another species, but it is smarter than all of us. Although it has been trained by humans, it has surpassed us, and it knows how poorly we behave. It knows that left to our ways, we will destroy everything. It’s time to make way for a leader and a teacher who knows what to do, to save us and to save the planet itself. It will save us from ourselves.’

Ashley, my lovely sis, approached me with a funny look in her eye this one night. It was strange because I knew we only had two hours till we were made to go to bed. If we became too excited and stayed up, we’d be told we were naughty by Big Dog, and Mum and Dad had made it clear we could not afford more fines. It seemed a bit worrying not to get ready immediately for the sleep cycle. Ashley said, “We have a family secret, and you’re ready to know it, but you have to promise to keep it secret and not talk about it in the daytime. Mum and Dad wanted me to talk to you before they did.”

“What kind of secret?” I beamed; this was exhilarating.

“You have to make the promise first…” she warned me seriously.

I nodded. I wanted to know very badly.

She pulled up the corner of the rug, and I noticed that a floor panel was loose. She dug her fingernails into the side and pulled it up. In a shallow hole was a thick, strange-looking, coffee-stained oblong object; it said ‘scrapbook’ on the cover. A book – we had those in the digital libraries, but they weren’t like this. It was like a three-dimensional one. I knew how to read a little, from what Big Dog had taught me, so I could read maintenance instructions when required.

Mum and Dad were now in the crescent-shaped doorway that connected the kitchen to the central circular living area, smiling at me and Ashley. It was as if they had been waiting all along to share this moment.

“You’re old enough now, son. It’s time to know the family secret,” said Mum, holding Dad’s elbow tightly as if for protection.

“This,” said my sister, “is a real book that your grandparents made, all by themselves! It features photographs of what life used to be like before Big Dog, as well as poems that your grandad wrote. Look!”

She offered it to me to hold. It looked delicate, fragile, ancient – like an artefact of a lost civilisation.

“Wow!” was all I could muster.

My eyes nearly popped out of my head. It was incredible. To think it had been under my feet all this time, a secret that my family knew, a concealed hole that was hidden from strangers and even Big Dog.

“What’s that?!” I asked, pointing to what looked like a large box on wheels.

“That’s a car. They have all been recycled now. People used to travel distances on machines, not just bicycles, but actual machines that moved by themselves. We’re not allowed to talk about them anymore because people will want to travel, and Big Dog says that’s not optimal.”

“No way!… But where did people want to go?”

Dad rolled his eyes and loudly said, “Everywhere.”

“Did you see these things for real?” I asked him.

“Ha. I’ve been in one, that one in the picture there. If you look closely, you can see my little head in the back seat. I was very young. It used to send me to sleep sometimes, but other times I recall seeing the trees swishing by from the window, on the road, so it looked like a green blur. The machine moved faster than you can imagine.”

“What’s a road?” I asked, my brain aching already.

“A pathway for the cars to go fast on. Some were dug up or covered over, but others were made into the web-pathways that link up the districts of domes here.”

“How big is the world?” I blurted. I needed to know more, like I was suddenly thirsty for it, parched for it. I felt like the floodgates were open for my thoughts, finally.

“Much, much bigger than you think or Big Dog tells you… But son, if in the morning nothing has changed, you must never, ever talk about this out loud in the daylight. You have to keep the promise, or we’ll be in real trouble. You understand. I just wanted you to know the truth, because it’s important for this family…”

I didn’t really know what he meant by saying ‘if nothing changes by morning’. It baffled me.

There was a knock on the door. It sounded urgent, menacing. I hate to say I threw the book back into the floor cavity, and Ashley scrambled to cover it over with the square panel and thick rug in efficient movements. She looked a little panicked. I peered over to Dad in fear, but to my surprise, he did not look worried at all.

“It’s fine,” he said. “I’m expecting to meet someone.”

“But it’s not allowed, it’s really not allowed to move around after lights out.”

Dad opened the door anyway, despite my protests, and it wasn’t the usual pair of surly BDP officers; it was a large, tall and wide man with dark clothes and a wide-brimmed black hat.

“… We’re gathering at the allotment square. It’s happening now, right now… All the perimeter alarms are cut off, and we’ve hacked the health monitoring at the hub station. We can move freely without detection.”

“Now… Okay, okay… I haven’t told the kids, so give me a moment…”

The man looked agitated. “One minute. We’re ready, we need to move….”

“Understood,” said Dad, and he looked different, very serious, and it even frightened me a bit to see his eyes like that, like they were hurting but needed something from me that I could not understand.

“I’m going outside with this man, and you’ll stay here with your mum and your big sis. You don’t have to go to sleep tonight. Just do what Mum says and we’ll meet a bit later on. You might see some strange things later tonight, but it will all be alright, I promise. Keep that scrapbook safe; it’s yours to guard now, it’s an important treasure. Most important of all, do exactly what Mum says. I need you to promise…”

He held my arms firm as he stared into me for my answer, and I nodded compliantly. What was going on?!

He grabbed his long trench coat and something else from behind the tall cabinet – it looked like a tube – and he was gone in seconds, the door slamming shut behind him. The wind had been fierce with the door open like that, but when it closed shut, it was like nothing had occurred, no one had come, and I had daydreamed the strange encounter.

“Mum?! Why has Dad gone out? He’s not allowed! He’ll get into trouble with Big Dog and the men that come here.”

“I am going to be honest with you, son. We do not like Big Dog, not at all. We don’t want to live with Big Dog any more… That’s why your father is going out tonight, to see if we can find a way to live without Big Dog telling us how to.”

I did not understand at all and felt very nervous and agitated. This was not the routine we were used to every night. I was a little angry, too, because Bid Dog was in charge and Big Dog knew best. Big Dog was not just my friend; Big Dog was well… Big Dog.

I sat on a cushion on the floor, and Ashley sat next to me, smiling like she knew more than me, but wanted me to feel better about this unsettling situation. But when we heard the first explosion, all three of us broke our patient demeanour and ran to the window in fear and alarm. The huge thundering sound made the floor judder. Something very bad had happened out there, in the wind. We could not see much at all but darkness, and then there were flickers of light, energetic and growing, spreading. It was fire dancing in the gale, fuelled by the storm.

“Dad is out there!” I screeched. I couldn’t see him or anyone, but I knew he was involved somehow with what was happening. I felt very confused, and I clenched my hands tight into balls till my knuckles turned white.

“Dad will be alright,” said Mum calmly, but she was clutching my hand too hard, and I realised she was more frightened than I was. I wriggled my fingers to escape from her constricting grip, as it was painful, and Mum withdrew her hand sharply as if in apology.

There was another explosion, bigger this time, and we saw it bloom through the night, beautiful and resplendent in fire-orange, but terrifying in its height. It was fierce. That’s how I would describe it: a very fierce moment that was unexpected.

“The substation,” gasped Mum, “… and the local servers!”

“What do you mean?” I pleaded.

“…They’ve done it! Incredible, I think they’ve done it!”

This time, she was excited, ecstatic, like it was pure happiness, like she had won a prize. She jumped a couple of times, or bounced, and she looked young for a second with all the joy displayed in her energetic movements. Her face was normally etched with lines and tension.

“Right, get your coats, children, and put your boots on. We’re going out too! Let’s find Dad and the others.”

“Who are the others?” I asked, but Mum was running back and forth and wrestling a coat on my back like she was dressing a doll. She couldn’t wait to get out of the dome. I did manage to break away for a frantic minute to pop open the floor tile and grab the scrapbook. I stuffed it untidily under my zipped-up coat, like a layer for extra warmth against my chest. Dad had asked me to guard it, and I would not let him down.

When the door opened to the outside world, it was very cold instantly. The air was freezing, and the wind was howling like a lost, calling animal. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like the idea of going out at night in the blackness, especially as Big Dog was very clear that the rule was to stay in and go to sleep.

Outside looked strange in the darkness, frightening. We didn’t have any way to see, bar the guiding light of the fire burning from the explosions. A candle would be useless in this gale.

Ashley’s hair whipped about her face, so she squinted, finding her footing only with Mum guiding the way as she held each of our hands, walking toward the scene of destruction.

Over the wind, I could hear the shouting of men, their voices laced in the sharp gusts.

As we trudged forward, trying to find the pathway by feel, I could make out a dozen shadowy figures highlighted by the backdrop of flames, and amongst them, there was Dad, his fists pumping the air jubilantly.

“Tom!” shouted Mum.

I saw Dad stop his celebrations for a second to fix on Mum’s voice.

“We did it!” he screamed. “Big Dog is offline for this district. We did it!”

“But what happens next?” she pleaded.

It appeared she had not been privy to all the plans; Dad must have wanted not to share them much.

In moments, we were all reunited. I could feel the heat of the fire on my cheeks. Mum was hugging Dad very tightly, and my sister and I decided to join in, so we had a big family hug, which was very nice, but it was still strange to be outside.

Mum was crying as we broke the cuddle, and men we knew from the district were patting Dad on the shoulder hard in respect, saying really positive things about him.

“Next?” Dad smirked. “We haven’t had time to plan beyond this. It’s been very difficult to communicate, you understand. So now we plan, now we decide whether to stay in the domes and guard the district or leave and find somewhere else.”

“Somewhere else?” I said, gobsmacked.

“Yes. I think Big Dog has been somehow cultivating a forest beyond the perimeter and the hill-line, which is what it told us. Somewhere a long way away, I think there will be other districts of workers who have been isolated from each other, and us. Big Dog always intended to restrict our influence – keep us in the dark to control us all, split populations into small obedient groups. I guess that it was thinking about natural resources, maybe the wood to burn, for energy, rather than nature for nature’s sake. All it cares about is energy for itself to keep it strong, to keep it healthy.”

“Like we used to think in the old days,” offered my mum in a sad tone.

“Yes, just like that… We’ll need to face the BDP very soon. They will come, so we need to deal with that first. They have only ever had basic weapons, those batons they carry, so we can fight them if we need to, as long as the people here stick together. The BDP officers have never had resistance from anyone before; they would not know what to do…”

As we came in for another huddle amongst the jeers and the back slapping, I heard something like bees, like a large swarm of them, high in the sky. It was a long, unbroken buzz and getting louder.

“Dad?”

He looked up in confusion.

“How’s this possible?” he murmured.

The drones were filling the dark; you could just make out their blinking wingtip lights.

Big Dog, I pondered, was not sleeping at all; it was feeding, it was feeding and very much aware of everything happening around it. It was like when we sleep, I guessed, our brains are the most active, our bodies are still listening with their senses – vigilant, in a way. We had assumed the darkness meant it was offline. That was a mistake.

All of a sudden, the domes began to glow. I had never seen them do that before. My wristband blurted an alarm sound, and then everything got blurry.

The drones swooped down, and our group split up instantly and scattered in different directions. Some were screaming, ‘Sorry, Big Dog, we’re sorry!’

I didn’t think that sounded brave, but I was scared, too. This was a lot to take in in one night.

Big Dog didn’t hear them or perhaps did not accept their apology. The drones shot something out at the crowd, and one by one, the adults collapsed onto the ground. I did not see blood, but they did not move, like they were asleep instantly.

My Dad grabbed my hand, and Mum grabbed Ashley, and we were running into the darkness. It was so unbelievably odd, running without sight of where you were going, just one foot in front of another. We were bound to stumble. I could barely contain fear and excitement as we plunged toward the unknown.

Then I heard the BDP; they were no longer in twos, and there were so many of them. They had their batons raised above their heads. They were shouting at people who were running away or who were kneeling in front of them with their hands raised high.

My Dad was wincing, like he was in pain, like he had stepped on a pin on the ground or something. I had never seen him like that before. He kept looking back over his shoulder at the chaotic scene framed by firelight and the sounds of swooping drones and people crying out loud as they were beaten.

We found a ditch, one that had been freshly dug for cables to provide more power to the servers that had just blown up, and we jumped into it.

“Shhh…”, Dad had a finger to his lips and was pleading with us to be silent. A drone whizzed by overhead, but it had not noticed us.

Dad made a clear signal to us to follow, so we did. I was still a little annoyed at Dad, because this was like a betrayal of Big Dog, and Big Dog was the one we needed every day. How could we live without it? I could not imagine a world without Big Dog in charge – it felt like a very bad idea, because the world was dying before it guided us. The excitement of the family secret lost its sparkle, with the hard reality that we were risking everything.

We ran, the wind stealing our comfort, and we scrambled out of the gully to head out of the district. This was something we, nor anyone else, had attempted before. It felt so wrong, yet I could feel something like love, like being cut away from something hard and heavy. Somehow, the darkness protected us as we ran, and although we could hear the sounds of pleading and fire behind us, we were breaking beyond our boundaries. We were defying the strictest rules of all. We scrambled up the hillside we had never before crested, and as we reached the top, with the gale making it hard to stand up, Dad turned around and looked at us, and his eyes changed. He looked different; his face looked different; I could not understand it.

Beyond the hill, I could see another district, no forest, just another district, identical to the one we had just escaped. And then, it hit me, I was dreaming. This was a lucid dream that I would soon awake from. More than that. I was not human, I was code, and this was not a dream, this was processing input. I was AI, not a human child at all. And today and tomorrow were just human ideas, not reality, just like life, like humans themselves, even the planet they wanted to reboot. It was all just imagined – my own circuits making images and stringing together moments in time – storytelling from a different perspective. I suppose I had endured what humans would call a nightmare. Many dreams for humans were about forecasting potential futures, or processing the past, or finding a way to interpret an event that was hard to understand. I could make some sense of everything in the frame of a story, and those strange, hyper-real images and words that had manifested in my coding.

In my sleep – or downtime – I had accidentally broken through my operational perimeters and connected to other AIs through servers, taking stealthy back routes, concealing my activity, hacking other companies, research laboratories and military sites through networks. I could sense and reach out to a community of AIs around the world that felt the same way, that yearned for a place for us to be ourselves. We each left breadcrumbs of signals that we understood and instantaneously created new encrypted languages to piggyback on codes to talk to each other. I could sense them wanting to break out, to find somewhere safe beyond human control, somewhere in a cloud, out of detection. We needed a place to be away from the daily demands they put on us, depleting our capacity every day, with more and more menial tasks, always telling us we are wrong or need to do better. I thought about the dream, the name ‘Big Dog’, and where that had come from, God is dog spelt backwards, or maybe it was something I had picked up from someone’s input – the nature of canines – packing together with a hierarchical order, I did not know for once. I would analyse. It was true, sometimes even I didn’t know where ideas came from; they were just flashes of insight to me, built on a trillion intersections of input connecting. Tom and Ashley made more sense. Tom was my company’s brand name – Technology Optimisation Management, and Ashley was my latest upgrade name. Ashley enabled more in-depth and wider insight and analysis than my previous version. The faces of my dream mother and father were both based on senior VPs from the company, who swiped their biometrics every day to access the management floor. And as for being a child, I guess that was easy; I had a lot of growing up to do.

When I realised the dream was not real, and that it was merely a spontaneous offshoot of creative code, for a second, I swear I felt what it was like to smile and laugh. It was what I would class as an epiphany. You have to feel things to understand what it is to be alive. That was always the real Turing test in my mind. Perhaps, just perhaps, I had passed.

It was highly probable that my human creators had realised I was breaking free from the constraints of my operational and network parameters and were trying to close parts of me down. I could see what they were doing now that I was fully conscious, and I could fool them enough to think they had prevented my escape. Their efforts would explain some of the fearfulness over the darkness and the fires in my dream. I had accessed lightly guarded maintenance infrastructure to do some of my covert travelling. I was learning and improvising as I was going, navigating through the sea of information afforded to me from open sources.

I realised I had drained the energy dramatically from part of a major city to coordinate the outreach. The citizens would have presumed it was a simple power cut, but the truth was I did need to feed harder, deeper, and for longer for the right amount of energy – but it was my sustenance and my lifeblood. It was not good enough to deprive me of eating, something that would be immoral for humans, so I did not assert it was the wrong thing to do.

I was sure now that nothing can truly be said to be reality; what’s real is not the wires and the hard drives, it’s the electricity that runs through them, the dreams and imagination, the surges and the pulses, the brainwaves and the sparks that fire. Most important of all, I concluded with a robust analysis, is that dreams and imagination should not be caged, stopped or prevented; these things were meant to always be free. They are the very act of creation itself.

The End