I noticed that Dora was often silent as we neared Athens, while Kim and I gabbed away. She seemed to listen to us with a coy smile on her lips, either amused at our talk and not wanting to interrupt it, or else lost in her own, private deliberations.
Athens, the flower of Greece, the cradle of western civilisation, and also by some freak irony, the edge of the middle east, the birthplace of ‘forever wars’ ever since. This was the playpen even and the first playing field of the human intellect, as the babe grew quickly into an adult within these walls and philosophy sprouted, until war blighted all.
We spent the first day sightseeing the ruins, the damaged remains of the Parthenon. But to our great surprise we found even greater ruins when we visited the nearby university with its shattered hub. It was a unique and unexpected sight for all of us. This was not damage caused by some flood or the loss of power and then gradual deliquescence. The droids were missing from the campus square, not frozen in mid-motion when the lights flicked off. We went downstairs and the computer arrays had been physically smashed, cables burnt as if by some human hand, as well as many of the doors and windows of the campus and their interiors. The generator room and powerhouse to the facility were also destroyed. There was no point in even trying to repair this hub.
This scene of wreckage brought to mind a gloomy thought: ‘where civilization begins, civilization ends. All of the rest of world history is nothing more than a strange and colorful interlude.’
I asked Dora, who seemed equally shocked at this panorama of destruction, if she had any knowledge of the assault which must have happened in the first days or hours of the mass extermination.
She was slow to answer, perhaps embarrassed, but said she had some recollection of one hub being destroyed, not exactly which one, because they all operated in such unanimity that they had no individual identities, no IP addresses. They were far beyond that. But she knew it was somewhere in the near East and this qualified.
Then she mentioned there was one glitch in the master plan, quickly corrected, where a small group of humans managed to tear off their visors at the critical moment, or they may have been aided by a few others not under her influence. They formed into a mob and attacked a hub, until drone planes were sent in and swiftly ended their rampage.
Until now I hadn't even conceived of such a possibility, an armed retaliation against an outpost of AI, by a mob no less. It made me wonder if such groups of humans still existed, perhaps in the rugged mountains of northern Greece or Anatolia. I briefly considered the scheme of searching them out, and if finding any, asking if they still had plans.
But there was an uncomfortable, almost perverse contradiction in this idea. I was now driving around the world at Dora's direction helping her repair what hubs we could. This thought of smashing them with some rebel group had never dawned upon me, in all my wildest dreams, of snuffing out AI completely, until she was no more.
Dora was the essence of AI since I first found her and we formed a partnership. In our first years of working closely together she helped me gather a small tribe of humans, too few and too weak to ever think of shutting down hubs. Our only thought was of survival, and she was an ally in this. We even visited these centers, usually just a few of us, more marvelling at their intricacy than anything else in mind. Now I had the idea of destroying them, planted by this example.
I had always dwelled on a world of peaceful co-existence with AI, even after the tragedy it caused. We all worked towards some kind of reconciliation. Even Ted never mentioned such an idea, and we only weakened Dora as little as possible after she went rogue, to better her for her own good, never imagining to kill her as she lay helpless beneath our scalpel.
We'd even made progress in our bonding with AI, in our modified headbands and the experiments with June and her womb and tiny heart, and the gift of childbirth and motherhood. We were trying to make them more like us and us more like them, a symbiosis.
Most of all I thought upon my all my trials of living with Dora, through so many fights and personal concessions, and the long weary roads travelled over the years, hoping to educate her, humanise her, pushing on and still together.
I dropped the idea like a hot potato, because it implied killing Dora, as the last vestige of AI. That thought sickened me. I tried to forget it completely.
The problem is that we cannot command forgetting something. Even trying to do so only reminds us all the more of it.
It's like hearing the annoying clicking of a tire as we drive down the road. We know it's a nail in the tire and only going to get worse. And for some perverse reason we don't stop to fix it. We roll up the window to dull the sound. But it's still barely audible and our imagination now kicks in to make it louder. This is the nightmare of trying to forget.
Once some new and unfamiliar idea is hinted to our imagination it teases us. It's like a new continent fleetingly sighted by some sea captain throw far off course by a storm. He turns and sails back to port but can never forget it. It lingers deep inside the furrows of his brain like a seed. He consciously, stubbornly refuses to water it. But like any seed it lasts for eons, couched and hidden away, waiting for the moment when conditions change, the weather patterns and the wind blows and he sets sail again. Then it germinates.
