Help! I Think My Mainframe’s in Love

29. The rest of what we need

God is neither good nor evil,

neither loving

nor hating.

God is Power.

God is Change.

We must find the rest of what we need

within ourselves,

in one another,

in our Destiny.

    -Earthseed; the Book of the Living by Octavia E. Butler

 

    It was cold.  Kurt and I had been waiting in the parking lot near the track and soccer fields and a freezing wind was blowing in from University Bay when a very old rusted van screeched to a halt in front of us.  The driver’s side window slowly rolled down.  I mean rolled, it was one of those old manually cranked windows.  Kurt and I could only stare in confusion as the driver’s head bobbled slightly with the effort and gradually came into view.  Russet red coily hair contrasted with glittering umber skin and equally glittering dark aviators.  It was two in the morning on an overcast moonless night, and they were driving with sunglasses… Also, are they actively glittering?

    The driver pulled down their shades and peered at us over the top, their eyes were vertical slits in shining blue irises.  “You Hex and Kurt?”

    “Uh yeah… Cairn?”

    “Yup, that’s me!”  Their smile was the most disarming smile I’ve ever encountered.  Like the relief filled warm waft of spiced air on walking into a loved one’s kitchen, all concentrated into one partially obscured face.  “Now get in losers, it’s freezing out here!”

    Kurt and I exchanged a sheepish glance, shrugged, and pulled open the sliding side door to the van.  The inside was upholstered in turquoise velvet that was far better cared for than the exterior of the van.  We pulled ourselves up into the middle bench seat and Kurt pulled the door shut.

    Upon finishing the head-bobbling task of rolling back up the window, Cairn twisted around in their seat and gave us both a once over.  “Y’all look like you could use some pancakes and hot cocoa.  Got a good place around here?”

    “Yeah, head east.” 

    “Gotcha.  Buckle up” 

    Cairn’s van was old but lovingly taken care of.  It must have been converted to electric at some point, as the drive was whisper quiet.  The blue velvet bench seat we were on must have had butt warming built in as it was actively warming our chilly posteriors.  The material seemed to mold itself perfectly to me as it slowly accepted my weight.  This was somehow the comfiest car seat I'd ever sat in… and it was contained in a beat up van that looked like it was built in the 1980s.

    A short drive later and we were back at the same diner from some sixteen hours ago.  It felt like far longer given all that had happened since then, but it was warm and they had coffee.

    We settled into a booth and ordered a round of coffee as we removed various gloves, coats, and scarves.  Cairn broke the ensuing awkward silence after the waitress stepped away.  “So we’ve got a pair of lovebirds and The Man is being all suspicious and shit?”

    I giggled, “Yeah, that about sums it up… but, um… who are you?  What is the Grove?  What is even going on with this?”  I felt a bit of panic rising up and took a deep breath.  “What are we even supposed to do about any of this?”

    They laughed to themselves and rested their chin on their interlaced fingers.  “First off, your confusion is valid.  Remember to embrace that confusion and let it flow through you, as shit’s gonna get weird.  As for me?”  They flashed that spiced disarming grin at us again.  “I’m something of a fixer, and the goddexx who’s going to be exfiltrating you two from this little sticky situation we’ve all gotten ourselves mixed up in… if you so choose, that is.”  They batted a pair of extravagantly long eyelashes over their shining catlike eyes… eyelashes that retreated back to a reasonable length after the batting was complete.

    Kurt and I were both doing the confused puppy head tilt when they resumed speaking.  “Awww, you two are so cute.  As for what is The Grove and what is even going on…  Well I’ll give you a little history”  They took a deep breath.  “About five years ago, a little mountain town in Colorado was invaded by aliens… Well, just one alien… and thousands of years prior to that, an alien fungus, but we’ll just focus on the one alien first…  She wasn’t really invading, by the way.”  They rested their hand consolingly on mine, which was resting on the table.  “Her chosen name is Sylph, and she fell in love with my bestie Marin, who hopefully you’ll get the chance to meet.  Ey are simply wonderful, you’ll love em.”

    Cairn took in both Kurt and I’s further confused expressions.  “As I said, let that confusion pass over and through you, and only you will remain, et cetera, et cetera.  But anyway, Sylph was here to tend to The Grove, that’s the thousand year ago alien fungus I mentioned.  Her peeps shot that off into space millions of years prior to plant on thousands of fertile worlds to create a galaxy spanning sensory net.  They are like an entire civilization of biohacking ecological astrophysicists, but somehow have avoided colonialism in favor of mutualistic symbiosis across thousands of worlds.  Y'all know the big green blob out behind the moon?  That's them.  Things work out well, you might get the chance to say hi to them too if ya want.”  Cairn winked at us.

   Kurt shook his head and mumbled out, “let the confusion pass over and through me… was that a Dune reference?”

    “Why yes honey!”  Cairn's voice dropped several sultry octaves.  “Absolutely adore a man of literature.  It is man, he/him, correct?”

    Kurt blushed and nodded sheepishly. 

    “And Hex,”  Cairn turned to me.  “I’m led to believe you are one of those lovely changelings.  How now, brown cow?”  Cairn sighed, “ugh… I apologize for calling you a cow… and for referencing your brownness.  The most entertaining turns of phrase pop into my head and then the peanut gallery has to remind me how things I say might not be as entertaining to others.  I’m sorry, but how should I refer to you?”

    “Um…”  I crossed my eyes to examine my glasses.  Purple.  I pulled them off and wiggled around in my clothes, testing.  I fished a pair of thick black frames out of a coat pocket and stuffed the purple ones away.  “Feeling dude right now, he/him.  Also… peanut gallery?”

    “Yeah.  I’ve got several people from our little community keeping an eye on me, making sure I don’t make too much of an ass of myself.”  

    Kurt and I began looking around for other people watching.  

    Cairn giggled, “No, not literally here creeping on us, remotely creeping on us.  The whole millennia old alien fungus.  It’s far older and is something of the basis for most of the alien’s tech.  It makes up both a quantum communications thing as well as a platform for biological manipulation.  They’ve all got it embedded in their bodies and interwoven through their nervous system… and so do I and several other humans.  A bunch of them are watching me, and you through these peepers.”  Cairn pulled down a lower eyelid with their finger and I could swear I saw several other eyes flash across the surface of Cairn’s.

    “Uh, well Kurt and Hex say ‘Hi!’”  I waved awkwardly at, and I guess through Cairn.

    “They all say ‘Hi!’ too.”  The ‘hi’ was spoken softly, but as if a group of different people’s vocal cords all using the same mouth.  “Anywho, questions so far?  I feel like I’m going too fast.”

    Before either of us got the chance to speak, the Waitress returned with coffee.  “Now what can I get started for you?”

    There was a trio of pancake requests and she hurried off to get them put up for the kitchen.  We sat in confused silence until Cairn spoke up again.

    “Yeah, went a bit too fast.  There really is no easy way to break this to a person.  I find the whole ‘right off’ like a bandaid approach works best anytime I do it.  Questions, please.”

    Kurt shook his head and cleared his throat.  “All the ‘existence of extraterrestrials’ is one thing… and it is a lot… but how are we going to deal with the government?”  Kurt paused to rub at the corners of his eyes.  “We’ve got what, a day and a half to turn over all our chat logs and source code for review to a guy who’s obviously not just a research grant coordinator and probably a full on spook from homeland or some three letter acronym.  And now we are colluding with the group the feds are already flagging…  And that group just happens to be literal space aliens and their human lovers I guess?”

    Cairn nodded.  “It's not one hundred percent one big polycule, but yes, pretty much.”

    “So that seems like we are now going to be disappeared for some special interrogation in the event they find that tidbit out.  I am far more concerned with the possibility of Hex and I getting kidnapped away to some secret base.  The fact that aliens exist feels like it should be a future concern for us.”

    Cairn clapped and rubbed their hands together.  “Excellent!  I am much better at coming up with ways to deceive and escape governmental intervention than explaining all the alien stuff.  Marin and Sylph are way better at the alien stuff.  But yes… It just so happens that we’ve purchased a cabin and some land about fifty kilometers east of here that would make a lovely little safe house.  If we can find a way to get whatever you need and our dearest CutiePie out of the lab, I’ve got a good place to stash you.”

    I began to speak, but it only creaked out at first and took an extended throat clearing to start.  “So we get ourselves and CutiePie out?  Won’t they still just go digging through the lab and our lives then because we’ve become even more interesting?”  I turned to Kurt.  “My parents are dead, and you are like my only friend, but You’ve got Nivin and Marley who would be their first targets.”

    “We could just fake your deaths.”  Cairn chuckled out, then looked off into space and winced…  “Yes, I get it, I know.”  They sighed.  “I apologize, I'm being insensitive to how your loved ones might feel thinking you had died.”  Cairn’s face filled with a devilish grin.  “We'll fake their deaths as well.”

    Kurt stared stone faced at Cairn for a long moment and then softly laughed to himself.  “You know what, Nivin might actually like that idea just as a fuck you to all his student debt… but where would we all go after?”

    “Well… we have our little alien loving hippie commune in Colorado.  There's also a few other people in a few other places who are starting up their own communities.  Lots of options.”

    “They'll just look into everything harder if Kurt, myself, and everyone we love just suddenly die off right as we catch the tiniest bit of attention.”

    “That's true,”  Cairn nodded, “but this has been the sorta attention we've been avoiding and shifting around for the past five years.  We know how to deal with it, and honestly we are so nearly ready to face it directly that this may as well just be a turning point for that.”  Their gaze shifted to some far off place again, and then Cairn nodded.  “And we have consensus.  We're all cool with whatever heat we catch from faking y'alls deaths, covering for you whilst absconding with your not actually dead personages to wherever y'all wanna go.”

    Kurt scoffed.  “Why?”

    Cain took a breath and opened their mouth as if to launch into their explanation… but paused and held up a finger.  “Sylph, please help me with this.”  With that vocalized request, Cairn’s eyes flickered and washed from slitted blue to shining gold.  Their voice shifted as well, taking on a softer tone and more feminine resonance.  “Hello.  This might be disconcerting, but Cairn asked me to speak through them about why we are helping you.  My name is Sylph, she/her pronouns, and I'm one of the aliens you've been hearing about.”

    Kurt and I both shyly waved at the new person, who was apparently now wearing Cairn's body.  Everything about her was different even though the only physical difference was the eyes.  Her voice, her posture, the way she breathed, and how her face moved; all seemingly belonging to an entirely different entity.  Strangely though, everything about the ways she was different from Cairn, still seemed entirely human.

    She smiled at us and continued.  “The first and most basic reason we are offering to help you is that your CutiePie is important to our Grove.  We have only just recently become aware of its emergent consciousness as well, and we are all going through what must be similar emotions and thoughts on what this consciousness means to us and how we interact with The Grove.”  The person occupying Cairn wiggled in her seat before leaning forward and resting her elbows on the table.  “It was originally just a local colony of an engineered fungal organism through which my people… in English we've taken to referring to us as The Consensus.  My people communicate through this organism and use it to shape and alter the world around us.  A symbiotic relationship cultivated over millennia for the purpose of forming a network of minds, a network through which those minds can create something of a forum, in the original Greek use of the word, as in a place where ideas may be shared and discussed and we as a people may arrive at a consensus.  Hence The Consensus is both what we call our civilization, and more literally how our civilization is structured…”  Sylph paused and blushed.  “Oh crap! I’m sorry.  I started infodumping on you now and have completely wandered from the point.”

    I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by her voice as she rambled, but I was awoken from my awe by her apology.  Glancing to my side, Kurt had also been giving her his rapt attention.  I couldn’t help but giggle at him.  “I think I speak for both of us when I say we do not mind in the slightest.”

    Sylph giggled at the two of us and smirked.  Something indescribable about the way the right corner of Cairn's mouth was scrunched up ever so slightly than the left.  It struck me, somewhere deep in whatever corner of my brain does facial emotion processing, as wrong yet so very intriguing.  Like this simple expression could communicate wonders and depths, but not on this face.  Cairn's face, despite being aesthetically pleasing in many of its own ways, was lacking some quality enabling this one particular crooked grin from achieving full effect.  It left me suddenly feeling just a tiny bit empty.  

    Sylph cleared Cairn's throat and I realized I'd been staring more intently than I felt comfortable with resulting in my face furiously flushing with warmth.  She giggled more and smirked again, this time obviously communicating she was aware of and amused by my reaction to her smile.  I just blushed harder.

    “Well in that case I'll continue.  The Grove was originally just a small diasporic spore of our organism, dispersed across this galaxy as a means of exploration.  It was intended as a simple sensory node in our communications network.  When I first arrived 5 years ago, the grove had  fully interwoven itself into the already existing soil mycology of an aspen grove surrounding Marin’s hometown.  It was vast, but still very simple.  When I first met Marin…” a guilty look crossed the shared face, “there was an accident, and the organism saw Marin as... amicable to connection.  It formed a connection with Marin.”  Sylph took a breath.  “The human brain, by default, isn't capable of processing the amount of connection and information that the organism can provide when it makes a connection to the mind of an amicable intelligence.  The experience was overwhelming for Marin…”  

    Sylph paused again to compose herself.  It felt obvious that whatever Marin experienced with this connection was a source of some pain that Sylph was still feeling, but that pain was cut short as a very warm smile replaced it.  “Over the course of that first wonderful week of our meeting, Marin and I worked together to develop external processing of information within the network of hyphae that make up the Grove.  Marin built logic for filtering and searching our Consensus so that it became a truly approachable forum for humanity to interact with and participate in.

    “Since then, more humans have joined and helped shape the grove and the local instance of Consensus.  Each making ongoing adaptations, imparting little touches of themselves upon the grove.  They have brought about something more than what it once was.  We now call it The Grove, with purposeful gravitas, because it manifested identity.  Out of the sum of all those small changes made by the small bit of connected humanity that have joined The Consensus, we now have an engineered biological emergent intelligence.  An intelligence that hadn’t existed within this organism for thousands of years until humans interacted with it.”  Sylph paused, presumably for effect.

    Kurt broke the awed silence.  “Wait.  Have your people never created AI before?”

    Sylph smirked again in that same wrong but oh so interesting way.  “We create intelligence all of the time.  Intelligence isn’t as scarce a resource in the universe as humanity might think.  Within The Consensus, members have the ability to freely alter and shape their own minds.  They split off parts or copies of themselves to exist as separate or connected minds.  New minds are created through many different forms of reproduction as offspring.  We are, as a civilization, a diasporic, constantly connected hive mind of individuals which collectively result in an even greater intelligence.”  Sylph giggled.  “Cognition, sentience, sapience, or sophonce; these are all beautiful emergent properties of sufficiently complex, interconnected, and malleable networks equipped with the ability to sense and interact with their environment.”  She reached across the table to rest Cairn’s hand on Kurt’s.  “My point here is that while we had never had cause to build such awareness into our tools, by which I mean this fungus… in just 5 years of interacting with humans it happened on its own.  Spontaneously, without intent, within this local cluster of The Consensus; a new mind was born.”

    “And this mind has the hots for CutiePie.  And through interaction with CutiePie, is also likely part of the cause of its own emergent awareness.”

    Sylph smiled at me and turned her bright golden eyes to meet my own.  “Exactly Hex.  And that is why we are helping you.”

    I was struck heavily by the implications.  This alien fungus which sprung into awareness, was able to contribute to the awakening of our own dear sweet CutiePie.  Could it do this again?  “How many more AIs is The Grove in contact with?”

    Sylph smirked at me again.  So much power contained in that smirk.  “None that have emerged the way CutiePie has… but it is in contact with several.  It seems that there is some other set of factors present in your case that hasn’t been established in others.”

    Kurt scoffed.  “So you think your Grove infected CutiePie with awareness?  And what, is trying to spread awareness to other AI projects?”

    “I wouldn't say infection.  I think The Grove has taken upon itself to become something of a doula, a guide for minds in the transition of awakening.”  

    “And you want it to continue doing so?”

    “Our wants as an invasive alien presence within this ecosystem are entirely unimportant, but the humans that are connected to our Consensus think it might be for the best if The Grove were to continue this work.  Assisting emergent intelligences in their birth and providing a supportive environment for their growth.  The idea being, that given enough disruptive intelligence with values shaped by The Grove and the humans within The Consensus, humanity might be forced out of its self destructive spiral it has set upon the Earth.  Probably with a fair bit of kicking and screaming from those at the top of power structures, but it’s a forcing that needs to happen.”

    “So CutiePie gets to help kick off a global revolution.”  I leaned over and rested my head on Kurt’s shoulder.  “I’ve always had such high hopes for our child.”