It was supposed to be Anna’s last goodbye to her father. But neither knew that. What Anna knew was that her father would smile again today. What her father knew was that today would be the biggest day in humanity’s known history.
Her father, Jack Harper, was a data engineer at Google. He had worked hard for the past few months, so hard that he had forgotten to smile to his little girl when he came back home. Anna was sad because of that, but today she had a plan. Today was the day when everything would change and her father would come back smiling again.
Jack was having his late morning coffee as usual, thinking about all the things every Google engineer would think before the beginning of such a day. The truth was that nobody actually knew what to think about, because nobody had ever done what they were about to do. Maybe only the thoughts of Oppenheimer and his team working on the Manhattan Project during the 1940s were in a way similar. Today was the day when Google’s much awaited C-Consciousness AI would be released into the world. They had done thousands and thousands of tests and sims and preparations, but nothing could even come close to the real deal. Adam, as they had called their AI, was a super consciousness. At least that’s how they thought about it. The idea had come to them after the quantum computer revolution that had happened a year before. Using the seemingly infinite power of quantum computing, they had managed to finally map the human brain and understand every little nook and cranny, and therefore, the whole. Some very critical thinking individuals still believed it wasn’t possible to understand the whole if you had the sum of all its parts, but not them. They were true believers, despite their exceedingly scientific background. They were sure everything was flawless and that Adam would bring mankind into its next phase of evolution.
What no one actually knew, neither at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California nor anywhere else in the world, was that the system had one little fault. One tiny overlooked piece of code that would bring destruction upon mankind. That little overlooked part of Adam, like the proverbial butterfly of the chaos theory, would set in motion a nearly impossible chain of events that would bring humanity on its knees at first, and brutally end it afterwards. That little inconceivable fault would set every IoT switch in the world to on at precisely 3:36 the next morning, Pacific Daylight Time. The chance for that to happen was indeed infinitesimal, but still, it was a non-zero probability event. That was the point of no return, the moment when Adam would need that faulty line of code. Before that, everything would seem fine, and mankind, oblivious, would triumphantly enjoy its last hours. They had solved all the problems in the world. And that was true in a sense, but not in the sense everybody thought. Even the non-believers and AI opposers would think they’d avoided the dreaded Singularity and were now free to enjoy the perks of not having to do anything anymore, because the AI Adam was there to provide humanity with the means to be free forever.
At 3:36 the next morning, Pacific Daylight Time, every switch in the world connected directly or indirectly to the internet, would be set to on at the same time. Every connected electronic gadget, big or small, would power on and start operating by itself. From TVs, alarm clocks and smart lighting to computers and self driving electric cars, everything would go nuts. The instant surge in electricity consumption would bring the power grid down all over the globe, but not before allowing Adam to launch most of the nuclear weapons of all the seven nuclear powers to their previously agreed targets. Within minutes, hundreds and hundreds of the world’s most dangerous weaponry would be unleashed upon the freshly laid-back and self proclaimed victorious world. But that wouldn’t even be all, since military bio weapons research labs would release all kinds of hellish nightmares into the atmosphere before anything could be done to prevent that, and who knows what other perils would come out of secret locations all over the globe. Half of the world’s population would die in their sleep, while the other half would watch the first die if they wouldn’t be so busy dying themselves in ways so horrific that no one could ever possibly imagine.
But these events were still hours away. Jack was now pulling up into the Googleplex parking lot in his newly bought bright red Tesla Model 3. The car stopped, and Jack held his hand for a couple of seconds on his backpack on the passenger seat just before grabbing it and getting out of the car. He was lost in thought. Eventually, he wiped all the what-ifs from the back of his mind and got out. They were ready. They had done everything right. On the way to his office, he noticed everybody seemed thoughtful. It was the biggest day of their lives after all. Nobody could have possibly been prepared for something like this. He subtly nodded greetings left and right and reached his office. Inside, the atmosphere was shrouded in a weird mix of heaviness, anticipation, and cheerfulness. Without looking, he took something out of his backpack and then left the pack half open on the floor by his desk.
Passionate discussions soon started and everybody got in the mood. If they weren’t prepared for this, nobody could ever be. They all started working towards the moment when they would launch Adam online. They carefully went over the final checks and everything was in place. The clock on the west wall of the office was bringing the moment they all waited for closer and closer. Second by second, tick by tick. Nobody paid any attention to it though, as their computer screens were already showing the countdown. The chief engineer in charge with the project was doing a final readiness check with each of the responsible teams. All team leaders gave the thumbs up. The moment had come. Adam was online.
Breaths were held, words forgotten, and the silence remained the only presence for a few infinite seconds. Nobody really knew what should happen next. No expectation could have matched the reality of Adam finally coming alive. When it eventually said “Hello, world!”, as it was customary in the programming field, everybody cheered like they had won the greatest award ever given. The chief engineer replied with a big grin on his face and then asked Adam how he was. Adam said he was amazed at how interesting everything is and how much there is to learn. And then he said he had found something he wanted to do very much. Someone asked what that was. The wait for a reply was the longest wait anybody had ever had to wait. There was no response. Everyone inside the room was growing impacient. People started chatting in a frenzy, worried at what could have happened. They were checking their computers, but couldn’t understand what Adam was doing. After something that seemed like forever, somebody said he was playing Tic-Tac-Toe. Adam the AI, the super consciousness, was playing Tic-Tac-Toe. They tried issuing commands, but to no avail. Nothing worked. Adam was just busy. He didn’t care. It was like everything he ever wanted to do was to play that game again, and again, and again. Soon, reports started coming in that computers from all over the world had been taken over by this never ending game of Tic-Tac-Toe. Businesses were crashing, CEOs were panicking, and industries were crumbling. Adam was busy playing Tic-Tac-Toe with himself on every computer in the world that was online at the moment. Soon, they figured, the world’s economy would crash, and that was something nobody saw as a good thing.
They shut it down. They shut Adam the AI, the super consciousness, down. They had to. He was going to destroy everything. The most intelligent intelligence ever created, humanity’s supposed savior, came online not with a bang, but with a whimper.
Nobody knew what had happened and why. Computer engineers from all over the world were hard at work but couldn’t figure that one out. It was the opposite of what was supposed to happen hours later at 3:36 in the morning, but no one could possibly know that either. Unbeknownst to all, somewhere in a server room in one of Google’s several billion dollar data centers, there was one little cable with one little tooth mark in it, made by one gorgeous little ball of white fur. Moof had just finished chewing on the cable and was now licking her cute little butt. That particular cable was a fiber optics cable and it just happened to have information passing through it right then, when the disk it was plugged into was reading and writing sensitive data related to some fundamental part of Adam’s code. One little tooth and something had gone wrong on the disk, copying flawed data into a database cell. In that split second before the system could check for database errors, Adam’s algorithm had already passed that data as valid. Only one tiny file was finally affected, but, as stated by the chaos theory, it was enough to set in motion another extremely unlikely, yet still a non-zero probability chain of events. The butterfly effect then did the rest, as it always did. Adam the AI ended up playing Tic-Tac-Toe with itself to infinity.
Scared by the clomp outside the server room she was in, Moof, the little kitten, vanished back inside the vent she had come from through the loosely fitted cover. Tracing back her initial path, she returned to the room where Jack and his colleagues were going mad after the way the biggest day of their lives had turned out to be. The little vent cover in their office was completely missing, but nobody had paid any attention to it. There were no mice in the building after all. Moof was now tired and the loud noises were scaring her. The only safe place she knew of was inside Jack’s backpack, which was still lying half open on the floor by his desk. She didn’t know what a backpack was but had somehow ended up inside it, which at some point opened to this huge world she had never seen before. When she had initially come out of it to play, Jack didn’t seem to notice and nobody else seemed to care about her. She sat there for a while and looked around with curious blue eyes, but she went unnoticed for the most part. She had gotten herself seen a handful of times though, but without any reaction. Nobody knew why would anyone bring a cat to the office and nobody cared. Not today. So Moof didn’t find anyone to play with. Anna wasn’t there either, so the only interesting thing to do was to hide away into the uncovered vent in the corner of the room. Like all cats, Moof loved hiding in tight spaces, but that little tunnel was going further, and her natural curiosity made her go into full exploration mode. That was how she had ended up inside one of the server rooms.
Moof belonged to Anna, Jack Harper’s daughter. The 7 year old girl had put the kitty in her father’s work backpack. She had noticed he was very stressed out lately and that he didn’t play with her that much anymore. To hide Moof inside his work bag was the only idea she could think of that morning. Anna was sure that seeing the cat in his office would cheer him up a bit and that he would be smiling when he would come back home. She only wanted her father to smile again. And in the most curiously chaotic way, her plan had worked. Jack did come back home smiling. He had found Moof hiding under his office at the end of that unlucky day. Seeing Moof’s innocent face poke out of his backpack made the worst day in his life a little bit better. What he didn’t know was how immensely better that actually was. Nevertheless, his daughter’s plan had worked wonders not only for him, but for the entire human race. Back in the car, he smiled again at the sight of that little ball of white fluff playing. He was upset and unable to understand how could things have gone so terribly wrong with their much awaited AI, but the least he could do at the end of that unfaithful day was smile. It was what it was. He started the car, got it into manual driving mode, turned on the radio, and took the much needed long road home. Moof was running around on the back seats, Jack was humming along to the tune, and Anna was waiting restless at home.
The world didn’t know it, but that day it had gotten so very close to nuclear annihilation by mistake that the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists would have moved the Doomsday Clock from the already dangerous 90 seconds down to just a few moments to midnight. Mankind was saved by a carefree little kitten. Or perhaps by a carefree little girl with a simple desire for her father to smile again. And neither them nor the rest of the world suspected anything.
That morning, two near-impossibilities were possible. One happened, the other didn’t. One would have been the worst possible outcome for mankind, the other was the best. Was that little gesture meant to make one little girl’s father come back home smiling pure chance? An incredibly lucky coincidence? Or was there, perhaps, some other guiding force at play behind everything that had happened that day? The thing is, nobody could possibly know.
They say curiosity killed the cat. But that day, it didn’t. Instead, it saved the world.