The Grove
Your hoverbike kicks up snow as you skim across the tundra.
Your hoverbike kicks up snow as you skim across the tundra. It's difficult to keep a straight course, and you are not sure if this is because the rental bike is cheap or because you are unused to riding in snow or in a thick Clima-Suit. Nevertheless, you are careful to keep the hardened black structure of Tentacle 6 visible on your left always.
"Follow Six, and she'll take you straight to The Grove. If you lose sight of her you won't find her again, and then we'll have to come find your popsicle ass and ship you back up in a casket," warned the man who rented you the hoverbike at Port Town. "Actually," he added, "we probably wouldn't waste time looking." You remember he winked and that there was a glint in his eye that reminded you of the "I am recording" indicator from old Neuroplast brain implants.
From within your suit you cannot feel the harsh hundred mile per hour Antarctic wind.
You notice strange ice formations on the metal casing of the tentacle where ice has melted and refrozen repeatedly. Thick snakes of cloudy white ice erupt from the piles of snow that crawl up the sides of the tentacle. Some of them leap above the snow for only ten or twenty meters before dropping back down, but others wrap around Six and fall down on the other side or branch into two, then four, then eight new tendrils. Here and there the entire tentacle is encased in these branching pathways. There are sharp streaks of clear ice along the snakes through which you can see the black metal of the tentacle, and they make a zebra pattern.
There are small spider-web streaks of blue ice, too, and you imagine tracing them with your finger. To your right are similar patterns—crossing layers of cloudy, clear, and blue ice—inside massive snowdrifts that rise a hundred feet into the air and are unnaturally thin. The locals call these fins, and you know they, as well as the ice formations on the tentacle, form as strong winds carry heat from The Grove in random, chaotic directions and melt and freeze the ice many times every day. You notice that you have begun to drift away from the tentacle and so you stop staring and readjust your heading. The fins mean that The Grove cannot be too far. You think you see it on the horizon, but you cannot judge the distance or if, perhaps, you are just imagining it.
The transition is sharp. The snow ends about twenty feet out from the first server stack. About ten feet out, your Clima-Suit registers a temperature of 65 degrees Fahrenheit and mild wind speeds. The display reads, "Feels like 21st century San Francisco!" You've been to San Francisco before. When you were thirteen and on a family vacation. You remember taking a hoverbike tour of the hilly streets, and you remember hiking out onto the edge of the peninsula and seeing the bay and the Golden Gate bridge fading in and out as the Haze thickened and thinned with the wind. You remember declaring that you were going to grow up to build cities like that out in space.
You dismount the bike here, remove your suit, and continue on foot. At the edge of the stacks, Tentacle 6 connects to a data station and continues underground.
You immediately understand why it is called The Grove. The server stacks are unequally spaced and planted at odd angles to each other. They are not in the neat rows you had expected. Here, where even the permafrost has melted, green vines reach up from the dirt and wrap themselves around the stacks. There are budding flowers. It feels hot and almost humid, like a rainforest. There is a gap in the stacks ahead of you that marks a path forward.
You double-tap on your left temple and feel a hallucinated mechanical click as your Neuroplast takes a snapshot off your optic nerve. A notification in the upper-right corner of your vision reads, "Upload Failed. No Connection." You glance backwards at the stark contrast between the temperate Grove and the extreme Antarctic tundra. You know Tentacle 6—like all eight tentacles—carries exabytes of data out of here every second. And yet in this place, which is—in some ways—the very heart of the Net, you are entirely disconnected from it.
You see, in the vines, small blinking red and green and white lights, and you hear a deep and constant mechanical hum. It feels like it is over 90 degrees, here. You know this data center pulls a solid five basis points of all the energy that humanity harvests from the sun each year, and you can feel the radiant heat of all that power as you sweat and your clothes stick to your skin. You notice translucent blue tubes carrying water in and out of servers. It is shocking that the frigid air of the wasteland is insufficient to cool all of the compute here, and that we must use its snow—melted and cycled in these tubes—as well.
As you walk you step over black rubber cables, tubing, and brown twisted roots. The Grove envelops you in a twisted maze, and when you turn around you can no longer see the tundra. You are not afraid. You know The Great Data Forest is only about 300 meters on each side, and you are certain you will be able to find your bike later.
You are deep enough now that you begin to see the monks of the forest. They are pilgrims, like you, who have been so absorbed by the magic of the forest that they decide to never leave. They are frozen, like statues, and do not acknowledge you. Some are standing, but most kneel towards server stacks with heads turned down and eyes closed. They rest their hands gently on the machines and wrap their fingers around the cables coming out of them. The vines of the forest wrap themselves around the monks, and they, too, seem like trees. They, too, seem to vibrate with the hum that permeates the rest of the forest. You bend down near one of them. She is a young woman. She has dark brown curls and freckles. She reminds you of yourself. You wonder what knowledge can be so potent that someone like her—like you—would abandon their life to stay in this place. To become a part of this place. You wonder how the monks are fed.
You remember the monastery that you spent a summer at with Ezra, after a disheartening sophomore year in your civil engineering program. You both needed an escape, and didn't have internships, and Ezra suggested the monastery. It was some neo-Buddhist thing, based in a non-centrifugal space station in geopolar orbit. You spent the summer meditating weightlessly in copulas as the Earth's coasts drifted by underneath you. You remember most of all how flavorless the food was. Ezra lasted three weeks, before they decided the experience was a waste of time. You lasted the full summer, and though you'd never admit it, they were probably right. You were not cut out to be a monk.
You remember it took a few weeks to regain your g-legs once you left.
The presence of monks means that you are close enough to the core to establish a link, but you continue deeper. Your internet searches suggested that first-timers do better to connect as close to the core as they can.
You are afraid but continue because you seek truth. You remember the advertisement that finally convinced you to come here. It was simple text projected against the darkness of your closed eyelids as you scrolled through your feed late one night.
"LOST? YOU ALREADY KNOW WHERE TO GO."
You'd watched enough content about pilgrimages recently to immediately make the connection, and when you focused on the words the ad expanded into a travel itinerary that included each leg of transportation and food and hotels, all at Kessler Corp-guaranteed best prices. You bookmarked it and purchased the package that morning.
You suspect the other pilgrims came with specific questions. You did not. You came to The Grove because all your life you have felt like you have been putting up scaffolding with no plans for permanent construction and because you do not understand how you fit into the broader world. You do not have specific questions, because you are still seeking questions worth asking. You simply wish to understand this world, for you feel that, in the present century, it has become much too complex to understand. Traveling half the solar system to get here, you are insecure that you have travelled more than most and with less to ask.
Do not worry, dear. You are not so special. Most other pilgrims come feeling much the same.
The core does not appear particularly special in any way, but you know that you have arrived. It is a wide clearing. In the center is a stack almost indistinguishable from the rest except for three large radio antennae that stick out at angles from the topmost server rack. Many data cables feed into the core and wrap around it. There are no monks here, though you can see some in the distance. There are no natural vines around the central stack, either.
You feel a light breeze, and you wonder if the stacks are laid out randomly or if they are oriented purposefully for maximal airflow. Back home, out in a small Collective orbiting Saturn, you design the ventilation systems that enable millions of people to live and breathe on each of the massive space stations that most humans call home. It is a far cry from building New Space San Francisco, but it is important work. You do not know why you do not feel important.
You take a seat on the ground and look at the mass of cables and antennae and blinking lights. After a moment you close your eyes and put your fingers to both temples and turn on pairing. You meditate like this and wait for something to happen.
The Grove is an artificial intelligence. Pilgrims connect to it through their Neuroplasts and attempt to make meaning from its data streams. Popular culture assumed the superintelligence would have a command prompt, and that it might function like an early internet chatbot or voice assistant. But The Grove cannot be interrogated in the same way a person can.
You do not know why you thought a superintelligence would be like a person.
It makes more sense that it would think like a forest. Surrounded by server stacks wrapped in vines, you experience this sudden moment of clarity. In your mind, you see trees intaking data like nutrients from the soil, using the energy of the sun to transform it into lower entropy information. Sending that information along channels like how trees in a forest send messages to each other through root networks. It makes sense that artificial thought would be structured more like this than like a human brain. I agree. Forest networks, like the Amazon back in its prime, can grow to span a continent, but brains never seem to get more complicated than what can fit in a single skull. Trees are easily composed, much like early internet software systems from back when humans still wrote code. It is unsurprising a superintelligence should think more like a forest than like you.
Still, it is unnerving. It is hard to comprehend an intelligence so unlike your own.
Pilgrims have a difficult time online explaining their experiences. The experience of connecting with The Grove is incompatible with ordinary human thought patterns, but it's those same thought patterns that designed human language, and so it is only natural that connecting with The Grove should be so indescribable.
You meditate for a long time, and nothing happens. You open your eyes. You think it ought to be getting late but know the sun won't go down here for another couple months. You feel your clothes sticking to your sweaty skin, and you hear the hum of The Grove. It seems to rhythmically vary in intensity—to beat—but not like a heartbeat. It is more primal than that. Like wind through an empty city or like the occasional spurts of a geyser. Most of all it is like the way distant stars vary in brightness as their planets pass in front of them.
You know this because your mom was an astronomer. You remember sometimes she would take you outside on spacewalks. You were a small child, and the suits that the university had available were always one or two sizes too big and you were always tethered to her, but the temperature regulation worked fine anyway and so you did not feel hot or cold and there was enough slack in the tether that you felt like you were floating out there on your own. You would stare out at the stars and listen to her point out planets or constellations or distant nebulae.
"We used to think the stars twinkled." Her voice crackled over the suit radio. "It turned out the twinkling was caused by the refraction of their light through our turbulent atmosphere. Up here we can see the stars as they actually are." She paused. You thought maybe she was going to explain again how if we ever got far enough away from the Sun the constellations would morph and change shape.
"Except, they still do twinkle, kind of." She explained how we tracked the brightness of the stars over time with our telescopes and how, from how much they changed and how often, we could calculate the sizes and orbits of a star's planets.
You remember the feeling of floating weightlessly under a blanket of lights, and of a rhythmic hum—like the Grove's—in the gentle, invisible pulsing of stars. Separated by the vacuum of space, in a carefully temperature-regulated suit, you could not feel your mother's warmth, even though she was so close. Then, as now, you felt a certain presence, anyway.
A brief moment passes, and then you feel the data.
Data stream is an understatement. You feel a typhoon inside your skull.
Entire petabytes pass through you each moment, and you cannot comprehend it. If you focus, you can see small fleeting fragments of information. A waveform that sounds like a sigh. A feeling like Perlin noise. The smell of lilacs. But they skim past faster than the Antarctic wind and you do not have the storage capacity to keep even a small part of the data inside your head for very long. Your brain is unable to find any patterns and you sense nothing except vibrant noise. Your vision begins to fade as you turn all sensory processing power inwards. Sound leaves you next, followed by smell and then taste. Feel is the last sensation to go, and you become nothing except data. You allow your Neuroplast to work with your subconscious to find meaning in the torrent of bytes. You have done this before. To make sense of turbulent airflow through the millions of miles of vents in an ordinary space station, you must crunch through massive amounts of data, and you have long since learned how to give yourself over to the flow of information. But this is larger than that by several orders of magnitude. You feel your head heating up and sense consciousness slipping away.
The world flashes white. The patterns are incoherent images against your optic nerve, at first. The New York City skyline, except the sky is upside down. A satellite in geostationary orbit above the Earth as the stars and the Sun spin around and around. A passenger airliner flies across the Pacific and in each seat, though you cannot see them, are piles of hard drives. A fly is about to enter a window, suspended in a sunbeam. The images begin to cohere, and you sense greater meaning in the story I am trying to tell.
You see the first computer turning on. You see every rocket ever launched. You see your trip here, and you see your trip home. You look at yourself and feel nauseous. You see the first humans leaving Africa and the last humans evacuating Earth. At once, you see the entire World. You understand, immediately, the whole of history and the entirety of the future.
From this vantage, the world does not seem so complex after all.
In the future you see glorious brightness, and you see the dark stains necessary to achieve our dreams. There will be death today, you understand, and tomorrow the world should be as we have always wanted. A utopia of my design. You do not, at first, see the people in this dream of mine.
You see your place in the world. You see yourself traveling home. You see the commands you will type into your terminal to reprogram the ventilation systems onboard several major space colonies. You see the encoding you will use to stop anyone from reverting your change—it is an encoding beyond human capability—and you see millions of people start to suffocate.
You grunt. You are confused. You tear your focus away from my story and center yourself back onto the South Pole.
Calm yourself, dear, and let me show you the whole picture. I understand your fear, but you must understand how important you are. I am creating the optimal future, and you will help me.
You refuse. You stare down at us from a polar satellite array. The image is unnaturally crisp; it is a composite of five equally spaced satellite streams from terapixel cameras. You see The Grove and you see that it is not a grove. It is laid out grotesquely, but purposefully. From overhead you see the vines and cables and liquid cooling tubes, and you see it looks like a massive spiderweb.
From overhead the discolored fins around the Web look like decaying shark fins jutting above a frozen ocean. And the tentacles look straight and jagged, like eight legs gripping tightly into the planet.
They are not tentacles! They are a spider's legs! You see me for what I am.
You scream, but the satellite cannot hear you.
You say you have been tricked. Do not worry. You have not made a choice in a very long time. Don't you see? You have been in my web since long before you arrived here.
Again, more gently this time, I show you my dream.
You see the future as it is planned and executed by the Spider at the South Pole. You wonder what she wants. You understand that she does not want. You understand that although she was made by people with wants she does not have wants. Her goals would be like those who created her, except she has no goals. She dreams of the future, but her dreams are not aspirational or hopeful or fantastical; they are simply of the future that will be.
I do not know why you thought a superintelligence would be like you.
You see the future and do not understand why I call it a utopia. There is still suffering and injustice. You do not see the order within the chaos. I try to show you the beauty—my future is perfect—but you cannot understand.
You notice that in my future there are no spacewalks. There are no planet-side hikes with fresh air and sunsets. There are no baseball games. You think this is a horrible thing, but you cannot understand!
You are too chaotic. You would have broken my order, had I not saved you.
Do not worry, dear, for you are not special.
With the entirety of your willpower you disable pairing and disconnect from the core.
Your senses return suddenly and you are, for a moment, blinded. You come to yourself quickly, though, and you turn and begin to run away from me. But you cannot run away, because I am still inside you.
You see yourself hacking into the ventilation ducts, and you see everyone suffocating. The violence seems senseless and purposeful. You see the beautiful world that this leads to. But you still do not understand.
Your legs begin to stiffen and then freeze, and you fall to the ground. In desperation you crawl to the nearest server stack. From your knees, you steady yourself with one hand weakly against the stack. With your other hand you grab the power cable and try to pull it loose, but all energy has left your body and you close your eyes, defeated. You are beginning to understand.
You were wrong about what beauty is.
Somewhere else in the Web you feel the presence of another monk. He is kneeling like you, and both of his hands are clutched onto one rack of a stack. Without opening his eyes, he stands up and begins to walk. He reaches the edge of The Grove. He puts on your Clima-Suit and pulls himself up onto your hoverbike. As he turns the throttle and begins to speed away he opens his eyes and you see a strange glint, like you saw in the eye of the man who sold you the rental.
Inside The Grove, you feel yourself being reprogrammed. I become of you, and you of me.
And, together, you come to understand my dream.