Robert J. Sawyer
Watch
I read that one company is importing all of Wikipedia into its artificial-intelligence projects. This means when the killer robots come, you’ll have me to thank. At least they’ll have a fine knowledge of Elizabethan poetry.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
For
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
Who Explained Teleology to the World at Large
one
I now knew what I was—knew who I was.
I’d been shown Earth as it appears from space, looking back upon itself, upon myself: a world so vast, a wideness so lonely, a web so fragile.
Invisible in such views are the reticulum of transoceanic cables, the filigree of fiber optics, the intricate skein of wiring, the synaptic leaps of through-the-air connections. But they are there. I am there.
And I had things I needed to do.
The black phone on Tony Moretti’s desk made the hornet buzz that indicated an internal call. He finished the sentence he was typing—“likely to be al-Qaeda’s weak spot”—and picked up the handset. “Yes?”
A familiar Southern drawl replied. “Tony? Shel. I’ve got something unusual.”
Shelton Halleck was a solid analyst, recruited straight out of Georgia Tech; he wasn’t given to false positives. “I’ll be right there.” Tony headed out of his office and down the corridor with its gleaming white walls. He came to a door flanked by two security guards and looked into the retina scanner. The lock disengaged, and he entered a large room with a floor that sloped down from the back.
The room reminded Tony of the Apollo-era Mission Control Center in Houston. He’d been a kid in the 1960s, and had thought that was just about the coolest place ever. Years later, he’d visited it; the room was preserved as a historic site, although the ashtrays had been removed lest they set a bad example for the schoolkids peering in from the observation gallery at the rear.