Paradox by Michael Woudenberg

Author:Michael Woudenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Sociology, Adventure
Publisher: Michael Woudenberg
Published: 2023-07-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14:

Mama Bear

You had to give Prometheus props; they knew human psychology. Yet it was perverted that to get back to their view of humanity they had ripped apart the polite discussion of what being human meant. They threw away the gentleman’s inclination for noble behavior. They upended lady-like dignity. They instead unleashed carnal, tribal, savage, lizard-brained beasts.

Entire nations were smoldering ruins after ethnic, religious, or just long-suppressed resentments were unlocked and allowed to run rampant. In the United States, cities governments tried to control the anarchy, violence, and destruction by using martial law to lock down the urban areas while people retreated into their social teams and lashed out at their opponents or took advantage of the chaos to claw for power and control.

Was this what it meant to be human? What were they even looking at in the news? The autoimmune response had begun shifting from the soft and vulnerable humans toward the technology infrastructure like a predator looking for a new target. The emphasis on an inanimate object that could absolve them from the carnage they’d caused rampaging through their fellow humans. Yet they still needed someone to blame. Someone who had goaded them. A person to carry the weight of the inhumanity that had ripped the world apart.

And now they had their scapegoat: Noah Vanden Brink, the once rising star of human advancement and defender against AI, who videos now showed as the despot behind the release of the AI that was being blamed for all the chaos.

Most people weren’t interested whether or not it was true. Their subconscious desire to exculpate their own behavior neatly accepted this suggestion. They had their target. A Vanden Brink. The son of the person who created Mother, the first sentient AI. Building a larger narrative from that only required this simple seed and a little nudge; the brain was brilliant at imagining the rest and creating a cognitive smoothing that satisfied their need for self-absolution.

But the chaos wasn’t evenly distributed. While the cities burned, the rural areas and fly-over states remained more balanced. Gaia’s research park being in one such flyover state meant they had a natural buffer of pure distance from the chaotic mobs prevalent in the cities.

Noah and Alexandra also gained a degree of protection from this separation as well as receiving some novel assistance from Mother. In a classic case of “Never waste a good emergency,” she had taken advantage of the data poisoning to delete all personal data and properties from the public records and vanishing them from many other data systems as well.

The world might have their scapegoat, but they were having trouble locating him. And then there was the difficulty of getting to him when they did.

“We need to bring everyone here,” Jasper had recommended the day Noah had been named as the source of the world’s problems.

“They’re safer as far from Gaia as we can keep them,” Noah countered.

“We’ve got the protection of the Government here.”

“Dad, how long do you think that’s

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