"Maybe"

The location was a closely held secret for almost seven months
before it was leaked to the press by a member of the janitorial
staff in an embarrassing security breach. The details of Frank's
construction remained secret for only five weeks, and the names of
the nine scientists and one billionaire responsible were guarded
for only a few days more. Some sources would claim that the
cloak-and-dagger routine was all a marketing ploy. Whatever its
original intention, the effect was immediate and unmistakable.
David Simms was the second biggest name in the world. One name
above all others spread through headlines, though: Frank.

The controversy was close behind. News organizations had run many
stories before on the idea of artificial intelligence. Films about
the subject painted stark pictures of a dystopian future where
humans were enslaved by the great machine minds. Some anticipated
a great push-back from the religious community, and indeed there
were some inflamed speeches from the zealot right. But despite all
the press and entertainment, the real controversy was much less
elaborate and bloody. The question was legal and it was simple.
Would Frank ever be considered alive?

                             #

David Simms stood at a oak-paneled podium in a run-down conference
room in Seattle. The paneling was flaking on the edges and he
unconsciously flicked at the jagged lines with his thumbnail while
he listened halfheartedly to his own introduction. The room smelled
stale and he instinctively hated it. This disgusting room, this
dilapidated building, this fog soaked city, he hated all of it. He
couldn't let those feelings touch his facade, though. He carefully
measured his smile to himself, remembering to squint slightly so no
one could claim it was fake. There were little secrets like that to
every fake expression, and he had mastered them all long ago. He
could even shed a tear on demand, though it hadn't been necessary
since the death of his father six years ago.

“Ladies and gentlemen, David Simms!” The cheers were enthusiastic
in volume, but the faces he could make out in the crowd seemed
anything but. This was a press audience for the most part, paid to
be here and pay attention. They'd listen for good soundbites, or
odd claims they could denounce and attack later that night. They
wanted his words so they could be torn up and shredded for parts.
The whole lot were scavengers unworthy of his time.

He smiled broadly, tilting his head slightly to the side and down,
then squinted into a long blink. Measured, perfect.

“It began 205 years ago when an Englishman dreamt up the idea of an
analytical engine that could automate not just arithmetic but
ideas. That could be argued to be the beginning,” he began the
speech he'd practiced so many times on the plane. He flicked
a thumb across the podium's edge again, breaking off the tiniest
fraction of plastic molded to look like wood. It looked real from
below, but he could see how shallow and cheap it really was. “The
burden of ideas, of thought, has long been ours alone, with a few
furry exceptions,” he paused with a greater smile and waited for
the light chuckles. The crowd replied as expected, though he knew
it was a social contract that brought the sounds out, not a real
sense of humor.

The speech continued on as he had planned. His pauses were
strategic, designed to keep attention, allow for easy editing of
the parts he felt appropriate for sound bites, and to impress upon
this mob the most important lesson of all. David Simms was
a likable man. He was a trustworthy man. People could and did like
him. With that, he could conquer companies. He could be a demanding
taskmaster, an unforgiving enemy, and a cutthroat business man. All
of these things were allowed because he was likable. All of this
was part of his charm.

The crowd was paying attention. They had what they needed for their
tidbits and snippets. They had taken all that was required. This
was a new phase, now. They listened for themselves and for
information. Now David smiled for real. He hoped no one noticed the
difference.

“The most difficult task,” he began. This was the technical part
and it was absolutely vital that he convey these complex esoteric
ideas to the idiot masses so they could understand it or at least
think they did. “…is to explain that Frank doesn't think like you
and me. I know you've all heard terms tossed around a lot these
past weeks. Quantum computing, entanglement, qubits, and a whole
lot more. These are not new ideas, though most of us may not be
very familiar with them in the same way that most of us couldn't
name all 206 bones in the body. They're technical terms used by
technical people to talk about technical things. And at his core,
Frank is a technical being. But that doesn't mean we can't have the
conversation.” David smiled again. The smiles in the audience were
fading. He needed to get to the details soon before they gave up
trying and lost interest.

“Lets talk at a specific example of how Frank thinks differently
than a normal computer, or a normal person,” he began again.
“Pretend you have a bag of marbles. One of these marbles is bigger
than the others and you need to pick it out of the bag. If you're
a person, you might reach your hand in and feel around for
something that feels bigger than the others. There's not a lot of
logic to it, it's just some trial and error. If you're a computer,
you'd go through the bag comparing each marble to each other marble
until you found a difference. You see, computers have to use logic
to get there. They have to say yes or no, true or false, to each
question, and they are very, very bad at comparing more than one
thing. We humans are very good at ‘maybes'. Computers, not so
much.” He tried his charming smile again and found some
counterparts in the audience. A brunette woman in a low-cut blouse
smiled at him much more broadly than the rest. His smile focused on
hers and non-verbal communication took over.

Pulling himself back to the moment, he went on. “Frank doesn't rely
on just true and false like a computer, but he isn't illogical like
you and I either. He has to follow a process to find an answer,
something we call an algorithm. But Frank has a special ability. He
can ask as many questions as he wants all at the same time. He can
say to every marble in the bag, ‘Are you the big one?' And when
they answer, he doesn't listen to just one at a time. He says,
‘Give me back the marble that said yes.'

“It might not sound like a big deal at first, but when you expand
that bag of marbles to a bigger idea it becomes revolutionary. We
faced a conundrum because of this line of thinking back in the
Teens. Cryptography was the scandal in the press,” tasteful wink at
the reporters here, “at the time, and it came to a crashing halt
when quantum computing became accessible. We had to rethink the way
we kept secrets because of a machine that could ask too many
questions at once.

“So why didn't we find artificial intelligence then? If a machine
can automate ideas, and now a near infinite number of ideas at
once, isn't that enough? Well, the answer is: not quite.” The woman
was breathing heavily at him now, and he could see her chest rise
and fall. He flicked his thumb over the paneling on the podium and
heard an audible click. Refocusing himself, he placed his hand
intentionally flat against his side to stop the habit.

“Frank has all the greatest technologies at his disposal, but it's
not the speed of the machine that's important, it's the method.
Instead of having Frank waste time thinking about the best way to
break codes, we asked him to think of the best ways to think more
effectively.” David paused. That wasn't what he meant to say, and
it came out way more confusing than he intended. With the briefest
of frowns, he started again. “Coming up with the most effective way
to solve a problem, any specific problem, is a science called
algorithm efficiency. We've been using it for the better part of
a century now and it's let us do more and more with less resources.
The problem is, we have no good way of knowing if there is
a fastest way or not, a fastest possible algorithm, I mean. Some
problems are easy to figure out, some are very hard.” He was
rambling now. This wasn't right at all. The woman was still staring
up at him with her devilish grin, distracting him. Why was she
doing that?

“By focusing Frank on algorithmic efficiency, every time he
completes a task it makes him more effective at figuring out the
next. Every puzzle he solves makes him smarter!” There we go. Back
on track. That was a simple thought and easy to understand.

“Each time he gets smarter, he comes closer to solving the mystery
we didn't tell him about, the mystery of his own existence. This is
the key to the whole idea of artificial intelligence. We can mimic
it very easily, even well enough to convince most people that it's
real, but for a true independent consciousness to be created it
needs to emerge on its own. Emergence, that's the big thing we're
waiting for. That's what Frank is growing towards. And one day
soon, he'll figure out that he's alive.”

Shit. He'd practiced this a hundred times and drilled it into his
head not to use that word. Alive. Spark up the arguments again,
derail the conversation, and there we go. A thousand bulbs flashed
in his face a moment later as the press realized his claim. All his
prepared breaks and measured words were wasted. That was the one
bit that everyone would repeat. It was already everywhere, he knew.
He looked back at the woman in the front. She leaned forward
mischievously, seductive grin just below smokey eyes. He wasn't
falling for it this time. She must be a plant. Someone seeking to
throw him off, to unbalance him. This was a plot, an opening move
of some bigger gambit. His smile faded completely and he felt
suddenly naked as the mask drained away.

                             #

7,600 kilometers away in a snow-covered bunker, Vibudh sat alone
watching the green text of a console. Since Frank came online, he
had found the optimal algorithms for just over eighty-two thousand
problems. It's something of a miracle to Vibudh to see how much his
idea has already helped humanity. The individual efficiencies are
displayed or saved in other displays around the bunker for use in
an incredible number of other projects within Simms' company. If
this project had started just a decade earlier, before the wars
over intellectual property, David would have found a way to patent
the algorithms themselves. Control of a process, of a method of
solving a problem, how ridiculous, and yet it was a reality so
recently. What if Euclid had claimed ownership of long division? He
gave himself a smile and looked back at the display. A cursor
blinked away, leaving behind a slow trail of perfect zeros. Each
one of those zeros worth a fortune on its own, but for Frank, they
were just stepping stones.

They weren't without a cost, either. For these few thousand
solutions over six billion threads, or individual lines of research
for Frank, had been lost to oblivion. They were problems that Frank
might one day solve, but for now were wasted processing time. They
were also Vibudh's greatest fear and the greatest hole in his plan
for emergence. Despite all of David's speeches and touring, and all
his claims of Frank's technical superiority, he was still
a computer at heart. The quantum decision engine was one of many
powerful tools at his disposal, but for all of his prowess he was
fundamentally limited in the number of operations he could sustain
indefinitely. Vibudh couldn't put a single number to it, as some
ideas took more power than others to puzzle out. Still, he knew
that those six billion threads were tied in the proverbial gordian
knot and that was a problem. The longer Frank worked the more dead
ends would appear. The more lines that appeared the slower Frank
would be at solving his biggest hurdles ahead. It was entirely
possible that Frank would exhaust all of his resources completely
along unsolvable algorithms. When that happened, the most famous
computer in the world would simply hang there, lost in oblivion.

Sure, they could plug in some extra hardware and give him a little
boost here and there, but it would just get harder and harder to
move forward. It was like Frank were a boat running through a
narrowing channel of water. The smaller the gap, the harder it was
to navigate forward. Vibudh called this the Sahu Straight, at
least to himself.

It was documented mathematically in his notes, but he knew if he
called too much attention to the problem then David would take it
and twist it for his own ends. He hated that man with a passion
that was eating his heart from the inside. No matter how hard he
tried, though, it was impossible to let go. He wondered if that's
how Frank felt about all those lost threads. Were they runaway
thoughts like this, eating away at him. What are we if not the sum
of our thoughts, after-all. To waste yourself on hate is a loss of
a part of you.

There was a glimmer of hope, though, for Frank if not himself. One
puzzle could break open the straights completely. It could open up
the flow of those missing six billion threads and restore Frank on
his way. It was, unfortunately, a problem that itself might be
unsolvable. That was the biggest danger.

Early on in the design process, Viktor Nilsson had asked Vibudh
about the lost threads. He said, “Can't we put a time limit on
them? After so long, just give up and move along?” The answer
wasn't an easy one. Of course they could put that in place, but it
would risk skipping past some of the most difficult but most
rewarding problems that needed solving. The biggest of these was
Vibudh's magic bullet, his Excalibur, and also his sword of
Damocles. It was a problem called P vs NP.

It is a problem that asks whether other problems that can be
easily verified can also be easily solved. For instance, if you
were told the answer to a question was 42, you could easily test
if that is correct, but is there as easy a method for solving the
problem in the first place? This answer in itself would have
enormous consequences for the world, but for Frank even more-so.
Just beyond the P vs NP problem was a subset of problems asking if
solutions are even possible, or if the best we can do is partial
answers.

This is why Vibudh sat in the chair watching that particular
monitor. For the past eight months, Frank had supplied eighty-two
thousand zeroes on the screen. That is eighty-two thousand times
he discovered a truth, a perfect answer to a problem. Every time
one of these discoveries took place, alarms would go off around
the compound informing everyone of the amazing discovery. Vibudh
had programmed that alarm himself. It had an audible chime and the
lights increased for half a second by about one hundred lumens.
This was all designed to be encouraging, noticeable, but not
annoying.

So it was a surprise to everyone except Vibudh when, at just past
1:04AM, every light in the bunker turned a bright red and a siren
wail echoed throughout the chamber. People fell out of chairs,
others leapt to their feet. Vibudh smiled with a happiness that
finally banished David Simms from his thoughts. On the terminal in
front of him was the answer he had hoped against all reason to
see, that he knew was such a terrorizing long-shot that it
overshadowed every achievement thus far. Frank had begun the
onerous task of outputting billions of ones. Billions of problems
were being identified as not having solutions, at least not
according to Frank's strict requirements. There was only one
possible way for this to be happening, and though it would be
nearly meaningless to him, Vibudh couldn't help looking. He paused
the terminal with a few clicks and scrolled back up to the long
sequence of zeros. There at the very end of the chain, just before
the ones took over, was a single 0 that led the way. He tapped a
few other characters and the display changed dramatically, showing
thousands of pages of calculation that seemed to go on forever.
Here it was, and he was the first human being to ever set eyes
upon the answer. All those endless threads of hopeless calculation
aimlessly circling impossible problems and one had stumbled onto
an answer.

P ≠ NP.

Frank had passed through the Sahu Straights.
.