Classified Location — April 2032 — 02:00
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Rust found Alterman in the server room at two in the morning because Alterman was always in server rooms at two in the morning, which Rust found personally inexplicable and professionally predictable.
'The mandatory deployment timeline,' Rust said, without preamble, because they had never bothered with preamble.
'I know the timeline,' Alterman said.
'I need your models to support the public health framing.'
'Your public health framing is accurate,' Alterman said. 'The device does what you say it does for public health. I don't need to falsify anything.'
'Then why haven't you provided the models?'
Alterman turned from the server rack he had been examining to look at Rust directly. They had known each other for eleven years. They had been in perhaps forty rooms together. The quality of this specific look — direct, tired, beyond the performance of their usual antagonism — was different from any look they had exchanged before.
'Because the public health framing is accurate,' Alterman said, 'and also incomplete. And the incompleteness is the part that my models actually show.'
'The terminal state argument.'
'Yes.'
'Which I've heard, Sam. And which I've considered. And my conclusion is that the terminal state you're describing is a stable state that ends the cycle of crises that has killed—' He stopped. Started again. 'The Reckoning. Those seven people. That warhead. That's what a world without the terminal state looks like. That's the alternative.'
'I know,' Alterman said.
'Then—'
'The alternative to that specific thing is not a binary choice between the warhead and the closed loop,' Alterman said. He was quiet for a moment. 'There is a third option. I've been working on it.'
'You said that in the session. Two months ago.'
'I know. I'm still working on it.'
'Two months.'
'The problem is hard, Elon.'
'The problem is political.'
'The problem,' Alterman said, 'is that the third option requires giving up something that everyone in that room is unwilling to give up.'
'What?'
Alterman looked at him.
'Control,' he said. 'The third option requires a system that is genuinely accountable. That can be audited. That can be corrected. By people outside the room.'
Rust was quiet for a moment.
'That's not a third option,' he said. 'That's surrender.'
'That's what I thought you'd say,' Alterman said.
'It's what everyone in the room would say.'
'I know.'
'Then it's not a viable option.'
'Then we're going to the terminal state.'
The silence between them was the silence of two very intelligent people who had reached the same fact from different directions and were standing on either side of it, unable to cross.
'I want to show you something,' Alterman said.
He pulled up a display. Not the neural correlate columns that Rust showed in sessions. Something else — a long time series, a model output, a projection.
'This is what happens,' Alterman said, 'when the modification protocol deploys to a population and runs for thirty-six months. This is the valence distribution — the emotional range across the population. This is the opposition correlate — the frequency and intensity of the neural signature associated with resistance.'
He let Rust look at it.
'It works,' Rust said.
'Yes,' Alterman said. 'Look at month thirty-six.'
Rust looked.
'And month forty-eight.'
Rust looked.
'And month sixty.'
'What am I looking at?' Rust said.
'The flattening of everything,' Alterman said. 'Not just opposition. Everything. Creativity. Problem-solving. Novel association. The neural correlates associated with breakthrough thinking — the kind that built your cars, your satellites, your interface. The kind that built my models.' He paused. 'The modification protocol doesn't discriminate between the neural signatures it suppresses. Resistance looks the same as innovation from the inside. You suppress one, you suppress the other.'
Rust was very still.
'You're saying,' he said slowly.
'I'm saying that the system, if it works the way you've designed it to work, will within five years eliminate the cognitive conditions that produce the kind of people who built the system.'
The silence was different now.
'There's a flaw in your model,' Rust said. But the certainty was gone.
'Find it,' Alterman said. 'I've been trying for four months. Find it and I'll run the public health framing tomorrow.'
Rust looked at the display for a long time.
He was a man who had built things — who had looked at problems and seen, in the gap between what existed and what could exist, the space where something new could go. He had built his life in that gap. He had built his identity in that gap.
He looked at month sixty of Alterman's model.
He looked at the flatline where the innovation correlate had been.
'I need to think,' he said.
'I know,' Alterman said.
'This doesn't change the deployment timeline.'
'I know that too.'
Rust left the server room.
Alterman turned back to the rack.
He thought about the transmission he had sent eight days ago, in fifty-nine fragments, through a network he had spent two months learning to access, using an encoding scheme he had built himself in a process that had taken three months and that represented the most operationally careful thing he had ever done.
He thought about whether it had arrived.
He thought about whether the person on the other end was as good as his models said she was.
He thought: Please be as good as my models say you are.
Then he went back to work.
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April 2032 – October 2033