The Before Short Story Series. Part 1. Иван Перепелятник

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СКАЧАТЬ from the noise of trains passing by at 600 km/h. Here and there between the hills—somewhere seemingly soft and yielding because of the green tree carpet, somewhere dangerously sharp with grey-brown rocks, reminding of a seasoned predator’s chisels—majestic stood Mt Fuji. This year it had no snow cap because of the unusual for the Eastern coast of Japan heat that came about in August. Hiromi did like looking at it, one of the main symbols of the country—yet she couldn’t help being jealous, resentful of the fact that it was taking nearly all of Keirou’s time leaving her with so little, and that was almost bringing her to desperate tears from time to time. A little animal park, a number of observation decks, meteorological and seismological stations, a museum, an infinite flux of tourists—requiring several hundreds of employees in high season—all that demanded attention and care. ‘Keirou is finding time for them, for Ayaka, but—unfortunately—not as much for me… well at least the article is long enough,’ thought Hiromi and tried to get those unpleasant thoughts away by immersing herself in an article about the summer 2167 holidays season trends on her tablet.

      ‘Mummy, I’m done!’ Hiromi looked at her daughter, ‘How could it be?!’ but showed not a thing.

      ‘That’s great, Ayaka! please tell me what you have read.’

      ‘So apparently the operation of artificial intelligence on the basis of a distributed quantum computer system, PAX, was started back in the middle of the last century, in 2053. The main developer of the system, Jordan Bensock, is a genius programmer and engineer from the U.S. He is still alive. Today Bensock is the richest man on the planet. His personal fortune exceeds one trillion dollars. Can you imagine, Mummy, Mr Bensock could help make refurbishments in Grandma Yano’s flat! Mummy, let’s write him about Grandma, let’s ask him to help her!

      ‘We will discuss this a little later, Ayaka. Have you understood, what is— well, how the PAX actually works?’

      ‘Yes, Mummy. It works just like our brain, like a human brain. Just that when PAX artificial intelligence is operating, it’s more like many many people would be friends.’

      ‘Sorry, and why friends?’

      ‘Because when we are friends, we always do things together. When PAX is working, it’s almost like many people—many minds—work together on a same task.’

      ‘Very well, Ayaka. Do you remember, why we are going to the capital today?’

      ‘Sure, Mummy. We are going to the Destiny house to learn what I will be doing in the future.’

      ‘Let me please tell you how everything worked earlier, how your grandparents lived.

      The traditions and the culture of our country, Ayaka, are such that for our society the concept of mutual respect—to each other, to the family, to those older than you—is crucially important. In our country it is important to understand that the work that we all do, everyone’s work, is important for everyone. We all are constantly making a contribution to the common good—to the common success of us all—and that we are creating new opportunities for the society—for us all. Before, when people were choosing their life path, they would mostly seek inspiration in their families’ history—so that, usually, the children would continue their parents’ job. A family owning a textile manufacture over tens—or even hundreds—of years, a small grocery, a publishing house, a dynasty of doctors or journalists, and a whole lot of other similar examples—children would often follow in their parents’ steps. And it is not because that was simpler or easier to get going: the problem had many sides to it. A human life used to be much shorter before. Now we live to two hundred years, and before only singular people would reach an age of one hundred years. People had to start developing the skills they would later use for work from a very early age so that they could potentially reach something in this short period of active life. The right to make a mistake—and to be able to start anew afterwards—used to be a privilege of a very limited group of people, and these people did pursue self-fulfillment indeed, not held hostages by everyday life problems. The majority of people, however, had to make a decision as soon as possible in their youth—to find themselves, they would say—as early as they could. And if life had it such that the choice, made some time ago, did not bring about the expected result—if the person did not succeed in life—it would often already be too late to begin anything new. In a competitive world as it was, it was very hard to make your way through. And sometimes there were families that tried to program their children’s lives since the very early age. For instance, some parents would send their children to a tennis school at the age of 5, hoping that it might turn them successful at some tennis tournament some fifteen years later. And sometimes it did work—the children would become prominent tennis players, or golfers, or such.’

      Hiromi looked at her daughter, ‘Ayaka, do you understand what I am talking about?’

      ‘Mummy, as far as I get it, before people would die much earlier and they didn’t have enough time to do their job the right way.’

      ‘Because?’

      ’They didn’t always make the right choice when they were children.’

      ‘So it is, Ayaka.’

      ‘So Grandma started breaking her back when she was born in our family?’

      ‘Grandma took on her father’s job, being a rice farmer in the fields that used to belong to our family.’

      ‘Daddy says Grandma would break her back from morning to evening.’

      ‘Ayaka, Daddy meant that Grandma worked a lot—in the field as well—helping to harvest the crops.’

      ‘Mummy, is it that Grandma also made a mistake when making her decision?’

      ‘No, dear. Our grandparents did not have the kind of possibilities that we have today with the PAX. Grandma was helping her family, taking on her father’s job, her grandfather’s, and so on. Grandma didn’t have a choice there, Ayaka. But you do have a choice. The PAX prepares high-probability scenarios to forecast in which fields you have the most chances to succeed and to do the most for the society—having access to the entirety of the world’s knowledge, and also having studied carefully your possibilities and intellectual potential. Do you see it, Ayaka?’

      ‘Yes, I do. The PAX will tell me what to do.’

      ‘The PAX will give you options. It will suggest you the fields in which you could do your best. It knows who, when, and where is doing whichever job. It also knows what issues are important now and which ones will be so in the future—by analysing the datasets it has—and it creates and carefully studies your personal profile. By getting all this information together into a strictly structured picture, into a single system of interdependencies, the computer is able to offer you a precise answer to one of the crucial questions in our lives—the one of why we are here in this world.

      Hiromi was looking at her daughter, ‘I wonder if she understands what I am trying to tell her…’

      ‘But the final decision is up to you. Whatever you will do in your life, whichever way you will choose, the choice is yours, and yours alone, Ayaka.’

      Pax

      ‘Look Beg, there’s one more thing that I’ve been thinking about,’ Jordan was going on with a weekly meeting on current issues. ‘I would like to work from home for a couple of weeks, so I don’t think I will be there in the office. I feel the solution is already at my fingertips, you see? I just need a little more to reach it. It is nearly there in my hands, so I don’t want to be distracted by quarrels with coworkers. And the other guys here will feel easier in my absence. At least for a while’

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