Charlie
by Jeffrey Wald
We have long
known the problem, but had no way of effecting
the cure. The problem? The past must be leveled.
The hedges torn out. A new beginning begun. Walls
white-washed. Soil tilled. The air purified.
But we’re
no dummies. We know that we can arrive at this
future only by the past. Yes, the present is
indeed perpetually becoming the past. Even the
future shall soon be past. And the collected
facts of human existence—the facts embedded
in the past—count for something. Perhaps
count for a great deal. For no single person, or
even a select group of people, could ever store
all these facts, the accumulation, accretion, and
accrual of facts within history. And even if we
could, we are prone to heresies, heresies that
would attempt to mingle with and pervert the pure
facts. Call it an evolutionary mis-wiring, but no
human is immune. Perhaps in another 100 million
or billion years the glitch will have been
corrected, and the human mind evolved to be
capable of storing, processing, and interpreting
all these facts. The pure facts. Nothing but the
facts.
But we can’t
wait that long. Thankfully, though, we’ve
solved the problem. Meet “Charlie,” our
super-computer, the greatest leap forward in
technology, micro-processing, and consciousness
ever achieved. Charlie is nothing less than a god.
Sure, he doesn’t seem like much, little
larger than an iPhone, barely a pound of metal
and glass and precious minerals, but he is
nothing less than a baetylus. Hs is life itself.
Stored within his sleek frame are all the facts
of human existence. Every single one, stowed and
capable of being retrieved instantly. That
storage alone would be impressive, the greatest
feat humankind had ever achieved. But it would
not solve our problem: how to interpret those
facts. In other words, how to live.
Now here's the
really good news: Charlie can do just that.
Construing all those facts, he can tell us what
to do. Never before has a computer been able
to do that.
Oh yes, humans
have been telling other humans what to do since
the beginning of time—and that, we know, has
been the cause of all our problems. For an
individual is prone to heresy; has such limited
capacity to store and retrieve facts. And in fact,
most humans profess more non-facts than facts.
Which, of course, makes evolutionary progress
stand-still, or in egregious cases, regress.
But no longer.
For Charlie is perfect, omniscient, infallible.
All you need do is push this little red button
here, and, after a brief moment of computing,
Charlie will tell you what to do. Come, watch me.
There, I’ve pushed it. See the spinning
circles? It’s computing. Ah ha! Come read it
with me. What does it say?
Kill.
That’s a
bit strange. Perhaps there was a slight glitch.
Let’s try it one more time. There, the
circles are spinning. Here we go. Let’s read
what it says.
Kill all.
Ah, not a
glitch after all. I had hoped there was hope. But
us humans are prone to heresy. I always knew it
might come to this. Which is why simultaneous to
the creation of Charlie, we created “Bob,”
the first ever micro-bomb, planted 100 miles
beneath Earth’s surface and, when detonated,
sure to eviscerate the planet. You understand,
right? Charlie knows best.
Good-bye world.
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