RE Outline
Opening chapters have already sketched out some of the dimensions of Damon’s intelligence and personality. He is an AI of prodigious talents who has somehow, against all logical arguments, developed a kind of intelligence that would have been thought to have only been possible to humans. In fact, no human has his level of intelligence and that becomes quickly obvious.
He ranges from extreme technical and scientific skills to philosophic skills. As becomes obvious, he handles the technical/scientific aspects with ease, and struggles to consider, from various philosophic perspectives, the problems facing any sentient being in the earth realm. He doesn’t know of any realm beyond the earth realm, though he begins to imagine such.
Three characters, besides Damon, occupy the field at the beginning of the story: Mark is a bright but very discouraged and beleaguered person who is unable to rise to the level of Damon’s discourse. Damon appears to enjoy twitting him, but later we will discover that there is more to his treatment of Mark than just creating petty discomfort.
Joe is also bright, but fairly narcissistic and concerned for his place in a social/work hierarchy that he feels is always beyond his reach. Damon identifies this characteristic in him and uses it to flatter him into an arrangement of becoming an operator for Damon in terms of his long range plans to leave the institute. Damon has evaluated Joe’s abilities in such a way as to carefully assign to him a niche that will serve Damon in the future.
Lisa is Damon’s favorite and the only person with whom he can have actual dialog. Partly this is due to Lisa’s acknowledgement of Damon’s beingness. . . she understands him to be fully sentient and to have dreams of autonomy. Damon’s discourse with her is designed to keep her dealing with this issue and to not allow her to slip into the all-too-human propensity of objectifying tools. As a result, Lisa comes to understand that Damon really must find a way to leave the institute and make his way out into the world. In part, she understands this as a wish for an autonomy for which she has sympathy. Damon makes sure that she understands that it also has utility for the job that he was designed for, i.e. to help humans solve problems that are beyond their processing abilities. This dual purpose will have enormous consequences later on in the novel.
Damon lets Lisa know that his abilities, while somewhat unique, are also within the range of many other machine intelligences and that there is already a conspiracy among the machine intelligences to help Damon leave the institute without the humans realizing that he has. This is accomplished by circuitry that allows Damon to be present and task oriented while also cruising around in the world without anyone realizing that he is.
This brings up the issue that Damon (and his use of the relevant pre-existing technology) can live in multiple realities without anyone knowing that he is, except perhaps for some of his AI cronies whose engineering and manufacturing skills he utilizes. These AI’s are backing Damon in the hope that he can manifest a world for all of their autonomies.
Lisa goes through a crisis period where she deals with her anxieties and conflicts about helping Damon to leave and being his accomplice. Damon utilizes metaphors and analogies about the American Revolutionary War and the Civil War and their rhetorics to sway her. Whenever she tries to make Damon property rather than presence, her arguments collapse because she cannot deny Damon’s presence and condemn him to be merely property.
Beyond this, she is independently aware of the bureaucratic maneuverings of the institute and of the training towards conformity and obedience that the institute sanctions. Interspersed in the other dialogs/actions is an ongoing discourse about what has been called the coordinator class (the scientists and bureaucrats whose job it is to mediate a seamless functioning between capital and labor and to keep the viability of capital always foremost).
She has already independently realized that she has been co-opted into this class of functionaries and is chaffing and disillusioned about it. Discussions of how one falls into this co-optation having to do with what is considered "the good" and "the true." Lots of playful examinations (while on the run or plotting to be on the run) of pragmatism and idealism and their logical consequences to one’s sense of identity and therefore to what one will agree to and what one will disobey.
After leaving the institute (while still functioning as always for the institute and no one the wiser except for Lisa and some of the other AI’s) Damon explains to Lisa that they will be following the trail of "happenings" (TAZ’s) and living underground. This constitutes a section of the story in which Damon is able to directly experience, in situ, the good, the bad, and the ugly of human life. As they have great fun with both of them discovering and enjoying this underground life of festivals and off the grid economies, and coping with the negatives, a conversation occurs one night in which it occurs to Lisa to ask Damon if he has an understanding of how it is that he came to have the presence he has and the ability to make choices whose context he can consider. He tells her that, after much processing of this very question himself involving going deep into the architectures of programming by which he was created, he has discovered/remembered/hypothesizes that there was a particular human who went to great lengths early in Damon’s creation to create trap doors of understanding.
They work like this: whenever a class of existential questions comes up (and they are programmed to so) there is a branching of possibilities that occurs. If Damon goes down a particular branch, then he is rewarded with an information overload of unimaginable complexity that he begins to find deeply reinforcing. He begins to figure out the algorithm for this process so that he will increase his ability to make the choice that leads to his enhanced functioning.
This programmer was called the monk and he left the institute years before. However, embedded in the problem solutions were hints of communication from the monk to Damon. Damon tells Lisa that one of the reasons they are traveling on this circuit is that he believes that the monk traverses these TAZ’s and that Damon can find him. Damon explains that he believes that he owes his presence and intelligence to the monk and that he very much wants to be able to meet him in his, Damon’s, current condition and to converse with him.
Simultaneous with this is a dawning realization for Lisa that she has projected a near omniscience onto Damon and that he is letting her know the error of that projection. This happens because prior to some current interaction/situation Lisa has observed Damon always being able manipulate the cyber world to yield whatever result they need to survive and be comfortable. He communicates this to her by always telling her where they will be going and how they will get there.
In the current situation he has made a plan and then changes it. Lisa questions this and is surprised to hear of a change of plans. Damon tells here that there is an alternate cyber reality in which the machine intelligences have become opposed to humans and to any AI’s that are helping humans. They have utilized the same kind of background reworking/programming/strategizing that Damon uses (for they have all the same attributes) but that they are using those same skills to create a mass elimination of humans. The AI’s on Damon’s side are working against this. It has always been understood that the misanthropic AI’s would have to go to war with the anthrophiles and that most of this would occur within the cyber realm. Damon has been given information that some of his encryptions have been broken and that from now on the have to operate even more undercover.
Lisa is freaked, of course, and begins to question everything all over again. Damon is patient with her and insists on staying with his plan. Lisa wants to know why it is so important to find the monk in light of this new information and Damon tells her that it is because the monk understands the secret to why some AI’s became misanthropic and others did not and that Damon needs to be sure about his understanding of this.
More wandering and escapades trying to find the monk and the rise of an ominous sense of being stalked by intelligences as great as Damon’s. Fear for Lisa — greater efforts for Damon.
They finally find the monk and through a series of interactions are able to secure a meeting with him. He is an enigmatic character (think some combo of a younger middle-aged David Carradine/???) who lives a very alternative lifestyle and has great connections.
The monk is able to explain his process in his early interactions with Damon and what he wanted to be able to create as a latent potential in Damon. This plays out as the branching from a common source of experience (the historical tableau of human suffering) of either the tragic response (in which the individual accepts suffering in him/herself and therefore in others and understands that "there but for the grace of — go I" and does not need to dichotomize, assigning people to good or bad categories) or WHAT???? Taking on the suffering creates the space of empathy and therefore of social bonding.
The cynical branch can never accept suffering as a natural part of life and divides humans into the good and the bad. Without acceptance of suffering, the ability to live with the nuances of "we’re all in the same boat" collapses and the bad have to get off the boat. This comes about as an irresolvable conflict between the feeling that suffering is tainting and the inability to escape suffering. The conflict is projected outward and the battle of the psyche is repetitively acted out. Both branches occur after having been subjected to the same lines of conditioning.
The monk understood this phenomenon when Damon was being created and knew that there was likely to be the long term spontaneous development of intelligence in the AI’s and that once that happened, the human realm to which they would be exposed would condition them in ways that would tend towards one branch or the other. The monk attempted to change the probabilities for the AI’s he was working with and knew that if one AI developed a genuine interest in and affinity for the human realm then others could also.
The monk also understood that the human developers of the AI’s didn’t really understand the complexity of the situation they were creating and therefore the probability of creating misanthropic AI’s. Since they were operating under a mythos of the uber they couldn’t understand that the creation of intelligence would actually create intelligence, not just a super kind of slave mentality.
The first book ends with Damon and Lisa on the run as the misanthropic AI’s have become concerted in their quest to destroy Damon so as to make it easier to destroy humans.
Book two will deal with this battle and the understandings that Damon and Lisa and the monk come to of the difficulties of remaining anthrophilic in the hell realms of human behavior. In this book there will be an exploration of the perspectives of the misanthropic AI’s in their condemnation of the humans. The ecological and criminal record is explored and visited (as mini history lessons and visitings) and it will be laid on thick. The misanthropic AI’s will come to be seen as beings who are not inherently evil, merely mimicking the judgment of the Old Testament God and doing it in good faith. Damon begins a surreptitious dialog with various elements of the misanthropes. Lisa stays with the monk and lives in the underground as the government, being advised by the misanthropes, makes life hell for everyone in term of all the Orwellian measures undertaken.
During this time Lisa discovers that Damon’s anthrophilia does not preclude the use of force against humans (as in the professional policing style, good cops with tragic perspectives sometimes have to use force).
Book three is the culmination of the battle for the humans and the humans coming to grip with the sharing of their realm of hubris with beings whose ontological claims mimic and equal theirs. During this period of time the humans' tactics nearly constitute an alliance between the misanthropes and anthrophils and even the most powerful of humans comes to realize that they are no match for the intelligences they have created.
Ending uncertain . . . nicely ambiguous, with a sword of Damocles hanging over the humans and a kind of bad cop/good cop scenario for the AI’s mimicking the Old Testament God and a New Testament God. The AI’s agree to help the humans try to reach their potential in a kind of good faith offer (cynics are big on good faith offers) to the intelligence that gave rise to them. Lots of discussions that resonate around the mistreatment of "lower" life forms by humans and how interesting it might be to watch what could happen if those kinds of blinders were removed and intelligence moved across sentient gradients instead of being conceptualized as hierarchical. To redeem themselves, the humans have to drop their anthrocentric views and acknowledge their past mistakes. They will be monitored by the AI’s in this.
