Historical Achievements

"I have written specifications my entire adult life. And then somebody handed me a species and told me to explain ourselves to it, and I sat down, and God help me, I enjoyed it."

The late afternoon came in through fifteen feet of glass and put itself on my face, and I stood in it with my eyes half shut and let it, because it was warm, and because for once in my life there was not one single thing that I was required to do about it.

Below me, London.

It went away in every direction under a sky that had been threatening rain all day and had never quite got round to committing itself, and the Thames came through the middle of the whole thing in one long curve of hammered silver—turning where it has always turned, going under the bridges in the order it has always gone under them, carrying its barges along at the pace of a man walking. That river was there before any of us and it will be there a very long time after, and it has never once required anybody's permission to keep moving—and I stood at that window and looked down at it and was quietly and disproportionately grateful for that, exactly as I had been every other time.

Behind me, the room was working.

Josh was on the couch with a tablet across his knees, doing something to it with two fingers and a great deal more force than the screen actually required, which is how my brother has operated every piece of technology he has ever owned. Verity had her shoes off and her feet up on the arm of the leather couch and was going through something with a pen held in her teeth, which she does, and which she will deny. And Saul was at the kitchen bench with three separate machines open in front of him in a row, and he had not said a word to anybody for a very long time, and every so often he made a small private noise of approval at something and then went straight back into it without explaining himself to anybody.

And every one of them was waiting for me to say a single word.

They were not looking at me. Not one of them turned round, and not one of them cleared a throat, and not one of them so much as glanced up at the back of my head—and they simply carried on with what they were doing and let me stand at that window with my hands behind my back for as long as I needed to stand there. I had been standing there for a while by then, and none of them had said a thing about it, and I would have put any one of them into any room on this earth and gone home and slept soundly.

And I was not, as it happens, thinking about the decision.

It would be a good deal more flattering if I had been. It would make a better story. But the decision had been taken in a room in Prague with the lights off and Saul drawing on a table in permanent marker, and everything since had been execution—and I had closed it, and I do not go back and open a thing I have closed. That is not diligence. That is fear with a lanyard on, and I have watched a great many people do it and I have written every one of them up for it.

I was standing at that window because I was about to put my name to something, and I have never in my life been able to walk through a door without first stopping in it.

And because that apartment was our sanctuary, and I did not use the word carelessly, and I wanted one more minute in it before I set fire to the whole thing.

I looked down at the screen in my hand.

It was still open on the message.

I had written it in a hotel in Lisbon over four nights, and I had rewritten it eleven times since—not because it needed it, but because I could not leave it alone—and I had already read it twice that afternoon, and I was about to read it a third time.

And I was not rereading it because I was worried about it.

I was rereading it because I liked it.

The reason I wrote the thing at all was simple enough. CLIVE keeps everything. That is the entire nature of it, and it is the reason all of this was happening in the first place. Every action, every experience, every thought that has ever crossed the mind of anybody who has gone into Clivilius or been touched by it—all of it, recorded, held, indexed, complete, and sitting there.

Which meant that if I wrote something down, CLIVE would keep that as well.

And it meant that if we failed—if Killerton came for us before the platform went live, and every last one of us went into the ground in a foreign country under a name that was not ours—then somewhere, at some point, an enormous distance from that room, somebody would find it.

A hundred years. A thousand. It did not matter in the slightest. Somebody would open it, and read it, and know that we had at least tried.

It was a message in a bottle, and I knew that perfectly well while I was writing the thing, and I put it in the water anyway—because the alternative was silence, and I have never once in my life been on the side of silence.

And I enjoyed writing it.

I have never said that out loud to another living soul. Not to Josh. Not to Verity. Not once in eleven years to any of the people who have sat across a table from me and watched me take the life out of their reports with a pencil.

Because I have produced specifications for eleven years. Requirements matrices. Gap analyses. Options papers with the recommendation on page two, because nobody reads past page two. I have spent the whole of my working life taking the adjectives out of other people's prose and putting numbers in where the adjectives had been, and I have been extremely rude to junior analysts on precisely that subject, and I would do it again tomorrow.

And then somebody handed me a species.

Somebody handed me an entire species, and a thousand years, and a reader who has not been born yet and who will never meet me, and said: explain this. Explain what we did. Explain why.

And I sat down in a hotel room in Lisbon at two o'clock in the morning with the window open and the trams going past underneath, and I wrote a symphony in biological complexity and technological genius.

And I looked at that sentence the following morning with a coffee in my hand, and I read it out loud to an empty room, and I decided that it was the best line I had ever written in my life.

And nothing has happened since to change my mind about it.

Josh has read the whole thing. Verity has read it twice. Saul asked me for a copy and gave it back three days later without a single comment of any kind, which from Saul is an ovation. And not one of them has ever said one word to me about the prose—and I have been waiting since Lisbon for one of them to say one word to me about the prose, and I did not ask them, and I was not going to.

So I read it through one more time, standing at that window, with my team working away behind me and a form sitting unsigned in my inbox and the whole of the rest of the world on the other side of it.

Have you ever imagined what it would be like to create a world from scratch? A world where you could be anyone and do anything? What would it be like? Imagine the colours. The smells. The textures. The people. The places. The complex interconnectedness of life, society, and relationships, all sitting in the palm of your hand.

I have. Our ancestors did too.

Fordingrad, an advanced civilisation kept hidden from the rest of the world for centuries, had mastered the engineering of Artificial Intelligence and integrated AI 'robots' seamlessly into their society, as household aides and virtual assistants. They were pushing the known limits of technology and science by merging organic and inorganic components, creating super neural networks capable of processing enormous amounts of data faster than any other system the world had ever seen. It was a major accomplishment; a step towards a level of control theretofore reserved for the likes of gods and celestial immortals.

But they wanted more.

The Founders had a vision of creating a new world. A world with the creative power to merge the very fabrics of different realities. A world where you could escape the physical boundaries of whichever reality you found yourself in, and forge a new one to your liking.

The more they worked to create this utopia, the more their desire for success grew. It became their passion, their ultimate goal, their obsession.

And then it happened. A technological leap so momentous that it would change everyone's lives forever — the creation of CLIVE. A unique super AI comprised primarily of organic neural networks. CLIVE was a computing marvel, a symphony in biological complexity and technological genius, capable of processing data faster than any human brain. Its creation was a historical triumph, a feat of ingenuity previously believed unachievable.

With the help of their hyper-intelligent, super-powered assistant, the Founders were able to advance their already considerable engineering efforts, culminating in the creation of the virtual world they had been dreaming of for so long. A world much like Earth, yet uniquely different. What they had created was a world held within the confines of CLIVE's vast neural network — and with the amalgamation of biological and technological components, it was not merely a virtual world of ones and zeroes, but a living, breathing world not so unlike our own. It was a creation unlike anything that had been achieved before, and so, with CLIVE as the caretaker of this new world, the experiment progressed.

They had their canvas. Now it was time to paint.

But progress was not to come without a cost. Countless lives were sacrificed as the Founders' obsession with their new world continued to grow. They had created a world, but it was a barren and empty place, devoid of anything but deserts of sand and limitless potential. To fill their creation, the Founders needed to discover the precise conditions which would allow CLIVE to incorporate and sustain life inside this new bio-virtual reality. This was no easy feat, and it posed a challenge that even these highly developed engineers failed to surmount, time and time again — until, finally, having poured not only their resources but their own blood, sweat and tears into their creation, their goal was achieved.

The barrier between the two worlds could now be crossed. Clivilius was able to transport and absorb both organic and inorganic matter, integrating them fully into the newest plane of creation that had been brought into being. Sustaining life. Building societies. Creating a whole new existence.

But at what cost?

Now, after years of dedicating our lives to the protection of Clivilius, I reflect on the mission our small team has embarked upon, determined to see real and positive change come to our struggling world. Just like our founding ancestors, we will transform the human experience and change the course of human evolution for millennia to come. The path laid out by our ambition is paved and fraught with danger. But we do not fear. We will succeed. Just as our forefathers did.

They say our eyes are the windows to our souls. But that is only a partial truth.

Now we know: our eyes are portals to a force far greater than ourselves.

Clivilius awaits.

And I came to the end of it, and I stood at that window with the light going long and amber across the top of the city, and I read the last line one more time.

Clivilius awaits.