John Jacob White first came into my office in the Summer of [X+40].  

I'd come across his name in the pay spectra archives of Arrow Corporation, the company for which we both worked and which was funding my latest research.  I'd taken an instant liking to the man this profile outlined: he was white, and nearing middle-age--and, with an early artistic career since suppressed by the corporate machine, I knew the obligatory 'crisis' would not be long in coming.  

He worked seven hours a day in a cubicle at the end of the hall, on the 31st floor of our tall, glass building.  He made just enough money to support a wife and daughter.  He lived in a small house, in a small neighborhood, and according to the latest survey, there were no less than three and no more than five Arrow Corporation-made robots in his household.  It had taken some digging, but here was the epitome of the modern man.  Here was absolutely everything I needed.

We set up an appointment--one of those casual, Wednesday afternoon affairs--and I had him drop by.  I remember my first impression very clearly: I thought, Here's an innocent bystander waiting to happen.  He had a modest haircut on top of a modest face; he had a black tie, immaculately knotted in a shape that I assume he had read somewhere emphasized underutilized creativity and deceptive intelligence.  There were pens in his chest pocket.  There was an anthro on his wrist.  There were thin-framed silver glasses, tucked into the one-button-open collar of his crisp, three-to-a-pack shirt.

"Hi, John," I said, all warmth and affectation, "thanks for coming to see me."

"Yeah, thanks!  Thanks, for having." he said.  "Me."   His tone had this kind of pre-teen anxiousness to it.  Was this a pay-raise waiting to happen?  Had someone finally come round to pluck him from the soul-crushing number-crunching tedium that was his daily grind?

Had he won the sweepstakes?!

(Could he finally stop with all this?!?)

I invited him to have a seat in the middle of the room, and did the same behind my big, impressive desk.  He crossed one leg over the other.  I shuffled some papers.  No doubt he said something about the weather, to which I probably  agreed.

But  "Nice." was what he said when a 6-foot plastic man walked into the room, carrying drinks.  

And "Expensive." was what I countered, as it took a quiet stance in the corner.  

I waited until White had taken a few sips before pulling out the Big Impressive Folder, and opening it vertically on the desk.  I looked at one side of it, and then the other, then back again, and said 'Hm'.  I did this for about thirty seconds, before lying the folder down, and folding my hands on the desk.  "Mr. White," I said, measuring the space between syllables, "we would like to offer you the opportunity to take place in a high-level experiment, under the umbrella of the research and development department."

He sat straight up and crushed a grin beneath a Super Serious Face.  But he let slip a, "Good," and a, "Great.  Okay.  What's it-uh?"

"Well before I get into the Details and Brass Tacks of the experiment itself," I said, "I'll need to Bring You Up To Speed, as far as how it came to be, and why you've been selected.  Do you have time today?"

"Yes."  he said, a touch too quick.  He looked to his left, and then off into the ceiling.  "Yes, I have time.  I believe.  Definitely.  Could I get sugar for this?" he asked.

"Alfred is there sugar for the coffee?" I asked aloud.

"Yes," came the quiet, flatly-enunciated answer, from the corner, "in, the smallest of, the ceramic containers, located, on, the tray, which I brought, in, to you."

"This one?" I asked.

"To the left, of the cream," Alfred clarified, "and, just above, the cutlery.  Yes: that one."

White said, "Thanks."

I said, "Thank you very much, Alfred."

Alfred replied, "You are very welcome, Mr. Tunner."

"Very nice." White said again, nodding pleasantly.  "Top of the line, that one."

"Yes," I repeated, "my  Alfred is quite the fellow.  Actually," I finally admitted, "Alfred there has a great deal to do with the work to which you've been invited."

John J. White sipped and turned, still nodding along as he really noticed my robot for the very first time.  

"Oh yeah?" he asked casually, as though he'd been asking things casually all of his life.   "How's that now, I wonder?"  

Jesus, I thought.  He was One Of Us already.

"Well," I said, and leaned forward . . .

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Six months before, Avon Aaronson had sent me a memo stamped 'for your eyes only'.

As a minor project head in the R&D department, there really wasn't much call for me to be on the receiving end of such communication, much less from the active Board Chairman and heir-apparent to the Arrow Corporation presidential throne.  But our fathers, I knew, had fought alongside one another in the far-flung enemy trenches of Barrel Corp Europe, and transferred to Arrow at about the same time.

My father had been a man of keen mind, and entrepreneurial vision.  (This was what my mother claimed, at least, from behind the beer and over the chess-board--and who was I to question, when I couldn't even cover my flank?)  He and Aaronson had become fast friends in the pristine halls of the home office, and while one charmed his way to the world of silk curtains and flying limousines, the other contracted Alligator Flu, and wasted away into nothing.  

At the funeral, a bereft Avon made a tearful vow to my mother, to the effect that he would keep her gestating little genius in mind; and I'm told it was all very dramatic.

So I was born Michael Thompson Tunner in August of [X-5]: naked, screaming, covered in blood . . . and already an A Corp employee.

Over the years, Avon had indeed 'kept me in mind': doing everything within his power short of capital arson to make sure I would one day sit atop the R&D ladder, as had my old man.  He tossed me private projects and opportunities for broad advancement, some of which I botched, some of which I won out, but all of which served to highlight my exemplarily mediocre mind.  

In [X+40], I and my muse lived in a Three-Bedroom New York Studio Apartment, overlooking a Charming&Quaint Local Market.  (You know, to show how down-to-earth and ~ bohemian ~ we were?)   I wore gray suits with the sleeves rolled up, mirror-shine shoes, and was not above occasionally donning sunglasses indoors.  I walked with my head held high and my shoulders squared, and when I smiled it was like a department store mannequin.

So when Aaronson sent me a memo asking for an algorithm that could preempt the stock market, it came as something of a shock: not that the soon-to-be-president had deemed a lowly R&D squire worthy of such a noble charge . . . but that I was the one he'd had in mind.

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"How long have you been with the company?" I asked White, offering him a smoke-free soy cigarette.

"Ten years?" he puzzled, unsure, lighting up.  "Maybe eleven?  Or, twelve?"
He was asking me.  Well, why not?  I already knew all the answers.

"Kids?" I asked.

"Just one." he replied, doing some digging in the vicinity of his left ass-cheek.  "Daughter," pulling out his wallet, "my Emily.  Little punk."

He showed me some pictures of her, I imagine; I can't really remember.  Probably they were downward-angled snapshots of a six-year old girl, in the midst of six-year-old-girl-ness.

"Cute kid, that one."  I smiled.  "Where was I?"

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The problem became stuck in my mind, for reasons I now can't remember.  Maybe it was the seeming simplicity.  After all, it was only an algorithm to predict the stock market; how hard could that be?

I started with Arrow's own financial records, for a nice population of raw data.  I looked at the ups and downs, and how they progressed as a whole, and tried to write a little hunk of code to feed out predictions with a relatively small margin of error.

Only, it didn't work.  Arrow Corp's stock rose and fell not only according to internal actions, but external pressures: supplier prices, media events, Barrel Corp buyouts of satellite companies.  

So, okay, what I had to do was draw up some kind of big matrix, incorporating all of the local corporations which influenced Arrow Corp's stock; right? What did that entail? Well, Faux News Incorporated. Oh, and Arcolai Industrial Arms. Maybe Toyota Machines.  

Microsoft.  

Nabisco.  

And so on.

But that wouldn't work either--and thank god, or who knows what we might have spent in white-walled think tanks? The real problem kept cropping up: that B Corp, The Loyal Opposition, had to be accounted for.  And once I did that, where did it end? I might as well just throw in every corporation in the western hemisphere. Reductio ad absurdum, I would end up needing a real-time stream of every financial interaction taking place everywhere on Earth--and Arrow Corporation had power, but it didn't have that kind of power.

(Not yet.)

And good god Christ, I could just see the pitch meeting now.

'Tunner,' Avon would say, 'have you figured out how to predict the stock market for me yet?'

'Yeah.' I would reply, with a stupid expression  'You just gotta', like, look at the entire stock market.  And then predict stuff.  ...the end?'

I should have just called the old bastard up then, and told him the truth: that it was too broad an idea, too small a mind, too much a task to be handled.  It was impossible, and that's what I should have said, plainly.

But only . . .

. . . what-if's, and I-wonder's . . .

Try as I might, I couldn't get that knotty philosophical Rubik's cube out of my head.  I thought maybe what I needed to do was create a new language.  An entirely new programming code; a financial programming code, for dealing predictably with the mechanisms of the financial machine.  Plotting the rise and fall of mutual funds, then, would just be reverse-engineering.

But that was a dead-end, too.  When you want a language, you need a broad population with a vague goal.  'Gather these'; 'survive that'; something to grant purpose and context to the myriad grunts and whistles.  I didn't have a broad population with a vague goal: I had a single backer, with a specific end-game in mind.  I wasn't serving the whole of the human race, because in the end, I answered to Arrow Corporation, and the fruit of my endeavors went to them.

I was looking at it from the wrong angle, I finally saw.  Top-down wasn't the way.  I needed to build from the ground up, and so what I needed was to start with a single unit--a solitary, simple, elegantly designed little chunk of programming, which would have the means to take in data, interpret it, and file it away for future reference.  

It needed, I figured, sensory processes of some kind, to analyze the world outside.  And it would need the ability to turn these processes on itself; that is, it would need to factor itself into any equation, or the whole thing would just be an exercise in futility.

Now we were getting somewhere.  

It would have to be physical, I decided.  We would need to come out of the realm of financial charts and jagged red lines, whose tedious company it was impossible to do any real work in, and we would need to construct some kind of experiment.  I was thinking we needed to create something which could understand the social transactions of a limited artificial environment . . . and then of a broader environment . . . and then of a vaguer goal . . . until finally we'd scaled all the way up to global industry, and the oracular prophesying thereof.   

I thought I finally had an idea of how to do it.  

I thought I finally had some way to wrap my head around the job.

But the truth is a funny little bastard, which worms in and out sight, and slips between your fingers when you try to grasp it--but I just saw it!  It was here!--before finally, enigmatically choosing to reveal itself.  It comes in unexpected ways, and at unexpected times.  It comes now, in the act of retrospective analysis, as it did then: in the form of a needle-point insight, from my font of wisdom and the love of my life, Cooperson Tunner.

Because when I laid it all out for this husband-o-mine, at 6 o'clock in the bitter-cold, on some high and gray Sunday morning, as we sat side-by-side and looked out across the world from the rooftop of our New York City home . . .



. . .  he only smiled at me, and shook his head.

'You know what you're doing?' he offered, ever the learned Socratic professor to my star-struck Platonic ideal.

'What's that?' I asked.  Had to ask!  

But in doing so, I realize now, I had thrown myself down a path both dark and winding--which, once embarked upon, would offer no directions, and no turn-offs, and no chances for food or for comfort.  There was only one lane this way, and it stretched inexorably forward: and to turn back against the force of that awful momentum would be not only suicidally dangerous, but entirely impossible.  

It was a momentum and a darkness that would soon rise up to engulf the entire world, and sometimes I think, looking back, that I was no more its cause than that one loose pebble which shifts sidways at the start of an avalanche.

But other times--in the dead of night, lying old and alone--I think that I could be wrong.  

And those are the times that haunt me.

'What am I doing?' I asked him.

And he said, 'Well,' and he laughed, 'Tunner . . . I believe you're inventing AI.'

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"And so," I said, to John Jacob White, "the Philosopher King Project began."