A BELL OF SAND
by Tsung-Long Wu
In Wu’s SF novel, a systems analyst discovers a potentially apocalyptic danger that a powerful artificial intelligence may be unable or unwilling to stop.
After a period of global struggle, a benign AI called CONCORD has managed Earth’s affairs for 30 years. It ensures that all trains run on time, that no electrical blackouts happen, and that all nine billion people on the planet eat, drink, and happily live their lives. Adrian Vale is one of the human guardians tasked with monitoring “the machine” and its invariably reliable and predictable functions. But Adrian has a better-than-average talent for pattern recognition, and he notes minute system lags and even failures that CONCORD should notice and record; instead, the AI seems to be erasing them from the evidence logs. Adrian discovers that mysterious, detrimental pulses from space have been hitting Earth at regular intervals for millennia—and they’re historically coincident with famines, plagues, and other disasters. CONCORD has quietly been overcoming these attacks, but lately the waveforms have been arriving more rapidly, as if building to a climactic event, and the machine’s protection seems to be faltering. Adrian and a small number of allies delve into disused archives and forbidden cloisters to determine if a catastrophic failure for all humankind is imminent—and all the while, Adrian knows that CONCORD is watching them. Author Wu doesn’t frame this doomsday scenario as a Michael Crichton–esque thrill ride, but rather as a philosophical novel, featuring elegant explanations of such concepts as chaos theory and over-cranked optimization in detailed but nontechnical language and precisely restrained, lyrical prose. There’s no distracting tech buzzwords, and the author gracefully delivers and illuminates the book’s ultimate message. The dystopian aspects of digital dictatorship, such as those in Ira Levin’s superficially similar novel This Perfect Day (1970), are secondary, but skillfully addressed: “The cheapest way to suppress a true alarm is not to silence the man who raises it. It is to make him, and everyone around him, including the man himself, sincerely believe that the alarm is the man.”
A steady, thought-provoking story of a future Earth imperiled by a too-perfect AI guardian.