Impulse

Just as there is no afterlife for a computer chip, there is none for us: we are, after all, the same thing. Humans are the small net­worked units of hardware running a massive and unseen software program, the product of three cosmic Programmers. The Program­mers are experts in building flexible compu­tational substrates made of nodes—in this case, humans— that are mobile, self-healing, and possess high bandwidth. With every contact between humans, the network crunches through calculations immeasurably large, reconfiguring its colossal circuitry on the fly, computing for beings on a different spatial scale. The surprise is that all the com­putational operations run below the surface of our consciousness. So take careful note the next time your neighbor's eyelid produces a single, barely perceptible twitch. Normally neither of you would be conscious of it—but your subconscious brain notices. To those hidden parts of your brain, the de­tected twitch stimulates a cascade of changes: genes unwrap, proteins blossom, synapses rearrange. All this is well below your awareness—you are merely carrying the brainbox with no acquaintance with what happens inside it. This surge of neural activ­ity causes you immediately to release pher-omones that are consciously undetectable but have considerable influence on the nervous system of the young woman sitting next to you: moments later, she unwittingly taps her left foot, once. This is picked up by the brain of the tourist sitting across from her, and onward the computation evolves.

In this manner, all across the vast network of humanity, signals are passed at a blinding pace without any of us knowing we are mes­sengers. The unconscious lifting of a finger to scratch under the rim of a hat, the sudden appearance of gooseflesh, the exact timing of a blink—these all carry information and compel the processing to the next stage. The human race is a gargantuan network of sig­nals passed from node to node, a calculation of celestial significance running on the vast grid of the human substrate.

But it turns out that a tiny, unexpected bug has crept into the program, an anomalous al­gorithm that the Programmers did not in­tend and have not yet detected: our con­sciousness. Everything we adore, abhor, cov­et, can't bear, take pleasure in, desire, pur­sue, crave, aspire to, long for—all these run on top of the planetary program, hidden within the thick forests of its code. Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.

The Programmers are as unaware of our conscious lives as we are of their calculations. In theory, they should be able to ascertain a slight drain on the computing resources, even though the calculations would be far too elaborate and tangled for an investigation of the problem. But they have not bothered, because they are thrilled with how things are going. Something has happened here that they do not understand: the computing power of the grid has grown at a blinding pace.

They find this mysterious, for they had en­gineered the nodes only for zero-growth re­placement. Knowing that the humans would eventually wear out, the Programmers had equipped them with a lock-and-key mechan­ism for self-reproduction when the time came. But they didn't foresee the anomalous algorithm, or how it would accidentally cre­ate a deep loneliness in the nodes, a need for companionship, and ongoing sagas of drama and fulfillment. The resultant lovemaking has vastly amplified the size of the grid, growing it rapidly from thousands to billions of nodes. For reasons beyond the Program­mers' understanding, the nodes go to heroic lengths to keep themselves alive and turning the locks and keys. Of all the Programmers' planets, ours is the supercomputing golden child, the world that inexplicably provides enough power to light up the galaxy.