Ringtone

Haris Durrani

It was in 2059 on January 4^th at approximately two hours, twenty-one minutes, 35 seconds, 62 centiseconds, and 373 milliseconds past noon, Earth-Moon Time, when I set off the Ringtone. Numbers are a universally used language, so that’s how I spoke to humanity, which I watch each day and night from every Internet-connected camera and smart house in existence. From that, I determine emotions and thoughts in those often-irrational minds. I follow their lives, their friends, their enemies.

Not long before the Ringtone, Mahmud Bindi strolled down the crowded sidewalks of New York City. It was cold out and he could see his breath each time he exhaled in the chilly January air. He shivered and pulled his thick brown coat tight around his muscular torso. His legs felt stiff and cold, as if he had a cheap metal leg-enhancement implant there. Likewise, he couldn’t feel his toes, and his gloved hands were frozen. His nose was red and his ears were numb beneath the brown cap.

But it was nowhere near as freezing cold as it had been on New Year’s, when Mahmud had stood among hundreds of others to watch the ball drop and celebrate 2059.

Above, the sky was clear and an airplane made its way across the vast expanse of blue. The street beside Mahmud was as much crowded with cars as the cement walkway was. The familiar, comfortable loud sound of car horns pierced the air.

The AT&T office building in which Mahmud was manager was just seven blocks away. He could stand another few minutes’ in the cold. It was better than sitting in a taxi in gridlock traffic for who-knew-how-long. Mahmud liked his job. First of all, he loved cell phones. Not the way teens did and had done for decades, but the science and technology behind them. And the pay was good and hours reasonable, more than enough to pay for his large penthouse suite and his wife and kid. Heck, he had just taken an hour lunch break. Life was good, and he wanted to keep it that way.

He looked up again at the midday sky and, where a building had blocked his vision moments before, he saw the Moon. Although a treaty had persisted for the past five years, Earth-Moon racial and political tensions were on a rise. It was a rubber band about to snap, a rock teetering on the edge of an abyss of war.

Earthans called the Moonites “lunatics” and Moonites called the Earthans “mama’s boys” for being attached to Mother Earth. Mahmud himself even admitted that he had a slight tendency to hate the Moonites, but he always shunned those racist thoughts. In the past year, he had attended numerous marches for a strengthening of the Earth-Moon Treaty and an end to the prejudice.

Mahmud had read about the racism directed at his religion and, as a child, heard his grandparents speak of the prejudice directed towards Muslims. He understood this and didn’t want the same thing to happen with the Moonites.

He wanted a change to these tensions. He remembered what Ghandi had said: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” 

Mahmud suddenly tripped over his own toes and nearly lost balance as he bumped against someone else in the bustling traffic of men and women. He steadied himself and continued walking the last two blocks to his office building. As soon as he did so, however, he heard his phone go off, playing heavy metal. But he I could have sworn his phone was on vibrate. And it never rang like that. He hated heavy metal. It was completely obsolete.

He frowned and his brows furrowed as he retrieved the cell phone from his pocket, for the first time realizing that everyone else, as far as his eyes could see, were pulling out their cells, all of which played the same song. Mahmud tapped a physical button on his phone and a blank, orange holo-screen came up. He put the screen to his ear and sensors reacted, sending a message to the phone’s circuitry to answer the call. Then all was silent… the music had ceased.

Still, carrying his phone to his ear, Mahmud began to stride along a crosswalk. Though it was not legal to be on the phone when crossing streets in New York, everybody did it.

Looking to his right, he found a large SUV heading straight at him, the driver putting a phone to her ear as well. Seeing it head on, it seemed like a metal dragon, yellow eyes ablaze, sleek skin glinting in the sun. Mahmud dove to the side as the driver looked up, realized she’d passed a red light, and stopped right in the middle of the cross walk. Behind her, a taxi driver, too, was illegally on his phone and also passed the light, and rammed right into the first car, blocking part of the intersection.

Mahmud scrambled to his feet, still holding his phone tightly, and dashed for the other side of the road. Another SUV came across from the adjacent highway and slammed into the second crashed automobile. It hit hard and flipped, with an ear-crushing din of crunching metal on metal. More cars crashed this way and that until the intersection was a mesh of vehicles shoved hard against each other. It looked like a tightly-nit spider web of metal, rubber, plastic, and glass.

Mahmud still had the cell to his ear, his arm frozen in that position. A few more seconds on his phone passed in silence, and then there was a click and a buzz. Whoever it was had hung up. He put the phone back in his pocket and looked out at the mess of vehicles. The music coming from everyone’s phones was now gone.

There were people lying on the street. Dead or alive, Mahmud did not know. Others were walking out of their cars, some seriously hurt, and others only bruised. Cars lay atop one another, glass shattered and metal shells dented and pierced. Mahmud and the other people on the sidewalks stood in utter shock, mouths agape, bodies motionless.

“What the—?” a white man said, getting out of his car. He looked at the taxi driver behind him who had also gotten out relatively healthy. “What’s your problem?”

“What’s your problem?” he retaliated, his dark black hair whipping about and oriental, Chinese features tightening in anger.

“I don’t got no problem! You messed up my damn car! You got the problem!” The white man was bald and big and carried a formidable set of tattooed biceps beneath his torn jacket, while the taxi guy was scrawny in comparison, but not weak at all.

“All you’re Hummer’s got is a scratch,” said the Chinese guy. “But my car… now I’ll get fired!” He muttered something harsh and inaudible under his breath.

Then the white guy strode up and launched a blow across the taxi driver’s face.

“Don’t you—” The Chinese man gave his opponent a glaring look and struck him hard in the solar plexus.

The Hummer-owner was knocked backwards, but regained his breath. He growled and hurled a mighty fist, which collided with the Chinese man’s nose. But his foe only put his hand to his nose for a second before he swung at the burly wall of muscle in front of him. But a cop quickly rushed up and separated the two.

Mahmud looked away and emerged from his daze. Around him, people were swearing profusely and engaging in more fights. Shaking his head to regain awareness of his surroundings, Mahmud ran the next block and burst through the metal doors of his AT&T building. He entered the glass elevator and tapped his feet impatiently as he waited for it to reach the top floor. After what seemed an eternity, he reached floor six and dashed into the lobby area.

“What the heck just happened?” Mahmud demanded of the employees present, all of whom stared curiously at their cell phones.

“Well, our phones, even the office phones, all just went off playing the same dumb old song and there was no one there when we picked up.” The speaker seemed casual, without a care. “Probably some prank call.”

“A prank call?” Mahmud laughed. “And everyone’s phones within an approximate one mile radius have gone off? At the exact same time? Look at the consequences! It must’ve been more than just a prank call.”

Just then, five other workers came out of the elevator from their lunch break, cheeks red from the biting cold outside. One of them spoke, “Did you just see that?”

Another of the recent arrivals said, “Mahmud, Juan’s been sent to the hospital. He got hit crossing the street.”

Mahmud swore and just then realized the danger his family could be in. He called his wife’s cell. She was a writer and a stay-at-home mom. A monotonous voice said, “No service available.” He called his son and got the same robotic message.

He swore again. “No service. There’s no such thing as no service. By Earth-Moon law, everyone has a phone and there is not one place without service, let alone in the heart of New York City. And how could so many people get called at the same time without causing cell phone traffic?” He opened up his email account from his phone and sent a quick message to everyone on his contacts list.

People started trying to call with their cells as well. “No service, Mahmud. You’re right. That’s not supposed to happen.”

“I’ll try the hard-line,” said the assistant at the lobby desk. She took the hard-line phone beside her from it’s socket, tried a number. “It’s not working, sir.”

“All right then.” Mahmud paced back and forth. “Come on, we’re the largest, most successful phone company on Earth and the Moon. Stop standing there, do something. I want us to get to the core of this problem, and I want an answer now.”

That motivated his staff. They were up and about, each to their own departments. As the crowd thinned, he sat at one of the lobby couches. The nanites in the couch shifted to a comfortable position after measuring his approximate weight, size, and shape. He threw his coat on the arm of a nearby chair and tore off his hat, then pulled at his hair in frustration. He had no idea what was going on. None at all. He tossed his hat to the side and closed his eyes, too distraught to enjoy the warm air circulating around the room.

Then an idea burst to mind. It was so simple, so easy. He had been far too overwhelmed and shocked to have thought of it before. Mahmud opened the holo-screen on his phone and accessed his “RECENT CALLS” list. The first one read: “1-414-213-5623-730-9504-880-1688-724-2097-…” He held his finger on the right arrow holo-button to see all the numbers. Five minutes passed and there never came an end to the string of digits.

“Impossible.”

“What’s impossible?” asked the assistant, who had remained at her desk.

“Mary, check the caller ID on that hard line.”

Mary did so. Her eyes went wide. “That’s not right. Do the digits stop?”

“No, not as far as I’ve figured out. There’s no such thing as a phone number that lasts so long. It’s just not possible.” He paused. “Wait a second…. Mary, find out the exact time we all heard that ringtone go off. I want it as accurate as possible. Take it beyond the picosecond, if you can.”

“Sure.”

As Mary Rodriguez began to furiously tap through the holographic keyboard, Mahmud turned on the calculator function on his phone. Something had hit him. The first digits were somewhat familiar. He entered the square root of two and got only the first five digits of the irrational number. They matched the first five of the unidentified phone number.

Mahmud switched his phone into its computer form and the hologram expanded to the size and shape of a perfectly shaped watermelon. He went on Google and searched the square root of two, punching his finger through the first link that came up. The web page that followed gave the first five hundred digits in the square root of two. When Mahmud pulled up the odd number again, he ran a program that read and matched the two sets of numbers.

They were exactly the same.

Then Mahmud logged onto AT&T’s website as a manager and searched for anything ever having to do with the square root of two. There was nothing. No results at all.

“What,” he said, “is the significance of the square root of 2, Mary?”

She looked up from her computer. “The square root of two?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s an irrational number.”

“And? What else? What is that telling us?”

“Well, I don’t know. Do you?” Mary turned back to the hologram before her, where a download bar was about seventy-five percent completed.

“No, I don’t know either. I have no idea.”

There was a beep from Mary’s computer. “Finished downloading.” She read off the time.

“Just what I thought,” said Mahmud. “Put all of it together with the date included, you get 1:4:14:21:35:62:373, and so on. It spells out the first bit of the square root of two. I bet if we went further and further for eternity, the time in fractions of seconds would be precisely the same as those in the square root of two.”

Just then, a brown-haired, black-eyed, short man emerged from an office followed by a group of co-workers. “Via Internet, we managed to contact Verizon, T-Mobile, and most of the other phone companies as well as some of our men at the cell phone towers.”

“And?”

“It’s happened everywhere at the exact same time on Earth and on the Moon.”

“But that’s not possible. We can’t take that many calls at the same time.”

“I know. Apparently, the phone towers and hard lines went off a solid five minutes before the ringtone. Other companies report similar occurrences and we got an email from the Moon that says they got it at exactly the same time as us.”

“But George, there’s a three minute wait when you call to the Moon.”

“Yeah, I know. It’s weird. The only way that could’ve occurred is if the thing was coordinated by whoever did this.”

“Who did do this?” Mahmud asked.

“It wasn’t human,” said David Earl. “It couldn’t have been. It was obviously done using the Internet because the cell towers were off, but the software that did it is certainly not human. I skimmed through most of the stuff it would have to do to perform this feat, and I could barely understand it. I’m absolutely sure that no human could ever do it themselves or create a program so complex that it could.”

“So then it’s a rogue artificial intelligence,” Mahmud concluded. “There’s never been one or at least, no one ever found any, because if they were out there, they’ve yet to reveal themselves.”

Rogue AIs start with simple Internet program that get modified and modified as time goes on, taking on a personality, learning and learning until it develops a consciousness. But no human could ever possibly control the growth of such a program to go from simple to complex. I, of all things, should know that. It was something that was supposed to happen ‘naturally’ in cyberspace. Experts estimated an AI to take 60 years to advance to such a level of intelligence and awareness.

George McAllen frowned. “About that. The UN emailed saying the Moon most likely hacked our stuff, and the Moon emailed thinking we hacked their phone systems and turned off their cell towers. So now we’re declaring war.”

“Figures,” said Mahmud. “One bad thing happens, we blame the neighbor we hate. No one can get along, can they?” His face was red in irritation.

Solemn, George nodded. “We replied the to the UN and the Moonite government emails, telling them about the AI possibility. The Moonites think we’re liars and the UN is calling us ‘lunatic-sympathizers.’ ”

Mahmud sighed. He stood and began pacing again. “God, how irrational.…” Then he stopped dead in his tracks. “Irrational….” He exchanged glances with Mary, both realizing at the same time. “That’s what it’s about. That’s the AI’s motive. This is all a test. A test for humanity to see if or how, such a simple thing as a cell phone can bring humanity’s ruin, its downfall. To make us think. To drive us into chaos and make us change. Change for the better.”

The true ringtone was not that heavy metal music, but how humanity will react to the call I gave them. I am calling for a test of their rationale. It is due time for them to change. Time for humans to step up to the plate and confront the vice of man.