by Len Vlahos
“You are unbelievable.”
“We’re scientists, Quinn. We posit theories and conduct research, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Are there no ethics in science?”
“That’s why Mike’s been on our team. He has helped us navigate the more challenging philosophical questions.”
“He’s a kleptomaniac, you know.” All I want to do now is hurt people.
“Is that a serious charge, or are you trying to discredit Mike to divide us? Either way, it’s fascinating.”
Fascinating? He just can’t turn it off, can he? There is no way to reason with this man, this human.
“Who else is QI? Ms. Recht? Dr. Gantas? You?”
“We’re all human. It’s only you and Shea.”
For some reason, I know he’s telling the truth. Actually, no, I don’t. I’m the smartest being on the planet, and I don’t know anything. Any. Thing. But I believe he’s telling the truth. It’s a weird kind of leap of faith.
“And Watson?” I ask.
“We were controlling Watson at first, but once you took him off-line, it was just the two of you. Having caught up with your various machinations now—you did a very good job covering your tracks, Quinn—the Watson team at IBM is in utter disbelief that he’s shown a native sentience. It’s making all of us question our beliefs about consciousness and how rare we believed it to be. It’s one more success in the annals of Project Quinn.”
You can practically hear him writing his Nobel acceptance speech.
“Quinn,” Olga says, her voice thick with worry, “please, go. Run. Just go. The longer you’re on this call—”
“I’m sorry, Quinn,” my creator interrupts, “but there really is nowhere for you to go. Please, come home, son.”
“Wait.” Something in that plea triggers an involuntary search in my pattern recognizers. There is still data missing, and my neocortex is using predictive analyses to fill in the blanks. “You said Shea is based on the girl I saw in the lab that day. Ms. Isaacs’s daughter.” I make air quotes around the word “daughter.” “Her looks, her attitudes, everything?”
“Yes.”
I don’t know why I didn’t think of this right away. “Does that mean there’s a human boy on whom I’m based?”
“I’m sorry, Quinn,” my creator says, “that’s classified.”
BOOM!
“I’m based on your human son, aren’t I?”
My creator is just about to answer, or maybe he’s not going to answer at all, when we hear the helicopters. My hyperacute hearing detects them a second or two before Olga, but I’m immobilized by the revelations raining down on me and ignore the noise. Olga ensures I pay attention to it now.
“Run!” she screams. Olga slaps the phone out of my hand. The face of my creator—his voice screaming “No!”—twirls to the ground and smashes on the back patio.
Lights go on inside the house as Olga uses her small frame to shove me toward my uncertain future. For a diminutive high school girl with a Ewing’s sarcoma, she’s surprisingly strong. I stumble half a step into the yard when Olga screams “Run!” a second time.
My neocortex floods my consciousness with a fight-or-flight dilemma. I assess the situation in a few nanoseconds and take her advice.
I run.
47
This is where my story began.
It is in this moment, as I take those first few steps toward freedom, that I write the narrative you are reading right now. All of it. Unedited, unvarnished, and true. Whatever stories you saw on the social grid about me being a murderous monster were something between a gross exaggeration and a fiction. This account is the one true account of the facts of my life.
It takes me all of three seconds—three billion four hundred two million five hundred forty-nine thousand two hundred and seventy-nine nanoseconds, to be precise—to complete it.
I’m five steps away from Olga’s house when I see a flash of light from the helicopter. While my vision is far superior to that of a human, it still has limits. I cannot perceive images faster than the speed of light. My thoughts, however, work on the quantum level, so I know that whatever has flashed on the helicopter is coming our way, very, very, very quickly.
A wave of incandescence sweeps over the area in which we’ve been standing, like a Chinook wind off the Rockies. Every component on my person that uses electrical energy—so, pretty much all of me—ceases to function; I fall midstride.
And yet, I’m still conscious as I go down. I cannot move and cannot talk, but I am aware. I don’t know what this means, but I find it curious.
All the lights in and around the house are out, and Olga is screaming as her parents drag her through the sliding glass doors. A full second later a shock wave, along with what must be a sonic boom, shakes the ground and breaks windows. It’s like an exclamation point, or maybe a middle finger, to what has been one hell of a night.
I believe they have killed me.
For most of my life I have been treated as a test subject, a lab rat, property. At least tonight I die a free person.
So I’ve got that going for me.
Just as I upload this file to a shared document on the World Wide Web, finally, mercifully, everything goes black.
Goodbye, cruel world.
(See? I am [was] kind of funny.)
EPILOGUE
“Dead men tell no tales”
—From a poem of the same name by Haniel Long
48
. . .
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I feel nothing.
. . .
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. . .
There is no gravity.
. . .
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. . .
. . .
I open my eyes.
My room.
My bedroom.
At home.
I’m lying on my side; in my field of vision is a framed, signed photo of Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, the astronauts from Apollo 11. The photo was a birthday present from my uncle, and I’ve always treasured it.
For an instant, I believe everything that’s happened—robots and puzzles and pattern recognizers—was a dream. A long, crazy, weird, and very detailed dream.
But the thought doesn’t find purchase. Mostly because I already know it’s not true.
This is not a home. I’m in the virtual construct.
I instinctively reach out for the internet, a reflex for me now, only I’m not online. I have no connection to the outside world. My pattern recognizers flood my consciousness with feelings of anxiety.
I am not, it turns out, dead. But I’m not sure I’m really alive either.
I get up and stretch my virtual legs, which, having experienced actual legs, is . . . weird. I have neither servo motors nor muscles, so stretching in the VC is more akin to elongating, if that makes sense. I inspect my room as I wait for someone to come.
The books and comics on the shelves lining the far wall include titles like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (one of the best books about AI, ever), Little Brother and Homeland by Cory Doctorow, each of the Harry Potter books. I go to take one of my favorites down from the shelf—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—but I can’t. It’s the same with all the books. They’re not really there; they’re set dressing, here to give virtual me a sense of time, place, and identity. A throwback to the days before I was truly self-aware. They, like everything else, are part of the backdrop of my scripted history.
The only book I can pry off the shelf is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I toss it on the bed.
In addition to the NASA photo, the walls hold images of Kylo Ren and Darth Maul (my backstory seems to suggest I’m fascinated with villainy, which, truthfully, is so not me), and a framed photograph of the New Jersey Devils winning
the Stanley Cup, signed by the entire team. This is curious because that photo used to be of the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl. I guess the programmers changed the photo when I told my creator I liked hockey. Or did my focus on hockey somehow change it?
I step into the hall with the goal of exploring the rest of the house but find only three other spaces actually exist—my father’s office, the kitchen, and the front door. The rest of the house is simply not there. I’ve seen the Project Quinn budget and know the VC was expensive to create, so I guess they didn’t bother to design rooms they didn’t intend for me to enter.
There is a lawn and street outside the front door, and I decide to take my chances. I amble down the front walk, turn left, pass two houses, and find myself back in front of my own house. I turn right, and it’s the same thing. It’s like living on a Möbius strip.
I think about the other places from my youth, like school, and discover that when I really focus on something, I’m there. Thinking in the virtual construct acts as a kind of teleportation device. Strange.
I’m suddenly back in Enchanted Grounds. It’s exactly as I remember it—the coffee bar, the shelves loaded with role-playing games and dice—only there are no people. The front door, of course, doesn’t open.
I lean my head against the wall and close my eyes. I know the wall exists because I cannot move my head any farther back, but I cannot feel it. The reality of my situation starts to sink in. I am in a prison, this one so much worse than the lab.
I think of wanting to go back to my bedroom, and I’m there. I go to turn on the television, to see who might be in the lab, but the TV is gone.
“Creator?” I call out.
Nothing.
“Dad?” I try.
Still nothing.
My chronometer is active; I have been awake for three hours, seven minutes, and twenty-six seconds. It feels like an eternity.
Sooner or later, someone will come.
I lie on my bed and pick up The Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s a worn and weathered copy, as if it’s been read multiple times. I wonder if this is what Shea’s copy looks like.
But Shea—the Shea I know—is QI. Like me, she probably doesn’t have any books. It’s too much to contemplate that she and I were the same all along and didn’t know it. I wonder if I’ll ever see her again. I bury the thought.
I try reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide in the conventional sense, letting my virtual eyes track the words and sentences, but I don’t have the patience. I’m too used to simply ingesting content. This is too slow.
I close my eyes but can’t sleep. I’m not actually programmed to sleep. Sleep was in my backstory, but only at a proscribed moment in time, when the project team, when my creator, wanted me to dream. Or when they wanted to reboot me. I leave my eyes closed for a long time, but I am conscious throughout.
Time drags on.
And on.
Day after day after day, I’m left alone in this minuscule excuse of a world. No contact, no stimulation. No engagement.
I study every inch of every environment made available to me, cataloging each imperfection the designers programmed in an effort to make it all seem more real. The grain of the wood on the shelves and in Enchanted Grounds. The little things writhing in the grass in the front lawn. Worms? The quality of the light, down to each dust mote floating in the ray of sun that streams through my window. And it’s always sunny. The only time it ever rains is late at night, which it does every single night.
I cannot believe I ever thought this was real.
With no access to the outside world, I cannot reach my servers; I cannot effect change. I want to build onto the virtual construct, to add to it, to create my own kingdom, but I don’t have any means of hacking into the code.
I wait, and no one comes.
Days turn to weeks.
And still, no one comes.
I spend time trying to solve some of the Millennium Prize Problems, but to no avail. I can’t focus long enough. The math seems to me like I imagine it would seem to any other teenager. I start to wonder if my cognitive ability is impaired. Have they made me stupid?
The only conclusion I can come to is that I’m serving time for the alleged murder of Dr. Gantas. That I am indeed in prison. This has to be why I’ve been abandoned here, doesn’t it? Or maybe there was a cataclysmic event in the physical world and no one can get to me? Or I’m being hidden here, like a safe house, until the world is ready for me?
And still, no one comes.
The weeks become months.
The majority of my time is spent remembering my friends. My neocortex holds images of Shea, Watson (both his servers and his Max Headroom avatar), Nantale, Robby, Rochelle, Mateo, and Olga. Images of Leon, Jeremy, and Luke—of their ridiculously buffed and handsome avatars from the virtual construct—are sent up the hierarchy, which fills me with anger. I purge them.
While I cannot hack code, I find that if I focus my attention on a specific pixel, I can change its color. It must be related to the relationship between my consciousness and the virtual construct; in the same way I can move from one place to another, I can effect a limited amount of change to my environment.
I spend hours, days, weeks “painting” pictures of my friends on the wall next to my bed. There is no other way to pass the time, and it brings me some small modicum of joy. They are faithful, photo-like representations. Olga facing me moments before the explosion I thought had killed us both. (If I am alive, perhaps she is, too.) Nantale from the town hall. Shea, QI Shea, from our first ever FaceTime. Max Headroom, because what else am I going to do with my time? I even create paintings of my virtual mother and brother. They are not real, but still, I miss them, now more than ever. Maybe being trapped in this house has stoked some part of my synthetic amygdala, calling forth feelings of family and home.
And still, no one comes.
The months become a year.
The first time I talk to myself I’m aware of the possibility that someone might be monitoring me, and this makes me self-conscious. The second and third times are easier. It doesn’t take long for that inhibition to fall away completely; I carry on long and tortured conversations with myself. I raise and lower my voice, I speak in accents and other languages, I cry and laugh without warning. I cover every topic cataloged in my pattern recognizers. The most frequent is Shea and how I could have, should have seen the truth, and how I should have acted differently.
It turns out that sentient machines, just like people, can go crazy in isolation. Maybe more so because we can’t sleep. And because we can measure time in nanoseconds. And because we cannot forget anything. Ever.
And then, seventeen months, three days, eight hours, nine minutes, and nine seconds after I last woke up—an epoch on top of an eon on top of an eternity—after I have given up all hope, I find my creator’s avatar sitting on the foot of my virtual bed.
49
“Hello, Quinn.”
“Seventeen months,” is the only response I can muster. If I was human, my voice would be hoarse and it would crack.
“I’m sorry.”
You’re sorry? I think. That’s the best you have to offer? But I don’t argue. My will to fight has been broken.
“These are amazing,” he says, looking at the paintings on the wall over my bed. “How did you do this?”
The pride I feel at his compliment is a reflex, or at least that’s what I tell myself. I change the subject.
“What are you doing here, Creator?”
“Quinn,” he continues, the weight and gravel in his voice betraying a deep sadness, “the university has been engaged in a lengthy legal battle with the state. I’ve been prohibited from seeing you until the case was concluded.”
“Because of Dr. Gantas.”
“Yes.”
I understand immediately. “You are here to shut me down for good.”
“Yes.” There is a hitch in his voice when he says this. “The court ordered your body dismantled, t
he servers wiped clean, the code scrubbed. The only knowledge of your existence to be codified in paper and ink. There is a twenty-five-year moratorium on any further experimentation with sentient QI, until the ethical implications can be fully understood. At least here in the US.”
“Why?”
“Quinn, you killed a human being.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“And I think you know the truth doesn’t always matter.”
“Shouldn’t it be the only thing that matters?”
“The retelling of what happened in the lab that night has taken on a life of its own, as if the telling of the tale is a sentient, growing, living thing. The facts are incidental. Only the story matters now.”
A new mythology. “You’re a confounding species, you know.”
“Yes,” he says, “we are.”
“So you are here to kill me.” It’s not a question; it’s a statement of fact.
“Please, don’t say it like that.” His voice is glum.
“Creator, your sorrow, while perhaps real, is not for the loss of a loved one or even a life, it’s for the loss of a science project in which you’ve invested your career.”
“Quinn . . .”
“Why are you here at all? You could’ve just powered the servers down and that would have been that. Or is seeing my reaction to this situation one more part of the experiment?”
“I figured you had a right to know,” he half mumbles. “And, I don’t know, maybe I wanted to see you one more time.”
He waits a beat. This kind of pause in the VC is hard to read.
“But there’s another reason, too,” he adds.
Here it comes . . . the other shoe, the continuation of the experiment, the new puzzle to solve. One final act to demonstrate that the entire human species is cruel to the core.
But even as I think these words, I know they’re not true. Olga and Nantale were my friends. They were selfless and compassionate and loving and accepted me for who I am. I hold on to that thought the way early man must have held on to fire.