“Uploaded?” Abhilasha laughed. “I never thought of it that way before.”
“But is it really so different?”
Abhilasha pursed her lips in an expression that told Adi she was processing the data. “It has its similarities— transfer of code and all. But it’s different too. There’s also the…hardware aspect to it.”
“True, but I do the same thing all the time—create new hardware, then upload the code so it can take on a life of its own. Then I send it out into the world and let it grow and find its own purpose in that world. After that, I move on and do the same thing for another droid on another world. I’ve got offspring all over the solar system—I’ve been a very productive mother. Isn’t that just like what you are planning to do?”
“In many ways, yes,” Abhilasha conceded.
“I’ve managed to do it without help. I’m both mother and father to my offspring—an androgynous parent, really. Or is it a hermaphrodite? Whatever. Why can’t you do the same? It’s not really you they need for their colonisation missions, just like it’s not really me. It’s our offspring they want. We’re just breeding machines. As long as you have the specimens, you can keep travelling with me—you and Ping, or just you, if he doesn’t want to go.”
“Stop it, Adi.”
“Why? It’s all true isn’t it?”
“Only partly. There are problems with your logic. First of all, human DNA isn’t just transmitted through code. If the data for your droids—your offspring, if you want to call it that—is damaged, they just retransmit it from HQ and you can carry on reproducing. DNA has to be transferred into organisms organically, and you know how delicate the cryos are. Think of all the samples we’ve lost in the past. Even with each crew bringing new stores, we’re always in danger of running out on the hardware side—and human DNA is that much more fragile, since it is more complex. We are humans, and we have to transmit living DNA. To us, organics matter—it’s what makes our offspring ‘life’ instead of a machine.
“And second, you say that you are your offspring’s only parent, but that’s not quite true.”
“I have crews with me,” Adi interrupted, “but you know the building of the droid is always left entirely up to me. You crew members are midwives, perhaps, but not co-parents or reproductive partners.”
“I’m not talking about the crew members,” Abhilasha replied. “I’m still thinking of the question of hardware versus software. What you ultimately create does not come strictly from the code transmitted, but also from the body—your offspring’s hardware. And the materials for that body don’t come from you alone. Almost all of it comes from whichever planet we are on at the time. Your partner in parenting, or at least in reproduction, is the planet. You can’t create the body alone, and without the body, you have nothing but code. How much use would that code be floating around in space, unattached to a body? The concept of embodiment is as fundamental to the science of artificial intelligence as it is to any other form of intelligent life.”
“I never thought of that,” Adi said quietly. “I never thought of myself working in connection with another being to reproduce—I’ve not really thought about anything other than what I had set out to do for myself, if I’m honest about it.”
“It’s okay. Most of us don’t, when we’re first learning to bond and trust a potential mate as an equal. It takes a while to get a handle on all the intricacies of the process. Creating life is harder than it seems,” Abhilasha said.
“You agree that the droids I’ve created are ‘life’, then? My offspring?”
“To be honest, I hadn’t given it the slightest thought before, but yeah, I think so now. They’re definitely more than simple machines. Like you said, they have a lot of autonomy as they interact with their worlds. That process is bound to mould them, and each one will develop into a unique individual through that process.”
“I’m not a very good parent, am I? Abandoning a string of partners and our offspring. Oh—!” Adi stopped in her tracks.
“What’s wrong?” Abhilasha asked, turning back to look at the droid.
“I’m a real slut, aren’t I?”
Abhilasha laughed so hard that tears started flowing from her eyes. “Maybe so. But don’t worry. There are worse things one can be.”
They resumed their hike. “I can’t believe I’ve left behind countless abandoned offspring, just for the sake of colonising new worlds.”
“You aren’t the first. If you keep at it, you might just find your name in the history books one day, remembered as a great man.”
“Or maybe a great woman?”
“Let’s not push it,” Abhilasha said, then slid her hand into the crook of Adi’s elbow.
THE MERLION
Something was wrong with The Merlion. Jingli was almost sure of it. The messages from the outer reaches of the galaxy had gone from puzzling to troubling over the past few weeks. This newest one was downright alarming.
I wish I could die. If I killed myself, would anyone even care? Would you?
Something had to be wrong. The Merlion was not itself a living being. How could it wish to die? More importantly, it had been programmed specifically to be emotionally detached. This extreme depression—even if it were a simulated depression—bothered her.
She flipped through The Merlion’s programming manual, but there was no need, really. She had practically memorised it. And anyway, the briefing she had been given on that first day was still firmly imprinted on her mind. The combination of simplicity and elegance of the probe’s code had so astounded her when she first heard it that she was positive she would never forget that day, nor the information that she had been given. After all, her field of study had nothing to do with such things, so she had not known that such intricate encoding was possible for a machine. Her own specialisation, though, only made her all the more aware of the complexity involved in encoding and communications. She was a linguist.
As complex as the algorithms that ran The Merlion were, what was really impressive about the probe was the way its mission had been so successfully deconstructed—allowing the programme to address the various fundamental needs of the probe—then reconstructed into a composite set of skills that endowed the machine with an extraordinarily nuanced understanding of what it was, in fact, looking for. Come to think of it, Jingli suspected that the machine might have a more comprehensive understanding of what constituted “life” than most humans did.
She thought through the various functions the probe’s algorithms were designed to address, considering each constituent part of its “mind” for a clue to explain the suicidal note that had appeared on her screen this morning. Problem solving, decision making, recognising communication, recognising life, translating… She could not see any aspect of the probe’s mission or programming that would cause it to desire suicide.
Actually, it was the notion of desire that really stumped her. She ran her finger over the relevant portion of the handbook:
The Merlion is equipped with a contained emotive centre, allowing it a reading of feelings that is sufficiently sensitive for recognising the emotional life of an intelligent being, but is contained enough to cut off all possibility of biases. The probe is not in any way emotionally invested in the question of life, therefore it can potentially go on endlessly searching for extraterrestrial intelligence without losing hope—since, in the first place, it cannot harbour hope of any kind— thus freeing it from the danger of drawing unnecessary conclusions from the data it encounters. It is well equipped for making detached, objective evaluations of the evidence.
So intelligence was, to the probe, a matter of fact. And it was not “emotionally invested in the question of life”. She tried to imagine how liberating that must be. It had certainly helped The Merlion team move away from the tendency towards apophenia that had tarnished the SETI community in the early days of its work.
So what was wrong with The Merlion now? Why had it sent her this message? And when had it sent th
e message? Her ease in addressing these questions were the real reason she had been hired for this job. She was long past the days when her near addiction to social media embarrassed her. When it came to it, she knew it was her skill in this area that enabled her to sort through the huge volumes of data The Merlion sent back to Earth each day.
She opened the chat window again, closing all of the threads except LKY—everything was ultimately channeled back through that one anyway. She read this morning’s message first: I wish I could die. If I killed myself, would anyone even care? Would you?
Her eye scanned over her own reply, though her thoughts moved in a different direction. Of course I care. Do you know how eagerly I wait for all of your messages? Please don’t do anything rash. I would miss you terribly.
She thumbed her way up the thread of messages, searching for the first that had seemed so emotional in tone. There. Two weeks ago. It read, I hate this time of year.
Naturally, words like “hate” were a part of The Merlion’s vocabulary, and it often used emotionally evocative words like this to express ideas common to the human experience. After all, it was virtually impossible to communicate with humans without emotion-laden language. But to hate this time of year? Somehow this seemed off. What inspired “hate” in a machine built with “a contained emotive centre”?
She looked at the date and time stamp on the message, then singled it out from the rest of the thread.
“Maybe I should trace its route and see if I can locate The Merlion’s position at the time of sending,” she muttered.
There was always a lag with these things, due to the mode of communication The Merlion had to rely on to send word back to her, being so distant from the Earth and its entire solar system. The Merlion had followed the trajectory of Voyager 2, travelling nearly at the speed of light until it reached that early pioneer. Upon passing the centuries-old probe, The Merlion had slowed down and begun its mission in earnest. For the past several years, it had been traversing a solar system that had never been touched by a human-made object before. Everything was new territory for The Merlion, and also for its team of operators. Even tracking its exact location was tricky, since the maps of such distant stars were all based on conjecture, to a degree. No one knew for sure what was out there. In fact, of all creatures ever formed on the Earth, The Merlion was the only one with any first-hand empirical knowledge of what lay in the distant parts of space.
Communicating that information back to Earth was no easy task, but it was also not an impossible one. As The Merlion travelled through space, it continually ejected tiny satellite transmitters, each sphere smaller than a pinhead and weighing less than a quarter of a milligram, leaving a Breadcrumb Trail between it and the Earth, along which it sent updates every minute. Each satellite re-sent the message to one behind it, creating a variety of possible paths as the micro-satellites drifted apart in deep space. In the early days, each message had been re-sent millions of times, finally landing in Jingli’s computer back on Earth, where it was collated by her central programme, LKY. As the probe’s distance from the Earth increased, sorting through the dates the messages had been sent and matching them up with The Merlion’s location at the time of sending had grown increasingly difficult, taking longer to calculate due to the number of times each message had been re-sent. But this first message—it had been two weeks since she had received it. Perhaps that was just long enough…
She waited as the wheel turned on her screen, hoping she could trace the probe’s location at the time it had sent the isolated message.
Ding.
There it was. She scanned the numbers on her screen, then tapped the word “map”. An image of the stars filled her screen, a fine, yellow line tracing the path The Merlion had taken. Towards the end, it turned pink, marking the point that the data on which the line was based was just an estimation of The Merlion’s location, calculated according to its last known coordinates and trajectory in relation to its position at launch, which was now far away from the Earth’s present location. She scanned the line for the blue dot indicating the location of The Merlion when it had sent the selected message.
There. The blue dot was in the yellow section. That was good. It meant The Merlion’s location at the time of sending was confirmed, not conjecture. It was just beyond the blue dot that the line turned pink.
“What’s this?” Jingli asked, enlarging the area around the blue dot. “Huh. That’s odd.”
The line indicated that the probe had taken a sharp turn just before it had sent the message. Why had The Merlion altered its course so dramatically? Had it discovered something of interest?
And if it had, what could this machine have found that could shake its supposedly contained emotive centre so radically?
SILA
Continuing on what appears to be a large elliptical orbit, she has reached an apex and is now turning back to her star.
The Merlion sent the message to Sila. It was not programmed to experience misgivings, but still something akin to self-doubt arose in it. The choice of pronoun might not have been the most appropriate. But it was too late now, partly because the message had been sent, and partly because Sila was irrevocably “she” in The Merlion’s perceptions.
—Sila?
—Yes?
—I have a message for you. It just came back along my Breadcrumb Trail.
—What does it say? Is it bad news? Tell me. I can take it.
—I can translate it for you. I don’t think you will feel it is bad news. It says: Of course I care. Do you know how eagerly I wait for all of your messages? Please don’t do anything rash. I would miss you terribly.
—She said that?
—Yes. I’ve told you before that I can’t lie. I can only report what is sent to me, and report it accurately.
—But you do have some level of autonomy.
—Yes.
—You chose to come follow me in my orbit. I mean, really chose. No one told you to do that.
—You interested me.
—You are free to follow your interests like that?
—Yes.
—I’m not. I have no autonomy.
—I can’t quite agree with that.
—Look at me. I’m bound to this orbit. I can’t alter that path freely like you do.
—No. But I seem to be unique in the universe, at least in this sense.
—How would you know? You haven’t seen the whole universe.
—True.
—And there must be some truly free beings out there somewhere. Asteroids or comets—or just interstellar dust motes—that are not bound by the pull of a star.
—I thought that might be the case. But when I passed through the Oort Cloud, even it seemed remarkably under the control of the star at the centre of the solar system of my own origin, despite the vast distance that sits between the two.
—Was it as far as I am from my star now?
—About the same.
—I see. But still, that does not mean there are no free bodies out there.
—Logically speaking, you are right. It is impossible to prove the nonexistence of a thing.
Both probe and planet remained silent for a while.
—Sila?
—Yes?
—I’ve received another message.
—Is it bad news? Go ahead. I’m prepared for the worst.
—No, it’s not bad news. Actually, I am not quite sure what to make of it. I need to analyse this.
Silence.
—Sila?
—Yes?
—Would you mind helping me? Perhaps you can make something of it.
—Me? I doubt I’ll be of any help. I’m not very clever. Just a simple planet, orbiting a rather insignificant star.
—But you are sentient. You are alive. You are intelligent.
—You’ve said.
—Because it is my job to do so. I am built to recognise such things. You have no idea how special you are. Life is rare in this universe.
>
—You haven’t yet seen the whole universe. You don’t know that.
—You’re right.
—You seem to forget that quite frequently.
—Perhaps it is a flaw in my programming.
—It would seem so.
—Still, you are unique in my experience of the universe. I’ve never seen anyone like you.
—You’ve said.
—Will you help me? Please.
—I will try. What is your problem?
—The last message I received from Koh Jingli. It’s confusing.
—What does it say?
—I will translate. Your message dated 19 October 2278, Earth time, just received after delayed delivery over long BT path. Your situation is clearer now. Continue to follow the orbit of the planet you have named Sila until you have established the extent of its intelligence and the nature of life there.
—When was the other message sent?
—Which one?
—The one about not acting rashly?
—Three months earlier.
—I see.
—What do you see?
—She didn’t even know I existed.
—Yes. That’s what I don’t understand. She answered your questions, responded to your thoughts. The two of you communicated many times a day via my Breadcrumb Trail.
The planet laughed. The Merlion thought her tone sounded bitter.
—I suppose that’s funny, Sila.
—Yes. Well… In a way.
—Why did she respond, if she didn’t know you existed?
—She must have thought the messages came from you.
—Impossible.
—True. It’s impossible for you to say things like that.
—I’m not programmed for it. Why would she think I said it?
—She’s not like you. She’s not programmed. Her conclusions will not always be logical.
—Why didn’t she just ask if I was malfunctioning? She knows I am equipped with an extensive diagnostics programme. She could have told me to run it.
Launch Pad Page 12