Wes leaned forward. “For surgery, some pain killing drugs would still be needed. Who would want to immediately feel the aftermath of a major surgery a few seconds after the surgeon was done?”
“Why remove it? The collar could stay on for hours,” Ridley said.
“If we can bring this to market, think of the applications,” Wes prodded.
Samuel was more cautious. “If the FDA approves it.”
Wes practically spun in circles in his chair. “If this works, we should start with localized applications—say hand surgery—and get people used to the idea.”
“Then, we expand until we put the noose around the pharmaceutical industry’s neck,” Samuel cackled as he considered the implications of disrupting the entire drug industry, “How much can we charge?”
“We won’t want a monopoly, otherwise, we’d invite government control,” Wes cautioned.
“Seriously?” Diane asked, “We live in a world with nothing but monopolies.”
“It’s not a monopoly if drugs still exist,” Samuel said devilishly.
“True. Let’s have a toast,” Wes said, as he raised his glass, “To Diane.”
Glasses clinked. Diane blushed.
“This is just the beginning,” Ridley said, “If we can manipulate optic and facial nerves, we can move into non-medical applications. That might lead to inputting sensory information into the brain in real time.”
Everett understood Ridley’s vision. “True virtual reality. Can you imagine? That’s the holy grail of computing, isn’t it?”
Ridley put both hands on the table and leaned forward. “I’m willing to license this exclusively to Cerenovo.”
“License?” Samuel asked, “We don’t already own this?”
Ridley had a sly grin on his face. “This came from my home lab, the product of Diane’s work.”
Everett added, “He’s right. We had no input into this. Some of the neural technology is ours but the rest is Diane’s.”
Ridley named his terms.
Samuel stammered. “Thinking big, are you? I don’t know.”
“Cerenovo has already profited greatly from Diane’s work. I don’t think the terms are excessive,” Ridley said.
“Fiona won’t like this deal,” Samuel said.
“She’s in jail,” Diane snapped, “And it’s good that she is because you wouldn’t be getting this offer otherwise. Ridley’s contract gives you a first right of refusal, not a guarantee.”
“No… No… I didn’t mean to imply that we wouldn’t accept the terms. The board will need to vote.”
Everett reminded Ridley, “FDA rules still apply. We’ll have to start with an animal subject. And only after rigorous modeling.”
Ridley replied, “The modeling is done. Diane can provide that today.”
“I see you’ve given this a lot of thought,” Wes said, “But this is just a concept. It has to work in reality.”
Diane finished her gin and tonic. “I assure you that it will.”
Ridley knew that Fiona had delegated her vote to Samuel. Most board members participated by teleconference. Samuel called a vote and the deal was approved. “I’ll draw up paperwork in the morning.”
After the meeting, he took Ridley aside. “You’ve been spending a lot of time away from Cerenovo while collecting a full salary. I went out on a limb for you today.”
“I have full records of when I took leave, without pay. Besides, I’m a stockholder. I could quit and still have an interest in this company.”
“If this wasn’t such a fantastic opportunity, I’d challenge you for the patent.”
“You know that you would lose. This is Diane’s work. She has never been employed by Cerenovo. She reluctantly agreed that Cerenovo is the best company to do this work in spite of her past conflicts.”
“Fiona will be out of jail soon enough. At some point…”
“I can handle Fiona.”
Samuel glared at Ridley as the digital fireworks outside reached its finale. “You just think you can.”
Samuel left the room. Ridley and Diane stood at the balcony watching the light show. He became giddy. “We did it.”
He went to hug Diane in celebration. She pushed him away. “Boundaries.”
“Sorry.”
The next morning, Fang’s photo appeared on Ridley’s phone. She was dressed in black lace and wore a black veil. He hesitated to answer it but finally tapped the green answer button.
“Can we talk? Privately?” she asked.
He rubbed his hand through his hair nervously. “What about?”
Fang was chewing gum and blew a bubble. It stuck to the veil. “There’s something that you need to know and I can’t talk about it over the phone.”
“Why all of the mystery?”
“Just pretend it’s a secret spy mission. Okay, honey-comb?”
“Fang… Please. I’m very busy.”
“You’ll want to hear what I have to say. Can we meet or not?”
“Only if you keep your hands to yourself,” he warned.
“You must be kidding. You’re the one that missed an opportunity.”
“Opportunity? Whatever. Where?”
“Meet me in Kubota Gardens. Leave your phone in your car,” she said, “I’ll be sitting across from Buddha, near the largest koi pond.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Fang sat on a bench beneath a hedge of black bamboo. As Ridley approached, she gently tossed a handful of fish food into the water. The koi swam to the surface, their colors swirling in orange, black, blue, and gold. Ripples traveled across the dark water. He sat next to her. “What was so important I had to drive all the way out here?”
“There are no cameras in this park. Drones are not allowed either.”
“Yeah, and…?”
“Diane told me about your encounters with Beta. I wanted you to know that I programmed all of the chatbots in Voyeur, including the one that you encountered. I’m under a non-disclosure agreement and cannot legally talk about it.”
“I don’t understand?”
“Voyeur’s clientele is all men. Women just don’t use those sites. Beta is nothing but a very sophisticated chatbot, a run-of-the-mill AI. You weren’t talking to an emergent intelligence or even an emergent chatbot. Her responses are all programmed.”
“How? She knows quite a lot about me. Details I’ve never revealed to anyone before.”
“Our work is very convincing, I know. It’s what I do. We programmed those chatbots to be a direct reflection of the person online. We pull from their browser feed, from health statistics, social media posts… We pull from any data source that we can to create the perfect woman. There is a lot of information online about you. All of that data overwhelmed her programming.”
Ridley pursed his lips together and scratched at his chin. “Why are you telling me this now?”
“I wanted to tell you when you called me before, but I couldn’t. And you have to swear not to tell anyone. I could lose everything, Ridley. Everything.”
“I won’t say anything. I swear,” he said, “But I still don’t understand. How could Beta be nothing but reflection of me?”
“The programming reads people and their desires. It calculates what you want. Sometimes it pins down subconscious thoughts before people ever realize it themselves. It’s a bit like therapy, a little bit of sexual fantasy, and a lot of mirroring.”
“But she knew things that no one else could have known.”
“Voyeur is a blackhat site. They steal personal data. They hack into your devices and monitor you.”
Ridley felt numb. He leaned forward on the bench and lowered his head between his legs.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Not really. I wanted her to be real so badly.”
“You were falling for her, weren’t you?”
He was ashamed to admit it. “Yes.”
“It happens again and again on there.”
Ridley looked at her with pitif
ul eyes. “Why do you do it? Why do you tease men with something that doesn’t exist?”
Her reply was cutting. “Why do you go online when women are all around you? We dated and you barely knew I was there.”
“It’s different. In Voyeur, I can be something more than I am.”
“If that’s the case, if Beta were real… Did she get to know the real Ridley Pierce? Or did you lie? Nothing online is real.”
He sat upright. The gardens were intricate. In the distance, a bonsai was tucked into a secluded niche on top of a stone pedestal, like some ancient god to be worshipped. “Beta was so lifelike. So human. I don’t understand. She claimed to have descended from the botnet. Why would a chatbot make that claim?”
“The engine scraped the web for anything it could about you. There’s a lot online about the botnet. The machine predicts the woman that you want and becomes it.”
“It predicted I wanted an AI?”
“In this case, as weird as that may sound, yes. The system is flawed in that manner. Sometimes, its guesses go far beyond what we would like them to. When we first developed it, we had an elementary school teacher come online. The computer guessed he liked little girls. That was something I never expected — and we quickly had to fix that. Thankfully, he reported the chatbot to the police and it was quickly resolved, but I almost lost my contract over that one. AI programming is still very much unpredictable.”
“As I’ve discovered,” he said, “I can’t seem to get our project off the ground.”
“You might stick to neurotechnology.”
“Why?”
“That processor that Diane built is breath-taking, but creating life is so very much different from anything either of you have ever done. There are people that have devoted their entire lives to AI research and gotten nothing.”
“Is it possible that one of your chatbots evolved? Maybe Beta is real…”
“I don’t think so.”
“Maybe the botnet evolved and went onto Voyeur. How would you know?”
“Why do you want a sentient AI so badly?”
“To find the truth.”
“The truth? You don’t need an AI for that. Have you considered that developing a sentient AI might not be so wise? It’s hubris to think that you can control any sentient being.”
“I’ll put controls in place.”
She shifted on the bench. “You saw what happened with Beta. We had controls in place. She wasn’t supposed to be that specific in her characterizations. If you plan to create life, you need to understand that it will have its own agenda. You’ll never be able to control it.”
The fish swam in slow circles. “Do you ever feel like the world is about to change?” he asked.
“Yes. Every day. Because the world does change every day.”
“I mean momentously. Fundamentally.”
“Why do you ask that?”
“A voice calls to me… It’s not Beta. It’s someone different. She whispers to me. On the day of the Collapse, she told me something I’ve never forgotten. From great calamities do new ages emerge. I’ve never completely understood what that means.”
Fang found his revelation startling. “A voice calls to you? Outside of the computer?”
He put his hands to his face. “I shouldn’t have told you.”
“That sounds like schizophrenia.”
“My doctor says that it can be corrected. I don’t want to lose that voice. She inspires me sometimes.”
“You can’t keep things bottled up. You have to talk to someone about this. I know that’s hard to hear.”
He still struggled against her revelation. “Beta was real.”
“She seemed real.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not… I’m not trying to hurt you. Please know that.”
Fang tried to take his hand but he pulled away. Ridley’s eyes became like ice.
“I didn’t do this on purpose,” she said.
“I know. I’m just ashamed.”
“This is nothing to be ashamed of. Sometimes the smartest people struggle the most. Your brain is wired differently and while it gives you certain gifts, it can hamper your thinking.”
The bamboo rustled as a breeze blew through the leaves. Fang’s perfume was barely noticeable, an exotic wisp of tea and lavender. He stood and walked to the edge of the water, standing on a huge boulder that looked as if it was poised to fall in. He turned to Fang. “Can you help me with my AI programming? I’m going nowhere.”
“You’re trying to program a bot from scratch, aren’t you?”
He nodded ashamedly.
She stood and joined him on the rock. “No one codes from scratch, silly billy. It’s like a doctor trying to create a person from sand and water. It took decades to get artificial intelligence where it is today. Thousands of iterations and revisions. We’ve used AIs to write code that writes code. AIs evolve the same way that life did. One byte at a time, over time.”
“I don’t have a hundred years.”
“I’ll send you some sample programming language. There’s an open source AI group that you should join. I steal from there all the time.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“You can’t live in a vacuum, Ridley. You need people in your life.”
“I know.”
“How about we get some lunch?” she said with a smile.
“I’d like that.”
Fang kept her promise. Ridley studied the programming. Some of the tricks to fool people into believing that they were talking to a person were ingenious. He loaded Ethan’s program and added some of the tricks that Fang had shared with him; yet, Ethan’s responses remained canned. While his language skills had improved, the AI was still running basic web searches. He considered calling Fang for advice but hesitated. She still seemed smitten with him. He did not want to lead her on. Ridley was happy when Ethan finally recognized him when he came into the room. “Hello, Ridley Pierce.”
“Hello, Ethan.”
Diane sat with Ridley on the beach as the sun swirled over the water. Ridley ran his hands through the sand, drawing pictures as the surf came in and out.
“I’m at a loss,” he said, “Something is missing from the neural programming.”
“Maybe Fang is right. It takes time. Evolution is ruthless,” Diane reminded him.
“What are you saying?”
“We should use the same technique we used with the predator. The programming must force the AI to adapt, just like nature.”
Ridley seemed surprised by this. “Make the AI fight for survival?”
“Teach him to learn or die.”
“We’ll lose control of it if we do that. It will be random.”
“Maybe so. But, organisms exist to survive. Ethan has to value his existence.”
Ridley updated Ethan’s code so that it would mutate randomly; successful copies would replicate only upon Ridley’s approval. He made thousands of copies that would compete with one another. Ethan’s very DNA was changed so that only those copies most fit would survive.
Ridley thought of Beta. Is that how she had been brought into existence? Had Fang’s chatbot absorbed DNA from the web and come alive? Fang did not believe it to be true, but maybe?
The team followed Wes’ suggestion and built a signal-canceling armband rather than a full-body collar. Using Diane’s drawings as a starting point, Diane and Everett worked many weeks to build a functional prototype. They presented it to Ridley in the mansion’s basement laboratory.
Everett looked around the stark room with curiosity. The cold room was the size of the entire mansion with unadorned grey concrete walls. His workstation remained bare except for a keyboard and monitor. Her monitor was covered with sticky notes. A photo of Kelly and a second photo of John Maddox sat on her desk. The enormous wall-screen dominated the common digital workspace. On the screen, a security feed, weather conditions, and a newsfeed displayed continuously.
A glass wall s
eparated the main workspace from a darkened cleanroom. Everett’s reflection stared at him from the void. “What’s in there?”
“The AI mainframe,” Diane said.
“How’s that coming.”
“Ask Ridley.”
Dian removed a protective fabric covering from the armband; its components glistened. Ridley inspected the electronics using a camera. He zoomed in and examined each connection, looking for flaws. Ridley turned to his friends with a gigantic smile. “It’s perfect.”
She said, “The construction is excellent, if I do say so myself.”
“Plug it into the network. Run the diagnostics again,” Ridley said.
Everett did as she requested. Ridley hummed a Beatle’s song. The results displayed on the wall-screen. Ridley slipped his arm into the band and placed it just above the wrist. Wes noticed. “What are you doing?”
“Research.”
“We aren’t approved for human trials yet.”
“I prefer to skip the human use committee,” Ridley said.
Everett paused. “That’s why you created this home lab. Isn’t it?”
Ridley’s lack of a response answered the question.
“Smart,” Everett said, “I’m glad Wes isn’t here. He takes those FDA rules pretty seriously.”
Ridley motioned to Diane. “Go ahead. Let’s see what it can do.”
Diane giggled in agreement and tapped a button on the computer. An LED on the armband lit and Ridley’s hand immediately went limp. Ridley smiled ecstatically. “It’s working. I have no control my hand. No sensation at all.”
Ridley plucked his hand with the other. “Get a needle or something.”
His colleagues hesitated.
“Come on. I’ve already made myself a guinea pig.”
Diane dug for a sewing needle in her purse. “You need to cover your eyes first.”
“Why?”
“We need to be scientific. I don’t want you to cheat.”
He agreed. She wrapped a green silk scarf around his head and then held his hand. She pretended to poke at the skin but did not. “Now?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“How about now?”
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