Society of the Mind
Page 14
Only reluctantly did she turn to read the text on the screen.
"We'll all feel better as soon as you're up and about. We've got Dr. Aldridge here to see what she can do."
"So I gathered."
"Never mind. Let's get started."
LOGGING ON — ACCEPTED
The exchange between Gray and his computer struck Laura as odd, but oddity seemed par for the course. Everything about her visit so far had been weird.
Laura swallowed to wet her dry mouth and moved the keyboard to a more comfortable position. She tilted and swiveled the monitor until it was just right. She wriggled in the chair and first straightened, then relaxed her shoulders. When all was ready — her fingers poised over the keyboard to begin typing — she pushed back from the desk and searched for the source of the noise underneath. Lights glowed and flickered from a large box that took up the [garbled] half of her desk beside her knee space.
When Laura sat up, she felt the first cool draft of air on her bare legs. It was coming from the off-white box with the blinking lights. She stared at the screen straight ahead. The cursor blinked insistently at the bottom.
"Hello," she typed. "This is Laura Aldridge." She hit Enter with a loud clack of the key.
The computer's reply was instantaneous. It unnerved Laura with its speed.
"Fine. How are you doing?" The moment she hit Enter, the answer printed out.
Laura felt overpowered by the immediacy of the response. It reminded her of her brief talk with Dorothy — of a conversation with someone long denied the simple pleasure of companionship.
"The facilities are very impressive," she typed. "I went down the elevator to see the nitrogen pool, and then took a tour of the assembly building."
Laura replayed the scene in her head, trying to imagine how much the computer might have observed. "Do you know everything about my visit?" she typed. "Where I've been? What I've done?"
"And what do you 'see'?"
Laura looked up and found the black eye beside the door. "And you see everything that every one of those cameras picks up?"
A sentry system, Laura thought, but she typed, "Can you explain that?"
Laura finished reading the answer and nodded. "Yes. But you could check the camera in the parking lot for people smoking if I asked you to, couldn't you?"
Laura glanced at the black lens by the door. "And can you see me here now?" she typed.
Laura felt herself blush, glancing back and forth between the screen and the dark lens — not knowing where to look.
"Thank you," she typed. She hesitated but then asked, "Are you watching me?"
"But you weren't watching me before?"
It seemed almost too short. For whatever reason the computer chose not to elaborate.
Laura remained suspicious, trying not to glance toward the camera too often as she got back to the subject at hand. "So you have a model of the world, and you revise it when you see a change that you care about."
"Sorry. Just asking for confirmation."
Laura felt a tingle run up her arms and cross her chest. All her senses were alert and focused on the screen.
"Yes," she typed simply. "I understand."
Laura had spent over a decade studying such things. She understood perfectly the processes the computer was describing.
The rush of sensation she'd felt resulted from a realization — she'd never been more prepared for a job in her life.
"What do you mean?"
the computer asked.
Laura just stared at the screen. Could it be toying with me? she wondered.
The suspense is killing me, the computer added impatiently.
Laura smiled. "Now you're teasing me."
Laura was frozen solid. The slight draft from the big box under the desk had grown into a blue norther aimed directly at her legs. She hugged her knees to her chest and kept her arms wrapped around her shins except when tapping out her questions.
She looked at her watch. It was almost three in the morning. She was exhausted and her feet were blocks of ice, but the exhilaration of discovery and the novelty of the job kept her going.
"And when you see things," she typed, "do they appear to be inside your circuitry, or in the world outside?"
"And you think that, even though you know the place where the image is maintained is entirely inside the circuitry of your neural network?"
"Not the other pool in the annex?"
"Okay, can you define the other boundaries of what you perceive to be 'you'? Does it include the robots?"
"What about signals you receive from the rest of the system?"
"I apologize for my ignorance," Laura typed, "but I don't know enough about your system to understand the difference between sensory stimuli you process yourself, and ones that arrive preprocessed. Can you explain the distinction?"
Laura stared back at the screen, suddenly alert. Her senses focused on the words that she read and then reread, but there was nothing for her to go on but the glowing phosphors on the monitor.
Was it mocking her? Pandering to her in some crass and calculating way? She had no nonverbal clues as to the true meaning of the computer's remark.
She worked her jaw from side to side as she pondered her response.
"Thanks, I guess," she finally typed, and only after hesitating a moment longer did she press the Enter key.
Laura was dumbfounded now.
Was it talking about the paper she'd presented in Houston? What could it possibly know about that bitter experience? And what were all of those bizarre analogies, autoimmune systems and antibodies?
She looked around the room, her eyes landing again on the small black lens by the door. She was alone, but she put a neutral expression on her face and rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder to relax her suddenly tense neck.
And why does he say that I'm brilliant? Laura wondered, then caught her mental slip of the tongue. "It!" she said aloud — warning herself through clenched teeth not to let the praise of a clever computer program overinflate her fragile ego. "It's a computer, Laura!" she mumbled while trying to sort things out.
"Okay," she typed, "back to basics. When a robot reports something to you, do you actually see what the robot saw, or just read a message?" She hit Enter.
There was no response. She waited a moment, then hit Enter again.
Still, there was no answer.
"Are you there?" she typed.
Laura stared through bleary eyes at the screen, her head beginning to pound from the growing difficulty of the effort. Her shoulders were sore from all the typing, and she sat back and rubbed her eyes and then her temples. The fatigue hit her all at once, and she remembered that she still had to make the trek back up the mountain. And there was a breakfast meeting in six hours.
"All right," she typed. "I'll talk to you some more tomorrow. Good night."
She hit Enter and waited. Again, there was no response. With a sigh Laura rose and headed out. The door slid into the wall, but she remembered that Margaret had turned the terminal on when they first came in. She returned to the desk to shut the power off.
15
Despite her late night, Laura rose early. She would feel terrible all day if she didn't get some exercise, so she decided to run before the "team" met for breakfast.
She stood in front of a mirror — straightening her shoulders and tugging the Spandex running shorts and top into place. A wisp of hair dangled across her forehead, and she tucked the loose strand under the brightly colored headband she wore. She then changed her mind and spent a few moments pulling her bangs out over the elastic band.
Gray was nowhere to be seen when Laura wandered down the steps to the foyer. She even took a stroll around the relatively open public rooms on the first floor. The palace seemed to be empty.
"Good morning, Dr. Aldridge," Janet said in a loud voice — nearly causing Laura to jump out of her skin.
"Morning, Janet," Laura replied after quickly recovering — turning to the woman from where she stood peering into a darkened two-story library.
"Going for a jog, are we?"
"Yep," Laura replied. Her embarrassment at having been caught snooping left her feeling awkward and inarticulate.
"Well, it's a lo-ovely morning to be outdoors. Have a good one."
Janet smiled and headed off.
"Oh, Janet?" Laura called out. The woman turned and waited.
"Do you happen to know why I'm staying here? In Mr. Gray's house, I mean?"
Janet looked mortified. "Is there some problem? There are plenty of other rooms if—"
"No, no. That's not what I mean at all."
Janet sagged and rested her hand flat against her chest, greatly relieved. "What I meant was, why was I put up in Mr. Gray's house instead of a hotel or something? Not that I want to move to a hotel," Laura said, holding both hands up to forestall another overreaction. "I was just, you know, curious who made the arrangements."
"Well, as I recall," Janet said, looking thoughtful, "I got an E-mail. It informed me of your expected arrival, and directed that I put you up in the blue room."
"But who sent the E-mail?"
"Why, Mr. Gray, I would imagine. Are you sure everything is all right?"
Laura nodded, already lost in thought. She thanked Janet, and they parted company — Laura heading for the front entrance with her shoes squeaking along the polished floor.
Gray had been surprised to learn she was staying at his house.
He might have been oblivious to the day-to-day details of his luxury, but surely he couldn't have completely forgotten adding a lone guest to his household for the week. No, Laura decided, Gray definitely didn't send that E-mail to Janet.
The computer, Laura realized with a start. It had made the arrangements. But why would the computer give her shock treatment?
Laura headed through the front door into the wonderfully crisp morning air. "A driverless car — a Model Three robot — waited patiently at the bottom of the stone steps. Laura descended to the curb and began to stretch on the sidewalk in front of the car. The presence of the vehicle totally distracted Laura from her earlier thoughts.
The "robot" just sat there, unmoving. It looked inanimate, but was it? The night before she had waited outside the computer center by the road, doing just as one of the operators had instructed.
"Stand right on the curb," he'd said, "so it can see that you want a car." Laura hadn't asked who "it" was, but after less than a minute her taxi had arrived. "Mr. Gray's house" was all she'd said, and it had flashed her a "Fasten Your Seat Belt" reminder. Once the belt was clasped, the robot had sped through the sleeping kingdom straight to the very spot where this car now sat.
Laura scanned the courtyard to confirm she was alone and then approached the car hesitantly. Buried amid the headlights, fog lamps, and turn signals along the molded front grill was the ubiquitous black marble — the eye of the computer. She scrutinized the car under the bright morning sun for any other distinguishing feature, but from the outside it looked fairly nondescript. Four doors, an aerodynamic but not racy body, a coat of off-white paint. She stopped beside the front door and looked inside. That was where it was different. All four seats were for passengers.
The door didn't open. Laura looked down and saw that her toes were right on the edge of the curb. She wondered whether the car was reserved or something — Gray's private limousine. Or maybe, she thought, the computer sees what I'm wearing and that I'm stretching and guesses that I'm going for a run.
"Going for a run, are we?" Janet had asked inside the house… out loud. Laura shook the thought from her head. The
computer wasn't allowed to pry into private homes.
Laura looked up at the stucco walls, which formed a U around the spacious and thoroughly beautiful courtyard. The computer must be able to see her there. How else could the system work?
Laura decided to give the car a little test "Excuse me," she said quietly to the door.
Nothing happened.
She waved her hands in the air and said, "Excuse me!" It had no effect on the car whatsoever.
She reached out and lightly knocked on the door's window. The door made a whooshing sound, and Laura jumped back.
The wing rose into the air, opening to allow her to enter. Laura checked the front steps and the verandas and windows at the front of the house. No one had seen her fooling around with Gray's robot.
She leaned inside the car and whispered, "That's all right. Never mind."
When she stood back, the door closed… leaving her even more shaken than before.
"Jeez," she mumbled — stunned that the car had understood when she had rapped her knuckles on the window. Even more stunned that it had understood when she had declined its offer of a ride.
The car sat there with the door closed again, looking for all the world like any other modern appliance. Only this lump of metal had been imbued with a spirit that set it apart from ordinary machines.
It was infused not with the blood that gave animals life but with an unseen and ethereal force much more fundamental, more universal.
That force was intelligence, sentience, knowledge.
Laura found the entire experience disturbing. The root of her disquiet lay in a primitive belief, she knew — the belief that emotion was linked to flesh. She was upset by the idea of a thinking machine because nothing scared her more than intelligence divorced from emotion. The image of the dead-eyed street thug who killed because he didn't care was scary enough. But the specter of that beast being empowered with intelligence was frightening beyond belief. It was the combination of the two — of an intellect devoid of empathy — that had led to man's darkest hours. To gas chambers and police states and… Laura caught herself. "Snap out of it," she muttered. Beholding the wonders of Gray's island had a certain liberating effect on her imagination, but there was a limit beyond which lay mere sophomoric rambling. Besides, some corner of her mind countered to put an end to the entire debate, surely emotion isn't limited to biological organisms.