by Steven James
“Give me your number,” I say. “I have a feeling I’ll be calling you tomorrow.”
“I work tomorrow.”
“That’s even better.”
I turn to Fionna. “Listen, the more I think about it, the more I think we shouldn’t give the information on this drive to anyone other than the authorities. Can you set up the drive so that, after they get through your firewalls or security measures or whatever, that the drive erases itself?”
“It’d be my pleasure. I’ll even drop a little Trojan in there to have the drive notify me when the firewalls are cracked. That way we’ll know when the bad guys know they’ve been had.”
“Groovy.” Xavier gives her an approving nod.
She takes some time to reinstate the security measures on the drive, adds firewalls of her own, we give Fred the drive, and he leaves to call his blackmailer and deliver the drive to him.
As we’re on our way back to our rooms, Charlene sidles close to me. “I’m proud of you, Jevin.”
“For what?”
“For everything tonight. For standing up to that guy at the bar, for coming up with a card trick on the spot for Solomon, for taking down Tomás. I’m proud of you.”
“You’re not mad that I’m still sort of a leaps-before-he-looks-er?”
“Maybe. A little. But I’m more thankful that you’re a do-anything-for-the-people-he-cares-about-er.”
“Works for me.”
And then we say good night with more than just words.
Calista kissed Dr. Jeremy Turnisen.
They were back in her soundproof suite.
She had her arms around him, and she could feel his heart drumming wildly in his chest.
She drew out the kiss, then pulled away, looked at him devilishly, and pushed him back onto the bed.
He grinned. “You said on the phone you were feeling naughty tonight.”
“Close your eyes.”
Without any objection, he did as he was told. He was hers and she knew it. They both did.
When Jeremy’s eyes were shut, Derek slipped quietly out of the closet. He sprinkled a little liquid onto a handkerchief he held in his hand.
Jeremy lay back and Calista straddled him. “Keep ’em closed, or do I have to get out a blindfold?”
“Promises, promises.”
“Mmm.” She positioned herself on top of him so that he couldn’t roll away and then placed her hand over his eyes.
“I’ll keep them closed,” he said obediently.
She licked his lips seductively, then took his hands and pressed them down against the bed and brought them together above his head.
“You are feeling naughty tonight.” His voice was breathless.
Derek crossed the room and leaned over the bed, pressed his left hand against Calista’s to hold Jeremy’s hands firmly in place, then slid the cloth over Jeremy’s nose and mouth.
He struggled, but Derek and Calista held him down securely.
“Yes, Jeremy, my dear.” As he faded into unconsciousness she gently stroked his cheek. “You have no idea how naughty I’m feeling.”
Part VI
The Three Laws
Sunday, February 10
I wake up refreshed.
It’s been an incredibly eventful week, and I think all the stress, jet lag, and lack of sleep have finally caught up with me. When I check the clock I see it’s closing in on nine o’clock.
Though I suspect that by this time everyone, except for maybe Donnie and Lonnie, will be up, the house is quiet.
As I get dressed, everything from the last couple days revolves in a confusing swirl of memories and emotions through my mind: Emilio’s death, the hectic flights back home, chasing the pickup, the incident in the piranha tank, visiting the Hideaway, making up a card trick for Solomon.
Then, of course, meeting the Sprite-drinking Cammo dude, Fred Anders, here at my house.
Quite a week.
Though I feel pretty well recuperated, my boulder-smacked leg is still sore and my arm really stings—this has been the worst couple days of my life for being attacked by exotic animals. Cobras. Piranhas. Enough with all that.
After smearing some antibiotic on the bites, I make my way downstairs and find Xavier in the kitchen finishing a large bowl of pistachio nut ice cream. A box of Captain Crunch cereal and a gallon jug of 2% milk sit beside it on the table.
“Morning, Xav.”
“Hey, Jev.”
“Pistachios today, huh?”
He holds up a spoonful of ice cream. “Fionna bought it for me yesterday. Nothing but the finest.”
“She’s taking good care of you.”
“Yeah, well, I know who butters my cake.”
I blink. “I think she’s rubbing off on you.”
“Hmm,” he says noncommittally.
“Where is everybody?”
“Sleeping in, I guess.” He points to the percolating coffeepot. “Charlene was down a few minutes ago, though. Put some java on. She mentioned she’s heading out in a bit to catch church before meeting with Agent Ratchford at eleven. I haven’t seen Fionna, but I think I heard the girls moving around. They may have been down already, I’m not sure. I just came in.”
I join him for a bowl of cereal. “Any word from Fred this morning?”
“Not since I got up, but last night around two he swung by my RV to return Betty to me. She was under a dumpster—that must have been nasty retrieving her, means a lot. Anyway, he told me he’d just dropped off the drive at the location the blackmailer arranged. At least up until that time the pictures weren’t posted yet. That’s all I know.”
“You two really hit it off.”
He shrugs. “First Cammo dude I ever met who wasn’t trying to arrest me.”
“No, he was trying to kidnap you—actually, he did.”
“True. But I’m a forgiving kind of guy. You never know what kind of strange people you’re gonna end up being friends with. Heck, I’m even friends with you.”
“I’m not going to make any smart comment about which one of us is the strange one.”
“Strange is in the eye of the beholder.”
“I won’t argue with that. Getting back to Fred, I suppose you picked his brain pretty thoroughly about Groom Lake.”
“Tried to, but apparently the military keeps its secrets pretty well hidden even from the Cammo dudes. He wasn’t able to tell me a whole lot that I didn’t already know.” He finishes the ice cream, licks off his spoon. “Did describe the road layout of the base, though.”
He pours himself a heaping bowl of Captain Crunch and has to use his hand to hold all the cereal in when he adds the milk.
We both eat in silence for a few minutes. I debate whether I should join Charlene for church. She goes at 9:30 nearly every week and hasn’t been pressuring me to join her, but I’ve definitely sensed that she’s pleased when I do.
It’s not that I’m purposely avoiding it, but ever since the death of my family, God and I have had an on-and-off relationship—or at least I have with him.
You can’t go through the trauma of having your wife murder your two boys and take her own life and not end up mired in questions about good and evil, about meaning, about whether God exists—and if he does, if he really cares.
Go through something like that and you’ll see how well trite answers and clichés really work out for you. And how hard it is to find solutions that actually do.
And now this week.
Tragedy, eternity, injustice—an awful lot has landed here in my lap. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad idea to join Charlene and see if it would help me sort through things, at least a little bit.
Besides, if I go along today, I can join her for the meeting with Agent Ratchford.
An ulterior motive?
Maybe.
I’ll just call it an added incentive.
While Xavier and I wait for Charlene to return downstairs and for Fionna and the kids to appear, we get talking about what happened last n
ight with Tomás, Solomon, and Fred, and eventually the conversation circles around to the transhumanism research that seems to be at the heart of everything that’s going on.
He goes for some grape juice from the fridge. “So. Artificial intelligence. What would it really mean for a machine to become self-aware? Think about the implications. If we don’t have a soul—let’s say for argument’s sake that we don’t—if all we are is a collection of biological systems and we can reverse engineer those, create them, maybe even improve on them nonbiologically through nanotechnology and synthetic biology, what essentially would be the difference between us and machines? Metaphysically speaking, that is.”
“Well, the key would be if we don’t have a soul.”
“But if you could upload someone’s consciousness onto a machine, would their soul live there too?”
“I have no idea.”
“We upload our consciousness and we can theoretically live as long as there’s electricity or batteries to keep the computer running. Continue learning, never grow any older, live forever, even survive a zombie apocalypse.”
“I like how you threw in the zombie survival perk.”
“Always a nice little side benefit of nonbiological existence.”
Strange scenarios come to mind—not so much about zombies, but about human consciousness being uploaded onto a computer. Do that, then place it in a robot. Make the robot look realistic. Destroy the computer or unplug it—would you be guilty of murder?
Is the essence of what makes us human found in our consciousness, or is it somehow tied to having an impermanent, transient body?
I finish my cereal, slide the bowl back. “So, just for argument’s sake, let’s say we have hundreds of millions of people’s consciousness existing on some sort of highly evolved Internet. What if someone sends a virus, wipes them all out? Is he the worst mass murderer in history or just a computer hacker?”
“It wouldn’t have to be a hacker. It could be a mistake. All of humanity—if society chooses to still use that word to describe what we are—could be wiped out in one tragic programming blunder, computer glitch, or inappropriate application of the machine’s protocol.”
“And AI, how would you even keep it under control?”
Donnie comes down the stairs, and he must have heard us talking because he says, “Asimov.”
“Asimov?” Xavier says.
“Isaac Asimov. The Three Laws of Robotics.”
Xavier stares at him blankly. I’m at just as much of a loss as my friend is.
Donnie looks more than just a little shocked. “You never read Asimov?”
Xavier shakes his head.
“I mean, maybe in school. I don’t really recall,” I tell him. “The Three Laws of Robotics. Is that one of his books?”
Now it’s his turn to shake his head, but he’s doing so out of exasperation. “Okay, listen, these are really famous, anyone who knows anything about robots knows them—or at least they should. Seriously, you guys never heard of ’em?” He helps himself to some coffee, and even though he’s only thirteen, it doesn’t really surprise me.
“You know, now that I think about it, I might have,” Xavier acknowledges. “But I’m not sure what they are.” For all he knows about killer robots and doomsday scenarios, I’m surprised he’s not more familiar with these three robot laws, whatever they are.
Donnie takes a deep breath and shuffles off to the other room, obviously still more than just a little sleepy. A moment later he returns carrying a book. “I don’t know ’em by heart,” he explains.
“That a classic?” Xavier asks.
He’s paging through the novel. I can’t see the title, but it must be one of Asimov’s. “Depends on your definition,” he mumbles. “Let’s see . . . Okay. Sure. Here it is: ‘(1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. (2) A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. (3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.’”
Donnie goes back to flipping through the book. “He added one more later, but instead of calling it the fourth one it was like a prequel. He called it the zeroth law.” Finally, Donnie finds what he’s looking for. “‘Zero: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.’ So it broadens it to relating to the human race.”
“Can you read through them again?” Xavier asks.
“Sure.” He does. “These laws appeared throughout Asimov’s stories with some variations, you know, but the general meaning never changed.” But then he qualifies that. “Well, at least not in the stories I’ve read.”
To me, the laws seem like a pretty good place to start in this whole discussion about robotics and autonomous machines. “They sound like they might not be that bad a set of laws for people to follow.”
“No kidding,” agrees Xavier.
Donnie sips at his coffee, then joins us at the table. “Ever think about what would happen when a computer passes the Turing test and Searle’s Chinese room scenario?”
“What are those?” I ask.
Another look of surprise. This boy is obviously more well versed in killer robot theory than either Xavier or me.
“Different tests for artificial intelligence.” He leaves it at that, and I get the sense that he isn’t really interested in elaborating to a couple of neophytes like us.
“You seem to know a lot about all of this.”
“I like science fiction, and this stuff comes up all the time. I mean, think about it, what happens when strong AI appears and a machine says it’s alive, and that it deserves to be granted the same rights as we have—you know, the rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, all that? How’ll we argue with it without undermining our very premise that it’s not alive? After all, you don’t argue with something that isn’t alive, trying to convince it that it isn’t.”
Not a bad point. “I hadn’t thought of it quite like that.”
Our conversation shifts back to what makes humans unique, and I hear light footsteps descending the stairs. A moment later Mandie appears, carrying Furman. “What are you talking about?”
“How robots are different from people,” Donnie answers.
“Oh.” She positions Furman on a chair so he can watch her eat breakfast. “That’s easy.”
Xavier looks at her questioningly. “Really?”
“Mm-hmm. They can’t smile and mean it. Can you make some more chocolate chip pancakes today?”
“Um . . . Let me clear that with your mom first.”
That satisfies her for the time being.
Robots can’t smile and mean it. That’s a better answer than I could have come up with, and that from a five-year-old.
Maybe someday in the future they will be able to smile and mean it. What would be the essential difference then?
That’s definitely more than I’m ready to process at this time of day.
Over the next few minutes Fionna and the rest of her family join us, and Charlene comes down and pours coffee into a travel mug.
“I think I’ll come along today.” I grab a to-go cup of my own. “To church. Jeans okay?”
“Jeans are fine.”
She grabs a Bible, we hop into the DB9 and take off.
Roses and Thorns
The auditorium at Charlene’s church is larger than the theater at the Arête. I’m guessing there are maybe twelve hundred people here.
We sing four songs—I wouldn’t call them hymns exactly. They have more of a college rock feel to them, and there’s no organ, just a band on the stage. The guy on lead guitar isn’t bad. They jam a little bit and it’s nice, definitely not your grandmother’s church service.
There are some announcements, and then the head pastor comes onstage to introduce the guest speaker for today, a missionary doctor on furlough from his work in the slums and leprosy colonies of India.
He’s white-haired and slow to take the stage and looks like he’s in his late sixties.
After some opening comments, he tells us the story of his first visit to India.
“It was about fifteen years ago, and I was doing some work in an AIDS clinic. The man who organized my trip worked with a number of ministries and programs to help societal outcasts. He invited me to visit with some street workers—prostitutes—who were being trained as peer counselors to other prostitutes. They would teach them how to avoid AIDS, what to do if someone got violent, and so on.”
It seems like this man knows his audience. There’s no way to be sure, but I can guess that most of the people in the auditorium who’ve lived in Vegas for any length of time have met prostitutes.
“We arrived in a dingy building that served as an AIDS hospital for them. The women greeted us joyfully, handing us roses to welcome us. It was tragic and beautiful. While talking with them we asked if any of them had hope that they could do something different, and in that small room packed with fifty street workers, not a single hand went up. All at once my host stood and offered to buy sewing machines for the center and to hire someone to come in and teach sewing. ‘If you’ll come for three months once a week and can make me a shirt when it’s over, I’ll buy you your own sewing machine and you can start a business as a seamstress.’ You should have seen the smiles and nods in the room.”
His story grips me, and when I glance around I can see that I’m not the only one. Hardly anyone around me is stirring.
“Well, afterward I asked my friend, who wasn’t by any means rich, how he would pay for it. ‘The money will come in,’ he said simply. ‘God will provide.’ I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have a lot of money with me, but I offered him a hundred dollars. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘use this to help with the expenses.’ And he took my hand and looked me directly in the eye and said, ‘You just bought two sewing machines. You just saved two women’s lives.’”
The missionary pauses, but just for a moment. “I’ll never forget that day. And I’ve never looked at the impact of spending fifty dollars the same again. I still have the roses on my shelf that the women handed me as I entered that room.”