Human Sister

by Jim Bainbridge

  “We thought you’d like something more formal with your family,” Dad said, “rather like an announcement to, and an acknowledgment from, the world of your love for each other.”

  The two rings blurred into each other through an aqueous film over my eyes. I swallowed hard and looked at Elio. How beautifully changeable he was, smiling broadly now, dark eyes sparkling, and every muscle in his face expressing delight and vibrant energy.

  “Do you remember the vows you gave each other?” Mom asked. “If they’re too private, you don’t have to. But if it’s okay, we’d like you to repeat them for us this morning.”

  “I’d like us to stand,” I said, “so that Elio and I can hold hands.” I wanted this occasion, this recognition of belonging to a family and to Elio, to be as intimate as possible.

  Dad glanced around the room. “How about in front of the fireplace?”

  Elio and I stood in front of the red-brick fireplace, above which hung a large evergreen wreath covered with brightly colored little ornaments. Never before had I seen anything resembling holiday decorations in Mom’s house. Perhaps it is true, I thought, that people mellow with age.

  Mom stood beside me, holding a ring. Dad stood beside Elio, holding the other ring. Elio took my hands in his, and I began the promises, word for word, that I’d given him six months before. But this time, because Mom and Dad were there, the words were richer with meaning, rooted now in a larger world. They came out slowly, each like a carefully crafted gift to be cherished by everyone hearing them. I wanted Mom and Dad to know how I felt. I wanted Elio’s and my love to blossom in the sunshine of their blessings.

  When I finished, Mom lifted the ring she held. “Here, Sara, put this on Elio’s finger. For me it’s a symbol that I’m giving my dear, dear daughter to you, Elio, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”

  I put the ring on Elio’s left ring finger, then kissed his finger, feeling at once the cool firmness of the metal and the warm softness of his flesh.

  After Elio stated his vows, Dad handed him the other ring and said, “With this ring, I give my best friend’s son to you, Sara, to love and cherish and care for all your days.”

  During that moment and for the nearly two hours that followed until we waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, I felt blissfully part of a loving family that included Mom and Dad.

  For years during the winter holidays, my parents had become increasingly oriented toward work, but this year, after they waved good-bye to Elio at the airport, they seemed busy almost to the point of panic. Our scheduled trip to Banff was canceled, and every night until I returned to California, we slept on cots in the lab.

  “Please be a love and stay out of the way. We’re so busy right now,” Mom said after I’d asked several questions the night after Elio had left. Probably in response to seeing that I felt hurt and disappointed, Dad gave me a draft of an article on evolutionary quantum computation that he was preparing for publication. He asked me to proof it.

  That task kept me out of the way for the next three days. On the night of 25 December, as we sat down in the break room for a quick dinner, I handed him back his draft with my comments. He immediately began reading. When Mom asked him to eat before his food got cold, he requested another espresso. He downed the steaming liquid in a gulp and got up, saying that he was going to his office to look up something.

  I had just fallen asleep on my cot later that night when Dad knocked and turned on the lights. “Thanks for your comments. Very insightful. You solved the problem I wrote in the margin on page 7. All of us here have been working on it unsuccessfully for some time now. Your brothers are curious about how you solved it and would like to examine you over the next few days. Would that be all right?”

  “Sure! That would be great!” My brothers are interested in me, I thought. At last!

  I lay awake for hours, fantasizing about our getting to know one another better and becoming closer. But the next few days would validate Grandpa’s admonition that disappointments are the disharmonies between expectations and desires, on the one hand, and the patterns of reality, on the other.

  One day just over eleven years earlier—it was about a month after Uncle Marcus had been killed—Grandpa returned home from Berkeley later than usual. He typically traveled to Berkeley in his tiltrotor two or three times each week to visit old professor buddies or take care of his duties as chairman of the board of Magnasea, the company his father had founded that was primarily in the business of robotic systems and deep-sea mining. Magnasea had had the Navy contract to develop android SEALs, the so-called Sentiren project, that resulted in the creation of my brothers. It was about a half year after my birth that the Navy canceled the Sentiren project and my brothers left the Magnasea lab to live at home with Mom and Dad, the home from which I had been cast only a couple of months before.

  Grandpa usually returned from those trips to Berkeley in good humor and with interesting stories to tell. But that evening, his face appeared unusually long and creased.

  Grandma offered him a glass of wine and asked what had happened. He told us that in the morning First Brother had taken the Turing test. Present during the test, along with Grandpa, had been Mom, Dad, Second Brother, and a panel of ten professors.

  I asked what the Turing test was. Grandpa said it was a procedure proposed by Alan Turing in the mid-twentieth century to determine whether a system had achieved human-level intelligence, based on whether the system was able to deceive human interrogators—who were permitted to ask questions of the system but were otherwise veiled from it—into believing it was human.

  “I take it from your demeanor that First Brother failed,” Grandma said.

  “Of course, he did! I told Karl we shouldn’t participate in such foolishness. Given our current state of knowledge, it should be obvious that only a human can pass the test, unless, of course, the examiners are incompetent. Not a single person on that panel could convince a dog examiner that he or she is a dog, if dogs could give and respond to such tests. And what would that tell us? That humans don’t have the intelligence of a dog?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Well, for example, a human testee—he’s the one we suppose is trying to deceive a dog examiner into thinking that he, the human, is really a dog—might be smart enough to feign that he finds the smell of anuses intriguing, but when the dog examiner asks, ‘Oh? How so?’ the human would be left speechless, whereas any dog capable of communicating could write a book on the subject.”

  “Grandpa!” Grandma scolded.

  “Do you have a better explanation? No, I didn’t think so.”

  There was a fleeting look of shock and displeasure on Grandma’s face; then she looked at me and her mouth silently formed the word “grumpy.”

  “Anyway,” Grandpa continued, “humans don’t have canine intelligence, and canines don’t have human intelligence. So it is with androids. They think faster than we do, so they see patterns we don’t, unless we do a lot of analysis. They’re not as attuned to emotional, especially sexual, nuance. They don’t have sex, for heaven’s sake, so why should they be? Thus, they don’t laugh at the same jokes, they’re not offended by the same things, and so on. To report that an intelligent system has failed to pass the Turing test is to report nothing more than that the intelligence isn’t human.”

  He gulped down the remainder of the glass of wine and scowled.

  “You didn’t care for the wine?” Grandma asked. “It’s last year's Chardonnay.”

  “It’s fine, fine.” Grandpa rolled his eyes. “In fact, I’d like another glass. What’s troubling me is Second Brother’s response to a question Professor Scripps posed after the test. I’m sure Scripps and others will make hay out of Second Brother’s rash answer.”

  “What’d he say that upset Professor Scripps?” Grandma asked.

  “I didn’t say Scripps was upset. He undoubtedly was happy to get an answer he can use to further his agenda to ban all experiments on non
human conscious intelligences. Second Brother was obviously hostile to the test and to the interpretation given it by some of the panel members. Smelling blood—the one thing that old shark can still do with some competence—Scripps directed the following question to Second Brother: ‘What do you think of the idea that it is wrong to kill humans?’”

  “And?” Grandma asked.

  Grandpa gulped down some more wine.

  “And Second Brother said that a parasite that unrestrainedly kills its host ultimately destroys itself. As long as the only host for ideas was human brains, the idea that it is good to kill humans was at an evolutionary disadvantage to the idea that it is bad to kill humans. Needless to say, all hell broke loose. Scripps and Senator Kephart made national news by 1600. I got a call from Senator Franklin at 1607. He said we’d just ensured the election of at least forty more members of Congress and at least five more senators for the ERP.”

  At the time, all this was a bit of an uphill slog for me. But what definitely caught my attention—actually, I was somewhat pleased to hear it—was that First Brother had failed a test, a test that I (presumably) would have been able to pass.

  “What didn’t First Brother know?” I asked, trying to appear appropriately concerned.

  “I wouldn’t say he didn’t know. It was that the answers he gave led the panel to conclude he wasn’t human.”

  “What did they ask? What did he say? How could they tell he wasn’t human?”

  “Sara, honey,” Grandma said. “I think Grandpa’s had a tiring day. Maybe we should—”

  "Tell me! Tell me! I want to know! I want to know what makes First Brother different."

  Grandpa smiled. He liked that I wanted to know. “There were ten professors. Each was allowed to ask a battery of questions. I can’t begin to remember them all. The point is that at the end of the examination, one professor concluded that, based on his questions alone, there was less than a ten percent chance that the interrogated system was human; the other nine concluded that, based on their questions alone, there was less than a five percent chance that it was human.”

  “But you remember some of the questions, don’t you?” I persisted.

  Grandma looked at me pleadingly. “Sara, honey—”

  Grandpa raised his palm to quiet Grandma. “One professor read excerpts from literature and poetry. After each excerpt, First Brother was asked what images, thoughts, and feelings the words had engendered in his mind. This professor and his students had performed the same test on hundreds of humans over the past several years. First Brother simply didn’t express sadness, terror, pleasure, attention, or arousal in a normal human way.

  “A second professor read jokes. First Brother was instructed to rate each joke on a scale of 1 to 10 and explain what, if anything, was funny about it. By the way, First Brother was allowed to respond to these and to all other questions only with typed responses. Jokes, as it turns out—I’d never really given it much thought before—tap deep currents of human nature, culture, and knowledge, often utilizing oblique hints at intimacy, absurdity, and offense. First Brother did particularly poorly on this test.”

  That’s for sure, I thought. He never laughs at anything.

  “Another professor asked First Brother to paint in his mind a forest scene that she described: a man walking with a dog, tall pine trees, dark understory, light filtering through treetops, and so on. The professor was reading from the script of another well-researched test. She then asked First Brother to repeat the scene. First Brother did, perhaps too well. Then she asked First Brother to look at the scene in his mind and state what his mind’s eye was focusing on in real-time: man, dog, man, tree trunk, forest floor, man—that kind of stream-of-consciousness response. Humans typically look most often at parts of the scene containing high-contrast and fine detail: up and down trunks of trees, along the visible horizon of the forest floor, the dog, the human. First Brother gave too much attention to the canopy, the moss, the grass.”

  “Just as he stares at strange things around here all the time,” I interjected.

  “Strange for you, perhaps, but interesting for First Brother.”

  “Sorry,” I said, having been corrected more than once after saying something to the effect that First Brother didn’t focus on the right things.

  Eleven years later, it was my turn to be tested. After breakfast, Mom and Dad told me to go to room B9, where my brothers were waiting. First Brother informed me that their goal was to compare my neurologic and other bodily functions with similar functions of other humans whom they had already tested. For the next three days, ten hours each day, I sat, strapped in sensors, and solved, or tried to solve, the problems I was given.

  On the morning of 29 December, only Second Brother was in B9 when I entered. He said he would be giving me what he called the Sentiren test and reminded me of the Turing test that First Brother had been forced to take over a decade before. He stated that he wanted to see whether I was an intelligent, conscious being.

  “But that’s silly,” I said. “Of course I’m intelligent and conscious but in ways different from you. It’s obvious I can’t answer questions within a conversational period of time if their answers require lengthy mathematical or logical computations.”

  Second Brother replied that he wouldn’t ask me to perform lengthy formal computations. He said his goal was to see to what extent I could feel; he already knew that I, like all humans, had to employ machines whenever I wanted to think about or do anything beyond the merest triviality. I was stunned, especially in light of Dad’s representing that these tests were being conducted to help my brothers understand how I came to solve a problem none of them had been able to solve.

  Despite my inability to do more than speculate as to their answers, I found many of the questions interesting. How does it feel to simultaneously entertain multiple foci of conscious attention, as opposed to a single focus—the serial monophonic consciousness to which humans are limited? How does it feel to be interrupted, while quietly simulating a series of quantum states, by the shock of having someone unexpectedly play at 110 decibels the radiant, beaming first three eighth notes and sustained tone of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

  There were hours of such questions. I mention those two simply as examples of questions into which I later gained insight from discussions with Michael. Other questions, such as how it feels to have a laser knife cut through integumentin or how it feels to have one’s hand placed in a microwave oven, I didn’t discuss with Michael, concerned that they might frighten him.

  With regard to the question about being interrupted while calculating quantum states, Michael, after performing the experiment, said, “When I was performing the calculations, I felt very pure, very crystalline. The shock of the loud sound was followed by a feeling that every cell, every metallic structure, every regularity in me had suddenly been shattered. It was a disturbing and frightening experience. I felt as though I was a diamond breaking.”

  With regard to experiencing multiple foci of conscious attention, Michael said he experienced no difference of feeling between thinking about one thing or about many things at once. He said he simply did what seemed most natural and appropriate at the time. He likened the mental state of thinking about many things simultaneously to watching four or five different events on a split-screen display or to letting his mind expand to take in the whole as well as each of the parts of complex polyphonic music. There still is one main, perhaps composite, observer, he explained, though that observer is continuously aware of many things at once.

  I wondered at the time, and still do, whether there wasn’t something more behind these tests. Were my brothers trying to humiliate me to see how I would react? Or was there something deeper, something more important that I failed not only to achieve but even to become aware of? Were they trying to introduce me to their world? Did they finally lose patience?

  The following morning, I was surprised at breakfast when Mom told me that Dad had already left. “On
business to Vancouver” was all she would say. Looking back, I think it likely that he, being of a kind and gentle disposition, didn’t want to be a part of what Mom and my brothers had in store for me that day.

  I was again left alone with Second Brother, who, before we began the testing, commented on my performance of the prior two days by stating that I was “hopelessly human, so gaudy with emotion” and that I had demonstrated not even the slightest degree of Sentiren feeling or intelligence. This was not unexpected, he added, since he and my other brothers were products of our parents’ minds, whereas I was merely a product of their loins.

  Trying not to show my irritation, I told him he was wrong, that I was also a product of their minds, knowledge, and culture. He responded by saying it was time to begin our work for the day. A few hours later, in the midst of an exercise that seemed to be testing the reaction time of my fingers to various visual cues, he placed his thumb on one side of the bone at the base of my right ring finger and his index and middle fingers on the other side of the bone and began to squeeze. The pain quickly rose as he increased the opposing force of his grip.

  I was faced with a choice of asking him to stop or of concentrating on the sensation and showing him I could tolerate the pain. I foolishly chose the latter, and before a minute had elapsed, I heard a crack as the bone broke. Though I don’t know what my face expressed, my mind was busy being amazed at discovering how well the real pain of the bone’s breaking conformed to the corresponding sensations induced by the algetor.

  “The proximal phalanx is broken,” Second Brother dryly said.

  A spark of anger flashed through my mind, but not wanting to appear gaudy with emotion, I suppressed it. “I think we should tell Mom.”

  We walked across the hall to where Mom and my other brothers were working on a scanner for large animals at the Calgary Zoo. Though my finger continued to communicate painful sensations, I was, as Grandpa had taught me, able to keep my mind from converting the sensations into physical suffering. I was disappointed, however, in Second Brother’s hurting me. Since when was physical damage part of a test?