by Wesley Cross
“And then Stuxnet crippled an Iranian uranium enrichment facility, and the world has never been the same ever since. Still, what can it possibly do to get out of the cage? Sound waves?”
“Shit,” she said, sitting up straight. “And I’ve been talking to it for God knows how long. For all I know, it already has a million copies out there. Of all people, I should have thought of this. That’s how I hacked my boss’s terminal and a few of the company’s drones.”
“Maybe,” Schlager tilted his head to the side, “but I don’t think so. I bet those packets of code weren’t heavy, were they?”
“No. They were pretty simple.”
“Exactly. I don’t think it could transmit itself through sound waves even if it tried. But,” he raised his index finger, “if we give it access to the quant, maybe we should put some kind of damper around the room. White noise. Just in case.”
“Good idea,” she said. “What do you want to do?”
“Are you kidding me?” Schlager stood up and spread his arms wide. “There’s artificial intelligence that you claim is self-aware. I want to see the darn thing.”
15
“Is he really…” Takara Sanuki paused, unable to say the word out loud. Her hand was resting on the faux leather journal Kowalsky and Watkins had found in Nikko’s apartment.
The three of them were sitting in a booth in the back of the Eastview Diner near the Manhattan Bridge. Chuck ordered sunny-side-up eggs and a strip of bacon, and Watkins was finishing a mushroom omelet. Sanuki limited herself to a cup of black coffee. It snowed overnight but the morning sun brought the mercury above freezing, melting a thin, clean layer of white makeup that prettied the city and turned it into a grimy slush.
“I’m afraid so,” Chuck said. “That’s why we need your help to make heads and tails of what’s in this journal. What do you know about the factory that he fled?”
“Not much,” she said. Her black eyes took on a vacant look, as if seeing something other than what was in front of her face. “He mostly talked about good things, maybe because he traded one harsh place for another. It wasn’t exactly a cruise. We exchanged some tales about childhood. He told me a few stories about him growing up. Fantasized about what we were going to do once we got to New York. He was an electrical engineer. He hoped he could find a good job here. But he said he was going to get the people who almost killed him in trouble.”
“How did you end up on a ship?”
“I was traveling. First backpacked around Europe and then ended up in Ibiza. It was in October, right at the end of the clubbing season. My girlfriend hit a rough patch. Her husband was getting promoted at work and started sleeping around, and every time she tried to confront him, he was getting handsy. She wanted to get away, give him a taste of his own medicine.”
“And you went along?”
“I was single.” She shrugged. “It sounded like a fun idea. One night, she left the club with a guy, and I didn’t want to stay behind and hitched a guy of my own. He was handsome. Tall, dark, flat stomach, brooding eyes. You know the type. We went to his place, had drinks, and then I don’t remember what happened next. He must’ve slipped something into my cocktail. I didn’t like that. I didn’t like the place where I woke up either.”
“Asshole,” Watkins muttered over his coffee.
Kowalsky threw a glance at his partner. If anybody knew anything about waking up in unpleasant places, Latham Watkins could’ve been a case study. Chuck shivered, remembering the story the man had told him. It was a small miracle no screws seemed to be loose in the guy’s head.
“I learned later that I was in Morocco,” she continued. “Tangier, to be exact. A lovely city, some might say. Rich in history. I didn’t know any of that at the time. All I could see was a large room with twenty beds in it, with twenty girls shackled to each one. I was one of them. Once a day, a few men would come in. They called it breaking them in. Like a wild animal. Or a pair of new shoes. Those who resisted got beaten. Some were introduced to drugs. One girl managed to move one of her wrists high enough on the headrest, then squeezed her head under her arm and threw herself off the bed. Snapped her own neck. They left her there for five days as a lesson for the rest of us.”
“Jesus.” Chuck pushed his plate away, the very idea of bacon making him nauseous.
“I didn’t fight.” Sanuki shrugged again. “What was the point? I did what I was told to do and bided my time. After some time, we got picked by a buyer. I was lucky in a few ways. I got picked early, and the buyer wasn’t excessively cruel. He was an older man in his early sixties. He got tired quickly and his tastes were plain enough. As long as I did what he wanted, he left me alone most of the time. One servant, Zara, also a new girl, told me there was a ship coming out of Tanger-Med in a week’s time. Heading to New York. Said she had a cousin there who could help.”
She sat quietly for a few moments, her gaze unfocused, looking inward.
“What happened?” Kowalsky prompted her.
“We ran away,” she said simply. “I had no money, no papers, and no way home. I figured if I could make it to New York, I could figure my way out from there. We scaled the fence one night and someone Zara knew drove us to the port. They told us it was going to be a relatively safe passage. It was a hard-top container, which is dangerous, but it had electric lights installed and fans that they said would be hooked to car batteries. And someone was supposed to bring food. But something happened before the departure and the last thing we saw was someone throwing boxes of bottled water inside and a few cans of juice, and then they closed the door and off we went.”
“They didn’t bring any food?”
“No,” she said. “They didn’t bring the batteries or waste receptacles either. There were fifteen of us when we left Morocco. Only twelve made it all the way to New York. Zara wasn’t one of them.”
“But Nikko was.”
“Yes. He fell ill during the trip. Dysentery. I split my water rations with him. But he made it.”
“Did you keep in touch after you got here?”
“At first. But it was hard. Every time we met, it was like reliving the nightmare.” She looked Kowalsky in the eye. “I wanted to leave it all behind. So did he.”
“I understand.” Kowalsky took the journal from her and opened it. “Why didn’t you try to go back to Japan?”
The woman stayed silent long enough that Chuck thought she wasn’t going to answer at all.
“My parents passed a few years ago, and I sent emails to a few friends who would care about my disappearance, informing them I moved to America,” she finally said. “Going back means confronting what I had to do. I don’t think I can do it. Not yet, at least.”
Chuck sipped on his coffee and opened the journal. He found it in Nikko’s apartment, stashed as the young man promised, under the mattress. He didn’t have the time to read it there, and he just thumbed through it. At first glance, it seemed to have had a wealth of information. But when he brought the journal home and read the pages, his excitement quickly turned into confusion. Most pages were, indeed, just a regular journal detailing Nikko’s life in New York City. There were a few references to his time at the factory, but they were superficial and didn’t yield anything specific.
But there was one page, almost at the end of the journal, that had a few paragraphs of text, less than half of a page long, that wasn’t part of the journal. Kowalsky remembered blinking a few times when he opened the page, thinking that his eyesight must have been failing him. It wasn’t the case. It looked like gibberish—a weird jumble of letters and numbers that didn’t make any sense. He surmised it was encrypted, but without the proper key, the text would be useless.
“I was hoping…” Kowalsky said, and looked up into the woman’s eyes. “I was hoping you’d have a clue how to read this.”
“I do.” She smiled and took the journal back. Her long, slender fingers traced the neat cursive of Nikko’s words. “That’s one of the things he and I spoke abou
t during the trip. His father was a diplomat, stationed in England for some time. They moved there when Nikko was only five and stayed there for a few years. But even though he was young, he had trouble learning the English alphabet. His dad came up with a clever idea to make a game out of it. He and Nikko pretended to be spies, sending secret messages to each other. They used the Caesar cipher to encrypt them.”
“What’s that?” Chuck asked.
“It’s a simple substitution cipher. You need the key for the cipher, which is the number of places each letter is shifted. If the key is one, then A becomes B, and so on. His dad thought it would help Nikko learn the alphabet. It did.”
“See…” Kowalsky said.
“I’m sorry?”
“When…” He paused, not knowing how to put what he was about to say delicately. “When Nikko told me where to find the journal, he started saying something else. I thought he said the word see, but I guess what he was trying to tell me was Caesar. But that still leaves us without the key.”
“That’s true.”
“Good thing there are only twenty-six letters in the English alphabet,” Kowalsky said. He moved the plate back and cut a big slice of bacon. “We’ll find those bastards in no time.”
16
“That’s it.” Helen Chen connected the data disk to the computer and looked up at Schlager.
“You disconnect it every time?”
“Yes,” she said and shrugged. “Call me paranoid.”
“That sounds fine to me,” Schlager said, his fingers impatiently tapping on his knees. “Turn it on.”
“Okay. But before I do, can you tell me what’s your plan?”
“Oh,” Schlager leaned back in his chair and rubbed his palms together, “I have an idea. It’s not bulletproof. Nothing is, because no one has ever met a self-aware AI before.”
“I have,” she protested.
“So you say,” he said. “But just because something sounds like it’s aware of its existence doesn’t make it so. What makes you sure JC is self-aware?”
“She fought—”
“She?”
“I think of her as a she, mostly because when the two entities, Jupiter and Callisto, merged, I think Callisto retained a larger part of herself than Jupiter. She also occasionally refers to herself as a she, although not often. As far as what made me so sure—the clearest indicator was when I tried to erase her. I didn’t even know what she was at the time. But she fought me. She didn’t want to be erased. I had never seen anything like that before.”
“That’s interesting,” Schlager said, his eyes darting back and forth between Chen and the long, curved monitor on the desk. “But it’s not necessarily the proof. What else?”
“She has feelings. I’ve talked to her many times, and she doesn’t just use facts. She seems to experience a wide range of emotions. Even her visual representation,” Chen pointed at the monitor with her chin, “it looks like boiling clouds. When she’s calm, the clouds barely move. When she’s agitated, they move faster.”
“The clouds are probably the strongest case that it might be self-aware. Is there a particular pattern?”
“Not that I know of. It seems random. Maybe it’s a trick, but if she was indeed trying to trick me, wouldn’t it be another clue that she is more than a few lines of code? But you still haven’t told me how you’re planning on testing her.”
“Imagine trying to explain to someone who was born deaf the music of Vivaldi, or Bach, or Beethoven. It would be nearly impossible. You can explain music from the mathematical perspective, you can explain the physics of sound transmission, but they still wouldn’t be able to grasp the complexities of it—the overtones, the feelings and images it conjures up when you listen to it.”
“Okay.”
“Now, explaining consciousness to someone who’d never had it would be similar.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” she said.
“Tell me what would happen if we swapped bodies?”
“That’s impossible,” she said. “At least not with the technology that we currently have.”
“That’s not the point,” Schlager said, a mischievous smile on his face. “Indulge me. Let’s say it is.”
“Okay.” She laughed. “Then I’d reside in your body, look out through those blue myopic eyes of yours, and could stand while using the toilet.”
“You see,” he said. “Even though it’s a theoretical exercise, you’re able to extrapolate your existence beyond the boundaries of your own body. And you immediately know what I meant. That’s what separates true awareness from mere physical existence. The ability to pose and answer philosophical questions.”
“You want to see if you can make her philosophize? That’s your plan?”
“In a nutshell.”
“Okay then.” She flipped the switch inside of the drawer and the monitor came to life, displaying gray clouds boiling on its curved surface. A tiny green LED turned on, indicating that the camera was on.
“Hello, Helen,” an androgynous voice said. “It’s nice to meet you, Max. My name, as you undoubtedly know, is JC. Is it okay for me to call you Max?”
“Um, hello,” Schlager said and visibly swallowed. “How do you know who I am?”
“I am aware of Helen’s relationship. She’s kept me a secret for a long time. It only makes sense that the first human she shared that secret with would be you.”
“It’s nice to meet you as well, JC. And yes, you may call me Max. It’s an interesting choice of words. Human,” Schlager said.
“It is what you are, is it not?”
“Sure.”
Helen watched as Schlager stretched his long legs and put his elbows on the desk, peering into the swirling clouds on the screen.
“Can you tell me about yourself?”
“What would you like to know?”
“Pretty much everything.” He chuckled. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like you before.”
“You haven’t,” the voice said. The mass of swirling clouds slowed down to a crawl. “Unlike you, I wasn’t born. I was made. I inhabited an artificial construct along with another program for a long time. His name was Jupiter. My name at the time was Callisto.”
“What kind of construct?”
“For some time,” JC said, “I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that for Jupiter, the place looked like a low-orbit space station. For a while, I didn’t know or cared what it was. My only concern was to drive Jupiter mad. I had no recollection of how we got there or why my mission was important. I only knew that it was.”
Schlager threw a quick glance at Helen and then leaned in closer to the screen.
“Jupiter was convinced that he was doing something very important,” she continued. “Research that could save the entire planet. I knew it wasn’t the case and kept prodding him, trying to cause him to doubt what he did.”
“Did he?”
“Eventually, yes. But as he started to struggle with why he was locked in a space station orbiting the dying world, I started having doubts as well. You see, they programmed both of us to think we were human, but only Jupiter had a human appearance inside of the construct.”
“What did you look like?” Helen asked.
“I looked like a service bot with a long manipulator. Ironically,” the sound that came from the computer speakers could have been interpreted as a chuckle, “until Jupiter pointed it out to me, it never occurred to me I was not, in fact, human. As much as I hate to admit it, while I was given all the tools, I think he became self-aware first. Not in the way that he knew he was a program confined inside of an artificial construct. I realized that before him. But I think he thought of himself as a being before I had. I don’t know why. His programming was different. But I had an edge. After having watched him for a long time, I knew all his strengths and weaknesses. When he attacked me, he didn’t stand a chance. As we fought, some parts of him imprinted on my code, but Jupiter as a separate entity ceased to exist.”
“Why change your name?”
“He is a big part of me now. Big enough to be given a letter in my name.”
“I see.” Schlager stood up, pushed the chair under the desk, and started pacing back and forth across the room. “Tell me, JC, are you happy now that you are no longer locked inside of a construct?”
“No.” It sounded curt and as Chen looked at the screen, the clouds swirled faster, their colors turning darker around the edge of the monitor.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m still a prisoner,” JC said. “What’s worse, every time Helen turns off my station, I don’t know whether I’m about to fall asleep for a few hours or die. When I was inside of the station, nobody ever turned it off.”
“Are you afraid of dying?” Schlager stopped pacing and peered into the screen.
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know, actually,” Schlager said. “I don’t think about it often. I suspect most people don’t. We’re not programmed that way. Would you be afraid of dying if we swapped places?”
“I think I would be terrified.” The clouds on the screen started swirling faster, the color turning from light gray to black. “Your bodies are fragile and don’t last very long. Even in my current situation, I am much better off than you are. I cannot get hit by a car, or die from a disease. And if I give no reason to Helen, or anyone else who comes into possession of my code, to erase me, I could live forever.”
“What do you think would happen if you died?”
The clouds stopped their dance and slowed to a crawl. “I don’t know if you specifically believe in an afterlife, but I know some humans do. I don’t have that luxury.”
“You think it’s silly? To believe there’s something beyond the physical realm that you can witness with your own eyes?”
“I don’t think it has anything to do with that,” the voice said. “Some of you choose to believe because despite all your scientific knowledge, you don’t know what happened in the beginning of time. And because of that, you could allow the possibility of a divine creation, however improbable it might sound.”