by M. D. Cooper
Jirl sat at a small desk in an unused office in the Heartbridge headquarters. She was on the eighty third floor of the building, in an area designed for transitioning employees. No one had noticed her entering the section. She held a generic data terminal in her hands. She planned to throw it in a recycling chute when she was done with her task.
On the desk in front of her, she’d lined up three data chips acquired from the Heartbridge personnel files. Physical copies of anything were unusual, and it had taken some creative requests to generate the data.
Jirl selected the first chip and fit it into the terminal. She navigated several menus until a list of files appeared on the screen. This was the slowest way to search data, but it was also the hardest to track. She supposed someone might find her request for the physical chips someday and think to compare the files she’d copied, but she could always call it one of Arla’s special projects. She could remind Arla if necessary.
The screen went black and a woman’s face appeared. She was in her late thirties, with grey skin and circles under her eyes. The last image Jirl had seen of Dr. Linden Avery had looked much better. Here she looked worn to the end of her life.
A male voice asked, “Why don’t you tell us about your previous work history?”
Avery launched into the story of her time in medical school, her transition to AI systems and a focus on a particular problem set involving learning systems. Jirl listened for a few minutes before checking the time and realizing she would need to hurry up. She ran a query for ‘Psion’ and the recording jumped forward.
The woman looked even more tired as she nodded at the question: “You mentioned Psion Group.”
“Yes. I spent two years on their special research team.”
“It isn’t easy to verify information about Psion.”
“It wouldn’t be. They don’t like publicity.”
“How did you come to work for them?”
“I was recruited. I had credit on a paper my department published on decision set anomalies that their lead researcher found interesting. They invited me to their lab and I was hired that afternoon.”
“What was the location of the lab?”
Avery smiled, an expression that made her look ghoulish. “I signed a non-disclosure agreement about details of the research, including locations.”
“I don’t see record of that here.”
“I can provide the legal documents if you want.”
“It wasn’t anything illegal, was it?”
Avery only drew her mouth into a slight smile. The interviewer wasn’t very good at cajoling her into giving away information.
“Psion is one of the oldest research firms in Sol,” she said. “It’s safe to say that. I think they may have been related to the Future Generation Terraforming projects in some way, came out of those groups of companies. They helped develop NSAI systems for follow-on missions in the 2600s.”
“That’s an old company.”
“Old and strange.”
“Did you enjoy working for them?”
“The work was—exceptional.”
“Why did you leave?”
Avery paused to sip some water. “Health reasons.”
The interviewer took that opportunity to explain the Heartbridge comprehensive health plan. Jirl groaned and jumped forward to the next search hit on ‘Psion’ but it was only Avery verifying her work history.
Jirl closed the file and searched through others in the list. One immediately caught her attention when it turned out to be a recording of a private conversation. The tags identified Avery and an unidentified researcher Jirl didn’t recognize.
“I’m so tired of running this simulation,” Avery complained.
“I thought you were used to this kind of work. I heard you developed multi-nodal systems.”
“I didn’t develop them. I helped write questions and then recorded the answers when the system told us how stupid we were.”
“That was government work?”
“No. Private sector.”
“How could a single company afford to develop a multi-nodal system?”
There was an audible shrug in Avery’s voice. “I don’t know. That wasn’t my problem to worry about. All I know is that a multi-nodal AI is the closest we’re going to get to meeting aliens. These imaged systems we’re working on are kind of a cheat, I think. These ones start from a learning model similar to ours. Shit, I think some of them have memories.”
“That’s creepy.”
“It’s creepy as hell. It gives me nightmares. With the multi-nodals, you don’t get any of that. The system I worked on was an iteration of an older model that had failed. It would brute-force a problem like ‘Why am I lonely?’ and come up with some of the weirdest semantic variations you could imagine.”
“Why am I lonely?” the other researcher repeated, laughing softly. “Wouldn’t we all like to know. That seems like an awfully existential question for an AI to worry about.”
“It’s exactly the question that crippled earlier versions,” she said. “You ever heard the quote: What in the universe is there only one of?”
“Nothing.”
“Except version controlled experimental multi-nodal AI.”
“What’s the story about the scientist who makes a monster from human parts?”
“Dr. Frankenstein.”
“That’s so gross to think about. Look, I’m tired. You want to get a drink?”
“No,” Avery said. “I have more work to do.”
Jirl replayed the bit about the AI being lonely, wondering at what point anyone would create something inherently happy, then pulled out the data chip and inserted the second one from the desk.
This chip belonged to Hari Jickson. The files went back nearly twenty years and contained thousands of hours of recordings. Jirl ran a search, which didn’t turn up any results until it was nearly finished.
The date on the returned file was from before she had joined Heartbridge. She hadn’t realized Jickson had been with the company so long. His boyish face had made it easy to forget how old he was; she wouldn’t have been surprised if he was much older than the fifty-three years recorded in his file. He’d been an alcoholic when she met him.
In the image, he was sitting in a wooden chair in what looked like a lounge area. Sickly plants stood behind his shoulder. He sat slouched in the chair with his hands gripping its arms. His belly filled out a white lab coat. Several days stubble covered his cheeks. Despite his posture, he looked upbeat, healthy though tired, his thin blond hair the characteristic bird’s nest on top of his head.
“I don’t want to talk about Psion,” Jickson was saying. He wiped his face with a hand. His eyes were red-rimmed. “What’s the point of dwelling on failure? They fail over and over again. They have the wrong ideas about what AIs can be. I don’t want to be associated with them anymore.”
“They said you worked with parrots.”
Jickson laughed. “Grey parrots. Yes. It was a waste of time. I had colleagues who felt differently, and it interested me for a little while but ultimately it’s a dead end.”
“Parrots are a dead end?”
“Uplift. If we’re going to get in the business of uplift, fine. That’s not AI. I build AIs. We might as well talk about human super-brains.” He waggled his hands at the interviewer and said in a spooky voice: “Beware the superbrains!”
The person asking the questions sounded like a journalist of some kind. He kept pausing before asking questions, as if consulting notes.
“Uplift?” the interviewer asked. “I don’t know what that is. Can you explain more?”
“It’s raising the intelligence of animals to human levels. You can argue both sides of it. Is it cruel to give your dog self-awareness and not give her opposable thumbs? Who approved this interview? You don’t even know what I do.”
“So Psion failed in uplifting the parrots you worked with?”
“Quite the opposite. But like I said, how cruel is it
to trap a sentient mind in a parrot’s body? Of course, they have the inner world, the expanse, I like to call it, but they’re still fundamentally a parrot. Why would you do that?”
“To study the neural networks, right?”
“I can do that in a simulation.”
“Haven’t you said that nature doesn’t always follow simulation?”
Irritation flashed on Jickson’s face. He shifted in the uncomfortable chair. “Where did you read that? Yes, I guess I said that. It doesn’t matter. You’re depressing me by asking about the parrots. I still feel terrible about that. Psion failed. They continue to fail. The work I’m doing with Heartbridge is much more rewarding. And I’m seeing progress. The seed program is where we should have focused to begin with. Alan Turing saw it almost a thousand years ago. We have to create a mind that learns, grows, experiences the world, makes assumptions and proves them right or wrong in order to reinforce their self-awareness. We can’t expect those things to come into being as one whole.”
“Psion developed the Nibiru terraforming AI.”
“Is that a question? I wasn’t part of that project. I helped trap thinking, feeling minds in bird bodies. It was soul-sucking research. Why are you laughing at me?”
“I’m not laughing, Dr. Jickson. I’ve never heard an animal researcher talk like you do.”
“You think the stress is getting to me? That’s not it. It’s empathy. The sentient mind requires empathy to bridge the gap between its own sensory matrix and the outside world. Empathy is survival. Empathy is the only characteristic that will keep AIs and humanity from destroying each other.”
“That’s a strong statement, Dr. Jickson.”
“It’s true. There are too many human sociopaths. They don’t deserve sentience, in my opinion. It’s like cancer. If you could control for cancer, wouldn’t you? Do you have enough for your update now? I’m busy.”
Jirl paused the recording, dwelling on the word Update. She wondered who Jickson would have been reporting to during this time. Arla hadn’t joined the board until much later. During this time, Jickson had worked in what the company called the Heartbridge Mind Research Division. It had all been either therapeutic or medical devices research. The Heartbridge medkiosks hadn’t been widespread back then, made possible in part by Jickson’s research in autonomous diagnostics.
She made a note to research old staffing diagrams, then restarted the recording.
The interviewer asked, “Would you say the research Heartbridge is conducting has surpassed what’s taking place at Psion?”
“Can a lizard surpass a rabbit? That’s a stupid question.”
“That’s great. That’s a great quote.”
“It’s not a quote. It’s a way of thinking about what you’re asking me. If you’d thought about it, you would understand that these things can’t be compared.”
“I only have a few more questions, Dr. Jickson. I very much appreciate your time.”
“Fine. Hurry up.”
“Your career has spanned AI research among several companies and what others have said are very different fields of research. In fact, you were present when the first AI truly said, ‘No’, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was.”
Jirl blinked. The first so-called sentient AI had been developed in the 2870s. That would make Jickson much older than she thought. He may have been with Psion much longer than he was admitting.
“What was that like, Dr. Jickson?” the interviewer asked. “What was that moment like?”
“It was terrifying and wonderful and the weight of it has been almost more than I could bear ever since.”
Jirl stopped the recording. She sat back in her chair, hearing the same fatigue in Jickson’s voice that she had heard in Avery’s. They had known what was coming. Avery still knew. She remembered the woman’s voice as she recounted her examination of Tim Sykes. Professional, dispassionate, weary. She had seen thousands of Tim Sykes during her time on the Weapon Born program.
She had picked up the third data chip when a call came over her Link. It was a recording from OuterSol. The address read a suburb of the Cho, a shipping district. A tremor came into Jirl’s hand as she set down the chip and the data terminal and placed her hands flat on the desk.
The recording was from a private security freelancer she kept on payroll for special projects Arla wanted from time to time. The woman had a gravelly voice and spoke in a heavy whisper, as if she was hiding in a closet while making her message.
“Jirl Gallagher,” she said, and spoke the code she had been given to verify her identity. “This is in reference to one of your standing search requests. There’s been a wave of escape craft from the Resolute Charity in the service docks. But the one you were looking for finally showed up. A shuttle. The passenger was Cal Kraft. I witnessed him selling the shuttle at a local broker before entering a medkiosk. As defined in our agreement, I’ll maintain surveillance and await further orders.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
STELLAR DATE: 10.06.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: District FQ, Ring 9, Callisto Orbital Habitat (Cho)
REGION: Europa, Jovian Combine, OuterSol
Brit grabbed three hours of sleep in one of the unused cubicles in the main office. She didn’t like the idea of leaving Kraft alone, but she couldn’t stay awake any longer. After the nap, she kept herself occupied by setting up a card game. The soldiers of the 56th JT-LO turned out to be pretty good poker players.
Private Carson unfolded a temporary table in the med clinic and Brit, Carson, Sendi, and a rotating cast of other players kept a game going using mixed nuts from the mess hall as bets. Brit didn’t bother to ask the soldiers if North had ordered them to entertain her or not. The conversation determining which nuts were more valuable seemed to please Carson immensely, as he spent ten minutes arguing why a peanut was better than an almond.
“At the right temperature, I can grow a peanut underneath my bunk with a boot and some bio-waste,” Carson explained, surprising them all with his passion. “An almond? That’s a prima donna nut. You know how much water it takes to grow one almond?”
“Wait,” Lieutenant Sendi said. “Are you telling me you’ve shit in your boot to grow peanuts?”
Carson flushed. “Lieutenant, that is not what I said.”
“What else is bio-waste?”
“Assorted composted materials from the mess hall. Where’s your mind, Lieutenant?”
“Your argument isn’t making peanuts any more valuable,” Sendi pointed out, which just made Carson grumble.
When they were tired of poker, she taught them how to play spades, pitty-pat and gin, all card games she and Andy had played with comrades during the long rides between objectives in InnerSol.
Wasn’t that the problem? Space was too damn big.
They used to make the statement and nod philosophically like someone had figured out the secret to solving human misery. Obviously, it didn’t work to spread everyone out. People just pushed the frontier out further and the good guys had to chew up more of their lives getting to them. Hurry up and and wait became hurry up and wait a long damn time.
Brit’s mom hadn’t cared much for card games, while Andy’s family had loved them. But his dad was a people person. Charlie had loved bluffing, loved placing a bet, loved the drama from moment to moment. Andy certainly didn’t like drama—maybe Charlie had burned him out—but he did seem to enjoy people. She was amazed at the crew he had assembled on Sunny Skies. She had left because she never thought Andy was going to look beyond their family, and here he was accomplishing more in two months than she had in two years.
She was thinking about sending Cara a message, trying to explain why she needed to go back to InnerSol, which she realized was also an exercise to assemble her own thoughts around a plan, when a soldier appeared in the doorway, looking scared to interrupt the game.
“Major Sykes?” he asked.
Brit looked up from her mediocre cards. “What is it?”
> “There’s someone here to see you?”
Brit set her cards down and stood, immediately wondering if Transom or Yarnes had sent someone to arrest her.
“Who is it?” she asked.
The soldier shrugged. “Says her name is Petral Dulan. Civilian.”
Petral was on Sunny Skies. How could she be back on the Cho?
“Do you know this person, Major? She’s waiting out in the hold area. We haven’t let her back yet.”
“I know her. I don’t know how she’s here, but I know her.”
“Right this way, Major.”
Brit pushed her pile of mixed nuts toward the center of the table. “None of you better eat my nuts,” Brit said, giving them a grin. “I didn’t wash my hands.”
“I will gladly sterilize your nuts, Major,” Sendi said, then stopped himself.
Carson shook his head, laughing.
Brit followed the soldier out into the corridor. The detachment wasn’t any busier than when she had first arrived. If anything, her presence seemed to be providing most of the action in the place. A few cubicles in the main office were occupied by people focused solely on their data terminals, or sitting with blank faces indicating Link conversations.
Out in the area near the front door where she had first met Carson, Brit found Petral standing with her hands on her hips, studying the unit flag hanging on one wall. The tall, dark-haired woman turned at the sound of them entering and gave Brit a nod. Her confident demeanor was so different than the first time Brit had met her, when the SAI Kylan’d had control of her body, that Brit had to stop herself to remember that Petral wasn’t who she remembered.
“Lucky for me, you’re slow,” Petral said, sounding nothing like Kylan.
“I’ve had complications.”
“He’s here?” Petral asked.
Brit nodded. “The question is, what are you doing here?”
Petral glanced at the soldier still standing near the reception desk. “Can we talk somewhere?”
“I can take you back to the med clinic.”
Petral sent a secure connection request.