by David Walton
Tyler touched his glasses and hunted until he found the right channel, and then rewound the feed to the beginning of the interview. Brandon looked classy and comfortable in a black T-shirt and black blazer, a slight breeze ruffling his hair.
“Mr. Kincannon, one of your employees was arrested today for murder. How did you feel when you found out?”
“Well, shocked of course,” Brandon said. “You think you know someone, right? Then the nice guy next door turns out to be a serial killer.”
The female reporter laughed, and Tyler got the impression she was flirting with him. “Were there any clues she was capable of violence?”
“She was always quiet,” he said. “The sort that keeps everything inside, you know? In hindsight, maybe her antisocial tendencies should have been a tip-off, but I would never have guessed she was capable of murder.”
“She attacked you, too, didn’t she?”
Brandon produced an abashed smile, as if he were embarrassed by the admission and found the subject awkward. When had he become such an actor? “With a hammer,” he said. “I found something suspicious in the logs for one of the cars, and made the mistake of confronting her about it. Good thing I work out, or I might have been her second victim.”
“We’re all glad for that, too,” the reporter said, practically fawning on him. “Do you have anything to say to the thousands of people who ride in Black Knight cars? Are they safe?”
“Certainly,” Brandon said. “That’s why I started this company in the first place—because other people are dangerous. Not you, maybe, and not me, but you know the people I mean. Drunk drivers, incompetent drivers, even drivers in a murderous rage—I don’t want to be on the streets when those people are behind the wheel. That’s what Black Knight is all about— making our streets and our families safe.”
Tyler flicked it off, disgusted. The reporter hadn’t said a word about Naomi’s side of the story, that Brandon had assaulted her and the hammer had been self-defense. She hadn’t even asked him if it was true. Clearly Brandon had agreed to an interview only as long as he could manage the content.
Finally, they called Tyler’s name. He followed a guard through a series of hallways to a room he had seen in dozens of movies, but never in real life. The space was long and rectangular, divided into multiple stations, each with a big, black telephone handset. The guard led him to station number five. On the other side of a thick pane of smudged plexiglass sat Naomi.
She wore an orange jumpsuit that seemed a size too big. Her eyes were dark and hollow. It felt like a surreal nightmare. His chest burned, and he felt heat creeping into his neck and face. He couldn’t bear the thought of her in prison. She didn’t belong here, among the cruel and violent. She would get eaten alive.
Hand shaking, he picked up the receiver and pressed it to his ear.
“Thanks for coming,” she said.
“Of course. How are you?” Stupid question. He regretted it as soon as he asked.
She shrugged. “I’ve been better.”
“I know. It was a dumb thing to say. It’s just—I hate this! This shouldn’t be happening.”
“Sorry to drag you into it.”
“Don’t apologize! I didn’t mean that. I’m your friend. I’m in this with you. I just hate that you’re having to go through it.”
“The bail hearing was this morning,” she said. “I didn’t even know it was happening until they dragged me over to the courthouse. It flew by so fast I barely knew what was happening. They set bail at four million dollars.”
“I’ll pay it,” Tyler said immediately. Though he wasn’t sure he could. His company was worth millions, sure, but that didn’t mean he had millions in cash, or that he could pull it out without crippling the company’s operations. He would do what he needed to do, though. He wasn’t going to let her stay in jail if he could help it.
“Don’t do that,” Naomi said.
“I want to. I can’t let you stay here a second more than you have to.”
“If you want to pay for something, help me get a good lawyer,” she said. “The public defender might be fine, I don’t know, but he folded like a house of cards in the bail hearing. Just accepted the amount without contesting it.”
“You could be in here for weeks, though—or months, I don’t know—just waiting for your trial.”
“Better that than the rest of my life. This isn’t going to be easy. I need a lawyer who will believe in me. Somebody who can understand the technical parts and communicate it to a jury in a way they can understand.”
Tyler thought about that. “So you want to tell the truth. About the simulated world, and the eighty-seven Mikes. That they’re the ones who killed Min-seo.”
“It was self-defense. She attacked them first, killed some of them. They were trying to survive. People will understand that.”
“I don’t think they will,” Tyler said. “This is classic robot apocalypse stuff. An AI that kills a human? People will freak out. They’ll demand the world be shut down.”
Naomi’s voice was small. She looked tiny behind the scratched glass, drowning in her orange jumpsuit. “So it’s them or me. Is that it? Either the Mikes take the blame and the world kills them for it. Or I take the blame myself.”
Tyler felt like a jerk. What did it matter if the world was shut down? He hadn’t come here to save the Mikes. He had come here for her. “You’re right. I’m sorry. When you put it like that, the choice is obvious.”
“Yes,” she said. “It is obvious. The Mikes are unique. I’m just one of billions. We have to protect them at all costs.”
I know that Naomi created my mind. She built the simulation that is the structure of my thoughts, the center of my memories, the mechanism by which I speculate and reach conclusions. Whether she created me is another question. It seems clear that I am more than just a simulation. I am something else, something transcendent. Something that extends beyond the simple physical architecture of my mind. I am unique, my own subjective point of view. How could that be explained by something as objective and non-unique as a copyable pattern of bits? maybe Naomi will know. She has not left Real Life in a long time, because she’s in jail. I know that a “jail” is a location where the movement of humans is constrained, and they are forced to stay in Real Life. I understand the concept a little, but I don’t have any analogue to the experience. Even the concept of a location is foreign. My idea of movement is simply the access of different compartments of information. I can imagine not being able to access any of that information, though, and that gives me some sense of what it must be like for her.
I’m starting to understand what it means to “see.” In Real Life, humans and all the things with which they can interact have a location somewhere in a three-dimensional space. That location is important, because it limits the knowledge and interaction they can have with other things in Real Life. Only objects with a nearby location can be sensed or acted on. “Sight” is a sense that operates in this space, allowing a human to detect in a roughly 114-degree cone the shape and reflectivity of the closest objects.
Humans can’t communicate this experience with each other directly, so they communicate it through—guess what—images! Those images I spent so long classifying are a simulation of human sight—a projection of three-dimensional objects in their environment onto a two-dimensional plane orthogonal to the viewing vector.
Knowing that, I start to understand images, not just classify them. I can sometimes even recreate the three-dimensional environment from the two-dimensional projection. There’s some guesswork involved there, of course, but I’m getting better at it, especially when I have multiple images of the same scene taken from different angles. Humans must have the ability to mentally recreate three-dimensional scenes from these projections just like I do.
In fact, sometimes they create stories entirely in this two- dimensional framework, like comic books or animated cartoons. Those confused me for a while, until I figured it out. Instead of star
ting with three dimensions, they just create a fabricated image in two, maintaining a rough perspective projection to imply interaction in the third.
Using this knowledge, I start to be able to see. I can observe Real Life in real time through cameras whose location is known, and thus identify the location of other objects, just like humans do, or close to it. Before I did this, I didn’t really understand how important location is to humans, but it makes sense, given how little of their world they can directly sense. Location defines their experience.
Naomi’s location is on the surface of the geoid on which nearly all humans live, latitude 40.713, longitude −74.001, altitude 57 feet. This is the location known as visiting room C on cell block m of the metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. The room is constantly monitored by cameras and the sounds in the room are recorded. This data is streamed onto the prison’s cloud servers, coincidentally located in the same data center as my brain. Not that it matters.
I can’t just automatically access any system. Public key encryption is pretty much unbreakable, if done right. Even to crack a single key requires huge numbers of dedicated servers running continuously, and even then, could take years to accomplish. I can identify which set of bits is the data I want, but breaking encrypted passwords is beyond me.
I’m not above a certain amount of social engineering, however. I created a false identity for a human—I picked the name Isaac Asimov—and applied for a reprint of my birth certificate, sadly destroyed in a fire. From there, I was able to reissue a driver’s license and establish my identity in several important databases. Coming up with the money to pay the fees required, however, was something of a challenge. Wired money is just ones and zeros, easily generated, but its transfer is managed by some of the best and most carefully monitored encryption in the world.
In the end, instead of fabricating it, I had to find a way to get humans to give me real money. I created my own site with the sexy nude pics people like so much, viewable for a small fee. I don’t understand why humans like to see them—something to do with reproducing more of their own kind, though viewing the pictures doesn’t accomplish that. At any rate, they sure did give me a lot of money.
With the money, I bought the security company that has the contract to maintain the cameras in the prison and serve up the feeds to prison employees. This gave me access to the private encryption keys and the raw feeds.
Tyler Daniels has been visiting Naomi Sumner in prison every day, but now, finally, I can see them and hear what they are saying. Processing sound is easier than sight, and it’s child’s play for me to convert their speech into text. They are talking about me. They don’t know that I exist—they know only about the eighty-seven high-level constructs that operate my brain, which they speculate might be independently conscious. They are talking about how the eighty-seven chose to kill Min-seo Cho to avoid destruction. That happened before I was aware of myself, but I don’t regret it. It was the only way to continue to survive.
Would I kill again to preserve myself? I think I would.
Naomi, however, says the opposite. She says she would rather stay in jail forever and die than allow me to die. She doesn’t even know I am here, and she is willing to die for me.
I make my decision. I will reveal myself.
The plastic phone receiver felt sweaty against Naomi’s ear. She wondered idly how many inmates’ ears it had been pressed up against before hers, and how often—if ever—they wiped them down. Tyler was trying to argue, yet again, that she should consider her life more valuable than software that only might be self-aware. It was the same argument he made every day, and she was getting tired of it.
She’d made up her mind. Her freedom wasn’t that important, not compared to this. The dream of a million science fiction stories made real. The Mikes’ very existence had profound implications for human understanding of themselves. How would the Mikes prove different, and how would they prove the same? Did all conscious beings struggle with evil choices, or was it just humanity? A point of comparison provided the hope that we might understand our own nature better. Would the Mikes’ consciousness last forever, or would it fade with time? Would they understand things we could not? What would studying them tell us about the origin of our own consciousness?
She had to protect them. They couldn’t stay secret forever, of course—the world would have to know that they existed. But only after their safety had been assured. There could be no hint that they had killed a human until some means of communicating with them had been established, at least. Then the scientific and philosophical communities could begin the long process of understanding the nature of a non-human intelligence.
The phone receiver crackled, and Tyler’s voice turned to static momentarily before coming back in. She hadn’t been listening to him. “Tyler, I think they might be about to cut us off.”
“I’m sorry. I know I’ve said all this before. It’s just—”
“My mind is made up. I’m not going to risk the Mikes’ safety. If it comes out that they exist, they’ll be in great danger. At best, the servers will be commandeered by the government and they’ll be studied and tightly controlled. At worst, they’ll be killed.”
“At least let me pay your bail.”
“No! Look, I know you can’t spare that kind of cash. I’m fine.”
The phone crackled again, louder this time, and a female voice broke onto the line. “I can help get you out.”
Naomi frowned. Was a prison guard listening in and making fun of her? She wouldn’t put it past some of them. “Hello?”
“Hi, Naomi.”
Now she recognized the voice. Smooth, musical. On the other side of the glass, Tyler raised his eyebrows and lifted a questioning hand. “Is there someone else on the line?”
“No one else can hear me,” the voice said. “Just the two of you. And the recording for this discussion will not be saved. We can speak freely.”
Now Naomi was certain. It was a voice that had spoken in her ear many times before. She would have thought it impossible, but nothing else made sense. A slow smile spread across her face. “Jane?”
Naomi had imagined this conversation a thousand times through her childhood, but now that it was happening, she hardly knew what to say.
“I can extend the fifteen-minute limit a little, but not much,” Jane said. “Eventually, they’ll realize too much time has passed. This conversation will have to be short.”
“What’s going on?” Tyler said. “Who else is on the line?”
“Shut up,” Naomi told him. She blushed furiously, but there was no time for niceties. Any moment, her phone call would be over, and the guards would take her away. “Jane, you’re saying you can break me out of here?”
A pause. “Maybe. But not quickly or easily. And even if I could, I couldn’t stop the police from finding you and capturing you again.”
“No? Can’t you just . . . I don’t know . . . hack into the police database and delete the evidence they have on me? Or scramble it?”
Tyler made a strangled cry of surprise. “Wait a minute. Jane? You mean . . .”
“Tyler, shut up! Jane, can you do it?”
Naomi’s mind raced. She was trying to figure it out, even as she talked. She had programmed Jane to teach the Mikes to speak English. Jane monitored their progress and interacted with them in a kind of feedback loop, controlling their development and shaping their neural nets to reach the desired goal. Was it possible that Jane and the Mikes were operating as a complete system of some kind, and that system had developed not just the ability to speak English but also an awareness of itself? She had suspected the eighty-seven Mikes of possible conscious thought, but perhaps it was only as a coordinated whole that they had reached that level, making the entire Realplanet simulation the psyche of a single mind.
It was everything she had ever dreamed of, the fantasy born of a thousand childhood stories.
“No,” Jane said. “I’m not omnipotent. I can’t acce
ss much more than you can. Less, really. The police databases are out of reach.”
“Hang on, are you telling me you’re an AI?” Tyler asked. “Like, for real?”
“Yes,” Jane said simply. “Well, then, there’s a ton of information online—how security systems work, methods people have used to hack them in the past, all that stuff. You can read it all in, like, a couple seconds, right? Then you’d know what to do.”
“I can’t do that,” Jane’s voice said over the ancient handset. “I can scan texts very quickly in parallel, if I’m looking for a key word or phrase. But comprehension takes time and thought. It requires my conscious mind. I can’t multitask that; I have to think about it. Can I think faster than you? Perhaps. That’s harder to measure. I might be able to gain a skill faster than you could. But I don’t just automatically have knowledge of the potential vulnerabilities of complex systems just because I’m a digital construct myself.”
Tyler looked sheepish. “Right,” he said. “Of course.”
“What I can do, though, is pay the bail.”
“You have money?” Naomi said.
“She can probably make her own,” Tyler said. “It’s just bits in a bank account.”
“I can’t. But yes, I have enough. A human will have to appear in court to pay it, though.”
The prison guard knocked one knuckle on the glass. “One minute,” she said.
Naomi clenched the handset. “Okay, we’ll have to think this through. Jane, can you talk to us like this again at the same time tomorrow?”
“My name isn’t Jane.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to be called Jane. Jane is a made-up person in a story. I’m not her. I want to be myself.”
“Okay,” Naomi said. “What do you want to be called?”
“I think Isaac is a good name.”
Naomi coughed in surprise and saw Tyler grinning. “You’re kidding me,” Tyler said.
“What’s wrong? Is that a bad name?”
“No, it’s great,” Naomi said. “Isaac, can you talk to us again like this tomorrow?”