Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  Except her.

  She made a mental note to ask Johnner about it the next time they were alone. She didn’t want Dr. Fielding to think that she was uncomfortable in the situation she had been placed in. It was just strange, that was all.

  “I think the initial questioning went well,” Chal said, turning back to Dr. Fielding. Focus, Chal. Focus on the specifics. “He had spatial awareness of his body and my own. Did you hear his question about me sitting with him? That was strange. It shows a higher understanding of the connection between individuals than I would have expected. We wouldn’t have gotten that from our questions.”

  Now that her mind was back on the experiment, Chal felt her mood lift. There was so much to analyze, so much to go over.

  “He was remarkably concerned with the concept of personhood,” Chal said. She was distracted, and didn’t notice the worried look that Johnner and Fielding exchanged between them. “Asking if the water was a person? Dr. Fielding, isn’t that something your language implant would have preprogrammed in?”

  “It’s a necessarily vague concept,” Fielding said. “Probably just trying to clarify the boundaries of the definition. The language implant is a very basic structure; it’s just that he picks things up quickly.”

  “Very quickly.”

  “That’s the goal,” Fielding said drily. “That’s how we programmed him.”

  “I would like to see the code you used,” Chal said. “And we’ll have to keep an eye out in the future for this kind of language use.” She was trying to remember the exact words Alan had used.

  “The most important thing, though,” Fielding said, “was that the prototype acknowledged its own mental states.”

  “That’s right,” Chal said, thinking back to the end of the session. “He said that he was sleepy.”

  “And?” Johnner asked. “Isn’t that interesting? Not quite an emotional state, but...”

  “Interesting, but not unexpected,” Chal said. “Children are remarkably self-involved. The most surprising aspect was his concern for my well-being, actually. That’s a mature thought to have.”

  “Do you think you can talk with him next time about his emotions?” Johnner asked.

  “I’ll write up some questions to be used,” Fielding said, glancing at Chal. “If that’s alright with you.”

  “Sure,” Chal said. “But I’d like the sessions to stay as unstructured as possible. I think it’s healthier for his development. Which is quite accelerated, don’t you think?”

  “It’s how we programmed him,” Fielding said again. “There are still skills and information his neural structure will eventually unpack, but the learning takes place very quickly.”

  “Unpack?” Chal said. “How much information are we talking about?”

  “That is classified,” Johnner interrupted. He wore a strange look on his face, and Chal thought it best not to press the issue. There would be plenty of time to examine the information once she was given access to the program’s code.

  Fielding gave a curt nod. “I’ll see you both for the next awakening.”

  He left quickly and Lieutenant Johnner followed.

  If Chal noticed Dr. Fielding’s change in attitude, she didn’t acknowledge it. It was nice that he was being a bit more deferential to her authority, even if it took yelling at him to accomplish it. Maybe Lieutenant Johnner had intervened on her behalf. If all of the men around her wanted to just get out of her way and let her do her thing, that would be fine.

  Just fine.

  ***

  CHAPTER TEN

  “People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.” - Roger Penrose

  ***

  Chal sat in the substrate lab, the octopus tank at the far end of the room. One of the octopi had climbed onto the water filter and hung in front of it by a single tentacle, letting itself be pushed back and forth by the current. It was playing, Chal thought. No time for that.

  It would be another eight hours before the next awakening, and she wanted to analyze all of the previous tapes to see what, if anything, she had missed. Now that she was able to talk to Alan, there were a thousand things to ask. She must make sure to prioritize the most important questions while still leaving room for him to explore.

  She began with the previous prototype questioning, since those sessions were only a couple of minutes long. She replayed the awakening with Dr. Fielding, studying the prototype carefully.

  "I am Dr. Fielding."

  "You are Dr. Fielding."

  "That is correct." Chal leaned forward, watching the prototype watch Dr. Fielding. His eyes never left the doctor’s face.

  “Who are you?” Dr. Fielding continued.

  “I--”

  Chal winced again as the prototype reached down and pulled out the IV, spraying blood everywhere. Then he was thrashing all over the screen, Dr. Fielding trying in vain to restrain him.

  “I am malfunctioning!”

  “AH! AH! AH! AH!--”

  There was silence, and Chal reached forward to restart the recording at the moment everything went wrong.

  “Who are you?”

  “I--”

  Chal paused the recording. There was something off about the prototype, she thought. Something different, lacking. In all of her time with Alan, she hadn’t felt this way. She stared at the prototype sitting in the chair. He looked exactly like Alan, and although she knew there were minor incongruities, the two prototypes biologically were twins. But there was something different about this one.

  He seemed inhuman.

  Chal pressed play. The prototype looked down at his arm and pulled out the IV. She paused the tape. The prototype’s face was completely impassive, even with blood already soaking his body. He had to have felt the pain from the IV. Why wasn’t he reacting?

  She pressed play. Dr. Fielding reached over and touched the prototype’s arm.

  There.

  She replayed the video and paused it at the same spot.

  That was it. The prototype hadn’t recognized his own body as an individual entity until that moment. Chal’s eyes narrowed. What if?

  She replayed the entire recording from the beginning once, then again, until she was sure of what she saw.

  The prototype hadn’t been aware of himself until the moment Dr. Fielding touched him. In fact, he might have identified himself with Dr. Fielding. From the very outset, his eyes never left the doctor’s face. He wasn’t aware of his own body at all: he never played with his fingers or touched himself. It was only when the doctor reached over and touched him that all hell broke loose.

  It made sense—the prototype ran into a mental paradox as soon as the doctor touched his body. It was the same reason you couldn’t tickle yourself—people had an innate sense of the limits of their bodies, and expected touches felt completely different than unexpected touches, even if the actual physical sensation was the same. The touch by Dr. Fielding had short-circuited that neural connection, and the prototype’s mind had broken down.

  Chal quickly put in the second videorecording. It was the exact same problem. Dr. Fielding, sitting directly in front of the prototype’s vision in bright light. Of course they had identified with the face in front of them. It was the same problem she had dealt with in her earlier experiments. Babies needed time to adjust to the concept that they possessed bodies.

  She was about to turn her attention to the most recent recordings when Dr. Fielding came into the lab. He was carrying a laptop.

  “Lieutenant Johnner told me to give this to you,” Dr. Fielding said.

  “Thanks,” Chal said. She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was no reason to tell him about her findings. As much as she wanted to share her discovery with someone else, she thought that Dr. Fielding would not appreciate her explaining exactly how he had gone wrong with his questioning. She opened the la
ptop instead.

  “There’s a password?” she asked.

  “Last four digits of your social security,” Dr. Fielding said.

  “Thanks,” Chal said. She quickly navigated to her email and scanned the inbox for anything important. Dr. Fielding took out a cage full of mice and set it on the table opposite Chal. As she typed a hasty reply about the conditions of an experiment she had started before leaving, she watched him out of the corner of her eye.

  His movements were slow and sharply efficient. After setting the mouse cage down, he went to the back and retrieved a rack of stoppered test tubes, each marked with a bright orange biohazard sticker. He took them out one by one, handling them with extreme care, and put them in a centrifuge.

  “Are you keeping an eye on me, Dr. Fielding?” Chal asked.

  Dr. Fielding smiled coldly.

  “I’m running the weekly tests on our interferon serum, Dr. Davidson,” he said. “If my presence bothers you, you may certainly leave.”

  “No thanks,” Chal said. “I was just curious.”

  Chal turned back to her email. The first page was full of bothersome nonsense, advice from unsolicited professors interspersed with a few offers of interviews. Then a flurry of emails from her work. There had been a delay in one of the experiments due to a shortage of a compound used in the biological substrate. She went to look up an acceptable substitute, and couldn’t – the page she knew the information was on wouldn’t load. She went to another site and encountered the same error.

  “What sites are blocked?” Chal asked. Dr. Fielding looked up from his work.

  “What sites aren’t?” he said, shrugging. “But what can you do?”

  “I can’t get to the information I need,” Chal said. She had been so excited to get access to the outside world, and now it looked like the only thing that would load was her email. She clicked on the home page from her email itself. Nothing.

  “It’s the military,” Dr. Fielding said, which was both a complete explanation and no explanation at all. A light went on, and the centrifuge slowed. He took out one of the test tubes. The contents had separated into two layers of thin gray liquid, small black residue at the bottom of the tube.

  “What is that?” Chal asked, pushing her email aside. God, it was so frustrating.

  Dr. Fielding took out a syringe and inserted it into the test tube.

  “It’s a kind of interferon,” he said. “We manufacture it ourselves here.”

  “What does it do?” Chal asked.

  “It inhibits neuronal connection cell growth,” Dr. Fielding said. As Chal watched, he reached a white-gloved hand into the cage. All of the mice scattered around, trying to escape. He caught one in the corner of the cage and wrapped his fingers around it, pulling it out.

  “Isn’t that the opposite of what we’re trying to do?” Chal said. “You’re in the business of growing brains, not destroying them.”

  “I’m not in business,” Dr. Fielding said, sniffing at the assumption. “I’m strictly a scientist. Learning is everything, whether in creation or destruction.”

  He brought the mouse down onto the lab table. Its pink feet scraped against the metal tabletop. Dr. Fielding picked up the syringe.

  “We’ve learned, for example, that this particular interferon only takes seconds to stop the production of new neurons,” he said. Chal watched as he pushed the syringe into the mouse’s lateral abdomen and injected the liquid inside. He put the mouse back down on the table.

  The mouse wanted to escape, Chal could tell, but it was already paralyzed. It would start out in one direction, then freeze in place, turn, and start in another direction. It kept moving this way, in jerks and starts. Chal would have thought it was having a seizure, but its eyes were focused and alert, fixed on Dr. Fielding’s figure.

  “Why are you injecting this mouse with it?” Chal asked.

  “This particular interferon compound is notoriously unstable,” Dr. Fielding said. “We run daily and weekly tests to see if the compound is still viable.”

  “Viable,” Chal repeated. “You mean fatal.”

  “Eventually, yes. It’ll eat away at enough of the neuronal tissue so that there’s nothing left. But it’s a relatively painless death.”

  “How long does it take?” Chal asked. The mouse had stopped trying to move and was lying on its side, legs kicking. Its eyes still tracked the movement of Dr. Fielding.

  “A minute or so in mice,” Dr. Fielding said. “Longer in human-substrate organisms.”

  “Like Alan,” Chal murmured.

  “You’re growing quite attached to the prototype,” Dr. Fielding said. “Is that how a scientist should behave?”

  Chal flushed. She had not meant to be so obvious about the connection she had felt with Alan during the last session of questioning. He was just a substrate, after all, grown and implanted with intelligence.

  “Would you like to see the others?” Dr. Fielding asked. His tone was deceptively casual.

  “Other what?” Chal asked.

  “The organisms we’ve grown for future use. The ones who haven’t had their neural structures implanted yet.”

  “There are others?” Chal thought there had only been the three prototypes.

  In response, Dr. Fielding simply fished a set of keys out of his pocket and walked to the other side of the lab. Chal followed, curious.

  It had looked like a closet upon first glance, but now that Chal’s attention was drawn to the door she saw that it had multiple security measures installed. Apart from the normal keypad, the door had a deadbolt that unlocked only with Dr. Fielding’s physical key. There was also a brief flash of light as the door opened.

  “Security alarm,” Fielding said. “Any time this door opens, a warning is issued to main security. They know that only a handful of people are allowed inside.”

  “Am I allowed in?” Chal asked, knowing the answer before he spoke.

  “Of course,” Dr. Fielding said, motioning her inside. He followed her in. “The eminent Dr. Davidson is allowed everywhere in my lab.”

  Chal did not respond to his bitterness; it was normal by now. Dr. Fielding didn’t treat everybody with such suspicions, but Chal was a woman, born outside of the country. She got the sense that he might have been part of the reason for the all-male staff.

  Stepping inside, she could not stop herself from gasping. It was chilly inside, and her breath came out cold. The prototype bodies were suspended along each side of the room, looming over her. The interior of the storage chamber was much larger than it had looked from the outside – the walls extended down for another forty feet or so before ending. And the bodies...

  They were all identical to Alan, with the same dark hair and shaped physique. A plastic molding supported them on the wall, and intravenous lines ran through their veins. They stared straight ahead to the wall in front of them, their eyes blank and meaningless. Their lips slightly parted, like the lips of a doll, or wax figures. And they were breathing.

  “It’s cold in here,” Chal said, trying to cover her initial shock. She watched the chest of the body nearest her rise and fall in slow motion.

  “The substrates are prepped for full animation before we begin growing the neural structures,” Dr. Fielding said. “Their growth is expedited to a certain point, but once they’re at a certain age we use the cold to slow the growth process.”

  “Why this age?” Chal said, examining one of the bodies. “Why do you stop them at this point?”

  Dr. Fielding looked at her curiously.

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “You’ll have to talk with Lieutenant Johnner,” Dr. Fielding said.

  “About what?” Chal turned to face Dr. Fielding. “Come out and say what you mean.”

  Dr. Fielding frowned. “It’s classified. What I’ve told you is all I can say. Talk with Johnner.”

  Although he was bein
g indirect, Chal sensed the kernel of sincerity behind his words. He was suspicious, yes, an asshole, yes, but he was an asshole who was telling the truth, this time at least.

  “What should I ask him?” Chal said.

  “Ask him why we’re putting intelligence into these bodies. Ask him why we’re putting emotion into them.” Dr. Fielding looked around.

  “Why did you show me these?” Chal said.

  “You would have found them anyway, curious as you are,” Fielding said. His voice had a deep sense of purpose in it, but he seemed disappointed by Chal’s lack of understanding. “But I wanted you to see what we’re doing. What we’re making.”

  “I’ll talk to Johnner,” Chal said. “Later.”

  “Of course,” Dr. Fielding said. He was back to being his cold, polite self.

  “And in the meantime,” Chal said.

  “Yes?”

  “In the meantime, you’ll be keeping an eye on me?” She arched one eyebrow.

  Fielding brushed past her and toward the door.

  “You’re just as replaceable as they are once the prototype is fully developed,” he said, once he had reached the entryway. “Don’t forget that.”

  Chal opened her mouth to reply, but found she had nothing to say. The soft sound of the prototypes breathing surrounded her as she stood there, watching the scientist leave. Dr. Fielding did not stop walking as he moved past the lab table, calmly reaching out his hand to brush the dead mouse into the trash can as he went by.

  ***

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was the fourth awakening. Chal felt confident, and the beginning of the experiment went as smoothly as she could have hoped. The white noise levels had been decreased to almost nil and the lights were increased, though only a small increment.

  All of the scientists working on the project thought that such small changes would not be enough to destabilize the prototype’s development. But they were focused on the wrong stimuli, and spent too much time taking care of the variables they had anticipated. This was a mistake, for crucial errors in experiments happen most often when dealing with radical shifts, changes that have not been anticipated. Such was the case in the fourth session with the prototype.