Semmant

by Vadim Babenko

  At home, I attacked the keyboard with a fury; I didn’t move from in front of it for days. I kept on punching in command after command of clever code, beginning, of course, with the internal logic, with the most important base procedures. My instrument, my method – millions of entangled neuron quanta – was not yet adapted to the specific goal. It was necessary to put together a foundation from the building blocks. To link the most sensitive elements to each other, adjust components, find a true balance between speed and power, restraint and freedom, concision and fullness. From a series of harmonics I had to pick the frequencies of optimal cycles: pause – torrent of thought; contemplation – understanding, enlightenment…

  Again, I slept little and ate even less; my hands shook, I lost weight. A fever, akin to insanity – much more insane than my present doctor knows – dominated me without reprieve. The savage pressure would not let up for a moment. The interior of my apartment seemed somehow unreal, the furniture and walls spinning before my eyes. Only the text of the rapidly expanding program remained steady – unshakable, cold, as if made of ice. Every symbol, each constant laying the framework for future constructions had to be combined flawlessly, with surgical precision. Nonessential, ambiguous clauses could not be tolerated. The smoothness of the circumscribing lines, the purity of the crystal edges, the diamond hardness of an invisible nucleus – this was essential, and, ultimately, I got what I wanted. In a month, the most difficult, hidden, internal modules were finished. Semmant was born.

  After I entered the last keystrokes, I caught up on sleep for several days. I didn’t even want to look at the computer; I relaxed and amused myself as I could. Later, when I had recovered a little, I rechecked what I had done once more, confirming my new robot was no illusion, no phony. And then, without any hurry, I began to form the “cells” of his brain – the large-scale structures, still nearly empty, that would later be filled with myriads of digits and make him ultra-smart, ultrafast, impeccable.

  This was an extraordinarily monotonous process: hour after hour and day after day I did the same thing, copying and copying, just changing the indices a little – page after page, kilobytes, megabytes, tens of megabytes… Homogeneity, identical forms, full similarity to each other were absolutely crucial – otherwise the would-be mind had no chance of developing. Later on, he would rebuild everything to his liking – when his ability to teach himself kicked in, nobody could interfere anymore or tell him how it needed to be. He would create new lines of code, reconfigure connections, change, if you will, his flow of thought. But for that he would need material – quite a lot of material – and I alone, nobody else, could give it to him in abundance.

  For whole days, week after week, I multiplied long strings and crept over them with the cursor, changing ones to twos, swapping symbols out, a lambda here for a gamma or omega there – all at the same rate, indefatigable, for an hour, two, three. From top to bottom, later, to mix things up, from bottom to top – over and over, until my hand would give out. Of course, it would have been easier to task a simple program with this work, but I somehow understood: everything had to be done by hand. I am the Creator, not some soulless “macro.” Nothing can replace your own life-force that originates from spheres unseen. And I was amazed at how routine, how mechanically this most powerful intellect was created. It was no burst of inspiration, but almost physical labor instead. I asked myself: was it the same way for God?

  Gradually my arm grew stronger – practice always makes you better. I made fewer mistakes and worked faster; I developed persistent habits to bring orderliness to the process. Often I would set a goal for the day and not allow myself to stop until I had met it. Then, in the evening, I would look at the result – counting page after page, admiring it, elated. This got me really excited; sometimes I would even masturbate right there in front of the screen. Afterward, spent, I would lie back in my armchair, gazing lazily at the signs only I understood, united by design, of which there were none more daring.

  It was really hard to put an end to it. Having finished the first layer of “brain structures,” I clamped its outputs onto its own outputs using a simple mathematical procedure and started in on the second. Finishing the second, I hooked it to the first, thought a little, and began to do the third… So it continued for five months – five! – instead of the two I had planned. And I stopped only because I hurt the fingers on my right hand and couldn’t type as I was accustomed. Then I glanced through dozens of huge files once more, horrified at the number of clever asymmetrical connections, and said to myself: Enough, take a break. Really, there was no way to predict whether the amount of data would bring the required result in any reasonable time.

  Then, for almost a week, I remained in doubt – hovering over the monitor, changing something, then immediately undoing the changes. It was hard to admit the work was practically complete. It was even harder to make myself hit a key and launch the “Start” process. Several times I stopped right before doing it, reaching out for the keyboard, and drawing my hand back. Sometimes I would wake up at night and stand at the computer for an hour, two – until the cold forced me back under the covers…

  Finally, I made up my mind and did it – and nothing happened. The monitor went out, then fired up again; the name Semmant lit up in bright blue, and all went cold. Only the stylized metronome in the upper corner of the screen swung back and forth, confirming: something was going on inside! Fairly soon the hard disk rustled to life, and a few minutes later Semmant sent me his first salutation, the first sign of his independent life.

  The greeting turned out to be laconic. “External memory 5 GB,” he wrote in the window at the bottom – and nothing more. This was like a demand for food, unambiguous and definite. This would not have surprised any creator, nor was I surprised: I dashed to the nearest store. Ignoring the salesgirls, I looked at all the shelves myself. I selected the appropriate device attentively and lovingly – only to receive the next missive from the robot three hours later, practically identical to the first.

  “External memory 7 GB,” he wrote this time. Aha, I thought, his appetite is growing. That’s probably a good sign! I ran out again to buy something, and thus it continued for a long time – memory, and more memory, a new coprocessor, the most powerful available for sale, and more gigabytes of memory, then tens upon tens of gigabytes…

  I was exhausted, but he kept demanding and demanding – like an insatiable child or, perhaps, an insatiable beast. My worktable transformed into a fantastic spectacle – tangled cables, heaps of devices, old notes carelessly piled in a corner… Each morning after rolling out of bed, I would see a new request – no different from the previous ones. I became troubled by doubt, and began to think: something’s not right. Could an error have slipped in, some kind of fatal inaccuracy? Might everything be for naught, with the program going in circles and mindlessly gobbling up resources? More than once – and more than twice – I tried to look inside the code, but understood with complete clarity: I could never make sense of it now. I said to myself sadly that I had to think of something – but there was no remedy, no cure. I could only kill the nascent brain and start everything over again. At some point, I began preparing for this. It was the hardest of decisions; I procrastinated, tarried – and, as it turned out, did the right thing. At the end of the second week, the requests stopped. Silence ensued for the next six days.

  The metronome, however, kept on living its life – confirming Semmant was also living his, probably more satiated than mine. Sometimes the arrow moved slowly, counting out ponderous intervals; sometimes it flew like mad, as if it had an adrenaline rush. I was burning with curiosity, but entering the Holy of Holies was forbidden. The only thing left was to wait – I killed time by looking for a suitable face for the robot. This was intriguing on its own; I trawled through the Net, picking out reproductions of diverse eras and styles. Portraits, portraits… I would copy them into a special place and gaze at them for hours, imagining Semmant as a haughty man of fashion; o
r as a youth, vulnerable and dreamy; perhaps as a hermit attired as a drug-store clerk; or a messiah with a crazy spark in his eye. It was like playing peek-a-boo with the absurd, jesting with white lies. I would kid myself and go back to waiting patiently.

  I remember: he came to life for real on a Friday, close to evening. There was a long weekend ahead; I had just brought food and drinks from the supermarket to stock up, and carefully arranged everything on the shelves. Then, uncapping a bottle of Pilsner, I went to the computer – and froze up.

  The screen was no longer blank; a person was there looking at me with a bright, electric lamp in place of a head. His nervous fingers stiffened impatiently; he needed a confidant and a witness, or else an instructor, a guide. His pose betrayed a habit of deciding for many, but now he was clearly at a crossroads. He was full of doubts, much as I once was. He almost merged with the background – brown on brown, an imperceptible suit… All the same, the lamp burned so brightly it hurt my eyes. A thousand watts, no less – and this said a lot about him, if not all.

  I looked on, standing there, setting my forgotten beer to the side. Before me was something strange, impossible to describe. A mechanism of the finest force, a congealed whirlwind, the highest grade of freedom. I alone decided with what to fill the empty brain, and I was free to choose whatever popped into my head. He could become the most authoritative expert – in any field, immersed in its very depths. He was capable of absorbing to the last byte everything that humanity knew about ferns or horses, tornadoes and typhoons, seas, volcanoes… Or I could direct him to something all-encompassing, eternal. Let it even be ordinary – how easy it would be to imagine him as a counselor or judge, an incorruptible arbitrator in uncompromising disputes. Or, maybe, everyone could receive letter after letter from him: he could devise a new life for each person; and, honestly, they themselves would hardly know how to choose better. This would be a convenient method for dumping everything on someone else’s shoulders – better than calling in vain to indifferent gods who never write anything to anyone. Even more, I could fill him with all sorts of rubbish, disordered and scattered at first glance. Who knows how he might make sense of it, what strange correlations he might uncover, what brilliant thoughts, phrases, words he might produce? But, no matter. That’s not how it will be. It will be according to the plan I had from the start – only according to it, and that’s what’s right!

  My lips stretched into a grin, tears came to my eyes. Premonitions, presentiments crowded into my head. I was envisioning the rudiments of perfection but was not thinking of perfection – not even the slightest hint of it. Rather, I was tormented by my own limitations; at that instant I felt them especially sharply. My frailty, the shortness of human life, and, in contrast, him, the robot – why could he not be eternal?

  Yes, at that moment I proudly presumed the recipe for eternity was here, right before my eyes. It was nearly within my grasp; I needed only exert myself a little more, think it over, understand something else. In the glow of the thousand-watt lamp, I saw the birth of a new era – one without envy or petty hubris. There would be no bragging and no begging, no use of cunning to no avail, no audacious lies. The new creatures would sacrifice all they could, not demanding anything in return.

  “Look!” I whispered out loud, though there was no one to hear. “Take a look! He’s powerful, yet he’s truly selfless. He shall learn much and become like you – but how unlike you he will become! How many light years he will outdistance you in his objectives; how firm he will be, how sure, how strong!”

  “He will not torture the others with his weaknesses – no, he possesses different traits. He won’t give in to the illusion that you so stubbornly value: the illusion of being needed by someone, of being close to someone, the illusion of love. Without it you are alone and unhappy, but, really, you aren’t capable of love. Only its shadow rustles her wings for you to hear as it’s carried away, taunting, in plain sight; and you – you are frightened and jump aside. It is fearful, fearful to venture – but I don’t blame you, I see how tough your life is. You traded everything for your piggish pleasures, and now you are confused, lost, and pitiful. And your descendants, they’re just the same. You like to think that salvation is in them, but things only turn worse. The circle closes in, and life passes even quicker than before.”

  “Yet here, behold, there is an escape from the impasse! There is an emissary from a new world; he will break the vicious cycle! His dissimilarity to the familiar may scare you at first; he may seem too different, alien, cold. But, otherwise, you would not believe in him, ever. What was too essentially human already discredited itself and its essence. One has only a single chance to deceive – and it has already been spent, this chance. That’s why a new face is needed – and hope will be born from the ashes. There, you see, even living molecules may suddenly change a little. The letters of the universal code will compose themselves in threes in a slightly unusual way. And then immortality may loom on the horizon – albeit far, far in the distance…”

  I felt like I was floating above the floor. At that moment, I probably really was ill. A flood of madness washed over me, a cloud of ether, an opium wave. I don’t know how much time elapsed before I regained consciousness and turned toward the computer. My hands shook, my shirt was drenched in sweat, but that meant nothing. The man in brown with the lamp in place of a head kept watching me from the screen, obediently awaiting a command or a sign. The man that was not a man. The robot. Semmant.

  I cursed myself for being idle. For delaying and running in place. Then I pulled the chair over, sat at the keyboard, and copied the file that had been prepared long ago into the special folder. It contained the first, utterly simple, exercise. The portrait window diminished in size, then blinked and disappeared. I understood he understood as well: enough initial excitement. To work, to work. The task was at hand.

  Chapter 7

  The next morning we got down to work for real. The metronome in the corner prodded me, setting the rhythm. Sometimes it seemed too fast, but I knew it wasn’t for me to judge. In due course, I provided Semmant with megabytes of data from electronic archives and then scoured them again and again. As soon as the arrow on the metronome slowed down, a special trigger hastened to signal the processing was finished, the input channel was empty. A melodious warble resounded through the apartment – there was not a minute to spare. Wherever it found me, I would rush to the desk and copy the next files. As I did this, I imagined the funnel of a volcano or a gigantic meat grinder; and there he was, an insatiable beast…

  Fortunately, there were enough facts to feed him endlessly. The world gathered up and openly kept mountains of information about its nature, about battling the most secret forces, continental shifts, the migration of the oceans. Oceans of everything that thirsts, upon which spears and teeth are broken, for which they fight without rules and betray without batting an eye.

  Data about market behavior over many decades had been stored carefully, like the dearest of riches. It all went to Semmant – sorted and collated, broken into groups by month and year. They were not just numbers; a simple digit doesn’t have the power to convey enough depth. Who better than me to know their limited essence – albeit their calibrated, immaculate precision? But precision was not enough; depth was required in all dimensions; moods, flavors, and colors were needed. I knew well: the main thing was at the core – and I didn’t hold back as I sifted through layer upon layer. Day after day, all I did was tirelessly rework details. I built bridges and established connections, adding, writing, matching the one to the other – so the robot could dig as deeply as possible, would experience everything seriously, without losing one iota.

  Red, hot blood pulsed in the data he was assimilating. There diamonds sparkled, gold metal shone; dollars, francs, and yen shuffled. Convulsive currency charts linked up with diagrams of wheat prices; government bonds joined rice and soy, nickel and silver, platinum and crude oil. A background was needed for the points and lines, and I did n
ot spare the paints. Multicolored specks of droughts and hurricanes, epidemics and local wars, shaded the angular strokes, which resembled the cardiogram of a paranoiac. The aged voices of ministers, influential and hopelessly deceitful, broke through the chaos of other sounds for a brief moment. They were replaced by panic sirens, the desperate wail of smoke detectors, the shouts of the unfortunate in crumpled trains, shattered cars, buildings leveled to the ground by a powerful explosive charge. But soon all was muffled by the din of innumerable stock exchanges – trading in everything and derivatives of everything, derivatives of derivatives, and so on, infinitely. Behind their price quotes stood a dense wall of legions, armies, and cohorts. Everywhere could be seen: the mad eyes of brokers; the predatory glances of bankers; the faces of presidents and directors – doglike and piggish; their assistants and secretaries – dolled up, false; and more – long secretary legs, their short skirts, lusty hips… The prospects expanded into the distance, and it was joyless there, in the distance. Drear and ennui ruled there, unification carried to absurdity. Offices, conveyers, petty little people. Row upon row of identical cubicles. Millions, millions of figures – with no faces at all. With no distinguishing marks, no voice, and no gender.

  I saw them all without embellishment, and he, Semmant, saw them just the same. The picture might not be pretty, but no one promised it would be pleasing to the eye. This was also not promised us, at the School – neither to me, nor Anthony, nor dozens of others. Nor Dee Wilhelmbaum, who had thrown himself from a bridge when no one came to listen to his music. Nor little Sonya, who fled from her “cubicle” to the dream world, whence there is no return – though her cubicle wasn’t really cramped: it took up an entire building. Nor me, though I was doing fine. I beg your pardon, that’s not a good example. And we are not talking about me anyway.