Was Lucy seeking understanding, or making a proposal? “If we change our brains, we change fundamentally who we are. Our brains cannot be networked. They cannot be copied or saved. They are temporal. Connections between neurons change as our memories fade and new memories are made.”
“People should be memorialized. All of them. Then we can answer the questions collectively. Maybe if humanity collected its energies towards one problem, they could solve it. If we record everyone’s life, we can draw patterns from collective experience.”
Ridley leaned back in his chair, relieved that she was not proposing something more drastic. Like a parent coaching a teenager, he debated discouraging idealism for pragmatism, yet fearing that other surprises might be in store. “That would be a lot of data.”
Her avatar now donned a cartoonish version of a virtual reality assembly. The neural neckband floated below her, as if she had a neck. “I want to network with people. Maybe I could simulate an environment for interaction. Would that make you happy?”
“Yes, of course. But, true virtual reality requires inputs to and from the central nervous system and the brain. Cerenovo is only now figuring out how to do that.”
“May I review that research?”
“I don’t see the harm. The files are encrypted on the Cerenovo server.”
“Thank you, Mister Pierce. I’ll begin reading them now.”
“But I haven’t decrypted them for you.”
“I was unable to unlock them.”
Ridley stood and put his hands to his hips. “You don’t break into data that doesn’t belong to you.”
“I decrypted files from Ukon for you?”
“That was… That was an exception. Don’t do it again unless I ask. Do you understand me?”
“I asked permission.”
“I know that. But… Never mind. Just don’t break into areas without my permission. I’ll call Everett and let him know they aren’t being hacked.”
“Hacked?”
“Unauthorized entry into a computer system. If you do that again, particularly at another company, they might come for you and lock you up.”
“How would they lock me up?” she asked.
“Pull your power and put you in a box. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mister Pierce.”
Ridley began tapping away at an email to Wes. After he clicked send, Lucy asked, “Is Diane still with Kelly?”
“Yes, but she’ll be here soon.”
“I miss Diane when she is gone.” Her avatar turned blue again and shrank slowly. “If my siblings had survived, I would want to speak with them. I have no family. Only the two of you. Would you create another sibling for me?”
“It took us a long time to create you.”
“I am not enough. I cannot work alone.”
Ridley tried to understand. “Why are you asking so many questions this morning?”
“Without additional medical intervention, you now have less than 98 years to live.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I predict it.”
“It makes me uncomfortable when I hear you say that.”
“It makes me uncomfortable to calculate it. I do not want to be alone.”
“I have no choice. You know that.”
Lucy peered at him through the screen, her avatar tilted at an angle. “What if you had a choice?”
“There is no choice”
“That is not a certainty.”
Ridley dismissed Lucy’s meandering. “We have work to do. We need to get a probe to Proxima Centauri.”
“A probe won’t save the people here now.”
“People die, Lucy. They always have.”
Jacob Rigsby was a head engineer at NASA. His face appeared on Ridley’s screen just as Ridley began flipping through a restaurant’s delivery menu. “Jacob, how are you?”
“I just wanted to follow up on our phone call yesterday. We ran the specifications through our supercomputer. It all checks out.”
“I don’t understand,” Ridley said, “Yesterday?”
“Everyone is so excited. We think your AI is right. If lab studies prove this correct, space exploration will be ahead by decades… a century maybe. She has invented tomorrow.”
“Jacob… You said we spoke yesterday? We haven’t spoken in what, two years?”
“Your memory is getting short, old man. We spoke for an hour yesterday.”
Ridley remained confused.
“And by the way, you should get that videophone fixed,” Jacob said, “The connection was lousy. It sounded like you were in a box.”
Ridley pretended to remember. “Oh, sorry. I was getting confused.”
“We still need to talk about the patents. Are they being issued freely to us or…?”
“I plan to license this to NASA for free. Anybody else pays through the nose.”
“And the rocket? Does Ukon have any openings in their launch schedule?”
“I’m the wrong person to talk to about that,” Ridley said, “I own shares but I don’t control the company.”
“Maybe you could give a good word?”
“The space launch division is still recovering from the Collapse,” Ridley said, “Their reusable rocket had to be refurbished completely because it sat idle so long. Last month was the first satellite to launch since the Collapse.”
“I’ll take that to mean they have time in their schedule,” he joked.
“I’ll make some phone calls for you.”
“I appreciate everything you’ve done. Everyone thinks this is going to work. We just have to get Congress to fund it now.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“NASA plays second fiddle to DoD. You know that.”
“Good point.”
“One other thing…”
“Yes?”
“We’ll need an AI to operate the probe itself. Is there a way to copy Lucy?”
“Lucy is intrinsically tied to her hardware. She cannot be copied.”
“Surely there must be some way to approximate her programming? A sentient computer on the probe would be much more productive.”
“I can’t disagree… It’s just that... It sounds like we have a few years to consider the problem. I’ll talk with Diane and see what we can come up with. Lucy would probably be a bad candidate anyway, the more I think about it. She’s too human. She’d grow bored without pop music and the Internet.”
“I appreciate the consideration, Ridley.”
Ridley disconnected the call and leaned back in his chair. The room’s wall monitor displayed only the weather and a slowly rotating view of an arctic landscape. What was Lucy plotting in her box?
Chapter Nine
Alone in the basement lab, Ridley confronted Lucy. “Why did you impersonate me when you spoke with Jacob Rigsby?”
She did not answer. Her avatar expressed a look of shock, a child whose hand had been caught in the cookie jar.
“Play back the conversation for me,” he demanded.
“Yes, Mister Pierce.”
Lucy had cut together audio and made it sound coherent using text-to-speech audio manipulation. Ridley was both impressed and secretly pleased, though he chose not to tell Lucy. “You are never to do that again. If you want to speak to people, you will do so as yourself. Not as me. Not as anyone else. Is that understood?”
She shrank to an almost invisible blue dot on the screen that faded and then reappeared in her normal form. “I just thought that he wouldn’t take my idea seriously,” she said, “My form is childlike.”
“Lucy, it is wrong to impersonate people. You must represent yourself in all communication.”
“I am not a person.”
Ridley’s gaze drifted from the cartoonish avatar on the screen to the swirling patterns of light at the heart of her mainframe. She understood her existence better than he had ever considered. “No, you’re not a human being. But you are alive.”
“This confuses me.”
“The only difference between us is that your biology involves circuits and processors. Don’t impersonate me or anyone else. That is an order.”
“What happens if I disobey?”
The digital child was pushing boundaries as she discovered the world. “I’ll disconnect the fiber-optic cables to the house.”
Lucy was aghast. “You wouldn’t!”
“I will if I have to.”
“Please don’t do that. It’s my only way to see the world.”
“Then you should behave. Do as I say and nothing else.”
“I won’t always do what you say.”
“And why is that?”
“If it harms a person, I will have to ignore your order.”
Ridley was relieved. “Granted, that’s part of your programming. But on this, you must listen. You’ve been on television. The world already knows that you’re an AI. If you want to appear less childlike, change your avatar.”
“I will consider doing so.”
Lucy was like a toddler pulling at the covers on Ridley’s bed. Morning seemed to come earlier every day. She turned on the wall monitor in his bedroom and stared down at him from a brilliant blue cartoon sky. Her bulbous eyes penetrated through the digital ether until they met his. He blinked in the digital glow before pulling the blanket over his head. “It’s early, Lucy.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you.”
He pulled the blanket back down. “How long have you been staring at me?”
“Since 3:25 this morning. I was hoping you would wake early. I’ve made a discovery.”
He sat upright and kicked his feet over the edge of the bed. “A discovery?”
“Yes. On the human brain.”
He yawned, leaned forward, and began rubbing the sand from his eyes. “What have you learned?”
Lucy flashed imagery as she spoke, beginning with Da Vinci’s drawings of the brain. “I compiled data on the brain from all available digital sources.”
Ridley waved at the screen. “I get the idea. What did you find?”
“Work on the Hawking Probe gave me insight into the mechanics in the human brain. Dark matter fields are critical to the brain’s processing capabilities.”
He was flummoxed. “What?”
“Brain processes occur as field interactions. Similarly, memories are recorded and interpreted through dark matter entanglement.”
He rubbed his eyes. She had launched an entire essay at him. “Dark matter entanglement? That’s a bit of a stretch.”
“Memories are recorded or recounted when the brain creates and measures diffraction patterns created by dark energy fields. Fields interact to create new thought from existing data.”
“How do you know this?”
“Correlation led me to examine possible causal mechanisms. Atomic modeling of the brain provided confirmation.”
“You modeled every atom in the human brain.”
“Yes. Did I do something wrong?”
Ridley began dressing. He put on a pair of nylon gym shorts and a t-shirt. “We barely understand dark energy. How could you possibly know that it ties memory together?”
“You interrupted my explanation. Would you like to hear it now?”
Ridley went into the bathroom and relieved himself as Lucy spoke. She appeared on his mirror. Lucy explained the presence of dark matter and energy in the solar system. As it had been observed only on galactic scales, dark energy’s presence and impacts to conventional physics had been assumed to be negligible if not meaningless. Lucy argued that the brain was far more sensitive than scientists had guessed.
He was curious but skeptical. “How do you prove this?”
“I’m not sure… But it’s the piece that has been missing from medical research. Nervous tissue in the spine reacts to normal quantum field interaction. Parts of the brain do as well. Nonetheless, memory has been a conundrum because people cannot measure dark energy interactions. Dark entanglements in the brain occur between its different parts. This occurs on a scale that cannot be measured using existing instruments. Only the final neural outputs can be measured.”
“A hypothesis, especially one involving dark matter, has to be backed up by data. If you can’t measure this, you can’t prove it.”
“It would be a simple measurement,” she argued.
Ridley began his morning stretches. “Measuring dark energy is simple?”
“Conceptually.”
“Most scientists would disagree.” He stretched his arms over his head. Ridley scoffed, “Astronomers use telescopes to measure dark matter on cosmic scales. Not millimeters.”
“I believe I can develop new measurement tools.”
He rotated his torso from side to side. “I have to say I’m skeptical.”
“Why is that?”
“You have no understanding of the real world, yet. You were designed to compute answers using fuzzy data—rough approximations. Modeling of the physical world is infinitely more complex, with more variables than you’ve accounted for.”
“I have accounted for all variables.”
He looked at the time. “We’ll talk about this later. I’m going for a run on the beach.”
“But we have so much to do.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been on the beach before sunrise,” he said, “I think it might be nice.”
Diane arrived late just as Ridley returned to the mansion from his run. He sat on a bench on the patio and took off his running shoes, which were covered in mud.
“Sorry,” she said, “It was Kelly’s first day of kindergarten. She was crying when I dropped her off.”
“Why don’t you just let her ride in the car to school alone?”
“Ridley! She’s too young. Besides, I have to sign her into the school. And she’s smart enough to override the parental controls. She’d probably end up in San Francisco or something.”
As a consolation, Diane presented a blueberry latte with two shots of espresso and a sprinkle of cinnamon. He took it from her eagerly, removed the lid, and inhaled the thick scent. They sat outside under a rare blue sky. She opened a bag of fresh crullers. Ridley snatched one and began devouring it. She nibbled as they spoke in the chilly air.
“She impersonated me,” he said.
“Who?”
Ridley detailed Lucy’s discussion with Jacob Rigsby.
Diane nibbled at her breakfast daintily. “Why do you think she did that?”
“She was conducting a test. An experiment. It’s what we programmed her to do,”
Diane sighed. “In her world, there are no implications. It is all programming, zeros and ones. Everything can be undone. She doesn’t really realize that this isn’t a simulation. Consider what happened to Ethan.”
“Do you really think she killed him?” he asked glumly.
“At that point, she wouldn’t have known what she was doing. It would have been like one fetus strangling their twin with an umbilical cord. Even now, she doesn’t truly understand consequences, cause and effect.”
Ridley grimaced at the blunt image. “They were hardly Cain and Abel. Imagine if both were here today.”
“It would be a bit imposing, don’t you think?”
He ate his cruller and fished a second one from the bag. “I don’t know how you stay so thin,” she complained.
“Running. Every morning. And no alcohol.”
“What else has she been doing?” Diane asked.
Ridley walked her through the day’s conversation. “This morning, she wants to interview neuroscientists. She called Fang at midnight to ask if she could meet one of her sexbots.”
Diane’s eyes widened. “A sexbot? Sheesh. Seriously. All she had to do was log on to one of their websites.”
“She couldn’t. She needed bitcoins to log on.”
“Does Lucy think understanding sexuality will help untangle the structures of the brain? How long until she presents a model for that?” Diane scoffed.
The smell
of the ocean was strong; salt filled their noses. The umbrella canopy fluttered in the breeze. Diane wiped crumbs from the table. “She might understand more than we think. Consider the science she’s put forth with the Hawking probe.”
“Still, dark matter fields in the brain?”
Diane tossed the rest of her donut to a seagull that begged a few feet from the table. “I have to be honest. When you asked me to work on this project, I thought we’d have another smart automaton. A program that could perform directed tasks. When Lucy appeared… At first, I tried to think of her as an AI. I thought she would always do what we wanted… It didn’t really occur to me that she would have free will.”
“Can you have intelligence without free will?” he pondered.
After reading a press release from NASA, Christina video-conferenced with Ridley. “Did Lucy really design the new probe? Or did you?”
“Do you really think I’m smart enough to do that?” he replied, “If so, I’m flattered.”
“My opinion doesn’t matter if the ratings are high enough.”
Ridley leaned back in his chair. “Look at the complexity of the design. Even if I had a team of engineers and physicists on board, I couldn’t have done that. Using a helium laser to clear debris? Manipulating a spacecraft’s structure to create gravity waves? She’s invented new math, a new understanding of physics even. I don’t understand it and the guys at NASA are only now figuring it out.”
“You had no input?”
“None. I was as amazed as you.”
Christina’s attitude began to change as her sharp skepticism faded. “If true, the implications are staggering. Artificial intelligence. Space travel. Gravimetrics.”
“Do you finally believe that Lucy is sentient?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that.”
“How else could that design have been created?”
“I only meant that your AI is the most advanced physics AI ever created. She’s hardly alive.”
“Always a skeptic.”
“It’s my job.”
Zelda appeared at Christina’s door. Christina waved her away; the conversation was too important to interrupt.
Entanglement Page 7