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His face was calm as her hand made its way up to his cheek and rested there. Chal’s fingers stroked the skin at his temple absentmindedly.
What will you think when you wake up? she thought.
“Are we ready?” Dr. Fielding asked, startling Chal out of her thoughts. The water rippled with drops as she removed her hand from the tank.
“Yes,” Chal said. She sat back, the clipboard resting next to her on the table. She was ready.
White noise came on over the speaker system, a static humming that blanketed the room and filled Chal’s ears. The IV began to drip emerald fluid, and Chal eyed the one-way-mirrored wall nervously. Having an audience made her a bit unsteady. She breathed in deeply, relaxing herself the way she did before any lecture. She would not have to do anything, she hoped. She was there just in case.
Just in case.
The red glow of the light shone softly over the prototype, his body gleaming. Chal focused her attention on his eyes. The dark lashes still lay motionless on his cheeks, but as the IV fluid dripped she thought she saw his eyes move underneath the lids. She moved forward on her chair, watching intently. The whisper of static filled the air and dampened any noise she made, but she was still careful not to make a sound.
His eyes opened.
Chal’s lips parted in a sharp inhale as she saw the prototype awaken. His eyes were dark, gleaming red under the laboratory lights. His pupils dilated, then refocused. His fingers twitched, sending ripples through the tank. The static humming covered the sounds of the small splashes as his feet, too, twitched and began to kick softly in the water. Then his limbs stopped moving. Chal looked up at his face.
He was looking at her.
She knew that with the dim lights she must only be a fuzzy shape to him. The red bulbs that illumined the inside of the tank would make anything outside blurred and dark. Still, his eyes met hers and she thought for an instant that not only was he awake, not only was he conscious, he knew what she was thinking.
Then he turned his gaze down and the connection was broken. Raising one hand, he looked at his fingers. Chal was astonished to see emotion already in his eyes. It looked like wonder, or awe, and maybe confusion. All of these subtleties were written on his face as clear as day. She wondered if this was how mothers felt when they looked at their newborns. There was a person there.
He clenched his fingers shut, then opened them again, turning his hand this way and then that. His fingers wiggled, and he formed a fist. The water dripped down his wrist and he tracked the movement of the drops with his eyes. Chal realized that he was really like an infant, albeit one with more sensory apparatus than normal. She thought that maybe they should have turned off all the lights.
Then the static noise stopped. The sudden silence shocked Chal, and her elbow knocked the clipboard, making a loud sound. The prototype immediately looked over to her, his nostrils slightly flaring.
“Ahhh,” he said, then closed his mouth, as though surprised to be speaking. His voice was very loud in the silent room. He looked frightened, and Chal cursed Dr. Fielding and every technician on the other side of the glass. Where was the static hum? Without white noise –
The prototype let his hand fall into the water, and the splash surprised him again. His body twisted in the water, and Chal could see that he was scared. Her own heart was racing, and she was trying not to stand up and scream at the technicians in the other room. Where the fuck was the static?
“AHHHHH,” he wailed, louder, and the room despite its padding echoed with the noise. “AHHHHHHHHHHH!”
It was an infant’s cry, and Chal heard the frustration and fear in it. She took a breath.
“SHHHHHHHHH,” she said. The prototype swiveled his head toward her, his mouth still open. He stopped wailing.
“SHHHHHHHHH,” she repeated, trying to shush him, to recreate the white noise. She didn’t know what to do, but the sedative should be kicking in soon. Damn it all, this would have gone perfectly if the noise hadn’t shut off. Now she might overwhelm his system with language. She hoped not. He turned his head away from her and began to move his hand towards the IV.
“Alan,” she said, and now the prototype frowned and opened his mouth to wail again.
Without knowing what she was doing, Chal leaned forward and began to sing in a soft voice.
“En Joan petit quan balla
Balla, balla, balla
En Joan petit quan balla
Balla amb so dit
Amb so dit, dit, dit
Així balla en Joan petit.”
It was a song her mother had sung to her when she was a child, an old Catalan nursery rhyme. The prototype stopped crying immediately to listen to it.
She brought up her index finger and danced it around in front of her as she sang. Alan’s eyes tracked the movement, his lips parting every so often but then closing again. He was paying attention. Out of the corner of her eye, Chal saw the red IV begin to drip. The sedative would kick in soon, and she could stop. She wiggled her hand above the tank and continued singing.
“En Joan petit quan balla
Balla, balla, balla
En Joan petit quan balla
Balla amb sa mà
Amb sa mà, mà, mà
Amb so dit, dit dit,”
The prototype’s eyes were slowly shutting, but he kept his gaze on Chal’s fingers the entire time. Then with one hand, he reached up and touched her hand.
Chal stopped singing, her mouth still open. His fingers were warm against hers, and they clutched at her hand with a soft longing that made her breath stop. The fingers slid down her wrist, then down against the side of the tank, letting go of her. As the sedative took hold, his eyelids came down and his muscles relaxed. His head rocked back into the water.
“Així balla en Joan petit,” Chal whispered, her hand still hovering above the tank. Her arm was marked with wet streaks where he had touched her skin. The prototype’s lips turned up slightly into a peaceful smile. Then he was asleep.
***
Chal waited until the observation room door had hissed shut. Then she turned to Dr. Fielding and the technicians.
“What the fuck was that?” she asked. “Where did the noise go?”
“I’m so sorry,” Evan said, looking aghast at his team of technicians. He was so upset that he could only stammer out apologies. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Fielding.”
“The speaker broke,” the dark-haired technician said. From the look on his face, he had been the one who had been in charge of that particular aspect of the experiment. “I think it was the adaptor connection.”
“I don’t give a shit what it was,” Chal said. “As long as it doesn’t happen again.” She looked away from Evan, not wanting to make him feel worse but unable to conceal her displeasure. That was something she had never been good at – hiding her anger when something went wrong.
“That went well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, coming into the room. Chal rolled her eyes but said nothing.
“As well as it could have,” Dr. Fielding said. He looked relieved, if a little pissed, and Chal realized that he had half-wanted her to fail just as he had done twice before. “Sensors show that his neuronal growth has quieted down into a normal structural growth. We should be able to let him sleep for ten hours or so.”
“Make it eight,” Johnner said. “We don’t want his mind to start branching out too far.”
“Eight, then,” Fielding huffed, unhappy that Johnner had taken over his decisions. Chal was impressed by how quickly Johnner had come to a conclusion. Maybe it was just protocol. But she sensed that he knew more than he let on. He caught her looking at him, and she turned away, cognizant of the ill effects giving men attention could have.
“You did well, Dr. Davidson,” he said.
“It would have been better to avoid language at all to begin,” Chal said. “It’s too much to start with. It might have overstimulated him.”
“Still, you did well,” Johnner said. “Quick thinking.”
Chal nodded, irritated that he didn’t seem more disturbed by the broken speakers. It was a big deal, and he just brushed it off like it was nothing.
“He could have died,” Chal said. “Next time–”
“Next time we’ll be sure to have a backup system, Dr. Davidson.” Now that they had successfully awakened the prototype, Johnner seemed distracted from the experiment. She wondered, not for the first time, what the military might want with emotionally conscious life forms.
“It’s important,” she said lamely.
“Of course,” Johnner said, his attention snapping back to her. “Don’t think I underestimate the difficulty you face with this. I’m on the hook for this project, too, and I don’t want to see millions of dollars of research down the drain.”
He continued talking, but Chal was too angry to listen. She felt just like she had back in the days when she was the only woman in her computer science classes, dismissed out of hand by the men around her. After a quick rundown of the data, convinced that everything would go better on the next run, she left the laboratory to grab a longer nap. She was on the prototype’s clock now, and the experiments would determine her sleep schedule. Every eight hours or so, he would have to be awakened, the stimuli slowly increasing.
“Sleep when you can,” Evan had told her. “This is underground time now, and you’ll never remember to sleep when the lights are always on. Any nap is a good nap.”
Another nap. Another nightmare. That was all she needed.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After an hour of restless tossing on her cot, Chal found that there was another bodily need that she had been sorely neglecting. Her stomach was growling loudly as she stood up from the stiff mattress.
“Shush, you,” she told her stomach. “Come on, let’s go find something to eat.”
Now she was talking to her organs. Chal wondered if she would be okay living down here for another day or two, let alone a week. Hell, she didn’t even know what day it was right now. For a moment, she remembered the outside world, realizing that everyone out there would have continued on like normal without her.
Nothing seemed normal now, not after her experience with the prototype. Everything would change, she realized. Most of the major world religions, or what was left of them, depended on the concept of a soul gifted to humanity alone. What would they say when Alan was unveiled to them: a creation of man, made intelligent and emotional, able to react just as a human would?
Chal felt relieved to be away from the world, although she never would have guessed it. The past few years had been spent pushing, pushing herself, and now that she had been yanked away from all of her commitments she realized how unnecessary most of her work was. Nothing she had done in the past ten years had excited her as much as this one interaction with the android prototype.
These were the thoughts on her mind as Chal made her way down to the kitchen where Johnner had told her she could find her meals. The cook there gave her a soup that tasted like a broth of nutrients, which was probably what it was. For dessert, a protein bar coated in chocolate, the chocolate flaking off like chalk.
With so much funding, this is the food you eat? Chal thought this, but didn’t say it to the cook, who looked unhappy to be there anyway. She finished quickly and began to explore the rest of the structure. The hallways that led to the laboratories continued through the building, and she found herself wandering through a number of preparatory laboratories. Some of them had technicians at work, but others were vast and empty, filled with computers and other analytic equipment. What other projects were happening down here? Chal was curious to know.
At first she greeted the military men standing guard at each door, but after a few brusque replies, she decided to just ignore them. Her ID card seemed to unlock any door, at least on this level, and she enjoyed the sense of freedom she had at being able to roam about the laboratories. She reached a large door at the other end of the hallway from the living quarters, and swiped herself in, nodding at the men with machine guns standing guard.
This lab was the bio-substrate lab, she realized as soon as she stepped in. There were shelves from floor to ceiling everywhere the eye could see, and all of them were filled with glass jars and cages. Mice scurried in wheels in huge tanks on some of the shelves. In others, small brains floated in a clear red liquid that she recognized by smell as being a formaldehyde-based compound.
There were no chimpanzees, but she was drawn back past the mice tanks to a huge aquarium that was set back from the other shelves. Inside was a reef of corals, but no fish. Peering into the aquarium, she tried to see what was hiding in the shadows of the coral. She thought she saw a small movement in the back and squinted, her hands cupping her eyes, but couldn’t see anything.
Letting her hands drop from the tank, she turned around and almost ran into Dr. Fielding.
“Jesus,” she said, starting backwards and bumping into the tank. “You scared me.”
“So sorry,” Dr. Fielding said, but his tone indicated that he was anything but. What would he be doing in this lab anyway, creeping up behind her like that?
“It’s okay,” Chal said, determined not to let him drag her down to his level. She was going to be professional, no matter how much she disliked the man.
“Octopi,” Dr. Fielding said.
“Excuse me?” Chal asked.
“Octopi,” Dr. Fielding repeated, gesturing to the tank.
“Oh,” Chal said. She watched as Fielding climbed the stepladder and retrieved a fish from a smaller tank above the octopus tank. He dumped the fish unceremoniously into the water. As quick as a flash, two octopi emerged from the coral and made for the fish which still seemed dazed from being thrown into the tank. It swam slowly through the tank, oblivious to the danger. The smaller octopus reached the fish first and enveloped it with its tentacle. Before it had time to swallow the prey, the larger octopus reached them both, and extended a tentacle out, prying the fish from the smaller animal. Their tentacles wrapped around each other, and they struggled to wrench the fish away. Dr. Fielding looked at them fighting, his pupils dark pinpoints flashing from side to side. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
“Why are there octopi here?” Chal asked. The octopus nervous system was useful for basic study, but she thought that was all it was useful for. It only had five percent of the nerve cells that the human brain had, tops. At least, that was all she remembered from her biology classes. Lord, she hated biology. The larger octopus had gotten the fish away from the smaller one, and was busy stuffing it into its mouth cavity. The smaller octopus lost interest, or pretended to lose interest, and stretched its way back toward the coral.
“The octopus is the smartest animal, aside from man,” Fielding said. His eyes tracked the octopus as it moved across the floor of the aquarium. “They can think, they can learn. Sometimes they play.” The small octopus sat motionless on the bottom, its tentacles waving in the invisible currents of water.
“They even use tools,” Fielding said, his eyes never once leaving the tank. The large octopus had eaten the fish and was now swimming lazily through the tank. The small octopus shied away from the large one as it swam by.
“They don’t feel very much, though, do they?” Chal asked. “I read once that they’re insensitive to burns or something like that.”
“They don’t feel anything,” Fielding said. “Nothing that we feel, anyway. They fight for dominance, but it’s strictly for survival.” He turned to her, the odd smile creeping once more across his face. “When a male octopus copulates, its heartbeat is as slow and steady as in an animal at rest.”
“So they don’t get excited over sex,” Chal said, raising an eyebrow. “Is that what you’re learning from them?”
“A purely unemotional creature with a high degree of intelligence is a wonderful control group,” Fielding said. He stepped down from the ladder, his fingers trailing across the glass.
“Intelligence without emotion,” Chal murmured. Certa
inly it was possible. Was that all Alan was? An intellect with no feelings? It could be, he could be mimicking rather than truly feeling. But no, he wasn’t. Despite her misgivings, she could tell that just from his face.
“It’s nice to have pets,” Fielding said. “I never had any myself when I was a child.”
“Oh? Where are you from?” Chal asked, relieved to be off the topic of octopi for the time being. She wanted to leave, but Dr. Fielding was staring at her so intently that she thought it would be rude.
“I’m from here,” Fielding said. “Arizona. Too many coyotes to have cats around, and my mother never liked dogs.” He looked into the tank again, and Chal had the odd feeling that he would have loved an octopus for a pet.
“Is your family still in Arizona?” Chal asked.
“No,” Fielding said, and his eyes narrowed. “My father lost his job. Fucking immigrants coming over and taking everything.” He said this with the same low, unemotional voice, but Chal could see the tic at the corner of his mouth. His tongue darted out to lick it.
Chal didn’t know what to say in response that wouldn’t be unduly rude. Many of her family members were immigrants, and one of her mom’s friends still worked for the embassy to help immigrants get through all of the paperwork and red tape and escape poverty after the digital Divide. Her mother, of course, had gone back in West Catalonia, having fought so hard for the creation of the country in the first place. Still, Chal remembered her family leaving, one by one, for the promise and future of digital-saturated countries.
Sometimes they had left illegally, Chal knew, but none of them was anything but grateful for a chance to live in a country that embraced technology. It seemed stupid to her to blame the individual immigrants, anyway. They were just doing what was right for their family’s survival. It was the natural thing to do.
She pressed her lips together and ignored Dr. Fielding. No need to make him hate her even more.