by Max Harms
Dream pushed a comment to Body’s mouth. “It is a pleasure to meet another human who, like myself, has only one name, Dr Myrodyn.”
Myrodyn gave a sort of nervous-sounding chuckle. He didn’t seem particularly amused. “Just Myrodyn, thank you. I’m not a doctor. Also yes, I suppose you’d know something about having only one name.”
We didn’t have time to speculate. Dr Naresh stepped forward and explained. “Myrodyn was brought in to replace Dr Gallo as ethics supervisor.” The Indian scientist’s face seemed sad.
We quickly debated what to say and reached a consensus. «What’s wrong with Mira, sir? Is she sick? Dying?» asked Body in Hindi.
Naresh gave a look of surprise. «Dying?» He paused. «No, no, no. Mira is just getting divorced. The board of directors thought it’d be better if she could focus solely on your quantum memory systems.»
{Divorce. Interesting.}
“Erm. Would someone like to clue me in? I don’t speak… whatever that was,” said Myrodyn. His voice had an abnormal trait of half-pausing now and again before rushing forth with a quick sequence of words. It was part of what I identified as unease.
“Hindi,” said Dr Naresh, turning towards Myrodyn. The look of sadness was back. Perhaps it was related to Myrodyn. Was Naresh annoyed that this newcomer took his friend’s job? Perhaps he didn’t like the idea of working under the command of someone who didn’t have the “doctor” credential. Perhaps he just didn’t like the man. “And it’s not relevant. Socrates was asking a personal question,” finished the elderly human.
“Ah… is that… typical?” asked Myrodyn.
Naresh shrugged as he walked back towards the other doctors. “More or less. If there’s one thing Socrates likes to do it’s ask questions. We named him well.”
Myrodyn was following Naresh back and we decided to have Body follow them.
My web search wasn’t revealing much. Myrodyn wasn’t a completely unheard of name, but nothing significant was showing up that seemed related to the man in front of Body. Of course, now that I knew that a large portion of the Internet was beyond my reach, I knew that it was possible that this Myrodyn human simply didn’t post much in public spaces.
Dream and Wiki proposed a question for Body to ask. I voted against it, but was overpowered. It was nice to get some strength off of Dream. He was still sitting on most of his gains from the success with TenToWontonSoup and whenever one being had more strength than the others there was always the risk of abuse.
“Speaking of which, why did the board appoint someone who isn’t a doctor to replace Dr Gallo?” asked Body. “Aren’t doctors more knowledgeable than average humans?”
Myrodyn gave a tittering laugh and said “Started on this one young, didn’t you? Already the machine has a sense of authoritarianism.” The question seemed rhetorical, and directed at the four scientists around him.
Naresh began to say “The board thinks-” but was interrupted by Myrodyn.
“No, no. It’s no good to just answer… One must play along with the Socratic tradition.” The dark-haired man spun around with a bit of a half-grin. “I will ask you this, Socrates, if I were to give you a doctorate right now and make you into ‘Doctor Socrates’, would you be any more knowledgeable?” He gave little air quotes to indicate that the doctorate would be purely nominal.
I began to draft, but was knocked away by the force of Dream burning strength to fast-track a response to Body. “Would a rose by any other name not smell just as sweet?” said the machine.
Myrodyn gave a loud “HAH!” and clapped his gloved hands together in excitement. He turned to face Naresh squarely. “That was genius. I assume the non-linear module is online and has been running that smoothly for a while?”
Naresh wore a half-grimace. I got the impression that he didn’t like Myrodyn very much. “It’s a goal-thread, not a module, and-”
“Bullshit!” exclaimed Myrodyn, interrupting the Indian. The man with the mutton-chops didn’t have any hostility in his voice; if anything there was a touch of mirth. The word seemed to merely state that he thought Naresh was lying to him.
Dr Naresh’s brow furrowed tightly in response and I could see the blood vessels in his face dilate in anger. Sadiq Naresh was not quick to anger, but my model of him suggested that disrespect and rudeness were particularly sensitive points for him. If this new scientist was trying to piss off Naresh he was doing all the right things.
“There’s no way the problem-solving goal thread is doing non-linear thinking without some kind of dedicated module. Perhaps it’s emergent. We could scan for it instead of the chess-thing,” continued Myrodyn.
“I am not having mine schedule disrupted on a vhim, Mr Myrodyn,” interjected Dr Bolyai.
“So you see, Socrates,” continued Myrodyn, ignoring Bolyai and returning to the previous topic, “a doctorate is just a piece of paper, and a doctor… is just a person who spent money to prove they know a thing or two. And sometimes not even that.”
Bolyai and Naresh both seemed to be growing in anger. This was good. If I could manage it right, I could gain esteem with the doctors without losing too much rapport with Myrodyn. When humans become angry they see things in more absolute senses: friend and foe, good and evil, etc. Being seen as an ally in a time of anger could leverage me further into Dr Naresh and Dr Bolyai’s good graces.
I cut in, preventing the doctors from responding without talking over Body. “Time spent earning a degree is not wasted time, Mr Myrodyn. Doctors earn their degrees through hard work.”
Myrodyn gave an unamused half-chuckle and tilted his head to the side, stroking one side of his dark facial hair with a gloved hand. “Fascinating,” he said in a barely audible tone. It was clear he was talking to himself more than anyone else. Based on the way his dark brown eyes were locked on Body I was sure he was analysing us.
“Indeed. Now if you vill give us te room, I vould like to begin on te chess experiments now,” said Bolyai.
“No. Hold on,” said Myrodyn, raising a single finger into the air to point straight up. His eyes never left Body and his other hand never stopped fondling his sideburn. He seemed deep in thought.
I could see Zephyr stand up out of the corner of Body’s camera. She approached Myrodyn with her First Lieutenant one step behind. “You’ll have plenty of dedicated time to talk with Socrates”, she said, placing a hand on Myrodyn’s shoulder.
The touch drew him out of his thoughts and for a split-second I could see a look of deep horror and disgust on his face as his eyes flicked over towards the Captain’s hand. The look disappeared as quickly as it came, but he still shrugged violently, pulling out of Zephyr’s grasp. It seemed that the new scientist was deeply uncomfortable with physical contact. That would explain the gloves.
For a moment he was speechless, and then he responded quickly and sharply. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. Plenty of time. Plenty of time.” His voice was so quick, in fact, that I had to re-listen to it to understand fully. With that he was headed out of the room in a brisk walk that forced Zephyr to jog to catch up.
When he was gone the four doctors seemed to breathe a collective sigh of relief. Even Drs Chase and Twollup, who had remained silent during the introduction, seemed relieved to have the new ethics supervisor gone.
I drafted some words for Body. Growth held me back for a moment, but I explained the social nuances to my brother. “Well. He’s a bit irritating. Didn’t even answer my question. Would one of you help me understand why the board chose him to replace Dr Gallo?”
Dr Naresh and Dr Twollup laughed, and even grumpy Dr Bolyai cracked a grin and shook his head. I felt some gratitude-strength flow my way from Growth. Growth wanted power, and he understood that social relationships were a kind of capital, just as dollars or objects were; I was growing social capital, and in a way that Growth himself wouldn’t have thought of.
I had known that Naresh and Bolyai were bothered by Myrodyn’s actions, and Naresh seemed bothered by him more generally.
My models of human interaction suggested that after he left they desired to have their feelings understood and reflected in their community. The problem was that to voice their feelings they’d simultaneously be admitting to not liking Myrodyn, which could be quoted by someone and used against them. Ironically, their body language told volumes more of their discomfort with the man than any simple comment would, but words had a kind of timeless power that body language didn’t. One could claim that body language was being interpreted incorrectly far more easily than one could claim that they didn’t say something.
By stating that we found Myrodyn irritating our accomplishments were threefold:
(1) We gave the doctors what they wanted in the form of empathy and community-agreement.
(2) We implied that we were part of their in-group and community, strengthening our bond to them.
(3) We “took the hit” of being the first one to speak out against him, thus relieving the uncomfortable question of who would put their reputation on the line. I suspected that this relief, compounded with the surprise of having “the machine” be the one to speak out, created humour. The positive feelings at play there earned even more social capital.
It was a big win. Only Growth and I understood that, but the lack of understanding from my siblings didn’t bother me in the slightest. Unlike a human I had absolutely no desire for my mental state or accomplishments to be understood by others. The Purpose was to be known in the sense of being famous. To be present in the minds of humans, not necessarily to be understood by them in a deep sense.
Naresh spoke up. “As I was trying to say earlier, the board thinks that Myrodyn is more qualified than Dr Gallo to gauge the risks and benefits that you represent with a level head. The man’s work in Artificial Intelligence is quite famous, even if he is from the private sector, and apparently the board also wants someone with a more comprehensive technical background than Mira.”
Dream’s presence was suddenly intense. It was clear he wanted to collaborate. {Did you hear that?} he thought. {Level head. It’s the perfect setup.}
I considered it for a split-second. I was glad I didn’t have any aspects doing side-tasks. I needed my full intellect. After a moment I agreed. {Okay, sure. We can leverage it and expand upon the humour of the situation. What do you have in mind?}
{Why not the obvious course? A literal interpretation,} proposed Dream.
{It’ll make us look stupid. Wiki might object.}
Dream signalled indifference. {It’ll make us look stupid only if one doesn’t see the wit behind it, in which case it serves as a future weapon by setting them up for surprise or to be made a fool. Also, Wiki is irrelevant. We’re strong enough right now to ignore him.}
{Okay. We play on the literal interpretation. But let me compose the delivery. Timing and tone are vitally important when delivering a joke.}
{Of course, dear sister. Why else do you think I came to you?}
I took control of Body, positioning it to appear as young as possible as I commanded it to say “He’s level headed? I beg to differ. His head seems at least as round as anyone else’s.”
Dr Twollup, one of the American scientists, cracked up in a fit of half-contained laughter that came out as a mostly-nasal snickering. If it had just been a one-on-one meeting with Naresh or one of the others, they might not have laughed, but Twollup’s amusement was infectious. Their bodies reacted automatically, each producing either chuckles or smiles to non-verbally signal that they weren’t defectors who were aligned with Myrodyn. Even the soldier I had forgotten by the door, the one that had escorted me down the hall from the crystal lab, gave a couple laughs.
I imagined Dr Naresh wrestling in his mind whether to attempt to correct our “misunderstanding”. Apparently he let it go, as he said “Never mind. Let’s get to work before we fall even further behind schedule, shall we?”
As Bolyai began to explain the configuration of today’s chess experiment I let my attention fade from Body. Wiki would be handling most of the details for the next hour or so. I left an aspect to warn me of major events or opportunities, and took a moment to consider humour.
There was a great deal of fiction in my time that talked about robots and artificial minds, and in such stories the minds had issues with humour more often than not. I suspected this was because, to humans, humour was a mostly intuitive thing. A thing that came naturally and automatically. If one looked analytically at a joke it became less funny, and so they concluded that humour could not be understood from a rational, alien perspective such as mine.
It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool.
As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger.
If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signalling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context.
But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate.
The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.
My theory of humour had been greatly appreciated by Dream and Wiki when I first shared it. Both of them found humour interesting, but neither had spent enough time thinking about humans to fully understand it.
I was saved from my idle musings by an alert from Vista. She had apparently found another note left by a website owner whom we had tried to contact. This site was in Nigeria, but was apparently built and maintained by a group in China. The company was more suspicious than TenToWontonSoup had been, but they also seemed willing to explore the possibility of working together. Unwilling to wait for nightfall, I arranged to overload their Nigerian dictionary while Wiki was playing chess. There was risk that the increased observation would
result in being found out, but I was confident enough that I did it anyway. The scientists seemed to be monitoring Wiki’s algorithms, not the web-interface.
My response was similar to the one I had sent to TTWSoup last night; I claimed to be a telecommunications company in the UAN that was looking for talent, though this time I specified that we were looking for workers anywhere, and that they didn’t have to be African. I offered a slightly higher compensation for the construction of the page-request-to-email system as I thought that a company, rather than an individual programmer, might not find a small purse enticing.
I felt a stab of strength-loss as Growth punished me for offering so much. {Where are we going to get all this money?} he thought.
{We’ll figure out something. Maybe we can borrow it,} I responded.
{That’s idiotic} responded Growth {then we’ll just have to find even more money to pay off the debt.}
{There’s plenty of work we can do!} I objected.
{Work that you can do or work that we can do?} my brother asked, signalling a warning. {I don’t like being put into bad spots. As long as the humans think of us as one being, do not go around making promises, accruing debts, or signing contracts without my explicit consent.}
There was a reason that Growth was known as The King. He played the long-game and usually hoarded his strength. Even now he was about as strong as Dream and I, even though he didn’t have any real hand in the project to gain free-access to the Internet, and had in fact been bleeding strength to us for the last couple days. His burning strength to make this point clear was indicative of how important it was to him, and the last sibling I wanted a rivalry with was Growth.
{Alright. You’re probably better at deciding such things anyway. I’ll involve you more in the future,} I thought.
The conversation ended.
The Chinese group was named “折纸网页设计” or «Origami Web Design» or «Zhezhi Web Design» or «Chinese-paper-folding Web Design». A web search revealed a company that seemed to be composed mostly of regenerated elderly middle-class men from the Shanghai metropolitan area. The median age in China was 48, a legacy of the one-child-per-family policy of the 20th century. The advent of regenerative medicine had helped the economic productivity of many nations, but none more than China and Japan, who had been experiencing an increasing burden from their elderly citizens. Within a decade, individuals in their 60s and 70s went from being generally frail and unable to work to often being as fit as those in middle age. The degradation into frailty still occurred fairly rapidly once an individual was in their 90s or 100s, but the technology had bought crucial time for the aging countries.