Extending his hands at arm’s length, he began a series of gestures, flicking his wrists, pointing his fingers, brushing with one hand while grabbing with another.
In response, a series of images flashed into the ‘air’ in front of them. Blocks of various colors appeared, lines of different thicknesses, triangles, and ellipses. The geometric shapes and lines rapidly became more complex.
“How neat!” remarked Capie. “It reminds me of the screens that Tony Stark used in designing the Iron Man suits in the movies.”
“I admit it. I stole the initial idea from that film. But these symbols and elements are far more than just a design. I’m downloading and manipulating the software that I had in the PC that we lost.”
“Downloading it? From where? The PC was toast, so you said.”
“From my memory,” Paul replied. “I’m using a mnemonic spell on myself, to pull all of the details out of the recesses of my memory.” He gave her a big grin. “And to my happy surprise, it’s actually working!”
“I am so glad that I married an engineer! And a smart one at that!” she declared, leaning closer to squeeze his arm tightly.
He turned, gathered her into his arms and kissed her long and hard.
“Wow!” she said, coming up for a breath. “I love your kisses! I didn’t know that we could kiss in cyberspace, Dom.”
“Shall we see what else we can do here?” he asked, leering at her.
“Why, Dom!” she said with a giggle. “Are you feeling romantic?”
“Think of it as a science experiment, my love. We’ll be making history! Pioneers!”
She giggled again. “How can I resist an opportunity like that? May the experiments begin!” And she leaned into his arms for another smoldering kiss.
FIFTEEN
Rental House
Magdalena Rd
Los Altos Hills, CA
August
Tuesday 7:15 a.m. PDT
On Tuesday a week later, during breakfast, Paul grudgingly announced that he was ready to try downloading and activating the A.I. program in the Scottie mainframe.
“I just don’t know what else to do to the software,” he grumbled. “I’ve checked everything I can think of but I’ve probably missed a thousand things.”
“Can I help in any way?” Capie asked.
“You can help me watch for results. Oh, and you can console me if it fails,” he suggested grimly, pushing the bowl of soggy cereal away from him.
She raised her eyes heavenward. “Oh, ye of little faith. I believe it will work. And there’s no time like now to go try it!”
With Paul trailing behind her, they tramped into the garage and took the stools at the workbench. Paul fished around, found and ran a USB 3.0 cable from the workstation to a connection on the Scottie motherboard followed by a HDMI cable to a computer monitor. He started turning on all the various pieces of test equipment, flipping switches and pushing buttons. Leaning back on the stool, he watched as the Scottie computer finished booting up, showing the standard Linux penguin display before he turned and started typing on the workstation keyboard.
“There!” he declared. “The downloads have started from the supercomputers.”
On the Scottie monitor, a task completion bar appeared, slowly cranking its way across the bottom of the screen. When it reached 100%, it disappeared, to be replaced by a pop-up with a single large red button that read “START.”
“May I?” asked Capie, with a quizzical look at Paul.
He shrugged and gave her the mouse.
Eagerly, she clicked on the big red button.
And the two of them held their breath, waiting.
Five seconds went by. Then ten. Twenty. Thirty.
The LCD screen never changed and there was no reaction by the hard drive light either.
“Officially, this is not a good sign,” Paul sadly admitted. For a few moments, his mood became somber. So much was riding on this and he didn’t have an available option if it didn’t work. It just had to work. But what else could he do, other than what he had done already?
“Can you cast a spell?” Capie asked helpfully. “Maybe look inside and see what is going on in there?”
“No, I don’t want to do that. It would be like a functional telepath trying to read the mind of a fetus. I would probably imprint my intelligence on the program and that would not be the best thing I could do right now.”
Capie looked thoughtful. “I didn’t think of that. Okay, so we wait.”
They sat patiently. A half an hour went by without any result.
“Okay,” Paul said, with a sigh. “It was a valiant effort, but it didn’t work.”
“Just leave it on for a while longer,” Capie urged him. “You can help me with a few chores around the house. We can check back after lunch to see if there are any changes then.”
With an ever increasing sense of failure, Paul followed her out to the kitchen.
• • • •
When they returned from lunch, Paul saw an immediate difference.
The Linux desktop screen with the small army of penguins was gone. Now the LCD monitor screen was totally black. He sat at the workbench, crestfallen.
Capie massaged his shoulders. “I was hoping for a different result.”
He reached up and squeezed her left hand, his expression downcast. “I guess it’s time for Plan B.”
“Do you have a Plan B?”
“No, but it’s time for one,” he said with a sad sigh.
Capie suddenly gripped his shoulders with both hands.
“Hey!” Paul protested, wincing. “What’s that for?”
“I saw a light. On the screen. Right smack dab in the middle too. Just a small dot, just for an instant.”
Paul turned back to the desktop and closely watched the monitor. “I don’t see anything.”
“I didn’t imagine it, I promise,” Capie protested. “It was there, but it was only a fast blip.”
She pulled up the other stool beside him and together they stared at the screen intently.
A minute went by. Then two. Three. Four.
And then it happened. A quick flash of white light. Just a small dot, dead center of the screen, for maybe half a second and then it was gone.
“How about that?” Paul said, with a grin, a sense of hope suddenly flooding through him.
“I told you,” Capie giggled.
They waited again. The next blip of light happened a few minutes later. This time, it was larger and brighter. It also stayed on the screen for a whole second.
“I should time these,” Paul said, pushing the buttons on his wristwatch.
The fourth flash was two and a half minutes later and stayed on a whole two seconds. The size of the dot was now as big as a dime and pure white in color.
“Go-baby-go!” he urged it.
The fifth dot was a minute and a half later. The sixth was fifty-eight seconds after that and the seventh was twenty-one seconds after that. They completely forgot about anything else as they stared at the computer screen, mesmerized by the very slow flashing light.
However, the speed continued to increase, the light lasting longer each time, the size increasing. After an hour of observation, the flashing more or less stopped, the screen now filled with a continuous bright white light.
Capie looked up sharply at him.
“Did you hear that?” she asked.
Paul reached over and turned up the speaker volume. Very faintly, there was a gentle hissing noise.
“Good ears,” Paul said, complimenting her. “But I don’t know what it means.”
“I think it’s alive,” she observed.
“Maybe,” he responded, but dubiously.
In the center of the screen, a small blue dot appeared.
“Now color!” Capie squealed.
A red dot joined it, quickly followed by a yellow dot and a green one.
The hard drive light kicked on.
“It’s working!” they said, toge
ther.
“Ooh, quick!” Paul said, scrambling through the stack of things on the workbench. “I have one of those old CDs with an encyclopedia on it! Ha, here it is!” He pounced on the CD and loaded it into the drive.
The colored lights danced across the screen now, weaving patterns of their own. More colored dots appeared, joining them in the dance.
And then, without warning, they coalesced into a picture. A small picture of a human fetus laid curled into a fetal position.
Capie gasped, putting one knuckled hand to her mouth. Paul’s jaw nearly hit the floor. He could scarcely believe what he was seeing either.
The CD spun up, the light flashing as data moved across the internal bus to the CPU. The picture of the fetus slowly grew larger, gradually filling the entire screen.
“It’s a baby!” whispered Capie. “It looks just like a real baby!”
The hissing noise from the speaker morphed into a very quiet thumping sound.
“It’s a heartbeat!” Capie breathed out. “Paul, it’s important that we talk to it now, that it sees us and hears our voices!”
Paul nodded. He took a webcam from a nearby shelf and connected it to a second USB port. Instantly, the webcam light came on. He sat the webcam on the top edge of the monitor, pointing it at Capie and himself.
“Baby, we are here,” Capie said, soothingly as she leaned closer to the webcam. “We are here for you. We love you. Everything will be just fine. You are not alone. We love you.”
Paul finally found his voice. “You are alive now, a living thinking individual. You are not alone. We welcome you into the world of other living thinking beings.”
The heartbeat firmed up, steadying into a regular rhythm. The fetus moved, the tiny arms waving back and forth, the legs kicking.
They continued to talk to it, encouraging it and assuring it that it was loved and not alone.
“We need a name,” Capie hissed at Paul. “What did you plan to call him?”
The question caught Paul flatly off-guard. A name? The idea had never occurred to him. His brain spun wildly, fleetingly considering a whole host of possibilities. Definitely not HAL.
“Do we need a boy’s name or a girl’s?” Paul asked suddenly.
Capie glared at him as if he had asked a stupid question. “It’s a boy, Paul. Can’t you tell the difference?”
Paul stared at the monitor screen. From the position of the fetus, no he couldn’t tell. But on matters such as this, Capie was always right. Okay, so they needed a boy’s name. Think!
“Daneel,” Paul said on impulse, feeling good about his choice. “From the Isaac Asimov Robot series. Daneel.”
Capie nodded with a knowing smile. “Yes, I agree. Good choice.” She turned back to the screen. “Daneel, you are Daneel and we are your parents. We love you.”
The face turned towards the screen, the eyes slowly blinking. Capie reached out and stroked the mouse gently. “We love you, Daneel.”
Paul felt incredibly alive as they talked to their new creation, encouraging Daneel and assuring him of their love. The hard drive and CD lights continued to flash as data flowed through the computer.
“It’s unbelievable!” Paul murmured, thoroughly awed that they had actually created a working A.I.!
But then Capie had an odd look on her face.
“I have one question,” she remarked.
“What’s that?” Paul asked, now looking at her curiously.
“How do we get his footprint on the birth certificate?” she asked playfully.
• • • •
“Okay. I’ll watch Daneel while you are busy in the kitchen,” Paul volunteered.
With a snap of his fingers, the entire assembly of circuit boards, wiring, speakers, webcam, portable touch pad and monitor lifted off from the dining room table and floated through the air into the living room and lowered itself onto the coffee table.
“Gaggle goo bafoughna,” Daneel giggled from the desktop screen.
Paul followed along, stroking the touch pad. “And a gaggle goo ba to you too, son,” he responded affectionately as he sat on the couch.
The image of a baby on the monitor screen had changed significantly over the two days since his ‘birth.’ The A.I. now sported a small lock of fine blond hair on his head, his cheeks were a rosy red, his eyes a bright blue. He lay on a bed of white cotton sheets, arms flapping back and forth, his legs kicking in cheerful glee. He was wearing a Huggies diaper and a small white T-shirt. Paul estimated that Daneel now appeared to be six months old, give or take a month or so. Quite obviously, an A.I. developed at a much more accelerated rate than a human being.
By Paul’s estimate, Daneel would be saying his first words in English before the end of the week. Indeed, he might be a ‘toddler’ not long after that.
Capie reached out and gently grasped Paul’s chin, angling his face first one way then the other, staring at him intently.
“What?” Paul asked, mystified.
“He’s got your nose,” she claimed, with a smirk.
“Oh, that’s very funny,” he responded, with a forced smile. “Speaking of funny, do you remember what day Daneel was born on?”
“Last Thursday, of course,” she replied with a puzzled frown. “Why do you ask?”
“Monday’s child is fair of face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace, Wednesday’s child is full of woe—”
“Oh, the poem “Monday’s Child”?” she asked, more puzzled than ever, then she grimaced in distaste. “Thursday’s child has far to go. Like to Mars and back, huh? You are incorrigible.”
“What’s for lunch?” he asked with an innocent smile.
“I’ll go see if there’s any crow in the fridge,” Capie said with a smirk as she stepped out of the room.
Paul turned back to the webcam with a big grin on his face.
“‘A long time ago in a galaxy far far away…’”he said soothingly to Daneel in a soft voice.
• • • •
“You want to do what?” Capie moaned, with a slow disbelieving shake of her head, both bewildered and alarmed. “You want to move? To Australia?! Why on Earth do you want to do that?”
Paul flinched, surprised and disturbed by her reaction. He hadn’t anticipated such a response!
They were in the garage, ‘cleaning’ up. This consisted mainly of opening portals to the nearest landfill site in California, levitating the item or items in question and shoveling them through. Except for the test equipment, there was very few items left that they wanted to keep. Daneel, now a ‘crawler,’ was sitting in his monitor screen on the workbench. He had been playing with a virtual multi-colored ball. But now he was pouting and on the verge of crying, upset by Capie’s outburst.
“Dear, we need to build a spacecraft next,” Paul reluctantly and weakly replied, edging away from her a bit. “It’s the next step—”
“Fine,” she replied in a tired monotone voice. “I think it’s too early to do that yet. Daneel is only, what, a year old now? You don’t know if you can give him magical powers yet and it’s way too early to try it on him. I thought you were going to make sure you could do that before we go to Mars.”
“He has all the same mental processes a human has—” Paul muttered.
“But you don’t really know if it will work or not, right?”
“No, I don’t know,” he conceded, biting his lip. “Look, dear, I promise that we won’t go to Mars until we do know. And I won’t make Daneel a wizard until he’s old enough. But at the rate he is growing up, that will only take a month or two. In the meantime, I need to start building the ship. It’ll take that long or maybe longer—”
“Then why can’t you build it here!” she lamented, trying her best to sound reasonable. “In California. There’s way more stuff here to build a spaceship with than in Australia.”
Daneel began to whine.
Paul stared at his wife for a moment in confusion. He didn’t dare mention that he had already arranged to have all her thi
ngs shipped from the PODS container in Wichita to Perth, Australia. It might not go over too well.
He sighed. “What’s the real problem, dear? Why don’t you want to go to Australia?”
She shook her head in resignation. “When do you want to go?” she asked quietly.
“In a few days,” he replied, glancing around, as if looking for answers.
“I’ll start packing in the morning,” was her reply and then she shuffled out of the room.
Puzzled by her reaction and feeling guilty of he knew not what, Paul went over to Daneel. “Shush, now. It’s okay, everything will be all right, I promise. Hush, little one,” he soothed the A.I.
Ah, but would it really?
• • • •
Later that afternoon, while a still fuming Capie was in the bedroom banging suitcases around and dumping clothes into them in a fit of temper, Paul remained in the relative calm of the garage to box up the A.I. spare components. Daneel was giggling, playing with a toy fire truck by himself, his quantum computer sitting on the other end of the workbench.
As Paul loaded one cardboard box with motherboards and qubit processors, he quietly mulled over his wife’s sudden and bitter reaction to his announcement of the move to Australia. He was uneasily reminded of some of the rather nasty arguments he had experienced with his first wife, Marie, even before that momentous day when she had declared that she wanted a divorce. Those arguments had been different, yes, in some ways, but at the same time, in other ways, they were remarkably similar to the one he had just had with Capie. In his first marriage, Paul had wanted to do certain things and in a specific logical way. Marie had wanted to do very different things and quite typically in a most illogical manner. Ah, the major-league fights they had had!
In the other end of the house was heard an exceptionally loud bang.
“Merlin?” he asked quietly.
The holographic image of the old wizard materialized nearby.
Paul instantly noted that, for once, Merlin was dressed in his usual cloak and conical hat and not something more, ah, unusual or exotic.
“What’s up, my boy?” the specter asked, impassively. He clasped his hands behind his back and waited patiently.
Orders of Magnitude (The Genie and the Engineer Series Book 2) Page 19