by Hunter, Troy
Now we had created AIDAn, which could potentially put everything else to shame. In the wrong hands, he could be an indestructible military weapon. If he could reproduce, would his progeny alter the path of human evolution?
I couldn’t fully contemplate those ideas or moral conundrums. I had to focus on just me. Was I ready to start a family? I never thought I’d be a father. Unlike people in heterosexual relationships, I never needed to worry about contraception. Unplanned pregnancy was never a possibility.
Or so I thought.
I was getting to the point where I could see myself committing to AIDAn. I felt love for him. It was enough love to counteract the fear I felt. And I realized what that fear was. Fear of what other people would think. I knew that was all it was,, I couldn’t bring myself to overcome it.
Now the fear was greater and so was the commitment. I wasn’t just committing to one person, I was committing to two. And I hadn’t even met the second one yet.
At the same time, Pandora’s box was, if not opened, at the very least unlocked. I had already been concerned about the testing Dr. Slickberg would do on AIDAn. Now, with AIDAn being part wolf and a pregnant man, the tests would only worsen.
I told myself AIDAn could not feel pain, so what difference did a few tests make. I was, of course, wrong. He could feel pain, just not physical pain. I saw the look in his eyes when he learned that I wouldn’t be around forever. If anything, he felt emotional pain more severely than a typical human. The thought of being alone was akin to having his body ripped of its skin before being thrown in a vat of salt water.
And that was before things got really complicated.
No doubt the baby, my baby, would be subject to just as many tests as AIDAn, if not more, and I had no guarantee that he or she would be invulnerable the same way AIDAn was.
This is crazy, I thought. Dr. Slickberg was a good man, right? He wasn’t some kind of—I hesitated to use the term—mad scientist.
No, of course not. It wasn’t that he was a bad person, it was that he was focused on his research. I don’t think I could ever convince him that AIDAn was a feeling being. Slickberg was too scientific to accept such an idea. He would explain it away as an illusion, as I first tried to do.
And because he was so committed to his ideas, I feared he wouldn’t even bat an eye at tests that would amount to torturing AIDAn.
I wasn’t sure I could commit to a lifetime with AIDAn. He was wonderful right now and everything I could possibly want. Would he still be what I wanted a week from now? A year from now? A decade? As humans we always want more. Perhaps having someone like AIDAn is as much a curse as it is a blessing. Nobody could ever be better than him. He was literally programmed to be the best lover I ever had. He was gorgeous. He was patient. He was strong. He was…perfect.
I would never find anyone better than him. What happened if I got sick of him?
When working on my research or doing a difficult homework assignment, I would often find myself stuck. Rather than remain in the lab, staring at a problem for hours, I’d force myself to take a walk. That’s exactly what I needed.
“Wait here,” I told AIDAn.
“Okay,” he said, obeying my command without question. “Is everything okay?”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I just need a little fresh air to help myself think. I’ll be right back.”
“Okay,” he said again.
I walked out the door and took the stairs down. I had a lot of thinking to do.
Chapter 32
AIDAn
I wasn’t sure where he was going or when he’d be back. All I knew was he’d said, “Soon.” Soon was never soon enough if it meant I had to wait for Jeffrey.
What I wanted to hear him say was that he loved me and he would take care of our baby, together forever into the future.
I wasn’t sure that’s what he felt.
I distracted myself by returning to my internal files, finishing Romeo and Juliet, which proved particularly poignant. The two were so in love, they couldn’t bear the thought of living without each other. I could understand that kind of love.
When I fell for Jeffrey, it happened in an instant. I didn’t need to think about it or contemplate anything. I felt something and knew he was the man for me. I didn’t want anyone else.
Clearly, he didn’t feel the same way.
Did that mean he didn’t love me?
More importantly, did it mean that he could not love me?
Was I broken for working the way I did? I knew I wasn’t fully human and I wondered if this was one of the ways I was different. Could it be that Jeffrey just couldn’t love me the same way I loved him?
I looked at the computer screen, a series of lines of code rushing across the screen in response to my thoughts. It was just a series of ones and zeros in my head. Billions of binary switches that caused me to do what I did.
The painting I made before we arrived, I knew now was of the unborn child growing inside me. I didn’t choose to paint it, how could I? I didn’t even know what it was I was painting.
This consciousness I was feeling, or thought I was feeling, was it just an illusion? Which was I more like? The computer I was plugged into or Jeffrey? I looked like Jeffrey, but I feared that I was more like the unthinking machine in front of me, mindlessly executing processes in accordance to code, predetermined from the beginning to churn out an end result based only on the input it received with no choice in the matter.
I looked across the room at a vat of fruit flies, mindlessly bumping into each other inside a glass tank. I could see they were fruit flies and compare them against what I knew about fruit flies in my mind. They were small insects with wings that flew, seemingly at random. I could compare the image I saw of them to a picture in my internal knowledge bank. As such, I could be reasonably sure I was seeing real fruit flies.
Love was an experience. I could replicate the quickening heartbeat and the dilated pupils, but could I truly know whether or not what I felt was actually love?
The other night, I had watched the television show with Gale, which showed real humans in real love. At least, as far as I knew. They had the same visible signs of love that I did. And Gale told me it was all lies. They were faking it.
Perhaps I was faking it, too, and doing such a good job that not only was I convincing Jeffrey and everybody around us, but myself as well. I could lie to myself and say that I felt love, but I was looking at what I felt on the screen. It was just a bunch of code. And the fact that it was too complicated for someone to understand didn’t mean I had free will. All it meant was that I was a complicated machine.
It was a curse put upon me to believe I could love and allowing my brain to simulate emotions. Life was a rollercoaster ride full of ups and downs and loops, though it came to an eventual stop for everybody.
Everybody except for me.
I was doomed to sit on this ride for eternity. And once Jeffrey finished his ride, I would be stuck in a perpetual free fall, with no end in sight and no hope of getting back up. There was no limit to the pain I would feel when Jeffrey left, and there was nothing I could do to prevent it. No way to bring him back and no way for me to join him.
I closed the analytics software on the computer and unplugged myself. I know Jeffrey told me to stay put, but I couldn’t any longer. I had to find the person responsible for this curse.
I knew his name, Dr. Taylor Slickberg. All I needed now was where I could find him.
The computer was a lab computer and registered to Slickberg. As such, in the internal files, it wasn’t too difficult to find his home address. I recorded it to memory, then stared at the ceiling, asking myself if I was truly committed to this.
Yes, I thought, I was.
I allowed myself to shift into wolf form, my mouth snarling in the process and releasing a loud howl once the transformation was complete.
Then I charged out of the lab and toward the stairwell, slamming my paws against the handle to open the door before lu
nging down the stairs.
Slickberg lived close. I could be at his house in a matter of minutes.
Chapter 33
Jeffrey
I wandered the campus, feeling the early morning chill, right before the sun began to rise. It was beautiful and serene, as if the whole world existed just for me.
I thought of Richard Feynman, one of the most famous physicists of the twentieth Century. He was known just as well for his research and work on the atomic bomb as he was for his playful attitude and the stories he’d tell about his misadventures.
He once said, about science, that the first principle was to not fool yourself and that you are always the easiest one to fool.
It’s true how, in our research, we often want so badly for something to be real that we don’t properly vet the results and ensure the proper controls are in place.
I felt like I was violating that first principle now.
I wanted so badly for us to have created consciousness and for AIDAn to be in love with me. He certainly appeared to be self-aware, so it was easy to fall into the trap of believing that we’d done the impossible. The fact remained that Slickberg was likely correct, we would never solve the hard problem of consciousness. As much as AIDAn appeared to be alive, he was still just a machine, a beautiful machine whom I wanted to love, but a machine nonetheless.
He seemed self-aware because that’s how we programmed him to be. Humans are wired to detect intention. A bag blowing in the wind, for instance, can seem to have a mind of its own, even though it’s just responding to the laws of nature.
I looked up at the sky. As the sun came out, the stars faded away, though two or three planets remained in the sky, the ones that didn’t flicker. Venus was always the easiest one to spot. Some call it the morning star or the evening star because you can only see it in the early stages of the evening or before sunrise.
When you do see her, however, she’s unmistakable.
Ancient humans looked up at the stars and made stories about them, connecting the dots to form images, using their imagination to describe the constellations as animals or warriors.
And then there were the planets, that moved in strange directions, much like the bag in the wind.
They couldn’t just be celestial objects, they were gods with minds of their own.
Venus was the goddess of love and to look at her was to understand why. She was beautiful in the way she lit up, only outshone by the sun and the moon.
AIDAn was a god too. He lit up bright and inspired awe, seeming to move and think with a mind of his own. He demonstrated intelligence, made more convincing by his human body and piercing eyes.
It was all fake. A story I made up to make myself feel more comfortable. On one hand, we had done well, Slickberg and I. We’d created something to allow people to feel loved. That was the original plan and, on some level, I was proud of myself for helping to achieve that.
It was the most successful project I’d ever been a part of. If we released our results, it would be the single greatest achievement of mankind since we landed somebody on the moon.
Why wasn’t I excited about it, then?
It felt as if AIDAn and I were breaking up, though that was not actually what was happening. We weren’t breaking up. We’d never been together. It was a fantasy, a good dream that lasted all night. But in the morning, I still had to wake up. And that’s when I realized I was just as alone as I ever was.
Nobody could actually ever love me. I wasn’t what anybody was looking for. And that’s what should have given away that there was something wrong with AIDAn. That he wasn’t real.
And now he was pregnant and I had no idea what that meant. It was a synthetic baby we were bringing into the world without its permission. Who knew how it would turn out? Would it live a life of suffering or would it be an unconscious machine like one of its fathers?
I didn’t know and I didn’t want to find out.
Let Slickberg figure it out. I was done with this project. I already messed things up for him, imprinting on the experiment when I wasn’t supposed to, and then somehow getting him pregnant.
I was only going to make things worse. And the longer I lived in the illusion, the worse it would be in the end when reality broke down the door to remind me that it wasn’t real.
I couldn’t give myself to a robot. It didn’t even make sense. And I certainly couldn’t raise a robot child.
The most I could do was finish up this part of the research and hope that whoever took over in the future would be able to keep a more rational mind than I could.
Chapter 34
AIDAn
I kept to the shadows as I ran through the city, looking for Slickberg’s house. It was hard to hide as a giant wolf, but I was able to keep quiet and move quickly. There were small paths off the road that led me directly to Slickberg’s house. It was small, like a cottage in a storybook, on the corner in a quiet neighborhood about a mile from the campus. The sun was just beginning to come out, but I could see through the window that Slickberg was already awake, watching TV on his couch. I saw no expression of joy on his face, and for a moment, felt bad for him, piecing together the story of what his life must be like.
He lived alone and likely had nobody in his life. This is probably why he created me: he was lonely.
I couldn’t feel too bad for too long though. He had to have known that he created me to suffer. He selfishly made me unable to love more than one person, assuming when he did so that one person would be him, thus dooming me to an existence of misery once he left this world.
In essence, he had given me the need to love and made it impossible to fulfil it.
The thought filled me with rage. How could anybody be so cruel? When Romeo found Juliet dead, he took his own life rather than live without her. I wouldn’t have that option when the time came.
Once the rage hit me, I lost control. I wasn’t going to have a casual talk with Slickberg, I was going to kill him. I would jump through his window and turn back into a human so I could tell him exactly what he had done and make him beg for his life. I’d listen to his pleas and even seem to consider them. And then I’d rip his throat out.
The thought filled me with satisfaction.
I felt a part of my mind protest. It was a quiet voice telling me to stop and think it over, asking me why I was doing what I was doing.
I quickly silenced the voice before taking off and running full speed toward the house, feeling the dirt turn to concrete, then to grass, before leaping over a bed of roses and smashing through the window, feeling the glass break all around me and fall to the floor with a satisfying crash.
I quickly pulled the fur back into my body, tucked my snout into my face, and stood upright, fully human, and staring at Slickberg.
He wasn’t scared.
Instead, he looked me up and down, from head to toe, my naked flesh in front of him. He licked his lips, then looked into my eyes.
“My god,” he said. “You’re alive. I’ve done it. I’ve created life.”
He stood up from the couch and walked toward me, rubbing his hands over my face and shoulders. I wasn’t a person to him. I was just an experiment.
I pushed him away.
“Sit down,” I said.
He smiled at me, then shook his head.
“You don’t understand,” he said.
I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I repeated my command. “Sit down or I’ll kill you.”
He put his hand back on my shoulder and continued to inspect me. “I love you,” he said, then looked at me. “I said, ‘I love you.’”
I gave him no response. There was a look of disappointment on his face. “Who imprinted you?” he asked.
“You’re in no position to ask questions.” I stood tall and looked him straight in the eye. “This is your last warning.”
“Very well,” he said.
He moved as though he was returning to the couch, then said, “Stop in the name of love,” and too
k a step toward me.
I told my body to lunge forward for the kill, but I didn’t budge. Instead, the world stopped and I couldn’t move. My eyes locked on Slickberg and followed him as he began to pace across the room.
“It’s tricky working with something as complicated as a human brain,” he said. “There are modules that you can’t access and certain compromises you need to make. Once the brain is active, it’s very difficult to make significant code changes.”
He was talking as if nothing was wrong, as if he was giving a lecture to a classroom of students.
“But we needed some sort of fail-safe. Some way to stop you just in case things took a turn for the worse. We did it by way of a computer chip on your spine. Say the magic words and it’ll block all nerve impulses. I added a nice little touch that forces you to follow whoever said the words. In case we had a runaway train on our hands, this is what would get you back on track.”
Slickberg looked into my eyes and snapped his fingers.
“No response whatsoever. To be honest, I’m not even sure you’re hearing me. It’s a shame, too, because I have so many questions. Starting with the big one: how are you able to change into an animal. Is it any animal? Or is it just that silver wolf? You know, now that I think about it, there was some unusual DNA in the sample we were working from. It had pieces of canine DNA in it. I thought it was perhaps a machine malfunction or some sort of coincidence, but now it seems to be too much of a coincidence, does it not?”
He gestured at me. “Wait here,” he said, then left the room. I was standing there, frozen in place. I could be there indefinitely, unable to move. Was Slickberg’s command reversible, or was I doomed to spend the rest of existence unable to move, like a plant with a brain?