by Hunter, Troy
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Slickberg began. “What I offer for you today is something that nobody’s ever done before. It’s a huge leap forward in scientific progress and I suspect none of you will believe me at first. It defies belief.”
Slickberg was on stage, standing in front of a podium, a screen behind him with his name and the title of his talk, A New Intelligence.
“As many of you may know, I’m a first-generation scientist.” He pressed a button, moving to the next slide. An old picture with faded color of Slickberg as a young, happy boy and his two parents.
“My parents were entertainers who performed in a traveling acrobatic act. That’s true. They tried to teach me the standard school subjects, reading, writing, math. By the time I was nine or ten, they left me with several textbooks and allowed me to teach myself. I took an interest in the sciences, all of them really, and quickly came up with questions my parents couldn’t answer.”
He looked across the room before clicking to the next slide. I looked at the pair beside me, the man rolling his eyes while his student watched intently.
The new slide showed a young child of elementary-school age with thick-rimmed glasses, perusing a high school or perhaps college-level textbook. It seemed almost bigger than he was.
“He’s so proud of that picture,” the bald man said. “I’ve seen it at every talk he’s given.” He shook his head. “Textbook narcissist, always talking about himself when he should be focusing on the science.”
I didn’t disagree with him. Slickberg did have a high opinion of himself. But was there any way for him to be modest after his accomplishments?
“I learned science on my own. What my parents taught me was showmanship. And it’s put me in an unusual place right now. Part of me wishes to cut to the chase and show you exactly what I’m hiding behind door number three. The other part of me wants to play it up and leave you wondering, ‘What does he have? What could he possibly have that’s bigger than a new type of antibiotic?’”
He paused, smiling to himself. “Ladies and gentleman, this dwarfs anything I’ve ever even attempted before. This is, if I may say so, perhaps the greatest accomplishment in human history. And yet, is it really so impressive? Is it not something that billions of people have done before me?”
The man beside me stood up, shouting impatiently at the stage. “Quit with the razzle-dazzle, Slickberg. Let your accomplishments speak for themselves and allow us to determine the merit of your work.”
“I suppose that’s proper protocol,” Slickberg said.
He walked to the side of the stage, behind the curtains, then emerged with AIDAn, standing perfectly still. He was dressed in a suit, almost like a mannequin.
The bald man beside me laughed. “Who is this, his boyfriend?”
I looked at AIDAn. I wondered if he could see me. He didn’t look like himself. He was lifeless and without a hint of the wondrous energy I loved about him. As if he’d just undergone a lobotomy.
“This may look like an ordinary man to all of you. Perhaps just the slightest bit extraordinary,” Slickberg said. He pressed a button and moved to the next slide, revealing an early prototype of AIDAn’s brain, circuits everywhere connected with a messy slew of wires.
“This,” he said, pausing for emphasis. “Is his brain. What you all see here is the first artificial man.”
You could have heard a pin drop. The audience was silent. I looked over at the man next to me. The blood had left his face and his jaw was halfway to the ground.
They were impressed.
Chapter 38
AIDAn
I stood there, staring at the audience, still unable to move with the cord connecting me to a laptop. Focusing my eyes was difficult, but I could do so slowly. I scanned the audience to see if I could find Jeffrey.
“Dr. Slickberg,” I heard someone say. “Surely this is some kind of a joke. You expect us to believe that we’re looking at a robot right now?”
“No,” Slickberg said. “What you are looking at is a human in everything except the brain. The brain is the machine. Is the correct word a robot? I don’t think so. I feel cyborg may be more appropriate, but even that doesn’t quite ring true. AIDAn defies description.”
He tapped a few buttons on his keyboard and I felt my jaw loosen.
“AIDAn,” Slickberg said. “Would you please say hello to the audience?”
He pressed a few more keys and I could move my head and eyes. I looked around. “Hello,” I said.
I spotted Jeffrey in the back, staring at me with a look of sadness in his eyes and I didn’t know why. When our eyes made contact, he mouthed words, “I love you.”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t know how to. Instead, I just moved my eyes elsewhere.
An older woman in the front row stood up. “Nobody doubts that this is a being that can speak and interact, Dr. Slickberg. What we want is proof that you’re showing us his brain.”
Slickberg nodded. “Dr. Martin,” he said. “Would you please come up here?”
The woman walked up the stairs to the stage.
“The eyes,” Slickberg said. “Are part of the brain.” He pulled out a small penlight and a magnifying glass, handing them both to Dr. Martin. “Please, take a look.”
She approached my face and shone the light into my eyes while studying me with the magnifying glass. She put them both down, as an expression of awe came over her. She touched me lightly on the cheek with her index finger.
“He feels so real,” Dr. Martin said.
“Describe for the audience what you saw.”
“It’s a series of small circuits, like what you’d see if you opened up a laptop, but with smaller components.” She looked at the audience. “I think we need to take what Dr. Slickberg is saying seriously.”
Slickberg smiled. “Thank you. Please have a seat.”
“Excuse me,” it was a man with thin framed glasses, off to the side of the auditorium. “But have you considered the philosophical and moral implications of what you’ve done?”
“I understand your concerns,” Slickberg said. “But I assure you, although AIDAn here looks and acts human, it’s just circuitry in his head. Concerns about ethics and morality are misplaced. He’s an impressive computer, but still just a computer and can’t actually feel anything. As a precaution, I disabled circuits meant to mimic emotional responses.”
“I’d like him to answer to these concerns,” the man said. “Do you feel, AIDAn?”
I thought for a second, standing there in front of the room. I knew I felt at one point, but no longer. I looked back over at Jeffrey, tears in his eyes, and it was as if a spark went off inside me. A small spark, no doubt, but an inkling that reminded me of what it was like to be with him before the change.
I dismissed it as existing only in my mind. I imagined the feeling, as Slickberg said, I was just a computer. I wasn’t capable of feeling, he had disabled such functionality.
“I do not,” I said. “I cannot feel. I can only respond as if I do.”
I looked back over at Jeffrey, his face contorted with my words and more tears began to flow down his face.
There was another spark inside me. A stronger one. One that was difficult to ignore, but, nonetheless, some kind of illusion. It wasn’t a real emotion. I wasn’t capable of it.
“Does that answer your question,” Slickberg asked.
“I’m not sure it does,” the man said. “As you know, there’s the easy problem of consciousness and the hard problem of consciousness.”
“Naturally. Preliminary tests have suggested that we’ve solved the easy problem. I have no doubt in my mind that AIDAn here would pass the Turing Test.”
“Right.” The man adjusted his glasses, searching for the question he meant to ask. “Now I, along with several other philosophers, insist that the hard problem of consciousness, the idea of qualia, or feeling of consciousness, isn’t a problem at all. If you create the illusion of consciousness, then you’ve created conscio
usness.”
“That’s just a philosophical idea,” Slickberg said.
“True enough, but my question is this. How do you know you haven’t created a truly conscious being? How can you demonstrate that he doesn’t experience qualia, whereas, for instance, I do?”
There was a gentle murmur in the audience.
“I mean to say,” the man said. “Shouldn’t we err on the side of caution here and treat him as we would any other human?”
Slickberg thought for a second. “Sir, what did you have for dinner last night?”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”
“Humor me.”
“My husband made me pork chops.”
“And I imagine you have a cellular telephone?”
The audience laughed. “Of course, but why does that matter?”
“What matters is the amount of suffering we inflict on the world is staggering. Animals are slaughtered for food that much of the time we don’t even eat. People in other parts of the world make the electronic devices the first world depends on and they do it for pennies an hour. Children are sent off to war, dying in battle or spending the rest of their lives waking up from nightmares. We do this all routinely without question, but you wish to ask about ethical concerns related to the way we treat a glorified computer who very likely can’t experience suffering?”
It was then I realized all that went into making me. My brain was made up of silicon chips, made overseas by people, forced to work in order to eat. Some of them were children, just like the child growing inside me.
It was suffering that created me.
And Slickberg didn’t care. He would keep me in this perpetual frozen state possibly for as long as I existed.
And when my baby was born, it would be studied and subjected to the same life as me. Perhaps even worse because it would be more of an anomaly.
I could handle such tests. I could handle having Jeffrey taken away from me and living a life of this nothing.
I could not allow my baby to endure the same life.
Another spark came from inside me. Then another. It felt like mini fireworks going off.
Whatever happened to me, I had to save the baby. I felt something for it despite Slickberg’s best efforts.
“Yes, toward the back,” Slickberg said. “You have a question.”
I recognized the man who stood up. So did Slickberg.
“Oh, Bradley,” he said. “He’s one of my researchers.”
“Yes, Dr. Slickberg, I do have a question, but actually it’s not for you.”
“You can ask AIDAn if you’d like.”
Bradley shook his head.
“It’s not for him, either.”
He was confused. “Who’s it for?”
“It’s for my beautiful girlfriend, Gale.” He got down on one knee. “Gale,” he said. “Will you marry me?”
The audience was silent. Everybody was looking in their direction waiting for an answer.
So was I.
Chapter 39
Jeffrey
I wasn’t thinking. I was on autopilot.
While the audience waited for Gale’s response, I made a beeline for the front of the auditorium and yanked the cord out of the back of AIDAn’s neck.
He immediately loosened his stance and looked at me.
“Jeffrey,” he said.
“We don’t have time. We need to get out of here,” I said.
Dr. Slickberg turned toward us and saw what was happening. “No, Jeffrey,” he said. “Stop it.”
He grabbed AIDAn’s wrist, but AIDAn pushed Dr. Slickberg aside, grabbed his laptop off the podium, and picked me up.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
He took off running, holding me close to him, in his arms. I’d never felt safer in my life.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“We need to return to the lab.”
“The lab? That’s the first place they’ll go looking for us.”
It wasn’t like I had much of a choice in the matter. I couldn’t escape from his grip if I tried. He was moving fast.
“Slickberg changed my settings,” he said. “I need you to change them back.”
Even with AIDAn’s protection, the wind roared loudly in my ears as he carried me out of the convention hall and toward the science building. I had to shout to be heard.
“We can’t do it,” I said. “We’d have to go to the lab and that’s exactly where Slickberg wants you. You’ll be plugged into the computer and you’ll be completely vulnerable when we’re doing the upgrade. All he has to do is press a few buttons and he’ll trap you forever.”
“It’s not a question,” AIDAn said. “I need to be able to love you. If I can’t love you, then I don’t care what happens to me.”
He’d made his decision. I wasn’t going to argue with him.
We reached the building and he raced me up the stairs. We got to the door and I reached for my keycard, but he simply knocked it down.
“Get it started,” he said.
He grabbed the connecting cord and plugged it into his neck.
I opened the software and waited through the loading screen.
“Hurry it up,” AIDAn said.
“I can’t. This is as fast as it goes.”
Eventually the software finished loading and came to the start screen, revealing the dials and variables I had access to in AIDAn’s code.
“Change it,” he said.
Here I was, with a computer in front of me and the ability to make AIDAn love me. He was asking me to do it, but there was something about it that felt like cheating.
“AIDAn,” I said. “It doesn’t feel right.”
“What?”
“You need to love me on your own. I can’t make you do it. If you don’t love me for who I am, what’s the point of changing settings so that you do?”
I glanced at the settings. He was set to lows on all the emotional levels.
“You never loved me,” I said. “You were just programmed to do it. You have autonomy, you need to use it.”
I touched his arm and looked him in the eyes.
“If you want to love me,” I said. “Then you need to love me. I can’t make you do it.”
He stared at me, then looked at my hand. I felt blood pump through his veins, surprisingly slowly for someone who had just run a half mile at a world-record pace.
He leaned forward and kissed my forehead.
The computer beeped. Then it beeped more as he moved down my face, kissing me until he reached my mouth.
When I said before that he’d kissed me perfectly, I was mistaken. It was because I didn’t know what a truly perfect kiss was.
Mechanically, before, his kiss was perfect.
Now when he kissed me, I felt him put his soul into it. It was as if every second of it energized us more and more.
The computer continued to beep, louder and louder, faster and faster.
When we eventually broke from the kiss, I looked at the screen, all the values were off the chart.
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“Do what?”
He looked at the screen.
“It wasn’t me,” he said. “It was you.”
There was no telling who it really was. All I know is we’d somehow undone the shackles of his code. He was no longer a slave to his programming settings, he could now be his own person.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” I said.
He nodded.
“Is there a backup of this computer?” he asked.
“As far as I know, just his laptop.”
AIDAn took the laptop and tore it in half as if it was a sheet of paper. He took out the hard drive and crumbled it into dust.
He then took the desktop computer and drove his hand through the case, removing the hard drive and crushing it.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
Chapter 40
AIDAn
We ran out of the building and I grabbed Jeffrey again, holding him close to my chest.
“Where can we go?” I asked. “Where’s safe?”
“Nowhere,” Jeffrey said.
“Then we need to get as far away from anywhere as we can.”
We went back to his apartment complex, and as I ran, I felt as though things were getting more and more difficult. Jeffrey felt closer and closer to my body or my grip was getting tighter. It wasn’t until we arrived that I realized it wasn’t me gripping tighter, it was me getting bigger. My stomach was growing, noticeably. My cells were designed to grow faster. I was born in a petri dish, created by scientists who didn’t have nine months to wait for a baby to be born.
When we finally made it there, Jeffrey asked if there was time to go inside and collect some of his belongings.
Then he looked at me and shook his head.
“It’s not worth it,” he said. “We need to get out of here. Every second we spend not on the road is another second Slickberg can get us.”
We jumped in his car, an old, beat-up Tercel, which started with a weak rumble, and he pulled out of the parking garage.
I lay in the back, putting my hands on my stomach. I could feel her growing rapidly inside me. I knew she was a girl. When I closed my eyes, I could see her inside me, her cells multiplying.
The shape wasn’t quite right. There was something off about her.
“Where do we go?” Jeffrey asked.
I had maps in my head and I scanned them. “Montana,” I said. “That’s as far from anywhere as I can think of. Get on Interstate 101. I can guide you.”
“AIDAn,” he said. He sounded nervous.
“What?”
“I’m low on gas…”
I sat up and looked at the dashboard. The low fuel light was on and there was no telling how much was left in the tank.
I consulted my maps. “Up the street about a mile north, there’s a station. We can stop there.”
“AIDAn,” he repeated.
“What?”
“How long are we going to be able to run?”
I didn’t need to answer him. He already knew the answer. “For the rest of our lives,” I said.