Choyeop Kim - Symbiosis Theory (html)

by Symbiosis Theory (html)

  * * *

  Hannah, who had been in charge of the first round of analysis, entered the conference room with a data chip in hand. The mood in the room was buoyant with the hopeful anticipation of her colleagues.

  “The results are . . . very strange. They’re not the kind of thoughts we’d think infants are capable of thinking,” she said. Then, heaving a big sigh, she projected the results onto the screen.

  The entire room fell silent. According to the interface, the infants had cooed and cried about the following:

  “How can we imbue a greater sense of morality in them?”

  “How are you all doing in there?”

  “No. This is our home now.”

  Everyone gaped at the screen, dumbstruck. The analysis was a complete mess.

  “It looks like data corruption,” Soobin said flatly.

  It only made sense to question the purity of data, considering how the imaging system worked. At the current stage of innovation, decoding accuracy was still highly subject to the noise level in the input data, after all. Noise, environmental or otherwise, had a way of making its way into data no matter how vigilant the monitoring, which frequently resulted in a frustrating amount of time spent on filtering it out. In fact, the team had already run into a similar problem during the adult trials. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine that the data collected from infants would be more muddled, since their brains were still learning how to formulate a thought, let alone vocalize it.

  Around 14 months of age, the average human baby begins to absorb basic vocabulary with a striking efficiency, and is able to follow simple commands. From infancy to adolescence, a person’s cognitive development and linguistic development follow the same general trajectory, which is to say, one’s thought development is critically dependent on one’s language comprehension and vice versa. Hence, logic dictates that an infant’s thoughts cannot greatly surpass the level of his current language comprehension.

  “So it has to be noise,” Soobin repeated, “If the data were clean, we’d be seeing I’m hungry, I’m uncomfortable . . . that type of output. And not even in fully formed sentences. Simple registration of pain and other sensations is what we should be seeing here.”

  “That’s what I thought, too.” Hannah nodded in agreement. And then she ventured, “But noisy data alone can’t explain everything. Look at this analysis of older children just beginning to speak. Their speech and neural patterns are all over the place, too. ‘Mama, I want that’ was matched to ‘I long to feel connected to the world’ . . . ? How do we explain it?”

  “Hmm . . . Could it be because children’s neural activation patterns are so completely distinct from those of adults?” Soobin wondered.

  “Possibly,” Hannah said, her face darkening as she added, “And if that’s the case, then we’ll have to start it all over again.”

  At that, the air in the conference room hung heavy with a sense of foreboding.

  * * *

  Thankfully, a problem identified was, usually, a problem half-solved. Soobin and Hannah set about sorting the collected thought-speech data by age group. Next, they separated the data of subjects whose language had yet to emerge. The effort drastically reduced the amount of available data, so a full day had to be spent on the phone while begging every cooperative agency for additional material. It was a chore they could do without, but surely it was more agreeable than accepting the results at hand and announcing to the world that babies babbled madly to themselves.

  They’d placed a great deal of hope on the effort, but the results that came back were nonetheless demoralizing. It turned out that the infants’ brainwave patterns were far more intricate than they’d had imagined, suddenly making it seem trivial by comparison to scrutinize the adults’. In fact, the other team, which had continued with the adult study, was enjoying smooth sailing. Having already mapped onto the interface the large database of neural patterns collected from adults with no speech or language difficulties, they were currently working on teasing out speech from the brainwaves of adult subjects who’d lost the ability to speak for various reasons. In sad contrast, Soobin’s team was still troubleshooting for the initial findings that indicated infants engaged in philosophical musings. No matter how many times they duplicated the entire process, though, the results remained consistently baffling.

  “These babies . . . ”

  Clutching at her head in frustration, Soobin plopped down on the sofa.

  “ . . . complicated, deep little philosophers, they are,” Hannah said.

  Had they underestimated the challenge? Could it be that the mysteries of the human brain were simply too complex for them to unravel? Soobin was at a loss, completely.

  Sensing that she was left with no other recourse, Soobin began talking with Hannah about the fate of the project, and whether a course correction was necessary to save it. Despite everyone’s efforts, the problem of the philosophical babies seemed insoluble. In the end, it was determined that the project should be redesigned at the next progress meeting. Enthusiasm dwindled, and the project began petering out when an unexpected development diverted it from its course once again.

  * * *

  “Soobin, could you take a look at this?” Hannah said, presenting her with a stack of analysis results she’d printed out. Her lips pressed together, she looked oddly intent. Taking the stack from Hannah, Soobin began scanning the pages, before clapping it shut within a minute. This couldn’t be right. She couldn’t take seriously what her eyes had just told her. It felt like she was reading a tabloid.

  “What’s this? What is it supposed to mean?” she accused.

  “It’s supposed to mean what it means. These are the results of the infant babble analysis,” Hannah said, “Do you remember that day? Ludmila’s Planet had just been discovered. The data captured on that day are all like this.”

  Soobin remembered, of course. It was on that day the two had first begun to debate the viability of the infant project. While she’d continued fussing over the puzzling results, Hannah had begun a new analysis with the remaining data, the staggering results of which were contained in the printout that Soobin now clutched in her hands.

  “What on earth . . . ” Soobin stared at the strings of letters.

  “This is where we’d all begun.”

  “I miss our planet.”

  “Ludmila!”

  “Ludmila!”

  “Ludmila!”

  “Ludmila painted the place exactly as it was.”

  “I miss it!”

  As Soobin stood there with her mouth open, Hannah emphasized how many times she’d already verified the results.

  “I couldn’t believe it myself, which is why it took me a little while to share it with you. Every infant was occupied by these thoughts that day.”

  With that, she produced an additional report containing the analysis results of reams of data she’d personally pored over, which had been initially rejected by the team for being corrupt and unusable. Working on the assumption that the data was, in truth, free of noise, Hannah had isolated the units of meaning that emerged repeatedly. The resulting chart at hand incorporated the infant thought-speech model that had been scrapped for being an utter failure. Once again, the analysis had found that some bizarre conversations were taking place inside the heads of these infants. These conversations, not to be outdone by the notion itself in their oddity, appeared to be thoughtful and, at times, lively exchanges between multiple voices in the brain.

  “You OK? I just heard a racket.”

  “No worries. Mr. clumsy just knocked over a chair, that’s all.”

  “I bet his eyes were glued to the screen.”

  “Are you already dreaming of the sea?”

  “Oh, I’d love to end up in the sea someday.”

  “This data right here? It’s from one infant, from the same time frame—as you can see,” Hannah pointed out. “It’s as if multiple beings coexist inside the infant’s brain. Please, stop looking at me like that
and hear me out,” she urged, turning the page for Soobin. “I extracted the interpretations that showed up repeatedly and then sorted them out. And I took care of the post-analysis, in case you’re wondering. Look.”

  It was true. There were multiple participants in these conversations, all of whom were speaking with the tenderness and devotion of a caregiver. They talked about morality. They talked about life. They talked as though they were co-parents, every one of them nurturing and looking out for the infant. These results all but pointed to a conclusion that Soobin herself would be hard-pressed to accept. Stunned speechless, she listened to what Hannah still had to say.

  “Something’s present inside their brains,” Hannah concluded. “Something not human. These occurrences can’t be explained without introducing an external entity.”

  “It must have been noise in the data,” replied Soobin in a tight voice.

  “Noise can’t account for it. The conversations are persistently and deeply coherent. How likely is it that noise interruptions turned into discussions of morality, ethics, altruism, and all that? Isn’t that more absurd to imagine?” Hannah persisted.

  “But . . . How? The data had come from thousands of infants, each one an individual. And you’re saying that, inside each of those little heads resides some force that acts like a parent?”

  “If not, then how do you explain what you see?”

  Given her radical-leaning perspective on many subjects, it wouldn’t be the first time Hannah had offended others’ sensibilities. Still, when it came to that, this current argument was her best effort so far.

  “All I’m saying is . . . ” Soobin began, only to realize she had nothing to follow it up with. Composing herself for a few moments, she said, “A foreign presence inside the infants’ brains? Some intelligent entities that aren’t human?”

  “It’s the only plausible explanation,” Hannah replied.

  Soobin decided to spare the team Hannah’s lunacy for now. Speculations of some force occupying the infant brain . . . Of course, such an idea didn’t stand a chance. And yet, when she finally decided to give her colleague’s argument due consideration in all its absurdity, intriguing patterns began to leap out at her in a way that they hadn’t just a few hours earlier. For one, she could now see that, among babies and toddlers on the verge of speech, there was a complete lack of congruence between the measured neural patterns and their outward expressions—specifically, the infants’ cries, babblings, and simple utterances. When fed through the interface, the neural patterns of these very young subjects consistently produced highly sophisticated and intellectual speech output, which could only be understood as exchanges between multiple mature voices inside the brain. It was just as Hannah had said.

  * * *

  Soobin and Hannah began referring to the voices as “them.” They discussed feelings and thoughts, love, and empathy. They clearly seemed to want to teach the infants something.

  Moving on to young children, the two scientists reorganized the large amount of speech data they’d collected, sorting them by age. Were there distinct conversations taking place beneath all the “mommy,” “daddy,” “I want that,” and so on? Their analysis showed a mix of the children’s surface communications and the conversations among them. Curiously, these two-tiered conversations seemed to vanish at around age seven, following years of gradual retreat that began at approximately three years of age, with some variation between individuals. It was as though the internal voices gradually withdrew until the child became fully communicative, at which point they seemed to bow out completely.

  These notions kept Soobin up at night. Even now, she and Hannah had kept the theory to themselves. Day in and day out, she labored through additional data in search of a clue that might help reveal their identity. Colleagues who’d noticed the pair beginning to look increasingly sapped and haggard expressed concern by gently reminding them that “it was what it was”, or that it was the nature of science to progress through trial and error, and so forth.

  Yet even as she persevered, Soobin didn’t completely rule out the possibility that everything might still turn out to be a massive decoding error. Still, the more data she analyzed, the clearer it became that there was only one possibly true conclusion: the analyses were accurate, and inside the infant brain, they existed.

  But where did they come from? How did they settle in the brain? And why do they leave when they leave? What was the tangible proof of their presence? And then, one day while reclining on the sofa in the back of the staff lounge, it struck her.

  “The box children!” she blurted out loud. This jolted Hannah, who had been nodding off nearby, into wakefulness.

  “ . . . What?”

  “A few years ago, there was an experiment conducted to see if human touch was absolutely necessary for normal infants development. Do you remember?”

  Hannah’s eyes began to widen as if slowly registering something.

  “Of course . . . yeah, the experiment with infant-care robots . . . ”

  “Their data may be useful to us.”

  “How?”

  * * *

  The so-called “box children experiment” had been conceived to test the efficacy of infant-care robots. In the experiment, infant subjects had been kept isolated from the outside world for the duration of the study, to be raised in the lab solely by caregiver robots. All other variables had been kept constant. Some researchers had speculated that the babies’ experience shouldn’t be too different from an extended tenure inside a giant incubator. After all, the ethics committee had given the research project its stamp of approval, which was supposed to have reassured everyone that no infant’s well-being was going to be compromised in any way. Still, this approval did little to mute the concerns surrounding its design. When the findings were finally published, the project once more attracted harsh international criticism.

  “It was such a huge mess,” Soobin sighed.

  “I remember.” Hannah nodded gravely. “By the end of the experiment, the subjects were found to act purely on instinct, their growth in the affective domain having been completely stunted over the course of the experiment. It was a big relief to hear that many were successfully rehabilitated and socialized later on, after the experiment finished.”

  “The experiment should never have gotten approved,” Soobin said, her gaze fixed on the empty air before her. “On the other hand, I still have some unanswered questions about it,” she continued, turning to Hannah. “Caregiver robots are designed to deliver optimal stimulation. Why does a simple lack of flesh and blood affect the infants’ socioemotional development so profoundly? I have to wonder if there’s more to what the finding seems to suggest. If anything, we, humans, are imperfect caregivers given to personal moods and circumstances. So . . . maybe there’s some connection with whatever caused the robot-reared infants to fail to thrive . . . ”

  What if they gained entry into the infant brain at some point after birth, in the way of parasites and microbes—as opposed to in utero? Like viruses, they could be lurking in the air, or otherwise widespread throughout the environment. Even so, there had to be a specific point of access for them. What if the box children had never gotten the chance to be exposed to them because they’d been locked up inside the lab? Hannah shot up from her chair.

  “There must be recordings. We need to analyze their cries,” she said.

  It took no effort at all to find relevant video files online, each trailing an endless comment section crammed with condemnations and disapproval of what the viewers considered a cruel and morally detestable experiment.

  “How dare you leave these babies alone with robots, you monsters!”

  “Babies NEED a warm and caring HUMAN touch! You’re raising androids devoid of humanity!”

  However, the question of whether or not the caregivers had been human might ultimately have been of little consequence. That is, if one could allow the possibility that they were the ones outfitting human infants with their
humanity, and that, perhaps, what we’d considered our innermost human qualities ultimately originated from outside of us.

  Soobin felt ready to turn her gaze outward for proof. She began to enter the audio data extracted from the videos into the interface. To the naked ears, the infants’ cries were indistinguishable from the cries of other babies. But their presence or absence amongst the box infants would soon be verified by the output of the interface, which would, in turn, disprove or validate the hypothesis that the crucial factor determining humans’ socioemotional development was them. Had they been absent among the box infants, as the two suspected, the interface would display only the infants’ requests, minus the veiled conversations attributed to them.

  The software commenced its analysis. There was nothing for Soobin and Hannah to do but wait for the results to load up. The first round of analysis produced units of meaning that remained too abstract and incoherent to make sense of. With a trembling hand, Hannah initiated the final decoding process, whereupon the algorithm began arranging the discrete units into sentences. Soon after, the final results appeared on the screen. The cries and coos of the box babies in the videos had apparently been concerned with the following thoughts:

  “I’m hungry.”

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “I’m scared.”

  Soobin and Hannah turned to each other, unsure of how to feel about this. Should they rejoice in their victory? Or should they be aghast at the overwhelming implications?

  Indeed, what had been fired by the synapses inside the heads of the box babies couldn’t properly be called thoughts. They were intense needs driven by pure instinct, which in fact was what anyone would have expected of such young babies. Mere days old, and having been kept in the laboratory since birth, these babies had yet to be exposed to them. Thus, their brains had generated only the neural patterns associated with typical infantile desires tailored for survival—the kind of neural patterns Soobin and Hannah had also previously expected to find in all babies who had yet to acquire speech, and thus, had yet to begin contemplating life and the world.