Loving AIDAn (Bernard Frankenheimer Center Book 3)

by Troy Hunter

  Until, of course, something like AIDAn, who is a real human being, at least physically.

  I’d moved up to the top of AIDAn’s legs. I could graze his penis with my fingers if I wanted to. It was sitting there, limp but still impressive. I just wanted to barely touch it, ever so slightly tracing it from the base to the tip. Nobody would ever know.

  I would know.

  His penis—it sounds so clinical to call it that, but I’m a researcher and need to be mature—began to stiffen. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just an unconscious reaction, part of a cycle throughout the day. His blood flows through his body and sometimes it makes its way south. An erection is the end result.

  I couldn’t stop staring. I felt saliva build in my mouth. Not content to just touch it, I felt an impulse to wrap my mouth around it. He was sterile, it was perfectly safe, and I would be disinfecting him before I left.

  And when my mind started rationalizing like that, I knew it was time to cover him up and move on.

  He’s not mine and I have a job to do. I pulled my hands away and placed the sheet back over his body before stepping away and taking a few deep breaths. I started up the computer.

  It’s important to keep things in perspective. AIDAn is just a collection of cells controlled by computer code. If I were to put my mouth on him, it wouldn’t be like doing the same thing to an unconscious person. He’s a machine. It’d be like putting my mouth on someone else’s car. Not necessarily a crime, but certainly inappropriate.

  I punched in a few lines of code and started the compile script. With any luck, I’d be able to catch Dr. Slickberg in his office before he left for the weekend. I was supposed to be meeting with him once a week to discuss progress but it always got put off. I was always nervous talking with such a brilliant man, worried I’d be wasting his time with my stupid questions, but there have been a number of times when he was able to tell me things that saved hours of work.

  When I asked him, for instance, whether we could create something that was conscious, he shrugged it off. As if talking to a kindergartener, he explained that philosophers describe two problems of consciousness: the hard problem and the easy problem.

  The easy problem is to create a machine that can make decisions and behave indistinguishably from a conscious being. If we succeeded, we would have solved the easy problem.

  We had no hope of solving the hard problem, which is to create a being that can actually have subjective experiences. The concept is called qualia and Slickberg insisted that no human would be able to create that in the lab. Anyone who claimed to be able to wouldn’t be able to truly test it either. It’s possible everybody else in the world is just a robot, acting without experiencing anything; we generally assume this isn’t the case, but we have no way of knowing for sure. Philosophically, Slickberg, and many others, believe we’ll never be able to generate qualia and solve the hard problem. We certainly weren’t going to solve it by accident.

  Chapter 2

  AIDAn

  System status: engaged.

  Loading BIOS.

  Performing diagnostic check.

  All subroutines active.

  I opened my eyes and saw the darkened room, through a blurry lens. There was cool metal against my back and I was lying on it. I didn’t know my name or where I was, but I knew it was 68.7° Fahrenheit. 20.4° Celsius.

  I removed the opaque plastic blanket from my body, then sat up and looked around. I could identify objects in the room. I knew their names. That bright rectangular screen was a computer monitor. I was sitting on a metal bed. Even more obscure objects, such as electron microscopes and autoclave machines, and I knew their names.

  I looked at my naked body. I could see my abdominal region, strong and defined. It was a human form, but not all humans looked like me. Most were smaller.

  Where did this knowledge come from? I had never met a human before but I knew about them. I knew about their anatomies, that there were men and women, as well as people that didn’t necessarily fit cleanly into either category.

  There wasn’t any ambiguity with me. I was a man.

  I was using English words. Where did I learn them? I set my feet on the floor and looked down on the metal table to see my reflection. So many things in the room were familiar but my face wasn’t one of them. How was that possible?

  I looked human, though my coloring was not typical. At first, I had assumed the metallic shade was an artifact of the reflecting surface, but when I moved my hand in front of my face, I saw it was the color of my skin.

  I looked back down at the table and saw several wires connected to the back of my neck. It didn’t look like I was in a hospital or any medical environment. This was a science lab and I was likely the subject—victim?—of several tests.

  I followed the wires out of my neck and into the computer. It was possible they were keeping me alive, but based on the series of beeps and graphs on the computer screen, I found it more likely they were monitoring my vital signs. What I was certain of was that they were tethering me to the machine, restricting my motion.

  I reached behind my neck and pulled the wires out. There was no pain or discomfort. They simply popped out. I looked at the terminals, metal pieces that clicked into place in the back of my neck. I felt where they had come from, expecting blood, but there was none. Instead, there were two metallic holes, implants of some sort, no doubt.

  The beeps on the computer turned into a long pulse while the graphs flatlined. That answered that question—the machine was monitoring me.

  The lab was dark and empty. I stepped off the metal bed onto the floor with my bare feet, allowing the sheet to fall to the ground. I noticed the room was cold and grabbed a lab coat to cover myself with, not due to any actual discomfort, but because all the ideas of humans in my head seemed to be clothed. Perhaps I should be clothed too.

  Was this a case of amnesia? Was I abducted by extraterrestrials who had taken my memory? Or was there something nefarious going on?

  I was more confused by what I knew than what I didn’t know. I not only knew what year it was, but was confident that the date was November 10th and the time was precisely 11:37:23 p.m. PST.

  And yet I didn’t know where I was.

  I tried opening the door, but it was locked. I was a prisoner. To whom or to what I didn’t know. Again, though, that didn’t make much sense. I was surrounded by objects I could use as weapons. Scalpels sat on lab benches, some of them unsheathed. I picked one up and placed my thumb on the tip. I felt that it was sharp, but it didn’t hurt. I pressed into it harder but the blade bent in response.

  They must not be real. The room looked dangerous, but whoever held me captive knew exactly what they were doing.

  Chapter 3

  Jeffrey

  Dr. Slickberg’s door was slightly ajar. I took a breath to calm my nerves, then hesitantly tapped on the wood.

  “Just a minute,” he said.

  He was working on something. It was, without a doubt, more important than talking to me. I stood in the doorway waiting as he rattled off a few more clicks on his keyboard. His face was lit from below by the glow of his monitor, revealing a mind lost in thought.

  There’s a common phenomenon of students in graduate programs known as “impostor syndrome.” None of us feel like we belong and we’re all afraid that soon somebody will figure that out. My therapist, Wally, pointed out that the reason I set out to get a doctorate was to learn things, so it’s all right not to know. Of course, it’s his job to say things like that. Dr. Slickberg is a kind and patient advisor, but I couldn’t help but think that, deep down, he thought I wasn’t especially smart. Of course, few people look very smart when compared to him.

  With Dr. Slickberg, the difficulty wasn’t coming up with ideas or even figuring out how to implement them. He never got stuck. Instead, he struggled with explaining what he wanted. If Dr. Slickberg devoted all his time to AIDAn, I’m confident he could get it working within a week. The problem is he was balanc
ing dozens of other projects of equal significance, delegating what he considered to be the menial work to his students. Most of these were kept a secret, but I’d heard bits and pieces of what other people were working on. My project, for instance, was built on the back of another project that used machine learning to assist people with flirting. Another group was studying the effects of various aphrodisiacs on fruit flies. Another one still was breeding mice in an effort to extract genes related to monogamy. All of these projects were on the fringe of the scientific spectrum, and in the hands of any other researcher, they’d be dismissed, but Slickberg has a track record for finding success in projects other scientists considered a waste of time.

  He finished typing, then looked over at me.

  “Jeffrey,” he said. “Come on in. Please, take a seat.”

  I sat down in front of his desk. Despite how busy he was, he never seemed to be in a rush. I was the one hurrying, worried that every second I spent with him was taking him away from another earth-shattering breakthrough.

  It caused me to always jump to the chase. “It still isn’t working,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Is the console returning any errors?”

  “A few warnings,” I said. “Nothing critical. As far as I can tell, it should be working.”

  He nodded, then stared into space for a few seconds. “What do you think it is?”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “You’re the expert on this. You’re the one most familiar with the code. What do you think?”

  If I knew what the problem was, I wouldn’t need to go to him.

  “To be honest…” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure if I could tell him the truth.

  “Yes, Jeffrey. Honesty is the best policy. What do you think?”

  I closed my eyes and allowed the words to come out. “I don’t think what we’re doing is possible.” The problem is, once the words started coming out, they didn’t stop, picking up speed and momentum like a boulder rolling down a mountain. “I mean, we’re not talking about small steps forward, this would be a giant leap. This would be the most significant achievement in human history. And you’re entrusting it to me. Why would you do that?”

  He laughed. “Why is it such a big deal?”

  “We’re creating a human.”

  “We’re creating a machine out of human cells.”

  “One that should be indistinguishable from a real human.”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Humans have been creating humans for thousands of years. You and I wouldn’t be here if humans weren’t good at it.”

  He always liked to fall back on that whenever I pointed out the significance of this work. Shrug it off as if what we were doing was as ordinary as going to the corner store.

  “It’s different and I think you know that.”

  He nodded. “I’m aware. But it’s somewhat reassuring that what we’re doing is possible. When scientists at Los Alamos were working on the bomb, they couldn’t be 100% certain that an atom could split. When the NASA engineers sent a man to the moon, they didn’t know it could be done, since no living thing had ever been to the moon. We know humans can be created.”

  That was little consolation to me.

  “What I’ve found is that you can’t let fear get in your way. You’re using version control, yes?”

  I nodded. I had backups of all the changes I made to the code just in case I broke something and needed to return to a previous version.

  “In that case, keep doing that and go nuts. Try whatever you want. Keep fiddling around and you’ll find where the bug is. Once you fix it, everything should fall into place and we can move on to stage two.”

  “Stage two?” I asked.

  “Trials and testing. Here, let me show you. This is actually what I was working on when you arrived.”

  He turned the monitor toward me. The screen revealed a slide with the title An Exploration of Producing Sexual Satisfaction.

  “This is your presentation for the conference on Monday?”

  He nodded. “Yes.” He clicked forward to reveal a photograph of AIDAn, lying asleep in the lab. He pressed a button and the photo started moving. AIDAn was clearly breathing. His body was alive. “This is a huge success, and I think it’s going to impress many of our colleagues. We’ve created a living being, for all intents and purposes. The next step is to make it conscious.”

  “Not truly conscious,” I said.

  “No, of course not. Not even I am naive enough to believe we’ll create anything more than the appearance of a conscious being. He’ll still be motivated by code and incapable of subjective experience.”

  “No qualia?”

  He smiled and pointed at me, happy that I was actually listening to the knowledge he imparted. “No qualia,” he said. He clicked to the next slide, labeled Human Trials. “Now this is stage two, and I don’t think it’s too early to talk about it. If we wait until stage one is done before we begin thinking about stage two, it’ll be too late.”

  He clicked forward, revealing a bullet point: safety. “It is absolutely essential we determine that our technology is safe. Why? Because if a single person is harmed by an AIDAn unit, we’d have to recall all of them, and nobody would attempt anything like this again for another fifty years. All the bioethicists need is one excuse to shut us down.”

  I nodded. He was right, but he was also talking about an impossibility. “How do you ensure that a new technology is 100% safe?”

  “You can’t ever be 100% certain of anything, but we can still get damn close.”

  “And how will we do that?”

  “Controlled human trials,” Dr. Slickberg said. “Under careful observation.”

  I did a double-take. “We’re going to watch people use AIDAn?”

  “Relax, Jeffrey. It’s all in the name of science. I will be using AIDAn myself and, yes, others will be watching me. You don’t need to be an observer, but should there be a problem that arises, it will be your responsibility to fix the bug.”

  “And patch him?”

  Dr. Slickberg shook his head. “The complexity of the neuronal network makes a patch tricky. It’s more likely we’d have to make the changes and implement them in a new version.”

  “And destroy the faulty one.”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. We can’t destroy AIDAn. We built him to be virtually impossible to destroy.”

  “Right,” I said. “We can just use the fail-safe gap.” This was a line built into the code that allowed us, by plugging a device into his neck, to prevent him from moving. We also had limited control over his emotional responses, though, in all, he was designed to be autonomous, which meant we couldn’t actually control him.

  “Exactly,” he said. “The second stage of testing will look into durability. I don’t anticipate any problems here. A tank could go toe to toe with AIDAn and lose.”

  “Why does he need to be so strong?”

  “AIDAn needs to be built to last a lifetime. He will love you as long as you are alive. Unlike a human lover, there’s no chance that he’ll die and leave you alone.”

  He clicked forward to the next slide with images of fire, wire, guns, and bombs. “We will be exposing AIDAn to fire, oxygen deprivation, and even conventional human weapons. If it was up to me, we’d drop a nuke on him to be sure, but I don’t think I could convince the government to go back on their nuclear testing ban.”

  “What do you expect to happen?”

  “He should be able to withstand the fire without a problem. His skin is tough enough to block all but the most powerful bullets and even the ones that penetrate his skin shouldn’t do lasting damage. The oxygen deprivation is what I’m most curious about.”

  “He needs oxygen to produce energy.”

  “Yes,” Slickberg smiled at me. I’d gotten something right. “His body works much the same as any other human, so he needs oxygen to function. However, his silicon brain should be able to go into s
leep mode. If our brains don’t get oxygen, they quickly die. His should just go on standby until he’s able to breathe again.”

  He still hadn’t answered my question. “So, if he can’t be destroyed, what would we do with the faulty units?”

  “Put them in permanent storage.”

  I hadn’t considered the idea of permanent storage. They’d be put in a box and locked away for eternity. Alone, like a puppy waiting for his owner to come home.

  I had to stop myself. No qualia. They couldn’t actually feel. They were just machines and couldn’t, as the expression goes, “experience experience.” It’s not right to project human emotions onto them. If a model is unsafe, the right thing is to do anything in our power to keep it from hurting a human being.

  “I see,” I said. I still couldn’t completely get used to the idea. We couldn’t prove that the machine felt, but we couldn’t prove that it didn’t either.

  “At any rate,” he said. “I could spend all night talking about this. You’ll be at the presentation on Monday, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “In that case, you’ll see the rest then. As for now, I suggest you take a break and focus on having a good weekend. I assure you, AIDAn will still be here for you on Monday.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “I’ll power everything down and head out.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Good night, Jeffrey.”

  “Good night, Dr. Slickberg.”

  He shut down his computer and grabbed his bag. We left his office and he locked the door behind him. I pulled out my keycard and walked back toward the lab.

  Chapter 4

  AIDAn

  The room was odd and unfamiliar, as were all the items inside it. It appeared to be a research lab with standard scientific devices lying around, beakers and test tubes and computers connected to each other with long bunches of tangled cables. Everything appeared real, and yet it seemed a bit off. I seemed a bit off. I held my hand in front of my head and watched as I moved my fingers around, one by one. They seemed to move in response to me, as if there was a middle man transporting the message from my brain to my fingers. It wasn’t quite that there was a delay, just that it didn’t feel like I was the one moving them.