by Troy Hunter
Did I come up with the thought on my own? It felt true to me and it felt personal to me. I wasn’t reading data—I must have been creating.
I liked it.
I liked it because it summed up how I felt about love.
I was that colorblind man when it came to love. I hadn’t seen it, but I knew about it. I even had an inkling of what it was like, based on descriptions, both poetic and analytical, filed away in my system. I knew it was something I wanted, but I had no idea what it was.
That’s why I had to ask Jeffrey if he was my love. I didn’t know. I certainly felt a connection that I couldn’t have with another object when I looked at him. It must have been because he was human.
I turned around to look back at him, a tiny speck in the distance, whose features I could make out perfectly. He had dark skin and thick hair along with thin-framed glasses that brought out his deep brown eyes. It wasn’t love. He told me so. But I still wanted to touch him. Though I had run off, I knew I wanted to return to him.
He was the only thing like me in sight.
Was I human?
I felt like I was. I looked like I was, though I didn’t think humans had silver skin nor could they turn into wolves. If I was being honest with myself, I knew I wasn’t truly human.
If I wasn’t human, what was I? I knew I was part computer, but what did that mean? How was I different from Jeffrey?
I knew Jeffrey had the answers. I knew a lot about the world, somehow, yet I felt as if I knew nothing. My knowledge was very much like a computer’s. I could spit out answers without knowing what they meant. It was like with the math problem on the board back in the lab: I knew the answer, but I didn’t know why it was the answer or what it meant.
I didn’t look like a computer though. I looked like a human being.
And I felt.
I could also think things without fully understanding what they meant.
I returned to my files on love. Love is an explosion of warmth, perpetually burning in your body like a fire, crackling and sending embers into the sky that can ignite someone else. It’s a selfless pursuit of caring so strongly about someone else that you can feel their pain and their pleasure. It’s a sense of completeness that only another human can offer.
Love is a summer’s day, it’s all you ever need, it’s being hurt and being lifted back up. It’s a sunrise in your heart and a blanket for your soul.
I could say all that or even write it into a poem, but I had no idea what it meant. I hadn’t been in love. It occurred to me that I may not even be capable of love.
I walked back to Jeffrey and returned to my human form. There was a different look on his face than before. It indicated that he didn’t feel well.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He looked me up and down and opened his mouth, though nothing came out.
I placed my hand against his forehead. “98.6 degrees,” I said. “You’re not sick.”
“You turned into a wolf,” he said.
“Yes.”
“How did you do that?”
I stared at him, not understanding the question.
“What did you do to make yourself do that?” he asked.
I stopped for a moment and tried to put it into words. “When I am speaking to you,” I said, “I am choosing the words I want to say. I don’t know how I am doing it, but words are coming out.”
He nodded. “You just turned into a wolf. You don’t know how you did it.”
“That’s correct.”
He shook his head. “You have a subconscious.” He sat down on a nearby bench and I joined him, sitting so our legs were touching.
“You need to give me a little space,” he said.
He nudged me toward the other side of the bench. I was only a few feet from him, but he may as well have pushed me to the other side of the world.
“It’s nothing personal. It’s just nice to have a little space to ourselves.”
“This is what people like?” I asked.
He nodded. “In this country, yes. It’s easier for me to think when I have a little bubble around me.”
I stood up and walked away.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“I am trying to give you more space so you can think better.”
“No, no. Come back here.” He stood up to take my hand and it felt as if a jolt of electricity ran through my body. I liked touching him.
He sat me down. “A little space is good but too much is bad. We can be on the same bench, we just need to be on opposite sides of it.”
I nodded. I didn’t understand completely, but I didn’t need to. Humans liked to have roughly two and a half feet of space between one another.
“You have a subconscious,” he said. “Does that mean you have a conscious part of your mind too?”
“I think so,” I said.
“You’re thinking for yourself? You’re not just running through an algorithm?”
“If I am, I am not aware of the algorithm.” I looked inward for access to such an algorithm, but it was as if my inner workings pushed my mind away from introspection. “What is it like to be human?”
He looked at me, up and down. “I don’t know how to answer that.”
“What is my purpose?”
He shook his head. “I’m not sure if I’m supposed to tell you. It could ruin the experiment.”
Experiment? What experiment? “What is the experiment?”
He looked me in the eyes and bit his lower lip. “You,” he said hesitantly. “You’re the experiment. We wanted to see if we could make a synthetic human being.”
“You have,” I said. “The experiment is a success.”
He shook his head. “That was just phase one. We weren’t just designing a…” He trailed off.
“I don’t understand.”
Jeffrey nodded his head. “I suppose you wouldn’t.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and typed something into it. “This,” he said. “Is Dr. Slickberg.”
He showed me a picture of a man. Older than Jeffrey but by no means elderly. He was thin and his cheeks were sunken.
“He’s the man in charge of the lab. It’s because of him and his genius that you’re here right now.”
“He created me?”
“Yes, initially. And then he brought me on to the project.”
“So he is my father?”
He hesitated, going back to biting his lower lip. “I wouldn’t put it that way, no. He’s your person.”
I looked at him again, in a different light. He was an attractive man, in an objective sense. He had features, such as well-defined cheekbones, that were conventionally attractive, according to information in my file system. I could see myself being with someone like him.
And yet, I didn’t find myself attracted to him.
“He is going to imprint on you and you’re going to love him.”
I understood now. I didn’t feel love for him yet, but I would. “He needs to imprint on me?”
Jeffrey nodded.
“And then I will love him. Forever.”
“Correct.”
I thought for a second. I suppose it would seem better when I loved him. For the moment, his face left me feeling nothing. My fate was to be with him. I was looking at my future.
“Okay,” I said.
Jeffrey nodded, looked at me for a moment, and then wrote something down in his notebook.
Chapter 7
Jeffrey
His response was unusual and I had to remind myself he wasn’t human. He wasn’t going to react in expected ways. That’s why these notes were so essential. He came off as a very strange human being, but not so strange that it was obvious he was a machine. Somebody meeting him would wonder what was different about him, though they might assume he just had a few screws loose. I’d certainly had professors who were stranger than AIDAn.
I had no idea whether or not he actually felt. I know Dr. Slickberg said we had no hope of producing qualia
, but it was hard to deny that AIDAn expressed excitement. Or at least the appearance of excitement. It’s all an illusion, I kept repeating in my head…just an illusion. His body was alive but his brain was a collection of transistors run by computer code. Complicated code, to be sure, but no different, at least in theory, from my phone.
I had to convince myself this was just an illusion. I wondered why I was working so hard to do so. Was it because I couldn’t allow myself to admit that I had inadvertently created a living, thinking being, and ended up in ethically questionable territory?
I shook the thought away. No, I told myself, such thought wasn’t objective. It was emotional and unscientific. He’s just a machine.
But I had to be sure.
I brought AIDAn back up to the lab.
“What are we doing?” he asked.
“It’s a game,” I said.
There’s a well-known test for consciousness in animals and babies called the Mirror Test. You place a mark on the subject’s head using grease or ink and allow them to look in the mirror. If they wipe the mark off, then they’ve connected the image in the mirror to themselves and are considered to be conscious.
I walked over to one of our lab chalkboards and palmed a piece of chalk.
“How do we play?”
“It’s a strange game,” I said. “The goal is to figure out the rules. If you do, then you win.”
The trick with the test is you need to get the mark on the subject’s head without their realizing it. I couldn’t just reach out and touch AIDAn’s head. I had to come up with something else.
He had a hair curl resting in the middle of his forehead. It was adorable. I reached forward to move it and, in the process, rubbed some chalk on AIDAn’s head.
“Is it a card game? A board game?”
“Don’t worry about it. I think it’s time we had formal introductions. I told you my name.”
“Jeffrey Patel.”
“Correct. I’m a graduate student in Computational Biology working at the Bernard Frankenheimer Center for Interdisciplinary Research here at the University of Northern California.”
He nodded. “It’s nice to meet you. Who am I?”
I thought he might ask that. “Your name is AIDAn. It stands for Artificially Intelligent Android.”
“What does the D stand for?”
“We’re still working that out. We started with the acronym.” I laughed. “Maybe it should stand for dog since you can turn yourself into one.”
He nodded. “Maybe, but I thought I was a wolf.”
“Oh, same thing.”
“Right,” he said, his mind processing. “They’re both the same species.”
He began to wander around the lab. This was good. He would encounter a reflective surface sooner or later.
“AIDAn,” he said, listening to the sound of the name. “I like it.”
He walked over to the input cable that we were using to connect to him. It was proprietary—we’d had to design it ourselves as no commercially available cord had the bandwidth we needed. That’s what Slickberg said, anyway. Part of me wondered if it was a way to prevent others from reverse-engineering AIDAn.
“You can use this to change me?” he asked.
“Not exactly. We can modify the existing code and tweak settings that are already implemented, but we can’t add new functions. Once you wake up, it’s more or less set.”
“Why did you do that?”
Is this something I should be telling him? The secrets of how he works? I chanced it. It was unfair for me to know more about him than he did.
“You’re potentially very dangerous,” I said. “If users can modify your code, then they can have you do whatever they want and that’s very risky. We had to make your functional software read only. You can create new memories and even learn new skills, but your overall personality can’t be altered. You’re peaceful by design.”
“That’s good,” he said. He returned the cable to the table. “I wouldn’t want to hurt anybody.”
“If all went according to plan, you won’t.”
He looked at the computer monitor and skimmed the code, written in a combination of Assembly Language, FORTRAN, and Monty, a new language specifically designed for the needs of our project. “This is what’s going on in my head?”
“Something like that. It’s a piece of your code. Do you understand it?”
“I can read it, but I don’t know what it means.”
That didn’t surprise me. There’s something about intelligence that prevents it from completely understanding itself.
He scrolled through the windows, nodding his head. “I’m complicated,” he said.
He had no idea. “I’ve spent months working on you,” I said. “And my work was based off what other people have done. You’re the pinnacle of decades of research.”
“What work? I want to know where I came from. I want to know my history.”
I was being quizzed. I’d never been good at the background of my research and hated when other researchers asked me about it.
I also knew he deserved an answer.
“You have files in your system, do you not?”
“I know about other AI creations. I know about ELIZA and HAL 9000 and Deep Blue and Watson.”
“HAL 9000 wasn’t real,” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
“The AI you’re based on is something used for Project ARF.”
“Project ARF,” he repeated, no expression.
“You don’t have any files on that?”
He shook his head. Of course not—why would he? The history in his files wouldn’t encompass such information.
“Project ARF was an implementation of a machine learning algorithm, attempting to read people’s body language and interpret their thoughts in an effort to allow users to engage in more effective flirtation.”
I was practically reciting from memory. I sounded like a computer when I said it, but AIDAn seemed receptive, nodding along with my every word.
“Did it work?” he asked.
“It showed promise, but the researcher scaled back his project as he worked on it remotely. When I came into the lab, Dr. Slickberg saw that I had experience with biological systems and asked me to pursue a parallel project, combining and modifying the code to work inside a host made up of living cells.”
“And that would be me.”
“That’s right,” I said.
He paced back and forth across the room, thinking and taking in this information. “I want to know everything,” he said. “What about everything else? I want to see the world.”
“In due time,” I said. “We don’t want to overdo it.”
He walked toward a lab bench and picked up a chemical vial, inspecting the label before putting it down. He moved onto another one, his curiosity demanding he look at and touch as much as he could, but he wasn’t looking at any reflective surfaces. I watched him carefully, but not carefully enough. At one point, he turned toward me and the chalk had vanished from his face. I never saw him wipe it off.
“What?” he asked.
“The chalk. Where did it go?”
“I’m sorry, was the game that I was supposed to keep it on my face? It wasn’t comfortable so I removed it.”
“But you didn’t use your hands.”
“I didn’t need to. My skin can clean itself.”
He could shed and regenerate skin on a whim to stay clean. It was a benefit of the fast-growing stem cells we had engineered him with. He’d never had a shower and yet he didn’t smell bad.
I don’t know what that meant. He could sense that there was something on his skin so he didn’t need to be conscious of his appearance in the mirror. He hadn’t failed the test, the test failed him.
Did that mean he was conscious or not? We need to be careful how we make our conclusions in science. We can never prove anything, only test hypotheses to a level that it would be more complicated to deny them than accept them. We’v
e never seen an atom, they’re smaller than light waves, but we know they exist because every test we’ve run supports their existence.
Every experience I’d had with AIDAn supported the idea that he was, in fact, conscious. If it was an illusion, it was a very convincing one.
I didn’t want to leave him alone in the lab. I told myself it was because he could get in trouble, but deep down, I felt bad because he’d be lonely. If he was a human subject, we wouldn’t be allowed to effectively imprison him. He, of course, didn’t have anywhere else to go, which posed a problem.
“Would you like to go home with me?” I asked.
He smiled, his eyes lighting up and his cheeks emitted a subtle sparkle. “Yes, that would be wonderful!”
I couldn’t take him back home looking the way he did in case Gale was home. “I need you to wait here,” I said. “It’ll be about a half an hour.”
“I’ll set a timer,” he said.
“You don’t need to do that. It may be a bit longer. I need to go pick some things up for you.”
There was a twenty-four-hour drug store around the corner from the university. I could swing by and pick some things up to at least try to make him presentably human.
As I left the lab and headed that way, I wondered about his shifting ability. We hadn’t counted on that. It wasn’t in the code, and even if it was, it would need to be compatible with AIDAn’s biology. It must have been in his DNA.
What else could he do that wasn’t in the code? We wrote him to be peaceful and non-violent, but is it possible that his genes might be able to bypass that?
Because if it was, I didn’t think there was anything we could do to stop him.
Chapter 8
AIDAn
It took Jeffrey thirty-two minutes and seventeen seconds to return to the lab. He brought a grocery bag full of makeup compacts with him.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s to cover your skin,” he said.
My heart crumpled in my chest. “What’s wrong with my skin?”
He looked at me with complete sincerity. “Absolutely nothing.”
I didn’t understand. I did understand that I wasn’t the same color as most humans, but I didn’t know why it should matter.