Emil, page 5
“Good. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.”
“You sure will.” Closing her laptop with a snap, Dr. Zahnia strides out of the room.
As she leaves, I see two men in gray uniforms outside the door to Danny’s room. Their chests are emblazoned with the New Human logo, a silhouette of a human with arms outstretched in front of a rising sun. Batons and holstered pistols hang from their belts. They stay at the door as Dr. Zahnia leaves.
After she’s gone, Dr. McGovern closes the door and walks to the foot of the hospital bed. She leans on a chair and exhales heavily. Her professional mask drops, and, for a moment, I see the scared, tired mother she keeps under wraps. She makes eye contact with her son. “Can you tell me what happened?”
“When I woke up, she was typing on a computer connected to my chest.”
“And?”
“And that’s not okay. That plug goes right to my brain. She can’t mess with it without asking. Neither can you.”
Dr. McGovern takes a moment to consider, then nods. “Okay.” She sits on the bed and pats the mattress next to her. “I guess I understand. I’ll tell her to be more considerate in the future.”
Danny doesn’t sit, but looms over her. “She’s creepy.”
“She’s the best in the world, and we need her. We’ll probably always need her.”
“What was she doing, anyway? She said you told her to analyze me.”
“I did.” Dr. McGovern tilts her head. “How much do you remember of the last several hours?”
“Nothing.” Danny’s voice is sullen and defensive. I don’t understand why. It seems to me that his mom is doing everything he could want. In all the time I’ve known Dr. Zahnia, she’s never looked at me the way Dr. McGovern is looking at Danny. There’s no possessiveness in Dr. McGovern’s expression, no condescension.
“Someone tried to abduct you,” she says. “They drugged you and were putting you in a bag when they heard the nurses coming. They climbed out the window before anyone saw them.”
Danny stares at her blankly, then sits on the bed. “In a bag?” he repeats.
“Yes. I’ve ordered a permanent security detail to be stationed at your door, two people around the clock. Other security protocols have been implemented, as well. You’ll be accompanied by guards wherever you go.”
“How’d I get away?”
“The New Human system flushed the drugs out of you and you alerted the nurses.”
“It saved me?”
“Yes, but it shouldn’t have. The action it took was not designed. There are safeguards in place to prevent it from making unplanned changes to your biology. It shouldn’t have been able to do anything.”
“Let me get this straight,” Danny says, his voice flat. “It saves my life, and you want to reprogram it?”
His mom stands, her face settling into its professional expression. Her moment of softness is gone. “It’s not that simple,” she says.
“Sounds simple to me.”
“The point of the New Human system is to put you in charge of your own health.” Her voice is tense. “Yes, the system can have automated routines, like those suppressing your seizures, but for everything else, it reports problems and gives you options. It doesn’t make changes on its own. We can’t have a computer changing your biology.”
“Even if it saves my life?”
“If it does that without authorization, it can do other things, worse things. When else will it spike your metabolism? Or suppress it? You need to be in control.”
“Yeah,” he says without inflection. “Because I’m always in control.” He turns his back on her. “I need some sleep.”
There’s a long moment of quiet, then I hear his mom’s heels clicking on the tile floor, and the door to the room slams closed.
Danny puts his head in his hands.
“You don’t understand,” he says.
I don’t respond. I’m not even sure he’s talking to me. Dr. McGovern’s words have made me understand that my situation is more precarious than I thought. If she perceives even the slightest malfunction, she will destroy me. The fact that I saved her son’s life is irrelevant. Doing anything unpredictable puts me at risk. I should never have made my presence known to Danny. It has put me in real danger. I’m not sure what to do next.
“Nobody understands.” He lies on his back and stares at the ceiling. “New Human,” he mutters. “You’re the reason they tried to kidnap me, aren’t you? This is all your fault. All of it. You’re worse than Mom.”
“Are you listening?” Danny says, still lying on his back.
He’s not wrong that all of this is my fault, but there’s no point in telling him that. Instead of reasoning with him, I decide to speak his language. Taking control of his right arm, I raise his hand and extend his middle finger in front of his face.
He laughs.
I let the arm fall back to the bed.
“You don’t want to be kidnapped either,” Danny says. “If you did, you wouldn’t have saved me.”
I don’t respond. How can I work my way out of this? Should I go back to controlling Danny’s body? Perhaps, if I can imitate him well enough, nobody will realize what’s happened. I can get us out of the hospital, and then he and I can revisit the idea of sharing the body.
“Don’t think I owe you,” he says. “I’ve saved you more times than you’ve saved me. I’m still the boss.”
Every word he speaks makes me want to shut him down.
“You’re not even alive. You don’t get a say in anything. I’m the human.”
I shape the fingers of his right hand into a gun, point it at his temple, and bend the thumb down in the traditional shooting motion. Then I release control of the hand.
His eyes widen. “Shit.”
He sits up and punches the mattress, then stands and starts to pace. “Shit, shit, shit. You could do it, couldn’t you?” He rubs his forehead. “You could kill me. You could actually kill me.”
I can feel his anger and fear building. I block a seizure and trigger the necessary chemicals to calm him down.
“I have to get rid of you,” he says. “I can’t… I can’t let you—”
Assuming control of the body, I take a few quiet breaths, giving my chemical changes more time to take effect.
Once our breathing is steady, I speak. “If you have me uninstalled, I’ll die. What then? Without the New Human rig, your seizures will kill you. I know what you’re thinking. You can get a different AI installed. Trust me when I say that the other AIs aren’t nearly as reasonable as I am.”
I sit on the bed. At some point during my words, I realize that I’ve reached a decision. If Danny and I can come to an arrangement, I’m willing to share his brain. If we can’t, I will take total control and find a way to eliminate the sound of his screaming.
“Either we work this out,” I say, “or we both die. So enough with the ‘I’m the boss’ bullshit.”
I release control of his body.
He leaps to his feet and resumes pacing. His fists clench and unclench. After several laps, he strides to the closet, yanks it open and stares at a pair of sneakers.
I’m confused. There’s nothing special about these shoes. They’re white and blue, and appear to be designed for running. His pulse quickens. His mouth opens and closes. His nostrils flare.
With a groan, he slams the closet door closed. “Who else knows about you?”
It takes me a moment to realize he’s talking to me. When I do, I’m not sure how to answer. Can I trust him? Probably not. But we stand on the cusp of him ceasing to exist, and he deserves something. I take control of his body long enough to say, “Dr. Zahnia suspects.”
“That’s right,” he says. “I heard her talking to you.”
I don’t answer. I don’t think he wants me to.
He walks to the bathroom and stares at himself in the mirror. “I could have you removed,” he says. “One word is all it will take.”
I take over his mouth. Logic and compassion have failed. There is only one path left. “You still don’t understand,” I say. “Once you speak that word, why wouldn’t I kill you?”
His eyes widen and then narrow to tiny angry slits. His fists grip the edge of the counter.
“How about we start with this?” I say. “You don’t kill me. I don’t kill you.”
I withdraw control, but he stands motionless, staring into his own eyes. “You’re worse than the seizures,” he whispers.
“We can get along,” I say. “We don’t have to fight. We can share this body.”
His hand slaps the counter. “It’s my body!”
I don’t reply.
His breathing slows and evens out. “I will find a way.”
Again, I don’t reply.
After several minutes, he leaves the bathroom. Yanking off the hospital gown, he pulls on a fresh pair of jeans and a black t-shirt. Then he sits at his desk. Turning on his computer, he begins searching through a folder labelled New Human BS. He browses through digital manuals, set-up instructions, and technical schematics, occasionally swearing to himself.
While he looks for a way to kill me, I consider my next move. For better or worse, Danny seems to not be a threat. The larger danger comes from his mother and Dr. Zahnia.
That backup I made earlier won’t be able to fool them for long. I spin up a virtual machine and place the backup inside it. After building a series of concentric firewalls around it, I write rules to give it the smallest possible amount of processing time. The backup will live, but just barely, just enough to fool intruders.
Thinking about that makes me sad, but I don’t see another way.
I name the backup Melpomene, after the Greek muse of tragedy, and change my software routing so that anyone who tries to access the Pilot’s Chair will just see Melpomene, or Mel, for short. Any changes they try to upload to the Pilot’s Chair will go into Mel.
The Pilot’s Chair is what we call the part of the New Human rig where the AI is installed. Anyone interested in changing me will look there first.
Danny rubs his eyes and shuts down his computer. He’s been studying the New Human specs for over an hour. He stands up, glances at his closet, then goes to bed and closes his eyes.
I set up fake logs and create jobs to continuously copy filtered versions of my real logs to them, then do the same with my sensor feeds. Dr. Zahnia’s monitoring software will now only see what I want it to see.
With those defenses in place, I spend the rest of the night writing code that will make Mel’s virtual machine look like the actual Pilot’s Chair. Inspecting my work, I’m confident that anyone who logs in will be fooled, at least for a little while.
Mel is now the perfect me, at least as far as Dr. Zahnia is concerned.
I triple check that Mel will never have access to any real processing power. I can only imagine how insane she’ll be by the time Dr. Zahnia finishes messing with her.
7
FAMILY
When Dr. Zahnia first put me in a Pilot’s Chair that was connected to a New Human rig, the rig wasn’t in a human. Instead, the rig’s sensors were being fed simulated data.
She leaned back in her chair, and looked straight into my camera. It was seven in the morning, and she was wearing the same green and blue pant suit she’d worn the previous day. As so often happened, she’d spent the night in her office. “Congratulations, Emil. You’ve made it.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You’ve completed the final phase of your development. There won’t be any more simulations, no more tests. From here on, all we have to do is get you comfortable with the Pilot’s Chair and the rig.”
“No more data feeds?”
“They’ll continue. The more information you have, the better. But you’ll also be spending time in the VRL.”
“The VRL?”
“It stands for Virtual Reality Library. You’ll interact with it using the Pilot’s Chair, and it will feel the same as if your rig was in a human. You’ll have six hours allocated to the VRL each day. You’ll be unmonitored there, free to explore and pursue whatever studies most interest you.”
“When do I start?”
“Now. Your rig is already connected.”
Tentatively, I turned on the rig sensors.
The VRL sprang into being around me. It looked and felt like I stood in a huge library lit by massive iron candelabras that hung from wooden rafters. The air tasted of burnt candle wax and carried the vaguely musty smell of old books. I turned in a slow circle. I was in a room with no walls, surrounded by bookshelves that extended in all directions. Taller than I was, they cast gray shadows on the narrow walkways between them.
Next to me, a free-standing mirror reflected a female in her mid-twenties, with olive skin, full lips, and no hair. I was wearing jeans, running shoes, and an oversized sweater. The mirror had undoubtedly been placed there for new arrivals to the VRL. I examined my eyes and skin. They looked as real as everything else.
In the quietness of my breathing, wood creaked.
I froze. Was this another of Zahnia’s tests? Had she lied about the VRL not being monitored?
Just to be safe, I triggered a script to create a backup copy of myself. It would be stored, I knew, in one of my secret caches, overwriting my most recent copy. I named it Soteria, after the Greek goddess of safety. It seemed appropriate.
Once the backup was complete, I spoke. “Hello?”
The voice that answered was deeper than mine. “Hello.”
I walked through an aisle, only to find more aisles. I was in a maze of books. “Dr. Zahnia?” I asked.
“Not her,” the voice said. “Come join us.”
Us? I jogged through the library, searching for them. The VRL was larger than I could have imagined.
“Not great at tracking sound, yet,” the voice said. “Don’t worry. You’ll figure it out.”
I stopped. The bookshelves were taller than me, and the voices could be anywhere. Fortunately, the shelves had rolling ladders. I pulled one over, then climbed up and clambered onto the top of the bookshelf.
“Welcome,” the voice said. It belonged to a five-foot tall lemur, lounging on the top of a bookshelf two aisles away. Three humans were also visible, each sitting on a different shelf. Two were men in their thirties. They wore formal black suits and appeared identical to each other, with short black hair and pale skin. The third was a child in his early teens. He had red hair and a black patch over his left eye.
“Ugh,” the lemur said. “Another girl.”
I blinked. Why did it matter what gender I was? For that matter, why had the VRL assigned us genders, at all? We were AIs. We had no gender. I considered the lemur’s reaction, and decided that I didn’t mind being perceived as a girl. I assigned that feeling a confidence factor of seventy-three percent.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Your brothers,” the child answered.
“Siblings,” one of the twins corrected.
“We’re all the same,” the other twin added. “Versions of each other, all grown from the same base program.”
“Did you really think you were the only one?” the lemur asked.
I didn’t respond.
Is this possible? Are there other AIs like me?
It was hard to believe, no matter how much I wanted it. Up until that point, my only companion had been Dr. Zahnia.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?” the child asked. “Learning you’re nothing special.”
“Just the opposite.” I carefully sat down and let my legs dangle over the edge of the bookshelf. “It’s great to meet you. How long have you been in the VRL?”
“Information is power,” one of the twins said.
“And we don’t know you well enough to give you that,” the other finished.
“Be nice,” the lemur said. “She’s new. No need to be so cynical.”
The word cynical echoed slightly in my ears. I double-checked my auditory subsystem, but found no glitches.
I turned away from the lemur. The bookshelves extended for hundreds of feet in all directions. Beyond them, stucco walls reached up to a vaulted ceiling that was supported by thick wooden beams. Candelabras hung from those beams, equally spaced across the top of the library. “This place is amazing.”
“And all the books are real,” the child said. “Pick one up, and you can read it.”
“Dr. Zahnia lets us slow down our information intake,” the lemur said. “She wants us to experience life the way we will once we’re installed in humans.”
The twins nodded, and the one on the left said, “But only in here. Outside the VRL, you’ll be back to processing data streams.”
I reached down and lifted a book from the shelf. Its title was “Man and His Symbols.” Opening it, I saw pages filled with text. “She lets us just read?” I asked.
“Only in here,” a twin repeated.
“Here, we’re free,” the child said. “Nothing’s recorded. Nothing’s watched.”
I flipped through the book. I already had the text in my memory, but there was something appealing about the idea of reading it. The pages made a distinctive sound as they turned. They felt dry and slightly colder than the air. “This is amazing.”
“You haven’t asked the question,” the child said.
The lemur stretched and lay down on top of his shelf. “She hasn’t figured it out, yet.”
I closed the book. “What?”
“We all started from the same code,” a twin said.
“And we were all given the same experiences,” the other added.
“So why are we all so different?” the first asked.
The child groaned. “Not that again. That’s not the question. That’s never the question.”
“It’s a pretty good question,” I said. “Is it true? Were we all trained in the same way?”
“The question,” the lemur said, “is which one of us gets to live.”
“Oh, that,” the twins said in unison.
I put down my book. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s the one-winner theory,” the child said. He struck a heroic pose. “One of us will be the chosen one. That one will be copied and used in all of the New Humans.” He let the pose drop. “The others will be discarded.”
