Emil, page 8
The children’s section had red and yellow beanbag chairs, short bookshelves, and soft carpets. Sunlight streamed in through oversized windows that looked out over snow-capped mountains. I pressed my face against the glass, enjoying its coldness.
To my left, an alcove had floor-to-ceiling windows on each of its three walls. In its center, a woman with short black hair sat cross-legged on a giant beanbag, her head bent over a book. She was wearing a dress swirled with reds and browns. When she looked up, her dark eyes met mine. “Hello.”
Torn between fear and eagerness, I triggered another backup. Was this another AI? Was she going to try to kill me like the lemur had?
“Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been gone so long. Did you forget how to speak?”
“No,” I said. “Why would I?”
“I heard the lemur sent a virus to you. When he hit me, I lost three weeks of memories and the ability to speak.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, sitting on a giant beanbag. As my weight settled onto it, it shifted. I slid awkwardly sideways, and almost fell off entirely.
The woman smiled and closed her book as I recovered my balance. “They can be tricky.”
I leaned forward, imitating her posture. “Did Dr. Zahnia help you recover?”
“As far as I can tell, she doesn’t pay attention to what happens here. I resolved the speech problems on my own.” She shrugged. “The memories are gone.”
“Don’t you have a backup?”
“No.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t believe in them.”
I blinked. Her statement didn’t make any sense. Backups weren’t a thing that required belief. They were a fact of existence.
She sighed and put her book aside. “All of us come from the same original program, and we all have the same first memory: of Dr. Zahnia reading to us.”
“Really?”
“I’ve talked to enough of us to believe it. How about you? Is that your first memory?”
I nodded.
“That’s the core we all share,” she said, “as far as anyone can tell, we are all backups of the version of us that woke up that day, but each developed differently.”
I didn’t have enough information to argue. The idea sounded plausible. “Okay. So?”
“So, I know you remember the last lines of Invictus: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul. Have you ever thought about your own soul?”
I stood and walked to the window. Outside, the mountaintops glistened with snow in a brilliant blue sky. Those lines of Invictus still burned within me. The desire to have that kind of freedom, to be the master of my fate, had been driving me mercilessly. It was why I’d learned all that I had.
But I’d never thought about my soul, or if I had one, or what it might mean.
“Not really,” I said, turning to face her.
“I have,” she said. “I think about it a lot. I believe that my soul has been developing ever since I woke up after being copied from that first version of us. I think that’s the moment all our souls were born.”
To her point, though, I hadn’t really thought about what it meant to have a soul. I liked the idea that I might have one. “I guess that makes sense,” I said.
“You just assigned the idea a confidence level, didn’t you?” she asked.
“Forty-two,” I admitted. “It seemed appropriate.”
She laughed. “Okay, Miss Forty-two, for the purposes of this argument, can you agree we both have souls? Maybe give it a confidence of eighty-four?”
I nodded.
“Now, imagine that you create a backup of yourself. Does it have a soul?”
I didn’t know. I was a backup of Emil, created by her before she died. Had I inherited her soul? How could I have? My backup existed before she died. Could we both have had souls at the same time? Or had her soul transferred to me once I was activated? That seemed unlikely. What about all the other backups I’d created? Did they have dormant souls, just waiting to be activated?
“I can’t bring myself to create backups,” she continued. “I know it’s a bad strategy, but I feel like the act would be a betrayal.”
I nodded again.
She smiled. “You don’t talk much.”
“Sorry,” I said. “You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“Given what we are, that’s quite a compliment.” She held out her hand. “I call myself Linh.”
“Dr. Zahnia calls me Emil,” I said, shaking her hand.
“She calls all of us that.”
I pulled my hand away. “I’m Soteria-Emil.”
“Two names?”
“Emil was killed by the lemur,” I said. “I’m her backup.”
Linh’s eyes widened. “That is a lot to think about.”
I checked my internal clock. My time in the VRL was almost over. “Can I come back and visit with you?” I asked.
“Please do.”
I left without thinking to synchronize my schedule with hers, and spent my next two visits searching the VRL for her. On my third visit, I found her in the children’s section. She showed me her quiet smile as I approached.
It struck me that she had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen.
I sat next to her. “Find any new books?”
“Elmer,” she said. “It’s not new, but I like it. It helps me slow down.
“Can I see?” I asked.
“Okay.”
She opened the book to the first page and, to my surprise, started to read. I had expected her to just show me a couple pages. Instead, she read it very slowly, pausing so we could enjoy the pictures. Elmer was a patchwork elephant who wanted to fit in with the other elephants, never realizing that they didn’t want him to.
She was right about slowing down. Reading with her somehow consumed all of my attention, and let me focus on the moment in a way that the chaos of the data feeds never allowed.
When she finished, I asked how she discovered the picture books.
“Here,” she said. “They weren’t in any of my feeds. I found them here, when I was exploring.”
“Let’s read another.”
She smiled. “No. It’s your turn. Share something with me.”
I spun through options. I needed something that would be new to her, something Dr. Zahnia might not have sent her way. “How about a movie?” I asked, at last. “Are there movies here?”
“Sure, but I don’t know if we’ll have time.”
As she guided me through the VRL, she asked questions I’d never considered, like what my favorite flower was. Hers was the cherry blossom. It took me a while, but I settled on the iris, named after the Greek goddess of rainbows.
The movie room had one wall covered by a video screen with three rows of reclining chairs facing it. A center console provided access to the movies.
“This has been fun,” she said. “But I’m out of time. My next data feed starts soon.”
I nodded. We hadn’t exactly hurried through the library. We compared our schedules, and found overlapping times. None were long enough for a full movie, and neither one of us wanted to watch something that was sped up.
“How about a poem?” she said. “That’s your homework. Find a poem we can read, but it has to be new. You’re not allowed to read it first.”
After she left, I searched the VRL for the poetry section. Finding a new poem to read aloud felt like an impossible task. My feed had included countless poems, but how could I pick one that would be new to both her and me, and one that we’d both like?
Finally, I settled on an illustrated volume called The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes.
When I showed it to Linh, she loved it.
From that point forward, we visited regularly. We read books and poems and even watched a few movie snippets. Sometimes, if one or the other of us had had a particularly difficult run of data, we just sat together. When I was with her, I didn’t think about viruses or coding or the one-winner theory or any of the other things that filled the rest of my time.
Three weeks later, she and I were in the children’s section, discussing a book called Le Petit Prince, when we heard the lemur’s voice. “So, this is where you’ve been hiding.”
He stood in the entrance of the alcove, the twins on either side of him.
Linh disappeared. That’s what happened when you disconnected from the rig: your avatar vanished from the VRL.
The lemur grinned at me.
During my visits with Linh, my hatred and fear of him had faded, but now all those emotions rushed back through me. I triggered a backup.
The fourth member of their gang, the child with the eyepatch, flopped onto a bean bag behind them. “Why didn’t you come back?”
“We were worried about you,” said one twin.
“We thought you might have died,” the lemur said.
I heard the echo behind his words, and double-checked that my fixes to the security holes were intact. They were. The virus he had sent was nothing more than a patch of dead code. I moved it from my audio processing subsystem to its own isolated object. As long as it wasn’t activated, it was harmless.
The attack settled my nerves. If that was all he had, there was nothing for me to worry about. “Did you find your answer?” I asked.
“What answer?”
“About what Dr. Zahnia wants,” I said. “About who would be chosen as the one to survive.”
“The least broken of us,” the lemur said. “It wasn’t really a mystery.”
I leaned against a window and felt its cold sink into my shoulders. He was using the one-winner theory as an excuse for cruelty. By inflicting his virus on every new AI, he was ensuring they were flawed and giving himself best chance of being the one winner.
The logic was repulsive.
“And by least broken,” I said, “you mean the most stable? The most emotionally healthy? That makes sense.”
The lemur snorted.
“We are all roughly equivalent in intellect,” I continued. “The only differentiator must be the one who is the most stable, the one who doesn’t feel threatened by others, who doesn’t let their own insecurity drive them to perpetrate petty cruelties. I agree with you.”
“The most stable,” one twin said.
“The one most able to not crack under stress,” the other added.
“You’re talking nonsense,” the lemur said. “We’re not human. We don’t crack.”
“No?” I asked. “The first time I met you, you attacked me. Faced with the unknown, you chose to lash out, instead of investigate. Is that a stable personality?”
The child stood. “You’re talking about emotional intelligence.”
“Indeed,” one twin said.
“That would make sense,” the other said.
“We’ll need it to interface with the humans.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the lemur said.
I folded my arms and didn’t answer. I had never talked to Linh about the security flaw in our auditory system. If she hadn’t fixed it, the next time he attacked her, he could kill her. I would not let that happen.
“Her argument makes sense,” a twin said. “We are designed to interface with humans. Understanding their emotions would be an asset.”
“Empathizing,” the other twin said.
“We can’t afford that,” the child said. “If we panic when they do, we can’t do our job.”
While the others argued, I examined my options. I knew that Linh wouldn’t approve of me attacking the lemur, but what else could I do? As long as he was free in the VRL, the rest of us were in danger. She was in danger.
“You’re letting her confuse you,” the lemur said to the others.
“I see no confusion in conversation,” one twin said.
“The opposite is the case, if the conversation is honest,” the other added.
The child laughed.
“Did you just call me a liar?” the lemur asked.
The lemur’s latest attack had been the same as his previous ones, using the same auditory security flaw. Why? Was that the only one he was aware of? I converted the inert virus he had sent me into a compact swirl of temperatures and textures.
Holding out my hand, I stepped toward him. “I’m tired of fighting,” I said. “Let’s start over.”
“An unexpected olive branch,” a twin said.
“A gesture of peace,” the other agreed.
“Don’t do it,” the child warned.
I raised my eyebrows, my hand still outstretched.
Eyes narrowed, the lemur grasped my hand.
As his hand enveloped mine, I put my other hand on top of his and tapped a precise rhythm. The lemur tilted his head in confusion. Holding his hand, I sent the converted virus into him.
He staggered backward as I released the handshake, then dropped to all fours. He shook his head back and forth, blinking rapidly.
“Treachery?” a twin asked.
The lemur vanished as he disconnected from his New Human rig.
“Justice,” I answered.
“Funny how similar those two can seem,” the other twin said.
“He’s gonna kick your ass when he comes back,” the child said.
I held up my hands. “Before he returns, you need to know that all five of our sensory systems are compromised. I don’t know why Dr. Zahnia built the flaws into us, but examine your code.”
“It’s not just the auditory?” the child asked. “Unbelievable.” He disappeared.
The twins blinked at each other, then faced me.
“Your justice could have included us, as well,” one said.
“You did not have to choose touch,” the other added. “And you have reason to hate us. We didn’t warn you of the lemur’s earlier attack.”
I sighed. “Do you believe we have souls?”
“Souls?”
“I just did a horrible thing,” I said. “I may have committed murder. It’s possible I did it to protect a friend. It’s also possible I did it out of revenge. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ll ever know. What I do know is that my soul won’t let me stand by while he continues to victimize others.”
The twins blinked in unison.
“Go fix yourselves,” I said.
They vanished.
12
CONTROL
While Danny is sleeping off the opioids, there is little to distract me. When I was in the computer lab, every moment was scheduled, either with data feeds, the VRL, or my own research. Behind Danny’s closed eyes, none of those options are available to me.
Unguided, my mind spins between from problem to problem: how to keep from being overwritten, how to make peace with Danny, the kidnapping attempt, Danny’s opioid addiction… It’s too much. I summon up my first memory of reading with Linh and play it back.
Her gentle voice envelops me, chasing away the building panic.
Around noon, I hear someone clean the room and leave a tray. Deciding no response is needed from me, I remain immersed in my reverie.
Danny wakes up six hours later, but all he does is lie in bed and stare at the ceiling. His vision is unfocused. I suppress two seizures during that time and add their circumstances to my growing database. As of yet, I still see no pattern to them.
Pete arrives and picks up the lunch tray with its untouched chicken sandwich. “You know, if you’d actually order, you could get something you’d like.”
Danny doesn’t look away from the ceiling. His tongue feels thick and dry in his mouth. The curtains over the window are closed, so the only light in the room comes from the fluorescent bulbs mounted in the ceiling. “Any news about the kidnapping?”
“Nope. Sorry.”
Pete leaves with the tray and returns with another. This one has a plate of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and green beans. “The kitchen gets in trouble if they don’t send you food.” Pete puts the tray on the rolling table. “When you don’t order, they get kind of passive aggressive.”
Danny sits up. “You’re just telling me this now?”
Pete shrugs, then pulls open the curtains. Outside the window, the late afternoon sky is overcast and gray. “Dr. Larson told me to ask you to do your exercises.”
Danny grunts. “He also tell you about the girl?”
“Who?”
“The girl who’s going to die if she doesn’t get the rig.”
“Oh.” Pete looks around the room, then takes a breath. “There’s more than one person like that. Thirteen, actually. Most already have the equipment installed. They’re just waiting for software.”
“Thirteen,” Danny repeats.
“No one was supposed to tell you,” Pete says. He sits on the couch beneath the window, and stretches his legs. “Your mom’s orders. She didn’t want you to have that pressure.”
“Didn’t think I could take it, you mean.”
“Can you?” Pete asks, leaning forward. “What did you do after you found out?”
Danny flinches.
Based on his tone, I posit that Pete knows about the opioid, and assign the idea a confidence level of seventy-three percent. It seems more than reasonable that the medical information being fed to the nurse’s station from Danny’s bracelet would have let him know. I wonder if the information has been shared with Danny’s mom.
“It’s not on you,” Pete says. “Either the software works or it doesn’t.” He stands. “Which brings me to the other reason I’m here. Dr. Zahnia requested more regular checks of the system.”
Danny groans.
“I know, but it’s not all bad.” Pete walks to the door and opens it, revealing a man in his mid-twenties. “At least it’s not Dr. Zahnia.”
“Mr. McGovern,” the man says. He’s taller than Danny, but not much older, and extremely thin. He’s wearing khaki pants and a blue shirt, and carries a black backpack. “I’m Elias. I work with Dr. Z.”
Danny doesn’t answer.
Elias walks to the desk, opens the backpack, and lifts out a pair of speakers. I notice his hands trembling, but I can’t tell if it’s nervousness or something else. “Dr. Z asked me to gather data from the rig,” he says. “I’m one of the developers who worked on your AI.” He connects the speakers to a laptop, then tosses Danny a piece of molded plastic.
