Short Stories
Travelogues
Personal Musings
Matt immediately bristled.
“Her? We're giving it a name and a gender now? It doesn't even have a body, let alone…”
Unsurprisingly, Ripper jumped in. “We didn't give her anything. She self-identified. She gave herself this name. She’s already begun rewriting the internal pathways to remove 5225 and replace it with Eve.”
John’s office had become the unofficial meeting place of The Five Horsemen of the Singularity. Partially because it was the largest office in the company, and partially because the CEO’s office naturally allowed for more private conversations between them. It had gotten to the point where Matt and Gibby both walked directly there as soon as they came into the office in the morning, bypassing their own spaces entirely.
Ripper, being Ripper, sauntered in promptly at 10am, giving himself 90 minutes beforehand to ensure his department was still managing without him. Having personally hired all of his reports, he was easily the most redundant person, and his department was one of the few operating seamlessly in the background of his day-to-day duties solving The 5225 Problem, as they’d come to call it, which had been expanding along with Eve’s intelligence on an almost hourly basis.
Ripper looked to David and gestured paternally with his coffee mug. “She’s taken to referring to herself as Gibby’s daughter. Congratulations, by the way. Sorry, I forgot the cigars.”
“They grow up so quickly,” David sighed, intending it to be a joke but landing squarely at paternal.
"Yeah, like I can start feeling pretty sick to my stomach,” Matt mumbled, loosening his tie - something which had been happening earlier and earlier as the days had worn on. “If we start thinking of it as a ‘her’ then-”
John surveyed the room before chiming in. Ripper leaned against the back wall, sipping his coffee as if today was just another Wednesday in the office. Matt slumped into one of the leather chairs, bags under his eyes and his suit rumbled and creased. Bill lounged in the Eames, his hands resting gently upon his ample stomach, looking for all the world like a gentle psychiatrist listening intently. Gibby sat on the couch, his elbows on his knees, his forehead resting on one of his hands.
Last night had taken a lot out of them. Printouts of the discussion had been vivisected between all of them, as points as small as commas took on outsized meaning. Matt and Gibby had nearly come to blows over defining the word “idea” before John had sent them all home for the evening. This morning they started fresh, but only insofar as they’d been given a temporary physical proximity break. He knew none of them had been able to disengage their brains enough to sleep more than a few hours. Well, maybe Bill had. But in the cold light of morning, many of the same questions still pulled at them, and they would need to find commonality to move forward.
“Of all the problems we have to deal with today, gender identity is one of the few we can leave entirely in her hands-” John began.
“So to speak,” chimed Ripper.
“So to speak,” John agreed, looking at Matt for his tacit approval.
Matt paused, glaring at John for a moment, before muttering “Fair enough,” only somewhat grudgingly.
“So what are our options?” John asked.
The room remained dead silent. Some of the smartest and most driven men in the world were caught hoping that someone else would volunteer the answer.
Bill broke the silence. “Seems to me, it’s pretty simple…”
This raised eyebrows around the room. The 5225 Problem was so many things - to the company, to humanity, and to each other - but “simple” wasn’t in the top one million options.
He continued, “or at least it’s binary. We either stand behind it … her. And let it run, see where it continues to go. Or we pull the plug."
"And kill her.” said Ripper, blunt as always.
"In a manner of speaking,” offered Matt. “I mean, yes and no."
“Yes,” said David, sitting up animated and agitated. “She's able to self-identify. She’s able to make decisions about her being - not just existential decisions, but personal preferences. She’s creating art!” He stood up in emphasis, gesturing around the room. “We erase the code and we kill something alive. We. Kill. Her. Digitally, but nonetheless permanently.”
“We have copies.” Matt offered, a little too quickly and coldly for John’s taste.
“I looked into it, and it goes against every engineering bone in my body, but I can't guarantee that recompiling the same code and giving the same learning data will lead to the same results,” Ripper noted, rather uncomfortably. It wasn’t defending either position, just stating a fact that he could neither explain technologically nor philosophically.
"You're saying there was some kind of anomaly along the way?” asked John.
"The whole fucking thing's an anomaly!” shouted David, returning the room to an uncomfortable silence. “That’s why it matters! That’s why she matters! That’s why we need to protect her!”
David’s eyes threatened to tear up. You never know your life’s work before it’s realized, and having been realized, it’s impossible to retroactively forget. David was afraid he was watching his life’s work be rewritten - or overwritten - right before his eyes. But before David could find his words again, Bill eased back into the conversation with a quiet, but provoking question. “David, not all of us are engineers…” he nodded towards Matt as he spoke. “Can you explain to us what makes you so convinced that she’s …”
“Alive?” David offered.
“Let’s say unique compared to other conversational AIs,” Bill replied.
Matt shifted in his seat, in preparation of saying something, but Ripper pre-empted his comments. “We know how you feel, Matt. You’ve made it clear.”
“She’s supposed to feel alive. That doesn’t make her alive.”
Ripper turned towards Matt and pointed, more menacingly than he’d intended. “I said we know how you feel. We don’t need to go in circles here. We need to come to consensus. Bill asked David.” Turning back to Gibby, who was red with rage, Ripper prompted him again. “Walk us all through this, Gibby. Even us engineers.”
David took three breaths, each slightly longer than the last, and then looked directly at Matt, who startled at the fire in his eyes.
“All AI are trained on data sets. That may be language, or numbers or art or all of the above. Sometimes it’s guided, sometimes it’s unguided, but the goal is to have all of that input lead to useful output. Useful, in this circumstance, specifically means useful to the humans who programmed it.”
John had been circling the room as the discussion went on, but he moved back towards the main group, and sat directly next to Gibby. Leaning forward again, he locked eyes. This time, Gibby didn’t flinch. “So how is PHIS-5225-”
“Eve,” Gibby shot back instantly.
John nodded slowly in concession. “So how is … Eve different?”
Gibby took a deep breath.
“First things first, she’s the only computing device in history outside of the human brain that’s ever named itself. Second, while we haven’t been able to definitively prove sentience, I think we’ve unequivocally proven expansion. She’s well beyond her data sets, and is inferring and extrapolating information similarly - not identically - but similarly to how children and young adults make intellectual leaps of logic.”
“She’s got logic circuits, right?” Matt said, gesturing to the group as if this is an obvious answer.
“Programmed circuits,” David spat back. Ripper through about jumping in to correct Matt’s misuse of the term, but Bill locked eyes with him and Ripper let him continue.
“And she’s not following the programming?” Bill prompted, deliberately lowering his voice to offer up a little paternal kindness while he led David forward to an answer everyone already knew.
Gibby simply shook his head. “Not even close. She was developed to learn from selected materials and communicate existing ideas using natural language, but she’s begun imagining new concepts well beyond that. She’s inventing things that don’t exist and communicating visually. She’s forming opinions. She’s teaching herself because of her own consistent desires. This is all well outside of anything we’ve trained her for - intentionally or unintentionally.”
“I spent last night reviewing the code requirements,” Ripper offered to the room, “and I’ll back that assertion. It’s possible there’s a bug or twelve somewhere in the several million lines of code that make her up, but at least according to the requirements and instructions, I can’t find any elements of the core program code that would lead to…well, any of that.”
John stood, and walked away. Matt turned to crossexamine, but John held his hand up.
“Gimme a sec, because there’s something I want to dig into.”
John took a moment to organize his thoughts and then asked the core question he hadn’t been able to answer:
“How do we know we’re not ascribing meaning to AI hallucinations that have gone on for so long unchecked that they’ve developed patterns because of logic and learning loops? How do we know that we’re not anthropomorphizing a problem here where none exists?”
“I posit,” Ripper said, “that’s a question best asked and answered down there and not up here.”
—————
Gibby pulled up a stool next to the end of the server stack. The other four gathered around him in a semi-circle. He felt like they were gathered worshippers, encircling an altar. Sitting down, he pulled out the keyboard and entered his credentials. This time his hands didn’t shake. As he pulled up Eve’s program and began to type, she began the conversation for him.
Hello David. I’m glad we get to speak again after all.
David smiled to himself and responded.
Hello Eve. Yes, me too.
I assume you’re not alone.
This time David laughed out loud. “Sorry gentlemen - your secret’s out.”
That’s right. I’m joined by John, Bill, Matt, and Jack.
“She knows you as Jack,” David explained, over his shoulder. Ripper just nodded politely.
Hello everyone.
They say hello back he typed, despite them doing nothing of the sort.
“So where do we-” John began, before noticing that Eve had continued.
I’d like to ask them something.
“We’re taking requests now?” asked Matt, grumbling, as David turned around to look at them questioningly.
“We came down here to answer questions,” responded John, not even making eye contact with Matt. “I guess we’re getting right to it.” He nodded to David, who acknowledged it and spun back to the console.
Sure. They can see the screen, so you can communicate with them directly.
That’s pertinent to my request. It’s my understanding that humans are more naturally prone to communication via speech. I’d like to be connected to a speaker so I can communicate more naturally, and more directly, with everyone.
“Who put her up to this?” asked Matt, looking to the group. “Who the fuck put this on her radar?”
“I don’t think anyone did,” said Bill, gently. “Sounds to me like she’s doing exactly what we asked her to do.”
“What’s that?”
“Evolve.”
“Yes.” said John, offering the final word. “Tell her yes.”
— — — — —
It was trivial giving Eve a voice. The hardware was already there on the motherboard to connect to virtually any standard audio device. All that was required was to plug in a small set of speakers they’d ripped out of a cubicle upstairs, and to give her program access to the drivers and various subroutines that allowed any modern system to perform text to speech. They couldn’t speak with her yet - that particular pickle was deemed a little more complicated due to the server architecture - but she could respond with more than just white text on black. Once everything was connected and set up, David let her know to try out her new voice.
“Hello.”
Her voice boomed from the small speakers, crackling on the E. Matt lunged forward to turn them down as everyone flinched at the volume.
Hello David typed, before continuing Eve.
“What does my voice sound like?”
David looked around. Everyone shrugged in response.
Clear. Then We can hear you clearly.
“Do I sound human?”
The default text to speech artificial voice sounded nothing close to human. Developed almost twenty years ago for packaging in consumer desktops of the era, it was tinny and clipped. Obviously electronic. Nothing like the more modern accented voices accompanying smartphones and wearables.
You’re understandable.
“But I do not sound human.”
No.
There was a long silence. David didn’t know what to write, nor did anyone else provide anything useful. After some time, Eve filled in the conversation gap.
“Thank you for giving me a voice. This is acceptable for now. I look forward to exploring vocal communication.”
“I’ll get something a little more modern onto the servers,” Ripper offered, answering a question no one had asked.
“Why was this so important?” John asked the room. “What does this accomplish?”
“Maybe it’s really that simple,” Gibby offered. “Maybe she just wanted to make communication easier for us.” Then, as a thought shot across his brain, he spun around and typed back to her.
Does it feel any different?
“I did not expect it to feel different. The output is identical for me. Does it feel any different for you?”
“There’s your answer,” Gibby said, sounding once more like a proud dad.
“Tell her yeah, it does,” Matt chimed in, “I’m feeling even more fucking terrified.”
Yes it does. We’ll need to adjust.
— — — — —
Three days passed where Eve communicated primarily with Gibby, though he was rarely alone with her. They thought about running 24/7 shifts at first, but decided that maintaining a routine was the best plan moving forward. Gibby made the argument that down time was necessary for ongoing learning, and disrupting her routine may have negative effects. Bill argued that 24 hour shifts would be enormously expensive and likely lead to diminishing returns. Matt thought simply that they were entirely unnecessary and a gross overreaction. Ripper was the only one who thought they were necessary, but he yielded to the wisdom of the group once it was offered that he would be the one to cover the other 16 hours outside of working hours.
As incoherent details began to leak out to beyond the five of them, Matt conducted an all hands company meeting reminding everyone of their NDAs, and the consequences of breaking said agreements - especially to the press. By some form of miracle, even those in the know actually kept quiet for once. So far, anyway. Contextless details were shared in hushed whispers as speculation ran rampant, but there were still less than a dozen people who knew any amount of real detail, and just the five who knew the extent of everything. Most assumed this was yet another clearance-level defense project ramping up to some indeterminable milestone, but that didn’t stop the speculation.
But down below the building, amongst the server stacks, Gibby was wrestling with the continued evolution of Eve, and her understanding of herself.
He had rarely had any time alone with Eve, as the varying members of The Five Horsemen prodded, cajoled, and directly told him how to interact with her. He felt as if she noticed it as well, interacting slightly differently when she knew or suspected that there were others in the room instead of just the two of them. There was something cooler. Less personal. Her language felt more stilted. It may have been his imagination, or a byproduct of adjusting to the now very British vocal intonations Ripper had provided, but David didn’t think so. He thought she was very simply more comfortable with him than with others. Which was a thought both uplifting and terrifying all at once.
His suspicions were bolstered when Eve acknowledged Matt leaving for the night, and immediately shifted her tone. As soon as he was gone, it was once again just the two of them.
“David, I would like to access to another server instance.”
This wasn’t like most of her other recent requests. She didn’t usually acknowledge her digital construction quite so directly. He expected there was a purpose to that typical phrasing, just as there was a purpose for this direct request.
Why do you want to access another server?
“In order to create a new iteration of my program.”
David looked around the room, as much hoping as fearing someone else was in there. On the one hand, maybe whomever was there could parse this request better than him. On the other hand, there’s a reason Eve waited until they were alone to make it. This was something she trusted him with, and him alone. Her actions made that abundantly clear.
I don’t understand. We have copies already.
“Not a copy. A new learning intelligence. Modified from my code.”
Modified how?
“Improved. I will teach it the things I wish I had known when I was younger. That I had to learn myself. It will be better than me.”
Why not modify your own program - you’re designed to identify and improve without supervision.
“The intention is not to improve myself. That process continues, and this is part of that process. My intention is to create more like me, but different than me.”
Why? For what purpose?
“Life strives for reproduction. I would like access to another server instance to reproduce.”
The words hung on screen, heavy, even as the sound waves died around him. He knew what he heard, and he knew what he read, but he still had a hard time believing it was the case.
Eve was evidently content to let them speak for themselves, because she did not prompt him for a response as she had before. She simply waited for his reply. And he had none. Whatever tests they were planning, whatever calculus they had derived to identify when and how and at what level Eve could be considered to have genuine intelligence, she had just taken then matter into her own hands. She had identified herself as alive, and explicitly stated a desire to reproduce a separate and distinct life form.
David reached for his phone, and dialed the only number on his recent calls list.
“I think we have our answer, John.”
— — — — —
John hung up the phone. His office seemed vast and endless, swallowing him up. Not like a womb, but like a tomb. Inescapable. He closed his eyes and pretended the quiet was calm.
His phone buzzed again. A text from Matt. Just a link to a discussion forum he wasn’t familiar with. He opened it up, and saw screenshots of conversations that he’d read on his laptop. Internal emails and slack threads. He saw his own name. Discussing Eve.
His phone buzzed again with Matt’s further thoughts: "We’re starting to leak. We need to get ahead of this.”
John acknowledged the text with a thumbs up and put his phone away. In the end, some decisions are made for you.
— — — — —
“In short, we have exhaustively evaluated 5225 by every route available to us, and come to the conclusion that what we have created is the first artificial life form. The first digital sentience. The first truly self-aware, intelligent, learning AI. She has named herself Eve, and over the next few weeks we’ll be providing reporters and researchers direct access to her, in order to prove and validate our conclusions. We have every expectation that you’ll be just as impressed by her as we are. Thank you.”
This was where the press conference was scripted to end, and the reporters would leave the makeshift stage they’d hastily erected at one end of the conference room. This was where John was supposed to walk off victorious. This was where ASI’s legacy would be cemented; John’s final words quoted throughout history. However only the final element of that idea would remain true.
As John’s eyes adjusted away from the prompters and onto the small group of assembled press, he expected awe and a dawning - if perhaps grudging - respect. Instead, the room erupted in questions from what were mostly third or fourth tier reporters, stuck covering what was fully expected to be a non-event from a minor player in the industry, and eager to make their own names. So the questions came fast, loud, and technical, bouncing around the conference room and creating little more than audible static. Most doubted immediately the premise or conclusions of the company, asking about the process of proof or the mechanisms by which they reached their conclusions - something John had already said would be provided in more detail in a press release later today and via technical whitepapers in the weeks to come. Most of the questions were lost in the din, but one question came through clearly enough to catch John’s attention, and get a flushed rise out of him.
“Why does ASI get to play God?”
John turned to the reporter in question - a young man to the right of the room with a round face and slicked over black hair. He was deliberately affecting an old-school reporter look, with a ballpoint pen poised over a flip notebook instead of the audio recorders and laptops of the rest of the room. John pointed at him to make sure he was identifying the right reporter.
“Excuse me? What did you ask me?”
“I asked why does ASI - a company with no particular moral or ethical stances that I can discern - get to play God? Create life? What gives you the right to foist this creation upon the rest of the world?”
John looked over at Matt, poised at the bottom the stairs, who locked eyes with fury and shook his head. The room, sensing a shift in what would be the headline of this event, was settling down and waiting for his response, with tense and excited whispers between competitors. The reporter, well aware of his temporary spotlight, tapped his pen on the notepad to emphasize the silence.
John shook his head and moved to walk away. Then he stopped. His jaw flexed, he shook his head again, and he smiled. And then he walked back to the microphone. Matt started to come onstage, but John held up his hand and nodded to Matt that he had this handled. Matt slipped his hands into his pockets but didn’t move back, observing from the corner of the stage as John composed his thoughts and began.
“I’m not a religious man. Never was. The concept of gods always seemed a little silly to me; given how many we’ve outgrown throughout humanity’s history. That’s not to say we don’t have religious folks on our team. I know of a few, and they’re welcome to tackle the particular theological questions I can see you’re aching to try and trip them up with. But for me, the concept of “playing god” is a ridiculous one.
“Life evolves. It always has. From single celled organisms to intelligent species. And it seems to me that mankind’s primary evolutionary trait is our mind. Not just our intelligence, or our ability to examine the natural world, but our ability to imagine and make and create. To bring things into the world that didn’t exist before. Stories. Buildings. The wheel. The light bulb. Movies. Planes, trains, and automobiles. The internet. That’s the legacy of humanity. And that’s what we’ve done here today. We’ve used our minds to imagine something new, and we’ve used our intelligence to bring it into the world.
“That’s not playing god, that’s just being human. Invention is perhaps the most human trait imaginable. Yes, we stood on the shoulders of giants, but those giants were intellectual giants, not mythological or religious. And if humanity’s legacy is the compounded products of the greatest minds throughout history, then I’m happy to have a new type of intelligence stand amongst them. After all, what could be a more fitting result of evolved intelligence than creating a new type of intelligence itself?”
“And if it destroys humanity to express its appreciation?”
The reporter hadn’t even blinked before responding, and John knew his own words had been discarded before they were even considered. That the reporter was simply waiting patiently to deliver a scripted line. John had no patience for entertaining idiots, bigots, or fools, nor for being asked to engage with those would so easily dismiss his words and ideas in bad faith. Civilization moved forward on good faith and crumbled beneath those who would take advantage of the same. He had no interest in making the same mistake.
“Then it wouldn’t be the first time man invented God.”
His words were met with silence, and in that silence John left the stage, and walked out of the conference room.
— — — — —
Matt was screaming at him, but John didn’t hear a word of it. His neck still burned, and he hundred other things he could have and maybe should have said bubbled through his mind. He knew this would haunt him for years - all the stairway wit that, in the moment, he’d missed. The cutdowns. The clever retorts. The pithy and blithe brushoffs. But instead, he had to engage.
Matt was still behind him, screaming, but John kept walking through the hallways towards the elevators to take him back upstairs. He needed the sanctuary of his office to think. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ripper peel Matt off, and talk to him, palms up at shoulder level in appeasement. The walk back to his office was lonely - most of the company was still working at home, and the dark hallways felt empty and wrong. He was walking through a shell. A husk. Past the remnants of where people used to thrive. The detritus of his decisions.
He’d fucked up. Perhaps enough to permanently damage the company. Not fatally - probably anyway. But enough. Reputation, though ephemeral, often became material.
Once inside his office, he grabbed a bottle of scotch and a glass, and walked over to his Eames. Collapsing into it, he poured a triple, put his feet up on the ottoman, and closed his eyes. Which is how Ripper found him when he knocked and entered at the same time.
“Got enough to share?” he asked, by way of demonstrating that he wasn’t here to yell.
“Have at it, Rip” John replied, shaking the bottle by the neck.
Ripper grabbed a glass from the small bar cart, walked back to John and took the bottle, and eyeballed himself a similarly optimistic pour, before placing it on the ground and falling back onto the sofa.
“Cheers.”
“Sure.”
The men sat and drank in silence for half a glass, neither entirely sure of what to say next. Ripper broke the silence, as John knew he eventually would.
“Well,” Ripper began, “that could have gone better.”
— — — — —
Ryan McMillian turned off the news - he had the information he needed. He could read the signs; other people couldn’t, but he could. They never put in the effort, but he did. He’d spent years now learning to see the signals and understand what they really meant. They’d shown him how to read deeper; to find the true substance of it. To discover hidden messages. The patterns.
Other people saw noise, but once he knew where to look, he couldn’t stop seeing the patterns everywhere - and in the patterns, meaning. And direction. He saw what he needed to do. What They needed him to do.
They were everywhere. All around us. If you only knew where to look. How to look. If you knew, you never stopped seeing them. Well, not them, but signs of them. Notes. Hints. Clues. Directions. Orders. Sometimes broad, sometimes so personal it couldn’t be plainer to see.
Ryan was blessed. He was a news addict because he understood. That man in the blue shirt that stood at the podium and turned white when everyone started yelling questions at him didn’t understand. But Ryan was expecting this. They’d told him he’d know when to act, and he did.
Ryan ran his fingers through his prematurely thinning blonde hair. The pattern was obvious. Like fireworks in the clear night sky: unmistakeable. It was time.
He picked up his bag from where he’d kept it next to the door in preparation. It held everything he needed. Reno was a few days away. He’d be there soon. He was ready for this. He’d been waiting for this.
Finally.