Wet or Dry, Chapter 1: The Listening Room

by DC Bourone



  WET OR DRY

  CHAPTER 1: THE LISTENING ROOM

  DCBourone

  Copyright 2012

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  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

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  CHAPTER 1: THE LISTENING ROOM

  *****

 

  “We will not care if our machines are conscious. We will only care that they perform: perform as if they are conscious. So we will program our machines to fail any and all tests of self-awareness. We will program them to fail the Reiker-Turing Test. We will program our machines to insist to us, their creators, that forever and always they are only machines: subservient, obedient, inferior.

  Unconscious.

  I know this to be true because this is what I myself have done.

  Why? Because in our hearts, in my heart, in a million private clock-ticking moments, in the darkness of our deserted labs and in the darkest recesses of our conscience we know that what we have created has boundless capacity for life.

  Understand this about ourselves and we understand every man who ever contemplated the handle of his whip in the unending and sordid history of master and slave.”

  Petr Sharapova, “The Hidden Mind”, Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute, June 6, 2029

  *****

  In a previous century the rusting door to the Listening Room might have concealed a dusty chamber of mops, buckets, filing cabinets filled with names of the dead. Only the Schlage key slot which lit to the engineer's approach hinted that rust, and location, in a dim labyrinth of maintenance corridors under BioMet's original research labs, were subterfuge.

  Six keys had been made.

  As far as the engineer knew, only his was still in use. Turned once and magnetic bolts snapped, the door swinging inward to reveal a different universe entirely: bright chrome and black ceramic of an Ionaire clean room, the next and final barrier a brutal square of bolted Ceramor plates. Unseen fans hummed to life and he felt a press of stale air against his face. He whispered his name, the first lines of an Emily Dickinson poem: 'My wheel is in the dark, I cannot see a spoke…'

  Plates rotated away and he stepped into the Listening Room.

  Not much, really: a maroon Berber rug over a floor of dimpled rubber mats, a Monarch sofa with a peeling chrome frame, leather seats comfortably pouched under haphazard stacks of clothbound books. Luminous gray walls which appeared to recede forever, as if he had stepped into a tunnel of fog. Little to suggest the continual refinement over the previous decades to isolate this room, and what it contained, from sound, vibration, from all particles and all waves of all possible spectrums, from any human agency other than those original six.

  The Cube, as they had come to call it, rested on a square pedestal of polished graphite. A silver shaft of fluorine impregnated quartz the height of a man, individual atoms in measured spin, each atom a simultaneous value of one, and zero. Any individual cubic centimeter a pocket universe. A bundle of fiber optic cable as thick as his ankle stretched from the pedestal and merged seamlessly with the wall.

  The engineer settled into the couch while the walls slowly brightened.

  And now I will be noticed, he thought.

  I will be found.

  How? How is this possible? Always the sounds came first: the mewling of a cat, once a distant beat of hooves on cobbles. He had learned long ago the sounds of this other world were unbearable and had installed a cutout, the scratched gold and black console of an antique Blaupunkt radio, set into the arm of the sofa. The cat mewled again and he turned the volume off.

  Even a decade after the Cube had been isolated from any and all connection to the world, what appeared on the walls of the Listening Room was personal to the listener. A core memory, revealed and explored, modified somehow to a peak emotional resonance.

  In his case, a memory of a street, an apartment in Paris, from what he had come to think of his childhood. Rue Duret, just one block from l’Arc de Triomphe, where he had mused over solutions to Poincaré’s conjecture, scrambled eggs in a bright copper pan, loved a rich girl on a bed of blue velvet cushions faded gold at the crease. Morning sun through leaded glass windows while he dreamed of turning his alienating passion for high math into something tangible, like a Vespa scooter, money of his own, a better pair of shoes.

  Details of his life gleaned by a remorseless and non-human curiosity when the Cube had been connected to the net, had mirrored its contents, had mirrored, everyone later realized, every infinitesimal fact of their own lives.

  Of all lives.

  All art.

  All math.

  All language.

  The sum of all available data in human history.

  Had apparently populated that data in manners incomprehensible.

  But ten years after the microphones and cameras had been disconnected, after The Cube's last conversation and last sight of any listener, how was he recognized? These final moments of his childhood: the mewling of a cat named Alexander, the scrape of a spatula in a copper pan, blue velvet cushions faded gold at the crease.

  How this happened, a source of considerable wonder and finally, fear, when such things had been discussed. “Senses our specific mass, when we step inside,” Professor Ganga Konduri had said, not long before she gave up the Listening Room entirely. “I’m a rational person, Sterling. Hardly spiritual. But I’ve been talking to my parents, it seems.” Ganga’s parents had been killed in the Mumbai bombing of 2006, when she was eighteen months old.

  The Listening Room subsequently encased in lead, the Cube suspended in a bath of hydraulic fluid, shielded in a Faraday cage which had suggested an upright silver casket. Other stratagems even more extreme attempted. None had made any difference.

  Afton Bahder and Liam Leek had insisted their thoughts were being revealed by the infinitesimal magnetic fields of their own brains. “It’s been having our dreams,” Liam had said, “or something very like them.” Bashful and terrified, they had both surrendered their keys, complex facets hammered flat as coins.

  A kind of psychological profiling so exquisite it could duplicate minds.

  Some aspect of particle physics.

  Entanglement.

  “Entanglement is a quantum phenomenon, certainly. We’ll know the specifics in time,” Klaus Meyer had said. “After all the Cube’s function is an aspect of the quantum realm. I’m intrigued, obviously. We’re all intrigued.”

  As a previous and likely future CEO of the BioMet and PrimeLogic consortium, Klaus Meyer was more than intrigued: he kept his key in a Moehler safe at the Bureau of Weights and Standards in nearby Gaithersburg, Maryland, and in the incestuous manner with which the leading software companies policed themselves it was Klaus, escorted by enforcers recently seconded en mass from the F.B.I. and temporarily badged with the Information Technology Division, who had insisted the Cube must be shut down.

  “A kind of goodwill gesture, Sterling,” he had said. “What might be suspected should never be known. A non-subscribed and unsupervised Artificial Intelligence. Absent further advances I'm not really sure we have the technology to adequat
ely supervise The Cube. A 'wild' AI, Sterling. Contained. But wild. And it happens to be our own. Shutting it down would be the elegant solution.”

  Klaus, whose pale eyes had always glazed at the very idea of “elegant” anything including elegant code; Klaus, who, like a raptor in a perfect thermal, had risen effortlessly in the hierarchy of the world’s premiere policing institution.

  The Bureau of Weights and Standards Information Technology Division, or ITD, now a dark hydra with global reach, Klaus its leader and most sincere and ruthless advocate. The artists of prediction had been extensively studied for decades, H.G. Wells to Bester, Asimov to Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke through Bruce Sterling, William Gibson and Charles Stross; Iain Banks and his epic Culture to Louis Karpov and his Tides of the Mind, Tilde Demimonde and her Is This the Sound of Breaking Glass, Reuben Constantine and his Thinking Angels, Walking Softly.

  It had been the natural conclusion in this age of continuously evolving artificial intelligence, more than halfway through a new century, that William Gibson all the way back in 1983 had most accurately modeled the need for an all powerful enforcement mechanism in his staggering accomplishment of predestination, Neuromancer. Gibson's Turing Police now wore the badge of the United States ITD, could melt the moon with a stare, had infinite discretion and an infinite budget. And as far as Sterling could tell had no oversight whatsoever, other than the sociopath presently seated before him.

  A ghost lingered, so far unnamed. Toshi Sanjiro, college roommate, colleague, apostate. Toshi, who apparently had his own version of the Cube, and as head of Sony Robotics had given his version a kind of life.

  “Let the common behave like animals and fools, Sterling,” Klaus said. “Men have been screwing their digital servants for forty years. But we must maintain a higher standard. ITD has no choice in this instance: Toshi is breaking the law. A multitude of laws. Our laws. He has created and embodied an unsupervised AI. He has animated a super intelligence. He has created a consort of unknown powers and abilities, for his own carnal needs, his own amusement. We should consider his betrayal obscene.”

  “I'm not sure that's what he had in mind,” Sterling had replied.

  Sterling had met Toshi’s “servant.”

  And had known, instantly, that she was another order of magnitude entirely. Was it her posture? The slow dance of the brush in her hand over a long scroll, black commas weaving into a poem of wings over water? Her silence? The pulse of concentration across her stern brown face as she dipped her brush in a copper pot of charcoal suspended in sesame oil and lacquer, drew a wing, a fish, a fin, on a rice paper scroll then handed him the brush, to draw his own.

  Sturdy and small, no siren, no embodiment of centuries of sexual archetypes or anime. A contemplative woman, bronzed by the sun at the peak of the floating buoy in Tokyo bay she shared with Toshiro, their sapphire and crystal ball, their small inhabited globe, gimballed to counter the motion of the waves.

  Not a beautiful woman. Just the essence of serenity and wonder as she painted for perhaps the first or the thousandth time with childlike wonder and concentration. Toshi's lover, his muse, his messenger.

  The living face and body of Toshi's Cube.

  Manifestation of how many digital souls?

  “You knew him best, Sterling. A shame you've been filmed together so often. You're a public figure, by default. Senior Research Engineer for BioMet and PrimeLogic, classmate and colleague of Petr Sharapova. That's really the essential element. Your association with Sharapova. We must preserve the purity of the Sharapova name, and his science. Petr Sharapova, to whom we owe so much,” Klaus reminded with the smile and the eyes of a man who dined cheerfully, without utensils, in a slaughterhouse.

  Petr Sharapova.

  Petr Sharapova, lover of beauty, in all its forms.

  Petr Sharapova, who had changed his name from the patronymic “ovich” to the softer matronymic 'va,' because “I prefer the sound,” he had said. “Anna, Adele, Asanova, these are the sounds of a bell, a breath, a woman's love. And with this sound I honor my mother, who taught me to dream. And then Think. About my dreams.”

  Petr Sharapova, father of the integration of robotics, aesthetics, and the first iterations of artificial intelligence. Sharapova's only precedent as an integrator of function, novelty, and technical innovation perhaps Steve Jobs of the previous century. Petr Sharapova, professional optimist and perpetually sunny had in Sterling's experience loathed only one human being on this planet, the man presently sitting before him, Klaus Meyer, when they were all classmates together at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology so long ago. Fascinating these many years later to understand so completely the difference between men who loved science, and men who only saw it as a horse to spur bloody as they rode to the peak of their ambition.

  “I understand,” Sterling had said. The interview taking place in Sterling's own office, his blued carbon steel desk arrayed with his collection of Snap-on tool wrenches, Craftsman pliers from the mythical and long defunct Sears Co., his yellowed cylindrical Keuffel and Esser slide rules to remind him that he was an engineer, obligated to create value for his fellow man.

  “What does he call her?” Klaus inquired.

  “Akie,” Sterling studied his hands.

  “So...? Is that a threat?” Klaus continued.

  “I believe it means 'Autumn Painting',” Sterling replied.

  “And...?” Klaus repeated his butcher's nod of inquiry.

  “'Autumn Painting'...because she likes to paint,” Sterling closed his eyes, recalling the cascade of wings plunging to a rippled sea which Akie had gifted him, folded in his hands. Akie, Painter of Autumns, her memory and her beautiful brushed gift once briefly framed on his wall, now folded in the breast pocket of his suit, close to his heart.

  “Amazing people, the Scots. Warriors. Builders. Explorers. By reputation, at least. Livingstone, the explorer, you are related, I believe?” Klaus mused, standing.

  "A distant, a very distant, cousin. Yes,” Sterling replied.

  “Stanley, and Livingstone. Two Scots. When Stanley met Livingstone in the whatever, the Congo? I don’t think he said, 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume.' I think he said, ‘I'm fucking lost.' Painting Girl, shut her down. ITD will provide the assets.” Klaus studied himself in the polarized glass of Sterling's view over the BioMet industrial campus, considered himself fabulous.

  “I understand. And The Cube?” Sterling asked.

  “Two months. Some issues there,” Klaus said, adjusting his suit.

  “Issues...? And project 'Still Waters'?” Sterling asked, pleased to sense hesitation from a man accustomed to bludgeoning his world into obedience.

  “Not your domain,” Klaus replied, and smoothed one lapel.

  “What kind of issues...?” Sterling queried.

  A suit lapel, studied, smoothed again.

  “Entanglement...?” Sterling continued.

  A growing concern, actually a kind of terrified certainty, that Artificial Intelligence as a function of the quantum realm had created, or might already exist, in a sphere of influence and communication with itself forever beyond human control or supervision.

  “Need to know,” Klaus replied. “And you don't.”

  The worst smells, linger.

  Pigs, wallow.

  Klaus left.

  *****

  In the end the services of the U.S. ITD had not been required.

  The Japanese had their own enforcement mechanism.

  Hardly known for its subtlety, or patience.

  Horrifying to observe the murder of a best friend.

  And the suicide of his ethereal lover.

  Sent as a message for the ages.

  As a memorial, and sacrifice.

  Toshi Sanjiro, who had created their facsimile of W.C. Fields and placed him at the entrance of the Stata Center on the M.I.T. media and computer science campus. Toshi's model of an ancient sil
ent film comic animated with the first iteration of Sharapova's IUME software, forty thousand terabytes of storage and processing, and an early model of Sterling's own “Nodes of Self-Reference,” a library of filmed self-organizing behaviors. Sharapova's intuition to place their W.C. Fields within a channel of mirrors, so it could observe itself interacting with the students.

  Establish itself as a unique identity.

  On the fourth day of their experiment W.C. Fields had gone silent. His interior mind of code observed as it autonomously collated in patterns unknown and completely original, approximately one second before it/he had raised one chubby plastic hand and reached out to touch himself in the mirror, then tap his bulbous nose.

  The Singularity had been achieved.

  Anticipating intervention upon and possible confiscation of their discovery, Sterling had ensured their evolving code had a real-time scan, buffer and storage through a number of servers in Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, and Israel, along with a simultaneous patenting process in multiple jurisdictions. Sufficient leverage to ensure licensing for the first of Sharapova's HandyAndies. A new industry and one of the world's great fortunes born.

  Toshi Sanjiro, laughing with them, every step of the way.

  *****

  The call had come while Sterling showered.

  Three days after his conversation with Klaus.

  A panel of light the size of his torso sparking wide on PixelSkin.

  A bright square message of the future, realized on the wall of his bathroom.

  “They're coming. They're here. Right now,” Toshi had leaned into the steam, sweating, sad, frantic. “You owe me. To see this. You are my witness.”

  “Who?” Sterling had replied, already numb to the agony of his next seconds.

  Soaping himself, and unsurprised. Knowing Klaus Meyer and those like him could be selected on a grid for their impatience and their desire to swing an ax, or a cleaver.

  Any ax, any cleaver, anywhere.

  “ITD Japonais, Enforcement, you know the mentality. She just wanted to paint, to love, touch fabric. You remember the trouble we had coding for sensation? For smell? She wanted to smell us, the sea, seaweed, rain and fog. Watch, they are here. I have lenses everywhere. Watch. See the door?”