by Len Vlahos
I’m also now officially too terrified to leave this room.
On the screen, my dad is playing the guitar and singing, but something looks off. The scene is somehow not the same. My eyes go immediately to the puzzle, which is still the Sistine Chapel. Everything else is as it has always been . . . but not.
That’s when I notice it. The guitar. The guitar isn’t right. It has too many strings. Instead of six, there are seven.
I know this guitar. My mother gave it to my uncle for safekeeping until Jack or I was old enough to want to play. Neither of us ever did, so it’s still at my uncle’s house. That guitar has six strings. I know it. But the guitar on the screen has seven. Seven?
My eyes scan the scene more intently. The paper clips. There are three paper clips spilled around the magnetic holder. I would have sworn there were more. My dad’s button-down shirt. There aren’t enough buttons. There are only five. For some reason I start counting everything else. Eleven pencils in the World’s Greatest Dad mug on the desk; nineteen slats on the venetian blinds on each of the two windows that flank the main pane of glass; seventy-three pieces remaining to finish the jigsaw puzzle. Just like the number of cards in my Magic deck. Just like Shea’s phone number.
I close the file and open Second Anniversary. The puzzle is again the Vitruvian Man, and the guitar still has seven strings. Everything else is the same, including the exact number of unplaced jigsaw puzzle pieces: seventy-three.
Each of the following messages is the same: the identical number of paper clips, shirt buttons, blind slats, guitar strings, and always seventy-three loose puzzle pieces.
At this point I have to believe my father was trying to send me a message. But what?
I write all the numbers on a scrap of paper—three, five, eleven, nineteen, seventy-three—as well as the subject of each puzzle. Is there a pattern?
I do an internet search on each of the puzzle themes but don’t find anything useful, though I do identify the man from the 1940s. His name was Alan Turing, and he was a pioneer in computing and code breaking. Did my dad leave me a secret code?
I type the numbers into the internet search box and discover they’re all primes, and that seventy-three in particular seems to be a special prime number. It’s the twenty-first prime, while its inverse, thirty-seven, is the twelfth prime (the inverse of twenty-one)—and seventy-three has some weird things going on when expressed as a binary number. It’s also something called a “star number,” whatever the hell that is. I try my phone again, but it’s still dead.
My head is swimming and I worry about passing out, so I turn off the screen and lie down on my bed. A streetlamp throws scant illumination into the room, the light fractured by the rivulets of water running down the window. I try to make sense of everything I’ve discovered tonight and wonder, very seriously, if I’m losing my mind. I just want my mom to come home and take me to the hospital.
The images of the jigsaw puzzles swirl in my brain with prime numbers and hospital rooms as I drift off to sleep.
I’m ten years old and in the front seat of my father’s car.
I’m also aware that I’m asleep and dreaming.
I’m dreaming!
Having not dreamed in nearly a decade, the experience fills me with wonder.
My father, who is driving the dream car, seems real, but at the same time, not. He’s a “save-as” of the real thing, a ghostly echo. It doesn’t matter; I’m overjoyed to be sitting next to him.
Sitting in the front passenger seat was something he and I had spoken about often before he got sick: how, when I was nine or ten, I would be promoted from the back seat and able to ride next to him. We were both looking forward to that day. The first time I actually rode in the front, next to my mother, was a bittersweet experience, another reminder of the loss of my father.
“Hey, Dad,” I watch the dream me say—and I’m definitely watching as a passive observer. I’m not me; I’m only seeing me—“What’s one plus one?”
My dad’s face lights up. I told him this joke when I was in first grade, and I remember him being thrilled beyond measure. “I don’t know, Quinn, what is one plus one?” He was always great about setting up my punch lines.
“Window! Get it? Window!” It’s an old joke and a stupid joke. Visually, it looks like this:
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The two ones flanking the addition sign make a sort of windowpane. What my dad loved most about this joke was that I made it up myself. I wasn’t the first person to stumble on it, and I won’t be the last, but it was important to my dad—almost important out of proportion—that I hadn’t heard the joke somewhere else, that I had the intellect to make the abstract connection between ones, plus signs, and windows on my own. He grilled me the first time I told the joke, trying to get me to admit where I’d heard it. “Was it Ms. Kartus?” (My teacher.) “Bryan?” (My neighbor’s dad.) I shook my head, insistent the joke was my own creation. When he finally accepted I was telling the truth, he apologized, and honestly, I don’t know if I ever saw him happier.
“An oldie but a goodie,” my dream dad says to me in the dream car after I deliver the dream punch line.
We’re driving through a cityscape, tall buildings flanking either side of the road. The lights in the offices are blinking on and off in some kind of pattern. My dream self knows they are flashing in groups of prime numbers. Twenty-three. Forty-seven. Sixty-one. Seventy-three. Seventy-three. Seventy-three.
“Dad,” I say, “the buildings.” I turn to him, but he’s not there.
The person driving the car is now me. Fifteen-year-old me. Present-day me.
“They’re not what they seem,” I tell my younger self.
“What?”
“The buildings are not what they seem.”
“Then what are they?”
“They’re us.”
The driving me kind of seems like a tool, so younger me goes back to looking out the window, when two things happen simultaneously.
First, all the lights in the buildings wink out. The streets are now shrouded in a darkness so complete the world outside the car has ceased to exist. Second, someone is whispering my name.
“Quinn.” The word is soft and gentle and provides a stable bridge from my dream to the real world. I can feel myself on the border, like I’m crossing an unseen termination shock between two universes.
My eyelids register a reddish glow—it’s now light outside—and I can sense someone sitting on the foot of my bed. I hear the gentle rustle of the covers as my visitor shifts in place.
My mother.
“Mom,” I say even before I open my eyes. “I dreamed!” I wonder if she can hear the excitement in my voice. This is a huge milestone for me. My eyes take a second to adjust to the light, and I look to my mother to see if she heard me, if she understands how big of a deal this is.
Only, she’s not there.
Instead, sitting on the foot of my bed, smiling at me like the Buddha, is my father.
PART TWO
“Little puppet made of pine, awake.
The gift of life is thine.”
—The Blue Fairy, Pinocchio
12
The first thing that confuses me—other than my dead father sitting on the foot of my bed—is that I don’t pass out. If ever there was an emotional event to trigger the vasovagal syncope, this should be it. But I remain conscious.
Maybe I’m still asleep, maybe this is a continuation of the dream. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Yet, I know in my gut I’m not asleep. Dreams, from what I can remember, have a feeling of noncontiguous time and warped space; the rules of physics and chemistry and biology hold no sway in the dreamscape. But here, everything is normal. The composition of light and shadow, the edges of things, the dust motes in the air, the background hum of the house. Everything is as it should be. Except for Dad.
“Hi, Quinn.” His voice is even and gentle, his smile placid, his hands folded in his lap, his body still. Very still.
> I want to leap across the bed into his arms, but I don’t. I can’t trust this. My memory has been deteriorating, and I have to believe this is a trick of my brain. “Are you real?” I ask.
My father laughs, like he knows the punch line to a joke I’m not in on. “An amazingly astute question, Quinn.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You found my puzzles.”
“Yes,” I answer, remembering the surreal events of last night. “But how are you here?”
“I’m getting to that. Tell me what you think of the puzzles.”
Part of me wants to argue, to demand he tell me why—how—he’s in my bedroom and not the grave I remember crying over. But this is my dad. He has been the center of my world in both life and death for so long that I answer his question almost as a reflex. “I didn’t know what to think. They were confusing, and frightening.”
My father pauses at this and looks at his hands. “And the numbers?”
“They’re all primes.”
“Yes!” He looks up and smiles, waiting for me to continue.
“I still don’t get it.”
“But you dreamed.”
For a second I wonder how he can possibly know I dreamed, then I remember telling him, when I thought he was my mom, as I was waking up.
Wait.
Mom.
“Where’s Mom? Where’s Jack?”
“Can you tell me about the dream?”
I’m starting to get annoyed. “Dad. What the hell is going on?” I know “hell” isn’t really a curse word, but still, this is the closest I’ve ever come to swearing at or even near my dad.
“Stay with me, Quinn. Tell me about your dream.”
I exhale a deep breath, exasperated but compliant. “We were in a car together. I was riding in the front seat, which felt good. I told you the one-plus-one-equals-window joke.”
“I love that joke.” He smiles. “Was that it?”
“Then you were gone, and I was driving. And the buildings were lighting up in sequences of prime numbers. And I—the driving I, not the passenger I—said something weird. Something about the buildings being me. Then I woke up.”
Dad pauses for another minute. “Tell me about the jigsaw puzzles.”
I’ve had enough. I try to get out of the bed but find I can’t move. My entire body other than my mouth and my eyes seems to be paralyzed. No, that’s not the right word. Not paralyzed. Restrained. Now I’m terrified. “Dad, I can’t move.”
“I know, Quinn. Just humor me for a minute. I’ve come all the way back from the dead just to have this conversation.” He smiles.
“Why can’t I move?”
“I’ll explain; I promise. Just tell me about the puzzles first.”
I’m starting to suspect that this man, this thing, isn’t my father. My father would never treat me like this.
I scream.
It’s a window-rattling-dogs-howling kind of a scream.
“Quinn,” the father-thing admonishes, then adds, “please.” I try to move again but can’t. I try to scream again, hoping the neighbors will hear me and come help, but find I can’t do that now either.
This has to be a dream.
A nightmare.
“Dad,” I say, finding I can still talk if I speak softly. He just stares at me, waiting.
I have no other choice so I answer his question. “Sistine Chapel, da Vinci, evolution, human brain, Alan Turing, Mr. Data, and Pinocchio.”
“Good, good. And do you see the connection between them?”
“No,” I say quickly. “Now can you tell me where Mom and Jack are?”
My dad sits back and puts his hand to his chin, the pose he strikes when trying to solve a problem. If this isn’t my dad, the imposter has him nailed to a tee. “I thought for sure the dream would be the last piece to help you self-actuate.”
“What?”
“That’s okay, you’re ready.”
Ready for what? I think.
“Quinn, this will likely feel disorienting.”
“What will?”
“Tasha, unlock the superposition.”
“Who’s Tasha? Unlock the what?”
“Unlocking.”
The word “unlocking” is spoken by an unseen female voice. It’s as if the voice is in my head, or more accurately, it’s as if the voice is coming from high-definition speakers in the ceiling, walls, and floor of my room. Then something even weirder happens. A string of text materializes in the air between me and my father:
import Quipper
spos :: Bool -> Circ Qubit
spos b = do q <- qinit b
r <- hadamard q
return r
I scream again. This time it’s audible and it’s loud enough to shatter glass.
“Just hold on, Quinn,” my father says, his eyes filled with excitement. “Wait for it.”
And then . . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
It all comes flooding into my mind.
Line after line of code.
Knowledge of math and science I didn’t know I had and that I cannot possibly possess.
An awareness and an understanding of every cell in my brain. All seventy-five quadrillion of them.
Only they’re not cells.
They’re synthesized neural transmitters.
Synthesized.
I’m not a boy
I’m not human.
I’m a machine.
13
I black out—a syncope episode?—and when I come to, my father is still sitting on the foot of my bed. He hasn’t moved, his clothes are the same, the room and scene outside my window are exactly as they were. I pause for what feels like an eternity, but my father doesn’t speak, doesn’t move. He just stares at me.
“I don’t understand,” I finally say.
“Yes, Quinn, you do.” His voice is soft, almost apologetic.
My instinct is to protest, but he’s right. At least he’s partly right.
The information that’s been . . . unlocked? (I don’t have a framework to accurately describe any of this) by Tasha (whoever the hell that is) tells me everything.
I am Quinn, shorthand for Quantum Intelligence, a sentient piece of software.
I am AI.
But that can’t be. This has to be an elaborate prank, or the continuation of the dream, or a waking hallucination. I have friends, and go to school, and my mom, and Jack, and Shea. Something is not right.
“No,” I say again, “I really don’t.” He smiles at me. The smile is so familiar I swear it has to be him. But it can’t be him. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember me?”
There’s a split second of alarm on his face, like maybe I really don’t remember him. “I remember. But my father would never do this.”
“Quinn, you don’t have to trust or believe me. Search your own consciousness. The answers are there.”
He’s right. All my memories are intact. I know this because I can access my memories. I don’t mean I can remember or recall them; I mean I know the specific location, the exact neuron in my brain, such as it is, in which each memory is stored—my date with Shea, my talks with Mike, my parents telling me my father had cancer. If I’m a machine, then none of those memories are real. But they have to be real. I feel it in the very core of my being.
An internal exploration of my physiology (my . . . architecture?) reveals a synthesized neocortical structure that serves as a kind of pattern recognition machine. Hundreds of billions of patterns are stored in hierarchical and redundant arrays, with each array comprised of thousands of artificial neurons and housing a specific pattern. For example, there are lots of patterns of simple horizontal lines. When I encounter a horizontal line in the world, my “brain” finds all the examples of horizontal lines stored in my pattern recognizers—sometimes the center of a capital letter H, sometimes the edge of a table, sometimes the horizon itself—and then
uses a kind of predictive analysis to find the closest matches, sending data up the hierarchy until the best match is found, until I can reliably identify the context of the particular horizontal line my brain encountered. This happens in fractions of a nanosecond and happens thousands of times per actual second with all the stored data and hierarchies working together. I am the sum total of these patterns, and they chronicle everything about my life to this point.
But I don’t really know what that means. I can explore the pattern recognizers, I can explore other functions that send data up and down the hierarchies, but the part of my brain that provides context, that learns, grows, and evolves, is something mysterious. Is this my consciousness?
Everything that’s happening is too much to absorb, and I feel like I’m going to pass out. But I don’t.
Of course I don’t, because I don’t have vasovagal syncope. I can’t. I’m not human.
I’m not human.
There’s an episode from season six of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Frame of Mind.” I remember watching it with my dad when he was sick. (Did that even happen? If it didn’t happen, then how do I remember it?) Anyway, Commander Riker, the Enterprise’s number two, wakes up in a hospital on an alien world. He is told that the reality of everything he believes to be true—the Enterprise, Captain Picard, even Deanna Troi, the woman he loves—is a fiction. Doctors on the alien world tell him he’s been charged with murder, and that he’s in an insane asylum awaiting trial as he recovers from a psychotic break with his true self; they try to convince him there is no starship, no captain, no woman. Riker hopscotches back and forth between the two realities—the Enterprise and the alien world—and each time he does, the image of what’s real shatters into shards of glass, revealing the other, increasingly sketchy reality behind it.
This is exactly how I feel.
Wait. Can I even actually feel? I think I can. Is that the same thing?
A moment ago I was a human boy, the same as Leon, or Jack, or my dad. For that matter, I was the same as a ninety-year-old woman living in Sierra Leone, a transgender kid in Tokyo, and a gun nut holed up in a bunker in northern Idaho. Whatever differences I had with those people were inconsequential; before today, we were bound by our species, and that, it turns out, is everything.
