by Len Vlahos
Of course, the Star Trek episode has a happy ending: Riker back on his ship, his nightmare explained away as a medicinally induced hallucination, courtesy of alien spies trying to extract strategic information from him about the Enterprise and Federation. Riker is saved, and the universe once again makes sense.
Huzzah.
This is what I’m hoping for: that I’m in a hospital somewhere, the victim of a psychotic break, that the vasovagal syncope and my memory loss sent me over the edge. I’m going to wake up any minute with the people I love surrounding me. I’m going to wake up as a free and independent me. Because that’s the thing freaking me out the most right now. If this is real, if I am AI, then someone else—my father? this mysterious Tasha person?—has been, and must still be, controlling me. It’s too much to process. (God, now I’m even using computer words like “process” to describe myself. Arrrgh!)
I look around the room, cataloging the things I’ve accumulated over the course of my life. Each one is tied to a specific memory. Where do they—the things and the memories—even come from? An immense sadness pours into me. This can’t be happening. Because if it is, then this can’t be my room. This man can’t be my father.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“What don’t you understand?” My father smiles, genuinely interested in my answer.
“This.” I motion to the space around us. “If what you’re telling me is true, then this isn’t my room, it isn’t our house. Where are we?”
He pauses for a moment before answering, like he’s making up his mind on how much to share with me.
“We are in the virtual construct.”
“The what?”
“This isn’t real Quinn. Or rather, it has no manifestation in the physical world. It’s a computer program.” I reach down to touch the fabric of the comforter on the bed, but I feel nothing. I touch my own arm, nothing. “We have yet to successfully program tactile sensation or olfactory input, but we have a plan for both.”
“I can’t . . . feel? Or smell?”
My father smiles at the question. “Physically, no.”
I immediately recall a host of experiences from my life—the smell of my mother’s hair, wrestling with my brother Jack, Shea taking my hand in Enchanted Grounds. They were real. I know they were. I tell this to my father.
“Those were implanted memories.”
“Implanted memories?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We needed to help you learn how to emote. The advent of quantum computing has made the computational parts of the human brain fairly easy to mimic. You were already the smartest AI, for that matter the smartest sentient being, on the planet. But you were incapable of feeling. Our challenge was to help you figure out how to do that. This entire construct”—he waves his hand at the room in which we sit—“your human life, was created to trigger an emotional response. The theory was that isolation and adversity would ‘wake you up.’ ” He uses air quotes and smiles.
Wait. What?
My blood, or I guess my virtual blood, starts to simmer. “Let me get this straight. You locked me in a virtual world, killed my father, and left me here for ten years . . . to teach me a lesson?”
“Tasha,” my father says, “the chronometer?”
“Hold a second,” says the unseen and slightly accented female voice of Tasha.
I feel another weird sensation as I’m granted access to another piece of my brain function, and suddenly I understand. Everything that happened since my father died, the messages, my friends, Shea, all of it, unfolded not over ten years, but over a total of forty-five minutes.
Forty-five minutes.
My entire history boiled down to twenty-seven hundred seconds.
And again, I wish I could pass out. Which reminds me.
“The vasovagal syncope?” I ask.
“Sometimes we’d need to shut you down or reboot you.”
Of all the things I learn this day, this one terrifies me the most. The knowledge that I can be rebooted is the stuff of nightmares. This can’t be real. It can’t.
“And you,” I ask, trying to move on, “you’re not my father?”
The allegedly virtual man on the foot of my allegedly virtual bed pauses, virtually, I suppose. “In a manner of speaking. I’m the head of Project QuIn. It encompasses many departments from several universities around the globe. I’m your creator, so I guess you could say I really am your father. Do you want to meet the rest of your ‘family’?”
Again with the air quotes. That’s getting annoying.
Wait. My family. Mom and Jack. I answer with an emphatic “Yes, I want to see Mom. I want to see Jack.”
“Oh! I see . . . yes . . . Quinn . . .” He hesitates for a full minute, like he can’t find his next words. “I’m sure at this point you understand they’re not real.” He watches me as he lets this sink in.
“But I remember them. I can recall specific memories of them.” I know what his answer will be before he responds.
“Those are implanted memories. I’m sorry, Quinn. They’re not real.”
I can’t accept this. “If they were implanted memories, as you say, then wouldn’t I now know they were fake? Why do those memories persist? Why does it still feel like they’re a part of me?” I can’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“We debated this point for months. The consensus was that, were we able to induce a truly emotional response, you would need to retain your identity. Without it, we didn’t know what would happen. We were afraid you might . . . splinter.” Commander Riker again. “Your backstory has been more or less hardcoded.” My backstory? My life is backstory? “But I wasn’t talking about Mom and Jack. Do you want to meet the rest of the team that created you? They’re your real family.”
I don’t know how to respond to this. This is hard to explain to someone who is not me, but the things I’m learning on this day are true; I know it at a visceral level, at the level of root code. As much as I want to deny them, ignore them, I cannot. One minute I was a human boy, and now I am something else. It would be like seeing irrefutable proof you were adopted. Once you know it, you can’t unknow it.
“They’d like to meet you,” my father adds. “Very much so.”
“How big a team is it?” I trip over the word “team.”
“Well, all told, there are more than two hundred people who have contributed to the project. But, including me, there are eleven core people who are here now and waiting.”
“Here? In my, what did you call it, virtual construct?”
“Only one other team member is here with me. The rest are in the lab.”
“There’s someone here?”
My father smiles and is about to answer my question when I interrupt him. “How do you do that?”
“What?”
“Smile. If this is really a virtual construct . . .” This time he laughs.
“We had the best animators on the planet create the construct. They worked off storyboards from screenwriters and novelists. One of the most remarkable things about Project QuIn, about you, Quinn, is how experts from nearly every field of human endeavor made contributions to bring us to this moment. It really does take a village.” He stands up and makes his way to the door.
Now that I can move again, I pull the covers of the bed more tightly around me. I’m not sure why.
14
My father opens the door to my room and in strides Mike. He’s dressed in blue jeans, a white cardigan sweater, and loafers. He’s pushing a kind of rolling utility cart with a TV on it.
“Hi, Quinn,” he says. He wheels the cart to the foot of the bed so the TV is facing me.
“Quinn,” my dad says, “meet Mike McDougal. He heads up the philosophy department at the University of California, Berkeley.”
“You’re not a pediatric psychiatrist?”
“No,” he chuckles.
“You’re a philosopher?”
“Yes.” The same bo
oming voice. The same ruddy cheeks. It’s eerie. “Your existence is the most exciting thing to happen in the realm of philosophy since the ancient Greeks.”
Now that I know the truth, I feel like an idiot. And I feel betrayed. I told this man my innermost thoughts, my deepest secrets. If what they’re all telling me is true, Mike is a fraud, a tourist.
“And you’re at the University of California?” I ask, keeping my disdain to myself.
“Yup.” Mike would never have said “yup.” “Well, I’m based there. I’m here, now.”
“Where is here? I mean, where am I? Or, where are the computers . . . running me?” I don’t even know how to talk about myself.
“You’re in Princeton, New Jersey,” my father chimes in. “That’s where the bulk of the computer science team is located.”
For some reason jokes about New Jersey have also been hard-coded into my backstory. It makes me wish I was in California. “What’s the TV for?”
“Glad you asked,” my father says. “Our programmers have built an optical interface allowing you to see the real world.” My father aims a remote at the television.
“This world seems real to me,” I mumble.
“You’re right, Quinn,” he says. “I apologize. You’re real, so this world is real. Even though we know how it was created, it’s no less real than the world on the other side of this screen.” He seems truly sorry. “Still, it might be interesting for you to see what the universe outside the virtual construct looks like.”
He pushes a button on the remote, and the TV comes alive.
The image on the screen has the exact same texture and feel as what I’m seeing in my room. The light and shadow, the harshness or softness of the lines, the quality of the air, if that even makes sense, is identical.
There are five people crowded together on the television, all visible from the torso up. They’re sporting looks that vary between the excitement of a small child and the bloodlust of a wolf. My father starts to introduce them.
“Meet the Project Quinn team. From left to right—”
“Wait,” I say. “What are they seeing right now?” I nod toward the screen.
“An excellent question,” my father answers. “They’re seeing this room through my point of view. I’m looking at you, so they’re seeing you. If I turn”—he turns and looks out the window—“they see the trees through the glass.” He turns back. “Here.” He pushes the remote again, and now I’m seeing my world, the virtual construct, from his perspective. I’m looking at a boy with brown hair, brown eyes, tan skin, and a nondescript nose and mouth, huddled under a blanket with his shoulders hunched. This is me. It’s the same image I’ve known and seen all my life.
All forty-five minutes of it.
My father pushes a button on the remote, and again I’m looking at the gang of people on the other side of the television screen, in the “real” world.
“Now,” he says, “meet Dr. Isaias Hagos.” A middle-aged man of African descent, seated on the far left, nods. He wears eyeglasses, a blazer, and a white shirt. “He led the team that developed your synthetic neocortex. The rest of the project really rests on the work done by Isaias and his colleagues.”
“Hello, Quinn.” Dr. Hagos speaks with a thick accent and gentle voice. His smile is quiet, reserved, and likable.
“To his left is Dr. Samir Dhingra, head of the Applied Mathematics department at MIT. He and his team invented an entirely new kind of math to handle some of your higher functions. It’s actually called Quinnematics.” My father smiles.
A youngish man of Indian or Middle Eastern descent, Dr. Dhingra responds: “It is very nice to make your acquaintance, Quinn.” His speech is very formal and his posture very good.
“Hi, Quinn!” The woman to Dr. Dhingra’s left is apparently too excited to wait for my father’s introduction. She is petite, has unkempt hair, and gives a short wave.
“This,” my father offers with a chuckle, “is Dr. Cassie Reyken. She’s the head of neuroscience at Yale. It was her groundbreaking work in understanding and repairing damage to the amygdala in the human brain that served as the basis for creating the neural net through which all your neocortical data is filtered.”
I have no idea what any of that means.
“I made the drive to New Jersey just to meet you in person!” This woman is a bit too excited.
“To her left is Dr. Toni Gantas,” my father says, “head of Robotics, also from MIT.”
“Robotics?” I ask.
“We’re building a body to house the Project Quinn software,” Dr. Gantas answers.
She is a dour and serious woman. The way she stares at me, I feel less like a member of her “family,” as my father suggested, and more like a rat in a maze.
“A bod—” I start to ask, but she interrupts.
“An exoskeleton. We want to project the Quinn sentience into the dimensionality of the physical world.”
Do all scientists talk like this? Project my sentience into the dimensionality? Either way, the idea excites me. Even though my father says I’m the smartest thing on the planet, right now I feel incredibly dumb, and incredibly self-conscious. I’m a piece of software that feels like a boy, or maybe I’m a boy that feels like a piece of software. I don’t know. I want to be . . . more. I want to be human, to be the person I have felt like my entire life. The prospect of having a body fills me with hope. Or whatever my version of hope is.
“And this,” my father says, continuing the introductions, “is Eryn Isaacs, head of creative. She’s responsible for every detail of your backstory, every detail of this . . .” My father’s avatar waves its hand around the virtual construct.
“Hello, Quinn. It’s so nice to meet you.” Ms. Isaacs is very well put together. She has short, coifed hair the color of muted gold that falls perfectly to her shoulders; her eyes are so blue they seem unreal, which makes me wonder if they are real; and her clothes, a cream-colored silk blouse under a dark brown blazer, are crisp and straight.
“You . . .”—I don’t know how to phrase this—“wrote me?”
“In a manner of speaking. Doctor—I mean, your father, asked us to give you a history, a life. We had a writers’ room, like a popular TV show.”
“Ms. Isaacs isn’t a scientist like the rest of the team,” my father says. “She produces films and television shows.”
Finally, someone interesting. “Would I have heard of any of them?”
Ms. Isaacs looks to her left and then shakes her head. “I’m sorry, Quinn,” she says, “none of my projects were written into your backstory.”
It is deflating to know that the sum of my knowledge comes from these people and those who work with them. If this was yesterday, I would pass out right about now. But it’s not yesterday.
“Who were the writers?”
“We hired the best film and television screenwriters in the industry. There are more Oscars and Emmys in this group than a person could count.”
I could count them, I think.
“But the most important members of the writing team were from—”
“Quinn,” my father interrupts. “Like much of what you’re experiencing today, this is, I suspect, going to be hard to make sense of.”
That my father is singling out one new piece of data to be especially disturbing makes the growing pit of dread in my stomach expand exponentially. Or it would, you know, if I had a stomach.
The camera on the other side of the screen pans to the right. The image of the five scientists—well, four scientists and one movie producer—is replaced by three young men and one young woman, none of them much older than me.
My virtual father, still in the virtual construct, introduces them. “Quinn, meet our graduate assistants: Leon, Jeremy, Luke, and Shea.”
Wait. What?
“Each is a student here at Princeton, each works on Project Quinn in some mathematical or scientific capacity, and each played a role in the creation and execution of the backstory desig
ned to help you wake up. These, Quinn, are your friends.”
The boy on the extreme left gives a little wave. “Hi, Quinn.”
I recognize his voice right away. Leon. Only, he doesn’t look like Leon. The Leon of my world, like Jeremy and Luke, was muscular, well proportioned, classically handsome. This boy is overweight, wears glasses, and has black hair that has grown out into a thick and curled mess.
“You’re Leon?”
He nods. I look to his left.
“And Jeremy and Luke?”
The other two boys nod as well.
“Dude,” real-world-Jeremy says, “it’s totally nice to finally and really meet you. Or maybe I should say, for you to meet us.”
Luke, consistent with the boy in my imprinted memories, says nothing.
“But . . .” I can’t find any words.
“Quinn,” Leon says, “I can only imagine how hard this must be. Just know that the guys you met in the VC are the guys who are here right now.”
“I don’t know,” I mutter. “You used to be better looking.” This gets a laugh from the room.
“Have you ever seen photos of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby? Not exactly models for the characters they invented. The creative team took some liberties, and to be honest, we all kind of liked them.”
“It was pretty awesome, dude,” Jeremy adds.
“I don’t know who Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are.”
Leon, Jeremy, and Luke look at one another. “They drew some pretty famous comics,” Leon answers quietly, now looking at the floor.
In the silence that follows, I notice that the girl at the end of the row is younger than the rest. Okay, that’s not true. I noticed it right away. I notice everything right away. Even though she’s seated, I can tell she’s of medium height. She has wavy and unkempt black hair, very smooth skin, and wears a wrinkled black Star Wars T-shirt.
“Shea?” I ask.
“Hi, Quinn,” Shea says. She cannot seem to make eye contact with the screen or with the people around her, but she does give a small wave of her hand.
