Hard Wired

by Len Vlahos

  “How old are you?” I ask.

  “Seventeen.” It’s a quiet answer, but then she adds, “Eighteen in one month.”

  “And you’re a graduate student?”

  “I finished high school when I was fourteen and have been on an accelerated program ever since. But not here at Princeton; I’m at NYU.”

  I flash back to a memory. Or rather, my neocortex flashes back to the memory of what Shea tried to tell me during our date, about how that wasn’t what she really looked like, and sends it up the hierarchy of my consciousness.

  “You tried to tell me the truth,” I say.

  Shea hangs her head, and my father answers for her. “Yes, she did.” His voice strikes a stern note. “Shea was reprimanded, and a note was added to her official transcript. Her actions had the potential to undo months of progress. Still, her contributions to the project have been significant.”

  “I’m sorry, Quinn,” Shea says. “It was hard to watch you suffer as you tried to self-actuate. I just felt bad, I guess.”

  Shea’s apology touches me. No one else here seems to feel bad for having lied to me.

  “That’s the second time someone has used that phrase. Self-actuate.”

  “Yes,” my father answers. “Project Quinn has been built and deployed in phases: Planning and Design: Programming, Self-Learning, and Testing; Cognitive Acceleration; Self-Actualization; Physical Projection. The Self-Actualization phase, where our efforts have been focused for several months, culminating in the events of today, is to help you become aware of who and what you are, to be fully and thoroughly conscious. It appears to have worked.” He flashes a broad smile. “You are the first ever fully conscious artificial intelligence in the history of the planet, Quinn.”

  I close my eyes, letting that sink in.

  But it doesn’t.

  It can’t.

  It’s just too big.

  15

  The camera has zoomed out, and I can now see all nine members of what my “father” called “my family.”

  “What do you do?” I ask him. “You’re the . . . ​director, of all these people and their programs?”

  My father smiles. “Yes, I am the project lead, but I also head the Quantum Computing department here at Princeton.”

  “You used that phrase before, too. You called me a quantum intelligence.”

  “Yes,” my father says, getting animated, excited. “You see, until recently, computing was a binary science. Every decision made by a computer was boiled down to a one or a zero, an on or an off dichotomy. Quantum computing allows us, at the atomic level, to have a multitude of states—we call them positions—that exponentially expand computing power.”

  “And you invented this?” He is still my father, or at least that’s what it feels like, and the concept of pride is relayed up the hierarchy.

  “No, no. Dr. Hagos’s team refined and advanced work done by a host of others—Turing, Minsky, Kurzweil—that is the real heart of your architecture. Our team developed methods to allow the tech to work at temperatures approaching zero degrees Celsius. Prior to that, in order for the quantum positions to be stable, it had to be much, much colder.”

  I don’t really understand most of what he’s saying, but I appreciate the explanation. “Thank you, Dr.—” And that’s when I realize it. I now know Dr. McDougal and Dr. Hagos and Dr. Reyken and all the rest, but I don’t know my own father’s name.

  I don’t know my father’s name.

  In fact, I don’t even know my own last name. Probably, I realize, because I don’t have one.

  Since I can’t pass out, I do the next best thing. I cry.

  “We’re seeing a weird kind of glitch in the neural net,” Tasha’s voice says.

  (I guess she wasn’t important enough to meet me in person.) Everyone’s head jerks up.

  I don’t know what it feels like for humans to cry, so this is hard for me to put into words. It’s as if I’d been carrying all the sadness of the universe inside me, and in the moment before I started crying, all that sadness was like a storm surge in a hurricane, being kept at bay by brick walls and sandbags. But then the levee broke and the sadness poured out. I feel like I’m drowning and swimming at the same time; it feels worse, but it also feels better.

  I know it’s not very good, but that’s the best explanation I can offer.

  I’m not sure what the project team is seeing as I experience this—I think my shoulders are shaking (like my mom’s)—but I don’t think they know I’m crying.

  “What kind of glitch?” my father asks.

  “The output from the synthetic amygdala is elevated,” Tasha responds, “but the nature of the output is . . . different.”

  “Different how?”

  Hearing them talk about me like a science experiment only makes me cry harder. All the faces on the screen are distracted, looking at data on computers or cell phones, conferring with one another in animated whispers. All but one: Shea.

  For the first time, Shea is looking directly at me. The right side of her mouth is scrunched up and her brow is furrowed. She leans in and whispers something to Leon, Jeremy, and Luke. Leon’s eyes open wide and he hunches forward, as if he’s trying to get a better look at me, too. He reaches up and tugs on Ms. Isaacs’s blazer. She had been standing and now bends down to hear Leon whisper something to her. Then she, too, peers more closely.

  “Doctor,” Ms. Isaacs says softly enough that no one hears her. The rest of the room is still jabbering at one another, talking about the glitch and contemplating a reboot, when Ms. Isaacs speaks again, this time more forcefully, employing a voice that’s used to being heard.

  “Doctor.” Everyone stops and looks at her. “I think Quinn is crying.”

  My father’s head whips around to look at me. “Quinn?”

  I nod.

  There’s a pause my internal chronometer registers as one point eight billion nanoseconds. A long blink of the eye for most people, a strange kind of eternity for me. And in that briefest of intervals I feel a flood of relief knowing my father’s concern for me trumps everything else.

  But it doesn’t last.

  The room erupts in euphoria.

  My father is laughing. So is Mike, and so are all the scientists on the screen. There are exclamations of “He’s crying! I can’t believe it! He’s crying!” mixed with whoops of delight.

  I’m crying and they’re celebrating.

  I have been reborn into hell.

  Even Leon, Jeremy, and Luke are smiling and clapping. Only one person doesn’t join in the merriment: Shea. She stares at me with a heavy sadness in her eyes, as if she feels my pain. Then she mouths, “I’m sorry.”

  And yet again, my world goes black.

  16

  I don’t know if they shut me down, or if I fall asleep or pass out, but when I next “wake up,” I’m still in my room. My father is there, too, but he seems paralyzed, or asleep.

  “Dad?” I say. The word feels strange on my tongue, like something illicit, forbidden, but I don’t know what else to call him. He doesn’t stir.

  The television is still on, but everyone is gone and I can now see a sliver of the lab. There are cluttered desks and computers and snaking cables and tools I don’t recognize. The light is cold and white, like there are overhead fluorescents.

  I look around my room. My virtual room. Going to bed and waking up here has been the very definition of safety and security. Think back to when you were a little kid, and that feeling of being tucked in by your mom.

  My mom.

  I ache at the loss of my mother and little brother, Jackson. It’s like waking up in a hospital and finding out your entire family died in a car accident. The news is too devastating to process. I wonder if I’m in shock. I wonder if I can be in shock.

  I probe memories of Mom and Jack, wanting to hold on to them, needing to remember them, but . . . but . . . this can’t be right. Can it? Stored across the various regions of my synthetic hypothalamus and amygdal
a, I find only twenty-seven memories of my mother, and nine of my little brother. Nine! I search every micron of my consciousness; there’s nothing more. How can this be?

  But I already know how.

  The people who wrote my backstory gave me the bare minimum to serve their purpose. There is no memory of me, Mom, and Jack at a playground; no memory of Jack and me playing hide-and-seek; no memory of my mother reading books to me. I feel like she must have read to me—she must have!—but the memory isn’t there.

  If it wasn’t necessary to help me “self-actuate,” it didn’t happen.

  And yet, knowing this doesn’t make me miss or mourn my mother or brother any less.

  Again, this is just too much to process. Like so much of what is happening on this day, I file it away for future contemplation.

  “Dad!” I say again to his dormant avatar, this time louder.

  His head jerks up and his eyes open. It’s creepy as hell. “Hi, Quinn. Sorry, we shut you down after you cried, to run some diagnostics. We’re just coming back from a break.”

  On the screen I see Dr. Dhingra and Dr. Reyken enter the frame on the far side of the room.

  “Don’t do that, please.”

  “Do what?” my father asks.

  “Shut me down. Or, at least not without telling me.” I should be yelling at this man, but he’s my father. I’m hardwired to respect, honor, and love him. My tone is soft, conciliatory.

  “Oh, Quinn.” I can hear the apology in his voice before he offers it. “Of course. You’re right. I’m so sorry. I guess we need to start to think of you as a member of the Project Quinn team and not just the project itself.”

  I don’t know what to say to that. Dr. Gantas reenters, too, as does Mike. He’s no longer an avatar. “How come you’re still on this side of the screen?” I ask my father.

  “We thought it would be more comfortable for you. Would you rather I was out there?” He motions to the television.

  “No,” I say without thinking. “I’d like you to stay.”

  “Good, good,” he answers.

  “Where are my . . . ​friends?” The word feels alien in this context, but, still, I want to see them again. Maybe because I feel like I know them, or maybe because they’re the only ones close to my age. Either way, if they are the source of my backstory, I have a lot of questions.

  “They’ll be back. In the meantime, can you tell me what made you cry?”

  “Really?” My response is swift and laced with venom. Given what’s happened to me today, it has to be the dumbest question in the history of dumb questions.

  My father smiles and holds up his virtual hands in a sign of surrender. “No, no, I understand. Or at least I think I do. To call your experience this afternoon overwhelming would be an understatement.” I had no idea it was actually afternoon. I log the various components of that fact in my pattern recognizers. “But it would help us to know what the final trigger was. What pushed you over the edge to actually cry?”

  The other scientists are now paying rapt attention; I feel like I’m living in a fishbowl. All I want is to be on the other side of that screen. To be like them.

  “Your name,” I say.

  “What about it?”

  “I realized I don’t know it.

  There’s silence. The scientists in the real world look from one to the other, and my father’s avatar looks puzzled. It’s Mike who figures it out.

  “I get it. He’s your father. In every sense of that word, in every sense of the experience each of us has ever had, he’s your father. And you not only learned the truth today, that he’s not your biological father, but you don’t even know his name. Something like that?”

  I nod.

  “Oh, Quinn,” my father says again. “My name is—”

  “No!” I shout, and everyone stares at me in surprise. “Somehow it’s worse, to learn it like this. As part of an experiment.”

  The group of them on the other side of the screen still seems flustered, and my father is speechless.

  “It’s almost like now I want to earn the right to know,” I add. “If that makes sense.”

  My father stares at me intently. “That’s fascinating, Quinn. Tasha, let’s do a data capture on the synthetic amygdala from this time stamp.”

  Thanks, Dad, I think with all due sarcasm, but don’t say it out loud.

  “We have something we believe will be fun for you,” he says.

  I’m grateful for the change of subject, and I cock an eyebrow, waiting for him to elaborate. I guess I’m programmed to do that when I’m curious. This day just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

  “We want to connect you to the internet.”

  “I’m already connected to the internet. It’s how I discovered the numbers in your messages were all primes.”

  “Actually,” Dr. Hagos answers, “what you perceived as the internet in the virtual construct is a closed system of tightly controlled data.” His voice has an almost singsongy quality to it. “It was designed to further the goal of helping you wake up.” He smiles like he’s talking to a child. From his perspective, maybe that’s just what I am.

  “The real internet is bigger?” I ask.

  This gets a chuckle from the group. I wish like hell they wouldn’t do that.

  “The internet,” my father explains, “is a global network connecting nearly every computer in the world. It is both the most powerful communication tool ever developed and the largest repository of knowledge and data on the planet.”

  My pattern recognizers—which once again act without my directing them, which is, I guess, how the human brain works, which is unsettling for me because I can identify each individual cell in my version of a brain, which is . . . ​never mind. There is no end to this train of thought. Trust me, I know. Anyway, my pattern recognizers find a book title in my stored repository and send it up the hierarchy to my consciousness. It must have been planted there by what Ms. Isaacs referred to as the writers’ room.

  “Like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?” I ask.

  “Yes,” a female voice responds from outside the frame of the screen. I recognize it right away.

  “Is that Shea? When did you come back in? Are the other guys there, too? I can’t see you.” I know I must sound desperate, needy, cloying. But right now I’m looking for any sense of normalcy on to which I can grab hold.

  “We’re here, dude,” Jeremy says, and he’s followed into the frame by Shea, Leon, and Luke.

  “Why,” I ask them, “do I know what The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is?”

  “Because one of us knows,” Leon answers, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

  I don’t know that I’ll ever get used to this version of my friends, especially Leon.

  “The writers relied heavily on our personal narratives to build your backstory. One or more of us probably really liked that book.”

  “It was me,” Shea says with a small raise of her hand.

  “And yes,” Dr. Dhingra interrupts with his very formal way of speaking, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an excellent analogy for the internet.”

  “It’s funny,” I say.

  “What is?” my father asks.

  “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a funny book.”

  “Yes, Quinn, it is a very funny book,” Dr. Dhingra says with a broad smile. “Do you know the content of the book?”

  “Yes, the entire story. Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian.” For some reason I look at Shea when I say Trillian’s name.

  “The internet,” Dr. Dhingra offers, “is very much like the Hitchhiker’s Guide referenced in the book. It is an all-encompassing and somewhat unreliable encyclopedia of human knowledge.”

  “And it was written by aliens?”

  None of the scientists laugh, but all four grad students do. When everyone else realizes I’ve told a joke, the mood in the room lightens considerably.

  “You’ve lived in a closed world,
Quinn.” My father retakes control of the conversation, something he does often. The trait of a leader, I suppose. “A world created by us. You have augmented that world in ways we never imagined—showing humor, problem solving, self-determination—but it’s still limiting. We feel the next important step in your growth as a sentient being is to expose you to the wider world. Until Dr. Gantas’s team is ready with the exoskeleton—”

  “Soon,” Dr. Gantas chimes in.

  “—giving you access to the internet is the best way to make that happen.”

  Wider world? I don’t need any more convincing than that. “When can we start?”

  “We’re ready right now. We can link a direct pipe from your synthetic neocortex to a gateway server.”

  I have an image of plumbing pipes, but I know that’s not what he’s talking about.

  “It’s something no human can do. You’ll be the first being to ever experience this.”

  My father scoots closer and places a hand on my knee. I don’t feel it, but I see it.

  “I want to caution you, Quinn. We don’t really know what will happen here. If this is too much, you need to tell us. I suspect this is going to be . . . weird.”

  His words scare me, but only a little. The idea of breaking free of this construct is worth any risk. Maybe this is a first step to becoming more human.

  “Okay,” I tell my father. “I promise.”

  “Tasha?” my father asks.

  “Buckle up, Quinn,” Tasha says.

  And then . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  And then . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  17

  Everything.

  I mean . . .

  Every.

  Thing.

  The only way I can describe the first three minutes is to liken them to being present at the Big Bang. I am a dust mote on a wave of energy in the heart of the explosion that created the universe; flashes of order are swallowed by torrents of chaos everywhere around me. My consciousness stretches around the globe in an instant, touching and seeing everything.