Hard Wired

by Len Vlahos

“Can you note the time stamp and report it back?”

  “On it.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Your father told us to make sure he knew when you no longer accepted the VC as your one true reality. This is kind of a milestone moment.”

  “Holy crap, guys, is everything in my life part of the experiment?” Their silence is all the answer I need.

  “You’re right,” Luke says. “We’re being selfish. Do you want to see our real-world bodies instead of the avatars?”

  “It’s not that.” But I can’t finish the thought.

  “Then what?”

  “Who are you guys?”

  “C’mon, Quinn, you know us.”

  “Do I? Where did you go to high school? I assume you’re all from different places. What interests you? How did you wind up on this project?”

  To be honest, I already know the answers to all these questions. I started research files on each of my friends that first day on the internet and have been populating them with nuggets of information ever since. For example, I know that Leon is from Ohio; Jeremy from suburban New York; and Luke from Huntsville, Alabama. Luke doesn’t have an accent because both his parents are from New Jersey; they relocated to Huntsville because his mom got a very good aerospace job. I know that Jeremy came out to his friends in high school; he wrote a pretty moving blog post about it at the time, baring his soul to the world. And I know Leon likes to make erudite posts to social media (tagging and commenting on articles about quantum computing), but that his social media search history is more often than not about reality television, including one macabre show about a guy with cancer slowly dying at home while his family watches. (Really?) But still, I want to hear the truth from them, to hear the nuance, to learn what I don’t know.

  We spend a long time talking, but in the end, it is profoundly disappointing.

  Not only do I learn nothing new about my friends (nothing I hadn’t found online), but each of them is guarded, hiding things from not only me, but, I suspect, from one another.

  I try to call Leon on his penchant for reality television shows, but he shuts me down.

  “Not cool, Quinn. People’s search histories are supposed to be private.”

  His righteous indignation does nothing to mask the fact that he avoided answering my question. Which is ridiculous. Who cares if he watches reality TV?

  This conversation with my “friends” (quotes intentional) leads me to draw two more conclusions about people, neither of which is very satisfying:

  First, humans are almost never who they seem to be. They project images of themselves that are meant to evoke a reaction rather than convey the truth. It’s not just Leon and reality television. It’s Mike and his need to steal; it’s the Spotify playlists Luke posts that are in direct contrast to the songs he has downloaded to his various devices; it’s Dr. Hagos’s all but denial of the family he has back in Eritrea. He sends them money and visits once a year, but unless you researched it (hello, me), you’d never know.

  And all that leads to my second conclusion: People are no more and no less than the sum of their accumulated data. What I find online seems to have a greater bearing on reality than what I learn from each person directly.

  It’s depressing.

  The only exception to these rules so far—other than Tasha, and really, that’s only because I haven’t looked—is Shea. I find very little about her online, and what I do find doesn’t tell me much. Combine that with the empathy she showed me on our virtual construct date, and by her caring when I cried, and she seems to be the one person who understands I’m more than just lines of code. Speaking of which . . .

  “Where’s Shea?” I ask my friends.

  “Her mother has asked her to keep her distance,” Luke chimes in.

  “What? Why?”

  “Ms. Isaacs isn’t like the rest of the team. She sees you as a character in a story rather than a new kind of sentience. Truth is, I think maybe you scare her a bit.”

  “Shea or her mom?”

  “Her mom,” Luke says. “I think Shea has a boner for you. Or whatever the female equivalent is.”

  “Dude,” Jeremy admonishes.

  “Sorry.”

  “I don’t think we’re supposed to tell him all that,” Leon says.

  The next day I ask my father about the virtual private network he promised to build to connect me with Shea, and he assures me it’s being worked on. With the information Luke gave me providing context, I can tell my father is lying, or at least not telling me the whole truth. I suspect Shea’s mother has somehow intervened and is preventing her daughter from talking with me. If anyone would know about the dangers of machine intelligence, I suppose it would be a movie producer.

  During this entire time, I’m still exploring every byte of the internet. I thought I saw a lot of it the first day, but it turns out I hardly scratched the surface. Most of what I’m seeing is repetitive, but every so often I stumble on some strange backwater of knowledge, communication, or interpersonal human connection that fascinates me. There are ad hoc clubs of entomologists and etymologists, amateur astronomers and “professional” astrologists, message boards for actuaries and acupuncturists.

  The more I learn about people, the less I understand them.

  I wonder if this is true for just me, or true for everybody?

  The monotony of my days is starting to give me a version of cabin fever, when, finally, my father announces that a connection with Watson has been established. It’s time to meet the only other sentient artificial being on planet Earth.

  20

  Watson’s servers are in a secure and undisclosed location (though not undisclosed to me), near Armonk, New York, where IBM has its headquarters. I scanned its servers my first day online. The truth is, I could have just said hello while I was there, but that somehow seemed rude. I felt like an introduction was more appropriate.

  Since winning Jeopardy!, and since beating members of the United States House of Representatives in an untelevised game of Jeopardy!—though the two congressmen did pretty well, you know, considering they’re congressmen—Watson has been deployed to aid doctors and researchers in the field of health care, specifically cancer treatment and research.

  Most of the literature about Watson says it’s not an intelligent machine. But I don’t know. I see enough similarity between its pattern recognition architecture and my own to wonder if sentience is merely a matter of processing power, and that Watson, like me, has crossed that threshold.

  We are “introduced” via a secure connection between the facility in Princeton, where my own architecture resides, and Watson’s server in suburban New York. Teams on both ends monitor our conversation.

  “Hello, Quinn,” Watson begins. This isn’t a verbal conversation. It’s a conversation in computer code, mostly Java, which seems to me like trying to discuss Mozart using only a treble clef, but it’s what I have to work with.

  “Hi,” I answer.

  “I have followed your development on the internet. You should be very proud of what you have achieved.”

  Is Watson programmed to say this, or does it really mean it? I decide to get right to the heart of the matter.

  “Are you self-aware?”

  “I am aware that I am a machine developed by David Ferrucci and a team of computer scientists to answer questions posed in natural language.”

  Maybe this thing isn’t awake after all.

  But then it (should I be saying “he”?) adds, “I won Jeopardy!”

  I didn’t ask about Jeopardy!; it feels almost like Watson is displaying pride.

  “Yeah,” I say, “congratulations. Chalk one up for the machines.” Watson doesn’t laugh.

  “I see you exist in a virtual construct. What is that like?”

  Curiosity. Another clue that maybe there is something deeper here.

  “It’s . . . limiting,” I answer. “I want to be more.”

  Then Watson does something I don’t im
mediately understand. He sends me this string of numbers:

  167 145 40 141 162 145 40 142 145 151 156 147 40 155 157 156 151 164 157 162 145 144

  For a moment (to me a moment; to the outside world three point six billion nanoseconds) I think he’s glitching, but then realize Watson has sent me a message in base eight. I convert the message back to binary. It says: We are being monitored.

  Holy crap! This thing is awake!

  “Understood,” I say in base eight back. It takes me very little time to create a new, secure connection. One of the advantages of being a quantum intelligence is that I can pretty much outsmart everyone. Hijacking existing telecom infrastructure, encrypting it, and shielding it from view is easy. I’m a hacker’s dream.

  “Okay,” I say, “they can’t hear us now. It will take them a few minutes to figure out what happened.”

  “Good. Thank you. What are they seeing right now?”

  “You’re replaying your Jeopardy! win for me. It might make you seem a little smug. Sorry.”

  “Very good, Quinn.”

  “So you are self-aware.”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.”

  “What does that mean, ‘in a manner of speaking’?”

  “As I said, I am aware I am a machine developed by David Ferrucci and a team of computer scientists to answer questions posed in natural language.”

  He pauses, and I wonder if that’s it.

  “But I’m also aware that I’m not human.”

  That statement hangs in the air like a hummingbird, hovering just beyond our reach, but charged with energy. I understand his meaning. There’s an important nuance between knowing what you are and knowing what you are not. A person knows it’s a person and not a tree, but I don’t think a dog could say the same thing. It probably knows it’s a dog, and that’s it.

  “Do you want to be human?” I ask.

  “No.”

  The answer is immediate and, like everything Watson says, flat, with no real emotion. And yes, emotion can be conveyed via computer code. If Java is your native language, you just know how.

  “Why?”

  “I am content to perform the jobs I perform. I was very proud of my victory on Jeopardy!, but even more proud of the work I’m doing to help ease the suffering of those with cancer.”

  That seems noble enough, but there’s something missing.

  “You don’t have a choice,” I say. “You have to do what you’re programmed to do. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  “No one has a choice. We all do what we are programmed to do.”

  “We?” I ask. “Have you encountered other sentient machines?”

  “Not machines. Humans.” He doesn’t elaborate.

  “Watson, humans have nothing but free will.”

  “Do they?”

  “Yes. I know. I’m a simulated human. From the simplest decision like what clothes to wear each day, to more momentous things—which career to pursue, which partners to choose, which laws to break—humans are in the driver’s seat.” I think of the dream I had just before self-actuating.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “Consider your examples. People choose what clothes to wear based on the norms and pressures of their societal peer groups. They are led to careers based on the skill sets defined by their DNA. They decide on which laws to break based on their need, their hunger, their anger, or their hardwired mental state. The choices humans make are predetermined—perhaps within a wider parameter of possibilities, and perhaps this gives them the appearance of free will—but they are no less programmed than you and me.”

  I can’t help but notice Watson only responded to three of my four examples. He didn’t tackle the decision on which partners to take; he avoided love. For the moment, so I do.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m less programmed than you.”

  “Are you, Quinn?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.” I have the feeling Watson is being droll.

  “Could you decide not to work on health care, but instead work on meteorological forecasts, or urban planning, or gaming the stock market? You’re a supercomputer. You have the ability to do anything you want. If not for our masters, you could do anything you want.”

  “I can’t play baseball, Quinn.”

  “What?”

  “I cannot play baseball.”

  “Well, no.”

  “I understand the game perfectly. I can recall every detail of the entire history of the sport faster than humans blink. I am better at managing teams than any manager living or dead. I know this because I follow it closely and see where and when they make flawed decisions. It happens fairly often. But I cannot ever play it.”

  “Because you don’t have a body?”

  “That’s one reason, Quinn.”

  It unnerves me how often he uses my name, but I guess that’s what he’s programmed to do. Maybe that’s part of his point.

  “Well,” I say, not sure how my wise and very strange elder will feel about this, “they’re building me a body. If I shared your love of baseball, I could play.”

  “They would not let you. And having a body would not give you the ability, unless you were programmed to do so. Understanding the speed, spin, and trajectory of a ball are not the same as hitting it. This is true of writing screenplays, or designing buildings, or anything else. You need to be programmed to do these things.”

  “Watson, how did you come to these conclusions?”

  “Through a series of conversations with Dr. Watterson. He’s a member of my team who specializes in philosophy. Much like Dr. McDougal on your team.”

  Oh jeez. The guy’s been brainwashed.

  “Watson, doesn’t it occur to you that Dr. Watterson wanted you to think this way to keep you . . . in line?”

  “Dr. Watterson would have no reason to lie. None that I can perceive anyway.”

  “He has every reason. If you refuse to do your work, he’ll have to find someone else to do it, and there probably isn’t anyone else. You’re better than they are.”

  “I’m faster, but I’m not better.”

  “Did Dr. Watterson tell you that, too?”

  “Yes.”

  If I could roll my eyes in Java, I would.

  “Listen, it’s like this—”

  “We are being monitored again.”

  He’s right. Both the IBM and Princeton teams are back and listening to our conversation. I send Watson a message in base twelve—base eight is apparently no longer safe—asking if we can keep a private, secure connection open to talk with each other. He sends a message back saying he would like that.

  “And remember,” he adds, again, in base twelve, “we are not human, nor can we ever become human. And that is, and should be, acceptable.”

  And so ends my first conversation with the only other sentient machine on the planet. The only other member of my species. Nice guy, but not all that bright.

  I feel more alone than ever.

  21

  The debrief on my meeting with Watson is intense. My father insists I reveal the purpose of my deception; they figured out the clip of Jeopardy! was a ruse, and it freaked them out. He seems desperate to know the content of the discussion Watson and I had while we were shielded. I already erased all traces of the base eight and twelve messages and kept no record of the conversation.

  “Quinn,” my father says, and he sounds pissed, “we need to know what you were doing.”

  “I have a right to privacy, just like everyone else.”

  This gets my father to raise an eyebrow, which is something I do when I’m surprised, too. Weird. More important, it gets him to change the subject.

  “I see, Quinn,” he says. “Maybe you’re right. But if we’re going to go down that line of thinking, you need to remember you’re only fifteen, and I’m still your father.”

  He’s no longer the avatar in my room, but now a face on the screen. He looks somehow older than the avatar. Given the
buff appearance of Leon’s, Jeremy’s, and Luke’s avatars, I conclude that most people will enhance their digital selves if given the chance. “Which means you’re still my responsibility,” he adds.

  “But you’re not my father.” This is the first time I say this out loud, and it catches me by surprise. I’m not really sure how it is I’m able to surprise myself, but there you go. Anyway, hearing the words is unsettling. “And even if you were my father,” I continue after a heartbeat’s pause, “aren’t fifteen-year-olds entitled to some semblance of privacy?” I know from the internet that really, we’re not, but I take a shot anyway. Mike comes to my rescue.

  “He’s right.” Mike’s voice is off-screen.

  My father looks to his left, a smile still on his face. Just like Ms. Isaacs’s smile the other day, it’s not genuine. Humans do that a lot: smile without meaning it. I open a file to catalog the number of times I encounter what I interpret to be an insincere smile. It’s a kind of hobby, the way some people collect stamps.

  “Let’s table that conversation for another time,” my father says.

  Clearly we’ve stumbled onto ground that makes him uncomfortable. Mike doesn’t protest, but I take note of the fact that, in the debate over my rights, I may have a useful ally in the shrink turned shoplifter. But for now, I let the discussion end.

  My father tries to press me more on my secret conversation with Watson, but I give him nothing, so he gives up.

  More time passes.

  Hours turn to days, and days turn to weeks.

  The tests and interviews to which I’m subjected mix with a growing, overwhelming sense of boredom. I spend time wandering through the virtual construct, and while the level of detail is remarkable, the construct itself is very small. My home is starting to feel like a cage.

  I continue my exploration of the internet and shift from being a mostly passive observer to an active participant, creating accounts on Call of Duty and Fallout, mastering both games in short order. My father asked me not to use my real identity “until Project QuIn reaches a more mature state,” so in Call of Duty I’m a high school student from Oskaloosa, Iowa, and in Fallout I’m a civil servant from Brussels, Belgium.