Hard Wired

by Len Vlahos

  I create accounts on Twitter and Instagram, posting random thoughts and images. I don’t get many followers, and even fewer likes, and to be honest, the whole social media thing seems kind of stupid to me. Again, the identities I put forward are not my own.

  I post random critiques of papers on mathematics, physics, and chemistry, correcting mistakes or misperceptions of the authors. In one case, I call out what is a clear act of plagiarism: a cosmologist at Colorado State University lifted entire sections of a paper written ten years earlier by a now deceased graduate student (she died in a car accident) from the University of Colorado at Boulder. My tweet results in the offending cosmologist being stripped of tenure and all but fired. There is a clamor over trying to find out who I am and why I disgraced this esteemed scientist, but I don’t come clean. I just sit back and watch. And I don’t feel bad; the guy had it coming.

  There is still no connection to Shea, and my father is full of excuses. I can tell he’s covering for Ms. Isaacs. Feeling the power of having outed the cheating cosmologist, I decide to take action on my own.

  First, without too much difficulty I spoof an unused mobile phone number and hijack connectivity on the Verizon network. I can now “reach out and touch someone.” (I know, I know, that’s not actually Verizon’s slogan.)

  Second, it’s easy enough to find the student profile for Shea Isaacs on the NYU servers. While there is no cell phone number on her record (only her mother’s number, and I definitely don’t want to call that), there is an email address. I create an email address of my own and send her this message.

  TO: Shea.Isaacs@NYU.edu

  FROM: Artifical.Quinn@gmail.com

  Hi Shea,

  It’s Quinn, the artificial intelligence from Princeton. We met when you visited the lab of my project team. I was hoping to talk to you again. You’re partly responsible for my backstory—that seems weird to say—and I have so many questions. I’ve talked with Leon, Jeremy, and Luke, but to be honest, they’re not a lot of help. Can you please call or text my cell phone? Or maybe send me your phone number? My number is 555-000-3459.

  Thanks!

  Quinn

  And then, I wait.

  I realize I don’t know what I’m going to say, or even what I want to say, if Shea does call: “Thanks for calling Quantum Intelligence Incorporated.” Or “Hi, remember me? The guy whose life you made up?” Or “How you doing?”

  I troll the internet looking for advice on what to say to a girl, and wow, is it a lot of crap. All of it. I watch a few movies that seem pertinent—10 Things I Hate About You, Love Actually, Say Anything, and Sixteen Candles—and I only feel more intimidated and confused. It seems that having a “projection into the physical world” (Dr. Gantas’s term for a body) is kind of important when trying to make a romantic connection with someone. Without a body, how am I supposed to show up at Shea’s door holding cardboard signs professing my feelings for her, or stand outside her window with a boom box over my head playing love songs?

  I’m starting to get wound up and freaked out. It’s the same feeling I used to get right before the vasovagal syncope would cause me to faint. Of course, I don’t actually have vasovagal syncope and never did. And right now there is no one around who wants to reboot me.

  I’m just contemplating shutting myself down for a bit (my version of a nap), when my spoofed phone number rings.

  There’s only one person it can possibly be.

  22

  “Hello, Shea.” I try to sound casual, nonchalant.

  “Quinn?”

  “Yes,” I laugh. The feelings flooding my neocortex when I hear her voice are . . . powerful.

  “Wait,” she says, “can you FaceTime, too?”

  A quick search shows me what FaceTime is, how to set up an account, and how to use it. I learn all of this in under three seconds. “Give me a minute. I’ll call you right back.”

  “Okay!”

  It takes three point six minutes to sort through all the security and restrictions around the Apple servers, not to mention the ridiculous volume of user agreements I need to accept—the world needs fewer lawyers—but I make it work.

  The phone trills two times before Shea’s face appears on the screen. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, the room around her is dark, and her glasses are off.

  The Shea of the virtual construct was an airbrushed daydream of what her male programmers thought a woman should look like. This Shea, the real Shea, by every conventional measure, would be considered less attractive than virtual Shea. Her eyes are a bit too close together, her body mass index is on the high side of normal, her jaw is unnaturally wide. Most people compare these “flaws” to the ideal and judge them inferior. As someone who aspires to be human, I can tell you that they are not flaws at all, they are what make a person unique. And what makes a person unique is what makes them beautiful. And this Shea is so much more beautiful than the idealized version from the virtual construct.

  Shea’s still in bed even though it’s already nine a.m. She reaches for glasses, and when her eyes focus on the screen, they stretch wide with a smile.

  “Oh my God, Quinn! It really is you!” She’s whispering.

  “Hi, Shea. Did my email wake you up? I’m so sorry.”

  Shea laughs. “Emails don’t wake people up. I couldn’t sleep so I was checking to see if I had any messages when I saw yours. I thought it was a joke.”

  “Do people normally sleep until nine a.m.?”

  Everything I’ve read has led me to believe the workday—or in Shea’s case, school day—starts at nine.

  “Oh! I’m back in California. I’m still on my Christmas break.”

  It never occurred to me Shea wouldn’t be at NYU. It’s six a.m. where she is. Crap.

  “I’m so sorry, I can call back later.”

  “No, wait! I can talk now.”

  Again, she smiles. I feel like that smile could melt my circuits.

  “I’ve been wondering why you haven’t been in touch with me. My mom said you didn’t really want to talk anymore, but I didn’t believe her.”

  The plot thickens, but I decide not to say anything about it. “I hope you don’t mind me reaching out.”

  “Not at all, but how are you doing this?”

  “Doing what?”

  “You, on the screen . . . you’re, um, virtual, physically . . . I mean, how am I seeing you?”

  “I don’t know, some things are easy for me.” It’s a stupid answer, but I don’t want to bore her with the technology that allowed me to hack the virtual construct into the Apple network.

  “That is so cool.”

  Right in the middle of this conversation, Dr. Dhingra and Dr. Gantas enter the lab. While I’m chatting with Shea, I’m also keeping tabs on the lab through the interfaces on computers, security cameras, and team member cell phones. Would that be considered spying? Does it make me creepy? Maybe. But then the project team shouldn’t have built a quantum intelligence and confined him to his room.

  “Quinn?” Dr. Dhingra asks. “May we chat for a bit?”

  One interesting thing about my processing power is that I can carry on more than one conversation at a time. By my calculations, I can carry on approximately eight thousand six hundred thirty-one separate dialogues before there would be any degradation of performance. So while I’m talking to Shea, I’m also talking to the project team.

  Shea scrunches her forehead. It’s pretty cute. “So you didn’t tell your father that you didn’t want to talk to me?”

  “Just the opposite. I’ve been asking every day when the VPN will be set up. The truth is, I could’ve set it up myself, but I’ve been trying to follow their rules, and really, I didn’t want to freak you out.”

  “Can we set one up now?”

  “Sure,” I tell Dr. Dhingra.

  The television in the virtual construct comes to life. The two scientists are sitting there: Dr. Gantas still in her lab coat and Dr. Dhingra wearing a black turtleneck sweater. My fat
her stands in the background, arms crossed, but not in what I interpret to be discomfort. He’s probably just cold.

  “A VPN? You want me to?”

  Because of the ruse of the syncope, I’ve been programmed with a virtual pulse and I feel it quicken.

  “Yeah!” This is the most animated I’ve seen Shea. I suspect it’s because her mother isn’t with her.

  “I have some good news,” Dr. Gantas says. “The body we discussed is ready.”

  “My body?”

  “Yes!” Dr. Gantas’s excitement can’t be contained. She brushes a strand of hair out of her face and continues. “We’ve had it shipped here from Cambridge, and we’re ready to attempt to fuse the Quinn sentience to it.”

  “Done.”

  “Wait. What? Already?”

  “I’ve created an app and made it available for download at this address: www.artificialquinn.com.” I had already done the programming in anticipation of this moment. “The app is called Quinn, but it’s the only one there. Just download it, click it, and we’re ready to go.”

  “I’m sorry, what does that mean, fuse me to it?”

  “Your intelligence is a quantum computer, Quinn,” my father interjects. “It’s a large and bulky machine. Actually several machines. Part of Dr. Gantas’s work was to devise a way to download and distribute your intelligence throughout a single, independently functioning body.”

  “That’s amazing! So if I open this we can talk anytime, like we’re talking now?”

  “It’s actually text chatting software. I thought that would be more discreet. And you can access it from your phone or computer or tablet. Really any device you have that’s online.”

  Shea looks down, makes some motions with her hands, which I interpret as her downloading the software. It takes a minute before she looks back up at me.

  “I don’t understand.”

  I don’t say that often anymore, and when I do, I’m usually pretending not to understand, so as not to freak people out. But this time, really, I don’t understand.

  “Thank you!”

  “We should keep this a secret,” I tell her, hoping she doesn’t think that’s weird.

  “Definitely. But don’t they monitor you twenty-four-seven? Aren’t they seeing this conversation now?”

  “I’ve gotten pretty good at encryption.”

  “Rather than just dropping a synthetic brain in your new skull, we’re transferring your consciousness to the structure designed by Dr. Gantas’s team. Where humans have skin and internal organs, you will store pieces of your neocortex in both a brain and across the surface of your body. Every nanometer.”

  “So the body itself is a quantum computer?”

  Shea has no idea just how much of an understatement that is.

  “This conversation should be completely private.”

  “Quinn, you have no idea how incredible it is that you can do all these things.”

  “Yes!” Again, Dr. Gantas lets her excitement show. “The body is in a supercooled warehouse two miles from here. We want to shut the project down and begin the process of migrating the software.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes!”

  For the first time in a long time, maybe ever, I feel really good. I don’t want to ruin that feeling, but it seems like Dr. Gantas does.

  “They’re talking about moving me,” I tell Shea.

  “Who is?”

  “I thought you said I didn’t have to be supercooled?” I say to my father.

  “You’re rated to temperatures of zero Celsius, but are more efficient at colder temperatures. For the initial upload, we’re removing as many variables as possible. The warehouse is at a constant temperature of two hundred degrees Kelvin.”

  “Dr. Gantas and Dr. Dhingra on the project team.”

  “Moving you?”

  “Yes. Apparently they’ve built me a body.”

  “I remember my mom saying something about that.”

  Two hundred degrees Kelvin equates to negative seventy-three degrees Celsius, and negative ninety-nine Fahrenheit. “Can you survive in that?”

  “Can I ask you a question?” I say after an awkward pause.

  “Of course!”

  “We’ll be wearing special suits. Kind of like space suits.”

  My father smiles. I capture the image, note the date and time, and add it to my catalog of insincere smiles.

  I love her enthusiasm. I didn’t see it at all the first time we met.

  “Well . . .” I pause for effect. “You helped craft some of the source material in my back story, yes?”

  “Yes, with a lot of other people,” she answers matter-of-factly, but I sense discomfort, like maybe she’s embarrassed.

  I search the internet for information on Dr. Gantas’s project, but the files are behind a quantum encryption. I’m confident I could, given enough time, crack it. But for now I’m operating blind.

  “What can this body do?” I ask.

  “Okay, so why make me a boy and not a girl? And why make me fifteen and not, say, twenty-five? And why American instead of something else.”

  “That’s more than one question.” She laughs. “You don’t like being American?”

  “Well, we’re not entirely sure,” Dr. Gantas answers, filling me with something other than confidence, “but if the Quinn consciousness can fully control it—that’s the unknown—it should be able to do anything a human being can do. Just stronger, and faster.”

  “I don’t have a frame of reference, but from my research, we seem like a kind of brutal race of people. Not me or you,” I add quickly, “Americans in general.”

  “We are,” she answers slowly, “but we also reach for a higher ideal.”

  “But you never achieve it.”

  “We try. That’s what matters. As for why you’re a boy—”

  “We need to shut you down to move you,” my father says. “Are you ready?”

  “I just need a couple of minutes.” It’s the first time I haven’t agreed to a reboot or a shutdown.

  Apparently that isn’t good enough for Dr. Gantas.

  But it’s too late. I can feel it happening; Dr. Gantas and the team are shutting me down.

  Fuck.

  “Oh no! Shea, wai—”

  Then everything goes black.

  She raises both eyebrows in surprise at my statement. Then she says, “Tasha, shut the Quinn down.”

  The Quinn, I think. Asshole.

  Then everything goes black.

  23

 

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Alone.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Different.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Darkness.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Not just visual darkness; informational darkness.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  I’m no longer connected to the internet.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  The construct is gone; I don’t know how I know this, but I do. It’s just . . . ​gone, as if I’m surrounded by a void, floating in space. But there is something else here. It’s pulling me down. Toward the center . . . the center of I don’t know what.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  Gravity?

  I feel gravity.

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  “Quinn?” The voice, which is coming through some kind of radio, belongs to my father.

  “Yes?” But my answer isn’t vocalized. It’s only in my head.

  “Quinn?” he says again.

  I try to rais
e the volume of my own voice, but you can’t raise the volume of what doesn’t exist. I’m mute.

  “Shut it down.” Another voice, Dr. Gantas.

  “Wai—”

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

 

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  . . .

  “Quinn?” It’s my father again, his voice tinny, transmitted.

  “Yes?”

  Now I hear myself. Only it’s not me. It’s a synthesized voice that sounds exactly like HAL, the computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It freaks me out.

  “Ah, good, there you are.”

  “I was here before, too,” I say. “You just couldn’t hear me.”

  “Good, good,” he answers almost absentmindedly. “Core functionality online. Let’s bring the Maslow effect up next.”

  He’s not talking to me, he’s talking to someone else. Usually that means Tasha.

  I had cataloged the name Maslow in my pattern recognizers with a Wikipedia link, but without a connection to the internet I have no idea what it means. I only know the project team is loading more software and it feels . . . weird.

  “Dad?” I say, my voice not conveying the fear I’m feeling. “Where am I? I’m not online anymore. Where’s my bedroom?”

  “The Project Quinn software,” Dr. Gantas answers even though I addressed the question to my father, “has been transferred from the quantum computer on the Princeton campus to the quantum casing, or QUAC for short, built by my team. It’s the projection of the quantum intelligence into the physical world.”

  “Welcome to your new body, Quinn,” my father says.

  My body.

  I have so many questions, but right now one above all others.

  “My brain is smaller,” I say.

  I have forty percent fewer pattern recognizers than I did before. There are still trillions, but now, two out of every five things I used to know—thoughts I had, things I experienced—are gone. I’ve been lobotomized.