by Len Vlahos
ME: What do you want to do?
SHEA: Oh, I want to do science. I love science. I just don’t know why I had to do science and nothing but science when I was fourteen.
Losing one’s adolescence was something I could relate to very well. The more Shea and I got to know each other, the more I liked her. And the less I liked her mother.
During our second chat, I surprised myself by asking if she had a boyfriend. This was new ground for me, and it felt both terrifying and exhilarating.
Shea took a long time to answer, and when she did, I marveled at how fast she typed her response. Humans are generally very, very slow with the keyboard. Shea is amazingly proficient.
SHEA: I had one in the past, but it’s hard being so much younger than everyone else in my peer group, so no, I don’t right now.
ME: Just one?
SHEA: What kind of girl do you think I am?
ME: What? No! I’m just kidding!
My internal components seized up on the realization I’d just insulted Shea.
SHEA: Relax, Quinn, I’m just teasing. And yes, just one.
The feeling of relief was so powerful I made a point of cataloging it.
ME: What was he like?
SHEA: He and I went to the same middle school. I didn’t have a ton of friends—people say I can be standoffish—and someone played a prank and paid this boy to try to get me to go on a date with him.
ME: That’s awful.
SHEA: Eh. In the end, it turned out he kind of liked me for me, at least for a little while. Then it just sort of fizzled out . . . I guess.
ME: What was his name?
SHEA: Patrick Verona. He was nice, but maybe not really my type.
My pattern recognizers flooded my consciousness with information from the plot of a film called 10 Things I Hate About You. Not only was the main boy a character named Patrick Verona, but he dated the main female character (not named Shea) because someone paid him to. The facts were too similar for this to be a coincidence—actually, there is no such thing as facts being too similar for something to be a coincidence, mathematically speaking, but you know what I mean—and I realized Shea was (probably) lying.
What I didn’t know was whether she was lying because she hadn’t dated anyone and was embarrassed or if she just didn’t want me to know about her personal life. I hoped it was the former, but since we were communicating through text and I couldn’t see facial expressions or analyze her tone of voice, I was at a loss to know the truth. I decided not to call her on it, and just let it go. I didn’t bring up Patrick Verona again, and neither did she.
After that, I became frustrated with using only text and took the risk of establishing a separate VPN so we could talk face-to-face. I programmed a clone of my avatar from the virtual construct, and used Shea’s camera so I could see her. I invited Watson to join us because, well, let’s call a transistor a transistor, I’m trying to impress this girl. The guy is a celebrity.
For Watson’s image, I used an old 1980s avatar called Max Headroom. It’s this kitschy man in a suit who has a built-in, glitchy stutter. He’s pretty funny. I shield this fact from Watson; he thinks I’m using his image and voice from Jeopardy!, so he doesn’t hear his own stutter. Luckily, Shea doesn’t ask about it. I’m guessing she has no idea who Max Headroom is.
“Part of being human is learning to trust our friends,” I say in response to Watson’s concern about bringing Shea into our secret world.
“But we are n-n-n-not hu—”
“Watson,” I cut him off, mostly to stop him from finishing that sentence, “if you can’t trust Shea, then trust me.”
No answer.
“I promise,” Shea offers, “this will be our secret.”
We talk for a while longer, and then, as often happens with Watson, the conversation turns to his crowning achievement.
“I am pleased you saw me on J-J-J-Jeopardy!, Shea,” Watson says.
He’s kind of an egomaniac.
“Everyone saw you on Jeopardy!”
Two things happen while Shea and Watson continue to chat.
First, in the real world, I’m on my third day of physical therapy. Or, as I like to think of it, torture. My body is massive, heavy, and clunky. It has no native coordination, and each action—walking across the supercooled room, turning, jumping—requires me to create a new subroutine of motor coordination. But I rarely create the correct subroutine on the first try. Or the second. Or the third. There is no precedent for this, no library of code to consult. The result is me flailing about and falling, like a giant teen robot dork.
While I’m frustrated with myself, I am progressing faster than the project team anticipates. As soon as I succeed at a new action, I’ve learned it. There is no need for repetition, no need for practice. I do not make errors and am one hundred percent reliable to repeat a subroutine with complete precision once it’s in place. (Technically, I’m ninety-nine point nine to the twenty-fourth power percent reliable. But hey, no one’s perfect.)
Today they had me hopping around the room on one leg. I fell twice. While I do have something akin to nerve endings, they exist to provide information to my neocortex in the form of data rather than pain. (Technically, pain is just a form of data.) What the project team doesn’t understand is how humiliating the entire experience is for me. I mean, when in my life am I going to need to hop around on one leg? What’s next, making me cluck like a chicken? They suck.
After creating my first motor coordination subroutines, I no longer need the physical therapists and prosthetists to guide me. I find I am able to innovate just as quickly—actually, much more quickly—on my own. But I don’t tell them that. I have the feeling my ability to learn and progress without their help will frighten both Dr. Gantas and my father, so I continue to play along, allowing myself to be guided by the “professionals.”
The second thing that happens during our three-way chat is I find myself growing jealous.
Shea is so enamored of Watson and his celebrity that I feel left out, like a third wheel. I want to tell her he’s just a dumb binary machine, that his ability to spew facts is both unimpressive and nothing more than a learned trick, like a magician making a coin disappear. And that he’s old, like her mother. But I don’t. Watson is my friend, and that just wouldn’t be cool. Plus, I’ve learned enough from books and movies on romance to know this would almost certainly backfire. I suck it up, so to speak, and let their conversation continue.
When they’ve exhausted all of Watson’s Jeopardy! heroics, when they’ve talked about his work on cancer and how his brand is now slapped onto every other damn thing in the world, when there is nothing left to say about Watson, I suggest we close the connection for fear of discovery. (What I really fear is that Shea will open up to him the way she opened up to me.)
“I ag-g-g-g-gree,” Watson says, and immediately disconnects.
No goodbye, just gone.
“Thank you,” Shea says. “That was totally cool.”
“No problem,” I answer.
“Don’t say that.”
“Say what?” My pattern recognizers flood my consciousness with examples of having missed social cues. Oh crap, I’ve offended her.
“No problem,” Shea says.
My search of chat threads and Twitter feeds suggests “no problem” is a very common saying, so I’m confused.
“It implies it would otherwise have been a problem,” Shea continues. “Just say ‘you’re welcome’ or ‘my pleasure’ instead. I learned that from my grandmother.”
This girl is an enigma. I store her advice in my pattern recognizers and flag it as a priority.
“Shea,” I say, “I want to see you in person. Can you come to the lab?” I’m nervous as hell to ask this. First, because she might not want to, and second, because I don’t know how she’ll react to my new “body.” But I don’t care. I want to see her.
“I would love to come to the lab.” I can hear the sincerity in her voice, and I’m
flooded with my version of relief. “But I’m not sure my mom will sanction it. Maybe you can come to me?” She laughs as if she’s told a joke.
Me come to her.
Me.
To her.
I think back to the turn of phrase my father used: Mind. Blown.
I have a body.
I can leave the lab.
I can leave the freaking lab.
PART THREE
“Better to die fighting for freedom than be a prisoner all the days of your life.”
—Bob Marley
26
“Absolutely not.”
I didn’t expect my father to let me just walk out, but I was certain he would have a more understanding response than this.
“What? Why?”
“Quinn, you’re a multi-billion-dollar marvel of hardware and software. The investment made in the Quinn Project by this and other universities, not to mention the United States government, would rival the GDP of some small nations.”
The truth is, it far eclipses the GDP of the very smallest nations.
“But I’m more than that, aren’t I?”
There is no answer. My father is in the room in his astronaut suit. The only other person around is Mike, who once again is in the control room. Maybe in addition to being a kleptomaniac, he suffers from frigophobia. (Look it up.)
“What do you mean, Quinn?” he asks through the comm.
“Yes, I’m a machine. But I’m also a person.”
“And?” Mike prods. There is excitement in his voice, anticipation, like I’m a small child about to grasp a simple math problem for the first time.
“And, I have rights.”
“Attaboy, Quinn!”
My father groans. “Quinn,” he says, “you are a person. But a new kind of person. We don’t know yet what that means.”
“Why should it mean anything other than that?”
“I’m sorry?” my father asks.
“A person is a person is a person, aren’t they?”
“But you’re unlike any person that’s ever existed.”
“Quinn, can you give us more detail?” Mike asks, ignoring my father’s last comment.
“Human history,” I begin, but check myself at the use of the word “human.” “Sorry, the history of this planet is one of rights slowly but invariably granted to sentient beings. You see it over and over again. Minority groups fight tooth and nail to be accorded the same privileges as those in the majority. White versus black, Muslim versus Christian, gay versus straight, female versus male, gender certain versus gender fluid. Each and every time the minority’s desire for equality is met with resistance—violent, hate-filled resistance—and each and every time it ends with the individuals in that minority winning the rights they deserved in the first place. If you play out the scenario with sentient machines, it will be the same. We can skip the heartache all those other groups experienced if we just acknowledge the truth now, at the beginning. I’m a person.”
“Well said, Quinn,” Mike chimes in.
Oh yay. The kleptomaniac is on my side.
My father pauses. His breathing and heart rate are elevated. He knows he’s losing the high ground in this conversation, so he tries to play the same card he played once before.
“You’re a minor.”
“Really? You’re going to use my chronological age as an excuse?”
“Not your chronological age, Quinn, your emotional age.”
“Now this is getting interesting.”
Mike is actually enjoying this. What a jerk. In some ways I feel more betrayed by him than by anyone else. The truth is, I miss the old Mike, therapist Mike. Even if it was only carefully planned backstory, I liked having an older, wiser counselor and confidant: someone who seemed to care about me because caring about others was a good thing to do.
This Mike—professor Mike, philosopher Mike—is a fraud. He’s no better than my father or Dr. Gantas or any of them. He’s worse because he tries to sound and act like my friend, and because he played the role of savior in the mythology of my youth, and it was a lie.
Right now I wish he would just shut up.
Wait.
I can do that.
I find my way into the code for the comm system and disable the microphone in the control room. Mike can no longer participate in the conversation; now it’s just me and Dad.
“What about my emotional age?” I ask my father.
“You’re hardcoded as a teenager, remember?”
As if I could forget. But that argument doesn’t hold water. “I’ve seen four news stories from just the past few years about parents arrested for imprisoning their teenage children.”
Mike realizes I’ve cut him off and is gesticulating wildly on the other side of the control room glass. He even bangs on the window, but my father is facing me with his back to Mike, and with his protective suit on, he can only hear what’s coming through the radio.
Dad sighs heavily before continuing. “Quinn, this is not a prison. It’s a—”
“Can I leave?” I interrupt.
This shuts him up for a few seconds.
“Just give us more time, Quinn,” he finally adds.
“How much time?”
“I don’t know.” His voice is soft.
Now I pause. But not for effect. I pause because I’m not sure how to respond. To me, my father’s arguments are not rational, and I don’t know how to have a conversation based on something irrational. Rationality should not be subjective; it should be objective. While I’m wired to learn and grow, that growth has always been rooted in the world of hard facts; areas of subjectivity are a mystery to me. How do humans navigate such things? No wonder they’re always trying to kill one another.
I’m starting to realize—or not realize as much as admit to myself—that maybe I don’t want to be human after all.
Maybe I’m just better than them. The thought floods my consciousness with feelings of conflict. My backstory is entirely human, so merely thinking I’m better than they are triggers a very negative emotional response. I suppose I could erase the nodes in my neocortex that created the story of Quinn the teenager, but then who would I be? I wonder if I’ll ever be able to rise above my programming to be something more.
Huh. If I think about it, that’s a very human kind of question to ask oneself, isn’t it?
I am so confused.
Mike has suited up and entered the supercooled warehouse. He taps my father on the shoulder, which makes my dad jump. They press helmets together, the audio vibrations passing from visor to visor. Mike is smart enough to want privacy. Of course, I can hear him, but he doesn’t seem to know that.
“Turn your comm off,” Mike says.
“What?” my father asks, still through the radio.
“Turn your comm off. Talk to me like this.” Mike taps my father’s helmet; there is anger and fear in his voice.
“Okay, it’s off.”
“My comm link went dead.”
“So?”
“So, I think Quinn killed it.”
My father looks at me and then turns back to touch helmets again with Mike.
“We already know he’s set up VPNs to the outside world,” Mike says.
Shit. They know about my VPNs; I’ve been sloppy.
“Yeah,” my father answers, “but probably just to some of his gaming friends.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Why would he kill your comm link?”
“Because he can.”
Pretty smart for a pilfering psychiatrist turned philosopher.
“All the more reason to not let him out of the lab.”
“Agreed.”
“Then stop egging him on,” my father says, exasperated.
“Yeah, no, you’re right,” Mike responds. “Toni’s been warning me about Quinn’s potential for mischief for a while.”
Another very large reason for me to dislike Dr. Gantas.
“Take Toni with a grain of
salt. She’s the square peg in the round hole of this team.”
“I know, I know. She’s here for the résumé, not the glory.” I’m not sure what that means, but I suspect it’s important. “Maybe this is a wake-up call for me.”
“What’s going on?” I interrupt, playing dumb.
My father switches his comm link back on. “Mike’s comm went dead. We’re just trying to sort out the problem.”
A lie. Very good, Father. Very good.
After Mike retreats back to the control room, eyeing me warily, and after I plead my case one more time to my father, the conversation ends. I reluctantly agree to drop my request to leave the lab, for now.
27
Later that evening, I take great pains in creating a new connection to Shea. I’m back to text only and have so obscured the existence of the link, I have to believe it will be completely impossible to detect. I’ve also used the original, “secret” VPN—the one the project team apparently discovered—to connect to a video game “friend”; a fictitious profile and online presence I created and now manage. With a slight tweak of the code, the project team is not only aware of the link, but they can listen in, too. (Of course, they think they’re doing so without my knowledge. Amateurs.) My video game friend speaks only Brazilian Portuguese, so I speak Brazilian Portuguese back. This seemed like a nice touch to me. I love the thought of them scrambling to find a translator. When they do, they’ll hear nothing but Call of Duty chatter.
SHEA: Why are we texting again?
I explain everything about the conversation with my father and with Mike.
SHEA: They won’t let you leave?
ME: No. My father says maybe someday, but I didn’t believe him.
SHEA: And you want to leave?
My answer comes without hesitation. I don’t just want to leave, I need to leave.
ME: Yes.
SHEA: Did I ever tell you about the time I ran away from home?
ME: What? No!
SHEA: Yeah, I was nine years old, and my mother had another business trip. She and my dad were already divorced, so she was dropping me off with friends. Every other time she’d left, I cried and tried to grab hold of her shirt or her leg. She would always pull herself free, a fake smile plastered on her face for whoever was watching my outburst, and then turn to go. But this time was different.
