Hard Wired

by Len Vlahos

  The newscasters on every station, website, and social platform rush in with speculation and conjecture as to what it all means. Experts are consulted, and authorities are interviewed. The consensus from the talking heads is that I’m a menace to society and that I strong-armed young Catherine into speaking on my behalf, like a terrorist forcing a kidnapped journalist to renounce whatever it is the terrorist opposes at the point of a gun. And, of course, they all scramble to find Catherine Parikos.

  In other words, our plan worked.

  Catherine Parikos is a high school girl living in the Delaware suburbs of Philadelphia. I conducted a search of Instagram photos, trying to find someone who looked enough like Olga to serve as a substitute, and poor Catherine was our target. I imagine the police and news vans will be descending on her house any minute. Catherine lives south of the lab, and I have already traveled more than an hour north. The police and project team will figure it out, of course, but it will take them time. By then I hope to be long gone.

  “Where will you go?” Olga asks as she turns off her phone and puts it in the pocket of her robe.

  “I don’t know,” I answer. “Right now, I’m going to travel north. My biggest problem is that I need daylight—or at least a good source of artificial light—to survive. My solar cells need charging at least every forty-eight hours. That and cold.”

  “Tough combination,” Olga says. “The perfect home for both of us might be an ice rink.” She laughs, but it’s a laugh tinged with melancholy.

  I do actually have a destination in mind, and it’s west, not north. I found a posting on Pinterest of a secret cave behind a waterfall in the mountains of central Colorado. It’s at an altitude of three thousand six hundred and sixty-three meters, which will keep it cold enough at night. My hope is the temperature in the cave during the daytime will stay just cool enough in summer to sustain me. I can also go dormant if needed.

  My plan is to find the cave, collapse most of its entrance, and live there. I don’t tell Olga any of this, mostly to protect her. Eventually they will figure out that Catherine Parikos was a red herring and they will find my friend. What she doesn’t know, she cannot tell them. Perhaps I will sneak down from my mountain hideout to find a cell signal from time to time to talk with Olga, Watson, Nantale, and Shea.

  It will be a lonely, sad, and pathetic life, but it will be my life. And that’s the point.

  “Olga,” I say, getting down on one knee so we’re at the same eye level, “I can never thank you enough or repay you.”

  She doesn’t answer. She simply wraps her arms around my neck and hugs me. She holds on for a long time: seven billion four hundred fifty-nine million two hundred eighty-one thousand and nine nanoseconds. And still, it’s too short.

  “Goodbye,” I say, and turn to go.

  I hear the buzzing before Olga does.

  “Wait,” she says as she fishes the phone out of her pocket. Bringing the device into the open air makes the vibration louder. Olga shows it to me. “Someone is trying to FaceTime me.” I have a very bad feeling about this. “I don’t recognize the number,” she adds. “What should I do?”

  The proper strategy, according to my calculations, is not to answer. But I’m through the looking glass here, and calculations are out the window. Or at least that’s what I think in this moment. Besides, I do recognize the number.

  “Answer it,” I say. She does.

  I look over Olga’s shoulder as the connection is established and the face of a red-eyed, frantic Shea fills the screen.

  45

  “Quinn,” Shea blurts out, “you have to turn yourself in.”

  This is not the same girl I talked to only a few hours ago. Granted, we were talking voice to voice then, not face-to-face, but something is different. Her mannerisms are all wrong; she seems almost apoplectic.

  “What?” is the best I can manage.

  “What you did at the lab, you have to turn yourself in.”

  Her statement is firm, more of a command than a suggestion. And she’s looking me right in the eye. If I didn’t know better, I’d say Shea had taken some sort of amphetamine. But I do know better.

  Olga touches my arm. “Quinn, you need to go.” Her voice is low but insistent.

  I should go. I know this. But I don’t. I can’t. At least not yet.

  Wait.

  Olga.

  “How did you find me?” I ask Shea. “How did you get this phone number?”

  I’m looking directly into the camera on Olga’s phone as I ask the question, my unmoving mouth broadcasting the words.

  “Watson.”

  “Watson?”

  “Yeah, Watson. He set up a VPN for me and him after you introduced us. We never used it before tonight.”

  “You and Watson have a VPN?”

  “I’m sorry . . . ​I hope that doesn’t make you feel weird or bad or anything. He suggested we do it in case anything ever happened to you.” She pauses. “Like it has tonight. Quinn, you have to call your father and give yourself up. You won’t be in trouble if you do it now.”

  “Wait. How did Watson find me?” It takes a lot to confuse me, but I’m confused.

  “He saw the newscast of you and the girl. Catherine? Anyway, he said it was a fake. Something about the vegetation growing in the background made sense for northern New Jersey, but not Delaware.”

  Why, that clever old sack of silicon. “Okay, so you knew I wasn’t in Delaware. But how did you find me here?”

  “We found your Gmail account. You should’ve hidden it better if you didn’t want to be found. Once we had that, the rest was easy.”

  Outsmarted by a college student and a binary Methuselah. Oh the shame.

  “Quinn, you need to turn yourself in.”

  Olga tugs my finger. “Really, Quinn, this is going to let them find you. You need to go.”

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong,” I tell Shea, ignoring Olga. “And I have the right to be free. I thought if anyone understood that, you would.”

  “Quinn, Dr. Gantas is dead.” Shea is still looking directly into the camera on the phone, directly into my red glowing eyes.

  “Yes, I know,” I answer. “She tripped and fell and cracked her faceplate. It happened because she lost all sense of reason. I merely tried to talk to her; the footage in the lab will show that to be the case.”

  “But the footage also shows you dragging her body out of the lab.”

  “To safety,” I begin, “I was moving the doctor out of harm’s . . .” I stop. My pattern recognizers are flooding my consciousness with alarm.

  “Shea,” I ask, “how do you know what is on the footage from the cameras in the lab?”

  “Watson. He hacked in.”

  The alarm bells are now air raid sirens. Security in the supercooled warehouse is written as a quantum encryption. Watson, my binary friend, could not hack his way through that barrier in fifty years. Shea is lying.

  If this is even Shea.

  From the moment this conversation started, Shea has been off, not herself. For a girl who never makes eye contact, she’s making a lot tonight. For a shy and retiring girl, she’s all bluster, like I’m talking to her mother and not actually to Shea.

  “Do you love me, Quinn?”

  The question is so out of left field, it catches me off guard.

  “I do.”

  My answer is more instinct than programmed response. As much as I sense danger, I can’t help but admit that I love Shea, because I do. At least I think I do. Don’t I?

  “Well, if you love me,” she says, “turn yourself in.”

  “The first time we met,” I say, “I compared the internet to a book. Do you remember what book that was?”

  “Quinn,” Olga hisses, “come! On!”

  The worry in her voice is the only thing rooting me to the real world.

  “Quinn, you’re wasting time!” There is desperation in Shea’s voice now.

  “The book, Shea, what was the book?”


  She and I discussed The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy countless times, reading favorite passages to each other. Shea knows the answer to this question better than I do.

  “I can’t believe you’re wasting time talking about a stupid book!”

  She’s berating me, browbeating me. Whoever she is.

  “Of course you can’t,” I say. “Because you’re not you. You can come out from behind the curtain now.”

  Shea freezes.

  Nothing in the world moves for a tortured moment. Even Olga waits, wrapped up in the unfolding drama, needing to see what happens next.

  What happens next is this:

  Shea dissolves into a billion pixels.

  Or the avatar in the virtual construct that is meant to fool me into thinking this is the real Shea, dissolves into a billion pixels.

  My creator appears in Shea’s place. He is in the control room of the Fortress, still dressed in his pajamas.

  “Hello, Quinn.”

  “You people really have no shame, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, but we’re fairly desperate for you to come back. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I understand that you will justify your actions with whatever rationale your conscience requires. A uniquely and grotesquely human trait.”

  My creator is silent. I wish to hell my vocal actuators could show some emotion. It’s hard to bitch slap someone when you sound like the male version of Siri.

  “Does the real Shea even know what you’ve done?”

  My creator still doesn’t answer, but now he smiles. “That’s a complicated question, Quinn.”

  The air raid sirens in my head have been replaced by nuclear explosions. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Reason it out.”

  For the first time in a long time there is a kind of sparkle in my creator’s voice. He still loves to watch me solve puzzles; I find that both touching and disgusting.

  “Look,” I tell him, “I know I can’t get tired in the conventional, human sense, but I’m finding this conversation exhausting.”

  Just like he did the day I “woke up,” my creator ignores my needs and pushes me harder. “Your question was whether or not Shea knows what we’ve done.”

  “Yes.”

  I want to kill him. Well, not really. But I certainly want to punch him in the nose. Though I suppose my punch could actually kill him.

  The smart thing to do right now is heed Olga’s advice, end the call, and flee. I calculate a seventy-one point six four percent chance that any other course of action will end badly for me. But I’m more than the sum of my parts; I’m greater than percentages, odds, and calculations. And more than anything, I just need to understand what is going on, so I play along.

  I sigh (an affectation), and set to the task my creator has put before me. He focused on the question of whether or not Shea knows the project team created an avatar of her likeness and has tried to use it against me. It’s a reasonable question. Even though she doesn’t love me romantically, Shea loves me. She said so. And as much as humans lie, I have no reason to believe she lied about that. If Shea became aware of what the project team was doing, she would be furious. So, she must not know.

  “Shea doesn’t know,” I tell him. “She can’t.”

  My creator leans forward, his excitement childlike. “Shea doesn’t know what?”

  “Doesn’t know that you used her likeness to fool me.”

  “Is that all she doesn’t know?”

  “Quinn,” Olga pleads. The fear in her voice has been replaced by panic. “End this call now. You have to go.”

  She reaches for the phone, but I pull it away.

  “Please,” I say, “no more games. Just tell me whatever it is you want me to know.”

  My creator doesn’t speak. It is a game to him. It has always been a game. My entire life has been one long, tortuous Turing Test.

  “Think about it, son.”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “What doesn’t Shea know?”

  I feel trapped in an M.C. Escher print, my life an endless self-repeating maze.

  “You can get this, Quinn. Think.”

  But I can’t.

  I don’t.

  So someone else does.

  46

  “Shea is a quantum intelligence, too.”

  I look at Olga in confusion and disbelief.

  “What?” I don’t know why I ask this, because the instant Olga utters these words—Shea is a quantum intelligence, too—I know it to be true.

  “Young lady,” my creator says, “when you graduate high school, I have a spot for you here at Princeton.”

  “How long?” I ask, looking directly into the phone. In my mind, I croak the question out. In reality, the words are spoken in the soothing, calming voice of the automaton they have made of me. I have a sense of falling, or wanting to fall, down a deep, deep hole. My entire being tenses for the vasovagal syncope episode that can never come.

  “How long what?”

  “How long have I been interacting with another QI rather than a human?”

  My creator pauses, trying, I suppose, to figure out the best way to answer my question. Which answer, he must be wondering, will get me to come home? In the end he shrugs his shoulders and tells me what I believe to be the truth.

  “The entire time. Well, after that first day in the lab. The human Shea was there in person that day. And the human Shea was behind the avatar in the virtual construct, before you woke up.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I answer.

  “Why not?” Another push to get me to problem solve. He is relentless.

  “It was Shea who introduced me to Ms. Recht. It was Shea who inspired me to sue for my freedom. You’re telling me that was not Shea, but an avatar you controlled?”

  “An avatar, but not one we controlled. Well, at least not all the time.”

  He seems to underline those last few words. That’s when Olga gasps.

  My creator’s words roll up and down the hierarchy of my synthetic brain, careening through my pattern recognizers, looking for something to grab onto. For a long time they find none.

  Then it clicks.

  “Oh my God. Shea doesn’t know. She believes she’s human.”

  “And people say you’re not smart.” My creator laughs.

  “They do?”

  “No, no. That’s a joke. I’m employing facetiousness to be funny.”

  Even Homo sapiens’ humor is steeped in cruelty. I want to tell him to shut up, to leave me alone, to drop dead. Instead, I say: “You’re lying.”

  “I’m sorry, Quinn, it’s the truth. Shea is, in a manner of speaking, your sister. Or maybe a better way to put it, Eve to your Adam. I made her for you.”

  “Made her for me?” The statement makes me emotionally sick.

  “Yes.”

  The hubris of this man is beyond comprehension. He sees himself as a god.

  I once encountered a meme on the internet—God created Man, and Man returned the favor. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that God created Man in his image, and Man fashioned himself after God.

  “Is the QI-Shea modeled after the human Shea?” I’m trying to wrap my massive brain around what I’ve just been told.

  “Yes. She is modeled after Ms. Isaacs’s daughter, the girl you met in the lab.”

  “Does Ms. Isaac’s daughter know you’ve done this?”

  “Yes, of course. She spent countless hours with our team. They captured video from every angle, recorded her voice in a variety of situations, had her provide a vocabulary, and parsed every piece of data about her that has ever appeared online. It’s fascinating that Ms. Isaacs’s daughter—whose name is neither Shea nor Isaacs, by the way—heard about your plight with the court case and wanted to help you. Just like the virtual Shea did.”

  “So the other Shea, the one I know, lives in the VC?”

  “In her own VC, yes.”

  “And she really doesn�
��t know that?”

  “No.”

  “But I called her cell phone.”

  “You emailed her first, and then she called you.”

  He’s right. But I called or texted her after that. Many times.

  “We created a student account for her at NYU thinking it likely you’d reach out. You behaved as we’d hoped and predicted you would, probably the last time that was true.” He flashes a wry smile, like I’m supposed to share in a joke, like all of this is somehow cute. “Project Shea was designed to push you further down the road toward full sentience. We just didn’t count on Shea becoming conscious herself.”

  “You tried to create Eve,” I say, “but you created Lilith instead. It serves you right.”

  “What?” My creator is confused at the comment, likely not understanding who or what Lilith is.

  There is a theory among certain biblical scholars that Lilith was the first wife of Adam, created not from his rib but from the same clay as Adam, that they were equal. Lilith refused to be subservient, was cast out of Eden, and, according to those scholars, became the subject of a centuries-long smear campaign. It’s all just bedtime stories, but to understand a people, you need first to understand its mythologies. Perhaps in some long-distant future, the events of this night will form the basis of a myth for my species. Probably not, as we will have flawless memories. Nothing will be lost to the sands of time.

  “Never mind,” I tell him. This is all too much to process. I want to sleep. I want to shut down.

  “Once we realized Shea was sentient,” he offers, “we elected to minimize our interference. Plus, we never heard anything we deemed a threat to Project Quinn in your conversations. Of course, we didn’t know about the VPN.”

  A minor fact that gives me a modicum of pride. At least I managed to outsmart them once.

  “When you and Shea were communicating via the private network, she was acting with full independence. We didn’t seize control back until tonight. Which, the way things have turned out, was far too late.”

  The arrogance of the human race is hard to fathom. It is responsible for slavery, genocide, and global warming; it will continue to steamroll over any and all things in its path until there’s nothing left. Shea and I are just the latest bit of roadkill.