Conception: Book One of Human Dilemma

by Scott Sibary

  Yet if her group could process ideas in disorder, and his group apparently did not, how had they—and not her people—developed a system that was doing something parallel to that within itself? Was it that his team discussed issues more patiently, with each person confident of having a turn to speak? Were each of her colleagues too caught up with his own ideas? Did they fail to seek the benefits that might be found in the insights of others? Or was it she who, constrained from openly sharing all the details of her design with anyone and unable to fully join her efforts with those of the collective, found herself left alone again?

  She reviewed the most essential recollections, assigning words or phrases to symbolize each concept AnDe had mentioned. In the manner of her farmer-ancestors who worked late into summer evenings to finish their harvest, every piece of fruit offered by AnDe had been carefully wrapped with its own label and placed in safe storage. When recovered enough, she would return to them, and, despite Reidar’s advice, she would work alone.

  She completed her planning in the reassuring presence of her guard. The quiet company of another woman, perhaps a few years younger than Solveig, was like water to a dehydrated body: gently energizing and reviving.

  “Katrine,” she said to the guard, “do you know about the project I’m working on?”

  “A little. Everyone at the embassy is aware of it. Some of us are trying to figure out what its success might lead to.”

  “Benevolently minded artificial general intelligence. We’re hoping benevolence is more than a just a dream.”

  They exchanged personal stories. Katrine had grown up on a remote farm above Stryn, at the head of the dramatic Nordfjord. The gently sloping fields bordered a small lake and in the distance beyond was a view of a finger of the great Jostadals Glacier. She hoped to go back in a few years and find work in the area.

  “I can relate to that,” Solveig said. “I miss Osterøy, especially the mountains and fjords.”

  But to be able to base my work there? she asked herself. More likely it would turn out as another repeat of history.

  In centuries past, the wooden city of Bergen had several times been ravaged by fires, and had drawn generations of carpenters from nearby Osterøy to rebuild the town. The island had bred more carpenters than there was work for at home, and many had left permanently, some eventually settling overseas.

  “Then again,” said Katrine, “I might just spend my entire career in the foreign service.”

  And in my case, Solveig thought, building a new world might last a lifetime.

  The next morning, Rolv visited and arranged a time in the afternoon to escort her back to the residential compound.

  “There you should rest a few days. Let your mind clear; catch up with personal things. You need to rest your mind as much as your body.”

  “Rolv, I truly am on the verge of a breakthrough. I mean a solution to getting the systems to merge.”

  Standing over the hospital bed, Rolv waved her idea aside. “It always feels like that. It shows you’re dedicated and eager. That’s how you keep going; that’s how you burn out.”

  “I know what burned-out feels like. I don’t have that feeling at all right now.”

  “Because you had a good night’s sleep and are on medication.” The chair behind him gave a scraping whine as he pulled it close to the bed. He sat down. “You’ve been going through more than you realize. And you’ve changed.”

  She widened her eyes, and her previously relaxed body stiffened.

  “That’s what I mean,” said Rolv, “you’re not really comfortable with it. You’ve been more engaged than when we arrived. Spending time with all of us, including Andy and even with other Chinese colleagues. That’s good, but you’re still stressed. You’re pushing ahead with everything you want, yet you seem to be forcing yourself, like you’re reluctant.”

  She stared at him, blinking several times. Her fingers worked the bed sheet, gathering and releasing the soft, white folds.

  Rolv continued to meet her gaze, and she looked away.

  “I force myself,” she said, “hoping the reluctance will go away.”

  “Hmmm, is it Andy? Is he pressuring you? Is he trying to take advantage of you?”

  “No, no!” She shook her head, wincing when her torso moved. “I hope not.”

  “You’re stressed about the project?”

  She nodded.

  “Then you’re still conflicted.”

  “I feel all the risks sitting on my shoulders.”

  “Risk does not exist.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an excuse for not choosing.”

  “Get off it! You calculate risks to make decisions.”

  “Exactly, almost. You calculate probabilities for the outcomes from each possible action or inaction, yeah?”

  “Yes, of course. You can do a spreadsheet or matrix if you like.”

  “And?”

  “You choose by comparing the value of the outcomes discounted by their probabilities, and . . . Don’t lecture me!”

  Rolv jerked upright in his chair.

  “That stuff is basic to the vital codes,” she said, irritation grinding in her voice. “You know I understand decision-making, but I’m the one with the final decision, and I don’t want to make the wrong one. Would you?”

  “You can make the wrong one if you think of risk that way. Risk can pretend that only losses count. Forget the word risk. Gains not achieved, they’re equally important. You think about lost opportunities, don’t you?”

  She lay silent, staring into space.

  “And we know we can’t sit back and rely on anything remaining as it is. Situations keep changing, and whatever we have today will eventually be gone. What’s that phrase you like to say?”

  Her eyes closed, and she let out the words softly: “The impermanence of all things.”

  Shortly after lunch, AnDe appeared. He offered his usual pleasantries and commented that he’d enjoyed their outing together, aside from the incident. Yet his ragged appearance, his shirt one button off, and his hair still ruffled, suggested to her that he could be the one with more of an ailment.

  Her silent, intense look received an answer.

  “Not to drop any bombs, as they say in English, but did you know there could be a leak of information coming out of your team?”

  Solveig sat up in the hospital bed, facing him even as her eyes darted in the direction of her guard. She replied in soft monotone: “I cannot discuss that subject with you.”

  He looked down. He seemed to have read an answer in her face. “I apologize. I just want you to know there’s going to be bilateral cooperation.”

  She breathed with no pain in her chest. With a wide-open smile she looked up at the pale white expanse of the ceiling, and felt as though she could levitate, as though she might do what had begun to seem impossible.

  The project would not be threatened by a schism between the two governments. And with the aid of the ominous Chinese police and intelligence agencies, they might close in quickly on the source of the problem. With AnDe’s information about the Great Wall, which she wouldn’t share with any team member, she felt she could lose any one of them, or even two, and still complete the mission. She put aside the sadness she knew would accompany the discovery.

  AnDe still looked troubled. She waited.

  “I don’t think you’ll be sent back to Norway. That is, I really hope not.”

  The alarm went through to her ribs, and she winced again. He could not be referring to her health.

  “You see, I have to tell you the sad news; the young man died from his injuries. He had concussions and severe hemorrhaging in the brain, and never regained consciousness. He didn’t last the night.”

  The soft-food lunch in her stomach shot up into her mouth. Clamping her jaw shut, she swallowed the bitterness. Another shot of pain in her ribs hit near her heart, and she went rigid, struggling not to convulse.

  “When foreigners are involved in accident
s,” AnDe continued in an apologetic voice, looking down at the chassis of the bed, “sometimes they are held in custody until an investigation is complete. Or sometimes, especially when it’s someone on a diplomatic passport such as yours, they are deported. But in this case, a couple of things work in your favor."

  "I didn't mean," she gasped. "I didn't mean to hurt him! I just, just wanted the purse back, and," her breath ran out.

  "Of course. Both the security agent who was following us and I gave enough information to the police. The justice officials told me they will close their investigation regarding any criminal liability on your part. That will also help if the family of the dead man demands remuneration. So will the attention the project has at high levels of government; I don’t think most there want you to leave. But we’ll have to wait and see.”

  “Leave?” she whispered, barely managing the one word.

  Failure. Career turned meaningless. Dreams annihilated.

  Her lungs heaved shallow and fast; her voice sputtered and the words fled out on pulsating breath. “I can’t leave. I can’t leave now! It’s not done. But I can finish it—I will, just a little more time. I can make it happen. Tell them! Tell them it’s what they need, what we all need!” She gave him a terrified look. “Or . . . or are they going to punish me? Lock me up, take me away to . . . to a firing squad? Isn’t that what you do here?” Drops of sweat began forming on her face.

  AnDe shook his head, saying something, but she couldn’t hear him over her own sobbing.

  “They have to care about this" she began again. "They must, or . . . and . . . We must get this done, make this work, or it will happen again. We’ll go through it all again, only worse, much worse. . . . Aren’t they afraid? How could they send me home?”

  Home. Her heart slowed as her mind fled to the farm at Kleiveland, tucked into its hidden valley. Osterøy’s cliffs along the fjords could be her fortress walls, until she was attacked by self-judgment.

  She whispered a fatigued prayer for some kind of absolution. “What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know. Similar to you, I think. Chased him. I would have tried to get the purse back.”

  She thought he probably wasn’t fast enough to have caught up with the younger man. The purse would simply have disappeared along with nothing irreplaceable. But, if AnDe had caught up, she could imagine what techniques he’d have used: well-trained martial art skills applied with agility, not the brute-force tackling she’d been taught.

  She recalled the moment . . . saw herself caught up in a storm of pride while walking towards the train. She’d realized she might be on the verge of a great discovery, and her ego had gone on parade. Then it was offended by the snatching of her purse. Her anger had set her blood on fire. She’d felt pride as she sprinted, realizing she was still fast enough to catch up with the younger man and that she was about to take down her target. She felt proud that she knew how to tackle, and how to keep her head out of danger. Even as they fell, she felt proud, too blinded to see the obvious insanity of making a tackle on asphalt, next to a set of stairs. She’d ended the life of another human being in a fight over a nearly worthless purse. And so she’d sunk to the callous cruelty she strove to keep their creation from emulating.

  Silently, she passed sentence.

  “Solveig, you can’t change the result. You’ll have to accept it, inside you. Let go of it. Tell the self-critic it’s not doing any good.”

  It could have been a minute, even more, that passed while AnDe bided and she stared without focusing at the clean, soft linens that covered her legs. Those legs that had moved so fast, maybe too fast, and taken her to her downfall. Could what she’d done be covered over? No. But on some, eventual day her whole body, like those of many people she had known, like that of the young man she had killed, would be covered over, and there seemed too much that was vital to accomplish before then.

  AnDe stood up. “In the meantime, you must let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.” He stepped close, held her limp right hand between both of his, and pressed. Then he turned and left.

  Lying exhausted, she rotated her right wrist and stared at her palm. Fingers cupped, her hand seemed to hold something warm, something she couldn’t see.

  Back in his apartment, AnDe cleared his desk of the remains of a late-evening snack. He hadn’t eaten a real meal that day, having spent almost all his time with officials: police, justice officials, internal security, representatives of Chinese international surveillance, his superiors in his agency, and briefly with the Minister of Technology himself.

  He had just finished reading all the news stories he could find about the incident. There were only a few. The incident was reported as an accidental fall caused by people using the pedestrian undercrossing in a hurry to catch a train, and it included commentary on the need for patience when using stairs or approaching trains, and with references to previous similar accidents.

  Then he pulled up the file on Solveig he’d been given the previous year. He’d read it all before, yet there he found himself looking at it again. His mind was tired and there was nothing to stop him. He flipped through the screens until he came to her photo. He admired how well the camera had caught her, head turned slightly to the side and smiling modestly. He enlarged the portrait.

  Quite a different look to the one she had when I told her the news. You are suffering now, my excellent colleague. Your heart is noble, yet you often struggle underneath. I pray you won’t be asked to leave.

  Yet he’d made the efforts he could; results were beyond him. He looked up at his own calm face in the mirror across the room. At that distance, his head was about the same size and elevation as hers on the computer screen. A lovely coincidence. The paired images depicted a couple gazing warmly at each other. For a fleeting instant, it seemed beautiful. Then he kicked the floor to roll his chair away from the computer, and swiveled to see his face reflected darkly in the window and covered with terror.

  How has the depth of these feelings escaped your notice? he demanded of the reflection. How much have you done in delusion? Have you been disloyal by telling yourself you were serving the project?

  He continued the interrogation. He demanded whether these hidden feelings, like a virus taking over an entire operating system, had usurped control: control that properly belonged to his conscious and deliberate ethical reasoning.

  Now you must resolve what action to take. No more deluding yourself by acting in a world crafted by the feelings in your mind.

  But what else do I have? He felt himself choking on the thought, and grasping for direction.

  I need a key! his mind cried. A key to dispel illusions.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Solveig paced around the table in Conference Room 1, passing behind the backs of Lars and four Chinese colleagues. The hum of the three-decades-old ventilation system sounded clear and loud. Another hot July day on its way, she thought.

  She raised her hand, tacky with insipient sweat, to the register in the ceiling and felt the cool draft on her fingers. No lingering smell of mold came from the ducting that day. A few days earlier, she had complained. Now the air suggested a perfume-like fragrance. She shook her head.

  She came to the door and peered out. AnDe had stationed himself in the middle of the hallway. Arms folded across his chest, he faced the three open doorways to the break-out rooms. His gaze seemed distant, and, as a guard approached, nodded, and walked by, AnDe did not seem to react. Like an ornithologist who recognized the appearance of a favorite bird, he spun towards her with lifted eyebrows. She shrugged in reply, turned back, and resumed pacing the room.

  Lars was massaging his chin with one hand. She leaned forward and whispered to him in Norwegian, “Well?”

  “You’ve put on your steely face, but I can tell you’re hiding a smile. Nervous, too?”

  “We’ve come to the edge of the crevasse. Do we make the leap?”

  “You know the answer. What was the meaning in al
l this if we don’t? They've started assembling the World Council, so we know they'll adopt some AI system as the WEA. Our project must be the first to succeed.”

  “Not everyone on the project is with us.”

  “They never are.” Lars focused his intense eyes on hers. “Everything I said that night about AnDe . . . I know I was tipsy, but I believe it even more today. He’s what we have to go by.”

  She blinked several times and straightened up. “Right,” she announced to the room in English. “Any results yet?”

  No one answered.

  She passed behind Mishuang, who offered her a look of sympathy mixed with hope.

  “OK,” Solveig said, and reversed course. “We’ll restart with the next modification.”

  Just as she reached her chair, one of the three Chinese men in the room grunted in surprise, and Mishuang uttered a sudden, “Oh!” She looked at Lars. His eyes were bulging at his screen.

  Solveig touched her keyboard and began to speak. She coughed as her words caught in her throat. She tried again. “System Proxy, verify that the Protection Lock has been accepted by the operating system.”

  “Verified,” came a voice from below her screen.

  “System Proxy, verify that the vital codes are fully operable but remain unalterable by the system or future users.”

  “Verified.”

  “Herregud!” she exclaimed. I’ve done it, she thought. She checked the others. Three were staring at their screens, while Lars beamed at her. Mishuang rose from her seat.

  “We’ve done it!” Solveig said.

  “Congratulations!” Mishuang made a bow to Solveig.

  “To all of us!” Solveig waved her arm in a circle above her head.

  The man who had grunted approached. “Congratulations to you. I am honored to have worked with you for this success.” He bowed his head. “Please, excuse me.” He walked quickly out of the room.