Conception: Book One of Human Dilemma

by Scott Sibary

  Yet the more he drank, the more uncouth and unfamiliar he became, no longer the handsome seventeen-year-old whose deep voice had entreated her to join him on a romantic venture. Weighting her down on the daybed was a stupefied human beast with his intellect rinsed away by alcohol. Gone were his shine and his grace.

  Her arms moved to resist him once he pulled down her pants far enough to reveal his naked goal. Then the other revelation.

  “What are we waiting for? You’re the wanting type. We all know it!”

  With the burning of his last words, the lust she’d felt steamed into anger. She grabbed his arms just above the elbows and sent him rolling sideways.

  “I don’t know you!” she shouted.

  In the bewildered expression, the dullness of his eyes, his mouth still open and his chin quavering, she saw no way to get through. She pulled up her pants, then jumped up to tuck in her blouse and tighten her belt.

  He popped to his feet and stammered an apology or an attempt to regain her favor. The color flushed from his face. His head swayed, and his eyes began to cross. With a look of surprise, he covered his mouth with his hand and lurched out through the door.

  She shifted over to sit at the table and dropped her elbows hard onto its top. The romantic duet they’d begun earlier was transformed into separate alternating songs of her heaving tears into her hands and him retching outside.

  She lowered her hands from her puffy, reddened face, passed her fingers along her belt, and tugged it for assurance. She shouted at the beer bottles, excoriating them for their lure. “Damn his manners! Damn his drinking!”

  She stopped trying to fool herself. She couldn’t honestly say how far she would have gone had they drunk little or nothing. But the betrayal, no! The infuriating insinuation that her mother was a disreputable nymphomaniac, and so she must be as well—never! Some classmates had said as much, but she’d never suspected he could be one of them.

  Witnessing adults merrily transformed under the influence of a party and a few drinks had been both alluring and repulsive. Experiencing it herself and losing the sense of what one is made her flesh creep. She, too, had hidden traits. If unseen, they could not be assessed. And, she concluded severely, if I can’t rely on myself, then I can’t rely on my assessment of others. And so I get betrayed.

  Well, Solveig thought as she propped herself up on her elbows, what should you expect but to have that memory pop up here. It must be Loki, come as a rodent, to alert you. You had better be a good judge this time.

  She laid her head back on the pillow, and her thoughts returned to the mission. The gnawing noise from the ceiling resumed, and with it her nagging, neurotic voice. It admonished her not to postpone the most key issue they faced. She and AnDe had yet to discuss access to information about the Protection Lock. Would he insist that more be revealed?

  She reached for the bamboo broom leaning against the corner near her bed. Lifting it vertically, she struck the ceiling with the butt of the handle. The gnawing sound was interrupted.

  So was AnDe’s deep slumber. On the daybed in the main room, he lay wide-eyed for a moment, listening. Then he closed his eyes again. Only one thought troubled him: do I really understand what I am doing? Not following his query to its many sub-questions, he left it as a nebulous interrogatory and drifted back to sleep.

  Solveig sat on a bench along the outside of the cabin, lingering in the heaviness of a wakening body and waiting for her tea water to boil. Contrasting sensations set her stage for the last full day: the cold bite of a morning breeze and the warm caress of the sun on her face; the bright image of an orange spot surrounded by the darkness of closed eyes; the freshness of the mountain air, breathed through nostrils still congested from pollution; the quiet of the countryside, letting her mind bring forth the urban noise she’d lived with for a year; the certainty of heading home from a successful project and the uncertainty of whether she’d be selected to return.

  She was tempted to make inquiries via her official contact in Norway, but the timing could backfire. Hidden diplomatic storms might be raging in terrain far from her view. Like a pressure cooker, calm on the outside told nothing of the state within. The same might apply to AnDe. Take a forbidden peek, before the pressure has let out, and one learns fast. Pandora in the kitchen, she warned herself. And then there was the other pressure cooker sitting on the bench outside the cabin, enjoying the morning air.

  One day remained to conclude the report; tomorrow they would return to Beijing, and a few days later she would head home to Norway. The site of this professional success remained the place of greatest opportunity, yet getting selected for the implementation team required clearing another hurdle. And again, she would need help.

  AnDe poked his head around the corner of the cabin. He waved as he headed off on a well-worn path, swinging his toiletries bag with little penguins on it.

  Whistling from the teakettle drew her inside. She was setting the table for breakfast when AnDe returned.

  “Say,” she said, “we might be nearly finished by noon. How about going outside for a picnic lunch, maybe on that bluff above the cabins?”

  “Wonderful idea.”

  Shortly after noon, they ascended the bluff on a trail that led across another meadow and up the mountain slope behind. AnDe had brought a blanket from the cabin. He unfurled it onto a patch of thick grass and sat down. Solveig placed the bag of food in the middle of the blanket. She stood gazing at the mountains newly visible to the west.

  Pulling items from the bag, AnDe placed a paper napkin next to himself and another in the area Solveig might sit.

  A sudden breeze lifted both napkins into the air. He caught his; hers took off upslope across the meadow. She sprang after, almost catching it twice when it dropped teasingly near her reach. It danced like a free spirit and came to rest on the branches of a lone, tall shrub.

  She walked over to the plant, which seemed to hand her napkin to her as a favor. Where was its kin, that it came to grow here, living its life in this different world?

  “Done! It’s all ready!” AnDe was calling from the blanket.

  Startled, she heard the word echo in her mind: done. Done was her basic work on the codes. At the age of thirty-five, she could already feel her brain slowing from its speed of ten or fifteen years earlier.

  It’s done, she said to herself. Continuing to focus on these codes would be foolish. I could end up simply trying to defend my ideas and criticizing alternatives. I could embarrass myself like the middle-aged Einstein with his attempts to refute Bohr’s quantum mechanics. Bohr, with his Taoist perspective. No, I must move forward with new aspects of AI, to help shape its perspective.

  She stooped to pick up a yellow leaf fallen from the shrub. She returned to AnDe and asked him if he recognized the leaf.

  “No, sorry,” he said, “I’ve no idea. You know, it’s kind of humorous. You work hard on abstract subjects in technology, and yet here you are, curious about plants. I love the juxtaposition!”

  Musing over the leaf in her fingers and his curious declaration, she sat down to his left. The wool blanket over the thick clumps of grass felt welcoming. “Yeah, being curious is crucial for me.”

  In the warm sun and light breeze, the wide-open space and single, familiar companion, her body relaxed and she leaned back. Her fingertips pressed into the soil. She could almost have lain back to feel the world spin slowly under the sky, accepting it as completely as it seemed to accept her.

  Sitting an arm’s length away from her, AnDe found his world was already spinning. Not at the slow, sidereal pace but as a whirring mix of sensations. He smelled the fragrance of crushed grass and soil, earthy and inviting, and his heart began to race. A sheen of sweat formed on his forehead even as a cooling breeze dried it off. The distant skyline seemed to vibrate, as if the world were shaking or his eyesight were unsteady. He brought his focus closer. In the immediate background extended the meadow with a few scattered wildflowers and, in the foreground, a plaid p
icnic blanket. On it sat a human lotus, edged by a glowing radiance.

  He began to tremble inside and lost his well-planned words. He swallowed hard and began a different subject. “Curiosity as a path to understanding: that’s a kind of wisdom, I guess. I think that life is very short. My grandfather had your habit of meditating regularly. He told me that you develop wisdom so late, you feel you can best live life when you have little of it left to live.” He paused to swallow again. “That leads me to think this artificial intelligence is going to have a hell of a time recommending action. Evaluating relative harms requires too much wisdom.”

  “You’re just saying maturation takes a long time. But that suggests a solution. Melding of different mental processes into one coherent mind, without any thoughts or feelings suppressed, might be the path to developing an AGI with wisdom. It might take us several decades. But why should we plan only for ourselves and our children, and not beyond?”

  He drew in his breath and held the image she suggested. “There are too many variables to do effective planning that far ahead. We should proceed cautiously, especially as AI participates more in its own development.”

  “Exactly. That means we must give structure now, as much as possible, to its latent capacities. Of all things, that’s most important to me. The design choices we make now could have prodigious impacts, right?” She let out a sigh, chose a plum from the picnic bag and began to polish it on the sleeve of her sweater. Then she reached out and offered the plum to AnDe.

  He reached out with both hands and took it between his ten fingers. His mouth began to water. He rotated the dark and speckled plum, admiring its convex depiction of the nighttime celestial sphere: a tiny universe held in the custody of his hand.

  “Yeah . . . right; we’ll have to,” he said, and summoned his courage. “Then, when this baby grows up, will it become a crutch for humanity? Or will it form wings? I believe we need to work together on this, trusting each other.”

  “You’ve earned more and more of my confidence. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here with you.”

  While raising and lowering the hand holding the offering, he took several deep breaths, and pumped up his nerve. He tried his subject from another angle. “Myself, I’m often suspicious of things. I assume the cabin is bugged and that agents are staying nearby. I’m used to that; our worksite in the health department was openly monitored. But it gets much worse. I’ve had eerie suspicions the thief was murdered by our security service in an attempt to get you out of the country. Or maybe the theft was setup to get clues from you. I got rather paranoid, and I spent a lot of time researching and talking to people, to quell my suspicions.” He spoke to the vista, avoiding looking at her even as she turned to watch him.

  “I suspect our Great Wall was designed to be difficult for you to work with,” he continued. “Maybe it was designed to crack your code and gain control. I know there are people who wanted that to happen. Right now, those people are suspicious of me, but I cast my die, and I know the path I intend to follow.

  “I could even find reasons to be suspicious of you,” he said, glancing at her. She was staring at him with a penetrating gaze, and he looked down at the blanket where her fingers played into the loose weaving. “But I avoid that in the absence of any direct evidence. When I learned of the security leak, I had to be suspicious again. But not of you, because I wanted to be able to interact with you.”

  He bit into his plum, chewed, and then swallowed. “I don’t find it healthy to be suspicious. Except where you have evidence of a threat, being suspicious is not an optimal approach to living.”

  “Easy for you to say, growing up in a safe haven. No threats to you or your reputation lurking in the woods. It can be different for women.”

  “Yeah. I saw that in my sister. She never got over it. She only trusted a few individuals, never any community. She never wanted her own family.”

  “I can understand that. Why wouldn’t you want people to earn your trust?”

  “If you apply that too stringently, you get secluded. You miss opportunities for connecting and growing.”

  “I’ll put it simply.” She began to sound exasperated, “If one has responsibility, then one must maintain some guard.”

  “And I’ve tried to be sensitive to that, within the limits of my duties. You have succeeded in your duties; so, do you feel like you can let go? Hasn’t it worked out?”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “As we sit here now, I honestly can’t be sure I’ll ever know.”

  AnDe saw her radiant spirit-image receding beyond his reach: off the blanket, off his ancestor’s land, through the skies and back to her island fortress. He leaned towards her. “I hope you will. Can you have faith in our cooperation? That it has been the wisest path for you to take?”

  “Well, it seems to have worked out on the surface,” she said, looking down at her fingers as they played with the blanket. “Faith is a tricky term, like trust. It can be an abdication of responsibility, of your ability to reason and to think through a difficult or painful issue.”

  “Oh?” His breath felt short.

  “Yes! I once felt that faith could protect against worries, like walls that guard against threatening thoughts. But I found that faith can act like prison walls within the mind. Fear and insecurity can keep the intellect from scaling those walls of faith and seeing the world beyond.”

  “Wow.” AnDe sucked in his breath. “That is a very different concept of faith than what I meant.” While he focused his gaze intently on the horizon, as if tracking a distant condor flying above it, he followed the thought rising up out of his subconscious and into his awareness. “I think there is something to believe in, like people having potential. I don’t know how to explain it clearly. I accept that I do not or cannot know many things I’d like to know. I can’t control outcomes. At best, I can direct my efforts. Faith works to me sort of like hope: the hope I act upon and follow. I need to hope—that is, I need to have faith—that what I’m doing is worth striving for.”

  He savored the last of the lingering sweetness from a bite of plum.

  Solveig turned from watching him, picked up a plum and polished it slowly. She looked to be contemplating his idea.

  The sweetness gone, AnDe cleared his throat. “As an aside, I thought I’d let you know that I’ve been offered an excellent faculty position at a prestigious university. It should be seen as an honor, but apparently I cannot take the position and still be on the implementation team.”

  “Well, congratulations. Do you know which you’ll choose?” Her face tightened, and she seemed to hold her breath.

  “That I have been offered the university position at this time suggests to me I will not be given the choice of being on the team.”

  He saw a wince of frustration come over her face. A minute passed as Solveig stared at the unbitten plum in her hand and his mind sped through an array of possible future worlds.

  Eventually he spoke, coloring his resigned acceptance with a tint of hope. “Of course, it would not prevent our working together on any number of things in the future.”

  “Right.” The word burst out, then her tone softened. “Then using your concept, I can say that I do have faith in our cooperation.”

  Solveig stood tight by the cabin’s west-facing window and stared out at the changing weather. They’d dealt with all but one issue and had gotten up from the little round table in the middle of the room to take a break. She’d thought of stretching her legs outside, but the outdoors no longer looked friendly. The soft breeze that had given gentle cooling in the midday sun had built up to a stronger wind from the north. It whistled around the walls of the stone cabin, suggesting that blustery weather would come. There seemed no threat to the little structure; the cabins at the site looked sturdy enough to withstand storms as grey and dark as the stones the cabins were made of.

  Yet in context of the mountain on which they stood, the cabins suggested a more ephemeral presence. The mountains themselves w
ould rise and be eroded, and long before the least of that happened, the seven cabins standing as a small community of temporary abodes would vanish along with their purpose.

  And that thought made her purpose seem as fleeting as a breeze. But more compelling. In the brief spinning that made up one’s lifetime, moments like these could count for everything. And then it came to her, like an urgent message carried on the wind, that she was among the luckiest of people. In placing weighty responsibility upon her shoulders, fortune had favored her.

  Yet the course that her calculating mind took to reach her purpose still seemed like a roller coaster ride. She stepped away from the window and took her seat at the table, the countertop behind her and the exterior door to her right.

  This is it, she thought. That breath-stilling moment when the roller coaster hesitates at the top, the world beyond disappears, and you wait, teetering and anxious.

  AnDe was reaching into his security box. He lifted out a twelve-year-old bottle of zinfandel.

  “I met the winemaker when he came to China. Andrew Nalle: nice old fellow. This should be excellent.”

  She shook her head. “Great, . . . but not while we’re still working.”

  “It’s for later, for celebrating. This is for now.” He drew out a bottle of Voss water.

  One thing after another! Voss water she had not had in years. It struck her as wasteful to ship water in heavy glass bottles, especially halfway around the world, when almost everywhere ought to have the technology to develop enough decent drinking water. Then again, maybe this was one of those times to try the imaginary taste of home.