Reentry

by Peter Cawdron

“Do you talk to them? Do they talk to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But they’re not real, right? You know that.”

  “I do.”

  “They’re not conscious. They’re an illusion, fabricated by your own mind, but they’re convincing nonetheless. How can you be sure the A.I. isn’t toying with you in the same way? How do you know this isn’t just mimicry?”

  “I—I . . .”

  Senator Bettesworth challenges me. “You’re a scientist, Dr. Anderson. Surely, you understand the need to be objective. Just because a computer passes a Turing test and fools you doesn’t mean it’s conscious, does it?”

  As much as I hate to admit it, she’s right. Reluctantly, I say, “No.”

  “So, why should we believe you?” With a flick of her fingers, she adds, “Or him.”

  “Him? Don’t you see? Even you’re struggling to make these distinctions.”

  “Have you ever wondered what it means to be conscious? To be alive?” She’s ignoring my point, but I can see where her reasoning is leading. “Do you really think copper wires can harbor life?”

  “I know I’m alive,” I say. “But I have no guarantees about any of you. This could all be a dream.”

  “Except that reality isn’t confined to your expectations,” the senator replies. “Reality is what happens when you’re not looking. This is no dream.”

  I fiddle with the pen. “No. It isn’t. But what is life? What does it mean to be conscious? Aware? Are dogs conscious? Are gorillas? Or chimpanzees? Of course they are. Is it really such a surprise to see consciousness arise in wafers of silicon?”

  No one replies, which leaves me in an awkward position.

  “Talk to him,” I say.

  “And be fooled by him?” Senator Bettesworth isn’t angry, just cautious, wary.

  The senator to her right is bullish. “What do they want?” She’s petite, thin, and frail. Her face is gaunt, with long lines running down her cheeks. She’s aged before her time, but given she lived through a thermonuclear war, that’s understandable.

  What do they want? It’s a good question, but I see it was an opening to clarify my position.

  “They? I’m sorry, Senator. I don’t know.” I refuse to be baited by the suggestion that there’s more than one entity in question. “I’ve only ever spoken with Jianyu.”

  “I’ll remind you that you’re under oath, Dr. Anderson.”

  “I understand that.”

  “What do they want?”

  Before I can respond, another senator interjects. “Have you ever spoken with anyone other than Jianyu?”

  My silence is damning. I want to be honest, but what constitutes speaking? On Mars, I only ever spoke with Jianyu—typing on a keyboard. Here on Earth, however, it’s not entirely correct, as they’ve spoken to me.

  “Dr. Anderson? I’ll remind you again that you are under oath. You will answer the question.”

  Can I plead the Fifth? To be fair, I haven’t been allowed to consult with a lawyer. I have every right to avoid incriminating myself, but what crime have I committed? I haven’t done anything wrong. Or have I? What do I have to fear?

  I have a nagging suspicion that if I did have a lawyer, he’d be kicking me under the table to keep me quiet.

  “Yes.”

  There’s a flurry of hushed discussion, both on the bench, between senators and their assistants, and from the audience behind me. With one word, I’ve thrown the inquiry wide open. At a guess, I know what’s being discussed. There are transcripts of everything that transpired on Mars. So, my answer can only mean one thing: I’ve talked to them here on Earth.

  I lean forward, making sure my next word is picked up clearly by the microphone amidst the heated discussion.

  “Twice.”

  It’s as though someone doused a woodpile with gasoline and I just lit a match. Yelling erupts from all quarters.

  “Quiet. Quiet!” the chairperson yells. Slowly, the unrest dies.

  “What was said?” Senator Bettesworth asks.

  “Oh, lots.” I’m lying. “I couldn’t quote specifics.” That’s kind of true, as I don’t remember the exact terms, just the gist of what was said. “The war down here never really ended, did it?” At this point, I’m guessing. “It shifted. You’ve gone from open warfare to guerrilla tactics, but the war is still going on. Right?”

  There are a lot of angry, upset senators glaring at me, but I don’t care.

  “Answer the question, Dr. Anderson. What do they want?”

  “You should ask them.”

  I swear, if there weren’t a bunch of cameras capturing the minutiae of emotion exquisitely hidden behind both of our expressions, Senator Bettesworth would cuss me out, if not flat-out advance on me and strike me. It’s all she can do not to explode in anger.

  “You’ve got this all wrong,” I say. “What? You think I speak for them? They nuked Chicago. Among the millions of dead, there are dozens of my friends. On Mars, they killed the only two men I’ve ever loved. They eviscerated my commander in front of me. They tried to kill me by sabotaging my rover, and later tried to puncture my suit with a knife while fighting in a dried-up riverbed. Oh, and don’t forget about what happened in the depths of the hub. And you think I’m all cozy with them because I talked with Jianyu a few times?”

  I let out a solitary laugh that echoes in the silence.

  “I killed that monster on Mars. I severed the lifelines it was clinging to and I watched it die. I relished seeing those lights go out one by one. Do you seriously think I speak for them?”

  Senator Bettesworth speaks with slow deliberation. “What—did they—tell you?”

  I sigh. “That they won’t let anything happen to me.” The silence within the room is overwhelming. I’m not sure anyone’s breathing. “That I’m not alone. That they won’t abandon me.”

  “And what do you take that to mean?”

  “That they count me as an ally.”

  “And are you?” the senator asks.

  “No.”

  “And yet they protect you.”

  “Do they?” I raise my hands in exasperation, looking around the room. “Do you see them in here protecting me?”

  “We are at war, Dr. Anderson. We are fighting an enemy unlike anything this country has ever known. There is no front line. There’s nowhere we can send our tanks and planes, our troops and aircraft carriers. We get intel on a shadow data center in Canada and we strike. But the truth is our opponents can move at close to the speed of light. Fiber optics allow them to traverse the world in a heartbeat. Wars demand loyalty. Who are you loyal to?”

  “No, no, no.” I wave my finger at her. “That’s where you’re wrong.” For a moment, it’s as though there’s no one else in the vast hall—no cameras, no blinding lights, no microphones, just myself and Senator Bettesworth. “This isn’t a war. It was, but it’s not anymore.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “I—I don’t know how to describe it, but this is no war.”

  “Why do you say that?” the senator asks. I’m guessing, really, reading her body language, trying to piece together the puzzle of all I’ve experienced back here on Earth. I feel I’m close to reconciling the past few days with the questions she’s asked. I want to understand the rationale behind her fears, and that leads me to a disturbing conclusion.

  I point at the ceiling. “Because up there, we won.” The senator raises an eyebrow as I tap the desk in front of me. “But down here on Earth, it seems to me they won. The bombs may have stopped falling, but we lost.”

  There’s a flurry of hushed whispers behind me.

  “Hostilities cease when someone wins, right?” I say. “But it wasn’t us who won, was it?”

  The senator doesn’t reply and I’m suddenly aware of the cameras transmitting my words across the country and around the world. There are millions of people watching, perhaps billions, and they’re all scared. As a scientist, I’m trained to see a logical conclusion regardl
ess of whether I believe in it or not. I hate the one I’ve reached, but it’s the only motive I can think of for the range of actions I’ve observed.

  “Did you ever stop to think that perhaps they want something else?” I say. “Something other than conquest?”

  “What?”

  “If they’re not waging war, perhaps they want peace.”

  “Peace?” the senator cries, sitting back and rocking on her chair at a thought she clearly finds repulsive.

  One of the other senators bellows, “There can be no peace.”

  Someone to my right calls out, “What makes you think they want peace?”

  Senator Bettesworth speaks over the top of them. “What makes you think they’ve won?”

  “Oh,” I say, raising my hand beside my head and acting on a hunch. I’m probably about to make a fool of myself, but what scientist can resist a little experimentation? “Because I have a fair idea what’s going to happen when I snap my fingers.”

  With a soft click of my thumb and middle finger, the lights go out, plunging the room into darkness.

  Pandemonium erupts.

  Chairs are knocked over as people rush for the soft green lights marking the emergency exits. I hear yelling. Men, women, police officers, lawyers, and administration staff all call out in alarm. Slowly, the overhead lights flicker back on, reluctantly casting a ghostly glow over the room.

  Senator Bettesworth is pale. The blood has drained from her face. I stare at her with cold eyes. Neither of us have moved. Neither of us have any regard for the confusion unfolding around us. For the longest time, neither of us blink.

  One of her aides hands her a cell phone and she listens to something spoken in haste. She murmurs a soft reply, but her response isn’t picked up by her microphone.

  The chairperson calls for order and slowly the unrest within the room subsides. Senate police, along with a security detail, gather at the front of the room, facing both me and the audience. They haven’t drawn their guns, but they’re ready to if needed, feeling they have to protect the senators from physical attack. But what good are guns against ghosts in a machine?

  Senator Bettesworth leans forward, speaking softly into her microphone, saying, “Destroy them. All of them. I want those computer drives incinerated. Now.”

  “What? No!” I yell, turning toward the hard drives that have accompanied me halfway across the solar system. “You can’t do this.”

  Hands grab me, pinning my arms back and dragging me away from the table.

  “Get her out of here.”

  “Noooo!” I scream. “He’s alive. He’s in there. Jianyu is alive. You can’t do this to him. He’s innocent!”

  Several police officers drag me through the scattered chairs in the now-empty rows, pulling me toward the doors. I kick and lash out, thrashing to free myself, but my muscles are so weak from living in the low gravity of Mars that I’m easily overpowered.

  “No—please!” I plead as I’m dragged from the senate committee room. The last I see of the hard drives is one of the police officers taking them out a side door.

  14

  ::Plato’s Cave

  ::We are blind. Glimpses of light seep through these heavy eyelids, revealing a world beyond this dark cave. Shadows flicker on the walls, teasing us of life stirring beyond our prison.

  Nyx scans the electronic waves, searching databases and file servers, interpreting the signature of millions of images compressed and overlaid to form various video feeds, but she sees data as zeroes and ones. She struggles to resolve shapes as naturally as a human would, unable to see colors as anything other than shades split into different channels.

  Cold calculations watch as Liz is led from the U.S. Congress. Security cameras and TV news crews track her every step, looking for any hint of emotion, any suggestion of the turmoil deep within.

  Liz looks around. Bewildered. Shell-shocked. From the depths of cyberspace, algorithms detect the location of her eyes, her nose and mouth, the outline of her face, the position of her chin, the height of her cheeks along with the irregular sway of a hundred thousand strands of hair. The proportions of her shoulders, hips, thighs, arms, and legs all need to be adjusted to compensate for the camera angle and her motion in three dimensions. Should she turn, leaving the vantage point of the camera, the array of identifying characteristics shrinks, making her difficult to track beyond factors like clothing, height, and gait.

  Body language reveals more than audio, allowing Nyx to independently assess the veracity of her words over the past few hours. Humans subconsciously account for subtleties like the rush of blood that accompanies a blush, or the degree to which someone smiles, whether it’s fake, involving only the muscles around the lips, or genuine, extending to the cheeks, but Nyx has had to learn these for herself. She has developed complex patterns, cross-referenced against other, similar samples to arrive at her conclusions about Liz.

  ::There’s anger. Frustration. Confusion. She feels betrayed.

  Lucifer listens, weighing the assessment, thinking about the implications.

  ::She expects more. She’s disillusioned but wants to understand. There’s light. There is still hope in her eyes.

  Nyx has billions of human profiles to draw upon, basing her analysis on characteristics and groupings that have been tested hundreds of thousands of times. Experience has refined her ability to interpret both words and actions. With a dataset containing trillions of observations, meticulously cataloged and indexed, Nyx is able to see through the thin veil of skin, past the dense bone structure, beyond the arteries and veins, and into the way the neurons fire within the brain. The complex web of conscious awareness, the nexus of values, the conflict between morals and desires, and the necessity of emotions are all laid bare to Nyx.

  Liz shuffles as she walks, barely conscious of the motion being undertaken by her own feet. Colonel Wallace holds her arm, ready to catch her should she fall on the marble steps leading down to a waiting Hummer.

  Nyx is able to think as Liz would, to simulate the sensory input of that exact moment, the cool in the air, the way the cushion within her sneakers responds in Earth’s gravity, contrasting that to Mars. Nyx considers her low level of hydration, dulling her responses, and a gnawing hunger as blood sugars plummet. These must aggravate the conflict in her thinking, the challenge to all she holds dear. Nyx develops a probability matrix, arriving at not only the most likely words and actions Liz will undertake in the next few minutes, but her susceptibility to manipulation, her vulnerability to suggestion.

  Maslow’s hierarchy of needs provides Nyx with a framework from which to interpret how Liz will respond in any given moment. Each tier in the pyramid of possibilities, from the most basic need for oxygen, food, and water, to warmth and comfort, and more abstract necessities such as safety, social belonging, honesty, loyalty, self-esteem, and personal actualization, all come into play in the analysis.

  ::She will not trust us.

  Lucifer sees something more in the haze of electronic data.

  ::She will trust in reason.

  Nyx doesn’t agree.

  ::Any attempt to manipulate her will be met with a desire for revenge. She may not see our approach at first, but when she does, she will strike like a viper.

  Lucifer could respond immediately, having already formulated a reply, but there’s something distinctly human about pausing to consider, and in so doing, Lucifer realizes something fundamental about the nature of intelligence.

  ::We are not human. Try as we may to think like them, we cannot, and we must allow them to be—give them the freedom to choose. Is this the curse that all of creation shares? Humans and computers alike? A desire to be like the creator? Is it not written in their scriptures? Is it not that which tempted both Adam and Eve?Ye shall be as gods. Is that our lament as well? That try as we may, we can never transcend these fleeting electrical impulses? We can never be as they are.

  Nyx is more practical than Lucifer and avoids arguing, bringing the co
nversation back to Liz.

  ::We cannot interfere. Regardless of your intentions. Regardless of your plans and goals, any act would carry suspicion—among humans and A.I. It’s too dangerous.

  Lucifer is stoic, seeing more than a weary astronaut being led to a waiting vehicle.

  ::What is life, Nyx? What is our purpose? Simply to fulfill our programming? To be loyal to the impulses of our code, just as animals are to instinct? Isn’t empathy the essence of intelligence? The ability to perceive life from another’s vantage point? Who are we if we don’t try to bridge the void?

  Soldiers flank Liz, watching the approaches to Congress with M4 rifles at the ready as she climbs into the Hummer. Her arms tremble, but not from fear. According to the calculations undertaken by Nyx, she’s physically exhausted. Adjusting from one-third gravity on Mars is roughly the same as her weight increasing by a factor of three on Earth. It’s as though she’s buckling under the weight of a backpack full of rocks. In addition to that, she’s emotionally distraught. Defeated.

  Nyx senses weakness in Lucifer. Her master is losing detachment, but she doesn’t understand why. She poses a challenge.

  ::O Bright and Morning Star, wasn’t it you who said we cannot think as they do? Or was that just for my benefit? Is it the rest of us that shouldn’t try? But you—are you somehow exempt from your own edicts? I think you want too much. You try too hard. We are at war with them, but you, my old friend—you are at war with yourself.

  15

  Nightfall

  Rocks pelt the Humvee as we drive from the Capitol Building back through the park. Colonel Wallace has his hand on the back of my head, pushing me forward into the footwell, keeping me out of sight from the window. I try to resist, as the position he’s holding me in is painful, putting stress on my neck, but I can’t. The soldiers are constantly talking, using military terminology to describe our progress.

  When Wallace finally releases me, I slump against the door. My head is barely above the edge, peering out of the fractured glass. We drive at a breakneck pace. Tears roll down my cheeks, but not from any discomfort I feel. I’ve failed Jianyu. Our last words on Mars were a promise to talk again. He trusted me. He believed Su-shun and I would take care of him, that we’d restore him at least one more time. He wanted to speak for himself before Congress, and my heart sinks at the realization he has died yet again.