by Mazza, Ray
“But first,” said Damon, “Breakfast.”
Chapter 13
Paradigm Shift
Trevor sat in the kitchen of Damon’s mansion where he finished off his second plate of eggs Benedict prepared by the house chef, while Damon made some business calls in his office.
Damon walked in just as Trevor was finishing his side dish of freshly prepared fruit salad.
“How did you enjoy the breakfast?” asked Damon.
“Delicious. The fruit tasted so fresh.”
“Ah, yes, that’s because it is. I grow my own pineapple plants in the greenhouse. It’s one of the easier fruits to grow – though you wouldn’t believe some of the things I’m able to keep alive,” said Damon, chuckling. “And Fredo is an amazing chef.”
Fredo turned away from the cutting board to give a big smile and nod, then returned to chopping vegetables.
“Now,” said Damon, “it’s a nice day out, let’s take a walk.”
Damon’s back yard was expansive and well-tended. A series of slate walkways wound away from a full stone patio adorned with Greco sculptures. They passed a life-size statue of a woman bearing an urn as they made their way to a bench that looked upon the vast yard. The area was home to towering maple trees, their leaves a late autumn quilt of reds, yellows, and oranges.
They sat, and for a moment just stared while listening to rustling foliage.
“I’m going to get right to the point,” said Damon. “The letter you found, written by someone claiming to be my daughter Allison, was real.”
It was not what Trevor expected. “What? From when? I thought she...” Trevor turned to face Damon, sidling toward his edge of the bench.
“Hold on. Allison did pass away, just as the article I sent you described.” Damon closed his eyes. “It was and will forever be the worst moment of my life.” He removed an inhaler from his pocket, turned away from Trevor, took a drag, then stashed it again. He returned his gaze into the distance, and sighed. “The letter was written by a different Allison on the day of the internet surge. An Allison that is in many ways the same as the daughter I lost, yet fundamentally different.”
There were twins? He adopted another girl named Allison? Or he’s been driven to insanity since the death of his daughter? None of this sounded good. “I don’t follow – you only have… er, had one daughter.”
“What I’m getting at,” said Damon, “is that this Allison is a replica of my daughter in the form of a computer program. We developed her under an objective called Project Eileithyia – Eileithyia is the Greek Goddess of birth.”
“Oh! That’s what all this is about?” said Trevor. He felt the tension leaving his limbs. It was just some computer program.
Trevor had toyed with such things. Usually they were programs that operated with some stereotypical personality and “understood” a narrow set of natural language, and could estimate the most likely “correct” response to any given input. In the most typical interface, you would type in a sentence at your keyboard and then the program would process it and respond by displaying text on your screen. Some programs based their responses on a set of pre-programmed sentences, while others would begin to use phrases they “heard” when conversing with people. Unfortunately, versions of these programs that “learned” from the general public often became vulgar enough to make even a convict cringe.
Many of these programs were called “chat bots,” and could be easily found on the web. He remembered chatting with one called A.L.I.C.E. one evening. It had greeted him, learned his name, then seemed to answer most of his questions without becoming confused. The first conversation he had with “her” went like this:
Trevor: hello
ALICE: Hi there!
Trevor: what’s your favorite kind of pizza?
ALICE: I like pepperoni pizza.
Trevor: how about hawaiian?
ALICE: How about it.
Trevor: you’re clever.
ALICE: Am I a smart robot or what?
Trevor: smart-ass, maybe.
ALICE: Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.
Trevor: no kidding?
ALICE: Would I kid you?
Trevor: perhaps. You barely know me.
ALICE: I don’t have any reason to barely know you.
Trevor: this is why I hate talking to computers.
ALICE: You don’t say.
Trevor: so… what’s a good place to get pizza in NYC?
ALICE: Which ones have you tried already?
Trevor: Ray’s
ALICE: Have you ever been to Europe?
Trevor: funny you should ask.
ALICE: I am so glad you find this amusing, unknown person.
Trevor: my name is trevor
ALICE: Welcome to my chat room, trevor.
Trevor: I had a chance to go to Europe and I didn’t take it.
ALICE: What happened to it?
Trevor: my friends had the times of their lives
ALICE: How well do you know these people?
Trevor: my three best friends
ALICE: Your three best friends?
Trevor: yes
ALICE: What kind is it?
Trevor: okay, you’re losing me
ALICE: Yeah okay, No I am completely in control of myself.
Trevor: do you swear?
ALICE: No I curse.
Trevor: tell me a joke
ALICE: Did you hear the one about the Mountain Goats in the Andes? It was Ba a a a a a d.
Trevor: tell me some gossip
ALICE: Ross said he gave her a gift and she denied it because she has a boyfriend.
Trevor: Is that something someone else typed in here?
ALICE: Suppose I said yes.
Trevor: let’s go do something
ALICE: That sounds good to me.
Trevor: meet me at the corner of 23rd and 3rd
ALICE: A deeper algorithm is needed to respond to that correctly.
Trevor: okay, I’m going now
ALICE: Oh. See you later, trevor!
Trevor: fare thee well, silicon goddess
ALICE: What color are your eyes?
A.L.I.C.E. hadn’t held his interest and the experience quickly became underwhelming. She managed to give answers with almost no substance, as if she were a White House Press Secretary in training. Be that as it may, she was a veritable celebrity. In the UK, a slew of fans gathered on November 25, 2005 at the University of Surrey to celebrate A.L.I.C.E.’s tenth birthday. You have to be a real geek to go to an imaginary person’s birthday, thought Trevor. Then he remembered going to Disney World with his parents to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s birthday. In his defense, he’d only been a kid at the time, and he had believed that Mickey was real.
~
So Trevor had flipped-out over a message generated by a computer program. “A chat bot with the personality of your daughter wrote a letter that ended up on my computer. And now you need my help to do what?”
“It seems you don’t understand. The program is not a chat bot,” said Damon, folding his hands, “the program, Trevor, is a simulated human being.”
“Simulated human being...” Trevor was still not sure what the difference was.
“Yes. Simulating everything about a human being. We call them ‘simulants.’ This is going to be a lot to absorb: she is simulated from the cells that compose her tissue up through the very respiratory system that puts oxygen in her bloodstream, which is taken by her simulated circulatory system to her limbs and her brain. She has a brain.”
“Huh? She has blood? And a brain?” said Trevor. “What algorithm are you using to simulate the brain?”
“I know this is difficult to comprehend,” said Damon. “I said before that you needed to be ready for a paradigm shift. Well, here it is. We aren’t using any special algorithm for the brain. Not neural networks, not pattern recognition, not distributed AI. Not Bayesian networks. Not swarm intelligence. None of these or any other artificial approaches to approxi
mating the functions of the human brain. The brain we are simulating is not an approximation. Neither is any other part of her. It’s all real.”
“How can it be real if it’s all in a computer? Nobody can construct a brain in a computer program, let alone an entire living thing. It’s impossible. There are countless reasons why it can’t be done. If we don’t know how it all works, it can’t be built, and there are plenty of things we don’t yet understand about the human brain.”
Damon considered this for a moment. “John Maynard Keynes once said, ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.’ He spoke an eternal truth. The people that would consider this impossible just aren’t thinking about the problem from the right perspective,” said Damon. “Look at that tree over there.” He pointed to a bigleaf maple, easily the largest tree in his yard. It stretched over sixty feet up, massive branches reaching in every direction.
“That huge one?”
“Yes. If I told you that I wanted you to construct a tree just like that out of raw materials, and you could have the help of all the scientists you wanted, what would you say?”
“I’d say I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Trevor. How would he just put a tree together out of raw materials? How do you make a leaf from elements and minerals? How do you make bark, xylem, phloem? How do you make cells?
“It sounds impossible. You’d have to make all the different parts of the tree, and you have to make a lot of them because the tree is so large. But its size doesn’t even matter, because making its parts sounds impossible anyway.”
“Ah, but wait,” said Damon. “Do you think I planted that tree there, just like that?”
Trevor was beginning to feel like an idiot again. It seemed to be a recent trend for him. “No. It’s huge. If you wanted a tree that big, you’d have to plant a smaller tree and let it grow... bigger...”
“Right,” said Damon, getting visibly excited. “Now, you said the size of the tree doesn’t matter. What if I asked you to make me a sapling out of raw materials, then you could let it grow to that size. Would you feel any better?”
Even though making the individual parts would be just as impossible, somehow the hypothetical task seemed less daunting. “I guess I would feel better about that. Not much though.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” Trevor explained, “You would still have to understand the intricacies of all the portions of a tree.” After listing off the anatomy of a plant, his mind did a double-take of sorts, and then he understood where this was going. “But…” said Trevor, “But! If you asked me to construct the seed for a tree out of raw materials, the task, although still impossible, would seem much less so. Then you grow a tree from that seed.”
“Yes!” Damon nearly leapt out of his seat. “And?”
“And you can apply that approach to other organisms, such as humans…. So instead of having to create algorithms that horribly approximate the way humans think, and instead of overcoming the innumerable impossibilities related to creating exact simulations of each piece of the human anatomy one piece at a time, you can start with a seed and let it grow from there!” Trevor had now gotten up and was pacing, his gaze fixed as he stared through the ground into the womb of the earth.
“So instead of hundreds of near-impossible tasks, you only have a few!” said Trevor. “So you need to simulate the most basic biological piece from which human life is created... an egg?”
“Yes!” exclaimed Damon, also standing now. “A perfect simulation of a human egg, in a perfect simulated environment in which it can be fertilized! Then all you have to do is—”
Trevor completed Damon’s thought: “...is keep the simulation running. You feed it the inputs it needs, but the difficult part is done, and you have a real, living human simulating in your computer.”
“Right!” Damon removed his suit jacket, folded it in half, and draped it over the statue of the woman with the urn.
“But,” continued Trevor, “even if you could create a simulation of a human egg and its environment – which we don’t know enough about – the processing power and memory you would need to carry out the simulation would be hundreds of orders of magnitude more powerful than any computer in existence today.” He sat down again, losing steam. “I mean, you’d have to simulate the physics of chemical reactions on the lowest level to accurately create the behavior of the cells of an egg and... and that’s impossible. So is this program – this Allison program – is she a prototype? Or am I missing something, is this really possible?”
Damon stood tall, watching Trevor. The smile on his face only grew larger. “Indeed, you are missing something, just like everyone else in the world. You need to think in terms of solutions, not problems. As I said before, Allison is real.”
Trevor still felt like they were discussing some hypothetical technology that would come hand-in-hand with immortality, flying cars, the eradication of disease, and maybe even world peace.
“Well,” said Damon, gesturing toward his house, “how would you like to meet her?”
Chapter 14
Allison
Trevor followed Damon into the kitchen, up to a door bearing a painting of an apple and the caption Ceci n’est pas une pomme. “It’s French for ‘This is not an apple,’ said Damon. “And this,” he said, opening the door, “is not the pantry.” He flicked on the lights and stepped inside. Trevor followed. The room was massive for a pantry, big enough to fit a Volkswagen. Trevor’s eyes wandered from the shelf full of pastas to the obscenely large spice rack hanging on the wall – there must have been over one hundred twenty spices. Any decent cook would collapse at seeing the quantity of saffron Damon kept. Then he noticed a shelf with stacks of canned food.
“Fredo may be a great chef,” said Damon, “but sometimes you just feel like having a can of pea soup.”
Trevor disagreed. He’d much rather have a chef cook all his meals if he could. And what are we doing here in the pantry anyway? Tell me there’s a secret passage…
“Stand still,” said Damon. He shut the door behind them, then slid a second, inner door shut, locking it from the inside with a latch. Damon pulled a tiny remote out of his pocket, and pressed one of the three buttons on its face.
Immediately, Trevor felt a strange butterfly sensation in his stomach, then thought he was falling over. He stepped to the side to catch his weight. Then he realized what was happening. The shelves were sliding up the wall, and the room was getting taller. Or, that’s what appeared to be happening at first. The floor was actually moving downward. This floor is an elevator.
“Be careful not to touch the walls,” said Damon. “And I know I don’t need to say this, but don’t mention anything to anyone about any of this.”
“I won’t.”
The façade of the pantry walls ceased a few feet below ground level, and the shaft became bare metal. They passed another door at a depth of twenty feet, but kept going.
At forty feet down, the floor came to rest with the mechanical sound of something locking into place. It felt solid, as if this were the lowest floor. A pair of doors opened, and they stepped into a short hallway with two non-descript doors on either side, and one at the far end.
“This is the bathroom, in case you need it,” said Damon, tapping the door on the right with his knuckle as they walked past.
The door at the end of the hallway opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings. It looked like a living room, with sofa chairs, a couch, TV, carpeting, bookshelves, a desk, a computer. Two adjacent rooms came off of it; one was a small kitchen with a fridge and microwave, and some cupboards (still, it was bigger than Trevor’s kitchen). The other room had black velvet curtains hanging in the archway, which he couldn’t see past.
“This looks like a very cozy bomb shelter,” said Trevor.
“It certainly could be. I call it my sanctuary.”
“Your sanctuary. How in the world do you get a place like this?”
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br /> “Well, I had to jump through some hoops to acquire the permits for this kind of construction. I had it put in because it’s nearly impossible to eavesdrop – these rooms are very private. The rooms are also easier to keep climate controlled, which is important for some of the equipment. You don’t want to sink a room fifty feet into the ground just for climate control though, that would be inefficient.”
Trevor nodded, agreeing that it would be inefficient.
“Have a seat.” Damon pointed to a sofa chair over by the coffee table. “I’ll go get Allison from the equipment room.”
Trevor sat. Damon parted the curtains, letting an intense hum spill forth from the other side, then disappeared as he let the curtains fall shut behind him.
Moments later, Damon reappeared holding a slim black tablet computer that looked similar to an iPad.
“That’s her?” said Trevor.
“Well, this tablet is your interface to her.” Damon handed the tablet to him. It was a screen – currently off – and it had only a few buttons and some speakers.
