by Mazza, Ray
Trevor walked along the wall. The first of the unpatented plates was dated December 21, 2006. The next was dated January 28, 2007. He counted only eighteen from the year 2007. There were many more from the year 2008, perhaps about fifty or sixty. It looked like there were nearly ten times as many from 2009, and he was only a quarter of the way down the first wall when he reached the year 2010. The rest of the wall and the entire second wall were all from 2010. The final mounted plate read:
Ezra: Simulation 4049
Pending Patent Filed: October 17, 2010.
For perceptional deviance feedback to promote stabilized non-specific medium transmission of electromagnetic waves at superconductive levels.
As Trevor looked over the plates, he’d noticed that more and more of them were attributed to a simulation named “Ezra.” In fact, in a quick scan of the entire last wall, he didn’t see any other name. Just Ezra.
“So this Ezra simulation… it looks like there was a certain point where he took over. Did you turn everyone else off?”
“She,” corrected Damon, “Ezra is a female… of sorts. Once she developed, she was our prime focus. She began making so many discoveries that we couldn’t even catalog them all on paper. And this was years ago. We don’t even know about most of them because there’s no practical way to sift through all the data.”
Trevor pondered this while studying the skin on one of his fingertips, the meandering bends and the grooves that cut through them, forming his fingerprint. A brief moment of absurdity rushed over him as he wondered about his own identity, and what it would mean to be one of these simulants. He felt excited and sad for them at the same time. Then, as quickly as the feeling had occurred, it was gone.
“You must have to just ask them what they’ve discovered then? Have them weed out their own discoveries to leave you only the most relevant or interesting ones?”
“That’s right, they give us daily reports… it’s almost as if they’re working for us like normal employees.”
“Actually, it sounds exactly like they are working for you. How did they get so smart? How have they discovered all this? When I talked to Allison, I never got the sense that she could end up doing anything like this… I mean… she’s smart, but, this is different. How old are these simulations? How – ”
“You must keep in mind that Allison is a very early generation simulation, very different from subsequent ones. Our focus with her was to get a living, breathing human. Once we had that perfected, we moved on to grander initiatives. Later generations are physically older, although they have been around for less real-world time. They are also magnitudes more intelligent, but their intelligence tends to be focused.”
“Yes, everything on the walls seems to be related to engineering… but what about other disciplines? Medicine? Have they found a cure for cancer yet?”
Damon chuckled, “The holy grail. What do you think?”
“They… no! They haven’t, have they?”
“More or less, but it’s a bit complicated.”
Trevor could hardly believe his senses. Was Damon really about to tell him that they knew of a cure for cancer? Something sought after for so long by so many people… “It’s complicated? What could be complicated about it? Have they or haven’t they found it? Biological advances should be some of the easiest to pursue with a fully-developed and functioning organic simulation! So have they?”
“What I meant,” said Damon, “was that it depends what you consider a cure. We didn’t specifically pursue a cure to cancer, and the environments the simulations live in don’t inherently have carcinogens… but there were other threats to their bodies that were more important to address. Mainly, cell deterioration due to age.
“We instructed a few simulants to study this early on. They have great insight into their own structures because they have access to their own programming. To our amazement, they eventually derived a series of genetic changes affecting telomeres that could be made to an organism such that their cells never sustain prolonged damage. The changes would guarantee that the organism’s genetic replication system would operate flawlessly. In other words, they learned how to avoid the physical effects of aging.”
Trevor nearly forgot to breathe. After greedily gulping some air, he filled in the blanks. “They figured out how to stop aging… and as a side effect, cancer would be an impossibility, because in an organism treated that way, its genetic replication system works perfectly and couldn’t go on a runaway mass-production of malformed cells!”
“Isn’t that incredible?” Damon nearly shouted. He was getting worked up again. “We don’t need to cure cancer, because we know how to halt aging!”
“Has it been proven? Have you tried it?”
“We’d have been mad not to! We tried it on the simulations, and it works. They all use it. But here’s the problem: it won’t work on humans. Unfortunately, it’s a programmed solution, so it’s not something immediately applicable to us with our current technology. It’s almost like a ‘bug fix’ in the program, so to speak. But soon we’ll have a solution that works for humans, too.”
Through all of Trevor’s excitement, he felt a modicum of disappointment as he recalled his sister, Amy. He’d loved her so much. They’d been best friends as children. Amy had been diagnosed with Huntington’s disease, a genetic disorder that produced the wrong proteins in her body which caused nerves to deteriorate faster than normal. She and Trevor both had a fifty percent chance to inherit the disease. A mere flip of a coin. Although they both could have gotten the disease or both escaped it, Trevor had always felt like somehow his escape from it had been why Amy had not been so lucky.
It had been devastating as a child to watch his sister degenerate so quickly. He still remembered the first morning she could no longer feed herself from lack of muscle control. He had to cradle her head in one hand and move cereal into her mouth with a rubber spoon in the other hand. An eight-year-old child shouldn’t have to do that.
He and his parents would take turns checking on her at night, often to find her writhing around with uncontrollable muscle spasms, something the doctors referred to as “chorea.” He would hug her and try to help keep her more still so she could sleep.
He asked his parents why this was happening, and they told him “God works in mysterious ways we can’t always understand.” So Trevor appealed to God each Sunday in church and every single night before bed with a prayer to help his sister get better. But God never listened.
Each day Trevor waited to be told that his sister was going to die. The curse of human intelligence, Trevor thought, is that we are smart enough to know that no matter what we do, one day, the people we love most, will die.
Trevor had learned to cry without making sound, not wanting his sister to know how scared he was. He couldn’t count on God, so he told Amy he would protect her, and that she would be okay.
But she wasn’t.
She eventually slipped into dementia. Then on Trevor’s tenth birthday, when Amy was only seven, she died from aspirational pneumonia.
His belief in God also died that day. The magical man in the sky hadn’t listened to his thousand prayers. Trevor hated His “mysterious ways.”
As Trevor matured and went through college, he had always hoped that by studying genetic engineering, albeit from a computer science perspective, he might be able to find a cure one day. Or contribute. Some way to help, for Amy.
Over time, Trevor was gradually less haunted about it. But it was still there, in the back of his mind. There had been a glimmer of hope that this might have been the answer. If we could stop cells from deteriorating, then Huntington’s disease would be stopped cold. But he knew it was beyond his reach. Whatever process that would be needed to induce this in a real human would be too hard to create in the physical world.
Trevor forced his mind back to the present.
“How long has a simulation been able to live then?”
Damon started walking onward, toward the nex
t set of doors. He waved for Trevor to follow. “A long time. Right now, we need to visit the oldest one.”
“Ezra.”
“That’s right. She’s been around for about two years our time… but in her time,” Damon turned to face Trevor again, “Ezra is over 9,000 years old.”
Chapter 22
While the World Sleeps
As Damon and Trevor ascended a set of stairs to the other hidden floor of Day Eight – the floor on which Ezra lived – Trevor grappled with all the information that had just been thrown at him.
All his textbooks and teachers and classes and research… they all went about artificial intelligence the wrong way! They tried to mimic the brain, imitate symbolic pattern systems, reinvent neural networks, how naïve! The same tired approaches for decades, and barely anything of interest to show. Sure, we had fairly accurate optical and speech recognition and a computer that could beat a human at chess or Jeopardy… but nothing groundbreaking. No actual “thinking.” The so-called “breakthroughs” were things like vacuuming robots that learned room layouts and an “incredible” robot that could play the trombone.
Trevor wondered how long the world would keep approaching AI from these tired angles if the technology for human simulations remained a secret. What a phenomenal waste of time!
What was the next step for the simulants? Should they be given robotic bodies to become part of society? Not the crude input devices that tortured Allison – but fully-functional movement, high quality olfactory, aural and visual sensory, haptic skin… mechanics of this nature were definitely possible in the present, with enough of an investment.
But would the simulants want that? Would anything live up to what they could get in their simulated worlds… that is, if their worlds were detailed enough already? Surely if Allison had the right physical “body” she would prefer all this to her cramped two-room world.
And then, would they be treated like humans, or second class citizens? Would they just be considered possessions, like pets? Pets – in the majority of the country – were merely considered “property” by law. That meant that if your negligent neighbor backed over lil’ Munchkin, your tiny Pomeranian, and she died, you would legally only be entitled to the initial cost of the dog. Forget how much you grieved her loss. If living, breathing pets weren’t considered to be more than property, how could something that ran on a computer ever be considered more than that, no matter how real it appeared to be?
Trevor was curious to pose such questions to Ezra… would she really be wise? Or was her intelligence more like a wildly complex physics textbook? Judging from the titles of the patents on the plaques, he suspected the latter.
At the top of the stairs they reached a vestibule with doors leading to rooms in each direction. Through the slender windows in the doors, they could see that the lights in the room on the left were on, even though they had not opened the door yet.
“Ezra is through there,” said Damon, as he approached the door carefully, “I’m assuming someone locked the lights on and forgot to flip them back to the motion sensor. Or,” he said, “someone could be inside.”
Damon looked through the window. “I can’t tell from here. I don’t see anyone. Can’t see the light switch, either.”
“I’ll wait while you check.”
Damon pulled the door open as quietly as possible with one hand and steadied it with the other. A drone of computer equipment – fans and hard drives and cooling units – flooded into the vestibule. Damon slipped through the door, letting it shut behind him.
Trevor felt very alone when the room went silent. After a few moments, Damon waved him in, and Trevor gladly moved into the next room.
Damon pointed at the light switch, “We’re good. Someone left it locked on, I don’t think anyone’s here. We’ll just leave it like this.”
Trevor nodded and let his eyes wander. The room looked much like the computer area in Damon’s basement but not as tall, and far, far longer. Row after row of tall computer cabinets crammed into the space, and various plasma screens hung mounted on the walls. Bunches of cables meandered through the equipment, dangling from the ceiling and weaving through cabinets, then into the floor, like the veins of some giant beast. It was cold enough that Trevor expected to see his own breath.
“Meet M.A.R.I.E.” said Damon, arms spread while he turned in a circle, indicating everything around them. “This is the machine that we birthed and raised Ezra in.”
“Huh.” Trevor shook his head. “I was dumped by a Marie once. It was long enough ago that it seems like another life, but the world still enjoys finding ways to mock me about that. So why M.A.R.I.E., anyway?”
“It stands for ‘Machine to Artificially Reconstruct Intellectual Entities.’ We liked the name and forced some words that made sense in there. Standard acronym procedure.” Damon motioned to Trevor. “C’mon, we’re going to the far end, that’s where Ezra’s main interface is.”
They set off.
“Do you really sit and work with her in this cold?” said Trevor, rubbing his arms and accidentally smudging ink from his palm onto his shirt.
“No. There are a connected set of interface rooms for that. You’ll see in a second.”
“Good… because Maslow’s hierarchy still has a grip on me.”
“Huh? What was that?”
“You know – the various levels of how people inherently value spending their time? One must be safe and comfortable before one can pursue intellectual delights?”
“I know that. I just thought I heard something…”
They were nearing the set of doors on the far end of the room when one on the left flung open, and Kane Fletcher emerged, the sound of a toilet flushing from within. Trevor and Damon froze. If Kane looked their way, they would be in plain sight. Kane rubbed his eyes and with a sigh, ran one hand through his blond hair. He withdrew his glasses from his breast pocket and put them on, staring at the floor. Then, with abrupt determination, he moved forward and disappeared behind the final row of computer shelves.
They heard another door open and close.
Trevor looked at Damon. He saw something he’d never seen in Damon’s face before: a hint of fear. Or was it shock? Damon’s expression resolved itself to its usual businesslike state.
“He went into the conference room,” said Damon. “The room on the left is a bathroom, the room directly in front of us is the control room for Ezra, and the room on the right wall is the conference room.”
They crept down one of the aisles between the tall computer arrays until they could see the window into the conference room. From this angle, the glare from the fluorescent lights on the glass obscured any view into the room.
Staying low to the floor, Damon moved over another aisle to get a better perspective. Trevor followed. The vertical blinds in the room were drawn, but weren’t angled to completely occlude the room. Through intermittent gaps, Damon and Trevor could make out the back of Kane’s head. He sat in one of the company’s fourteen hundred dollar mesh office chairs, facing a projector screen. Someone else was in the room on the other side of the conference table, and he, too, was seated with his attention focused on the screen. He had brownish hair and sat moderately tall, but without seeing his face it was unclear who this man was.
Trevor stared past them at the screen. A shape moved on it… it was… a head and shoulders. Trevor recognized it. “That’s our CEO, Mark Stonefield. On the screen.”
“Yes. I was afraid of that. Kane… deceitful fool. I knew he’d had a secret agenda with The Valley. I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish, but I can’t suspect they have good intentions. Can you tell who that other man is?”
“No, who?”
“I don’t know, I thought maybe you’d figured it out. From the back, he doesn’t look like anyone with regular access to this floor.”
“Maybe we should leave,” said Trevor. “We might be in view of the outgoing teleconference camera. If Stonefield sees us spying – ”
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Damon held his finger in front of his mouth, hushing Trevor. “I’m trying to hear what they’re saying.”
Every once in a while Kane would gesture or nod, then the unknown figure would scratch his head, rub his ear, or move a bit, and Stonefield would talk, looking back and forth between the two of them. This continued for another ten minutes or so. Trevor was becoming uncomfortable squatting in an awkward position.
“This is no use,” sighed Damon. “I can tell they’re talking about something highly sensitive from Stonefield’s facial expressions, but I can’t tell what. I had the opportunity to learn to lip-read once. I should have taken it. Instead, I opted to spend my time – ”
The teleconference screen went blank, and the two men rose from their chairs. Trevor tensed. “We have to hide.”
Through the slits in the blinds, they could see Kane shake the man’s hand. He was at least eight inches taller than Kane. And he looked familiar.
“Is that?” said Damon. “No, it can’t be.”
Trevor confirmed it.
“Yes it is. It’s Mayor Paxton.”
Chapter 23
In the Belly of the Beast
“We have to hide,” said Trevor, as he and Damon awkwardly waddled in squatted positions out of view. They couldn’t hide in the bathroom, someone might go in. They couldn’t hide in the control room, they’d have to cross the field of view of the conference room and risk exposure. It was also too far to make it all the way back to the entrance vestibule safely. “The computer cabinets, are there empty ones?”
“Maybe, maybe a few,” said Damon.
They both started pulling open computer cabinet doors as silently and quickly as possible. They both knew they might only have seconds before Kane and Mayor Paxton left the room. Damon found a partially empty one and huddled in the bottom half, Trevor closed the door on him and continued to check for another empty spot.
