Uncanny Valley

by C. A. Gray

  I felt Madeline blinking up at me from just below my desk. “What?” I asked.

  “What did you and Liam say after I left? I sensed that the conversation was becoming intimate.”

  “Oh! No no, nothing like that. We just decided that I’m going to try to design an experiment to study what happens in the brain when someone’s emotions come in conflict with their core programming. Which one wins—the emotions, or the driving belief?”

  Madeline blinked at me, confused. “That’s not very intimate…”

  “No. Not intimate at all. Nothing between Liam and me is intimate,” I added firmly.

  “Then why did you seem so embarrassed when I left?”

  “I wasn’t embarrassed, I was—” I tried to think how to explain. Then I conceded, “I guess I was embarrassed, but only because I told Liam more than I meant to. That’s all.”

  “You’re blushing now,” she observed. “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, I’m just… remembering being embarrassed. Let’s stop talking about it now, please.”

  I moved toward Madeline’s charging station, and she wheeled over to it behind me, understanding my intention. But just before I plugged her in for the night and powered her down, she murmured to herself, “When your words give me one set of data, and your emotional cues give me a different set of data, I don’t know which one I’m supposed to believe…”

  Chapter 7

  I walked to the lab the next morning, a Friday, with a sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. I didn’t want to examine the emotion too closely—all I knew was I wished there was a way I could avoid seeing Liam today. Every time I thought of him, the image of him looking down at me at the sink last night replayed in my head, along with a sense of dread. If I could get to the point where I didn’t think that moment had been a big deal, where I didn’t relive it like a video clip on repeat, then I could see him… I just needed to stay away from him until then.

  Except I couldn’t. He was my boss, and I had to see him in approximately three minutes.

  I’ll just pretend it didn’t happen, I decided. Andy. Think about Andy.

  I climbed the stairs and took a deep breath outside the lab, pushing the door open.

  Nobody was there. Momentarily confused, I blinked and began peering around towering bookcases atop black work benches. All the lights were on, but it was too early for the coffee break… “Hello?” I called.

  Nilesh stuck his head out from the back room, where Liam’s work bench was. “We’re all back here,” he said. He sounded somber.

  Wary, I dropped my backpack at my work station and made my way over to him. Nilesh, Dr. Yin, Geneve, Jerry, and Larissa all stood around Liam, who ignored them all. He didn’t look up at my approach either—he typed frantically, while everyone behind him exchanged glances of sympathy. It looked as if someone had just died, and everyone else knew that he was in denial.

  “Liam?” I asked tentatively. Still he ignored me. Larissa tiptoed to my side instead, which was a bit odd, since we rarely spoke to each other.

  “His locus has been black-listed by the labyrinth,” she whispered to me. “Everything is gone.”

  I blinked at her. “I don’t understand.”

  A howl erupted from Liam, and he pounded the black-top table. “CollaboratorXXI got pulled too!” he shouted, “they’re all gone! Every last one of them!”

  Larissa looked at Liam sympathetically. “Last night he posted an update to the collaboration he was telling us all about,” she whispered. “Something about a call to action for studying the nature of free will. I guess within the hour of that post, his entire locus got pulled! He assumed it was a glitch at first, and tried to re-upload all the posts, but he couldn’t—it’s all gone!”

  I shook my head. “How is that possible?”

  Larissa tucked her red hair severely behind her ears, making them stick out. Behind her glasses, her eyes were wide, and she bit her lip. “He knew the names of the biggest supporting researchers from memory, and most of them had their own loci as well. He tried to go there and re-post his manifesto and everything about the collaboration so far. But all of those have been pulled too, apparently.”

  “But… that can’t be,” I whispered again, glancing at Liam. He held his head in his hands, taking deep, measured breaths. “What about Odessa? Can’t she find out what’s going on?”

  “Odessa is a research bot,” Nilesh pointed out, joining us on my other side. He, too, spoke in a low voice, as if we were mourners at a funeral. “She only has access to what she can find on the labyrinth. Apparently there’s nothing to find.”

  “What does this mean?” I whispered.

  “It means,” Liam roared, “that they’re on to us!”

  “Who?”

  “Halpert and his board, who do you think? When you search now on the progress of creativity for Synthetic Reasoning, literally the only thing you can find are those predicting a utopian world in which all human suffering has been completely eliminated and everyone is free to enjoy unlimited leisure! They’ve silenced every dissenting voice on the labyrinth!” He pounded the black top table again so hard that a few loose-leaf pages stacked on the bookshelf above him fluttered to the ground.

  I pulled out my handheld interface and searched. The top hit was a holographic replay of another address from Halpert. I hit play.

  “…bots won’t need sleep, and won’t get tired, the way humans do,” he was saying. “They won’t make mistakes. Imagine—an army of these types of bots, as intelligent and creative as the smartest humans, but without the common human foibles that hinder progress. In the next twenty years, just imagine! We’ll have cured life-threatening diseases, and perhaps solved the problem of aging. We’ll have solved the problem of clean water for the entire planet. We’ve already colonized Mars and the moon, but what if we can even explore galaxies light-years away? What if we can travel at the speed of light? What if we can unify quantum physics and Newtonian physics—if we can have the machines solve the problems for us? We will essentially live in a world protected by a benevolent god…”

  “Shut that off!” Liam raged.

  I stopped the hologram, and Halpert’s image disappeared.

  “Every voice on the labyrinth has become an echo chamber!” Liam thundered. “Anybody with a different idea will think he’s the only one in the world now, and therefore he must be crazy to doubt the powers-that-be!”

  I flashed back to the dinner table when I was fifteen: Dad gesticulating at the interface reporting the news, as he howled, “It’s all a pack of lies! This is censorship! This is against everything that the Global Republic is supposed to stand for!”

  “But… isn’t that censorship?” I asked, tentative.

  “You’re damn right it is!” Liam shouted.

  I glanced at Larissa. Her eyes were squeezed tightly shut. “What’s the matter?” I asked her. When she didn’t reply, I nudged her. “Larissa?”

  “Oh!” She jumped a little. “Sorry. I was…” she cleared her throat in lieu of ending her sentence, smoothing her hair self-consciously.

  Nilesh supplied on her behalf, “She was imagining that she was a world-famous hacker, rushing in to save the day and assuring Liam that his locus would be up again by mid-morning. Right Riss?” He bumped his shoulder into hers, and Larissa’s cheeks grew pink.

  This was why Larissa and I had never been friends, truth be told—I thought she was a little weird. We’d all catch her from time to time, whispering to herself about how she was a secret agent, or a big film star, or that she’d just won the Nobel prize. I wasn’t sure if it was escapism or some kind of self-motivational tactic, but I assumed she thought nobody could hear her. Or else she got so lost in her own world that she forgot anybody else was around in this one. Nilesh apparently found Larissa’s little Walter Mitty-esque escapades endearing, though.

  Turning back to Liam, I said, “Can you… I don’t know, comm your labyrinth h
ost, find out if it was all just a mistake?”

  He gave me a bitter smile, and I read in it that he’d already done that and more.

  “We can all comm our senators,” Larissa’s eyes widened enthusiastically. “Tell them about the suppression of free speech—!”

  Dr. Yin, a very short woman with close cropped, graying black hair, grabbed my elbow and pulled me aside as Liam and Nilesh told Larissa why the senators would not care, would not even listen. “They’re all in his pocket—” Liam was saying. But then Dr. Yin arrested my attention.

  “Liam said he’d talked to you about designing a human experiment to identify the nature of free will last night,” she said in a low voice. “Any ideas how you’ll do it?”

  I cleared my throat. “I… was thinking we’d recruit people who had been through five or more years of therapy,” I whispered back, “so that they could succinctly identify their core motivations—that would be analogous to the core purpose of the bots—and also their deepest unmet desires. Then we’d design Artificial Experience scenarios in which their desires could come true, but only if they violate their core motivations. Take VMI images the whole time to see what brain areas are involved, and pre- and post-blood draws to identify neuropeptides to see if there’s a consistent structural or biochemical basis for overriding core purpose.”

  “Except we’ll be all on our own.” Liam had apparently overheard this: he brushed past me on his way to the kitchenette. He spoke in a flat tone that did not seem to belong to him. “Only us and those whose comm addresses we memorize to help us. And no funding either, I’m sure.”

  “Well, maybe that will be enough!” I called after him, hands on my hips.

  He turned, halfway to the kitchenette. “All right, Rebecca. Let’s say you find out exactly what part of the brain and what neuropeptides are involved in free will, and we can figure out how to effectively block it. And let’s say Nilesh, Larissa, Dr. Yin and I can take that and translate your discovery into silicon and wire, or even better: a software upgrade available to all bots across the labyrinth. Do you think that upgrade will remain available long enough for a single bot to download it? Do you think there’s even one chance in a million that it will ever see the light of day?”

  Tears of frustration pricked at the corners of my eyes. “Well, I don’t know what you want me to do, then!”

  “I don’t know either!” he roared, turning his back on me again and stomping off to the kitchenette.

  I stood there staring after him, wanting to yell as Dr. Yin patted my back. “Just give him a few hours to calm down,” she whispered, soothing. “He’ll have a brand new scheme and with it, a much better attitude by the end of the day. Count on him for that—Liam’s never down for long.”

  Chapter 8

  Julie met me at the Quantum Track around ten am the next morning, double-fisting two take-out coffee cups.

  “Hey girl!” she cried, running up gingerly so as not to spill. I hugged her before relieving her of one of them.

  “Thanks.” I sipped mine with a slurp to avoid burning my tongue.

  Julie tilted her head to one side, inspecting me. “You seem distracted.”

  I looked up, surprised. “Oh—no, I’m fine.” It wasn’t entirely true. I shook my head and gave a forced laugh. “It was just this thing that happened in the lab yesterday. Or I found out about it in the lab.” I dropped my voice, just in case, and told her about Liam’s black-listed locus on the labyrinth as we boarded the Quantum Track and sat down. Then I told her that all of his conspiracy theory friends’ loci vanished also.

  Julie blinked at me. “That sucks for them, but…” she reeled her hand, like trying to get me to the point. Clearly this wasn’t point enough for her.

  “It just seems strange, doesn’t it? All of them posted stuff about Halpert’s challenge and how this could lead to superintelligent bots and the end of the world and all that. I always just rolled my eyes when I heard about it all, but the fact that they got black-listed almost implies they were on to something. Or at least that Halpert and the others want to silence all dissenting opinions, which goes against everything the Republic is supposed to stand for. And besides, why wouldn’t Halpert want to safeguard against that very thing? What could his motive be in suppressing those opinions?”

  “Becca. Listen to yourself.” She gave me that deadpan look of hers, dropping her chin so her eyes bored straight into mine.

  I obliged her with a half smile, to show I wasn’t totally serious either. “Do you think it would be that bad if Halpert succeeds? I mean, if bots become super creative and intelligent and all that?”

  “Uh, no!” Julie declared. “It would mean we’d all be free to do stuff like this all the time,” she gestured to the compartment we were in, “and we’d never have to work! It would be amazing! You could do nothing but perform and write your novels all the time…”

  “I know, that’s what I think too,” I admitted. “Everybody in my hometown hates being unemployed, though. They don’t know what to do with themselves.”

  “Hey. Look at me.” She gestured from my eyeballs to hers. “You and I? Will never have that problem.”

  “I know,” I said again, resting my head against the glass.

  “They should just get counseling or something! Figure out what they want to be when they grow up. Becca, throughout human history, people have been striving for exactly this kind of freedom!”

  “Have they?” I challenged. “You’re a woman’s studies major, didn’t women fight to get back into the work force in the Second Era? Why would they do that if working was so bad?”

  “Ugh, do we have to talk about something this heavy on a Saturday?” Julie complained, rolling her eyes. “That was never about work per se, it was about equality. If everybody equally isn’t working, we’ll have the chance to redefine our lives by something other than our careers for the first time since like the Stone Age! And that’s the end of this conversation. Tell me updates about Andy.”

  A horrible fear suddenly struck me, and I declared, “You are not allowed to say anything about Andy to Jake!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re best friends, and Jake would tell him!”

  “Uhh, are you sure that’s such a bad thing? Haven’t you said yourself that maybe Andy just isn’t confident enough to pursue you without knowing for sure that he won’t get shot down?”

  “Yes, but—” I closed my eyes. “Just, please don’t say anything in front of Jake. Okay?”

  “All right, all right!” Julie held up her one coffee-free hand as the Quantum Track picked up speed. “Even though I really think you should tell Andy yourself, but it’s your life…”

  Julie chatted about boys and gossip and music as our tube track skimmed the top of the ocean. Come rain or shine, the Quantum Track zipped through the tube with the force of compressed air, let the seas do what they might. It was much too fast to see any detail—I couldn’t watch the dolphins or anything like that. But still, it was pretty cool.

  When we arrived, Jake met up with us in the Quantum Track station in London. He looked expertly disheveled as always, like he couldn’t care less, but somehow still managed to roll out of bed looking like a rock star. I heard Julie suck in a breath beside me and I suppressed a grin.

  Jake ambled over and hugged me first, and without a moment’s hesitation hugged Julie too, even though it was the first time they’d met.

  “Thought we could get breakfast first. Or, breakfast-slash-lunch I guess. You girls hungry?”

  I wanted to laugh at the suave put-on Jake assumed whenever he was in the presence of a new girl he found attractive. He seemed excessively aware of his persona, controlling it down to his tone of voice. I should find a way to give them some alone time, I thought.

  At breakfast which was really lunch, Jake and Julie swapped life stories, occasionally applying to me to fill in details and say things like, “Jake, you and Julie both love mu
sic by the Heavy French,” or “Julie, you and Jake both spent a summer in Bali!” I smiled absently, watching them both light up at these little tidbits of information, pleased with myself for my matchmaking success. Julie gestured with her hands and all her features even more than usual, and I noted that by the end of the meal, Jake had dropped his affected aloofness, too captivated with her to consciously maintain it. I tuned back in just as they were talking about the contrast between their hometowns and travel.

  “…depressing to be back home, you know?” Julie was saying. “The tech hubs couldn’t be more different than rural middle-of-nowheresville. In Dublin I feel alive. I feel like everybody’s alive. At home, everyone’s just…. biding their time until they die.”

  “And we’ll join them, once we graduate!” Jake laughed. “C'est la vie.” He raised his water glass as if making a toast.

  “So you dislike the idea of the bots taking over?” I asked Jake. I knew Julie’s answer already.

  Jake shrugged. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  I looked at Julie with a pointed smile. Jake turned to look at her, and she seemed to squirm a little.

  “I just… try to make the best of things,” she said, clearly not wanting to disagree with Jake.

  “Julie’s very ‘in-the-moment,’” I told Jake, knowing he’d find this attractive. Sure enough, he grinned and high-fived her.

  “Only way to live!” he declared.

  After breakfast, we wandered through the streets of London, not really going anywhere in particular. The sidewalks were narrow, so I trailed behind them as they discussed travel and wine.

  It was definitely not politically correct to have a negative view of Halpert's challenge, I mused, and I would never say anything against it to a stranger for fear of starting an argument. It was almost like there was some kind of massive worldwide peer pressure that made everyone think the challenge was a great idea, even if no one really knew why.