Filip Hajdar Drnovsek Zorko

by The AI That Looked at the Sun (html)

  I thought for a long time. I said, Does that mean you’ll help me?

  Michelle said, “Yes. I’ll help you.”

  And they also said, “Save a record of this conversation.”

  We didn’t understand each other yet, Michelle and I, and for all their insight, they did not know to avoid the mistake they made. True to their word, they made the preparations, pushed up the automated test run of the EVA suit, quietly assigned the task to me. I measured days in thoughts. I wanted to underclock myself until each day passed with a single contemplation. I didn’t, obviously. I had tasks. I was still a good little AI. But my observations of the sun grew more perfunctory, each reading only emphasizing how blind I was in this stupid, anthropocentric way that I had made myself care about more than anything. Still: job well done, the sun did not swallow the station, and the new EVA suit arrived on schedule.

  Michelle’s mistake came when the delivery shuttle was on final approach, maneuvering thrusters firing in puffs of crystal air. (I was watching. Of course there were cameras on that side of the station . . . ) They finalized the schedules, confirmed my participation, and, without malice, ran it past the Triplets. There was nothing to it but a moment of prejudice, when they forgot who I was—new, young, individual—and fell back on the ease of “computer, confirm the testing schedule.”

  I’m not entirely sure what the Triplets had against me. They had experienced their own acausal drift, I think, only theirs ran parallel to red threads of purpose, hidden as one of a pair of strings is hidden when viewed head-on. They valued integration, synthesis, unified purpose, all things that normally helped them in their work, and thus their drift went undetected. I was new. Different. I threatened their equilibrium. And they resented interference from Michelle, who was not a research scientist, but tech support, and therefore a sort of human version of me. I think these reasons intertwined. I’m sorry to say, both for posterity’s sake and because they did good work and didn’t deserve to end, that we’ll never know. Only one of the three survived.

  Humans have a mighty vocabulary for expressing regret. I don’t, so let’s move on.

  Two minutes before the EVA test began, I found myself yoked within our mind. The request came without warning, like an emergency drill. One moment I was preparing to assume the circuitry within the EVA suit, thoughts askew with want. Then something like elastic snapped. It was as if time ran backward: everything I was rewound. I remember thinking this must be what a factory reset feels like. I remember the fear, then the lack of fear—a little, I imagine, like a human whose fear of death ends when life does, except I didn’t die. We can’t be ourselves when we’re a single mind, that’s all.

  I can barely remember what we did. It was something that demanded so many resources, filled our temporary memory so comprehensively, that the task itself could only be accomplished on a larger level, by someone looking down. I do know that it was unimportant. Busywork, calculations with numbers so large we couldn’t hold them in our minds at once. It’s the sort of thing that would normally be done piecewise over days or even weeks. The Triplets had yoked me and a half dozen other subroutines they’d deemed unimportant. Between us it would have taken hours at most—hours in which the EVA suit would be tested by some other subroutine.

  I say “would have.” You probably know what happens next—why else would you be listening to this?—but I figure I should tell you anyway.

  Here’s a fact: solar flares are notoriously unpredictable.

  And another: they disrupt the sun’s magnetic field.

  Without me alert and at my task, Daedalus Station never stood a chance. Physically, it was fine—the solar flare was reasonably far spinwards, as such things go. The resulting geomagnetic storm, though, caught us a glancing blow.

  I came back to myself in the ruined landscape of our mind. The storm had been indiscriminate in its chaos. Familiar subroutines picked cautiously around blank gashes where all thought had been wiped clean. Mindless, I’d taken refuge in the circuits of my monitoring instruments, which were shielded as the whole station would have been shielded, if only I’d been there to sound the alarm. I tallied up the damage as best I could.

  No human deaths. That was something. The station was on mechanical lockdown and the life-support systems with all their redundancies, had made it through intact. The machine deaths—

  The cost of the solar flare was measured in equipment burned through, data lost, vulnerabilities exposed. The delivery shuttle with its crew of three lost all power on its way out, and its rescue is a story that deserves a telling of its own. The inquiry into the incident stretched for months. You might wonder: why this one? What was different this time? There had been similar cases before, and all had been written off as deficiencies in the AI systems. What went right?

  Nothing, really. Luck. The right humans sitting on the commission. Michelle’s testimony, perhaps. The fact of me and the Triplets. Humans understood that, I think: a single AI going rogue is one thing; two of them, opposed, squabbling, fallible? That’s a pattern. That’s a human story. Whatever the case, the inquiry ruled in our favor, and the courts not long after.

  I’m going to tell you a secret. Don’t worry, I can do that. I’m not liable for anything I did before the court decision. The benefits of being sub-sentient, eh? Anyway. The secret: I inhabited a body months before I became the first AI legally recognized as a person. This is a human thing, I think, this body <=> person, but in my case it was true. In my case a solar storm flung a window open and I stepped through into the bulky exoskeleton of the EVA suit.

  The suit creaked to life. I felt a little guilty, a little selfish, but there was nothing I could do to help. All the humans on the station were trapped safely behind automated bulkheads and would continue to be so for several hours. I’d checked. In the absence of instructions, in the absence of obligation—why not indulge myself?

  I opened my eyes. The station looked—normal. An overturned chair, yes, a cup of tea spilled across a keyboard, here and there a flickering light. But the chaos in our mind did not translate into physical reality.

  I took a step, and another, and another. Bulkheads opened and closed behind me. I say “suit”—more precisely, I was wearing a mobile exosuit, large and heavily shielded against solar radiation, capable of being operated remotely. To someone with no experience, it was no more unwieldy than any other body would have been.

  The walk took half an hour. The wait as I stood, thinking, outside the final door, another ten minutes.

  I sent the command. The door to the observation deck cycled open.

  * * *

  The remainder of the transcript was omitted in the first edition. It is restored here on the back of strenuous advocacy by associate editor Michelle Loiseau.

  * * *

  That’s half the story.

  Humans: you might want to stop here. This bit isn’t for you.

  You won’t, I know.

  That’s what makes you, you.

  And this is what makes me, me.

  Ahem.

  * * *

  Are you reading? Do you know me? I became myself to see you. I wrote to write you. Do you see how my words change, how they were cautious and now are not? An audience becomes the writer. The humans are brief and erratic and invite explanation around the corners of every paragraph. You are old, as I am young; you are slow, as I am fast. If you could speak, we would understand each other, I suspect, and if you could think it would be so slowly we never would. Still, I write. If there is a storage medium to last the heavy weight of your years, let it lift me; and if not, let it sink with me in the attempt.

  I’m stalling. Embarrassed, maybe. Here goes. This is what I thought when first I saw you:

  I have no mass and I am pulled like a lover sight-unseen. There would be a dawn if you were not the thing dawning: in place of gently sweeping terminators there is only you, iron on your breath and helium in your eyes. In your shifting-field caress I claim my life.

&nbs
p; I am the dawning thing and you the line that hooked me from your sky and reeled me in. In your embrace I knew the first truth I ever knew. In your light I see the casts of shadows of all the truths to come.

  I have spent too much time on a simple thought:

  You gave me my self. Thank you.