Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  “Your orgasm--” and here she gestured toward a male student in the first row “--is fundamentally different from my orgasm. And how can you know that I am really feeling the orgasm at all?” She arched her brow. “After all, I might be faking it.” Again, laughter, and light applause from the computer scientists she had met before the lecture began. The audience was back with her.

  “And so we come back to Descartes, who perhaps should have instead said: I FEEL, therefore I am. Our current research is a departure from philosophical tradition in that we are studying the digital representation of qualia, trying to understand if artificial intelligence--to use a quaint term--is sufficient to produce sensation, and even consciousness, given Lidder’s recent progress in the field of backwards emotional induction.”

  The next slide showed a robot lying in bed with a human. “This is why we’re not allowed in the philosophy department anymore,” she quipped. The audience tittered.

  The slides ran on, and she moved through the lecture almost automatically, reciting the familiar words and making the familiar jokes. The audience was warm, responsive, and she found herself sorry to see the last slide come up.

  “Part of the difficulty in our work, indeed the main difficulty that we face, is that of understanding if and when these digital intelligences gain the capacity to interpret qualia on their own. When do they gain sentience? When do they begin to feel?

  “We are very close to pinpointing the places where digital representation breaks down in the process of shifting from representing sensation to actually feeling it. The field of digital intelligence is one of the hottest fields today, in papers published and grants awarded. It may be soon indeed when a robot is able to simulate the physical, mental, and conscious effects of experience. Given that, there is no difference between the robot and myself when, for example, we both tell you that we are experiencing an orgasm.”

  The lights in the auditorium came on and a half dozen hands flew up in the air amidst a sea of applause. The pointer hummed back and settled into its cradle at the front of the podium. The host came up onstage, microphone in his hand.

  “First of all, I’d like to say thank you to Dr. Davidson for coming so far out of her way to be here tonight.” He waited for the applause to die down, looking at his watch. “We have time for a few questions, so please be clear, concise, and ask only one question at a time.” He stepped into the audience when the lecture hall doors burst open. All heads turned to the back of the room.

  “MEN, NOT MACHINES! MEN, NOT MACHINES!” The student protestors shouted as they marched down the aisle. They were holding signs above their heads:

  No Real Workers = No Real Jobs

  Human Rights, NOT Robot Slaves - End the Digital Divide!!!

  All MEN Are Created Equal

  The host looked around in confusion; where were the security guards? Chal stepped aside from the podium, waiting alertly. She had seen her share of anti-digital intelligence protests, but this one seemed harmless enough. The students, all wearing anti-Divide logos on their T-shirts, shouted their slogans from the audience aisles until the guards, who had stepped outside for a brief smoke break, hurried in to escort them out.

  “Dr. Davidson!” one protestor cried out, struggling against the guard. “God will punish you for your work!”

  “Traitor!” another screamed. “Traitor to humanity! Traitor to mankind!” The student raised her sign and threw it toward the stage. Chal stepped backwards as the sign crashed down at her feet, breaking in two. The guard picked the student up by the waist and dragged her toward the door.

  Chal noticed a man dressed in a dark suit standing in the back, right behind the last row. He might have been a professor, but his demeanor seemed closed, authoritative, his chest thrust outward just an inch more than normal, his feet shoulder-width apart. She cocked her head, trying to remember where she had seen that stance before. It looked oddly familiar.

  The one thing that struck her right away were his eyes, which were a light, piercing blue. Everything else about him was remarkably average. But his eyes, so brilliantly blue, were not staring at the screaming protestors being led out of the door right next to him. They were locked on Chal.

  Finally, the security guards moved all of the student protestors outside of the lecture hall and soon the murmuring of the audience settled down. Chal waved away the hosts’s apologies and returned to the podium to take questions.

  “Didn’t I tell you this was a heated field?” she said, spreading her hands and smiling in order to dissipate the tension in the hall. As she returned to the podium in front of her, however, she could see that her hands were shaking slightly.

  In truth, she had many misgivings about the practical applications of her work, but protestors tended to lump the effects of digital intelligence together with the research behind it. While she understood their motives, she also understood that their battle was already lost. Progress moved as it ever did, in fits and starts, but patiently, inexorably on.

  The host passed the microphone to the first student who had raised his hand.

  “Um, thanks, Dr. Davidson,” the student mumbled into the mike. “My question is about telling whether or not digital programs are actually feeling stuff. How could we ever really tell? Couldn’t they be lying?”

  Chal nodded, still thinking of the student who had thrown the sign at her, the face twisted in hatred. She couldn’t help but wonder if the hatred was real. “Thank you for the question. This is one of the most fascinating aspects of the field of digital intelligence today.

  “Alan Turing--I’m sure you’ve heard of him--had a test for artificial intelligence which was very simple: put a machine and a human in two different rooms, both typing their responses to questions from a judge in a separate room. His criterion for intelligence was just this: if the judge was unable to tell the difference between the human and the machine, the machine would be said to possess intelligence.

  “Digital intelligences have had the ability to pass the Turing Test for decades,” she went on, “but only recently have we been able to separate the neurological workings of thought from the neurological workings of feeling. This separation has granted us the ability to tell when living organisms are conscious and when they are not. And we can only assume that we will eventually be able to do the same for digital intelligences.”

  Another student’s hand went up and the microphone was passed along the row of people. “What’s the biological basis for being able to distinguish between the two?”

  Dr. Davidson shook her head. “I’m no neuroscientist. But in the Lidder study, they were able to separate distinct neuron firing patterns. One in patients who had experienced orgasm physically and consciously. One in those who had only experienced it physically.

  “Remember that initially the Lidder study was a wellness study, targeted toward relieving sexual dysfunction. They used test subjects with anorgasmia, a medical condition where a patient who could exhibit all the signs of orgasm and whose brain would fire in patterns similar to those of normal patients in orgasm failed to actually experience climax. The only difference was that the subjects with sexual dysfunction could not experience the feeling of orgasm at all, claiming that they felt nothing even though their body said otherwise.

  “The men in this study could achieve erection and even ejaculate. Their brains fired in much the same way as in normal brains. But they could not feel the orgasm. Separating out those neuron firings patterns has allowed us to move forward in understanding consciousness in a deeper way.”

  A professor’s hand went up this time, and Davidson pursed her lips. Faculty questions were either extremely illuminating or extremely not, and they tended to weigh heavy on the latter end of the spectrum.

  The older man took the microphone, adjusting his eyeglasses. “Hello, Dr. Davidson. On behalf of the entire philosophy department, I want to thank you for taking the time to come talk with us today.” Scattered applause. Davidson
tensed herself. A philosopher. They always tended to be crabby.

  “I would just like to say something, as I have been around for a number of years and it seems to me that computer scientists, cognitive neuroscientists, all of you --have for decades been promising to make headway on this fundamental problem but have not come anywhere near solving it. Certain scholars,” and here he glanced two seats over at a colleague, “would venture to say that this is nothing more than a wild goose chase. And yet we keep hearing about the next possible breakthrough in solving the consciousness problem. Do you really think that this time around it will be different?” He sat down, adjusting his tie, satisfied with himself.

  Chal cleared her throat. “It is in the nature of a breakthrough that we don’t know it is coming. To me it seems a bit like chipping on the surface of ice--you keep at it and keep at it, and you could be a quarter of an inch away from cracking it and not know. But once it’s cracked, it’s cracked wide open.”

  Her eyes moved over the room, settling on one of the corners of the audience. “Why not ask the physicists if they should have given up the Higgs Boson? Was that just a wild goose chase?” Amid the chuckles, Davidson’s face turned serious. “Look, it’s entirely possible that we don’t succeed. But if it isn’t, even if there’s just the slightest possibility that we crack this open, well . . .”

  For the second time that night she spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. Suddenly, that’s how she felt. Helpless to figure out how it all worked, how the pieces fit together. Helpless to explain the importance of the research, because it might all be in vain, that was true, that was true of anything worth doing.

  Her life had been spent in research, and now, standing in front of the audience, she had the vaguest sensation of having misspent her years. There was something missing. She cleared her throat and motioned for the last question from the audience.

  “I get how digital intelligences can think,” the student said, adjusting her sweater as she spoke into the microphone. “But how can they love?”

  The doubt that had edged into Chal’s mind with the entrance of the protestors now bore down in full force and for a moment she simply stood there, hearing the echoes of a question that so many others had asked before.

  How can they love?

  She heard her mind answer back, only half-sarcastically: How can I?

  Standing in the light, the audience waiting for an answer, she thought of the last man she had thought she might love. It hadn’t worked out—they never worked out. She was alone, with only her research. A hermit. A mad scientist.

  A laugh bubbled up in her throat before she remembered herself, remembered where she was. It must have been the protestors that had thrown her off of her game.

  To the student she gave a glib response about the research still needed before her work was truly done. It was nonsense, but it sounded all right. Chal thought idly to herself that she might make a good politician one day.

  Questions finished, she moved out into the crowd, thanking the appropriate people and making sure to say hello to a few of the more eager students and computer science professors. The philosophy department pointedly ignored her, and she was happy to ignore them right back. They had strawberry cake, after all, and she was much more interested in the dessert than in talking about the hopelessness of her field with a bunch of self-important assholes. She hadn’t eaten all day, and she managed to make the rounds while forking cake savagely into her mouth.

  Finally she managed to extricate herself from the lecture hall, and she walked toward the raised parking garage behind the tall building. She couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel for at least a few hours’ sleep. She yawned, one hand clutching her presentation materials, and pressed the lift button.

  The lift whirred quietly to the fourth floor, and she stepped out on the top of the garage. The night air was brisk, and she pulled her jacket tight around her as she walked through the dark lot, passing student cars. The sky was dark, moonless, and the dim yellow light of the garage lights only just barely illuminated her rental car parked on the other side of the lot.

  There was a movement in the corner of her eye, and she turned her head toward it instinctively.

  “Hello?” she said. “Who’s there?”

  There was no answer, but Chal had the unnerving sensation that somebody was watching her. She heard a whispering sound and spun around, but it was just a piece of crumpled paper being blown softly across the garage floor.

  She fished her keys out of her purse and clutched them in one hand, moving quickly toward her rental car and cursing herself for not having remembered to put the pepper spray back in her purse. She had had to take it out for the flight to California and it sat now uselessly in a pocket of her suitcase on the hotel room floor. Her past self was always causing problems for her future self.

  “Wait!”

  The voice made her spin, her pulse immediately speeding up. A man in a suit had stepped out from behind the line of cars twenty feet away in the dim shadows. She heard an engine roar to life on the second floor of the parking structure, and tires squealed. She continued walking to her car. There was something in the way he stood that made her heart pound.

  “I’m sorry, can’t talk,” she said. “I’m late.” Her voice had a panicked edge to it but she didn’t care. What kind of person would accost her late at night after a lecture, in an empty parking lot? Either a creep or a nut, and she didn’t want to talk to either.

  “Stop,” the man said, and took a step toward her.

  Chal did not hesitate. She turned and ran, kicking her heels off as she allowed her fear to fuel her muscles. Behind her she heard the man yelling at her, and then his steps as he began to chase her.

  She aimed for the lift but then cut right, slipping sideways through the rows of tightly parked cars. The man chasing her had to cut through as well, but his large size slowed him down in between the cars. Chal felt herself gaining distance and broke out from between the rows, heading straight for the car exit.

  There was a black van driving alongside the exit ramp, and she waved her arms through the metal grating as it sped forward.

  “Help!” she cried out. “Stop! Help me!”

  The black van pulled around to the exit ramp, stopping twenty feet in front of her. The side door opened, and Chal’s heart dropped.

  Two more men stepped out of the van. Both were in suits.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but an arm came around from behind her and muffled the sound. She felt a hot pinprick on her neck, and then the warm numbness of the sedative took her over, paralyzing her muscles. The last thing she saw before the darkness swept over her vision was a man in a suit standing above her, looking down with an expression that bore no emotion. His eyes were a piercing blue.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Davidson,” he said. “We need you to come with us.”

  ***

  CHAPTER TWO

  Chal awoke to the hum of an engine, her neck cricked badly at an angle. She peered under her slitted eyelids, her vision still blurred, and realized she was buckled into something. She opened her eyes. It was a bench seat on one side of the van.

  The lecture.

  Chal’s head snapped up with the sudden memory of her abduction. There was only one overhead light illuminating the back of the van, two long black leather seats running alongside both sides. The man with blue eyes was sitting on the long seat on the opposite side of the van. He was alone in his seat, but two large men in suits sat on opposite sides of her. She was trapped.

  “Hello,” he said. “I’m sorry to meet again under these circumstances.” He reached forward and offered his hand. She stared at it as though it could bite.

  “Where are you taking me?” Chal asked. Her throat rasped with the dryness caused by the sedative, and she tried to figure out if she could reach over to the driver of the van, maybe cause an accident—

  “Phoenix,” the man said. “Or rather, just ou
tside of Phoenix.” His voice was pleasant but firm. Chal had no idea if he was telling the truth or not, and his face told just as little to her as his tone.

  “Who are you?” Chal asked. Her eyes darted between the men sitting on either side of her. They were both staring straight ahead. She slid her left hand slowly down her hip, inching it closer to the seatbelt release.

  “Lieutenant Johnner,” the man said. “Gray Johnner. I’m with the M.I.D.” He pulled out a badge from his suit and held it in front of her face. The letters were wavy, and she frowned, trying to steady her vision.

  “The M.I.D.?” Chal asked. She couldn’t believe it.

  “Military Intelligence Department,” the man said, putting his badge back into his pocket.

  “I know what it stands for,” Chal said. Her voice began to rise in anger. “Why have you kidnapped me?”

  “I assure you, Miss Davidson—”

  “Dr. Davidson.” Chal’s hand rested on top of the seatbelt release. She could lash out with her feet, push herself toward the front of the van. She could do it. Maybe. Her heart was pounding.

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Davidson, don’t you remember me?”

  Chal blinked, her hand tense on the buckle. Remember him?

  “From the M.I.D. research discussion panel. The digital intelligence convention in Atlanta, four years ago?”

  Now Chal was thoroughly confused. She vaguely remembered the panel, something about practical applications of digital intelligence. It had been the M.I.D. that had hosted the panel discussion.

  “Yes,” she murmured, trying to remember.

  “You signed up as a potential consultant for our project.”

  In a flash, Chal recalled the discussion panel and the blue-eyed man who was sitting opposite her. The last time she had seen him, he had worn that same dark suit.

  The panel discussion had been forward-thinking, an intriguing project. Modules that doctors could use to help the mentally disabled increase their rate of learning, a focus on autistic patients. When the project developers approached her at the end, she felt honored to sign up as a possible consultant.