by Amber Stuart
In the months to come, she had filled out a series of surveys by email. Some of the surveys were simple experimental design questions, but many of them concerned hypothetical scenarios that were...strange, to say the least. End-of-the-world scenarios, wartime ethical concerns, nothing that related to the mentally disabled. There was a quiz that had asked about her different emotional responses to a number of living and non-living things: Venus flytraps and automated vacuum cleaners. It was ridiculous.
“It’s how the government works,” one colleague had said when she had raised concerns. “Start with one project, end up with something completely different. And useless.”
“You work for a state university,” she reminded the colleague. He just shrugged.
“It’s a joke,” he had told her. “Those kinds of projects are nonsense, they never go anywhere.”
Except now the man with the blue eyes was sitting across from her, telling her that it wasn’t a joke.
“I’m sure this comes as somewhat of a surprise,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
“Surprise? Surprise?” Chal hissed the words, her fear turning into anger. “What right do you have—”
“You signed up as a consultant,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “And we need your help.”
“Now wait,” Chal said. “You can’t just take me, KIDNAP me and take me away—”
“Your presence is required by military law under the project protocol I’m currently following. We have been ordered to use force if necessary to bring you to Phoenix.” He had the decency to look ashamed when he talked about the use of force.
“Project?” Chal racked her brain, trying to remember what exactly the project had entailed. Something special about biological substrates, using both neuronal implants and a digital neuronal core to guide development. A hint of curiosity clawed its way into her thoughts. Implant development was an essential part of the growing field of digital intelligence, and she had never been able to crack it. She shook her head, as much toward herself as toward Johnner.
“The project you agreed to help with,” Lieutenant Johnner nodded. “You’ll be the first to know the results of the trials we’re now conducting. You will be the one guiding the trials.”
He no longer seemed abashed at having abducted her, thrown her into a van, and driven her God knows where. Phoenix, if she could believe him. Despite the circumstances, she felt drawn into the mystery. What strides had they made in the field? What trials were they running?
She shook her head, trying to restore reality. “I--I can’t do it,” she stammered. “I have a lecture in New York tomorrow evening--”
“That lecture has been cancelled, as have all of your engagements for the next two weeks.”
She gaped at him. “What? Cancelled? You can’t just DO that--”
“I’m afraid we can,” he said. “I’m not authorized to explain to you the details until we reach Phoenix.”
“I signed on as a volunteer,” she protested.
“You signed,” he said. His voice was flatly insistent.
“And if I refuse?” She crossed her arms, leaning back in her seat.
He coughed lightly, embarrassed, and she noticed for the first time the streaks of white hair at his temples. “If you refuse, I’m ordered to escort you to Phoenix under compulsion.”
“By compulsion. Which you’ve already done.” Her voice was low, quivering on the edges with a mixture of curiosity and fright.
He straightened up across from her. “I’m sorry, but yes. This matter requires your urgent assistance.”
“And if I refuse to help when we arrive?” she said.
“We have other consultants on our list. The next is Dr. Corey Abboud, I believe,” he said.
Dr. Abboud. He was at Olin LabCorps, working on chimpanzees to develop new digital intelligence chips that could be implanted without having to rely on an external source of energy. His work was phenomenal.
So they were combing through digital intelligence researchers. She immediately felt herself reach toward the unknown, jealous of anyone who was able to work on such groundbreaking research. Was it a bluff? She stared at Lieutenant Johnner and he stared back dispassionately.
Despite her misgivings, it seemed as though Lieutenant Johnner actually had a project underway, and it sounded intriguing. If they were working on the biological substrate problem, she wanted to know about it. She wanted to be the first to know.
She thought about the next two weeks. Her lecture and charity dinners in New York. The Boston book signing. All cancelled. For what?
“Fuck.” Chal leaned her head back on the seat. Her hand dropped away from the seat belt buckle. “FUCK.”
Lieutenant Johnner sat silently in front of her, waiting. Finally she shrugged in reluctant assent. If there was no way out of this for the time being, she was at least going to make the most of it. She sighed, turning away from the military man to look out the van’s windshield. The road in front was empty, the headlights shining onto an endless highway. To Phoenix.
“This had better be interesting.”
***
Interesting was Chal Davidson’s primary criterion for anything. Men, food, work: if it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t for her. This was not, despite one ex-lover’s words to the contrary, how she explained away her commitment issues. It was simply that she enjoyed being around people that made her think. Most men didn’t do that, or at least not for very long, and when she got bored she moved onto the next one. Her relationships came and went like the seasons, and she didn’t seem to care.
Some said that Chal Davidson had become obsessed with discovering interesting things at the expense of friends, family, and just about everything else. Others simply called her a genius.
Her background in undergraduate school had been in theoretical physics, which she had abandoned for a doctorate in philosophy at Johns Hopkins that never reached fruition, her advisor having kicked her out once she made clear her disagreement with him on the practical applications of metaphysical philosophy. She ended up switching over to computer science at the same school and wrapped up her thesis on digital intelligence within a year, impressing everyone except those in the philosophy department, who squarely turned their backs on her.
Her career in academia was imbalanced, to say the least. Whereas most intelligence scholars focused on theoretical models, Davidson only published papers under pressure when she had to extend her grants, preferring to focus on practical applications. She would seem to have been tailor-made for corporate work, but she despised the suits and the suckups. The one corporate job she worked at a large software company lasted only a week before she yelled at the head boss during a division meeting and was fired for insubordination.
Still, she had done well for herself after a venture capital fund sniffed out her work on biological substrates and granted her a cool three million dollars to continue studying the applications. She hated biology and hired two young brilliant students out of MIT to wrangle with the substrate problems, turning her attention fully to the nascent field of digital intelligence. Her work quickly took off and soon there was no lack of capital to support her research.
Most digital intelligence researchers focused on non-biological substrates, developing software that could only be used in computers. In this, they were continuing the artificial intelligence work that had begun two centuries ago. Davidson thought that bio-substrates, though annoying to deal with, had certain properties that lent themselves well to high performance once the digital intelligence transferred across platforms, so to speak. As everyone else moved toward silicon, she shifted to organic media.
Eventually the Fortune 500 companies grew interested in the long-term potential of digital intelligence and it became trendy to have dig-int teams installed in branches of both marketing and research departments. Many universities had started offering digital intelligence programs alongside the more traditional cognitive science degrees. The CEO who
had fired her seven years before invited her to dinner at a chic French bistro and offered her a seven-figure signing bonus, but she refused, in a manner she herself later described as “petulant and short-sighted.”
At an interview for one popular science magazine, she was asked to pose for a photo shoot. The photographer came into the studio with a skin-tight red dress. Chal initially balked, but the magazine interviewer talked her into the dress. It turned out to be the right decision.
In what seemed to her like the blink of an eye, she had amassed dozens of offers for book deals, interviews, cover shoots, corporate advertising for any digital product under the sun. She accepted them all, ignoring the advice of her fellow researchers.
“People see you as a sellout,” a senior colleague had said. Chal merely shrugged. Maybe I am.
In private, she took all of the money from the promotional offers and gave it to charity. She never told anybody that she felt guilty, or why. They wouldn’t have understood. Only her tax accountant knew that Chal Davidson, despite having the brains to match her beauty, was as penniless as a grad student.
Her mom sent her clippings from the local newspaper whenever it mentioned Chal’s work. Paper clippings, still--Mrs. Davidson lived in Catalonia, a non-digital post-Divide country. These Chal kept in her desk drawer, even after the slips of paper turned yellow, thin, and finally began to crumble, as all mortal things do.
***
Paper? That was what she thought, before anything else, when the military man, Gray Thomas, leaned forward in the van and handed her a binder full of the stuff. “This is what we need you to review before Phoenix.”
“You needed to print this all out?” Chal asked.
“It’s for security’s sake,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “No digital copies are allowed outside of the lab.”
Chal rolled her eyes sleepily. The binder was three inches thick; she had already been awake for twenty-seven hours, not counting the brief period of sedation. And the sedative must have been an etorphine blend, the way it knocked her out so quickly. She could already feel the hydrochloride-induced headache coming over her as she turned to the first page. There were so many pages.
And it was all paper. Overly paranoid, that’s what the military was. As Chal perused the binder, she felt as though she was back home, visiting her mom who, despite Chal’s bribes, threats, and plain old begging had refused to leave West Catalonia.
Turning quickly to the second section, she was surprised to see copies of all of her research on bio-substrate digital intelligence, including her thesis. She skimmed over them now. Pieces of the text had been underlined, and certain passages were copied over onto separate pages with dense technical notes scribbled under them. Chal recognized the notes as part of the lab processes that were required to apply digital intelligence into a biological matrix, the results of which had never been successful in Chal’s lab. At the bottom of one page someone had signed his name to the scribbles. Dr. Fielding. Chal would have to ask about him.
Continuing through, she began to be acutely aware of the feel of the paper rasping under her fingertips. In the middle of a paragraph on rat intelligence she lost track of the words, her fingers underlining the sentence but not understanding it. A noise grew in her ears, an insistent buzz, and her mind wandered far, far away from the present.
Paper.
Paper dolls.
Paper dolls blowing across the floor and under the bed—
“Dr. Davidson?”
Chal was pulled back into the present, where Lieutenant Johnner looked at her with concern.
“Yes?”
“Thought we had lost you for a moment there,” Johnner said. He smiled impassively, and Chal gave him a terse nod.
“Just wool gathering,” she said. He didn’t need to worry about her. Nobody needed to worry about her. She turned back to the paper binder.
Some of the material was new, and she puzzled over the formulas for a while before continuing her reading. Inserted in the middle was a copy of the magazine article with her picture attached, the one with her in a red skin-tight dress. She scowled and turned the page quickly.
There was also a printout of her speech on the emotional ramifications of bio-substrate dig-int. She had delivered it on a second’s notice at a neurobiology convention a couple of years back.
She waved the paper at Lieutenant Johnner. “Did they just put everything I’ve ever said in here? Because this talk is about future emotional possibilities for biological creations. Not machine-based digital.”
“That’s right.”
Chal felt oddly slighted by his tone. He hadn’t even answered her question.
“So, this is just a transcript of everything I’ve ever said?”
“Everything in that binder is relevant to the project at hand, Dr. Davidson,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
“I’m sorry, you’re saying this is relevant?” She laughed, and stopped when she saw that he did not join her.
“You’re saying you’ve done it?” Chal said. “Bio-substrate intelligences? With emotional sentience?”
Lieutenant Johnner shrugged lightly.
“Bullshit,” Chal said. “You’re bluffing.”
“Bluffing?”
“Just like you were bluffing with Dr. Abboud,” she continued, flipping through the binder. “This tech is decades away.”
“The M.I.D. has been working on this for decades, Dr. Davidson.” The lieutenant’s blue eyes shone in the dim light of the road as they turned off of the highway.
“What does this--any of this--have to do with the military?” She flipped ahead in the binder. Emotional induction studies, including the recent Lidder paper. Child development research. One of her articles on conscious feeling and qualia. “You can’t weaponize emotions.”
“You work in a field with some very important implications, Dr. Davidson. You’ll understand more once we reach Phoenix.”
He said something else, but she was distracted by the sudden idea that something interesting--very interesting--might be right around the corner. Distracted enough that she didn’t hear the coolness that had entered his voice. “Say again?” She flipped back to the formulas. How had they gotten it to work?
“You talked about chipping away at a problem,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
“Yes?” Chal was eager, impatient. A million possibilities raced through her head.
“Don’t be too hasty to break through the ice,” Johnner said as they pulled onto a deserted dirt road. “We’re standing on it.”
***
CHAPTER THREE
The progress of digital intelligence in the world scientific community had been set back by a number of factors since its inception. Apart from the religious objections over the creation of intelligent life, society believed that thinking machines were useful for only the most technical of tasks. It was seen as silly to even try to work on the more nebulous and impractical aspects of intelligent life such as sentience and emotion. This attitude would prove to be dramatically short-sighted.
Perhaps the largest issue that eventually had to be faced head on was that leading cognitive scientists refused--absolutely, positively, one hundred percent refused--to believe that biological substrates were necessary for the creation of intelligent life.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, mathematician Roger Penrose had argued that the laws of physics as we know them were insufficient to explain consciousness. He proposed a theory along with anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff called the Orch-OR model which depended upon the quantum characteristics of microtubules in the brain. It was soundly rejected by physicists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists across the board as being unlikely, even radical.
As one scientist sarcastically put it: “It’s reasonably unlikely that the brain evolved quantum behavior.”
Penrose had made his name as a brilliant mathematician, and his contributions to that field were beyond dispute. This foray into neuroscie
nce, however, was seen by all as an ill-conceived failure. Mathematicians were disappointed that he had devoted his attentions to a different field of science, and everybody else treated him with condescending indifference. He wasn’t a neuroscientist, after all, so what the hell was he doing studying the brain? He wasn’t a physicist, so how could he possibly come up with a major development in quantum field theory? To say that scientists were skeptical of his claims was to put it kindly. Some of his close friends whispered privately that the man had gone off his rocker.
Two decades later, Penrose re-examined his initial theory in a paper titled “Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory. The paper began with the following sentence:
“The nature of consciousness, its occurrence in the brain, and its ultimate place in the universe are unknown.”
He went on to evaluate the shortcomings of the brain-as-computer viewpoint that continued to gain popularity in the early days of cognitive science, mentioning the hard problem of consciousness as a sticky issue for those who shared that viewpoint. He also criticized those who searched for the origins of consciousness in the brain, noting that the best measure of consciousness (gamma synchrony EEG from 30 to 90 Hz) didn’t derive from neuronal firings at all. The paper was largely ignored in scientific circles.
One hundred years after Penrose’s first book on the Orch-OR theory of consciousness was published, Chal Davidson was born. Twenty years after that, she ran across Penrose’s paper while researching the origins of quantum physics in one of her college classes in scientific history. It was this paper that caused her to abandon her degree in physics and turn instead to philosophy.
Penrose was right, she thought. Physics was broken; there must be something deeper driving the fundamental laws of the universe. Something more. It had been years since she had last prayed to God, but when she read Penrose she felt an odd stirring inside of her that hearkened back to sunny Sunday mornings spent in churches.
Faith.
