by Amber Stuart
“Why?” Chal interrupted.
Johnner and Fielding looked at each other, and Chal got the idea that Fielding was embarrassed by the question. He frowned, coughed, and frowned again before speaking.
“For the past few months, we’ve been pressed by the government for results,” Fielding said.
“You’ve been promising results since before then,” Johnner interrupted. Fielding shook his head, visibly annoyed, and went on.
“The third prototype has reached the stage where it is ready to be awakened,” he said. “We know we can’t keep a nascent brain in stasis forever, and every minute that passes sees the mental structure grow further in directions we can’t predict. We need to awaken the prototype as soon as possible in order to ease it into the world while its brain is still malleable.”
“As soon as possible,” Chal repeated, disbelieving. “You’ve already started another one? Is there any reason to think it won’t just fail again?”
“Well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “This time we have you.”
There was a brief pause while Chal took in all this information.
“We only need to awaken the prototype for a few minutes before re-sedating it,” Fielding said. “The problem is that the prototypes so far haven’t survived their first awakening.”
“Wait,” Chal said, confused. “Back up. I don’t understand.”
“What don’t you understand?” Fielding asked, his voice sliding into condescension. His confidence—or lack thereof—in Chal’s abilities was clear on his face.
“This—” and here she pointed to the screen, “—this was the first time you awakened the prototype?” She had to make sure. It was impossible that they had done something so wrong.
“Yes,” Fielding said. “As was mentioned in the recording.”
“I thought that was the first time the prototype had been questioned.” Chal’s eyebrows knitted together in the middle of her forehead. “You’re telling me that was the FIRST time he was woken up? Ever?”
Johnner and Fielding looked at each other again, and this time Chal could see that both of them were more confused than she was. Could they really have made such a huge mistake?
“Yes,” Dr. Fielding said, a bit less confidently.
Chal’s mouth was open, and she didn’t even try to hide the contempt that oozed into her voice when she asked him her next question.
“Did you read any of my papers?”
***
CHAPTER SIX
One of Chal’s earliest experiments in biological-substrate intelligence had been her work with the same rats that she eventually was forced to abandon as failures. Initially, she had needed to create a system to ease them into the most basic forms of consciousness.
She, too, had had problems with her organisms “malfunctioning.”
At first, when the lab had applied anti-anesthetics, they had run into a series of issues. Many of the rats, upon being awakened, would freeze as though paralyzed, their eyes darting around wildly. When touched, they would go into spasms, squeaking horribly.
The EEG sensors on the rat brains were made to be as precise as possible, and for that reason were grafted directly onto the brains of the rats. But the readings made no sense at first. The sensors picked up nothing until the anti-anesthetics were applied. Then the sensors went wild. Every part of the rats’ brains lit up like a Christmas tree, the erratic spikes of electrical output shooting way past their normal ranges. It was as though there was a surge of electrical activity that sent the rats into brain seizures.
Chal still remembered the sound one of them made after an assistant had tried to poke it to see if it was responsive to stimuli. It had kicked its legs, spinning in circles and squealing until it spun itself right off of the edge of the table and onto the floor, ripping out the EEG sensors as it fell. Legs kicking, the rat’s squeaks grew fainter and fainter and then ended.
Chal had been frustrated, but only for a short while. None of her assistants could make sense of the EEG readings, but Chal continued analyzing them after everyone else had given them up as random electrical output. Working backwards, she was able to untangle the spikes of electrical activity and realize that the rat brains were, in fact, being overloaded too quickly upon awakening. Chal thought she could come up with a solution.
If it was a surge that was killing them, they needed a surge protector.
The problem with the rats wasn’t that their brains weren’t able to handle being awakened, it was that they were overwhelmed with the stimuli that the world provided them right away. Chal had been trying to wake the rats up into immediate adulthood, with a full memory center and physical sensor capabilities. There’s a reason that babies are born with underdeveloped eyes and ears, Chal decided: it was to prevent information overload. And that would be her surge protector.
Easing the rats into awakening was not as hard as it seemed at first. Rather than having to rework the rats’ brains, Chal found that they could simply rework the environment, making it less stimulating. After some experimentation and a lot of dead rodents, they found that awakening the rats in a soundproof tank with only dim red light was optimal. Rather than have a normal rat cage with lots of objects around and cardboard bedding, they put in a soft sponge floor. The direct EEG sensors had to be replaced with remote ones so that the rats would have no contact with wires, or, for that matter, with anything.
The assistants started to call the tanks wombs, and Chal thought the comparison was apt. Once the rats had adapted to the womb, the scientists could add in external stimuli one by one. The rats did much better, and eventually were able to be taken out and placed into the mazes which they promptly failed to solve. That was when the funding ran out and Chal gave up on the project, believing it unworkable.
One laboratory in Germany had asked Chal for help with awakening chimpanzees in the same fashion. She had been thrilled to fly over to assist them, but it turned out that they were still in the beginning phases of the program and didn’t have any new insight. The only thing she got out of her visit there was that chimpanzees were much harder to deal with than rats, especially when being awakened.
Passing through childhood into adulthood was difficult enough over an extended time period. To grow up instantly was a challenge, but with rats the transition was solved through the womb tanks. The German scientists, working with apes, had also to deal with the subject’s transition into sexuality. For the first few days after the chimps were awakened, they spent all of their time touching their own bodies, licking themselves, and masturbating.
Chal remembered going into the viewing room for one of the full-sized tanks, which closely resembled her rat setup. Red light, soft floors, but in this case there was a monkey stroking its erection. She had blushed, then scolded herself for blushing.
“Zis is how zey act for the first few days,” the German scientist had told her.
“I see,” she had said, and pressed her lips together. “And afterwards?”
“Afterwards zey are not so aggressive,” he told her. “But we are just beginning testing for levels of consciousness.”
That was what she was interested in, but the Germans were not prepared to divulge their results, and Chal returned to the United States disappointed. Her disappointment was tempered by her belief that the Germans had not succeeded, and that was why they had been reluctant to speak about their results. Or so she thought.
***
Now, as she watched Dr. Fielding twitch nervously in his chair, these memories sprung back into her mind and she realized that the military, for all their resources, had not done their homework before beginning this project.
“Which paper was that, exactly?” Dr. Fielding asked.
“There were several,” Chal said, directing her attention to Lieutenant Johnner. She was sick of watching Dr. Fielding’s weaselly face. “You’ve wasted quite a bit of time if you’ve been trying to wake up prototypes in a room while attached to
a bunch of machines.”
“I think we’ve been wasting time listening to you,” Fielding said. He stood up. “Telling us we’ve done everything wrong--”
Chal interrupted him, her attention still on Johnner. She had dealt with bullies before and found that ignoring them worked wonders.
“You’ll have to set up a new room. No bright lights, no machines. A sensory deprivation tank would be best.” She ticked off the requirements on her fingers.
“Anything else?” Lieutenant Johnner asked.
“I can’t believe you’re listening to this!” Fielding cried. He made no attempt to leave the room, but the tic jumped wildly at his lip.
“Make sure that the floors in the lab are padded,” Chal continued. “The walls too. We don’t want any loud noises.”
Johnner turned to Dr. Fielding. “How long will it take before you can get this set up?”
Fielding stood silently. His body was nearly trembling with anger that he had to answer to Chal. Finally he turned his hateful gaze away from Chal. “A couple of hours, maximum.”
“Do it,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
Dr. Fielding swiped his ID across the keypad and strode out of the room. Chal felt the tension in the air ease.
“Well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, “I guess we can both grab a couple hours of sleep then.”
***
Johnner walked with Chal down the hallway to her quarters. Right next to her bedroom, at the end of the hallway, was a large metal door with a wheel attached to it.
“Where does that lead?” Chal asked. It didn’t seem right to have another sealed lab so close to the living quarters.
“That’s one of the escape exits,” Lieutenant Johnner said.
“Escape exits?”
“There is one on every level on the south side of the structure,” Johnner said. “Even during an emergency, the elevators should still work off of generated power. Just in case.”
“A backup for a backup.” Chal noticed something. “There’s no keypad for that door.”
“Wouldn’t be a great backup if you couldn’t open it during a power outage, would it?” Johnner said. “In case even the generators fail.”
“But,” Chal said, “isn’t that dangerous? I mean, couldn’t anyone just pass through without going through decontamination?”
“The doors don’t open from the outside,” Johnner said. He seemed unworried about it. “The wheel locking mechanism seals it from here.”
“But someone could open it from the inside,” Chal said. “Or they could steal equipment and then leave.”
Lieutenant Johnner seemed amused at her insistence. “An alarm is set to go off if anyone so much as cracked one of these doors open,” he said. “All of the labs and living quarters lock down--from the outside, not the inside—and security is alerted at the entrance.”
“Someone could still escape,” Chal said.
“Sure,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “But where would they go?”
Chal shrugged. Anywhere, she supposed. Again, Johnner answered as if he were reading her mind.
“To get here, you have to drive for hours through the desert. Anyone who escaped from here would have a hard time finding their way back to civilization. There isn’t anything except for the airstrip for miles and miles,” Johnner said.
“Oh,” Chal said. All of a sudden she felt more tired than she had in the past two days. The adrenaline from seeing the first experiment on a bio-substrate human was beginning to wear off.
“I’ll have someone wake you up when we’re ready to start,” Johnner said, opening her door. Chal nodded and went inside. The door hissed shut and she could hear Johnner’s footsteps echoing faintly down the hall.
At first Chal thought she would not be able to sleep, her excitement was so strong. She looked around her room, which was little more than a storage area with a couple of cots attached to the wall. The sheets were folded crisply at the corners, military-style, and she had the sensation of being stuck in a hospital. Or a prison.
She lay down on the cot, the video recording of the prototype replaying again in her mind.
Hello.
Hello.
I am Dr. Fielding.
You are Dr. Fielding.
That is correct. Who are you?
What a question to ask an artificial intelligence. Chal twitched a little on the cot as she remembered the IV being pulled out, the blood dripping on the floor.
I—I am malfunctioning.
Chal’s legs kicked softly as she drifted into sleep, the prototype’s twisted face looming in her mind.
***
The playa was an empty bowl of cracked earth under the sky. It felt to Chal as though she could reach up and burn herself on the bright blue horizon, maybe even pull herself through to the other side of the atmosphere. Strange to think that beyond this thin bubble of air there was nothing but darkness and space stretching out beyond what the human mind was capable of imagining.
This was why humans were not nocturnal beings. Owls and coyotes could stand to live under the vast expanses of the heavens, but when man turned his head to the sky he got dizzy underneath the stars. They reminded him of how infinitely small he was. How insignificant.
How replaceable.
Chal walked alongside a parched gully in her dream. Silver brambles clouded the edges of the dried out stream, hoping for the ghost of a creek to come along and wet their roots. She walked on and on, until at last she saw in the distance the chain-link fence that surrounded the government station on the Tohono reservation. The galvanized steel mesh twinkled in the blinding white light of the midday sun, its shape rippling in the heat coming off of the desert floor.
Chal heard laughter beside her, and turned to see two small girls playing in the sand, about thirty feet away. Their backs were to her, but she knew without knowing how she knew that it was her, Chal and her sister playing together as young girls. When she moved toward them, she found that no matter how many steps she took, they were still sitting the same distance away. She stopped walking and just watched.
The girls were singing a song that Chal almost remembered, a lullaby from her youth. Now, though, she could only hear snippets of the melody when the girls would turn slightly toward her—
“--tit quan balla...”
She found her lips moving along, mouthing the words that she had forgotten years and years ago. Although the song sounded far away, she was able to whisper the chorus along with the girls.
“...balla, balla, balla...”
Then Chal noticed that the sound was diminishing. There was a rumble in the air, something that seemed to make the whole world shiver with sound. It was a noise that was out of the normal range of human hearing, but Chal felt her body shiver as the vibrations hit her body. It was a strain now to hear the girls, who were still sitting, playing.
Under her feet she felt the ground tremble, and she bent to the ground to listen. The rumbling grew louder, and she was scared for the girls.
Go. Run.
She opened her mouth to call to them, but the words would not come to her tongue. Her ear was pressed to the dry surface of the playa floor, and dust stained her cheek, but she could not pull away.
Go!
There was a slow murmur underfoot. The secrets hidden underneath the earth were being dug up and overturned, and the earth did not like this. As Chal listened, she felt the rumbling begin to shake her cheek and her palms, and the mesh fence in front of her quivered so hard that its chain links rattled like so many wind chimes.
Chal thought of the Robert Frost poem her fifth-grade teacher had read to the class. It was one of the first assignments she had been given after they had immigrated to the United States, and she had loved the lyrical quality of the words that she had just begun to understand:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spi
lls the upper boulders in the sun
The ground rumbled and shook, and still Chal’s ear was glued to the ground. She reached out her hand toward the girls, and saw her younger self stand up and look out, away, toward the mountains.
RUN!
She screamed but there was no sound. Between the mountains, miles away, she saw the earth begin to crack, the chasms breaking their way through the crust of the desert faster and faster. The black cracks were like lightning across the playa floor, and Chal saw the ground split and crumble, coming closer to the girls.
No!
She saw the earth give way under the girls, and her heart was wrenched inside of her body as she strained to rescue them but could not move. There was no chance. They fell in a second and when Chal blinked she found that they had disappeared from view. The floor under them was gone and then they were gone, and there was nothing but a black pit remaining. Her face felt hot and there was a roaring in her ears, the sound of earth cracking and crumbling.
When the ground split underneath her, she felt her fingers scrabbling at the sand, but then she was falling, falling, deep into the darkness and the earth’s core. Falling--
***
“Dr. Davidson?”
Chal woke with a start, her fingers clutching the blanket. She blinked in the bright light. Standing in the doorway was a young lab assistant, his long blond hair greasy but smoothed back into a ponytail. The hair of a researcher who didn’t care when he got his next haircut. His face was chubby with baby fat that he hadn’t yet lost, and Chal got the distinct impression that he was suppressing a smile.
“Dr. Davidson?”
“Yes?” she said.
“Hi there,” the lab assistant said, and his face broke out into the hidden smile Chal had seen. Although he was not handsome by any stretch of the imagination, when he grinned his face looked so friendly that Chal felt they were already intimate. “My name’s Evan. It’s an honor to work with you.” He took two steps towards her and tripped, catching himself on the cot and extending his hand eagerly for a handshake.
