Portal to Passion: Science Fiction Romance

by Amber Stuart

  ***

  Chal waited until the observation room door had hissed shut. Then she turned to Dr. Fielding and the technicians.

  “What the fuck was that?” she asked. “Where did the noise go?”

  “I’m so sorry,” Evan said, looking aghast at his team of technicians. He was so upset that he could only stammer out apologies. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Fielding.”

  “The speaker broke,” the dark-haired technician said. From the look on his face, he had been the one who had been in charge of that particular aspect of the experiment. “I think it was the adaptor connection.”

  “I don’t give a shit what it was,” Chal said. “As long as it doesn’t happen again.” She looked away from Evan, not wanting to make him feel worse but unable to conceal her displeasure. That was something she had never been good at – hiding her anger when something went wrong.

  “That went well,” Lieutenant Johnner said, coming into the room. Chal rolled her eyes but said nothing.

  “As well as it could have,” Dr. Fielding said. He looked relieved, if a little pissed, and Chal realized that he had half-wanted her to fail just as he had done twice before. “Sensors show that his neuronal growth has quieted down into a normal structural growth. We should be able to let him sleep for ten hours or so.”

  “Make it eight,” Johnner said. “We don’t want his mind to start branching out too far.”

  “Eight, then,” Fielding huffed, unhappy that Johnner had taken over his decisions. Chal was impressed by how quickly Johnner had come to a conclusion. Maybe it was just protocol. But she sensed that he knew more than he let on. He caught her looking at him, and she turned away, cognizant of the ill effects giving men attention could have.

  “You did well, Dr. Davidson,” he said.

  “It would have been better to avoid language at all to begin,” Chal said. “It’s too much to start with. It might have overstimulated him.”

  “Still, you did well,” Johnner said. “Quick thinking.”

  Chal nodded, irritated that he didn’t seem more disturbed by the broken speakers. It was a big deal, and he just brushed it off like it was nothing.

  “He could have died,” Chal said. “Next time--”

  “Next time we’ll be sure to have a backup system, Dr. Davidson.” Now that they had successfully awakened the prototype, Johnner seemed distracted from the experiment. She wondered, not for the first time, what the military might want with emotionally conscious life forms.

  “It’s important,” she said lamely.

  “Of course,” Johnner said, his attention snapping back to her. “Don’t think I underestimate the difficulty you face with this. I’m on the hook for this project, too, and I don’t want to see millions of dollars of research down the drain.”

  He continued talking, but Chal was too angry to listen. She felt just like she had back in the days when she was the only woman in her computer science classes, dismissed out of hand by the men around her. After a quick rundown of the data, convinced that everything would go better on the next run, she left the laboratory to grab a longer nap. She was on the prototype’s clock now, and the experiments would determine her sleep schedule. Every eight hours or so, he would have to be awakened, the stimuli slowly increasing.

  “Sleep when you can,” Evan had told her. “This is underground time now, and you’ll never remember to sleep when the lights are always on. Any nap is a good nap.”

  Another nap. Another nightmare. That was all she needed.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  After an hour of restless tossing on her cot, Chal found that there was another bodily need that she had been sorely neglecting. Her stomach was growling loudly as she stood up from the stiff mattress.

  “Shush, you,” she told her stomach. “Come on, let’s go find something to eat.”

  Now she was talking to her organs. Chal wondered if she would be okay living down here for another day or two, let alone a week. Hell, she didn’t even know what day it was right now. For a moment, she remembered the outside world, realizing that everyone out there would have continued on like normal without her.

  Nothing seemed normal now, not after her experience with the prototype. Everything would change, she realized. Most of the major world religions, or what was left of them, depended on the concept of a soul gifted to humanity alone. What would they say when Alan was unveiled to them: a creation of man, made intelligent and emotional, able to react just as a human would?

  Chal felt relieved to be away from the world, although she never would have guessed it. The past few years had been spent pushing, pushing herself, and now that she had been yanked away from all of her commitments she realized how unnecessary most of her work was. Nothing she had done in the past ten years had excited her as much as this one interaction with the android prototype.

  These were the thoughts on her mind as Chal made her way down to the kitchen where Johnner had told her she could find her meals. The cook there gave her a soup that tasted like a broth of nutrients, which was probably what it was. For dessert, a protein bar coated in chocolate, the chocolate flaking off like chalk.

  With so much funding, this is the food you eat? Chal thought this, but didn’t say it to the cook, who looked unhappy to be there anyway. She finished quickly and began to explore the rest of the structure. The hallways that led to the laboratories continued through the building, and she found herself wandering through a number of preparatory laboratories. Some of them had technicians at work, but others were vast and empty, filled with computers and other analytic equipment. What other projects were happening down here? Chal was curious to know.

  At first she greeted the military men standing guard at each door, but after a few brusque replies, she decided to just ignore them. Her ID card seemed to unlock any door, at least on this level, and she enjoyed the sense of freedom she had at being able to roam about the laboratories. She reached a large door at the other end of the hallway from the living quarters, and swiped herself in, nodding at the men with machine guns standing guard.

  This lab was the bio-substrate lab, she realized as soon as she stepped in. There were shelves from floor to ceiling everywhere the eye could see, and all of them were filled with glass jars and cages. Mice scurried in wheels in huge tanks on some of the shelves. In others, small brains floated in a clear red liquid that she recognized by smell as being a formaldehyde-based compound.

  There were no chimpanzees, but she was drawn back past the mice tanks to a huge aquarium that was set back from the other shelves. Inside was a reef of corals, but no fish. Peering into the aquarium, she tried to see what was hiding in the shadows of the coral. She thought she saw a small movement in the back and squinted, her hands cupping her eyes, but couldn’t see anything.

  Letting her hands drop from the tank, she turned around and almost ran into Dr. Fielding.

  “Jesus,” she said, starting backwards and bumping into the tank. “You scared me.”

  “So sorry,” Dr. Fielding said, but his tone indicated that he was anything but. What would he be doing in this lab anyway, creeping up behind her like that?

  “It’s okay,” Chal said, determined not to let him drag her down to his level. She was going to be professional, no matter how much she disliked the man.

  “Octopi,” Dr. Fielding said.

  “Excuse me?” Chal asked.

  “Octopi,” Dr. Fielding repeated, gesturing to the tank.

  “Oh,” Chal said. She watched as Fielding climbed the stepladder and retrieved a fish from a smaller tank above the octopus tank. He dumped the fish unceremoniously into the water. As quick as a flash, two octopi emerged from the coral and made for the fish which still seemed dazed from being thrown into the tank. It swam slowly through the tank, oblivious to the danger. The smaller octopus reached the fish first and enveloped it with its tentacle. Before it had time to swallow the prey, the larger octopus reached them both, and extended a tentacle out, prying the f
ish from the smaller animal. Their tentacles wrapped around each other, and they struggled to wrench the fish away. Dr. Fielding looked at them fighting, his pupils dark pinpoints flashing from side to side. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “Why are there octopi here?” Chal asked. The octopus nervous system was useful for basic study, but she thought that was all it was useful for. It only had five percent of the nerve cells that the human brain had, tops. At least, that was all she remembered from her biology classes. Lord, she hated biology. The larger octopus had gotten the fish away from the smaller one, and was busy stuffing it into its mouth cavity. The smaller octopus lost interest, or pretended to lose interest, and stretched its way back toward the coral.

  “The octopus is the smartest animal, aside from man,” Fielding said. His eyes tracked the octopus as it moved across the floor of the aquarium. “They can think, they can learn. Sometimes they play.” The small octopus sat motionless on the bottom, its tentacles waving in the invisible currents of water.

  “They even use tools,” Fielding said, his eyes never once leaving the tank. The large octopus had eaten the fish and was now swimming lazily through the tank. The small octopus shied away from the large one as it swam by.

  “They don’t feel very much, though, do they?” Chal asked. “I read once that they’re insensitive to burns or something like that.”

  “They don’t feel anything,” Fielding said. “Nothing that we feel, anyway. They fight for dominance, but it’s strictly for survival.” He turned to her, the odd smile creeping once more across his face. “When a male octopus copulates, its heartbeat is as slow and steady as in an animal at rest.”

  “So they don’t get excited over sex,” Chal said, raising an eyebrow. “Is that what you’re learning from them?”

  “A purely unemotional creature with a high degree of intelligence is a wonderful control group,” Fielding said. He stepped down from the ladder, his fingers trailing across the glass.

  “Intelligence without emotion,” Chal murmured. Certainly it was possible. Was that all Alan was? An intellect with no feelings? It could be, he could be mimicking rather than truly feeling. But no, he wasn’t. Despite her misgivings, she could tell that just from his face.

  “It’s nice to have pets,” Fielding said. “I never had any myself when I was a child.”

  “Oh? Where are you from?” Chal asked, relieved to be off the topic of octopi for the time being. She wanted to leave, but Dr. Fielding was staring at her so intently that she thought it would be rude.

  “I’m from here,” Fielding said. “Arizona. Too many coyotes to have cats around, and my mother never liked dogs.” He looked into the tank again, and Chal had the odd feeling that he would have loved an octopus for a pet.

  “Is your family still in Arizona?” Chal asked.

  “No,” Fielding said, and his eyes narrowed. “My father lost his job. Fucking immigrants coming over and taking everything.” He said this with the same low, unemotional voice, but Chal could see the tic at the corner of his mouth. His tongue darted out to lick it.

  Chal didn’t know what to say in response that wouldn’t be unduly rude. Many of her family members were immigrants, and one of her mom’s friends still worked for the embassy to help immigrants get through all of the paperwork and red tape and escape poverty after the digital Divide. Her mother, of course, had gone back in West Catalonia, having fought so hard for the creation of the country in the first place. Still, Chal remembered her family leaving, one by one, for the promise and future of digital-saturated countries.

  Sometimes they had left illegally, Chal knew, but none of them was anything but grateful for a chance to live in a country that embraced technology. It seemed stupid to her to blame the individual immigrants, anyway. They were just doing what was right for their family’s survival. It was the natural thing to do.

  She pressed her lips together and ignored Dr. Fielding. No need to make him hate her even more.

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare for the next round of awakening,” she said.

  “Where were you born?” Dr. Fielding asked Chal, as though he hadn’t heard her.

  “Not here,” Chal said. “Forgive me, I really have to go prepare.” She turned to leave.

  “I’m keeping an eye on you,” Dr. Fielding said.

  Chal turned around, astonished. “Excuse me?”

  “You heard me,” Dr. Fielding said, and now there was a sharp edge to his voice that Chal had never heard before. “Don’t think you can just do anything you like here. I’m watching.”

  Chal tossed her hair back. So that’s what his deal was.

  “Watch all you like, Dr. Fielding,” she said. “It’s possible you might learn something.”

  He scowled, but Chal didn’t wait to hear his reply. She was already through the shelves, swiping her ID at the keypad. As she left, she looked back to see Dr. Fielding standing next to the tanks, his thin eyebrows knitted in anger, the octopi waving their tentacles up toward him as though in supplication.

  ***

  Chal’s second interaction with the prototype was normal, or as normal as possible given the circumstances. She sat back and watched Alan play with his fingers, his hands, his eyes wide and wondering as an infant’s. At one point he made a gesture, and she froze in her chair. After he was re-sedated, she fairly ran out to the observation room.

  “Did you see that?” she said.

  “See what?” Dr. Fielding asked in a cold and clipped tone.

  “His finger. He was dancing it the same way I danced mine during the first awakening.” She was heady with excitement.

  “Wait, what?” one of the technicians said. Dr. Fielding looked as though he wanted to throw the technician through the wall.

  “His finger,” Chal said. Did none of them get it? She wiggled her finger in the air. “Balla amb so dit. He remembered!”

  Dr. Fielding put his hand over his clipboard.

  “Dr. Davidson, we must avoid jumping to conclusions about the prototype. It’s simply too underdeveloped to have that kind of memory retention yet,” he said.

  “But I’m sure--”

  “We’ll be sure to record your observation about what you believe the prototype is doing,” Dr. Fielding said. She wanted to shake him by the shoulders. This was important! He was learning!

  “Let’s prepare the room for a slight increase in stimuli,” Dr. Fielding said. “Up the ambient noise to sixty decibels.”

  “Should we increment the variety of noises?” the technician asked.

  “Not yet,” Dr. Fielding said, looking straight at Chal. She was staring daggers at him. “We must be patient.”

  Chal turned on one heel and left the observation room. Evan and another assistant had taken the prototype out of the tank and were wheeling him out of the room on the hospital gurney. She ran to catch up with them.

  “Mind if I tag along?” Chal asked.

  “Sure thing,” he said. “He’s already under full sedation.” They pushed the gurney along the hallway. It was too narrow for Chal to walk alongside, so she lagged behind, looking at the prototype from where she could glimpse him around the shoulder of the other assistant. He looked just like he was sleeping, peaceful almost.

  They came to the holding room and the assistants picked up the prototype carefully, transferring him to what looked to be a normal hospital-style bed. They inserted the necessary IVs and Evan checked for sores, bruises, or soiling. The monitors along the wall beeped and whirred, performing the necessary task of constant observation.

  Before they left, Evan came around the bed. To Chal’s surprise, he pulled out handcuffs from under the bedsheet. One end was clasped around the bedpost. The other he slid around the prototype’s arm and cuffed shut. He then proceeded to do the same for his other arm, and then his legs.

  “Why are you doing that?” Chal said.

  “Huh?” he asked.

  “Why are you han
dcuffing him to the bed? He’s sedated.”

  Evan shrugged. “Protocol. It’s Dr. Fielding’s order.”

  Chal nodded, but inside she was seething. She felt that it was ridiculous – unduly paranoid, to be sure – to handcuff a child to a hospital bed. For that was what Alan was – a child. One that looked like a man, to be sure, but still a child inside. His neuronal connections had taken a steep jump in the second experiment, and they had read sharp spikes of alpha waves in alternation with longer theta states, which most likely meant that he was learning, or at least thinking about his experiences.

  “It’s crazy to think of what’s going on in his brain right now,” Chal said. “Were you involved with the programming?”

  “A bit,” Evan said. “I worked mostly on capability programming.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Setting up neuronal structures to be activated later. Stuff like how to drive, how to use a fork, little things.”

  “Using backwards induction?”

  “Yeah,” Evan said. “I actually worked with the guy whose DNA we’re using for all this. So that there wouldn’t be any problems interfacing brain and body.”

  “But you can’t just preprogram stuff like knowing how to drive.” Chal frowned. Her rats had still needed to learn the mazes. There was no way to put that knowledge into their brains beforehand.

  “No, but the structures are set up to make learning easier.” Evan was starting to get excited, and she could tell that this was the kind of research that he was best at. Some scientists liked the code, and some liked the lab work. It seemed like Evan was one of the former.

  “If the brain has to build out all those structures, it takes forever,” Evan said. “We code it so that the myelin networks for different tasks are all already built up by the time the brain is ready to be developed. That way, just like that--” and he snapped his fingers “—the brain is ready to go.”