by Amber Stuart
“So it grows into the existing structure.”
“And it should be damn quick,” Evan said. “What you’ve seen so far... well, it’s much better than what we’ve done before, but I want to see what comes next. He’s going to be a superlearner.”
“Can I see the program notes?” Chal asked. “I’d like to know exactly what kinds of structures he has preprogrammed.”
“Sure,” Evan said. “Dr. Fielding should have all of the code on his workstation.”
“You don’t have a copy I could look at?”
“They classified everything as soon as I was done with it. How dumb is that, right? I made the damn program and I’m not even qualified to see it without permission.” He rolled his eyes.
“Pretty dumb,” Chal murmured. She was distracted, thinking about the possibilities of preprogramming brain structures. Using an actual person to do backwards induction was a brilliant idea, and she wished she had thought of it for her rats.
“Ok, I’m off to run the blood samples. See you later,” Evan said.
“See you.”
She sat down by the bed and looked at the prototype. They had put a sheet over his body to warm him, but one corner had fallen down. She pulled it up to his shoulder and tucked it behind. Touching him, she was surprised at how warm his body felt.
He was just sleeping, just a man sleeping.
She sank down beside him and watched him breathe. His muscled, perfect chest rose and fell in time with the low beep coming from the monitor behind him. Reaching out, she brushed the dark hair away from his forehead. He shifted, and her hand retracted instinctively, as though being stung. She had an irrational fear that she would wake him at the wrong time. But of course that was impossible.
He looked just like a man, she thought. They had created him from scratch, of course, so there were no seams or stitches. He wasn’t one of Frankenstein’s monsters. She still had the nagging suspicion that she could pull back his ear, or look into the crook of his elbow, and she would see a computer chip poking out from underneath the whole thing. There must be something that showed, something that could tell the difference between the simulation of a man and a man.
What was the difference between a simulation and the real thing, anyway, once the simulation was realistic enough?
Chal rested her head in one hand, her gaze sweeping over Alan. She felt so tired. There was something in her driving her toward a purpose, and she had always let that drive carry her along, from project to project. Every once in a while, though, she would sit down and just feel tired. It was as if all of the exhaustion that she had been outrunning had caught up to her and tackled her to the ground.
Perhaps it was just the adrenaline seeping away after her second encounter with Alan. She had wanted to reach out, wanted to talk with him so badly after the session had started. He was sitting only a few feet away, splashing lightly in the water. She knew that the experiment’s success depended on her, though, so she had sat on her hands and observed, observed, observed.
She knew he remembered her singing to him. Hadn’t he danced his finger around just like she had showed him to? It wasn’t just her imagination. She would have to rewatch both tapes, just to be sure, whenever she had time. Eventually, eventually...
She did not remember falling asleep next to the bed, and when she awoke, her neck hurting from the position she was in, she rubbed her eyes and sat up with embarrassment. Alan lay on the bed, his chest rising and falling slowly. The monitors beeped on and on.
She heard steps out in the hallway and turned her head, but there was nobody there. She went to the door and swiped her ID, looking quickly out into the hallway. Nothing.
Chal turned to Alan. Someone had been watching them. It gave her the chills. She made sure that he was covered completely by the blanket, tucking the sheets in around the handcuffs on his wrists and legs, before she left to go find something to eat.
***
CHAPTER NINE
Johnner was already in the kitchen, bent over a sandwich. Chal’s stomach growled at the sight of it, and she asked the cook to make her one as well. She sat down across the table from Johnner.
“You were right,” Johnner said. “About the finger. I think he’s developing memory.” Chal was surprised. She had expected him to side with Dr. Fielding, and was pleasantly encouraged by his backing her.
“That kind of development is a lot quicker than normal, isn’t it?” Chal said.
“What’s normal?” Johnner said. He threw his hands in the air. “The only data we have are questionable results from animal-substrate experiments.”
“Still,” Chal said. “Most of the animal-life substrates I’ve worked with have taken weeks, sometimes months to develop mimicry behavior and mid-term memory retention. And he seems to be developing emotion as well.”
“Apart from fear?” Johnner was disbelieving, and Chal thought that perhaps she had gone too far.
“He seemed happy at times during the second experiment,” she said, hedging. “And he’s certainly curious.”
“The curiosity I can do without,” Johnner said. “I only wish we could move onto language soon. We need to know for sure if he’s able to feel emotions.”
“Are you more of a linguist, then?” Chal asked. It was nice to be able to talk with someone else who seemed to know what was going on, even though she felt an invisible barrier between her and Johnner. He only let on so much, and she wished she knew what he was thinking.
“More or less. I’d like for him to be able to understand verbal commands and respond in kind,” Johnner said.
“So that we can understand what he’s feeling.”
“Yes, to know that he’s feeling.”
“We need to develop his other senses first,” Chal said. “I’ve had most success beginning with basic things like touch, then moving onto activities that require higher levels of consciousness.”
“Then we should start with touch.”
“He’s already touched my hand once,” Chal said. “And that was while listening to a song. I’m impressed that it didn’t overstimulate him.”
“We should start working on other senses as soon as we can.”
Chal took another bite of her sandwich and chewed thoughtfully.
“You seem impatient,” she said, watching him gulp water to wash down his food.
“I’m a military man under a military deadline,” he said. “That’s all it is.”
“What deadline are we working under?”
“That’s classified information,” he said. “But I’ve been asked to hurry this project along.”
“Tell them you need more time,” she said.
“They’ve given me more time. They need results,” he said.
“You can’t push a growing person too quickly,” Chal said. “It could kill him.”
Johnner coughed. “We’ll be starting the next awakening at 1600 hours.” He stood up. “If you can begin to talk with him, that would be fine.” He didn’t say a word about what would happen if Chal didn’t, and she realized that it was an order.
“I’ll do what I can,” she said carefully.
“Good, good,” Johnner said. She could tell his mind was already elsewhere, but she had one more question.
“Another thing. I’d like to contact my agent and get to check my email. Is there any way I can do that?” With all of the hubbub and commotion around the experiments, Chal hadn’t had time to sleep properly or shower, let alone find a way to access the internet. Now she wondered if she was even going to be allowed contact with the outside world. She hadn’t so much as seen a phone anywhere around the labs. Despite herself, she almost wished for the answer to be no. It had been nice to be isolated from the pressures of the world.
“Yes, of course. I’ll send over a computer for you to use as soon as possible,” Johnner said.
“Thank you,” Chal said. So much for that. She was sure there was lots of news to g
et back to at home – grants to approve, project results to pore over. But the project she was working on right now was so incredible, so absolutely insanely important, that all other things seemed to pale in comparison. She was so distracted that she did not notice the look of suspicion on Johnner’s face as he turned away from her.
***
Dr. Fielding handed her the clipboard.
“I’ve attached the standard questions,” he said. “Isn’t it quick to begin developing his language network?”
“Lieutenant Johnner wants to see his language develop as quickly as possible,” Chal said, by means of explanation. What she didn’t explain was that she was very, very excited about being able to talk to Alan again, and possibly get him to respond. His language network had already been grown and programmed with vocabulary, and all that was left was for him to connect language to the world around him.
All that was left. Ha! It certainly was a slow process in children, taking years and years. But Alan’s mind was different, developed in many ways to be an adult human’s, and she wondered how fast he would progress once they had begun speaking.
They started by letting him play in the tank for a minute or two upon waking. Every time he woke up, he had to be reminded of his physical form, to get acquainted with the notion that he had a body. Chal was fascinated by the process.
Most people thought that they were their bodies, to some degree or another. Even though many scientists claimed that they didn’t identify solely with their physical form, even though something like cutting off a hand or a foot didn’t seem like cutting off part of your consciousness, there was still a part of them that believed their body was different somehow. That the bag of muscle and fat hanging off of their bones was different from the wood that made up their kitchen table.
It was hard, but sometimes Chal was able to concentrate enough on her body so that it didn’t seem a part of her anymore. There were pores in her skin, letting in air and water. There was her mouth and digestive system, which took in pieces of the world and excreted out the transformed material. Every cell in her body had died and been replaced a hundred times. Sometimes she could feel this ebb and flow down to the very core of her being, and she felt herself to be nothing more than a pinprick of consciousness in the universe, her body’s particles interwoven with every other particle in the world.
She never talked with anybody about this, in part because she thought they might call her crazy or worse, obvious. Her philosophical background had afforded her the tools for understanding the key debates in metaphysics, but there was a difference between understanding and knowing.
Her reverie was broken by the timer’s red light flashing on her clipboard, to indicate that she should begin talking. Hesitant, she leaned forward and allowed Alan to see her more fully. She waited until his eyes focused on her before speaking.
“Hello.”
“Hello.” He seemed surprised by the words coming out of his mouth. His lips moved timidly, forming the words piece by piece, but the programmed linguistics structure was intact. She put down her clipboard.
“I am Chal,” she said.
“You are Chal,”
“That’s right,” she said. “I’m Chal.” Let’s see how he did with a contraction. She paused, letting his brain adjust. So many neurons firing, all at once. Memory centers, linguistic parsing, phonetic synthesis. All of the pieces working together to form a single sentence. It amazed her every time she thought about it.
“I am--” he said, and stopped.
“You are Alan.” His eyes turned to her, then down to his body, and he smiled.
“I am Alan.” He moved his fingers through the water, making ripples that grew until they reached the sides of the tank, then rippled back.
“That’s right,” she said.
“What is Alan?” he asked absently.
“Alan is a name for you. You are a person.”
“I am a person. Alan is my name.” He touched his face with both hands, then moved his fingers down to his neck, his shoulders, his arms, touching everything. He looked down at his body, then back up at her.
“You are Chal.” He sat up in the tank quickly and leaned over, taking her head in his hands. His fingers pressed against her temples, wet with salt water. They felt warm. Chal’s eyes widened, but she tried not to appear too frightened. It was okay, she told herself. He was only learning. His naked body was dripping onto the floor, but his head was cocked, his eyes fastened to her face.
She could feel the strength of his arms, his hands. If he wanted to, he could kill her with one twist of the neck. It was amazing, how he had developed physically. They must have spent a lot of care with the substrate development. All these thoughts ran through Chal’s mind as she stood, motionless.
Behind him she saw the laboratory door open, and two technicians stood in the doorway. They both had syringes in their hands. Chal raised her hand up behind Alan’s body, motioning for them to stop. No. Don’t come in. They paused and looked at each other, then off to someone else behind the doorway opening. Nodding to an unseen command, they closed the door, leaving Chal alone again with the prototype.
Alan’s fingers ran across her eyebrows, her cheeks. He looked at her with an intense curiosity, entirely enraptured with her face. He hadn’t even noticed the door opening, or hadn’t cared.
“Are you a person?” he asked.
“Yes, I am a person.” Chal nodded slightly, feeling the drips of water trickle down her cheeks and neck.
“Thank you, Chal.” He seemed fascinated by her face. She didn’t know why he was thanking her. He shifted and she saw the IV trailing behind him.
“Please sit back down,” Chal said. She was worried that he would tear out the IV with so much movement.
“Will you sit too?” he asked.
“Yes, I’ll sit too,” she said. He relaxed his grip and sat back down into the tank. She settled on her knees next to the tank so that she could be at face level with him. This worked well with chimpanzees, anyway. She hoped it would work just as well with a person. He seemed to be responding to her statements in an understandable way.
“What is this?” he said, splashing the water.
“It’s water,” she said. The clipboard was abandoned behind her, but this was much more interesting. We should let him play more, she thought. Let him ease into reality on his own.
“Water is not a person,” he said. He looked up at Chal for confirmation.
“No,” Chal said.
“Wonderful,” he said, splashing water all around the tank. He raised his hands, fingers spread wide, and smacked the surface of the water. Some of it splashed over the edge of the tank, right into Chal’s face. She raised her hand to wipe it off, and saw Alan looking at her, concerned.
“Did I hurt you, Chal?” he asked. His voice was timid, and she saw the worry all over his face. Quickly she shook her head no, and smiled to show that she was okay.
“Of course not,” she said. He still looked worried, until she reached over and patted his arm. The IV was starting to drip red, the sedation flowing back into his bloodstream. “Don’t worry.” She wanted to tell the technicians to stop the sedative. She wanted to talk with Alan for much, much longer, see what other language he knew and what kind of language he could develop through discussion. She wanted to play with him and see reality as he saw it. But she knew their conversation had gone on long enough already. It was just too soon for her.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Alan said, traces of nervousness still in his expression.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Everything is okay.”
“Everything is okay,” Alan repeated. His eyelids drooped. “Chal?”
“Yes, Alan?” she asked. His muscles were slumping, and he splashed his fingers listlessly on the water’s surface.
“I’m...” he said. He yawned.
“Sleepy?” Chal felt an irrational desire to lean over and hug him.
“It’s normal,” she said. “It’s normal to be sleepy.”
“Normal,” he whispered, and then the sedative took him over. He floated in the tank exactly as a dead body might have. The lab door opened, and the technicians came in.
***
Chal left the lab and took a deep breath. She watched the assistants load Alan onto the gurney and wheel him out. It had all been too much for her to take in at once, and now that she was out of the room she felt her shoulders slowly beginning to untense. Eyes closed, she stretched her neck, rolling her head around.
“Did it hurt you?” Lieutenant Johnner asked. Chal opened her eyes and saw Johnner and Fielding standing in front of her. She set her face back into an impassive expression.
“No,” she said. “Everything went well.”
“You were supposed to read from the clipboard,” Dr. Fielding said. “How are we supposed to know the extent of his spatial awareness if you don’t ask?”
“Real interaction isn’t a question survey,” Chal said. “Do you want him to develop as a normal person or not?” Johnner and Fielding exchanged a brief look.
“There are certain parameters for questioning,” Dr. Fielding said.
“I know!” Chal cried out, losing her self-control for an instant. The men were quiet. “Don’t you think I know? Why did you call me in here if you aren’t going to listen to what I have to say?”
“You’ve been doing an admirable job,” Lieutenant Johnner said. He raised his arm as though to put it around her consolingly, but she stepped back. He lowered his arm. “I know you’ve been under a lot of stress.”
Men. They always blamed any problem they had with her on how much stress she was undergoing. Chal did well under stressful conditions, thrived under them. She knew from innumerable studies she had read that women were by far more resilient under stressful circumstances than men. Yet they had staffed this underground laboratory with assistants and staff who were all male.
All male. Chal realized that all of the staff she had seen had been male. Every single one. She thought back. Surely there must have been some other woman here. But no. The cook, the military guards, the scientists and technicians – every single person here was a man.
