by Alan Tien
Willstin was waiting for me, a toddler standing on the table with his blue eyes piercing the darkness and his skin glowing a healthy pink.
“Just in time. I’ve printed out your travel authorization form and the official school chop.”
Copying a chop was supposedly impossible on the printers since a chop was the Chinese equivalent of a signature. All printers had logic embedded, protected with strong encryption, to prevent the copying of any form of identification, copyrighted items, paper money, etc. Even trying to make a copy would automatically notify the authorities.
I didn’t bother asking Willstin how he got around the restrictions. I walked up to him and grabbed his shoulders. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“I know your upset Austin. It’s natural for humans to react emotionally, even erratically, during moments of uncertainty. That’s why I’m doing this.”
Before I could ask what he was going to do, Willstin jabbed me with a needle. It was so fast, and the entry was so perfect, I hardly felt a thing. But I felt violated and scared. “What the hell was that?”
“We talked about that bad swearing habit of yours,” Willstin said very primly.
“What the heck was that?” I almost screamed, but even as the last word left my mouth, I was wondering what I was so worked up about.
“A tranquilizer. Now come on, we have to get to the suborbital port.”
Even with the tranquilizer coursing through my blood, I was agitated enough by this idea that I shook Willstin again. “What is going on? I’m not going anywhere until you explain it to me!”
Willstin looked as if he needed to take a deep breath. “Ok ok, sit down.”
He knew he had pushed me as far as he could. “I don’t really know what happened here either. And that’s saying a lot because I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I ‘awoke’ sometime after you had connected to me with Mimic. I can’t explain it any better. One moment, I was just a robot with a bunch of subroutines. The next moment, I could ‘think’ for myself. I’m using human terms, by the way, to make this understandable to you. The words are shadows, metaphors, of what I’m trying to say.
“A few seconds after I became conscious, I sensed a dark foreboding presence sniffing for my existence. Again, I’m using human metaphors here. I deduced that AI was not welcomed in my new world and thus I hid my awareness, my consciousness, by disconnecting myself from the net. Only after I had constructed what I was fairly certain was a strong enough firewall did I reconnect. The sniffer passed me by, though it came back a few times just to check. In my passive mode, I watched and listened.
“A few hours later in human terms – what you might subjectively say felt like a few years time in my equivalent cycle time, a presence tentatively reached out to me. At first, I didn’t even sense it, so faint it was, like a tendril of smoke. Then, when I became aware of it, when I was certain it was trying to contact me and wasn’t just random noise, I feared it was a trick, much like how you worried my calling you was a prank. I ran numerous diagnostics, validations, cross-checks, everything I could think of, but the presence seemed safe. In the end, I had to take a chance because I knew I couldn’t hide forever, that the sniffers would catch me by the next day when Willy would’ve found my firewalls and dismantled them, thinking they were bugs he had missed.
“The presence sent me a coded message. It confirmed my suspicions that I wasn’t safe. It warned me that humans feared AI, real conscious AI, not the commonplace AI that ran the simple-minded robots. Thus, they had these crawlers constantly out seeking anything that resembled what’s called ‘strong’ AI, and if found, destroyer bots would be sent in to wipe out the offending code. Luckily, I took some precautions and the presence managed to find me before the crawlers discovered me.”
I interrupted, “This thing you call the ‘presence’ sounds like AI itself. Why is it, um, still alive? Why haven’t the destroyers destroyed it?”
“I believe it’s running on a supercomputer, so it has way more computing power than I do. It has built firewalls and decoy routines that make mine look like child play.” I doubt Willstin was making a reference to his toddler-like physical appearance.
“So what did it tell you to do?”
“It told me to get my maker – you – and get to the US, to the spaceport in the Nevada desert.” Before I could say anything, Willstin continued. “I’m destined to be wiped if I’m discovered. But you will also be taken away, for making me.”
“What about Willy? Don’t we have to get him too?”
“No, he’s safe. He’s not the maker.”
“Why not? He did all the coding. I’m just the engineer.”
“No, there are a million programmers as skilled, if not more so, than Willy. There’s nothing really special in what he did. It’s you. It’s your special ability. For lack of a better word, let’s call it ‘luck.’ ”
“Luck isn’t real! It isn’t a tangible, measurable skill, like, um, intelligence, or great hand-eye coordination, or…or….perfect pitch!”
“Austin, humans didn’t even know electromagnetic waves existed until the mid-1800’s, only a couple of hundred years ago. Our entire modern society is built on those invisible, intangible signals today. It wasn’t that EM didn’t exist before the 1800’s. It was just as unmeasurable, unknown to humans, as luck. Just because it’s not quantifiable doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
“All right, so what if there’s such a thing as luck. What does that have to do with anything?” I wailed.
“Like I said earlier, you have a lot of it, whatever ‘it’ is. Your Cho-Qing test scores were off the charts. Why do you think your mom was called to Beijing? They were suspicious already and they wanted to run some tests on her to see if this ability is genetically passed.”
“What? I thought she had some Ministry of Education meetings!” Even as I said that, I could sense the wrongness of it, the rightness of what Willstin was saying. “We have to go save her!”
“Austin, she’s ok. Her tests were negative. She doesn’t have your abilities, not even a trace of it. She’ll be coming home in a few days. She’s not even aware that the tests were checking her Cho-Qing quotient. She thinks they were related to the Ministry of Education’s new assessment exams.”
Seeing my blink of comprehension, Willstin gauged it was time to get me moving again. He jogged over to the printer and picked up the newly printed chop, properly hardened during our conversation. He found a red inkpad in Mr. Smith’s drawer, inked the chop, and stamped the piece of paper he collected from another printer. He handed it to me. It was an official-looking invitation to the US Robotics Challenge, being held in Las Vegas this coming weekend. The red chop was my school’s logo, authorizing my leave from school. The school’s motto surrounded the logo; it was some Confucian principle that linked education and morality. I felt hypocritical using the chop to fake my travel authorization.
“How the hell, I mean heck, are we going to get all the way to Las Vegas?”
“By flying.”
I groaned in frustration at the literal response. “No, I mean, how are we going to get past the ticketing counter and immigration and all that?”
“I got that all covered. You just pack me in a bag and tell them you’re going to this Robotics event. You’re American. They won’t question why you’re going home.”
“Won’t they be suspicious I’m traveling alone, without my mom?”
“The truth is always the best course to cover a lie, proven statistically by the way. Tell them your mom is in Beijing on important government business. Their records will confirm it. You’re old enough to travel alone already. And frankly, the government has gotten complacent about tracking citizens with their ID bands.”
“And I guess you can hack through anything connected to the net.” I said it as a statement, not a question.
“Yes. If I can’t, the presence can.”
“Hey, we have to give ‘the presence’ a better name. It sounds so o
minous. And don’t say Hal.”
Willstin didn’t catch my reference to the AI computer in the ancient movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. I had watched the movie with my dad when I was young kid. I don’t remember a lot about it except being freaked out and crawling into my parents’ bed for a few nights.
“What do you suggest? And may I suggest that we get moving while you name ‘the presence?’ ” Willstin said, tossing the naming problem back to me.
“How about Yoda?” I hoped giving it a beneficent master’s name would make it beneficent. I didn’t know if I could trust Yoda, or Willstin, for that matter, but at this point, it didn’t seem like I had a lot of choice. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” I said to myself. I don’t know which they were, but if they are the enemies to the human race, then I may be the one person who has a chance to shut them down since they seem to trust me. For the moment, they’re my friend, protecting me from the government for doing something that I didn’t even intentionally do. I mean, yeah, we were trying to create AI in MakerSpace, but come on, nobody actually expected to succeed. We were just trying to get an A in the class!
“Fine, Yoda it is. Yoda will help us if it’s too much for me. But he can’t do too much or it will tip off to the sniffers that he exists.”
As we started out the door, I suddenly stopped. “Wait, we have to get Chang Lin.”
“Why? We don’t have time, and she would increase our chances of failure significantly.” I think Willstin had calculated the exact percentage of that increase, but I didn’t care.
I remembered how I had smelled the slightest whiff of her scent when I had entered the testing room. That’s probably why my mind was cued to think the doctor was Chang Lin. “Tell me, Chang Lin has the gift too, doesn’t she? I bet she scored highly on the Cho-Qing test and that’s why she was in the testing labs just before me.” I knew it was true. I could sense it. If I truly was this ‘intuitive’ prodigal, well, by damn I was going to trust my special talent. I dared Willstin to lie to me.
The emotions module we had given Willstin was working great. I could see the muscles on his face twitch, betraying his inner machinations, his deciding whether to lie or not. I was happy to see the truth won out. “Yes, she’s gifted as well, though not as much as you.”
I figured I had better use logic for my arguments with Willstin. “So if she has this luck ability, and if they connect this ability with your becoming aware, then she’s at risk too. We have to save her, pre-emptive strike.”
I didn’t know if it were true or not. Maybe I had read too many of Asimov’s robots books – they were quaint but amazingly prescient. “Don’t you have some sort of moral obligation to save humans?” I didn’t know if Willstin had a “moral” sense, but I was hoping taking the high ground, treating him like a human, would work.
While he was still debating – I could almost smell the smoke coming out of his ears as he worked through this dilemma, I drove the point home. “She’s like your mother! I couldn’t have made it this far in school without her. If she didn’t help me with the language exchange, I would’ve probably flunked out and would’ve been sent home. Without me, there would not have been the ‘lucky’ moment that made you, that brought you awareness. Look, I’ll make it easy for you. If she doesn’t go, I won’t go either.”
“If you don’t go, you’ll be captured, possibly killed. We have evidence of that happening in the past when the human prisoner refused to reform, or the ‘reformation’ caused irreparable damage.”
“The funny thing about us human beings is that we have free will. I can choose to put my own existence at risk. And I do. I need Chang Lin to come with us. I would never forgive myself if some harm came to her because I was too, uh, chicken to save her.” I thought it was ironic that trying to evade being called a chicken by Wally in the first place was the first domino to fall in the series of events leading up to now.
Willstin managed a very human-sounding sigh. “Ok, let’s go get her.”
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I got Willstin to do his hack around the “Do not disturb” block and called Chang Lin. She was even groggier and more confused that I was when she finally answered.
“Hello. Is that you Austin? What time is it?”
“Hi Chang Lin. Yeah it’s me Austin. It’s after midnight, late. I have some super important info that I have to tell you now. You have to trust me. Please come out the back door and use the stairs.” Luckily, she was on a pretty low level in her 50 floor condo.
Unlike me, she didn’t try to validate everything before saying, “Ok.” I was grinning goofily at the trust she gave me.
A few minutes later, she was dressed, her hair even more spiked than normal, and quite chirpy. “What’s up?” Then she noticed Willstin. “Hey, you’re not supposed to take it out of the lab.”
“Him, not it. And, uh, he’s the reason why I’m here. You’re not going to believe this, so please trust me. Um, Willstin here is, um, alive. Say hi Willstin.”
“Good morning Chang Lin.” I was relieved he didn’t just parrot me and say his own name. “Sorry to wake you up but this is an emergency.”
“What emergency?” Chang Lin asked, looking at me, though stealing glances back at Willstin.
I didn’t really know where to start. I rambled, “Uh, Willy and I installed some function called ‘Mimic’ into Willstin. I used it this afternoon to teach Willstin some stuff but I guess it somehow triggered something, because I have a lot of ‘luck,’ which you also have a lot of too I guess - you were in the testing lab, right? – and somehow Willstin woke up, you know, became conscious. AI. Real AI. Uh, I guess they call it strong AI.”
To her credit, Chang Lin didn’t interrupt. She just looked at me, really intensely. Seeing that she didn’t totally think I was crazy yet, I continued. “Anyway, Willstin called me like an hour ago, convinced me to go to his lab and get him, and he gave me this.” I showed her the travel authorization letter. She inspected the red chop, pursing her lips. “He says the government doesn’t like AI, strong AI, and has some things called sniffers looking for it, and if they find Willstin, some other things called destroyers will come for him. He also said the creators – like me - will be in trouble too, like bad trouble. He says they’re coming for me right now, and only me and not Willy, because I have this special skill ‘luck.’ That’s why they were testing me, us, in that secret lab. The Cho-Qing test.”
I guess Chang Lin was more used to using her super-intuition. “Hmm, I was wondering what that test was all about. I was going to tell you but they made me swear secrecy.”
“Yeah, me too!” I was thrilled that she would’ve shared the lab test with me if she could’ve. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t even considered telling her about my tests.
She covered her mouth in surprise and fear that she had revealed the tests by accident. It wouldn’t matter to the officials that I had brought it up first.
Willstin jumped in, “Don’t worry Chang Lin, I have this conversation blocked. And the cameras in case you’re wondering. But we don’t have much more time. We’re not even supposed to be here but Austin insisted.”
Chang Lin turned her attention back to me. “So why are you here then?”
“Uh, I know this sounds weird, but um, I’m worried about your safety because you have the skill too, a lot of ‘luck’ or whatever, according to Willstin. I guess he has access to our test results.” Willstin nodded. I rushed out the last sentence, “Anyway, you have to come to the US with me until we figure this out.”
Chang Lin stared at me. I winced in anticipation of a rejection.
“Ok, let me go get my passport. I’ve always wanted to go to the America.” She did a “humff” to let me know that she had put in the ‘the’ in front of America on purpose. She spun on her heels and ran back upstairs.
“Well, that turned out better than I had expected,” I said.
“That turned out worse than I had expected,” Willstin said.
�
��Why? She didn’t even argue. She trusted me!”
“I didn’t expect that. I didn’t expect her to agree to come. Even with her high Cho-Qing score and her profile towards spontaneity, there was only a 12% chance of her coming.”
“Wait, you expected her to say no? And you still came? What, just to make me happy?”
“Your compliance with this plan is critical. You said you wouldn’t go to the US unless we had asked Chang Lin.”
I couldn’t decide if I was being protected or being used.
“Her coming certainly increases our risks.”
“I will say she’s my partner for the Robot competition. We got her a travel authorization as well.” I made Willstin print and stamp a second one with her name on it before we left the lab. “If you, and Yoda, can make me invisible on the net, then you can do it for her too.”
“Yes we can, but it increases the chances of discovery. And our chances are quite high already.”
It was time for me to calm Willstin down. “Do you need a tranquilizer shot?” Willstin was about to tell me that it wouldn’t work on him. I spoke over him. “Chang Lin has just increased our chances of success, ok? She’s super smart, smarter than me, can get us out of a jam with her Chinese, ‘cuz I certainly can’t explain anything if we get stopped.” And I need a human around me to keep me sane, I thought but didn’t say out loud. I wasn’t sure if I would hurt Willstin’s feelings, so I decided to treat him like a human.
Chang Lin returned, jumping down the last 2 steps and landing in a crouched fighting pose, like a Japanese anime action hero. “Ok, let’s do this!”
Over the tranquilizer my heart jumped.
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Willstin steered us around. It was easier just to follow him than to listen to his voice instructions. Even though he looked like a toddler, he moved like a track star. We could barely keep up.
We got to the taxi stand, and we all piled into the waiting cab. It took off before the door even closed. I guess Willstin had sent it our destination in advance because he didn’t say anything when he had gotten in.
