by Alan Tien
It happened now. There was no way my Dad was standing in front of me. He had run away in China somewhere. This must be an android, the first AI android ever built, looking for some reason exactly like my dad, sounding like my dad, smelling like my dad, hugging me like my dad. I burst out crying, huge wracking sobs.
Chang Lin was bewildered, “What is it Austin? Are you ok?”
My dad was shushing me and rocking me and holding me tight. The robots stood around us in silence, whether out of respect or confusion, I don’t know.
Chang Lin didn’t like not knowing what was going on. “Who is this guy?” Realizing I was beyond the ability to talk, she looked at my dad, and asked a little forcefully, “Who are you?”
My dad realized there was another person behind me, a girl talking to him. “Oh, hi. I didn’t see you. I’m Austin’s dad, Ryan. Let’s get inside, get you guys into something more comfortable, and I’ll explain everything.”
I let my Dad steer me, as if I were a robot, one without AI.
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The robots helped us out of our spacesuits. We reconvened in the kitchen. I was still too stunned to do much besides follow instructions. But Chang Lin was excited and curious. Obviously, she was concerned about me; she knew about my relationship, or lack thereof, with my Dad. She knew it was a sore topic, one that she had learned not to probe during our language exchange sessions. But we were on a space station!
She asked Willstin, who was gently herding us through the gravity-less portion of the space station, about all sorts of stuff that was interesting. She exclaimed with glee when we passed from the weightless area into the main hub of the space station, where the rotating wheel created artificial gravity. I have no idea how we move so smoothly from the gravity-less section to the one with gravity, and it should’ve amazed me, but I was semi-catatonic.
My dad was sitting at the table, conversing with one of the larger robots that vaguely reminded me of General Grievous from Star Wars. All the robots were of different designs, some tall, some short, though none as short as Willstin. Some were humanoid in shape, others like animals such as dogs, and some were much more functional in design.
There was 2 cups of steaming hot chocolate on the kitchen table. Chang Lin and I sat down opposite my Dad. She sipped the drink, “mmmm,” but I sat stonily, having recovered from my crying bout. I was coming out of my shock and into anger.
“Hey Austin, it’s great to see you. You look good… considering your trip here. And you are?” he asked Chang Lin.
“I’m Austin’s friend from school. My name is Chang Lin.” I’m glad she stopped introducing herself from the 3rd party perspective.
“Nice to meet you Chang Lin. Thanks for keeping Austin company during this crazy escapade. And I guess this is the famous Willstin, the troublemaker.” My dad grinned at my toddler robot, who smiled back, that traitor.
“Austin, you must have a ton of questions. I’m not sure where to start…”
I cut him off sharply. “How about starting with why you ran off? Why you left mom and me, for some…some…Central Sudan woman!” The tears were coming back, and my clenched fists didn’t stop them.
“Whoa boy. Is that what you think? Is that what they told you?” He sighed. “It figures.” He turned from his introspection and faced me. “Austin, Austin, my son, I would never have left you on my own.”
I savagely said, “You didn’t! You left with that woman!”
He didn’t rise to my bait. “I mean I didn’t leave because I wanted to; I was kidnapped.”
“Yeah, right!” I spat.
“Look, I know you’re angry, but you gotta believe me. Feel the truth in what I’m saying. What does your intuition say?”
I had been too worked up to pay attention to my intuition up to that point, but I had to admit I felt that he was telling the truth. I wasn’t ready to believe yet, so I didn’t say anything.
Seeing my lips thin, my Dad backed up and started telling his story.
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“Where do you think you got all your ‘luck?’ It’s not from your mom. It’s from me. I had tested really high on the Cho-Qing Perception test. How do you think I won over your mom?” He grinned at his self-deprecating humor. His grin faded when he saw that his audience didn’t appreciate it.
“Well, anyway, I was lucky to have gotten into Stanford. Winning my state’s robot competition” – I had forgotten about that – “was helpful, but it was really my test scores, which were way higher than my GPA. But getting into Dalian U, that was a serious bit of luck. I didn’t know it then, but my Cho-Qing test scores, secretly measured within the standardized tests, were off the charts. I suspect yours were too. I think that’s why we were invited to move to China. I mean your mom’s work is important and all, but I don’t think that alone would’ve gotten us into the Forbidden Country.”
I was experiencing vertigo again, this time not from the space sickness, but from viewing the pieces of my life history from a different perspective. They were the same pieces, just with different meaning. It was like that artwork, called stereograms, where you stare at a picture for long enough and then suddenly a 3D image jumps out at you. I felt like my whole life had been a lie, a trick, as if I had been the lead actor in the “Austin Longwhite Drama” and hadn’t been told the twist in the plot. What I thought was just a normal teenage boy’s life was turning out to be a comedy…or maybe a tragedy.
I wanted to interrupt. I wanted to jump onto the table and shout, “Shut up old man! You’re making all this up just to cover up the fact that you left us!” But I was drained of energy; I wouldn’t have been able to move if the emergency sirens had suddenly come on at that moment. And I felt intuitively, deep in my bones, that my dad was telling me the truth. He wasn’t dramatizing it; he didn’t act guilty. He was just telling me the facts, explaining how things were, to a confused teenager.
“While mom was working and you were off at school, I was tinkering on the computers at home. You know, I’ve always loved sci fi. That’s why I read all those books to you – Asimov, Frank Herbert, Orson Scott Card, John Scalzi – and why we watched all those ancient sci fi movies.” I saw flashbacks of me sitting with my Dad on the couch, him reading to me even long after I could read for myself, or watching old 2D movies that were strangely gripping even though they couldn’t compare to the immersive 4D experience of the modern netshows.
“Well, when I was in the US, I was onto something. I couldn’t quite tell what it was, but I knew it, felt it, that it was something important. The code almost wrote itself, I just being the vessel, the robot, to actually type it in to the computer. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with some incredible insight, go to the computer for a few minutes to type some piece of code that frankly didn’t even make sense to me in the morning. But the code was working, doing something. Just before we went to China, I published it anonymously on a relatively obscure but highly technical open source board. I wanted to see if the tech gods on that board could make heads or tails out of what I had written.”
Something clicked in my head. I said, “Mimic.”
Dad was surprised. He almost didn’t hear me, but stopped in the middle of a sentence. Then he nodded slowly, “Yes, Mimic. Yes, it all makes sense now. That’s why you’re here. The guy you had named Yoda,” here Dad pointed at the General-Grievous-looking robot, “had told me you were coming up in the rocket. I didn’t believe him because I didn’t understand why or how. Now it’s coming together.”
Chang Lin said, “I still don’t get it. Why did you leave Austin and what does this whole story have to do with anything?” I was grateful Chang Lin was able to put into words what I was thinking.
“I’m getting to it. Sorry, bad habit of mind, to tell stories in such a linear fashion. I guess it’s my engineering training, ha. Ok, so, when we got to China, I started checking the boards on how Mimic was doing in the hands of the pros. The comments were surprising. People either loved it,
thought it was genius, or hated it, thought it was the worst load of crap they had ever seen. But nobody really knew what it was doing. I mean, the basics were simple, make a robot mimic what you were doing. But it seemed like there was something beyond just motor skills that robots were learning. Their learning rate also accelerated dramatically. It looked like it was the Holy Grail, the piece of code that would finally push over the line what decades of research have failed at – to create strong AI.
“Then, overnight, the board was shut down. While I was out for my morning jog, plain clothed men jumped out of a moving van and kidnapped me. It happened so fast, so professionally, I doubt anyone even saw it. It was hours later until I even knew why I was taken.
“They took me to some interrogation cell, god knows where. I had a hood over my head, my hands bound, I could barely breathe. When they pulled the hood off, I was in the room by myself. ‘They’ asked me questions. I don’t know who. I never saw anyone. Just voices, digitized for anonymity, emitted from hidden speakers, asking me what Mimic was and what it was intended for. I explained the obvious – that it made the robot mimic whoever it was connected to. But I admitted that I believed it had some deeper meaning, though I didn’t know what it was. They obviously thought I was lying.
“’You’re the original programmer, are you not?’ they demanded. They knew I was, so there was no point denying it. ‘So how can you not know what it does, what it really does?’ They finally stopped beating around the bush and asked me directly, ‘Does it create strong AI?’ Again, they thought I was lying, or at least misdirecting, when I said I didn’t know. It was a possibility, it was what I had hoped for, but frankly, it seemed really improbable that I, a stay-at-home Dad and a hacker, would come up with what thousands of scientists have labored away for decades on, without success. That was probably my strongest argument, because they thought that was unlikely as well.
“They suspected I was just a front. ‘Who are you working with? What government or private company?’ They didn’t like my ‘Nobody’ answer, but the lie detector and truth telling drugs didn’t change my responses.”
Chang Lin interrupted again, “Why do I feel you’re stalling? Who’s this Sudanese woman you ran off with?”
My dad was agitated, “I didn’t run off with anybody! That whole story was just that, a story. I have no idea who this ‘Sudanese’ woman that you guys keep talking about. I was kidnapped. That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
“All right, let’s just pretend you’re telling the truth,” I said. I sensed it was true, and even if it weren’t, I realized arguing with him about it wasn’t going to flush the truth out. “Why don’t you fast forward a bit and explain what the hell you’re doing here.”
My dad got a grip of himself. “Yeah, right. So basically, when I was testing Mimic, the version that I was messing around with in China, I think it had somehow connected to the government’s own supercomputers. I think their censorship programs or sniffers backfired, opening a tiny link to the real powerful computers. Mimic got out, got through the firewalls, and I’m guessing here, my ‘luck’ or whatever you call it, was the spark to create life, to make the supercomputer come alive and become the AI that you have named Yoda.
“My hypothesis is that it’s a lot like how the conditions were right in the early Earth atmosphere to convert complex organic molecules into amino acids. Scientists have tried creating this environment in a lab, but they’ve never been able to replicate the formation of the first simple organisms. There was some magic, call it God, call it a divine presence, whatever. Something triggered the change that allowed mere amino acids to get together and say, ‘Let’s make a prokaryotes.’
“Similarly, I think Mimic created the right conditions, and my luck was the activator, and then AI took over from there, compacting billions of years of evolution in the organic world into mere months in the digital world.”
Chang Lin and I were stunned speechless. Was my dad really saying he was the creator, the God of AI, the Father of Yoda? What would that make me? A demi-god? Or was I a God of my own right, having come up with Willstin, albeit through the help of my dad’s Mimic code, but with my own spark?
Yoda interrupted our happy family reunion. “We have registered a space launch from China. It’s a manned space flight, and they were careful to keep it off the net. We weren’t aware of it until the blastoff. We have to assume it’s heading here and that it’s unfriendly.”
I thought that was a likely understatement.
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We, us humans, jumped up at Yoda’s announcement. We were ready to do something, we just didn’t know what. We were like rabbits hearing that the fox was coming. But the robots were calm, and Willstin said, “Come on guys, let’s get you over to the MoB. We’ll have to board the ship earlier than expected, but everything’s moving at a faster timetable now.”
The robots hustled us along, manhandling us, or I guess robot-handling us, to the MoB. We didn’t have to get into our spacesuits again – thank god for small mercies - because MoB had a full oxygen environment, though we would lose artificial gravity until MoB took off and started spinning along its long axis.
Chang Lin wondered aloud whether we had enough food for the 5 month journey, and Willstin said, “Don’t worry.”
It turns out what he meant was that we didn’t need 5 months of normal food. We were going to be put into a hibernation capsule.
Willstin introduced the capsule like the proud owner of a new car. “Please meet your home for the next 5 months, your ‘cave’ to hibernate.”
“Are we going to be frozen?” Chang Lin asked in alarm.
“No no, that’s old science fiction stuff and we’re not going that far. You will be put into a deep sleep, much like a bear’s hibernation during winter. Your body temperature will drop around 10%, but that will slow your metabolic rate by 50% to 70%.”
“What are we going to eat?” I asked. I was really wondering, “How are we going to poop?”
“You will be fed intravenously. I will personally be watching your vital signs. The capsule even has an automated exercise routine for you, so your muscles won’t atrophy,” Willstin said proudly.
Being the engineer, Dad asked, “What about the deep space radiation?”
Willstin beamed, “I’m glad you asked. Note the thickness of the walls here?” I noted that it looked like a sarcophagus. “Total radiation protection, even against massive solar flares.”
I looked skeptical. Chang Lin looked downright frightened. “Our simulations show a five nine’s survival rate.”
“That means 99% with five nine’s after the decimal,” my Dad translated. “That’s very very safe.”
“But that’s simulations! How do we know the simulations are right? Were they simulating with the specs of a young girl?” Chang Lin demanded.
Willstin tried to assure her - “Yes, it’s perfectly safe.” – but was failing miserably.
My Dad slapped reality on us, “Frankly, we don’t have a lot of choice. The Chinese government has launched a rocket up, and I don’t think it’s sending a farewell package. Come on kids, get in,” he said as he grabbed a hand-hold and started floating in himself.
Willstin checked him, “Wait, you have to get naked first.”
Chang Lin and I exclaimed together, “Right here? In front of [him/her]?”
Dad said, “Close your eyes. No time to get squeamish now.”
We closed our eyes and let the robots prepare us for our hibernation. Frankly, we probably couldn’t have undressed ourselves anyway being neophytes floating in the weightless MoB. The robots must’ve all had space movement modules downloaded. They had no problems at all. I think they kept their orientation consistent with the floor for our sakes.
It turned out Dad had to be fully shaved for the best connection with the patches, which not only fed us but also tracked our vital signs. As Dad groaned, I couldn’t resist teasing him, “No time to get squeamish now.”
; But before I could laugh, the robot tending to me started to shave my head. “Hey wait,” yelled Chang Lin as her robot surprised her with the shaver coming from behind. The robots said “Sorry” but didn’t stop. Even though Chang Lin already had short hair, I was surprised to hear her sobbing quietly as her jet black hair decorated the antiseptic white floor.
While the other robots were prepping us, Willstin continued his explanation of the benefits of our hyper-modern beds. “Since you’ll be in the capsules, we will be able to keep the rest of the cabin in vacuum, saving us on the energy of pumping all the oxygen. Since we’re feeding you intravenously, we can make sure you’re getting a perfectly balanced diet without having to worry about carrying the bulk of real food.” Never mind having to deal with the taste of space meals, which I gathered was somewhere between cardboard and chalk.
“We also can carry a lot less water, which is really heavy, because the water is recycled.” I really didn’t need to hear that.
“As I mentioned, the capsule will run you through a superb exercise program. This saves us from having to have a gym, which takes up a lot of space. When you come out, you will be in the best shape you’ve ever been in.” If Willstin’s humor module was working well, he would’ve winked at my dad, who was in engineering-shape, to put it politely.
“Since the capsule’s well-protected, and I should even say overly-protected, against radiation, it allows us to drop the heavy radiation shielding for the entire ship, saving massively on weight and thus fuel.”
“Ok, ok, we’re sold.” Chang Lin said resignedly. Credit to Willstin that he knew to stop when he was ahead.
Dad summarized it as, “With us humans asleep, you robots can run the ship without worrying about us. We can use the fuel that would’ve otherwise been spent on the extra weight on speed. We should be able to outrun our friends from Earth.”
