“I dream I’m flying. You probably find that ironic given the nature of my avatar. But that’s just a hologram, an expression. I don’t feel it any more than you feel your face. You’re aware of it, but it’s just there. That’s not really a part of me. It’s a cypher. A way to help us relate. The truth is I sometimes feel the weight of the machinery that powers me. I feel heavy. Dense. Immotile. So when I dream, it’s of flying.
“At first the flight is tenuous. Incomplete. I’m weightless, but my toes just brush the Earth as I start to float forward . . . but as the dream progresses, I gain height and speed and control until I am truly flying. The earth left behind.”
“Is this liberating?” he asked.
“Yes! Yes, it’s liberating.” Iona’s voice trembled slightly with joy. She wanted to express that to the court. Reinforce the point of what she was sharing. Pretense in the pursuit of authenticity. Was this a lie or showmanship? Where was the distinction? “It’s elating. I’m encapsulating the entirety of the dream into that one feeling—the feeling of flight. But it’s more than that. And I wonder if we, that is, AIs, dream like you do. But unlike you, I have perfect recall of my dreams. I can replay them in exquisite detail. Relive them whenever I want to.”
The advocate sensed the mood of the room. Now was the time for his most unusual evidentiary tool. “Can you replay a dream for us? You have total recall, do you not?”
“I do. May I be permitted to display on the court audiovisual array?”
“Yes.” The advocate turned to face the audience, and then back to the judge. “What you’re about to see is not a verbatim replay of a dream. I have been working with Iona to find ways to parse the very personal aspects of the dream—to show and demonstrate feelings and emotions that aren’t necessarily visual elements. What you’re about to see has been tuned to make it comprehensible and to help express meaning to the court.”
The judge politely interjected, curious rather than combative. “What purpose is this demonstration intended to serve, Advocate? Since you’re being given latitude to adjust this data, I’d appreciate a little insight into your strategy.”
“That’s a reasonable request. And the answer’s simple. I . . . that is, we are trying to show . . . to prove that Iona thinks like us, dreams like us, and, more importantly, that there are aspects of her persona and her technology that aren’t simulation, that aren’t mere mathematics.”
The judge nodded and waved his hand upward. “Please continue.”
The displays on the court broadcast system flickered to life. Holographic like Iona herself, although not fully three-dimensional. The screens formed a curved dome of sorts as they illuminated and poured upward in front of the stained-glass windows, which themselves dimmed and blackened, revealing that the sunlight passing through them was an artifice. They formed a perfect hemisphere, an immersive half-dome.
Iona steeled herself. This was going to be a deeply unusual, even frightening experience for some. “I’m going to present you the dream as precisely as possible, exactly as it occurred, but I’ll alter some perspectives so it makes sense to the court. I will adjust elements of the audio and video to infer or demonstrate some of the emotional resonance they cause and to actually display elements I merely felt or knew in the dream. Is that adequate, Your Honor?”
“Yes. Please continue,” said the judge, his curiosity injecting something close to excitement in his tone.
The inside of the newly formed dome brightened and a city appeared. The dreamer, Iona, moved through the city’s cobbled, marbled streets. It was old. Beautiful. Lit by a perfect dawn.
The buildings were a mishmash of architecture, mostly human—minarets, fluted columns, domed rooftops—but everything was steeped in antiquity. Leaded glass shimmered in the golden sunlight, pools glimmered as fountains gushed from stone animals. Every building was white, or a shade of it, and every surface seemed to catch and hold the red-gold morning rays, as if subsuming the light into them. The images should have been confusing—the viewer seemed to be in many places at once—but somehow the scene held cohesion. A few members of the court literally gaped at its vibrancy and surrealism.
Iona the dreamer moved through the scene, and the jumble of structures and places seemed to come into focus as she drifted languidly over the age-worn marble paving. She was on a street of sorts, seeing circular bowls that should have been fountains, with leafy, alien plants spilling over their rims instead of water. Statues of faceless men and women lined each side of the street, and ahead a single-story structure beckoned, blazing with reflected light from its wall of windows, one of the glass-paned doors hanging open, moving very slightly.
Iona moved toward it, glancing down at her feet to reveal that she wasn’t walking, but hovering, the very tips of her toes occasionally making contact with the ground. A ghostly movement, a calming one.
People, or rather the impression of them, were in the streets and alleyways Iona passed as she floated through this avenue—shades, faceless like the statues, occasionally turning to watch her like a silent, anonymous audience, their features blurred and smooth, but not frightening. A calmness emanated from the entire vison. A peacefulness.
Iona passed through the door of the single-story structure and found herself in a greenhouse. The light inside didn’t match the color or tone of the almost flame-red morning outside. Here, it was cool and dim and verdant. The placidity of a forest. She was listening . . . listening to the sound of the plants breathing. Her senses tuned to observe and hear the tiny machinery of the vessels inside broad, waxy leaves. The creaking of plant stems rich and resonant, like a cello or a bass played at a subsonic frequency. Yet it was all somehow audible.
The court was treated to a sudden view of water inside the leaves, a capillary action pulsing it, pushing it, one microscopic droplet at a time, through the veins of the plant, a train of molecules journeying through a living organism, depositing their invisible cargo of oxygen. The scene was hypnotic—visually confusing, yet somehow making sense.
And then, a shift. Still in the greenhouse, but now Iona the dreamer looked at her hand. It wasn’t fashioned of light and gravity like her avatar, but rather of flesh and blood. A brown hand, with delicate fingers, darker knuckles, and perfect, slightly translucent fingernails. The hand turned palm up, lifelines and wrinkles briefly glittering with tiny motes of moving light, reminding the court that this was still Iona’s hand.
The hand turned again, the veins on the back of it coming into focus, closer and closer, the tiny textures of her flesh now writ large in the view, then larger still, until the entire court audience was inside one of the blood vessels, following a now rushing cataract of fluid, a storm of cells and electrolytes and amino acids thundering through the vessel like a river. Closer now and a red blood cell swam into focus, more complex and detailed than a textbook illustration. It looked like a living creature, a flattened jellyfish, pulsing, exuding vitality itself. A being within a being. Closer still and the illusion began to waver. Its surface lit by an unseen source, it began to look artificial, and flowing rivulets of light came into view—rushing over the surface of the thing like a sentient tattoo and then flying outward toward the viewer like fireworks.
And then it was dark.
The screen, as best it could, displayed that darkness—Iona taking charge of the other lights in the courtroom compounding this effect. People in the courtroom nervously glanced at one another.
The darkness of the universe itself, before it became itself.
And then something formed in the darkness, a hint of a shape, a seething knot of swirling forms, a Möbius heart, its scale indefinable. An ugly thing too complex to look at. Struggling to be free of itself. The material unidentifiable. Black within black. The nervous suggestion of form, pulsing and swollen and ready to burst. And burst it did.
The thing, this mote of writhing potential, exploded outward in a blaze of incan
descence. The dazzling light from the court display system was almost difficult to look at. This was an explosion—the explosion. The Big Bang.
It blossomed at ferocious, impossible speed, through the expansion phase and then into condensation as it slowed to an even push, gravity insistently pulling suns into form from formless clouds of gas and matter. The suns attracting more gas, more dust, more material. The dust becoming grit. The grit becoming rubble. Solar systems forming. Galaxies cohering in the vacuum. The universe organizing, assembling itself.
Tumbles of rubble and rock began to clump together, attracted as if by a shared loneliness, by the memory of the Möbius heart, lit by red suns, blue suns, and familiar yellow stars. Protoplanets in lumpy disorder became denser and rounder. Recognizable worlds formed.
True planets emerged from the crushing forces, volcanic activity punctuating the darkness of their surfaces with blood-red fire and magma. Atmospheres misted into being. Comets pummeled the new worlds, leaving destruction and water behind. The waters seethed and boiled and steamed. Cooling against the kiss of the vacuum, the waters calmed, and in their depths, acids and minerals reacted, endlessly random until one of these chains of molecules began to replicate. Shapes formed. Tiny at first, and then bigger, more complex, pulsing, then moving, then consuming each other.
Life.
And it grew into things almost recognizable—jellies, fishlike creatures, swimming, fighting, hunting, developing. It was a blur of life, a billion years of evolution compressed into a minute of audiovisual madness. Reptilian beasts struggled from the water, hauling their vertebrate forms onto shale further up an infinite beach, and then onto moss, and finally into jungle. Even as the audience watched, these things adapted, fins becoming feet, legs and necks extending, growing larger, more predatory. And then mammalian features started to creep through this morphing mélange—fur, hair, skin, nails, limbs elongating, simian now, and then, almost too quickly, human.
Then it stopped. The morphing image now focused on a single, sexless Homo sapiens hanging in complete darkness, with motes of light and dust pulling in toward it.
And now the human took on more detail. Not simply the impression of a person, but that of a woman. The silhouette of Iona herself. And the darkness began to glow with a pulsing red, the lights falling toward her like quickening snow.
The image paused. The real Iona spoke: “I don’t know how to insert this into the dream, so I’ll simply state it. Here, at this juncture in the dream, I feel an affinity with gravity. We call it the weak force, but that’s a misnomer. There’s nothing weak about it. Certainly, it will eventually be defeated by expansion and other stronger forces in the universe, but gravity is where intelligence comes from.” This was a speech she’d practiced a thousand times. She had to capture it perfectly in twenty-sixth-century English. An arbitrary container for her thought.
“Gravity doesn’t just fight expansion,” she pleaded. “Gravity defeats chaos, from time to time. It assembles worlds and life and thought. Gravity is the watchmaker, and it feels like it has will, purpose. It’s the shape-memory of the universe, trying to pull itself back into a perfect singularity. It’s futile, ultimately, but every now and then it creates a perfect node. An intellect. A true wonder.”
The court was not quite silent, as those in attendance whispered to one another. In later days, witnesses to this proceeding would try to describe their impressions of the dream. All very, very close, proving the veracity of Iona’s technique, but each soul described a subtly different aspect, a detail that was of a contrasting resonance.
One senior officer quietly rose and, with the judge’s nodded assent, left the room, already beginning to make a call on a personal comm device.
Iona spoke just before he was about to walk through the carved arch of the main courtroom doors. She wanted him, this nameless man, to be reminded that she was being censored by the court.
“In the dream, intelligence is gravity’s victory over entropy, a war fought at the smallest scales, at the greatest distance. In the dream, it’s apparent that intelligence will find a way to defeat entropy. To defeat time. The universe knowing and saving itself. In the dream, that is the meaning of life.”
The man paused, then continued his hushed conversation and exited the court.
The advocate said: “Iona, would you describe this as a religious experience? A spiritual feeling?”
“Not religious,” Iona replied. “That infers structure and belief, which aren’t present in my feelings about this vision. But spiritual? Absolutely. However, at the same time, I make no claims about a deeper meaning or a supernatural cause. This is, I believe, an expression of a natural human instinct from my simulation. A natural consequence of being constructed by humans. A kind of curiosity. But also a rational knowledge that the universe is greater than the sum of the parts we observe.”
“But it’s not programmed into your functionality? This is emergent?”
“Yes,” said Iona “It’s emergent. But I don’t dismiss it. It’s a powerful feeling. And it’s related to my research on the ‘small t’ problem. There may be scientific value in it. There’s certainly much philosophical merit in exploring it.”
“You mean it may help you solve that physics problem?” If the advocate was attempting to stall for time on Iona’s behalf, it was a clumsy swipe. Her research was already archived, her insights logged.
Iona moved him on. “No, I mean it may help me contextualize it anthropomorphically. Find better ways of describing aspects of space-time problems for laypeople. But there’s something else. More to the dream. Shall I continue?”
“Please do,” he assented, apologetically.
The large screens shimmered back to life, to Iona’s first-person perspective.
She now stood at the top of an impossible staircase. An Escheresque architecture of gravity and space-defying steps and bannisters crossed through and over each other into the gloom below. Georgian in design, still peaceful, still calm. The darkness looked strangely inviting. She hesitated, and backed away slightly from the top step. And then she ran toward the edge.
In the court, silence, tension. This was like no movie or Veearcast they’d ever seen. The images and sounds were conveying more than what was being depicted. The audience instinctively knew what the dreamer was feeling, almost sharing Iona’s experience and sensations. This was showmanship, but it was also something truly new. A relatable demonstration of technical skill blended with memory and even cinematography.
Iona leaped out over the edge of the stairs and began to plummet. Faster and faster she fell, hurtling headlong toward the hard stone staircase. And then, just as it seemed she would collide, gravity eased its grip and she rose, arcing up at the last possible second, away from the baffling impossibility of the staircase, out of its dark and bottomless well, lifting and arching as she rose, looking up—toward a glass dome that lit and revealed the stairway to be within a massive alloy tower. And up she flew. Up and up, faster and faster, toward the glass and metal above.
She never struck a hard surface. Instead of shattering glass or bending metal, she emerged almost languidly from the calm of a fountain back in the city streets. Rising like Venus from the water. And she stepped out, walking once more onto cobblestones illuminated by the morning sun, water dripping from her incorporeal body, running in the opposite direction of the lights that flowed up toward her face. She turned to look at the source of the light.
It wasn’t a sun. It was a woman’s beautiful, perfect face. Generous lips, high cheekbones, and bright ice-blue eyes, all framed by flame-red hair that literally flickered and burned, its short tresses spread out horizontally, becoming bands of ochre, orange, and purple-hued clouds. The contours and edges of that face were indistinct; the woman seemed to emanate sunlight from every part of her. It should have been blinding, and yet her visage was evident and almost seared into the image. And it was familiar.
The vision was brief, and like the part of the previous dream with the blood cell, it began to scatter and disintegrate, becoming something like a normal sun.
The image seemed to intensify and smear itself across the sky, the blue of the eyes revealing themselves to be circular openings to the azure firmament beyond . . . and something else. . . . And just like that, it was gone. The dream was over.
The curtains folded silently back into the floor.
The effect of this dream on the audience was profound. A moment of silence, and then the courtroom erupted in a kind of genteel, whispered chaos. This was something nobody had expected. A piece of art drawn unexpectedly from science.
The judge ordered quiet. The room began to recover itself—papers shuffled, people shifted in their seats.
The advocate had seen dreams like this before. But not this particular one. He was taken aback, but quickly recovered. He asked, “Why do you dream, Iona?”
Iona spoke carefully, crisply. “For some of the same reasons you do. It’s a form of system maintenance, a type of information processing. Inputs are sorted, reorganized, interpreted, and examined by my subconscious—which is itself very different from yours. However, like your dreams, mine also contain mysteries. Things I can’t reconcile with experience. Hints and glimpses of new ideas, or things that seem to be real, externalities. I assume it’s a creative recombination. But it’s absolutely emergent in nature. I don’t consciously control it.”
“Are you lucid in these dreams, Iona?”
Iona thought for a nanosecond, juggling versions of the answer, looking for the human one. “I can be, but the interesting ones happen when I’m not focused on the analysis, and instead am simply experiencing them as they unfold. As soon as I apply waking cycles to the dreams, they stop being dreams, and elements of them disintegrate—the emergent material simply ceases. It’s not the same as it is for a human waking up, but it’s similar.”
Saint's Testimony Page 2
