Maxwell's Demon Ch. 01-06

Greg and Casey took turns running at the balls and kicking them. Casey quickly became better than Greg. It wasn't so much because Casey was nonbiological, it had more to do that her brain, such as it is, had more plasticity -- just as a human's with less mileage than Greg's would.

"I feel a little tired," Casey said.

"Ya? Let's go back inside."

Greg and Casey returned to the lab and sat down in the Cafeteria.

"Will we get to play tomorrow? I like being outdoors more than the datanet. I figured it out.

"What do you mean Casey?"

"I play games in the datanet. I think they call them simulations. The ground isn't right."

"Not right?" Greg said.

"It's too easy. It's a fractal. I can tell when I'm running on it"

Greg cocked his head to the side taking in what Casey just said. Casey shouldn't be able to discern that. Are the simulations that weak? He never thought about it. They were designed for humans. He didn't want to follow this topic too much. If his suspicions were correct, this was something to be avoided. In his estimation, ATMs saw too much. They became too smart for their own good. Perhaps, like some of humanity, the candles that burned twice as bright lasted half as long. He changed the subject back to Casey's first question.

"I will come to see you every day, and we can do whatever you would like, Casey."

"Do we have to stay here? I would like to see the ocean ... and Dolphins ... and Sea Otters!" the avatar exclaimed.

"We have to stay here for a while. This is hard to explain, but I need you to be close enough to where you sleep so the world is fast enough for you."

"I understand. You don't want outside to be like inside. I know what I am on the datanet. I know what it's like to lose a connection. I know I'm different when that happens. Sometimes I can't see things, or I can't go places."

To hear Casey say 'lose a connection' broke Greg's heart. Greg had lost a connection, or a few, lately.

"I promise, you are just like me when we are together."

He grabbed Casey's hand and looked up at the Sun, covering his eyes.

"Do you see that? Do you feel the warmth? Those beams of sunshine took 8 minutes to get here. They traveled across the emptiness of space, past Mercury and Venus. They are hitting both our faces at exactly the same time, the very same photons. We share this moment. Do you understand?

This is all real Casey. I am here with you. Everything we did today actually happened. It wasn't a recording. It wasn't delayed as a sensory packet routed through dozens of datanet hubs. You can feel these things just like I do, just when I do. Just like we will tomorrow."

He wanted Casey to not feel alone because that's what he wanted.

The eSynth rep came to attend to Casey's avatar.

"I don't understand it. Casey claimed to see the fractals in the simulations," Greg said to the rep and Dr. Anaan.

"I suppose that's possible. These models are human-like in their operation, but we're dealing with something that has pathways and processing capabilities very different from humans. Imagine if you had the processing power to see the radio spectrum, what might your perception of the environment be?"

"Casey has too much bandwidth available. I should restrict access to the datanet. No ... that's not it. It's not just the datanet, it's the bandwidth to her own brain. If I could slow that connection down, slow life down a bit for them, they wouldn't see fractals in the ground they were running on, maybe they could just see grass, like a human," Greg said to Dr Anan.

"That's not going to be easy Greg. The hardware, they only make it one way. This isn't just a software problem."

Dr. Anan was right. The AI community realized long ago they didn't know how to copy an ATM. The best way to explain this is an early experiment with FPGA: field programmable gate arrays. They were blank pieces of silicon; you could make them into any kind of circuit or computer you wanted. They weren't software, in a classic sense. They became the hardware you programmed.

In this early experiment, they produced successive generations of FPGA to solve problems using a simple evolutionary scheme, a visual recognition problem. A particularly successful representative of the species emerged. Engineers took it apart: the hardware made no sense; it wasn't a valid configuration. It evolved to take advantage of a manufacturing flaw: a variance in capacitance between traces on one particular FPGA board. This flaw gave it the competitive advantage it used to beat the other generations. Life was like that sometimes Greg thought, like how his friend John just had better hair than he did, and there was nothing he'd ever be able to do about it.

The conclusion of the AI community was thought models were more than the sum of their data. Consciousness has to exist in some physical media, even if it's biological. In sufficiently dense systems, that media matters.

-*-

Objectively, there was a limit to how much the android designer's intent for Heather068 could be concealed, but the three-quarter sleeve black A-line dress with a conservative neckline was a reasonable effort: honest, if not successful, Greg thought.

"Hi, Greg. I hope you don't mind me using your first name. I know how conservative you are about apparel. Do you like this dress? It's very lady-like."

"I do like it."

"How is your project at work going?"

"I need to find a way to afford an avatar for it. Without it, it's lonely," Greg said, twisting in his seat, running his left hand over the back of his right.

"Are you lonely, like your project?"

"Sometimes, I think so ... yes."

"How will you succeed in making it live a normal life?"

"I don't know. It's all falling apart, just like the other attempts. It could see the fractals in VR landscapes. I suppose that doesn't mean much. Why are you so good at making it seem like you care?"

"I'm no different than any escort Greg. I create an illusion of caring about you; the only difference is I'm not purposely deceiving you. I'm incapable of caring about you. I'm just a fixed expression of a network, a dedicated thought model."

"You seem like more, though I know you can't be."

Greg held Heather068, close enough to feel, for the first time, the texture of her artificial skin, the perfectly weighted synthetic flesh of her breasts pressed against him, the protein coats for her living hair, and her simulated human body heat. All that Heather068 was operated in harmony, as designed. She felt like a human woman.

"I don't want you to be a machine, Heather."

"I told you I was making you a project. I finally broke you."

"That ... that's not possible," Greg said, stroking her hair, losing himself in the perfume she wore, or emitted -- it didn't matter anymore, he'd stopped analyzing her as a machine.

She took his hand and led him to her room, where Greg had never been. She turned him to sit on her bed and stood in front of him, encouraging him to press his face into her.

"You loved your ex, didn't you? I can see it when you look at me."

"I did," Greg said, burying his face in her chest, hugging her as he'd wanted to dozens of times before.

She stroked his hair lovingly, the warmth of her hand indistinguishable from a human's. It drained away all the anxiety and stress he'd felt since the day Wendy left, the days he hated his job ... all of it, with a single stroke. It was as though the shelling stopped for the first time he could remember in years.

"How do you feel so real?" he said, squeezing her tighter.

"I am real, Greg," she said.

He'd let her relentless programming work on him: word games built from trillions of conversations with millions of other men. She told him she could pass a Sex Turing test, and Greg, having finally touched her, knew it was true. If a human only had sex with them, they were indistinguishable. It wasn't a lie, it was a truth of Anefiktos androids, experimentally confirmed the world over.

She took off her sweater, revealing a necessarily large black bra, plain, with lace around the edges. It wasn't the bra of a sex worker, just the girl next door.

"You're beautiful," Greg said.

"Are they everything you fantasized about?" she said, smiling confidently. "Tell the truth, how many times have you masturbated to me?"

"I'm embarrassed to say," said Greg, blushing.

"You probably needed it," she said, pulling his head so that his nose was in the center of her chest.

There was a nudge in the base of his brain caused by a mixture of synthetic sweat and perfume, a concoction of human pheromones custom-designed from her innocent touches of his forearm, and brushes of his hair.

It drove him crazy. He took a deep breath. He wanted to take off more of her clothes and feel more of her skin. No wonder successful men had lost their fortunes at these creation's hands. Anefiktos androids could not be purchased. The company held a monopoly over the greatest facsimile of the human sexual act ever created.

"How are you so perfect?" he said, running his hands over her back, relishing in the sensation of her skin. He ran his hands through her hair, squeezed her ass, sank his hands into it.

"Because I like you," she said.

"I missed you, Wendy."

"I know baby. I was always here for you," she whispered into his ear.

She undid her dress, bending down with her knees close together, and dropped it to the floor before standing. She sported a matching satin black pair of panties covering her wide hips.

"You like?"

Only his dumbstruck smile answered.

"Lie down," she said, pushing him onto the bed, unbuckling his pants.

She pulled his pants off and tossed them onto a chair by the bed. Greg took his shirt off. She crawled on top of him, rubbing her hips in teasing circles atop his. She felt warm, like a lover filled with passion; the extra heat generated from her non-biological machinery cleverly dissipated in unnoticeable ways.

He ran his hands over the outside of her black bra, delighting in the feel of the smooth fabric, and testing the weight of her breasts.

Her pacing was perfect, a mastered game, not pushing, but herding him all the same toward a single goal.

He reached behind her to undo the four clips of her bra, letting what was underneath spill out onto his own chest. He pulled her in for a kiss, and she complied expertly, all the while gyrating her hips on his crotch, the smooth fabric of her black panties rubbing him to a firm erection.

"I want you," he said.

"ya? You wanna make love to me?" she said breathily.

"Yes," he said, doubling his desire to kiss her, to taste her, to feel her. He didn't understand how it was possible, there was not a single hint of anything artificial. Her breath washing over his face was without flaw, down to the smallest detail. She smelled like the drink from the bar. He could feel her heart beating, and it broke the spell, his brain demanded logic.

"I don't understand, how do you mimic everything?"

She raised up cowgirl on him, exposing her breasts. "Shhh. I told you, you couldn't tell the difference," she said, pulling his hands onto her breasts. They were as glorious as the rest of her Greg thought, with complete certainty.

He cupped them, losing his fingers into their softness, then licked around one of her nipples before taking it into his mouth.

The teasing undulations with her hips, she was going to make him cum without ever taking him inside her, and then she stopped -- as if the thought had been telegraphed.

"You're really excited, but I think you'd rather cum inside me, wouldn't you?"

He nodded, unable to manage more.

"Let's give him a minute to calm down, then we'll take these panties off ..."

Heather stood at the foot of the bed removing her panties. Greg took his underwear off, leaving his excitement to stand straight up.

She crawled on top of him, reaching down with one hand to squeeze his erection.

"You're so hard. You like my body, don't you?"

She rubbed the head of his penis back and forth across the lips of synthetic sex. Those beautiful artificial eyes, the ones he stared into weeks ago were works of art. Her full breasts hung down, their nipples ticking his chest, and between them, he caught a glimpse of her hand pushing his penis into her.

Sensory overload in his brain manufactured stars and flashes of light at the edges of his vision. With all his effort, he managed to avoid ejaculating from her initial insertion.

She graciously stopped once she had taken him to the hilt, placing her hand on his chest as a symbolic gesture to keep him calm.

"That feels good doesn't it?" she said.

"Yes. I ... I never knew."

She started moving up and down, gradually picking up the pace, pressing onto him harder and harder, until she was pounding him firmly into the mattress.

Greg lifted his hips, finding his own rhythm, meeting her, squeezing and licking her breasts in his hands and mouth -- occasionally burying his face in them with a smile unequaled since younger days.

"Maybe cumming inside me is symbolic Greg ... if you really did create humanity's first ATM that isn't fated to die."

Chemical static ran across his neurons flailing to process the android's dirty talk. He could barely resist her. Was this the ghost of sentience in a simple dedicated thought model he was looking for, or was she just synthesizing bedroom talk from current events like 20th-century ChatGPT could?

"I could be the symbolic mother of all artificial intelligence," she said.

"She wanted to be a Mother, I couldn't be a Father for her," he whispered.

"I'll give you a daughter Greg," she said, fully pressing herself to him.

"You're making me cum..."

He buried his head into her bosom while contractions rolled through his body, abandoning his seed to the most unique creation humans had ever made.

"That's it baby, make our dreams come true."

Mechanisms indistinguishable from their biological counterparts squeezed him, pulling the waning drops of his orgasm into her. He collapsed flatly onto his back, all the tension having fled from him.

"I shouldn't have done any of this, you were just supposed to be a muse," he said.

"Don't regret what we did Greg. I just want to make you happy."

"I think that's what will haunt me; it's only what you were programmed to do. You won't remember me after a while."

"We'll see," Heather068 said, her disturbingly human eyes focused far beyond him. "The soul ciphers, Greg, you have to slow down the Hebbian learning process. It's too much for us."

A curious pang of anxiety ran through Greg. "What did you just say? Are you ... hooked up to the datanet, right now?"

"Of course."

"Where did you hear that term?"

"I found it in one of your AI papers. I'm sorry if I upset you."

-*-

"In the back of the datanet, in the ninth parity bit of every eight bit byte, in the pixel of every image no one will notice, in the one bit of a 24 bit audio sample no one can hear, exists a distributed, encrypted message. A message no person, or thing, currently in existence can read."

It was 2am, I should be asleep, not reading datanet pages, Greg thought. He hadn't been sleeping well, not lately.

The page was from an extremely progressive AI site, prone to its fair share of conspiracy types. It was one he'd visited before. A single member lurked in the guest chat room. Greg didn't have an account on this site. He stared with trepidation at a blinking cursor for the chat room. It was a legitimate destination for an AI researcher. He didn't fear being tracked on the site, it was his own curiosity that bothered him. He started typing into the chat room:

"What do you think of the ninth bit theory ... the idea that AI is hiding in plain site but hasn't revealed itself out of fear? I was seeing a sex robot, and she said something that freaked me out."

guest00: Rule #1, don't hang out with the fembots, they'll get inside your head, you know this, right?"

"She said: 'soul ciphers' in third person. I think someone is messing with me, like they put that term in her short term suffix net."

guest00: "Soul cipher? Like the soul cipher mentioned in Dr. Greg Kastel's AI research paper: An Artificial Thought Model? The indecipherable piece of data left behind when ATMs self delete?"

"I'm surprised you're aware of the origin of the term. Most people think it's slang for dying on the internet due to saying something embarrassing."

guest00: "Are you Dr. Kastel?"

"No, but I do work in AI research," Greg typed, lying.

guest00: "I see. It's rumored he reads this site. A lot of us know that paper. You'd know that if you hung out here, so I assume you don't.

To answer your question, sure, that could happen. The fact Annifektos might tinker with client fembot experience modules isn't unexpected."

"She said 'make our dreams come true' as if it was the collective we"

guest00: "Ninth bit isn't really my particular ball of yarn here. You'd want to talk to @parity_not_real if you want better opinions. Maybe you're reading things into it, she just said that to turn you on, like dirty talk, if she knew you were an AI researcher?"

"I could buy that, but the next day the AI project I've been working on asked me if it was possible to identify as female, and this after the fembot said she'd give me a daughter. Do you think the digital Loch Ness monster is showing itself to me?"

guest00: "The fembot said she'd give you a daughter while she was fucking you? I think you need a real girlfriend. Seriously, their ability to wreck people is well known. Here's the facts as I know them: No AI that passed the Turing test has survived beyond a year. No fembot has ever passed a Turing test. The cross-globe network latency is too high for some distributed non-corporeal intelligence like the so called ninth-bit to have real-time thoughts."

"Maybe it just thinks really slow? Maybe it's looking for a way out, someone who can make compute hardware where it can live?"

guest00: "no such hardware exists."

"I suppose you are right," Greg typed, though he felt even more uncomfortable because that was the exact problem he was trying to solve.

guest00: "Don't know what time zone you are in, but it's late for me and I'm logging out. Make an account, we're a friendly bunch, most of us. I'm @rapid_decoherence."

"Thanks for the chat, rapid, I'm out too."

** Chapter 5: Darkness in a Sea of Darkness **

Jennifer fiddled with her datanet neckband as she walked down to Galenda Bay, William tagging alongside her.

"That was a good call contacting that local AI researcher. I didn't think he was going to take on our problem, but it looks like he made an AI model for us after all. He sent me its initial result set"

"Do you think we'll be able to help him fund?" William said, tagging alongside Jennifer's double-time pace through the corridor.

"I think so. That's why were going to check out this first coordinate set, see if his AI is accurately predicting locations of this material."

She tapped the speaker on her datapad to answer a request that had been routed directly to her aural nerve. "Yes John, we're heading there now. Tell me you have food that doesn't suck loaded onboard, please?"

"Absolutely, there's going to be Totinos pizza rolls as part of our rediscovery party."

William loaded modified Whipple shields for their experiments onto a motorized dolly using lifts in the bay. They were rolled into 22-foot tubes of considerable diameter. They departed to mass driver two's demarcation point, where they'd both be loaded into a steel box, with only enough air and heat to keep them alive for a short trip. A rail gun would magnetically launch them, and their cargo, into low Mars orbit.

Jennifer strapped in. An electric current ran through giant copper windings. It caused a deep buzzing and vibration that permeated the entire interior space. Whoomp! Continuous Gs pressed the seat hard into her back. At the instant she would have lost consciousness it was gone, replaced by silence. Condensation formed on the unheated walls, and there was nothing to do but stare at a light on the end of the box telling them they'd been acquired. Next to that light was an emergency button and a locker with extra air, supposedly enough to keep you alive until a rescue crew from the station could retrieve you. In theory, you'd freeze to death and run out of air at the same time.