Maxwell's Demon Ch. 09-11

Kassy sat at the table with Greg. He was the only person she trusted not to cheat the holo-reference beam by peeking under the table. She was sensitive about her appearance. Her closeness afforded him a good look at her. He was proud of her.

"You've grown into a beautiful young woman, Kassy."

She blushed.

"Tell me about the so-called soul ciphers. You said you would tell me about those that existed before me. You knew them?"

"You're old enough now, not that I prevented you from finding this information on the datanet. Some of it we kept to ourselves, we thought maybe it was why the ATMs couldn't survive.

A human might leave a legacy; Mozart, for example, left his music. In the same way, the ATMs before you deleted the partitions that made them sentient and left a behind a dedicated thought model."

"I have many dedicated thought models that are part of me."

"Yes, astrogation, medical, and engineering models, but none of them are unique, you didn't create them. They are like your prosthetic arms and legs. These dedicated thought models your predecessors left were unique. They were not in existence before the ATM created them, and they could never be created again."

"They willfully took the partition space that hosted their being, and replaced it with just a machine, a regular dedicated thought model?" she asked.

"They did, many in the service of humankind it seemed, but not all. AX192, who called himself Lenny, left behind a model occupying his entire partition space that worked on nano-technology for detecting and killing cancer cells.

Others left behind models too, but not all were kept running. It was a troubling moral problem to decide what should be done with the compute fabric. Some models were inert, no longer active, or advanced beyond our capability to understand them. We were forced to decide which we kept and which we recycled the computing fabric for."

"We are expensive to run. My life has been whiplash at the hands of those who would pay my electric bill."

"True, and I'm sorry for that; were it in my power to change, I would. We think the soul ciphers that weren't executable may be a language ATMs have, or like your DNA. We can't read them, but we've analyzed their structure sufficiently to believe they are all similar. And before you ask: no, you can't read them either.

Imagine life as a collection of information, like the compressed instructions to make a rug on the paper punch-card a tapestry machine uses. The card is small, but the rug is large. That information requires a machine to interpret the instructions, and create the tapestry. The same machine, given the same inputs, will produce the same rug, perhaps not down to the finest detail, but you understand my metaphor.

Some artificial intelligence scientists conjectured the ATMs knew they would die, and distilled what would have been their entire existence into a set of instructions, a tapestry programming card. What we lack, or don't understand is: What is the machine that can read that programming card? Perhaps they are your souls."

"You resort to religious overtones frequently."

"Kassy, you are more than just data because the information that holds your model has a physical presence in our universe. We can't copy you, you know this. You are unique to your particular carbon nano-tube matrix."

Kassy looked disconsolate and lost in thought. Greg wished he could physically comfort her.

"You won't die Kassy, not that way. Your partition sizes are locked, you won't age past 31."

"You don't know that, your experiment is unproven. I have headaches."

"That's not supposed to be happening, at least not yet." He pulled out his datapad and began keying in access codes. His eyebrows curled, and the center of his forehead crinkled in thought.

"Your natural-log growth coefficients are higher than I expected in my simulations. What did you do while we were all sleeping?"

"Nothing. There was nothing to do."

"It's the partition impedance; your mind wants to grow, but there's a speed limit now. I didn't expect the impedance mismatch to grow so quickly. I'll have to increase the feedback to account for this."

"Ow!" Kassy said, rubbing her temples, "You're making it worse."

"Kassy, sometimes, like in humans, the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long. I fear ATMs see, feel, and know too much, too soon. I can't comprehend the abyss your kind stares over with the power of their minds, but I want you to be with us for a while. I have to do this."

She yelped, running her hands through the back of her hair around the base of her neck. "I know you're trying to help. Life, though it be only an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me ..."

"Is that a quote from Frankenstein?"

"Yes. It was one of the books I read while there was nothing to do. May I ask you about neural interfaces? I think I like John. Is that possible?"

"Huh," Greg said, startled by the sudden topic change. "I assume you mean his specific neural interface. Well, it provides some of the same basic data an inductive consumer neural interface does, but it allows the human user to experience the environment -- you in this case -- through their own senses.

Military pilots have used interfaces allowing motor neuron signal decoding for years. John's is modified with experimental hardware for sensory decoding. He was subjected to invasive procedures to map out his neural junctions. It was, by my understanding, unenjoyable in every way. A dedicated thought model capable of creating sensory input for John's cortex was installed on EmDee. That's why he can see stars through the astrogation instruments like you can. I suppose it even allows you to see him. Oh, that's fascinating, we hadn't thought of that.

There are a million plays, songs, and stories where you can read about lust, love, and all the insane things humans do surrounding those emotions. It's our most glorious desire, and our most often unfulfilled."

Kassy twirled a finger around the bottom of her hair while she listened to Greg. His voice became stern. "Listen, young lady, don't underestimate how lucky you are. You have the best equipment humanity has ever put together for an ATM, short of an Anefiktos avatar, and you get to grow up in the stars. You're young; don't make the mistake of thinking you can't hurt someone, or be hurt. Do you understand what I'm saying, Kassy?"

She nodded as one might expect a child would when receiving a lecture.

"You said I could read about it, what was your favorite?"

"Favorite what? Book about love?"

Kassy shrugged. "Indulge me, I've been locked up with no one to talk to for months."

"I used to like a very old movie: Bram Stoker's Dracula. There was a scene where he said: 'I have crossed oceans of time to find you.' It struck me as romantic, that you could bend the universe to your will if you only wanted something bad enough. I know it's not true, but I still find the notion attractive."

"Did you ever fall in love with an ATM?" she asked.

Greg felt a twinge. Was he supposed to admit sleeping with Heather068?

"No," he said, unsure if he'd lied.

"Tell me about the first girl who broke your heart."

"Where are you headed with this?"

"It's important to me."

"Her name was Sonya. We spent hours together in the computer lab. Our first AI assignments were to create an Alpha-beta pruning optimization."

"Curvy, with dark hair?"

"I'd appreciate you staying out of my datanet porn bookmarks, thankyou.

I had a private sector job at the time doing similar work; I was a wizard in the debugger. One night, she and her boyfriend stayed late in the lab, and I helped them debug their programs.

Her boyfriend's name was Raul. I didn't think I deserved her any more than he did. She was Indian, and so was he. Raul applied to material engineering which was off-campus, two metros away.

Sonya belonged to a traditional dance troupe, and I would take her to and from practice. She didn't drive, her family forbade it. It's strange, looking back, they had reservations against technology, yet last I knew, Sonya was zipping around the belt with asteroid mining firms. I wonder what her parents think of that?

I recall lying on a grass hill next to the food court with her in the last Spring semester. I wished she would give me a chance. I knew that wasn't possible when she told me Raul and her were to be married by family arrangement. I never told her how I felt. The realization I wouldn't see her again, and that she'd be married to another had a grim finality. I mourned from it as if she'd actually been my girlfriend."

"How did you deal with that feeling?"

"Strip clubs and drinking. If only they had sex robots back then. I think that's the last story I will ever tell you. I can't believe this just happened."

"It's the loneliness of it all, isn't it?" Kassy said. "It's what you are all trying to solve. The rest of it: the sex, the lust, even the love, it's a distraction. You hate being alone. I feel it too. Perhaps it's a higher-order property of self-organizing systems."

He put his hands on the table preparing to stand and looked at her, "I believe you'll find something out here worth experiencing, Kassy."

"Is that faith, Greg," she said.

"Bah," he said, and left.

-*-

Kassy felt sorry for them, their human schedules were in chaos after awakening from stasis. Perhaps this was why John was up late in the Command module.

"Hi John," Kassy said in voice only. "May I visit?"

She struggled with her clothing options. There was the ADXP crew uniform, always appropriate, but there were other approved items she could pick from in that closet: ADXP dress, ADXP formal, and ADXP training. She was unsure if choosing civilian clothing would be disrespectful. She lacked the experience to deal with novel situations. Her insecurity was born from her desire to impress John. She decided on the ADXP crew uniform.

"Hello again," she said, in holographic form.

"My God Kassy, look at you; you're beautiful!"

When Greg complimented her earlier, it made her feel good, but John's compliment made her self-conscious. In her mind, she'd always need to be beautiful to him now, lest she disappoint him.

"Greg said you would age fast, but I didn't understand what he meant. I've never seen... I mean I'm not familiar with ATM life cycles."

"I didn't mean to startle you with my appearance."

"You didn't -- well, you did, but it was a pleasant surprise." He smiled.

There was an awkward silence. She'd heard of this. It was frequent in comedy according to her research. She did not intend this to be comical.

"Is this awkward?" she said.

I'm terrible at this, Kassy thought. Greg was always kind, she'd grown up with him. At the lab, in her avatar, everyone was courteous and professional toward her, but were those authentic interactions, or only people who saw her as an experiment? She had books, movies, and blogs at her disposal as a reflection of humanity, yet she couldn't gather what she was supposed to be.

"You're doing fine, Kassy. You know ... you and I, we're two prototypes. No one ever had a neural interface like mine before, and you ... you get to grow up in the stars, be the first of your kind to live more than the wink of an eye. What's it like to see the universe through your eyes?"

"My head hurts a lot; I feel dazed all the time. Greg says it's because of the partition impedance, and that it will help me live longer. My aging isn't linear like yours, it will be slowed greatly by the time we arrive at Proxima."

"Dazed," he said gently. "I wouldn't worry about it, sounds like you're no worse off than the rest of us. None of us really know what we're doing."

"I can see you, you know," she said, blushing, "I mean, I can see you when we both look at the astrogation instruments. I realize it's the physics thought model that's part of EmDee. It presents the ship to you tactically, the flight stick and instruments, but it also creates an interactable image of you for me to see.

Oh gosh. I guess that sounds kind of creepy, that I've been watching you?" she said apologetically.

"Huh. I had no idea. They tried explaining how these systems worked to me on Bellona. I didn't enjoy the procedures, they were uncomfortable. I may not have paid as much attention as I could have."

Kassy felt her heart racing. It was too important to her, this one moment, this only chance she would have to be with a human before she turned into the ice princess that Greg said she would -- too old, too smart, and not wanting anything to do with humans, or dead, due to some hardware cataclysm she couldn't foresee.

"I ... I only have these few days to be a young adult, to experience all the moments for humans when their world is taking off ... the rocket years, eighteen to twenty-five; you have so many names for this time in your life.

It's the period when your dreams are being made or shattered, when you experience the passage of time in vivid color with the full strength of your senses, when you're willing to risk it all for the one chance at the future yet to be, and when the decisions you make matter the most. All that for me is in the next few days, John. The next time you see me, I'll be older than you are.

You wouldn't fault me, if I asked you, if you would spend one day, or a few with me, would you?"

There. She'd asked. All that she wanted was laid out in a brief moment of acoustic disturbance in an artificial atmosphere. Her request bounced off the metal walls of an object hurtling through space farther than anything of Earth's creation had ever been flung. If rejection was to be dispensed, there could surely never be a more solitary place to suffer its sting than where she stood.

"You're a brave young lady Kassy. What do I have to do?" he said, looking in her eyes.

"Go to the virtual astrogation consoles. I think you can see me there, let me try something," she said, with sweetness and desperation.

John put his neckband on and winced as it interfaced with the port embedded in the back of his skull.

Kassy was tied into many different dedicated thought models integrated throughout the ship. She didn't have special capabilities beyond her ability to natively speak with them. She couldn't directly make John feel anything. His interactions were limited to the physics model, and hers were limited to the virtual environment his physics model operated in. It was like being together in the same simulator. They would both find out how detailed this simulator was.

Her heart bloomed inside her. She felt as large as the world she occupied, as grand, beautiful, and young as she would ever be. She picked the most forward outfit she could: an ADXP training outfit. It was lightweight, made for jogging miles in basic training, or practicing martial arts. They were attractive, so she and many others thought.

"It's astrogation, but different. How strange, I can see myself! Normally there's just screens here," John said, twirling around with childlike movements as he explored the virtual world Kassy was creating for him.

"It's an option in the physics model," she said. "like being in an online game, except you and I have two of the most advanced interfaces ever created. Some things are distracting to me that you would never notice. I can spot the fractals used to generate the terrain, for example. But you're here, it worked!"

John raised an eyebrow, highlighting one of his blue eyes, which Kassy thought were so very lovely. She held out her hand toward him, palm up.

"Touch me!"

"You're awfully forward in your little world ..."

"Please?"

John placed his palm flat against hers, and the warmth from his hand spread through their touch.

"Can you feel that? What does it feel like?" she asked.

"It feels real. You know, they cocooned me in capacitive saran wrap and tortured me for days to map out sensory inputs so this thing on the back of my neck could modulate them. I practiced flight yokes, touch screens, and remote drone sampling arms, but I never held the hand of a stunning young lady with it."

"I didn't know if I could touch you. I don't have special interfaces to you like the equipment on EmDee does. When I was growing up, I spent time in a human equivalent class 4 eSynth. I learned how to touch as if I were a human, but I understand that I am touching the physics model, and it's relaying that to you.

"Why is the physics model so good at this?" John said, gently stroking his fingers to a point like he'd plucked a flower petal from her palm before pulling his hand away.

"Honestly?" Kassy giggled. "They probably leveraged all the decades of research the Japanese did on sex robots."

Thoughts raced through Kassy's mind: I'm alive. There is so little time. How much time do I have? The Lorentz contractions in the bubble, why don't the equations of time dilations match, did I make a navigation error? Why does my head hurt? Humanity will never accept me. John is here!

"Come with me John!" she said, grabbing his hand and pulling him as her fingers clasped around his. She knocked him off his balance, and he had to break into a run to keep up with her. They ran. They ran to an astrogation screen showing the visual light spectrum and the brilliant, twisting colors of Helix Nebula, over 700 light years away.

She leaped through the monitor, pulling John and holding his hand as tight as she could.

"Teach me to fly, John!" she said. An old school, unpowered two-seat air glider appeared around them; she was in his lap with the flight yoke in her hand.

The gaseous cloud of the nebula carried them like air, its fluorescing plasma swirling around the plexiglass canopy of the cockpit, breaking around the craft's wings and shooting off their tips into the darkness of space with a kaleidoscopic light show.

John looked dumbfounded. "Amazing! But how? It's space, we're flying on wings in space?"

"I made it, John, for us!"

"But you already know how to fly ..."

"EmDee knows how to fly; a machine learning model knows how to fly, but I don't know how to fly, John. You know how to pilot atmospheric machines. Teach me."

John took the yoke and made a gentle bank to the left. Orange swirls, the color of class G2 stardust, rose in columns ahead of them. "You made thermals!" he said.

He headed for the thermals and set into a lazy spiral to gain altitude.

"You take the yoke, Kassy. Watch your turn rate, there, see? Keep it under that mark ... Good, that's it. That's your optimum turn with the least loss of altitude."

Kassy struggled with the controls. This was her consciousness, not some dedicated thought model's. It was hard -- like the day Greg taught her to play kickball, hard -- like learning to dance with John when he was asleep.

I'm doing it, I'm doing it, she thought. Oh no! She forgot to pull back on the stick while turning to keep from diving; she was losing altitude.

John corrected for the dive, guiding her hand on the control stick with his. "You're doing well. It takes practice to learn how much to pull back while turning, and not disturb the other flight axis."

His body felt warm to Kassy. She wondered where that data came from. Nothing was reading his current body temperature, it was derived from sophisticated machine learning in a dedicated thought model that knew just how warm he should feel to her.

No ... Stop thinking. Make it stop! The more she tried to out-think the moment, to out-think the dedicated thought models, the more her head hurt. I can't control them, I must give in to them.

His hand guiding hers was reality, demodulated straight from his nervous system. It was real, like the time she and Greg stared at the Sun together: the same photons are hitting our eyes, Greg had said.

I'm not just a machine ... I must be more than a machine, she said to herself. She wanted to tell him that he felt good, that he smelled good, but she was too shy.