The Body Electric - Special Edition (45 page)

“Because if it has a soul, then that means man has usurped God. But if it doesn’t have a soul, then that means . . .”

“I don’t know,” Andy says. “But that’s the line between A.I. and human, isn’t it? A soul. Not intelligence. Soul.”

And he has a point. It’s not intelligence that will enable me to pick between Blue and Andy as to which is human and which is essentially just a trumped up computer.

“And have you seen what’s been done in android research?” Andy continues. “I’ve seen bits of it. Computer engineering, you know. And they can make an android now that has the exact same motor functions as a human. It’s so precise. Pair the mechanics of that with the A.I. that people in your department are working on . . . you’ve got something that 
looks
 like a human and 
thinks
 like a human . . . so what’s the difference between you and it?”

And suddenly I remember: the urgency Dr. Philips had in setting up this Turing test; the secretive nature he’s had about it; the way everything, 
everything
 had to be “for the record.” Maybe this is the breakthrough. If I were to open the door and go to the other room, would I see two things that look like a human? Two things that look so similar to me that I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart, even though one has electronics and circuitry inside and one has bones and blood?

But I laugh, and in my laugh is the sound of relief. “But we’re not that advanced yet,” I say. “We haven’t come close to pairing a realistic robotic android with an A.I. of adequate intelligence. In fact,” I say, “have you noticed that every answer to my philosophical questions have been answered by a question from Blue.”

“Excuse me?” Blue says.

“Another question. Big surprise. You’ve had to repeat everything I’ve said, or turn it around, turn it into a question for me. You can’t add depth to the conversation, you can only string me along with equal questions. You can’t do anything else because you can’t think for yourself. Nice try, but I’ve done my research on Socratic A.I.s. Blue is the artificial intelligence, Andy is the human.”

The lights in the room flash, and the screen with bright blue letters goes dark. Andy’s red letters stay on.

“I’ve figured it out,” I say to the room. “I’m done.”

“No, you’re not,” Andy says.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s more to test.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A simple Turing test is to figure out which one of two options is the human and which one is the A.I.. But that’s too simple—and you’re an A.I. major, after all, so you’d know about standard Turing tests. To
make it more complicated, Dr. Philip has added another layer—there’s a chance that 
both of us
 are A.I., or that neither of us are.”

I roll my eyes and sigh, but a thrill runs up my spine. A challenge.

“If you’re A.I.,” I tell Andy, “then you’re very, very good.”

Andy doesn’t respond at first. “I wonder if the test is more than that,” he says finally.

“What do you mean?”

Andy is silent for a longer time this time, so long that I start to get nervous that Dr. Philip has cut off his screen, too, and ended the testing, but the red cursor on his screen still blinks.

“How much do you know about Dr. Philip?” Andy finally says.

“He’s Dr. Philip. What’s to know?”

“How long has he been at the university? Who’s he working for? When did he start studying A.I.?” Andy types this so quickly that I have a hard time reading the words fast enough; the red blurs together.

“Why are you asking these questions?”

“Test subjects should maintain focus,” Dr. Philip’s voice echoes across the room from the speakerphone.

My mind’s racing, though. I met Dr. Philip only a few weeks ago, when he began looking for subjects to screen for the Turing test. When I think of him, I think of sterile labs and clipboards and questions.

Do I know him outside of the Turing test projects?

No.

Do I know where he came from?

No.

The university set the entire research project up. The university that has the most advanced android and A.I. programs in the nation . . . in the world. And two of the subjects in the test are an A.I. major and an android engineering major. What if I’m not testing Andy . . . what if the university is testing both of us? To see if . . .

If Dr. Philip is such a good android that even we won’t notice.

I eye the camera in the corner of the room. He’s watching me . . . or maybe the university is watching me, waiting to see if I can figure this out.

“I’d like the test to be over now,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” Andy types on the screen, but before I can see what he’s sorry about, it fades to black.

I hear a click, and the door opens. Dr. Philip enters, clipboard in hand. “Your final evaluation?” he asks. When I don’t speak, he adds, “Do you think Subject Red is a product of artificial intelligence?”

“No,” I say, looking straight into Dr. Philip’s eyes.

“For the record, your final standing is that Subject Blue was A.I., and Subject Red was not?”

“Yes. For the record.”

A small smile twists the corner of Dr. Philip’s mouth. “Very good. Now, if you wouldn’t mind turning that way.” He points past me.

“Why?” I ask, immediately suspicious. If I turn the way he’s indicated, I’ll have my back to him, and something about this entire project has me deeply afraid that if I turn my back to Dr. Philip, something horrible will happen.

But he smiles at me, and in that smile, I remember the easy way he would speak to me during the lab sessions before the official test, the way he told me once about his wife and young daughter, and I think to myself: no. Surely not. He’s not an android with A.I.. He’s human, like me.

I turn around.

Everything goes black.

Test Facility Site: Nabco Research Station B

Test Administrator: Dr. Richard K. Philip

Test Subject: Rory Rivers

Test Administered: Turing

“Do you know why you’re here?” Dr. Philip asks.

“Yeah,” Rory says.

“Could you state your role in the Turing test? Speak up, please; the microphone is here.”

“My name is Rory Rivers. I’m a junior at State.”

“Your role in the Turing test held today?” Dr. Philip prompts.

“I was Subject Blue.”

“And could you tell us a little bit about your experience?”

Rory shifts in his chair. “Do we have to do that with . . . 
that
 here?”

Dr. Philip makes a note in his clipboard. “Does it disturb you?”

“Shit yes. It looks effing 
human.
”

The doctor makes another notation. “Good. That is, of course, the goal.”

Rory swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.

“I need your account please. For the record.”

Rory nods and rips his gaze away from the thing slouched in the corner of the room. “I was Subject Blue, like I said.” He bends closer to the microphone in the center of the table. “I was told to give really short answers to all the questions and to use a computer to help me with answers if I needed one. I was told—
you
 told me—that I should be really focused on the questions.”

Dr. Philip nods. “And you were quite good at that role. Thank you.”

The door opens. A tall, thin man enters. He’s wearing a lab coat just like Dr. Philip, and a broad grin slices across his face. “A success, don’t you think?”

Dr. Philip nods and turns off the microphone. He checks his clipboard. “The subject displayed a wide range of reactions. Curiosity, reasoning, philosophy, logic. Even paranoia and fear.”

The tall man’s grin turns into a smirk. “And even romantic interest there at the beginning, I think.”

“Who are you?” Rory demands. He’s unnerved by everything that’s happened today. He signed up for the Turing test because it was an extra $200 credited to his university account, but he hated the mind games being played.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to be rude!” the tall man says jovially. “I’m Dr. Andrew Deckard.” His eyes light up. “Andy. Subject Red.”

Rory stands and shakes Andy’s hand.

“And I see you’ve met Elektra Shepherd,” Andy adds, nodding toward the 
thing
 in the corner.

Rory glances back at it. It’s beautiful—for a robot. Long, graceful-looking legs, slender arms, wavy dark hair. The eyes stare openly—a vivid, clear shade of hazel—but there’s no light in them. If Dr. Philip were to go back to the android and flip the switch on the back of her neck, though, Rory had little doubt that the thing would come alive and speak as animatedly as it had during the Turing test.

“She’s our pride and joy,” Andy says. “Model #ES42. Our first sentient android. We’ve been working on her a long time, and she’s pretty much perfect.”

“What will happen when you turn her back on?” Rory asks. He stares at the android with a sort of horror-filled fascination.

“She’ll pick up immediately. She’s designed to assess the situation before sentience is fully booted up, then her artificial intelligence creates an artifice for her. She’ll believe her situation is real and valid.”

“What Dr. Deckard means,” Dr. Philip says, stepping into the conversation when he sees Rory’s confused face, “is that we’ve constructed her intelligence in much the same way dreams operate. When you dream, you believe the scene you’re in is perfectly reasonable. Perhaps you dream that you’re in a classroom—if you were aware of the dream and questioned, you’d realize you have no memory of how or why you got in the classroom. ES42’s reasoning works the same way. If Andy had probed her for details on how she got in the room and got set up for the test, her artificial intelligence would supply her with some answers—give her just enough information to make her believe that it was perfectly logical for her to be where she is now. But if pressed, she couldn’t tell you what the outside of this room looks like because, frankly, she’s never been outside.”

“We’re displaying her at the International Research on Android and A.I. Studies Seminar at the end of the month,” Andy says, pride ringing in his voice. “When we turn her on there, she’ll process the situation quickly and create a reason in her A.I. for being there. She’ll probably think she was an assistant to Dr. Philip on a project or something similar. And she’ll just blend into the scene.”

Dr. Philip laughs. “I suspect that many of the other scientists won’t even figure out she’s a sentient android until we reveal at the end of the seminar!”

Rory, however, can’t take his mind off her clear, ringing voice, the way she asked about souls. Andy had said that life meant something different to everyone, and it was only now, in seeing the hollow shell of Elektra Shepherd—of Model #ES42—that Rory realized just how true those words were.

EXCLUSIVE AUTHOR INTERVIEW

Q: How did you become interested in science fiction?

Beth: I think I was always interested in sci fi, I just didn’t know it. My husband likes very techy, hard science fiction stories, the kind of books that are eight hundred pages long and half of that is details about the spaceship engine.
That
I never liked. But I’ve always loved light sci fi on television and in the movies. I grew up with
Star Wars—
Princess Leia is one of the reasons I have long hair to this day—and grew to love
Firefly, Doctor Who,
and many more. So the love was there, but when I started writing my first sci fi,
Across the Universe
, I was totally intimidated. I didn’t think I could do it—I thought sci fi novels had to be like my husband’s favorite books. Fortunately, I’ve discovered that sci fi can be whatever you want it to be, and I’ve loved seeing the boom in YA science fiction we’re experiencing today.

Q: Do you purposefully put symbols into your books?

Beth: Just as America has a separation of church and state, I think all books have a separation of book and author. I’m sure that there are perfectly valid symbols within the text that are there, but that I did not consciously put into the novel. But there
is
one symbol that I very specifically added: bees. What the bees symbolize is something I’ll leave to you English majors out there.

Q: What’s your favorite bit about
The Body Electric?

Beth: The last line.

Q: What was your journey to publication like?

Beth: I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Across the Universe
changed my life. A lot of people ask me, “Will you ever publish one of your ten trunk novels?” The answer is: probably not. I’m too busy writing new stories. Better ones, I hope.

Q: What’s a typical writing day for you like?

Beth: Every day is different. Some days are writing days, some days are thinking days. Sometimes I have to forget about writing at all and focus on the business side of this life. But that’s one of the things I love the most about writing full-time—you never know what you’re going to do next. I purposefully don’t have a schedule. Schedules stifle me. And I don’t write the same way with every book. I like the adventure of writing; I like not knowing how it’ll all work out.

When I’m drafting, one of the things that I tend to do is light a scented candle. I really like candles, and I have a Pavlovian response to burning candles and getting to work. I also quite like coffee and/or cheese, but who doesn’t?

Q: What’s your favorite part of being a writer?

A: Being able to work from my couch, sans pants.

THE INSPIRATION BEHIND
THE BODY ELECTRIC