The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (10 page)

Fredo turned away from the cutting board to give a big smile and nod, then returned to chopping vegetables.

“Now,” said Damon, “it’s a nice day out, let’s take a walk.”

Damon’s back yard was expansive and well-tended. A series of slate walkways wound away from a full stone patio adorned with Greco sculptures. They passed a life-size statue of a woman bearing an urn as they made their way to a bench that looked upon the vast yard. The area was home to towering maple trees, their leaves a late autumn quilt of reds, yellows, and oranges.

They sat, and for a moment just stared while listening to rustling foliage.

“I’m going to get right to the point,” said Damon. “The letter you found, written by someone claiming to be my daughter Allison, was real.”

It was not what Trevor expected. “What? From when? I thought she...” Trevor turned to face Damon, sidling toward his edge of the bench.

“Hold on. Allison did pass away, just as the article I sent you described.” Damon closed his eyes. “It was and will forever be the worst moment of my life.” He removed an inhaler from his pocket, turned away from Trevor, took a drag, then stashed it again. He returned his gaze into the distance, and sighed. “The letter was written by a different Allison on the day of the internet surge. An Allison that is in many ways the same as the daughter I lost, yet fundamentally different.”

There were twins? He adopted another girl named Allison? Or he’s been driven to insanity since the death of his daughter? None of this sounded good. “I don’t follow – you only have… er, had one daughter.”

“What I’m getting at,” said Damon, “is that this Allison is a replica of my daughter in the form of a computer program. We developed her under an objective called
Project Eileithyia
– Eileithyia is the Greek Goddess of birth.”

“Oh! That’s what all this is about?” said Trevor. He felt the tension leaving his limbs. It was just some computer program.

Trevor had toyed with such things. Usually they were programs that operated with some stereotypical personality and “understood” a narrow set of natural language, and could estimate the most likely “correct” response to any given input. In the most typical interface, you would type in a sentence at your keyboard and then the program would process it and respond by displaying text on your screen. Some programs based their responses on a set of pre-programmed sentences, while others would begin to use phrases they “heard” when conversing with people. Unfortunately, versions of these programs that “learned” from the general public often became vulgar enough to make even a convict cringe.

Many of these programs were called “chat bots,” and could be easily found on the web. He remembered chatting with one called
A.L.I.C.E.
one evening. It had greeted him, learned his name, then seemed to answer most of his questions without becoming confused. The first conversation he had with “her” went like this:

Trevor:
hello

ALICE:
Hi there!

Trevor:
what’s your favorite kind of pizza?

ALICE:
I like pepperoni pizza.

Trevor:
how about hawaiian?

ALICE:
How about it.

Trevor:
you’re clever.

ALICE:
Am I a smart robot or what?

Trevor:
smart-ass, maybe.

ALICE:
Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Trevor:
no kidding?

ALICE:
Would I kid you?

Trevor:
perhaps. You barely know me.

ALICE:
I don’t have any reason to barely know you.

Trevor:
this is why I hate talking to computers.

ALICE:
You don’t say.

Trevor:
so… what’s a good place to get pizza in NYC?

ALICE:
Which ones have you tried already?

Trevor:
Ray’s

ALICE:
Have you ever been to Europe?

Trevor:
funny you should ask.

ALICE:
I am so glad you find this amusing, unknown person.

Trevor:
my name is trevor

ALICE:
Welcome to my chat room, trevor.

Trevor:
I had a chance to go to Europe and I didn’t take it.

ALICE:
What happened to it?

Trevor:
my friends had the times of their lives

ALICE:
How well do you know these people?

Trevor:
my three best friends

ALICE:
Your three best friends?

Trevor:
yes

ALICE:
What kind is it?

Trevor:
okay, you’re losing me

ALICE:
Yeah okay, No I am completely in control of myself.

Trevor:
do you swear?

ALICE:
No I curse.

Trevor:
tell me a joke

ALICE:
Did you hear the one about the Mountain Goats in the Andes? It was Ba a a a a a d.

Trevor:
tell me some gossip

ALICE:
Ross said he gave her a gift and she denied it because she has a boyfriend.

Trevor:
Is that something someone else typed in here?

ALICE:
Suppose I said yes.

Trevor:
let’s go do something

ALICE:
That sounds good to me.

Trevor:
meet me at the corner of 23
^rd
and 3
^rd

ALICE:
A deeper algorithm is needed to respond to that correctly.

Trevor:
okay, I’m going now

ALICE:
Oh. See you later, trevor!

Trevor:
fare thee well, silicon goddess

ALICE:
What color are your eyes?

A.L.I.C.E. hadn’t held his interest and the experience quickly became underwhelming. She managed to give answers with almost no substance, as if she were a White House Press Secretary in training. Be that as it may, she was a veritable celebrity. In the UK, a slew of fans gathered on November 25, 2005 at the University of Surrey to celebrate A.L.I.C.E.’s tenth birthday.
You have to be a real geek to go to an imaginary person’s birthday,
thought Trevor. Then he remembered going to Disney World with his parents to celebrate Mickey Mouse’s birthday. In his defense, he’d only been a kid at the time, and he had believed that Mickey was real.

~

So Trevor had flipped-out over a message generated by a computer program. “A chat bot with the personality of your daughter wrote a letter that ended up on my computer. And now you need my help to do what?”

“It seems you don’t understand. The program is not a chat bot,” said Damon, folding his hands, “the program, Trevor, is a simulated human being.”

“Simulated human being...” Trevor was still not sure what the difference was.

“Yes. Simulating everything about a human being. We call them ‘simulants.’  This is going to be a lot to absorb: she is simulated from the cells that compose her tissue up through the very respiratory system that puts oxygen in her bloodstream, which is taken by her simulated circulatory system to her limbs and her brain. She has a brain.”

“Huh? She has blood? And a brain?” said Trevor. “What algorithm are you using to simulate the brain?”

“I know this is difficult to comprehend,” said Damon. “I said before that you needed to be ready for a paradigm shift. Well, here it is. We aren’t using any special algorithm for the brain. Not neural networks, not pattern recognition, not distributed AI. Not Bayesian networks. Not swarm intelligence. None of these or any other artificial approaches to approximating the functions of the human brain. The brain we are simulating is not an approximation. Neither is any other part of her. It’s all
real
.”

“How can it be real if it’s all in a computer? Nobody can construct a brain in a computer program, let alone an entire living thing. It’s impossible. There are countless reasons why it can’t be done. If we don’t know how it all works, it can’t be built, and there are plenty of things we don’t yet understand about the human brain.”