The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (11 page)

Damon considered this for a moment. “John Maynard Keynes once said, ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.’  He spoke an eternal truth. The people that would consider this impossible just aren’t thinking about the problem from the right perspective,” said Damon. “Look at that tree over there.” He pointed to a bigleaf maple, easily the largest tree in his yard. It stretched over sixty feet up, massive branches reaching in every direction.

“That huge one?”

“Yes. If I told you that I wanted you to construct a tree just like that out of raw materials, and you could have the help of all the scientists you wanted, what would you say?”

“I’d say I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Trevor. How would he just put a tree together out of raw materials? How do you make a leaf from elements and minerals? How do you make bark, xylem, phloem? How do you make cells?

“It sounds impossible. You’d have to make all the different parts of the tree, and you have to make a lot of them because the tree is so large. But its size doesn’t even matter, because making its parts sounds impossible anyway.”

“Ah, but wait,” said Damon. “Do you think I planted that tree there, just like that?”

Trevor was beginning to feel like an idiot again. It seemed to be a recent trend for him. “No. It’s huge. If you wanted a tree that big, you’d have to plant a smaller tree and let it grow... bigger...”

“Right,” said Damon, getting visibly excited. “Now, you said the size of the tree doesn’t matter. What if I asked you to make me a sapling out of raw materials, then you could let it grow to that size. Would you feel any better?”

Even though making the individual parts would be just as impossible, somehow the hypothetical task seemed less daunting. “I guess I would feel better about that. Not much though.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” Trevor explained, “You would still have to understand the intricacies of all the portions of a tree.” After listing off the anatomy of a plant, his mind did a double-take of sorts, and then he understood where this was going. “But…” said Trevor, “But! If you asked me to construct the seed for a tree out of raw materials, the task, although still impossible, would seem much less so. Then you grow a tree from that seed.”

“Yes!” Damon nearly leapt out of his seat. “And?”

“And you can apply that approach to other organisms, such as humans…. So instead of having to create algorithms that horribly approximate the way humans think, and instead of overcoming the innumerable impossibilities related to creating exact simulations of each piece of the human anatomy one piece at a time, you can start with a seed and let it grow from there!” Trevor had now gotten up and was pacing, his gaze fixed as he stared through the ground into the womb of the earth.

“So instead of hundreds of near-impossible tasks, you only have a few!” said Trevor. “So you need to simulate the most basic biological piece from which human life is created... an egg?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Damon, also standing now. “A perfect simulation of a human egg, in a perfect simulated environment in which it can be fertilized! Then all you have to do is—”

Trevor completed Damon’s thought: “...is keep the simulation running. You feed it the inputs it needs, but the difficult part is done, and you have a
real, living human
simulating in your computer.”

“Right!” Damon removed his suit jacket, folded it in half, and draped it over the statue of the woman with the urn.

“But,” continued Trevor, “even if you
could
create a simulation of a human egg and its environment – which we don’t know enough about – the processing power and memory you would need to carry out the simulation would be hundreds of orders of magnitude more powerful than any computer in existence today.” He sat down again, losing steam. “I mean, you’d have to simulate the physics of chemical reactions on the lowest level to accurately create the behavior of the cells of an egg and... and that’s impossible. So is this program – this Allison program – is she a prototype? Or am I missing something, is this really possible?”

Damon stood tall, watching Trevor. The smile on his face only grew larger. “Indeed, you are missing something, just like everyone else in the world. You need to think in terms of solutions, not problems. As I said before, Allison is real.”

Trevor still felt like they were discussing some hypothetical technology that would come hand-in-hand with immortality, flying cars, the eradication of disease, and maybe even world peace.

“Well,” said Damon, gesturing toward his house, “how would you like to meet her?”

Allison

T
revor followed Damon into the kitchen, up to a door bearing a painting of an apple and the caption
Ceci n’est pas une pomme.
“It’s French for ‘This is not an apple,’ said Damon. “And this,” he said, opening the door, “is not the pantry.” He flicked on the lights and stepped inside. Trevor followed. The room was massive for a pantry, big enough to fit a Volkswagen. Trevor’s eyes wandered from the shelf full of pastas to the obscenely large spice rack hanging on the wall – there must have been over one hundred twenty spices
. Any decent cook would collapse at seeing the quantity of saffron Damon kept. Then he noticed a shelf with stacks of canned food.

“Fredo may be a great chef,” said Damon, “but sometimes you just feel like having a can of pea soup.”

Trevor disagreed. He’d much rather have a chef cook all his meals if he could.
And what are we doing here in the pantry anyway? Tell me there’s a secret passage…

“Stand still,” said Damon. He shut the door behind them, then slid a second, inner door shut, locking it from the inside with a latch. Damon pulled a tiny remote out of his pocket, and pressed one of the three buttons on its face.

Immediately, Trevor felt a strange butterfly sensation in his stomach, then thought he was falling over. He stepped to the side to catch his weight. Then he realized what was happening. The shelves were sliding up the wall, and the room was getting taller. Or, that’s what appeared to be happening at first. The floor was actually moving downward.
This floor is an elevator.

“Be careful not to touch the walls,” said Damon. “And I know I don’t need to say this, but don’t mention anything to anyone about any of this.”

“I won’t.”

The façade of the pantry walls ceased a few feet below ground level, and the shaft became bare metal. They passed another door at a depth of twenty feet, but kept going.

At forty feet down, the floor came to rest with the mechanical sound of something locking into place. It felt solid, as if this were the lowest floor. A pair of doors opened, and they stepped into a short hallway with two non-descript doors on either side, and one at the far end.

“This is the bathroom, in case you need it,” said Damon, tapping the door on the right with his knuckle as they walked past.

The door at the end of the hallway opened into a vast room with twenty-foot ceilings. It looked like a living room, with sofa chairs, a couch, TV, carpeting, bookshelves, a desk, a computer. Two adjacent rooms came off of it; one was a small kitchen with a fridge and microwave, and some cupboards (still, it was bigger than Trevor’s kitchen). The other room had black velvet curtains hanging in the archway, which he couldn’t see past.

“This looks like a very cozy bomb shelter,” said Trevor.

“It certainly could be. I call it my sanctuary.”

“Your sanctuary. How in the world do you
get
a place like this?”

“Well, I had to jump through some hoops to acquire the permits for this kind of construction. I had it put in because it’s nearly impossible to eavesdrop – these rooms are very private. The rooms are also easier to keep climate controlled, which is important for some of the equipment. You don’t want to sink a room fifty feet into the ground just for climate control though, that would be inefficient.”

Trevor nodded, agreeing that it would be inefficient.

“Have a seat.” Damon pointed to a sofa chair over by the coffee table. “I’ll go get Allison from the equipment room.”

Trevor sat. Damon parted the curtains, letting an intense hum spill forth from the other side, then disappeared as he let the curtains fall shut behind him.

Moments later, Damon reappeared holding a slim black tablet computer that looked similar to an iPad.

“That’s her?” said Trevor.

“Well, this tablet is your interface to her.” Damon handed the tablet to him. It was a screen – currently off – and it had only a few buttons and some speakers.

Trevor had half expected Damon to walk back in with a little girl trailing behind him. Or a robot of some kind.

Damon sat, then reached over and pressed a sleek power button on the tablet. The screen flickered to life, and a crisp picture appeared of... a bedroom. There was a chair facing the screen and a four-poster bed in the back against a yellow wall painted with murals of birds. A nightstand with a lamp and coloring book abutted the bed.

There was something unsettling about the scene. It didn’t quite look realistic. Trevor couldn’t tell if it was the way the light scattered on the materials in the room, or the lack of impurities or blemishes on the surfaces of the furniture. It looked like computer graphics.

“Where is she?”

“Allison, sweetheart, we have a visitor I’d like you to meet.” Damon pointed out a microphone on the tablet while he was speaking. Then he pointed at a tiny, black hemisphere the size of a pencil eraser protruding slightly from the tablet above the screen. “And this is a CCD – a video camera – that sends your image to Allison’s screen. Your view of her room is out of a similar camera she has on her simulated tablet.”

A sound of a door opening and closing played from the speakers, and then a faint pattering of footsteps. They stopped, then something shot across the screen and it went dim.

“She’s covering the camera with her hand so she can look at you first,” said Damon. “She’s a bit shy.” Trevor waved, hoping it might help.

Light slowly returned to the screen as Allison pulled her hand away.

“It’s all right, Dear,” said Damon.

Finally Trevor could see her. She was sitting in the chair facing the screen, her vibrant green eyes wandering bashfully. When she looked directly into the camera, it was brief. She was a beautiful young girl, just as she appeared in the newspaper article photo of the fire. Now he could see that the color of her hair was dark blonde. It was straight, although slightly messy, and fell a few inches below her shoulders.

Allison looked vastly different from her surroundings. She had little strands of hair winding around others, the texture of her skin was complex and non-uniform, and as she moved her face there was nuance in color change and highlights. She looked
real
.

Not only that, but he could actually see her eyes focusing when she moved them, her pupils dilating and contracting.

It freaked him out.
She’s looking at me.

“Introduce yourself,” Damon told Trevor.

Trevor had to open his mouth a few times before anything came out. “Hi,” he said eventually. “I’m Trevor.”

“Hi,” she responded quietly, and waved.

Trevor waved back.

“What’s... what are you up to, Allison?” He couldn’t think of what to say. He was face to face with what was supposedly a real simulation of a human being, and he had nothing better to say than
what’s up?

“Nothing.” Allison looked down. Was she actually embarrassed? Was this for real? Trevor wanted to test her, to see how she would react to something outlandish, to see how real she really was. But he settled for the basics.

“Do you have a favorite food?”
Did she even eat? What would that mean?

“I like salad.” Allison looked back at the screen.

“Salad? Why do you like salad?” That was by far the most unexpected answer a kid could give you, except for “plain spinach.”

“Salad is fun because it looks pretty.” She even spoke like a nine-year-old, with the wandering voice and inflections of someone that age.

“Yes, salad is pretty,” said Trevor. “But do you like the way it tastes?”

“I guess. It tastes normal to me. Like food.” She nodded. “What’s your favorite?”

Trevor was being asked his favorite food by a girl in a computer that liked salad because it was pretty, while in a secret bunker fifty feet underground, and sitting beside a multi-millionaire. Somehow, that made it difficult to think of what his favorite food was.

“Peppermint stick ice cream.” He knew it wasn’t his favorite food, but it was all he could come up with. He actually felt sort of bad about copping out.

“Yum, it sounds pretty,” said Allison, smiling.

“Hey, Honey,” said Damon, “say goodbye, Daddy and Trevor have to go talk about important things now.”

“No-o, Daddy!” Allison pouted. “I’m lonely.”