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“It’s
water,” she said. The clipboard was abandoned behind her, but
this was much more interesting.
We should let him play more,
she
thought.
Let him ease into reality on his own.

“Water is not
a person,” he said. He looked up at Chal for confirmation.

“No,”
Chal said.

“Wonderful,”
he said, splashing water all around the tank. He raised his hands,
fingers spread wide, and smacked the surface of the water. Some of it
splashed over the edge of the tank, right into Chal’s face. She
raised her hand to wipe it off, and saw Alan looking at her,
concerned.

“Did I hurt
you, Chal?” he asked. His voice was timid, and she saw the
worry all over his face. Quickly she shook her head no, and smiled to
show that she was okay.

“Of course
not,” she said. He still looked worried, until she reached over
and patted his arm. The IV was starting to drip red, the sedation
flowing back into his bloodstream. “Don’t worry.”
She wanted to tell the technicians to stop the sedative. She wanted
to talk with Alan for much, much longer, see what other language he
knew and what kind of language he could develop through discussion.
She wanted to play with him and see reality as he saw it. But she
knew their conversation had gone on long enough already. It was just
too soon for her.

“I don’t
want to hurt you,” Alan said, traces of nervousness still in
his expression.

“It’s
okay,” she said. “Everything is okay.”

“Everything is
okay,” Alan repeated. His eyelids drooped. “Chal?”

“Yes, Alan?”
she asked. His muscles were slumping, and he splashed his fingers
listlessly on the water’s surface.

“I’m...”
he said. He yawned.

“Sleepy?”
Chal felt an irrational desire to lean over and hug him.

“Sleepy,”
he repeated softly. He yawned again. “Sleepy.”

“It’s
normal,” she said. “It’s normal to be sleepy.”

“Normal,”
he whispered, and then the sedative took him over. He floated in the
tank exactly as a dead body might have. The lab door opened, and the
technicians came in.

***

Chal left the lab
and took a deep breath. She watched the assistants load Alan onto the
gurney and wheel him out. It had all been too much for her to take in
at once, and now that she was out of the room she felt her shoulders
slowly beginning to untense. Eyes closed, she stretched her neck,
rolling her head around.

“Did it hurt
you?” Lieutenant Johnner asked. Chal opened her eyes and saw
Johnner and Fielding standing in front of her. She set her face back
into an impassive expression.

“No,”
she said. “Everything went well.”

“You were
supposed to read from the clipboard,” Dr. Fielding said. “How
are we supposed to know the extent of his spatial awareness if you
don’t
ask
?”

“Real
interaction isn’t a question survey,” Chal said. “Do
you want him to develop as a normal person or not?” Johnner and
Fielding exchanged a brief look.

“There are
certain
parameters
for questioning,” Dr. Fielding said.

“I know!”
Chal cried out, losing her self-control for an instant. The men were
quiet. “Don’t you think I know? Why did you call me in
here if you aren’t going to listen to what I have to say?”

“You’ve
been doing an admirable job,” Lieutenant Johnner said. He
raised his arm as though to put it around her consolingly, but she
stepped back. He lowered his arm. “I know you’ve been
under a lot of stress.”

Men. They always
blamed any problem they had with her on how much stress she was
undergoing. Chal did well under stressful conditions,
thrived
under them. She knew from innumerable studies she had read that women
were by far more resilient under stressful circumstances than men.
Yet they had staffed this underground laboratory with assistants and
staff who were all male.

All male. Chal
realized that all of the staff she had seen had been male. Every
single one. She thought back. Surely there must have been some other
woman here. But no. The cook, the military guards, the scientists and
technicians – every single person here was a man.

Except her.

She made a mental
note to ask Johnner about it the next time they were alone. She
didn’t want Dr. Fielding to think that she was uncomfortable in
the situation she had been placed in. It was just strange, that was
all.

“I think the
initial questioning went well,” Chal said, turning back to Dr.
Fielding.
Focus, Chal. Focus on the specifics.
“He had
spatial awareness of his body and my own. Did you hear his question
about me sitting with him? That was strange. It shows a higher
understanding of the connection between individuals than I would have
expected. We wouldn’t have gotten that from our questions.”

Now that her mind
was back on the experiment, Chal felt her mood lift. There was so
much to analyze, so much to go over.

“He was
remarkably concerned with the concept of personhood,” Chal
said. She was distracted, and didn’t notice the worried look
that Johnner and Fielding exchanged between them. “Asking if
the water was a person? Dr. Fielding, isn’t that something your
language implant would have preprogrammed in?”

“It’s a
necessarily vague concept,” Fielding said. “Probably just
trying to clarify the boundaries of the definition. The language
implant is a very basic structure; it’s just that he picks
things up quickly.”

“Very
quickly.”

“That’s
the goal,” Fielding said drily. “That’s how we
programmed him.”

“I would like
to see the code you used,” Chal said. “And we’ll
have to keep an eye out in the future for this kind of language use.”
She was trying to remember the exact words Alan had used.

“The most
important thing, though,” Fielding said, “was that the
prototype acknowledged its own mental states.”

“That’s
right,” Chal said, thinking back to the end of the session. “He
said that he was sleepy.”

“And?”
Johnner asked. “Isn’t that interesting? Not quite an
emotional state, but...”

“Interesting,
but not unexpected,” Chal said. “Children are remarkably
self-involved. The most surprising aspect was his concern for my
well-being, actually. That’s a mature thought to have.”

“Do you think
you can talk with him next time about his emotions?” Johnner
asked.

“I’ll
write up some questions to be used,” Fielding said, glancing at
Chal. “If that’s alright with you.”

“Sure,”
Chal said. “But I’d like the sessions to stay as
unstructured as possible. I think it’s healthier for his
development. Which is quite accelerated, don’t you think?”

“It’s
how we programmed him,” Fielding said again. “There are
still skills and information his neural structure will eventually
unpack, but the learning takes place very quickly.”

“Unpack?”
Chal said. “How much information are we talking about?”

“That is
classified,” Johnner interrupted. He wore a strange look on his
face, and Chal thought it best not to press the issue. There would be
plenty of time to examine the information once she was given access
to the program’s code.

Fielding gave a curt
nod. “I’ll see you both for the next awakening.”

He left quickly and
Lieutenant Johnner followed.

If Chal noticed Dr.
Fielding’s change in attitude, she didn’t acknowledge it.
It was nice that he was being a bit more deferential to her
authority, even if it took yelling at him to accomplish it. Maybe
Lieutenant Johnner had intervened on her behalf. If all of the men
around her wanted to just get out of her way and let her do her
thing, that would be fine.

Just fine.

***

CHAPTER TEN

“People think
of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little
things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on
that.” -Roger Penrose

***

Chal sat in the
substrate lab, the octopus tank at the far end of the room. One of
the octopi had climbed onto the water filter and hung in front of it
by a single tentacle, letting itself be pushed back and forth by the
current.
It was playing
, Chal thought.
No time for that.

It would be another
eight hours before the next awakening, and she wanted to analyze all
of the previous tapes to see what, if anything, she had missed. Now
that she was able to talk to Alan, there were a thousand things to
ask. She must make sure to prioritize the most important questions
while still leaving room for him to explore.

She began with the
previous prototype questioning, since those sessions were only a
couple of minutes long. She replayed the awakening with Dr. Fielding,
studying the prototype carefully.

"I am Dr.
Fielding."

"You are Dr.
Fielding."

"That is
correct." Chal leaned forward, watching the prototype watch Dr.
Fielding. His eyes never left the doctor’s face.

“Who are you?”
Dr. Fielding continued.

“I–”

Chal winced again as
the prototype reached down and pulled out the IV, spraying blood
everywhere. Then he was thrashing all over the screen, Dr. Fielding
trying in vain to restrain him.

“I am
malfunctioning!”

“AH! AH! AH!
AH!–”

There was silence,
and Chal reached forward to restart the recording at the moment
everything went wrong.

“Who are you?”

“I–”

Chal paused the
recording. There was something off about the prototype, she thought.
Something different, lacking. In all of her time with Alan, she
hadn’t felt this way. She stared at the prototype sitting in
the chair. He looked exactly like Alan, and although she knew there
were minor incongruities, the two prototypes biologically were twins.
But there was something different about this one.

He seemed inhuman.

Chal pressed play.
The prototype looked down at his arm and pulled out the IV. She
paused the tape. The prototype’s face was completely impassive,
even with blood already soaking his body. He had to have felt the
pain from the IV. Why wasn’t he reacting?

She pressed play.
Dr. Fielding reached over and touched the prototype’s arm.

There.

She replayed the
video and paused it at the same spot.

That was it.
The
prototype hadn’t recognized his own body as an individual
entity until that moment. Chal’s eyes narrowed.
What if?

She replayed the
entire recording from the beginning once, then again, until she was
sure of what she saw.

The prototype hadn’t
been aware of himself until the moment Dr. Fielding touched him. In
fact, he might have identified himself with Dr. Fielding. From the
very outset, his eyes never left the doctor’s face. He wasn’t
aware of his own body at all: he never played with his fingers or
touched himself. It was only when the doctor reached over and touched
him that all hell broke loose.

It made sense –
the prototype ran into a mental paradox as soon as the doctor touched
his body. It was the same reason you couldn’t tickle yourself –
people had an innate sense of the limits of their bodies, and
expected touches felt completely different than unexpected touches,
even if the actual physical sensation was the same. The touch by Dr.
Fielding had short-circuited that neural connection, and the
prototype’s mind had broken down.

Chal quickly put in
the second videorecording. It was the exact same problem. Dr.
Fielding, sitting directly in front of the prototype’s vision
in bright light. Of course they had identified with the face in front
of them. It was the same problem she had dealt with in her earlier
experiments. Babies needed time to adjust to the concept that they
possessed bodies.

She was about to
turn her attention to the most recent recordings when Dr. Fielding
came into the lab. He was carrying a laptop.

“Lieutenant
Johnner told me to give this to you,” Dr. Fielding said.

“Thanks,”
Chal said. She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was no reason
to tell him about her findings. As much as she wanted to share her
discovery with someone else, she thought that Dr. Fielding would not
appreciate her explaining exactly how he had gone wrong with his
questioning. She opened the laptop instead.

“There’s
a password?” she asked.

“Last four
digits of your social security,” Dr. Fielding said.

“Thanks,”
Chal said. She quickly navigated to her email and scanned the inbox
for anything important. Dr. Fielding took out a cage full of mice and
set it on the table opposite Chal. As she typed a hasty reply about
the conditions of an experiment she had started before leaving, she
watched him out of the corner of her eye.

His movements were
slow and sharply efficient. After setting the mouse cage down, he
went to the back and retrieved a rack of stoppered test tubes, each
marked with a bright orange biohazard sticker. He took them out one
by one, handling them with extreme care, and put them in a
centrifuge.

“Are you
keeping an eye on me, Dr. Fielding?” Chal asked.

Dr. Fielding smiled
coldly.

“I’m
running the weekly tests on our interferon serum, Dr. Davidson,”
he said. “If my presence bothers you, you may certainly leave.”

“No thanks,”
Chal said. “I was just curious.”

Chal turned back to
her email. The first page was full of bothersome nonsense, advice
from unsolicited professors interspersed with a few offers of
interviews. Then a flurry of emails from her work. There had been a
delay in one of the experiments due to a shortage of a compound used
in the biological substrate. She went to look up an acceptable
substitute, and couldn’t – the page she knew the
information was on wouldn’t load. She went to another site and
encountered the same error.