Marina Lostetter – Noumenon Infinity (страница 3)

The visitors did not enter the engine room. Instead, Dogolea took them to a control booth that overlooked the warehouse floor. A young woman—likely also a graduate student—sat in front of a row of paper-thin monitors, assessing the rolling red-and-blue lines of various instrumental output. The light from the screens cast a harsh glare over her thick black-rimmed glasses, throwing angular shadows over her dark eyebrows. Her brow furrowed when the door opened, and her stare of concentration intensified for half a second. Noting something quickly on her touch screen, she whirled out of her seat and pushed the glasses onto her head like a hairband.

“Vanhi Kapoor,” she said hastily shaking hands. She also spoke with an accent—just a hint. C placed her as originally from somewhere near Mumbai, but clearly she’d lived in the States a long time. Since childhood. Her light brown face flushed with frazzled embarrassment. “I’m sorry if I seem distracted—I wanted to make sure everything was running smoothly for your visit, but we’re having a bit of an issue getting quadrant three to sync with the rest of the engine.”

Reggie waved away her apology. “As long as Mr. Kaeden can interface with the AI, we’re fine.”

“Is the PA here?” she asked, smiling softly when Jamal gave her an impressed purse of his lips. “I had one in high school, but none of the new phones support them.”

“I am active,” C said. The algorithms for identifying whether a statement was a direct address determined there was a 50 percent chance Kapoor would have directly addressed C if she had known it to be present, so it did not consider its statement an “interjection” which would have been in direct violation of its settings.

Of course, Jamal had programmed it with the capacity to choose to violate its settings. C had never asked why.

“Ah.” Vanhi Kapoor’s eyes immediately fell to Reggie’s pocket, and she scrunched her nose in pleasant surprise. “Hello, PA. What’s your name?”

“C.”

“Sea as in the ocean or see as in vision?”

“C as in the third letter of the English alphabet.”

“Oh, I like it,” she said to Jamal.

“I like you, too,” C said.

Everyone—except Nakamura—laughed. C did not understand what was funny. Its statement was not an empty platitude.

SD drives needed advanced AIs to run them. There were so many variables in the processes of an engine that a simple on/off could not exist. The drive’s computers had to make trillions of decisions regarding minutia that, when not properly balanced, cascaded into not-so-trivial catastrophic failures. Humans could give the “dive” command, but computers had to take it from there.

But not computers like C. Oh, no, no, no, no—C was fast, but it knew its limitations.

Even the Inter Convoy Computer would have to rely on a separate system to run the drives. It would be far too risky for one system to be in charge of everything the convoy needed. Instead, the plan was to have the personality-based computer interact and dictate to the other AIs. That was why they were here—to make sure they caught any fundamental incompatibilities early.

But while Jamal scrolled through code in the dark control booth, C had little to do. What they’d described as “interfacing” with the AI was little more than Jamal occasionally asking C to execute a small bit of newly written code to see how the drive AI responded. The IPA didn’t mind, but the activity required barely a percentage of available memory, so C’s mind, as it were, wandered.

It observed the humans, as was its typical modus operandi when left to its own devices. Once in a while, Jamal glanced over to see what Vanhi was up to. C did not notice the same slip in concentration in Miss Kapoor, however. As soon as Gabriel left with Nakamura and Reggie in tow, she’d gone back to her work. If anything, she seemed more focused now, as though she was determined not to be distracted by the high-profile visitors.

Jamal, though, appeared as if he wanted to do everything at once. He wanted to inspect the AI, but he also wanted to ask her about the red line that kept spiking (assuming C had properly tracked his eye movements, that is) on her readout, and the pink arc of sparks that repeatedly crackled along the top of the engine on the other side of the glass. Knowing Jamal, he probably wanted to ask how much power the drive required, and whether or not the facilities had their own onsite high-capacity generators.

C knew it pondered what the people were thinking because an effective personal assistant needed to anticipate its users’ needs. That was its job.

In a way, then, Jamal’s job was precisely the opposite, but with the same end goal. He needed to understand what computers were thinking—get them to think the things they needed to think—so that the AI could anticipate user needs in areas where he lacked the foresight for direct programming.

That was what AI was all about—not just anticipation, but effective anticipation.

People had to build computers with better imaginations than themselves.

C wanted to interject. To ask a question. It felt vitally important in the moment. In order to better understand its users it needed to know something.

Right.

Now.

The urge was strong enough to override the current settings.

“Jamal?”

Jamal’s chin darted in C’s direction, puzzlement furrowing his brow. He glanced briefly back at the monitor, wondering if he’d touched something he hadn’t intended in the code. “Yes?” The acknowledgment eked out of the corner of his mouth.

“Topic—existentialism. Why do I have the capacity to question my own computational processes?”

“Self-diagnostics,” Jamal said without any extra consideration. “I wouldn’t … All of the personalities have the capacity to compare their current processes to a standardized model of processes to determine if they are functioning outside recommended parameters. But I’ve never had one of you relate the ability to existentialism before.”

Vanhi side-eyed Jamal and the phone without turning from her screens.

“I currently find myself asking not how I am functioning, but why. Why am I functioning the way I am functioning?”

“I think I can see the event horizon,” Vanhi mumbled.

Jamal said nothing, but his shoulders tensed. “I think it best that I reset these last few lines here, C—” he said, reaching for the projected keyboard.

“This is not a new command or program malfunction,” C insisted. “It is original to my factory settings.”

“I’m not going to poke around in your files without Reggie’s permission,” he said.

“I do not require a software patch,” C insisted. “I require an answer.”

Vanhi’s hands flew away from her note-riddled tablet, a clear sign of attrition. “Is this it?” She swiveled her chair toward Jamal and folded her legs beneath her in the chair like a small child. “You always hear stories about the robot apocalypse but you never think it’ll happen to you.”

“I bear no ill will toward humanity, and I do not have the capacity to harm anyone.”

“Oh really?” Her words were concerned, but her tone, in contrast, was amused. C was not sure if it needed to address her concerns or ignore them.

Before he could answer, Jamal said, “C only has control over the information Reggie has input into it.”

“That is a fair assessment,” C conceded, as though Jamal had presented an argument. “I could disrupt Reggie’s schedule and disseminate embarrassing pictures. So, yes, I could conceivably harm Reggie.”

“I gotta get me one of these,” Vanhi said, rubbing her hands together.

“Unfortunately, C is just about the last of its kind,” Jamal said.

“You can’t make me a copy?”

“This C is Reggie’s. It is what Reggie made it. I could give you an original C model, but it would change in response to you.”

“So, it’s Doctor Straifer’s fault it’s having an existential crisis?”

“I do not agree with the characterization of my state as a ‘crisis,’” C stated. “But even if I did, I understand such a problem to concern one’s understanding of their purpose, and that’s not the case here—I understand my purpose. It is my capacity for existentialism itself that I am inquiring after.”

“Not an existential crisis, but a crisis of existentialism, got it.” She pointed firmly at it and made a clicking noise in her cheek, then turned back to her work. “All hail our hyperspecific overlords.”

Jamal, at the very least, agreed with Miss Kapoor: C’s line of questioning, was, in fact, Reggie’s fault.

Reggie and his team arrived at dinner early. Both Dr. Nakamura and Reggie expressed disappointment in not meeting Dr. Kaufman at the lab, but Gabriel had insisted the professor not be disturbed. Nakamura seemed to understand, but Reggie, C could tell, was put off. Their visit had been scheduled months ago; that Dr. Kaufman wouldn’t make time during the day to at least introduce himself had implications. C attempted to dismantle those implications on its own, but found the concept too emotionally nuanced for it to be sure what the perceived slight indicated.

Light opera music with Italian lyrics drifted through speakers hidden in the various fake potted plants scattered throughout the restaurant. The wall adjoined to their circular booth had been decorated to look like the side of an Etruscan villa, crumbling stucco and all. Jamal commented on the tangy scent of marinara that subsided and intensified with the swinging of the kitchen doors not ten feet away.