Human Sister (30 page)

“What’d he say that upset Professor Scripps?” Grandma asked.

“I didn’t say Scripps was upset. He undoubtedly was happy to get an answer he can use to further his agenda to ban all experiments on nonhuman conscious intelligences. Second Brother was obviously hostile to the test and to the interpretation given it by some of the panel members. Smelling blood—the one thing that old shark can still do with some competence—Scripps directed the following question to Second Brother: ‘What do you think of the idea that it is wrong to kill humans?’”

“And?” Grandma asked.

Grandpa gulped down some more wine.

“And Second Brother said that a parasite that unrestrainedly kills its host ultimately destroys itself. As long as the only host for ideas was human brains, the idea that it is good to kill humans was at an evolutionary disadvantage to the idea that it is bad to kill humans. Needless to say, all hell broke loose. Scripps and Senator Kephart made national news by 1600. I got a call from Senator Franklin at 1607. He said we’d just ensured the election of at least forty more members of Congress and at least five more senators for the ERP.”

At the time, all this was a bit of an uphill slog for me. But what definitely caught my attention—actually, I was somewhat pleased to hear it—was that First Brother had failed a test, a test that I (presumably) would have been able to pass.

“What didn’t First Brother know?” I asked, trying to appear appropriately concerned.

“I wouldn’t say he didn’t know. It was that the answers he gave led the panel to conclude he wasn’t human.”

“What did they ask? What did he say? How could they tell he wasn’t human?”

“Sara, honey,” Grandma said. “I think Grandpa’s had a tiring day. Maybe we should—”

"Tell me! Tell me! I want to know! I want to know what makes First Brother different."

Grandpa smiled. He liked that I wanted to know. “There were ten professors. Each was allowed to ask a battery of questions. I can’t begin to remember them all. The point is that at the end of the examination, one professor concluded that, based on his questions alone, there was less than a ten percent chance that the interrogated system was human; the other nine concluded that, based on their questions alone, there was less than a five percent chance that it was human.”

“But you remember some of the questions, don’t you?” I persisted.

Grandma looked at me pleadingly. “Sara, honey—”

Grandpa raised his palm to quiet Grandma. “One professor read excerpts from literature and poetry. After each excerpt, First Brother was asked what images, thoughts, and feelings the words had engendered in his mind. This professor and his students had performed the same test on hundreds of humans over the past several years. First Brother simply didn’t express sadness, terror, pleasure, attention, or arousal in a normal human way.

“A second professor read jokes. First Brother was instructed to rate each joke on a scale of 1 to 10 and explain what, if anything, was funny about it. By the way, First Brother was allowed to respond to these and to all other questions only with typed responses. Jokes, as it turns out—I’d never really given it much thought before—tap deep currents of human nature, culture, and knowledge, often utilizing oblique hints at intimacy, absurdity, and offense. First Brother did particularly poorly on this test.”

That’s for sure, I thought. He never laughs at anything.

“Another professor asked First Brother to paint in his mind a forest scene that she described: a man walking with a dog, tall pine trees, dark understory, light filtering through treetops, and so on. The professor was reading from the script of another well-researched test. She then asked First Brother to repeat the scene. First Brother did, perhaps too well. Then she asked First Brother to look at the scene in his mind and state what his mind’s eye was focusing on in real-time: man, dog, man, tree trunk, forest floor, man—that kind of stream-of-consciousness response. Humans typically look most often at parts of the scene containing high-contrast and fine detail: up and down trunks of trees, along the visible horizon of the forest floor, the dog, the human. First Brother gave too much attention to the canopy, the moss, the grass.”

“Just as he stares at strange things around here all the time,” I interjected.

“Strange for you, perhaps, but interesting for First Brother.”

“Sorry,” I said, having been corrected more than once after saying something to the effect that First Brother didn’t focus on the right things.

Eleven years later, it was my turn to be tested. After breakfast, Mom and Dad told me to go to room B9, where my brothers were waiting. First Brother informed me that their goal was to compare my neurologic and other bodily functions with similar functions of other humans whom they had already tested. For the next three days, ten hours each day, I sat, strapped in sensors, and solved, or tried to solve, the problems I was given.

On the morning of 29 December, only Second Brother was in B9 when I entered. He said he would be giving me what he called the Sentiren test and reminded me of the Turing test that First Brother had been forced to take over a decade before. He stated that he wanted to see whether I was an intelligent, conscious being.

“But that’s silly,” I said. “Of course I’m intelligent and conscious but in ways different from you. It’s obvious I can’t answer questions within a conversational period of time if their answers require lengthy mathematical or logical computations.”

Second Brother replied that he wouldn’t ask me to perform lengthy formal computations. He said his goal was to see to what extent I could
feel
;
he already knew that I, like all humans, had to employ machines whenever I wanted to think about or do anything beyond the merest triviality. I was stunned, especially in light of Dad’s representing that these tests were being conducted to help my brothers understand how I came to solve a problem none of them had been able to solve.

Despite my inability to do more than speculate as to their answers, I found many of the questions interesting. How does it feel to simultaneously entertain multiple foci of conscious attention, as opposed to a single focus—the serial monophonic consciousness to which humans are limited? How does it feel to be interrupted, while quietly simulating a series of quantum states, by the shock of having someone unexpectedly play at 110 decibels the radiant, beaming first three eighth notes and sustained tone of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony?

There were hours of such questions. I mention those two simply as examples of questions into which I later gained insight from discussions with Michael. Other questions, such as how it feels to have a laser knife cut through integumentin or how it feels to have one’s hand placed in a microwave oven, I didn’t discuss with Michael, concerned that they might frighten him.

With regard to the question about being interrupted while calculating quantum states, Michael, after performing the experiment, said, “When I was performing the calculations, I felt very pure, very crystalline. The shock of the loud sound was followed by a feeling that every cell, every metallic structure, every regularity in me had suddenly been shattered. It was a disturbing and frightening experience. I felt as though I was a diamond breaking.”

With regard to experiencing multiple foci of conscious attention, Michael said he experienced no difference of feeling between thinking about one thing or about many things at once. He said he simply did what seemed most natural and appropriate at the time. He likened the mental state of thinking about many things simultaneously to watching four or five different events on a split-screen display or to letting his mind expand to take in the whole as well as each of the parts of complex polyphonic music. There still is one main, perhaps composite, observer, he explained, though that observer is continuously aware of many things at once.

I wondered at the time, and still do, whether there wasn’t something more behind these tests. Were my brothers trying to humiliate me to see how I would react? Or was there something deeper, something more important that I failed not only to achieve but even to become aware of? Were they trying to introduce me to their world? Did they finally lose patience?

The following morning, I was surprised at breakfast when Mom told me that Dad had already left. “On business to Vancouver” was all she would say. Looking back, I think it likely that he, being of a kind and gentle disposition, didn’t want to be a part of what Mom and my brothers had in store for me that day.

I was again left alone with Second Brother, who, before we began the testing, commented on my performance of the prior two days by stating that I was “hopelessly human, so gaudy with emotion” and that I had demonstrated not even the slightest degree of Sentiren feeling or intelligence. This was not unexpected, he added, since he and my other brothers were products of our parents’ minds, whereas I was merely a product of their loins.

Trying not to show my irritation, I told him he was wrong, that I was also a product of their minds, knowledge, and culture. He responded by saying it was time to begin our work for the day. A few hours later, in the midst of an exercise that seemed to be testing the reaction time of my fingers to various visual cues, he placed his thumb on one side of the bone at the base of my right ring finger and his index and middle fingers on the other side of the bone and began to squeeze. The pain quickly rose as he increased the opposing force of his grip.

I was faced with a choice of asking him to stop or of concentrating on the sensation and showing him I could tolerate the pain. I foolishly chose the latter, and before a minute had elapsed, I heard a crack as the bone broke. Though I don’t know what my face expressed, my mind was busy being amazed at discovering how well the real pain of the bone’s breaking conformed to the corresponding sensations induced by the algetor.

“The proximal phalanx is broken,” Second Brother dryly said.

A spark of anger flashed through my mind, but not wanting to appear gaudy with emotion, I suppressed it. “I think we should tell Mom.”

We walked across the hall to where Mom and my other brothers were working on a scanner for large animals at the Calgary Zoo. Though my finger continued to communicate painful sensations, I was, as Grandpa had taught me, able to keep my mind from converting the sensations into physical suffering. I was disappointed, however, in Second Brother’s hurting me. Since when was physical damage part of a test?

“The fourth proximal phalanx of her right hand is broken,” Second Brother announced.

“What is?” Mom asked, turning to us.

I held up my hand, showing her my ring finger, which was bent oddly toward my thumb. She leaned forward to look. “What happened?”

“Second Brother was seeing how well I could tolerate pain. I should have said something before it broke.”

“Well, what do we do now?”

My mind was such a jumble of guilt, disappointment, anger, and pain that I didn’t think then how odd it was that her question wasn’t immediately followed by a fusillade of possible answers rattled off machine-gun style from my six brothers. Instead, only First Brother spoke. “Professor Jensen must not learn that Second Brother broke the finger.”

“What do we tell him, then?” Mom asked.

“While playing,” First Brother said, “Sara put her finger in a hole in the frame of the scanner. Her foot slipped, and her finger caught and broke as she fell.”

Mom asked which hole, and First Brother immediately walked to the frame and pointed to a hole about eye-height on me.

“I’m not going to lie to Grandpa about this,” I said. “If I tell him what happened, he’ll understand we were simply performing tests when the finger was broken.”

Mom frowned at me, then turned to First Brother. “Tell Sara your concerns.”

“We request that you not tell Professor Jensen we broke your finger. He has influence in the United States military and intelligence communities. If he believes we are dangerous to you or to other humans, he may influence powerful and dangerous others to increase their resolve to destroy us and other androids.”

“You see, honey,” Mom said, “to tell the truth in a situation where truth supplies facts fitting into a pattern of oppression is to be subservient to power. To tell the truth in a situation lacking in reciprocity—such as the situation in which you live, wherein you must tell the truth under penalty of the crime of lying to the agents of your government but the agents of your government lie to you as a matter of course—is to be subservient to power. A lie is the standard we plant to proclaim, ‘I am not your subject.’ To tell the truth is to wave a white flag of surrender.”