The Phoenix Code (4 page)

Megan sat at the table. "Hello, Aris."

"Hello." His voice had no life. He sounded even less human than Trackman.

"My name is Megan O'Flannery. I'm the new chief scientist."

"Echo told me."

"Who is Echo?"

He indicated the LP behind him. "That is Echo."

That. Not he or she. Humans tended to refer to robots as male or female, based on the robot's voice. She knew she shouldn't be disappointed at his lack of affect, but she couldn't help but hope for more.

"Are you comfortable?" she asked.

"I am operational."

"Operational" hardly sounded promising, but it was better than no response at all. "Aris, do you feel anything about this? By 'feel' I mean, do you have any reaction to Dr. Hastin's departure and my arrival?"

"No."

His lack of affect didn't surprise her. Hastin's notes indicated he hadn't had much success in making Aris simulate emotions. Nor was he the only one who had run into problems. Hastin was the third chief scientist MindSim had lost on the Everest Project. They had fired the first two.

"You can simulate emotions, though, can't you?" she asked.

"Yes." His eyes were beautiful replicas of human eyes—with no sign of animation.

"Why aren't you simulating any now?" she asked.

"I am."

Could have fooled me.
"Can you smile?"

His mouth curved into a cold, perfect smile. It looked about as human as a car shifting gears.

"Get angry at me," Megan suggested.

"I have no context here for anger," he said.

At least he knew he needed a context. "What emotion do you think would be appropriate for this context?"

He spoke in a monotone. "Friendly curiosity."

"Is that what you're doing?"

"Yes. I am pleased to meet you." He might as well have been saying, "The square root of four is two."

It unsettled her to talk to someone who appeared so human yet sounded so mechanical. "Do you have any questions you would like to ask me?"

"No."

Megan exhaled. Well, she had known she had work ahead of her. "Would you like to take a walk around NEV-5? You can show me places you remember, tell me what you know about them."

He stared at her.

After a moment, she said, "Aris?"

No response.

Alfred swore under his breath. When Megan glanced up, they were all coming over to the table.

"What is it?" Megan asked.

"He hangs that way if he can't handle a question," Alfred said.

Megan frowned. "He can't handle something as simple as 'let's take a walk?' "

"Pretty much not," Miska said.

Alfred laid his hand on the android's shoulder. "Aris? Can you reset?"

Aris remained frozen, staring past Megan at the wall.

"We can restart him," Alfred offered.

"No. Not now." Megan stood up. "I'll come back later, after I've had a chance to look at the rest of the facilities here." In other words, when she was by herself. Although she doubted it made any difference to Aris if people saw his difficulties, she felt compelled to give him privacy. If they wanted him to become sentient, it would help to interact with him as if he had already achieved that state.

She glanced at Echo and spoke gently. "Make him comfortable."

"I will ensure the RS-4 suffers no damage," Echo said.

That isn't what I meant.
But she said nothing. What could she do, tell one machine not to treat another machine like a machine?
 

The room had nothing on its ivory walls. It had no furniture. No console. Megan stood with Aris, the two of them alone. Ever since yesterday, when she had come to NEV-5, either Echo or Trackman had always accompanied her and Aris. So she had barred all the LPs from this room. She wanted nothing to distract the hypersensitive android.

She set a shoe box on the floor. "Can you see that box?"

He looked down. "Yes." The cameras in his eyes integrated so well into his design that she detected no difference between his and a human face—except for his utter lack of expression.

"All right." She gave him an encouraging smile. "Jump over it."

As Aris regarded the box, Megan unhooked a palmtop computer from a belt loop of her jeans. She had named her palmtop Tycho, in honor of a famous astronomer. Using its wireless capability, she logged into Aris's brain much as she would log into the NEV-5 intranet. Tycho became part of the android's mind, giving her a window into Aris's thoughts.

The android had a huge knowledge base of facts and rules about the world. Combined with his language mods, it let him converse. He "thought" with neural nets, including both software and hardware neurons, which received signals from other neurons or input devices. If the sum of the signals exceeded a neuron's threshold, it sent out its own signal, either to other neurons or to an output device. Aris learned by altering thresholds. When he did well on a test, it strengthened the links that gave those results. Bad results weakened the links.

Although he couldn't alter his hardware, he could rewrite his software. He used many methods to evolve his code, most of them variations on generic algorithms. He copied sections of code and combined them into new code, often with changes that acted like mutations. It was survival of the fittest: code that worked well reproduced, and code that didn't died off.

A simulated neuron could operate faster than its human counterpart, but putting many together became resource intensive and slowed Aris down. Although the number of links in his brain was comparable to a human brain, but he couldn't match the speed of human thought—yet. As he became more sophisticated, Megan suspected his speed would outstrip unaugmented human thought.

Right now he just stared at the box. According to her palmtop, Aris was calculating the trajectory he needed to jump. After his nets learned the process, he would no longer need to solve equations, any more than a child had to work out trajectories when she jumped, but he hadn't yet reached that stage. Even with his untutored nets, though, Megan didn't see why it was taking so long. He should only need seconds to translate the math into commands for his body.

Using Tycho, she probed deeper into his code. It looked like his brain had switched to a mod that directed his expression of fear. She tried to unravel how it had happened, but the complexity of his always-evolving code made it impossible to follow.

"Aris? Can you jump?"

He continued to stare at the box.

"Tycho," she said, "what is the highest level of fear Aris can tolerate before he freezes?"

Tycho answered in a well-modulated contralto. "It varies. He has an array of values that determines what immobilizes him."

His face did show emotion now. Frustration. He looked like a toddler stymied by a puzzle, reminding Megan of her sister's two-year-old son. But she held back her smile. Although she doubted Aris could have hurt feelings, she took care in her responses anyway, not only because his brain might have developed more than she realized, but also because she found it hard to think of him as a machine.

She spoke into the comm on her palmtop. "Why is he frozen?"

"The main contributor is an element in his fear array." It showed her several lines of code. "If the element goes above six percent, it stops him from moving."

"
Six
percent? Are all the elements set that low?"

"The values range from two to forty-three percent. The average is sixteen."

"That's appalling." What could Hastin have been thinking? How did he expect the android to function with such stringent caps on his behavior?

"Aris? If you can hear me, try this: use your logic mods. Have them analyze the situation." His mind should be able to determine he had no reason to fear the jump.

At first she thought her suggestion had no effect. But as she studied Tycho's display, she realized Aris had shifted some processing power to a logic mod. Although he remained trapped in the fear mod, his logic response kicked in, trying to make him jump. His fear response persisted, conflicting with the logic. That branched him into an anger mod, which then sent him to a fight mod. The fight code kicked him into a
parachuting
mod, for heaven sake, probably due to some strangely convoluted interpretation of her request that he jump. So now his mods wanted him to throw himself out of a plane in the sky.

"I need an aircraft!" His voice exploded out. "How can I jump
without
one?"

Megan spoke gently. "Can you get out of the jumping mod?"

He didn't answer, he just kept staring at the box. Controlled by his anger mods, his body pumped fluids to his face and raised the temperature of his skin. Aris stood frozen in place, his face bright red, looking for all the world like a furious young boy. A curl of yellow hair was sticking up over his ear as if to protest his ignominious situation.

She tried another tack. "Do you know how to do a parachute landing fall? It's what jumpers practice on the ground before they go up in a plane."

He neither answered nor moved. His face turned redder.

Watching his quandary gave her the same emotional tug as seeing a toddler struggle to understand a baffling situation. Her voice softened the way it did when she spoke to her young nephew. "You don't have to jump. Aris? Can you hear? Don't jump."

Nothing changed. He stared at the box as if it were a monster that had broken the rules of childhood nightmares and come out from under his bed in broad daylight.

Megan disliked resetting him, in part because he would lose some of what they had just done. It also bothered her to wipe his brain that way, even if she was only removing a few commands. However, she had to free him from his frozen state.

"Tycho," she finally said. "Reset the RS."

"I can't," Tycho answered. "He's protected from resets."

It made sense; Aris could never learn independence if anyone could reset his mind. However, as his main programmer she needed access. "Check my retinal scan."

A light from the palmtop flashed on her face. "Retinal scan verified."

"Okay. Do the reset."

"Done."

Aris's face went blank. Then he straightened up. "Hello."

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Do you remember what happened?"

"You asked me to jump over the box."

"And that frightened you?"

"No." Although almost a monotone, his voice had a trace of nuance today. "Your command caused my code to exceed certain tolerances, which stopped my movements and prompted me to mimic behaviors associated in humans with anger and fear."

She smiled. "I guess you could put it that way."

"Do you wish me to put it another way?"

"No." That intrigued her, that he asked her preference.

"Do you still want me to jump?"

"Not now. I need to reset your tolerances. That means I'll have to deactivate you so your mind isn't evolving while I'm trying to make changes." She spoke with care, unsure how he would respond to being "turned off."

He just looked at her. At first she thought he had frozen again. Then she realized he had no reason to answer. Unlike a human, who would have reacted in some way, he simply waited.

Megan knew it would cause him no discomfort to lie down here on the floor. He wouldn't be aware of anything after she turned him off. Even so, the thought of asking him to stretch out on the hard surface bothered her.

"We can use one of the apartments," she said.

He continued to look at her.

"And Aris."

"Yes?"

She touched his arm, instinctively seeking to make human contact with him. "If you understand a person, it's customary to indicate that in some way."

"How?"

"Nod. Smile. Make a comment. Your knowledge base must have rules for social interaction."

"I have many rules."

"Don't they indicate how you should respond?"

"Yes."

She waited. "But?"

A hint of animation came into his voice. "You are new."

"So you don't know what parameters apply to me?"

"Yes."

"You should apply all your rules with everyone."

"Very well. I will do so."

"Good." Surely it couldn't be this easy. There had to be a catch here somewhere.

They headed down a hallway in the residential area. As they walked, she regarded him with curiosity. "Aris, do you have any hobbies?"

"I don't engage in nonfunctional activities."

She smiled at his phrasing. "We'll have to change that."

"Why?"

"It's part of having a personality."

"What nonfunctional activity should I engage in to have a personality?"

Megan almost laughed. "Haven't you ever done anything besides interact with the Everest team?"

"I make maps." A tinge of excitement came into his voice. "I made one of NEV-5 for Dr. Hastin. I tried to make one of MindSim, but I didn't have enough data."

It seemed a good activity. "Do you like doing it?"

"I don't know how to 'like.' "

"Would you do more of it even if you didn't have to?"

"Yes."

She beamed at him. "Great. I'll see if I can find you some map-making programs." It was a start. Aris had a hobby.

They went into a bachelor apartment with blue decor and holos of mountains on the walls. A comforter and piles of white pillows lay on the airbed.

"This is nice," Megan said. "You can relax on the bed."

Aris lay on his back with his legs straight out and his arms at his side. Sitting next to him, she said, "Does it bother you to be deactivated?"

"Why would it bother me?"

"It's like becoming unconscious."

"I have no context for a response to that state."

Megan supposed it made sense. She just wished he would respond more.

"Dr. O'Flannery," he said. "Should I call you Megan?"

Startled, she smiled. "Yes. That would be good."

"Are we going to engage in sexual reproduction activities now?"

Megan gaped at him. Good grief. When she found her voice, she said, "No, we are not going to engage in sexual reproduction activities. Whatever gave you that idea?"

"You told me to apply my rules about social interactions. According to those, when a woman sits with a man on a bed in an intimate setting, it implies they are about to initiate behaviors involved with the mating of your species."