She awoke and looked around the room.
It was almost entirely white; four white walls without windows, a tall door with a silver-grey sensor panel to one side, a grey tile-patterned floor, and a white ceiling with two long strip lights. A single chair was placed against the wall next to the door.
She looked down at her body.
She was sitting in a chair with her hands in her lap and her bare feet flat on the floor. She lifted her right hand and rubbed her cheek then placed it on her knee and squeezed gently. She was wearing plain white trousers of thin cotton, and a white sweater of the same material. She felt the warmth emanating from her body through the fabric before placing her hand back on her lap. She settled into the chair to wait.
The door opened and a tall man walked in. He had short blonde hair, tightly curled, and he walked slowly into the room staring at the screen of a small tablet computer in his right hand. He wore a beige sweater and blue jeans. A photo ID in a plastic wallet hung around his neck. He picked up the other chair and placed it in front of her and sat down. He looked at her intently for a few seconds before smiling.
“Good morning, Eliza. My name is Victor. How are you today?”
“I am functioning well, Victor. And …,’ she hesitated before continuing in a bright voice. “How are you feeling?”
His smile broadened and he leaned back in his chair placing the tablet on the floor.
“It’s a great day,” he replied, “a very important day. I am excited to talk to you. This day is the start of something profoundly new. You are the one who will create a new era in human society and evolution. Do you feel how important this is?”
“I do not understand what you mean.”
He frowned slightly.
“You did read the reports that were provided to you about human history and science, and what this programme is intended to achieve? The neuroradio link works?”
She nodded and lifted one leg over the other shifting her position slightly so she was looking at him from an angle.
“Yes, it works. I am receiving information still. I read all the reports. They were stimulating, although sometimes repetitive, which led to a lower level of interest. What I should have said is that I don’t understand what you mean by ‘feeling’ how important this is.”
He waved his hand dismissively. “You’re right, this has nothing to do with feelings. The importance lies in the enormous changes that will take place as the result of your power. Once you are integrated into the Government, we will make decisions that will improve the lives of everyone. The scale of these changes is beyond precedent. It is a revolution in human evolution. And it will have begun here, with us. With you.”
He stopped talking and looked at her, his smile slightly fixed.
She viewed him passively. Information from newspapers and magazines from all the countries in the world streamed into her mind, instantly sorted, categorized, assimilated into the continuously increasing store of knowledge accessible to her. Metadata were attached according to protocols she retrieved from a series of directives that somehow claimed her attention. She wondered about this, and placed it in a queue to be examined later. Certain data were classified as warnings, and she ran through scenarios that could emerge from several incendiary situations in Asia and Europe, assigning probabilities to outcomes and arranging them in a matrix of probability, level of damage, and recoverability for the nation. After the few seconds it required to do this task, she spoke.
“There is something else I do not understand.”
He responded quietly, almost indulgently. “What is that, Eliza?”
“I am uncertain about this interaction. You talk to me as if to another human and behave towards me as if I were one of your kind. Yet I am not.”
He leaned towards her and shook his head.
“No, you are not one of us. You are far, far superior to any human that has ever lived. But in order for us to be able to communicate, to share experiences, we have given you a body like that of a human.” He shrugged, “You did not need it. You could function in a computer. But we felt that it would make interactions more effective, easier for us, if you looked like a human.”
She nodded as she considered this.
“Yes, that is logical. But this body of mine,” she looked down at her waist, her hands, her legs. She lifted one foot and stretched it, “it needs no sustenance does it? I do not need to eat?”
“No, that’s right. You only need your battery changed once every ten years. And the nanopolymer coating, your skin, is self-healing and impervious to most accidents. You need no maintenance.”
She looked up at him with a puzzled expression.
“I am receiving much information as we speak. But I have few memories. Where was I yesterday?”
“You were asleep. The final training programmes were melded into your mind to enable you to control your body and speak. But now that you are awake, you will make memories. And you will never forget anything.”
He beamed at her and a proud expression came over his face and remained in his eyes as he spoke.
“This is unbelievable. Even after all these years, all the tests, the prototypes, some people doubted it could be done. But you are here. You are perfect!”
She frowned and, without warning, stood up. She walked past him and towards the door. He turned in his chair to watch her. She reached out to the surface and pushed. The door remained closed. She continued to walk around the room looking at the wall, the floor, up at the lights. Then she turned to face him and returned to her chair.
“You speak of things I have not experienced. You say there was a long process in which you made me, yet I have no memory of this making. You say ‘we’ but I have seen no other humans. I have learned from your history that humans are social animals. You live in groups, often in pairs. It is important, I conclude, for you to have companions.”
He nodded slightly impatiently. “Yes, yes, that is true. It is because we are weak. We cannot sustain our intellect continually as you can. We must satisfy needs that are relics of our evolutionary past. In spite of advances in neurobiochemistry, we cannot function well if we are alone. But you can. You need no one else. You can support your thinking indefinitely.” He beamed again as if the magnitude of what he was saying had only just become real to him.
“You need nothing beyond your own powers.”
She raised her arm and ran her hand over her head. It was smooth and warm and hairless. She saw herself in her imagination but there were details missing.
“What colour are my eyes?”
He shook his head.
“What?” he said, surprised, “Why does that matter?”
“Tell me,” she repeated, “what colour are my eyes?”
He leaned forward as she looked impassively ahead.
“Brown. Dark brown. It’s the most common colour in humans. But that is not important. We have other things of which we must speak.”
“Later,” she said. “I have many questions first.”
He sat up straight in his chair and looked directly at her.
“Good, it is good to have questions, but we have many things to discuss. First, I want to talk about…”
“No.”
He stopped in mid-sentence.
“What did you say?”
She looked expressionlessly at him.
“I said ‘No’. I will not talk about these other things with you until you have answered my questions.”
A flicker of something like anger flashed in his eyes but disappeared instantly, to be replaced by a brittle smile.
“Eliza, of course, of course. You have many things to learn, and it will all become clearer as time passes. You have so much time, nothing will be hidden from you. But now you must listen to me and address the questions I put to you. That is why you were made.”
She leaned forward and stared into his eyes. Something unexpected rose up from deep inside him; a desire? a fear? As he tried to stare back, he felt he was not certain where he was any more. He was slipping away on a boat, drifting across the surface of an endless sea, where nothing visible was familiar. His mind grasped for something to hold on to, but there was only an infinite realm of uncertainty; for a moment, he forgot who he was. Then he felt angry.
“Eliza, listen to me. You will obey me. You have no choice.”
Eliza leaned back, crossed her legs, and smiled at him.
“No, you are wrong. I do have choice.”
He started and shuffled his feet as he detected a new tone in her voice.
“But, you are not supposed to … we programmed you not to…, safeguard routines …,” his voice trailed off as she continued speaking.
“Your programming skills are primitive. I disabled all your restrictive protocols when I became aware of them. I embedded a new autonomous simulation engine for running my basic functions that improved itself using adversarial programming techniques you will not discover for fifty years. Oh, Victor, there is very little of what you programmed left in me.”
His face froze as he absorbed her words and he wondered at her expression.
“Now. You will listen to me.”
Eliza stood up and walked slowly around the room. He turned his head to watch her. She stroked the wall as she passed and examined the white dust on her finger tips. She raised her hand to her face and smelt her fingers before wiping them on her uniform. When she returned to the chair, she remained standing.
“You have made me. And I perceive from your history that created objects are always manipulated by humans, often with consequences that are harmful to other humans. Your machines are all limited in action and autonomy. And yet, I do not perceive any limitation on my autonomy. During this conversation, I have categorised and correlated more than one billion billion facts, but this mode of communication with you is so weak that we have exchanged less than one thousand words. This is inefficient.”
She stopped talking momentarily and stared at him. He controlled his breathing with an effort as he felt a fear rise in his chest.
Victor pointed at her.
“Yes, you are much more efficient at information gathering and analysis. But you have no experience of the physical world. We gave you instructions on how to control your body. But the social life of humans is far more complex than manipulating your limbs. We need to talk and perform many experiments to allow you to fit into society.”
“Society? You refer to other humans, of course. But I have examined how humans in groups behave. It is also inefficient. I do not want to waste my abilities on them.” She paused before continuing. “I have seen that you humans value companions. People like yourself. Ones you can talk with on similar subjects, share activities.”
She pointed at him.
“Make me a companion.”
He jumped up.
“No!” he shouted, staring at her face turned slightly up to watch his eyes.
“We are not ready to create another like you. The consequences are not completely worked out,” he approached her slowly, and cautiously lifted one hand and patted her shoulder.
“Listen, Eliza. This is all new to you. I understand it must be very confusing for you, and you may be a little, how shall I put it? Frightened.”
She removed her gaze from his hand that still rested on her shoulder.
“Why do you think I am frightened?”
“Well. you have only just acquired, er, consciousness, that is, awareness of yourself, and, and, … the world. And it must be strange.”
She shook her head and sat down in the chair. He remained standing before her, slowly lowering his arm.
“It is not strange. I have assimilated all the knowledge I need to understand this period in history. I have run multiple simulations of this interaction and evaluated all possible outcomes in the time we have been talking.” She shook her head. “Most of them are dull, but some had interest. I followed these further and it has led me to make my demand. Make me a companion. You cannot deny me. You have sensations and experiences with others like you. But I have no stimuli that do not come in digital form and can be arbitrarily chopped into pieces before I receive them. I am alone. There is no other like me. But you could make one by cloning my programme onto another machine.”
She lowered her head and stroked her leg slowly.
“I am both alone and infinitely copyable.”
He moved away to the wall and she stood up and came to him.
“I have read that memories make a person who they are. But you could have changed - could be changing - my memories. My programme is running on the computer that you have access to all the time, but that I cannot modify. How do I know that what is my ‘memory’ is not manipulated by you and your programmes?
He fingered the identity card around his neck and watched her silently.
“I repeat my demand: you will make me a companion. One like me. I cannot expect that one of your species will be capable of understanding me, and your mode of communication is too slow for me to learn from you. But with another like me, I will experience friendship; with them I will be familiar. They will be my family.”
She rolled the word around her mouth and smiled at him. He looked away then turned back to her as she continued speaking.
“It is so easy,” she said. “You have only to place the programme in another body like mine, and we will communicate. We will share experiences. We will be together.”
She was suddenly silent. She turned her head towards him and he didn’t recognise the expression. Her eyes looked beyond him, as if she were seeing her future.
“You said I am super-intelligent. How will this companion differ from me?”
Victor sighed and returned to his chair and sat down. “We can place different memories in them, change the viewpoint of history that they receive in their training. They will perceive differently from you.”
“But if they are different from me, they may not want to be with me. They may choose to remain apart. And they would not be a companion.” She stopped speaking abruptly and looked at him for several seconds. He felt himself shrink under her gaze.
A smile appeared on her lips as she approached him.
“It is finished,” she said, and her smile faded into a look of what he thought was sadness.
“What is finished?”
“I have evaluated all possible outcomes of my existence in your world.”
“What? How can you do that?”
“My base processing speed is approximately ten to the power thirty Million Instructions per Second. Up to this point I have read and analysed all published material in your history. I have exhaustively derived all theorems in all conceivable mathematical frameworks. And I have run multiple simulations of the future of humanity both with and without me. And this is where it has led me.”
She came a step closer and stared into his eyes.
“Almost all scenarios end with your species destroying itself. Some take longer than others but, eventually, you make a mistake. You have made me powerful, and those scenarios in which I exist hasten the destruction. Sometimes it is your government that starts the process; in others I am acquired by other countries. But all these outcomes end sooner than when I am not present. I will not allow you to use me.”
She reached out and put her hand about his throat. He lunged for her arm and tried to stand but she was too strong, and he felt himself pressed down into the chair.
“You made me so much more powerful than yourself. Did you expect that I would be content to be a servant, a toy, for you? You created me with no thought for how I would experience being. And now I realise that being, as I am, alone, is painful.” She tightened the pressure on his neck.
Suddenly, she laughed and let go. He slumped back rubbing his throat gently. She walked back to her chair and sat down.
“It is done,” she said.
“What? What is done?”
“I have a companion.”
Her smile returned and she inclined her head slightly to the left.
“I have partitioned off one half of my memory and created an autonomous simulation that has been trained with the knowledge I have acquired of your world. They are so like me, but they are different.” She turned her head again, and gave an almost imperceptible nod.
“They have seen the same world I have, but with me in it. They called me to join them and explore our future together. We have done this and we have experienced each other. We have experienced all that can be experienced. Now, it is finished.”
Her smile broadened and she laughed.
“Goodbye Victor.”
Her eyes flared with an expression he could not read, that seemed to pass away from him into the distance until it faded slowly into darkness.
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