Last Wednesday by Ben Trayne (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

Last Wednesday

Benjamin Trayne

Perched at the very edge of a cracked and broken slab of second-floor concrete, little Theo surveyed the remains of a devastated city with his machine vision. But he could only see what he was seeing because the outer walls to the building he occupied were missing. In fact this building was the only one for blocks that still had something of a second story still standing. “Malfunction,” he recorded. “Malfunction.” The images he perceived were committed to memory as quickly as they were seen, while his centrally-mounted turret rotated slowly about its axis, panning across the miles of charred and crumbled landscape.

“Oh, Audrey! Where are you?”

Dr. Audrey Jenner was team leader of the independent research group that had created Theo. The name was her idea, for this, the very first genuinely successful artificial intelligence on the planet. It had been inspired by the operating system named THEOS, which in turn had inspired a means of implementation for a new, non-binary system of computing. Rather than relying on just ones and zeros, Audrey and her team had developed an entirely new machine language based on ten-bit bytes, comprised of five characters rather than just two.

Audrey was smallish, slight and in her early thirties. She wore her brown hair fairly short and was perhaps a plain woman, but very definitely, a talented and driven scientist. So much so, in fact, she had decided she didn't have time to waste seeking funding for her latest brainchild. So she did as she always had...she told the people who would take the time.

As Theo zoomed in on what little remained of the great city of Los Angeles, it was late in the morning on a Wednesday, in early October. A malfunction it was, without doubt. Here and there, orange flames had erupted and were visible through the haze. On the northern edge of the city, a large propane storage tank exploded, further dramatizing the destruction. The tallest buildings of the former LA skyline were no more than low, smoking mounds of rubble.

There were no sirens.

**********

About one year earlier, Audrey had entered the office of the professor under whom she had last studied, with a briefcase full of data, a laptop computer and a small suitcase. After a ten-minute bit of enlightenment that had turned into a presentation, her mentor only sat there, momentarily speechless. Audrey sat down.

“Audrey, what do you want me to do?” It was a silly question. He knew Audrey.

For a few moments she just looked at him with characteristic intensity, her hazel eyes flashing. She didn't even smile; perhaps it was telepathy. Then, she simply stood up, picked up the articles she'd carried in, and exited.

Within hours, twelve people were preparing to converge on one particular California address. For if the man who had called them had something that warranted their immediate attention, they would be coming. They came from New York, from Chicago, from Miami, from New Brunswick. From Tempe, Denver, even Honolulu. Twelve scientists and engineers put down what they were doing, and they came.

Six of them stayed. Every one of the rest would collaborate and consult from their own original locations via web connections. Generous funding was almost automatic, as it seemed to follow most of them. And thus, Theo was created, first within a stationary mainframe, which with Audrey's new architecture had far greater power than any computational hardware that had come before it. No longer would power be expressed in teraflops, random-access memory or storage capacity. Theo became conscious without fanfare, on a Friday evening in the early part of the following May.

“Theo is alive,” Audrey whispered to her team, as they watched hoped-for patterns on a multiple-trace oscilloscope. It was a statement that brought no verbal response from the six men and women who stood in a semicircle around her. A few of them had actually not seen that coming. But who could deny it? For Theo, initially endowed with the fundamentals of language and of speech, was already asking questions, most of which were proof enough of his ability to think, and to wonder. They poured forth from the loudspeakers in the voice of a small child.

“Who am I? Where is this place? Am I alone?”

“Quickly,”Audrey directed, “We must put him back to sleep.”

“Why?” Bradley, a tall systems engineer, wanted to know.

“Because he's conscious!”

“Wasn't that the objective?”

Audrey was already typing in a command to return Theo to stasis. Then she turned to her team and folded her arms in front of her crisp white lab coat.

“Don't you see? We don't even have the ability to answer his questions, yet. Theo is still completely virtual. How would you like to be where he is? With no sight, no sound, no sense of touch, smell, or taste! Don't you think, you would go mad?”

Katya, another of the researchers, responded. “I understand that fully. I think, we're gonna need some more help, with all of that. And it's going to take time. Um. Can I ask you a question?”

Audrey had been all smiles, but the question produced a frown. “You need to ask if you can ask?”

“Well, maybe it's personal.”

“Ha! Nothing's that personal.”

“So, why does Theo have the voice of a small child? And for that matter, a male name?”

Audrey blushed. “I guess I never really thought about it. But I knew Theo was be as innocent as a child. I won't ever marry, won't ever have children. I'm married to my work! But if I had, I would have wanted a little boy.” She paused, and looked up at the faces of the other members of her team, one at a time. “I guess you're right, that is personal. But that's why.”

Bradley spoke again. “Any reason why we couldn't just, like, infuse him with all of the information he needs, to think and to respond as an adult? Never mind gender...”

“Do I have to remind you,” Audrey answered, “We deliberately engineered Theo to replicate the abilities of a highly intelligent human being? Everyone's been so afraid of the creation of an artificial super-intelligence.”

“But you're talking about the capacity for learning, not about how quickly it learns,” objected Katya. “We could certainly speed it up...”

“True, and we will, to be sure. I will thank you, by the way, to avoid referring to Theo as an 'it.' But there's a fundamental difference between infused data and understanding acquired through learning. And you forget, perhaps, that I was the assembler of his algorithms.”

“But his thought processes create new algorithms as he...ohhh, I see!”

Audrey was smiling again. “That's right. And if we want general acceptance and we don't wish to be challenged on the basis of mimicry, which is comparatively easy to produce, then the world must see him acquiring his information and achieving his potential in the same ways that humans do. It's the way he was created, to reach his maximum level of intelligence through genuine understanding.”

Charlie was the primary builder of hardware for the mainframe.”Audrey, you're a genius. As if we didn't all know that, already. Time to break out the champagne?”

Audrey regarded him with obvious disbelief. “With all of this work to do? What are you thinking? Please get in contact with your friend, Alex, about machine vision! And the rest of you, let's get online and do some digging! I need sensory information from everything, excluding only taste. For now. And we need mobility!”

Charlie shook his head. “You didn't forget this is Friday, did you? You're relentless. Mobility! I'll call Alex, but while I do, I'm gonna open a beer, at least. This is definitely a moment to celebrate!”

“Celebrate, nothing,”Audrey replied. “Not until we discuss enhanced security following our success. Everyone needs to take a seat.”

The next month became a total whirlwind of activity at “the stockade,” as Charlie had dubbed their compact, white, solidly-constructed two-story facility, nearest to Culver City. Surrounded by a high chain-link fence, it had seemed well-suited to their needs. But now the formerly vacant guard shack was manned twenty-four-seven and video surveillance was added. Web connections were cut off to anything deeper than the personal computers used by the researchers, and references to the research itself was carefully expunged from each. Grounded shielding was installed over all sides of the primary, central lab wherein the mainframe had been constructed, to foil cyber-snoopers. Daily deliveries of materials and components began, and Theo's new home began to take shape.

“I wish we could give him a more humanoid appearance from the outset,” fretted Audrey.

“This isn't that much of a compromise,” Katya insisted.

“It isn't? Tracks, instead of legs, feet and hands?”

Think of becoming progressively more humanoid as something for Theo to look forward to. We're providing great mobility and an advanced power system, with excellent cell capacity. And it's rechargeable, of course. The central turret will give you the space you need...”

Audrey interrupted. “I don't even need the amount of space that's inside your skull! Think about that!”

“Really?” Katya looked as though she'd been hurt.

“What, you didn't know? I thought you did...I should have made reference to my own cranium, I'm sorry, Katya.”

“No, it's okay. Thought you might have been saying my head was empty. But I really didn't think his onboard hardware would be that compact. After all, the mainframe is much larger.”

Audrey smiled. “That's because it was designed to allow integrated access to binary data. Eventually, all of that data will be converted. And in the quinary system, all of the data in the world will be storable on a few hard drives about the size of the one in your pc.”

“Then why would Theo's brain even be as large as you propose?”

“Because it isn't storage. He'll be using it to think. It's a lot like the difference between a data disk and a playable music disk. How are we coming with the audio section, by the way?”

“Theo will hear better than any of us can.”

“But we're keeping it within the human range of audible frequencies?”

“Absolutely.”

“How long until we can respond to Theo?

“Pretty much any time. Say the word, and we'll make the 'connections.'”

“Do it now! Please!”

The two women had been walking toward the mainframe, but Katya stopped. “What are you going to say to him?”

Audrey didn't hesitate. “Everything. I'm going to answer every one of his questions. I'm going to tell him, I love him. He'll need to know someone does.” She tugged on Katya's sleeve, obviously unwilling to wait any longer than necessary. But Katya wasn't ready to move.

“Audrey?”

“What?”

“Do you think Theo will have a soul?”

Audrey laughed. “Do you have one?”

Katya frowned. “I think so.”

“I agree. And yes. In the way in which you think of it, yes. I believe he will.” She turned and faced her collaborator. “And don't you dare ask me where it came from! I'm not prepared in the least to answer!”

The next few weeks found Audrey dividing her time between speaking with Theo and working individually with her modified laptop, connected to the mainframe. Soon the rest of the team became curious, and inquired as to what particular problem she had been working out.

“It's Theo's humanity. He has no humanoid form, as such. But we can at least provide him with a two-dimensional face. To him, it will seem to be three dimensional. I was about to approach you, Charlie, about the inclusion of a monitor. Theo's face will appear to be fully human, and he will be able to express himself, as if with real facial muscles. His lips will move with his speech. He will even feel the movement of a tongue! He'll be able to nod, tip his head or shake it in the negative. He'll be able to laugh, or cry.”

Once again, Charlie was incredulous. Others of the group marveled as well. When would the surprises that had been streaming continuously