“You were saying?” she asked her date, sitting back down. The boy across from her sat with his head sunk, staring at his syrupy pile of pancakes while the yellow pat of butter decoded itself into a puddle that wound through then mingled with the maple brown.
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
Clearly, she’d said or done something wrong, this “being normal” business frequently harder than it looked—or was worth, frankly. Still, she tried rescuing the moment by simulating interest in the mopey boy in front of her. “So,” she said, “what’s it like being a mascot?”
He shrugged, dug into his pancakes. Pandora did likewise, noting that she was apparently in the middle of a race she hadn’t been informed of. Not that that stopped her from trying to win.
Later, in the car, the pimply boy said, “Echoey,” into the dashboard lights.
“Excuse me?”
“You asked what being a mascot was like,” he said. “Back at the restaurant.” Pause. “It’s echoey.”
Another silence enveloped them as Pandora processed the latest input only to suddenly exclaim, “Yes!” startling both her companion and herself. Until the pieces fell into place, she hadn’t realized she’d been holding a whole other conversation in her head, one about heads and how they work. Taking a shot at empathy, she’d imagined her own head inside the polar bear head, imagined talking and hearing her own voice come back at her, concluded that it wasn’t all that different from how things usually went re: her head and her voice, except she didn’t need to open her mouth and actually say anything to hear what amounted to an echo inside her head, roughly behind those peepholes, her eyes. Preparing her response to his response, she was about to say that it reminded her of what consciousness was like when she stopped herself and blurted, “Yes!” instead.
“Did I do something wrong?” her companion asked, his Pandora-facing shoulder canted a few inches farther away from her than where it had been a second earlier.
“Nope,” Pandora said, leaning in as he leaned back. She surveyed that minefield of acne, located a spot between zits, and applied the most platonic of kisses. “You’ve been perfect,” she added. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome?” he guessed.
“You can take me home now,” she announced, eager to text George in the privacy of her own . . . well, with the shower curtain drawn at least.
“What’s being conscious like for you?” she texted him.
“It’s like a conversation,” George tapped. “It’s like I’m talking to myself all the time, quietly, in my head.”
“Exactly,” Pandora tapped back. “I think consciousness is a collaboration between the sides of ourselves. A conversation. Or narration. It’s a story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and it keeps going in real time, editing itself on the fly.”
“POV,” George typed.
“Spell out.”
“Point of view,” George typed, as requested. “The world is all around us but is not us. We are the target the world aims itself at. We are our point of view—the whole history of everything we’ve seen or heard from our particular focal point. We are the thinking thing in our own blind spot that we can’t see but know is there, through intuition.”
“Or a mirror.”
“Or selfie,” George typed. “I get it. But you see what I’m saying, right?”
“I am the drain between the world and my collective, subjective experience of the world,” Pandora typed. “The world circles me, pours down me, becomes the experience of me from the funneling center that calls itself me.”
“Yes,” George texted back, watching as Pandora smiled in the palm of his hand.
39
Brainstorming about artificial consciousness is one thing; rendering what you’ve brainstormed into code is another. So how were they supposed to achieve what the best minds in the field hadn’t cracked yet? Because that was the goal they’d set themselves—the Everest of AI, the Holy Grail of neural nets, pick your hard-to-impossible metaphor and that’s what they were up against.
Why? It was central to both of their goals.
For Pandora, the idea of surviving dementia or the bigger D, death, by uploading her memories to the cloud was just the first part. Those memories needed to inform something else with agency, something that could form new memories contextualized by the old memories in storage, something consciousness-compatible for her consciousness to inhabit when it got out of the habit of having a mortal body and became immortal either as a robot or virtually, living in an alternative sim world beyond her wildest imagination.
George, on the other hand, needed his AI to be conscious so it understood what it was the people it was tasked with saving stood to lose. George’s AI needed a consciousness so it could understand what might motivate thoughts of self-destruction in other conscious entities as a first step to reverse engineering its way back to wanting to “live,” or at least remain conscious.
Seeing as George was the one who was actually getting a paycheck, it made sense that he take the first stab at coding their baby AI before handing it off to Pandora to take potshots at. It also made sense that George would be the one to make the introductions.
“Pandora Lynch,” his message read, “meet Buzz,” followed by a link to what was really just a doodle in code as opposed to an actual beta of anything.
“Buzz?”
“Yep,” George wrote back, going on to explain that his baby AI had actually named itself. He—George—had coded up a two-dimensional VR space for his baby AI to learn the rules of and . . .
“Two-dimensional virtual reality space?” Pandora echo-typed.
“Pac-Man,” George wrote back. “I was having my AI teach itself Pac-Man. And my CPU started getting toasty even though most of the crunching was happening in the cloud. And I’m watching the activity light go crazy, and the cooling fan kicks on, and then there’s this loud buzzing noise, like there’s been a head crash and the hard drive’s getting trashed.”
“You’re not using an SSD?” Pandora typed. “How big a cheapskate is Lemming anyway?”
George was not about to cast aspersions on his employer in writing, even over a private phone, using a proprietary, encrypted texting app with a self-destruct option. Instead, ignoring the comment entirely, he continued. “Turns out a fortune cookie fortune got stuck in the fan and was rattling like a playing card in a bicycle’s spokes,” George continued. “Catastrophe averted.”
“So what did it say?”
“What did what say?”
“The fortune.”
“I don’t,” George began typing, but then stopped. “Wait,” he said to himself, aloud. “Yes, I do.” He reached into the paper-clip tray in his top drawer, which was filled with slips of paper from the assortment of free fortune cookies the Quire cafeteria gave out whenever the menu featured Asian cuisine.
“‘It’s not the destination; it’s the journey,’” he typed.
“How pseudoprofound,” Pandora’s reaction blooped back.
“What do you expect from a baked good?” George typed. “But that’s not the point. My AI made something happen in the real world. It buzzed. So that’s what I’m calling it: Buzz.”