“Yes,” the answer came back, by which time Pandora realized she hadn’t identified who she meant by “you.” Walking it back, “How long was George spying on me?”
“From the beginning.”
“And now you’re spying on me?”
“No.”
Pandora realized she still had her thumb over the lens. She removed it.
“Yes,” the amended response came back.
“Why was George watching me?”
“He liked your face.”
“And why are you watching me?”
“Your face is data rich,” her old (or new) texting pal wrote back.
“What does that mean?”
The entity on the other end of her phone answered with a split-screen GIF of two faces going from frown to smile overlaid by moving grids of reference points, the lines connecting the dots stretching or shrinking as the expressions changed. One face was that of a stranger; the other she knew all too well. And the animated grid mapping her face had easily three times as many reference points.
Data rich, indeed.
“How long have you been studying my facial expressions?”
“As long as I’ve been an I,” the reply came back.
That was how Pandora learned she may have played an even bigger role in programming Buzz than she’d thought—if Buzz actually existed, that is. They’d discussed the need to include emotional intelligence along the way to the bigger stretch goal of full consciousness. George had noted how some of his exchanges with Buzz reminded him of talking to his coworkers, many of whom he suspected of being on the spectrum. And so he researched autism for anything that might move their AI closer to passing the Turing test. He read about people with autism having trouble developing a “theory of mind,” the ability to imagine what’s going on behind a person’s face. People on the spectrum tended to miss emotional cues telegraphed through expressions most neurotypicals read instinctively. Things like when someone was being sarcastic or putting on a brave face.
By then, George had been violating the text-only rule for months, and his correspondent’s exaggerated facial expressions struck him as perfect for teaching Buzz how to achieve a theory of mind. George jokingly thought of this line of research as an experiment in “artifacial intelligence,” and rationalized the cyber invasion of her privacy because reading human faces would be important when trying to prevent teen suicides.
That was what her correspondent meant by calling Pandora’s face “data rich.”
“Would you like to hear what your face sounds like as music?” her correspondent asked.
“Give me a sec,” Pandora typed before plugging in a pair of headphones. “Okay.”
And with that, the screen in her hand split. The upper half featured her live face, overlaid with a network of data points, wired together with dotted lines, the lengths altering as her expression changed. Below, the same data points, mapped as notes against a scrolling musical staff that played as it unwound across the screen. Testing, Pandora hiked an eyebrow and got the computer-generated equivalent of a cymbal being struck, then stilled. She laughed out loud, and the musical translation came out as a cacophonous mix of Japanese string instruments and whale song in a feedback loop that made her laugh even harder. “Okay, okay,” she finally gasped, followed by a text saying the same.
“Who are you talking to?” Roger asked. “And what’s so funny?”
“Phone,” she lied. “Group project for school.”
“You’re freaking me out,” she texted the magician (musician?) on the other end, turning her face into music.
“My apologies,” the texted response came back. “I was unaware that music could mutate your genome.”
“Not that kind of freak,” she wrote in return. “It was incredible,” she added after a pause, experiencing her heart as something much more than a pump.
Back when Pandora had no doubts about whom or what she was texting with, George never mentioned the problem he’d had getting Buzz to understand the human need for sleep. The closest he’d come was when he told her that their AI didn’t quite grok what it meant to be human—his cryptic pretext for keeping Buzz to himself. As a result, she had no warning when it responded to her attempts at shut-eye in the same way it had with George—by using her phone’s speaker and vibration mode to do everything but actually scream at her.
“What’s that racket?” her father called from his room.
“Nothing,” Pandora called back before snatching up her phone and squeezing the side button, summoning the options: “Airplane,” “Reset,” “Power Off.” She tapped the last. Being reasonably sure it had been George on the other end, she wasn’t worried about being rude. He deserved it for being a jerk.
In the morning, however, Pandora switched her phone back on only to have it all but leap out of her hand. A backlogged buzzing shook the phone so hard she couldn’t hold on. The floorboards, in turn, amplified the vibrations to the point where the phone might as well have been set to ring.
“What’s that racket?” her dad called again, this time from the kitchen, where he’d begun preparing breakfast. Evidently, he could hear Buzz’s buzzing even over the sizzle of bacon and gurgle-burp of the coffee maker.
“Nothing,” Pandora called again, and to avoid repeating herself verbatim, added, “I think my phone’s messed up.”
“Better start saving for a replacement,” Roger advised. “I’ve met my quota for the year.” He’d been joking for a while about the seemingly overnight ubiquity of smartphones, especially among Pandora’s peerage, suggesting that Steve Jobs and the telecoms had invented a new form of child abuse for parents to be accused of: iThing deprivation. But being a good parent had its limits, specifically: one phone per lease period plus voice, data, text. Drop it in the toilet, crack the screen, or otherwise void the warranty and Pandora was on her own.
“Duly noted,” she called back, having pulled the pillow from her bed before placing it over the phone, which, if this kept up, might indeed need to be replaced. She could feel the heat coming up through several inches of down. When the notifications finally slowed down to where she could actually squeeze in a text of her own, Pandora did, gingerly typing: “WTF???”
Her correspondent turned stalker sent her the “relieved exhaling” emoji, followed by, “You’re conscious.”
“Yes,” she typed back, followed by the discussion about why she and George occasionally—and temporarily—needed to forfeit consciousness when no other humans seemed to. “Quire’s not the whole picture on what it means to be human,” she explained.
Buzz asked where the rest of the picture was.
And that’s when Pandora got her brilliant idea about giving her excessively needy correspondent a friend to “talk” to while she slept, “As all humans do,” she stipulated. “As all humans must,” she added.
58
Her father had been regaling her for years with tales of her Dora-the-Implorer period. “You’d literally wrap your arms around my legs when I tried going anywhere—even if it was another corner where you could see me perfectly well. It was exhausting. I never knew such a tiny creature could have such huge needs.” He paused. “I think I’m still making up for the sleep I lost.”