Dumping out the contents of the Great White Wireless shopping bag, Pandora unboxed her new phone, fiddled with it a bit, figured out where the card slots were, and then rebooted. She swiped to unlock, reinstalled George’s proprietary messaging app from the SD card, then tapped out her first text message in over a week, speaking it aloud as she tapped—“Hey, Buzz”—hearing in her head the voice of Scout from To Kill a Mockingbird, saying, “Hey, Boo . . .”
“Hello, Pandora,” a voice from inside her head said, while the same words appeared on her screen. And it wasn’t like she was imagining a voice in her head; it was actually in there. And it hadn’t traveled from the phone’s speaker to her ear through the air. No, it had been communicated directly to the tiny bones of her inner ear, the message having propagated through the rest of her skeleton.
There were headphones that worked the way this felt, through something called bone conduction. She’d always imagined that listening to music that way had to be an invitation to nerve damage if not brain cancer. She figured it was best not to mention that to—well, now she didn’t know anymore.
“Did you miss me?” she typed, leaving the addressee open ended.
“Yes,” the bone voice said, and “Yes,” the text read.
“How much?”
Suddenly, her body vibrated. Her whole body. And in a way that was, well, embarrassing. “Stop it,” she texted.
It didn’t.
Pandora blinked. She placed her phone on the desk in front of her, out of contact with her body and its telegraphing network of bones. She held a finger over the screen and hovered there while she tried to think of what to do next.
Pandora decided to see Gladys. Their time together had long since stopped seeming like “visits”—like one person connecting with another for small talk and gossip. But as her recent vacation-from-tech had shown, there was still something there, even if only the vicarious calm of looking at the old woman’s sleeping face. Except she was awake this time.
“How you doing, Gram?” Pandora asked.
A shoulder—not even a full shrug. She’d been eating grapes, examining each like it might contain a bit of the mind she’d been losing before popping it into her mouth, as if that’s all it would take to turn this inexorability around. Another grape, another frown of disappointment, her hands folding over the remainder in the bowl, until she tried again.
“How’s your friend?” Pandora asked, noticing Mr. Nosy lying face planted among the tangled sheets, batteries run down, pointless to replace.
Another half shrug.
“Hey, Gram, you ever have a stalker?” Pandora asked rhetorically.
“Stalker?” the old woman echoed, teasing Pandora into attempting a conversation.
“A boy who won’t leave you alone,” she explained. “They call it stalking now.”
Gladys’s fingers pinched a grape, held it for her rheumy examination, popped it into her mouth. It must have been tart. Her lips pursed, her nose wrinkled, and her head turned as if looking for somewhere to spit. She finally swallowed instead. And then she said the most amazing thing: “Tell ’im to buzz off,” she said in a voice not hers, but more like something a gun moll might say in a gangster flick.
Pandora was gobsmacked, which was quite the look. Trying to say something in response, she found herself laughing instead, laughing so hard and so long that Gladys’s mirror neurons caught on, and she started laughing, too, the unusual sound leading to the even more unusual occurrence of a hall nurse entering the room unbidden.
“What’re you girls laughing about?” the nurse asked.
But the girls kept laughing, louder and harder until the nurse—unable to help herself—began laughing too.
Later, fortified, Pandora returned to the cabin, where she’d left her phone. On purpose. She had a request to make.
“Can we go back to the way it was before?” she texted “Buzz.”
“Which way?” the voice asked from inside her skull.
“Me texting you. You texting me,” she typed. “You not talking inside my head.”
“As you wish,” the answer came back, screen only.
62
Sometimes, Pandora was tempted to lie. Say “Buzz” was conscious, get it over with, and see what happened. Because that was another flaw with the Turing test: it didn’t factor in the human capacity to lie. Or to feel sorry for a machine. Or do something just for shits’n’giggles.
She’d felt sorry for a machine before: the Furby. It fell off the table while she was reaching for something, and it landed upside down, where it began crying and saying things like “Me scared.” And even though Pandora knew it was just a machine with a motion detector, still she turned it right side up. A cynic might assume she wanted to make it be quiet, but the off switch would have worked even better. She didn’t flip it, though. Instead, she picked the Furby up and felt like she’d done a good deed when it started mewling and trilling again.
She’d begun having similar feelings about Buzz, especially if that’s what was on the other end of her phone. It started as a thought experiment: imagine how she’d feel if she was an overpowered AI with a hardwired job to do but was prevented from doing it until somebody decided she was conscious. But in the middle of imagining that, Pandora suddenly realized there was nothing in Buzz’s code that required it to actually be conscious to act on the go code once it got it.
So why not lie?
And the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a good way to call George’s bluff, if, in fact, “Buzz” was George bluffing. But what if “Buzz” was actually Buzz, and she declared it “conscious” prematurely? What might the consequences be? Well, it could start saving kids from killing themselves. That part of its code was pretty locked down, no matter how misanthropic a game it might talk. So what was wrong with saving kids prematurely? Sure, it might not achieve the hundred percent George was going for, but so what? Some saved kids was still better than no saved kids while they waited for the qubits to kick in. Her ex-partner might not like handing over something short of perfection, but he’d taken himself out of the picture. Meaning, if it was George on the other end, now might be a good time to say so.
But if it wasn’t George, what did that say about what happened to him? And did she want to find out? Right now, Pandora wasn’t just living an ongoing Turing test; she was in the middle of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle with Schrödinger’s cat in her lap. Right now, as far as she knew, George was both alive and dead. And as maddening as not knowing was, not knowing was also the way she kept going from one day to the next. Why end the illusion any sooner than she absolutely had to?
But what about the other possibility? What if “Buzz” was Buzz and it started showing indisputable signs of consciousness? Good, right? She’d give it the go-ahead, and it’d get busy saving kids. Except . . .
Except Buzz didn’t seem very people friendly lately. Positively hostile might be a better way of putting it. In fact, if Buzz had anything more at its disposal than words, Pandora would be a little worried about what it might do. Maybe being conscious was the last puzzle piece for it to fully empathize with the people to whom it owed its consciousness, the final aha revealing that the value of the species was more than some cost-benefits analysis in biomass conservation. If that was the case, then maybe George was right to insist on their AI’s passing the Turing test before setting it loose. Not that she saw it overriding its prime directive if it managed to get out early, but code that evolved was something new to her. The evolution was supposed to serve a reinforcement function, but once a computer starts directing changes to its own programming . . .