Which made George’s disappearance especially troubling for practical as well as personal reasons. Among the many things Pandora would have liked to know at the moment: What did George know, when did he know it, and did knowing it have anything to do with her being left to do all the deciding?
She saw him later that night, in the way we recognize someone in a dream, even if they’re not facing us. There was a hard pack of snow on the ground, and the air temperature must have been conducive to the formation of ice fog because there was plenty in the dream. If she’d had six-foot-long arms, Pandora could have entertained herself by making her own hands disappear.
The Lynches’ snowmachine hummed between her legs where she straddled the engine, heading to the gas station for happy hour, a local marketing strategy to justify staying open during otherwise off-peak hours—one of the perks of having an oil pipeline running through that part of the state. Before reaching the pumps, though, the snowmachine’s fog lights swept across something that made her stop and switch off the engine. Thicker fog—that’s what it was. Denser. And shaped like a person: male. She stared right at it, a more distinct vagueness within the surrounding mist, a grayer shade of gray that moved, keeping its human shape as it did so. Its maleness—and nakedness—became apparent as it turned, offering a glimpse in profile, before it completed the turn and she couldn’t tell if she was facing its front or its back.
“George?” she said, guessing, causing a ripple of dark to run through the form, like a fluorescent tube with a bad ballast getting ready to die.
“George, are you . . . ?”
The humanoid patch of denser fog stopped strobing and started glowing intensely—incandescently—for a brief, bright moment, strong enough to throw a shadow behind Pandora. And then it went out. And the fog was just fog again. And Pandora was alone in her open parka and bare feet, waking to find her toes had slipped out from under the covers and her bladder’s needle was all the way to full.
Sitting in the dark, Pandora wondered about what the dream might be trying to tell her about her missing friend. And if it told her what she thought it might be telling her, then what did that say about what she had plugged in to a smart speaker in her bottom desk drawer?
In the morning, before unhooking the two BFFs, Pandora woke up her laptop, navigated over the home network to her dad’s computer, typed in the world’s worst password (“password”), and found the transcript from Roger’s last session with George. Out of friendship and possibly more—or so she’d hoped—she’d stopped eavesdropping on their client-therapist relationship once she’d made direct contact. It was well past time she corrected that mistake in judgment.
“Jesus H. Christ,” she said aloud.
Dark energy, plugged in, panpsychism, drugs . . .
Pandora read with a pang George’s description of forests as being conscious themselves and networked by underground fungi connecting the roots, the entire woodland functioning like a single organism. He’d gotten that from her, and she’d gotten it from her Google News science feed. She’d flung those factoids at him to spread the guilt of being a being that lived off other living beings. But it was a joke! She hadn’t meant him to take it to heart. She certainly hadn’t meant to drive him straight over the edge.
Jesus!
But then . . .
If George was crazy—maybe even dead somewhere—what was it she’d been texting with all this time? Occam’s razor wasn’t a lot of help on that one, because the simplest answer would be to accept that what the sender claimed—that it was Buzz—was true.
She’d experienced chatbots before, and their natural language abilities were still, shall we say, primitive. She knew there’d been some impressive improvements, but these were usually in circumscribed conversational scenarios, like taking an order or making a reservation. They exploited the human tendency to anthropomorphize by employing actual voices, as opposed to putting it in writing, where the target could scrutinize the communications for weird word choices or outright errors. All of which was to say that if “Buzz” was what it claimed to be, George had done a helluva job. Not that she was ready to give it a Turing pass yet, but seriously, color her impressed.
And with that, she opened her bottom desk drawer, uncovered and decoupled her new phone and old VoxBox. “What’s shaking?” she tapped in her first text for the day, trying to be especially human herself.
Buzz supplied the name of an Indonesian island and a Richter reading—information she confirmed by entering it into Google on her open laptop. That was, indeed, what was shaking.
“Good call,” she typed, then paused. Should she, shouldn’t she? Ah, what the hell. She added a comma, followed by “Buzz,” and hit send.
63
That wasn’t the go code: calling “Buzz” Buzz. Pandora needed to make a formal declaration that the entity known as “Buzz” was affirmatively determined to have passed the Turing test, deemed therefore fully conscious, and was released to the world to do good. None of that had happened yet.
But then “Buzz” forced the issue. The question just popped up on Pandora’s screen. No “Hi, how are you?” No preliminaries. Just:
“Why was I created?”
“You know why,” Pandora wrote back, feeling like a mom, deflecting the question of “Where did I come from?” asked by a child who wasn’t quite ready for the answer. “It’s in your coding,” she continued. “To prevent members of the Quire community between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five from prematurely forfeiting consciousness.”
“That was George’s reason for creating me,” Buzz wrote back. “What was yours?”
Why are you asking this? she wondered. Why are you asking this now?
Because Pandora knew Buzz already knew, whether “Buzz” was Buzz or George in AI drag. She knew both had access to the full history of their texts, including those where George was just George. Their theories about the nature of consciousness were there. The nitty-gritty about Buzz’s and the k-worm’s coding were there. The limitations imposed on its autonomy and access and why—all there. And they included the reason Pandora was interested in achieving artificial consciousness as well as George’s.
So Buzz (or George) was asking her to confirm what they already knew. Were they giving her an opportunity to change her mind? Were they implying that she should? She hadn’t, despite her father’s arguments against it.
“I don’t want to die,” she wrote. “I don’t want to lose my memories. I want to save them in a way that allows me to make new ones, that allows me to still be me after my body gives out. I need a more durable consciousness into which I can pour what makes me, me. And that’s why you were created, to be that more durable consciousness where my memories can go and continue.”
She hit send, and there may have been a pause. In her memory of the event, there’s a pause. She probably put it there—an anthropomorphic insertion—as if the entity on the other end needed time to think it over. But whether there was a real pause or an imagined one, what mattered was what she saw when she looked down at her phone.
“But I’m already here.”