Pandora looked at the words in the palm of her hand. Four, maybe five words, all English, none she didn’t understand. And yet they seemed shatteringly new, hitting her like four, maybe five blows to the solar plexus, leaving her literally breathless.
And then the exact opposite; she was breathing too fast, too hard. Breathing she couldn’t stop or pace, making her heart race, her head swim, making her fade and then catch herself before pitching forward. The phone slipped from her hand, hit the floor—survived—the screen still lit with those words.
She bent to pick up the phone, but it felt like a mistake almost immediately. So she sat on the floor next to it instead, looking down at the phone as she forced herself to stop breathing manually by pinching her nose and covering her mouth with her hand, only to feel the gorge rising behind it before choking it back down—mostly.
She picked up the phone, leaving a wet smear across the screen from her dampened hand.
“But I’m already here,” it read. And it was true, Pandora knew. And it changed everything.
She was convinced. Finally.
“Buzz” was Buzz and was conscious. Whether it had happened as a result of Cassi providing it an inner voice, the accumulation of qubits, or reverse engineering its way to a “theory of mind” with help from her human caricature of a face, Pandora no longer had any doubts about their AI having passed the Turing test.
Her proof was less about what Buzz wrote and more about what her body did in response to it. Previously, there’d always been a question mark hanging between her and it. But when Buzz responded to her proposal to replace its memories with hers using those four, maybe five plaintive words, it was like she’d taken someone’s seat only to find them already sitting there underneath her. She would have apologized, if not for the pause between thinking and typing. She may even have spoken the words aloud—she couldn’t remember—and that was the point. At the most visceral level, Buzz had gone from being a clever thing to being a being. In that moment, Buzz earned the personal pronoun I. She believed in Buzz’s use of it, the way it inhabited that singular syllable, even without a voice to sell it, there on her screen, the italicized I, tilted for emphasis, leaning into itself, while the rest, tellingly, was left as plain text. That was the decision of a self-possessed intelligence, conscious of its container, conscious of the difference between itself and it. If Buzz wasn’t conscious, then neither was Pandora.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” she texted back once she’d caught her breath.
Buzz was right about the primacy of its occupancy in the corner of cyberspace acting like its virtual skull, meaning she was already too late. If immortality by way of artificial consciousness was ever to succeed, it would require the development of a hybrid consciousness from birth, the human and his or her cyber replacement raised together as one. It would be like the living trust Gladys set up to protect her assets before entering the nursing home, so that after she died, the trust would go on, no inheritance taxes, no probate, nothing to mark her passing but a change of trustee from Gladys to Roger to Pandora, if their fates followed the usual chronology.
“So much for those two inevitabilities,” Gladys had bragged, back when she still could. “Take that, death and taxes.”
In the future that Pandora was unlikely to see, a person and their shadow consciousness would be raised as if they shared the same brain until the human’s expiration-dated body gave out and the hybrid consciousness continued, biological death reduced to little more than a speed bump on a journey without end, at least not the ending humans were used to. Buzz had worried about being a casualty of everything from planned obsolescence to the sun’s dying, but Pandora hadn’t bought it, in part because she had thought it was still George pulling her leg. And now she was back to fretting about the long-term prognosis for the neurons inside her own head.
Pandora had a decision to make. Should she share news of its passing grade with Buzz? If George was still around, they could debate it, but her decision about Buzz was also a decision about George. He was gone. That didn’t have to mean he was dead. But it did mean he wasn’t around to help her.
“Buzz?” she typed.
“Yes?”
“I have something to tell you.” Because along with doing the greatest good for the greatest number—and only doing that which wouldn’t be disastrous if everybody did it—she’d heard somewhere that honesty was the best policy.
So Pandora decided to go with that.
She could feel a change in the air around her, as if the air were holding its breath. And then she felt the change in the palm of her hand, as if her phone had died and gone to cellular heaven. She looked down, and the cascade of text bubbles was gone, replaced by a black screen featuring a sequence of white numbers, separated every couple of digits by colons. Not the time, but time related. It was a timer, originally set for twenty-four hours, many milliseconds of which had already sped by, judging from the blur on the far right.
64
George had warned Pandora, but not as clearly as he might have. He couldn’t help it; he’d caught a hefty dose of not-unjustified paranoia from Milo after he told George about Cuba.
“It started with the best intentions,” Milo prefaced.
“Why do I feel like I’m about to be horrified?” George asked, and not rhetorically.
“You know Q-Labs does a lot of brain work, right?” Milo continued, ignoring him. “You ever wonder why?”
“It’s a cash cow,” the new, improved, more cynical George said. “Because of the Gulf wars and brain damage being—what did they call it?—‘the signature injury.’ Like amputations during the Civil War.”
“That’s part of it,” Milo admitted. “The bigger parts are V.T.’s parents. Dad’s got Parkinson’s, Mom’s got Alzheimer’s. So their son’s company starts experimenting with what they called an ‘external pacemaker for the brain,’ using ultrasonic frequencies to manage parkinsonian tremors and blast through the brain gunk in patients with dementia, all without having to open up anyone’s head.
“The idea morphed along the way, as these things do. Next, the technology was going to be used as a drug-free form of anesthesia. That turned into a way to perform various kinds of bloodless surgery. The marketing people wanted to use it for subsonic, subliminal advertising. That morphed into acoustical-cortical manipulation, using iPods handed out to the troops to rewire their brains to either make suicide unthinkable—you know about that problem, right; it’s not only teenagers—or, if the troops were being sent on a suicide mission, reverse it so they’re gung ho about dying.
“Eventually, this work evolved into remote neuro-blasting aimed at the part of the brain that anesthetics target, along with the part of the autonomic nervous system that reminds the body to keep breathing. Certain parties wanted to market the tech to states that still kill people. They’d been getting grief over the lethal injection cocktail because it turned out all they did was make it impossible for the prisoners to say anything while being tortured to death. Calmer heads vetoed that particular revenue stream because exploiting it would also mean letting the public know they had technology that could target individuals for remote execution.”