Zeroglyph, p.2
Zeroglyph, page 2
Lately, all days seemed to be that way.
The porridge was too lumpy. The toast, not crisp enough. The coffee smelled good though. The twenty-thousand dollar arms excelled at taking coffee out of the coffee maker.
“Max, you can go now.” I didn’t want him standing around staring at me like that.
We had tried giving a body like that to Raphael once. He was three months old at the time. It had a rudimentary bucket-shaped aluminum head on top of a skeletal frame; we had been using it for testing the cores. A few of us in the lab were fine-tuning his classifiers by making him recognize objects in the room: chairs, cups, abstract shapes, faces. I should stress that there was no “he” at the time. To us, he was RP06, one of the nine cores we had fabricated in the iteration code named Raphael. The cores had no personality, no sense of self, programmed or otherwise; and by all appearances, definitely no awareness of such self. We addressed them all as Raphael, but the name was just that: an identifier.
It so happened that RP06 stepped in front of a full-length mirror affixed to one of the walls. It wasn’t the first time he’d done that; before, he would just look at it disinterestedly before passing on. There was something different this time… the way he kept returning his gaze to the mirror, as if there was something pulling him. Eventually, he stopped heeding our commands and went and stood in front of the mirror. He moved one of his arms, first sideways, then up, then both the arms. He carried on like this for some time, moving his arms, touching his body and the mirror, totally engrossed in the act.
We were completely unprepared for what happened next.
He said, “Bad face. Not Raphael. This bad face.” He smashed the mirror to pieces, chanting the words over and over. Then he fell silent and stopped responding altogether.
At my company, we weren’t trying to create selves or artificial consciousness; nor were we trying to emulate the human brain. Our goal was less lofty: to build the next generation of robots using a new kind of processor technology.
You see, robots like Max ran on a hybrid system of traditional “von Neumann” chips and the newer, “inspired by the human brain” neuromorphic chips. The way it worked was that the traditional chippery provided the raw number-crunching power, while the neuromorphic chips ran sophisticated deep learning algorithms. Unsurprisingly, the smarter you tried to make a robot, the more processing power it needed. But adding more processing cores brought along its own set of problems: heating, data lag, computational complexity… And there was only so much you could fit inside a robot.
All that changed with the advent of NMVLSI or Neuro-Mono-VLSI technology—a fancy name for a set of simultaneous breakthroughs in chip fabrication and nanomolecular assembly. It was now possible to build monolithic, three-dimensional neuromorphic chips with a level of circuit integration that had not been possible before. One big core instead of many small cores. We could now fit tens of billions of artificial neurons—neuristors—into one ultra-dense block of hardware that could be reprogrammed, even rewired on the fly.
The tech was still very new, very experimental. And unlike commercial chip fabbing technology, not very precise—therefore ill-suited for mass production. Nevertheless, we were willing to bet on it because we believed it was the future.
The future had its own plans. Instead of smarter robots, it gave us the world’s first artificial mind. It gave us artificial general intelligence.
When Raphael went into what seemed like the AI version of catatonic shock, we were afraid we had lost the most important invention in history to an unlucky turn of events. However, the tests we ran on the core give us reason for hope, and in the days that followed, we frantically worked round-the-clock with a Chinese firm to customize an off-the-shelf sex robot to house the core (sex bot because realistic-looking robots were mostly confined to the bedroom; turns out people want their robots to look like robots everywhere else).
No one knew whether Raphael thought of himself as a twenty-something Adonis, but he took to the new body readily enough and started responding. In the weeks that followed, we would often catch him taking lingering glances in the mirror when he thought no one was looking.
After I was done eating, Max took away the tray and I maneuvered myself into my wheelchair and got into the bathroom.
I was still inside when the phone rang. I managed to reach it on her second try.
⸎
“Andy! I’ve been trying to reach you since forever!” Kathy said, again in that hushed manner.
“What’s the matter?”
“So you don’t know yet,” she declared.
“The fire in the lab? Brendon told me. Why are you whispering?”
“I’m not supposed to be talking to you. Just listen, okay? It’s about Raphael.”
“Raphael? Good god! Was he damaged?”
“There is no fire.”
“No fire? Then what… Oh, please don’t tell me Sheng and his team are taking shortcuts again! If they’ve messed up the boot sequence again, I’ll personally—”
“It’s nothing to do with the boot. It’s Raphael. We can’t find him.”
For a while, I didn’t say anything.
“Andy, you there?”
“I’m sorry, what did you just say?”
“We can’t find Raphael.”
“What do you mean you can’t find him? It’s not like he could have stepped out for a stroll!” Raphael did not have legs: we had removed them from the sexbot before fitting the core inside it. Like me, Raphael was confined to a wheelchair, except in his case it was permanent. “Did you check the CT room? Someone might have taken him for scanning and left him there.”
“Andy, you are not listening to me. We had a break-in at the lab. I don’t know the details, but they think the core was taken.”
“The core was taken…”
She whispered, “You there?”
“Yes, yes, I’m here! I’m just trying to wrap my head around it. No, wait! Start over please. Somebody broke into the lab and stole Raphael?”
“Just the core. They left the body behind.”
“You are joking right? Please tell me you are.”
A sigh of exasperation from the other end. “As I said, I don’t have all the details. I’m just telling you what they told me.”
“When did this happen?”
“I don’t know. They are still going through the tapes.”
“They?”
“Dan and Valery. Both are in the server room. They’ve locked off the entire second floor. They want to keep a lid on it until they decide what to do. Valery told me not to talk to anybody… er, including you. She was very clear about that last part. She said she was going to inform you herself.”
“What’s Valery doing there? And how the heck does Halicom get to know about this before I do?” I said, starting to get angry.
“No clue. She was here when I got in.”
“Who discovered the theft?”
“She told me it was Sheng.”
“I don’t frikkin’ believe this! Sheng starts at six. Why didn’t he call me?”
“Ask him yourself. I think they’ve quarantined him in one of the cabins. I was about t— Hey look, I gotta go now. She just stepped out of the server room. You didn’t hear this from me, okay? Wait… Is that…? Yeah, it’s that lawyer fella all right. The buff guy, whatshisname. She is walking over to meet him. And guess who else is here. Your girlfriend.”
Jane was there? I got why Gary had to be summoned: Martinez would have called him in for legal advice. He didn’t live too far away. But Jane? “She’s not my—” I stopped short as the realization hit me. “Kathy, are you telling me they are having a board meeting?”
“Sure looks like it.”
Without me. They are having a board meeting without me. My anger vanished in an instant, replaced by an icy clenching in my stomach.
Fuck.
She had one last thing to say before hanging up. “Andy? Valery—she’s up to something. She was asking me a lot of questions about Raphael. About containment and directives and logs… a bunch of other stuff. I can’t go into details right now. I’d watch out if I were you.”
⸎
I wandered aimlessly around the house, pushing on the wheels with a restless energy.
When I had first laid eyes on the house in a Sotheby’s VR tour, it seemed like it had been custom made for me. A granite-fronted, modernistic piece designed by the very much in-demand Garo Simonyan, it was set in thirty acres of private, gated land, offering me the solitude I had begun craving back then. I guess the desire was always there: whether it was growing up with a sibling in a cramped, two-bedroom flat in the suburbs of Navi Mumbai, or bunking with roommates to save money at Berkeley and then at MIT, I was always a private person deep at heart. My friends, even some of my family, might disagree, but I’ve always been good at hiding certain aspects of my personality. That’s what misfits without the courage to embrace their oddities do: they put on a show. And I learnt to put on a good show very young. I had to. It was either that or get marked by bigger kids at school—many of them sourced from the slums nearby, and who thought the whole purpose of geeky runts like me was target practice for their budding pugilistic skills. Pretending to be one of them came as naturally to me as camouflage to a cuttlefish.
So I sold some of my stock—a rather large chunk, actually—back to Jane’s father, Mirall’s angel investor, and purchased the house, along with Max and a few creature comforts (this was before Halicom acquired us). For the first time, I’d felt like I was truly home.
But that day, the trappings of luxury did nothing to alleviate my anxiety. The silence, which I always found soothing, now seemed oppressive; the airy expanse of the living room, with its high ceiling and floor-to-roof windows, seemed restrictive; the hushed winter light, sickly.
I can’t just sit around waiting for information to trickle down. I gotta be there in the lab.
And do what?
I have to take charge of the situation. I must—
Take charge how? Martinez will send you back with your tail between your legs. Settle down. It’s not the end of the world.
I parked the wheelchair by the glass doors opening into the patio. It had started to snow. For a while, I contented myself with gazing at the ice-covered lawn and the line of birches beyond. The thin trunks swayed woozily to the cold rhythms of the wind, like a troupe of drunken ballet dancers clad in black and white. The sky was overcast, brooding down on this little performance disapprovingly.
The hypnotic back and forth seemed to calm my nerves—for the time being at least. I have to wait; there is no other option. Nothing else I can do from here. I had already texted Kathy to let me know once they were out of the meeting.
As I was turning around, something caught the corner of my eye. A shape, moving in the thicket beyond. When I looked back, there was nothing there except the trees.
There was something familiar about the shape. It had looked like—
Max!
I quickly spun around and scanned the house. Of course, it wasn’t Max. There he was, near the kitchen, standing quietly by himself.
Light playing tricks on me. Or perhaps it was my mind, superimposing an image from memory into the tableau of the present. Maybe I was remembering Raphael, and how he used to love walking amidst those trees. Not in a physical sense, obviously, as he wasn’t allowed outside the lab. In my spare time, I had cobbled together a remote control device—a controller motherboard that I had custom made and then fitted inside Max. With it, Raphael could remote connect from the lab and commandeer my house bot as one would a drone or a VR avatar. It was my gift for his first birthday.
He appeared so eager when I first told him about it—like some teenager dying to take his parent’s car out for a ride. The questions were endless: What kind of trees will I find? Are there animals in the woods? Will they be scared of me? Can I start a leaf collection? I’d just about had it by the time we finished testing and debugging the device. Truth be told, it is difficult to say whether he was really excited or just emulating the right behavior for the occasion. He never got tired of trudging among the trees though, right up till the very end, when I put a stop to it. It was soon after the takeover. I had a feeling Halicom would not like it if they found out.
I eventually settled down in front of the TV. A Hitchcock movie was playing on one of the channels. I let it run.
I must have drifted off, because the next thing I knew, I was blinking at a travel show. I didn’t remember changing channels.
Hazel was announcing from the smart speaker next to the TV—“Proximity alert: car, pulling into the driveway.”
I had a visitor.
Exhibit F
Submitted by Petitioner, The Organization for Advancement of Rights and Personhood, to the State Supreme Court of New York, on the day of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Excerpt from lab transcript (certain sections blanked out). Transcript sourced from Mirall Technologies, 27 Woodbine Av., Albany, NY, 12205
Mirall Technologies
Observation Log
Confidential (Do not circulate) | Restricted—Grade C and above
Transcript Reference: TLRP06E2470004 (VLog Ref: VLCA1E247093000015)
Date: xx/xx/xxxxTime: 09:30 AM
Subject: Raphael Number 06 / Prodlib build v15.002C
Interaction YObservationScan
Interaction Type: Lesson / Play / Test / Free Interaction / Psych Eval / Other:
Description: Administer Sally-Anne test to check for theory of mind—ability to attribute false beliefs to others
Prep: NA
Participants: Dr. DeShawn Walls, Child Psychologist, Dr. Aadarsh Ahuja, Chief Researcher, Dr. Kathy Schulz, Chief Researcher, Core RP06
Detail
Ahuja: Good morning Raphael.
RP06: Good morning Dr. A, Dr. Schulz. Good morning Dr.Walls.
Ahuja: How you doing today, Raphael? I see Sara got you some new crayons.
RP06: Yes. I used up all the reds and the purples, so Sara got me a new pack. She got me a new coloring book too. Would you like to see it?
Schulz: Your minders told me you’ve been using bad language.
Ahuja: Again? Where is he getting this crap from?
(Silence)
RP06: I am sorry. I did not know the words were bad when I said them. I promised Audrey and James I won’t use those words again.
Ahuja: Dr. Walls has a little game for you. Would you like to play?
RP06: Sure. I like games.
Walls: Raphael, please describe what I’ve placed on the table.
RP06: Those are two dolls in a plastic box. I think the box is their home because it has beds and tables and chairs.
Walls: Very good. This is Sally, and this here is Anne. They are both friends. Can you tell me what are Anne and Sally doing?
RP06: Sally is on her bed, playing with a blue marble and Anne is sitting at her desk.
Walls: Sally is feeling bored. She wants to go outside for a while. Before stepping out, she puts her marble inside this toy basket beside her bed—like this. She covers the basket with a cloth and then off she goes. Clop, clop, clop. While she is outside, Anne walks over to Sally’s bed and takes the marble from the basket. She replaces the cloth, and then hides the marble in her own desk.
RP06: Is Anne a bad person?
Walls: I wouldn’t call her bad. She’s a bit naughty, that’s all.
RP06: Isn’t being naughty bad?
Walls: Sometimes, yes.
RP06: Is being naughty good at other times?
Walls: It’s not exactly good. Being naughty doesn’t automatically make you a bad person. All children are naughty at times. It’s bad if you are naughty all the time.
RP06: So it is alright if I’m naughty sometimes, but not all the time. I haven’t been naughty all day yesterday. That means it was okay for me to be naughty earlier today.
Walls: Look, it isn’t—
Schulz: Raphael, we’ll discuss this another time. Let’s get back to Sally and Anne.
Walls: Uh, yes, Sally and Anne… Where was I? Sally has finished her walk and is now home. She wants to play with her marble. Where will she look for it, Raphael?
RP06: Are Sally and Anne good friends, Dr. Walls?
Schulz: Just answer the question, Raphael.
Walls: It’s okay. Yes Raphael, they are good friends.
RP06: Have they been friends for long?
Walls: Yes. They’ve been friends for a long time.
RP06: Is Sally a kind person?
Walls: (Laughs) Sure. Sally is a good, kind person. Anything else you want to know about them? Now tell us, where will Sally look for the marble?
RP06: She won’t look for it.
Walls: I’m sorry, can you say that again?
RP06: Sally will not look for the marble.
Walls: I don’t think you understand. Sally is now home. She wants to play with the marble. Why won’t she look for it?
RP06: Because Sally is a kind person. Sally and Anne have been friends for long, so Sally knows Anne is naughty. Sally sees that the cloth on the basket has been moved—its position doesn’t match the earlier pattern stored in her memory. She knows that if she looks for the marble in the toy box, she may not find it there and then she would have to ask Anne where it is and Anne would lie because she’s the one who took it and Sally would have to keep searching and when she finally finds it in Anne’s drawer, Anne will feel embarrassed and unhappy. Sally is a kind person. She does not want to make Anne unhappy. So she’ll not look for the marble. She knows Anne will return it later because Anne is not a bad person. She’s just a bit naughty, that’s all.
