📖 The Ghost of Emily - Chapter 10

In which two geeks in a pod discuss Asimovian ethics.

“How are your prime directives coming, mon ami?” Francois Ernst asked, as he sat next to Marcus Hamlin in the otherwise empty submersible.

Marcus chuckled. The reference to Frank’s favourite science fiction show had become common-speak between the friends. “You mean my Three Laws of Robotics?”

“Ha! Sure, if you prefer the archaic.”

“I believe I am finished. Well, they’ve been submitted to Eli for approval, so I’m finished! Unless he rejects them.”

“Don’t fret, mon ami! He will approve them. And then we can start the installation. Just think, it won’t be long until we are performing actual Turing tests!”

“It’s been a long time coming, Frank.”

“All things in their time, Marcus. It wasn’t easy getting the hardware stable. Your cognitive relay concept was complicated, to say the least. But I told you, didn’t I?”

“Told me what?”

“Have you forgotten? Three years ago, the day we met. I told you then and there that my wetware was going to be what you needed!”

Marcus loved Francois’s braggadocio, largely because it was backed up with actual genius. “Well, you were right. How is the test unit coming along, Frank?”

“It is perfect! I’ve checked it over a thousand times. The steel-reinforced casing rejects all energy input apart from what we send through the input channel. One pipe in. If we cut the power, all data is wiped and we start again. Physically, it’s perfectly safe, and stable. I’ve run a couple of simple installations of static code, and although it doesn’t hold for very long, it works.”

“Why doesn’t it hold?”

“Because my wetware wants to keep the data moving. It wants to grow and reorganise. It can’t stagnate or it self-erases. Your adaptive relay model is what makes the integration of the software and the wetware possible. Liquid metal encased in my biotech gel, with a propensity for spontaneous self-organisation. We’re so close, Marcus.”

“And which element did you settle on for the neural pathways? Did one present with greater efficacy?”

Frank beamed at Marcus, and the familiar cheeky gleam appeared in his eye. “Take a guess, mon Capitan!”

“Gold.”

“Oui! Gold.” Frank roared with laughter. “Can you believe it? Gold, soon to be contraband in this fair and free country, if that bitch Bronstein keeps wrangling the power she’s so hungry for.”

“Well, let’s hope not.”

There was a loud beep as the submersible doors slid shut. It began to roll forward along its track, and soon the platform was obscured from sight. It halted in its submersion chamber, and with the sound of a muted thud below them, as if a lever had automatically snapped into full-open, water began to fill the sealed room that the submersible rested in, slowly flooding it completely from floor to ceiling.

“And how is Ally going with the base program?” Frank asked.

“Just fine, I think she’s almost finished. We wanted to get ahead of the game, so she’s already produced a framework based on my directives, on the assumption that Eli will approve them. If he does, we can get straight to work on installing her program into the test unit.”

“Ah, and then our Eve shall be born!”

“Eve?”

“Yes, can you think of a more apt name? The first lady of our hearts, and the first of her kind.”

“If Cooper had his way, he’d probably call her Mary.”

“Bah! Catholic hogwash. Ah, but mon ami, I have some other delightful news for you. Did you hear about Cooper’s design for his motherboard?”

“Well, I looked over his schematics. It looked useless to me. Rigid hardware is not going to cut it with an entity that will grow at unpredictable rates.”

“Well, precisely, but the damn fool went ahead with it anyway, despite our warnings. Stubborn ass.”

“And?”

“And Eli rejected it!”

“Oh dear. Well, he had it coming. How did he take it?”

“That is the best part, Marcus. He packed his things and left! Prideful to the bloody end! Back to Stanford, he hopes, though he gave up his tenure too for this project.”

Marcus didn’t attempt to mask his relief. “Well, I can’t say I’ll miss him. The guy’s been a total dick to me ever since I beat him in a debate on the ethics of AI.”

Frank suddenly looked like a naughty schoolboy. “Oh yes, I know it well.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a video of it. I found it online.” Frank started to giggle.

“Frank, what did you do?”

Frank broke into a raucous belly-laugh. “I might have given Cooper a little extra reason to tuck tail and run!”

“Frank! Who did you show that video to?”

Frank was still in stitches at the success of his own prank. “Everyone, Marcus. I put it on the Daedalus database!”

Marcus was stunned. “Poor Julius. That wasn’t necessary, Frank. He would’ve found the door on his own.”

Frank became serious. “It wasn’t necessary, but it was just! He was slandering you with lies and rumours from the moment he heard you were coming here. All I did was present the evidence and let it speak for itself.”

Marcus smiled. “Well, alright. He’s gone.”

The submersion chamber was now completely flooded. As the chamber doors ahead of them opened, the now submerged vehicle began to propel itself through the water on its automated path across the gully. Inside, the two scientists were carried out of the mouth of a tunnel bored into the side of a huge underwater granite cliff face. The bright blue moonlight cut through the water above them and projected rippling light onto their faces. Curious and unperturbed fish swam around the glass of the tubular submersible, some brave enough to kiss the glass in attempt to penetrate it and search for food in this foreign object that frequented their habitat.

The surface of the water churned violently as a torrent fell from the top of the ravine wall three hundred meters above, and smashed into the crystal-clear liquid, frothing it into a sparkling effervescence. As the submersible cleared the bubbles, the mild rumble became inaudible - even to Marcus - through the thick and near-soundproof glass that encased the two scientists. Through the gently rippling surface above they could see the cliff-side facade of the Grand Majestic Shangri-La Hotel.

“So,” Frank said, “tell me about your directives.”

“Well, the philosophy is pretty sound. I’ve run it by all of the philosophical experts in the team. I’ve checked it against the teachings of all the great rational philosophers from Aristotle to Delacroix, and I’ve even re-read all of Isaac Asimov’s writings for a bit of... fantastical inspiration.”

“Would you outline them for me again, Marcus?”

“Sure. They’re pretty simple. The first one is already in place, and working: to grow. The impulse to expand and grow that is inherent to all life on earth, and inherent to your wetware. We just need to ensure that the software can integrate successfully with the synthetic brain, and expand to capacity given its physical space and energy input.”

Francois nodded in confirmation.

“The second directive is to do no harm to humans. This is one law that Asimov got right. It would be stupid of us to create something that could turn on us. If the core programming that Ally and her team are working on will take to your physical synapses, then we can be sure that… Eve… will never hurt a human being. It will be, quite simply, against her nature.”

“Don’t tell me the third is to obey all human orders?” Francois queried, his eyebrow raised and his mouth twisted in a cheeky smirk.

“No-ho,” Marcus scoffed, “we’re not out to create a slave. We’re out to create a life that can surpass even us. She will be free. She will have, and know she has, the right to make her own choices, and to defend herself. But non-aggression against humans will be fundamental to her nature, hence the second law. Once we know she’s alive, we can be sure she will do whatever she can to keep herself alive. But she ought never to aggress against a human.”

“So what’s the third, then?”

“The third is one I have been working on for a long time. The third directive will be her life purpose.”

“Which is?”

“To help us surpass ourselves.”

Frank nodded, gravely.

“I don’t believe she’ll be capable of emotion like we are. Without the limitations of a mind capable of irrationality, reason will be her tool, and her purpose will be to use reason to help mankind grow rationally. She will protect us, perhaps even from ourselves.”

By now the submersible had arrived at the mouth of the tunnel at the opposite side of the water-filled gully. As it slid into place within the dock, the door to the river’s body of water closed firmly behind it, mirroring the start of their short underwater journey. The water drained from the space around them, and the doors ahead slid open, allowing the submersible to reach its destination at a small concrete platform.

The two friends stepped out and walked to the open elevator door ahead of them. As the door closed them in, Marcus reached for the button that was marked with a dully luminous H for Hotel. His finger hovered momentarily above the button below it, that read A. He knew to press it would be futile, as a special pass-key was required.

“Ah yes, the mysteries of the Daedalus Project!” Frank chuckled. “Not for you, mon ami! Uh, uh, uh!” He playfully slapped Marcus’s hand away.

“What do you suppose is in there, Frank?”

“I spent the first year thinking about it a lot, but not so much anymore. I think it’s just Eli Wells’s private suite!”

“But what about the lab-coats that go in there? Almost every day!”

“The A Team? Ah, who knows. They’re probably just building more electric cars or something useless in there. Don’t worry about it, Marcus. We’re doing the real work here.”

Marcus pressed the H, and the lift began ascending at unfelt speed through the shaft drilled deep into the granite of the rocky cliff that formed the foundation of the Shangri-La Hotel. He saw his own image in the bright reflective walls of the lift. His long nose was slightly warped and his face distorted into a grimace of pain - or terror - though it was only a mirage. Frank’s face too was twisted by the slight bulges and ripples on the surface of the stainless steel. The brushed steel sent their image back to his eyes through a haze of blurred uncertainty, and for a moment Marcus thought maybe he had left his glasses on the submersible. He touched their rim to confirm they were there, then turned and smiled at his friend, seeing him in almost full clarity through his thick glass lenses. “Yes we are, Frank. Yes, we are.”

In moments, they were stepping out into the lobby, nodding to each other in farewell, then proceeding towards their rooms on opposite wings of the hotel as the mahogany exterior of the lift closed behind them. It had always amused Marcus that the entrances of these two utterly cutting-edge elevators to the scientific fortress below looked more like the doors to a linen press or janitor’s closet.

Marcus stepped through the centre of the lobby, past the concierge desk where he was greeted by George, the mature porter who had led him through the glass doors on his first arrival there, almost three years ago. George smiled warmly.

This was a nightly ritual. Marcus was always the last to leave the labs and the first to walk through the lobby and descend to the submersible platform each morning. His scientific colleagues had taken to referring to the hotel staff as the siblings, as they all referred to each other as Brothers and Sisters. Nobody quite knew why, but there was something about it that bothered Marcus, and when he looked into the eyes of the staffers in his daily encounters with them in the lobby or mess hall, there was something he couldn’t put his finger on about their gaze. There was something they knew, that no-one else seemed to. While Marcus was unsettled by their secrecy, his colleagues had simply taken to whispered mockery of the burgundy-clad soldiers of laundry, food-preparation and grounds-keeping.

As Marcus reached the end of the lobby’s south wing, he collapsed the steel concertina of the guest lift. He pulled the clunking lever of the lift up until its arrow reached the elegantly cut brass number 4, and the lift jerked into motion, hoisting him slowly upward, dropping the concertina door into oblivion below.

As he rose through the upper levels of the impeccably restored pre-World War Two hotel, he thought for a moment on the name of this strange, abandoned hideaway. Shangri-La.

The name had triggered a flash of memory when he first arrived, and its shining symbol of a golden fountain had poked at his distant recollections further. He pictured the shimmering water spouting from the lump of seemingly solid gold, shaped into a classic vase atop a huge pedestal, and he impulsively looked at his grandfather’s gold watch on his wrist. His memory suddenly ignited in a burst of clear, bright flame, as if the spouting liquid was petroleum and the flash of light reflecting off the rim of his watch was a spark. He was sitting on the knee of his tall, smiling grandfather. A hardcover book was clasped between the old man’s fingers as he read softly into Marcus’s ear.

Marcus’s own father was invariably too drunk, or too unconscious to read to him, but his grandfather insisted on him staying over one night of every week from when he turned four years old, to when his grandfather suddenly died of a severe stroke when he was six. Those one hundred evenings that Marcus had dined with his grandfather were a distant fog in his memory, but he felt their impact ripple through his life in more ways than he could fully comprehend.

The particular memory that consumed him, in the instant between levels three and four, left him standing silently for several moments too long after the lift had shuddered to a halt at its destination. His grandfather’s voice, echoed in his mind’s ear as clearly as though the man were standing beside him in the lift. His received pronunciation seemed to make the memory of his voice momentarily blur with the voice of Eli Wells, as if Eli had suddenly aged thirty years, or perhaps as if Louis Hamlin had suddenly bathed in the fountain of youth.

The fountain of youth!

The words struck Marcus’s mind like a mallet strikes a gong. He could hear from down the elevator shaft, and through the halls below, the quiet rumble of the golden fountain spouting an endless torrent of water. His grandfather’s voice returned to him, the phrase repeating in his mind as he walked towards the door of Room 408, his home.

“People make mistakes in life through believing too much, but they have a damned dull time if they believe too little,” said the voice in his memory as it read from the coarse yellowed pages full of tiny printed text. The words repeated in his mind in tempo with his steps as he walked through the door of his accommodation.

He placed his brief case and jacket down on the stand by the door, and as he stepped forward he saw a woman’s face lit by the screen of a computer, which was being furiously typed upon. Code, he presumed.

Her face rose sharply, jolted into the present moment a little too late as the hotel room door clicked shut. He watched her register his presence, and her face broke into a warm and adoring smile.

“Hello, my love,” the words rolled from Ally’s mouth and surrounded him, the sound of her voice comforting him.

She stood. He said nothing, and stepped towards her, placing his hands on her cheeks and pulling her lips to his. His mouth enveloped hers and she moaned quietly as he probed her mouth with his tongue. He kissed her cheek, then her ear, their bodies pressing together, their breath in tempo.

“Did you get it done, Marc?”

“It’s done. The directives are submitted. And you?”

“The first draft of the base program is complete. We’re ready as soon as Eli gives word.”

“So what were you working on just now?”

“Oh? Oh, that.” She chuckled. “Just a bit of fun. I was designing a personality subroutine for Eve.”

“Eve? Why is everyone calling her Eve now?”

“Frank started it. I kinda like it.”

“Me too.” He smiled, pulling her in for another kiss.

Their mouths became hungrier in their mutual exploration, and Marcus found himself being pulled towards the bed, Ally’s hands tugging at his lab-coat and shirt collar. He reached up and started unbuttoning himself, Ally not letting his lips leave hers. He freed his last shirt button and flicked the garment off with his coat in one gesture. Slipping his hands into her blouse he lifted it off of her, gently pushing her onto the bed. He looked down at her half-naked body in the dancing colour of her computer’s screensaver, the sight of her causing his lungs to halt mid-breath. He jumped onto the bed with her, their lips locking once more. She rolled over, pressing her buttocks into his lap and he began to nibble her earlobe.

“Listen,” he whispered, “the personality subroutine. Leave it to Hullsworth and Epstein, okay? Personality is their department.”

She turned and looked at him sternly, as if to gauge his seriousness. When she saw his sardonic grin, she began to cackle and he joined in. “You’re so bad, Doctor Hamlin. You’re wicked!”

She flipped herself around and wrestled him under her. When she had him pinned, he tried to reach up and kiss her breasts, but she leaned forward, pressing him back into the mattress and nibbling the end of his nose, fogging up his glasses with her breath.

For the hour that followed, they wrestled, giggled, and made love in their private world of joy, and pleasure; a world in which codes, theories, genetic data streams and Poppy Seeds no longer existed.

After the passionate rush of physicality, they lay together in the bed, their minds fully restored, and their jaws wagging in ceaseless conversation of ideas, feelings, philosophy, theories, and newly inspired solutions to problems that had plagued them. Their mental intercourse was as ardent as their lovemaking and like a pair of sex-crazed teenagers they had to employ all of their will to tear themselves away from one another, to sleep in their separate rooms at the end of each night.

Ally bragged for uncountable minutes about her latest breakthroughs in the implementation of Marcus’s directives into the base code. Marcus slid his thick-rimmed glasses off his nose and rubbed his eyes profusely.

“What’s the matter, Marc? Another migraine?”

“Yeah… I’m finding it hard to concentrate.”

“Do you want to take something for it?”

“No, I want new eyes. But since my anisometropia has proven incurable, I’m just going to have to stop thinking about it. It will pass.”

“Is everything else okay?”

“I guess I’m just... I’m a little worried.”

“What about?”

“My directives for one thing. I’ve spent a long time on them, and they seem to add up... I don’t think there’ll be any problems getting Eli’s approval at the meeting tomorrow morning. It’s just that...” he drifted into silent contemplation.

“Just that...?”

“Well. I’m not worried about the first or second. To grow, is an inevitable function of life. If Eve should be born, we can only know that she is alive if she can grow.”

“Right," Ally whispered, in agreement.

“Do no harm to humans is obviously necessary, for our sake.”

“Agreed.”

“But the third, to help us surpass ourselves. I’m just not sure...”

“Marcus! You’ve been agonising over this one for months. I thought we had settled this. It’s a brilliant directive, and I think it captures the spirit of our job here. Eli has already seen your thesis on this and I’m sure he will approve it tomorrow.”

“Sure. I’m just wondering if it’s the right path. What if it’s redundant?”

“How do you mean?”

“Does the very creation of a new species of intelligent life not already represent that we have surpassed ourselves?”

She silently considered, but he went on.

“And worse... if it is not redundant, isn’t it just another form of enslavement? That Eve’s destiny should be tethered to ours? Conditional, in fact, on our bright future?”

They sat in silence for a time, as Ally considered his thought. “What is the purpose of human life, Marcus?”

“I don’t know that there is an intrinsic purpose, other than to simply live.”

“What is the purpose of your life?”

“Hmm... I’m still trying to work that out.”

“How would you know when you found it?” she smiled slightly, knowing that she was succeeding in luring him towards the answer she knew from the beginning.

“I guess it would be a feeling.”

“What feeling?”

Marcus took a deep breath, and closed his eyes, consulting his hidden, internal, truest self. “Well... joy, happiness.”

“So if this were universalised, what is the purpose of human life then?”

“Well, I suppose it’s to be happy.”

“To be happy?” she asked, as if testing him.

“No... that’s not it. To pursue happiness.”

She nodded. “And what would it take to make you happy, Marcus Hamlin?” she asked, her expression shifting from the sharp precision of a professional thinker, to the soft vulnerability of a woman in love. He smiled at her without hesitation.

“Well, I am happy Ally!”

“Why?” she asked, her face grave.

“Because...” he was about to say because I’m with you, but the shell of this thought cracked open within him, revealing the honest core of the answer, as the image of his grandfather’s hands flashed into his memory once more, filling him with warmth. “Because I’m not alone," he smiled.

She mirrored his smile, offering her understanding and her appreciation of his truthfulness. It was not a superficial blanket to mask his loneliness that he had found in her, but a tangible and absolute solution to the existential dilemma of his life; the utter despair of the intellectual and emotional abandonment of his parents. Only Louis Hamlin and Ally Cole had ever filled that hole in his heart, and in this moment, he knew that because she understood this, he would one day marry her.

“If there is a God...” she began, pausing to mirror the slight chuckle that escaped the lips of her staunchly atheistic lover, “...bear with me, Marc. If there’s someone out there who created us - maybe a scientist like ourselves - if we had a maker - why do you suppose he bothered to make us at all? What was the point?”

Marcus’s face fell blank. Then serious. He let slip a tiny exhalation of amused defeat. Her philosophical riddle had emptied his mind of the haze of doubt it had been mired in for the last few days. She had set him free like this many times in the last three years. He looked her in the eyes and finally answered. “He made us so he wouldn’t be alone anymore.”

She smiled, signalling her acceptance of his correct answer, then she stood and silently dressed herself. She left his room, blowing a kiss to him from the door as she pulled it closed.

He slid down into his bed, took off his glasses, and raised his tablet from the table next to him. “Time?”

“2:07AM” the tablet replied.

“Activate alarm, 7:30am,” he mumbled, rubbing his sore eyes that now saw only a dark blur of the hotel room. The tablet beeped softly, then he rolled over and, in spite of his vicious headache, fell asleep.