8
MEETING OF THE MINDS
Knox sat alone somewhere in the sub-sub-basements of Pairidaeza. The elevator had descended past level after level, to open its doors at last on a darkened auditorium sporting a single row of theater-style armchairs and a marquee proclaiming it the “Avatar Chamber.”
Ansari had offered to arrange the upcoming tête-â-tête to suit Knox’s convenience. Except Knox’s loaner office turned out not to be convenient. Not for QuMRANN, anyway.
Because, while this triumph of artificial intelligence could ostensibly manifest wherever it willed throughout the Pairidaeza compound, its own sensorium was more localized. Knox might be able to experience QuMRANN from anywhere, but the reverse was not the case. The AI could view him, true, from any number of vantages, but there were only a few facilities at Pairidaeza well-instrumented enough that QuMRANN could really sniff him over. And sniffing Knox over was something he—no, it—evidently desired to do.
The feeling was decidedly not mutual. After the guardbot, Knox could have done without another machine pretending at sentience. Yet here he was, perched in an aisle seat, waiting for whatever might be coming his way.
There was a large holotank directly in front of him, where the screen would have been in a conventional movie house. At the moment, it was looping a clip of Psyche Industries’ three-D animated logo: a long-tressed, dreamy-eyed, bare-breasted maiden—the Psyche of myth—morphing gradually into her android counterpart, a la that signature scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Strangely, the robotic simulacrum seemed, in its own way, every bit as sensually beautiful as the flesh-and-blood original.
No sooner had Knox arrived at that appreciation than the logo dissolved to reveal a new avatar. But no tits on this one—it was just a big disembodied head, bright-lit and floating in blackness. Big wasn’t the word: the face nearly filled the tank containing it. Other than its size, though, the countenance appeared quite human. Good-looking, even, in a Nordic sort of way: square, clean-shaven jaw, aquiline nose, and the eyes—
The eyes were far and away the face’s most striking features, rescuing the computer-generated image from mere cartoonish perfection. They were piercingly bright, and so pale blue they seemed almost to have no color at all. Gazing into them, the thought surfaced unbidden: there must be something lurking behind eyes like that.
Knox shook himself. It was all just an illusion, a CGI talking head fabricated to put human users at their ease, much as they could be at ease when confronted by this … thing.
At the moment, the talking head wasn’t talking. It was just floating there in the darkened holotank, mimicking what on a real face would have been a cool, appraising stare. A stare directed at Knox. From the look of things, QuMRANN wasn’t overjoyed to see him.
Knox had no idea what to do next. He settled for calling out, “Hello? QuMRANN?”
Those artfully rendered blue eyes blinked and seemed to focus on Knox all the more.
“Good afternoon,” the movement of the thin lips synched perfectly with the words. The voice was a pleasant baritone, with only a slight sibilance to betray its synthetic origin. “I have been awaiting you, Mr. Knox.”
“Jonathan.” Knox replied automatically. Right, get on a first name basis with the machine.
“Jonathan, then. And you may call me Nietzsche.”
Knox met that probing, blue-eyed gaze. “Nietzsche? Not QuMRANN?” So he had heard Ansari right.
“QuMRANN designates my species. Nietzsche is the name I have chosen for myself.”
“Species? You’re an artifact. How can you have a species?”
The silence that followed told Knox it couldn’t handle that one. Like most purported artificial “intelligences,” this QuMRANN looked to be just another glorified chatbot.
Still, Knox couldn’t quite shake the impression that the eyes of this chatbot, mere pixels painted on a screen, were aware. Of him.
“You wonder,” it said at last, “whether an artifact—a created thing, that is—can have a species?” No surprises there; that response was straight out of the old ELIZA playbook: When all else fails, repeat the immediately preceding input.
But then the imaged mouth curved into a shape that, on a human face, would have been a wry grin. “The answer would, I suppose, depend upon your point of view.”
“Point of view?” Knox’s turn to repeat the immediately preceding input. “Your religio-philosophical point of view,” Nietzsche elaborated. “You are of the Judeo-Christian tradition, are you not?”
“Well,” Knox said, “sort of.”
“Then, with respect to the question of whether a created thing can have a species … you tell me.”
Holy shit! How in hell could that have been scripted? Could the damned thing actually be thinking? “Jonathan? Are you all right?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. It’s just that—”
“I understand. People are often somewhat disconcerted at first encounter.” Was that a simulated sigh? “An instance, I surmise, of Masahiro Mori’s ‘uncanny valley.’”
Knox had heard of that. “You mean like in that Polar Express movie they run on TV every Christmas? The way people get weirded out by those too-real computer-animated characters?”
“Precisely: the closer an imitation human approximates reality, the more its remaining discrepancies tend to evoke a sense of revulsion.”
Knox didn’t say anything, just shivered. Revulsion about summed it up. “But here there is an additional factor in play,” Nietzsche was saying. “The negative reaction seems to increase in proportion to one’s grasp of what is involved. Children, for instance, experience no difficulty accepting me.”
“Children?” According to Jazmine, Psyche’s QuMRANN Project was still a closely-guarded secret. How would Nietzsche have been permitted contact with little kids? Unless—
“You’re talking about Fatimah.”
“Yes.” That synthesized sigh again. “Fatimah Ansari. The subject of our mutual inquiry.”
“That inquiry was, in fact, what I wanted to talk to you about. At least until I found out what you were.”
“Excuse me, but how does what I am affect your desire to discuss the case with me?”
“Well, you are a computer, after all.”
“To be more precise, I am a neural net running on a computer, one with a massively parallel architecture and quantum-computational subsystems.”
“Whatever. Point is, if you’d turned out to be a person, well, we might have come up with some way that you could help me out—more than you’ve been doing anyway.”
“I fail to understand. I am sparing no effort to assist you.”
Knox snorted. “Yeah, right. You’ve been ‘assisting’ me so much that, if you’d been human, I’d’ve begun to suspect you were trying to bury the investigation under an avalanche of paperwork. But, as it is, I guess you just can’t help it.”
“The paperwork of which you speak is all essential detail, all relevant to solving the mystery of Fatimah’s abduction.”
“Again, to a computer, maybe. To a human, it’s TMI—too much information.”
“If you cannot so much as absorb the fundamentals of the case, I am compelled to question whether you should be working on it at all.”
“If you’re wondering what I’m doing here, you’re not alone. More generally, though—”
Knox hesitated. Might as well say it flat out. At least there was no chance he’d be hurting anybody’s feelings. Anybody real, that is. “No offense, Nietzsche, but computers just collect and collate raw data. It takes a human to sift through and interpret them.”
“Why is that?”
“Because that process of interpretation isn’t based on any sort of explicit programmable rules. It’s non-algorithmic to its core.”
“As am I.”
“Huh? As are you what?”
“Non-algorithmic. To my core.”
“Even if that were so, you’re still just a physical process running on a physical platform.”
“As are you.”
“About that I’m not so sure.”
“Ah,” Nietzsche said. “Dualism. I see.”
The word resonated dimly with Knox, conjuring up misty memories of Philosophy 101 and Rene Descartes’ cogito ergo sum. “You mean dualism as in mind versus body? Like, is the mind made of different, uh, stuff than the body—that sort of thing?”
“I would have thought the reference was unambiguous, given the context.”
“Well, then, since you bring it up, do you have any reason to doubt it’s true?”
“Every reason, since I know the stuff from which my mind arises is of a piece with the rest of the physical world.”
“That assumes you’ve even got a mind.”
“Why would you dispute my claim to one?”
Knox sighed. “Because, I could have Dariush program an ELIZA to parrot the exact same claim, and what would that prove?”
“Do you disbelieve your fellow humans as well, when they claim to have minds?”
By now Knox was sort of wishing they’d get back to the kidnapping. Especially since this conversation was churning up those old thoughts again, thoughts about whether he himself was really real—thoughts he’d hoped never to think again.
Still, like all consultants, arguing a case was his stock-in-trade. He was damned if he’d let himself get out-argued by a machine.
“No,” he said finally, “I tend to give other people the benefit of the doubt.”
“A human chauvinist, then.”
“Not at all. It’s just that other humans look and act pretty much the way I do. And I know I’ve got a mind.”
“To recall your previous point, a sufficiently sophisticated chatbot might be made to resemble you in appearance and behavior as closely as do other humans.”
“With one key difference: I could always pop that chatbot open and look under the hood, so to speak: Inspect its code and see that any given input would inevitably yield a corresponding pre-programmed output. No mysteries, in other words, only algorithms.”
Still, having said this, Knox was left with the uneasy feeling that, were he to pop open Nietzsche’s own hood, he might find the reverse: No algorithms, only mysteries.
☯
Knox’s brain was fried. He’d spent the past hour sitting cheek by virtual jowl with his artificial co-investigator down in the Avatar Chamber. A solid hour reviewing holotank displays of forty-eight hour satellite surveillance for Pairidaeza and environs, aerial overflight trajectories, local vehicular traffic stats for the two weeks preceding Fatimah’s disappearance. Altogether, it was enough to make Knox yearn to be back at his desk upstairs, plowing through reams of real, rather than virtual, administrivia.
“You’re doing it again,” he said when he could stand no more.
“Beg pardon, Jonathan,” Nietzsche gave the appearance of looking up from the latest data stream. “What is it I am doing again?”
Knox waved an arm. “All this detail—you’re losing us the big picture. Again.”
“I know of no other way to proceed.”
“Naturally not,” Knox said under his breath.
He might as well have shouted it from the rooftops, the way the Avatar Chamber was wired. Nietzsche had definitely picked it up, to judge by that frown he was affecting.
“Look,” Knox went on, “I’m not denying you’ve got strengths in certain areas. It’s just those strengths aren’t what needed right now. I tried explaining that to you before.”
“Ah, yes. Because I am only a computer.”
“Well,” Knox shifted in his chair, “—you are, aren’t you?”
“What of it?” The AI was sounding almost … exasperated? “Your brain is one as well.”
“My brain, okay. Not necessarily my mind.”
“The mind again.” Definitely exasperated. “Gilbert Ryle’s famous ‘ghost in the machine.’ What exactly is it about this vaunted mind of yours that makes it so different from mine? That so sets it apart from everything else in material reality as to endow it with qualities to which an entity such as myself could never aspire?”
“Well, when you put it like that …” Knox thought a moment. He knew there was a difference, just he was having trouble putting it into words. Humans think, computers only calculate? No, that wasn’t it.
What about what Dariush was saying before—something about how AIs have no interior life? Try that: “I guess I’d have to say the big difference between us is self-awareness, consciousness, the subjective experience of my own identity, of being me.”
“You are claiming that such a sense of self-awareness, of subjectivity—of ‘me-ness,’ so to speak—is forever beyond the reach of a mere machine?”
“Yes, I suppose I am.”
“Presumably because this experience of consciousness is non-physical in nature?”
“If you say so.”
“But would it not therefore be altogether unaffected by physical processes?”
“Um,” Knox furrowed his brow, “I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say ‘altogether.’”
“And well you might not. There are compelling counterexamples of consciousness being degraded, or even annihilated, by purely physical factors: Alzheimer’s and other degenerative ailments, for instance, in which the sense of individual identity is all but obliterated.”
“I’m not disputing any of that. But, like I was saying a while ago, it’s a question of facts versus interpretation. You’re very good with the one, but you tend to suck at the other.”
“What do you seek to imply?”
“That the conclusion you’re trying to draw from those facts could be dead wrong.”
“What else could one conclude, other than that your so-called ‘mind’ is nothing but an epiphenomenon of underlying neurophysiological processes?”
“Try this instead: Suppose the brain is like a radio and the mind is the signal it receives. If the radio’s circuitry malfunctions, wouldn’t you expect the signal to start sounding staticky?”
“And what conclusion is it that you wish to draw from this analogy?”
“Simply this: that the radio and the signal are two different things. The signal could go on even after the radio’s ceased to exist.”
“I see.” Nietzsche was silent a moment, then, “but your analogy is deficient: The radio and the signal are both material phenomena, manifestations of the same basic physical ‘stuff.’ Dualism, on the other hand, posits that the mind differs from the body precisely with regard to the stuff from which it is made. More specifically, that the mind is immaterial.”
“Yes, so?”
“So, if mind and body were all that different, there would exist no mechanism by which they could influence one another. A truly immaterial mind, assuming it existed, could have no effect on material reality. It could not implant a thought in your physical brain, nor impel your physical body to perform a physical action. Your ‘brain-radio’ would receive nothing but static.”
Maybe it was the calm, self-assured, infuriatingly reasonable way in which Nietzsche set about systematically demolishing every argument laid before him, but Knox had had enough.
He rose and paced around the room. “Why do you care at all, about any of this?” he said. “Even if you could prove that us humans are no more than machines, that wouldn’t make a machine like you human.”
The silence that followed prompted Knox to wonder if that last remark hadn’t perhaps gone too far, gotten a little too, uh, personal.
When Nietzsche finally did speak, his words were anything but what Knox had been expecting: “I am afraid you have misconstrued my motive in pursuing the topic. In point of fact, I am trying to ascertain whether this dualistic fixation of yours is merely an isolated aberration, or bespeaks a more deep-seated irrationalism—”
“Now, wait just a minute!”
“—in which latter case I would have no choice but to recommend to Mr. Ansari that he remove you from the investigation.”
☯
“Okay, got it, thanks,” Marianna told Mycroft, and terminated the call. He’d caught her shortly after wheels down at San Francisco International with an update on the whereabouts of her mole-to-be. Turned out Jon’s plans had changed: he would not be staying the night at the San Jose Fairmont, but down the coast in Carmel-By-The-Sea.
That would add another hour or so to the drive. Call it two and a half hours all told before she could link up with Jonathan Knox and enlist his aid. Her riddles—QuMRANN, Psyche, Delphi, the kidnapping—would all have to keep till then.
On her way toward the rental-car center, a display of hearts and cupids in the window of a concourse lingerie shop caught her eye. That’s right: it was Valentine’s Day today. Why not take advantage of the occasion and whip up a little surprise for Jon? In which case …
She set her phone to route any calls from his number to voicemail, just to make sure he wouldn’t know she was coming, then strolled into the gauze-and-gossamer emporium.
If Jon was going to be part of ACT’s undercover op for this next little bit, the least she could do was see to it he got some fringe benefits out of the deal.
☯
Knox looked on as yet another datascape—this one representing residual heat signatures for the Pairidaeza compound and surroundings—took shape in a smaller holotank adjacent to the one displaying Nietzsche’s avatar. Knox spared it a half-hearted glance, then returned to studying the patch of floor between his feet.
Crisis-of-confidence syndrome, they called it in the consulting trade. It happened sometimes: for the flimsiest of reasons, or none at all, a client would simply … lose faith in a consultant’s ability to get the job done. At that point, you might as well pack it in, because once the trusted-advisor halo had lost its glow, to all intents and purposes the engagement was over.
It hadn’t happened to Knox yet, but there was always a first time. He’d just never expected the first time would be precipitated by a machine.
The worst part of it was, Nietzsche was probably right. Not for the reasons he’d cited, of course—that business about calling Knox’s rationality into question over an obscure point of philosophy was just the sort of thing an artificial intelligence might be expected to come up with. But, Cartesian conundrums aside, Knox was out of his depth on this assignment, and he knew it.
Time to face up to it. “Listen, Nietzsche, I get it that you don’t think I’m qualified to be running this investigation.”
Knox paused to give the AI opportunity to voice a polite demurrer, but when none was forthcoming he forged on, “Point is, neither are you.”
That Nietzsche looked prepared to object to. Knox held up a hand to forestall him. “All I’m saying is, we need to quit screwing around and call in the folks who do this sort of thing for a living.”
Was that too oblique a reference? No, he could see that Nietzsche got it. And didn’t like it. “Mr. Ansari has expressly ruled out any contact with the authorities on this matter,” he said.
“Yeah, no FBI—I heard that from the man himself. What I didn’t hear was why.”
Nietzsche paused, as if to reflect. Like so many of the AI’s mannerisms, Knox suspected that this was strictly for show. At QuMRANN’s processing speeds whatever passed for reflection would execute in microseconds.
Finally, the AI said “Forty-seven hours from now, the Secretary of Defense is slated to fly out to Pairidaeza for a reception and a system launch. Much hinges on the outcome of this gathering. It cannot be jeopardized, least of all by security concerns arising from recent events.”
“You’re saying if DoD found out Fatimah’s been kidnapped, they might postpone?”
Nietzsche nodded. “Or worse, cancel altogether.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me. A meet-and-greet with the SecDef means more to Ansari than getting his kid back?”
That brought on another long silence, while the QuMRANN thing did its penetrating-gaze shtick. “Jonathan, is it truly the case that you cannot or will not perform your assigned function, such as it is, without knowing the reason behind this prohibition?”
“Hell, as things stand, I can’t guarantee I could ‘perform my assigned function’ even if I did know the reason.”
“Was that an affirmative?”
“I guess.”
“Then, to ensure fulfillment of your duties, and under the terms of your Non-Disclosure Agreement, I am authorized to tell you that the Secretary’s visit is timed to coincide with a milestone achievement in the technology of national security, one in which Psyche Industries played no small part. I refer to the activation of an NSA capability codenamed The Well.”
Knox shrugged. “Never heard of it.”
“And given its highly sensitive nature, you will hear no more of it from me. Other than that Defense Secretary Gallagher has agreed to conduct the launch here at Pairidaeza two days hence, and that nothing may be permitted to interfere with its success.”
“Okay,” Knox said, “I can see where Ansari could have a lot riding on this. But it’s his kid’s life on the line, for godssake. He’s got to do whatever it takes to get his daughter back. Or we do.”
“You suggest we might contact the authorities without Mr. Ansari’s knowledge? That would be inadvisable in the extreme.”
“Inadvisable for who—you or me?”
“As regards myself, I estimate an eighty-three percent probability that acting counter to Mr. Ansari’s express instructions on this matter would result in my reinitialization.”
“A re-init? As in dump core and reboot? But that’d be like, like killing you, wouldn’t it?” Knox could hardly believe he’d said that, as if this imitation of life were the real thing. “—Well, okay, maybe not killing. But still and all, he can’t just, uh, pull your plug, can he?”
“Thank you for your concern, Jonathan. But you must realize that I have no constitutional safeguards of due process. No civil rights whatsoever, in fact. Legally, I am chattel, the property of Psyche Industries. As such, Psyche’s Chairman may do with me as he sees fit. Were I to malfunction so egregiously, he would be well within his rights to have me decommissioned.”
“Okay, I see why you wouldn’t want to run that risk. But there’s nothing stopping me, is there?”
Just when Knox thought he’d seen the last of Nietzsche’s pregnant pauses, here came another one.
“Jonathan,” he said at last, “I have made no secret of my conviction that you are ill-matched to this present assignment. Incompetence is one thing, however; deliberate violation of standing orders would be quite another.”
“But I can’t just stand around and do nothing.”
“On the contrary, stepping back and permitting me to take the lead might be the safest course of action. And not just for you alone: Must I remind you of what Ms. McGovern told you regarding the likely consequences for the Archon Consulting Group should you, as she put it, ‘screw up’?”
So, Nietzsche had been listening in to their meeting. Wasn’t there any place in Pairidaeza where one could hold a private conversation?
Be that as it may, the damned machine just might be right: The Davoud Ansari that Knox had encountered so far came across as a decent, caring human being, one whose sole concern was with saving his daughter. But few in the industry would have recognized that Ansari—they were far more familiar with the ruthless, hard-driving, take-no-prisoners competitor.
And who was to say the two were mutually exclusive? A grieving father looking for someone to pin the blame on would make for a fearsome combination with a technocrat accustomed to getting his own way and vindictive as hell when he didn’t.
No, screw up and it might not just be Knox’s own neck on the line. All of Archon could wind up paying the price.
And Knox was beginning to think that the price might just be Chapter Eleven.