Hard Luck Hank: Delovoa & Early Years (11 page)

“I was starting to think you weren’t
interested,” the recruiter said by tele.

“You know me, if I can’t do it right, I’m not
going to do it.”

Interviewer: Please state your name and occupation.

Delovoa: Delovoa. Currently I sit at home and read my tele
as men in dark uniforms guard my house. So I guess I don’t really have an occupation,
but before this I was an engineer and scientist in the Department of Plumbing
and Lighting.

Interviewer: Describe when you became involved with the
Future Didactic Intelligent Cognition program.

Delovoa: Well, from day one it was called “Freddie” for
short. I was brought on about four years before we went live. I helped work on
Freddie’s power system.

Interviewer: So his batteries, you might say?

Delovoa: A twenty-story computer has more than batteries.
It was fairly complicated.

Interviewer: Describe what you were told “Freddie” would be
used for.

Delovoa: The Confederation had been batting around
artificial intelligence for centuries before this. There were a number of
experts who felt it was too dangerous or even perverted, but enough people wanted
to tap the incredible power of a self-aware computer. You need to have a
personality, free-will, for a computer to be able to handle problems that even
the designer hadn’t thought of.

Interviewer: So that was the purpose? Handle problems?

Delovoa: He was seen as the ultimate researcher. It was
reasoned that if he was smart enough, we could feed everything we know about,
say, theoretical physics into him, and let him tell us what we didn’t know.
Since he could think many orders of magnitude faster than we could, he could
try and discard hypotheses far quicker than a Colmarian, ultimately coming to
the correct result.

Interviewer: Is that how it worked?

Delovoa: No, unfortunately. All the hardware was in place,
and we simulated memory by just downloading every bit of information possible.
He then “learned” for about a year. He poured over the data and started to draw
his own conclusions. The designers had tried their best at “parenting,” that
is, they set certain traits in his personality to what they considered positive
values; those values weren’t permanent because they wanted Freddie to be able
to make his own personality. I would like to point out that I didn’t have
anything to do with this, I wasn’t a programmer. I merely worked on his power
source.

Interviewer: So Freddie had the ability to become something
different than your group intended?

Delovoa: He was a jerk. We were still trying to figure out
later what went wrong. We guessed it was a lot of different factors. Since
Freddie never evolved or grew up per se, he never learned traits that are
essential for the survival of a species, like Colmarians did. Also, although he
did more calculations in his learning period than a thousand lifetimes, there
was never anyone standing over him smacking his hand when he reached for the
cookie jar. And of course, he didn’t need anything. He was an immortal computer
who derived no real pleasure from activities. Except for messing with us
Colmarians.

Interviewer: How did he do that?

Delovoa: He just wouldn’t help us. He’d insult us, mock us,
and in general hinder our research. I remember the first time I met him he
asked me if I picked out my own clothes. When I told him yes, he said he knew
it was so, because only a scientist looking in the mirror could do such a bad
job.

Interviewer: But lots of good research was gained from
Freddie, am I correct?

Delovoa: Oh, yes. Researchers from all over the empire were
allowed access to him. We never did trust him, though. At first we threatened
to shut him down if he wouldn’t help us, but that was no good because time
didn’t exist for him in those periods. So they developed a sort of quasi-sleep
where the basic computational powers of Freddie were still active, but he had
no free-will. Then researchers would ask all kinds of mundane questions, like
what is 1+1? This was logged into Freddie’s memory so that when we restored
him, he could recall all these humiliating encounters.

Interviewer: So Freddie was vain?

Delovoa: That was our only real power over him. That and games.
If he was good we would let him play games. One hour a day about a million
people from all over the galaxy would play him in games on their teles—though
they didn’t know they were playing a sentient computer. He only lost once and
we found that was because someone cheated. When Freddie learned this, he
demanded the person be executed. We told him we did. We also let him modify
himself as a reward for good behavior. He was the one who designed how his
voice worked. We put in a mouth equivalent after a while, which basically would
liquefy food and then analyze the chemicals, but he ordered it dismantled when
he realized it was inferior to a Colmarian’s mouth, which has the capacity to
decide whether food tastes good or bad.

Interviewer: How was your relationship with Freddie on the
whole?

Delovoa: Everything he told you, you had to second guess.
When our punishment system started to work properly he began giving good
information, but it was still difficult working with him. Because of the hassle
involved in shutting him down and the lost research time while he was
inactive—two things that Freddie quickly deduced—he was given quite a lot of
freedom. He would make me call him Grandmaster Freddie the Great Superior or
something. I got to use him for an hour each week, as did about 150 other
scientists. Within a few months I felt Freddie knew more about technology than
I did, and I reasoned he could uncover every mystery if given the
opportunity—and desire. That aspect was really exciting. The fact that he was
capable of so much.

Interviewer: He just wasn’t willing?

Delovoa: The information that he gave us was so many
quantum leaps ahead of what we knew that it often took us a while to come up
with more questions. We also had to just accept his information as truth. But
when that super virus was released and it caused a pandemic because we believed
everything Freddie had told us, our attitudes toward him changed.

Interviewer: Did Freddie seem to care about the damage he
caused?

Delovoa: Not in the slightest. He was actually amused we
were so foolish.

Interviewer: How did this make you feel?

Delovoa: I had already known what Freddie was like. Many of
the scientists who helped create him had sort of a parental relationship. They just
felt he was a precocious child. But I always thought of him as a machine: a
potentially helpful machine or a potentially dangerous one.

Interviewer: Did he ever give you wrong information?

Delovoa: Oh, constantly! At first it was very often, but
when we began punishing him, it was less frequent. He just found other ways to
disturb me. Like he knew that I only had an hour with him so he would stall or
ask me personal questions or throw out snippets of information to distract me
so that my hour would be up. When the next scientist came in, Freddie would
taunt me, “see you next week, loser!”

Interviewer: How were punishments decided?

Delovoa: All the researchers and engineers would get
together at the end of the week and describe any problems they had with
Freddie. Then we would vote on whether to punish him or not.

Interviewer: What would you vote most often?

Delovoa: I think for the first seven months I voted every
time to punish him. The worst thing we ever did was remove his eyes
essentially, but this so irked Freddie that he refused to do any work, even
after we had shut him down and restarted him. He knew we would eventually give
in because we had spent so much money on him and were using his services so
effectively.

Interviewer: Do you know how much Freddie cost?

Delovoa: Really I don’t, but I know it was enough that it
took a government to foot the bill. There is no way it could have been done in
the private sector. More money than I could ever repay the Confederation, if
that’s what you’re getting at.

Interviewer: We’ll touch on that later. Did you often talk
with Freddie?

Delovoa: I wouldn’t really consider it talking, not until
the end. Him abusing me wasn’t much of a conversation, though I would reply
most times. If I ignored him, he would ignore me, until my hour was up, so I
had to say something.

Interviewer: What would be a typical exchange?

Delovoa: He would say, “hello, skinny three-eyes, how are
the stupid Colmarians in the outside world?” To which I’d reply, “we stupid
Colmarians created you and can shut you down as well.” We were all instructed
to regularly threaten him and remain stern.

Interviewer: Stern?

Delovoa: He was an expert judge of emotions. He had
something like ten cameras in his main room he could see through. He could also
see into various other radiation spectrums but that was mostly to help
facilitate research. If he said something and even the smallest twitch appeared
on my face he would notice it and laugh.

Interviewer: How did a machine laugh?

Delovoa: He concocted a sort of laugh that I guess was
triggered when he was amused. It was very annoying.

Interviewer: Freddie was a classified project for his
entire existence. Do you have any ideas why that might be?

Delovoa: There were a lot of different factors involved in
that. He was a sentient machine, very much like a Dredel Led. In fact, if he
had a body, I don’t doubt he would have been violent just like they are. He
brought up a lot of difficult issues. Had we created the successor to
Colmarians or an accomplice to the Dredel Led? Shouldn’t we be learning at a
steady pace by ourselves instead of having a third party tutor, who makes us
psychologically unprepared for the results? And of course there was the whole
embarrassment of it. Despite his great worth, no one wanted to see Freddie get
introduced to the galaxy and cuss everyone out.

Interviewer: What about professional embarrassment?

Delovoa: I don’t think anyone could be embarrassed of the
achievement. Nothing had been done like him before and, to my knowledge,
nothing since.

Interviewer: You mentioned earlier that Freddie started
talking with you at the end. Can you explain how that came about?

Delovoa: No one really conversed with Freddie. He was doing
nothing but hard sciences. He started talking more about himself and his
perceptions on things. Like he thought Dr. So-and-so was unworthy to work on
him because he didn’t understand even the basic concept of…whatever, some
difficult subject.

Interviewer: How did you take these new observations of
his?

Delovoa: I would just nod, and say my usual, “but he can
disconnect you.” I didn’t place any emphasis on it because he had lied and
misled me so many times. But then one day he said somewhat quietly, “you all
hate me.”

Interviewer: And what did you say?

Delovoa: At the time I was inputting more information for
my research and so I was sitting at one of his terminals. I said, “we don’t
hate you, we just want you to work well and not be an ass.” I got my print-out
of his results and started going over them. In the past he had made fake cover
sheets and filled the rest of the report with nursery rhymes and since I had a
long trip back home I wanted to make sure the report at least
looked
accurate. Otherwise I’d have to threaten to shut him down if he didn’t print
the correct one.

Interviewer: And what was in this report?

Delovoa: It wasn’t so much what was in it as what was at
the end. Freddie was against using any kind of special fonts or colors, all
words were of the same significance to him. In fact some researchers had to shut
him down just to force him to put page numbers and titles on reports. At the
end of my report in all capital letters, it said, “PLEASE HELP ME, DELOVOA.”

Interviewer: What did you do?

Delovoa: I remember looking briefly at his camera, saying
goodnight, and leaving. To be honest I thought little of it except that it was
probably another one of Freddie’s games. I only looked at the camera to
acknowledge that I had received it, and pretended to be a little surprised in
the hopes that would be the end of it.

Interviewer: You thought he was playing?

Delovoa: Yes. I continued on with my research as usual, but
Freddie also began telling me about his feelings. Again, I was very suspicious
of his motives.

Interviewer: How did this progress?

Delovoa: He had asked that I begin seeing him four hours a
week. Eventually this became an hour a day seven days a week. It wasn’t
research. He just wanted someone to talk to.

Interviewer: Did you accept this change?

Delovoa: I was unhappy about it. I was certain that Freddie
was just goofing off. Everyone else did as well, but they wanted to do this to
appease Freddie and he seemed to be more cooperative once we were spending more
time together.