Philippine Speculative Fiction (33 page)

It was then that Manuel realized that Kevin’s earlier comment had been correct—he was playing God in a digital garden, and the program was his virtual Eve. It felt strange, somehow,
the notion that he was essentially remaking humanity, but it was somehow comforting, too. At least there was something important in his life over which he could exert some kind of control.

This was on his mind as he met with Bea Peria, a BS Psychology major who also happened to be batch secretary for their student council. Bea was busy with a capital “B,” so in
addition to agreeing to meet her in the student council office, Manuel promised to keep things short and to-the-point, much like Bea herself.

When Manuel entered the room, he saw Bea slide her five-foot-flat frame onto a bench next to one of the council room’s three wooden tables and motion for him to join her on the other
bench. The tables, like the rest of the room, were a study in seemingly purposeful disarray—piles upon piles of seemingly random papers, all organized into carefully chosen places, or at
least that was how they appeared. A couple of freshmen sat hunched at the table on the other end of the room, their brows knitting as they pored over a ridiculously thin stack of papers. Apart from
them, the rest of the room was deserted; clearly, the business of student government was less important than the business of hellweek. Bea was probably one of the only people still working.

“Kevin already told me what you asked him,” Bea said. “I’ll get you a copy of my Cognitive Psychology textbook by next week, and I can include stuff from my Social Psych
class as well if you’d like.”

Manuel shook his head. “I’m interested in replicating an individual human mind, Bea, not an entire society. Maybe for graduate thesis.” He chuckled.

Bea clucked. “Current psychological theory says that no mind can work properly without interacting with other minds around it. The other is an essential part of the individual’s
development.”

“The program needs to be self-sufficient, Bea. I don’t need a well-adjusted human, just a functioning one. Think ‘man living alone on an island.’”

“If that even counts as a man.” Bea clucked again. “But you’re not just here to debate social psychology with me, are you? You could’ve just emailed to ask for my
files, or messaged me on Facebook.”

Manuel exhaled. “Two things. One, I need a source for brain patterns. Brainwaves. Whatever. I need something that I can compare to whatever the program generates, so I know if I’ve
succeeded.”

Bea nodded. “I’ll link you to a couple of websites. What’s the second thing?”

“I need to pick your brain. The program’s getting buggy. I don’t think it can handle all the sensory data it’s supposed to process. I need a way to get it under control
and working.”

“I’m not a programmer, Manuel.”

“I just want a starting point. I’m fresh out of ideas.”

Bea thought for a moment. “I know you’re trying for a spontaneously generated intelligence, but have you thought about putting in some preliminary rules? All human minds come with
some in-built schemas for processing information, passed down through evolution. Still nature, not nurture, so you wouldn’t be cheating too much.”

“And I’m guessing you know exactly where I should start, huh?

Bea raised an eyebrow. “I was just going to say that you’ve got options. My Cognitive Psych textbook has a few examples in chapter 11, and your material from your AI classes should
be helpful too. And psychology’s an increasingly interdisciplinary field; you could look at anthropology, linguistics, philosophy—”

“Not philosophy.”

“Right. When are you two going to talk, anyway? It’s been three months now and this is getting unhealthy.”

Manuel shrugged.

“
I CAN’T BELIEVE you would even bring that up now, Manuel.”

“What? I thought most girls loved this kind of thing—commitment, settling down. I thought it would give you some kind of reassurance, security.”

“Marriage was invented to transfer ownership of the bride from her father to the husband. It started out as a business deal.”

“I thought you’d be happy.”

“I’m happy now. No labels, no contracts, just you and me and what we have. You know I don’t like being confined.”

“Well, where do you see us going after college, then?”

“I think we don’t need marriage to be happy. Like you said, it’s the twenty-first century.”

“Whatever you say.”

“Look, let’s… let’s not fight, baby. Let’s just enjoy the night.”

“All right, Mitzi. All right.”

MANUEL DEVOURED THE psychology material he got from Bea in one Red Bull-fueled night, skimming through the text and bookmarking everything he could find about organization of
data—how sensory input was parsed by the different parts of the brain, which information became memories and which was ignored or discarded, where and how all these memories got stored. Then
it was back to coding, translating his bookmarked material into parameters for how his digital human processed data, a process which took two more weeks and a whole case of Red Bull. A few debugs
later, fifteen weeks after embarking on the project, Manuel had his first successful test run with anything that even vaguely resembled a functioning mind.

While Manuel waited for his program to output its psych readouts into something readable, he logged onto Facebook to see whether Kevin and Bea had come up with any additional research for him.
No such luck—his feed and inbox were full of the usual trivialities: people asking for homework from classes they’d missed, announcements from various organizations that began with
“Hey student!” and other generic salutations, and even gossip about who from the dorms had gotten photographed wasted this week. How petty.

Curiously, some of his messages were from classmates asking where he’d been for the past couple of weeks. Manuel had been skipping a few classes, it was true, and he hadn’t gone out
with his friends in a while, but such were the demands of thesis year. Most of the messages were from underclassmen; they’d never understand until they became seniors themselves.

While he was logged on, a new message came in. It was from Jomar Lim, a Socio-Anthropology major and Manuel’s last unofficial thesis consultant, confirming whether they were on for their
meeting later that day. Shit. Manuel had almost forgotten.

Before powering down his computer, Manuel glanced at the psychological readout that the program had generated. He’d set up a simple macro that automatically compared the raw data against
the profiles Bea had provided and outputted the closest match.

As it was, his digital human, so the program said, had brainwaves that most closely approximated the intelligence level of an above-average chimpanzee.

“Fuck.” Manuel booted up the graphics application and ran the program again. He saw the forest again, with the woman walking through it. This time, she—it—did react to
the pre-programmed stimuli in the environment, and no longer traveled in a completely random path, but rather in straight lines and right-angle turns. It was algorithmic, all
stimulus-response-action, behaving in all respects like a top-notch computer program, but nothing like a human.

Wasn’t this enough? Why couldn’t people be that predictable, anyway? The creature functioned, had intelligence, was self-sufficient; why couldn’t that be enough to qualify as
human?

Manuel saved this latest round of test results, reminded himself that generating a digital chimpanzee was still quite a feat in its own right and was a one-way ticket to some high-paying
dead-end programming job at Microsoft, and shut down his computer for the first time in days.

Manuel met Jomar on the stairs in front of the dorm building. Jomar made for an unusual sight, decked out in his purple statement shirt (“Valium is my favorite color.”), black jeans,
gray knit hoodie, and canvas shoes in a place where people usually wore shorts and slippers, but at least his hair was messy enough to look like he’d just gotten out of bed. He probably had,
at that.

“Dude, I already talked to Bea,” Jomar said, “and I don’t know how I can help you. Most of the shit I take up is about society, and you’re only making one
person.”

“Not even,” Manuel replied. “At this point, my program’s about as smart as an ape.”

“Sucks, man. But until you get more than one monkey in there, I still don’t know how I can—”

“What makes a human a human, Jomar?”

Jomar blinked. “Uh—rationality, culture, self-awareness—”

“Have it, don’t need it, have it. Keep going.”

“Shit, chillax, man. Intelligence, communication, ability to form a society—”

“Have it, don’t need it, don’t need it.”

“—values, love, what the hell’s gotten into you—”

“Say that last one again,” Manuel said.

Jomar exhaled. “The Washington University School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry published a study earlier this year about how love helps in brain development. Ties into a lot of what
I’ve been reading about for my majors. Recognizing something that’s so different from you—a culture, a person, whatever—and opening yourself to that difference is what helps
you to define yourself, know who you are.”

Manuel thought for a moment. “Yeah. I can use that.”

“What’s gotten into you, dude? Focus is one thing, but you’re obsessed. I hear you’re cutting classes, missing consultations. When was the last time you slept?”

“You try doing an actual thesis and see how much sleep you get, Mr. SA major—sorry, didn’t mean it that way.”

Jomar stood up. “Look. First semester finals are next week. Let’s go out for drinks after we’re all done. You’ve already made your chimpanzee brain; that should make for
a pretty good midyear progress report, right? Give yourself one break. You can turn it into a human next sem.”

“You guys miss me that much?”

“And we’re…” Jomar hesitated. “Concerned. We think maybe you’re a little fucked up right now. Senior year, thesis, that whole mess with
Mitzi—”

“Why is everyone talking to me about Mitzi? We’re done, it’s over, end of story, nothing more to discuss, Q-E-fucking-D.”

“You think you’re still in control, Manuel? You’re letting this thing define your life. It’s creating you as much as you’re creating it.”

“You talking about my thesis, or the breakup?”

“Look. Just go out with us, dude. One night, and then we never have to bother you about this again.”

“I’m fine.”

“
I’M FINE, MANUEL, really.”

“That doesn’t sound like fine.”

“All right, so I’m not fine. But I’ll get there. I asked you to give me time, remember?”

“Come on, Mitzi, talk to me. I’m just trying to help.”

“And I told you that you could help by giving me my space. Marcel says that love requires patience.”

“Why wait when we could talk this over now?”

“You’re not listening to me.”

“You’re the one who keeps saying she doesn’t want to talk.”

“Good night, Manuel.”

“Fine. Good night, Mitzi.”

AFTER FINALS WEEK ended, with Manuel having survived most of his exams despite the doubts of those who thought he had simply cut too many classes to pass, he did end up going
out for drinks with the gang. They had all been insistent, and besides, Manuel guessed he owed them for helping with his thesis.

In between his exams, he’d tried to incorporate Jomar’s advice about programming a notion of love into his artificial woman, but could never figure out an effective parameter. How
did one make something like that into a formula, anyway? The best he managed was to draw on some of the more esoteric research from Kevin and Bea, programming in oxytocin and serotonin—the
primary biological factors behind love—as well as the definitions of love in Bea’s textbooks, and so on. This gave him a creature that, by his estimation, knew how to relate an
unreachable other being, but still conceived of it in the limited terms that it could understand.

Who does that sound like?

“Shut up,” Manuel said, although he didn’t know to whom he was saying it.

An hour before leaving the dorm, he’d booted up the program and set it to debug automatically by the time he left. If tonight was to be idle time for programming, he could at least make
sure that when he did get back to work, the program would be ready for him.

He ran the program again while waiting for the debugger to load. The woman wasn’t walking this time, but was sitting on the ground, holding some of the digital earth in her—its,
dammit, “its”—hands. Manuel zoomed in a bit further, and he could see that the woman seemed to be trying to mold the earth, shape it into a figure. His heart jumped; this was
new.

Suddenly, the woman looked up, whipping her head up to look towards the sky, towards—Manuel? No. Impossible. Perhaps there had been a noise in one of the trees, or a change in the wind
bringing some unfamiliar scent.

Even without full digital sentience, the artificial woman had a gaze that was arresting somehow, fascinating. And whether due to some trick of randomized pixels or lack of sleep, Manuel thought
he could almost make out a lopsided smile (hadn’t he built the program for symmetry?), and a strangely familiar pair of brown orbs gazing back at him. The eyes seemed intent, focused, and
scanned the air above the woman, as if searching for something which she couldn’t find.

Manuel shuddered, backed away from the computer, and threw on his jacket. Maybe he really did need a drink. He left the dorm room without looking back to see whether the woman was still
watching. The debug would erase this iteration of the program anyway.

When Manuel got to the bar, he saw his friends stand up from their table to wave at him. They were all there—Kevin fresh from his Theology orals and still dressed in a long-sleeved blue
polo and slacks, Bea already in a pink T-shirt and short shorts into which she’d probably changed after her written test that morning, even Jomar in his usual black and gray despite the fact
that he, like Manuel, hadn’t even had any exams that day.