Pygmalion Unbound (3 page)

“Yes, I did,” said Kelly. It had taken two months for the background checks, and for once, her outwardly conservative, ambition-driven life had served her well. Nothing more than a couple of traffic tickets as a teenager, and she’d kept her romantic affairs invisible out of necessity.

Crane turned the monitor to Kelly and let her see the real time video. “Her name is Maria. She’s your project.” Maria was sitting on the bed, with a box of Legos spread on the sheet.

“And the goal of the project would be?”

“To speed along her development as a person, from infancy to adult.”

“Memory loss?” Kelly was puzzled. “Autism? Schizophrenia?” Crane shook his head. “I don’t see any visible signs of head trauma.”

“There aren’t any.”

“You’re testing on a completely healthy subject?” Kelly asked, alarmed. “That’s — ”

“No,” Crane said quickly, defusing her. “No, it’s not like that. What do you see?” He pointed at the monitor.

“I see a very pretty young woman, maybe twenty to twenty-five, dressed rather scantily, who is playing with plastic blocks. Mental age of about five at best. Is she mentally retarded?”

“No, she’s perfectly normal. Above average IQ, in fact. Way above average.”

Kelly felt a start of alarm. “You — this wouldn’t be some kind of ESI research, would it? That’s been outlawed — ”

“No. We’re not tinkering with human enhancement.”

“Then I’m not sure why you need a behavioral psychologist, and what she” — Kelly pointed a long, delicate finger at the screen — “has to do with artificial intelligence.”

Crane merely smiled. “You’d never know without me telling you.”

“Telling me what?”

“She’s not human,” Crane said triumphantly, picking up a thick manila folder and tossing on the edge of his desk. “Not fully, that is. Maria is the first biologically engineered android.”

“Android?” Kelly tried to reconcile the pretty young woman on the monitor with visions of clanking metal nightmares.

“She’s just passed the first test. You thought Maria was human.” Crane smiled. “We’ve bridged the Uncanny Valley.”

“The what?”

Franklin leaned against one of Crane’s file cabinets “It’s a term coined by Masahiro Mori, a twentieth-century roboticist. He noticed that as a robot becomes more like a human, human beings will have a positive reaction. But at some point, as it gets closer, people will instinctively feel revulsion. Which turns to positive reactions as it gets even closer.”

“The key is to have the robot’s abilities match its appearance,” Crane said. “If it looks like a toaster, then to have it perfectly emulate human emotions just seems creepy. If it looks human, then to have it act like a toaster causes the revulsion.”

Kelly looked at Maria again and tried to regain her composure. “Which is, I presume, why you’ve dragged a perfectly content behavioral psychologist from a comfortable teaching and research position out to the Rocky Mountains for a six-month sabbatical.”

“It is.”

“Not quite human, you said. How did you create her?”

Crane glanced at Franklin, who nodded. “We did borrow some ideas from the ESI work — American Cybernetics was involved in that research.”

“Were you personally?”

“No. Not directly. It took years to work out the theory, and about as long to do the actually engineering. Start with a ceramsteel endoskeletal frame, an exact duplicate of the human skeleton, but ten times tougher; we can do a scan of a template and re-create it, do variations by sex, and ethnicity. Take muscle tissue and clone it with some modifications.”

“Such as?”

Crane turned and tapped keys on his desk, and the monitor picture cut from Maria’s room to a corner shot of a laboratory. Figures in self-contained clean suits moved around a large central tank with the lid open. A central platform on the tank held a gleaming white skeleton. The cleansuits began attaching wispy strands of muscle tissue to the ceramsteel bones.

“Genetically engineered to cut reaction time, and augmented for human-plus strength. We graft the tissue onto the skeleton, drop it in a nanomachine nutrient bath, and let it grow.”

The cleansuits immersed the body in a thick sludge, then withdrew it. Red bands of muscle were growing on the human form.

“Organs cloned as well?”

“Precisely. But augmented, making the digestive system more compact and efficient, borrowed from ruminants — she can live on hay if she has to. We’re working on cross-species engineering with the visual and olfactory nerves for greater sensitivity. We’re close to creating eyes that can see in ultraviolet, electromagnetic and infrared spectra. Maybe even radar or microwave detection capabilities. She also has boosted auditory sensitivity.”

More grafts on the screen, another immersion, and Maria rose from the tank, the slimy sludge sloughing off her, her hair plastered to her head.

“Skin also grafted, cloned from donor cells. We’ve placed carbon nanotubes in her skin — carbon filaments that are a few nanometers wide. The potential uses are almost limitless. For now we’ve used them as piezoelectric receptors, allowing her to pick up small changes in organic and nonorganic objects. It permits her to measure small changes that result from mechanical stress.”

“Meaning?”

“She can anticipate movements and react accordingly.”

“Like duck a punch,” Kelly said. “Maybe even a bullet. So far, it doesn’t sound any different than an ESI. How do you get around the ban?”

“Read it,” Crane turned and tapped more keys, slid the mouse, and a dense text appeared on his monitor. “The ban, as passed four years ago, outlawed all genetic engineering enhancement work on, and I quote, ‘human embryos or fetuses, or gametes or diploid cells.’ The term ‘human’ is defined as ‘being derived by fertilization or parthenogenesis, or any other means from one or more human gametes or human diploid cells.’ Maria is excluded on at least two grounds that I can see. Maybe more, if I were a lawyer.”

“So you don’t define her as ‘human.’”

“Not in the sense that you and I are human,” Crane said. “Since we borrowed from other species, maybe eighty-five, ninety percent.”

“So she’s what — human derived?”

“If you must put a name to it, that’s as good as any. The term we use is android, or droid for short.”

Kelly mulled his words, with an uncomfortable gnawing in her stomach. There was so much wrong here, so much that could be abused, it was clear even after a short introduction. But so much right, as well. The screen flickered back to the live feed from Maria’s room, where she was examining the blocks again with a childlike intensity, building a small multicolored tower.

So vulnerable
, Kelly thought.
She has no idea what she represents
.

“And the brain? I presume that at least is human.”

“Correct. Separately created, from one hundred percent human tissue. It’s an RNA-based computer.”

“Tissue? From where? Stem cells?” Christ, Crane was bumping up against at least two research bans, what was another?

“Donated by volunteers. All within federal guidelines.”

“Does she have a soul?” Kelly asked.

Crane gave her a puzzled look.

“You mean is there a ghost in the machine?” Franklin asked wryly.

Kelly said, “Because of the spiritual soul, the body made of matter becomes a living human body. Spirit and matter in man are not two natures united, but their union forms a single nature.’“

“Interesting. Plato? Socrates?”

“Basic Catholic catechism, Doctor.”

“I just wrote the code for the brain,” Franklin said. “Everything from grade school math up to quantum physics, biology, history, you name it. The soul is your job.”

“The brain — can you download additional files?”

“Of course. Since it’s human tissue, the neural pathways are already there. The new programming is done via a small USB port, located right here,” he tapped his right temple. “She can get the whole
Encyclopedia Britannica
online in a few seconds.”

“But can she use what she downloads? If I read something, I can usually remember it. Can she retrieve data from a memory dump?”

“That’s what we’re about to find out,” Crane said. “Oh, there are file directories in there, just as with our own brains. But she has to know what to access and when, and the only way to do that is from experience.”

“Can she pass a Turing Test?”

Crane nodded his head to the monitor. “At this point, most likely not. Which makes her no different than any other silicon-based AI system currently available.”

“I remember seeing that computer on
Jeopardy
when I was in college. Watson, I think.”

“A glorified calculator,” Franklin said disdainfully. “Since then, IBM has been working on the Virtual Brain, which was an AI project back in the teens. The problem is that it was silicon-based, and could only mimic human thought.”

“Using carbon-based RNA makes Maria capable of human thought,” Crane said. “Your job, Doctor Kelly, is to see that she achieves it. To make her fully human.”

She drew a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “Consciousness, in other words. That sense of ‘I am.’ And do it in six months. I do enjoy a good challenge.” She peered at the screen, squinted her eyes. “Right now there are a lot of things going on in that pretty head of hers, lots of viewpoints — what color is the block, what’s it made of, how was it made, its dimensions. But what’s missing is what any five-year old has — asking ‘what can I do with this?’ Or even more basic, ‘
can
I do something with this?’ We integrate knowledge with experience to form a personality.”

Frankin asked, “How?”

“Human interaction. Stimulation. Some process to make those millions of neurons match up, connect, create something new.”

“So, in other words, you’re going to be her tutor?”

“So it seems,” Kelly said. “And a finishing school headmistress as well.” She stood up. “I had best get started right away, then. If you’ll show me to the lab, Doctor Crane?”

“I think Doctor Franklin can do that.”

Franklin shot him a dirty look.

“I’m expecting another visitor,” said Crane. “Business.”

Crane waved Kelly and Franklin out the door, then clicked the messenger program on his computer. After several minutes, a woman appeared on the screen, dressed in a crisp, neatly-starched Air Force uniform with three rows of ribbons. Behind her was the American flag furled on a stand, pictures of men and women in uniform, and a large picture taken with the last President.

“Colonel Danner,” said Crane.

“I got your email yesterday. I would have replied, but I had a hearing all day on next year’s DARPA budget, ran until six. So, Doctor Crane, we have our unit ready?”

“She was activated yesterday.”

“Excellent. You’re ahead of schedule. What’s her status?”

Crane glided the mouse over its pad, clicked several times, and linked the room cam to Danner’s terminal.

“Doesn’t look like she’s doing much.”

“The brain is a prototype. She’s got all the knowledge stored inside. It’s just a matter of integrating it.”

“How long will that take?”

“I’m going slowly, to be cautious. You can force-feed the brain too much, short it out, and you’re left with a lifeless shell, and we have to start over. We let the unit activate, grow, let the neural connections develop, do MRI and CT scans, maybe program that into the next generation of brains so we have a higher baseline as far as behavior. We might be able to drop the lag between inception and operations to a matter of a few days by the fourth or fifth prototype. Don’t worry. You’ll get your money’s worth.”

“I certainly hope so,” Danner said. “DARPA’s plowed twenty billion into your lab over the past ten years, for this and the ESI work. Inside of five years, you could have a regular assembly line going.”

Danner was ambitious, he could see that the first time they had talked. She had stumbled across his monographs in some obscure journal and had immediately convinced her superiors of the potential for real-world and military applications.