Pygmalion Unbound (5 page)

“They have a tech come in and put her in a standby mode — ”

“Standby mode?”

“The equivalent of sleep,” Franklin said. “Droids don’t require sleep like we do. Plug in a USB cable,” he tapped his temple, “and it’s off to dreamland.”

Kelly frowned. “You’re treating her like a computer, putting her on a standby mode. Leaving her here alone.”

“You got a better idea?”

“She could stay with me.”

“She’s an inquisitive child with an adult body, and you’re gonna watch her twenty-four seven? Let her loose in the big bad world?”

Kelly sighed. “I see your point. I don’t like it, but I see it. But eventually — ”

“You like Chinese?”

Kelly had to stop and refocus. “Food or culture?”

“Either, but I meant food.”

“I love it.”

“I know a great Szechuan place downtown. They make a great
shiuzhu
.”

Kelly looked at him warily. “It’s generally unwise to get involved with colleagues, Doctor Franklin.”

“Relax. Romance’s got nothing to do with it. I know you have plenty of questions, but they like to clear this place out after five-thirty, for security reasons. So we can talk. Alone.”

“I see.”
Without Crane around
.

“I promise not to molest you,” he smiled.

“It’s a deal.”

On the way home, Kelly pondered the day. Her head felt light, dizzy from the breathtaking new world opened up before her, before humanity. New life from old, not of woman born. Waiting for her to shape and mold.

And to what end? Every jump in man’s progression from cave-dweller to astronaut had been ultimately used to dominate others. Fire warmed caves, but it burned wooden houses. Agriculture fed the masses and made civilization possible, but its bungling or withdrawal starved millions, as Josef Stalin had proved in the Ukraine. Iron, bronze, and copper all went to axes and swords and bullets, as well as pots and pans. Realizing the dream of heavier-than-air flight produced B-52s as well as 747s. The same kind of thinking that killed millions, that had taken her father from her, all came down to men swaggering about like children trying to cover their fear with tough playacting.

She sat on her bed and thought. There were two roads ahead. One, the principled path, would have her quit in a huff, muttering about militarism and penis size and retreating back to her cloistered little air-conditioned world in Madison, washing her hands of the whole business and letting come what may. Maria Mark One and Maria Mark Two, Three, etc., would be decanted, programmed, made to live and die just as Crane dictated.

Or…

Her daddy had been a wise man, in a backcountry roughhewn Western kind of way. A wiry man of few words but a quick smile, who had won her mother’s reserved Boston Brahmin heart. He’d imparted a few words of wisdom to his only child, phrased in language that her mother frowned upon. “It’s better to have someone inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” Not original; she later found out that Lyndon Johnson had said it of J. Edgar Hoover. But the meaning was clear. She could offer constructive criticism, nudge the program in a certain direction, but only if she was inside. Go too far, and she was out, and there was nothing she could do for Maria.

She had no idea how hard it was going to be.

She showered and got rid of the business attire; Franklin’s advances wouldn’t have worked, no matter what, but she did want to relax. A shorter pleated skirt, heels, a lower-cut blouse and cardigan, over a pinstriped lingerie set, and hair blown back from her face, a little more makeup — not so businesslike any more. Maybe the strangeness of the town, her anonymity, the air of illicit possibilities had gotten her adrenalin going, since her tries at the temptress look were few and far between. Maybe after the meeting, she’d check out the night life…

They met at seven. Franklin rose and greeted her then, took her hand. He wore faded jeans, a turtleneck and a Harris Tweed sport coat over his muscular frame. She saw him quickly give her the up-and-down at her above-the-knee skirt, the blouse undone just so, hair brushed out, and smiled inwardly.

Not for you, doctor,
she reminded herself. The waiter seated them.

“I think all went well today,” Kelly said. In all they had spent two hours in the garden with Maria, getting her to identify things and relate them in a human way, going from kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus to “lovely” or “pretty.” It hadn’t been easy at first, but Maria eventually caught on.

They ordered; Kelly ordered the
szhuizhu
; Franklin ordered a stir-fry. “Vegetarian?” she asked him.

“You expecting soul food?” he replied with a wry grin. And then a trace of Black Belt accent crept in, got broader. “I done had me enough chitlins and grits when I was a young ’un, back in Alabammy.” He lost the accent. “Killed my momma at fifty, one of my sisters at forty-five. I plan on staying around some.”

Kelly was taken slightly aback, but didn’t detect any hostility in Franklin’s tone. She changed the subject. “So how did you hook up with Desmond Crane?”

“We are the odd couple, aren’t we? We met at a biomedical conference ten years ago in Chicago. He was giving a paper on using nanotech to clone organs from tissue cultures. I was on the same panel, doing the hardware end of it, what you’d have to do to program the nanos, how you get them to shut down so they don’t multiply and take over the world or destroy it. We got to talking in a bar after the session, one thing led to another, and we collaborated on a few papers that got published. The front office here at American Cybernetics took notice, offered us everything we could want, told us to work on making an organic android a reality.”

The wine arrived, and she took a sip. Franklin had ordered mineral water. He drank, and eyed her. “So you’re supposed to give our girl a personality.”

“Not quite. I’m supposed to ease her along in developing one herself. You’ve seen her in the room. Conscious, in a physical sense. But maybe not in a metaphysical sense. She reacts to stimuli, can verbalize simple thoughts, responds to simple commands. But there’s no sense of individuality behind it. She’s largely a blank slate.”

“I did what I could,” Franklin shrugged. “I took the RNA and wired all kinds of knowledge into that pretty little head of hers.”

“And did a fine job, I’m sure,” Kelly said. “But as good as you are you can’t create a
person
out of lines of code. She has to assimilate all that knowledge, all her sensory perceptions, to create a fully formed character. Mere mimicry always been the problem with AIs.”

Franklin poured the wine. “Teach her to show emotions, not be a zombie.”

“It’s more complicated than that, but you’re essentially correct.” Kelly took a sip. “Personality is more than general intelligence, what we call IQ. You’ve given her a fairly high IQ, but without more she’s a complete misfit. The idea, I gather, is to create something that is capable of interacting with human beings on our level, even fooling us into believing she’s human.”

“So what more is there?”

“Social intelligence, problem-solving strategies, like completing a work assignment. There’s emotional intelligence, or how one manages interpersonal relations. And then there’s wisdom. The first is easier to solve, since the learning curve of the android brain is fairly high, if what you’ve told me so far is correct. The second is much harder, since she’ll have to catalog and analyze thousands, maybe millions, of different human reactions and discern the appropriate responses. You can’t program that. The third — well, wisdom is hard enough for human beings. For her — I don’t know.”

“So how long’s all that gonna take?” Franklin asked. “Can you even
do
it?”

“I guess we’ll see, won’t we? I’m starting out with a fully functional brain and an extensive database. It’s not like a child, who begins with a simple brain and no memory banks. Over time in humans, the brain’s neurons make new connections and old ones die out. By age ten, the brain is totally different from what it was at birth. What you created is an organic CPU, with all those connections in place. Three months was an optimistic guess. But in the end, who knows?”

“That’ll be a big bottleneck in mass production,” Franklin said. “Have to set up big day care centers for all the droids we turn out.”

Kelly paused. “Possibly. Is American Cybernetics planning on that?”

“That’s the reason we’ve been given a few billion plus any equipment we need and protection from any nosy regulatory agencies. The payoff, if it works, is a bonanza. We jump a few generations in the artificial intelligence game, get the drop on the Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans. Maria’s a prototype. She’s America’s entry into the AI race.”

“I didn’t even know there was a race on.”

“It’s to the 2020s what the Space Race was to the 1960s. So far, the Japanese and Koreans are ahead, developing AI software and mechanical bodies. You might have seen things like Honda’s Asmio or the Korean’s Hubo.”

“I’ve read about them, I think seen them on some netcasts. Pretty primitive.”

“Not as much as you’d think — they’ve made progress over the last decade. But you’ve still got something that looks like Robbie the Robot, and about as sociable, too. The Geminoid series, from the Japanese, is the closest they’ve come to a truly humanoid form, but it’s still a dive off the cliff into the Uncanny Valley. The movements aren’t right, the voice is off. People
know
it’s a robot, and get creeped out by it.”

“So Crane bypassed all that. Organic, not silicon based.”

“Exactly. Des’s genius is in seeing that silicon computer chips can only take you so far. Creating another Commander Data wasn’t in the cards. So he decided to do reverse engineering on a human being. Take the end product, break it down, built it back up from constituent parts — with a few improvements.”

“So he told me. It sounds like the whole ESI debate all over again.”

“Huh-uh,” Franklin shook his head. “The problem with the ESIs was that they started out as infants and then children with god-like powers. Think back to third grade, Doctor. Imagine your worst enemy. Now make her Supergirl.”

Kelly shut her eyes, and there was the snarling face of Claire Hutchens, eyes squinted and lips curled in disgust, standing over her. It was a warm spring day. Kelly was in second grade in 2000. She had been an awkward girl, never able to say the right thing, painfully shy and quiet, and a little clumsy, lacking self-confidence, and shorter than everyone else. She might was well have had a bulls-eye painted on her forehead, under the short haircut her mother had given her.

Claire Hutchens, on the other hand, was one of those girls who knew she was beautiful, who was going to be popular, carrying herself in a wispy pink fog of charisma that drew other children, boys and girls alike, to her. Kelly found herself staring at Claire, taken with her and not knowing why (that wouldn’t come for another ten years), and drew her wrath.

Kelly had been walking down the sidewalk a block from the school, when she felt two hands on her shoulders. A hard shove and her books went flying, and she tumbled to the ground, skinning her knee and smudging the red plaid school uniform.

“Quit staring at me, freak,” Claire Hutchens hissed, aiming a kick at her math book and sending it across the neighbor’s yard. The hatred in the eyes never left, but she only had to tolerate Claire for another year before her father was reassigned.

Franklin continued. “Their brains couldn’t handle the responsibilities, and the enhancements. No parent — not one who’s normal, non-enhanced — can give adequate upbringing to a child who, by age five, knows that he or she is clearly superior to their parents.”

“The ultimate spoiled brat,” Kelly said. “I read the studies. There were 342 reported ESIs produced from 2013 to 2022, when the ban was imposed. At least in America — other countries, like Russia or China, weren’t so careful about their record keeping. Eighty percent were diagnosed with major psychological disorders. Thirty percent were dead at a young age, usually from misjudging their capabilities. Another fifty per cent committed suicide. The rest had to be quietly institutionalized. Bad numbers. Maria is different how?”

“She’s an adult. The brain is somewhat adult, in that she can access information that a three year old can’t. She can, with proper training,” he pointed a large finger at her, “assimilate and use that information. Plus, she’s got a mighty capable nanny.”