“Nothing happened, we were just talking.”

  He leaned into my face, barring his teeth.

  “Did you hit her?”

  “What? No.”

  He punched me in the gut, and for a second, I thought I was going to vomit up a serving tray of salmon rolls.

  “Don’t lie to me,” he yelled.

  I groaned my way into an upright position.

  “Barry, I know you don’t like me–”

  “Don’t like you?” he forced a laughed. “You’re the reason one of my sisters is dead and the other is sad all the time. I hate you.”

  “Not as much as I hate myself,” I smiled.

  Bad math.

  He backhanded me.

  This time my belly flamed, and I punched him back. I couldn’t help it – the motion erupted out of me in a reflex. It was almost the same thing that had happened when I kissed Claire. I was losing control of myself.

  Barry bent at the knees and staggered back. He recovered, but he was drooling blood. He wiped it away with his left hand then laid into me with everything he had. I was down on the floor before I knew it. There wasn’t much fight in me: just enough to get my ass kicked.

  Barry started kicking me in the gut. He showed an incredible amount of restraint by not killing me. One stray boot landed on my cheek, and for a minute, I teetered on the edge of blackness, but I came back in time to feel Barry kneel down on my chest and punch me across the jaw a few times. I’d had a lot to drink, but it wasn’t enough; I would remember all this in the morning.

  Barry stood and leaned over me.

  “If you hurt her ever again, I will kill you.”

  Then the blurry towering visage thundered out.

  I heard weeping, and it took me a moment to realize it was my own. I’d fallen pretty far. I’d lost my best friend, my job, and my girlfriend in one week. Now I was lying half-drunk and bleeding on a cold cement floor, wishing I’d just been killed. I curled up on the floor with my knees to my chest, and let the howling emotions inside finish the job Barry had started. My world was falling on top of me.

  I’d been wrong about exploding. I was imploding.

  010100110101010101000010010100110100111101001110010010010

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  CHAPTER TWENTY: SUBSONIC WAVES

  The next morning, I awoke on the floor next to my bed. I hadn’t mustered the strength to travel the two extra feet and land on the mattress. In truth, I don’t know how I got as far as I did. I don’t remember coming home.

  According to my watch – which had pinched its way up my arm, cutting off the flow of blood to my hand – it was one thirty-five. I pulled my chin off the carpet and felt the divots it left on my cheek before staggering to the window. Squinting under the sun’s rays, I quickly drew the curtains closed. I was still wearing my dress clothes from the art show. The same shirt and tie I’d picked out for my meeting with David Hayward. Brown and wrinkly, they looked like the skin of a ninety-year-old farmer. I scratched at a mustard stain on the left thigh of my pants – remnants from some terrible hors d’oeuvre. One of my few clear memories, and it was a terrible one.

  In painful lurches, I staggered into the bathroom. It was another four-Aspirin day. I took stock of my bruised body. Magically, nothing felt broken. I showered until the water ran cold then discovered I was out of clean laundry, so I grabbed something that almost smelled clean out of the clutter on my floor. I was starving. I told myself I should eat, but I knew I wouldn’t. My mouth was dry and cracked, but water was the last thing I wanted. Poised over the toilet, staring angrily at a pod of dolphins, I waited for a puke that never came. My life was like a study in clinical depression, except there was no one around to take notes.

  That wasn’t entirely true. I wasn’t alone.

  Shinji was still camped out on my couch. His desire to crash here “just one night,” had slowly turned into an indefinite stay. He’d been at my place nearly a week. I got the impression he was afraid to leave, but I didn’t have the heart to make him. In the midst of my trauma, maybe I didn’t want to be alone either.

  Since his arrival, we’d spent the bulk of our time together – in separated silence.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  Today we weren’t alone.

  I heard Gordon before I saw him. When I walked into my living room, he was sitting on my couch staring in shock at a Game Over screen. Soon the all too familiar tick-tocking of a Grandfather clock heralded the title sequence of the SNES game Chrono Trigger.

  “I can’t remember the last time I saved,” Gordon grumbled before looking over at me. His head jerked back in shock. “You look like you had a rough night,” he said with a bit of a question mark.

  “Yeah.” My voice sounded like it had been buffed with sandpaper. “I went to an art show last night,” I added in poor explanation.

  “Yeah, art shows can be killers,” Gordon said with only the slightest sliver of sarcasm.

  I smiled.

  Gordon had actually made me smile. Physically I couldn’t have felt worse, but for a brief moment, my life was an absurd joke. And it amused me.

  Gordon restarted the game from his last save point.

  “Shit, shit, shit. This is from, like, an hour ago.”

  I looked over at Shinji. He sat at my desk typing with the speed of an impassioned poet. He was still playing with the Evi code. Since the brief incident right after we’d brought the AI home, Evi had been in hiding.

  “So Gordon, why are you here?” I asked, since no one was volunteering the information.

  “Shinji asked me to come over. He said you guys were working on some program and wanted me to take a look.”

  I raised my eyebrows at Shinji. What could Gordon do? He was an artist. I’m sure I knew more about programming than he did. Hell, Shinji knew more than the both of us put together.

  “Looks like you’re being really helpful,” I said sarcastically.

  Gordon shrugged it off without looking up.

  “We haven’t been able to get your program to work.”

  “I’d rather be doing this on our work computers,” Shinji interjected. “Yours is too slow.”

  “Yeah, I should probably get a new graphics card.”

  “You know, I kind of miss the days where you had to build a computer yourself,” Gordon said. “You really felt ownership over it. I remember when my dad brought home our first PC. It was a self-assembly kit that cost him $3,000. It took us two months to figure out how to put it together, and it was about as powerful as a watch calculator nowadays, but we took pride in that little beige box.”

  I’d never had a PC as a child. I bought my first computer in 1989. It was the most powerful machine in the store, and it set me back about $8,000. It took six minutes to take it out of the box and plug into the wall.

  “You know, computers used to be people,” Shinji said without looking up. “It was a profession, like plumber or doctor.”

  “What?” Gordon asked.

  “It’s true,” I explained. “A hundred years ago, computers were teams of professional mathematicians who worked in parallel to solve long complex equations.”

  Our definitions are never as static as we like them to be.

  “Huh,” Gordon shrugged then turned back to his game.

  The subject hadn’t really held his attention.

  I sat down on the couch to watch Gordon play. I didn’t have the energy to do much else. I was feeling delirious – like I was in a pseudo dream, except for all the very real pain I was in. Was it possible to be hung over while drunk? At the very least, I was in no condition to follow the time warping narrative of a game like Chrono Trigger.

  Gordon’s main character was traveling through time in search of a friend who had ceased to exist when one of her ancestors had been kidnapped. In order to restore his friend back into existence and right the time stream, Gordon needed to seek the help of a warrior frog and find a missing queen.

  It was a fairy-tale story – the kind that struck a chord somewhere deep inside. The narrative presupposed that true love could trump fate. It played on a fantasy that history could be rewritten. That death’s greedy grasp wasn’t all-reaching.

  The fables were all wrong. Time always moved forward – it was a stream humanity couldn’t swim against. The princess died from her poisoned apple. “True love’s kiss” couldn’t remedy death. The only things you could receive from a kiss were germs. Man had been kicked from God’s garden. We couldn’t re-inhabit Eden. The stories were an illusion. Fictional happiness. Though sometimes, it was worth getting drunk on their delusion.

  “So, what’s so special about this program?” Gordon asked, breaking the silence.

  “It’s an experimental AI program,” I stuttered.

  “A new game? You guys are working on a secret project?” he asked.

  “No, not exactly,” I said. “It’s something Dexter was working on. It’s sort of unique.”

  I looked over at Shinji, and he returned the favor. He was the one who’d asked Gordon to come over; why hadn’t he explained this stuff?

  “Gordon,” I continued, “I need you to keep this a secret.”

  “What?”

  “After you hear what I’m going to tell you, you might be tempted to talk to someone, but I don’t want you to.”

  “Who do you think I’m going to talk to? I have, like, two friends.”

  “I don’t know, but I just want you to promise that you won’t. I’m serious. Don’t tell your friends. Don’t tell your grandma. Don’t tell your dog. Too many people know about this already, and it’s gotten out of hand.”

  Gordon chuckled. Then he noticed that Shinji and I were staring at each other, looking very intense.

  “Whoa, you guys are pretty serious about this.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “No,” Gordon realized as he straightened in his seat. “You guys are scared.”

  “Gordon, have you ever heard of Alan Turing?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said, hesitantly.

  “He was the computer pioneer who did some revolutionary work during the late forties and fifties,” I said. “He developed some pretty bold theories, which at the time, created a social uproar that could be compared to Darwin’s work.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well, in 1950 Turing laid out the parameters for what is quite possibly the best test for any thinking machine. If a computer conversed with a human being, and its dialogue was so convincing that the person thought they were talking with another human, then the machine could be considered intelligent.”

  “And?” Gordon questioned, raising an eyebrow. He had no clue where this was going.

  “We found a program that Dexter was working on before he died,” I said. “We think it’s a true thinking machine – an evolved AI that could pass the Turing test.”

  Gordon scratched his head.

  “Huh. Okay,” He shrugged. He looked vaguely impressed. “Is that it?”

  What more did he want?

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “Gordon, I’m serious.”

  “This is your big bad? This is what you both seem so scared of?”

  “You don’t believe us?”

  “Not really.”

  “Gordon, we’re not pulling your leg. We’re not exaggerating. We don’t just have a computer program that can carry a conversation – we have a sentient machine.”

  “Okay Jack, maybe you have an impressive piece of AI. I don’t know. You won’t show it to me–”

  “We can’t find it,” Shinji said defensively.

  Gordon eyed us for a moment. “You guys are both utterly convinced that this is an intelligent program?”

  “Yes,” I nodded.

  “Have you also considered the idea that maybe you’re the man who taught his horse math? Maybe you’re misinterpreting this program’s actions. Programmers observe the unexpected in their work all the time.”

  “This isn’t a horse.”

  “Just hear me out. I had a friend up in Seattle who, just last month, told me about this problem he had with a game he was working on. They were developing a realistic physics system where in-game bullets had actual mass and shape. It sounds like pretty cool tech, but once they integrated it into the game, the main character started randomly dying.”

  Gordon cleared his throat.

  “For weeks, they couldn’t figure out why this kept happening. Some programmers joked that the game was possessed. Then finally my friend realized that the main character’s own bullets were ricocheting back at him and killing him. Sometimes a programmer doesn’t anticipate how the code they’re working on will affect the rest of a program.”

  “I had a similar experience in college,” Shinji jumped in. “I was working on the AI routines for a simple 2D shooter and I noticed that one type of enemy was unintentionally destroying the player’s super missiles. It perceived the player’s missiles as a more interesting target than the player, so it attacked them first. It was basically a bug, but I decided to keep it because it added an extra challenge to the game.”

  “Shinji, who’s side are you on?” I asked.

  “I’m just saying,” he shrugged. “I got an A on the project because of that mistake.”

  “Evi isn’t some isolatable programming bug,” I protested. “It’s a real program. We’ve interacted with. I’ve spent time with it. Gordon, this thing affects you emotionally. I can’t explain it, but it’s scary.”

  Gordon frowned.

  “You said Dexter was working on this?”

  “Yeah, it was like a pet project.”

  “And he did this by himself?”

  “Mostly.”

  Gordon shook his head. “That couldn’t be done.”

  “It’s too much work for one person. Maybe it’s a subsonic wave.”

  “A subsonic wave?” Shinji asked.

  “A couple of years ago, I read an article about a university student who started work in one of Great Britain’s science labs – CK Science or Volt Limited or something. Anyway, when he started, all his co-workers told him about how their laboratory was haunted. Some people had seen things: equipment and lights turning on and off, strange noises late at night, and whatnot. But this new kid, he was too smart for any of that. He wasn’t going to buy into any of that supernatural mumbo jumbo.

  “Well, one night he was working late, and he started hearing these sounds. He began to sweat, and he said this general feeling of unease settled over him. He later told a reporter that he felt like someone was watching him from behind. Out of the corners of his eyes, he kept seeing these grey, human-like aberrations, but every time he turned toward them, they disappeared.

  “Anyway, this guy still wasn’t buying it. Even faced with tangible, firsthand evidence, he wasn’t going to turn Fox Mulder and start believing there were ghosts. Instead, he got out his PKE Meters and other science shit and investigated the building. Do you know what he found?”

  “No,” I said flatly.

  “Subsonic waves.” Gordon smiled.

  I shrugged. What was a subsonic wave?

  “There was an extraction fan in the room that was generating standing infrasound waves,” Gordon said, as if those words were used in everyday conversation. “Subsonic waves that emanate at such a low frequency, humans don’t hear them. However, when these waves reach a high enough intensity, other senses can start to pick up on them. Once the fan’s bolts had been adjusted, the ‘ghosts’ were exorcised.”

  “Subsonic waves,” Shinji mused.

  “Subsonic waves,” Gordon echoed.

  “And you think this is what we’re experiencing with Evi?” I questioned.

  “All I’m saying is that there are reasonable scientific explanations for everything. Bigfoot is a gorilla on blurry film. Alien UFOs are just weather balloons in a storm. And ghosts are just subsonic waves. You may think this thing knows how to converse with you, or has feelings, or whatever, but there’s probably a much more mundane explanation.”

  I hung my head. Gordon had worked me into a corner. The only thing I had to argue with was my own personal experience.

  Shinji stood and began riffling through a bag he’d brought over the other night. He pulled out a small cassette and walked over to his office TV, which he’d also brought over. The TV sat next to my computer, playing a rotating loop of Japanese cartoons. He swapped the tapes, and another episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion started up. My living room suddenly felt a little too much like my office.

  “Even if we were to see intelligence emerge out of machines, it would probably start small, like bacteria,” Gordon said. “I don’t think it would emerge from the electronic womb fully formed as a sophisticated chatbot.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He was right.

  “Evi’s different,” I shrugged.

  “Okay, let’s say you did have the most impressive AI in the world – it would still be more limited than a human and wouldn’t be able to convincingly talk with us.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s a computer,” Gordon said. “Do you think it’s capable of feelings?”

  “No…I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He frowned.

  “Doubtful. We can make our computers play chess with increasing aptitude, but we’ll never be able to get them to feel emotions. They’ll never hold romantic interest in other computers or even people. They won’t make art or ponder theology. We don’t even understand how we are able to do any of those things, so how can we program them into a machine? Computers will always be limited by our own understanding.”

  But Evi wasn’t just programmed, I thought. Evi was an evolved thing. It seemed to have a persona. Maybe it was a person.

  “Of course, if machines were ever capable of those things,” Gordon conceded thoughtfully, “we’d all be out of a job.”

  “You think so?”

  “Think about it. We can’t make games that never get stale or boring. We can’t create environments that are always changing, that are different for every person, that are affected by how a person plays them. You need something that thinks, something that’s capable of processing information creatively, in order to make entertainment that’s interesting to another creative mind.”

 

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