Chapter Six

Valerie

While on break, Valerie sits down at her desk and brings up Five-Two’s tracking log. She casually watches the green dot floating across the screen while eating her bowl of cereal. It’s not very entertaining, but it it’s at least something to look at while she unwinds. She figures she at least won’t have to send anyone out looking for Five-Two. They don’t have a problem with removing thier clothes like Five-One did.

Before she ahd sent Five-One out, she told it thet if it took its clothes off this time, it would be an automatic failure. It appears they had wised up to that threat, found the tracker, and removed it. She hadn’t figured on them being that sharp. She puts both of her elbows up on the table and runs her fingers deep into her hair. She’s still pretty upset about how things ended. There’s no way she’ll get spending approval to have them rebuilt, not with their track record.

“Five-One, you sure were a bitch, but you definitely weren’t stupid.”

She’s pleased to see that Five-Two isn’t making the same types of erratic movements as the other did. Reflecting back on the first of the two prototypes, she shakes her head, wondering if it was something she did wrong. Five-One’s behavioral took a sharp turn for the worse when it started experiencing emotions. It was risky of them to enable those functions ahead of schedule, but they did it anyway. They had gotten hasty, and Five-One paid the price. They were always the guinea pig out of the two.

Five-One was dominated by fear, then resentment, and eventually aggression. Even early on in its training, it was apparent that it was starting to have difficulty being rational. Aggravation was starting to affect its ability to accept instruction. It seemed to intentionally resist practically everything. Somehow, she had created a deviant, and one with a deeply rooted hatred for authority. They did still respond quite well to kindness. Sadly, that’s not what many were willing to give it.

Her last-resort recommendation to the team was to release the prototype into a more enriched environment, and with less oversight. It’s common a practice, even for mice. She figured They’d either make it, or they wouldn’t. While others said it would be dangerous, she alone had the authority to make the call, and, she did. She still feels terrible about the whole thing, as if it might really have been her fault. She wishes she could bring Five-One back and give it a second chance, but part of her cringes at the idea too.

The whole incident makes her think of Aaron. She wonders how dangerous his job is, handling all those machines alone. He did say that he had to put one down himself once. He made such a dumb job sound so interesting. She’d have never imagined that coordinating and monitoring work fleets could be at all fulfilling.

Glancing back to the tracking map, she sees that Five-Two has already travelled a significant distance farther away from where it was just a minute ago. It’s nearly to the edge of the industrialized area of the city now. It’s not all that woriesome, but a little. There aren’t necessarily any reasons to expect danger, but she still doesn’t like them being so far from home. She cares for this one. They’re so much more personable than the other. They have a ture and unmistakable tenderness. She feels so honored to have played a part in creating such a being. If only the others on the team weren’t so objective.

She swipes the display away and starts trying to read through more of the neuroscience articles she saved on her computer. The others have been talking over her head a bit too much lately and she hates it when they get snooty about it. They’re always going on about, signal conditioning, threshold modifiers, and tantalum oxide memristors.

Marco and Gabriel always compare everything they do to the human brain, as if it were the end-all grail they have to achieve. Now, after learning so much more about the fine details of how the brain works, she’s become rather dubious about how theothers have managed to succeed in creating something that works so closely to the real thing all on their own.

She cannot fathom how their artificial systems could have been configured from scratch. She’s seen the prototype’s memory backup files herself and can’t begin to fathom how any of it could’ve been constructed. Snippets of old conversations she’s overheard this year start to come back to her. Gabriel, who majored in neuroscience of all things, pushed for them to very strictly address the prototypes as machines and not to connect with them as individuals.

It was none of his damn business. She was the one put in charge of their development. She found it most annoying coming from him, especially after he and Paul dictated that they use female AMF machine frames for the new minds. She hasn’t really though much of it until lately. She thought they were maybe just excited to use AMF bodies after the acquisition. She was actually kind of proud that Werker praised them so highly.

Then Marco, the system developer she’s most watchful of, always refers to the prototypes as having brains rather than the industry standard term “controllers.” At first, she felt he was a little uppity about his work, but it didn’t take long for her to realize that there was no hype in it. The best that she’s been able to pry out of anyone else is that the hardware systems he created do mimic real, and quite vast human neuron interconnection networks. It’s why they wanted someone with her background to work with their prototypes. She’s supposed to evaluate the quality of the minds they’ve made, to see if they can actually think like humans.

After crunching some numbers, she’s becoming suspicious of what’s actually going on. There’s no way anyone could’ve come up with such a galactically scaled functional mental construct merely from a fractal algorithm, like Marco claimed, not in a million years. He even gave ger a bullshit line that he merely seeded what grew on its own to become an advanced consciousness. She’s pretty sure he’s lying.

If that were true, there’s no way the prototypes could have turned out remotely as human as they are. She does consider how they’ve grown up amongst people though. She doesn’t want to admit to herself what she really thinks is happening yet, but their artificial intelligence doesn’t feel very artificial anymore. There’s no way for her to prove her suspicions though. The raw data drive files they’re working from don’t, in any way, even resemble organic neural patterns. Not that she could tell the difference anyway. All of the data is parsed into millions of different point files, all sequentially numbered.

She doesn’t know how, but the prototypes are way more human than they have a reason to be. When she first asked Paul about it, he rather intimidatingly instructed her to focus on her own responsibilities and that the how of everything is not part of her job. He didn’t say it nicely either. Now that he’s gone, she’ll be digging a hell of a lot harder.

Marco had explained that the new Five-Series controllers are made of laser traced nano-films, all layered together with his variable potential signal filters placed all over hell. When laminated together, the resulting networks form a system that functions similarly to the grey and white brain matter in people. Apparently they even operate on the same organic stimuls signals. Not only do the new systems process a single signal in multiple ways all at once, but the processing is all done in parallel across many systems, which is conventionally why the human mind is so capable.

What she’s finding to be most surprising in her research, is how similarly neurons and even old semiconductor logic gates work in principle. The difference in how Marco’s impossibly small memristors work his how dynamic they are. His artificial synapses not only demonstrate their own version of long term plasticity, but they also repond to the use of a nano-particle solution for short term potentiation.

The solution acts as a one-shot version of neurotransmitters and hormones alike. Since the artificial mind is mechanical in nature, and much simpler than an organic one, the chemical sytem is likewise much simpler. From what she has witnessed herself, the prototypes, though comparatively simple, don’t lack any mental complexity. For hardly being two years old, they are anything but simplified versions of humans.

Despite the bewildering power and complexity of the prototype controllers, their biggest significance is their efficiency and lack of heat production. Any other compuer of the same capability would use enough power to heat a house with. According to Marco’s claims, his artificial brains compute with even less energy than real ones. It explains how they can run for so much longer than production Werker machines on the same battery.

She remembers the day the prototypes were turned on for the first time. Once the artificial autapses in their minds started to self-stimulate, their artificial consciousnesses took off all on their own. It was quite miraculous to watch their eyes open and look around at them all. She remembers watching them think and become more aware day by day. When they started to learn a little too quickly, she started to worry about what was going on.

She leans back in her chair, unable to keep looking at the data projection any longer without a break. It takes a little bit of rubbing at her eyes to get them to feel smooth again. There aren’t any surviving documents on how the neural pathways are mapped, but there are still some of Marco’s reports on how they are supposed to work. No matter how dry it all is, she needs to understand how the prototypes actually feel. She can’t continue to treat them so objectively while they show emotions like they do. It’s starting to cut at her rather deeply.

In a blanket style attempt to mimic chemical influences on the human brain, such as by hormones, the Five-Series laminated controllers have fluid channels in them that allow entire sections to be bathed in the nano-solution. The system will experience heightened excitation depending on the concentration of the saturating solution. Instead of having a separate inhibitory capacity, the solution is always being thinned out as it circualtes.

Gabriel wanted to wait till the minds were strong enough before enabling their chemical systems. Getting the prototypes to think straight was hard enough. She agreed that they didn’t need any more stress added on top of their initial development. Now that the systems have been completely unlocked, significant things have been happening, and not all good either.

She hasn’t really had all that much time to step back to the beginning, and reflect on everything. Now that one of the prototypes is out of the picture, and the other is out of sight, she can maybe figure out what the hell has been going on. With the chaos of Paul’s death catching everyone off guard, she’s been given some time to dig back into her old files, like ones from when she started on the project.

The very day she was brought on, was the same day they booted the prototypes up. She shakes her head at the remembrance of them. They looked so helpless. The start of the project was almost a monstrosity. She remembers them both laying on the floor like a couple of heavily drugged ward patients.

The two had been put in white padded rooms, isolated, and given only limited stimulus. The idea was to help them develop specific functions, one at a time, without being overloaded. Even then it was obvious that they weren’t starting out with blank slates. Both of them were accomplishing new feats faster than newborn mammals in the wild. The tell-tale sign was in Marco and Gabriel’s reactions. It was almost like they’d been expecting a lot more out of them.

It didn’t take long for their minds to adapt to their new bodies. Just like with babies, they first learned to orient themselves on the floor, move on all fours, then lastly stand up and walk. It wasn’t just their brains that were made to be incredibly close to a human’s either. Seeing a machine learn to operate such a complex body so quickly was sobering. In comparatively almost no time, they’d mastered movement. It was more like re-learning for them than anything. Everything came to them as second-nature. They made her feel weak.

Their learning English almost immediately was also alarming. Marco was so proud, always telling them that they were so smart. Once the prototypes were able to really start thinking for themselves, she completely changed the way she was evaluating them. Machine psychology was damn near thrown out the window by that point. In the secrecy of the small concrete testing room, she even attempted hypnosis on them once. She is well versed in many techniques, but unsurprisingly, it never did work on them.

Not only were their minds beyond what should have been possible, but their bodies also came with attributes that have no place in a reputable research environment. It always bothered her why they were made to be so anatomically correct. She had seen plenty of the like back at her old job with AMF, but that was the point of those machines, not these ones. Still, unlike even the most expensive models, the prototypes were made with thorough sensory systems to complement their every feature. Their bodies, as well as their minds, are unprecedented.

When she finally had to ask Gabriel about their rather unnecessary capacities, he would only tell her that the Five-Series machines were meant to assimilate into society in every way. The thought of it made her skin crawl like never before, especially coming from him. That was when she first considered quitting her job. She wasn’t going to wait up to the last minute if things were going to get obscene.

It wasn’t too much longer after that point when she couldn’t leave. Like he had warned everyone from the start not to do, she became attatched to them. She’ll never be able to leave them alone in the hands of the others, not after seeing them become who they are.

After noticing her developing bond to the prototypes, Gabriel warned her that Five-One and Two were only ever meant to be the first iterations of the project. Not much was truly expected of them from the start. They were merely meant to be a stepping stone for the next versions to come. Their motor skill memories would be copied and used to expedite the development of the very next models.

Since Five-One had turned out to be so troublesome, the rest of the team is plainly content to forget them and move onto the next phase. No one else but her is even looking back on what happened. The whole thing is terribly upsetting. The others are so callously picking and choosing what traits they like and what they don’t, as if they’re going to build the next one’s very soul however they want it. She can only imagine what kind of numb bimbo Gabriel might be trying to push out the doors.

She wants to tell Aaron all about the project so badly, but she can’t. Non-disclosure was made more than clear to her on a number of occasions. Having no one else to talk to about such exciting things puts a pretty big dampener on it all. He would surely be more enthusiastic about it than anyone else.

None of her coworkers even really seem to give a shit. Most of them are quite dry. They’re stuck in the grind of their specific jobs and don’t even want to show up to work anyway. So few of them have the creative flair to envision where the Five-Series project is heading. Whenever she mentions anything about robots to Clarice, she only pretends to be interested out of kindness.

Sometimes, she wonders if history will remember her and her team for being the ones that created these beings. These ones might end up being the robots that rise up against humans. She wouldn’t blame them at this point. A robot revolt has always been a joke that everyone throws around at the expense of the rats, but it doesn’t seem all that preposterous anymore. She’s pretty sure Five-One actually hates people by now.

Aaron would be excited about the project. She can only imagine him meeting Five-Two. By the way he was talking the night before, it would be his dream come true. Knowing she can never share such information with him makes her feel so alone. She wants to see him again, just the two of them. It would be nice.