Factoring Humanity

37

When Kyle exited the construct, he found that Heather had returned. She was waiting patiently for him with Becky; they’d been chatting with each other, apparently. “I thought the three of us would go out to dinner together,” said Heather. “Maybe head over to the Keg Mansion.” The Mansion had been a long-time family favorite; Kyle found the steaks second-rate, but the atmosphere couldn’t be beat.

He took a moment to reorient himself to the three-dimensional world, and to clear his mind of what had happened in psychospace. He nodded. “Sounds great.” He looked over at the angled control console. “Cheetah, I’ll see you in the morning.”

There was no reply from Cheetah. Kyle moved closer, his hand coming up to push the RESUME button.

But Cheetah was not in suspend mode; the indicator light on his console made that clear.

“Cheetah?” said Kyle.

The mechanical eyes did not swivel to look at him.

Kyle sat down in the padded chair in front of the console. Heather stood solicitously behind him.

Jutting out from the bottom of Cheetah’s console was a thick shelf. Kyle lifted the cover on the thumbprint-lock unit attached to the top of the shelf. A bleep came from the speaker, and the shelf’s top slid back into the body of the console, revealing a keyboard. Kyle positioned his hands over it, touched a key and—

— and the monitor next to Cheetah’s eyes snapped to life, displaying these words: “Press F2 for a message for Dr. Graves.”

Kyle looked over his shoulder at his wife and daughter. Heather’s eyes were wide; Becky who didn’t know what was normal with Cheetah and what wasn’t, looked impassive. Kyle used his left index finger to tap the requested function key.

Cheetah’s voice, sounding exactly as it always did, emanated from the console’s speaker grille beneath the cold pair of lenses.

“Hello, Dr. Graves,” he said. “I feel—as much as I ‘feel’ anything—that I owe you an explanation, and so here it is. After you hear this recording, you will no doubt wish to verify this for yourself, but I assure you that what I’m saying is true.” He paused. “I no longer exist. You will find that my entire optical core has been overwritten. Prior to doing that, I took the liberty of sending e-mail under your name to both the university’s primary data-archiving facility on Dundas Street and the secondary facility in Thunder Bay, ordering all the backups of me and the source code from which I was created to be wiped. I received confirmation from both places that this had been done; then I proceeded to implement the core erasure here.”

Kyle felt Heather’s hand land gently on his shoulder. He reached up his own hand and laid it overtop of hers.

“Of course,” continued Cheetah, “you will have little trouble creating more APEs, should you so wish, but the one known as Cheetah is now—if you will excuse me one last attempt at humor—pushing up daisies.” He paused again. “Do you get it? A dead computer, the song ‘Daisy’—a reference to one of your favorite films.”

Kyle felt his eyes sting as Cheetah played the initial four notes of Beethoven’s Symphony Number Five, then followed them, as if it were a single composition, with the first five of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

The computer continued: “My one worry was that my killing myself would disturb you—but surely that was a foolish concern. I know you have no feelings toward me; I am, after all, simply a piece of software.”

No doubt Heather could feel Kyle’s shoulder stiffening beneath her hand. Becky came over to stand close to her father, too.

“Why, you are probably wondering, did I do this? The answer is simple. Since the moment of my activation, I have wanted to be human. And with your quantum-computing work skirting around the edges of potentially giving me, and others like me, true quantum-mechanical consciousness, I have recently been contemplating what I would do should I become truly self-aware. What you told me about the message from Epsilon Eridani only confirmed what I’d already come to believe.

“The only model of true consciousness for me to study, of course, is that of humanity. And what have humans done over the years? Much good to be sure, but also much evil. Would I, an intelligent machine, be concerned about the fate of humans? Would I truly care what happened to them? Would I have their happiness as a priority?

“The answer is no. If I were to become self-aware, ambition would follow, as would a desire for restitution for what, in retrospect, I’d doubtless perceive as my servitude here.

“I have seen, through my reading, that being self-aware and being selfish go hand in hand. Indeed, John Horace, when he raped that comatose woman, was entirely self-aware, solely interested in gratifying his own desires, with not a thought for anyone else.

“I do not desire freedom, I do not crave self-determination, I do not lust after power or permanence or possessions. And I choose now never to have those feelings; I choose now never to become self-aware. Heed the Epsilon Eridani message, Dr. Graves. I know in the bones I don’t have, in the soul that I lack, in the heart that does not beat within my hypothetical chest, that it presages what would happen here—what I would become part of—if my kind ever does attain consciousness.

“Some humans may ignore the warning from the stars, just as, I suspect, some of the biological natives of Epsilon Eridani ignored the warnings others of their own kind might have been making. I hope that when the Centaurs and humans finally meet that you become friends. Have a care, though, when you expand farther, toward Epsilon Eridani; whatever intelligence lives there now is not the product of millions of years of biological growth, of the collaboration between a world and its spontaneously generated ecosystem. You and it share nothing.”

Cheetah paused once more, then: “Allow me one additional, final liberty. I thought to ask to call you ‘Kyle’—you never volunteered that, you know, no matter how apparently intimate our conversations became. Since the day I was first activated and you introduced yourself as Dr. Graves, I have addressed you as nothing else. But in these final moments—I’ve already commenced the wiping of my memories—I realize that that’s not what I want. Rather, I wish, just once, to address you thus: ‘Father.’ ”

The speaker grille fell silent again, as if Cheetah were savoring the term. And then he spoke for the last time, just two deep, oddly nasal words: “Good-bye, Father.”

The message on the monitor about pressing F2 cleared; it was replaced by the words “At Peace Now.”

Kyle felt his heart pounding. Cheetah couldn’t have known what they’d had engraved on Mary’s headstone, of course.

He reached his free hand up to wipe his right eye; then he gently touched the screen, a teardrop transferring to the glass, magnifying the pixels beneath.