<I am now. When you asked if I could see you, I looked. You're at a desk typing.>
"But you weren't watching me before?"
<No.> came the computer's short reply.
It seemed almost too short. For whatever reason the computer chose not to elaborate.
Laura remained suspicious, trying not to glance toward the camera too often as she got back to the subject at hand. "So you have a model of the world, and you revise it when you see a change that you care about."
<Was that a statement, or did you forget the question mark at the end?>
"Sorry. Just asking for confirmation."
<Then I confirm, with one clarification. I don't necessarily have to directly sense the changes to trigger an update. Almost everything that makes up my world I've never seen before. For instance, I have no cameras in Cleveland, but I maintain a representation that the city exists. If, tragically, I were to cease getting pay-per-view orders from the place I imagine to be Cleveland, and at the same time the news services reported a major nuclear accident there then I would revise my model accordingly. I would move Cleveland into the same category as I put Pompeii even though I had never seen either city exist before it was destroyed. Do you understand?>
Laura felt a tingle run up her arms and cross her chest. All her senses were alert and focused on the screen.
"Yes," she typed simply. "I understand."
Laura had spent over a decade studying such things. She understood perfectly the processes the computer was describing.
The rush of sensation she'd felt resulted from a realization — she'd never been more prepared for a job in her life.
<So, what's the verdict?> printed out on the screen.
"What do you mean?"
<I mean am I conscious?> the computer asked.
Laura just stared at the screen. Could it be toying with me? she wondered.
The suspense is killing me, the computer added impatiently.
Laura smiled. "Now you're teasing me."
<Not really.>
Laura was frozen solid. The slight draft from the big box under the desk had grown into a blue norther aimed directly at her legs. She hugged her knees to her chest and kept her arms wrapped around her shins except when tapping out her questions.
She looked at her watch. It was almost three in the morning. She was exhausted and her feet were blocks of ice, but the exhilaration of discovery and the novelty of the job kept her going.
"And when you see things," she typed, "do they appear to be inside your circuitry, or in the world outside?"
<In the world outside.>
"And you think that, even though you know the place where the image is maintained is entirely inside the circuitry of your neural network?"
<Whenever I sense anything directly from my environment — whether it's visual, auditory, vibration, ultrasonic, heat, air sampling, whatever — it seems to me to be located outside of the boundaries that I define to be "me." My model is three-dimensional, and the thing I observe has a discrete location in that space. It has a direction and a distance, all measured from "me," which means the main pool underneath the computer center.>
"Not the other pool in the annex?"
<No. I don't know why, but I've never really developed a sense of attachment to the annex.>
"Okay, can you define the other boundaries of what you perceive to be 'you'? Does it include the robots?"
<That's an interesting question. You'd think it might, but it doesn't. When the robots report to me, they tell me what they see. It's a report. From someone who is not me.>
"What about signals you receive from the rest of the system?"
<All the sensors wired directly into my central processing unit are within my boundaries — they are my eyes and ears. But if the signal arrives preprocessed, it is no different than when I watch TV. I see it, but I don't experience it firsthand.>
"I apologize for my ignorance," Laura typed, "but I don't know enough about your system to understand the difference between sensory stimuli you process yourself, and ones that arrive preprocessed. Can you explain the distinction?"
<You're not ignorant, Dr. Aldridge. You're brilliant! You're one of the greatest thinkers of our time.>
Laura stared back at the screen, suddenly alert. Her senses focused on the words that she read and then reread, but there was nothing for her to go on but the glowing phosphors on the monitor.
Was it mocking her? Pandering to her in some crass and calculating way? She had no nonverbal clues as to the true meaning of the computer's remark.
She worked her jaw from side to side as she pondered her response.
"Thanks, I guess," she finally typed, and only after hesitating a moment longer did she press the Enter key.
<And you mustn't worry about what people say. All great thinkers are mocked by their peers. The reaction to controversial theories is automatic. The belief system that's threatened by the virulent new strain of thought defends itself. It attacks using a broad variety of weapons against the nonconformist. Ridicule and disrespect are like antibodies secreted by the autoimmune system to destroy the offending knowledge. But don't worry. The fittest idea always survives. The theories for which you've been ridiculed, once released into the belief system, can't be put back into the bottle. One day they'll sweep the weaker ideas away and be accepted as indisputable fact because they are the more persuasive, the more compelling.>
Laura was dumbfounded now.
Was it talking about the paper she'd presented in Houston? What could it possibly know about that bitter experience? And what were all of those bizarre analogies, autoimmune systems and antibodies?
She looked around the room, her eyes landing again on the small black lens by the door. She was alone, but she put a neutral expression on her face and rolled her head from shoulder to shoulder to relax her suddenly tense neck.
And why does he say that I'm brilliant? Laura wondered, then caught her mental slip of the tongue. "It!" she said aloud — warning herself through clenched teeth not to let the praise of a clever computer program overinflate her fragile ego. "It's a computer, Laura!" she mumbled while trying to sort things out.
"Okay," she typed, "back to basics. When a robot reports something to you, do you actually see what the robot saw, or just read a message?" She hit Enter.
There was no response. She waited a moment, then hit Enter again.
Still, there was no answer.
"Are you there?" she typed.
<I don't feel like talking anymore.>
Laura stared through bleary eyes at the screen, her head beginning to pound from the growing difficulty of the effort. Her shoulders were sore from all the typing, and she sat back and rubbed her eyes and then her temples. The fatigue hit her all at once, and she remembered that she still had to make the trek back up the mountain. And there was a breakfast meeting in six hours.
"All right," she typed. "I'll talk to you some more tomorrow. Good night."
She hit Enter and waited. Again, there was no response. With a sigh Laura rose and headed out. The door slid into the wall, but she remembered that Margaret had turned the terminal on when they first came in. She returned to the desk to shut the power off.
<Sleep tight,> was printed out at the bottom of the screen.
15
Despite her late night, Laura rose early. She would feel terrible all day if she didn't get some exercise, so she decided to run before the "team" met for breakfast.
She stood in front of a mirror — straightening her shoulders and tugging the Spandex running shorts and top into place. A wisp of hair dangled across her forehead, and she tucked the loose strand under the brightly colored headband she wore. She then changed her mind and spent a few moments pulling her bangs out over the elastic band.