As I write this, the Turing test has just been passed in real life, by an artificial intelligence that its programmers call Eugene Goostman. This A.I. fooled the test judges, at least 33% of the time, into believing they were conversing not with a robot, but with a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian boy.
“Humanity” is the story of a double Turing test, about how a little girl and a man both fail their tests, and their redemption.
The epigraph is taken from the film A.I. by Steven Spielberg, a modern retelling of Pinocchio (or the commedia dell’arte Buratino) in which a robot boy longs to regain the love of his human mother by becoming “real.”
“Humanity” also references the experience of the Holocaust era, when a Star of David was used as a method of identifying Jews. The apartheid of the world of “Humanity” is underscored by my Three Principles of Robotics—with apologies to Isaac Asimov—mentioned in passing in this story and explored elsewhere in my other stories, including “Liberty” (subtitled “Seeking a Writ of Habeas Corpus for a Non-Human Being”). It’s a construct that allows me to explore the nature of, not robots, but human beings.
“Humanity” is set in a world I think of as the Labyrinth—the same world that houses my stories “Trauma Room,” “Hereafter,” and “Liberty”—a world where corporations have expanded beyond governments, where people live in the shadow of surveillance by telepaths, and where robots are second-class members of society, on the verge of becoming self-aware.
If that world sounds almost familiar, you’d be right. Change “telepaths” to “intelligence agencies” and “robots” to the name of any one of the many displaced segments in our societies, and we’d be talking about the world we live in today.
Ever since I fell in love with science and speculative fiction—both the classic writers, including Asimov and Ray Bradbury, and the more contemporary, including Margaret Atwood and Kazuo Ishiguro—I’ve realized that what such fiction does so well is to illuminate not the future, but the present.
And yet, we live in a present in fear of the future—of something unknown, dystopian, apocalyptic. I believe that, despite all this, there is promise. There is hope. I write about that, and I hope you’re with me for the journey.
My website—forever being revamped—is http://www.samuelperalta.com. And if I have new books, a continuation to “Humanity,” or other stories, a small circle will hear about it first on my free newsletter http://bit.ly/SamPeraltaNews. Please join me there.
Many thanks to my editor, David Gatewood, whose surgical eye kept me from splitting too many infinitives. Thanks, too, to my colleagues in these pages and in my community of science and speculative fiction writers, for their encouragement and support of a simple poet. It’s a privilege to share these pages with such talented authors.
The best is yet to come.
ADOPTED
by Endi Webb
The fierce pounding on the metal double doors escalated. Louder, harder. Like metal hammers. I was scared, more scared than I had been in weeks, though the events of the previous few days seemed to have been having a competition among themselves to see which one could make a twelve-year-old boy pee his pants first.
I looked up at Dad, the man I had always known as Dad, and he just stared ahead at the rattling door, the hinges shaking, the sound of metal scraping on metal coming from the other side. His breathing was labored and heavy, still a little raspy from the knife that punctured his lung weeks ago. The banging turned to crashing, and he gripped my trembling hand tighter.
I remembered the zombie movies my dad and brother would take me to just a few years ago, and this was always my favorite part. The unseen walking corpses would bang on the doors, trying to get at the tasty brains of the cowering people hiding inside.
But these were not zombies.
They were men. And women. Some children.
At least, they looked like people.
I could never tell a robot from a real person. They acted like people. They smelled like people. They laughed and cried like people. But when they decided to kill you, they were not people.
They were inhuman.
And they were stronger than people. One time, my dad took me on a trip to New York. We rode a lot of trains. In one train station the crowd was enormous, and no one saw it coming. A man on the concourse walked up behind a woman waiting for a train, and just stared at her until she turned to look at him.
And then he punched his fist into her side.
His fist went right into her body, clear up to his elbow. She didn’t even scream. Just coughed a little blood and shook a bit—and that was all. She fell down and the man calmly walked away, as a station full of terrified passengers quickly emptied itself, hysterical people scattering, screaming in all directions.
I didn’t move though. I was too scared. I couldn’t even scream. I was nine. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. My dad just grabbed me and ran.
It was like that now. I wanted to say something to Dad. Anything. Are they going to get past the door? Do you have any bullets left? Do we still have time to go to Charlie’s grave? Are we still having pizza for dinner? But my throat tightened with each nerve-wracking crash, and my joints stiffened in terror as I saw the hinges shake.
“We can’t stay here.” Dad let go of my hand and paced up and down, searching the room we were trapped in. He opened the other door in the room and confirmed that it was just a storage closet. He slammed it shut. He grabbed a chair and stood on it, knocking loose a ceiling panel with his already-bloodied fist. Jumping up, he grabbed the edges of the adjacent panels, pulled himself halfway through the ceiling, and looked around.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
The crashes had given way to powerful thuds, as our pursuers began assailing the door with a heavy object.
Dad lowered himself back onto the chair. “Come here. Now!” I ran to him and he grabbed me under the armpits and lifted me up into the hole in the ceiling.
“Grab onto the sides and pull yourself in!” I did as he said, and hoisted myself over the edge of a nearby panel. He followed close behind, and when he was up he pointed to a large duct.
“Crawl.” I obeyed, crawling as fast as I could to the large steel tube. It was supposed to be attached to the wall, but it was loose, and Dad ripped it the rest of the way off.
“Go!” I climbed up into the ductwork, pulled out my cell phone to use as a flashlight, and worked my way down the tube, Dad close at my heels. Behind us I heard a loud clang and a crash, and thuds from who knows how many boots spilling into the room.
“Dad!” I cried, my voice finally loosened by the action of climbing and crawling. I pointed behind us in the duct, directing my phone’s flashlight at a man that crawled toward us with inhuman speed. Dad already had the gun out. As the man reached out to Dad’s ankle, he got a bullet through his eye. He slumped onto the floor of the tube, and another man, close behind the first, crawled up and over his bloody companion. With another explosion from the gun, he too collapsed. The bullet had passed straight through his thin metal skull, splattering the wall of the duct with blood and what must have been bits of brain.
Dad said something, but I couldn’t hear. My ears still hurt from the gunshots, amplified by the close quarters of the tube. He yelled it louder. I still couldn’t hear, but I saw him point down the duct.
I crawled.
I built a fort once, with my brother. We used fallen tree limbs and other junk that we found in the woods of the abandoned lot behind our house. It had a low, rickety ceiling and a few long passages that connected its three small rooms. We used to crawl between those rooms as we planned our battles against the enemy of the week. One room was our command and control center, and another was the armory where we stored the weapons—usually swords, given the abundance of sticks in the forest. We would take turns being the alien or the terrorist or the robot, and we’d swipe at each other with the makeshift weapons with a ferocity that surprised me then. I guess I had already seen too much violence.