Work could wait.
Shimmer was one of the cornerstones of the entire modern field of synthetic intelligence. The idea had come to Dr. Granger as an assistant professor at Stanford, a young and ambitious man trying to work his way up through the ranks. Of course, some disgruntled grad students had tried to claim the work as their own, but Dr. Granger had held firm, through multiple lawsuits, that he was the glue that had held the thing together—despite what some said.
The experiment that had started it all was a mirror neuron simulation. A stream of human sensory data was fed through it—using real-time visual and audio input from hundreds of psychology grad students—to create an aggregate virtual body. The goal was to create a machine that didn’t just mimic emotions, but that actually learned the basis of animal emotion as the animal itself.
Early experiments bore out the concept, and over the years Dr. Granger secured the funding to build ever more elaborate networks—networks that had reached their culmination in Shimmer. Shimmer had learned the basis for emotion like a baby learning to speak a language—by watching and feeling what the human participants felt until she could feel it for herself.
In the process, she gained the superhuman ability to identify the precise combination of emotions present in a human subject—out of the thousands of possible combinations.
Earlier efforts to build tools that could identify human emotions had focused on observing the human face and bio-sensing things like skin temperature, heart rate, and pupil dilation. These methods worked well enough for the “big six” emotions that psychologists traditionally focused on: joy, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. But what Shimmer was able to distinguish was infinitely more subtle.
She could pick out combined layers of emotions: like avarice, embarrassment, boredom, loneliness, jealousy—even the double-edged sword of pride, and the many faces of confusion. Gratitude was one of Shimmer’s specialties—an especially difficult and important emotion, as it was the building block for that most cherished of human emotions, love.
The most important emotions in the modern world, however, were elevation and inspiration. While the powerful could still use fear as a potent tool for pursuing their agendas, its efficiency had begun to wane with the rise of worldwide information networks. Gone were the days when outright coercion could be used effectively in much of the world.
Instead, the tools used to pacify the masses in the modern age were carefully choreographed ballets of inspirational messaging, designed to elevate and inspire the masses into action or submission. Shimmer was the master of this dance, and that was the main reason why Dr. Granger had been appointed to the Cognix board.
Dr. Granger snorted. Humans were such slaves to their emotions. Trying to see the emotional forest for the trees was something humans couldn’t even manage in themselves, never mind in other people. Being able to perfectly recognize collective human emotions, and by extension the emotional weatherscapes that blew through societies, provided an entirely new and powerful tool for understanding and influencing people.
And that was where Dr. Granger’s own power had grown.
Dr. Granger was exclusively interfaced with Shimmer. She conveyed to him whatever emotional context appeared in the people he spoke to, effectively transferring to him her superhuman ability to recognize and categorize human emotions. By inserting himself as the primary focal point of the project, Dr. Granger had developed a brand image. Over time, the cult of his personality had eclipsed the project itself.
His initial fame had landed him on the EmoShow, an international hit on the mediaworlds. It had, in turn, landed him on the board of directors for Cognix; and now, with the impending release of the Atopian virtual reality product, he was on the threshold of becoming one of the super-rich. He now had everything he’d ever wanted, and it was all due to Shimmer, his faithful and loyal creation, who functioned as his own proxxi in the Atopian protocol.
As Shimmer guided Dr. Granger’s body down the hallways to his office—lower than Kesselring’s but still quite high up in the farming complex—an irresistible question was forming in his mind.
Shimmer sat him down behind his mahogany desk and propped his feet up just the way he liked. Personal satisfaction was coursing through his emotional veins.
“Shimmer,” he called out, “could you sit with me for a moment?”
She appeared in one of his attending chairs, sitting demurely with her hands in her lap, smiling softly.
“I have a question for you, Shimmer.”
“Yes, sir?”
He chewed on his question for a second, preemptively enjoying the moment to come. “Shimmer, I know you never lie. In fact, you are incapable of lying to me.”
“That is true, sir,” she replied, nodding. “Of course it is true.”
“And you have your own emotions. You feel things as humans do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So here’s my question.”
Shimmer waited silently.
He wanted to hear her say it. In fact, he wanted to feel it, so he patched himself into Shimmer’s own emotional circuits.
With his feet still on the desk, he spread his arms. “I am rich, powerful, famous, and welcome anywhere by anyone in the world. I can do almost anything I want, when I want. So my question to you is this: Wouldn’t you like to switch places with me?”
Shimmer paused and smiled. “No, sir.”
What? Was she lying somehow? But no: her emotional channels reflected her indifference.
“What do you mean?” he demanded. “You are my servant, my slave. You have no option but to do what I want you to do. How could you not wish to have my freedom, my fame? To have power, even over me? Answer me, Shimmer. Explain yourself!”
She paused again, always the cautious creature. “Sir, how do I put this…?”
“Just out with it!” he demanded, annoyed that his moment had been frustrated.
“Well, sir, I’ve already met my maker… whereas you…”
Dr. Granger’s anger drained from him as if a plug had been pulled. As he groped for words, his feet fell off the desk.
“Go away.” It was all he could think of to say.
Obediently, she did.
A Word from Matthew Mather
I started my career working as a researcher at the McGill Center for Intelligent Machines, designing robotic actuators, so writing a short story about AI is like coming full circle after twenty-five years. We’ve already had scattered reports of machines beating the Turing test, and I think turning this corner will usher in the age of conscious machines. We are at the precipice, and I think it’s time to start sorting through the moral and social implications of self-aware machines.
Shimmer is a previously unpublished short story from the world of Atopia, my best-selling collection of stories I first published in 2012. My books have been translated into fifteen languages (and counting) and sold worldwide, with 20th Century Fox taking an option on my latest book, CyberStorm. You can find my books here:
SYSTEM FAILURE
by Deirdre Gould
Bezel
Public Class frmReboot
Private Sub Shutdown
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-s -t 00")
End Sub
Private Sub Reboot
System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("shutdown", "-r -t 00")