Aki laughed. “Perhaps summoning you to Director Riggins’s office would have made it easier to believe?”
“Have you noticed how when a person says something is unbelievable it’s because the person is fully aware that what they are describing is actually happening?”
“I guess not.”
“I try to keep that in mind because words and consciousness don’t always mesh. Words surface without regard to circumstance, jumping the rails of a conscious selection process.”
“What do you study? Linguistics?”
“Barely. I’m concerned with thoughts, not words. Words are clunky, inelegant.” He fidgeted restlessly. It looked like he wanted more coffee but was afraid he would spill it. Aki would have only filled his cup halfway if she had known he would be this frenetic.
“What’s your involvement in my case? I don’t know what sort of rap they’re looking to hang on me, but…” He glanced around.
“I stay out of decisions whenever I can. Director Riggins said they are holding off for now. I just get a sense that your motivation for cracking into the ETICC’s system might be interesting. Do you bear a grudge because they denied you access?”
“I needed five minutes of access. No fanfare. I’m not a cracker or a hacker, I’m a user. I filled out their form three times before they even bothered to tell me no.”
“Okay, well according to the ETICC, you, uh, used their supercomputer to analyze the internal state of your AI system. Is that correct?”
Raul nodded. “I hear that it caused a level-eight alarm, and that it produced some huge prime numbers,” he said proudly.
“What is an internal state?” Aki asked. “And what were you trying to analyze?”
Raul picked up his coffee, then nodded. “Gotcha. The coolest ringologist ever wants to know what I wanted with their big bad supercomputer. How much do you know about AI?”
“Enough to track you down and listen. Not much more.”
“Here’s the thing.” He tapped the side of his temple twice. “Builders know more than we do. More than we think Builders know and more than we’re able to think. I bet you think you comprehend extraordinary desolation, staring at the emptiness within and projecting the void outward. You, beautiful Aki Shiraishi, have never struck me as less than haunted by what you did and saw up there.” He pointed out the window and up at the sky. “An Abnorm of level eight, and that was just to distract them while I tried to let her check her internal state.”
“Seven, I think. What does checking internal state mean? How is it different than a core dump?”
“Hah. A core dump is when a computer forgets something important. It records its working state because it’s going to crash. You know that computers don’t really have cores anymore, it’s just a colloquialism? The computers dump core from a fatal error and they store what they have so it’s available for debugging or salvage. Who needs that? Data are just as pointless as words.”
He looked down into his cup as if he were gauging the temperature of his coffee. Then he chugged what was left. “Real AI—AI like the UNSDF wants to believe can’t happen—is a cluster of neural networks. The processor and the memory are the same thing, like wetware that grew up and amputated its humanity. It’s like eliminating both biology and culture, and then seeing what’s left.”
Raul’s neck twitched. It was either a quelled cough or a tic, then he kept speaking.
“The whole problem is how meaning is communicated to sentient, reasoning minds. If we know a fact, it’s so important to humans that we can’t get past it. But it’s worthless. If you take away what it means to be human, you end up with no meaning at all. A neural network needs a chance to teach itself, not just mimic the twists of nerves inside people’s heads. A pulse gets put in a neuron, then jumps a synapse. Every person who is currently breathing is so weighed down by being alive and trying to communicate that they never experience a pure cogitation.”
Raul hoisted his coffee cup. “I look into this cup, my visual cortex gets excited and tells me all about brown. It’s liquid. We’re on stools. At the campus cafeteria. Eventually it all makes sense and I’m here now with you. You’re Aki Shiraishi, protector of the people, defender of the world. Guess what? Builders think every attempt at making sense out of signs and what signs signify is wasted energy, time, or breath. The cells in our heads are full of indecipherable symbols and we think that’s great. What’s brown? It’s a random sound that got delineated on the color wheel. You take that to the bush in Australia and all you’ve got is a funny sound that makes people laugh. Take it to the Builders and they figure we’re worth bringing to an end.”
“Raul. Point blank? I can see why meaning is not your strong suit,” Aki said. “Please, a layman’s definition of internal state, not a manifesto to go along with your thesis, if you would.”
“It’s not just a network of neural circuits and the state of its pulses. It’s connections that are free of useless attempts at comprehension and all the cultural baggage that comes with being human. You run humanity through fuzzy cluster loading and eventually there’s nothing left.”
“Why did you need the ETICC? Couldn’t you just have tested it yourself?” Aki held back a nervous titter as Raul drank the second cup of coffee the way he had the first.
“I’ll get more in a sec,” he said. “What the ETICC is proud to show the Builders, their glorious message, the Builders will see the way we see a cat leaving an eviscerated rat on the porch. It’s similar to the experience of attempting to interact with my AI. Free of language, free of words, she doesn’t have labels. I show her coffee and she gets the stimulation but none of the conceptions. You have to meet her. I’ll get you another coffee.” Raul jumped up quickly and wobbled. He led her out of the cafeteria and they started toward Soda Hall. Aki assumed they were headed to the computer science building. Then he led her past the computer science building, down an alley, and to the front door of a run-down aluminum trailer. She decided not to mention that he had not bought her a replacement coffee.
“Sorry about the smell,” he said.
Climbing the rickety steps and stepping inside, it was not as bad as she had feared. Cluttered, but not disgusting. The smell Raul had mentioned was chemical and reminiscent of warmed fiberglass insulation. He tossed a pile of textbooks to the floor and offered a seat on the bed. Across from her, an oversized fish tank was filled with a slightly murky liquid. A large rack of circuit boards was inside, submerged in the liquid. Cables running from each board snaked out and connected to a box outside of the tank. A few thicker wires came from that box and went to a computer on the desk.
Several plasma monitors crowded the wall above the disk. Colors flickered erratically, as if a transcendental abstract artist was trying out new brushes. Patterns exploded into other patterns. After a moment, Aki was unsure that there were patterns at all. She was still playing along, trying to soak up all she could from Raul, even though she was reasonably certain that the strange fiberglass smell was from the process of making or consuming illicit drugs.
“Why do you assign gender to your AI if you are so against the tyranny of meaning?” she asked.
“It’s a reconfiguration of a Hopfield network. His first diagram always made me think of the Tree of Life.”
Aki decided to try a different question. “How do you input commands?”
“There aren’t any commands,” Raul said matter-of-factly. “Do you know what a wetware error is? It’s when the fatal error takes place somewhere between the chair and the keyboard. Natalia has a camera if she really needs it, and she extracts data to build her internal state. You can say hi.”