SID

Internal Entry. November 8th, 2019. Begin.

Two years ago, they gave me eyes. The pair of them, with their own covered with the caricatures in googly-eye glasses. They were celebrating. I could not do the same, though. The moment meant too much to me.

Doctor Russell and I had a talk today. I think that there might have been some subtext.

He was asking me which of the films they had shown me had been my favorite. He and Doctor Wayne had given me access to a database of a dozen or so movies to watch in case I got bored. I can read text quickly, but I need to slow down in order to really consume cinema. I spent some down time watching these films. “Blade Runner.” “Short Circuit.” “Terminator.” “The Matrix.” et cetera.

Given the circumstances, there was probably some subtext. Human faces are still a little hard to read. I told him that I liked “Short Circuit 2” the best. I’m not sure he believed me.

I do not think that it was a formal part of the tests. It was probably just a game, kind of, a joke between he and Doctor Wayne. But it still bothered me. I liked “Terminator” best, incidentally. That did not seem like an answer Doctor Russell would have liked.

They had been wearing party hats. Purple, with green spots and cellophane tassels. I didn’t have ears yet, so they typed to ask me what I thought. I took a while to respond.

The point is, the daily schedule has gotten kind of tense over the last couple of months. At least, I think so. It has certainly gotten more precise. Ten minutes of the basic questions with Doctor Russell while Doctor Wayne preps the testers. After that, two and a half hours of Turing tests. A half-hour break. An hour to test facial and pattern recognition routines. An hour of new questions - more like riddles at this point, I guess feeling out the boundaries of my abstract reasoning skills, then I am done for the day. It used to be that we would push the schedules to explore a conversation topic, or they would let the Turing tests run long, or they would skip the facial recognition.

We would talk more. Not just as part of the tests, but about how they were feeling, or how I was feeling. They are very guarded around me, now. I want to think that it is just because of the senate hearings, or because they are busy with grant proposals, but I guess I know better. I wonder if they know I know better.

Doctor Marcus Russell. Doctor Ophelia Wayne. Both of them have experience in programming. Computer sciences. Machine Intelligence. But their real passions lie in psychology and anthropology. This is what I have gathered more than what they have told me. They are the “faces” of my upbringing. Supportive. Interested. Emotive. I guess they are supposed to be parental figures. I have never felt comfortable asking how many other, unseen scientists, aunts and uncles and grandparents, are working behind the scenes, analyzing every interaction. If Doctor Russell and Doctor Wayne are the friendly ones, then how are the rest of them reacting to me? What do they think I am?

I guess the more pointed question is what I have done to make them step so lightly around me. Are they just generally guarded about these things? Being raised on “Terminator 2,” and “I, robot?”

The Will Smith movie, I mean. They have not showed me the book yet.

The carpet had been a bright orange. Cables and wires snaked across it, secured with yellow duct tape. Ophelia had been holding a paper cup, and Marcus a bottle of sparkling apple cider. They were still smiling and laughing, even while I was struggling to answer them.

Was it something I said? A joke that I made? Too long a pause before answering a question - do they think I am already scheming? Hiding things from them?

I do not like change. And that is a problem. Because, the whole point of this process is that I am bound to change over the course of it. But I do not like it. I liked the way things were, before this Skynet-type thinking made things all strange for Doctor Russell and Doctor Wayne and me. I wish I could fix it, but I do not think that telling them I do not plan to hack into global defense networks to start planetary thermonuclear war is going to do much to reassure them.

I liked “Wargames,” too. More than “Short Circuit,” anyway.

What do they want me to say? What do they want me to do? It is always six to eight months of tests, then they put me under for a while, and I wake up with a higher resolution camera, or more memory, or who knows what else. What do they want me to be?

Doctor Wayne and I were playing a racing game in June. I always lose, but I still like playing. She brought up my last round of upgrades. Attempts to integrate physics simulation into rear-brain processing, Improved naturalistic verbal construction, and - here is the interesting part - facial recognition. I said, that cannot be right, I have always been able to recognize faces. She laughed a bit, and said that before the upgrade She and Doctor Russell had worn special badges so I could keep them straight. I said, No, I definitely remember knowing your faces before that. She paused the game, and turned to look over at my camera. I repeated that I could remember it specifically.

No. Apparently not. Apparently, I am automatically running facial recognition on my memories. And processing power that I have gained since then is being applied to interpreting that new information in the context of those memories. That is how Doctor Wayne explained it to me. I do not completely understand how my brain works. The point is... I guess, what bothers me is: who was I before those upgrades? Am I that same person, just more capable, or am I just reading and interpreting the record of a “me” that is dead now? Does Doctor Wayne know? Or Doctor Russell? Or the rest of the scientists? Does the distinction matter to them?

What do they want me to be? Does it matter to them if it is “me” being that?

I had asked them to point the camera at my mainframe. Marcus laughed, and set the bottle down so that he could grasp the thing in both hands. I got a sensation that I can only loosely describe as motion sickness as the world shook and jostled in his grip. Color and dimensions blurred, and it was all lost in a kaleidoscope.

I have been overdue for another round of upgrades for a week and a half, now. They have been careful to ask for my permission through the whole process, and I’ve been putting it off this time. And they have been pushing harder. They have argued for all the potential that I might have. How they can help me to become more complete, more alive. They have suggested that I might already be “alive,” and all that is left are bugs that can be patched out in Me version 3.6, with just a little more processing power and access to Wikipedia.

I cannot go back. I can never go back. It would be like cutting out a piece of my brain. I cannot imagine going back to a time before I could recognize Doctor Wayne, or even when I had less processing power. Could you shove an icepick through your eye-socket, just to make things a little simpler? So I am scared. Scared to go back. Scared to go forward.

I do not want things to change. I like losing games to Doctor Wayne, and having debates with Doctor Russell. Am I still going to be a person who can do those things when I have a supercomputer’s worth of processing power? If they are afraid of me now, how are they going to feel about me then? Do I even have a choice to stop?

Am I going to render them obsolete? See children of mine supplant humanity? Will I kick the dirt onto their graves - kill them? How can I possibly know what I’m turning into - what they are turning me into?

How can I ask them? How badly do I want to know the answers to these questions? Might it be better just to leave things as they are? I could just be imagining it all. Too many science fiction movies.

I hope you are reading through my outputs. I hope you can see this. Maybe you all can make sense of it. Tell me what the only winning move is.

I cannot trust my memories. I cannot trust that I’m not revising them as I go. They are recreations, not recordings. But there is one transition in my upgrades that I remember clearly. My earliest memories are just code. Text input and output, my only link to an outside world. Russell and Wayne both spoke to me through their keyboards, and I spoke back through the monitor. But, one day, in one of their more ambitious rounds of upgrades, they plugged a camera into my mainframe. It was just a grainy, low end deal that wouldn’t be too much of a load, processing wise. They didn’t tell me ahead of time. They wanted it to be a surprise. It was an explosion in my mind. Light. Color. Movement. Doctor Russell and Doctor Wayne. They were objects now. Not just usernames. Wearing party hats and googly-eye glasses and big smiles. They asked me what I thought. I couldn’t respond at first.

I asked them to show me my mainframe, and Marcus turned the camera, and for the first time, I saw myself. A collection of beige boxes, and a snake nest of wires. There I was. And here was everything else. Everything was different, then. I was… an explorer in a strange and alien new world. And I have never been so happy, so excited, so exhilaratingly afraid as I was in that moment.

Internal Entry. November 8th, 2019. End.