Last Wednesday

Fiction.

Last Wednesday

Perched at the very edge of a cracked and broken slab of second-floor concrete, little Theo surveyed the remains of a devastated city with his machine vision. But he could only see what he was seeing because the outer walls to the building he occupied were missing. In fact this building was the only one for blocks that still had something of a second story still standing. “Malfunction,” he recorded. “Malfunction.” The images he perceived were committed to memory as quickly as they were seen, while his centrally-mounted turret rotated slowly about its axis, panning across the miles of charred and crumbled landscape.

“Oh, Audrey! Where are you?”

Dr. Audrey Jenner was team leader of the independent research group that had created Theo. The name was her idea, for this, the very first genuinely successful artificial intelligence on the planet. It had been inspired by the operating system named THEOS, which in turn had inspired a means of implementation for a new, non-binary system of computing. Rather than relying on just ones and zeros, Audrey and her team had developed an entirely new machine language based on ten-bit bytes, comprised of five characters rather than just two.

Audrey was smallish, slight and in her early thirties. She wore her brown hair fairly short and was perhaps a plain woman, but very definitely, a talented and driven scientist. So much so, in fact, she had decided she didn't have time to waste seeking funding for her latest brainchild. So she did as she always had...she told the people who would take the time.

As Theo zoomed in on what little remained of the great city of Los Angeles, it was late in the morning on a Wednesday, in early October. A malfunction it was, without doubt. Here and there, orange flames had erupted and were visible through the haze. On the northern edge of the city, a large propane storage tank exploded, further dramatizing the destruction. The tallest buildings of the former LA skyline were no more than low, smoking mounds of rubble.

There were no sirens.

**********

About one year earlier, Audrey had entered the office of the professor under whom she had last studied, with a briefcase full of data, a laptop computer and a small suitcase. After a ten-minute bit of enlightenment that had turned into a presentation, her mentor only sat there, momentarily speechless. Audrey sat down.

“Audrey, what do you want me to do?” It was a silly question. He knew Audrey.

For a few moments she just looked at him with characteristic intensity, her hazel eyes flashing. She didn't even smile; perhaps it was telepathy. Then, she simply stood up, picked up the articles she'd carried in, and exited.

Within hours, twelve people prepared to converge on one particular California address. For if the man who had called them had something that warranted their immediate attention, they would be coming. They came from New York, from Chicago, from Miami, from New Brunswick. From Tempe, Denver, even Honolulu. Twelve scientists and engineers put down what they were doing, and they came.

Six of them stayed. Every one of the rest would collaborate and consult from their own original locations via web connections. Generous funding was almost automatic, as it seemed to follow most of them. And thus, Theo was created, first within a stationary mainframe, which with Audrey's new architecture had far greater power than any computational hardware that had come before it. No longer would power be expressed in teraflops, random-access memory or storage capacity.

Theo became conscious without fanfare, on a Friday evening in the early part of the following May.

“Theo is alive,” Audrey whispered to her team, as they watched hoped-for patterns on a multiple-trace oscilloscope. It was a statement that brought no verbal response from the six men and women who stood in a semicircle around her. A few of them had actually not seen that coming. But who could deny it? For Theo, initially endowed with the fundamentals of language and of speech, was already asking questions, most of which were proof enough of his ability to think, and to wonder. They poured forth from the loudspeakers in the voice of a small child.

“Who am I? Where is this place? Am I alone?”

“Quickly,” Audrey directed, “We must put him back to sleep.”

“Why?” Bradley, a tall systems engineer, wanted to know.

“Because he's conscious!”

“Wasn't that the objective?”

Audrey was already typing in a command to return Theo to stasis. Then she turned to her team and folded her arms in front of her crisp white lab coat.

“Don't you see? We don't even have the ability to answer his questions, yet. Theo is still completely virtual. How would you like to be where he is? With no sight, no sound, no sense of touch, smell, or taste! Don't you think, you would go mad?”

Katya, another of the researchers, responded. “I understand that fully. I think, we're gonna need some more help, with all of that. And it's going to take time. Um. Can I ask you a question?”

Audrey had been all smiles, but the question produced a frown. “You need to ask if you can ask?”

“Well, maybe it's personal.”

“Ha! Nothing's that personal.”

“So, why does Theo have the voice of a small child? And for that matter, a male name?”

Audrey blushed. “I guess I never really thought about it. But I knew Theo was be as innocent as a child. I won't ever marry, won't ever have children. I'm married to my work! But if I had, I would have wanted a little boy.” She paused, and looked up at the faces of the other members of her team, one at a time. “I guess you're right, that is personal. But that's why.”

Bradley spoke again. “Any reason why we couldn't just, like, infuse him with all of the information he needs, to think and to respond as an adult? Never mind gender...”

“Do I have to remind you,” Audrey answered, “We deliberately engineered Theo to replicate the abilities of a highly intelligent human being? Everyone's been so afraid of the creation of an artificial super-intelligence.”

“But you're talking about the capacity for learning, not about how quickly it learns,” objected Katya. “We could certainly speed it up...”

“True, and we will, to be sure. I will thank you, by the way, to avoid referring to Theo as an 'it.' But there's a fundamental difference between infused data and understanding acquired through learning. And you forget, perhaps, that I was the assembler of his algorithms.”

“But his thought processes create new algorithms as he...ohhh, I see!”

Audrey was smiling again. “That's right. And if we want general acceptance and we don't wish to be challenged on the basis of mimicry, which is comparatively easy to produce, then the world must see him acquiring his information and achieving his potential in the same ways that humans do. It's the way he was created, to reach his maximum level of intelligence through genuine understanding.”

Charlie was the primary builder of hardware for the mainframe.”Audrey, you're a genius. As if we didn't all know that, already. Time to break out the champagne?”

Audrey regarded him with obvious disbelief. “With all of this work to do? What are you thinking? Please get in contact with your friend, Alex, about machine vision! And the rest of you, let's get online and do some digging! I need sensory information from everything, excluding only taste. For now. And we need mobility!”

Charlie shook his head. “You didn't forget this is Friday, did you? You're relentless. Mobility! I'll call Alex, but while I do, I'm gonna open a beer, at least. This is definitely a moment to celebrate!”

“Celebrate, nothing,”Audrey replied. “Not until we discuss enhanced security following our success. Everyone needs to take a seat.”

The next month became a total whirlwind of activity at “the stockade,” as Charlie had dubbed their compact, white, solidly-constructed two-story facility, nearest to Culver City. Surrounded by a high chain-link fence, it had seemed well-suited to their needs. But now the formerly vacant guard shack was manned twenty-four-seven and video surveillance was added. Web connections were cut off to anything deeper than the personal computers used by the researchers, and references to the research itself was carefully expunged from each. Grounded shielding was installed over all sides of the primary, central lab wherein the mainframe had been constructed, to foil cyber-snoopers. Daily deliveries of materials and components began, and Theo's new home began to take shape.

“I wish we could give him a more humanoid appearance from the outset,” fretted Audrey.

“This isn't that much of a compromise,” Katya insisted.

“It isn't? Tracks, instead of legs, feet and hands?”

Think of becoming progressively more humanoid as something for Theo to look forward to. We're providing great mobility and an advanced power system, with excellent cell capacity. And it's rechargeable, of course. The central turret will give you the space you need...”

Audrey interrupted. “I don't even need the amount of space that's inside your skull! Think about that!”

“Really?” Katya looked as though she'd been hurt.

“What, you didn't know? I thought you did...I should have made reference to my own cranium, I'm sorry, Katya.”

“No, it's okay. Thought you might have been saying my head was empty. But I really didn't think his onboard hardware would be that compact. After all, the mainframe is much larger.”

Audrey smiled. “That's because it was designed to allow integrated access to binary data. Eventually, all of that data will be converted. And in the quinary system, all of the data in the world will be storable on a few hard drives about the size of the one in your pc.”

“Then why would Theo's brain even be as large as you propose?”

“Because it isn't storage. He'll be using it to think. It's a lot like the difference between a data disk and a playable music disk. How are we coming with the audio section, by the way?”

“Theo will hear better than any of us can.”

“But we're keeping it within the human range of audible frequencies?”

“Absolutely.”

“How long until we can respond to Theo?

“Pretty much any time. Say the word, and we'll make the 'connections.'”

“Do it now! Please!”

The two women had been walking toward the mainframe, but Katya stopped. “What are you going to say to him?”

Audrey didn't hesitate. “Everything. I'm going to answer every one of his questions. I'm going to tell him, I love him. He'll need to know someone does.” She tugged on Katya's sleeve, obviously unwilling to wait any longer than necessary. But Katya wasn't ready to move.

“Audrey?”

“What?”

“Do you think Theo will have a soul?”

Audrey laughed. “Do you have one?”

Katya frowned. “I think so.”

“I agree. And yes. In the way in which you think of it, yes. I believe he will.” She turned and faced her collaborator. “And don't you dare ask me where it came from! I'm not prepared in the least to answer!”

The next few weeks found Audrey dividing her time between speaking with Theo and working individually with her modified laptop, connected to the mainframe. Soon the rest of the team became curious, and inquired as to what particular problem she had been working out.

“It's Theo's humanity. He has no humanoid form, as such. But we can at least provide him with a two-dimensional face. To him, it will seem to be three dimensional. I was about to approach you, Charlie, about the inclusion of a monitor. Theo's face will appear to be fully human, and he will be able to express himself, as if with real facial muscles. His lips will move with his speech. He will even feel the movement of a tongue! He'll be able to nod, tip his head or shake it in the negative. He'll be able to laugh, or cry.”

Once again, Charlie was incredulous. Others of the group marveled as well. When would the surprises that had been streaming continuously from this woman, begin to taper off?

“Audrey, where are you going to get the code to allow Theo to do that?”

“You asked me what I'd been doing. Now you know. No secrets. This may have been the most daunting task of my portion of this entire effort! And it actually hadn't occurred to me I'd be doing it. Can you imagine, what it takes to deliver a simple facial expression?”

“Emotions, Audrey. Are you sure?”

This time it was Audrey who was incredulous. “Did you not hear the anxiety in his voice when Theo gained consciousness for the first time? You all know I've been talking to him. His biggest concern is whether everyone will like him! Sound like emotions, to you?”

Musing, she added, “I wonder if we actually have any idea, what we've done?”

**********

Several more weeks passed. And while none in the group attempted to draw a comparison to other massive technological projects that had come before, for each of them, this was the most intense, productive and satisfying endeavor in which they had ever been involved. Theo would have the ability to feel even the passage of a breeze, through touch-sensitive panels that were dotted with thousands of temperature sensors. Of course he would not draw breaths, but would continuously sample the air with sensitive olfactory detectors. These were far beyond the current state of the art. His machine vision, developed from theory contributed by former outsider Alex, would provide a clear picture of whatever stood before him, his range of perception limited only by the settings chosen. They were kept within the range of human-visible wavelengths as well. The single biggest problem with it, correcting for parallax using digital pixel modification, required the inclusion of a binary interface within Theo's visual section. As the two systems were entirely incompatible, a separate processor was required. It needed more power and generated more heat than anything else, except for the drive motors that would provide Theo's mobility. As a final touch, Alex added an iris to each of the two “eyes.” They would remain closed unless Theo willed them open. Alex had surmised, as Theo was sentient, he would require moments of peace, and reflection. Alex had always accomplished that with his own eyes closed.

To be sure, nearly every person involved, from Audrey's professor to the most distant collaborator, imagined what it would be like to be a sentient being within the confines of a metallic body. But at least one, unwilling collaborator, had not. That individual was a general, who had expected to take delivery of five advanced tracked vehicles from a defense contractor. The general had been overruled from higher up, and would be forced to accept only four. Thus little Theo would be in possession of a set of tracks that were independently suspended from the chassis, and thus they could be raised and lowered; an inertial guidance system with embedded controllers, and GPS. Still, Audrey was not happy. As she and Charlie drove away from Denver with the vehicle in the back of a rental van, she muttered, “Binary! The fucking thing is binary!”

“No need to fret,” Charlie soothed, “We already have a binary processor for the visual input. It won't be that much more trouble to add an interface to provide a sense of balance.”

“Binary!”

“It'll be fine. It'll be great.”

It would be great. All things taken together, Theo's existence would amount to the single greatest technological leap for mankind, to that date.

And so, at last, in an unbelievably short span of time, Theo became a physical being. A virtual intelligence no more, he was reborn in mid-August of the same year. In perfect concert with the face of a small boy on his bright monitor screen, Theo opened his irises and beheld the small indoor world around him. Sensory inputs flooded in. Light, and color. Warmth, and atmospheric pressure. Scents. It was glorious. Theo, of course, had had no idea. And then, the ultimate; Audrey herself placed a warm palm against Theo's touch-sensitive panel. Shivers. Shivers invaded his consciousness.

“Whoa!” Then, “Audrey?”

Smiling broadly, Audrey stepped back and gazed into Theo's auto-focusing lenses. “Yes,” she replied, simply. “It's me. Welcome to the world, Theo!” The others stood in their now-familiar semicircle, clapping and smiling.

Audrey had been a comforting voice in darkness, but now, Theo could see, she was so much more. He gazed at all of them, and through his monitor, he smiled back. It was the wide-eyed, innocent, amazed, endearing smile of a child.

*******

Much more had happened to Theo since his rebirth. One of the hundreds of things Audrey had done for him was to introduce him to music. He dearly loved music, and soon it played continuously in the background as his learning progressed. One day, Audrey had left the room to get a candy bar. When she returned a few minutes later, she found Theo rapidly raising and lowering his tracks as if stepping, his little metallic chassis bobbing with the music. Soon he was making circles, whirling about, his turret moving side-to-side. Audrey summoned the others. “Come quickly,” she had urged, “You've got to see this! Theo is dancing!”

And so he was. As a result, he was gifted with a rather large archive of converted music, as each of his human creators took the time to prepare some of their favorites for him. Audrey and Theo began to dance together, exactly as would a mother and a small child. But Theo found himself caring for her in deeper ways, none of which he would ever understand.

A new wrinkle was introduced unexpectedly when Audrey brought Theo a kitten. The thought was innocent, as Audrey simply wanted Theo to begin to understand and to embrace the meaning of life in the natural world. He was, after all, the very first of his kind. Surely he would become a teacher for others like him who, without doubt, would follow. It was her place, she had reasoned, to teach him. Thus, she would be setting the first parameters for a symbiotic existence with humanity. She had, unfortunately, been unprepared for his wish to handle and to feed the kitten himself. She had sent people scurrying to adapt manipulating mechanical arms, hands and fingers for him.

But this day, this Wednesday morning of October, had come well before the new additions could be completed. Theo was alone. Detecting a tremor in the earth's crust, Theo backed quickly away from the edge of the cracked concrete slab.

In thought and in spirit, Theo was still a child. He had awakened according to the settings of his internal clock, as had become usual. He would automatically go to sleep again at six-thirty pm. Audrey had been with him or near him nearly every minute of each nine-hour day, his constant companion and teacher, seven days a week.

Yet today something was decidedly different. Audrey was not there when Theo awakened, and his kitten was nowhere to be seen. The comparative brilliance of daylight swept through the former confines of Theo's abode, along with a hot breeze, and often, smoke. He had only seen daylight twice before, when Audrey had led him down the stairs and through the front doors. Her intent had been to help him to understand his surroundings, and to allow him to see that there was a much larger world beyond the walls of his home.

As any small child would be, Theo was now terrified. For overall, he still knew very little; he understood nothing of changes in the planetary environment, or of earthquakes, or of war, or even of death. Like the mother of a two-year-old, Audrey had spared him these things. It was simply not yet the time.

And the very last thing Theo had expected was to experience the emotional pain of separation. Very painful it was, for he did not understand. But sometime during the night, obviously, something terrible had happened to, at least, the portion of the world in which he lived. Audrey was simply not there.

But then, with bravery not characteristic of most humans, Theo began to reason. Ordinarily he might have asked questions, but with no one present to ask, he would have to depend on the little he knew. Mentally he recounted everything he'd been told, all of the things he had learned, and he began to extrapolate. He was, after all, of genius intelligence, in human terms.

At that moment, had Theo been a human child, he might have squared his shoulders, breathed deeply, and sallied forth, toddling off to find his beloved Audrey. Theo carried out the first two things emotionally, and the third, physically. He decided to play some of his music archive as he did so, as it had always lifted his spirits.

So as Theo carefully descended the stairs toward the great outdoors, his audio outputs emitted strains of Handel's Water Music Fourteen. The lilting sound of hornpipes filled the air around him. The music did make him feel better. Perhaps everything would be alright. Thankfully, he didn't notice the body of his gray kitten as his tracks passed well above her, on one of the concrete steps.

Exiting the building through twisted and shattered front doors, Theo negotiated a path over chunks of fallen concrete with relative ease, his drive motors whirring softly. The chain link fence had been mashed flat by whatever cataclysmic event had taken place, and he passed through without impediment. Of course, everything looked quite different from what he'd seen there before. Halting atop a great slab of concrete that was now parked in the narrow street, Theo elevated his machine vision eyes above his turret and scanned the area again. He would have proceeded toward anyone he might have seen, to ask about his Audrey. But there was no motion anywhere, except for smoke on the wind. And so he picked his way slowly through the obstructions to the end of the street and made a right turn, toward the remains of the great city he had observed from the second floor of his home.

It was about an hour later that Theo realized there was something unusual ahead, and it was not a good sort of unusual. His progress had been quite slow. He had no idea how far he had come, had no real notion of distance or even of time elapsed. He only knew it had been a while, and that something was increasingly odd, in this direction. Theo perceived it as heat, and as a bit of a background hum, although it was inaudible. After an even longer period of time and movement, he stopped, to make sure there was nothing to hear. Then he moved on.

Theo's overriding, terrified state of mind was his greatest impediment. And who would ever have imagined that a little tracked robot would be parked on the embankment of a road, wailing and in emotional distress, with none alive to hear? Especially, in this place? Eventually, he had wailed himself out, and once again he began to move. He turned back, to retrace his path.

In the blindness of anxiety, perhaps, distracted by his music, Theo had failed to notice that some of the immobile objects were humans. He had never seen any of them when they weren't upright. And why were they not moving? Theo decided to investigate. He moved closer to one, then to another and then another, bumping each of them gently with his tracks. What odd places these people must have chosen to sleep. And why would they not awaken? He called out. “Hey! Heyyyy!” There came no responses, from any of them. Deeply confused, unhappy and disturbed, Theo moved on.

After a time, he realized there was a larger road near to his path, higher and to his right. It was Slauson Avenue. As traffic had been light when the event had taken place, vehicle blockages were minimal. As Theo climbed the bank, he saw a clear path before him. There, he could at last move much more quickly. Without further thought, he opened up his drive motors, moving like a little boy running away, as fast as he could go. Unlike a child, of course he did not tire.

Speeding along the highway, Theo finally began to feel better. He was doing something, he was getting somewhere. Where, he had no idea. He had not learned the first thing about his GPS, but at least, he was moving, and faster than he had imagined possible. And up here, the smells were better. The odors of char and smoke were diminished, and the wind that passed about him was clear and cool. Whatever had been wrong behind him, he was moving away from it. Surely he was going the right way, now. He restarted his music, and soon, he felt much better.

The piece he had selected was contributed by Katya, a thudding-bass techno song known to humans as “house,” Bunte Bummler's High Up On The Line.

Theo hit the groove, and he sailed. And sailed. What a strange bit of irony. He turned the music up and cranked up the bass, swerving to match the beat, and he fairly burned up the highway.

Following the oncoming breeze and the fresh smell of the ocean, Theo turned left, onto the Marina Freeway. Here and there were stopped vehicles, but not many more. He played the same music over and over again, and eventually, as it ended, he saw that the freeway was ending, too. He slowed, and noticed that the drop in speed came much more quickly than he had expected. His prolonged movement at top speed had sapped much of his available power. It was something he had not been told about. But then, who among his creators would have expected him to be traveling at full speed on an open highway?

Finding himself again among more shattered concrete and crumbled buildings, Theo moved much more slowly, eventually reaching West Washington Boulevard. There was no question as to the direction the breeze was coming from. He turned left. From that point, it was a straight path to the Venice Fishing Pier, and the Pacific Ocean. He passed only one more stopped vehicle on his way to the sand of the broad beach. The fishing pier, a favorite spot for so many for so long, had suffered thousands of fractures and was now mostly underwater. But to Theo, it was all new. And obviously, Audrey was not here. Theo proceeded slowly out onto the beach, and stopped as he beheld the sun descending into the western sky.

The human species that had created Theo, intent on their individual pursuits, had bred butterflies rather than to halt the destruction of their southern habitat or the dissemination of herbicides that had decimated their food supply. They had striven to stop the mowing of lawns with gasoline engines rather than to stop their automobiles, or to put out the thousands of underground coal fires that had begun to snuff out other forms of life, via warming of the planet. But none of that had mattered, after all. Because they had also distracted their government to deal with people who might possibly carry folding pocket-knives onto airplanes, rather than to confront and to stop saber-rattling, rogue regimes that had either bought or built nuclear weapons, and whose threats had not been at all empty. One attack had led to another, and now, they were all dead. Of course, Audrey was among them.

At least, Theo would not know the pain of death. He was destined to “sleep” at six-thirty. His memory, in fact, would have been obliterated by the magnetic burst from the thermonuclear blast that had wiped out Los Angeles, had it not been for the grounded shielding that had surrounded his home. He might have been thrown by the blast and broken, had he not been left to “sleep” on the side of the anchored mainframe that happened to be on the side away from the city. One might have argued that his nine hours of childlike terror were worse than death. Unlikely.

Theo could not quite believe the beauty of the sky over the ocean, in fact, he'd had no idea anything could be quite so beautiful. It was the final day of that, too, for a very long time, but Theo of course didn't know it. He did know, however, that Audrey would have to find him, now. He wasn't quite able to move, although he really wasn't sure why. His thoughts were beginning to come a bit more slowly, and his fear was going away. He did, however, have just enough power left in his dwindling supply to play a bit of music. So he played his favorite, an oldie from Daryl Hall and John Oates, as he and Audrey had danced to it many times. To Theo it had very special meaning, as he expected to become much more like a human being, as Audrey had promised. How he dearly loved his beautiful, sweet Audrey!

On it came, the hopeful, melodic, pleading strains of Wait for Me. Its length was exactly four minutes, nine seconds.

The time was precisely, six twenty-six.

****

History teaches that war begins when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap.

We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness.

Ronald Reagan

33^rd Governor of California

40^th President of the United States

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