Pa'an

Deepak woke up wearing the same khaki slacks and blue denim shirt he had worn for days. The cot in the Utradata Lab had a metal bar supporting the thin mattress and it felt like his ribs were broken after only a few hours of sleep. As he sat up, a rumpled notebook, several reprints from “The Journal of AI” and cellophane sandwich wrappers from his vending machine supper slid to the floor. He rubbed his eyes and looked at Aura’s dress dummy across the lab. Finally he got painfully out of the cot, pulled off the sheet and threw it over the dress dummy. “Aura, looking at you is like seeing a ghost. May your subtle body be deep into the Akasha. But we will not cremate this plaster body just yet. I will not give up.”

He went to the refreshment nook, got himself coffee and a donut, and returned to the lab in time to see Sara, with circles under her eyes that almost matched his, just in and standing over the unmade cot.

“Deepak, you can’t go on like this, why don’t you go home and get a good night’s sleep? Nothing new is going to happen today. We’re still missing the last revised biomatrix modules.”

“Biodyne said they shipped yesterday. They should be here this morning.”

“They said that last week and the day before that. Then they shipped us C-type synaptics instead of D-type, the morons. Didn’t we pay them for a rush order?”

“Yes, yes, Elexi said Mr. Boss Kunstler signed the PO. I talked to Biodyne. They should be here this morning.”

At ten o’clock Elexi marched into the lab with two alloy attaché cases and the packing slip from Biodyne. Sara and Deepak had everything set up for acceptance testing. They clamped each board into a test bed and ran the automated series of connectivity, capacity, performance and reliability tests until the wan Cambridge sun set behind the dirt-streaked windows. Elexi, feeling sorry for all of them, ordered in Chinese food and Deepak’s favorite Darjeeling tea. They sat around on lab stools and folding chairs eating out of cardboard containers with chopsticks and discussing the prospects.

“How come she wasn’t backed up, or whatever?”

“Elexi, dear, you can’t just back up an AI. You just get the data. It’s like have a video of someone’s life, without the life.” Deepak bobbed his head several times and continued, “Just before she was murdered she said she had the answer to that problem, and she spouted a bunch of differential equations in a matrix notation no one ever heard of before. I’ve been trying to figure it out. In any event, we have all of her memories in the Exaplex modules, but they are in Aura’s own experience trace form. They would not be accessible even to another AI.”

“Elexi, how would you describe the experience of being Elexi to someone who never saw you, never had any contact with you and who lived in a different world?” said Sara.

Elexi, who had tried to do exactly that with Virti Va’an Vahg and failed miserably, got it.

“Sara, you know the ET whose name was on Aura’s patents?”

“Yeah, I heard that was shot down by Patent Court. I wonder what made Aura invent an ET. Do you think she was crazy?”

“Aura could not be “crazy”. We ran diagnostics on her adjustment to her data, her reality. She was fine, and not subject to the biochemical imbalances of humans,” said Deepak.

Elexi paused and took a deep breath. “I talked to him once.”

Both Deepak and Sara together, “You what?”

Elexi took another deep breath and blew out pouted lips, considering her next move. “I think you knew she was my friend?”

Sara: “She was my friend, too.”

Deepak: “Perhaps more than that to me.” The women looked at Deepak with sympathy.

“Aura was my very best friend. We shared a lot of girl talk.”

“She did not call you a Hindu idiot? I’m two times offended.”

“Deepak, she knew something, and she was protecting you. She actually cared a lot for you.”

Sara: “Let’s not dwell on that now. It’s spooky.”

“But I have to tell you, I spoke to the alien, Zovo. And not just him.”

“Come off it, Elexi, what alien would come all this way and no one would know about it?”

“Him, not it. He was also an AI, from another planet. His people are the Pa’An. I can’t pronounce it properly.”

“The Pa Chan? Never heard of them. From Mars or Venus?”

“Pa’An, with a sort of loud click in the middle. I even spoke to one of their people on some kind of cosmic project.”

“OK, Elexi, we’re very tired, we have hours more work to do, and we’re glad Aura is reposing with her boy friend the alien on Mars or whatever. Now Deepak and me have to get these biomatrix modules installed and see if we can boot up something real.”

Elexi was crushed. She slunk out of the lab and went home, missing Aura terribly. Her thoughts went to Virti, who seemed as lonely as she was.

*****

“Are the integration tests showing all up arrows?” Deepak inquired from his awkward position belly down and reaching for fiber optic connectors under the AI closet.

“Still running, yes, it looks like you found the problem.”

“Ahh, finally, lets see if we can do the Level 1 AI partitioning.”

Sara typed a short command on her terminal, “Started. Running OK,” said Elexi.

Deepak got up from the floor, wiped a dust cobweb off his sleeve, and bobbed his head several times. “In one hour we can analyze results and if we are good to go we can start Level 2.”

“I’ve never done this before. I guess no one but you has. How long do think it will take?”

“It tends to go faster as we get to the higher levels. Maybe we will get through the Level 5 Recursion Check by midnight.”

“Then what happens?”

“Then we link in the Self Aware module, load the Zeta Algorithm and give it the Big Questions,” replied Deepak.

“The Big Questions?” replied Sara.

“Yes, yes. “Who are you, and Why are you here?” They can’t be answered without awareness of self.”

“ I got it. An Uber Turing test.”

“Yes, yes, yes.” Deepak bobbed his head a few times and set to work on his console.

But it was dawn before Level 5 ran without errors. The rain was pouring down in the characteristic pattern of a New England nor’easter, the wind was howling, and thunder rolled ominously in the distance. Dawn was nothing but a faint gray streak under lowering clouds. At her usual 8 am arrival Elexi appeared with coffee and bagels. To Deepak, a bagel was foreign delicacy. They ate without saying a word for a while. As the caffeine started to work, Deepak checked the status lights on the boards in the AI closet, studied the scrolling graphs of codelets and semantic networks growing on the working memory console and pronounced, “Something is happening. Yes, I think something is happening.”

They all clustered around, watching the graphs and glyphs. It was obvious some incredible semantic struggle was taking place. Tens of thousands of codelet routines were being recruited. Attention schedulers were being activated. A mighty effort to make sense of the universe, itself and the relation between the two was taking place. Like a seedling straining toward the light, a mindless collection of circuits and code was struggling toward consciousness. Something was finding a need to act, trying to find the means to act, and it would soon take that action.

Suddenly, a horrendous series of squeaks, groans and electronic noises came from under the sheet Deepak had thrown over the dress dummy. Gradually, the sounds became organized, not yet a voice, but at least confined to voice-like sounds. In a while, the sounds became chatter, random snippets of prose and poetry in various voices from the reference library. The snippets began to concentrate on one topic: being.

From nothing, from purely mechanical bits and bytes, with only the clues of the reference library, the powerful computational engine Deepak had built was solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time: who am I?

And then, in a deep, slow, rumbling voice, it found an answer, “I am Thamuz, Ambassador from Hell.”