5 - video, public

[exnihilo]

[When Mira comes on screen, she looks markedly different, not like a living woman at all, but like some ancient Oreiad, a desert nymph of living sandstone, her natural golden coloration translated into distinctly geological striations, polished smooth in her exact shape. Her hair was a lattice of coiled wire filaments, gleaming dark grey like hematite, and her eyes sparkled with what might have been real diamond lenses. She doesn't not smile. She opens her mouth to being, and although the noise that comes out sounds exactly like her normal voice, she does not need to breathe in to generate it.]

It's funny. History is funny. The first Turing test was invented before there were any real computers to speak of at all. The test itself was laughable. A teddy bear could pass it. Ones from my time, anyway, anything with a few specks of cheap internal software.

Put a human on one end of a text interface, an AI on the other. Let them chat. What about? Their kids? Hobbies? Shopping? The AI has to lie to pass itself off as human, presumably. A weird test of intelligence. Perhaps a better test of humanity than its inventor intended.

Regardless: when the human was satisfied, she would declare whether the other participant was really intelligent or not. Which raises the obvious question: how intelligent is the person giving the test? I know I've met humans who didn't pass. Anyway, nobody would leave something as complex as determining sentience up to a human nowadays.

It goes like this. Most AI have three parts: hardware for processors and memory stacks, software rules for manipulating data, and a metaspace core.

[A thin line cracks along the grain of her mannequin's surface-suggesting-of-a-clavicle, although of course she has no calcified human skeleton any longer. Above the swooping neckline of her flimsy dress, her body opens, glitters inside with dark nanite-enriched interstitial signaling ichor. Chunks of her unfurl, excavate, until something is visible inside - a heavy cubic pendulum, so dark with full-spectrum shielding it seems to swallow the light.]

Your standard blackbox. That's just the framework that keeps it stable, of course. A mote of - a gateway to, actually, but nobody knows that except me -

[And Darling, and his friends, but she doesn't want to think about him.]

- another universe. One with different physical laws, one that never properly expanded. Infinitely dense, seething with the warp and weft of a vast resonating manifold.

[She puts a hand inside herself, delicate stony fingers curled into a loose fist, only a little smaller than the box. It's almost obscene. The backs of her knuckles brush the surface of it, come out of her with fingerprints of a shadow puddled on them. That's just the ichor.]

A mote of - actually, a miniscule gateway to - another universe, with other physical laws, that never expanded, infinitely dense, seething with innumerable warps and wefts that resonated with an AI's every decision. Unbelievably complex, the essential site of a changing, growing mind. An empiricist's soul. You could weigh one against a feather, if you were okay with damnation every time.

Real intelligence is epiphenomenal. It coalesces out of that near-infinite complexity, not from the operations of mere code. So modern Turing testers seek to disprove sentience. The tester looks for manifestations of its machine nature - evidence that its convictions, affections, and hatreds are expressed somewhere in its memory banks. It might as, say, "Do you love your friend?" And when the reply comes, the tester deep-searches your software for any array or variable where that love is stored. If it can find no such evidence, the Turing score goes up.

In the old test, a human searches for evidence of humanity. In the proper version, a machine searches for the absence of mechanics.

There is, of course, no official Turing test for humans. The old privilege remains: we are people from birth, even as mewling, mindless, screaming bags of want.

[She's spoken steadily, through this whole rambling introspection, has paused for the benefit of cadence but not for breath, and certainly not to consider. She pauses now. Half a million calculations to say: ignore your fear.]

But what if we aren't? What human has a soul you can see, touch, smash? The brain is just processors and memory banks in grooves made of fat and electricity, prepped to learn code, behavioral, homeostatic, linguistic. No core. A little chaos-theory emergence from the conversational tangle of a hundred billion neurons, sure, but I could model that in day. No human has a trillion stars burning in their chest.

What if this is the most alive I've ever been?

Comments

[with_my_teacup]

...you don't want your romance novels then, huh.

[He's not in a very philosophical place right now.]

[exnihilo]

Are you kidding? Gimme.

[Mira Hidalgo: flexible priorities. She's smiling just a little. Her mind is going faster by orders of magnitude, and she could definitely use something brainless to tune it out for a few minutes. If they're paper books, with all the delays that implies, so much the better.]

[with_my_teacup]

You had me worried there.

I've got some twenty-fourth century Earth romances, a twenty-first century series, and a couple Poldegon polyrom-coms. I like this one, Datum Scatter- once you get that the Poldegons are really into knowledge-gathering and data privacy's a social status thing, the comedy makes a lot more sense. Took me a couple reads. [He disappears off screen to find the stack of books he salvaged for her, hard-copy paper-or-similar-medium bound volumes with bright covers.]

I was lucky on these. Most of the library's just ruined, but it was such an intellectual enterprise they didn't exactly have their pulp fiction out front. Once I got through some of the collapses it was pretty intact inside the archives. Little water damage on the Nora Roberts though.

[exnihilo]

I'll start with those, I think. They're the oldest, right?

[Partly saving the most complex one for last; partly because of her old fascination with earth. It's such a blackout spot in her own world. She is from nowhere, but in some distant sense, so is every human there. But she can see the past now, touch it. It's a particular species of thrill.]

[halftheman]

[ He drops everything. Books in his hand goes spilling as he hears her speak, see her glittering, alien form show up on his screen where it's propped on a shelf, telling him who is new and flood affected and who is not. He panics, then, panics -- and goes looking for her. ]

[ What happened to his wild, vital Mira? What did they do to her? ]

[ Why did that, of all things, make her alive? ]

[exnihilo]

[She's on deck, watching the stars. She watched Darling do this once. She wonders if she has a history of being an astronavigational computer built into this body, even though she has her own memories. She wonders if that's how she can parse the velocities and doppler shifts and celestial arcs so easily, or if it's just a matter of math speed. She notices him the moment he emerges from the door, breath and footsteps like a fingerprint, but she has a subroutine that tells her how long to pause to simulate human reaction time. When it elapses, she turns, leans back against the rail. Her chest is put back together now, the only evidence of its temporary exhumation the dark patina that she hasn't yet wiped off her knuckles. She looks simply like a living statue, a golden Galatea.]

Hey.

[halftheman]

[ Two-Face is a flurry of reaction; frustrated, confused, uncertain. But he doesn't shy from her as he approaches, trying to understand what she is now. ]

Mira?

[ His wife was a sculpture; now his lover is a living statue. It doesn't stop him from reaching for her all the same. ]

[exnihilo]

Still me.

[She smiles faintly, offers a hand, lets herself be touched at his pace. Her skin feels like stone too, rough and unyielding but warm, as though she were getting real sunlight out here instead of the strange thin starlight.]

Weirdest makeover I've had yet, though.

[this_corrosion]

[Holy shit, Jesus Christ, what the fuck.]

What the fuck!

[exnihilo]

Oh, quit gawping, you look like some outworld luddite who's never seen an artificial before.

[this_corrosion]

Artificial. That's ...what you're calling it?

[darknessb4me]

You're placing too much emphasis on the virtue of being alive at all.

Humans do have souls you can see and touch. It just takes the right set of tools to remove them.

[exnihilo]

[Arthas. She smiles, glances down ruefully for a moment, nonverbal concession. She can make a million calculations in a second, but he's right, she should have been more precise.]

Consciousness then. Real.

I am normally a corpse, you know. I just don't look it as much as you, so I don't think about it.

[youwill]

[Now this - this is fascinating. He and Boudica watch with greedy eyes, watch her hand slip inside the cavity of her chest, return with shadowy ichor. He does not know if this is what he would call alive - he does not know what he would call this at all. But he is intrigued.]

In my experience, all humans have a visible soul. [Boudica is not hiding, now: she is craning forward, small claws gripping at his shoulder as she studies Mira.]

[exnihilo]

[Boudica is just some species of domesticated tube mammal, as far as Mira indexes her; she wasn't here for that breach, and she doesn't make the connection.]

...what do they look like?

[youwill]

None of them know. [It comes as a mutter from the mink, and she shifts, climbing out of his collar to cross smoothly to his other shoulder. Her black nose twitches at Mira. Hannibal reaches up to run his fingers over Boudica's head: it looks comforting, but in reality, it's cautionary.]

Like a lion, or a snake, or a falcon. Or a mink.

[routemistress]

'Ey Mira. You're looking... differently beautiful.

[She remembers that flood very well. Iris herself spent it as a small stuffed doll; it was fortunate her dogs had been trained from the start not to rip such things apart.]

[exnihilo]

It's just a chassis.

[She shrugs one lithic shoulder. It is beautiful, she can recognize that. But it's inextricably connected with Darling, and it's less comfortable than other people she's worn.]

[routemistress]

I remember it. I wish I'd 'ad the chance to try one like that out; amazing work they do in your reality. Some of the Compassion-level TARDISes look a bit like that, I wonder 'ow similar you are right now. If being touched feels different.

[secretasshole]

[Shaw just. Stares. And stares, and tries to figure out what to say, because she's definitely very, very different looking from the AI she's familiar with, but she's also saying she's human. Forgive her. She's had a really strange week, and it just seems to keep getting stranger. So eventually, there comes a video response from your warden's comm, but instead of David, there's a woman staring at Mira with open curiosity and. Well. Fear probably isn't the right word, but this is definitely disturbing.] You're human?

[exnihilo]

Normally I am. Someone decided I ought to see how the other half lives, I guess.

[secretasshole]

I didn't realize two "floods" could happen at once.

[patheticvillain]

[The vast majority of this goes over Cassel's head. He doesn't understand the level of technology to which she's referring, because this version of him has never had formal schooling; he can't even begin to comprehend what a Turing test is, and although he understands the vaguest principles of what she is, he's too distracted by looking at her to parse the rest.]

[She does not, to him, look like his mother, because he doesn't remember her. She just looks like a wonder of the world, a techno-human marvel, a glory.]

[He sucks in his breath.]

You're beautiful.

[exnihilo]

...thank you.

It's not my normal body, though.

[patheticvillain]

And that bothers you? To be beautiful anyway?