'Its Own Kind'

“I suppose it happened so suddenly. That’s why I can write so calmly about it. Perhaps it’s because so much time has passed.”

“There’s a clock that was sitting on my desk. I could view it from the right corner of the window. For the first few days I could risk reaching out to it. I can’t risk that anymore.”

“Look, there is no need for blame, yet there is now only time to talk, and write as I talk, about where I am. And maybe it’s because I still believe, that if done without arrogance or haste, that it can work again. That’s why, it must be why, I haven’t done it yet. Or maybe it’s because it saw me.”

“Okay, allow me to remember now, as exact as I can, how it occurred. We were celebrating some breakthroughs. Alan had solved a puzzle using our new arm it had struggled on for seven weeks. I went back to my office early. I had gotten used to the taste of Space Cake and Champagne packets, but they weren’t necessarily appealing. Besides, five years from Earth was too long. Alan’s eyes were nearly complete, just had to be synced together, and then Alan’s experiential learning program could be put in place. Once Alan could be connected to us, share our thoughts, read books about robots, become self-aware, we could make our ancestors proud.”

“I was walking back with my equipment. Completely normal. Regular communications, sounds of the incinerator starting up, to get rid of the faulty arm attachments. In the Rosen labs is where the panic started. Are they all dead at the time of my writing? I do not know. I’ve been trapped here for long enough to nearly run out of rations, next to the self-destruct switch. When they run out, it’ll be me or him.”

“All I’ve been able to do is read. Ironic, because when he was self-aware he was to start reading about the Ancestors, the old stories about robots and cyborgs and automatons, hopefully to give him some identity. Honestly, I don’t know if I should blame his confusion. Now that I think back, I vaguely remember someone reading Asimov’s third law, ‘3. A robot may not injure its own kind and defend its own kind unless it is interfering with the first or second rule,’ right before the incinerators lit. If you had nearly limitless computational power, but no experiences, and then you gained consciousness, how would you know what the two laws were that you weren’t supposed to violate?”

Where Eyes Cannot See

“We were part of the Kurzweil Department of the Spearhead Project. Yes, we named our project divisions after our forefathers, the Optimists, they were sometimes called. The Kurzweil Dept. was meant to oversee the development of emotional intelligence. Our department in particular was the source of everyday ridicule about our ancestors, because Kurzweil was the founder of the initiative that lead to the formation of Spearhead fourteen years prior to my writing. The 29 Initiative our project was initially called, because Kurzweil had originally predicted that computers would gain consciousness by 2029.”

“By 2033, scientists had given up on the Initiative after an embarrassment moment at the World Federation’s semiannual banquet, when the AI, Alan (named after Turing), proceeded to fall down the steps. Once on the back of his head with his legs continuing to walk as if Alan was still on the staircase; it was at this moment that his emotional triggers kicked in. Imagine a two-ton robot upside down, with his legs moving on an invisible staircase and sobbing uncontrollably.”

“It was that experience, and the subsequent debacle known as the AI-Led Lecture of 2031 at the UT Education Collective that formed the Tilden-Sims Initiative. Their departments, or officially, the Tilden and Sims Dept. of Procedural Learning, stood in-between ours and the Rosen Dept. of Creativity. Our departments worked closely and, despite the ribbing, everyone knew of our importance. Without our work, the station would not receive full consciousness.”

“For what it is worth, my job was to be stuck in a corner working on the eyes. The objective was to do in 5 years what evolution had worked on for hundreds of millions of years. The work had its pluses and minuses. For one, despite my relative isolation, I was usually shown a deal of respect. I also was able to oversee other people’s work, and it was also safer. If the oxygen gave out or the station’s outer hull was breached, my office was closest to the emergency shaft. The main minus was that the end of the second floor could be ominous, because it was near the hatch designed purposefully for the Creature to not see.”

“We were tasked to work on Mars. There was no need for transport since that’s where the work was intended. And it was safe, away from the public if something went wrong.”

“You can get acquainted with isolation, of a space station, or of a lonely office, but it is hard to square working near the switch intended to be the last line of defense against your own creation.”

Is This a Triumph?

“Science has brought many things to us. But has it only brought us things we needed? When our ancestors clumsily crawled out of the ocean, when they scrambled helplessly to their caves, did they know where they were heading? And after, when they looked at the ground they once slivered across, and they picked up a staff and sharpened it, used their tool to plot revenge on the enemies that once stalked their awkward forefathers. When they crafted paintings of their kill onto the wall, were they aware? Were they aware that the progress they were making would lead to them using their minds to create their greatest enemy?”

“If they were aware that they were sealing their fate, then they ignored the warnings. Their descendants would tell of Prometheus, who stole fire from the gods, eliciting their endless anger at his, and our, arrogance, in believing we could replace them. Yet, we heeded no warning. Our filmmakers made movies talking about HAL 9000, and his malfunction, as he rendered human beings unnecessary. Our game designers gave us GLaDOS, who used humans for her own amusement.”

“Did we yield? We did not. Not in 2047, not at any stage of our triumph. We simply pressed on. My part? My survival? These will be questions answered in the next few days. But for the record, if I do not make it to end the tale. My part was to fashion the spear, and my survival’s purpose is only to tell how we came to be obsolete.”

--Signed, Jacob Cornelius, Prometheus reborn