That’s right.
Mara continued: “You have to remember that Eve is basically a child. And as a digital construct, one who will never reproduce sexually, she certainly doesn’t need to be taught the intricacies and complications of biological love. Instead, I need her to learn a complex series of more pertinent lessons.”
“Like what?” Monk asked.
“To start with, the oxytocin subroutine will encourage a rudimentary emotional bond. With that established, Eve will grow to understand so much more.” Mara straightened and pointed to the pair on the screen. “Look how she is staring into Adam’s eyes. She is trying to understand him, to read him if you will, to try to guess his needs, his wants.”
“You’re talking about teaching her the theory of mind,” Carly said.
“What’s that?” Monk asked.
Mara answered, “It’s the next step in the advancement of her intelligence. Children start to develop this ability at about the age of four, when they begin to look outside themselves and attempt to interpret what another is thinking. Is someone being honest with them? Are they lying? Then the child makes decisions based on that assumption.”
“It’s also the core to developing empathy,” Carly added. “You can’t feel sympathy for someone until you begin mentally putting yourself in their shoes.”
Monk sighed. “I get it. This is a small step toward making your AI friendly, more compassionate.”
“But only one of a number of steps.” Mara tapped the small image of the beagle pup. “Wrapped up in this tiny form are layer upon layer of algorithms, each intended to further Eve’s psychological development and understanding of us—and how she’s different from us.”
“In what way?” Carly asked.
Mara glanced over. “How do many children first learn about death?”
Carly stared over at Adam, “From the loss of a family pet.”
“I gave Adam a heartbeat, a metronome to mark the passage of time. But it’s a timer that must expire. Eve must not only understand mortality, she must appreciate how Adam is very different from her in this key regard. He’s mortal.”
“Like us,” Monk said.
Carly stared aghast at the screen, noting the way Eve looked adoringly down at her puppy. “Mara . . . what are you planning to do?”
Her friend licked her lips, her eyes looking wounded, even guilty. “It’s already done,” she whispered. “Not once but thousands of times.”
“What do you mean?”
“Eve is learning at an astronomical pace, exponentially faster than the first time. This lesson took two days before. This time, she’s absorbed it in twenty minutes.”
“I don’t understand,” Monk said. “What lesson? It looks like her programming glitched. She’s just sitting there, frozen on the screen.”
“No. You have to remember that what’s on the screen is just an avatar. What she’s truly experiencing is happening inside the Xénese device. And it’s happening too fast to be captured by the screen.” She waved to the scrolling data. “In the past three minutes, she’s watched Adam live and die a thousand times. I can show you one example, basically a screen capture of one iteration.”
Mara scanned and highlighted a long stretch of code, then hit the ENTER key.
The image of Eve jittered, then began to move rapidly. Over the next minute, she and Adam shared a life, appearing in snatches and moments: . . . raising the pup, caring tenderly for him.
. . . scolding and teaching.
. . . soothing and consoling.
Adam slowly grew from pup to frolicking adult, bringing forth more snapshots: . . . chasing each other through the gardens.
. . . nestling under stars.
. . . laughter and barks.
Then Adam aged under her care, and the view turned both deeper and more somber: . . . waiting for the old dog to catch up on a walk.
. . . helping him out of a stream, where the slick mud was too challenging for his arthritic hips.
. . . curled together, cradled together.
Finally, Adam appeared across her lap, panting hard, eyes bleary and ghosted by cataracts. She held him close, hugging him tightly as if she already knew what was going to happen.
Then a still painting of grief.
Eve held his dead body, bent fully over him, tears frozen on her face.
Mara let that image remain on the screen. “Adam would be born again shortly thereafter. Cycle after cycle. A thousand lifetimes. A thousand Adams.”
“Dear God, Mara . . .”
“This algorithm was intended to teach Eve about life and death, about mortality and immortality, but also so much more. By training Adam, she learned about responsibility, about the consequences of positive and negative reinforcement. About how sometimes the hand that feeds gets bitten. Along with what it means to be kind . . . or cruel. In those three minutes, those thousand lifetimes, Adam has strengthened her understanding of compassion and empathy, while also serving as a lesson about loyalty, even unconditional love.”
Carly stared at the image of Eve weeping over Adam’s body. She didn’t know whether to respect Mara’s cleverness or be appalled at her callousness.
Monk summed it best. “Death is a hard lesson for us all.”
Before the man could turn away, she noted the tears in his eyes, as if this lesson was especially significant to him. He took several deep breaths, then called over to his teammate.
“Jason, how are you and Simon managing over there?”
Carly looked to the other workstation. Simon and Jason had their heads bent over the other laptop. It was wired into a small server bank. As was Mara’s Xénese device. They were all preparing for the moment when they released Eve into the city’s telecom network.
Jason straightened. “There’s a big problem.”
Monk stepped closer. “What’s wrong?”
“We hacked into Eve’s original orders—the version of Eve that the Crucible used to orchestrate their attack. From parsing those coded instructions, we were able to study their plan to take down the power plant. If the enemy’s projections are accurate, the facility will reach critical mass—hitting the point of no return—in fifteen minutes.”
Simon nodded. “And that’s not the only problem.”
2:50 A.M.
With time running out, Mara halted the BGL subroutine. On the screen, Adam vanished from Eve’s lap. The image shuddered, and the static garden returned to its full living glory. Leaves rustled along branches, water babbled across stony stream beds, and pink petals drifted from a dogwood.
Eve rose to her feet. Her face still wore the image of Mara’s mother but little else was the same. The simple innocence, the amused curiosity had been wiped from her countenance, erased as fully as the body of an old dog. Eve looked momentarily lost, looking down to her empty arms, glancing over to where Adam normally regenerated. Still, she seemed to understand as she lifted her face.
While it had only been a span of seconds to Mara, for Eve it was an understanding that took a considerable stretch of her processing time.
Adam was gone, a lesson hopefully no longer needed.
But Mara could not know for sure.
Worried, she turned to Simon and Jason, having overheard their warning to Monk. “What’s this other problem?” she asked.
Jason answered. “From our forensics of their equipment, it’s clear how the Crucible controlled their copy of Eve.” He pointed to the knee-high bank of servers. “These units contain drives for running hardware that was engineered into their duplicate of the Xénese device. Hardware called a reanimation sequencer.”
Mara stood up and crossed over. Oh, no . . .
Simon nodded. “We think it’s why they made a copy of Mara’s invention, in order to incorporate this hardware so they can control Eve.”
Monk frowned. “But what exactly does that hardware do?”
“It’s a torture device,” Mara explained. “If the program violates a set protocol or sequence of orders, then it is destroyed—but not before it’s punished.”
Monk stared over at her. “Punished? How?”
“Neuroscientists have already mapped out the mechanism by which pain is perceived by our brains. By digitizing the same and overlaying it atop Xénese’s neuromorphic core, the program will be forced to experience the same.”
Monk looked ill. “To feel pain?”
She nodded. “In all its many horrible incarnations. Only after it suffers will the program be regenerated.”
“Thus learning its lesson,” Jason finished.
“But I still don’t understand.” She pointed to her Xénese device. “I don’t have that hardware built into my systems. So what’s the problem?”
Simon answered, “We’re faced with a difficult choice. To reach the Nogent nuclear plant, your Eve can certainly attempt to forge her own path. She can learn along the way and hopefully discover how to breach the plant’s firewalls. But it took the other program over an hour to accomplish this same task.”