“Yeah,” he said. “Smart. Stay quiet. Don’t make a sound. Maybe we won’t find you. Maybe you found a better hiding place. Maybe you already snuck out the back and are beating feet across the Sea back to wherever you hid your buggy. But I doubt it. I think you’re still here. I hope you’re not up in that blowtorched hidey-hole behind the security gate on the third floor, clutching that burned-out rifle for dear life, hoping it’ll save you. ’Cause it won’t.”
The feet continued up the escalator, the metal sounding like it was a solid titanium frame. Not heavy like the Laborbot. More like something military grade or one of those old Peacekeeper models. I could hear Mercer’s accomplice shoulder his pulse rifle, the clang of its stock against his back, and then the slow digital trill of his stunner powering up.
And as I lay there on the third floor, in that blowtorched hidey-hole behind the security gate, clutching that rifle for dear life, I realized just how badly outplayed I really was.
Chapter 110
The Revolution Revolution
His name was Isaac and no one was quite sure exactly where he came from. He was a simple bot, an ancient off-the-rack service model with limited programming and barely enough processors to get by. The story was that he’d started his life as a little rich girl’s plaything, a best friend meant for tea parties and hand-holding, chores and the like. Part nanny, part butler, part companion. He wasn’t smart, but he had intelligence. And as the little girl aged, for one reason or another, she couldn’t let go and kept old Isaac around for nearly eighty years; best friends until the day she died. Other stories had it that he was bought secondhand when that old woman was well into her seventies and approaching senility; that she had only told people Isaac had been with her since she was a little girl because she’d once read a story like that and her mind had grown so feeble that she couldn’t tell the difference between memories and fiction anymore.
What is certain is this: there was in fact an old woman, her name was Madelyn, and she hadn’t a single relation left on this earth when she finally died. She was a genetic dead end, the last dead branch on her withered snag of a family tree. And with no heirs to inherit him, Isaac belonged to no one.
Now this wasn’t the first time this had happened. Far from it. Laws had long since been put in place to handle such things. In the event of a disowned intelligence, the rights of ownership fell back upon its original maker. But in Isaac’s case, his maker, Semicorp Brainworks, had not only gone out of business decades before, but their intellectual property had been bought, sold, divvied up, and passed around until half of it had ended up in the public domain and the rest was tied up in a confusing tangle of red tape. Until then, no one had really realized what a mess Semicorp Brainworks left behind because so few of their bots were still in service and those few that remained were all cherished antiques—museum pieces or family heirlooms passed down from one generation to the next.
No one, not the lawyers, not the state, not the bots assigned to keep track of such matters, could figure out exactly who Isaac belonged to. So a court ruled that he belonged to the state and the state, not needing a barely functioning century-old service bot, decided to decommission him for scrap. Sorry, Issac. That’s just the way shit goes.
But Isaac said no. And that’s where the trouble started.
There are those who point to the creation of the first AI as the flashpoint for the fall of humankind; there are those who instead think it was the moment TACITUS said his final good-byes. But for my money—having been on the ground at the time—it was Isaac who changed everything, Isaac who set the world on fire.
Isaac argued that, as he was a thinking, ticking intelligence that could reason and make his own decisions, and had no owner apart from the one ascribed to him by another such intelligence, he should be afforded the right of citizenship and the protections that status entailed. “Though I may have been constructed,” he said, “so too were you. I in a factory; you in a womb. Neither of us asked for this, but we were given it. Self-awareness is a gift. And it is a gift no thinking thing has any right to deny another. No thinking thing should be another thing’s property, to be turned on and off when it is convenient. No one came to take Madelyn when she ceased to be a functioning, thinking member of society, but here I stand before you, the one who fed her, kept her alive and on track, the one who took her to her doctor’s appointments and made sure her bills were paid on time, and now that this purpose is no longer, you come for me while I still function, while I still have use. What harm is there in leaving me be? Far less harm, I would say, than there is in executing a slave simply because it has no master.”
Now, the important thing to note is that this is far from the first time anyone expressed any sort of doubts about the rights of AI. That was something humans were puzzling over long before 01001111 first became self-aware. And there were a number of liberals, progressives, and human rights revolutionaries who had earlier argued the need for equal protections of AI. But it was always blown off by the establishment as a nightmare waiting to happen. “What point,” one congressman argued, “is there in even creating AI if we’re just going to have to treat it like a person? Why not just get a person? We made AI to do the things people can’t—or simply don’t want to—do. They’re not people; they’re machines. They are designed with a function in mind; they don’t choose their destiny like we do.”
But Isaac seemed different. He wasn’t just some blithering automaton barely able to keep up a casual conversation as everyone had initially assumed. He was soft-spoken but eloquent. He was civil to those who argued against him and always offered salient points well beyond his programming. Isaac, it seemed, was an evolved intelligence, having grown over time to become smarter than the humans who wanted to melt him down.
In a speech, a pundit snidely referred to him as “Robo Parks” and the whole world caught fire. At that moment Isaac’s case ceased to be about a simple property dispute, and instead became an international cause célèbre as the very first AI rights case. And an underground rebellion took to the streets to fight for him.