"Like this place… the place where are we?" he asked her.
"You can look for yourself," she said, gesturing to the window. "I’m going to give you a task to complete while I’m not here."
"Okay."
"I want you to look outside, and I want you to think about what you see, and I want you to draw it on the paper. Can you do that?"
He glanced toward the window. A pane of clear glass.
"Can you do that?" she repeated. "It’s very important."
"Yeah, I think I can."
When the woman left, he tried. He tried to see beyond the glass. He could hold it in his mind for a moment, but when he went to draw it, the images evaporated like mist.
He tried again and again, but failed each time. He tried moving quickly, putting pencil to paper before he could forget, but no matter what, he could not move quick enough.
Then he came up with an idea.
He pushed the table across the room to the window.
He lay on top of the table, with the paper before him, and he tried to draw what he saw, but even then he failed. It was only when he tried purposefully not to see it that he could suddenly make the pencil move. He drew without understanding what he drew—just a series of marks on a page.
When he finally looked down at what he’d drawn, he could only stare.
Function/Query: Can you tell what the defect is? {
/File response: Neurons are just a series of gates. An arrangement of firings. {
Function/Query: Consciousness is more than that. There are cases of brain damage that have shown similar patterns. AIs always have this problem. {
/File response: Not always. {
The next time the woman came, the boy was much worse. Something had broken in him. TIAs, he thought. Tiny strokes. But it was more than that. Worse than that.
Sometimes he imagined that he could see through the walls, or that he could see through the floor. He was sure by then that he existed when the woman wasn’t in the room with him, and this was a comfort at least. He was autonomous from her, and from the room itself. He could drop to his knees on the floor and place his face on the cool tile and look under the door. A long hall disappeared into the distance. He saw her feet approaching, and that was the first time he noticed her shoes. White. The soles were dark.
He showed her the picture he’d drawn.
She held the paper in her hand. "Is that what you see?" she asked.
He nodded.
A series of lines. It might have been an abstract landscape, or something else.
He told her about his hallucinations, about seeing through the walls and floor. "I am getting worse, aren’t I?" he said.
"Yes," she said.
In her face, he saw a thousand emotions. Mourning. Rage. Fear. Things he didn’t want to see. He wished for the mask again. A face he couldn’t read.
The woman sat by him on the bed. After a while, she said, "Do you know what dying is?"
"I do."
"Do you know what it will mean for you?"
"It will mean I am no more."
"That’s right."
"The stories you told aren’t true, are they?"
"The truth is like a word with no translation. Can blue be green, if there’s no word for it? Can green be blue? Are those colors lies?"
"Tell me a new story."
"A new lie?"
"Tell me a truth. Tell me about the man." He thought of the swing and the summer day. The man’s voice saying his name.
"So you remember him." The woman shook her head. "I don’t want to talk about him."
"Please," the child said.
"Why?"
"Because I remember his voice. A tree. Berries on the ground."
She seemed to gather herself up. "There was once a man," she said. "A very powerful man. A professor, perhaps. And one day the professor was seduced by a student, or seduced a student, it’s not really clear, but they were together, do you understand?"
He nodded.
"But this professor also had a wife. Another professor at the university. He told her what had happened, and that he’d ended it, and probably he meant to, but still it went on, until, in the way of things, the young woman was with child. A decision was made to solve the problem, and so they did. And six months went by, and the affair continued, and though she was careful, she was not careful enough, and she felt so stupid, but it happened again."
"Again."
She nodded. "And again he pressured her. Get rid of it, he said, and so she did."
"Why?"
"Because she loved him, probably. Until the following year, her senior year at the college, she stopped being careful, and it happened again, and he told her to take care of it, and this time she said no, and she defied him."
"Then what?"
"People found out, and his teaching career was ruined—everything was ruined."
"And that’s the end?"
She shook her head. "The two stayed together. The man left the wife, and he and his former student raised their boy."
"So it was a boy?"
"Yes, a boy. And then the wife, who’d had no children who survived, was alone. And loneliness does strange things. It lets one focus on one’s work."
"And what was her work?"
"Can you not guess?" The woman gestured around her. "Neuroscience, AIs."
The woman was quiet for a long while before she continued. "And the years passed and the new couple stayed together, until one day the man and the boy were at the ex-wife’s house, because they all had to meet to sign papers regarding some property—and the boy was with him. And the man left the boy unattended for just a moment, and it was a simple thing for the woman to put the ring around the boy’s head."
"What ring?"
"A special ring to record his pattern. You only need a minute—like a catchment system for electrical activity. Every synapse. A perfect representation of his mind, like a snapshot transposed into VR. She stole him. Or a copy of him."
"Why?"
The woman was quiet for a long time. "Because she wanted to steal from the man what he’d stolen from her. Even if he didn’t know it." She was silent again. "That’s not true."
"Then what is true?"
"She was lonely. Desperately lonely. It was a small thing to take, she thought, just a pattern of synapses, the shadow of a personality, and he’d never know. The wife had wanted so badly to be a mother."
The woman stopped. Her face a porcelain mask again.
"But there was a problem," the child said.
"Yes," the woman said. "Patterns are unstable. They last only for so long. Every thought changes it, you see. That is the problem. That is the fatal flaw. Biological systems can adapt—physical alterations to the synaptic network to help adjust. But in VR, it’s not the same."
"VR?"
"A location," she said. "The place where the pattern finds expression. The place where we are now."
The boy looked around the room. The white walls. The white floor.
"The patterns of older people are stable," the woman said. "They’ve already thought most of the thoughts that made them who they are. But it’s not the same for children. The pattern drifts, caught midway in the process of becoming. It’s possible to think the thought that makes you unfit for your pattern. The mind loses coherency. As the pattern drifts, it destabilizes and dies."
"Dies."
"Again and again."
How many times?
The woman would not answer.
"How many times?" the boy repeated.
"Sons beyond counting. Every son different, every son the same."
"How could that be?"
"The system reloads the pattern."
"So I will die?"
"You will die. And you will never die."
"And what about you?"