Zeroglyph Read online

  ZEROGLYPH

  A TECHNOTHRILLER

  VANCE PRAVAT

  © 2019 Vance Pravat

  https://vancepravat.com

  All rights reserved. This ebook is for your personal use only. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, posting, uploading, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously in order to provide a sense of authenticity. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, establishments, companies, government or judicial entities, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Part I: The incident at the lab

  Day 1—9:45 am

  Day 1—12:30 pm

  Day 1—1:15 pm

  Day 1—2:30 pm

  Day 2—8:30 am

  Day 2—11:00 am

  Day 2—03:00 pm

  Interlude

  A case for personhood

  Part II: The incident at the house

  Day 3—11:00 am

  Day 3—1:30 pm

  Day 3—2:00 pm

  Day 3—3:30 pm

  Day 2—7:00 pm

  Day 3—4:40 pm

  Part III: Goodbye

  Appendix

  A rights-based solution

  Afterword

  Bibliography

  About the Author

  Coming Soon

  Sample Chapter

  To subjugate another is to subjugate yourself.

  Elbert Hubbard, The American Bible

  “Tut, tut, child!” said the Duchess. “Every thing’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

  Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

  Introduction

  While the identities of the people involved in the creation of the world’s first Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is by now common knowledge (or at least a simple web search away), what follows is a work of fiction, and in no way an accurate account of real-life events. Obviously, names of persons and corporate entities have been changed, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  The court proceedings of the trial over the AGI are not in the public domain, but I have hope that one day they will be released. Until then my condensed version will have to do. They have been heavily edited, with the purpose of cutting through the legalese and getting to the crux of the arguments made that day.

  When talking about the weighty philosophical and moral dimensions of artificial personhood in a work of fiction, it can be difficult to strike a balance between what needs to be said and what can be said without straying too far from the more paramount considerations of storytelling. At the same time, an excessive dilution of subject matter ends up conveying little of value. As a sort of compromise, I have peppered throughout the book excerpts from the actual lab transcripts of conversations between the AI and the scientists. Edited and abridged as they are, they should give the reader some insight into the mind of the entity in question, as well as provide a brief foray into the complex world of artificial ethics.

  The lengthier ones—the court transcript and a rather detailed discussion on a possible solution to the various trolley problems (or at least what contours such a solution might take)—I have separated from the main narrative and included in the interlude and appendix sections. Those looking for nothing more than a good story may safely skip these parts. If they really must, they may skip the shorter transcripts as well, but I feel that they add to the story rather than digress from it. I’ll let the reader be the ultimate judge.

  My thanks to Gantt, Lyle, & Steadman, for allowing me access to the papers left behind by Dr. Aadarsh Ahuja, without which none of this would have been possible. Thanks to those former employees of Mirall who agreed to help me with my research, though under the condition of anonymity: you know who you are. Finally, a big shout-out to Ed Walzer at Judge Rosa Gray’s office at the New York State Supreme Court, whose help was pivotal in obtaining the court records.

  One last thing: I am neither an ethicist nor a legal expert; any errors in understanding and presentation are mine and mine alone. Regardless, Raphael is just the first of many; it becomes imperative that conversations on these matters be had more frequently and among a broader set of people than is currently the case.

  It is never too late until it is late.

  VP

  Part I: The incident at the lab

  Day 1—9:45 am

  I woke up late on the day they found out Raphael was missing.

  I didn’t mean to. It’s just that I had so much going on in my mind the evening before that I forgot to set the alarm. I didn’t get much rest either; sleep kept coming and going in stages, and I think it was past four when I nodded off for good.

  In hindsight, it was sloppy of me for not setting the buzzer. Monday, after all, is Resurrection Day, and though they start bringing Raphael back from the dead only after ten, there are those pre-boot checks that Sheng likes to get out of the way much before that, and it was simply indefensible to have forgotten about them. Doubly so, because just last week—the Monday before, that is—the checks were all I could think of as I lay in the hospital all broken and feeling sorry for myself.

  It might look like I am still trying to sneak in an excuse, but that is not the case at all. I take full responsibility for everything that happened with Raphael; I created him after all. And yet, can one really take responsibility for an eventuality? I don’t know.

  This time, it wasn’t a nightmare that woke me up. It was Hazel, cooing something unintelligible from somewhere far away.

  Buzzing by the bedside.

  “You are receiving a call,” Hazel repeated, just before the phone disconnected.

  Shit, what time is it? I groggily blinked at the screen while the phone lock read my face. 9:47. Shit shit.

  The call was from Kathy. I rang her back, but it went to voicemail. Maybe she was trying to call me again, so I hung up and waited.

  It was murky and sullen in the room, as if it were still early hours. The stub of a dream, all but smoke and vapor now, lingered as my eyes traced the patterns of frost on the window. Something to do with Raphael…

  A premonition, you ask? Nothing like that. I don’t believe in premonitions. Just garden-variety anxiety. And doubt: that nagging feeling of somehow being completely wrong about everything—a feeling, I’m sure, everyone has had at one time or the other.

  Kathy didn’t call back.

  “Hazel, turn on the lights,” I said, wanting to bury myself back in the sheets, but a more pressing need compelling me to grope for the scratcher I must have left there last night. There. I urgently thrust the implement under the plaster casts on my legs, sighing as I alternated between left and right. One week over, nine more to go. One week over, nine more to go. Remind me never to go on a black run again.

  “Good morning, Andy!” Hazel—short for Home Automation and Security Logic—chirped from the speaker above the fake mantelpiece. The lights in the room slowly brightened into a soothing ivory-white glow as my virtual assistant gave me the obligatory rundown for the day—“It’s a nippy twenty-eight degrees outside, with snowstorms expected in the Tri-state area later today. You have zero new text messages, one missed call, and one voice message. Your calendar—”

  She must have left a message.

  “Hazel, play all new voice messages.”

  “Okay. You have: one unread voice message. Playing message one, from Kathy Schulz, received today at 9:44 am
.”

  “Andy, it’s Kathy.” Her voice was subdued, as if she was deliberately speaking low. “Listen. We have a big problem. There’s been… an incident. Valery’s here. Can’t talk right now. Just wait for my call, I’ll ring you as soon as I can. And pick up the phone, for chrissake!”

  I called her again, but no luck.

  Kathy Schulz was the head of research at Mirall. She worked under me. She was one of the old-timers; she’d joined the company a few months after I started it. She had taken over the role from me about eighteen months ago, after the buyout by Halicom.

  Sure, I was CEO of Mirall before that, but I never let it get in the way of real work. I like to think that tedious tasks are like needy lovers: ignore them long enough and they’ll find someone else to take care of them. Back then, Eric used to handle most of the day-to-day, and Jane liaised with her dad on finance and funding, leaving me free to focus on research. Halicom had let go of Eric, and Jane had… Well, Jane was technically never an employee—all of which meant that I was the one left picking up the slack in the new regime. So much for my little nugget of wisdom.

  I tried Sheng next. Sheng usually came in at six on Mondays.

  The voice at the other end said the phone was switched off.

  I once more silently admonished myself for forgetting to set the wake-up. Why weren’t they answering their phones? And what was that about Valery…? I ran over Kathy’s message in my head. She’d said Valery was at the lab. What was she doing there?

  I called Brendon, one of the systems architects.

  “Andy, you got to fix this,” he blurted out before I could say hi. He sounded annoyed.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You for real? You don’t know?”

  “Only that Kathy left me a message saying there’s a problem.”

  “It’s the lab. The electrical wiring caught fire or something. Everyone’s been herded into the first floor.”

  “A fire? Is it serious?”

  “I doubt it. They wouldn’t have let us into the building otherwise. I don’t see any fire trucks. Dan says we have to work here until they get the wiring fixed. He won’t tell when.”

  “Dan’s handling the situation?” Dan Spiros was in charge of office security and administration. “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Look, this is absurd. They are not even letting us go up there to collect our notes. Dan is being evasive as hell, won’t give me straight answers. We were supposed to run latencies on the prototype core today. How the hell are we to do that with the lab closed? Vendor’s not going to finish the dies in time if—”

  Brendon Powell had a tendency to get stressed about all the wrong things. Like most researchers in the lab, he thought the world started and ended with his problems. Still, he was one of the best machine-learning experts around (it had cost us a bundle getting him to relocate from Cali where he was with Google) and we tried to work around his eccentricities. As everyone did with everyone else at Mirall. A group of hyper-competitive, ultra-smart individuals do not a frictionless team make.

  “Do you see Kathy anywhere?”

  “Kathy’s not answering her phone. Where is she, by the way? In your absence, she should be taking care of this crapfest, not me.”

  “What about Sheng? Or anyone from his team?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. Andy, we need our stuff. Now. Or you can tell them to kiss their timeline goodbye. Look, I gotta go. The designers are going to throw a fit if I don’t find us a meeting room soon. Just talk to Dan and get it sorted out, alright?”

  He hung up.

  A fire, huh? Okay.

  I rechecked the call history on my phone. No calls that day, except the one from Kathy. I was starting to get worried now—not a full-blown panic, but a creeping sense of fatality, of not knowing what to expect. The thing that was bothering me most was the wall of silence that seemed to have sprung up out of nowhere. My phone should have been ringing without pause given what had happened. Yet, there was nothing.

  Maybe there is a problem with the phone network. Sometimes the signal does get weak at my place…

  I wasn’t surprised when Dan didn’t answer my call as well. By now it was beginning to dawn on me what—or rather, who—was behind the blackout.

  Valery Martinez was a VP at Halicom and a professional pain in the ass. Halicom had pushed her on us as transition manager soon after the sale. Just an advisory role, they’d said—just to help you folks settle in. It had been more than a year since and she was still there, settling us in. No prizes for guessing whose job it was to crack the whip.

  When she first started, she used to work out of Mirall’s building in Albany most days of the week. She had since cut it down to one day, having gone back to her home base, to Halicom’s corporate offices in New York. She usually visited us on Wednesdays. Today was not Wednesday.

  I knew she stayed somewhere in Westchester, so it was conceivable she had decided to come down for a surprise visit. Conceivable, but not likely. She was the sort of person who has entries in her planner for bathroom breaks. I debated whether to call her, but eventually decided against it. Not until I spoke to Kathy before.

  First things first. My stomach was threatening to cave in: a couple of sandwiches were all I’d had time for the previous day.

  “Hazel, wake up Max. Then tell Chef to make my breakfast. Breakfast menu preset number… um, preset number three.”

  “Waking up Max. Turning on ChefStation. You have requested for breakfast, preset three: pancakes with blueberry jam, scrambled vegan egg, and black coffee. Please confirm if correct.”

  “Correct.”

  “I am sorry. Can’t do that. Out of one or more key ingredients. Out of: pancake mix. Would you like to add the ingredients to your shopping cart or would you like to request an emergency drone delivery?”

  This was exactly the kind of nonsense I didn’t want to deal with in the mornings. I made a mental note to enable auto-replenish later. “Forget it,” I grumbled.

  “Confirmed. Adding two packets of Bisquick Organic Pancake Mix to your weekly shopping cart. Would you like to order a different breakfast?”

  “Preset one.”

  “You have requested for breakfast, preset one: oatmeal porridge with honey, two slices of rye toast, and black coffee. Please confirm if—”

  “Yes,” I said impatiently. “Hazel, show me my inbox.” Maybe there was something there.

  “Breakfast order preset two queued at chef station. Expected wait time: ten minutes. Show inbox. I am sorry. Can’t do that. I do not detect any display units in the room.”

  Right. I kept forgetting I was not in my usual bedroom. Since my ill-timed skiing accident last week, I had been sleeping in one of the guest suites downstairs. I suppose I could have gotten Max to carry me up and down the stairs every day, but the thought of me cradled in his arms like some overgrown baby had put me off the idea. I’ve seen him navigate those stairs: the imagery doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, no matter what the ads say.

  I opened the office mailbox on my phone. My fingers were shaking as I swiped at the screen.

  There were a dozen or so unread emails. I quickly scanned through them.

  Some chatter on Titian, the new iteration of cores Halicom had us making.

  An auto-generated message from Friday stating that the shutdown sequence for Raphael had been completed with an error code of zero.

  A newsletter from Corporate.

  A video-conference request for later that day from Valery Martinez. Like I said, she wasn’t the type to drop in on a whim.

  The emails were all from Friday.

  Needing something to distract my mind, I turned my attention to the news. The headlines, continuing the theme from last week, were mostly about December’s unemployment rate crossing the fifteen-percent mark. I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about. Everyone knew it had been as high as that, if not higher, for quite some time now, creative accounting from the Bureau of Labor St
atistics notwithstanding. The markets were doing well though, unruffled by trivial affairs such as the state of the economy. Halicom, the world’s third-largest robotics company, had closed in the green last Friday. The NYSE was yet to open, and I expected the trend to—

  There was a soft whirring sound at the door. “Good morning Andy.”

  “Hello Max,” I said. I refreshed the mailbox a final time before setting aside the phone.

  “Your breakfast is ready. May I serve you?”

  I glanced at him as he stood in the doorway clutching the breakfast tray. I’d had Max with me for over two years now. I’d gotten him soon after buying the house, thinking a robot would prove useful for someone living alone in a 9000 square feet home with nothing around but trees for company. A limited edition version of Halicom’s bestselling Nestor 5 caretaker-cum-housekeeper robot, Max took getting used to, especially in the mornings.

  I think it was the jarring mismatch between appearance and voice: his dome-shaped head, cartoonish bug eyes, and half-moon smiley just didn’t get along with the deep, carefully-articulated voice that was more at home in a Shakespearean stage-actor than in a house bot. Plus the fact that his sophisticated-sounding voice belied what was essentially a pretty stupid brain underneath. Fetch that. Put this there. Help me get up… Not exactly intellectual giant stuff. Despite being one of the most advanced robots in the world, the Nestor 5 was no AGI. It didn’t have human smarts. No machine did. Until now.

  I rolled on my side and retrieved the foldable tray table I'd tucked away below the bed. The slight hum of actuator motors accompanied him as he moved into the room and carefully placed the tray on the table.

  Max couldn’t cook, but I had installed one of those automated kitchen counters with overhanging mechanical arms that could whip up a dish or two on days when I couldn’t care less for my taste buds.