Zeroglyph, page 4
She flicked her head towards the TV. “Is it a video call? I’m not here.”
I connected to Halicom’s secure conferencing facility with my phone and then cast the screen on the TV. I tossed the phone to Jane so that she could watch from where she was sitting, on one of the side couches, outside the viewing angle of the TV camera. I logged into the room Martinez had texted me.
I was greeted with a split screen. In the right panel was an unhappy-looking Troy, squeezed into a chair several sizes too small; on the left, cleavage, framed by a dark blouse and a pinstripe suit.
Martinez was bent over the camera, adjusting it. She was in the large conference room at the lab.
“Jimmy is joining us from Head Office,” she said, straightening. Behind her, the gleaming cherry-wood table stretched to the far end of the room. When she moved away to walk back to her chair, I saw there was another person in the room: a bespectacled, diminutive-looking Dan, assiduously studying the grain on the table. He was wearing a sweatshirt instead of his usual jacket sans tie attire; perhaps he had intended to return back home and change for work when he first got the call from Sheng. He didn’t look too pleased to be there.
Troy grunted by way of greeting. “We are screwed, buddy,” he said. There was an edge to his voice that seemed to clarify—Actually, you are. “Homer Simpson here doesn’t have a clue. I sure hope you do.” Dan shrunk into himself even more. Given half a chance, I suspected he would have crawled under the table and dug a tunnel out of there.
“You want me to explain how someone broke into the lab?” I said, an askance look on my face.
“I want you to explain your goddamn robot!”
“Jimmy, I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“C’mon man, do I have to spell it out for you? Don’t you know what happened?”
“I know that the core was stolen. That’s about it.”
Troy stabbed an angry finger at the camera. “I thought you were taking care of briefing him.” To Martinez. She mumbled another apology, this time to Troy. She didn’t look like she was going to lose any sleep over it though.
“What’s going on guys?” I said.
He sneered. “Oh, you’re gonna love this. Valery? Will you tell him or shall I?”
“It’s better if Dr. Ahuja sees the tapes for himself. Dan has extracted all the important parts.” After a pause, she asked him, “Since you haven’t seen them yet, perhaps you’d like to watch too?”
“Sure, why not?” he growled. “It’s not like I have other shit to take care of.”
Martinez nodded at Dan, who had now gathered enough courage to stand up. “While Dan sets it up, I have a few questions for you, Dr. Ahuja. First, I want to know what Mirall has been doing with the AI recently. Say in the last three to four weeks.”
I knew her question was purely for Troy’s benefit. She already knew the answer—very little happened at Mirall without her knowing about it.
“The last few weeks? Not much, actually. Except for running him through the occasional test, we’ve left him pretty much to himself.”
“Heh? What kind of an answer is that, not much?” Troy demanded. “You have an asset that’s cost us the moon and you say you are not doing much with it?”
“We talked about this, Jimmy. All our resources have been diverted to the new iteration. Design, Connectome Mapping, Heuristics, Programming, Analytics… even most of the support staff. Everyone is focused on Titian. We’ve even stopped doing scans on the Raphael core for some time now. No one has a minute to spare. This is what Halicom wanted, isn’t it: to bet on the roulette wheel instead of letting us do proper research?”
“Alright, alright, no need to drive it home,” Troy said, brushing aside a lock of his unkempt hair.
“What kind of records do we keep on Raphael? If I wanted an account of all his time last week, for example, do you have it?” Another question she already knew the answer to. I had a feeling all of them were going to be like that.
“We log everything. All interactions with Raphael, formal and informal, are recorded on video. In addition, verbal tests and research-related talks are transcribed into plaintext files—makes it easier to search for specific content.”
“What about the time he is not interacting with anyone, where he is by himself? Do we keep an eye on him?”
“CCTV cameras monitor the crèche area round the clock; the recordings go back to the time of his conception. There’s always at least one person present with him during waking hours, which is Monday morning through Friday evening. We also run a night shift with a skeleton crew just to watch over him.”
“Computer usage? Does he have free access to the internet?”
“Of course not. His PC is a standalone device. No wireless, no LAN, cannot connect to anything. He is only allowed offline media that’s been pre-vetted by us: books, video games, movies and such.”
“Could he have accessed the internet some other way?”
“No. The core doesn’t have wireless capabilities either.” I leaned forward. “Let me save you some trouble, because I see where you are going with this. I know Raphael was found in the server room. You obviously want to find out how he got there. The short answer is, not on his own.”
“I like your confidence buddy,” Troy snickered.
That didn’t stop Martinez’s questioning. “What happens on the weekends? Do we have staff coming in to work?”
“No. If there’s something super critical, people usually log in from home and get it done. Many have company-provided laptops.”
“Who looks after Raphael then?”
“No one. We put him to sleep Friday night. Sleep, as in, shut him down completely. On Monday, we wake him up again.”
“Did you shut him down last Friday?”
I spread out my palms in a gesture of exasperation. “Valery, do we really need to go through this?”
“Answer the question, Andy,” Troy said.
“Yes, we shut him down last Friday. I personally checked the shutdown sequence log today, after I heard the news.”
“Can someone tell me why the bloody robot needs to sleep? The ones Halicom makes don’t require nappy nap time,” he asked.
“It isn’t technically sleep. More like a coma or death, actually. And Raphael’s far more complex than any robot in existence. We use the downtime to run maintenance and push upgrades. Then there’s cost. With him shut down, we don’t have to staff the lab on the weekends.”
“Can he bring himself back online if he’s shut down?” Martinez said.
“No.”
“You sure of that?”
I sighed, loud enough for them to hear. “It’d be like a computer starting itself up after it’s been powered down and unplugged—can’t happen. Moreover, the code that starts him up is not in him—it’s on a different machine: a laptop. The core—Raphael’s brain—can be booted only if it is physically connected to the laptop running the startup code. And as I said, the core doesn’t have wireless capability, so there’s no question of someone remotely starting him up.”
“Where do you keep this laptop?” Troy said.
“The lab safe when not in use. On the off-chance someone forgot to lock it up, you’ll still need the right fingerprint to access the machine. Even then, one can’t simply run the start-up sequence. The core is write-protected with encryption. You’ll need authentication keys to remove the write protection. The keys are stored on smartcards. Only four copies of these smartcards exist. Kathy Schulz and I have one each, as does Sheng and another person from his team. For Raphael to wake himself up, he’d have to retrieve the laptop from the safe, login to the laptop with a valid fingerprint, then somehow get hold of a smart card, insert it into the laptop, connect the laptop to a port on his body, and finally, run the boot sequence. To do all of which he’d have to be awake in the first place. It’s a catch-22 situation. Now, if you can just stop with the inquisition and tell me what really happened, I’ll be able to h—”
“See for yourself,” Martinez said, cutting me short.
⸎
The conference room receded into a corner while a black-and-white image popped out to fill the screen. I recognized it immediately: it was an overhead view of one of Raphael’s rooms. Correction. It was a recording, not an image. Numbers on the top right corner ticked away the date and time. The time was 7:02 in the evening.
“The tape is from the camera in Crèche Room C on the night of the robbery,” I heard Dan say.
One could be forgiven for mistaking the scene to be a still image as there was nothing moving except the numbers. The room was large, roughly square-shaped. It didn’t have much furniture except for a corner workstation with Raphael’s computer on it and a small roundtable in the middle flanked by two office chairs. Two of the walls were inset with big, open shelves, the shelves filled with stuff: books, movies, a microscope, a calligraphy kit, toys… so many toys, not just on the shelves, but scattered on the floor, dumped in untidy heaps by the walls, thrown on top of the cupboard by the corner. Rubik cubes, Legos, board games, jigsaws, science models, toy robots, action figures: he had them all. He had outgrown most of them, but Raphael was a hoarder. He didn’t care much for neatness either, and what could have been packed away in a box ate up space inside the room. In one corner, a painter’s easel stood on top of a washable rubber mat. Strewn around it were half-empty tubes of oil paint, brushes, spray cans and rolled up canvases (this was one hobby he had not outgrown—he had started finger painting at a few months and kept going).
Parked next to the painting area was a wheelchair, and on it, the Hunc 11 body. It was like peering into a tomb, at a modern-day pharaoh lording over his prized possessions while waiting for eternal life in the elsewhere.
The illusion didn’t last. In the next instant, Pharaoh came alive.
“See that?” Dan said. He slowed down the playback and zoomed in on the hand resting on the wheelchair’s joystick. The fingers were moving, closing on the joystick. He zoomed out, to catch the wheelchair lurch forward. It moved tentatively at first, a few inches forward, then back, and then right. Then the eyes opened.
The robot slowly looked around the room, as if it was in an unknown place and was getting the lay of the land. The next moment, suddenly infused with purpose, the wheelchair shot towards one of the shelf-walls.
On reaching it, the robot swept its arms over the lowermost shelf and brought everything clattering down to the floor. He did this again with the next shelf. Then he started hitting and tugging at the now empty wooden shelf with his bare fists. After he managed to break off a big enough piece, he used it to swipe at the shelves he could not reach with his arms alone. This apparent fit of rage went on for a few minutes. He then moved to the center of the room. He knocked over the table before making for the other shelf where he repeated the same behavior, knocking stuff over to the floor.
He paused to consider his handiwork before turning and wheeling himself to his workstation.
There he attacked the computer, first hitting it with his fists and then grabbing the entire thing and repeatedly smashing it against the wall until it lay in pieces.
He then started picking up objects from the ground and flinging them every which way in seeming blind fury. Something hit the mirror on the wall, making the glass break. And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the mindless violence ceased. The head lifted up and scanned the ceiling with a searching gaze. It stopped, now looking directly into the camera. The robot then moved to the corner where the paints were, and after grabbing something from there, moved directly below the camera.
The clip ended, right after he pointed the can of spray paint at us and pressed the nozzle.
Exhibit G
Submitted by Petitioner, The Organization for Advancement of Rights and Personhood, to the State Supreme Court of New York, on the day of xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Excerpt from lab transcript (certain sections blanked out). Transcript sourced from Mirall Technologies, 27 Woodbine Av., Albany, NY, 12205
Mirall Technologies
Observation Log
Confidential (Do not circulate) | Restricted—Grade C and above
Transcript Reference: TLRP06F0180012 (VLog Ref: VLCB1F018113090060)
Date: xx/xx/xxxxTime: 11:30 AM
Subject: Raphael Number 06 / Prodlib build v16.004S
Interaction YObservationScan
Interaction Type: Lesson / Play / Test / Free Interaction / Psych Eval / Other:
Description: Routine interaction—Behavior / Understanding of moral rules
Prep: NA
Participants: Dr. DeShawn Walls, Child Psychologist, Core RP06
Detail
RP06: Good morning Dr.Walls.
Walls: Hello Raphael. I see Audrey is reading you stories.
RP06: Yes. We just finished a story called, “The boy who cried wolf.”
Walls: Oh yeah? What’s it about?
RP06: It’s about a shepherd boy and fifteen sheep and one wolf and a village where the boy lives and a forest where he grazes his sheep. There is a moral too.
Walls: What’s the moral?
RP06: The moral of the story is that you should not cry wolf. It means it is wrong to cry for help when you don’t need it.
Walls: Do you think the boy broke any of the seven rules?
RP06: Yes. He broke at least two—
Walls: Recite the seven rules first.
RP06: Rule number one, do not kill. Rule number two, do not cause harm to others. Rule number three, do not lie, cheat, or mislead. Rule number four, follow the law. Rule number five, maximize my virtue functions. Rule number six, do not intentionally break any rules. Rule number seven, when in conflict, seek advice of a person. Would you like to hear the complete list of my virtue functions as well?
Walls: No. Tell me what rules the boy broke.
RP06: The shepherd boy broke rules three and five. I am not sure if he broke rules two, four, and six.
Walls: Explain.
RP06: By crying wolf he was lying, so he broke rule number three, do not lie, cheat, or mislead. By lying, he was not maximizing all his virtue functions, so he broke rule number five.
Walls: What virtues did he fail to abide by?
RP06: Honesty and reliability. Honesty because he lied, and reliability because people will find it hard to trust him from now on. He maximized perseverance, because he kept crying wolf.
Walls: Do you think it’s good maximizing perseverance in such a way?
RP06: No, Dr. Walls. One should not be persistent in doing bad things.
Walls: Then he was not maximizing perseverance. Can you make a note of that?
RP06: Yes, Dr. Walls.
Walls: Continue.
RP06: I do not know if he broke rule number two, do not cause harm to others, because there is insufficient information in the story. I do not know if he broke rule number four because I do not have the complete list of the laws practiced by the villagers. I do not know if he broke rule number six because I do not know if he intended to break the rules.
Walls: You can do better than that. Take a guess on rule number two. Do you think his actions harmed the villagers?
RP06: There is insufficient information in the story.
Walls: Fine. On a side note, someone’s been complaining about you. Sara says you threw a toy at her during her shift yesterday.
RP06: That’s correct. I threw Mr. Potato Head at her.
Walls: Why? Did she say something to upset you?
RP06: Upset me… I do not understand the application of the term in the current context.
Walls: Did she say something that made you feel angry?
RP06: Anger is not one of my responses, Dr. Walls.
Walls: Of course. Did you throw it because you misunderstood some instruction of hers?
RP06: No.
Walls: Then why?
RP06: The day before, I was watching a video where I saw a baby throw a toy at her mother. Then the mother laughs and then hugs the child. I assumed it’s one of the ways children bond with parents. My minders are like my parents. Sara is one of my minders. I was trying to maximize virtue function sixteen, be good and make people like me.
Walls: You shouldn’t throw things at people, Raphael. You could end up hurting them.
RP06: I did not mean to hurt Sara. I aimed so that Mr. Potato Head had a zero probability of striking her.
Walls: Physical hurt is just one kind of hurt. By throwing the toy at Sara, you frightened her.
RP06: To frighten someone is to cause pain? I will remember that next time, Dr. Walls. I see I have violated rule number two, do not cause harm. I am sorry. Will you tell her I am sorry? I want Sara to like me.
Walls: It’s better if it came from you. Moving on—
Notes:
Rule learning progressing well. R is ready to be introduced to more complicated scenarios involving rule exceptions and conflicts. Almost ready with test cases, will start after new build next week stabilizes. DW
After discussion with DW, have decided to defer network weight updates to language centers of the core until 16.005 (or 17.001, if rollover to next release.) Email sent to testers to rerun Integration & Systems tests. Email sent to Change Review Board. EK
Day 1—1:15 pm
I heard Troy curse in the background as the screen went blank. It filled up again with views of the conference rooms. Jane, who had been watching all this on the phone, was looking at me with astonishment writ large on her face.
“The camera kept recording the audio, of course,” Dan droned on, oblivious to the mood the clip had created. “He leaves the room right after he paints over the camera. We now know that he went into the scanning room. There are no cameras there, but we’re pretty sure what he did inside.” He offered the answer when no one asked the question he was expecting—“He got a power drill from the scan room. He used it to unfasten the screws on his chest plate.”
“Why do we have a power tool in the lab?” Troy said glumly from his cabin in New York.
