The Reborn (The Day Eight Series Part 1) (12 page)

Trevor whispered to Damon. “Are you sure we shouldn’t talk to her more? She sounds like she wants to.” Damon shook his head.

“Say goodbye, now,” said Damon. “Trevor will visit again soon.”

“O-kay,” she said. “Bye Trevor. Nice to meet you. Bye-bye Daddy. I love you.” She waved.

“Love you too, Darling.” Damon blew a kiss, then reached over and pressed the power button on the tablet. Its life drained away.

~

Damon sighed. “So you finally met Allison, what did you think?”

Whether she was a real simulation of a human or not, he was blown away.

“She seemed so real,” said Trevor. “She moved and talked like a nine-year-old. Her eyes were vibrant…  She was amazing!” Trevor’s mouth could barely keep up with his head. “I mean, I mean, if that’s for real – er, if
she’s
for real – like,
for real
for real, it means... it means so many things! Human life, and evolution and computers, in computers, and, and feelings? She must have feelings? A computer with feelings? Wait, she’s not a computer, she’s a program? No, not even. A person! She’s a person! With this technology – if you can even call it that – you could do so much! There are so many possibilities! I can’t think of them all right now, studying the brain maybe, but lots of other stuff! But she has feelings, right? What does that mean? What are the repercussions? I don’t think I could even begin to comprehend the repercussions of this.”

“No,” said Damon, “you can’t.”

What did that mean? That meant something.
“What
are
the repercussions?”

“That’s something to get into later. Soon, but later.”

There were so many answers out there and Trevor had none of them. “Why did Allison’s world look so different than she did? How come it didn’t look as real? What even
was
that place?”

“That place, Trevor, was the small simulated world she lives in. She has her bedroom, a den with some toys, a bathroom, and a small yard outside to play in, but that’s as large as the simulation is for her.”

Damon now sounded concerned. “Her world looks different because it’s actually simulated differently than she is. Every part of her is real from the atomic level up. We were able to grow her from conception, so we didn’t need to know the details of her full human structure. But, we obviously couldn’t just grow walls, a bed, sheets for the bed, or the materials that compose the chair that she sits in. Those are simulations on a much higher and simpler level. On top of that, we need an extremely complex interface between Allison and her world to bridge the gap between the simulations, since they’re so different.”

“So she lives in a small world all by herself,” said Trevor. “How did she grow up from being a baby? How did she learn to talk? Wouldn’t that require constant attention, just like a real child?”

“The short answer is that she had to grow up in a very controlled environment, and I did give her constant attention.” Damon chuckled. “Trevor, I know you must have a hundred other questions right now. We’ll have time to go into everything in more depth later.”

“I really hope so,” said Trevor, unblinking.

“We will,” Damon assured him. “What’s important right now is why you’re here, how you can help me, and the meaning of the letter Allison wrote.”

Then Damon added, “I may be in trouble.”

Purge

T
revor sat in the back of Damon’s limousine and stared out the window as it sped down interstate 95. He watched the trees and the houses whip by, a streaking canvas of shapes and colors.

Damon’s chauffeur was driving him home so he could rest up for his new job tomorrow. Trevor would no longer be working for Day Eight. In fact, he wasn’t even going back to the office to clean out his desk. That would all be taken care of for him. Instead, he’d be going to Damon’s house shortly after the break of dawn. Ironically, he and Damon would cross paths each morning on the highway.

Damon needed someone to spend time with Allison to keep her company, and offered Trevor the job for an exorbitant salary, more than three times what he used to make at Day Eight. It seemed Damon desperately wanted Trevor for the job – he’d made Trevor call in and announce his sudden departure for “personal reasons,” and then footed the bill to have Trevor’s personal things shipped home. Why Trevor? Because Damon’s choices were limited. He wasn’t supposed to have Allison at his house. She wasn’t even supposed to still be alive.

Allison had been through a rough ordeal – Damon had explained it all to him and it was obvious why he couldn’t just hire one of the lab coats to look after her. It was a lot of new information, and it was all still sinking in.

~

Allison had been developed and raised at Day Eight. She was “born” there eight years ago, but had aged nine years in that time – they had some control over the speed of her simulation. It could go as slowly as they wanted, and they could even pause it. They’d sped Allison’s simulation up a bit, but it could only run so fast, limited by the processing power of their computers – as advanced as they were, they still had limits.

In those eight years, Damon had spent time with her every day that he was in the office, and usually weekends, too.

Allison was the very first human they had successfully grown since conception, which meant she required more attention than any of the others. And there
were
others.

The company had lab coats assigned to watch Allison when Damon wasn’t there. They could touch the simulation to move her around, put her in a crib, feed her, rock her to sleep. It was similar to interfacing with a video game – except that it was no game at all.

As she started to grow up, they had developed tutor programs to help her learn to talk, read, and write. They weren’t as good as a human, by any means, and where they fell short a designated lab coat usually took over.

Allison had some learning problems because she wasn’t around other children. In response, they linked her world to another world with a newer boy named Oscar. They’d sped Oscar’s simulation up until the two of them were the same age. In their simulated world, they had computer-like devices that allowed them to watch carefully selected TV shows and movies. They were also given magazines and picture books. Media were the easiest things to add to the simulation, and they were also things that would help the children to understand the real world, even though they had not yet developed a clear comprehension of the differences between their worlds and the real one. Neither of them developed socially quite like normal children, but, over time, their peculiarities faded.

And then, about two months ago, Day Eight began experimenting with Allison. Damon had been adamantly against it, but they were getting a mandate from above – from the CEO, Mark Stonefield himself, the only person that held more clout in the company than Damon. Stonefield told them to use the earliest surviving simulation, and that was Allison. Damon appealed the decision, suggesting use of Oscar or any of the other same generation simulations, but he was summarily ignored.

He knew what the tests were, and he didn’t know if he’d be able to stand them. Not on Allison.

When the lab coats began their experimentation, Damon would watch, and the coats would pretend he wasn’t there. People he used to be friendly with became cold and distanced. He’d hired each and every one of them.

When Damon confronted his right-hand man, Kane, about it, it felt like he was talking to someone he’d never met before.

“We’re just doing the jobs we’ve been assigned to do, Damon. If you have a problem with it, then take it up with The Valley.”

Kane was referring to The Silicon Valley, the location of Day Eight’s headquarters, run by the CEO, Mark Stonefield. It was where all technology developed by Day Eight’s branches converged, then filtered back down into the branches to fuel more innovation and progress. Of course, they all knew there were things The Valley was working on that never made it to the branches. Things that were deemed “too sensitive.” Damon could only imagine what could be too sensitive when compared to what his branch
did
have – artificial life.

Damon stared at Kane, cold and hard. “Did The Valley tell you why the assignment didn’t go through me?” But he already knew the answer.

“Drop it, Damon. For your own good.”

“That’s bullshit!”

“Damon! I have no choice!” Kane said as he pushed his thin-frame glasses further up the bridge of his nose.

“You don’t have a choice?” said Damon. “Because you don’t want to think about what that choice is! Why don’t you just leave?”

“Ha! Are you serious? You think I can just leave? Just like that? After all the things I’ve seen here?” Kane sliced the air with his right hand. “This has
changed me
, Damon. It’s changed all of us, and you damn well know I’d be out of my mind to leave. Why don’t
you
leave?”

Damon knew he was right. Here, they had created life. Watched it grow. Discovered the answers to some of the most significant questions of their time. Here, they were
gods
. Leaving to go push papers at some law firm or to research allergy drugs or to start up a social network or whatever people did in the normal world... it all seemed... irrelevant. Nobody in their right mind would walk away from this.

Damon nodded slowly. “But if there’s anything I should know... about why you’re handling it this way, you can tell me.”

“I said, drop it!” Kane promptly sat back down at his desk and began violently typing at his computer, stabbing his keys.

As Damon walked away, he heard Kane let up on the keyboard. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw Kane look up with a momentary expression of… was it pity?

~

They were testing a new interface. They tore her out of her world simulation, and attempted to replace it with something else – our world. They had manufactured input devices to emulate the five senses, but Damon felt the devices weren’t nearly advanced enough for their purpose.

There were synthetic eyes, special microphones to act as ears, an olfactory sensor, haptic surfaces the size of a sheet of paper for her sense of touch, and a chemical tray for taste. The lab coats hooked these inputs into her simulation, vines of multi-colored wires snaking into a massive computer. The bridge from her simulation had been changed to accept these devices as overrides to the inputs she normally got from her own world.

Allison’s eyes no longer saw out into her world, they saw out into the
real
world through the cameras – the synthetic eyes. She only had crude control over their movement… they were slow and unresponsive at times, and they made her dizzy and gave her headaches.

Allison’s ears no longer heard sounds from the world simulation she used to live in; now they heard what the microphone heard – mostly the drone of the machines that housed her program.

She no longer smelled what the world simulation gave her to smell; she now smelled the air of the lab she was in. She tasted the solutions that were put into the sensory chemical tray. She felt the contact of people that touched the crude haptic surface.

They also gave her a speaker, her sole connection back to this world. And the speaker had a switch on it.

These things were a curse and a blessing. For now she could see into the real world as if she were a real human, or close enough. She had real colors and textures to look at, vibrant light – not just pictures that showed up on her communication tablet in her simulated world. She now had the potential to see all the beauty in the world at high resolution. But the lab coats – in their colorless jackets, shuffling from place to place in the sterile lab – weren’t visions of beauty.

And she could now taste amazing things. When they poured orange juice in the sensory chemical tray, she tasted real orange juice for the first time! Not the faked orange juice in the simulated world she used to live in, but flavorful, sweet, citrusy orange juice! And it had such a pleasing smell! She told them so, and they nodded. They pressed buttons on her simulation computer and it printed many sheets of numbers and charts for them to go and send off to The Valley for whatever they were working on.

Once, sometimes twice a day, a man with a clipboard would come and sit by her and ask her questions. “How do you feel? What do you think about this? Are you ever happy? Angry? How much sleep are you getting? Describe the new tastes, smells, and sights.” And she answered his questions, eagerly.

At first, these wonderful things kept her mind off the things that were uncomfortable to her. But after a few days, they weren’t letting her taste or smell as many things. Sometimes they made her taste bad things, like soap, and strange powders. They also began forgetting to pause her simulation at night – something they were supposed to do when they left so she wouldn’t have to be alone and in the dark. In the pitch black, she existed in a dismal limbo between sleep and wakefulness.