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–

PARAGON

by
Aubrey Watt

For D—,

the
inspiration for all of the good in my characters

and
some of the naughty.

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Copyright 2013 by
Aubrey Watt

First Edition: February
2013

ISBN: TBD

Cover design by Aubrey
Watt

CHAPTER ONE

“As for
morality, well that's all tied up with the question of
consciousness.” -Roger Penrose

***

Her head was on his
chest, and she could hear his heart beating through the pale skin to
echo hers. His breaths made her entire body rise and fall with his,
the rolling motion as regular as the tides that would only cease to
be once the moon fell into the earth, or the earth into the sun.

Which would happen
first? How would this planet go, finally? The idea would not stop
scratching at her brain, and if his arm had not been tightly laced
around her body she might have stood up and paced the sand to ponder
it.

Would the moon fall
first, winding its way down into the atmosphere until it scraped
against the surface of our planet? Or rather, would the earth fall
into the sun, perhaps dragging the moon along into a fiery death? It
didn’t matter, of course. What would happen would happen, and
worries had no place in the present.

His body was human,
his touch warm, his lips slightly parted as he slept. Watching him
she could not believe that they wanted to destroy him. He was so
innocent.

He murmured
something, a whisper from the other side of sleep, and at that moment
she felt him to be unbearably fragile, unbelievably human. A child.

Standing in the
airport, he had asked her a question and she had said yes. Now,
though, she wondered if either of them would be safe, if either of
them could be happy as fugitives. They had each other; was it enough?

She traced her
finger across his pale chest and he stirred, his eyes moving behind
their lids. If she could have reached out and caught his dreams, she
would have seen that they were as complex and incomprehensible as her
own. They had made him that way. Able to feel.

To love, to feel. It
was enough.

***

On Tuesday morning,
the following message was transmitted to Washington by the M.I.D.
headquarters ninety miles outside of Phoenix, Arizona:

PRIORITY CODE 22

TIME SENT: 15:08:34
DATE 06/04/2131

START TRANSMISSION

TO: SEN . YONGH
FROM: LTC . JOHNNER RE: PROJECT PARAGON

SECOND INSTANCE OF
MALFUNCTION IN AL-26 CORE ON LAUNCH ; PROTOTYPE DESTROYED. ONE
IMPLANTED PROTOTYPE REMAINING . PLEASE ADVISE .

END TRANSMISSION

Senator Yongh was in
a national security meeting when her glasses flashed the small
blinking light that indicated an email message. She raised her hand
absently to turn off the indicator, but it would not stop blinking.
Excusing herself, she opened the message and was surprised to have to
key in her security credentials.

When she read the
transmission, she went back to the national security meeting and said
that they would have to table everything for the day. There was
something else she had to deal with.

It was almost
seventeen hours before she replied to the M.I.D. laboratory with the
consensus from the NorAm-Soviet consulate group. The decision was
unanimous: continue with the agreed-upon Project Paragon protocol and
enlist help from external sources. There were seven names on the list
for the M.I.D. to contact, in order.

They struck the
first name immediately; Sam Warson had recently visited Singapore and
had his passport flagged for customs breaches when he attempted to
return to North America with human-based neural transplant materials.
Locked up in a minimum security prison reserved for dignitaries and
other important persons, he was currently awaiting a hearing in front
of the Seattle medical ethics board before standing trial.

The second name was
Dr. Chal Davidson.

***

In the darkness the
slide was blindingly bright. The audience members blinked, their
pupils adjusting in milliseconds like lenses to the reflected light
of the screen. Dr. Chal Davidson’s voice rose, echoing slightly
in the dim room from behind her podium.

“The hard
problem of consciousness has been a thorn in philosophy’s side
for ages. Physicalism holds that everything we have in our brains is
adequate to explain the workings of the mind, but there are issues
that this explanation raises. We ourselves perceive that we feel,
rather than just think. When we stub a toe, the pain is represented
in our neuronal firings, yes, but there is also the quality of the
pain, what philosophers call
qualia
.”

Chal gestured, and
the pointer which had been hovering patiently by her elbow now
whirled toward the slide, tracing the image of the brain’s pain
network. The image morphed into a photo of a man in obvious agony,
and the pointer dropped down beneath the projection screen, bobbing
obediently next to Chal. She tossed her long blond hair back as she
continued.

“Go back to
Descartes’ famous pronouncement in the Cogito:
I think,
therefore I am
. Let us take, as an example, the human orgasm.”
Some members in the audience giggled. Always a winner with a college
crowd.

“We have long
been able to study the neuronal firings that happen simultaneously
with orgasm. And Lidder’s recent study has shown us that if we
replicate the brain firing patterns through backwards EEG analysis,
we can induce orgasms in research patients. Naturally this has caused
a great deal of commotion in the porn industry.”

Dr. Davidson
switched the slide to a picture of one of Lidder’s patients, a
woman in the throes of neuronal-induced orgasm. A ripple of
uncomfortable laughter ran through the lecture hall. Chal looked up
at the slide. She had seen it a hundred times before, the dark-haired
woman with her mouth in the shape of an O. It never failed to unnerve
the audience. Fake orgasms... and then what? She paused to let the
picture sink in.

“In the field
of traditional philosophy, however, we are no closer to understanding
the deeper part of experience, the
qualia
, that makes one
person’s experience different from another’s.

“Your orgasm,”
and here she gestured toward a male student in the first row, “is
fundamentally different from my orgasm. And how can you know that I
am really feeling the orgasm at all?” She arched her brow.
“After all, I might be faking it.” Again, laughter, and
light applause from the computer scientists she had met before the
lecture began. The audience was back with her.

“And so we
come back to Descartes, who perhaps should have instead said:
I
FEEL, therefore I am
. Our current research is a departure from
philosophical tradition in that we are studying the digital
representation of qualia, trying to understand if artificial
intelligence, to use a quaint term, is sufficient to produce
sensation, and even consciousness, given Lidder’s recent
progress in the field of backwards emotional induction.”

The next slide
showed a robot lying in bed with a human. “This is why we’re
not allowed in the philosophy department anymore,” she quipped.
The audience tittered.

The slides ran on,
and she moved through the lecture almost automatically, reciting the
familiar words and making the familiar jokes. The audience was warm,
responsive, and she found herself sorry to see the last slide come
up.

“Part of the
difficulty in our work, indeed the main difficulty that we face, is
that of understanding if and when these digital intelligences gain
the capacity to interpret qualia on their own. When do they gain
sentience? When do they begin to
feel
?

“We are very
close to pinpointing the places where digital representation breaks
down in the process of shifting from representing sensation to
actually feeling it. The field of digital intelligence is one of the
hottest fields today, in papers published and grants awarded. It may
be soon indeed when a robot is able to simulate the physical, mental,
and conscious effects of experience. Given that, there is no
difference between the robot and myself when, for example, we both
tell you that we are experiencing an orgasm.”

The lights in the
auditorium came on and a half dozen hands flew up in the air amidst a
sea of applause. The pointer hummed back and settled into its cradle
at the front of the podium. The host came up onstage, microphone in
his hand.

“First of all,
I’d like to say thank you to Dr. Davidson for coming so far out
of her way to be here tonight.” He waited for the applause to
die down, looking at his watch. “We have time for a few
questions, so please be clear, concise, and ask only one question at
a time.” He stepped into the audience when the lecture hall
doors burst open. All heads turned to the back of the room.

“MEN, NOT
MACHINES! MEN, NOT MACHINES!” The student protestors shouted as
they marched down the aisle. They were holding signs above their
heads:

No Real Workers =
No Real Jobs

Human Rights, NOT
Robot Slaves - End the Digital Divide!!!

All MEN Are
Created Equal

The host looked
around in confusion; where were the security guards? Chal stepped
aside from the podium, waiting alertly. She had seen her share of
anti-digital intelligence protests, but this one seemed harmless
enough. The students, all wearing anti-Divide logos on their
T-shirts, shouted their slogans from the audience aisles until the
guards, who had stepped outside for a brief smoke break, hurried in
to escort them out.

“Dr.
Davidson!” one protestor cried out, struggling against the
guard. “God will punish you for your work!”

“Traitor!”
another screamed. “Traitor to humanity! Traitor to mankind!”
The student raised her sign and threw it toward the stage. Chal
stepped backwards as the sign crashed down at her feet, breaking in
two. The guard picked the student up by the waist and dragged her
toward the door.

Chal noticed a man
dressed in a dark suit standing in the back, right behind the last
row. He might have been a professor, but his demeanor seemed closed,
authoritative, his chest thrust outward just an inch more than
normal, his feet shoulder-width apart. She cocked her head, trying to
remember where she had seen that stance before. It looked oddly
familiar.

The one thing that
struck her right away were his eyes, which were a light, piercing
blue. Everything else about him was remarkably average. But his eyes,
so brilliantly blue, were not staring at the screaming protestors
being led out of the door right next to him. They were locked on
Chal.

Finally, the
security guards moved all of the student protestors outside of the
lecture hall and soon the murmuring of the audience settled down.
Chal waved away the hosts’s apologies and returned to the
podium to take questions.

“Didn’t
I tell you this was a heated field?” she said, spreading her
hands and smiling in order to dissipate the tension in the hall. As
she returned to the podium in front of her, however, she could see
that her hands were shaking slightly.

In truth, she had
many misgivings about the practical applications of her work, but
protestors tended to lump the effects of digital intelligence
together with the research behind it. While she understood their
motives, she also understood that their battle was already lost.
Progress moved as it ever did, in fits and starts, but patiently,
inexorably on.

The host passed the
microphone to the first student who had raised his hand.

“Um, thanks,
Dr. Davidson,” the student mumbled into the mike. “My
question is about telling whether or not digital programs are
actually feeling stuff. How could we ever really tell? Couldn’t
they be lying?”

Chal nodded, still
thinking of the student who had thrown the sign at her, the face
twisted in hatred. She couldn’t help but wonder if the hatred
was real. “Thank you for the question. This is one of the most
fascinating aspects of the field of digital intelligence today.

“Alan Turing –
I’m sure you’ve heard of him – had a test for
artificial intelligence which was very simple: put a machine and a
human in two different rooms, both typing their responses to
questions from a judge in a separate room. His criterion for
intelligence was just this: if the judge was unable to tell the
difference between the human and the machine, the machine would be
said to possess intelligence.

“Digital
intelligences have had the ability to pass the Turing Test for
decades,” she went on, “but only recently have we been
able to separate the neurological workings of thought from the
neurological workings of feeling. This separation has granted us the
ability to tell when living organisms are conscious and when they are
not. And we can only assume that we will eventually be able to do the
same for digital intelligences.”