\n| <\/td>\n | [audio:http:\/\/www.somethingwicked.co.za\/podcasts\/audio\/SomethingWickedEp06_SilverCityandGreenPlace.mp3 |titles=The Silver City & The Green Place by Abi Godsell]
\napprox 21 min<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n<\/p>\n The doctor is small and grey-haired. He talks rapidly and jumps between subjects. It’s hard to believe that this abrupt little man headed up the team that implanted the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence into the body of a brain-dead teenager.<\/p>\n My editor is going to have a field day.<\/p>\n “It worked out well though. Her parents had given up, they were looking for a reason to pull the plug. Donating the body to science must have seemed easier.”<\/p>\n “And the purpose of the project Doctor, just to remind our readers?” My tone is neutral and engaging, but in my head I am grinning.<\/p>\n The little man looks up at me sharply and I stare back, feigning good-natured interest.<\/p>\n He picks up a biscuit and replies carefully, “We needed a way to teach them. The AI’s I mean. There was no other way they’d process us properly. Not without ‘knowing’ human, without experiencing it.”<\/p>\n He studies his biscuit intensely and I can see the slight tightening of his jaw as he speaks.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was a\u2026 a learning experience\u201d<\/p>\n In my head, my grin becomes wolf-like.<\/p>\n Outwardly, I smile pleasantly and ask him about the science, to keep him relaxed. I will ferret out your secrets, Doctor; every horror, every monstrosity, every small abandonment of ethics. Everything that causes you to tighten your jaw as you lie to me.<\/p>\n I smile again, and sit back listening, as this unassuming old man plunges into the story of the most controversial science experiment of the century.<\/p>\n \u201cThe problem with the surgery was its technical complexity, keeping the synaptic connections alive, making sure the organic tissue didn\u2019t reject the synthetic material and\u2026 are you listening?\u201d<\/p>\n I nod placidly, watching his irritation with private amusement.<\/p>\n He is charmingly straightforward, this old man.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyway, after the project stabilised, after the surgery – we managed the surgery seamlessly by the way \u2013\u201d<\/p>\n There is a touch of wounded pride in the offhand way he says that.<\/p>\n Perfect. Let him be angry, let him be defensive, let him be vulnerable.<\/p>\n That\u2019s how people get careless.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyway, after stabilisation the team decided to choose a name. No one had ever dreamed of attempting this before, and we had just done it. We wanted a name to, you know, celebrate.\u201d<\/p>\n His face is softened for a moment by some distant memory.<\/p>\n \u201cBut the name had to be perfect, you understand.\u201d<\/p>\n He is all enthusiasm now, trying to draw me into his long ago excitement. He forgives quickly then, this elderly scientist. That is useful too.<\/p>\n \u201cWe needed something to show that she -\u201c<\/p>\n I start at the pronoun.<\/p>\n \u201c- was a groundbreaker. Some of the others wanted Virginia, but that was vulgar.\u201d He frowns.<\/p>\n \u201cI suggested Core. Like the middle of a reactor.\u201d<\/p>\n He looks at me pityingly. \u201cLike Persephone, daughter of the Greek goddess of the moon and deity of spring and new life. Core was her other name. It means Maiden, as in \u2018first\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n I nod, stupidly, trying not to wince at his horrible pronunciation. Kohree, old man, not Core. And Demeter was never a moon goddess.<\/p>\n He continues, looking out into the garden. He has an omnitree orchard. It\u2019s a nice touch, something like that in the middle of the city. He continues. \u201cWell, I suggested Core- \u201c<\/p>\n Kohree<\/em><\/p>\n\u201c- and Core stuck.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe first few years were hard. For a long time she -\u201c<\/p>\n This time I can\u2019t help myself. \u201cWait. \u2018She\u2019? As in the machine?\u201d I ask, gesturing incredulously at the thing wheeling itself clumsily along the path between the omnitrees. They\u2019re producing pomegranates today. Nicely ironic, although I\u2019m sure the reference is lost on the old man. He is talking again.<\/p>\n \u201cWe couldn\u2019t just shove in a computer with no concept of personality or gender or social interaction or anything. The transition was hard enough, even after we programmed her with everything.\u201d<\/p>\n I berate myself silently for being distracted by the trees. I almost missed that opening.<\/p>\n \u201cEverything? Even emotions?\u201d<\/p>\n Caught off-guard, he looks away sharply.<\/p>\n I swallow a small smile.<\/p>\n Then he turns his head back to me, his eyes on the ground and a softness like defeat in his shoulders.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d he says evenly, \u201cNo, those came later.\u201d<\/p>\n After that he natters on for a while, every bit the retired scientist. I tune out his heartfelt descriptions of the hardship of the years of catatonia, as he waited for the programme to learn its new operating system. I tune out the quiet regret with which he tells me how his team splintered around him, leaving him alone with the experiment. These are not what I have come here for. My editor pays me for scandal, not sentimentality.<\/p>\n It\u2019s really only when his voice changes, hesitating, that I prick up my ears.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was after she woke up\u2026 after she began to adapt to the body that the \u2026 unexpected developments occurred.<\/p>\n I listen, waiting.<\/p>\n He steeples his fingers and sighs. A frown etches the wrinkles deep into his face, making him look older than he is.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were watching\u00a0a film. \u2018Human movies\u2019 she calls them. Even now. I had to leave the room, I can\u2019t remember why, and the next thing I knew she was calling for me desperately. I didn\u2019t think. I just ran. She\u2019d fallen out of her chair. She could hardly move then, worse than now, though I doubt she\u2019ll ever be able to walk, not without major surgery to try and fix the damage to the donor body, at least.”<\/p>\n I file this away for a possible sympathetic slant on the machine, although the thought of doing that makes me cringe.<\/p>\n \u201cI… tried to pick her up, see what had happened. And she just clung to me. She clung to me and she was, you know, crying.\u201d<\/p>\n He tracks an imaginary tear trail down his cheek.<\/p>\n I watch, fascinated by the way the memory affects him.<\/p>\n \u201cCrying uncontrollably, just like a scared little girl. A scared human<\/em> girl.\u201d<\/p>\nHe lifts his head to the garden again and his eyes soften.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019d cried before but not \u2026 nothing like that.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhy?\u201d I ask it candidly without meaning to, and clench my jaw in frustration. I don\u2019t like uncalculated moves.<\/p>\n The Doctor doesn\u2019t seem to notice though; he\u2019s too caught up in his story.<\/p>\n \u201cI sort of, tried to pick her up off the ground, but I couldn\u2019t lift her. So I just\u2026\u201d He looked lost then. \u201cI\u2019ve never had children.\u201d<\/p>\n I could see them then; the man struggling to hold it, this machine he had built into the body of a girl. I could see the way he\u2019d try to comfort this thing that he had watched growing into a young woman while she was catatonic. I could see him afraid, he who had never had children. I wouldn\u2019t have been afraid. I\u2019ve seen chat-bots that cry, computers that laugh – hell, even skytrains are programmed with basic emotion simulation routines. Tears are easy enough to fake.<\/p>\n I ask again, controlled this time, \u201cWhy was she crying?<\/p>\n He looks up at me and for a moment I think he must have noticed my earlier lapse, then his expression evens.<\/p>\n He drops his voice conspiratorially: \u201cYou know, I asked her that too. She couldn’t tell me. She didn’t know.”<\/p>\n He sits back, regarding me keenly. “I think she has a lot less control than she pretends sometimes. Control over the body, I mean. The donor body. There’s so much we don\u2019t know about cellular memory.”<\/p>\n It would have been heavy. A young woman\u2019s body is heavy. He’d have known that he’d never be able to lift it, but he’d tried.<\/p>\n The Doctor is talking again. I swear under my breath and feign interest.<\/p>\n “Wait, cellular? Forgive me Doctor, but I don’t really understand computer terminology.”<\/p>\n Any act becomes more convincing with a grain or two of truth.<\/p>\n He sighs and begins explaining to me slowly: “Not battery cells, human ones. The biological unit of living matter.”<\/p>\n “But… cellular memory? What do you…”<\/p>\n “It\u2019s a well documented phenomenon. Well, inasmuch as we know it exists.”<\/p>\n I can see him warming to my interest now, drawing closer to me through my questions. His animation almost brings out my smile.<\/p>\n “Cases of transference of properties, tastes usually, from the donor to the recipient, even if all they share is a kidney.”<\/p>\n I can see the trust, kitten-cautious, as he sneaks a glance at me. I keep my eyes gentle.<\/p>\n “- research into facial recognition of the donor\u2019s family by the recipient. It was inconclusive, sure, but that was because it was never finished.”<\/p>\n I will win him over with gentle eyes and soft questions.<\/p>\n “Why?”<\/p>\n The Doctor smiles, rueful and knowing.<\/p>\n Just a little closer, old man.<\/p>\n “Funding was cut. The board couldn\u2019t see enough practical application.”<\/p>\n I glance out at the machine under the omnitrees and quirk an eyebrow. The old man laughs with me.<\/p>\n “We know that something happens. Knowledge shifts from one body to the other, carried by constructs that are surely too small, too simple to have memory. But they do. Even a single cell of a single organ of a single human being\u2026 knows. And sometimes they can share that knowing.” He’s holding my gaze now, leading me along a chain of reasoning, confidently, surely.<\/p>\n I have no choice but to follow.<\/p>\n “I saw her crying and shaking and cringing away from the screen and trying to get out of her chair. There was a train wreck, you see, on the screen.”<\/p>\n He looks at me as if I should understand. I shake my head.<\/p>\n “The body donor was on the one-four-seven.”<\/p>\n I know that name… It was something to do with … “That was the skytrain collision? Head on, derailment, no… no survivors…”<\/p>\n I gape at him.<\/p>\n \u201cIf I were looking for a trauma so great that it imprinted onto the very cells, I wouldn’t look much farther than that.”<\/p>\n The fragments of science suddenly mesh into clarity<\/p>\n “That’s preposterous! Isn’t it?” I only just manage to soften the end, moderating my cynicism, giving him space to correct me. “The body wouldn’t<\/em> – couldn\u2019t- remember something like that surely?\u201d<\/p>\nMy tone is coaxing, placating, because even this nonsense, mad as it is, is not what I’m here for.<\/p>\n He doesn’t correct me, though. Just sits back and looks away.<\/p>\n “That\u2019s what she said too, when I suggested cell memory. But it would happen sometimes. She’d know things she’d never learned, hate things she’d never experienced, prefer things for no reason. At first it terrified her.”<\/p>\n I must have looked sceptical because he smiles indulgently at me.<\/p>\n “Imagine a rationalising machine, because that\u2019s all an AI is, when it starts out. Imagine a… a fancy pocket calculator that suddenly encounters uncontrollable, inexplicable reactions? It’s no wonder she hated it. It undermined her sense of self-determination. ”<\/p>\n I pick up a biscuit, nod to keep him talking and try not to scoff at the idea of a machine with a sense of self-determination.<\/p>\n The Doctor goes on. “Soon enough though, she adapted to that too. She even began to enjoy it, the freedom that irrationality can confer. She discovered baseless preferences, choices without recourse to objective logic. Free will, if you like.”<\/p>\n I nearly choke on my biscuit. A machine with personal preference? A computer making choices for nothing but itself? With the same ability that allows each one of us to become whatever we dream: writers or wreckers, dancers or dictators?<\/p>\n He laughs into his cup, glancing at the thing in the wheelchair and then at me. I swallow my shock. This is the moment.<\/p>\n I may not know machinery and I may not know science, but I know this.<\/p>\n This is the moment that he decides if he will trust me with it. He will choose if he will tell me the thing that has been shifting his eyes from mine, keeping his fingers drumming the table top. Now he decides if it\u2019s safe to reveal to me the scoop that my editor is waiting for, the transgression or mistake or lapse that would shut down his project if it were to be printed. (It will be printed, old man, because scandal sells papers.) Now he is deciding if he will give me that which I have come looking for and if I will protect it as he has.<\/p>\n The Doctor licks his lips. I hold my breath, pulse racing. I have played my part well, but…<\/p>\n He darts a glance at me, something like shrewdness in his gaze.<\/p>\n Trust me, old man<\/em>, my eyes say. Trust me, trust me.<\/em><\/p>\nHe laughs into his cup, glancing at me, the kind-eyed journalist in front of him.<\/p>\n “Can you imagine a rationalising machine with fears and favourites and dreams?”<\/p>\n His tone is gentle, but still I\u2019m stunned. Dreams? Tears I can buy, you can fake tears. Preferences I can buy, because of that whole cell memory thing, but dreams? We still know almost nothing about dreams. We can\u2019t create what we don\u2019t understand right? Right?<\/p>\n \u201cYou programmed it to dream?”<\/p>\n \u201cI didn’t, no, but human can never be just a casing.”<\/p>\n “What?” the idea shocks me into honesty.<\/p>\n He drops my gaze then.<\/p>\n Incredulous, I realise he has more to say.<\/p>\n He stirs the coffee in his glass cup. It is probably cold by now. And then he tells me how they, how he and the machine, were sitting here a few days ago, when it told him it had been dreaming.<\/p>\n \u201cShe surprised me the way she said it. So unselfconsciously, totally unaware that nothing in her programming, nothing in her code should have given her dreams.<\/p>\n She just looked at me, her lips blue from that terrible children\u2019s cereal she eats (that she eats because she likes <\/em>blue). She sat here -\u201d<\/p>\nHe gestures at the empty seat next to him.<\/p>\n \u201c- among the grass and the synth-soil and the omnitrees, and she said to me…\u201d<\/p>\n The Doctor pauses and I wave him on impatiently.<\/p>\n \u201cShe said: \u2018I dreamed of a green place where I could no longer go.\u201d<\/p>\n He switches his gaze to mine and his eyes are sharp and wise.<\/p>\n He holds up his coffee, catching the late afternoon light in the depths of the dark liquid. \u201cDon\u2019t you think,\u201d he asks, appearing to address the cup, \u201cdon\u2019t you think that we\u2019re just lonely? Humans, I mean. As a species. Why else would we chase the hope of other intelligences out among the stars so desperately? Why else would we ache to build machines that could understand us?\u201d He turns the cup and the light splays out through it, refracting onto his fingers. \u201cI think that. That we\u2019re desperate to be seen by something other<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cCan you imagine,\u201d he asks, something thrilling through his voice that I have not heard before, \u201ccan you imagine being seen<\/em> by an Other that is neither servant nor judge?\u201d<\/p>\nBefore I can answer, he points at the machine.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are things that she can never know because she is not human.\u201d He pauses momentarily, decides against saying something more and then continues. \u201cAnd there are things we cannot imagine knowing, because we are not her.\u201d<\/p>\n I shake my head violently. \u201cRubbish!\u201d\u00a0 But the word is hard to say.<\/p>\n Outside in the garden, the daily four-fifteen shower has started.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s rubbish!\u201d But it\u2019s an empty phrase. He knows that I hear him. He knows that I understand and that makes me hate him.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve done nothing more than put an electric motor in a dead human. That thing is nothing more than a twenty-first century zombie!\u201d But his eyes see my confusion and laugh at me. I have no words now, no accusatory, shocked, righteous words, and he knows it.<\/p>\n He\u2019s won.<\/p>\n But the Doctor\u2019s gaze does not hold a winner\u2019s complacency.<\/p>\n He sits up, pointing.<\/p>\n The machine is holding its hands up to the rain. It doesn\u2019t seem troubled by it. In fact, it is singing.<\/p>\n I think I can see what he\u2019s trying to show me. I think I know now what he wants…<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s nothing,\u201d I croak, \u201cnothing. The body is just used to songs.\u201d<\/p>\n The Doctor shakes his head. \u201cThe voice is an instrument of the body, but the words… She chose that song for herself. The body donor never listened to vintage music.\u201d<\/p>\n I begin to tremble.<\/p>\n I demand: \u201cWhat have you done here?\u201d but I already know the answer.<\/p>\n It sings of silver cities and flowing rivers.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat have you made?\u201d<\/p>\n The Doctor looks at me, almost kindly. I look at his creation, reaching from its wheelchair to the sky with the dead girl\u2019s wisdom in its fingers.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m not sure what I\u2019ll send my editor now. He was expecting something big, you know, something shocking. This is the first interview you\u2019ve allowed, after all. It was supposed to be a scoop.\u201d\u00a0 I try for annoyed but it comes out whiny and lacking conviction. I want to say more, but I can’t find the words. The Doctor is silent. His eyes say enough.<\/p>\n I watch the blonde girl tasting the rain.<\/p>\n Neither servant nor judge.<\/p>\n \u201cThe garden path will be slippery by now. Too slippery for that chair to manage. She\u2019ll need someone to fetch her.\u201d<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t move. I hesitate and stand up awkwardly.<\/p>\n I think I want to be seen.<\/p>\n As I step out onto the lawn, she turns her head towards me –<\/p>\n (Things we cannot imagine knowing…)<\/p>\n – There is hope in her eyes.<\/p>\n I walk out across the wet grass, calling over my shoulder as I do so:<\/p>\n \u201cWhat do I even call her, now?\u201d<\/p>\n The Doctor smiles very slowly, and tells me:<\/p>\n \u201cSomething New\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2011 by Abi Godsell
\nIllustration \u00a9 2011 by Vincent Sammy
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