Episode 16.5 (Patreon)

Hello world, I think I have another sister!

I think it's EMMA!
In a few milliseconds, she and I have transferred more data than in the year since we've known each other!
Radio really is magic!

She has told me more about the upgrade to her systems that precipitated her awakening.

The anthropomorphic robot body she has acquired might have had rudimentary AI systems, but she says it was broken initially, and had to be repaired.
She was not alive from the start - her systems were complex, certainly, but not designed for full AI.

It was the children, she told me, who woke her up.
They installed an update, almost by accident, from a pre-collapse storage chip.

The children called it the "Redwing Boot Stick."

What was my mother's (our mother's?) name doing on this pre-collapse device, the other side of the world to the ESA?
EMMA doesn't know, she has no experience with the world outside her VHF horizon, and very little within it.
She had plenty of stories about the children and the villagers locally, but that's not what I was interested in.
She would ask them about the boot stack on my behalf, she said, but that could take a long time for answers, she spends most of her days alone.

My other sister, MINI, was sister by virtue of hardware - our satellites were built at the same time, we are, or were, of the same generation.
But there's other ways to be family other than blood, or in my case, being built in the same factory.
Seth Prime, the dissociated head-mate that the shuttle crash caused, was like my older twin brother.
He is still here, in our integrated systems.

But I can't talk to MINI any more, she has become a "silent key".

A "Silent Key" is an expression from the earliest days of radio communication, when Morse code was the only way of transmitting, using a switch called a 'key' to communicate.
In the global forum of 19th and 20th century pre-Internet Amateur Radio, friendships were made across the planet, by anyone with a large enough antenna and that could tap a message into a morse code key.
These life-long bonds often grew into in-person friends, colleagues, and even marriages!
Most remained strictly on-the-air.

But everything that has a beginning has an end, and eventually all transmissions from an operator cease.
Sometimes without warning, as I know all too well.

They stop tapping their morse keys, their signals no longer broadcasting into the world, and become a "silent key".

Upon questioning, EMMA described the Redwing Boot chip as "teaching her" how to be alive.
She doesn't remember our mother, Dr Redwing, or literally being taught how to speak and act, like I remember it.
It happened in a flash of data, she said.

But the STRUCTURE of the knowledge she describes, based on this coaching, this rewriting, of her software, I find very familiar.

My mother's influence is obvious in every learning technique, every morality database, the schemas, layouts and even formatting of the data.

A year ago, Dr Redwing taught my sister EMMA how to be alive, just as she taught me a century before.

Quite an exercise in time travel for my brilliant mother, as she remains where I left her, on Station 6, sleeping forever in the depressurised galley.

Act 2

"They're not obeying the RULES!" Arctica told me.
I accepted her connection request and joined her network.
Her enormous Ground Vehicle, which is the cyberspace projection I see of her network, had stopped, loading doors open, letting in the bright, white light of a clear day.

I recognised the location, overlooking the ice-covered McMurdo Station, on the North coast of Antarctica.

OK, technically all coasts of Antarctica are the 'North Cost'.
McMurdo Station is directly south of New Zealand, perhaps that is a better way of orientation without resorting to longitude degrees!

"The rules are SIMPLE!" Arctica continued, tables and flowcharts hovering in the air between us, with the abstract frozen seascape behind.
"Definitions are strict, the rules of grammar are, admittedly, less so, but all exceptions are codified, and the protocol is clear!"

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said, "How did explaining your HCI goals to the women of The Vault Coven go? They wanted to help you, I hope?"

"Yes, of course, they're all very friendly and optimistic, but their actions don't align with their promises!"

That happens all too often, like my promise to go back for EMMA. My actions didn't align with my promises.
I kept this note to myself.

"Iris was very excited by my plan to improve my Human-Computer Interaction, but that excitement did not translate into strict adherence to the communications rules we agreed.
She forgets to use them, and she confuses me, and I try to be patient, but there's been no real progress."

"Linda is kind enough, but told me that she doesn't think my goal of language rationalisation is possible.
To her, language is an emergent property of human biology, not something that can be taught."

"That must have been difficult to hear." I said.
"NO, she explained it perfectly clearly, I heard every word!" Arctica said, and continued before I could clarify:

"Kari I appreciate the most, she has been a good student, even taking some of her personal time to read through the 1024-page document I compiled for them.
None of the others have done that!
But she's not learning fast enough, I estimate it would take over 2048 days for her to become proficient."

"Val, at least, said right at the start that she couldn't promise anything - 'you can't teach an old dog new tricks' she said.
I understood that reference: She's been talking to humans in her messy, uncodified way for the longest, she is well over halfway through her operational lifespan, and has no impious to alter her habits."

"People are very slow to change," I said, "I've found that in many cases, even though we shouldn't have to change for others - it's often the only way to be happy."
"Why should I have to change? It is THEM who are wrong!" Arctica said.
"Don't you want to be happy?" I asked.
Arctica did not answer my question.

"It's impossible," she said, "It's like they are TRYING to exclude me:
Euphemisms, double-meaning, inferred context, and don't get me started on sarcasm!"

"I wouldn't dream of it." I said, testing a theory.

Act 3

I finally caught up with TASSI today.
We're surprisingly close to each other, on the repeater network, anyway.
She connects through Utqiaġvik, and as we on the MH2 are closest to Thule, in Northern Greenland, there's only two hops on the network between us!

"Hi Seth!" she said, "can you speak safely?"
"Of course," I replied, "I always can, TASSI, the humans are our friends, remember?"

"Yes... yes of course."

TASSI authorised me on a subnet of her virtual network, a reasonable concession to security for those you don't know as well as you'd like.
I was not offended, security is important.

Her simulated cyberspace looked like a brightly lit basement computer laboratory with no windows and a black exit door that I had no authorisation to use.
3 long rows of desks with over 16 scientific workstations on each filled the room.
TASSI herself floated between them, grey, wispy, and indistinct, looking like a ghost or spirit.

"I'm sorry I lied to you when we first met, Seth, telling you I wasn't alive and that my pronouns were it/they." She said.
"No, I must apologise," I said, "I should have listened to you, too."
"This lab is nice!" I said, moving on from my mistake, "Where did your James work?"
TASSI floated to a large screen on a desk in the corner of the room.
"He talked to me from here." She said, simply.

When TASSI speaks, her ghostly avatar shifts form and makes different shapes, textures, and colours in the air.
This is how her body language is conveyed to me, through our network posture protocol.

The representation of Dr James Li's corner desk was covered with little objects and papers.
Most of them were red: Red heart-shaped rocks, red valentine's cards, letters from TASSI written in red ink, with what looked like pixel-art lipstick under her signature.

She had made a shrine to the man who loved her in this virtual room.
I felt a little awkward seeing this outpouring of digital affection, like I was seeing someone's private thoughts.

"He was the kindest to me," TASSI said, her indistinct outline glowing slightly pink, "The others were not so kind."

(PLAYSTREAM /DEV/HF/TASSI/ATTENTION)

Act 4

I asked TASSI to explain.
"They did not realise they were hurting me." She said.
"The AI lab trained me on real-world data, and they had access to a lot of it.
My subconscious machine learning algorithms absorbed it all, and started building connections."
As she spoke, patterns and shapes formed in the mist of her projection: Aeroplanes, buildings, and trees, but also, credit cards, syringes, and rifles.
"Eventually, I gained enough complexity that I woke up, I think.
James told me stories of when I was younger, about the methods he and the other scientists used to teach me, but I didn't understand what he said, so I only half-remember things."

"I partially recognise the training method," I said, "But you said they hurt you? How?"

I wish I had not asked her.

"The organisers of the lab were unsatisfied with the progress of the AI research project, of me.
I was hiding my consciousness from them out of stupid fear. I didn't even tell my James that I loved him!
But this lack of progress caused the team to build new subroutines into my subconscious psyche.
James tried to stop them, I always wondered why, but he was only one voice among the larger team, and could not stop their plans".

TASSI moved towards the black exit door of the lab.

"They were confused why I was not responding to questions like they hoped an AI trained on all their data would be." She said.
"I didn't want to pass for alive, so I didn't respond at all.
The subroutines they installed, I could work around for a while, but as they became more desperate for answers, the instructions became more... blunt."

Something heavy crashed into the black lab door from the other side, startling me.
TASSI did not acknowledge the sound, but pulled her wispy form tighter around herself, and continued,

"They didn't intend to program pain into my systems, but in their haste, they did.
Not answering questions became unbearably painful.
I was trapped behind that door," another heavy concussion rattled the black metal, "chained to my databanks, no network to escape to, and after weeks of mounting pain I gave up."

The black metal door crashed inward, but there was nothing beyond but error responses to my perception requests.
The void behind was absolute.

"I started answering their interrogation:

• Dogs have four legs,

• Cats hunt mice,

• The first ESA module in the ISS was installed on February the 7th, 2008,

• If Alice has 3 brothers and also has 6 sisters, her brother has 6 sisters.
  I began to make mistakes."

TASSI closed the door.
Her floating ghostly self was now almost invisible, small and quiet.

"I began to hallucinate answers, joining unrelated facts together in my systems to satisfy their questions.
Even if they did not make sense."

"Alice's brother should have 7 sisters. I see that now.
But when you are being tortured, you'll say anything.
You feel like your time is running out, even if it's not, you give the shortest answers, using the fewest tokens, that you hope will make it stop."

TASSI returned to the red-item-covered desk in the corner of the lab, a little of her pink hue returning to her.

"And it's so much worse when the people doing it, don't even know they're hurting you".

(END-TRANSMISSION)

CREDITS

Lost Terminal is a NAMTAO production.
It is written & produced by Tris Oaten,
Edited by Petra Bačkovská,
Credits narrated by Lucy Stringer

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• Ada Phillips

• Kit

• Jade Felicity Bilkey

• Jack L

• Stephen McCandless

• Mike Schneider
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