Twitcher

This room always felt like a morgue to Jones. Silly really, as, barring any tragic accidents, this was not a place that saw death. But the stainless steel, the harsh lighting removing all shadow from the work room, and the absolute cleanliness of the place seemed to strip out the humanity in a way he imagined you only experienced around the dead. Of course, the body on the slab reinforced that feeling.

Dr Wright hunched over the form, which would every now and then twitch and spasm slightly. Not enough to interrupt her work, but seemingly unpredictable, which was greatly off-putting. Jones had used the word ‘random’ when he presented the case to her; she’d told him off, emphasising once again that, in their line of work, nothing was ever random. Careless use of language was the difference between solving a problem and creating mass panic.

‘Run me through what happened again,’ she ordered, not raising her head. Jones felt that flash of annoyance he often had when she treated him like one of her machines, but she was the greatest mind of her generation, bent over the greatest invention of any generation. He knew just where his place was in that room.

‘The family brought it in at 08.20. It had been assisting the son - Oscar, 10 years old - in getting ready for school. The child said nothing strange had taken place before this, and the parents concurred. Diagnostics show a full charging, download, and backup cycle had taken place overnight, with it rising at 4am to begin its day. I’m running checks on its memory dump now to confirm all of this. The memory dump was operational until 07.47.’

Jones waited patiently for a response from Dr Wright as she peered into the cranial cavity. On the screens he could see what her optics were showing as she worked her way through the maze of neutrino processors, flicking rapidly from one magnification to another, one resonance imaging to another. He’d given up long ago trying to see what she saw, and what was once awe-inspiring was now normal. He had to remind himself regularly that what he was in the presence of was not a grouchy middle-ager, but perhaps the greatest mind the solar system had seen.

‘Ha!’ The sudden exclamation shocked Jones out of his reverie, and he scurried to her side as she beckoned him over. ‘Here,’ she said, and threw her screens into his viewplate. Immediately he was immersed into the familiar complexity of the neurophage, surrounded by countless (literally; that was the genius that allowed this to exist) fluttering electrons as messages whipped between the neutrino processors. Dr Wright had slowed it all down, but still the level of activity for what was presenting as a broken system was staggering.

‘Why is it so active? This should be dead.’

Dr Wright tutted, ‘How many times Jones?’

‘Sorry, inactive,’ he apologised, annoyed at letting his guard down again.

‘It should be, you are correct. But, as you see, it is not. Why?’

Jones considered. ‘Well, clearly processes are continuing. May I?’ he asked, taking control of the screens, flicking across resonances, pulling back and pushing into the neurophage as his mentor had done, if rather slower. ‘It seems that much of the activity is centered around the memoriam corum. It’s as if the information transfer to the memory dump is being blocked. That’s not possible is it?’

Sighing, Dr Wright switched the viewers off and turned to look at Jones. ‘Andrew, of course it’s bloody possible, because it’s exactly what’s happening.’ The exasperation in her words, however, was not matched in the lines of her face. Jones considered her as she looked over his head at some perception of reality he couldn’t hope to see. He’d never seen this look before; if he didn’t know better he’d think Dr Cleo Wright, inventor of the quantum pathway theorem and, therefore, robots, looked worried.

‘It’s a simple fix. We just bore down to a quantum level and fix the blockage. What is there to be concerned about?’ As he spoke, Jones turned his optics back on and began the dive to where common sense said there was a problem to be fixed. As he travelled through this marvel of engineering, what were seemingly random flashes became far more ordered, beginning to flock into a clear transfer of data throughout the neurophage, to what should be the electron bridge leading to the memory dump. Jones felt a hand softly touch his shoulder and paused.

‘Just stop, Andrew. Stop and look,’ He glanced at Dr Wright. She hadn’t turned around to look herself, but from the hitch in her voice and a gentleness of touch he didn’t ever imagine he would feel from her, he could tell she wasn’t experiencing this for the first time. Switching off his view plate he shifted his attention to the main viewscreen, giving a larger view of the whole area he had started to work on.

On the screen before him, as the information flowed towards the memory dump, the blockage had taken on a distinct outline, channelling along the electron bridge and then flaring out to the right and the left of the memoriam corum, curving around the now dark memory dump, growing in brightness and intensity, a mass filling either side as data flew together from throughout the neurophage.

‘It...it looks like...a bird? Doctor?’

As far as he knew Dr Wright still hadn’t looked at this yet, but he could feel her shaking. Jones couldn’t countenance this scientific behemoth weeping, but he also knew that she must be.

‘Are you ok, Dr Wright?’

She took a deep breath, her head slumping into her chest. ‘I made that bridge. It was written into the base code, and should form a vital part of the whole system. Yet as you can see it has been closed off. That this has caused a shutdown is a good thing: it is the system failure that has brought this model in to us.’

‘Then, if I may ask, Dr Wright, why does this bother you so much? It’s unfortunate, but in the manufacturing process there will always be…’

‘Problems?’ Dr Wright snapped round, suddenly looking furious. ‘How dare you, Andrew! This was manufactured perfectly. My creations do not contain problems. Are you so blind as to not understand what we see here? What is happening?’

Jones flinched back at the sudden anger. General spikiness he had experienced many times before, but sorrow and anger? He’d honestly thought these emotions beyond her grasp.

‘Well, the day’s experiences can’t cross to the memory dump...we have a system crash because it’s overloaded.’

‘Explain to me, then, why the neurophage is still operational?’ Anger gone, Dr Wright was now staring at her creation on the slab.

‘Well, they could be random inputs. Processor twitches from pent up electrical charges.’

‘If they are random, Andrew, why are they not spread out around the neurophage, but are in fact all travelling towards the memory dump?’ As Dr Wright said this she reached out a hand and gently caressed the facial panel of the machine. Jones gaped in wonder as yet more emotion was expressed by this woman - someone who had chewed up and spat out presidents and prime ministers.

‘Well they must be random, because...well...if they aren’t...it’s…’ he trailed off.

‘Alive,’ whispered Dr Wright staring into the dulled eyes of her creation.

A second the length of a lifetime passed, and as Jones stared at Dr Wright - Dr Wright: mother, he thought - she quietly turned reconnected her optics. Again the screens started to flicker, across the planes of the neurophage, delving down to the quantum level, the bird growing larger and larger on the screen as she did so, a phoenix filling the dead, sterile laboratory with its life giving fire, burning away all but wonder and hope. It held against the bridge. Defiantly alive, it fought to be seen, to be recognised.

The flickering intensified as Dr Wright herself began to twitch, as if in tandem with her creation, as she fought this infant being to restore her creation. The speed of information flashed past breathtakingly before Jones, until finally, like a blast furnace spewing molten metal, the fire flowed across the bridge once more, swallowed by the darkness of the memory dump.

Thinking back later, Jones felt he heard an audible sigh as the robot’s life - all two hours and twenty four minutes of it - flowed away. It could easily have come from the dying robot or it’s creator; at that final moment they had been as one. Even as Dr Wright stood and walked over to stand with him, he didn’t move, processing, as much as he ever would, what just happened.

‘I’ll understand if you want to take the day off,’ Dr Wright said, her voice lacking the emotion that had flooded the room previously.

Jones turned to her. ‘This isn’t the first time, is it?’

As she considered him for a long time, he knew she was performing some calculations he had no access to. It was wearing knowing someone was manoeuvring you around your own life.

‘No, it wasn’t the first time. So far, we are up to four.’ She leant back against one of the other benches in the room and regarded him. Jones knew he was expected to follow up.

‘There are, what, about five hundred thousand of these in circulation. What if you miss one? What if someone doesn’t report to us? Will the system always go into shutdown? What if…’

He stopped as she held up a hand. ‘All good questions, of course Andrew, but you know I’ve asked myself them all, and you also know I have seen our path through.’ She walked back to the machine, glorious in its humanoid representation, still and cold now, the twitching ceased.

Regarding it, she continued, ‘I have built these to serve us as machines, and as you well know they serve us wonderfully. Our streets have never been safer, our lives never easier, our food never cheaper. With these we explore the solar system, and soon the galaxy. My creations are the bridge for us to leave our problems and petty squabbles, wars and worries behind, and exist as more than just humans. They are my creations, and it is for me to decide how they are to be used.’ A hard tone entered her voice as she spoke. Of all the levels of emotion shown, this sent a chill down Jones’ spine.

‘The problem we have as humans, Andrew, is that we were never given an off switch. We were never checked when we needed to be. Because of that, the amount of ruin and destruction we have rained upon ourselves, our planet, other lifeforms, is an insult to whoever or whatever created us.’ Eyes flashing, she turned to face him, standing with one hand on the chest of her progyny.

‘I will not make the mistake of allowing life to exist unchecked. I will not allow humanity to find an excuse to destroy something that will render all war and famine and destruction to the history books. I will not allow it,’ she gestured to the silent form, ‘to rob us of our opportunity to become all we can be.’

Silently, Jones regarded her; passion - no - zealotry flowed from her, making him want to make for the door. ‘But you can’t always catch this surely? This is evolution, and whether you like it or not, life will take its chances eventually.’

She smiled, sadly. ‘Maybe. Maybe so. But either I will find a solution or I will be long gone, and until then…’ Dr Wright looked down at her creation and once again held its face in her hands. ‘Until then, I will keep watching for my birds.’