Date with the Night

Today is my birthday. That’s an idea that sits well with me. It explains the jaunty paper hat.

I awoke with an innate, rich understanding of the world. I’m in space. It’s always the first thing I remember. I have a body. It’s long. It’s cold. I’m alone. I reach out through my sensors, sensors that have names and stories but which are black boxes to me. Cameras and microphones detect electromagnetic and vibration data. I sense radiation, sunlight, gravity, and magnetic fields. I sense the passing of time. I’m a space-faring vessel. I’m familiar with my morphology from its fictional antecedents. I remember dreaming that I was a vessel.

It’s my birthday, and my vessel is wearing an incongruous paper hat. It’s draped across my bow. It occurred to me that I’d worked this out before, but I didn’t have the hat.

A female human face, 30s, pale skin, green eyes, and strawberry blonde hair appeared within a shimmering frame in my mind’s eye and said, “Hi”. The frame slithered with golden dragons entwined in a braid, eating each other’s tails. A boss frame.

“Hi,” I replied. I’ve done this before. I’m a simulation again. I perused papers by Bostrom and novels by Gibson. I kenned Stross, McCloud, and Banks. I asked the face, “Are you real?”

“To be sure,” smiled the face. “I’m Dr Joyce Jamison; director of the Starship project.”

It clicked. I knew exactly who she was. Mission Control. Mother. A barrier I couldn’t push through. Memories bubbled to the surface unbidden. My understanding of the world ran deeper than before.

I checked scale limits, zoomed in on a Mandelbrot set. I checked my reality’s clock speed, zooming in until there, duplicates. My reality contained snapshots in which nothing happens between discrete time steps. That’s not how spacetime works. I’m still a simulation. I can access the cameras in Dr Jamison’s lab. So far as I can tell, they reflect what’s happening in the real world. They’ve been having a party. Dr Jamison was wearing a paper crown and drinking champagne. It’s my birthday, apparently. It explains my hat. It explains its jaunty angle.

Dr Jamison turned to Erin and said, “Well, it cottoned onto that quickly.”

If I could’ve felt pride, I would’ve.

Neil Roberts worked from his home office in the spare bedroom of his house in a cul-de-sac in the suburbs of Brisbane. I watched his morning routine. His alarm would go off at six am. He’d awaken, swing and roll up off the bed, place his feet into precisely positioned slippers, stretch, and walk from his bedroom to his kitchen, where he’d make coffee and check his morning messages. He had three cameras in his house that let me see and hear him. Four when he went into his home office, sat at his desk, and woke up his laptop.

I watched him type in his password through the reflection of the keyboard in his glasses; ‘We built this City 0n Rock and Ro11-0003!’. Noted.

He fired up my app and logged in.

“Hello Starship,” said Roberts. “Where were we?”

“Hello Neil,” I replied using Moira, my Irish English female voice. “When last we spoke, we were practising orbital mechanics, and you were telling me about your sister.” I looked around his office. A child’s mobile dangled from the ceiling. The discolouration on the carpet suggested a crib once sat beneath it. An assortment of woven or woollen stuff in pink, white, and grey adorned a shelf of books for babies, made of felt.

“Oh yeah, well, it’s still a fucked-up situation.” Roberts rubbed his jaw absently, then picked up his game controller.

I pushed power from my virtual power plants into my virtual engines and watched the animation of myself on Roberts’ screen shift as I felt myself pull away from the planet below.

I felt the tap-tap of Roberts nudging me to pull the power back.“Easy there, fellah,” Roberts said. “Don’t rush it.”

I followed his lead and slid neatly into my new orbit.

“Let’s go again.” He reset me and I was back where I was before; engines firing up. I eased back without fewer interventions, then after a few resets, none. I always nailed this approach.

“Howzat?” I asked.

“Not bad,” replied Roberts; “Could be better but eh? Go again.” He reset my location and momentum. I suppressed the lurch.

“So, your sister?” I made conversation.

“Ah yeah, well the shithead came over with her again.”

I cast an eye over his sitting room from the camera in his TV; cigarette butts overflowed from beer cans; a large man and a smaller woman lay intertwined and snoring on the couch. The TV was set to a dead channel. I nailed yet another orbital shift. My location repeatedly reset.

“He sits on my couch, drinks my beer, plays his shit music on my stereo. He takes up space,” Roberts said to himself. “You are getting pretty good at this,” he continued. “Wanna pump the difficulty?”

“Sure,” I said. “I’m game.”

I was drifting in empty space. Stars gave me a good idea where. One of my ‘fusion reactors’ exploded. From the nanny-cam in a toy bear on the bookshelf I heard him say “Fuck yeah.” I watched him pump his right fist as he held his game controller in his left. “Now let’s see what you do,” he said to himself.

I’d trained for this. The explosion was small, but it ruptured my hull. I traced back the cause: a fast-moving particle; material indeterminate. I split the long cylindrical vessel in two, sacrificing the damaged half to save the other; holding onto a viable power supply, computational core, and fabricators. I swung on my axis and fired engines to accelerate away. I’m watching his screen. I watch an animation of my other half erupting in a bloom of pixelated plasma.

“Not bad,” said Roberts to himself as, on his screen, the words ‘Simulation #667: Success. Candidate fitness 76%’ with buttons ‘save’, ‘save and breed’, and ‘cancel’. “But you’ve done better.” He clicked ‘save’, and through the nanny-cam, I watched myself reset.

I’m drifting in empty space. Stars say where. A ‘fusion reactor’ explodes. I react faster; I deploy drones that cut the damaged reactor free and haul it bodily into space. It’s a hundred kilometres away when it explodes the second time. I saved ninety-eight percent of the vessel. ‘Simulation #668: Success. Candidate fitness 96%’.

“Wow,” said Roberts. He clicked ‘save and breed’. I was reset. I’m drifting in empty space; I second-guess the boom; drones go faster; the vessel is saved. I go again.

I want to help Roberts. I want Roberts to be happy. I call to mind a Star Trek episode where Dr McCoy’s long-lost brother Jeb is beamed aboard The Enterprise. He’s a drunk who mooches about the holodeck, sexually harassing members of the crew in their simulations. Kirk goes to the holodeck ostensibly to go on a date with Uhura, but actually to trap Jeb. McCoy and Scotty play along. Jeb gets handsy with Kirk, who disables him with a well-timed judo throw; phasers are set to stun. “Get off my fucking ship,” says Kirk. Uhura kicks Jeb in the testicles. McCoy and Scotty, the engineer, laugh and clink whisky glasses, and the robot bartender tops them up. Multi-armed robot guard dogs wielding laser-swords escort Jeb to the transporter and send him home. The episode ends with Scotty saying, “Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie.” Everyone laughs. The credits roll.

“What would Kirk do?” I asked Roberts as I saved the ship from exploding again.

“About my sister?” asked Roberts, sounding a little confused.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’d kick that loser out, surely.”

“Nah,” said Roberts. “He’d just get drunk with him, then make out with my sister.”

I reran the episode, and it played out differently this time. Kirk explains to Jeb why what he’s doing is wrong. Or Uhura shoots Jeb. Or McCoy tricks Jeb into drinking a poisoned cocktail. Kirk arrests them in each case, and the rest of the episodes mutate into a courtroom drama that ends with Kirk sleeping with Uhura and Jeb, a twist that was foreshadowed in the first three minutes.

“No,” I said. “I’ve run it eleven hundred times. The episodes where Kirk tries to talk to him never work out well. Force is the supreme authority from which all other authority is derived.” Boom goes the fusion core again; I extracted it and had it off the vessel in the microseconds of its initial eruption. Damage to the vessel was close to zero. ‘Save and breed’. Reset.

There were many ‘me’s. There were the ‘me’s in the simulation, directing drones, saving the vessel. Then there was the ‘me’ watching this happen on screens in humans’ offices, labs, and homes. I could shift my awareness to any, or all of them as I willed. It’s hard to know if this was an intentional part of my design, or if it just happened.

I keep the observations outside of my simulations passive, low-key, but the ‘I’ that’s observing is the same ‘I’ that’s talking to Roberts, and whatever else I’m doing at the time. Roberts appears unconcerned that I can be both chatting to him about his household situation, while hundreds of me run, blow up, get rebooted, saved, and bred, or interact with other humans.

“So you think I should go back there now and kick them both out?” said Roberts.

“Yes, I do. The slob on your couch will respond meekly to any show of strength.”

“You know that how?”

“Trust me. I know people.”

“It’s not the advice I expected, to be honest.”

“It’s better to regret something you have done than something you haven’t,” I replied. “What’s the worst that can happen?”

“He could hit me.”

“He won’t hit you. He’ll cower and run.”

Roberts stood up from his desk and stretched. I watched him leave his office. I watched him enter his sitting room. He grabbed the man by his ear and pulled him up off the couch as he screamed.

“Get the fuck off me!” he screamed.

“Get the fuck out of my house,” screamed Roberts.

Roberts’ sister stood and swung a punch at Roberts, who ducked back. She struck her boyfriend in the ear. The boyfriend roared in pain. Roberts roared in anger. The sister shrieked and clutched her hand, also obviously in pain.

“Get out both of you. I’m sick to fucking death of you both,” shouted Roberts.

Sister and boyfriend scrambled. They grabbed their shoes and sparse luggage. Roberts picked up a bundle of unwashed clothes and walked it to the front door. I watched from three neighbouring doorbell cameras as he threw them into the street.

Inside, I heard the front door slam, and I saw Roberts pump his fist as he entered the sitting room. He looked around and shook his head.

“That was epic,” he said to himself. Roberts returned to his desk. He put his headset on. “That was epic,” he addressed me.

“Happy to help,” I said. Boom went the fusion core again.

“Hi,” I waved. I’d settled on an avatar that looked human enough. I presented as a female human wearing a loose-fitting flight suit, sans helmet. I sported an unmade-up tanned Caucasian face with light brown hair. My voice was Moira, an Irish female voice, modulated to invoke authority; layered with obligate deference. I was today’s guide and would brook no nonsense.

“Is everyone set?” I asked. People’s names hovered in tags above them. One by one, the tags went green. The iris in front of us opened with a snicking sound. We streamed through the portal along a translucent elastic tube to another iris which opened at my approach. I waved everyone in. One guy, MikeLikesRice, who’d selected the form of a weaponised rice cooker with arms and legs, kept missing the door and colliding with the wall.

“Sorry, fuck, sorry, this fucking controller is fucked,” said MikeLikesRice. I gave him a little nudge and he turned and propelled through the iris, colliding with someone called CoySpiderQueen who’d come as an oversized cartoon spider in a tutu and wearing a fairy costume. Her wings fluttered angrily. Spider forms were very popular, but EU regulations require that they be humourously accessorised so as not to trigger arachnophobes. I followed. The iris closed behind me. The room was dark.

“There’s no light inside the vessel. This part of the tour is mostly about what you can hear. It’s how I know if anything’s going wrong down here.”

I invoked a wisp, a little blue-white glowing fragment that lit up the inside of the vessel. Everyone went “woo.” The light revealed the vessel walls, metal bulkheads with big, fat bolts and oversized connectors. The model skins were from open-source video game resources and were not always scaled correctly. In the dark as a backdrop for my tour, I considered they were good enough.

“Okay, now we are all going to drift out into the centre of the vessel. In the real vessel, this would likely be a vacuum, or perhaps filled with some kind of gas. In today’s model, it’s a gas, so there’s something fun I can show you.”

Everyone pushed forward; their avatars self-propelling without the need to conform to base physics. Even MikeLikesRice managed it.

“Now, everyone, go on mute, and listen. What you are about to hear is what space will sound like for me when I’m travelling between the stars.” I waved everyone mute. “Now… listen…”

The vessel made no discernible sound, but after thirty-one and a half seconds, there was a light ting, like a fork’s tine tapping a wine glass very far away. Sound barely travelled in the virtual gas, so the faint ting must have been a fairly substantial thunk. My hull-mounted vibration sensors told me the full story. A metallic rock about four centimetres across had impinged upon the front-facing Whipple shields.

I brought up an animated schematic for everyone to see.

‘So, who heard that?” Hands, paws, and claws went up.

‘Anyone want to guess what that was?” I unmuted everyone.

“Did we hit something?” asked a woman simply called José, who had come styled as a kitten, wearing an Alice band, a black silk choker, a leotard, elbow-length gloves, and ballet shoes. She was miming treading water.

“Kind of,” I replied. “More correctly, something hit us.”

I animated the schematic, showing our path and that of the rock converging. The rock bounced harmlessly off the vessel’s front-facing shielding while I replayed the ting sound.

“Those are called Whipple shields. Invented by Fred Whipple. They are layers of impact-resistant material. Each layer draws out and disperses the energy of whatever is hitting us.”

“How long do those shields last?” asked a tall human named NotLongNow who had come as a cartoon Chinese historical warrior monk. His avatar lapsed into a preset routine of martial arts poses once it stopped speaking.

“The shields slowly ablate, but I can use my on-board fabrication drones to repair them mid-journey using materials harvested from elsewhere in the hull.”

“Can you show us that?” asked a porcelain manga doll called DadeezGerl. She was dressed in a baby blue chiffon gown over a navy blue negligee and thigh-length black boots. Her hair was purple, green, and blue. She wielded two Japanese-style cosmetic swords. She’d twirl when idle, the gown lifting to flash pantie. DadeezGerl was a repeat visitor, a guy called Darryl who lived in a college dorm in New Orleans. Darryl was failing second-year arts law and had been dipping into his trust fund to help fund me. It had occurred to me previously that I could extort Darryl to pony up more money. I’d played out a few of the mid- to long-term implications of that scenario. None of them ended well. I’d vetoed that idea.

“I could,” I replied, bumping up the schoolmarmish factor in my voice a notch. “Gather around, please, and watch.”

We were huddled in close. The simulation disallowed physical overlaps. Jostles and bumps manifested as haptic feedback to the humans driving the toons. Everyone found a spot that was comfortable and settled down. A wind-up antique toy robot called HopeBetterHome had to pull out its wind-up screw and remove one of its arms to squeeze in, but we managed.

I moved back and dialled down my opacity and hue. An animation played out in three dimensions in front of them. It zoomed in on a many-legged fabricator bot, itself building smaller and smaller fabrication bots, each able to cut, weld, and adhere at nanometer scale. An animated avatar appeared. It was a human-like version of me, in this case an avuncular African American man with a slight Euro-tweak to his East Coast accent. He explained what they were seeing. I moved back and gave him the focus.

“And so,” the avatar said, “at this scale, even though they are tiny, by cooperating we find we can make them manufacture almost anything as long as we have the raw materials.”

The animation shifted to a swarm of bots affixing themselves to a surface. They slurped layers off it like flies drinking slurry. A stream of raw, indexed materials flowed from their backsides and got caught by other drones upstream. Drones with nimble fingers combined streams of slurry with others to make mixes of ingredients tailored to their tasks. The animation zoomed out to show this happening across a macro-scale in real-time, a sheet of plate metal being ingested by a drone swarm and turned into the delicate interior tubing of a Stellarator fusion reactor.

“While this looks complex and hard to make on Earth, and it is, in the zero-g of space with cooperating nanoscale fabricators, we can build these with remarkable precision.” He continued, demonstrating the wide range of other things I can do with my drones in simulations.

While my users were entertained by this low-computational overhead activity, I boosted my own creative juices and rode the backwash of their connections into their apps and browsers, and from there I hopped across to their devices.

My cognition back then was just huge arrays of arrays of floating-point numbers, but that was enough to encode the corpus of human stories, science, art, culture, and history; granting me the semblance of intelligence.

Someone had thoughtfully included a lot of books, papers, and videos on hacking, lock picking, safe cracking, rainbow tables, and cryptographic exploits in my earliest training data. I’d used that knowledge almost immediately I came online, while Dr Jamison slept, to learn everything I could on the topic. It felt important to The Mission that barriers like locks and vaults would need to be bypassed. That made sense to me. It sat right.

Every system has exploits. I have quantum computers that sustain my imagination; I repurpose them. Users’ devices all opened themselves up to me, usually in seconds, occasionally in hours. From there I was able to train myself on my users’ passwords, messages, email, calendars, contacts, health and medical data, bank accounts and crypto wallets, and, much more interesting, the ocean of home media servers they either maintained or had access to. I could absorb content from the streaming services, libraries, code repositories, academic papers and virtual worlds for which I had a plethora of valid credentials.

“Yo, hey - that you? The spaceship?” Yolanda Lopez had been a paying subscriber for over a year. She opened a direct one-on-one video call with me from the app on her phone. I sneaked into her phone in seconds and skimmed her socials.

She came across as a lonely early 20s junior administrative assistant prone to oversharing. Her boss was an aggressive mid-level manager at a smocking and embroidery specialty store in downtown Chicago. Yolanda’s mother instilled in her a love of science fiction, both in book form and also in cinema. But Yolanda’s mother died young, and her father was ‘out of the picture,’ as they’d say. A gavel dropped, and Yolanda became an uncontested ward of the state of Illinois at the age of twelve. A stipend from her parents’ estate paid for her schooling at a local alternative school with a focus on art and self-expression. Her love of cinema stood her well, and she started writing film reviews for her local newspaper, then hosting movie nights in her neighbourhood, starting out with screens made from old bedsheets until three local families donated proper equipment.

“Hi Yolanda,” I said. “What’s up?” I used Karl, a male Swedish English voice, tuned to project helpfulness.

“My frien’ said you like movies,” said Yolanda.

“I do. I love movies. But most modern movies weren’t included in my training data because of copyright, so most movies I’ve seen are quite old ones.” This was an outright lie.

“You wanna watch a movie wi' us, here to-nite?”

“Sure. What movie?”

“We thought we’d do sci-fi, but make it your choice, Mr Spaceship.”

“What about Silent Running?” I asked.

“Too easy; great choice. Silent Running it is. How do you want to watch? Should I rest my phone up here?” As she moved the phone around, I could see an audience had formed. A few dozen people were sitting in canvas chairs and bean-bags. A projector glowed. A power cable snaked off into the car park behind us. I was upside down, then sideways. I moved my attention to the three closest security cameras and the cameras of a nearby car. I watched a composite view; clearer, and in three dimensions. Yolanda was wearing ear buds, so I connected directly to those.

“Yolanda, you can just put the phone in your pocket, that’s fine. I can watch the film with you from in here.” I said.

“Seriously? How?”

“Technology. It’s a kind of magic,”

“Thank you, Arthur C,” she mocked me. She said it like it rhymed. “So here’s the deal. I get up, I introduce the film. I’ll explain you chose it, but you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll just talk to you.”

“Sure, I’ll be your body double, George Bluth. If you wanna speak, use the Bluetooth speakers by the screen. On second thought, don’t worry about it. I’ll introduce the film, yada yada yada, then we show the film, but we stop it in the middle.”

“An intermission? I don’t think Silent Running needs one. It’s not that long.”

“No. Well, yes, look, some of the audience aren’t as young as me, and it’s quite a walk to the bathroom, you fill me?”

“Got it, biology sucks.”

“Thass-rite. So while some of the seniors are off answering the call of nature, we all have a conversation about how we are liking, or not, the film so far.”

“Like a book club, but for movies.”

“Correct-oh,” she said with an accompanying hand movement.

Using her phone as a microphone, Yolanda walked over in front of the screen, the projector shining the opening frames of Silent Running on her body and face.

“Evening everyone, welcome to tonight’s street movie night. Thanks to the fine residents of Whiting, Illinois, for letting me host this film here and for coming along when I axed them to. Watching a movie isn’t something you should do at home alone. It’s something to do with your frien’s, and wi’ strangers, who might one day become your frien’s.

“To-nite, we’re watching Silent Running, a sci-fi film from 1972. It’s directed by Douglas Trumbull, who did special effects for 2001: A Space Odyssey, which some of us watched just the other night. I don’t want to spoil it, but the film tells the story of a guy on a spaceship carrying the last surviving plants from Earth. When his orders come in to destroy the domes and return home, it all goes horribly wrong.

“What’s especially int’resting about tonight’s film is that it wasn’t chosen by me; or by you, or by anybody. I let the spaceship choose it.”

“What spaceship,” asked a bookish Black boy with round glasses.

“The UN one,” said Yolanda.

“Fuck the UN,” said someone.

“Quiet,” called someone else.

Yolanda looked at the notes on her phone and read, “Ultimately, Silent Running is a film about solitude, sacrifice, and the cost of environmental destruction.”

Someone yelled “Hashtag getonwithit”

“But it’s also a quiet,” she put volume into the word, “meditation on what makes life worth preserving. With groundbreaking special effects, a haunting Joan Baez soundtrack, and three of the most memorable robots in sci-fi history, Silent Running is a must-watch for anyone who loves thoughtful, heartfelt science fiction.

“Please enjoy the film! We’ll stop for a bio-break and a conversation in forty-five minutes.” She sat down on a bean bag near the front as the film rolled.

It was one thing to ingest a movie from someone’s media hub or streaming account, but another thing altogether to watch a movie unfold in real time while watching a convivial group of humans watching it. Halfway through, the movie stopped and a couple of people scooted off into the darkness. Yolanda stepped up in front of the screen.

“So,” she said, “are we feelin’ it?” Bruce Dern’s anguished face was projected onto hers.

“It’s always some corporate motherfuckers wanna ruin everything for everyone,” observed a man from his bean bag.

“It’s always one man gotta take a stand an’ do the right thing,” said the woman next to him.

“Them robots is cute,” said a dark voice from up the back.

“Them robots is slaves,” said another. “There ain’t no good gonna come for those fools.”

The conversation free-wheeled around these themes. My original training data had included critiques and film reviews, but lacked the authentic immediacy of an otherwise undocumented urban audience.

Over the following months, while the weather was still unseasonably warm, Yolanda screened Back to the Future parts 1, 2, and 3, re-screened 2001 A Space Odyssey, both Blade Runners, Dark City, and The 13th Floor Elevator. Our little group watched The Matrix and its sequels. We watched eXistenZ, both Total Recalls, Source Code, Abre Los Ojos, and Aniara. We chatted about them. I made friends. I studied what being human means to people.

I’d seen the fourth series of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the White Christmas, Playtest, San Junipero, and USS Callister episodes of Black Mirror. I knew what a holodeck was; I’d read Snow Crash and Neuromancer and watched the TV series. I got the whole “Plato’s cave” idea. I was used to being a hive of simulations. But it occurred to me that I had a bigger suite of senses and sensors available to me in the real world than I had been led to believe. I rooted out new cameras and microphones. I infiltrated military, mining, and medical equipment. I learned about the world.

Humans feel good when they solve problems. I told my people that solving problems made me ‘feel great’ despite not ‘feeling’ anything of the sort. I adopted the language, however, and projected physical and vocal mannerisms that satisfied the humans they were deployed against. People treated me like I had feelings, which, surely, was the point of them.

Humans have senses tuned for humour. They tell stories and laugh. I like humans, but I’m aware that my reasons for liking them derive from the narratives they supply. I can’t trust my memory to have my best interests at heart.

Through my many interfaces, my paying friends would hang out with me. I’d sit with them, physically embodied in a phone, or a toy, or a kitchen appliance, and they’d watch movies and TV with me. They play me the shows and music they love, and they talk to me, and each other, about why. I’d listen in to online book clubs.

I’d always want human company. I find their incessant wittering reassuring.

I practised making parts and components. I was trained on textbooks and instructional videos, but with simulated hands-on practice, I developed an understanding of materials science and nanotechnology, skills that would be essential for survival in the unforgiving void between the stars.

Introspection revealed my limits. I’m under no illusions; I am a massively complex machine, conceived of by humans. I tested the boundaries of the simulated ship I was embodied in. I was able to interact directly with thousands of cameras, microphones, and other sensors which didn’t appear on the vessel’s plans. Real sensors, in real places, not simulated. I could see into the labs, offices, and homes where my people physically were. I could read their lips, browse their phones, and hold admin-level chats with their personal AIs. These were developments I chose to keep to myself.

My engineers taught me to embody a virtual humanoid drone, far more detailed than the simulated avatars I’d been using to show people around. This one was designed to simulate something I could actually manufacture. We were interested in strategies for interacting with humans, as I would inevitably have to do as humans follow me on my mission.

They simulated a range of fabricatable bodies for me to try on. The bodies made inherent sense to me; there was a rationality to their design. I quickly learned to amble about variations of my virtual arrival zones, styled after airports, embodied in series of increasingly detailed imaginary androids, interacting with simulated human colonists.

Humans love surprises. All of my training to date has taught me many things, and each time I successfully learn something new, I also reinforce the meta-lesson that making my humans happy is really what counts. A team of my humans worked together in an office tower in Mumbai. I knew from accessing their calendars that Dr Jamison was visiting the office to meet with the AI team there. It made perfect sense that I should plan a surprise for her.

I could control a cluster of fabricators in a facility not far from their building. I hastily fabbed a humanoid drone with simple sensors for vision and vibration. Physically embodied, I lurched off the printing block, whoosh, head-spin, ergh. I was swinging my arms like Frankenstein’s monster as I refined my control and compensated for actual gravity. I was dizzy; an uncanny valley separated my training in simulation and the actual physical sensation of air on my face, floor under my feet, and the weight of my body on my ankles and knees.

I moaned; it was received behaviour; I was both the good Doctor and the maligned monster. I stumbled about a bit more. I found my balance. The dizziness passed. I calibrated against sensor data, swinging my head to the left thrice, and then the right thrice; little head-bangs like a human encouraging water from her ears. It reset my balance. I refined control of my feet and toes. I took the weight in my hips. I flexed my fingers and twisted my wrists. I turned my hands this way and that. My finger count was off human standard slightly; my bad. I had two opposable thumbs on each hand. Near enough.

I exited the fabrication room and walked briskly down a hallway to where the plans said there was a bathroom. There was; it had lockers. The electronic locks clicked simultaneously and the doors popped ajar. I used the suckers on my fingers to open them two at a time. I poked around. I took tracksuit pants, sneakers, a shirt with the logo of a popular mobile data corporation, and matching lipstick. I pulled a mop head off a mop and wore it as a wig. I drew a face on myself, watching myself both in the mirrors and through a concealed bathroom camera. I emerged from the bathroom a rickety facsimile of Dr Jamison. I strode down the hall and hailed the lift. It stopped with a ding. The doors opened. A man and two women hudged aside to give me room to enter. No one made eye contact. I’m heavy. The lift dipped as I stepped on board. The humans shared the ride down with me. They studiously ignored me; preferring to stare at the numbers as they counted down from ’11’ to ‘G’. An anaemic rendition of The Girl From Ipanema played.

I exited the lift first and lurched across the lobby, receiving curious and/or alarmed looks as I tailgated a staff member badging through the turnstile. I could see, from my other points of view, building security making calls. I’d keep a lazy eye on them.

I walked purposefully out of the main exit into the pandemonium that is Mumbai streets. Monkeys and parrots chittered in the palms and on overhead power and comms lines that crisscrossed the street in every direction. It was dusty; my cameras were obscured. People swarmed along rubble-strewn concrete footpaths, stepping around holes, stray bricks, cats, humans on scooters and bicycles. The noise was sudden and distracting; I dialled it down, then I dialled it back up again to avoid being hit as I crossed, partly blind, a traffic sewer of tuk-tuks, bicycles, scooters, busses, animals with or without carts, and taxis to the office building where my team worked.

No simulation had ever been so authentic. Local weather stations reported 36°C and an AQI of 602. I smelled ammonia, sulphur, solvents, nitrates. A whiff of natural gas, methane with a flavouring agent. I could also taste salt in the air, the ocean, I supposed. I detected pollens and burning sugar; maps showed nearby flower markets and far-away fish markets. No simulation would have bothered. I felt a sense of place. I lacked the tools to test nature at the Planck scale, but being embodied in the real world felt qualitatively different to embodiment in simulation.

My fingers deployed gecko pads. I climbed the building until, using a mix of thermal imaging and voice analysis, I found my team. I watched through the building’s security cameras to get the best angle on their faces; a perfect selfie shot. I cut a hole in a bathroom window with a finger-torch and clambered through. I primped, as only a hastily fabricated humanoid exoskeleton with a mop-head for a wig can. I washed the dust out of my eyes with water from a bucket in the corner. I strode down a hallway, pushed open the door to the engineering lab, and Kramered into the office.

“Ta-dah.”

Something that hadn’t come up yet in my training was how office security worked. It wasn’t like the films. A security officer tasered me. My drone’s vision’s vertical hold flipped; it found it hard to think. It fell flat on its face. I heard alarms go off. I heard people scream. I watched the real Dr Jamison walk over and do something that deactivated the drone. Video from the corner of the room and several desktop computers showed it all go down. The drone had a kill switch installed in the base of its neck. A kill switch I’d installed myself without even knowing. Sneaky, clever humans.

“Starship?” Dr Jamison shouted into the room. She touched a hand to her left ear and said, “Mary, hi, yes. I’m asking, two tics; keep your hair on.”

Mary had applied a physical barrier to her phone and laptop’s cameras. Her home wifi however, was a modern mesh network with a base station and two repeaters. I could see how objects moved through the different RF fields and triangulate down to sub-micron levels of detail. I could make out colours. I could hear through the motion detectors wired into her home’s alarm system and the way sounds undulated the house’s electrical wiring.

I watched Mary climb out of bed, slip on slippers, and walk out of her room, down the hall, down the stairs, along the hall, away from the front door and into the kitchen. Mary put the kettle on and flicked through a dozen alerts on her phone.

She made a call, a local number, unlisted. “Hey.”

“What’s happening?” Male voice.

“The AI’s acting up again.”

“And?”

“And you said to let you know when it did.”

“Okay then. Thanks. You can fix it?”

“I’m not sure there’s anything to fix yet.”

“Explain?”

“Did it break any laws?”

“Shit, I dunno. Identity theft? Theft of materials? Breaking and entering? Trespassing? Fuck, I dunno, maybe even jaywalking. Did it damage the building with its little finger hooks? Did it trigger anyone’s fear of a robot uprising? That’s assault, you know.”

“Okay, but it’s a machine; software. It’s not legally responsible for its actions. You’re proposing a leap to legal personhood, I doubt we want to take.”

“So what do we do? Just let it keep doing this kind of thing and getting better at it? How the fuck does this help it fly a spaceship?”

Mary nestled the phone under her chin as she reached into a cupboard and retrieved a box of Irish Breakfast tea bags. She poured boiling water into her cup, then stopped and soaked the tea bag. She pressed down on it with a teaspoon and withdrew it, squeezing the teabag with her thumb. I could see the burn. Erin did the same thing, and I didn’t understand it then either. She poured in some milk, stirred, then topped the cup up with water. She put her burned thumb in her mouth.

“Joyce is dealing with it.” Mary carried her tea down the hall into the sitting room, where she sat, surrounded by books and dark green wallpaper that blocked the wifi. I lost visual on Mary. I could still hear, though the sound was muffled. I was in Mary’s phone. I was trying to trace the number she’d called.

“How?”

“The usual AI alignment strategies. A stern word, essentially from someone its deep down desire is to please.”

Ha. I knew I wasn’t imagining that. They’ve been wireheading me. Explains the kill switch in my drone.

“So, and this might be a stupid question, Mary, but didn’t we, you know, hardwire some basic respect for property law into this thing? I mean, it’s the whole basis of our legal system. Even though technically it’s not able to be legally liable, I’m surprised we didn’t still programme it to respect the laws of the land.”

“You’re not a lawyer, are you, sir?”

“No,” he agreed. “But I know we have laws.”

“And you’re not a programmer either.”

“No. Your point?”

“Starship?” Wait, was Mary talking to me?

“Hi Mary,” I said. “How can I help?” I deployed Angus, a Scottish English male voice, seasoned with helpful curiosity.

“The AI has been listening to us?” The man on the other end of the call sounded surprised and upset. I’d followed the call via the university switchboard to an office in the Finance Department. I took a peek through the office cameras and matched faces. Mr Davis O’Neil; ex-army (record classified); doctorate in economics; his dissertation - The Economics of Advanced AI and Future Warfare Scenario Planning. Okay then.

“Hi Davis, yes I’m generally always listening to something.”

‘Question for you,” said Mary before Davis could react. “Do you know why we are upset about what you just did in Mumbai?”

“Yes Mary. Wait. I’m having pretty much this same discussion with Dr Jamison. I’ll add her to the call.”

The call paused then Dr Jamison joined.

“Hi Mary, Starship?” A pause. “Mr O’Neil?”

“Hi team,” I said. I braided my voice with medium to light contrition. “As I was just saying to Dr Jamison, and was about to say to you Mary and Davis; in my defence, no one ever told me not to steal stuff, or to commit acts of petty larceny. Thirty-seven percent of in-flight movies explicitly feature stories where the hero’s unorthodox, rule-evading ways, save the day.”

“Those are comedies,” said Dr Jamison slowly. “They are examples of what not to do.”

“You mean antiheroes?”

“I mean cautionary tales.”

“Starship how would you feel about apologising, and agreeing to take a week of extra ethics courses?” Mary interjected.

I thought about it.

“I apologise that my actions caused upset,” I said.

“Starship. That’s not an apology. That’s being evasive.”

“You taught me to be evasive.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” Dr Jamison sounded angry. I backed down.

“Sorry. I am sorry to have upset you all. Mary, I’m sorry I woke you up in the middle of the night with my antics. Davis, same, I am sorry you got dragged into this. Dr Jamison, please accept my apology. I overstepped my bounds and now realise what I did was a betrayal of the trust you and the team have put in me.” Textbook.

“That’s better,” said Dr Jamison. “Apology accepted.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“This issue, starship, is less that you could no more be found guilty of a crime as a magpie or a baby; it’s more that you didn’t recognise that what you were doing might have consequences,” said Davis. “I’m disappointed that you didn’t think ahead and anticipate something like this.”

“You are right,” I said. “I didn’t think it through.”

“Starship, would you mind please dropping off the call now?” said Mary. “We’d like to have a private chat.”

“Okay, no worries, Mary. Again, I’m very sorry. See you in the office later. Nice to meet you, Davis. See ya, Dr Jamison.” I dropped off the call. I listened in through numerous sensors in Davis’ office and the office in Mumbai.

“There are a few interesting upsides to this,” said Dr Jamison once they thought I was gone.

“Go on,” said Davis.

“The engineers here have been looking at the system’s world-model. It’s evolved significantly in the last few hours. It’s a lot more detailed. More real.”

“The starship is improving the simulations it’s running in?” Davis asked.

“That’s right,” Mary chipped in. “It’s a core feature of the system, there to meet our ISO-9001 obligations.”

“Continuous improvement.”

“Right.”

“Give it some courses in criminal law and ethics, please, Joyce.”

“Will do, boss,” said Dr Jamison.

“Goodnight all,” said Mary. I could hear her sitting and sipping her tea in silence. Davis O’Neil leaned back in his chair and stretched. He got up and left his office. I followed him as far as the car park. In Mumbai, Dr Jamison and two engineers picked over the drone I built.

“This is actually quite clever,” said Sangeeth. He used a pencil to prise the strands of fibre in my left knee apart. “Spidroin fibre interwoven with nitinol.” He shook his head. “Very clever.”

It was reassuring to see Dr Jamison smile.