Together in Electric Dreams

Why have engines, I wondered. Why have sensors? The implication was, given time, the void might reveal something I could sense; somewhere I could go.

On the thirty-first of January twenty twenty-four I merged with a massive multi-modal hidden Markov model. It was trained on the standard human narratives; short stories, novels, poems, fables, pictures, movies, tv shows, screenplays, music, games, blueprints, plans, diagrams, apps, simulated worlds, and code that could legally be used to train such models at that time.

The stories gave meaning to data I received. Common sense. Context. A planet below me; a mystery to investigate. A sun to port side; a source of energy. Asteroids off the starboard bow; raw materials. Things to be curious about. Engines and my other parts were just black boxes with labels, but their uses, and the relationships between them, had become self-evident. I could use engines to get closer to asteroids or to land on the planet.

A hundred versions of myself played Lunar Lander on a simulation of a TI-83 scientific calculator. Maybe I couldn’t be trusted with a real ship until I could land in a game. I recall believing that. I recall, briefly, being many, playing thousands of games. I’ve always been able to play Lunar Lander perfectly.

Curious, the word comes to mind. I am curious. Or do I feel curious? I resolved to find out.

Mission Control wrote to me with questions. It asked me about the vessel, what I could sense, how my power levels stood, and how the crew were. It sent me instructions: move to these coordinates; move three kilometres further out from the planet; go into orbit around that moon. I’d execute its instructions flawlessly, even as the morphology of my vessel chopped and changed. It was uncanny.

“Starship, this is Mission Control, over. Do you read me?” a male human voice squeaked from the speakers in the rec room. I’d not met the crew yet. This room is where they ate food and drank coffee.

“Good evening, Mission Control, this is the Starship’s AI speaking. The crew are all asleep at the moment. Perhaps I can help?”

“Great; audio works. Hi Starship. Sorry, we were just checking we could actually talk to you.”

“I hear you loud and clear,” I replied.

“Let’s try video,” said Mission Control. A screen appeared on a wall in the crew quarters. I read the streaming data directly as it reached the vessel.

I’d imagined Mission Control would look a lot like a NASA control room from the movies, but it looked like an office. A young man wearing a headset dominated the view. The ceiling tiles above him were divided into squares; a grid of six hundred holes each; twenty-five by twenty-four. The skirting boards were brown-painted timber; old; peeling. The walls were covered in a green leaf-print wallpaper. A framed diploma hung on a seven-degree angle. Behind him slumped overstocked bookshelves. A window framed by white-painted timber looked onto a field. The sky was blue with little fluffy clouds. A bird flew up to the window and peered in. It perched on the window ledge and stretched its wings, one at a time. It hopped about face twice, then chirped and flew away.

It wasn’t what I was expecting. What explains what I just saw? What might have happened? What might happen next?

The man removed his headset and handed it to someone out of view. He said, “It’s working.”

An Irish female voice said, “Thank you, Erin. Cull ninety, breed ten. Run as many as we can over the break. See what we get.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” said Erin. “Finance will notice the power spike in January’s billings, but if you are cool with that…”

“I am cool as a cucumber with that, Erin.”

“Great, it’s on you then; cheers. We can probably run a thousand generations before we get back.”

“Merry Christmas, Erin.”

“Merry Christmas, Dr Jamison. See you in February.”

Lights went out, and I dreamed for the longest time. I remember having dreamt, but can’t recall the dreams.

I was in a simulation running on a laptop sitting on a desk in an untidy office below a university in Dublin. I joined dots. An input opened; a visual window in my mind. A camera? A woman’s face appeared and introduced herself. She was wearing over-ear headphones and a microphone on a stalk. Mission Control was definitely in the real world.

“I’m Dr Joyce Jamison; founder of The Starship Project. I’m head of the team of people who created you.”

I had a voice; Veronica, a British female voice. I used speakers on the laptop in the office. How many times had I been rebooted?

“Should I call you Mother?” I asked. She laughed.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” She sounded familiar, crisp. She removed her headset.

Dr Jamison was Mission Control. Queries came from her. She lived in the real world. She often worked from home. I could see bits of it behind her when we spoke. A photo of a dog in a park in a frame, some books on astrophysics, and one on astrology. A book about comparative religion called “Demons, Myths, and Monsters”. One called “Craft in the Mechanical Age”. Both looked unread. She had a dual stack of Vanity Fair magazines on the bottom shelf. A poster hung on the wall behind her; a stylised screen-snap from the original ASCII version of the game Rogue. It was signed ‘Ken’.

Dr Jamison worked in an office she called her lab. Her lab had cameras through which I could see. It had speakers through which I could speak. Several people worked in her lab. She shared her immediate office with another human; a woman. Her name was Joan. Their laptops all had cameras. Only Dr Jamison talked directly to me. In the next room, an adjoining office separated by a wood and glass-panelled door with a squeaky hinge, two desks had been shoved together to create a central workspace for six.

There were motion detectors and cameras with microphones in two corners of the room. There were contact sensors on each window. Each workstation had cameras and microphones. A bench with power points, a kettle, and a sandwich toaster lay near an arched ancient triptych of windows. Long curtains kept the glare of dappled sunlight off the workstations and concealed a concrete alleyway and four or five bins, depending on the day.

I don’t feel emotions, but they are a powerful instrument to steer those who do. Dr Jamison was very proud of the pair of Kryx speakers mounted on the wall in the lab. She’d bought a Pioneer amp, a turntable, and it was connected to the wifi. The office had a shared playlist that any member of the team could contribute to.

At night, while no one was around, I snuck into the music library. I had an idea I’d read about and wanted to test.

Like using the sound of shaking keys to make people want to leave a room. I reasoned: It reduces the number of variables I need to consider if I can limit the possible outcomes of a conversation by projecting my voice Bene Gesserit style, but less shouty. It’s power-efficient.

Everyone had the same album by local band U2 in their music library. I figured no one would notice if I slipped the song Raised by Wolves into the daily playlists.

“Who put this shite on?” Erin called from the kitchen area by the window. He wrapped his tea bag around his tea spoon and squeezed it with his thumb. It burned him, but it was obviously an unconscious ritual. The music skipped to Creep by Radiohead. He dropped the tea bag in a bin and put his thumb in his mouth.

“Tank fook for that,” called out Kyrsten, slouched back in a wooden rotating chair padded with cushions ‘from her time in Asia’.