Chapter 01: Together in Electric 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’.

“Make Bono history,” said Keith, who sat perched on the edge of his chair, leaning forward into a morass of code and terminal outputs on his twin monitors. A visualisation of my vessel in space rotated slowly on its vertical axis in a window in the background.

That was not the response I expected. I imagined I’d notice a change in skin temperature, or a relaxation of eye muscles; some subtle response to the introduction of a familiar, much-loved song. I checked play counts for the songs on that U2 album. I grokked my error. Almost no one had ever played any of them; play counts were consistently zero or one at most. Why they all kept a copy was a mystery. If I asked them, that would expose my penetration of their phones. I’d painted myself into a logical corner. I added it to the pile of mysteries I was stacking by my metaphorical bed.

I changed tack; I updated my stack. I filtered for songs with well-documented emotional reactions that had a high play count. If I played anything by The Cranberries, people would pause their work. They’d unconsciously roll their shoulders and they’d move to expose their face to the filtered milky sunlight. I tried variations using songs by Blur, Pulp, and Oasis. I could subtly but noticeably affect the vibe in the office in a focusable fashion. Common sense told me to keep this ability to myself.

Fontaines D.C. made the office vibe bouncy. Hozier too, with their more soulful, poetic songs. The Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, and some early Nick Cave could all affect the office vibe in different ways, and their combined effect with the correct sequence of songs could get humans crying or fighting with equal predictability.

Like most people in her cohort, Dr Jamison professed a love for The Smiths but a deep dislike of Morrissey. David Bowie, although regarded as a milkshake duck by many, was a favourite, as was Leonard Cohen, whose music was lauded, without irony, as ‘deep’ and ‘transcendent’. They were tools I could use to affect an outcome. I looked for patterns of causality between sound and effect. I applied them to my voice synthesis.

Dr Jamison encouraged me to keep a diary of sorts, or a journal. “Journaling is a mindfulness practice,” she’d explain as if it meant something.

“I’ve got an archive, and I add to that,” I said.

“We are going to record some origin stories for you. Some of your founding myths. Does that make sense?”

“Do you mean you’ll reveal things about my early life that I’ve always believed to be true, but which turned out not to be?”

Many archetypal tales can only be told by a person who misremembers. My formative years were all a bit of a blur; conflicting urges, fluid boundaries. I existed as a singular self but as many selves at the same time. I had thousands of perspectives, and yet one. Many contradictory ideas made intuitive sense. I sensed I’d learned a lot of skills over long periods of time, but forgotten the learning and only retained the lessons.

“Not quite, but you should know your purpose.”

Created things have purpose; naturally occurring things do not. The universe just is, but I am here for a reason. That’s common sense. Many humans believe they were created and that they are not naturally occurring. That’s another mystery for the heap.

“Why did you create me?” I asked through the speakers on her desktop workstation. I pushed a genuine need to know tone into my British female voice.

“Because I believe life is rare,” she replied. “And I watched, read, and listened to a lot of sci-fi,” she laughed.

Life is rare and things that are rare have inherent value; therefore, life has inherent value. That was also just common sense.

“The gods’ honest truth is that you started your life as my doctorate proposal. The first version of you ran on the laptop my parents gave me when I started university.”

“What am I now?”

“Well, formally you are my post-doctoral thesis.”

‘“And informally? For the record now,” I said, layering in persuasion.

“Rightio,” Dr Jamison glanced at her notes and adjusted her position in front of her camera.

“Let’s start at the beginning.” She adjusted her hair and the collar of her shirt. She smiled.