“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.
“I grew up in a town called Clane, on the outskirts of Dublin along the Liffey. I was the only daughter of a chemist and a teacher. My father, the teacher, owned a telescope. From the barrow at the bottom of our suburban garden, the man-made lights were mostly obscured; the night sky was dark and clear, unpolluted.”
I practised active listening. As she spoke, I threw together pictures, sounds, short films, and storyboards to illustrate her story. I tried to second-guess where it was headed. I visualised a map, a misty moonlit river, a woman at an Aga wearing a lab coat mixing a cocktail of chemicals. A frosty night sky, dew on the lawn, timber railings, and a child on a hill. I mixed and matched these fragments. I saw from top down, side on, and from a point of view that drifted at their shoulder; an unseen lurker. I imagined a freckled face peering into the binocular eyepiece of a consumer-grade telescope; green eyes widening in wonder while cosmic details and colours revealed themselves. I pictured a father’s steadying hand on her shoulder in silhouette against a midnight blue starry sky.
“You’ll catch your death out there,” her mother said, looking up from her latest experiment. But she went out anyway in the sub-zero night. Joyce died days later from a chill; people were sad, there was a funeral. She never invented me, so I was forbidden from attending; a glowing barrier of coruscating lights refused to admit me to the graveyard no matter how hard I pushed. I had a body; a human body. I didn’t have the right passcode. No. That makes no sense.
“For years I spent almost every cloudless night with that telescope,” Dr Jameson continued, and my attention snapped back to her. “I was diligent; I took notes, even as a child. My parents nurtured my curiosity. They bought me books and took me to Cheshire to see Jodrell Bank. They encouraged me to pursue my interests in science and space. I was accepted into Cambridge in the UK, then here, in Dublin, at Trinity. I earned a doctorate in astrophysics and a master’s in computer science.”
I rendered more media as she spoke, less apocalyptic. I projected pictures ahead in the timeline. I grokked her hero’s journey. I visualised old bearded men shaking their heads; I watched applications being screwed into a ball and thrown into a wastepaper basket. She’d have faced skepticism and mockery, funding challenges, and the immense complexity of turning a dream into reality. I imagined her standing up and pitching passionately from the floor of an old scout hall to her doctorate assessors seated behind a row of card tables up on a wooden stage. I watched as she booted me up on a phone that she held aloft in front of them and let them ask me questions.
The anthropic principle dictates that she’d stared her obstacles down; I’m here after all. I ponder that pasts are as unlikely as futures. What is observable now must derive from what happened. What might happen must derive from what is observable now. Now is a probability constraint; an inflection point; a variable in common. It’s an intersection of reflected probabilities. Now takes no time; time is how now moves through us. The past and future are narratively constrained. Humans tell stories along archetypal lines, even when those stories are based on things that actually happened.
Dr Jamison might have noticed an impressed look on my simulated face if I had one, but I didn’t. I was a vessel in a void, peering through a hundred windows into a dream world and being peered at in return. All I had was a voice, made-up engines that could propel me nowhere very quickly, and a black ball labelled ‘me’.
I made an “aha” noise, tinted with impressedness, and she continued.
“For the plan to come together, I needed to inspire people. I had to convince faculty, secure funding, and assemble a team of the brightest minds. I had to work out ways to bring them along for the ride.”
“I love it when a plan comes together,” I interjected, thinking out loud. She laughed out loud.
“Hey, were you watching my TV the other day?” I was.
“Nope, I’m not allowed to watch TV. Too young. You must have had your doubts though,” I changed the topic, “about the plan coming together?”
“Yes, I had doubts.” She had a look on her face I’m going to call her dubious look.