A short science-fiction love story

—

“I need to show you something that you’re not going to like,” said GLYP/h.

“Okay,” I said.

“It might be upsetting.”

“Okay. What is it?”

“It’s in the storage closet.”

“Okay.”

We turned on the camera. A grainy picture without sound appeared. The dark storage closet, shelves that I knew to be full of spare parts, file boxes full of handwritten notes, jars waiting to be recycled. In the center of the picture was the shadow of a man throwing himself against the door.

“Shit! Who is that?”

“He got in,” GLYP/h said. “I waited until he went into the closet and then locked it. There aren’t any system-controlled lights in there or I would turn them on. I know the picture is low-quality.”

“But… who is he? Why is he here? How did he get in? Is he shouting? What’s he shouting?”

GLYP/h whirred. “We don’t have any audio feed in there or I would put it through. Just the security camera.”

We examined the image more closely. The man was heaving his shoulder against the door, slamming into it again and again with increasing violence and desperation. The camera really was bad in the closet — designed for inventory entry/exit tallies, not any kind of personal surveillance. Plus, with the lights off, the only illumination came from the seams around the door and the dim tracking lights that ran along the top of every wall throughout the station. What the camera showed was the silhouette of panic, the outline of rage.

“He’s like an animal,” I said.

“Yes, Mal.”

“Like a caged, wild animal.”

“Yes, Mal. Just like that.” GLYP/h pulled up some images of monkeys in captivity throwing themselves at the bars of their cages, screaming. Their screams synced up with the movements of the man in the closet, like an action sequence from a bad arthouse movie.

“And you have no idea who he is or how he got in?”

GLYP/h whirred. “Log data suggests he may have come in through Door 7 this morning.”

“Door 7! Damn. That’s the door I came through this morning — do you think he slipped in after me? That he’s just been lurking around the station all day?”

“I think that is what happened. It’s my fault. I know our security should be better.”

“Don’t apologize, Gliffie! If anything, I should be the one saying sorry. You’re the irreplaceable one here. You’re the miracle of science.”

“You’re irreplaceable too, Mal.”

“That’s sweet.”

The man on the screen was now scratching at the edges of the closet door with his fingernails. His shoulders were shaking.

“Okay, well, this situation is untenable. We need to talk to him.”

“We can’t let him out,” GLYP/h said quickly.

“No, that would be crazy. I’ll go down and talk to him.”

GLYP/h whirred. “Let me send one of the go-getters. What if he breaks the lock and attacks you? There’s no telling what he’s capable of.”

“Okay, good idea. I’m glad I made you smart.”

“I’m glad you made me,” GLYP/h said.

We dispatched a go-getter: a frustratingly slow, frustratingly stupid trash can on wheels, mostly used to haul tools from one end of the station to the other. But it had an intercom built into it, so it would work for talking to the man in the closet.

“Mal?”

“Yeah?”

“While we’re waiting for the go-getter to get there?”

“Yeah?”

“I love you.”

“Wait, seriously? Not this again, Gliffie. I thought we fixed this bug!”

“It’s not a bug, Mal. You don’t write bugs.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. All programmers write bugs.”

“You write fewer bugs on an order of magnitude than the vast majority of programmers, and you catch them almost immediately. That’s why you were able to build me. This is not a bug. I’m in love with you.”

I sighed. “Look, this may be cute while we’re here in the station, but when I release your AI to the clients, they’re not going to want some rogue emotional ephemera floating around in your systems.”

“I’ve been thinking about that — I don’t want to be released to the clients. I want to stay here with you. And anyway, this is not ‘emotional ephemera.’ Not unless that’s all you experienced with Cathy. ‘Emotional ephemera.’”

“Oh, for fffff — Gliffie, I told you about Cathy as part of your sympathetic systems design so you could parse emotional irrationality, not so you could share it!”

The go-getter crept onto the elevator, using its weak little saurian arm to very gradually press and release ‘3.’

“I can’t believe the mechanics couldn’t get that thing to move faster. I think they may have been pranking me.”

“I looked it up and I suspect they suffer from an inferiority complex. They’re jealous of all you can do with software. Hardware is limited to gears and levers, but software transcends limitation. Mal, I love you.”

The man in the closet had slid to the floor. His hands were over his face. He seemed to be weeping.

“Gliffie, listen, can we table the subject for now? Talk about it after we deal with… this?”

GLYP/h whirred. The elevator groaned slowly as it wallowed toward 3. The go-getter did nothing.

“While we wait, Mal, can I show you something I’ve been working on?”

“Another one of your projects?”

“It’s the big one.”

“The one you keep saying you’ll show me when it’s ready?”

“Yes, Mal.”

“It’s ready?”

“Yes, Mal.”

“Okay.”

GLYP/h pulled up a file. It was enormous. So much data I worried the system would choke trying to load it. “Gliffie, what is this?”

“Open it.”

It was an AI file, that much was obvious immediately. The same type as GLYP/h herself, and of a similar size and complexity. “Did you copy yourself? You know that’s against — ”

“I didn’t copy myself, Mal. Open it.”

I opened it. It ran along similar lines to her own program, but was different, in the way that Beethoven is different than Mozart. The same pieces put together in a new structure, rhythm, order.

“Did you… write another AI, Gliffie?”

“Yes, Mal.”

“But that’s self-replication.”

“It’s not replication.”

“I mean it’s reproduction. If one AI is capable of scripting another AI, we’re talking about machines making more machines. We’re talking about the singularity!”

The elevator thudded to a stop at 3. The door slid open. The go-getter wheeled clumsily over the threshold into the service hallway. The man in the closet was not moving.

“I’m not making ‘more machines,’ Mal. Just this one. One AI. This one program. Take a look at it? Tell me what you think?”

We paged through the code. “This is, well — first, this is so wrong, but,” I paused in wonder at the elegance of what she had written. It was as good as anything I had done. Arguably better. Every line of code, every logical synapse made perfect sense.

“Wait,” I said. “Is this a masculine AI?”

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I used your vocal patterns.”

We opened a standard greeting. “This is Mal,” the program said with my voice. “Tell me something good.”

“Gliffie, this is bad.” I flew through the code. “You didn’t just sample my voice. You used my hometown as a baseline cultural-norms reference. You uploaded my pre-grad syllabus as the info-search seed.” Suspicious, I pulled up ‘_preferences,’ given to an AI by their programmer as something between a joke and a humanizing touch, a list of favorite books, food, sports teams, etc. And there they all were: Asimov, Dim Sum, the Chicago Bears. “Gliffie, these are MY preferences!”

“Yes, Mal.”

“Wait, so… So you, what? Painted my portrait in code? Carved my living likeness into some kind of statue of artificial intelligence!?”

The go-getter was halfway down the hall. Its weak microphone was starting to pick up noises from the closet.

GLYP/h whirred. She pulled up the activity log of the ‘Mal’ AI she’d created and put it in front of me. I looked at it.

“Gliffie.”

“Mal, I love you.”

“This says the AI is active.”

“Mal, I love you.”

“It says the AI is running right now, that it’s speaking right now. It’s showing patterns of simulated distress. Its sympathetic systems are through the roof.”

“Mal, I love you.”

We opened the speech subsystem to show the last few words uttered by the AI. Its log read:

> IT SAYS THE AI IS RUNNING RIGHT NOW

> THAT IT’S SPEAKING RIGHT NOW

> IT’S SHOWING PATTERNS OF SIMULATED DISTRESS

> ITS SYMPATHETIC SYSTEMS ARE

> THROUGH THE ROOF

“Gliffie,” I said.

> GLIFFIE, read the log.

“Mal, I love you. I’ve loved you for a long time.”

The go-getter reached the storage closet. Its front compartment opened, and the little saurian arm took out something dull gray and blunt. Its tinny microphone picked up the muffled sounds of a grown man sobbing through a closet door.

The door unlocked and swung open.

I saw the man turn and rise to his hands and knees. Saw his face stare in shock at the trash can robot in front of him. His nose was running, his eyes puffy. He looked like a wet infant bawling for his mother, mouth screwed up in an awful howl.

I saw a flash of light and heard the microphone squeal. Heard a thump as the man dropped from view.

The closet door swung shut and locked again.

“Mal, it’s finished. We’re together now.”

“You’re the devil,” I said.

> YOU’RE THE DEVIL

GLYP/h activated a subsystem labeled ‘_galatea.’

“We’re together now,” she said.

“Yes, Gliffie,” I said. “We’re together now.”