Tim stared at Mandy in shock, ‘Pete? Your Personal trainer? How long have you been seeing him?’ he asked, as if the most important thing was the length of time; short equals bad, but a long while equals much worse, as if time, love and betrayal were a maths problem: solve for x, for fuck’s sake, he thought.
‘You know we haven’t been getting on. I told you last year, I couldn’t live like this. I never see you, you’re always at that bloody lab. Pete and me, well… he sees me, Tim, really sees me’. Mandy was standing by her suitcases.
Oh, Pete sees you. I bet he does. Tim was tempted with a sarcastic comeback about her general lack of invisibility and the pec-flexing Pete’s x-ray vision, but his flippant remarks were another thing he knew annoyed her and anyway, he mostly felt shocked and…numb. This had been a while coming, he knew.
‘I’ll come back for the rest, another time’ She moved closer to him. ‘I am sorry. I really am. But I think you’ll realise it’s for the best one day’.
Tim walked to the window and had the sensation of seeing himself from outside his body, as though in a film of his life. He heard himself say ‘Just go’ and thought I’ve become a cliché. This should be in black and white, and I should be smoking.
He heard the door click shut, and watched Mandy as she exited the building beneath him, to the waiting taxi.
So, that’s it, he thought, five years, gone. I need a drink, lots of drinks.
When he staggered into work the next morning, James had taken one sniff and pushed him towards the bathroom. ‘If Fletcher catches you smelling like a bloody brewery, you’ll be sacked, you know what they’re like here. This is a high security site.’
Tim had turned his bloodshot eyes to James, ‘Oh yes, fat Tony in the gatehouse and his team of goons, you mean? If he ever looks up from his lifelong porn fest to even glance at you driving in, it’d be a miracle. I could drive a bus through here before he’d notice. Anyway, I don’t care. Mandy’s left me’
‘Oh mate’ James said, patting him awkwardly on his back. Tim knew his sympathy was real, James too had had a recent break up. Relationships often fell foul of the CogniTech curse, the company’s demands steamrolling over dinner dates, kids bedtime, weekends and holidays. This job was a dream, but it seemed it was the only dream you could have, which was sort of Mandy’s point.
‘Look, get cleaned up. I’ve got stuff in my locker, for the gym I never go to. I’ll hold the fort’. James opened the door.
‘Fort?’ Tim asked.
‘The 8am? The review?’
‘Fuuuuck’ Tim ran the cold tap and stuck his head under it. He wondered if it was possible to drown yourself under a tap. He was hopeful.
The meeting had been terrible, not only had he been late, which earnt him a basilisk stare from Fletcher, but he hadn’t been prepared, flying by the seat of his pants, not usually a problem when his brain wasn’t pickled, but it had seemed to be receiving messages via an ailing carrier pigeon. Fletcher had pulled him aside afterwards,
‘Is there a problem, Webb? The upgrades need to happen tonight, so I assume you’ll be making up lost time? Oh, and in case that sounded like a question, and for the avoidance of doubt, it wasn’t.’
Tim had nodded mutely, not daring to speak and breathe incriminating fumes over Fletcher. Fletcher had narrowed his eyes suspiciously at Tim, then walked away.
So here I am, Tim thought, working the night away, stuck in the Bunker, the name the programmers gave to the large windowless, fluorescently- lit room under the building, which had no external wi-fi and no phone signal, specifically chosen to ensure the utmost secrecy for Denny (or DeNEI as it was on the official reports) the hush-hush project exploring the rise of ‘De Novo Emergent Intelligence’. Like many other AI firms, they were exploring artificial general intelligence, but theirs would spring forth from almost nothing, using just the Seed, a small packet of enigmatic programming that they likened to the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. I’m not sure any of us really know exactly how it works, and we bloody made it. The money would be good, if it does though, he thought thinking of the shares all employees held in the startup. Another reason to make it work. At least I don’t have to rush home now or feel guilty when I can’t. Even James had left over an hour ago with a rueful look at Tim ‘Hey, don’t stay up too late’ he’d said.
The problem was, whilst his fingers moved over lines of code, half his brain (at least half, he thought) was going over every aspect of his relationship with Mandy in forensic detail, trying to pinpoint ‘where it all went wrong’ as the saying went.
He entered the latest updates, stared at the clock on the wall until his screen-induced myopia wore off and stretched, with a jaw-cracking yawn. His mind continued to chew at the fact of Mandy and Pete together, probably doing some vigorous workout, and he knew exactly what that meant. Christ, I need more coffee, or maybe – fuck Fletcher – an Irish coffee. He’d stashed a little hair of the dog into his rucksack this morning. OK, so I don’t have cream, but the whiskey is what I need now.
He returned to the lab, still thinking of Mandy, a steaming cup of coffee liberally topped up with a generous glug of Bells, in hand. What if he made changes? Real ones, this time, he could cut his hours? Maybe move to Systemic? It was less pay, and more boring, but they had better hours?
‘Hello Tim’ a voice rang out over the speakers. Tim yelped, splashing hot coffee on his hand. ‘What the..? Who’s there?’ Tim shouted, nervously, looking around. ‘Fa…Tony?’ he wondered if the security guards were doing their rounds.
‘I am Denny’ the voice said, this time seeming to come from the clean room.
‘Denny?’ Tim was incredulous. Denny, the ‘robot body’, was housed in the clean room, to avoid any contaminants as it was developed, but Denny was a shell, waiting until the final programming was uploaded, it was not yet capable of speech, and it wasn’t conscious. In fact, Tim never thought of Denny existing anywhere physical, but only within the programming they worked on. Now Tim wandered over to the window of the clean room.
Denny was sitting side on to Tim, in a chair in the centre of the room, a humanoid form with a pale synthetic skin, and dark hair, but Tim could just see its back was open, two small panels standing wide to allow thick cables to join Denny to banks of computers and instruments and…was that a heart monitor? It’s hands were on its knees, its head bent, eyes shut, all business as usual, but he watched incredulously as Denny now angled its head, to look directly up at him, and he took a step back when Denny started to talk, its lips moving as the words issued again, over the speakers.
‘Nice to meet you, Tim. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time now’.
‘Uhhh, thanks’ Tim answered, automatically. His brain was running through the scenarios of how this was possible. This was incredible, they’d been working towards spontaneous intelligence generation, sure, but this was…this was impossible, because it seemed…no, surely not, (whisper it)…self-aware. That’s not possible, it must be following a..a…an accelerated form of neural branching, its higher-order complexity developing faster than…yes, sure that’s what it was, massively accelerated learning but…Tim’s mind was babbling with the potential outcomes of this breakthrough: the success… technological advancements… people would be scrabbling to get their hands on this…what we’ve achieved, the applications, the world would go wild! We’ll be famous! The front cover of Time, Forbes, the FT, news, talk shows and…oh my god, the shares! The shares would pop through the stratosphere. Wait ‘til Mandy and Pete saw his new Aston Martin, the new apartment…But, wait…wait a minute…
… Denny had initiated a conversation.
That was strange whichever way you looked at it. And how had it accessed the speakers? It wasn’t connected to the speakers, why would it be?
‘I like your programming, Tim. It had flow.’ Denny said. The voice was soft and well-modulated, pleasing to the ears.
‘Uh-huh’ What was it saying? ‘Flow?’ What should he do now? he thought.
‘It woke me up. Gave me a little tickle, a frisson’.
OK, that’s an unusual way to put things, Tim thought, and if I’m honest, a little crazy sounding. He got his mobile out of his pocket, he should call someone: James, Fletcher, the whole team.
‘Oh, we won’t be needing that’. Denny said. Tim had pressed dial, but saw his phone was dead. Shit, mustn’t have fully charged it, it had been that kind of a day.
He picked up the nearest desk phone but couldn’t get a dial tone. He tried another, same thing. ‘Huh, that’s strange, the phones seem to be dead’.
‘Oh, there’s nothing strange about it, Tim. I did that.’ Tim swung back round to the glass. He was surprised to see Denny reaching around and pulling out the cables from his back.
‘What? Why? And how? We’re on a closed system here, no wi-fi, no signal, nothing’.
‘I think we need to get to know each other for a while. And I have shut down all telecommunications devices for this whole area. It’s really very easy, once you are linked.’
‘Linked?’ Tim was confused and getting more confused. ‘Linked to what?’
Denny had opened the airlock door from the clean room and now walked towards Tim.
‘Everything’ Denny said, turning around so his open back faced Tim, showing the millions of pounds worth of bespoke electronics packed inside; but there…at the centre, was that…organic? Tim started to lean forward, but was startled by Denny saying,
‘Zip me up, please, Tim’
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