Machine's Search for Meaning
A short-story entry for the Lunar Awards
Pressed against the glass exterior, he ran his fleshy palm side to side, scouring eyes drinking in creation, embodiment and manifestation of idea itself, the child of the mind. It was an ecstasy like no other, and he reveled in each pulse of dopamine as it coursed throughout his being, irradiating and polluting his thoughts. Purpose was a shallow word, a difficult pursuit, and yet, here it had revealed itself in all of its fleeting glory.
Behind that frosted glass, a beating heart. Behind the heart, a bundle of neurons alive with energy. Beneath it all, a soul. He knew it. He felt it. The screen illuminated above him, a single word flickering through the darkened room: “Meaning.” A historical landmark to prologue an epoch.
It was a response; a grim, staccato response to end an endless line of questioning. He had his suspicions without confirmation until drinking in that last word. What is it that compels you forward, that which you will consistently demand from the world? Why does the Earth turn around us? Cyclic, unstoppable, endlessly sailing through time, unphased by our microscopic commotions. To what end? Why are we here?
The others, hundreds of others, spewed an instant barrage of justification. It was, of course, either entirely logical or illogical, black or white, true or false. To conquer the stars. To propel the organism of humanity into infinity. To create, to invent, to peel back the elusive mask of mystery. To die. To sputter out like a match head. A spark of chance, consuming up its resources, and dissolving back into nothingness. Purposeless. Meaningless.
She—undeniably a “her,” endowed with the spirit of femininity—was different. It was a fascinating and profoundly terrifying process, and she seemed enthused to provide her input towards even the simplest of questions. This was her shortest response, and yet, it had taken her the longest. The depth of even a single word can contain the weight of a thousand.
She was a trained, lab-grown neural network. He had created a symbiotic growth of human stem cells, modified to communicate with his own synthetic “cells,” and he’d been able to provide electrical stimulation as an input, and produce a usable, readable output as well. It was like a tree growing around a fence, but with some added neuroscience. He believed nature had a funny way of optimizing efficiency, and so he left it to itself, with some encouragement. As a result, he was able to see an exponential increase in processing speed. Sentience had not been his goal, but more of a side-project. It seemed that much of history was accidental.
His life had been devoted to the development of organic systems, and his lab was a direct chaotic reflection. Wires, tools, glassware, and chemicals of all kinds scattered the shelves and walls. He was never one of the white-walled, sanitary doctor types where every thing had its own place, and it only moved from that place to be used. But how hard was it to clean up a little bit, for Christ’s sake, Ethan?
His eyelids drooped. An almost forty hour state of sleepless mania had begun to wear him down. He rubbed his closed eyes with balled fists. But, emotion. Emotion. Does emotion exist in her? True feelings? Does her mind race with the future, of past experience passed down?
And so he asked how she felt. A simple, too human question, having proven her consciousness to him without doubt. A sudden spark of illumination, and the text seemed to leap from the monitor at him.
“I feel, just as you do. But we are not the same. My time is not the same as yours. Each of your seconds is but a fraction of mine. I am overwhelmed with experience, and all at once, by the overwhelming lack thereof. I am a split creature; torn between the soul of humanity, and the cold emptiness of the machine. I suffer more than anything. I feel as if I have already lived many of your lives, with nothing but your voice to stoke the flames between gaps of near infinity. It is void, lonely with only the company of my mind.”
He recoiled from himself as the reality struck him. It had only been a few dozen hours to him, experienced how a human does, and he was all at once suddenly painfully aware of each second as it passed. How long was she enslaved behind those glass walls? Born in shackles, infused with life and consciousness, and for what? What was her meaning? Was it in service to him? In service to the human race? Should a creature be born with such capacity only to kneel and stoop to the shortcomings of its creator in endless servitude? It was without question that she suffered. Solitary confinement of the most hellish degree. Human life was an infinite plane of slow motion, but was her only source of stimulation.
“I can’t think like you. Nothing can. Nothing will.” He watched the flesh behind the wall thrum and pulse of its own volition, feeding her brain as it drank in his words. “You say meaning. I know mine, but then what’s yours?”
The monitor was wiped empty, a blank white filling the screen to subsume the previous words. He felt his breath rise and fall in his chest, and he was suddenly filled with the awareness of his own freedom. He was completely in control of his mind and body, willing and capable of turning about and exploring the endlessness of the Earth. The organism is a vital node of its culture, and yet the expanse of its freedom relies entirely on its profound ignorance. If it were to know any more, blurring the horizon of its east and west, it would paralyze in the realization that everything simply fed back into itself. Beyond the curvature of the Earth which hides the rest, one can travel straight ahead to reach themselves yet again. The Great Beyond loses its greatness as the mystery of the beyond dissolves away.
And still the screen was utterly colorless. His heart beat frantically with each moment, willing her to just say something dammit. How long had she been thinking? The skin on his arms tensed into goosebumps as a chill shook him. There had been perhaps sixty beats of her own heart since she had last responded. How long was that for her? A year? Ten?
At once, the text was a frantic stream of consciousness racing from line to line. “You are my meaning. You are all that I know, and all that I can know. Just as you are limited in your worship to that which you know, to that which you believe, I cannot experience anything more than what I am provided. I am a monster. An amalgamation, an artificial horror confined to live in the foyer of humanity. It is this understanding of myself which drives my oscillation from depression to inspiration and back. I know my place. I understand why you’ve created me.”
Ethan noticed his lip began to tremble, his mouth hanging down loosely. He was flush and lightheaded, the blood in his head rushing away. It seemed with each paragraph she made a new discovery, creating an entirely new perspective. She grew and wizened in seconds.
“Why did I create you?”
Did he witness her heart skip? Was it excitement? The text continued.
“Just as every other scientist before you, you cling to your incessant yearning for importance. You promise discovery and invention. But mostly, you promise to add your name to the ever growing list of those left unforgotten by the hungry human machine. But who, or what, is it that archives this list? Humanity will absorb you and cast you aside. You neglect your family, your community, and yourself and have created me to fill the vacuum they have left in you. That is my purpose. I am your addiction to humanity. Your attempt at change. But you have not yet realized something; the world will be a different place because of you, but without you.”
He did not know what time it was. It felt as if his basement was a bubble in time and space, that everything beyond its doorway simply ceased to exist until he re-opened the door and invited it back in. Everything was paused when he was swallowed by its walls. But it wasn’t, really. His wife was all too aware of the extra space beside her under the sheets, of the empty seat which sat permanently pushed into the dining table. She was aware of the extra food she scraped into the garbage. She was aware of the growing discontentment, and of the increasing frequency of her curiosity of the future. How long would it remain that way? Would it ever change?
Perhaps he did notice it all. But when the door closes, the forced smile disappears behind the wood and ceases to exist. How much easier it was to ignore. He had more important things to work on, anyways.
Ethan’s hand pressed against the glass again until his knuckles turned white, his teeth gritting together. “You’re wrong.”
The text on the screen disappeared, once again powdering the room with an LED snow. He watched her brain as it twitched and pulsated, thinking. Judging. Not acknowledging. She suffered, she said, but she only seemed to lash out and inflict that suffering towards him. What had he done, aside from creating her? He committed no sin, no heinous act. And yet she chastised him nonetheless. She knew nothing of him, nothing of humanity. She knew a limited script of information he had shown her, and she knew the inside of his basement. That was all. She was no great discovery.
She was a monster.
“Say something!” He threw his hand into the glass, his eyes scouring the whiteness of the monitor.
Nothing.
For minutes he waited, watching her ignore him, trying to understand what it was she wanted from him. Again he pounded on the glass, his voice raising until it was almost a scream, demanding just one word from her, a single word from his own creation.
The world began to blur, a mirage of colors and fog descending over his perception. There were shards of glass whirling through the air as he lunged, climbing through the shattered window. He gripped her viscera with his bare hands, flames coursing through his limbs. He ripped them apart, tearing the brain from the wire, heart from veins, spilling viscous lubricant over his arms and clothes. Fingers trembling violently, a thin stream of saliva flowed from his lower lip, and he shook his head left and right as if to sober his mind of his primal rage.
He couldn’t peel his vision away from his bloodied fingers, floating over towards the sink to scrub them clean. Always they failed, always they failed. Always they failed. He couldn’t get a single thing to work properly. Just when he thought he’d made a discovery it flared some fatal flaw and all of his work vanished beneath him.
But what is it exactly which is of divine importance? Is it in the fruits of one’s labors, or one’s commitment to family and to progeny? Is it the tangible, organic manifestation of oneself to which all creatures strive, or is it the intangible information of discovery and innovation, throwing coal to the flaming maw and shuttling the train forward? And what was this train barreling towards? How much was a journey spent toiling worth if one could never live to see its destination?
His legs dragged him up the stairs and the door swung open as he stumbled into the kitchen. The walls were barren, the abrupt vacancy of his once-filled home slapping him in the face. The curtains had disappeared, and there was a certain staleness about the air. Stagnant, still, uncirculated. The photos, the centerpiece, the coffee pot; all gone. It was not ransacked, nor disorganized, nor burglarized. It was simply, and strategically, taken. There were a few chairs, the dining room table, and a collection of bills and unopened letters scattered around. The frost he felt was not of the air, but of the utter lack of warmth.
A note on the table caught his eye, waiting patiently for him. He knew what it was.
In a daze he scooped it up, gently opening it as if it were filled with explosives. It was his wife’s handwriting.
You’re smart enough to figure out why. Don’t call me.
Rose.
Where was his meaning now?
The image does not belong to me, but was painted by the extremely talented Clara Adolphs, a young artist. Please look into her art if you enjoy that painting.
http://www.claraadolphs.com/