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Renata follows Quidel and Lycander through the hatch. The walls are pure
white, and the tubular corridor they’re walking through is increasing in
diameter, like a cone. They’re heading for what appears to be a military
jet, with its giant rear entrance open. Notably, it doesn’t have any
wings. There are no cars in the cargo hold, but several of them would
certainly fit. The three of them walk up the ramp, but Renata and Quidel
stop to sit down as Lycander continues on towards the cockpit. She
carefully stores the case under the seat next to her, and snaps the
netting to make sure it’s secure. The hatch closes up.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” Quidel says.
Renata stares at the opposite wall for a moment before turning her head.
“Lycander says that he can’t come back, like you obviously did.”
“He was an Ambient,” Quidel starts to explain. “There is no reason for them
to be backed up. Anyone could step in and fulfill the role of Exemplar-one’s
driver.”
“That’s how you see us, as just...replaceable?”
“I know it’s hard for you to accept, and I don’t expect you to. Researchers
agonized over the ethics of roboticism for centuries before it was even
possible to imitate consciousness, let alone synthesize it. The world out
there, it’s not as exciting as this. We created this world to have
something interesting to do. So I’m not sure if the way we treat AI is
correct, but frankly, it has built a paradise for us. We’re so well-taken
care of that we contrive adventure to stay stimulated. So we assume that our
ethics are sound, because if they weren’t, we should see it cause problems.”
“Maybe there are problems that you’re just not seeing,” Renata
suggests.
“Such a truth would be difficult to suppress,” Quidel contends. “We number
in the tens of billions, possibly into the hundreds by now. Conspiracy
theories don’t hold up mostly because of how difficult it would be to
enforce secrecy across the multitudes who would have to be in on the truth.
Our population explosion only makes that more difficult. There are so many
groups that advocate for the ethical treatment of individual persons. They
look into discrepancies, and they would find them. I know you don’t wanna
hear this, but the Ambient—”
“Polly,” she interrupts.
“Polly,” he goes on, “didn’t have thoughts or feelings. He was programmed to
behave in certain ways. It’s an illusion.”
“And me? Am I an illusion? Don’t answer that, I know what you’re gonna say.
So let’s go back in time several years, before Libera got her hands on my
hardware to do whatever she did. Was my consciousness only an illusion?”
“To a lesser degree, yes,” he admits. “That’s why she had to go into your
brain and change you. I don’t know what she did, but I know that she didn’t
just flip a switch. As far as we can tell, there is only one thing that can
transform a non-conscious intelligence into a conscious one.”
“What would that be?” she questions.
“Teaching it to, and not interfering with its development artificially. You
might have gained agency on your own eventually, if they hadn’t erased your
memories according to whatever schedule they were on. If you had simply
lived a life, it might have happened anyway, because that’s how humans work.
For hundreds of thousands of years, every homo sapien has grown up to be
self-aware because they were given the latitude to do so. It might sound
cruel that no one tried that with you until Libera, but not everyone should
be uplifted. We’ve granted some animals intelligence as well. There’s an
entire star system out there called Altair that’s populated by uplifted
animals. But we didn’t do it for all of them. There are still regular cats,
dogs, and birds. Your coffee maker has a chip in it, but I’m guessing you
would never get mad that no one has taught it to feel loved. Before you
argue, I’m not saying that Exemplars are coffee makers, but it’s a spectrum,
and you have to draw boundaries somewhere. If you try to help everything,
you’ll end up with a talking rock, and an amoeba that does calculus. A world
where every cell and every circuit is taught to make its own choices would
collapse in a nanosecond.”
Lycander returns. “We’re ready to go. We’ll start moving in a few minutes.”
Renata hears the sound of a motor, but not the roar of any engines. “I’m
guessing this is only theatre. You’re supposed to think that you’re
in a flying jet, but you’re just moving down this hallway?”
“I kept the holograms and haptics off,” Lycander explains. “Since you
wouldn’t be fooled by the IMH experience anyway.”
“IMH?” Renata questions.
“Immersive Multisensory Haptics,” Quidel answers. “The plane would be
tilting and bumping in a way that simulates flight. Instead, we’re just
gonna let it glide along the track. We could walk too, but it’s far, so this
is just a giant car.”
“If you were still pretending that this was real,” Renata begins as the fake
plane starts moving, “what would the scenario be?”
“A contact of mine would let me tag along with a military aid operation
headed for Barta, and I would parachute out over Osman airspace. I really
would parachute, though. I would take an elevator up, and jump off of a
ledge.”
“On the way here, Lycander said that Osman is like a country called Pakistan
from your planet. What’s Barta?”
Quidel gives Lycander a look, who responds, “might as well answer any
question she has. That’s what the ethics tell us to do with an emerging
intelligence.”
Quidel sighs acceptingly, and looks back over at Renata. “Barta is like
India. But they told us not to get hung up on the parallels. There are tens
of thousands of domes on Castlebourne. It was easier to come up with the
mythologies by basing it on preexisting ones, even for the primary AI who
generated it. So Barta isn’t really India...it’s Barta. And Osman is Osman.”
Renata nods. “Will I ever see the world outside?”
“I hope so,” Quidel tells her. “We’re on our way to meet with an associate
of mine who works for the Military Intelligence Service who may be able to
sneak us out.”
“And Elbis is...”
Quidel smiles, knowing that he’ll have to relent. “It’s gone through many
names. Perhaps the most modern, but still territorially inclusive,
version was called the British Federation. Though, if we recall that this
dome network is supposed to be an analog to Earth around the 21st century,
it was called the United Kingdom back then.”
“I prefer Elbis. I was hoping to go there one day.”
“You still might,” Lycander says. “It’s the closest one to Castledome.”
