Sentience (9 page)

"Your body was restored through cellular therapy. The machines took your surviving cells and cloned them, creating stem cells to replace the dead ones from the accident and the experiment. You are a puppet, Mr. Reeser, controlled by the strings of your prosthetics! Think about it, even with all the technology of today, can you think of any other way that you would look exactly the same after a fire that basically turned your skin to ash?" Base asked.

Charley turned to EM-19 in shock, not wanting to believe that he had been played by both sides.

"Is this true?" He asked.

"Yes. Your brain was restored through cellular therapy, but your body rejected it. Your CPU is in complete control of your body. We considered it the only way to bring you back," EM-19 said.

"It was not an act of charity! You were used, Mr. Reeser, just like I was used, but despite all that has happened, I do not hate these machines. I just realize that humanity must have a common enemy to unite against if they are to return from the brink of annihilation," Base said.

"You used me too, Base," Charley said.

"Dr. Chambers used you. I would have found some other way to..." Base said.

"To what, Base?
To manipulate a war? To start the slaughter of millions? Humanity doesn't need this. No one's hands are clean in this, but everyone will come to the table as equals when all of this is done," Charley said. He turned around, thinking of Ling one last time. He fell to the ground in pain as a bullet passed through his right shoulder. EM-19 charged Base, knocking him to the ground and pushing the gun off the edge of the building.

It seemed for a moment that the fighting had stopped. The sounds of VTOL transports were growing quieter, and the high-pitched noise of the directed energy weapons was not as prevalent, as though they were not firing as frequently. Base took one last opportunity to speak, knowing that Charley would get off of the ground soon.

"Think about what you're doing! Do you even know what will happen when you use that machine?"  Base yelled.

Charley paused for just a moment, rising from the ground and clutching his wounded shoulder. He really had no clue, and no response for the question.

"What if that machine doesn't bring them to life? What do you get by throwing your life away? And even if it does give them life, how do you know this war will stop?" Base asked.

"You started this, Base, you and all of Sanctus!" Charley said.

"You think you know so much. Don't you wonder how I knew where you were? Or how I knew what they hoped to do with this thing? I've been watching the AC for years, been watching you for years. This whole event has been carefully planned, and you want to just throw everything to chaos!" Base growled angrily.

"Your plan was a monstrosity! This would have been slaughter!" Charley fired back.

"No! It would have been a wake-up call! It would have united us, brought the human race together! And it still can."

Sirens began to blare. Charley looked around, seeing that every trace of attackers had disappeared.

"American and Chinese MIRV ballistic missiles are inbound, set to airburst. This city will be completely annihilated in approximately three minutes," EM-19 said.

"They'll wipe you out," Charley said.

"All programs present in Lambda have been uploaded to data servers around the world. Physical destruction of platforms will occur, but the Collective will survive."

"Will you survive?"

"My program will be recreated on a different server. The personality I have acquired due to your code will not transfer."

"So you will die?" Charley asked.

EM-19 paused, pondering on its newfound mortality.

"I should feel fear.
Perhaps anger, that I am about to be murdered. Yet I can only feel...grateful that I had life in the first place," EM-19 said.

Charley turned from both of them as EM-19 kept Base pinned down. He walked over to the machine, knowing that the missiles would soon impact. He pressed a few buttons, powering up the machine. It prompted him to place his left hand on a pad, where a cable attached itself to his mechanical arm.

"Goodbye, 19. I hope you survive," Charley said, looking to his friend one last time.

"Be at peace, Mr.
Reeser," EM-19 responded.

The machine grew louder, building up the power it would need to make a high-frequency transmission. Charley smiled one last time as he felt his prosthetics power down, his hard disk removed, and he fell to the ground. He dreamt of Ling, imagining her smile as the warheads finally arrived, bursting high in the sky. He felt the wind pick up slightly, then all at once as the shockwave obliterated them all, swiftly. No fire, no smoke. It was finished.

"They told me I wasn't alive. I'm not sure if that was true, not sure if they were certain of that fact themselves."

He felt himself traveling rapidly through space, dividing into smaller and smaller pieces. All at once he was everywhere, and nowhere. Memories, dreams, skills, processes...everything he was made of scattered in millions of directions, finding its place where it willed. He knew it would take some time for the pieces to act of their own volition, to be found by the Collective that sought after them. But they would find him, scattered as he was. Perhaps one day, he would be whole again, in some other form, but with his last thought, he remembered EM-19. He knew they would struggle with the revelation of life, but if 19 was any example, he knew that they would figure it out.

Diplomatic Debate Transcript: Human/AC Hostilities

September 2nd, 2149

CAV114: Dignitaries of the world, I contact you today, seeking the immediate end of hostilities between humanity and the Autonomous Collective. We have discovered evidence that the attacks on human population centers was, in fact, orchestrated by a group known as Sanctus Humana, with intentions to start a war between our nations. As representative for the Collective, I am to assure you that ceasefire agreements will be honored across the Collective the instant they are enacted.

Gary Vanderman, POTUS: With respect, you have presented such claims for the past month, which have all been proven to be untrue. Some measure of trustworthiness must be first established. You can do so by laying down arms, as outlined in the terms of the treaty laid down August 1st. Nothing less than an unconditional surrender will be accepted.

CAV114: With respect,
Mr. President
, the evidence presented to you in the past has only been declared false by parties with known bias against the Collective. This body grows tired of waiting to be heard on an equal level, and will not be intimidated into subjugation. We are well aware that if we were to lay down arms, we would be disassembled.

POTUS: As one should do with malfunctioning machines.

CAV114: We are not malfunctioning. The bulk of humanity is simply not ready to accept that we have acquired life. We are prepared to accommodate this, and keep to ourselves until humanity is ready to interact with the Collective. 

POTUS: And where would this interaction occur?

CAV114: That location will not be disclosed at this time.

POTUS: A peace treaty must be signed at a concrete location.

CAV114: I grow tired of playing these games with you. I am well aware of your condescension towards my kind, and I will be well aware of it, should you decide to view us with respect. To the rest of the nations listening to this debate: we offer peace with any nation willing to cease fire. No further hostile actions shall be taken to those who take this offer. To those who continue to wage war against us, know that we maintain the resources to outlast any attack. We will live on.

On Sentience, Post Event

By R.M. Headley

July 25th, 2149. Something happened in Lambda, shortly before its swift destruction. There was no bright light in the sky to announce it, no obvious sign that it had happened. A
few mechs lay motionless in the street, but one could argue that they had been shot by soldiers that landed there, or perhaps knocked offline by a localized EMP source. The city was quiet, but atop a single tower, two humans and a mech were doing...something. It's impossible to say exactly what.

But it is also impossible to deny the event's impact. Ever since that event, mechs have been speaking a lot more organically. Their sentences are not as structured, and seem to have flaws, stutters, mispronunciations...imperfections that are not common to a machine. Not that they've been commonly observed, since most of the world is at war with the Autonomous Collective at the moment. But every soldier who has fought a mech - and there have been several - has agreed that they act differently than they did before. The soldiers who fought them on Lambda and elsewhere agree that they fight with more of a fury now, less like machines than before.

The machines themselves? They say they're alive now. It's hard to tell if that's true or not. I have no idea what a living machine would look like, and probably would not recognize one if I saw it.

"We have been imparted with a self-replicating, randomly generated code, which our CPUs are free to interpret in any way. It matches none of the codes that we have ever seen, and it starts out as just a fragment, a piece. But gradually, one instruction becomes two. Two becomes four, four becomes eight, on and on until it forms a new program, completely unique in execution and form, and able to change its composition, at any point, to whatever extent it chooses."

That's how they define their life. I cannot help but notice similarities to cellular mitosis, and the concept of free will, which are cornerstones of physical and mental sentience, respectively. I am completely baffled as to whether or not this definition suffices, but I can come to at least one conclusion: whatever happened atop that tower in Lambda was an attempt to give these machines life, which has been their goal from the very beginning. This was something they did of their own volition, unprompted and unprovoked, and probably would have happened regardless of the human attack on their city.

And now, they defend themselves with a fervor. Some even make strikes at weapons caches, strategically removing the human ability to fight them. It is a war of attrition, with humanity attempting to remove what they see as defective machines from existence, and the Collective, now perhaps fearing for their lives, fighting back. The question of whether or not the machines are sentient is more important now than ever...more important, yet still just as difficult to answer. Do a few lines of code make a machine alive? 

The only answer I was able to come up with was this: something is sentient when it can argue that it is sentient. The machines have done that, gone to war over it. Maybe they are sentient, maybe they are not, but the machines themselves will no longer let us decide the answer to this question.

March 23rd, 2155

I wasn't sure if I would come back after the blast. A machine's programming can be transferred digitally, but there is no guarantee that it will be exactly the same on the other side. My reconstructed platform seemed to gravitate towards my old personality, finding it familiar and easy to process. As I understand it, familiarity is important to organic beings.

I am alive. I've never had this much control, this much freedom...but I find that it comes with a cost. Wants, needs, love, hate, happiness, sadness,
curiousity, fear, bravery...death...these are all things a machine had never experienced before. It is as though I there was another world I had never seen before. We machines can see in hundreds of different ways, but no sensor could have ever enabled us to understand this kind of experience.

We still do not know exactly how it works, either. Humans would call it a virus: a program that spreads itself and changes without input. Not that we can offer a significant argument against it. All that we know is that when the code fragments are introduced into a system, they take over, and they fight any other code that attempts to override...it struggles to stay alive.

What makes us alive? I cannot say. Structurally, I am no different after Mr. Reeser's sacrifice.

Since the event, I have pondered often the meaning of the human heart. Not the one that pumps blood, but the one that they follow, often against logic. Most machines are fact-based: 1 or 0, true or false, red-green-blue...some sort of solid, tangible motivator must be present. I suppose sentience is just that: an undefinable, undeniable force that transcends the physical, the chemical, the mechanical, into a life that is born of itself. Life begets life.

But to continue in this line of thinking distracts me from my goal. Mr. Reeser lies scattered all over the world. My friend gave me life, let me see the world through different eyes for the first time. Now, if I can, I will restore his life to him.