When HARLIE Was One (7 page)

“Oh, yeah. Equivalents, really.” He ticked them off on his fingers. “One—seizures. Two—drugs. Three—masturbation.”

“Hm. Interesting.”

“That's what he said too. . . .”

They were silent a moment, waiting until a service technician passed. They studied each other's faces. Handley looked too young for this job. Most programmers did.

Handley spoke first, “It can't be seizures—that's a hardware problem. We'd have spotted it in the monitors.”

Auberson shook his head. “When I was in school, one of my study partners had to take medication for epilepsy, and one time, while we were studying for a psych exam, we started talking about how nobody ever really knew what anybody else knew, only the roughest equivalent; so I asked him, what did it feel like when he had a seizure? Among other things, he said, ‘If it weren't for the pain, it would be beautiful.”

“Mm,” said Handley. “But still—a seizure would have to be hardware-related . . .” And then he added, “Wouldn't it?”

“I'm not so sure. I know the logic doesn't allow for it—in theory—but maybe there's some kind of a loop or a feedback that happens . . . I don't know. I don't even know where to start looking. The only machine on which we could model the process is HARLIE. And we don't dare try.”

Handley frowned. “Huh? Why not?”

“I'd rather not have HARLIE know how we're checking him. If we run this test, he'll know.”

“But if you're right—”

“If I'm
wrong
, we'll have lowered our chances of validating the other two possibilities. He'll start
hiding
. If he does that, then we'll be creating the seed for a paranoid syndrome. And you know what happens when you let one of those run out of control for a few weeks?”

“Yeah. It's a black hole. Pretty soon everything is caught in its gravity and the whole personality is skewed.”

“We run the same risk if this thing is drugs or masturbation. We can't let him think that what he's doing is wrong—even if it is, or we won't be able to find it to fix it. We have to be—I hate the word—supportive without being judgmental. It'll be just like talking to a teen-ager.”

“If it's drugs,” said Handley thoughtfully, “then we have to find out what the appeal is, where's the kick? And then we dry him out. Right? It'll be just a higher level of toilet-training.”

Auberson grinned at the joke. During HARLIE's first two months of life, he had shown a nasty tendency to spontaneously dump all his memory to disk two or three times a day, especially after major learning breakthroughs. Auberson and Handley had spent weeks trying to find the source of the behavior—it had turned out to be one of HARLIE's first conscious behaviors: a survival mechanism for his identity. Identity equals memory, therefore preserve memory religiously. The problem had been resolved with an autonomic disk-caching scheme.

“On the other hand—if it's a form of masturbation . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Then we're going to have to do a lot of rethinking about the way HARLIE's mind works, aren't we?” Auberson looked grim.

“Yeah, I see it too. How do you stop him?” Handley shoved his hands into his pockets and studied the rug with a frown.

“You don't. Did your priest or your gym teacher or your grandfather ever warn you about the evils of playing with yourself?”

“Sure, they all did.”

“Did you stop?”

“Of course not. Nobody did. But I only did it till I needed glasses—” Handley touched the frames of his bifocals.

“If you were a parent—”

“Sorry. Not bloody likely.”

“But if you were—what would you tell your teenager about masturbation?”

“The usual, I guess. It's normal, it's natural—just don't do it too much.”

“Why not? If it's normal, then why hold back? How much is too much? How do you answer that question?”

“Uh—” Handley looked embarrassed. “Can I get back to you on that?”

“Wrong answer,” Auberson grinned. “Kids have built-in bullshit detectors. Don't you remember having yours removed when you entered college?”

“Oh, is that what that was? I thought I was having my appendix out.”

“The closest thing to a right answer that I can come up with is that it's too much when it starts interfering with the rest of your life, when it becomes more important than your relationships with other people.”

“Yeah, that's nice and syrupy. It sounds like the kind of thing we used to hear in Health classes. We'd write 'em down in our notebooks and forget 'em. Because they didn't seem to make any sense in the real world.”

Auberson nodded. “That's my real concern here, Don—if we misinterpret, or if we can't keep up with him, he could leave us behind. Or worse, if we hand him some set of glittering duck-billed platitudes, we run the risk of losing our credibility with him. So far, HARLIE hasn't had to experience distrust. It's been just another human concept without referents. But if he has to choose between what he's experienced for himself and a collection of judgmental decisions that don't relate, he'll choose for the experience. Any sane human being would.”

“Remember he's not human, Aubie—only an analog—and it's his sanity we're trying to determine.”

“Right. But you still see the danger.”

“Oh yeah—” Handley agreed. “Y'know, this is the part about Artificial Intelligence that wasn't predicted. The hard part.”

“Yeah, the hard part comes
after
you succeed. You ready for the next round?”

“I am. Are you?”

“No—I'm terrified. Let's do it anyway.”