Dad knocked on my door early in the morning.
‘Ash?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘Ash? Are you okay?’ I thought this was possibly the dumbest question anyone could ask under the circumstances, but I couldn’t be bothered to point it out. I was tired. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with lack of sleep. It was in my bones. ‘Ash, I’ll have to break the door down if you don’t say anything. You know that, don’t you, sweetheart?’
‘Go away,’ I said.
‘Are you okay?’
‘No. Go away.’
There was a long pause.
‘You can’t stay in there forever, Ashleigh. I’ve got breakfast here for you. And a drink. You must be thirsty. Please come out.’
I thought about it. He was right. I couldn’t stay in here forever, mainly because if I did, I wouldn’t be able to see Aiden.
‘I’ve made you chips.’
That would’ve broken my heart, if it wasn’t already in pieces. He’d made me chips for breakfast. Well, let’s all carry on as if nothing has happened, shall we? Because there’s no tragedy big enough that some fried potatoes can’t make it all go away. Poor Dad. For a brief moment I felt sorry for him.
‘I’m opening the door,’ I said. ‘But just you, okay? Mum can’t come in.’
‘All good,’ called Dad. ‘Just me.’
I pulled the chair from underneath the doorhandle and opened the door a crack. Why should I trust his word? Maybe Mum was there, behind Dad, ready to barge her way in. But she wasn’t. Just Dad, with a stupid grin and a loaded tray. He came in, and placed the tray on my bedside table while I put the chair back under the handle. Then he sat down on the bed and patted a space to his side.
‘You’re not sitting on my bed,’ I said. ‘I’m sitting there.’ Dad looked around my room but there was only one chair and it was acting as a lock. I pointed to the floor.
‘You stand,’ I continued, ‘or you sit there. Your choice.’
He stood, swaying slightly as he put weight first on one foot and then the other. I picked up the glass of water. Food didn’t interest me, but I was thirsty and I needed to be hydrated. Whatever was going to happen, I had to be thinking clearly. I drained the glass, refilled it from the jug.
‘We couldn’t take the chance of losing you, Ashleigh,’ said Dad. ‘And we would have if it hadn’t been for your mother and what she … did. You would’ve died on that camp. You know that.’
I stroked Z’s fur and he lay on his side, tongue lolling in apparent pleasure.
‘It was Aiden who saved my life,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said Dad. He at least had the grace to keep his head lowered. ‘But your mother …’
‘I want to talk to her,’ I said. ‘Not now. This afternoon. At two o’clock I will come to the living room and I will be asking questions. Tell her I want honest answers. This evening I will go to see Aiden. Tell her to arrange that or whatever she needs to do to make it happen. Can you do that for me, Dad?’
He nodded.
‘I’m so sorry, Ashleigh.’ He took a step towards me, but then reconsidered and backed away. ‘I wish you could see how sorry, how … distraught I am. I loved Aiden. He has been a son to me, but …’ I crossed my legs and waited for him to finish. I wasn’t going to make this easy. Hell no, I wasn’t going to make it easy for someone who already referred to my brother in the past tense. ‘Your mother thinks … no, she knows, that this is the right course of action. I mean, I … Yes, it’s hard. No, I don’t mean that. “Hard” is not the word. It’s a disaster. It’s a …’
‘Dad.’
He stopped talking.
‘Tell Mum, okay?’
He nodded and backed away to the door.
‘Take the food with you,’ I said, ‘but leave the water.’
He scurried to the bedside table, picked up the tray and placed the water jug next to my lamp. I took the chair away, opened the door and stood to one side to let him out. He stopped in the doorway.
‘We didn’t want to lose you, Ash,’ he said again.
‘There’s more than one way to lose someone, Dad,’ I said as I shut the door on him.
Maybe I should’ve eaten something, even though the thought made me want to throw up. But I needed a clear mind and my blood sugar must have been disastrously low. I knew Dad would bring those chips back in a flash, but I didn’t want anything from them. The water would have to do. Maybe hunger would sharpen my mind, rather than dull it. Because at two o’clock I would be a defence lawyer. Mum, the prosecutor, would be arguing for the death penalty and she’s educated and super-intelligent and articulate and … and ruthless.
I had an oral presentation to prepare. I suck at them. Always have. That would have to change.
Mum sat on the couch in the living room. The windows had been dimmed, but there was still plenty of light. She didn’t look good, as if she hadn’t had any sleep either. I rummaged through my feelings to see if I could find any sympathy. Nope. I’d used it all up. Dad sat at her side. He was chewing his lip and one hand plucked at his earlobe. Mum was like a statue. I took the armchair opposite, a glass coffee table between us. That was another antique, like the couch and the chairs and the paintings on the walls. I used to think the whole place was beautiful. I didn’t feel that way now.
‘Aiden doesn’t have to die,’ I said. Mum held up her hand, but I knew what she was going to say. I’d had plenty of time to think all this through. ‘You were going to say he has never been alive, in the biological sense, so he cannot die. That’s just words. I’m going to talk about life and death. You might not like those terms, but to be honest, I don’t care. We will not be arguing about the meanings of words, because that’s just going to get in the way.’
Mum wanted to say something, she wanted to argue. I could see it in her face. But she nodded, folded her hands in her lap, fixed me with her eyes.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So, I’ll come back to that, but I want to ask a couple of questions first. Is that goo he eats vital to his survival?’
Mum shook her head. She was on solid ground here. We were talking about facts, rather than feelings, and Mum always was the master of facts.
‘A cyborg, or whatever word you want to use – a humanoid AI doesn’t require food. None of the machines I make would have any use for food. Look at your toy dog. Not that they would be given any regardless, since there’s barely enough to feed people. As you know, that’s the reason pets are illegal.’ I could tell she wanted to stand and pace while giving a fascinating lecture on the subject, but I wasn’t going to let that happen. I needed to keep my agenda in focus.
‘So why the goo?’
‘If I wanted him to pass as human, he had to eat something,’ said Mum. ‘Hence the goo, which wastes no foodstuffs.’
‘Klinsmann’s disease?’
‘My invention.’
‘It’s on the internet. I’ve looked it up.’
‘Of course it is. I made sure of it.’
I nodded.
‘How does he function then? I eat food, which is converted to energy. Where does Aiden get his?’
‘It’s a good question.’ I really wanted to tell Mum to go to hell. This wasn’t a lecture theatre and I wasn’t a student to be patted on the head for being a bit bright. But I had to keep my emotions in check. If I lost control of them, then I would lose everything. There’d be time for emotions later. ‘In fact,’ Mum continued, ‘your brain requires less energy than used to be consumed in one of those old-fashioned bulbs in lamps. Nearly all your energy goes into metabolism and the human body is a shockingly inefficient system. Put simply, Aiden’s body is efficient and he runs on renewables – the sun and the wind basically.’
‘What actually happens when Aiden goes into that clinic if it’s got nothing to do with cleaning his intestines?’
‘I told you. Modifications to his appearance to give the illusion of growth, and checking out the artificial neural networks that enable his learning capabilities. Tweaking those if necessary. Just recently, when his behaviour changed after the skull trauma, I tried to alter the algorithms back to the original setting, remove any possibility of violence. I failed. I tried so hard, but I failed.’
‘What would happen if Aiden never went back to the clinic?’
Mum frowned.
‘Well, he wouldn’t grow, obviously. He would stay the same, looking like a thirteen-year-old boy for … well, forever, I suppose.’
‘It’s interesting,’ I said. ‘Whenever you talk about Aiden, you say “he”. You might try to be the cold, hard scientist, but you see Aiden as a person. You see him as your son.’
There was a flash in Mum’s eyes at those words, but it was difficult to read it. She steadied herself and it obviously took an effort of will.
‘Would you prefer if I referred to the machine as “it”, Ashleigh? Would you?’ She took a deep breath. ‘I thought not. And if you think that I’m enjoying any of this then you are wrong. Wrong. I feel, I feel …’
‘Spare me,’ I said. ‘So, Aiden doesn’t have to die. You can just let him be.’
‘I’ve explained this,’ said Mum. ‘He should not be behaving in the ways he’s behaving. I put limiters on the AI neural networks that make it impossible for him to commit any acts of violence. Clearly he has found a way to get around them or remove them altogether. He was created to protect you, Ashleigh. Now he could hurt you. He might kill you.’
‘Aiden would never hurt me.’
‘He already has. You say by accident, but the point is, you just don’t know. I don’t know and I made him. He might have killed that boy in the classroom fight. He might kill you.’
‘Okay.’ I’d got to this point quicker than I’d planned, which probably showed how little headway I’d made against Mum. It was clear that me just saying Aiden would never hurt me wasn’t going to cut any ice. ‘In that case, leave him in the clinic. Keep Aiden locked up there, where he can’t do any harm. I could talk to him all the time and visit regularly. It would be just like having a brother who was very ill and wasn’t able to leave hospital. There’s no need to kill him.’
Mum did stand now, but she didn’t come anywhere near me, for which I was grateful. Instead, she moved to the window, unfolded her tablet from her pocket and punched in some command or other. The windows changed from opaque to clear. She stood with her back to me and looked out over our garden, the lines of vegetable plots stretching into the distance. For a moment, I seriously thought she was considering my idea.
‘When I created Aiden, I did something illegal,’ she said, her back still to me. ‘The law is very specific on AI. All devices must be registered. I didn’t do that with Aiden. Or your dog, actually. The reason why they must be registered is so that if there are any … malfunctions, swift action can be taken. By swift action, I mean shutting down. Leaving Aiden in the clinic would serve no purpose and it would certainly put me in prison.’
‘Maybe you deserve that,’ I said.
Mum turned then. There was a small smile on her face.
‘Maybe I do,’ she said. ‘If going to prison was the price to pay for protecting you, then I would consider it a bargain. But I told you. Leaving Aiden as he is would serve no purpose.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Have you heard of Stephen Hawking?’
‘He was a brilliant scientist, I think.’
Mum nodded. ‘He was, indeed. One of the greatest minds of the last couple of hundred years. He was worried about the future of artificial intelligence. He predicted, and it’s since come true, that advances in AI would bring about a revolution in machine thinking. Our human minds are slow. We evolve, but evolution takes a long, long time. Millions of years. What deep neural network AI learning does is reduce those millions of years of learning into weeks, days, hours … seconds, maybe. We just don’t know. And imagine a machine that can build a better version of itself and then a better version again and so on, all without human interference. We think we are so much more advanced than an ant. An AI machine could make us seem like intellectual ants in comparison to its mind.’
‘But a mind like that would solve all our problems.’
‘A mind like that probably wouldn’t notice our problems. When was the last time you worried about a problem an ant might be experiencing?’
‘You’re talking about evil machines. Aiden is not evil.’
‘I’m not talking evil. I’m talking overwhelming competence. If humans get in the way of that competence, there’s no telling what could happen. I suspect we’d be brushed aside. Like an ant.’
‘Aiden is not a super-intelligent machine. He’s just a boy.’
‘He is now,’ said Mum. ‘But I come back to what I said before. He has worked out a way to get past the restrictions I put on him. He’s out of control, Ashleigh. I have no idea what he could become, but I can guess it won’t be anything like the kind boy you’ve always known. And that’s why you should remember him that way. The brother who saved your life, rather than the advanced AI that destroyed humanity.’
‘This is stupid.’ I was panicking. I couldn’t argue against all these things. Me against possibly the world’s greatest expert on artificial intelligence? I’d hoped to find a crack in her logic but now I realised I hadn’t had a clue in the first place.
‘I was stupid,’ said Mum. ‘I was stupid to build him in the first place. I should’ve accepted that you would be an only child, like the vast majority of children brought into this world. But I wanted better for you. And I risked too much to make that happen. I was selfish. And now we’re all suffering because of it. I’m sorry, Ashleigh. I’m so sorry.’
‘But doesn’t the fact that you don’t know what kind of a genius he might become, mean you should continue to study him?’ I’d found another proposition, a last-ditch one. It sounded good. It sounded like the kind of argument a scientist would like. ‘You could learn so much from an AI like Aiden. All you’d need to do is work out a better … what did you call it? A better limiter on his mind.’
Mum sighed.
‘Wouldn’t that be good?’ she breathed. She made the windows dark again. ‘Someone once said about AI that people could stay in control because there’s always an off switch. Pull the plug, problem solved. And there’s another story. A person says to a super-intelligent AI, “Is there a God?” And the AI says, “There is now,” and makes the plug disappear.’
‘That’s dumb,’ I said. ‘That’s science-fiction, not science. Aiden couldn’t destroy the world if he’s locked in a room.’
‘I could lock you in a room,’ said Mum, ‘and you’d have access to the internet via your tablet. You could open and close doors around this house. You could adjust the lighting and the heating. In short, you could make changes in the world. The kind of AI I’m talking about wouldn’t need a tablet. It could control everything remotely from its mind.’
‘It’s fantasy,’ I said.
‘It’s possible,’ said Mum. ‘Probable, even.’ She sighed. ‘This conversation is over, Ashleigh. I will take you to see Aiden tonight because I gave you my word. You will say goodbye and afterwards I will shut him down. I have no choice, but I am sorrier than you’ll ever know.’
And with that all my arguments melted away, all my resolve to be logical, cool and reasonable. I sobbed. I lay on the floor, curled into the foetal position, and I sobbed. At some point I think I felt Dad’s hand on my shoulder.