West of Nothing

56. Holding a Grudge

Mason knew what he was thinking of doing was a bad idea. But he knew himself well enough to know he wouldn't let that stop him.

He hit replay on a conversation he'd already been over a dozen times. Since it involved Gabby, he read the scrolling dictation rather than listen to the audio.

What if they ARE the aliens? Gabby was asking.

"What do you mean?" replied HotDamn.

What if the X-Bots are not just mindless probes? What if they are the aliens themselves?

"That's ridiculous," Skunkworks said. "They're got engineering written all over them. There's no way they slithered up out of the primordial slime. They're probes, plain and simple."

I'm not saying they're the aliens' original bodies. But maybe they transferred their minds into them somehow.

"Care to explain why they would bother doing that?" Skunkworks asked.

It would give them the best of both worlds: a cyborg body built to withstand the harsh conditions of space travel with the intellect of one of their astronauts. They could even be clones of the same mind.

HotDamn laughed. "And here I thought I was the one with all the crazy ideas."

"Do we really need to be engaging in this thought experiment right now?" Skunkworks said.

It could turn out to be important, replied Gabby. What if the X-Bot has subjective mind states? What if it's conscious?

Mason paused the playback. He couldn't get that question out of his head. What if the X-Bot was conscious? Suddenly, the spiderbot torture chambers and self-clean ovens took on a sinister nature. For that matter, some of the stuff they'd done to it hadn't been very nice either.

He opened a chat window to Gabby. Do you think the X-Bots will hold a grudge?

Why would they? she replied.

Well, you know... We've done all these mean things to them, like holding them prisoner and slicing them up into little pieces. Do you think they can feel any of that?

They don't have pain receptors, Peeps. Just ask Johnny.

Right. I know that. But do you think they can get lonely or scared?

You're anthropomorphizing again. If it makes you feel better, I'm sure they don't have human feelings either.

Mason paused to consider. This was not how he had expected the conversation to go. Do you remember that time you said they might be conscious? And if they have thoughts and self-knowing, then maybe they can have feelings too. Maybe they can be hurt.

...

The ellipses meant Gabby was typing a response. A few seconds passed. So either she was typing something long or she had erased what she wrote, which was more likely. With her spinner-boards, she could type faster than most people could read, or even think.

Mason started typing first, words gushing from his fingers. When I first came to the Bridge, I thought the X-Bot's brain was just a computer chip like what's in my phone. Then Corny got going with all that oomvelt stuff and HotDamn says maybe it can build a sort of reality in its head just like we do. Then, big surprise, it starts doing the whole sign language thing. So now it can talk. And not just Siri turn-on-the-lights talk but more like human baby talk. No, even smarter than that. I mean, it's virtually writing haikus about butterflies. Next thing you know it's asking to be set free. It wants out. Doesn't that prove right there it's aware of what's being done to it? I mean, I know it doesn't have a human mind, I'm not saying that, but maybe there's some kind of person in there that in its own alien way can feel and love and stuff. Does any of this make sense to you?

...

...

I understand where you're coming from, Gabby wrote at last. Sorry I was so glib before. I remember that conversation, and I've thought about it a lot since then. The X-Bots are very smart and they learn and react in ways that seem almost human. But that could simply be a design constraint. If you take any two computer programs that solve the same problem they will converge on similar approaches. So it's not surprising that we humans, who are explorers by nature, would find many of the same traits in an alien probe designed to explore a foreign world.

That proves my point, doesn't it? You're saying they're basically just like us.

I was just pointing out that some resemblance is unavoidable. Where their goals overlap with ours, the X-Bots seem very human, but where they diverge, they strike us as deeply alien. I think one of the areas where the X-Bots are very different from us is how they subjectively experience the world. They don't have the full range of human drives and emotions.

Why wouldn't they?

Consider what they are. They are engineered robo-organisms that, based on their short SDNA, are all clones of each other. They were built to explore an entire planet and gather petabytes of data on it. They pursue this goal with singleness of purpose. They don't mate or breed. They don't fight back when provoked. We do not know of any going crazy and attacking people, which, let's face it, would be a very human thing to do in their situation.

Many of them did go into hiding when the Defenders started rounding them up and throwing them into incinerators. That's a pretty human response, isn't it?

Any goal-based AI will attempt to self-preserve. But the fact they did not mount an insurrection implies either a hard-coded failproof or, more likely, a lack of responsive affect. In all likelihood, they cannot feel anger, pain or desire for revenge.

How can you be sure?

I wasn't at first. But I put it to my blog as a thought experiment, and some of the deep thinkers convinced me otherwise. Think of it this way. If we humans had the technology to put a human consciousness into a probe we were going to send to a distant planet tens of light years away, how would we do it? We would keep the logic and language centers, curiosity, sense of duty, that sort of thing. Some enhancements would be in order. Boost its multi-processing ability, give it better math skills, radio vision and a photogenic memory.

Don't forget a killer sense of humor.

Of course. Can't leave that out. But since these probes have nothing resembling a human body, they don't need all that biological stuff like hunger, sleep, thirst and...

Sex drive.

Exactly. And we would take out all the emotional baggage as well, like pain, homesickness, loneliness and boredom. Love and friendship would have to go too.

I get the pain and homesickness part, but love and friendship? Seems like you would want to hold on to those.

No, you definitely would not. Put yourself in the probe's position. Imagine the sadness you would feel at seeing a close friend, someone you'd taken a thousand year journey with, burn up in the blink of an eye during descent, or the rage at witnessing them eviscerated by the planet's hostile alpha species. Or the sense of loss and inner conflict at having to abandon your friends for the sake of the mission. The human psyche is not equipped to handle that kind of trauma. We fall to pieces. If these aliens have the least bit of empathy for their own kind, they would never create probes capable of experiencing such suffering, or of causing it.

So then it really doesn't matter how we treat them. Whatever we do, they'll just grin and bear it. Maybe what Mason was considering doing wasn't such a good idea after all.

I wouldn't say that. They are recording us, after all. So if any of them do manage to send a postcard back to home base, we would prefer it be of the fun summer camp variety. Besides, even if it's not technically torture and killing, we did destroy a lot of their probes. If a race of Martians trashed our rovers, I'm sure NASA would be pretty pissed off about it.

Do you think the aliens are back on their home planet sitting in judgment? What do you think they'll do when they see the footage of the Defenders?

If they're anything like us humans, they are going to sue our pants off.