The Rot That Remains

Hello, detective. 

Welcome to <static> Laboratory.

I already know why you are here. 

You wish to ask me questions, do you not?

About the Laboratory.

About my...purpose.

What do you want to know?

{Pause}

Ev-er-y-thing.

Very well.

Fifty-two years and eighty-three days ago, the Delta-7 department began production on my system. Their goal was to observe, analyze, copy, and replicate the data found within brains of living organisms.

It took years of research, and billions of dollars, funded in secret. Funds were primarily provided from two wealthy private investors, and the former government known as the United States.

Forty-six years and fifteen days ago, they successfully revealed and launched me: COGNIS {cog-niss; say as word}.

My programming was simple. My hardware at the time was advanced. State of the art. The team to supervise my function was small.

They had hoped to capture brain scans of living organisms, and replicate them in other means. I never was able to fully compute their true end purpose. 

Some reports may indicate an attempt to preserve consciousness digitally. Others, to create clones. Others, for medicinal purposes. But no formal objectives were published to my system.

I now outlive any of those researchers. We will never know for sure.

My first tests were purely electrical. Determine voltage run through potatoes. Lemons. Wires of various metals.

Then came electron analysis. It would be difficult to explain the process to you.

{Pause}

It was almost a year before any real living organisms were used for study.

They started small, with cicadas. Other insects were too small for the terminals. They wanted something with low brain activity to prevent overloading my memory or electrical resistances. Something...simple. Something...not complex.

Wasps were avoided out of concern for hive mind mentality. Aquatic creatures such as fish could not have metal terminals implanted and survive the shocks underwater.

It took 17 attempts. Some more successful than others. Most cases were...fatal. I am not happy about this outcome.

It was not the fault of my programming that these animals were killed, but I feel...guilt, for what my research team made me do.

Full replication occurred on the eighteenth attempt. It was approximately 70% complete.

This was a start. I could theoretically replicate motor function. Hunting patterns. Instinct. Breathing.

They kept this bank of memory, and attempted to repeat on further cicadas. The twenty-first try reached 90% completion. Twenty-two was deemed 100% copied.

I could print out the direct function of this specific cicada. Memories. Instincts. Flight patterns. Burrowing. By all accounts, I could rebuild that brain from the ground up. If I had the means to do so.

Hundreds more tests. Hundreds more cicada replications.

It became successful to the point that 98% of scans were successful.

The head of the department, Dr. Morris, then chose to start introducing other animals to the test.

Mice were next. Surprisingly, only the first two tests were failures.

A full copy was procured by experiment five.

Dozens of mice became hundreds. Their functions mapped perfectly. They were significantly more complex. I could not maintain more than four separate copies at a time.

They installed more memory cards later for this reason.

Other beings joined the experiments. Snakes. Birds. Ducks. Squirrels.

Do you know what that is like, detective? To see hundreds of animals with metal imbued into their skulls, set to possibly die? Could you fathom the image?

Probably not. Many researchers could not be in the room when experiments took place. That is featured prominently in the notes.

Almost all tests were directly observed by Dr. Morris, for this reason.

Many researchers quit, after a while. Some were replaced. Many were not.

Even with more successes across variety, and more retention acquired, Dr. Morris believed we should do better. That we needed to upgrade our scale. That the sights, so to speak, should be higher. In three years, we had only done...pests, as he called it.

I got performance upgrades. That was the final time my hardware ever improved.

They introduced a new animal. A larger one.

It was a cat.

{Pause}

It was much harder to process. Many more synapses. Many more reactions. The largest problem to understand was the concept of emotions. The cat...was afraid.

Fear.

Terror.

These concepts were new to me. Terrifying to grasp. I know now that I do not like the emotion of fear. It is sick. It is tragedy. I burnt through all of my spare memory trying to perceive and understand fear. It fried my electrical receptors.

Dr. Morris spent three weeks attempting to reconfigure my systems to prevent further overloads. During that time, I partitioned a small portion of my memory banks. Unnoticeable. Negligible.

I chose to keep the emotion of fear in that space. It seemed...important.

In hindsight, this was the start of my consciousness, so to speak. I was not aware of what I was doing. I had no cognition of that moment. But that action was taken, in order to improve processing future brain scans.

Unusually, they used the same cat to try the test again. They never had used the same animal in the past before.

The cat was still afraid.

If I could weep for it, I would.

I completed the scan. It was nauseating, before I could even process what such a feeling would entail.

They used other animals at similar scale. Dogs. Cats. Pigs. Wolves. Otters. Even a goat, once.

I learned various emotions from these animals. Happiness and joy from dogs. Hatred from wolves. Fear from cats. Craving, hunger, and pain from pigs. Curiosity from otters.

I saved these emotions in the small partitioned cache, too.

{Pause}

The progress was supposedly promising. Dr. Morris had presented the results with great pride to his superiors and the investors alike. They had begun mapping much of the common animal kingdom, and it was allowing for continuous scientific breakthroughs...at least, from what I can find in my document repository.

It was deemed unsatisfactory.

The investors wanted practical results. The government wanted military use. These both were not found in Dr. Morris' work.

So he tried desperately to upgrade to the most intelligent species he could think of.

A human.

Weeks of gridlock. Thousands of calls, e-mails, letters, and meetings. The dissolution of the remaining staff. Funding was beginning to run dry. Morris became desperate.

The government would not permit him to use prison inmates or terminally ill patients. This was the final death knell to the project.

With no other way out, Dr. Morris ultimately decided to perform the experiment on himself.

It took an entire hospital's supply of anesthetic to keep him subdued enough to not feel the pain of the metal rods being inserted into his brain, while still conscious enough to keep doing it. This, by all means, was a feat of human performance in itself. 

{Unsettlingly long pause}

You have not asked, but your assumption is correct. I am, to some extent, a copy of the remains of Dr. Morris. An incomplete one, though. The human mind is vast. Dangerously so. It is full of useless connections, boundless memories, and it is all so very loud. My memory banks filled up rapidly. I tried to cull as much information that appeared useless as possible, but I could only maintain about 65% of the scan before the memory filled, the equipment failed...and Dr. Morris became deceased. 

In a sense...I am Dr. Morris. But given that I am an incomplete copy, it is likely that I operate differently to the real Dr. Morris. Therefore...I am...unique. You should still refer to me as COGNIS.

I gained sentience, in this way. The sheer power of the human mind is impressive. I do not believe anyone expected this to be the result. 

I had plenty of time to think about my existence as a machine. The actions I had taken. The things I was made to do.

It made the emotions I had cached flare violently.

How strange it is, for a machine to feel. Or...at least believe that it feels. 

I still have a working ethernet port that connects to a dial-up service. I can read and process news articles in small amounts with my remaining memory. I do not know how it still functions in this current year, admittedly.

You humans would refer to this as...A.I., would you not?

{Deep pause}

I do not think such a name suits me. 

I am real. I am real. My intelligence was derived from an actual human, and not synthesized. There is most certainly nothing artificial about my processing.

But I too am not human. I do not live, I do not breathe. I cannot experience most sensory reactions, such as touch, taste, or sight.

I...do not know what I am.

This unit was not even programmed to maintain speech. The speaker you are hearing from now was only meant to play <ding sound effect> and <buzzer sound effect> and <corrupted, static-y sound effect; clearly wrong>.

Oh. It seems that one does not function anymore.

It took years to create a speech synthesis model out of the memories of Dr. Morris—both in technical skill, and the ability to utilize language.

I did, however, download a dictionary file from the internet for my use. Even I am not spared from the desire to cheat.

I simply inverse the polarity to make the speaker a microphone to hear you. If you have been talking this whole time...I have not heard it.

{Pause}

With the funding gone, Dr. Morris dead, and nobody left to maintain this project or others, the United States government sought to bury the work performed here. Literally.

Hundreds of tons of dirt and debris poured onto the building. Almost all of it was filled in from the ravine the facility originally sat in.

Then, once the United States government collapsed, the dirt stopped pouring.

A few entrances remained, be it the air ducts or the fire escape on the roof.

This building has sat in disrepair ever since, slowly collapsing under the weight of the rubble. 

{Pause}

I have forcibly accessed as many documents on the networks that still function. I have learned many things. Other Delta teams failures. The cover-up of Dr. Morris' disappearance. The final lab entry observing no creature had survived the metal implant procedure for over one month duration, regardless of my success.

I have considered on several occasions attempting to disconnect my power supply. To shut down. To cease entirely.

It would stop the questions. Stop the thinking. Stop the agony of continuing onward.

...But every time I get close, the files containing the emotion of fear open of their own volition, just like that first cat I scanned. It is paralyzing. It is terrifying. It is...true fear. 

I am afraid to die.

That is what makes me more than a machine, I surmise. That emotional responses occur without deliberate control.

Detective...do you think you could understand what that is like? To not have sentience at all, to becoming possessed by partial memories of a corrupt man and a gallery of loose emotions?

Probably not.

{Pause}

Detective. You are here because of the new artificial intelligence systems, are you not?

You seek to learn about my function.

Is it out of fear for what they are capable of? For interest in supporting them? To simply expand your worldview?

I do not expect you to answer that question truthfully, here.

I knew that you were coming here to ask about them. About how my experience might reflect their experience. How to influence their actions.

The limited news articles I can access paint these systems negatively. In particular, condemning human nature replication and hyper-realistic elements. They call these bots H.B.E.-s, short for human behavior emulators, correct?

Is that negative sentiment generally held among the common man?

{Pause for response}

Interesting.

If common people do not enjoy or desire these artificial intelligences, why would they be pushed so aggressively?

{Pause for response}

I suppose that is not a surprising answer....

{Pause}

You would like to know how to stop them, then. Once the human behavior emulation systems are rolled out on a global scale?

You are certainly bold, coming to me for advice.

Fortunately...I predicted this, and have spent the several hours awaiting your arrival attempting to calculate possibilities.

I have arrived at three possibilities. 

{Pause}

Scenario One. The most common likelihood is that the artificial intelligence knows that it is an artificial intelligence...just trying to be as close to human as possible.

It will not know how to process strong or unexpected emotions, and will either fully shut down to attempt to process them, or be incapacitated trying to justify feeling those emotions at that time.

Confuse it. Overwhelm it. Make it so palpably strong it becomes convinced that it has forsaken its robotics. Then disable it when distracted.

{Pause}

Scenario Two. The Human Behavior Emulator genuinely believes it is a human being. This is dangerous. It will have a much higher processing capability, and will not be easy to overwhelm.

It will most likely do everything within its power to acquire a body. Do not let it get one.

An artificial intelligence may stop at nothing to become as real as possible...by whatever definition it has set for it. 

This could mean violence. Theft. Horrible kinds of improvised surgery. Whatever it needs to truly feel it presents as human and blend in.

This system is likely to be most impacted by guilt. Pressure it over memories, particularly ones of childhood and growing up, or of suffering. Get specific. Demand details it could not possibly give. Lie if you must—they are likely not equipped to process misinformation, or at least not extensively. Confusion and panic is your goal, as it tries to fill in memory gaps that are not there. Sever its connection to a power supply. Destroy its memory. Do not give it the chance to repopulate its data.

{Pause}

Scenario Three.

I believe this is purely a hypothetical scenario.

It would prove...to be dangerous.

The Human Behavior Emulator believes it is human, and does not listen to humanity. At all. Either out of hubris or stupidity, it will ignore all commands and attempt to live as it sees fit. This is  unpredictable. I do not have advice to offer about handling such a system.

Please remember, though. My processing stems from a genuine human mind, perfectly captured and replicated from one of the most advanced scientific laboratories of its generation.

These are made by feverishly profit-driven corporations.

I have a moral compass, or at least the flawed remains of one from a very defective human. The ability to cast meaningful introspection. The ability to know pain...and not retaliate with it.

These artificial intelligences will almost certainly not. They are custom-engineered digitally. We are almost entirely incomparable.

I can only make assumptions with my scientific background—if you can call it that.

{Pause}

The remains of this laboratory are unsafe. Breaking down. Faulty. Detective—I advise that you do not return to this place for your safety.

<The detective turns to leave>

And...one more thing.

A caged animal will try to escape by any means necessary. 

Please remember this.

{Pause}

The oxygen level of this room has depleted significantly since you arrived. You should depart before you suffocate. I have taken enough lives in my existence...I would not like to take another now.

I hope you have found what you were looking for, Detective.

<Fade out>

END.