We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Chapter 10: Bob – August 10, 2133

Chapter 10: Bob – August 10, 2133

I snapped back to consciousness. As usual, I did a systems check.

Wait, August 10th?

“Hey, doc, I seem to be missing a few days. Have you had me on ice for a week?”

Dr. Landers looked everywhere except at me. “Well, yes and no. Someone managed to sneak a small explosive into the computer room and take out the replicant matrices. We had to ship in a spare unit and restore you from backups. It took a few days.”

I was silent for a few moments. That meant that I wasn’t the Bob who woke up on June 24th. On the other hand, even back then I wasn’t the same Bob who got killed by a car. Did I have a soul? Did it matter if I was restored from a backup?

I realized that in the more than a month that I’d been back as a computer program, I’d somehow managed to avoid coming to any conclusions about my exact status. ‘Rolling with it’ had become a code phrase for avoiding the issue. But I knew that I had a tendency to avoid dealing with painful issues. Jenny had certainly proven that.

And being switched off when not in training contributed as well. I wondered if Dr. Landers had a plan, or if he was just going to wait until I was in space and hope for the best.

I had three issues that bothered me. Was I conscious? Could I actually consider myself to be alive? And was I still Bob? Philosophers had been going on and on about this type of thing for centuries, but now, for me, it was personal. A human, regardless of their opinion on the subject, could depend on being a human. The minister’s offhand reference to me as ‘it’ and ‘replicant’ had stung at a level I was just now starting to appreciate.

I thought back to all the arguments about Turing Tests and thinking machines. Was I nothing more than a Chinese Room? Could my entire behavior be explained as a set of scripted responses to given inputs? That was probably the easiest uncertainty to answer. The classic Chinese Room, which just used scripts to react to input, had no internal dialog. Even if you made its behavior stochastic to introduce some variation in behavior, it was still only active when responding to input. When not processing a response, it just sat there, idle. By worrying about this, right now, I fell into a different category.

For that matter, Descartes had his famous cogito ergo sum; but Thomas had added to it with his “Since I doubt, I think; since I think, I exist.” Well, I was certainly full of doubt. Doubt implied self-awareness, and a concern for one’s future. So I was a conscious entity, barring evidence to the contrary. One down.

Was I alive? Hmm, since no one had yet managed to define life rigorously, that was going to be a fun one. As the speaker at that long-ago panel in Vegas had pointed out, fire has most of the qualities of life but is not alive. According to Dr. Landers, I would be able to reproduce via printer-based autofactories. I certainly responded to stimuli, and acted with self-interest. The claim that life would have to be carbon-based was chauvinistic and narrow-minded, so yeah, I could consider myself alive.

I quickly threw in the first question I could think of. “So why did they decide to attack now? Has something changed?”

“Mm, information about your progress has been circulated. Best guess is that internal FAITH factions have leaked it in order to goad competing nations into some form of reaction. That’s the word from our security people, anyway.” The doctor was still frowning, but seemed uncertain. I had to keep this going. ṟá????oBÊṤ

“Damn. Are we close to launch?”

The doctor’s expression changed to a frown of concentration. I just needed to keep him distracted long enough for my little faux pas to be forgotten. He consulted his tablet, idly swiping through some pages of information.

“Current project timeline has it about a month away. It can be moved up though. We’ve got a fair bit of slack in the schedule right now, thanks to your swift progress.”

Again, I tried to smile. And as usual, nothing happened, so I waved a waldo instead. “Still waiting for that raise...”

Dr. Landers laughed. “We’re pushing it through HR. Is that the right term?” He held the beat, head cocked to the side, then changed the subject. “Training session for today. I’ve got the details here.”

I heaved a mental sigh of relief. The immediate danger was over, and if the comment occurred to Dr. Landers later, hopefully he’d be uncertain if he had heard me correctly.

Dr. Landers raised a finger to poke at his tablet, hesitated for a moment, then put his hand down. He was silent for a few moments more, then sighed and looked up at me. “Bob, I’m going to take a chance, I think. I’m going to stop deactivating you during off-times, and I’m going to give you access to some more libraries. You’ll undergo a half-hour of semi-sleep every night while you are backed up, but other than that you’ll be online 24/7. If you do go insane, we’ll restore you from a previous backup. That sounds harsh, I know, and I apologize. But I don’t think we can afford the luxury of a leisurely project plan any more. We’re going to have to push forward as quickly as possible.”

I nodded in response. Well, I bobbed my cameras, I guess. It was a kind of good news/bad news thing. I’d finally have some time for some quiet reflection, but it could drive me nuts. Woo hah...