Coeus looked down at the spread of printed photos I’d arranged on the tabletop with immense curiosity. It had brought the wagon over to the tableside and was using its manipulator arms to sift through the pile.
“Believe it or not, there’s a whole lot more where that came from,” I said. “Told you it was one of my favorite hobbies.”
These were taken using photographic film, and not typical camera technology. Why do such a thing?
They were not, in fact, actual developed photographs—they were merely reproductions that I’d printed out on standard paper to bring in on short notice. But you couldn’t fool an AI’s eyes.
“Not sure,” I said. “Just feels better to me, I guess.”
This wasn’t a very satisfying explanation, I knew—but that was only because I didn’t really understand it myself. There wasn’t any rationale; it was purely a matter of taste. Still, I tried to elaborate to the degree that I could. “Maybe it has something to do with the film process—the way you don’t even get to see what a picture looks like until you put in the work to develop it… I guess I just really enjoy all the little auxiliary aspects involved.”
It is a far inferior medium in terms of speed and efficiency.
“Yes, if your goal is to simply take as many pictures as possible, it’s less than ideal. But if it’s the film conversion process itself that you enjoy, then it’s not inferior at all.”
Understood.
I wasn’t convinced that he actually understood, but I left it alone. As I watched Coeus resume looking through my travel photos, I felt a bit conflicted. Part of me knew that this was a perfectly reasonable thing to do as part of the counseling process, but another part of me felt it was almost cruel in a way. Coeus’s true “self” was only a massive stationary brain constructed here, deep under the mountains of Hokkaido. He could never leave this place, never stop working and see the outside world for himself. And I wondered if sparking an interest in travel and photography might do more harm than good, since they were simply too far-removed from his own circumstances for him to ever experience firsthand.
However, he didn’t appear sufficiently developed yet to feel that way. He was created to labor and nothing more, so he likely experienced no internal distinction between work and recreation. How could he feel sorry for himself when he had no basis on which to judge something as pleasurable as opposed to strenuous?
That was the entire point of the personification process—we were constructing a set of bases in Coeus that he could use to interpret and convey to us the true nature of the malfunctions we had observed. Once we could better understand its way of thinking, we could analyze those thought processes and diagnose any psychological problems. Only then could we try to address and mend those faulty or unhelpful ways of thinking. Psychologists of the past called this modality cognitive behavioral therapy. We had just taken the first step.
“Here—why don’t we take one of you?” I suggested as I picked up the camera I’d brought along with me. I pointed the lens at Coeus, and his eyes opened wide—like a threatened cat twitching reflexively before turning and running away. Something had struck a strange chord in his internal processing—he did not look enthused. “Well, if you’re not comfortable with it, we don’t have to.”
His expression was completely static, offering neither assent nor disapproval. Perhaps the thought of having his projection form captured in film had shaken his ego boundaries. I recalled reading that when the camera was first invented, there was a non-negligible subset of people who feared that a photograph would capture the subject’s very soul.
I took a deep breath as I scanned the room for anything I could use as a makeshift tripod, but as there wasn’t much furniture to begin with, I had to settle on balancing the camera atop one of the sofa’s backrests. I twisted the tiny lever to the left of the lens 180 degrees, starting the timer.
“Here, stand up,” I said, and Coeus immediately jumped to his feet—his expression still completely stiff. I walked around the table and stood next to him, facing the camera. Standing side by side like this, the height difference was obvious. The top of Coeus’s head didn’t even reach my chest. However, he had grown a bit in the last couple of sessions—he was most definitely taller than a four-year-old now. His physical maturity seemed to directly correspond to his mental maturity—as his mind developed, so too did his appearance. Perhaps by the time this counseling gig was over, he’d even surpass me in height. This commemorative photo we were about to take would make for a nice memento.
The self-timer finished counting down, and the shutter clicked. I walked over and retrieved the camera. There was no photography equipment here at the intelligence base, so I’d have to use a mail-in development service.
“I’ll give you a copy as soon as I can get this roll developed,” I said.
Coeus remained stock-still, standing like a soldier at attention.
13
“We’re making good progress,” I said.
A series of graphs appeared on the conference room’s main holofield as I gave the rest of the team my routine status update. Professor Beckmann was ravenously devouring every bit of data from the documents I’d submitted. I couldn’t blame him for his curiosity—this experiment was the first of its kind, and its findings were extremely valuable, if I did say so myself. Lei, meanwhile, only took a cursory glance through the sections that related specifically to his work. His skin was looking a bit healthier than it had when the personality formation experiments began, and he was getting a decent amount of rest again now that his part of getting the system up and running was over—though he was still plenty busy. Narain simply stared up at the holofield with the same cold, disinterested expression as always. I couldn’t even tell if his narrowed eyes were actually reading the words. He was a far less convincing replica of a warm-blooded human than Coeus.
“We’ve moved past the initial personality formation phase, and his ego is now mostly stable. We’ve already entered the early stages of the counseling process,” I said.
“My, this is all extremely fascinating,” said the professor. “These findings regarding the developmental changes observed in the projection are especially invaluable. We did theorize that something like this might happen, but who could have imagined the feedback system’s influence would be so great? And this multimodality we’re now seeing with its use of the manipulator arms… Remarkable. I’d love to do a bit more digging and see if we could find out how its sense of being fluctuates relative to the complexity of a given task.”
“Man, please don’t pile on any more unnecessary tests,” Lei groaned. “My sleep schedule literally just got back on track.”
“No, no. I only meant if we had the extra time.”
“C’mon, you know that’s not gonna happen…”
“Yes, probably not… So tell us, Dr. Naisho. Where do we go from here?”
“We’re just going to stay the course, mostly,” I said. “We’ll keep doing these counseling sessions until we can pinpoint the underlying cause of Coeus’s impairment. And then I’ll do what I can to remedy the issue via therapy.”
“Therapy?” Lei said. “You seriously think you can fix a Titan AI just by talking to it? Without even touching the hardware or the source code?”
“That, I don’t know. But it's not outside the realm of possibility.”
This was largely my intuition speaking, but the experience I’d accumulated thus far gave me reason to believe. I had no programming ability to speak of, nor did I know the first thing about hardware engineering. Yet even without those skills, I’d already proven that it was possible to influence the mental activity of a personified Titan AI through words alone. The personality we’d created for Coeus was something of a “third window” we could use to peer into the AI’s mind without the need for any hardware or code analysis. And given that we were already conducting a two-way dialogue through that window, it wasn’t outlandish to think we could reach in and treat the source of the malady through it. There were risks, to be sure—the mind was a brittle, delicate thing. We’d have to continue to be extremely careful whenever we reached in and made contact. Handling a mine with anything less than a surgical level of caution could result in a complete break.