“Rei Ohashi. Pleased to meet you.”
The woman giving us a very Japanese bow looked far younger than me, despite her profile saying she was my age. I’d heard Asian people often looked younger than their true age suggested they ought to, and it seemed this woman was a shining example of that. She had a lab coat on, but it seemed to wear her rather than the other way around. She didn’t feel like a researcher at all but more like someone you might find working in an office somewhere.
“I’m the project lead, Claire François. Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m the lead assistant, Lene. Pleased to meet you, Rei.”
Rei wasn’t the expressive type; it was kind of hard to tell what was on her mind. Perhaps it was simply a cultural difference between Europeans, who valued self-expression, and the Japanese, who found virtue in modesty. Ultimately, it didn’t matter. This facility only asked for ability, not amicability. Even if she turned out to be a little awkward to deal with, as long as she could do her job well, there would be no problems.
“Let me introduce you to TAIM,” I said. “TAIM, this is Rei. We will be working with her starting today.”
“Pleased to meet you, Rei,” TAIM said.
“So you’re the world’s greatest AI,” Rei mumbled, gazing reverently at TAIM.
I’d heard Japanese people tended to envision souls in objects more easily than Europeans. Perhaps that was the case for her as well?
“How cruel…”
“Huh?” I said.
“Oh, nothing,” she said evasively. “So what exactly do you want me to do?”
She wasted no time at all in getting down to brass tacks. I liked people like her.
“Well, our ultimate goal is to avoid the destruction of humanity, as I’m sure you understand,” I said.
“Yes, more or less,” she replied with eyes devoid of warmth.
“More or less?”
“Nothing. Please, continue.”
“All right. That is our ultimate goal, but it’s not something we can easily achieve right away. And we only have half a year in which to do so.”
“I see.”
“What we want from you is your expertise in your field of research, soul quantization. Please provide all the research data you can to TAIM.”
I briefly explained how to enter data into TAIM. Rei figured it out rather quickly, being fairly smart.
“Got it.”
“Any questions?” I asked.
“Just one.”
“Ask away.”
“Are physical bodies necessary for the survival this project hopes to achieve?”
“Huh?” I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “What do you mean?”
“If we succeed in soul quantization, I do not believe it necessary for us to retain our bodies.”
“What?” I said, bewildered.
“Allow me to explain what I believe Rei’s getting at,” TAIM said. “If we were to succeed in turning the soul into quanta and store it in a medium, the body would no longer be a necessary vessel.”
“Exactly. Thank you, TAIM,” Rei said.
Though I finally understood, I didn’t know how I was even supposed to respond. Soul quantization might have existed as a concept since the last century, but only in fiction. It hadn’t been taken seriously as a field of study until some decades ago. The idea of abandoning the body sounded outlandish at best.
“Aren’t our bodies what allow us to be human?” I asked. “Could we still call beings that live purely as quantized souls human?”
“It should be fine as long as we give people the impression of having bodies,” Rei said.
“You mean like by giving them an avatar they could inhabit a virtual world?”
“Yes. As long as the person feels nothing is out of place, it should be fine.”
Was that really “fine”?
“Someone would need to perform regular maintenance on the medium in which the quantized souls are stored,” I said. “That would be impossible without a physical body.”
“There’s no need for a human to do maintenance,” she replied. “A machine could just as easily manage it.”
Rei was pretty insistent. I did think there was some merit to her suggestions, but I couldn’t help but feel a kind of emotional resistance to the idea.
“Let’s end this discussion here,” I said. “For now, enter your data into TAIM under the assumption that our physical bodies will be necessary.”
“Understood.”
Rei remained as expressionless as before, although I felt I could see a bit of displeasure on her face. But she began her work all the same, obeying my instructions, at least for the time being.
“She’s a strange one, huh?” Lene whispered to me after we walked away. She had watched my exchange with Rei.
“Yes, she’s a bit peculiar, I suppose.”
“A bit? Only a psycho would suggest being all right with living without their bodies.”
“Lene, that’s no way to talk about a new colleague. Especially not when you’ve only just met them.”
“I know, but still…”
Truthfully, I agreed with Lene somewhat, but I couldn’t express that, given my position in the laboratory. You often saw people write about forgoing their bodies in science fiction, but a person would have to be insane to seriously think about attempting it in reality. Rei’s expression hid most of her inner thoughts, but she seemed fairly sane to me.
She must truly believe we have to leave our bodies behind to move forward. I couldn’t help but wonder what she had to have experienced in her life to develop such a belief.
“You should get to work, too, Lene. You still have your thesis on the reutilization of radioactive waste and fossil fuels to write, don’t you?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
On my urging, Lene returned to her desk and began working. I returned to my project as well.
Was the physical body truly necessary for humans? Surely it had to be, right?
A similar problem had revealed itself over the course of making AI. The human mind was deeply connected with the body, so much so that it was impossible to make an advanced AI—an artificial mind made in the image of a human mind—without giving it the five senses a body would have.
As an example, an AI could never truly understand the taste of things, or the feeling of eating, without experiencing it themselves. When I made TAIM, I had given her ways to artificially experience the same five senses as humans, surmounting the unscalable wall that had separated past programs from their creators.
It stood to reason then that I believed humans needed bodies. But Rei strongly insisted otherwise. Just what kind of experiences and thinking could have led her to such a different conclusion? While I felt she was a bit off-putting, I couldn’t deny that she intrigued me as well.
Other than that, one thing about Rei still bothered me. What had she said earlier when she first saw TAIM? Something about something being cruel? What did she mean?
Regardless, with Rei now onboard, our research progressed at a dizzying pace. In just four months, she did what I had been unable to: She created a working plan to save humanity.
When I heard about the Eternal Loop System, I knew without a doubt it had been born from the mind of a genius.