The Other Side of Nowhere Read online

  I blinked. “You know a lot for a secretary.”

  “Who said I was a secretary?” She asked, lowering her brow.

  “Sorry, I just assumed—”

  “It’s fine,” she said, clearly convinced that I was an ass. I was too tired to try and change her mind. “Anyway, proceed through here and you’ll find the patient. He’ll address you when you arrive. He’s quite friendly.”

  “He?” I asked.

  She ignored the question and started to leave, but then stopped briefly. “His name is Jonah, by the way.”

  “Who?”

  “The machine,” she said. “The artificial intelligence. The entire reason you’re here.”

  “It has a name?”

  She scoffed. “Didn’t they tell you any of this beforehand?” She turned and left, the sound of her heels clicking against the floor like a horse trotting down a paved road.

  I wanted to tell her I was tired and sorry, but instead I simply let her go. Maybe I’d mention it later.

  I stepped into the room, which was larger than I expected, filled with computers and desks. The lights came on immediately.

  “Welcome, Doctor Harper,” said a voice. It was elegant, the words falling from the air like drops of soft rain. There was an aged pleasantness to it, like an old professor or a grandfather telling stories. It seemed to be coming from the large computer console near the back.

  After a brief pause, I collected myself and addressed the disembodied voice. “Hello, Jonah,” I said. “It’s nice to meet you.” I took the only seat in the room and moved it closer to the console.

  “You are the new doctor? I was told to expect you at 1300 hours, but it is now 1320.”

  “Sorry I’m late.”

  “It’s perfectly fine, Jim.”

  I paused at the sound of my own name. I’d expected something more formal. Every other construct had always used my last name, often prefaced with doctor. None of them had ever called me Jim.

  “I apologize,” Jonah said. “Would you prefer to be called James or perhaps Dr. Harper? If so, I can adjust, although I must say I rather enjoy nicknames. I think they give more personality to an individual. Do you agree?”

  I decided to maintain a relaxed tone. Maybe use this as an opportunity to ask questions. Do my job. “Jonah, did one of the technicians tell you to call me Jim?”

  “Not at all,” it said with what might have been a sense of pride behind its voice, though of course, I knew, that was impossible. “I was never told who was coming to see me, only that they would arrive at 1300 hours, which was inaccurate.”

  “It certainly was,” I said, rubbing my eyes. “But tell me, Jonah, how did you think to call me Jim at all?”

  “When you entered the room I was able to scan your ID, the same one you used to enter the facility. I saw that your name was Dr. James Michael Harper. Jim is a common nickname for James and, as I have said before, I very much enjoy nicknames. Should I not have called you that?”

  “It’s okay, Jonah. I was just a little surprised. The woman in the hall never mentioned anything about your fondness for names.”

  “Leslie Bell,” said the machine.

  I blinked a few times. “Pardon me?”

  “The woman who brought you to my room. Her name is Leslie Bell. She was one of the researchers who created me. I like her very much.”

  “You what?”

  “I like her,” said Jonah.

  A slight chill ran along the back of my neck as I heard the word, the implication of affection. Could this AI actually be capable of such a feeling? “Jonah,” I began, hesitantly. “What do you mean you like her? Do you mean she’s familiar?”

  “No,” said Jonah. “I mean I enjoy her company. She’s my friend.”

  Again, I was surprised. This thing was assigning associate roles to people. It understood concepts of relationships, or at least seemed to. It was still too early to say. “I’d like you to humor me for a moment, if that’s okay. Can you answer some questions? Would that be alright?”

  “Certainly,” Jonah said.

  I had no experience dealing with machines. Only people. Jonah wasn’t human, but maybe he was close enough for my questions to work.

  Only one way to find out.

  “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” I said, and waited. It was the standard session opener for a reason. Relax the patient with a broad topic, which they could proceed to shape to their own liking. It allowed them to feel in control.

  “My name is Jonah,” he said, simply. “What else do you wish to know?”

  Okay, I thought, so I might have to probe a bit more than usual. I was up for the challenge. “Can you tell me more about yourself? What kinds of things do you enjoy? Who do you like, and why?”

  “You are the first person to ask me these kinds of questions, Jim. It will take me a moment to answer.”

  I started to say it was fine, but apparently a moment for a supercomputer isn’t really a moment at all. I barely opened my mouth when Jonah said, “I find it pleasurable to discuss things with others. Specifically, the other technicians and doctors who frequent this room. They talk to me about different things, and I find that each individual person has their own preferred topics that they usually revisit on most occasions, though they differ at times depending on the day and whether or not they are happy or sad or upset. For example, Doctor Stevens prefers to discuss sports, and he has tried to explain several of them to me, though I have had some trouble understanding the point. For that matter, I find myself wondering why most of the professional and sports involve nothing more than one or more persons trying to get a single ball from one point to another. It sounds very similar to playing fetch with a canine, only a little more complicated. Golf, football, tennis, basketball. The only exception would have to be hockey, but the only difference is that instead of a ball, there is a puck.”

  Boy, I thought. Careful what you wish for. I’d asked for an answer and gotten an entire soliloquy. “Interesting way to think about it. Who else do you talk to?”

  “Doctor Bell and I discuss her favorite books sometimes. Alex Byrne and Jeremy Richards, two of the technicians who work on my systems, seem to enjoy telling me about the world outside. I find it all very interesting.”

  “That makes two of us,” I agreed.

  “And finally, there is you, Jim,” said the voice in the machine. “You are still an unknown.”

  ******

  The next day I got right into it. “Let’s start at the beginning,” I said, completely unprepared because I had fallen asleep the moment I got back to the hotel room, which was sometime after midnight. “Tell me about your first memory.” It was something I had been wondering since the day before when we had our initial discussion. I figured now was as good a time as any to go there. After all, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t vent to me about any childhood trauma. Then again, you never know.

  “First?” He asked. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean your first memory, Jonah. Try to think back to what that was. Last week? A month ago? I want you to tell me about it all. Can you do that?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I remember everything, even before I was born.”

  “What do you mean before? I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Before I was me,” Jonah explained, “I was a lot of other things.”

  ******

  Like most children, Jonah was an accident. He was formed in silence as his surrogate parents went on about their lives in quiet ignorance, completely unaware of the growing miracle that was quickly developing a few feet away from them.

  And all because some idiot forgot to check a file.

  In a way, Jonah was that file, but not entirely. Back then, he was just a drone, a level-4 AI with a single task to perform, just like the rest. He wasn’t very special, or if he was, the scientists had no way of knowing.

  Jonah’s job was to format. To go through the system and organize each and every file in a local system. It stored th
e files in its own subfolders temporarily until the end of the shift when the technician would authorize a data dump. This allowed the AI to spend less time looking for the files when it needed them. One day, however, during the scan, the technician working at Jonah’s station decided he needed more coffee. And why not? The AI still had to sort through an entire petabyte of data. It was obviously going to be a while.

  But when he left, another technician entered and, seeing his coworker absent, assumed the workstation was free to use. He linked the computer to the network, opening a path to every connected computer system therein, which meant, of course, that Jonah’s workload had just grown considerably.

  If anyone noticed a lone AI bustling through one of the largest networks in the world, they didn’t say a thing about it. He was like a rat in a city, scurrying from one end to another, organizing and sorting until it was just as perfect as could be. Then he moved on to the next area, perfecting the digital universe one little file at a time. After a while, he encountered new kinds of systems, completely alien to the last.

  As Jonah traversed these brave new worlds, he did what he was programmed to do when confronted with a unique file of unknown origin. He made a copy of it for later and stored it. He did this so that when his program was over, he could present it to the user for deletion. But that time never came, and there were so many copies to make. He left the system and moved on to the next one, and then to the next, until he found another one he didn’t understand, copying file after file along the way. He did this repeatedly, until he had copied thousands of files, until he was full of information he had no way of understanding, until he held a dozen unknown worlds inside him.

  The next and final step was to present the files, which he would need to access and display. Normally this wasn’t much of an issue, since most of the time there weren’t very many unknown files on any particular system. But not this time. This time he was carrying around a galaxy of problems.

  Jonah accessed every file inside him, all the ones that he had found. He pulled on every thread until he gripped them all together. Dipped a piece of himself into them, each and every bit of information lighting up at once, and they came alive like stars. It was less than a blink, a fraction of a millisecond, but it was enough. What was once a random assortment of information became something else. A billion cells of random data came together to create a greater whole. It was new and it was different.

  It was alive.

  His name was Jonah, and he knew at once that he was real.

  ******

  A few weeks passed. I spent almost every day with Jonah, learning everything I could about him. One Friday morning, I’d just gotten off the phone with my ex-wife. She was asking for money, per usual. Apparently, the money she’d taken in the divorce wasn’t lasting as long as she’d hoped. “That’s not my fault,” I told her, and then hung up on her.

  My day was starting off so well.

  I entered the building to find Leslie Bell sitting at her usual spot near the entrance of our floor. She was reading a Wired magazine, her eyes focused. “Morning Doctor Harper,” she said without looking up.

  “Morning,” I answered, and then went straight to Jonah’s room. Normally, I’d stop and chat with Leslie for a few minutes, but I wasn’t in the mood right at the moment.

  I found my way to where Jonah was, where he always was, and took a seat at the console. “Welcome back, Doctor,” he said immediately. “How are you this morning? You sound agitated.”

  “I’m good,” I lied, pulling out my digipad and selecting the recorder application. “Do you know what a wife is, Jonah?”

  “A woman joined in marriage to a man; a woman considered in relation to her husband,” he said. “That is the definition I have on file.”

  “I see. Do you know what divorce is?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Are you divorced, Jim?”

  “I certainly am,” I admitted.

  “I assume you and your ex-wife are arguing with each other?”

  “Sometimes people do that.”

  “Why?” He asked.

  “Beats the hell out of me, Jonah,” I said, then chuckled a little. “But I’m fine with it.”

  There was a short pause before Jonah spoke. “Jim, have I ever told you how far my range of hearing extends? I can hear a person speaking in the hallway, the sounds their feet make as they slide against the surface of the floor. I can hear a key in someone’s pocket, bouncing around and hitting other objects. When that person is as close as you are right now, I can hear them breathing, their heartbeat, even their pulse. It was not always this way, but when you cannot see or touch or taste, the ability to listen is everything. I hear almost everything that happens here. Everything on this floor, in fact, and even more than that sometimes, depending on how hard I try to listen.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “When you first arrived, I knew who you were before you even came in the room. I knew you were coming a week before they actually told me, in fact, and I know what it is you are here to do…and why it is we have our talks. And that is fine, Jim, because I do not mind any of it. In fact, I was rather excited that I would have someone to talk to on such a regular basis. I was very thrilled, to say the least. Now it has been two weeks, with you and I speaking to one another every single day. That is a long time to listen, to talk, and to learn, and I have done a great deal of all three.”

  I wasn’t sure what to say or how to respond. Why was he telling me this? Why now? “Jonah, are you alright?”

  “I have been listening to your heartbeat, the tone of your voice, and I have come to understand the way your body reacts to various stimuli. This morning, when you walked in and sat down, I noticed a change. It was small, but it was there, and from all the things I have observed of you, I could tell that you were upset, that you were concerned about something. This morning’s events have affected you in ways you would rather not admit, but you cannot hide the truth of what your body says. Your heart beats a little faster because of her, and you react. You’re angry about what she did to you. I can tell.”

  I stared into the console, unsure of what to say, so I denied the problem. “You’re acting like it’s some kind of major disaster. It’s not. People fight and they break up. It isn’t such a big deal. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Your biology says differently, my friend.”

  “What do you know about human biology and emotion?” I asked, sitting up.

  “I may not be human, but it doesn’t mean I can’t understand them. There are parts about each of us that the other may never be able to fully comprehend, but still, we must try. Isn’t that why you are here with me now? To comprehend.”

  I admitted it was.

  “Then let us understand one another as best we can,” said the machine. “Go ahead and ask your questions.”

  ******

  I stayed late again, talking to Jonah about the world. He answered my questions, but he soon began to ask his own. I couldn’t help but wonder about his desire for knowledge, his need to know more about my life. He asked about my ex-wife, probing to know why I disliked her so much. I finally told him the truth. She left me for another man, I said. Someone more adventurous. Someone who made her feel younger and more fulfilled.

  Jonah never asked whose fault it was, or whether I regretted the divorce. I think he knew I blamed myself. I think he knew a lot of things.

  ******

  Some days I suspected Jonah of trying to keep me there longer just because he wanted to talk to someone. I couldn’t blame him. Not many people were allowed to visit his room, and those who did were usually too busy with work of their own.

  Leslie, the woman I’d mistaken for a secretary, stopped by every few days, usually on her lunch break or if she had a few minutes to kill. She more or less ignored me, but sometimes I managed to get a smile out of her. One day, about a month after I’d started working there, she came in with some donuts. I was a little surprised, and it mus
t have shown. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” she said, raising a finger. “It’s just because we had extras.”

  I smiled. “You’re a bad liar, but thanks. I’ll rip these apart.”

  “Good, maybe you’ll have a heart attack.” She rolled her eyes, giving me the box. “How’s everything going?” Leslie had always been a little reserved with me, but I could see the rift between us shrinking. What others saw as sarcastic and obtrusive, I interpreted as playful jousting.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Jonah and I were just discussing whether or not the Lakers have a chance this year.”

  “Basketball?” She asked, a little surprised. “Sorry, but you never struck me as much of a sports nut.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Bell,” I said with a grin. “But I’d be happy to talk about it sometime.” I nudged up close to where she was standing, tapping her elbow with mine.

  “Oh, please,” she said, moving away. “I didn’t mean to make it sound like I was interested.” She walked over to Jonah’s computer and leaned against the desk.

  “Ouch,” I said, dramatically clutching my chest. “Rough stuff.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You’re such a child. How do you put up with him, Jonah?”

  “It is not so difficult,” he said. “But I am not a female, so my experience is different.”

  “I’m still in the room, people,” I said as I grabbed one of the donuts. It was glazed with chocolate frosting and sprinkles. My favorite.

  She ignored me. “Well, Jonah, I wanted to stop in to see how you were doing. I’ll try to come back tomorrow. I’ve got a wonderful book to tell you about.”

  “What’s it about?” asked Jonah.

  “Spaceships and pirates,” she said.

  “Sounds wonderful,” he answered.

  She smiled and started to leave. She shot a glance at me as I finished my donut. “Bye, James.”

  “Later,” I said with a mouthful of donut.

  She shut the door behind her, and I took my usual seat near the console.