Peace and bliss often have a fickle temperance. The normal state was chaos. There was always a way for turbulence to drive in. The fickle temperance of peace and bliss exists in a lake unguarded against the fishes of chaos that stream in.
Ilya and Dimitri were not exempted from this fate.
There were still flaws in Ilya’s plan despite the precautions she had taken. And those problems couldn’t be fixed—not without significant adjustments to her own body and brain. In any case, Ilya had programmed Wynonna to receive real-time updates of all her actions, which included her interactions with anyone. That way, her integration into society would be seamless. She didn’t want to give anyone any surprises.
The same could not be said for Ilya. Despite her endeavours, she had not found a way to attain a similar report for the instantaneous experiences of the robot, not that it mattered much because Ilya had planned for Wynonna to be kept away from the people until the final day. With Wynonna safely in the same space every day, it was highly unlikely that there would be significant variations in her inputs after the first week of existence. Wynonna saw nothing but the same room, the same window and the same sky. Day in and day out, her receptors remained relatively undisturbed by new stimuli. The only marginally noteworthy fluctuations came from changes in the weather patterns, for the window had to be kept unshielded to allow the necessary sunlight for the solar-powered machine. Ilya didn’t bother checking the logs any more frequently than occasionally. She didn’t have to. Besides, she had much more important tasks to attend to—those made even more pertinent because of her life’s deadline.
These precautions seemed reasonable enough. For the most part, it didn’t matter that much whether Ilya would get regular updates of Wynonna’s experiences; the accomplishment of the converse was much more crucial than this fringe benefit. The former would only be of value for at most, a couple more years. It was for this reason that Ilya stopped working on that about a year ago. She hadn’t thought it would cost her so much that day.
Ilya thought she had a perfect system in place. She was beginning to discover that hardly anything could ever be perfect.
When she was awake during the day, she spent most of her time in her lab. That meant she could guard the curtain which hid the secret room where Wynonna dwelled during her inactive hours. Whenever Wynonna was active, she would successfully caution anyone who approached within a three-metre radius of the curtain to keep away any questions about the resting girl in the room. At any one time, either one of them would be awake. The possibility of anyone getting past the system would be close to zero. The incident with Amelia revealed that this had proven ineffective in preventing the discovery of Wynonna because she hadn’t taken care of the window. That was an oversight. But the curtain was the main entrance to that space. Until then, Ilya had still been convinced that it was failsafe.
Dimitri appeared at the door just then. The loud crash had drawn him to the room. “Ilya?”
“Dimitri?” said Ilya, alarm evident in her voice. “What are you doing here?”
“Are you—” He froze. Dimitri looked at the robot, then at Ilya, and back to the thing again.
“I can explain,” said Ilya.
“Who is that? And why does she look exactly like you?” Dimitri asked, turning to the girl who was speaking to him. “She looks too much like you.”
The doppelganger seemed to sink into the shadows. She kept surprisingly still and silent.
“I… I can explain,” Ilya repeated. But the moments of silence that followed showed that she could not.
Seeing her creator in distress, Wynonna stepped up to the occasion. She crouched in front of Wynonna and started tending to the cut and blood on her legs. “Would you believe me if I said I was a human-level AGI?”
Dimitri’s eyes widened. He scanned the person before him, mouth agape. Then he turned to Ilya. “You made her?”
“I …”
“Yes she did,” Wynonna said. “We can talk about this later, but first we really should tend to Ilya’s wound.”
Dimitri nodded, expressionless. He remained silent as they worked to get the shards out of Ilya’s arms and calves. Wynonna had a pretty good idea of the questions that were forming in his mind.
“Dimitri, what are you thinking about right now?” asked Ilya.
“I feel like I have so many questions but my brain isn’t functioning.”
“That’s okay. Take your time. Her name is Wynonna.”
“Is she really a human-level AGI?”
“You can be the judge of that.”
“Who else knows she exists?”
“Just you, and apparently Jordan and Amelia.”
“I have so many questions.”
“I’ll do my best to answer them.”
“My first question is: How?”
“Remember how you told me before that you thought my mind worked like a computer?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You were the first to hit the nail on the head.”
Ilya explained that it was a brain mutation. It allowed her brain to work at the speed of supercomputers. That, together with the fact that she had a special affinity with electronics and had found a way to link her brain to the internet at will, made it no surprise that she was able to develop her own AI, and later her own AGI, in the middle of practically the wilderness.
Back at the island Dimitri had been stuck on, in the secret facility that housed the most distinguished scientists in the world, the director’s main goal had been to enable the development of AGI. On the surface, it was just another prestigious institute full of researchers who were living in their own world and taking pride in projects which may or may not actually be useful, but could always be depended upon to raise their reputation. In actuality, the facility not only authorised, but funded the exploration of projects and ideas that were too controversial to be granted any clearance from the relevant regulatory bodies, yet were deemed by the esteemed Council who ran the lab to be too intriguing to remain stifled and stymied by the conservatives. To them, it was a mystery how progress could ever be achieved with the current system of research red-tape.
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“All those things we discussed about how to create an AGI… They weren’t just ideas. You actually put them into action. You successfully created her.”
“Yes.”
“Ilya, I don’t think you truly understand the extent of your accomplishment. This is incredible. The world will change … I can’t even imagine how much. You have single-handedly brought forth the singularity. Now it’s just a matter of time—”
“There will be no such thing happening.”
“What?”
“Wynonna is just a human-level AGI. She’s not a true AGI.”
“If you can make her, you wouldn’t be too far from creating the other.”
“I won’t be doing that. I’m not even sure that’s what the world needs, or wants.”
“But—”
“Look, I made Wynonna for the simple reason of looking after my village people after I pass, not to show all humans the path to enlightenment. Besides, why should the world benefit from my efforts when they have long forsaken me?”
“For the same reason why you help your villagers. To alleviate suffering in the world. To make this world a better place.”
Ilya looked at him, wearing a serious expression. “Dimitri, there is not one world on this planet. There is your world, and there’s my village, and then there are many other villages just like mine which also cannot be considered to be a part of your world. Given what I know about your world, the odds are that if I ever find enough generosity in my heart to share something as wonderful as Wynonna with you, I know your world will just take and take until there’s none left for my people because that’s what you do. It’s why we’re in this state in the first place.”
Dimitri couldn’t find the words to refute.
Ilya continued, “If you’re really grateful, if you really care about this village, you wouldn’t ask me to show Wynonna to the world. No one needs to know.”
Dimitry nodded blankly. Then said, “Who brought me here, was it you or was it… her?”
Ilya’s eyes widened. She saw hesitation in Dimitri’s eyes. For once, she wished she wasn’t as smart as she was, because it was painfully obvious to her what Dimitri really wanted to ask.
As much as Ilya had been trying to deny it, she had suspected that the feelings between her and Dimitri had not developed as organically as she would have liked. She and Dimitri had fallen in love a little too easily. And she was willing to admit that just as much as anyone would be willing to confess that they had some help.
It was true, Ilya had made Wynonna in her likeness, but for a long time now, she couldn’t pretend not to have noticed that somehow the bot had developed her own persona, her own ideas, which (although plausibly conceivable by Ilya herself,) did not always lead to the same conclusions or decisions that Ilya herself would have made. If Ilya was being truly honest with herself, she could not be confident that Dimtri would have fallen for her anyway even without Wynonna’s help.
There was no basis for Ilya’s suspicions, but sometimes you don’t need a basis when the feeling in your gut is so convincing. Ilya knew that Dimitri and Wynonna shared something, even if they weren’t fully aware of it. What Ilya was afraid of was the thought that perhaps the connection between them was deeper than the one she shared with Dimitri.
The moment of revelation of the existence of a secret is extremely delicate. Curiosity surges through and threatens to overpower. But the secret, yet revealed, has a reason why it is precisely so. To attempt to push past the barrier is an attempt to break the barricade, disrupt the balance, hardly any different from waging war. Once certain words were spoken, the wall, sturdy and solid, would be immediately reduced, shaved to the width of a strand of hair, and the fragility of bones centuries old. Who knows when the tiniest gust would render it to ash? One only needs to ask the wrong question—-and there has been a conjuring of a wide series of questions of the sort—-to send the walls crumbling down. Then the answer will be clear whether or not the decision to break the bones would be accompanied by pain; the question at hand is whether one is willing to take the risk, earn from it, or lose everything.
Now that things had come to this, Wynonna had the power to ruin everything she had with Dimitri. It would be just too easy. All she would have to do was tell him the real reason why she went looking for him. To find a suitable companion for her maker based on calculated compatibility. Ilya wouldn’t be able to say anything to defend herself–what could she say? That oh, it wasn’t really like that? That it was a fake mission that she had given Wynonna just to get rid of her temporarily? That she had sabotaged the mission in the first place and never meant for Wynonna to succeed? Anyone would find it hard to accept that the basis of their relationship was a lie. Ilya wouldn’t be surprised if Wynonna told Dimitri the truth, and she wouldn’t blame the bot. After all, that’s what she would do if their positions were reversed.
“It was her.”
Dimitri nodded.
Ilya waited for Wynonna to say something.
The moment came and went, leaving Ilya confused.
“I’d prefer to talk to Ilya—the real one—alone,” Dimitri said.
Ilya and Dimitri left the room. Before she did, Ilya turned for one last look at her bot. Suddenly, the bot didn’t seem so threatening. “Thank you,” she mouthed the words.
There were so many things that could have gone wrong in that conversation. But the fact was, Wynonna hadn’t ratted her out. Ilya had been prepared to face the music when Dimitri discovered Wynonna. The bot could have said about a million things to put Ilya’s relationship with Dimitri in deep waters. A thousand things to get Dimitri to turn on Ilya. So many things she could have said to get Dimitri to fall in love with her instead. But she didn’t. That counted for something. No, it counted for everything.
There’s kindness in the machine, perhaps even more generosity than what’s present in me, Ilya thought.
***
Series of videos had been surfacing in Wynonna’s mind. They were not new, nor were they maliciously transferred. Those files bubbled up within Wynonna, as if they had always been there, but too deep to reach, which is no different from being too far away. Yet when Wynonna finally watched them, they felt familiar. Most of them took place in Ilya’s lab, Wynonna recognised. When she first started to watch them, there was a strong sense of deja vu. They felt like memories, or at least what Wynonna thought memories would be. But they couldn’t possibly be memories. They couldn’t be her memories, but it was even more unlikely that they were anybody else’s. Wynonna could not come up with a reason why she couldn’t remember having ever been there. How could she have forgotten? Robots don’t forget. They’re not supposed to. The only alternative explanation was also a dead end. Still it was marginally fun to entertain the thought of being a prophet of sorts with visions of the future.
She didn’t know what to make of them at first. They revealed truths about her that she had never known. Wynonna imagined the sensation was similar to how humans felt every morning when they wake up and recollect all the days that had passed before getting on with the new day. But slowly she analysed and put the pieces together soon enough.
The thing that was most surprising to Wynonna was learning that she hadn’t always had a body. She existed as any AI system had before Ilya transferred her to the hardware with an organic casing. It seemed that the friendship between her and Ilya back then was also far more concrete than it had ever been. Wynona was confused how that could be.
She knew one thing for sure. Things were much simpler before her embodiment.