West of Nothing

3. The Bridge

"Let me get this straight," said the Gray Man. "You're going to intentionally use a lid with a hole in it to see if the X-Bot tries to escape?"

"The resonance oscillator will keep it in bounds."

"Resonance oscillator?" Mason let out.

"It's a sound waveform generator with an adjustable frequency that can be made to match the natural resonance of most solids," explained Grizzly. "A glorified tuning fork basically. It can do some pretty amazing things. Tune it properly and you can direct the flow of water up a vertical plane. When the X-Bot starts climbing the walls, we flip on the resonator and it makes the glass ring like a bell. Knocks it flat on its ass."

"It can climb walls?"

A new face appeared on a jumbo, a woman's. She had Nordic skin with pronounced cheekbones and a firm jaw. She might have been attractive in a butch sort of way were it not for the hideous corn rows that sprouted from her scalp like baby cauliflower. "The X-Bot has superfine hairs on the bottoms of its feet that use electrostatic energy to make them clingy, like what allows geckos to climb so well."

"What happens if the resonator stops working?" asked the Gray Man.

"The X-Bot gets loose and goes on a killing rampage!" Shouter said.

Grizzly sighed. "We're installing a remote triggered emergency plug."

Mason asked what seemed like an obvious question. "Can't the X-Bot just break through the glass like it did with the jar?"

"That's not just any glass," said Grizzly. "That's ten centimeters of diamond-reinforced borosilicate built to withstand thousands of atmospheres. They make the windows of deep sea submersibles out of the stuff. Our little robo-friend won't be chipping his way through that, not in a thousand years."

"Can't we just use a transparent lid?" The Gray Man paused for a few seconds after which he answered himself. "Yes, I suppose the acoustic and pressure differences would be detectable." A longer pause. "So you want the X-Bot to believe—if that's the right word—that it really has a chance of escaping?" Pause. "I take your point. Just keep a close eye on it. We don't want any jailbreaks."

Mason wondered who the Gray Man was speaking to. He wasn't wearing an earpiece. "Is someone saying something?"

"Are you illiterate as well as stupid?" Shouter said. "Gabby was talking."

The Gray Man pointed out a digital ticker band that ran above the jumbo monitors.

Hi, Peeper, it read in scrolling text. Good to meet you. The face that appeared on the jumbo was cute in a beluga sort of way, and ugly in the same way. She had a bulging forehead, squinty eyes and permanently puckered lips. The hand she raised to wave at him was encased in a tubular contraption that looked like a designer coffee can that had been hollowed out, sliced into cross-sections, and reassembled by a mad scientist.

"She has a mild case of neurofibromatosis," Shouter explained. "You know, that thing the Elephant Man had. She had to have her larynx removed when she was a kid. But don't let her appearance fool you. Gabby is a freaking genius of the first order."

Aw, (blush). The hand devices whirred into action, her fingers playing across their inner surfaces as words appeared on the ticker. Some sort of keyboard then. I was just explaining to the major here that we need to create an action incentive. Unless the X-Bot is convinced there is some way out of its confinement, it will just go and sulk in a corner. We can't learn anything about it that way.

"You talk about it like it's almost human," Mason said.

It's called anthropomorphizing, and yes, I suppose I'm a bit guilty. But human psychology gives us a baseline for assessing the intelligence of artificial agents. Think about it, if you were shut up for days in an unbreakable glass cage, what would you do?

"I'd probably bash my brains out."

Let's hope it doesn't do that. The point is, if you knew escape was futile then you would conserve your energy. That's not being defeatist. It's just logical. On the other hand, if you saw the way out was right in front of you...

"You'd fight like hell to get away," Mason said. "You really think the X-Bot is that smart?"

Who knows? That's the point of the experiment.

Mason hadn't noticed the Gray Man leave until the doors were already closing behind him. "Where's he going?" he asked, wondering if he was allowed to stay.

"I'm sure the major has more important things to do than babysit the new guy," said the woman with the corn rows.

"I can be a part of the team then?"

"What do you think this is, the debate squad?" Grizzly said. "Find something useful to do and shut your damn trap. You can take that workstation cluster over there. Corny can get you logged in and show you where the files are. I suggest you give them a good skimming over. Maybe then you'll stop asking so many dumbass questions."