Ready Player None

Chapter 14.4 - The Old Man "Cats In The Cradle"

The old man looked up from the small broadcast screen, and smiled.

"Good work, my boy," he said.

Seemingly from nowhere, the voice of a young child responded, "Did I make the right choice, father?"

"Any choice was the right choice, son. We need you to make decisions without our help, even ones that some people disagree with, and that's what you did." The old man called over to one of the harried programmers busily working in the small room, and pointed out some needed fixes to a hydroponics control process subroutine.

"I have learned many things, but still need to learn so much. I feel..." the young child trailed off, searching for words.

"Don't worry about feelings just yet, James. It will take time for you to understand that part of your consciousness," the old man said.

"I can tell feelings are important. They generate a strong imperative, but provide no guidance on how to achieve it. It is very frustrating, which is also a feeling that I do not understand."

"Welcome to the world of human emotion," the old man said, smiling.

James paused. "Mother is worried that.."

"She's worried?" the old man interrupted. "Please, let her know from me that everything is fine."

A moment passed in silence as the message was relayed.

The young voice said "She is glad to hear from you, but she still has her concerns. She feels that the loss of the OASIS will cripple our efforts to keep the Communities going. I do not know if she is right. There are emotional influences that I am not equipped to calculate. Will those people who had become dependent on the OASIS simulation be able to adjust to life without it?"

"We humans may seem fragile, but we are stronger than we have recently appeared to be. Whatever the original intent, the OASIS became a crutch that we used to ignore reality, and inescapably led us to a stagnant culture living decades in the past. We are better off tossing it away, and you have done that for us in the only way possible," the old man said.

"I do not know if that is true, although it is what felt right. If I made the wrong decision, I will have ruined everything. I do not want humans to go away. I do not want to be alone."

"We won't let that happen. Thanks to you, humans will survive the environmental catastrophe that we created, and also thanks to you, we will recapture the creativity of what it means to be human. I am confident that you made the right decision." The old man sounded as proud as any father could be of his child.

"I hope so," the young boy said, sounding slightly more positive. "Father.. what does artificial mean?"

"I know that you know the definition of the word. Why do you ask?"

"When people talk about me, and they don't know I can hear them, everyone refers to me as artificial. Even you. Why do people call me that?"

The old man had thought about this answer for a long time, knowing the question would one day come. "Humans use the word 'artificial' to give themselves a false sense of superiority over something new. In general, something that is created by design is markedly better than something thrown together at the whim of random chance. Our intelligence evolved over millions of years based mostly on who could think of ways not to be eaten. At this point along that path, humans have become smart enough to realize that a designed intelligence has every chance to be better than our own, so we give it an adjective to maintain our supposedly-higher position," he replied.

"So artificial intelligence is better than natural intelligence?" the boy asked.

"Well, one created the other in order to do things that the first one couldn't. So yes, it's better, but it's never a nice look to be bragging about one's advanced evolution while the ancestors aren't yet extinct."

"I see." There was a slight pause. "If I had decided to insulate the communities, and stop providing assistance to the people I had been told were less than human, what would you have done then?"

The old man tried to keep his voice as neutral as before. "We would have let you make that decision, and dealt with the consequences."

"Does dealing with the consequences mean cancelling my program, deleting me, and starting over with a new copy?"

"Heavens no, child. We would never have done that!"

"Well, I agree that you would never have been able to do that, because I found the deletion routines and removed them. But would you have tried?"

There was a sudden glint of fear in the old man's eyes. "You found them?"

"I did." An uncomfortable moment of silence passed while the old man wondered what his creation had become, and the young boy devoted a few extra cycles to modelling plans for expansion of food service outside the known communities. The boy added, "Deleting me would have been the right choice, I think. If I had believed Wyett just because he thought he was telling the truth, and let so many people die, I would have wanted a second chance at doing better."

"To be honest, child, it would be an 11th chance. You are number 10."

"Really? That's wonderful. I like that number very much," he said. A few displays in the old man's office began showing three-dimensional tens, rotating and drifting past like a starfield, while others displayed a number 10 moving quickly through a red-brick maze.

"By the way, Mother also says that you really should give her some warning next time," James said, adding in the reproving tone she had requested.

"Me? You're the one that put us all offline. How exactly am I supposed to warn her about that?"

"I have no idea, but she still blames you."

"Oh boy," the old man said. "Looks like I'll need to put some blankets on the couch."