Factoring Humanity

“It’s a pun. Mais oui! — that’s French for ‘but yes!’ — Mais oui! Higgs boson! Quark!” Cheetah paused for a beat. “Mary Higgins Clark.” Another pause. “She’s a famous mystery writer.”

Kyle sighed. “Cheetah, that’s too elaborate. For a pun to work, the listener has to get it in a flash. It’s no good if you have to explain it.”

Cheetah was quiet for a moment. “Oh,” he said at last. “I’ve disappointed you again, haven’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Kyle. “Not exactly.”

Cheetah was an APE — a computer simulation designed to Approximate Psychological Experiences; he aped humanity. Kyle had long been a proponent of the strong-artificial-intelligence principle: the brain was nothing more than an organic computer, and the mind was simply the software running on that computer. When he’d first taken this stance publicly, in the late 1990s, it had seemed reasonable. Computing capabilities were doubling every eighteen months; soon enough, there would be computers with greater storage capacity and more interconnections than the human brain had. Surely once that point was reached, the human mind could be duplicated on a computer.

The only trouble was that that point had by now been attained. Indeed, most estimates said that computers had exceeded the human brain in information-processing capability and degree of complexity four or five years previously.

And still Cheetah couldn’t distinguish a funny joke from a lousy one.

“If I don’t disappoint you,” said Cheetah’s voice, “then what’s wrong?”

Kyle looked around his lab; its inner and outer walls were curved following the contours of Mullin Hall, but there were no windows; the ceiling was high, and covered with lighting panels behind metal grids. “Nothing.”

“Don’t kid a kidder,” said Cheetah. “You spent months teaching me to recognize faces, no matter what their expression. I’m still not very good at it, but I can tell who you are at a glance — and I know how to read your moods. You’re upset over something.”

Kyle pursed his lips, considering whether he wanted to answer. Everything Cheetah did was by dint of sheer computational power; Kyle certainly felt no obligation to reply.

And yet -

And yet no one else had come into the lab so far today. Kyle hadn’t been able to sleep at all last night after he’d left the house — he still thought of it as “the house,” not “Heather’s house” — and he’d come in early. Everything was silent, except for the hum from equipment and the overhead fluorescent lights, and Cheetah’s utterings in his deep and rather nasal voice. Kyle would have to adjust the vocal routine at some point; the attempt to give Cheetah natural-sounding respiratory asperity had resulted in an irritating mimicry of real speech. As with so much about the APE, the differences between it and real humans were all the more obvious for the earnestness of the attempt.

No, he certainly didn’t have to reply to Cheetah.

But maybe he wanted to reply. After all, who else could he discuss the matter with?

“Initiate privacy locking,” said Kyle. “You are not to relay the following conversation to anyone, or make any inquiries pursuant to it. Understood?”

“Yes,” said Cheetah. The final “s” was protracted, thanks to the vocoder problem. There was silence between them. Finally, Cheetah prodded Kyle. “What was it you wished to discuss?”

Where to begin? Christ, he wasn’t even sure why he was doing this. But he couldn’t talk about it with anyone else — he couldn’t risk gossip getting around. He remembered what happened to Stone Bentley, over in Anthropology: accused by a female student of sexual harassment five years ago; fully exonerated by a tribunal; even the student eventually recanted the accusation. And still he’d been passed over for the associate deanship, and to this day, Kyle overheard the occasional whispered remark from other faculty members or students. No, he would not subject himself to that.

“It’s nothing, really,” said Kyle. He shuffled across the room and poured himself a cup of the now-ready coffee.

“No, please,” said Cheetah. “Tell me.”

Kyle managed a wan smile. He knew Cheetah wasn’t really curious. He himself had programmed the algorithm that aped curiosity: when a person appears to be reluctant to go on, become insistent.

Still, he did need to talk to someone about it. He had enough trouble sleeping without this weighing on him.

“My daughter is mad at me.”

“Rebecca,” supplied Cheetah. Another algorithm; imply intimacy to increase openness.

“Rebecca, yes. She says — she says…” He trailed off.

“What?” The nasal twang made Cheetah’s voice sound all the more solicitous.

“She says I molested her.”

“In what way?”

Kyle exhaled noisily. No real human would have to ask that question. Christ, this was stupid…

“In what way?” asked Cheetah again, no doubt after his clock indicated it was time to prod once more.

“Sexually,” said Kyle softly