Chapter 11
Some part of Chan’s awareness realized his hands were shaking, so this session was over. He pulled them back into his lap and barely noticed that the old terminal had slid silently back in place, concealing the AI device.
He leaned forward and rested his head on the flat surface of the desktop. How long he stayed thus he didn’t know, but when the foreman came around and tapped him on the shoulder, he arose to his feet just noticeably unsteady.
“You feeling alright, Chan?” The foreman seemed genuinely concerned.
Chan did his best to grin and nod his head yes.
“Don’t fall out on me. They are ready for us to put that desk together and we don’t need them seeing you in bad shape.” The foreman’s sternness began to return.
Despite his highly distracted state, Chan managed to do his part. Once the carts were moved into a hallway space outside a very large private office, the packages were selected and unwrapped carefully, then carried into the room and the whole thing was assembled carefully. In the different lighting, Chan did have to make a few color adjustments and gave it his full attention. To his surprise, they were done before lunchtime.
They gathered the empty wrapping materials. While much of it was a bit ragged, few businesses could afford disposables. These were bundled up for carrying and the carts were almost empty as they returned to the elevators. It was only a short delay when the doors slid open. The man inside looked up from an electronic tablet and seemed quite surprised at where the car had stopped. He said nothing but seemed rather impatient as they rolled the carts inside. The elevator stopped partway down and the man got off in a silent huff. The others looked at each other and shrugged. Chan figured he was the only one who had any clue what had happened.
They paused at the exit because the doorway scanners were temporarily off. Chan spotted the uniform of an IT Inspector – an odd gray color for the shirt with a dark green trim on the color and sleeves. The pants were the same dark green. The folks were part technician and part busybody, conducting surprise visits to places where public terminals stood, and in the few homes where people could afford to purchase refurbished units from government disposal.
Most of the older terminals were simply a large flat display with the guts hidden behind the touchscreen. Smaller displays might have a slight fatter profile, but only the oldest stuff like those at the entrance here. Physical keyboards were rare. Most units had some kind of onscreen keyboard, but plenty of public terminals were small and used a compact keyboard that required multiple pokes to get anything typed. Most people realized this was to discourage their use for anything more than mere consumption of whatever data and entertainment the government wanted to offer.
However, the terminal controlling the scanners at the freight entrance had a compact physical keyboard. It was a wireless device and the IT guy was tossing it in the nearest trashcan. Chan stepped over and stared down in the container at the keyboard.
The IT Inspector glanced around. “You want that? Go ahead and take it, but it’s dead. Won’t stay connected with the main system for some reason. We’ve had a bad batch of those and it’s getting hard to recycle all of them. Enjoy.” He turned back to installing a replacement.
Glancing over at his foreman, Chan grinned and fished it out of the rubbish. The thing just fit inside his cargo pocket. It was a different vehicle that carried them back to the shop. It was an open bed with shallow sides and the wind from their movement was a welcome relief from the warmth of mid day.
As they were unloading the bundles of wrappings, the foreman grabbed Chan by one upper arm. All the same, the sternness was gone. “Don’t come back from lunch break. I don’t need you getting sick on me.”
Normally Chan would have argued, but his head was still spinning. He picked up his lunch bag and wandered off down the street.
A few blocks down, he passed a school building. He slowed and glanced in some of the windows. Children were lined up at the standard school computer terminals. These had large keyboards, not always included in public terminals in most places. Education consisted of children working on programmed lessons at their own pace. What they still called “teachers” were simply bored babysitters who kept order. Childhood antics were limited by the absence of all physical objects beyond the tightly fixed hardware and furniture. They wore very simple uniforms suited to the season and talking was simply not allowed. What Chan saw told him this was one of the better schools for well-behaved children. Rowdy kids were confined in places more like a prison, with no windows at all.
It also reminded Chan of stories about schools where teachers actually taught, students talked and lessons were not simply a matter of data fed from a machine. Even older stories of children educated by their parents seemed simply too far from Chan’s experience; he couldn’t relate to that. It’s not that things were bad in his childhood home, but he was deeply aware that society was nothing today like it was in the past.
Some of the rarer books, those he was most likely to collect, actually dealt with serious questions of society and human destiny. It wasn’t so much the answers proposed by the authors in their fictional worlds, but the questions to which Chan kept returning. Chan knew these books were rare because they were too often frankly confiscated. The entertaining pulp was generally ignored and marginalized, but stories with serious contents kept disappearing. It was the content of such stories that made Chan resolve to internalize them and make sure they were passed into good hands. His only real friendships revolved around the nerdy deep discussions of big questions about life.
So it was upon arriving back in his apartment, Chan quietly ate his lunch while setting up the AI unit on his lap tray. It had occurred to him that AI might have had something to do with his getting that keyboard. Either way, it was worth trying to see if it would work with his device.
He opened it and turned the fake book sideways. The cover stayed open by itself as no book would have done. This time there was a new icon on the first screen. It was a large question mark. He gestured and it opened into a pair of boxes. The one above had a faded gray question mark in the muted white background. The larger box below it was a nice shade of blue and bore a faded exclamation point. “This looks interesting,” he mumbled to himself.
He set the keyboard in front of the device. Pointing a finger at the upper whitish box, he saw a text cursor flashing. He tapped a few keys and was gratified to see sharp black letters. “This is more like it!” He had a thousand questions and couldn’t imagine having to spend all afternoon just trying to get the gestures right. First, did anyone in the government know he accessed the AI terminal at the Grellman Building?
In the nice blue box below, sharp white text appeared. No. It was very easy to read. “Nice touch. I like that.”
And would the government ever find out later? The answer was a bit odd: Highly improbable. He had to think about the implications for a moment. He stood up and fetched his lone plastic tumbler with some water, and then sat down again.
He discovered that AI didn’t like pronouns and preferred impersonal address. So he was always “Chandler” and not “I” or “me.” AI was never “you.” The responses were typically terse, but gradually grew longer. His questions got better as he became accustomed to the sort of wording that got the best response. His fingers got faster on the unusual keyboard. He passed the afternoon all too quickly this way, completely lost in the interaction.
He glanced up and the angle of light leaking past the poorly fitting door of his apartment told him it was getting late. His stomach loudly proclaimed it was dinnertime. “Where does the time go? I really need to eat.”
He glanced back at the device and readied his fingers for one more query but something caught his eyes. The response box had a new message in it. Don’t drink the local water. It is loaded with random pharmaceuticals, industrial toxins and some intentional government poisons. The Brotherhood gyms have been struggling to get your system clean.
?
??What? Wouldn’t that mean not eating the food, either?” It didn’t occur to him that he was simply talking to the device, not typing.
Correct. Visit the life support facility.
Then it dawned on him. “Was this device already capable of deciphering my audible speech?”
Device was ready. AI needed sufficient samples.
He had been muttering and chattering to himself all afternoon. Well, he needed to eat and it would take a few minutes to set up the portal. He closed the device and set to the task. Still paranoid, he opened the portal inside the shelf again and pulled the box over it behind him as before.
Rising to his feet, Chan strolled into the tiny automated kitchen. On one table was an opaque fabric bag and his name was clearly emblazoned on the side facing him. It was a very nice book bag and the material seemed a good grade of woven manmade fibers. Inside were several of the now familiar vacuum-packed bags.
The largest items turned out to be a trio of empty water bottles in various sizes. There was a tightly rolled up item made of an even better grade of fabric. Unrolled it revealed itself as a light backpack. The last item was a small box.
When opened, he found some tiny inexplicable items. The box had written across the top: “ask AI.”
He set them down in a row and pulled his device from his cargo pocket. He opened it and stood it on end near the small pieces. “So, what are these items from the box?”
The query box was gone, but the blue response box was visible. It referred to a thin-walled, oddly shaped tube as an earplug. Chan interrupted. “What for?”
AI can speak.
Chan took a moment to digest that. The response box explained about AI devices typically capable of detecting that he wore it and would attempt to respond to him audibly through it. There were instructions and even an image showing how it was inserted. Chan tried it, noticing immediately that it had no effect on his ability to hear ambient noise.
Greetings, Chandler.
The voice was clearly artificial, but awfully close to human sounds. There was even a modicum of inflection that reminded him of Pete’s odd pronunciation of words. That would take some getting used to, Chan was sure, but he was determined to stay with it. The next item he picked up was a tiny flat piece that appeared on one side a bit shiny like metal. The other side was smooth white plastic with a split down the middle. “What’s this?”
Again in his ear: System on a chip that turns most computing devices into AI. This one is for your watch.
On his larger computer display, an animated image showed him how to peel off the white cover and press that side down on the back of his watch. He performed the actions he was shown. Visually, the sticker was almost invisible. After putting it back on, the watch displayed in low resolution: Hello.
It had never done that before. “If I have AI in my ear, why do I need it in my watch?”
Additional information in context. Also, earpiece is not fully AI.
“But I don’t want people to see me talking to my watch.”
The larger device displayed instructions on placing the last, tiniest item on top of one of his molars. The text mentioned silent vocalization simply by moving his mouth. In his ear: AI will need sufficient samples again.
Chan stared at the stuff on the table for a long moment. He went to the automated dispenser and took out a meal. Eating slowly, he noted that the dental implant did not interfere and was not itself affected by eating. When finished, he ordered several more meals in the vacuum packed bags and moved to the backpack. Stuffing them inside, he then added everything else. The water bottles he filled and put them in the book bag.
As he moved toward the portal, he said quietly to himself, “I’ll never be alone again.” He decided AI knew that qualified as an editorial comment and didn’t respond.