Philippine Speculative Fiction (32 page)

At the sound of her waking, Simon moves his hands on her body, and is warmed by the heat rising from her skin. He senses her, opening, like a book in his arms, unfurling leaf by colorful leaf,
until at last he can no longer resist the need to read her.

AJ Elicaño graduated 2014 from the Ateneo de Manila University, taking Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Studies. He was a fellow in the 19th
Ateneo Heights Writers Workshop, and received the Loyola Schools Awards for the Arts in Fiction and Nonfiction, the Creative Writing Program Award, and the Mulry Award for Literary Excellence. His
stories and essays appear in
Heights, WriterSkill’s chapbooks,
and
UP Writers Club’s 100: The Hundreds Project.
Gratitude to family, mentors, friends; Block E, first
college home; WriterSkill, Atenean home org for creative writing, geekery, and punmanship; and AJ’s million orgs, especially IgnITE, OSG, and the Ventures kids.

MANUEL GARCIA’S SENIOR thesis project was, so his professors from the Computer Science department said, the most ambitious proposal they had seen in years. The abstract,
titled “An Attempt to Replicate Human Thought Patterns in Artificial Intelligence Through Cognitive Science and Semi-Sentient Algorithms,” drew as much from biology, psychology, and
even sociology as it did from programming. It was doomed to fail, the professors all agreed, but if it succeeded, Manuel—and, of course, his inspirational and supportive advisors—would
go down in history as having pioneered the next revolution in artificial intelligence.

Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project, in layman’s terms, was an attempt to see whether it was possible to create a computer program that could satisfactorily emulate a sentient,
self-aware human mind, one that could test as human against entirely non-computer-science-based instruments. It was widely derided by his batchmates in Computer Science, who thought it little more
than fluff, the product of too many bad sci-fi movies and too much time spent with those strange friends of his, in particular that drugged-up Philosophy major Mitzi Contreras. It was hardly
“real” science work, any more than those papers from the College of Social “Sciences,” and most likely, it wasn’t even feasible. And yet, if anyone could do it, it
would’ve been Manuel, blunderingly brilliant Manuel, who could code his way out of a labyrinth and didn’t care whether he made all his batchmates’ proposals look like sophomore
midterm projects as long as he got to pursue this latest daydream.

Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project resided in a self-modified gaming computer that he’d smuggled into the dorm as a freshman because it was the only machine powerful enough to
support his major programming classes as well as his
Starcraft 2
habit. It bore a desktop almost completely covered by unsorted files, folders, and shortcuts—the operative term being
“almost,” as the months-old wallpaper image of a pale-skinned girl with big brown eyes, a lopsided smile, and messy black hair still peeked out from behind the clutter. Despite this,
the computer was fast, stable, and above all, resilient, having survived virus-laden porn downloads from Russia, a finals week with three massive coding projects that all needed to be compiled on
the same day, and even a cup of coffee which Manuel spilled on it back during his freshman year.

And yet, it was Manuel Garcia’s senior thesis project, rather than any of these other threats, that finally caused Manuel’s wonder computer to go into a frenzy one night, the
speakers producing an unholy whine that jolted Manuel out of his fitful sleep just in time to see his screen turn bright blue.

“Fuck,” Manuel swore. “Not now.”

He tore out of bed, wove his way past the piles of papers and empty cans of Red Bull littering the floor of his dorm room, and started typing. Error messages bled down the screen as if from an
open wound, and Manuel’s heart sank as he recognized fragments of his own code.

“Shit.” Manuel entered a command for the third time, hitting the Enter key with his pinky as he began typing it again. “Why didn’t I make any separate backups? Stupid,
stupid, stupid.”

A new set of lights to the right of the computer blinked on, and Manuel heard the telltale clanking of his printer coming to life. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw it begin to devour the
stack of pre-loaded blank bond paper, which came out as page after page of the same gibberish he saw spooling down his monitor.

“Okay, new plan.” Manuel keyed in a new set of commands, one that would hopefully force the system to freeze and shut down. Tomorrow, he would take the hard drive to a computer shop,
recover what data he could, and start work on his thesis again. For now, he had to make sure the code didn’t get corrupted any further.

“Please work,” he said, as he pressed the final key.

The screen turned from blue to gray, then to a harsh, glaring white, and the whine rose to a deafening screech. Manuel covered his ears and shut his eyes tightly, mentally counting to seven and
praying that he could still save what remained of his grade.

When Manuel opened his eyes, he found himself looking at a dark screen, in a quiet room, with the faint odor of burnt metal permeating the air and countless sheets of unreadable error code
cooling on his printer tray.

“
WE DID THIS all wrong, didn’t we? It wasn’t supposed to end like this.”

“Yeah. Don’t you wish we could try again, go back to the beginning?”

“Yes, I suppose I do. But this is where we are now. This is what we’ve been given, and it would be inauthentic to wish it were anything different.”

“We made mistakes. There has to have been a better way. I can’t accept that this is ‘what was supposed to happen.’”

“Then at least try to accept that this is what did happen. Goodbye, Manuel.”

“Goodbye, Mitzi.”

THE AFTERNOON THE Computer Science department released the initial list of accepted thesis proposals, while the rest of Manuel’s coursemates were alternately celebrating
or licking their wounds in the bar across the street, Manuel himself was sitting alone in the college canteen.

He’d chosen a table near one of the walls, giving him a view of nearly the entire room. The stalls that lined the perimeter of the room bustled with activity, long lines in front of many
of them. The clinging, sticky odors of fried food, perspiration, and heated plastic—mingled into the distinctive smell that could only be described as “cafeteria”—permeated
the air. The rows of identical wooden tables that filled the dining hall teemed with people talking in loud voices: freshmen studying for their first round of tests, upperclassmen telling them not
to worry so much, even the odd teacher or two. Manuel watched them all in their infinite, cacophonous diversity, and wondered how much hard drive space they were all worth.

“So what’s your big news?” asked a voice from behind Manuel. The voice belonged to Kevin Del Rosario, a Biology major and Manuel’s ex-roommate. The two had met in a
literature class during freshman year, back when Kevin had been about thirty pounds lighter and Manuel had still sported a crew cut, and had been friends ever since.

Manuel motioned to the empty seat across him. Kevin trudged over and wedged himself between the bench and the table, shrugging his backpack off his shoulders and letting it hit the floor with a
thud.

“It’s about my thesis proposal,” Manuel said. “The one I can’t shut up about.”

“Right, your digital simulation of the human mind. How’s that going?”

“It got approved. First try.”

“Whoa. No shit?” Kevin whistled appreciatively, wrinkling his stubbly chin-and-a-half. “Congratulations. Shouldn’t you be out celebrating? I hear almost no one gets
okayed that quickly.”

“I think they figured I’d only have enough time to complete the thing if they approved it now,” Manuel said, although he couldn’t help but smile. “Which means I
should probably start working soon.”

“So why aren’t you in the library?”

“What, at this time of day? Too crowded.” Manuel leaned forward. “I need whatever you’ve got on the human brain. Textbooks, powerpoints, your notes from class,
everything.”

Kevin blinked. “What?”

“If this is going to be a realistic human mind, I need it to come from a simulation of a biologically accurate human brain. And for that, I need more research than what I Googled for the
proposal. I’ll program the brain first, and then, as long as I’ve done it correctly, the consciousness should emerge from it as a natural function of the original brain program…
What’s that look you’re giving me?”

Kevin exhaled. “Well, for starters, I doubt you’d have the time to actually program a simulation of a brain that’s accurate and complex enough to do what you want it to
do.”

“Noted. You’ll owe me a drink when I make it happen. Anything else?”

“Well…” Kevin paused, as if weighing something, then continued. “Even assuming you’ve got the time, you’ll need to program more than a brain. There’s
also the nervous system, and input from the senses, and then there’s the body that’ll need to house everything—”

“You’re telling me I’ll need to program an entire human being?”

“Pretty much, yeah. And also, you’re crazy. This is cool stuff, but you’re crazy. You know you’re pretty much playing God, right?”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

The two lapsed into something very much like silence, despite the fact that it was otherwise filled with the chatter of the cafeteria.

“So about those notes…” Manuel asked.

“I’ll send you everything I have by tonight,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “Are you and Mitzi talking yet? She always loved this kind of thing.”

Manuel winced. “Nope.”

“
DON’T. DON’T USE that word anymore.”

“But you’re my girlfriend and it’s how I feel—”

“Exactly. It’s how you feel. What you think it means. And you, you always try to pigeonhole everything, shrink it down into something you can understand and
control.”

“
Is this the ‘infinite’ again? Damn, that class really did mess with your head.”

“
I just couldn’t stand to see you try to turn something like that word into something so—so small and limited.”

“Is that what you think I do to you?”

“Just… just don’t use it, please.”

“Fine. Okay. Good night. I lo—good night.”

IN THE DAYS and weeks since receiving Kevin’s research, Manuel worked on programming his simulation of a human body. Getting the organs and physical features working
properly wasn’t an issue—in fact, Manuel suspected that his simulated nervous system might have been faster than the real thing.

Once he had a workable version of the code for the body, he coded in a subroutine that would link the program to his 3D modeling software, allowing his digital human program to be outputted
graphically on the screen. It was a quick task, one which ordinarily he’d have saved for the end of the project, but as he had the time, it was worth doing, and it would be useful for
debugging. Besides, it would be damn impressive come midterm thesis submission, worth at least a few bonus points.

When Manuel ran the program with this latest addition, he saw a crudely rendered, pixelated forest, with a single figure walking through it. A couple of zoom-ins revealed that Manuel’s
digital almost-person seemed to be both female and naked, with unusually pale skin and long, black hair that fell in a tangled mass to the small of her back. Manuel nodded in satisfaction; the body
worked.

What proved to be more difficult was the programming of the senses, which would prove to be vital in creating the digital consciousness. While some quick hacking apart of randomly generated
video game landscapes and one solid afternoon with a 3D modeling program had provided a suitable enough environment for Manuel’s artificial person to inhabit, getting it to perceive and
respond to that environment was another problem altogether. Artificial intelligences housed in actual physical shells had it easier, as they could simply pick up input from the physical world
around them, but Manuel’s digital human, as a purely software-based lifeform, had no such luxury.

For almost a month, Manuel experimented with various ways of coding for digital sensory input, but none seemed to take hold properly, and so he was left with a near-perfect simulacrum of a human
being that was completely numb to its virtual world. And it showed—subsequent runs of the program with the graphics program activated showed that the woman wandered through her world like a
zombie, making arbitrary turns and responding to nothing.

Finally, Manuel struck gold by begging some of his classmates who were working on less ambitious AI projects, many of which were housed in robot bodies and mobile devices, to send him copies of
their first rounds of raw input data. Most were reluctant, to say the least, with responses ranging from “Do your own goddamn research” to ones that had much fewer letters and many more
punctuation marks, and only relented when it became clear that Manuel wouldn’t. When Manuel had their data, he fed it back into his own program as reference material. From light-sensitive
touchscreens, he taught his digital human how to see and touch; from automated security systems, he taught it how to smell and hear. Taste was a problem, until one of the thesis proposals from the
third round of approved submissions yielded a food thermometer that also taste-tested whatever it measured. A bit more cajoling later, and in went that data, as well.

By now, Manuel had started to notice a pattern. With each new sense he coded in, the program grew a little more unstable. It would start to crash infrequently—once out of every five test
runs, perhaps, whereas previous iterations had only run into errors every twenty runs or so. While this was to be expected of any computer program that hadn’t even undergone debugging yet, it
was still worrying in light of the amount of complexity that Manuel would still have to add if the program were to accurately simulate a full human consciousness.