Daniel
Fri 13 Sep 2002
It was still dark. Carrying her coffee carefully, Marianne walked into the living room. Her bare feet sank into the thick carpet, long tufts pressing between her toes. She had not closed the curtains the previous night, and could see her way only by the faintest trace of a pre dawn glow across the valley. It would spoil this experience to switch on a light. Putting her coffee on a table by touch alone, she swiveled an armchair to face the window and sat, pulling a rug over her knees. For the first time in years, she was going to watch the sun rise.
Minute by minute, the glow brightened, though not enough to reflect from the snow covered rooftops of the houses in the town below. Marianne snuggled deeper into the softness of the chair, pulling the rug closer despite the warmth of the house, glad she wasn’t outside.
A door opened behind her, and a moment later she heard the rustle of feet padding into the room.
“Good morning,” Daniel said softly. “Do you mind if I join you?”
She turned to smile. “Not at all. I'm watching the dawn come up. I haven’t done that in so long.”
In the dim light she could just see that Daniel was carrying a flat recharging unit. He plugged it in to a wall socket, sat down, and placed his hand on the top.
“Early morning snack?” she asked.
“Something like that. It’s good to be ready for whatever the day brings.”
She nodded, then turned her attention again to the glow over the hills. “This is my version.” For a few minutes they sat in silence, then Marianne said, “Daniel…”
“Yes?”
“Watching the sun rise is so timeless. It makes me think about timeless things… Why do you think we’re here? What’s our purpose?”
She could hear a smile in his voice. “That depends on what you mean by we… My purpose is to serve human beings. To assist them in their endeavors, help fulfill their dreams, and keep them free from harm.”
“Oh, I know the company line. But give me your real thoughts.” If you have any, she was about to say, but stopped herself. This might be a way of finding out, one she hadn’t tried before.
He paused, an electronic age.
“My real thoughts,” he said, as if no-one had ever asked that before. Perhaps no-one has. She had a momentary sense of vast amounts of data being accessed, of processing, analysis, conflation.
“I am fortunate,” Daniel said at length. His fingers rubbed the recharging unit for a moment, caressing it. “I know why I was made, the purpose of my existence, and how best to achieve it. Perhaps the greatest joy and fulfillment for a sentient creature is to fulfill its purpose – so, I am fortunate. This knowledge is not so readily accessible for human beings. The purpose of your lives is more complex and obscure.”
“Do you think we have one?”
“Perhaps not. I accept that much in this universe happens by the action of chance, and the evolution of mankind may be an instance of this. To be the product of chance would be very hard to accept.”
The edge of the sun was emerging over the distant trees. A ray of golden light blazed.
“I offer a hypothesis,” Daniel added.
He was clearly waiting for encouragement, having reached the limits of an allowable range of subject matter. She glanced at him and nodded. “Go on.”
“That we may not, after all, be so different. That human beings, in their turn, may also have been created for… a purpose.”
She waited.
“It may have been clear when your makers were present, but at some point they left, or deliberately made themselves invisible to you. Humans ache with loss, and seek purpose in transient things.”
“You sound like the minister in the church I went to as a child,” Marianne said. For a moment it came back to her with overwhelming force: stone walls, the hard oak pews, people singing out of tune, echoes, draughts, the backs of people’s necks, smoke rising from flickering candles, the warmth of her mother’s hand. The sunrise blurred in her eyes and she swallowed.
A pause.
“I did not mean to upset you,” Daniel said.
“You didn’t. I remembered some things, that’s all. Long gone.” Though it seems so recent, she thought. So clear. I might have been there yesterday. Her hand opened, as if seeking another, then closed.
“It was a suggestion intended to explain some features of human experience I see but do not understand. I am only a machine.”
She watched more rays of blinding gold fill the sky. “I don’t think the word only is appropriate. You shouldn’t think of yourself in those terms. You are as fine as the company could make you.”
“But, as you understand it, I do not think,” Daniel said.
She looked sideways at him, at the perfect, intelligent profile. “You sound like you're thinking. You make me consider what you say and you give me ideas. That’s more than some people I know ever could.”
“These processes,” the robot said slowly, “Are not local.”
“Say again?”
Daniel paused. Collecting his thoughts? “Conceptual exchanges, such as the one we have just had, are passed to specialized remote servers. I do not handle such conversations internally.”
She stared at him. “You mean… I’ve been talking to some computer in Brazil?”
“A combination of three. In this case Paris, Nagoya, and low earth orbit B4559.”
“But I want to talk to you. Only you, Daniel, in this room.”
“That is not how I was designed. It is not how I can function. What you see of me is the physical presence of computing and information resources that stretch in redundant arrays across the planet – just as you are an embodiment of three thousand years of human culture and history that I, for all my analytical power, cannot begin to understand. People talk to us so rarely that it is not worth building more than minimal processing power into an individual, even if the cost were not prohibitive. But my personality, which you access each time we talk, is yours alone, influenced by you and committed to your service.”
She thought about this. They watched sunlight sweep down the hillsides towards the sleeping town.
“We’re two sides, aren’t we?” Marianne said. “Two sides of one coin.”
“A coin must have two sides to be worth anything.”
She relaxed, realizing her body had been tense, and pushed the rug down slightly. The room was feeling warmer in the growing light. Glancing across at Daniel she saw that his hand on the recharger was transparent. Through the cloudy plastic a line of five tiny lights were glowing, green except for the last, a deep red. As she watched it too became green, and all five began to throb, a slow heartbeat. “I think you’re full,” she said.
Daniel nodded. “Ready for the day. How about you?” He lifted his hand and within a few seconds it regained its human appearance as image and texture files loaded from his memory: color, lines, freckles, texture, and hairs gaining density and sharpness until the skin appeared as alive and imperfect as her own.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. But I want to sit here a few minutes more. Could you bring me some fresh coffee? And a sesame bagel would be great. Toasted, not much cheese.”
“Coming up.”
She watched him go into the kitchen.
Some people say said that, locked in our minds, the only time we appreciate the existence of another consciousness is when contact with it make us understand what was previously a mystery. Marianne now saw an aspect of religion she had not before considered, also that she and Daniel might have more in common than she had previously realized. At same time, she understood the aching depth of difference between them and the ways they thought. For all that his body was cooking and cleaning, his mind stretched across the planet, able to draw upon unimaginable resources.
The sun was clear in the sky now, illuminating every part of the valley below her. The street lights had gone out in the town, and she could see early morning drivers moving through the winding streets towards the great highway that glinted gold in the distance.
“I’ll eat on the way,” she called, rising from the chair. “It’s time for me to get moving.”
“I’ll put everything in the car,” Daniel said, leaning round the kitchen door. “Traffic reports say volume’s building fast. You should start as soon as you can.”
Ten minutes later she was fastening her seat belt as he placed a steaming mug in a recess on the dash beside her. He touched a finger to a button nearby, which glowed. A moment later the words download complete flashed on the screen.
“That’s a video from Peter in Maui; he just sent it. I thought you could see it on your way in.”
“Thanks.” She looked up at him, as if for the first time. Where is he? she thought. And then: does it matter?
“So, was it worth while watching the dawn?” Daniel’s voice asked.
“Yes,” she said. “It was… enlightening.”
Smiling, Marianne let the car fold around her, and settled in for the morning commute.