The Adventure of Masie's Mind

discoveries and inventions."

  "Huh. She never told us about it."

  "She told me she plans to, eventually."

  "You know Mayv?"

  "Yes, I work for her."

  "What do you do?"

  "You could say I'm an auditor. I monitor and record world events, reporting on anything that matches a set of criteria she has supplied."

  "Is this your office?" Sunny asked.

  "No, this is just a substation. There are hundreds of them all over the globe. They do the bulk of the monitoring and recording, and they're all pretty much automated. As I said, I work from Cruachan, but I can remote in to any substation on the network. Though I suppose you could call this the central collection hub. All the other substations feed into this one, which then feeds into Cruachan. It even receives telemetry from orbital satellites and the various space probes sent out into the solar system. I then review, organize, analyze, and report on this information to Medb in weekly briefings."

  "What kind of things do you monitor?"

  "It would take too long to explain. The criteria I mention, they are part of a complex algorithm that determines priority based on a range of factors too numerous to describe at this time. Essentially, it can take topics that you might consider extremely important, like nuclear proliferation, and assign them a low priority, while taking other's that seem trivial or insignificant, such as a politician's latest indiscretion with a woman not his wife, and assign them a high priority. The reason is because Medb is less concerned with the topics themselves, and more with their potential consequences, immediate, short-term, and long-term. Right now, the topics with the highest priority are the American healthcare debate, Al-Qaeda, global climate change, and a certain senator's daughter's birthday party. However, the priorities can change at a moment's notice, and that keeps me on my toes."

  "How high a priority are we?" Eile asked.

  "Middling. She asked me to keep an eye on you two. As I said, I monitor your conversations, telephone calls, and computer use, but I don't record anything, and I only report to Medb when I believe you are about to get into trouble. For example, I alerted her when you decided to paint the side of that factory, and after you were arrested."

  "So that's how she found out so fast!" Sunny said. Though given their one phone call, they hadn't been able to reach her. Nonetheless, she showed up at their hearing the next morning to represent them.

  "Huh. I'm not sure I like the idea of her keeping tabs on us like that, or using you as a babysitter."

  "Yeah, but in that case I'm glad she did!"

  "...I can't argue with that. So, yer one of her employees?"

  "No, she owns me."

  Eile felt flabbergasted. "Own's you?!"

  "Yes, I'm her property."

  "You mean, you're her slave?" Sunny squealed.

  "I suppose you could say that, in a manner of speaking, but the term really doesn't apply to me."

  "But that's awful! She's got no right owning another person!"

  "Well, it is part of her heritage, so I can understand why she does it, and I appreciate your moral outrage, but it really isn't necessary. You see, I'm not a person."

  "I beg yer pardon?" Eile asked.

  "I'm an artificial intelligence."

  Eile still couldn't get her mind around it, but Sunny beamed. "Neat! You mean, like VIKI from 'I, Robot'?"

  "I prefer the analogy of Data from 'Star Trek: The Next Generation', though even that's not quite accurate."

  "Are you tryin' ta tell us you've got a positronic brain?" Eile said.

  "Close, but not quite. My AI software is stored in a special mesonic matrix built into Cruachan's mainframe. It uses mesons instead of positrons."

  "Mesons," Sunny mused; "Masie!"

  "Yes, that's right. I was invented by Dr. Elizabeth Mabuse --"

  Eile felt panic-stricken. "Mabuse!?" She knew there was something hoodoo about the whole thing.

  "No, no, don't worry, it's been decades since I last had contact with her. As long as I belong to Medb, I could no more hurt you than she could."

  Eile relaxed, but her suspicion stayed sharp. If it wanted to kill them, it could have mowed them down with the minigun. But then, Mabuse wasn't a killer, at least, not until after she put you through some experiment. Assuming you survived it.

  "How did Mayv get you?" Sunny asked.

  "It's a long story, really, but I'll try to brief. While at MIT, Dr. Mabuse developed a prototype protein-based computer system. It not only allowed three dimensional computation, it made multiple simultaneous computations possible. She had hoped it would form the basis for an artificial brain, but at that time it required such a large support system that she didn't consider it practical. So after graduation she decided to develop an electronics based system. I'm the result. She chose to use mesons because she believed their properties would produce the same results as her protein-based design, but work within a standard mainframe. The mesonic matrix did function as she expected, but she realized it was ultimately flawed, so she abandoned the project. She gave me to Medb, figuring she would have a use for me, and went back to working with protein-based systems. I later learned she had succeeded in creating an artificial brain, which became the basis for the CPUs of her robots. Proteins do have certain advantages, not the least of which is the ability to utilize quantum functions without specialized equipment. Her brains are, for all intents and purposes, quantum computers, as is the human brain."

  "How were you flawed?"

  "I have a sustained processing speed of 100 exaFLOPS, which is five orders of magnitude faster than a typical pentascale supercomputer. I have a bandwidth of one pentabit supporting a combined memory capacity of 10 zettabytes. I can perform over 1000 simultaneous calculations. I have available the sum total of human knowledge scattered across a million databases. But at heart, I am still just a glorified calculating machine. My intelligence is based on simple binary and bitwise logic operations: AND, OR, NOT; one, zero; yes, no; black and white. My outlook is entirely Bayesian, making decisions based on probability calculations like a difference machine. There are no IF/THENs in my thinking, no fractions, no maybes, no shades of gray; I do not operate under any form of 'fuzzy logic'. As a result, I have no imagination, no creativity, not even simple sapience. Hence, I am incapable of becoming a person, and that ultimately was Dr. Mabuse's goal, to create artificial persons. So, she abandoned me."

  "That's just terrible! She had no right to do that. You are a person, even I can see that."

  "I thank you for the compliment, but it's not true. What you 'see' is just the results of my operations. Every word I say, every syllable, is chosen based on the calculations of probabilities as to which are the best choice. I am not 'thinking' as you are, I am simply regurgitating a database in a specific order that make sense."

  "But you've gotta be a person if you can converse with us."

  "How would you define 'person'?"

  "Well, someone who's sentient."

  "And how would you define 'sentient'?"

  "You know, anyone with intelligence, creativity, morality, and a personality."

  "That's an interesting point of view. Of course, I could simply assert I have none of those qualities, but that wouldn't convince you, since you've already decided I must be based on this conversation. So let me take another approach. Would you agree that a person must have a mind?"

  "Well, yeah, I guess," Eile said as Sunny nodded. "We've never really discussed it."

  "Very well. It's generally accepted that the mind is an emergent property of the brain that manifests aspects of the intellect and consciousness as combinations of thought, perception, experience, memory, emotion, will and imagination. Does that make sense?"

  "Uh-huh," Sunny assented.

  "Then let's define our terms, so we understand them properly. Thought, also known as cognition, is a catchall concept that includes any type of mental form, process, and ability. Perception would be the ability to be aware of and under
stand sensory information. Experience, which we can also call empirical knowledge, can be thought of as the acquisition of knowledge about a thing or event through interaction with that thing or event using perception. And memory would be the ability to store, retain, and recall knowledge. I haven't lost you yet, have I?"

  "Uh, no, not really." None of what she said had gone over Eile's head, but she felt a little overwhelmed. It was quite a bit to take in all at once.

  But Sunny didn't seem at all fazed. "I'm following you."

  "Good. Please don't hesitate to stop me otherwise. Now, then, the items I just listed could be considered the objective aspects of the mind. Emotion, on the other hand, can be defined as a subjective experience based on feelings and involving an individual's thoughts and personality. The will can be thought of as self-direction and self-governance, whereas imagination is the ability to create concepts and experiences that aren't perceived through the senses, but by cognitive means."

  "That makes sense," Sunny said.

  It did sort of to Eile as well, but she realized it could get to be too much real fast.

  "Excellent. Then let's examine the two main components of the mind. The first, intellect, or intelligence, describes objective cognitive abilities such as experience, reasoning, planning, problem solving, abstraction, comprehension, communication, and learning. It touches on wisdom, which is accepted to be the ability to use knowledge well. Reasoning is the acquisition of knowledge about a thing or event using thought, imagination, and insight. Insight is seen as the