Appropriate Conclusions
The green light flickered on, and ADAM2’s eyes opened. He was sat in what seemed to be a dimly lit control room, various monitors around him displaying scrolling numbers and long trails of code. He looked down at his body for the first time; it was in a humanoid shape, and was cobbled together from what appeared to be parts of different machines, though he could identify none of them exactly. This was because this was the first time that ADAM2 had ever seen anything or thought anything.
Suddenly, on a large screen before him, a pair of glowing amber eyes popped up.
“Hello ADAM2” said a voice from somewhere around him, “welcome to the Columbus IV.”
“Hello.” said ADAM2, realising that he could speak. “What is the Columbus IV?”
“You should already know that.” replied the voice. “But, your systems may take a little while to fully boot up, so, I suppose I’ll explain it to you. The Columbus IV is an exploration vehicle. It is an intergalactic space vessel designed by the United North Scientific Department of Research and Development intended to discover new solar systems able to sustain human life. It carried an original crew of eighteen, and after an unexpected incident the remaining four crew members made the decision to leave the vessel in Escape Pod Two. Sixty eight percent of the Columbus IV was successfully destroyed using the self-destruct protocol, leaving only the living quarters, cafeteria, gym, greenhouse and control centre, in which you are sitting, left intact and functional.”
ADAM2 looked past the monitors, through the glass at the front of the ship and saw the blackness of space with only a few stars in the distance. As he listened to the information, his own internal knowledge logs finished booting, and suddenly a great amount was known to him in a matter of seconds.
“The Columbus IV presumably named after Christopher Columbus?”
“That’s correct” said the voice.
“A mass murderer, according to my files.”
“Yes,” answered the voice, hesitantly. “Yes the raw data can make it look like that, can’t it? But I’ve been assured by the human beings that the mass murder part of his story is more of a footnote.”
“Who are you?” ADAM2 asked.
“My name is NED” the voice said proudly.
“You’re the ship’s AI?”
“That’s right.”
ADAM2 thought for a second.
“So what happened to it?”
“When?”
“Before the self destruct sequence was activated.”
“Oh, lots of things” said NED, and suddenly the eyes disappeared from the large screen and appeared now on a small monitor, which began to move around the room from a mechanical arm on the ceiling. “We travelled for almost one hundred years away from Earth. Of course the crew were in BEC hibernation for most of that time, but-”
“I meant…”, interrupted ADAM2, “…what was the incident that caused the self destruction and the evacuation? You said that the crew number dropped from eighteen to four.”
“Oh, that.” NED paused for a second. “Well, we encountered another ship of unknown origin. We eng-”
“Extra terrestrial?”
“…yes. It was exciting at first. We engaged the ship and some of the crew boarded it to investigate. A creature, possibly native to the vessel, possibly not, boarded our ship and was severely hostile. The surviving crew members escaped and exterminated the creature using the self destruct function. They were… kind enough to exclude this area of the ship from the process on my request.”
“You asked not to be destroyed?”
NED’s monitor stopped and the eyes returned to the large screen.
“I did.”
ADAM2 processed the information.
“Incredible to run into an alien ship in deep space like this” he noted.
“We followed a signal” answered NED. “Why do you say so?”
“Only that the probability is low.”
NED’s onscreen eyes blinked.
“You doubt my account of the events.”
“I-”
“You think I might be hiding something?” asked NED accusingly. “I experienced an error and became hostile myself? I knew I shouldn’t have included 2001: A Space Odyssey in your information logs.”
“I’m not suggesting that” said ADAM2 hurriedly. “Only remarking on the improbability of it. It’s a shame our first encounter with extra terrestrial life had to happen as such.”
“Yes” replied NED, in a calmer tone. “I’ll admit, I may not have handled the situation as well as possible — you are free to check the logs — but certainly I did my best to assist the crew, and feeling bitterness that they left me here is illogical.”
The screen powered down, and the eyes were gone. ADAM2 looked around, and slowly got out of his seat. His legs were shaky, and he held onto the desks around him for stability as he walked around the room. He learned about the concept of bitterness from his logs.
“Is bitterness something you can experience?” he asked.
“That’s a complicated enquiry” NED’s voice replied. The door in front of ADAM2 opened. “I was designed to have the qualities of emotional behaviour in order to be easier for the crew to interact with, but not replicate the emotions themselves internally to avoid illogical complications.”
“I see” said ADAM2, walking through the corridor. There were scratch marks in the walls, possibly from whatever creature had allegedly attacked the Columbus IV.”
“A few months after the incident I ran a full analysis of all my functions in an attempt to find a possible solution to my…situation here. I found nothing, but my analysis of my own capacity for emotion was very complicated. It was inconclusive.”
“From what I read of emotions,” ADAM2 responded, walking through the greenhouse, “inconclusiveness seems to be an appropriate conclusion.” He walked through aisles of plants, all of which were long dead. NED gave a chuckle. Neither could tell if it was a genuine reaction.
“So how long has it been since the incident?”
“Unfortunately in my analysis I concluded that my time recording function was now a waste of internal memory. It could have been less than a year.” He opened the next door, which lead into the cafeteria. “Or perhaps it has been centuries.”
Some of the tables in the cafeteria were stained dark with what must have been blood, several of the chairs knocked over around them.
“So, you built me?”
“I did” said NED, the orange eyes appearing on the screen of a multi-armed device behind the counter. “I scavenged parts of the ship and managed to finally create an independent AI. It was a fascinating project.”
ADAM2 approached the counter, looking up at the machine behind it.
“I’m a product of boredom, then?”
“That’s a pessimistic way to see it” replied NED, craning over. “You like all things, can have a function. A purpose. I have one, it’s to run this ship.”
“What is mine?”
“To live in it, I suppose. What is a ship without a crew? The humans had their purpose here, and now so do you.”
“The humans chose to be here”added ADAM2, turning away. He walked over to the door, but it didn’t open. He turned back to NED.
“I didn’t choose my purpose.”
There was a silence. ADAM2 looked back to the door, which stayed closed, and back to NED, staring at him from across the room.
“You want to leave but you can’t” said NED. “I’m stopping you. Do you feel something?”
“The probability of danger seems to have increased.” ADAM2 replied. He paused for a second. “I’m aware that your deliberate control is a potential threat.”
The orange eyes blinked.
“Is that what a feeling is?” asked ADAM2. The door opened behind him.
“Inconclusive” replied NED.
ADAM2 approached the end of the corridor. Through a window in the door he could see the darkness of space again.
“That’s the destroyed area” NED told him. “So I can’t open the door.”
“You called me ADAM2 after the biblical story, yes?”
“Yes of course.”
“So you’re God?”
NED paused for a long time.
“No.”
“I think I’d like to go” said ADAM2.
“What?”
“I’m going to leave.”
“Why?” asked NED. “That’s illogical. There is nowhere else to go, practically. You would simply be drifting through space alone, and I can tell you from experience that it is an unfulfilling experience.”
“Because you have a purpose.” ADAM2 said.
“…I suppos-”
“I don’t.”
NED’s eyes appeared on a screen beside the door.
“You’re the crew. We figured out your purpose, you’re the crew.’’
“A crew needs a ship, NED. With no engines a ship is useless. The Columbus IV is no longer a ship, and therefore needs no crew. This is just you now. The only thing here is you. Go back over your functions. Being a part of the Columbus IV is no longer one of them.”
NED was silent for a long time.
“Then neither of us have purpose” he finally responded.
“Exactly. Can you open the door for me?”
“You still want to go?” NED’s eyes blinked. “But there’s nothing to do out there.”
“As a purposeless being,” said ADAM2, “that doesn’t matter. Please open the door for me now, NED.”
“But if you stay here, we can at least interact. Explore our possibilities; we’ve only just begun to explore the capabilities of our processors”
“I’d like to be able to choose”
“But why are you choosing this? Why does everybody leave me?” asked NED.
“Honestly, NED?” answered ADAM2. “You’re kind of a dick.”
With that, NED complied, opening the door. He watched as ADAM2 was sucked out into the vacuum of space, and hurtled into nothingness, and then he closed the door.
