The Electric Things Have Their Life Too: Prologue [Apprentices, Organization XIII]
Canon Status: AU.
Genre: Science fiction.
Rating: G.
Characters: Ansem's apprentices, Organization XIII.
Pairing: None.
Warnings: None.
Notes: Above applies to this section only.
Summary: Do androids dream of electric sheep? A story of birth.
It doesn’t look like a lab, the floor beneath the floor in the building that isn’t supposed to be there. The corridor is long. There are doors all along it, doors to rooms without windows. That isn’t like a lab. They look like apartment doors. The man being led down the corridor wonders why he thought this, then realizes that the doors he passes have neat metal numbers on them, Roman numerals counting down from thirteen.
The scientist talks as they move down the corridor, explaining what the men who have beds and kitchens and apartments elsewhere but live down here do with their days and nights. They work on artificial intelligence, he tells the man, how to recreate in silicon and copper the thousand minute processes of the human brain. The man nods. Now he wears a government suit and carries three different identification cards in his pocket, but once he was a boy who devoured stories of robots that talked like men. He has no time or interest in things so fanciful now, but he remembers.
The room at the end of the corridor is more like a lab as the man knows labs. He has visited labs before, although not this one. He only just received high enough level clearance to come here. The reinforced windows are standard safety procedure; he can see the elaborate ventilation system for the same purpose and the fire extinguishers neatly tucked into recesses. Anyone outside can see in through the windows that fill the wall. This is a room meant to be observed, as the man is here to observe, as his colleagues come every week for an hour or two to observe.
The name of the scientist is Braig. He looks unlike a scientist, even in his white lab coat: pitch black hair too long, posture too relaxed, scar on his face and patch across one eye that he dismisses as a lab accident in his youth that he was lucky enough to survive. He is barely thirty, the man recalls from the file he read before coming here, but already doing great things. They are all young, this group. If the man were of a wondering turn of mine he would wonder if the men working on this project are young because only the young still believe that they can breathe life into their dreams.
The man is not of a wondering turn of mind. He attends to Braig’s explanation instead.
The other five scientists are all at work. The man recognizes them from the pictures in their files: Even at the whiteboard writing out evolution in chemical formulae; Ienzo and Elaeus working with a simulation at a computer; Dilan typing a report on another computer for the benefit of the serious and powerful men who have never been here but who control its life. The leader of the group, Xehanort, comes forward to meet them.
“We have been expecting you,” he says.
Nobody knows much about Xehanort, not even he himself. His personal history file is by far the shortest, little more than an acknowledgment of the void surrounding the mysterious boy of perhaps fifteen who appeared seemingly out of nowhere with no memory and an unparalleled scientific genius.
“As my colleague has undoubtedly told you, the ultimate goal of this labor of ours is to produce an artificial being capable of imitating the behavior of a human for extended periods of time. At present, we are extensively addressing the issue of motion, particularly fine motor skills.”
“Beg pardon, but I was told this project was supposed to be working with artificial intelligence, not prosthetics,” says the man.
“The two issues are inextricable,” Xehanort says with an authority unusual in a man not quite thirty-five. “Were this project simply intended to produce a computer capable of Turing-compliant interaction, naturally we would have ignored motion entirely. However, the human brain controls physical action on levels which are as yet imperfectly understood by the greater number even of scientists who make it their business to study such things. The autonomic nervous system alone has given us much difficulty, to say nothing of the problems inherent in modeling artificial hands capable of manual dexterity on a normal human level even while controlled by our own brains. The issue of engineering such appendages has largely been surmounted, I am happy to say. This may provide some benefits in terms of artificial limbs; I believe that Dilan is in the process of describing our discoveries in that area now.”
Xehanort leads the man into the lab area without making much of a change in the environment. The four men within barely acknowledge the intrusion, as though the man were not truly there at all.
“Our work in communication intelligence takes place here,” Xehanort says. They stand before a box of metal and plastic lying on the table. It is, the man thinks, not in the least impressive as a work of scientific advancement. There is a speaker on one side. “Perhaps you would care for a demonstration of our progress.”
“Certainly,” says the man.
“Be seated, then, and speak into this microphone.”
The man does not know what to say, so he says, “Hello.”
“Hello,” says a mechanical voice that sounds as though Xehanort is speaking through the machine. “What is your name?”
“My name is Gervase Antonelli. Do you have a name?”
“My name is Hal.” That voice sounds similar to Braig. The man worries that this is a hoax, after all, and nothing like the feats of brilliance promised. “What is the weather like today, Gervase Antonelli?”
The man starts back, even his unimaginative, professional soul shocked by the sound of his own voice floating out of the speaker saying his name, an all too real ghost in the machine.
Xehanort takes the microphone from him without a change in expression. “This apparatus is not suited for producing sounds in any fashion analogous to a human voicebox. Rather, our current studies concern enabling it to choose the appropriate response from its recorded vocabulary. Accordingly, we collaborated to record individual words. The program for direct address records the response to a request for name and repeats the relevant section when the program requires. It can be somewhat startling to the unprepared. Is there anything else you would like to see?”
The man sees a great deal of scientific experiments in progress that day, very little of which he understands but all of which reminds him, as in a dream, of something he read once, a long time ago in another country, which is childhood. He departs eventually with a pile of printed reports and the assurance that all is proceeding at a reasonable pace.
As he walks down the corridor, the doors do not open, but from behind the small peepholes above the metal numbers thirteen pairs of what might be eyes watch him go.
Genre: Science fiction.
Rating: G.
Characters: Ansem's apprentices, Organization XIII.
Pairing: None.
Warnings: None.
Notes: Above applies to this section only.
Summary: Do androids dream of electric sheep? A story of birth.
It doesn’t look like a lab, the floor beneath the floor in the building that isn’t supposed to be there. The corridor is long. There are doors all along it, doors to rooms without windows. That isn’t like a lab. They look like apartment doors. The man being led down the corridor wonders why he thought this, then realizes that the doors he passes have neat metal numbers on them, Roman numerals counting down from thirteen.
The scientist talks as they move down the corridor, explaining what the men who have beds and kitchens and apartments elsewhere but live down here do with their days and nights. They work on artificial intelligence, he tells the man, how to recreate in silicon and copper the thousand minute processes of the human brain. The man nods. Now he wears a government suit and carries three different identification cards in his pocket, but once he was a boy who devoured stories of robots that talked like men. He has no time or interest in things so fanciful now, but he remembers.
The room at the end of the corridor is more like a lab as the man knows labs. He has visited labs before, although not this one. He only just received high enough level clearance to come here. The reinforced windows are standard safety procedure; he can see the elaborate ventilation system for the same purpose and the fire extinguishers neatly tucked into recesses. Anyone outside can see in through the windows that fill the wall. This is a room meant to be observed, as the man is here to observe, as his colleagues come every week for an hour or two to observe.
The name of the scientist is Braig. He looks unlike a scientist, even in his white lab coat: pitch black hair too long, posture too relaxed, scar on his face and patch across one eye that he dismisses as a lab accident in his youth that he was lucky enough to survive. He is barely thirty, the man recalls from the file he read before coming here, but already doing great things. They are all young, this group. If the man were of a wondering turn of mine he would wonder if the men working on this project are young because only the young still believe that they can breathe life into their dreams.
The man is not of a wondering turn of mind. He attends to Braig’s explanation instead.
The other five scientists are all at work. The man recognizes them from the pictures in their files: Even at the whiteboard writing out evolution in chemical formulae; Ienzo and Elaeus working with a simulation at a computer; Dilan typing a report on another computer for the benefit of the serious and powerful men who have never been here but who control its life. The leader of the group, Xehanort, comes forward to meet them.
“We have been expecting you,” he says.
Nobody knows much about Xehanort, not even he himself. His personal history file is by far the shortest, little more than an acknowledgment of the void surrounding the mysterious boy of perhaps fifteen who appeared seemingly out of nowhere with no memory and an unparalleled scientific genius.
“As my colleague has undoubtedly told you, the ultimate goal of this labor of ours is to produce an artificial being capable of imitating the behavior of a human for extended periods of time. At present, we are extensively addressing the issue of motion, particularly fine motor skills.”
“Beg pardon, but I was told this project was supposed to be working with artificial intelligence, not prosthetics,” says the man.
“The two issues are inextricable,” Xehanort says with an authority unusual in a man not quite thirty-five. “Were this project simply intended to produce a computer capable of Turing-compliant interaction, naturally we would have ignored motion entirely. However, the human brain controls physical action on levels which are as yet imperfectly understood by the greater number even of scientists who make it their business to study such things. The autonomic nervous system alone has given us much difficulty, to say nothing of the problems inherent in modeling artificial hands capable of manual dexterity on a normal human level even while controlled by our own brains. The issue of engineering such appendages has largely been surmounted, I am happy to say. This may provide some benefits in terms of artificial limbs; I believe that Dilan is in the process of describing our discoveries in that area now.”
Xehanort leads the man into the lab area without making much of a change in the environment. The four men within barely acknowledge the intrusion, as though the man were not truly there at all.
“Our work in communication intelligence takes place here,” Xehanort says. They stand before a box of metal and plastic lying on the table. It is, the man thinks, not in the least impressive as a work of scientific advancement. There is a speaker on one side. “Perhaps you would care for a demonstration of our progress.”
“Certainly,” says the man.
“Be seated, then, and speak into this microphone.”
The man does not know what to say, so he says, “Hello.”
“Hello,” says a mechanical voice that sounds as though Xehanort is speaking through the machine. “What is your name?”
“My name is Gervase Antonelli. Do you have a name?”
“My name is Hal.” That voice sounds similar to Braig. The man worries that this is a hoax, after all, and nothing like the feats of brilliance promised. “What is the weather like today, Gervase Antonelli?”
The man starts back, even his unimaginative, professional soul shocked by the sound of his own voice floating out of the speaker saying his name, an all too real ghost in the machine.
Xehanort takes the microphone from him without a change in expression. “This apparatus is not suited for producing sounds in any fashion analogous to a human voicebox. Rather, our current studies concern enabling it to choose the appropriate response from its recorded vocabulary. Accordingly, we collaborated to record individual words. The program for direct address records the response to a request for name and repeats the relevant section when the program requires. It can be somewhat startling to the unprepared. Is there anything else you would like to see?”
The man sees a great deal of scientific experiments in progress that day, very little of which he understands but all of which reminds him, as in a dream, of something he read once, a long time ago in another country, which is childhood. He departs eventually with a pile of printed reports and the assurance that all is proceeding at a reasonable pace.
As he walks down the corridor, the doors do not open, but from behind the small peepholes above the metal numbers thirteen pairs of what might be eyes watch him go.