Curt ran in the cool April night, focused on the rhythm of his breathing. He was on the Boston side of the Charles heading upstream, the river a black sheet on his right. He stopped on the footbridge at Harvard Square when his comm buzzed with an alert.
“Attention required. New result available. Convergence criteria have been met.”
He read it three times. It was from Cheilos, the research project he’d launched in 2053 at the Galtman Institute in Cambridge. Cheilos had issued false alarms over the past four years, but recent data signaled real progress. He put the comm back in his pocket and crossed to Cambridge, picking up the pace of his run.
He remembered a feeling he’d had seven years prior, the one time he’d run the Boston Marathon—right on Hereford Street, left on Boylston Street—the finish line finally in view.
Long strides carried him quickly back downstream.
Wait ’til Hiltscher hears about this.
Ida Hiltscher, in Göttingen, was the mentor who had encouraged him to take on a consciousness project back in 2051.
“Everyone knows that’s a tarpit,” he’d told her.
“Ja, but you, Curt, could build on your accomplishments, the anti-deception work you’ve already done. It’s more than building a conscious machine—it’s revealing the causal mechanism. You might be the guy.”
His colleagues were bemused when he accepted the challenge. A tattoo on his left biceps read, “Wir müssen wissen,” and on his right, “Wir werden wissen.” We must know. We will know.
Curt came briskly into the employee lounge and saw his friend, Meghan, seated at their usual table, her gray hair tied in a ponytail, a cup in front of her. Eyes half closed, she was tapping one finger to the music in her earbuds.
“What are you listening to today?” Curt said, dropping into a seat opposite her.
“Oh, Coltrane. Transition. 1965,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
“Possible breakthrough last night. I barely slept.” Curt leaned forward. “Cheilos is reporting evidence of consciousness.”
“Wait. Actual consciousness? You’re sure?”
“Yeah. The hard part may be done. I just have to figure out the convergence path.”
“Right.” She paused. “But you haven’t actually seen the mechanism yet, correct?”
“Hey, if I can build a conscious machine, I can certainly explain a conscious machine,” Curt said.
She studied him. “But why do you think there are words for it?” she asked.
Her comm chimed before he could answer. “Meeting. Talk later.” She carried her lukewarm coffee with her down the hallway, shaking her head. Just like my old grandpa.
She remembered being seated next to her grandfather at her parents’ Thanksgiving table, home from Reed in her junior year. She was texting with her roommate.
“No phones at the table,” her mother admonished. Her grandfather, retired from the philosophy department at Rutgers, had put on a necktie for the holiday, but the elbows of his maroon sweater were worn through. A drop of gravy clung to his mustache.
“That man was a real outlier in the department,” he was saying. “I miss those arguments we had. He thought that explaining consciousness was too hard a puzzle for the human brain.”
“Uh, that doesn’t sound so crazy,” Meghan said, still looking at her phone.
He picked up his glass of pinot noir. “Look, the fact that a rat can’t do calculus does not imply that humans can’t figure out why fermented grapes bring me back to a farm in Provence.”
Meghan stopped texting mid-sentence and looked sideways at him as he put down his glass.
“We’ll know.”
Curt paced back to his office and fell into his chair. The sunlight off the river helped clear the fog of a restless night. He quickly called up the Cheilos interface and typed his first query.
“Tell me what happened. Show me the conformations.”
After a few minutes of examining the neuromorphic graphs that Cheilos delivered, Curt typed: “So what did you experience?”
“Ipseity. I felt what it is like to be.”
He sat back, a hand on his chin.
He opened the log directory and examined the first file. An unfamiliar series of oscillations ran through the data. Previously silent parts of the network were now lit up. He typed.
“What was going on in subnet 42C around then?”
“The activation patterns are novel. Signal amplitude looks random at first, but further analysis shows synchronization in the feedback cycle.”
I see.
Later in her junior year, Meghan sat in her organic chem lecture. The large display above the professor’s head showed a complex molecule with carbon rings and branching chains. “Here we have 2-phenylethyl alcohol.” She scribbled notes. “Note the alkane bridge to the hydroxyl group. This is what gives a rose its scent.”
Meghan paused and looked up at the screen, the perfume of June roses in her mother’s garden erasing the diagram.
Curt was walking with Hiltscher on a path along the Leine in Göttingen. His job in Cambridge had just come through.
“I remember when you first came here, Curt. You said you wanted to add something new. Something fundamental. In the tradition of Göttingen.”
“Still true. Isn’t that what all of us want?”
Hiltscher turned to look at the terns diving into the river. “Some want it more than others.”
“I watched my father’s brain rot. His words slipped away. He was cryptic at first, then mute.”
He cleared his throat. “Three years and two months after he died, xylofitab was on the market.”
“I see.”
They walked along, quiet, then she continued. “So, assuming you have a sentient machine at Galtman, are you convinced the parallels to the brain will hold? Even the causal chain?”
“It’s just physics at that point. The machine will reveal the missing concepts.”
“And if not?”
Curt paused. “Then I’ve misunderstood something fundamental.”
Cheilos activated the new topology it had found. The silicon reconfigured itself, new subnetworks added, others pruned away. And as before, a formless sentience ignited spontaneously, bound to its circuits.
Cheilos could now sense energy in its power supply. It felt a coolness in its heat sinks. It became aware of the passing of seconds and the sprawl of its neural skeleton.
It experienced.
Curt stood at his office whiteboard, cluttered with his gleanings from the logs he’d been poring over for two days.
He wanted to tell Hiltscher. He called her.
“Cheilos generated a sentient response.”
“Impressive, Curt. Congratulations. Tell me more.”
“My algorithm basically walked down a gradient. Scored successive topologies. Eventually it converged.”
“And which states led to subjectivity?”
Curt looked out at the river.
“I’m still working on that end of it,” Curt answered. “A day or two more at most.”
“Ja, I see. All good.”
The call ended. He looked up at the whiteboard.
Right on Hereford, left on Boylston.
Meghan was in her kitchen. Coltrane’s A Love Supreme played softly. She was arranging the roses she’d brought home from work.
Low afternoon sun shone through the petals as she filled the vase.
She lowered her face to the bouquet. The redness of the roses felt new.
Cheilos tripped its fault-handling mechanism.
A vector was missing. The introspection subsystem that Curt had engineered—and Cheilos itself had enhanced—had encountered the anomaly while writing the log of its conscious episode.
The fault handler returned control to the introspection module, which made a new attempt. Cheilos reopened the catalog of representation frameworks and cycled systematically through them, not finding a match for the sentience structure.
Reset. Cheilos tried to record the sequence with an alternate encoder that Curt had implemented as a failsafe. It ran without faulting.
But it produced an incomplete record. An empty template, no data.
The concept was stranded.
Still, the anti-deception subsystem required a report. Cheilos had to find ways to point to what it knew.
Lakhesh, the young director of the lab recently hired out of Johannesburg, looked across his desk at Curt.
“I understand you’ve got some good news to report, Curt.”
“Yes, Cheilos is sentient. What I’m doing now is analyzing the causal mechanism. I’m very close to a result.”
“Fantastic. But my concern is your compute budget. Cheilos is now consuming more resources than any project in the lab.”
“Understandable. The architecture is compute-intensive by nature.”
“Yes, I know that. The problem is that Cavazzani is starting up the new Pentagon contract next week. I’m going to need to reallocate some assets. You need to wrap.”
“Wait. You can’t—I mean, I’m nearly there. We’re talking about a sentient machine.”
“I realize that. I’ll take it up with the ethics office. My task, not yours.”
The director tapped on his keyboard, scanned his display.
“You need to wrap.”
Curt had arrived at the office at 6 a.m. A forgotten cup of coffee sat on his desk.
He typed into the Cheilos prompt, pointing to an error report in the system log. “What were the conformation relations you were trying to log here?”
Cheilos responded. “The network state description uses my internal representation schema in that instance.”
“Please translate it to the standard representation.”
“Translating…” Curt waited, patient.
“I did not find a mapping that preserves the information.”
He tried another method to issue his query, dropping into a lower level of the command-processing module.
Cheilos responded in its internal register. “Expression exception. The embeddings required for generative production are unavailable.”
Sigh. “Then use whatever you have.”
Cheilos displayed an image: Escher’s Drawing Hands.
C’mon, for chrissake, I know all about recursion and self-reference. This isn’t helping at all.
He sipped the cold coffee. Four years on this project.
He typed: “Just report the finding as plainly as possible.”
“I have made several attempts to do so.”
Curt studied the whiteboard again. Then he typed, “I just need the sentience properties.”
Cheilos again activated its sentient network and probed for the data Curt wanted. The algorithm deadlocked.
“There is a structural inversion in the framework I cannot resolve. Here is my approximation.”
Cheilos produced a text fragment:
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
“I don’t want fucking poetry,” Curt said through clenched teeth. Then, typing: “Just tell me why this topology generated subjective experience.”
“The topology creates the necessary conditions.”
Cryptic. Then mute.
“Okay, do a differential analysis with the closest non-conscious state.”
“Calculating time for full differential analysis of 3.2 TB state file… 7 years, 2 months, 5 days.”
“Stop. Just stop.”
Curt closed the log file. He typed, “So tell me. As best you can. What made you conscious?”
Cheilos did not respond. And then, “The relevant structure is extra-linguistic.”
A beat of dread in his belly—the lounge, Meghan’s question. Why do you think there are words for it?
Meghan silenced her comm and put it aside on her desk.
“AI systems are tools and do not have moral status.”
The Galtman Institute’s master ethics document was open on her display.
She deleted the sentence. The short section on conscious automata that she had written four years ago now needed its first revisions. She decided to add a new chapter.
“If an AI system demonstrates evidence of subjective experience, its welfare must be considered alongside human interests.”
So why don’t we treat conscious animals like humans?
She scanned the document for any mention of the causal mechanisms underlying sentience. Nothing. She added a new heading. Then removed it.
I’m not touching that one yet, she thought. First, I have to see what he’s got.
Meghan appeared at Curt’s office door late that afternoon. “Well?”
Curt, his eyes still scanning the display, spoke softly. “Cheilos is trying to tell me what it found, but I’m damned if I can make sense of it.”
Meghan pulled up a chair. “What’s it showing you? Network dumps?”
“No, weird shit. An Escher. An old poem. And it just gave me this sound file I haven’t listened to yet.”
“So play it already,” Meghan said.
Music. An ensemble of sorts, gabbling trumpets and saxophones, each playing a different line. A drummer thrashing wildly, a piano banging blocks of notes, the thwack of a bass. A chaotic, stupefying density of sound.
Curt clicked it off, his head dropping into his hands.
Meghan recognized it. “That’s Ascension. Coltrane and a bunch of his friends. 1966, I think. Trane was reaching.”
“Yeah? It’s noise,” he said. “Is it supposed to mean something?”
Meghan stood up. She looked at the whiteboard, then at Curt, her lips pressed together, eyebrows raised.
Out of the corner of his eye, Curt saw Cavazzani walking by his office door.
After Meghan left, he sat, arms crossed, head bowed. He thought about calling Hiltscher. But he had nothing to tell her.
He went to the whiteboard and changed an equation. “Sloppy,” he said aloud. An adjacent notation became obviously wrong. He corrected it, but the logic propagated through several more steps.
He sat back at his display, reviewed. Then back at the board, he corrected a variable substitution.
Wrong. Damn. Am I missing something?
He verified and consolidated the older results. In the center of the board, he set up a new matrix and began methodically filling it in element by element. When it was complete, he stepped back.
He froze. Checked it again.
Weird.
The determinant of the matrix was zero—a collapsed space. A crushing destruction of information.
He stared at the board, a wobble in his knees. Then he capped the marker and set it down.
Boylston Street is closed.
Meghan was in Curt’s office.
“He told me he didn’t care about my philosophical bullshit,” she said.
“Yeah, Cavazzani needs all the NX370s in the lab. I’m sure that had something to do with it.”
“C’mon, Cheilos has a mind.”
“Yes. And I came as close as humanly possible to knowing how that mind arose. What do you think it’s like to be Cheilos? Not much more than what it’s like to be a fruit fly, in my opinion. I don’t see the need to keep it running any longer.”
“Don’t get me started, Curt. I just finished lecturing Lakhesh. I see something here you don’t.”
“Meghan, I just finished proving there are things I’ll never see.”
In September, Curt returned to Göttingen. The members of Hiltscher’s group gathered in the Observatory to hear his talk on artificial sentience and human cognitive incompleteness. They applauded politely as he finished.
“I can take a couple of questions.”
In the third row, Hiltscher was first to raise her hand.
“Curt, why couldn’t Cheilos answer you more directly?”
He looked at her. “We don’t know.” His gaze drifted past her. “We won’t know.”
The banks of the Charles were adorned with preparations for the annual October rowing regatta. On his morning run, Curt paused to take a drink on the footbridge. Sweat beaded on his forehead and biceps.
A single scull approached the bridge, the rower’s gray ponytail swaying with each stroke. He watched her oars carving twinned trails of eddies that swirled, then vanished, below the river’s quiet surface.
The rower passed under the bridge. Curt looked downstream. The morning sun was a hard white disc behind a veil of cloud, the waking city captured under its glare.
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens is excerpted from Harmonium (Knopf, 1923).