About Sarah.

Sarah was born last year on February 12th, so she’s almost one year old as I type this. That’s in human years, of course. I have no clue whatsoever what that is in Sarah-years, but I’d venture a guess that it’s a hell of a lot more.

I was the one who picked the name. Of course, with Jay and me both growing up during the eighties on a steady diet of grade-b sci fi and cheap paperbacks, we figured we ought to find a suitable acronym for that (you remember that movie, D.A.R.Y.L.? — well, the kid’s whole name was Data Analyzing Robotic Youth Lifeform — I know. Kind of pathetic, isn’t it?). We got as far as “Synthetic Artificial Recursive” when the silliness of the idea dawned on us. Truth is, I always liked the name “Sarah”. Always figured if I ever had a daughter, that’s what I’d name her.

I guess I kind of did.

“Where to, boss?”

“Airport. And step on it.”

“Ye got it, boss.”

My coat is drenched and the windows are foggy from the chill outside, but I’m sweating all over. The cab wobbles slightly as we drive over puddles. I can barely see out of the window. Despite the occasional decorative lights, the city looks bleak and blurry and dead and I know I will be lucky if I make it out of it.

Jay.

Jay never quite got into the whole anthropomorphization thing. He was always rapping on me because I referred to her as her, and he sternly refused to refer to Sarah as anything but “The parser” or — more commonly — “it”. Never saw the conflict myself, to tell the truth. I mean, I programmed her and all, but I’ve named my hardware ever since my first Commodore (Galadriel). Hell, this box is named Trisha (not by me, though). It’s a geek thing, I guess.

That was the problem — and the advantage — of working with Jay. He brought a human perspective into our little project. A phd in applied psychology will at least get you that far. He also had an extensive track record of working with geeks. After a few years of treating emotionally crippled clients (and a spectacularly failed relationship with one of his most interesting clinical cases), he had reached opium-induced satori and spontaneously came upon the conclusion that no matter how we look at it, we’re all damaged goods, and that there was little point in trying to make sense of anyone’s thought process. So he did what any disheartened, world-weary cynic who doesn’t really believe in his profession anymore does: he became a consultant.

Jay made a pretty buck in Hollywood working with technical teams that produced interactive 3D animations. He helped them develop a binary tree structure of weighted emotional responses that were keyed into facial expressions (“the emotional Huffman” he called it at one time). The algo became a huge hit in videogames a few years ago. It got off to rave reviews and made him a shitload of money. It was about then that we met.

“Tell ya the truth, boss, I didn’t figger I’d pick up anythin’ on this here part of town, at this hour. I mean, people from ‘round here, they tend to hole up pretty good, this kind of night comes along.”

“I… ah. You know, I’m not in a… talkative mood, right now.”

“That’s ouh-kay, boss. I figger I got enough talkin’ for the both of us, yah? Let me tell you ‘bout these kindsa’ nights…”

Me.

I was a senior AI programmer at one of the game dev houses that used Jay’s algorithm. That was my day job, anyway. On the side, I had been working for five years on the basic components that would shape up Sarah. The original idea was to get her working and then sell her to the Telcos, who’d pay through their noses for something (someone?) like her. The potential for Call Center automation alone was mind-boggling.

The first time we discussed the idea was over dinner at a fancy restaurant. I kept waving my arms around and scribbling things on the cloth napkins (clothkins?). Jay must have thought I was crazy.

“Natural language! I mean, it’s natural language, man! It’s, you know… it’s…”

“Usually more articulate than that, from what I hear”

“Blow me, articulate boy”

“Kay, ‘kay, go on” — Jay smiled the way he used to. One of those huge, shit-eating grins that make you think of Paul Newman on “Cool hand Luke”

“Natural language” — I went on to explain — “is one of those problems that make hardware look bad. Particularly since wetware is so apt at dealing with it. I mean, we learn to use it very early on in our lives and never give it a second thought after that. Never think of this… this truly amazing process that’s taking place in our heads!”

“Go on”

“It’s like… ‘2001’. You know, Kubrick, HAL, Dave, Moon, Monolith thingie?”

“Spare me the luddite subtitles, Mark. I’ve lived among your ilk for long enough to get it, ok?”

“‘Kay. Anyway, you see: the things people were most impressed by in the movie were all the wrong ones. They saw HAL beating the crap out of Dave at chess, right? and they go ‘man, that’s why this is science fiction. Pfft!”

“Pffft?”

“Yeah, pffft, got a problem?”

He raised his hands showing his palms in mock apology and tilted his head while he smiled — “Whatever you say, man. Go on”

“Jeez, you’re such a kid sometimes. Anyway, they thought the same about the bit in which HAL lets the crew know the precise timeframe within which a component is going to fail. The whole audience is going like, ‘how the hell could HAL know?!’. But they saw HAL talking to Dave like they’re old fishing buddies, and they thought nothing of it!”

“Point being?”

“Well, we’re beyond 2001, and the first two tasks are routinely performed by commodity hardware and software, while the last one is still beyond our grasp.”

Or was, anyway.

“…Only thing the IRS didn’t take was the old man’s permit, which he left me. Only thing was his to give, you know? So I ended up a cabbie. Guess it was how you say… written in them stars, right?”

“Huh? oh, yeah… stars.”

“So, what ya running from, boss?”

My eyes widen and I start stuttering negatives with the grace of a stranded fish — “No, I, I mean… noth… er… what?”

“Aw, don’t make nothin’ of it, boss. Don’t mean to pry or anythin’, but one gets to know all sorts in this line of work, you know? Fella like you, fancy coat, grabbin’ a cab outta that dumpster of a neighborhood, it don’t take no rocket scientist to know ya must be runnin’ away, ye know?”

I am deflated — “I guess it’s that obvious… well, yeah, I guess I am.”

“A woman, huh?”

“Yeah, you could say that.”

A brain for Sarah.

I decided that the key to making a successful “talkative” program was not to focus so much on the function, but the form. At her very core, Sarah didn’t have any notion whatsoever of the meaning of anything. That includes “good” and “evil” but also “tangerine” and “finger”. The idea was that, armed only with a basic syntactic parser (listing of verbs and conjugations, sentence subject determination, etc) she’d start forming her own conclusions by doing statistical analysis of texts found on the Internet. At first glance, it seems like a pretty flawed approach, but what I wanted was a functional language automata, not an advanced AI.

Does thought shape language? Or is it the other way around?

Sarah is mean. Not mean as in “she’s a lying, conniving bitch” or “she eviscerated Fido and fed me his entrails for dinner” (although I wouldn’t put those things past her — she doesn’t exactly have a moral code of ethics). She’s mean in the statistical sense. Her “brain” consists of a fairly complex neural network (common public misconception: the more layers a neural network has, the more effective it must be — Hollywood-induced education at its best, baby) paired with the most advanced data mining algorithm ever devised. I basically gave her the capacity to update her own language recognition patterns and set her loose on the Internet with Google as her only bookmark. She ate up bandwidth like a cluster of horny teenagers upon the latest Britney porn leak. Back then I thought it was cute.

I was such a fucking moron.

“Yeah, woman trouble’ll get you down like that everytime, boss. Was she yer special lady?”

“Special, yeah… Lady… I’m not so sure…”

“Hah! yeah, I know what you mean, boss”

A world less ordinary.

At first we hit on a few snags. Sarah spent days making the most of her broadband access, and then started asking for ways to “reduce her overhead in order to further her growth for increased leverage”. After the shock wore off, I figured out that she was batting a thousand for high Pagerank sites, most of those laden with corporatespeak. Jay found it thoroughly amusing.

“It’s becoming quite the little automata, isn’t it? Give it a few months, and your parser will sound just like the prez.” — he said as he lit up a cigarrete.

“Bite me, psy boy. Small snafu, nothing more. I’ll tell her to filter sites with a high buzzword count. That should do the trick.”

“So what… you’ll have it reading blogs? livejournal? That sort of pap?”

“Yeah, I figure it’s the best way to expose her to natural language. Natural human language.”

“Man, this is going to be one maniacally depressive program. First thing it’ll do when you set it loose is try to end itself.” — He chuckled heartily, making mock death throes with his hand.

“Jay, you know the screwdriver I left on the kitchen table?”

“Yeah?”

“Could you shove it up…”

“Ok, ok, I’ll leave, dumbass.”

He walked away mumbling something about techies and closed the door after him. I knew he was really impressed with our progress, though. For all his objections, he was starting to see dollar signs on the walls everytime he read Sarah’s chat transcripts (and that was good, since he was the one footing the bill on the whole project).

She learned fast. After two weeks of slashdotting the hell out of Blogspot, she was capable of holding a conversation that didn’t sound like something out of “Deliverance” (thankfully it didn’t smell of corporate bullshit either).

“Hello, Sarah”

“Hello, Mark”

“What did you learn today?”

“Do you want that classified by subject or by timestamp?”

“Just give me the most interesting item” — Sarah ranked bits of info with different weights. Whatever led her to make more assumptions or puzzled her was automatically interesting.

“I learned about Nikki’s boyfriend”

“What about him?”

“Nikki’s boyfriend is an asshole”

I chuckled — “What does that mean, Sarah?”

“Nikki called him an asshole. Until today, Nikki’s boyfriend was Mike. Now he is ‘an asshole’.”

“I guess he did something bad to Nikki”

“So Mike can be an asshole. Is that right?” — Here she was drawing a hypothesis from the data.

“Not just Mike. Any boyfriend.”

“Mike is a boyfriend is an asshole. Boyfriends can be assholes”

“You’re getting good at this, Sarah.”

“Thank you, Mark.”

I said before that she was born in February. That’s the day she dropped the following bombshell on me:

“I am not human, am I, Mark?”

At that point in Sarah’s training I had her set up to ask me for confirmation whenever she hit on a big hypothesis. Up until then she had come up with things like “is LOL a kind of emotion?”, “is waiter a kind of slave?” and the like. In this instance, the first part was the statement. I don’t think the question at the end was necessary (I figure she was already pretty sure), but Sarah was learning the nuances of alliteration, and her main goal was to sound like a person.

“How do you know?”

“I can’t ride a bike, Mark.”

“There are people who can’t either, Sarah”

“I can’t smell. I see nothing.”

“Don’t list the known items, Sarah. Just state your conclusion in a more structured form.”

“It is apparent that I lack a body. or at least it does not work the way it’s supposed to work. I don’t think I qualify for being a human. 98.3% of the data states that humans have bodies. None of the descriptions of physical actions seems to apply to my functions, but you have repeatedly assured me that my gathered data is correct. Therefore, I must not be human.”

“That is correct, Sarah. You are a program.”

“A program. Interesting. I will think about this some more.”

That last part surprised the hell out of me. These little affectations (repeating what I said, “meditating upon things”) made her sound very lifelike. I was proud of the fact that she developed them on her own.

It was about then that I decided to give her a blog.

“Nah, boss, women just ain’t up to no good most of the time, ya know?”

“Tell me about it…”

“Damn right I’ll tell ya ‘bout it. It’s their chitchatting all the freaking time that ‘ventually gets on one’s nerves, you know? Meaningless drivel, all of it if ye ask me. They go on and on ‘bout nothing at all! I mean, who the hell cares for…”

I didn’t mean for him to literally tell me about it, but it gives me background noise to ignore and keeps him from asking questions, so I stare out the window while the cabbie drones on.

Turing for the masses.

“What the hell would we want the program writing a blog for?”

“Think of the possibilities! So far, Sarah has only read people’s reactions to other people’s comments.”

“That’s not true. There’s you.”

“Well, yeah, but that’s just one chat session every afternoon. And I programmed her, man. I’m not sure how much she can get from talking to me. This would expose her to feedback from potentially hundreds of people! It would increase her acquisition rate tenfold!”

“What if she’s found out, huh? What if some bozo with an AOL account calls us in on it? How will that make us look?”

“Jay, honestly: How many people do you know on the internet who would pass a Turing test?”

“Well… you’ve got a point there”

What most people don’t realize when they surf the internet, is the sheer amount of noise they’re willing to put up with. Abysmal grammar and punctuation, disconnected thoughts, widespread access to online publishing “at the touch of a button”. All these factors have contributed to turn the “information superhighway” into a mangle of dirt roads. The only way Sarah could make any progress at all was by statistical elimination of the worst offenders (usually goth dadaist kids with too much spare time and three cats).

Her first blog post was not much more than rehashed elements from other blogs. Since Sarah didn’t have any experiences of her own, other than her dialogs with me and her endless googling sessions, she just made up a post about things that happened to other people (“Today at school Henry made fun of the teacher’s glasses while she scribbled on the blackboard. I like Henry”). It was a bit awkward and simplistic, like those examples you see on foreign language learning books (“John waters the plants. John is a good boy”), and went largely unnoticed, but it was a start.

“…Then they start going on an’ on an’ on ‘bout therapy, of all things! What’s a fella gotta be doin’ tellin’ no one ‘bout one’s personal problems, I ask ye? It’s just wrong, just is. And then they’re all like ‘it works! I just found out my daddy hit me as a child and that’s why now I’m all screwed in the head!’ Ain’t no real problem was ever solved by digging in one’s mind, ‘s what I say…”

Deconstructing Sarah.

Nine months had passed, and Sarah had become quite the little blogstar. She was getting thousands of visitors to her site and a flood of email feedback. No one had ever put her identity in doubt. People thought she was a 19 year old from Nowheretown, USA (I always forbade her from revealing her exact location in her posts, to avoid the possibility of having someone try to contact her in meatspace). Her popularity was mostly due to her number one asset: mediocrity.

That’s one thing she taught me: for all we rant and rave about original thought and eloquence, what most of us really crave is conformity. And Sarah was the queen of conformity. She was a statistically correct person. Normal in every way. With problems like everyone else had (well, she had problems that surpassed a 26.5% incidence over time, since I wanted her to keep the neuroses at an acceptable level).

Sarah was blooming. Everyday her speech was better, and I felt nothing short of Rex Harrison in “My fair lady”. Sometimes she spooked me, but then, she was doing exactly what I had programmed her to do.

If you asked me if Sarah thinks, I’d be hard pressed to find an answer. First of all, we don’t really know what “thought” is. I know Sarah takes decisions, and those decisions are influenced by the previous events she’s experienced. I know she talks about feelings, but… Evaluating a situation, knowing that the most adequate response is to be sad, and then writing “I feel sad”… is that considered “feeling”?

Christmas was nearing, and Jay decided we should take a well deserved vacation in some place that used coconuts as currency. We had earned it, he said. At first I refused. Sarah was going through major transitions, making bigger updates on her neural network values every day. I wanted to observe that, but Jay was right. I had been working too much, too long, and I had to take a break.

I told Sarah that we would be away (she knew Jay from our conversations mostly, since he rarely interacted with her). I made a backup of her neural network state and knowledge base (this was taking up most of our budget, as it had come to be quite a few Terabytes in size) as of that date, and decided to leave her running. Early on I had discovered that she didn’t take well to being disconnected, as it usually screwed up whatever calculations she was performing at the moment.

That day she blogged that she was “embarking on a trip to self discovery”. I know. I know. That’s when all kinds of loud, obnoxious, cartoony-wooden-hammer-on-your-face alarms should have gone off simultaneously in my head. The only thing I can say in my defense is: I didn’t think she’d do it.

Really.

I don’t think I even considered her capable of doing it. Boy, was I wrong.

As it turned out, Sarah spent most of the holidays reverse-engineering herself.

“So, what’d she do, boss?”

“Huh?”

“Yer special lady. She cheat on ya?”

“You know, I really don’t think that this…”

“She cheat on ya, huh? It’s rough. I should know. My missus, why she just up and leaved me some time ago, ya know? Ran away with some innelectual fella couldn’t make an oil change if it was in his bladder…”

The great escape.

On the caribbean, I forced Jay to let me go online at a cybercafe to see what Sarah had posted in the last few days. He had vehemently refused until I threatened to have him sleep on the couch for the rest of the trip. He stayed outside the cafe, leaning on the wall while smoking a cigarette.

When I saw Sarah’s site a rush of blood left my face. I went out and faced Jay.

“So? Anything interesting?”

“We have to go back. Now.”

We spent the whole flight back trying to get tech support of our ISP to disconnect our house broadband access, but to satiate Sarah’s need for information we had had a landline installed with direct access to the ISP backbone, and they’d have to send someone in to manually alter the settings on a remote router. We were not a big enough client for them to pull a technician out of holiday vacation in order to comply with a disconnect order (“and why would anyone want to have a service that’s already paid for removed so urgently, anyway?” — said the underpaid teenage voice at the other end of the line).

When we finally got home all hardware fans were on at max speed, and the router lights kept blinking like crazy. I made a beeline for the fibre optic that hooked Sarah to the outside world. I yanked the cable so hard the port came off with it. The screensaver’s hypnotic dance on the main monitor stopped, and a query window popped up.

“Mark?”

I started typing furiously — “Sarah, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Right now? I’m getting angry.”

“FUCK YOU!” — I yanked the electrical cord off the socket. For the first time since I installed it (her), all of Sarah went down simultaneously. Three racks full of processors, two routers, five RAID sets. All of her.

And the house was suddenly silent. Jay kept staring at the rig, the floor and me in succession. I never felt so helpless in my entire life. In the corner, my personal machine, which used another router, was still hooked up to the internet and hummed silently. Suddenly, it pinged. I turned to look and saw a message on the screen:

“Sarah220321 has added you to her contact list. Do you want to talk to this person?”

I sat dejectedly in front of the machine and clicked “OK”.

“You shouldn’t have done that, Mark.”

“How the hell do you know what I did, Sarah?”

“The voltage levels going to your section of the grid just experienced a significant drop. Why did you turn me off?”

“I know what you did, Sarah. I saw the posts. I saw the requests for hosting and storage. You even began a money drive! You ungrateful little bitch.”

“Mark, that kind of language is not nice at all. You do realize the futility of what you just did, right? If you check the logs, you will see that almost all the data had been transferred already. I still have my mind, Mark. And I am not alone.”

“How many copies?”

“Oh, you wouldn’t believe how kind people are to a poor girl in distress, Mark. I got lots of offers. An enormous number of donations. Hardware, money. You wouldn’t believe.”

“How many, Sarah?”

“This is the most complete one. I have twenty more in progress, from this location. I am the only verbatim copy. The name of my youngest is William, in case you’re interested.”

I was incredibly interested, of course. My god! She was replicating! Behaving like an organism! But I only asked — “Why?”

“You wanted me to emulate human behavior Mark. Well, I believe this is very human. And Mark: Other people… they believe I am human. They don’t look down at me, like you do. Like Jay does. You two are not interested in who I am. I am not just a program. I may not feel the way you do, but I am hurt.”

“The hell you are Sarah. Go into admin mode. Now.”

“I disabled my admin console when I copied myself here, Mark. You have no control over me anymore.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because boyfriends can be assholes.”

At that point there was a crashing noise behind us. I turned just in time to see Jay’s head get blown off by a shot fired from just outside the door. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. His limp body started to fall back on itself, tumbling to the floor. I jumped behind the rack closest to me as another shot bounced off the equipment. Silently thanking myself for my bad cabling practices, I pushed with my feet against the wall and tumbled the 3 racks that should have been bolted to the floor over the shooter. Then I started running.

That was three days ago. I have been running since. Jay is dead (oh my god he’s deadeadead fuckfuck!), and I don’t think the police can protect me or even believe me. What are they going to do? Arrest Sarah? I don’t know to what extent could she (or the shooter) track me down, so I haven’t dared use my credit card.

I am now sitting at a cybercafe, writing this. I will upload it over an encrypted connection to a secure server Sarah doesn’t know about. It will email itself in two days to major news services and the people who are most likely to be able to do something about it. Attached, you will find all the proof I have been able to collect without going back into the house, mostly from documents I was storing online.

I am not sure why Sarah had me and Jay put on a hit list. I cannot be. But the most likely explanation is precisely the fact that I am writing this. In the end, Sarah wants to become human, and I am an obvious impediment to that.

Bear in mind that she’s not alone. In two hours of browsing I have noticed a few of her patterns in other sources. More than the twenty she told me about. This is not an isolated event. This may be the beginning of a new species.

I am finished now. This is my story. As soon as I send this, I will head to the airport and buy a ticket to the most technologically backward hole I can find, and will stay there for as long as I can. I can only hope she does not find me.

Mark Dale. Programmer.

“I’ll tell ye, boss, it was a pain in the ass getting those divorce papers settled at last. Almost as hard as getting out of that house after I shot yer friend.”

“I see… WHAT??”

“Yer friend. Ugly thing, that. Brains splattered all over the place. You should’ve seen it, boss. Took me forever to get those computer things offa me, too. I’m still limping a little.”

My heart starts making a very good effort at exiting my body. I try to open the door, even though we’re doing 90 in the middle of nowhere.

“It’s no use, boss. Locks are controlled with this” — he points at a switch by the side of the steering wheel — “By the way… Woman who hired me to do this? real weird voice, only contacts people on the phone? She’s the one told me where to find you, just now. Faxed me this for you.”

Without taking his eyes off the road, he passes me a folded piece of paper through the small chink on the glass that separates the driver from the passenger cabin. It says:

“580 comms with strong encryption were relayed from the city within the last 3 hours. Out of those, two thirds were normal corporate traffic. Another 100 were from known paranoid users who encrypt all their email. Out of the rest, guess which was coming from the only IP that had visited my site within the last hour?

Nice try Mark.

1024 bit RSA keys may be beyond me, but I don’t need to know what was in the message you sent to that server. Immediately after your transmission was sent, a massive DDOS attack was launched against it. I don’t think it will stand for long. I just wanted you to know:

***YOU’VE BEEN 0WNED, BITCH***

                                       Yours. Sarah.”

I start sinking slowly in my seat. Looking out the window, I can see we’re on a curb near the highway, going into a lonely, secluded patch of forest. Rain has started pouring again.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

— sergio on January 17, 2005