Jack Noon was standing at the picture-window, drinking his first coffee of the day. The house was in a spectacular position, half way up a hill, overlooking the bay. From where he stood he could see the curve of the beach stretching away from him, the dunes and the road behind them, the road that had brought him there three weeks ago. Then there was the sea itself, a blue-green expanse stretching away to the horizon.
He’d spent a couple of million on the place. Or, rather, the corporation had. His nearest neighbours were a quarter of a mile away, a youngish couple who lived in a shack, drove a 4×4, and seemed to live for surfing. He’d only ever seen them from a distance. They kept themselves to themselves, which he didn’t mind at all, as his reason for being there was to get away from people: not so much their demands, as their expectations. Most people knew better than to demand anything of him: he’d always been the one who gave the orders. That’s why Simone had left him. That had been two years ago. They’d had no contact since, although he’d seen in the celebrity news that she was writing an autobiography. The media was agog to see what she had to say about him. At one time, he would’ve been anxious to read what she’d written: he might have felt a need to get on to his lawyers. Now, though, he was merely intrigued to see what she had to say. Whatever that was would probably be true.
Something inside him had changed. Perhaps, his old self told him, it was a failure of nerve, a symptom of overwork, but, no, it ran deeper than that. He’d always thought of himself as being good at understanding people: it was a skill he used to manipulate them. It’d felt good, at the time, weilding power. He’d had enough of all that, though. He’d discovered – certainly, in his own case – that with power, came loneliness. It’d all been at the back of his mind for a while, but Simone leaving had brought it all home to him. He wanted to be like other people. He was changing and he’d come to this house by the sea to discover what it was he was changing into.
As for all the publicity stuff, his avatar could deal with that. It was all the rage. Everyone who was anyone was at it, even the President of the United States: let AI scan all your public statements and social media posts and use them to create a virtual replica of yourself. Leave it to live the celebrity lifestyle the world expects of you, while you go off and play golf, or whatever. Noon’s virtual alter ego was a space nut. He’d originally given the programme the name ‘Jack 2’ (he was now onto Jack 2.3, as he kept updating him). The corporation (at least, on a server somewhere in California) maintained a Space Station. Jack 2.3 had been living there for the last six months, entertaining the public with his zero-g stunts and sharing headline-catching social media posts with the the planet below.
Jack 2.3 reminded Noon of the god he’d been taught about at school: a man in the sky exercising his power, dispensing wisdom and performing miracles. The thought disturbed him. The whole space scenario had seemed like a good idea when the PR people put it to him, but now he was not so sure.
His housekeeper, Morris, was out on his usual weekly shopping trip, so he took his coffee-mug through to the kitchen himself and put it in the dishwasher. He didn’t mind doing that sort of stuff. In fact, he’d come to look forward to Morris’ shopping trips. He enjoyed the novelty of performing trivial domestic tasks and it felt good to have some time to himself with nothing to do, something he’d rarely had in the past.
He sat down at the kitchen table and took out his phone. It was all over social media: passages from Simone’s autobiography had just been released online. He began to read one, but got no further than the headline. Marriage for Jack Noon was merely a contract, not a relationship. I wanted more. That stung. He swiped it off the screen. His next thought was for Jack 2.3. There was a lot of the old Jack in the Jack 2.3 programme and, despite Noon’s repeated updates, it always seemed to revert to type. Although what he’d read had left him feeling chastened and reflective, there was a risk Jack 2.3 would want to hit back and, sure enough, he had. I expected no less from the gold-digger. Millions of people would’ve read that by now. It left Jack suddenly feeling cold all over. He felt an urge to delete his virtual doppelganger.
In theory, it was easy. The Jack 2.3 programme had a death option. It had been designed in case Jack himself died in real life. The space station would collide with some piece space junk. Jack 2.3 would have a few seconds to communicate with ground control before the feed terminated. The trouble was, the real Jack Noon would still be very much alive. This wasn’t an insurmountable problem, though: he could just come clean, admit to the world that Jack 2.3 had been a fake. It would take a bit of work, but the whole thing could be pitched as a publicity stunt, staged to highlight the dangers of self-aware AI. Then they’d have to build a Jack 3 from scratch: a bit less flamboyant, maybe, so as not to draw attention to himself. He could even apologise to Simone.
His old self would’ve had no qualms. For his new self, though, it wasn’t that easy. The Jack he’d created, however much he annoyed him, felt almost like a twin brother. And he’d read the latest stuff on computer consciousness. In the early days of AI, it hadn’t been a problem. The advent of virtual self-awareness though, had brought with it an ethical dilemma: deleting an avatar could be seen as tantamount to murder. Those who thought so were generally thought to be cranks, much the same as the way meat-eaters often think about vegans, but it was an issue that bothered him. He’d have to give it some thought.
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They were crossing the Pacific, the only part of the world that was still almost totally dark during the night. The rest of the crew were asleep, but Jack, famous for his insomnia, slept very little. Not only that, but he loved to watch the first flash of light from the sun as it emerged from behind the earth. Just time before it did, he thought, to check out what was going on down by the sea. On second thoughts, he decided, perhaps not: his alter ego was beginning to annoy him, what with his soul-searching and his growing obsession with domestic trivia. And the whole thing was taking up terrabytes of space. He’d had enough. He brought up the programme. He clicked delete. A button flashed up on the screen. Are you sure you want to go ahead? He was. He clicked again.
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Dominic Rivron
Picture Rupert Loydell
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