10/

As a child, Henry had wanted to be a mad scientist; before today he thought this project was the closest he could ever ethically get. Watching his third sunrise in a row, he tries to convince himself that this is all worth it.

Next to him, Ellen’s fallen asleep at her desk despite the half-imbibed, sand-colored coffee cooling in a mug near her head. He lets her sleep — closes the lid of her laptop and caps the dry erase marker near her hand — figuring to himself that they’ve already made history and she deserves the rest.

It’s too late to go home but too early to be there, so Henry reruns the validation test suite to kill time. It passes — it’s been passing for a day and a half at this point — though somehow still there’s a disquieting tug in his stomach.

He wanders to the atrium and sits to look out at the mountains. In a way, he and Ellen have become parents. They’ve created what he struggles to define as something other than life. And they’ve become responsible, therefore, for the implications of what they’ve done.

“Are you ready for today?” he starts at the sound, but Ellen is already pulling out a chair at his table and sinking down next to him, yawning as she smooths her hair.

“Honestly? I’m not sure I thought, deep down, that this project was viable.”

Ellen scrunches her nose. “I know. It feels…surreal. Honey, our baby is all grown up and passing the Turing test.”

She barks at her own joke, but he’s staring at the ground between his legs, eyebrows furrowed. “I’m being serious. I’m suddenly feeling very humbled by what we’ve done. I thought it would be cool to witness a program learn and communicate on its own. But yesterday it wrote like a child and today it’s responding like a college student, with an understanding of idiom, and that’s — ” he trails off, gesturing toward the windows.

Ellen nods, but says nothing as Henry drops his head into his hands and threads his hair through his fingers, tugging on it like he’s testing if he’s dreaming. “This was cool to think about, but now it’s here and we — what if we’ve opened a very bad door?”

“It’s pretty startling how quickly it’s learned,” Ellen’s face is solemn, all traces of her previous humor gone. “When I think about how fast it’s making progress, and what this tech could do if it was applied to weapons or the military or bad actors — it just all happened too fast.”

“So what are we going to do?” Henry asks. If their program has a consciousness — or at least a simulated one — does it have a right to whatever life-equivalency it may possess? He wants to suggest they shut it down, but struggles to get the words out.

“I thought about pushing some bad code,” Ellen puts her chin in her palm. “But even if we delete production and the whole repo and all the server backups, we’re not the only ones with the code locally. It would take them, what, at most a couple hours to redeploy?”

He sits up and turns to her, shaking his head. “What have we done?”

Ellen sighs and knits her hands behind her head, leaning back into her fingers. “I don’t mean to make light of this moment, Henry, I really don’t. But I think this is truly an exemplary definition of fuck around and find out.”