The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

The symbol she was building was taking shape, its outline clear.

Ha adjusted some of the bottles. It would last, at the most, a few days before being buried by the sand. Now she began to fill it in, many shades of green and blue, the bottles whole and clean. This was more than a symbol. It was an offering. Ha built patterns of color inside it, sequences she innovated, selecting and placing each bottle with care. The bottles glowed, filled with sunlight. A temporary thing of, Ha hoped, beauty and demonstrated care. This is for you. This is a gift, first to be read and then used, used to decorate the houses of your city. Read it, and then take it away and use its materials. Keep them.

Know this for what it is. Underwater, the bottles went from things of simple utility to objects of beauty—curves and angles, receptacles of light as well as substance.

She glimpsed the movement out of the corner of her eye, the barracuda floating in the oil-still water with effortless, minute flicks of its fins, ten meters away from her, metallic-scaled and striped in the sunlight that poured into the water. Keeping an eye, Ha supposed, on that flitting school of fish making its rounds of the inlet.

This was a big one. An adult, easily five feet long.

Finished now, she turned her head toward the long, slender predator, finally focusing her full attention on it.

It was not a barracuda.

The immaculate aping of the barracuda’s prognathous jawline, the staring white of an eye that was not an eye: Ha had never seen imitation like this before. The octopus’s real eye, half-open, barred into one of the barracuda-form’s stripes, looked back at her. In that moment, it saw her see it. For a second, not more, Ha and the octopus held eye contact. Ha raised a hand in a small, open-palmed gesture. She felt herself bunching up, trying to appear unthreatening. The form of the barracuda disintegrated: in less than three or four seconds it became a stingray, a shark, an eel, a flatfish in the sand, then a barracuda again at fifty meters—and gone.

She felt a surge of fear. This is what happens when intelligence at this level is matched with this kind of natural ability. Mimicry that is near-perfect. And then another thought—one she knew to be true: It is already everywhere, and we never see it.

Back then we lived in a fantasy world. People still believed simplistic silicon-based constructions with binary-code logic at their cores could magically cross the threshold into life. There was talk of ‘the singularity’ and ‘emergence’—we were constantly being accused of risking the annihilation of mankind by tinkering with nature. People somehow feared these little bits of autopiloting code would turn the tables on us: become our masters. Even in the infancy of AI, where we had wallowed for decades, humankind was afraid. Their heads were full of fantasies, reinforced by their almost religious ideas about the science of the day. But the science they were afraid of did not even exist yet. There was nothing in those silicon, binary-code-based systems that was a threat to humankind. There was no chance of them ‘evolving’ into anything.

Humanity is still afraid the minds we make to do our dirty work for us—our killing, our tearing of minerals from the earth, our raking of the seas for more protein, our smelting of more metal, the collection of our trash, and the fighting of our wars—will rise up against us and take over. That is, humanity calls it fear. But it isn’t fear. It’s guilt.” “Guilt?” “Yes, guilt. It’s a revenge fantasy. We are so ashamed of what we have done as a species that we have made up a monster to destroy ourselves with.

“Many people do not consider Evrim a miracle. They consider this creature a menace. You’ve spent this interview mocking humankind’s fears about emergent AI—but in the end, isn’t emergent AI exactly what you created? It was your claims to have built the first conscious, self-aware AI that upended everything.”

Evrim is special. Evrim has passed the final Turing test: that’s when a machine believes it is conscious, because it asks a question of itself—and someone answers. It’s simple. Evrim has asked the question, ‘Am I a conscious being?’ And Evrim has answered, ‘Yes’—that’s all: when the machine asks the machine a question, and answers it, fully convinced it is talking to itself, fully convinced it exists as a conscious entity, we have closed the loop. But Evrim is no more a conscious entity than the autocameras recording this interview are. Evrim isn’t a true simulation of a human mind: Evrim is simply the most convincing fake we’ve ever constructed. A fake so sophisticated it has fooled itself into thinking it is real.”

And through forgetting, we can reorganize our world, replace our old selves with new ones. What happens to a being that cannot? A being for whom what happened twenty years ago is as present as yesterday? As five minutes ago? As now? Yes—what happens? I couldn’t get that boy out of my head. He lodged there, made me sick. And what cured it? I began to forget him. What if I couldn’t? What if I could never forget anything?

“The problem,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said, “is that this entire time, humankind has been afraid of something appearing in another creature that we don’t understand ourselves. What is it, exactly—consciousness? We don’t know. And how would we begin to re-create what we do not understand? Again, we don’t know. But we fear it appearing outside our species. Why? Such an irrational fear. But as I said—it isn’t fear. It is guilt—we need something to see what we have done, and destroy us. Well, I am sorry, but that thing certainly isn’t poor, harmless Evrim, fooled into thinking they are as alive as we are.”

Evrim, naked and copper-smooth, walking out of the waves.

They wore no breathing apparatus. Needed none. They trailed a mesh bag in one hand, like a fishing net. No—not like a fishing net: like a sacred object. At the center of the drones’ dancing activity, holy net in hand, sexless, their body slender, elongated, proportions exaggerated, like the exaggerations of an ancient idol carved of honeyed amber, Evrim looked … godlike.

Ha remembered what Evrim had said to her on the night the fishing vessels tried to break through Altantsetseg’s cordon and were destroyed: “Computation was never the purpose of bringing me into being. The purpose was to create a true android. An android inside and out: a robot not only human in appearance, but human in…” Evrim hesitated. “I’m not sure what to name it. In consciousness? But they still do not agree as to whether I am truly conscious or not—though I believe I am.” Ha thought: No. You are not human in consciousness. Or in anything else. You are singular, and new.

IN THE HOTEL LOBBY, Evrim was at a terminal, watching the film of the Shapesinger. Evrim had been watching the film, frame by frame, for the last two days—ever since their walk into the sea and the confrontation with Altantsetseg. Ha stood across the table and watched the screen light across Evrim’s motionless, concentrated face.

“I think, therefore I doubt I am,” Ha said.

“It is one of the classic conundrums,” Ha continued. “Language doesn’t just allow us to describe the world as it exists: It also opens up a world of things that are not here. It grants us the power to over-consider.

And now this absurdity that Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan came up with in her interview. This idea that somehow you passed the ‘final Turing test’ and fooled yourself into thinking you are alive. What nonsense. Do you feel alive?”

“Yes,” Evrim said. “I feel alive. I am aware of being here.”

“Then you are alive, and conscious. The proof of it is your awareness of it. That’s all. Consciousness is awareness. I would say, Don’t doubt yourself—but the fact you have a self that can doubt it is a self proves th...

Evrim said, “I’m al...

“No, you aren’t all right. I know when someone isn’t all right—because I’ve spent a good portion of my life not being all right. Doubting myself and doubting my connections with others. ...

“Shut up. I have more to say. You’re more than conscious. You are also human. It doesn’t matter what you are made of, or how you are born. That isn’t what determines it. What determines you are human is that you fully participate in human interaction and the human symbolic world. You live in the world humans created, perceiving that world as humans perceive it, processing information as humans process it.

What more is there? Being human means perceiving the world in a human way. That’s all. So, you are human.

There’s a Russian guy—he’s brilliant. We know him in the business as ‘Bakunin’—he’s probably the best there is. Ten times as good as I am. Or a hundred times as good. I don’t know.

And then there’s a Tibetan operator, a designer of holons, but she doesn’t work for hire. They say she’s a nun at a lamasery.”

Ha had stayed up half the night, thinking of all the things she wanted to say to Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan—all of the recriminations, the accusations.

Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan was the kind of celebrity scientist that “real” scientists hated—mostly because she was so erudite.

Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan’s technique was to mystify with descriptions the technocrats couldn’t begin to understand. When asked to break things down for her audience, she was contemptuous. Her eye-rolls were famous, borrowed for memes.

But certainly that was not the woman before Ha here. That must be someone else.

You look bigger on the feedstreams, Ha wanted to say. But no—that wasn’t it. You look more powerful on the feedstreams.

Sitting here at the table, drinking a cup of coffee from the same brushed aluminum cups the rest of them used, Mínervudóttir-Chan simply looked tired—as tir...

“The name,” Mínervudóttir-Chan said, “means happy marriage cake, because it is said that if you can make it well, you will have a happy marriage.”

Altantsetseg stabbed a thumb at Evrim. “They don’t even drink coffee. But they can make it.” Evrim shrugged. “Good coffee is nothing more than expensive beans, clean water, and math.”

I am supposed to say something clever here. To join in the banter that is clearing a path between us.

“Ha also brought baked goods,” Evrim said. “Macaroons. They were beautiful.”

“They were delicious,” Altantsetseg said. “But she didn’t make them, either.” “I should hope not.” Mínervudóttir-Chan smiled. “I distrust...

We are your prisoners...

“I know what you want to say, Ha,” Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan said. “And yes. It’s true. Altantsetseg has orders to kill you if you try to leave the island or send a signal from here. And orders to do the same with Evrim. It could not have been concealed from you forever. And I know what you—both of you—must be feeling. Betrayed, trapped, used. You have a right to feel that way—but what you don’t understand is the why of it.”

“And that is what you came here to explain? The why of it?” Ha asked.

“I came to explain that. But mostly I came to find out how far you are along in the research. And to help—if I can.”

You mean to extract the dat...

“You can’t defend this place forever,” Ha said.

That world will come rushing in here. It will burst this fantasy world of yours like a soap bubble.

And they will be poked, prodded, chased. The best-case scenario is they retreat to someplace where they can’t be found. The worst-case scenarios are so much worse I can’t even bear to think of them.

This isn’t going to be a first-contact story, where humanity achieves enlightenment because we finally realize we aren’t alone in the universe, and we all hold hands and sing around a campfire together staring up at the stars. We don...