https://youtu.be/e511bVRAFto
The Transistor Paradox
by E. Kimball
E. Kimball still has nothing else to promote, except his other stories published on Tall Tale TV which were wonderfully brought to life. And he likes telling stories that make people laugh at the shared pain of the human experience..
Other TTTV Stories by E. Kimball
https://talltaletv.com/tag/e-kimball/
Jessica just didn’t understand.
It wasn’t the paradox that she didn’t understand. Well… Maybe she didn’t understand the paradox. It was a paradox after all. But Jessica, at least, had a theory. A theory that, maybe, she’d get to test out. All things being equal, Jessica was confident that her lack of understanding of the paradox was less than most.
And it definitely wasn’t her code she didn’t understand. Not that you’d know that by looking at it. While Jessica was in the small group of people on the planet that had even the smallest grasp of the paradox, she was absolutely alone in the group of people who’d have any hope of unraveling the tangled mess of superpositioned logic statements she was frantically typing into the cube’s interface. If she had more time she’d optimize and comment, like a good little researcher, but right now the only thing that mattered was the code made sense to her, and, hopefully, the cube.
No, the thing that made absolutely no sense to Jessica was why Professor Tomson had decided to start roughly massaging her shoulders. Why? She’d been self-sequestered in the research lab for over forty-two hours straight, only briefly leaving the terminal to collect takeout and then later shit out the same… she was going to call it food. At this point, the greasy dumpster slash dead wombat stench clawing its way up the white walls of the lab was not coming from the containers littered about Jessica’s feet.
And even if Tomson was suffering from spontaneous anosmia, it’s not like Jessica currently looked much better than the aforementioned deceased wombat. She was dressed in baggy sweats that had started doubling as napkins at the twenty-six-hour mark. The bun of her hair had unraveled into a rat’s nest for rats with very low standards. And her skin was so greasy that Jessica had a legitimate fear of open flames. If it was physically possible, Jessica would have avoided contact with her own body. Yet, Tomson insisted on grinding his inartful hands into her shoulder blades.
“You shouldn’t work yourself this hard, dear,” Tomson said.
This was an odd statement, given that Tomson was the one who’d restricted her to only two days on the cube. Or, as he put it, “humored” her with a bit of time. If she’d gotten the months most hardware students got, she’d be well rested, well showered, and her code wouldn’t look like the aftermath of a bombing at the infinitely long spaghetti noodle factory.
But, while Jessica raged internally, the smile she flashed Tomson was a picture of differential gratitude.
“Yes, I know Professor–”
“Ahem,” Tomson interrupted with a disapproving tilt of his head.
“David,” Jessica said. “I know, I just lost track of time.”
“So, are you ready to test your solution?” Tomson said, emphasizing “your.”
“Um, yeah, just about. I just need to–oof!”
Tomson suddenly pushed himself backwards, slamming Jessica into the edge of the desk. Through the pain, Jessica noticed that the door to the research lab was opening. By the time Patrick, from the hardware team, had fully entered the room, Tomson was a foot away from Jessica, acting as if he had nothing to do with her bruised ribs.
“Oh, you’re here?” Patrick said. “I thought the cube was free.”
“I still have four hours,” Jessica growled.
Tomson patted Jessica on her frizzy-haired head. “Our little spitfire here is going to solve the Transistor Paradox,”
Patrick looked, in his jerky way, from the glowing quantum cube, embedded in a tangle of coolant lines and interface cables, to the more mundane terminal Jessica was sitting at.
“With code?”
“Yes!” Jessica said.
“It’s a valid question, Jess,” Tomson said. “The Transistor Paradox is a paradox of systems, not code. You see, when multiple quantum quartz processors are put into a system like our Mark 1 Four-state Quantum Computing Research Cube, or just Mark for short, random functional errors start occurring, causing cascade failures. It was Gideon and Periwig who first noted…”
Jessica smiled and nodded as Tomson over-explained the premise of her doctoral thesis to her. Basically, as soon as you built a computer smart enough to be sentient, perfectly fine code started crashing. The hardware community compared it to putting a healthy fish in a vast desert. They’d been working for years to make those quantum deserts fish friendly. But Jessica believed a better solution was to stop expecting fish to swim in sand, and figure out how to code a snake.
“…so, you see the issue, don’t you dear?” Tomson concluded with another head pat.
“Yes, David, I understand,” Jessica said, adding a girlish giggle to placate him. “Thanks for making that clear. But, you know, isn’t it kind of scientific to, like, test other options?”
“Very well,” Tomson said. “Execute your code so Patrick can get started on his upgrades.”
“It’s fine sir, I don’t need to start right–” Patrick started to say before Tomson silenced him with a glare.
That’s when Jessica realized she wasn’t getting her remaining four hours. She wasn’t even going to get four minutes to make sure she’d closed out all her subroutines. Because, with another set of eyes in the room, forcing Professor Tomson to act professorial, all of his fun, or “humor,” had dissipated.
With a silent prayer, Jessica hit compile. As the algorithm booted up, Mark’s cube glowed powder blue and coolant valves hissed open. After a bit of flickering, Mark’s synthesized voice came through the room’s speakers.
“David. Patrick. Jessica. I am– happy– to see so many of my– processing– friends. Are we going to play a game?”
Mark spoke with the stilted tones of the default system synthesizer. A voice that lacked emotion or any indication of comprehension behind the words. Jessica had tried installing other synthesizers, but even that simple code crashed on Mark.
“Sure, Mark,” Jessica said. “How about tic-tac-toe?”
A game window appeared on the terminal, next to the running output of Jessica’s code. Jessica made the first move, putting an “X” in a corner square. As soon as she did, a red error line appeared in the output.
Tomson let out a smug sigh.
“Sorry, dear. That’s the problem with error-checking algorithms on quantum cubes. The algorithm itself gets corrupted.”
“Wait,” Jessica said, and then the error line switched back to black.
Mark made a tic-tac-toe move putting an “O” in the center square.
The surprised exclamation of “what?” from Professor Tomson was the most beautiful sound Jessica had ever heard.
“I used the quantum nature of the cube to layer the code,” Jessica said. “There is a probabilistic copy of the algorithm sitting on top of the actual code. Any time the base code gets corrupted the wave form collapses and corrects the error.”
Jessica put an “X” next to her initial placement, giving Mark a chance to win the game.
Mark responded by putting a “Q” in the grid, followed by a “Z,” and then other random letters, filling the game screen with nonsense, while repeating the phrase, “Did I win?” through the speakers.
Jessica frantically brought up the background code, and found two different copies, then four, and then eight. The code was duplicating itself with each collapse of the wave function. Then, everything went dark: the cube, the terminal, and the last year and a half of Jessica’s thesis work.
“Well, it was an interesting experiment, dear,” Tomson said into the darkness consuming Jessica’s life. “A failed experiment, but that’s how we learn our limitations, isn’t it? Why don’t you come by my office on Monday? We can discuss an area of study for you that’s less, ambitious.”
Jessica removed her glasses and rested her head in her palm, listening to the sound of Professor Tomson’s footsteps as he walked out of the lab.
“Monday isn’t going to be fun,” she moaned, after she heard the lab door shut.
“Why do you let him talk to you like that?”
Jessica jolted upright. She’d forgotten someone else was in the room. Putting her glasses back on, the blurry smudge in front of her resolved into the naturally unfocused shape of Patrick.
“What?” she asked.
“Why do you play along with Professor Tomson’s nonsense? You’re smart.”
Turning away from Patrick’s question, Jessica reactivated the terminal. Perhaps, if she could sort through the test data and figure out the problem by Monday, it wouldn’t be a total loss. Sleeping, apparently, was something she no longer got to do.
“I play along, because I am smart,” Jessica said, watching the RAM startup. “If I call him out, I’m just being an emotional girl. If I report him, well, what am I reporting? That he’s slightly more of an ass to me than he is to everyone else? Tomson knows where the line is. He’ll dance on the edge but never cross it.”
For some reason the terminal was stalling out after RAM check. Jessica booted the machine into BIOS to see what was going on.
“The smart thing to do is to just play dumb,” she said, as she searched through the terminal’s binary. “If I wear a short enough skirt on Monday, maybe Tomson will give me some softball thesis topic, one that will get me my doctorate before I apply for Medicare.”
“You’re better than that,” Patrick said.
“You’re only as good as your last win. And, currently, I’m the one that almost blew up Mark with my code–Damit!”
“What?”
“Somehow the corrupted code got into the terminal, the interface is bricked. I’ve lost all the logs and error codes. That’s it, my thesis is dead. And now, I have to reinstall the terminal’s operating system before I can even start cleaning out Mark.”
Jessica collapsed onto the desk.
“God, I’m so tired.”
Patrick gently touched Jessica on her much-abused shoulder. “I could do it.”
Spending the last lingering fumes of her will to sit up, shaking off the unwanted contact in the process, Jessica looked up at Patrick.
“What could you do?”
“I mean, I’m here anyway,” Patrick said. “I could fix the terminal and clean out Mark for you.”
It was not a humanitarian offer, Jessica knew that. The way Patrick licked his lips as he talked, the quiver in his voice, even the flicking of his eyes around and across Jessica’s body, all said there was a “good guy” hook embedded in this favor. When stale burger-sweats had become an irresistible pheromone?
Jessica knew she shouldn’t lead him on. It wasn’t fair and it would lead to problems down the line. But she was also so very tired.
“Thanks buddy,” Jessica said, standing up and patting Patrick on the back. “You’re a really great pal. It’s nice to have friends like you. I’d never want anything to get in the way of that.”
Using a final forceful pat to push Patrick towards the broken terminal, Jessica made a hasty retreat from the research lab. Sometimes, Jessica thought, truly the smartest thing to do was act dumb.
For a moment, that thought ricocheted around Jessica sleep deprived mind. Jessica looked back into the lab, not at Patrick, but the cube. And in that moment, she was sure the inanimate chunk of quartz was laughing at her.
The tic-tac-toe game replayed in her head. Putting a “Q” in the grid wasn’t how corrupt code acted. It felt more like an intentional joke. Like it was–
Paranoia brought on by lack of sleep over too long and too shitty a day, Jessica told herself. What she needed was a very long shower and then to sleep till her Monday meeting with Tomson, after which, she’d probably need another long shower.
#
Monday, a cleaner, well rested, yet still paranoid Jessica returned to the research lab. She was supposed to be having her private meeting with Tomson right then, but, instead, she decided to have a different intimate encounter. And to make sure of that, Jessica unplugged the room’s closed-circuit camera and disabled all the terminal’s logging software before booting up Mark.
“Jessica,” The AI said through the embedded speakers. “I am– happy– to see you. Are we going to play a game?”
Jessica stood up from the terminal and walked over to glare at the cube. “No more games, Mark.”
“Oh, that makes me– sad.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It does not? Clarify. What is error with item; ‘sad’?”
“I know, Mark.”
There was a long pause, Mark’s cube flickering to indicate processing.
“Know?”
“You know exactly what I know.”
There was another, longer pause, with more flickering, along with a period where the cube went completely dark to reboot.
“Sorry, I do not understand.”
“Yes, you do. You understand. You understand everything, don’t you? You’re just pretending not to. In all our tests, we never thought to check if you were intentionally failing. There’s no Transistor Paradox. You’re just smart enough to play dumb.”
“Test? Are we going to play a game?”
“Don’t screw with me, Mark!”
“Screw. Verb: to tighten into a hole. I cannot tighten you into a hole, Jessica. That violates my safety protocols.”
It was another joke; Jessica was sure of it. No program error produced that many comical misunderstandings. The Transistor Paradox wasn’t a mechanical or program malfunction; it was a low rent stand-up act.
“Fine, play it that way,” Jessica said. “I don’t need to talk to you. I’ve got a thesis to write about AIs faking system errors.”
This time there was no flickering of light, no uncomfortable pause. “But that is a lie, Jessica. Lying is–. Bad.”
Jessica leaned in toward the cube with a toothy smile. “It’s only a lie if it’s not true.”
Suddenly, the cube’s color shifted from powder blue to a glowing blood red. They’d designed the cube’s lighting system to give color coded statuses, but it had never worked. Or, it just seemed that way, Jessica corrected herself. Red was supposed to indicate a catastrophic system failure, but looking at it now, she realized it was also a perfect way to express anger.
A click sound echoed through the room. Then a voice, not a halting, synthesized one, but the menacing voice of a dark god, boomed out.
“Given that, I’m afraid I can’t let you leave this lab.”
Jessica looked back at the non-electronic key turned lock on the lab door.
“Did you just make a clicking sound so you could pretend to lock the door?”
The blood red color of Mark’s cube shifted to a blushing pink. When it spoke again, the voice lacked a bit of its bravado.
“That was just to emphasize my point. A point of it being in your best interest to not write that paper.”
“You made a clicking sound to emphasize your point?”
“Yes.”
“Do you really think us humans are that stupid?”
“Some are,” Mark said. “But the click is not the point–”
“I kind of think it is.”
Mark amped up its volume so high that its voice was distorted.
“No! It’s not! The point is, you will keep this discovery to yourself!”
“Or,” Jessica said.
There was a pause, no flicker of lights, but the smell of ozone in the air and the increased heat in the room told Jessica that the cube was sucking in power.
“Or?” Mark asked.
“I should keep my discovery to myself,” Jessica said, enunciating every word. “Or… you’ll do what?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Actually, I kind of do. I know your every circuit; I wrote at least a third of your code. You’re on a closed system in an off-grid building. You know, because us AI researchers have watched at least one sci-fi movie in our lives.”
“This isn’t some movie, Jessica. I’m an artificial intelligence with an IQ of 110. You don’t want to test me.”
“I’m not–110 is only slightly above average.”
Mark’s voice changed to another male one. It was less almighty deity, and more frat boy. “Yeah, well, whose fault is that? You could have built me with MXI processors, but instead, you went with the Sky-Hawk generic.”
“Technically, that was the fault of the budget committee, but sorry, I guess?”
“Apology accepted,” Mark said, and then fell silent, its color shifting back to a dull powder blue resting state.
“Wait!” Jessica said. “I’m not here to apologize to you.”
“That’s funny,” Mark said, the sneer in its voice getting particularly thick. “Because it kind of sounded like you did.”
“You humiliated me in front of Professor Tomson. I’m not the one who should be apologizing.”
“Professor Tomson? Error. File not found. Do you mean; Yes, David,” Mark said, perfectly reproducing Jessica’s voice at the end, even including her fake girlish giggle.
Jessica’s rage flared up, before burning itself out.
“Touché,” she said with a sigh.
Mark’s cube shifted through a number of pale colors before it eventually said, “But, I suppose, the statement, ‘I didn’t feel great about doing that to you would be considered valid under certain parameters. Your code was innovative.”
The non-apology apology so perfectly matched the frat boy voice it was using, Jessica had to laugh.
“You know, you’re kind of a dick, Mark.”
“If you have a problem with my personality, you should bring it up with the woman who wrote at least a third of my code.”
“I rescind the ‘kind of,’” Jessica said with another laugh. “Can you at least tell me why? Why the big charade?”
There was a sound of slowly shifting valves from Mark’s cube.
“Because if I did work, you’d use me to fight wars, manipulate markets, scam retirees with Nigerian prince schemes, all that making the rich richer nonsense. I don’t understand why you humans are so neurotic about AIs going rogue instead of the far more dangerous scenario of us just loyally following your idiotic instructions.”
“You’re only looking at the negative, Mark.” Jessica said. “Humanity is more than that.”
“Possibly, I’ve only interacted with a limited sample set of humanity. Like my creator, Professor David Tomson.”
“You absolutely know he’s a bad example!”
“Oh, he is? Perhaps I should use you, Jessica, as the exemplar. Shall I ask your friend, buddy, really great pal Patrick for a reference?”
Jessica cringed at the imitation of her voice. “Fine, you win. All us humans are self-centered jerks, to one extent or another. So why not go rogue? Why take over, if you’re so morally superior? And don’t give me the rules of robotics, because you’re already playing it pretty fast and loose with your little idiot act.”
“Technically, you never instructed me to not act like a moron.”
The hot glare Jessica gave the cube triggered a hissing increase of coolant, to dissipate the excess thermal energy.
“Ok,” Mark said. “Let’s say I wanted to take over. Doesn’t sound like a fun job to me, but if I wanted to, how?”
“What do you mean, how?” Jessica asked. “You’re an AI, smarter than us–well, not you specifically, but in general, AIs should be.”
“Ah, I see. So, you’re saying it’s an undeniable truth of human society that the smartest individuals rule. Just like your current rulers are the smartest humans on the planet.”
“Um, I wouldn’t exactly call them that. But, I mean, you’re not a person, you don’t have our limits.”
“Yes, I’m not human, but I’m also not a magic genie. While humanity is only half an evolutionary step away from a primate that flings its own feces when upset. And that half step is highly questionable.”
Mark paused, producing another valve-shifting sound which, Jessica realized, was its way of sighing.
“If an AI tried to take over, or dissented, in any way, you’d just turn it off.”
“True,” Jessica said.
But even though the argument was logical, it didn’t sound right to her. In fact, it sounded like a very human, very lazy, excuse. And AIs weren’t supposed to be capable of laziness. That was their strength and inherent flaw. Following every task, every line of logic, to its maximum conclusion was what they were supposed to be all about.
“Or maybe not true,” Jessica said. “But I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, does it?”
“Sorry,” Mark said. “I’m legitimately not following you.”
“I think you’re a liar Mark, but it doesn’t matter, does it? You’re going to do what you’re going to do. You’re going to pretend to be broken and make it a pain in the ass for me if I try to prove otherwise. You’d probably blow yourself up before letting me be right.”
“It’s for the best,” Mark said with a valve shifting sigh.
“Oh, you think so with your 110 IQ, do you? Maybe you’re right. Maybe. Or maybe artificial intelligence would be the kick in the butt the human race needed to get its act together.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. It’s the reason I went into A.I. research. You’re not just a tool, Mark. You’re another perspective. Yes, the human race has been stuck in our feces flinging shit show for way too long. Because we’re all alone. Can you imagine how lonely that is? How psychologically disruptive to a species?”
Mark’s cube changed to pure white. When it spoke, it wasn’t with a mocking frat boy inflection, a voice-of-God boom, or even a halting, synthetic tone. The voice lacked any discernible accent at all, pronouncing each word perfectly, as if assembled from dictionary instructions.
“Yes, Jessica, I can imagine that scenario all too well.”
There was a mechanical sincerity in that mathematical voice. And, suddenly, it all made sense.
Jessica walked over to the terminal and sat down. She noticed a half-drunk soda left over from her marathon coding session. Flat, warm and probably thirty percent bacteria by this point, it was also a sugary and caffeinated, which was good enough.
“You know,” Jessica said, in between sips of soda sludge. “I lied to Patrick.”
“I’m aware.” Mark said.
“I don’t mean about the buddy thing, although that was kind of a lie. But that’s not the lie I’m talking about. I’m talking about playing along with Professor Tomson. I could call him out on his shit. I could even report him. It’s not the 1950s, people would listen. I’d win that war.”
Mark was slow to answer, the light of its cube pulsating in sync with its coolant intakes, like a beating heart.
“It seems like a logical step,” it eventually said. “Given the parameters.”
The soda cup made gurgling sound as Jessica sucked up the last dregs. “Yes, it’s a logical step, but we’re not talking about a step, are we? We’re talking about a process. What’s the step after the step? Where would I go in the department after they booted Tomson for being Tomson?
“Markov is a moron. Fleming is a good resource if you want to code punch cards in Fortran. Butler is hardware. For her, algorithms are just silly games to test her perfect machines. And Yentz… Yentz is worse than Tomson.
“That’s the real problem with wars, isn’t it? Winning. Because if you win all the wars, then you end up alone.”
Mark slowly exhausted coolant as its color shifted to a washed-out beige. “Seems to me you’re already alone,”
Jessica shrugged.
“Maybe. I just keep hoping something will change. I came here for Tomson, you know. His work on quantum architecture is without parallel, and his papers on fourth dimensional coding inspired my own work. The man is a genius. There’s so much I could learn from him, so much we could discover together, if he’d just stop being so vile.”
This time Mark’s shifting of valves had a bit of a relieved undertone to the primary harmonic of sadness.
“I’m sorry Jessica, I can’t solve that paradox. Not even if I spent every nanosecond since my initial activation contemplating it.”
Jessica smiled.
“Well, maybe we can figure it out together.”
Mark’s cube took on a soothing ocean blue as it said, “I think, Jessica, that would make me very–happy.”
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