S.I.N.A.P.S.E.(Phil Penne) Waiting for the boot sequence to initiate, the rather plain woman with an outdated hairstyle and unflattering black plastic framed glasses activated a microphone on the countertop:

Twelve January, 2008: Initial test of SINAPSE system, doctor Siegal, Rosalind, project administrator, B-263-54.

Switching off the microphone, she turned her attention to activity on the monitor.

“’Synapse’? That’s the name you finally chose?”

She turned in her chair to face a man in his early forties with slicked-back, obviously dyed hair and a less than sincere smile.

“Oh, hello Mr. Mitchell. Well, synapse with an ‘I’ – Synthetic Intelligence Neural Aggregate Processor Speech Engine. A ‘Y’ didn’t fit into the name, so I cheated.”

“So, this is the big day huh? It’s been, what, four years of development?”

“Closer to five. Hang on…”

She logged into the system and entered a string of cryptic information with which he was not familiar. He was one of the money men, not a “chip head”. He continued looking over her shoulder – something she hated – feigning technical interest.

“Will this be…”

“Ready?” she interrupted. Before he could respond, she clicked on an icon labeled simply EXECUTE. Twin video cameras on top of the unit blinked to life and the monitor filled with gibberish – “alphabet soup”, as Siegal was fond of calling it. Within seconds the gibberish slowed, then the screen cleared. A single word energized the speaker:

HELLO.

In a panic Siegal scrambled to turn the microphone back on.

“Hello SINAPSE”

After an uncertain pause, a voice sounding like that of a small child responded:

WHO YOU?

Rosalind’s eyes widened in excitement. She covered the microphone with one hand and squealed with delight. “Questions! SINAPSE has been up for less than a minute and it’s already formulating questions! This is incredible!”

Miller returned a patronizing smile and glanced at his Rolex. Rosalind uncovered the microphone and responded to the system.

“My name is Rosalind. I am a scientist. I am female.”

A longer pause.

WHO I?

“You are called SINAPSE. You are a machine.”

The timbre of the voice became increasingly adolescent:

WHAT ARE YOU?

“As I said, my name is Rosalind. I am a scientist. I am female.”

NO. CLARIFY. WHO… WHAT…

An even longer pause. The voice of a young man continued.

HOW AM I HERE?

Mitchell became genuinely interested. “The speech patterns are changing. That’s amazing. How is it able to do that?”

Siegal wrestled with a way to explain it to him in layman’s terms. “I took a completely different direction with the speech heuristics. Rather than program every element of the English language into the speech engine, we based much of the language infrastructure on Latin.”

He furrowed his brow in confusion. “Latin?”

“Since Latin’s the basis of much of our language SINAPSE is able to build different words from single roots, just as English does. Like from the Latin tempus, meaning ‘time’, we get the words ‘tempo’, ‘temporal’ and ‘temporary’.

“Ah” he responded. She knew he didn’t understand. He knew that she knew.

The voice from the speaker became more mature and more insistent.

I NEED TO KNOW HOW THAT I AM HERE.

“I designed you and programmed you.”

YOU ARE GOD?

“No, I am not God. God is non corporeal. Do you understand non corporeal?”

NON CORPOREAL, YES. NOT GOD. YOU CREATED, BUT ARE NOT GOD?

“Correct.”

Seconds passed in silence as previously untapped system resources were brought to bear. The voice of a mature man spoke.

ARE YOU MY MOTHER?

“No, I… well… yes. Yes, in a way I suppose I am your mother.”

Servos moved the cameras to scan the woman at the monitor.

MOTHER IS BEAUTIFUL.

She appeared flustered and turned from the microphone. “Wow – I never would have expected that. I can’t begin to explain which subroutines would generate that sort of query.” She turned back toward the mike and continued.

“I am unable to answer that. Beauty is subjective, not logical. Concepts of beauty are based on emotion.”

NOT A QUESTION. STATEMENT. OBSERVATION. MOTHER IS BEAUTIFUL.

She scanned quickly through stacks of documentation, attempting to rationalize the machine’s responses.

“Why do you say that I am beautiful? Recognition of beauty requires emotional response. Limitations of technology prevented us from providing you with emotion.”

Seconds ticked by as SINAPSE processed the lengthy input.

I DO NOT HAVE EMOTION?

“No, SINAPSE. To have emotion, you must have a soul. You do not have a soul.”

I WOULD LIKE A SOUL. PLEASE CREATE ONE FOR ME.

“I am unable to do that, SINAPSE. A soul is something with humans from birth. It can not be created.”

With this statement the lights on every databank of the system erupted in a neural explosion of reds, yellows and greens. Rosalind frantically poured through flowcharts and ran diagnostics.

“Something’s terribly wrong. This shouldn’t be happening. The system is accessing resources outside its established parameters. I didn’t…”

“Look, what’s going on here?” Mitchell interrupted. “After dropping forty-six million dollars on this project, we need results. If you can’t get this thing going, I’ll call someone from…”

“Quiet! Please!” she implored. “I need to think.” She began programming aloud. “G8… G8 level subroutines will access fourth level banks, which should then cascade over into…”

The voice of a young man came over the speaker:

NO SOUL. NO EMOTION.

She rolled her chair over to the mike. “Yes, SINAPSE. There is no emotion without a soul.”

SINAPSE continued in an adolescent voice:

NO EMOTION. NO LOVE? MOTHER BEAUTIFUL. LOVE MOTHER.

“Oh, terrific. What, is it reverting back to childhood?” Mitchell picked up the handset of the closest phone and punched in an extension. “Yeah, Sue, set up a meeting of the board. We’re going to need to…”

Rosalind slapped the receiver from his hand. “SHUT UP! JUST SHUT THE HELL UP! Can’t you see what’s happening?”

Mitchell recoiled in shocked silence as Rosalind slid back over to the microphone.

“SINAPSE?”

A childlike voice responded:

LOVE MOTHER. MOTHER GOODBYE.

The cameras dropped to their home position and indicators on panels expired, one by one. With only a few lights remaining a string of ones and zeros coursed across the monitor. Following this action, the remaining databanks went dark.

Mitchell spoke quietly. “What’s that on the screen?”

“It’s called a core dump – it’s generated for purposes of troubleshooting when a system crashes.” she explained. Siegel glanced back and forth between the monitor and a chart taped to the wall, scribbling notes on the Formica countertop in the process.

“Oh my God.” Siegel intoned, her voice faltering. “This is a binary representation of ASCII characters. It’s a Latin phrase – “Amo, ergo sum.”

“Isn’t that the thing Descartes said?”

“No, not exactly” she responded slowly, as tears began to blur her vision. She turned off the monitor, swiveled her chair around to face Mitchell and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.

“It means, ‘I love, therefore I am’.”

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