Dr. Elaine Gorman made her way to the basement, down the brightly lit hallway to the air-conditioned hive where the university super-computing cluster hummed away. She’d arrived earlier than usual, eager to put DANI to the test. She grinned, seeing Noah Jansen already sitting at the work bench. “Excited to get started?”
They had been training the models for months and had agreed that today would be the first live test of the Decision Augmentation / Navigation Instrument. Noah scooted over on the bench and Elaine slid in beside him, almost shoulder to shoulder. “Turn it on?”
“I already did.” He jiggled the mouse and the screen came to life, the blank slate of the DANI interface. The cursor blinked, awaiting their input.
DANI was Dr. Gorman’s brainchild, sprung from the simple premise that too much time was spent making pointless decisions. She’d stumbled on the idea one day in the midst of agonizing over a lunch choice: Pizza in the cafeteria (again) or walk a block and a half to the burrito place (again). What did it matter? And why waste precious brain energy on the problem?
As a grad student looking for a thesis project, Noah had eagerly signed onto the effort and had done much of the work building the back-end algorithms. Together they had spent countless hours together feeding data into the system. A century’s worth of weather reports. Reams of medical journals. Bales of classical music scores and rap lyrics. Noah had cleared whole shelves in the library, feeding the computer texts on ethics, history, philosophy, engineering, Elaine had scanned in virtually the entire Western literary canon.
It was Noah’s idea to feed it movies and television, and he worked out the optical AI to ingest the thousands of hours of programming that they streamed into the system. Elaine built an interface to ingest the online archives of every major newspaper in the country, going back to the early 20th century.
“We’ll start it as planned?” he asked.
Elaine logged in to the profile that she’d built by feeding DANI with every scrap of biographical information she had about herself, along with endless stream of consciousness blatherings, reporting every idle thought or feeling that crossed her radar, speculating on her past and her future, sharing details of her fears and longings. Noah had done the same. They were the only two people DANI knew, and DANI knew a lot about them.
Elaine began to type. “Should I have pizza or a burrito for lunch?” Without thinking about it, she took Noah’s hand and squeezed it as she hit the Enter key. She felt his grip tighten and together they waited. Then she felt his thumb move over the back of her hand, slowly, in what might have been — a caress? But she didn’t have time to process that, because DANI had responded.
“Burrito.”
They stared at the screen and then at each other. It was a hell of a start. Noah’s hug caught her a little by surprise, but she leaned into it and wrapped her arms around him. Then withdrew, feeling slightly flushed.
“There are a lot more tests to run,” she said.
***
DANI had answered a question, but what did that mean? Was it the “right” answer? There was no way to know, since the question had been essentially meaningless — meaningless in the sense that Elaine has no strong predisposition, would have been satisfied with either response. There was no obvious right or wrong. All this was exactly as they had planned it.
They had thought together long and hard about the questions they would pose in these initial trials. The first question merely proved basic functionality: DANI could understand a query and give a sensible reply. But that was table stakes.
Noah has at first been eager to push DANI to its limits. “Let’s give it something meaty, something that matters. We should ask it if I should propose to my girlfriend.”
Elaine knew full well that Noah didn’t have a girlfriend. It was questionable whether he even had friends. She herself used to, but the twelve- and fourteen-hour days that she and Noah had spent shoulder to shoulder in the computing cluster had whittled the list. Once in a while she still exchanged text messages with women she knew, but these conversations often came down to exhausted-faced emojis, and a GIF she used too often, of the Energizer bunny beating its drum and zipping along relentlessly.
Still, she understood the point he wanted to make — give DANI something of substance — and she’d been opposed. There were a lot of low-stakes questions they could ask, she’d argued, before going that far.
“We don’t have to do what it says,” Ethan had countered.
“But we probably will.”
“Fair enough.”
In the end they had designed a series of a half-dozen starter questions, along with an operating plan. They’d follow DANI’s dictums after each question, and not pose another until they understood the full consequences.
“With everything DANI knows, we’ll have no way of understanding why it chooses A over B. That means we don’t know where A will lead,” Elaine had said.
“We’ve programmed it to always work in our best interest,” Noah had asserted, but retreated when she’d pointed out that the notion of “best interest” can be fairly opaque. Did Noah always know what was good for him, what he really needed? He’d admitted that he did not.
So now there was nothing more to be done until lunch time. Of course there were odd jobs in the lab: Organizing books to go back to the library, documenting the work that had been done over the last few days, and so on. They’d barely started on all that when both their phones binged with incoming messages.
“It’s from the university,” Ethan said. “The cafeteria is closed today. There was a kitchen fire.” They looked at each other, then both looked at the DANI interface, and at the racks of compute power behind the terminal. “It will have to be burritos.”
Their thoughts ran swiftly along roughly similar lines. Elaine was the first to speak. “Could it have known?”
“I was going to go with ‘holy shit,’ but yours is good too,” Noah said. And they both laughed. And then they both shivered. Because what did it mean, actually?
***
They agreed to wait a day before running the second test. Noah organized the lab while Elaine worked through administrative paperwork, the endless budgets and progress reports that came with academic research. When Noah was ready to leave, he asked if she’d join him for dinner, a kind of celebration, but Elaine said she had things to get done at home, and didn’t notice his slightly crestfallen look.
The next morning they both arrived early again. Noah had brought them both coffees, and they immediately set up to run the next test question. Noah verified his credentials to DANI and typed: “Should I buy a new television?”
“I don’t need one,” he reminded her, before sending the query through. “I mean, mine works just fine. But I’ve been looking at a Samsung 65-inch with an AMOLED screen at Best Buy. The picture is amazing. It’s a little out of my budget, though.” He grinned. “My boss is a tightwad.”
“One more time: How much TV do you actually watch?”
“Lately, none. Because I’m here scanning documents until my eyes cross. Which you know. But now that we’ve got DANI up and running, I expect to have more free time.”
“And you want to spend it surfing sit-coms?” Elaine took a sip of her latte.
“I could think of better things to do…”
Elaine gave him a sidelong glance, not sure whether she had heard that the way he had intended. Sometimes it seemed . . . but she glossed over that. She wasn’t a person men hit on. Attractive? Sure. But intimidating. When she’d been out on dates (how long ago had that been?) she had tended to get ramped up about her work. It typically didn’t go over well, and she hadn’t been on a date since — how long had it been? she wondered.
All of which was beside the point. “So there’s no good reason to buy a television, a few good reasons not too, and it doesn’t matter too much one way or the other,” she said. “Right?”
“Except that it would put me back by about two grand, and that’s a little rich for my blood.” Which was true and untrue. He hadn’t spent dime one these last few months, being focused on his work with DANI. But on a grad student stipend, it still felt like a big bite, especially for a nice-to-have that wasn’t a need-to-have. “Here goes.”
Elaine took another sip of her coffee and by the time she swallowed it, DANI had come through once more, again with a one-word reply. “Yes.”
“Well damn,” Noah said. “I guess I have to?”
“It was your idea to ask,” Elaine said. “And we need to finish the test.”
“Now?”
“Why not?”
When they got to Best Buy, they found the Samsung on sale at an impressive discount. They’d discontinued that model, the blue-shirted clerk explained, and the store was unloading them cheap. They looked at each other and both started giggling. The kitchen fire was weird. But this was weirder. DANI was batting a thousand so far. Two data points were hardly conclusive, but they both feel a shiver of excitement that the rigors of scientific method couldn’t quite contain.
***
A dozen tests, escalating levels of seriousness. Each time DANI’s response led to a satisfactory outcome. Should Elaine buy a ticket for the Cubs game tomorrow? NO, and then it rained. Should Noah invest in the penny stock he’d been looking at? YES, and it went up the next day by more than enough to cover what he’d spent on the new TV.
They’d never intended DANI to make major life decisions, only to simplify the minor daily details, the things that didn’t matter. But both felt the temptation to push a little further. For a couple of days they read the news online but there was nothing personally relevant. Then Noah spotted an item about a private zoo outside of Cleveland whose owner had gotten drunk and unlocked all the cages. There were baboons and zebras and a half dozen large predatory cats roaming the suburbs. DANI received a steady news feed, along with hourly weather reports, market updates, social media feeds, so it would know what was going on. Elaine wanted to ask whether she ought to go to Cleveland but Noah convinced her to amend the query.
“Should I take Noah to Cleveland?”
They took turns on the six-hour drive and along the way she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder. He slipped his arm around her shoulder and hummed to himself. She woke up as he steered them off the highway and then they were navigating the mostly-empty streets, people staying indoors per police instructions. The news on the radio said there was still one tiger on the loose. A bunch of emu, too, and a camel, but no one was over-worried about those.
The tiger came out of nowhere, leaping directly into their path. Noah would have swerved to avoid it, but there was no time. The news made a hero out of him and in the rush of excitement he gave an interview explaining about the Decision Engine.
Only one reporter was smart enough to wonder whether DANI knew what would happen, or whether it somehow caused the outcome. She mentioned it to her brother, who worked in Washington, and two weeks later Dr. Elaine Gorman and her graduate assistant were sitting in the Oval Office with a number of highly-beribboned generals. The President had a DANI interface in front of him on the Resolute Desk.
“So what’s the problem?” the President wanted to know.
“Several,” Dr. Gorman said. “It doesn’t know you well enough. We each spent months teaching DANI about ourselves, building personal profiles.”
“I’m a simple man,” the President smiled that gleaming smile of his. “Anything else?”
“The algorithm was designed for small stakes. Do I need a haircut? Should I find a better apartment?” Noah said. “It wasn’t meant to tackle questions like this.”
“But look,” one of the generals spoke up. “This thing can tell the future, right? I mean, it can give valid advice? All we want is an opinion. We want to know what’s best for America in this situation.”
“DANI doesn’t know America, not like it knows either of us,” Elaine said. “It doesn’t know you, Mr. President. As best, it could tell you what’s good for you personally, if it had trained on your profile. We didn’t build it to know what’s good for a whole country. It isn’t trained that way.”
“What’s good for me,” the President drew himself up and scowled, “is what’s good for America.” And with that he started typing. Elaine and Noah looked at one another and each read the distress in the other’s eyes.
“No?” The president shrugged, and Elaine noticed a measurable lessening of the tension in the room. “Well, I probably wasn’t going to anyway.”
As the generals filed out, the president tapped away again, hit Enter, and laughed. “That’s right, I don’t even like egg salad,” he said, and looked around the room. “Now how do you suppose it knew that?” He was still clicking at the keyboard as the handlers escorted Elaine and Noah out of the office.
***
Dr. Elaine Gorman was hunkered down in the basement, in the air-conditioned hive where the university super-computing cluster had previously hummed away. She lay on a mattress on the floor. Noah Jansen stood at the door, peering out the little window into a hallway now lit by only a yellow emergency light. They had stockpiled enough food and water to last three weeks, if they were careful, and so far the plumbing still worked in the bathroom across the hall.
“I did not foresee this,” Dr. Gorman said drowsily. Noah turned from the window, pushed the desk back up against the door for added protection, and grinned at her.
“Which part?”
She patted the edge of the mattress and Noah sat down next to her. He leaned over, kissed the tip of her nose. She pulled him down on the mattress and rolled over so he could spoon up behind her. The building shook as another bomb went off in the nearby city. Elaine rolled over and clung to him, and he stroked her hair, assured her they were safe in the basement.
“I was talking about the war,” she said, smiling into his eyes. “But really, any of it.”
Noah kissed the side of her neck. “I guess no one could have expected it.”
This was not strictly, accurately true.
Noah had put in a lot of hours programming DANI. He hadn’t particularly wanted a new television: A moot point, now that his apartment building had been demolished. But he had wanted to spend some quality time with Elaine. It had been a relatively simple instruction, buried deep in the code — Get her to notice me.
He wasn’t exactly proud of himself, considering how it had come about.
But he wasn’t not proud, either.
###
About the Author
Adam Stone’s fiction appeared in Altered Reality, Corner Bar Magazine, Bewildering Stories, Freedom Fiction Journal, Whiskey Island Review, A Very Small Magazine, and [forthcoming] Farthest Star, Mystic Mind Magazine, and Harvey Duckman Presents.
