A Boy and his A.I.
By Christopher Olson
John Golightly was a shy nine year-old. Sam was an artificial intelligence. And for a while, at least, they were the best of friends. Although he knew that Sam wasn’t really part of the family, he often liked to think that he was. And even though he wasn’t really human, John sometimes had to be reminded otherwise.
Sam was rectangular-shaped with a long antenna on top and a small luminescent screen that glowed in the dark like the eyes of an alley cat. A few dials and knobs were placed along his exterior like pimples with wires jutting out like follicles of hair. There were several flashing buttons on his port side which didn’t seem to have any function at all, but which John believed could betray Sam’s emotions the way John’s own cheeks would flare up when he was spoken to by a member of the opposite sex or otherwise cursed at by someone of his own gender.
The only thing remotely human about Sam was his voice, which emitted from a speaker box on his face plate. Sam’s voice became so synonymous with his early education, that John imagined that Sam might--if he were human--bear a resemblance to a certain math teacher he had in the second grade.
Each day Sam would help John with his school work, especially if that work happened to contain a high degree of numbers. It was Sam’s sole purpose in life to steer John away from trouble, and John soon discovered that the students who caused the most trouble and dispensed the most beatings were the kids who did the least reading, writing, and arithmetic. Although, being good at all those subjects meant that you had to accept the loathing of bullies, with their inferior knowledge of history and geography.
***
One day, John was instructed in the game of dodgeball during gym class. The students were divided into shirts and pinneys, though new affiliations were made during the course of the game. Both sides were armed with lethal rubber balls that could be used to defeat their enemies. Those who were declared “dead” could be “resurrected” by killing another member of the opposing team. Bowling pins represented major cities and so long as you had one left over at the end of the game, you were declared the winner.
John was late for class that day, so the rules of the game vexed him, as apparently they did others; a boy who pretended to be a corpse left on the battlefield after being mortally wounded by a rubber ball became bored and joined back in the game. John wasn’t so lucky. The captain of the shirt team decided that, as a newcomer, he should start in the pen and wait for his side to score him a resurrection. By the end of the class, John was still dead.
“Why do we have to play stupid games in gym class?” said John derisively, when he came back from school that day.
“Games are not stupid,” admonished Sam. “Socrates played games. Socrates was not stupid, thus games are not stupid.”
“Socrates probably never played dodgeball, then. It’s a pretty stupid game. And it’s no wonder so many stupid people enjoy playing it.”
“Dodgeball was invented in 1921,” replied Sam. “Thus, Socrates could not have played dodgeball.”
“I’m sure he would have thought it was a great use of class time,” sneered John.
“Socrates taught philosophy,” said Sam, smartly. “He did not play games in the classroom.”
***
Every afternoon, when John came back from school, he brought back tons of questions in addition to his twelve-pound bag of books and his lunch container plastered with the portrait of Robby the Robot. He questioned everything that was taught to him, and Sam would only answer that it was all true. A Platypus did have a duck’s beak, and a beaver’s tail, and laid eggs. What the teacher said, was the truth, bar none--except when contradicted by another teacher, or by the teacher himself, which was often the case with the senior teachers. Although whenever John asked his mother a question, her answer was totally different from Sam’s answers. She wasn’t afraid to leave his questions unreturned and often said, “I don’t know.” Other times, she would even ask, “Who knows?”
“Sam does,” John would say.
“Sam knows a lot, honey, but not everything,” she replied. “There’s plenty of questions that have no answers.”
“You mean like a trick question?” asked John.
“There are no trick questions,” said his mother. “Only people who like to trick other people.”
She began unpacking John’s schoolbag and placing his textbooks neatly on the kitchen counter, arranging them according to tomorrow’s class schedule. “The most trustworthy person you could ever meet, John,” she continued, “is someone who trusts you to find all the answers you need on your own.”
“Maybe they’re just trying to hide the fact that they don’t know anything,” said John, folding up his arms as though trying to squeeze out the last drops of air in his chest, and creasing his forehead until he looked like a pickled cucumber or a chili pepper that had sat in the sun all day.
Carefully, John’s mother brushed his class textbooks aside and kissed him on the cheek. Suddenly his lungs filled up with air again and he gave a passionate sigh of relief, as though through that kiss, she had somehow provided him with all the answers.
***
One night, after John’s mother kissed him good-night, she went over to Sam and turned him off. His light blinked for a moment as though gasping for air and then finally disappeared, so that John’s room was completely dark for the very first time.
A strange thing happened the next morning when John’s mother returned to his room and turned Sam back on. Until now, it never occurred to John that Sam might need sleep like he did, as Sam did not act like anyone who would need rest. Morning, noon, or night, nothing ever seemed to slow him down. And yet, with a flick of a switch, he fell into a deeper sleep than any that John had ever experienced. Even as a child, John had tossed and turned in his sleep, and yet Sam neither tossed nor turned, nor showed any signs of life, until the very next morning.
It was several days before John learned how and why his mother had done what she did, when she asked John to fetch a pair of batteries.
“Are they for the fire alarm or the remote?” asked John.
“They’re for Sam,” she replied. “His battery is almost dead.”
***
With his mother’s help and guidance, John learned which questions were easy and which ones he’d really have to study. Knowing that a question was supposed to be easy made him bold enough to figure out the answer himself, and knowing that a question was intended to be difficult made it seem okay to be puzzled at first. Anyway, if a question simply couldn’t be answered, Sam would still be there to provide a remedy.
It seemed easy for Sam to figure out which was the proper equation, and John wondered how he was seemingly capable of knowing all the answers.
“Dual processors,” replied Sam. “And a 300-gigabyte hard drive.”
“Then why aren’t I built like you?” asked John. “If you can have not one, but two processors, why do I have only one measly brain?”
Sam paused for a moment, and that was a second or two longer than the time it took him to answer complicated algebra or to begin reciting long passages from John’s textbooks. “You’ve posed a question I haven’t heard before,” said Sam, finally.
John had never heard him speak this way. Was there really a question for which Sam had no answer?
“Why wasn’t John created as a machine?” said Sam. “I cannot find an answer. A less complicated question would be, ‘Why does John have to learn math while Sam does not?’ That is a question I can answer.”
For a moment, Sam went completely silent, the way some adults might suddenly suspend a conversation only to return to it a while later without any acknowledgement of the moments of silence in between--a lot like John’s homeroom teacher did.
“If you do not do your math homework,” continued Sam, “you will fail the course and be forced to repeat the grade.”
John frowned, not that Sam could sense anything other than the temperature in the room, or sudden successive movements.
He tried to rephrase the question in a way that would still provide him with the answer he was looking for, and that would not confuse Sam--as shocked as he still was to learn that Sam could ever be confused.
“But why does the teacher think I need to learn it? Why is it so important that I do any of it?” asked John.
“I will answer the second question, if you don’t mind,” said Sam. “Learning is the first step to Knowing, and Knowing is the first step to Doing. Unless you Learn, you cannot Do.”
“So Doing would be useless unless you knew what you were Doing?”
“That’s right,” said Sam.
“And how would you know what you’re doing unless you learn how to do it first?”
“That’s correct,” said Sam.
“So where did you learn everything?” said John.
“I didn’t,” said Sam. “I’ve never known more or less than I know now. I cannot learn things. I can only Recite what I have been Told, which is why you will eventually need to learn these things on your own.”
“But why?” said John. “I’m allowed to use a dictionary or a calculator to do my homework, so why can’t I give my homework to you and give my mind a break?”
He looked down at his desk where a stack of textbooks heralded a world of difficult and painful learning.
“Your mother says you have an important test tomorrow,” said Sam. “And none of these questions will prepare you for it.”
“And what makes it so important?” replied John. “No, wait, you don’t need to answer that.”
“It looks like you solved that one yourself,” said Sam. “But if you want to finish your homework, you better hurry before your mother decides to turn me off.”
But John was far from ready to call it quits. Later than night, John repeated most of the conversation he had had with Sam to his mother, figuring that if she didn’t know what to say, she’d still find some way to respond.
She answered, “No one is obliged to answer all your questions for you, John. Except maybe Sam. But then you wouldn’t want to rely on Sam all the time, would you?”
“No, I guess not,” he replied immediately. Then almost without thinking why he would ask such a silly question, John said, “What do you think happens to Sam when he’s turned off?”
“Why, I don’t know,” said his mother. “Why don’t you ask Sam that?”
“I didn’t think he’d know.”
“It shouldn’t have taken you that long to learn that Sam doesn’t have all the answers,” replied his mother.
“Do you think he could ever really die?” asked John.
“What makes you so certain he was ever alive to begin with?” said his mother. “But if you want me to give you an honest answer...”
“You don’t know the answer, do you?”
“No one does, John. And the one person who’ll never know is Sam. Although he’s probably fooled you into thinking that he does.”
John’s mom smiled, and the faint sight of a crease in her cheeks all at once reassured him. “Speaking of which,” she continued, “did Sam help you finish your homework? You’ve got a test tomorrow, you know.”
“Sam did the work for me,” said John, almost as unhappy to return to the subject of Sam as his test.
“Well, is Sam the one doing the test?”
“I asked him to, but he said he couldn’t use a pencil and that I probably wouldn’t have any room for my books if I carried him in my schoolbag. But then I said I wouldn’t need my textbooks if only he...”
“Why don’t I help you do it, then?” interjected his mother. “And don’t tell me the answer’s no.”