Loving AIDAn (Bernard Frankenheimer Center Book 3) Read online

  Loving AIDAn

  Troy Hunter

  Loving AIDAn

  A Gay Sci-Fi Romance

  Bernard Frankenheimer Center Book 3

  Troy Hunter

  Copyright © 2019 by Troy Hunter

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is a work of fiction. All resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  Editing by: Jo Bird & Sandra S.

  Beta Reading by: Melissa R.

  Contents

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  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Coda

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  Prologue

  Taken from the Journals of Dr. Taylor Slickberg

  June 13

  With the summer beginning, I thought I’d take the time to peruse some of the classics. This week, I pulled out Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I loved the film when I was a boy. One of my few memories as a very young child was watching it with my grandfather, huddled up against him, afraid of the hideous creature (who was, of course, just Boris Karloff in what we would now consider rather uninspired makeup). It’s surprising I never found myself reading the novel the film was based on. I suppose it was some deep fear I had previously been unable to admit to myself. I now know that such science fiction fantasies are silly.

  June 14

  I read the book in one sitting. How silly I had been to assume the film was anything like the novel. No, Hollywood always ruins everything, portraying the creature as some kind of brutish oaf. No wonder I considered such things silly.

  It’s only silly for those who don’t have the imagination.

  The story is not, strictly, about the reanimation of dead tissue; that’s where the movie got things horribly wrong. It’s about the creation of life and man’s attempt to play God.

  Of course, one doesn’t need to reanimate dead tissue in order to create life. No, in fact, that seems an odd way to do it. Not that one can blame Shelley for that, as she was a product of her time. Rather than start from dead cells, one would need to begin with germ cells, those which can reproduce indefinitely.

  Actually, now that I’m considering it, the body wouldn’t be too difficult at all. With modern technologies, we can clone a sheep or produce a cow-less hamburger in a lab. Indeed, we could genetically engineer whatever traits we want into the creature. He wouldn’t need to be an ogre, as in the movie. No, he could be an Adonis, closer to what he was in the novel.

  Now, the brain…I’m afraid that part truly is science fiction. I suppose, in theory, it would be possible to transfer a human brain into this semi-artificial body, though it would require a fresh one, likely from a participant who would be willing to risk their life and sacrifice their body for science. It’s unlikely we’d find such a person.

  Still, there’s no reason we couldn’t create the body.

  June 17

  I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. It was so obvious. A silicon brain. Yes! A body made of human cells (specifically selected for strength and durability), controlled by a brain with the most state of the art artificial intelligence currently available. We do have something currently floating around. A small device with advanced neural networking circuits meant to mimic the human brain in order to recognize patterns related to human social interactions, specifically with regard to sexual signals. It’s small enough to fit inside a human skull.

  We could use the body to generate enough power to run the CPU, and from there, connect it with the nerves. It would be, in effect, a human body controlled by computer intelligence.

  Is it possible? On paper, it seems as though it should be.

  Can we actually pull it off?

  There’s only one way to find out.

  Chapter 1

  Jeffrey

  No one can understand how every element of a complicated piece of software with millions of lines of code works, but they can focus on the parts. The AIDAn project was that concept on steroids.

  Past attempts to build a truly human-like AI have never found success. The difficult parts of human intelligence are relatively easy to recreate. We can build a computer that’s an expert chess player, for instance, or one that can choose the best route from point A to point B at any time of the day, though those algorithms are somewhat imperfect. What we couldn’t do was produce a computer that can come up with a good joke. Or engage in conversation. Within a few moments of talking to a computer, the computer will ask a nonsensical question or phrase something in a way that makes it clear there’s an algorithm at work and not actual intelligence.

  In 1950, the mathematician Alan Turing devised a concept that was later referred to as the Turing Test. In the Turing Test, a judge is given two computers, into which he can type questions. On one computer, a human will be supplying the responses. On the other, computer AI will do it. An AI is said to pass the Turing Test if the judge cannot accurately determine which one is the computer.

  One of the earliest attempts to beat this test was released in 1966. Her name was ELIZA and she acted as a virtual therapist. At first, it was comforting for viewers to type in their questions: she was a good listener and would always ask follow-up questions. After only a few moments, though, it became clear she wasn’t actually listening. Her questions were vague, such as “What does that suggest to you?” or, if they did address your statements, were little more than an ungrammatical rephrasing of what you just said, like “How long have you been doing well today?”

  That was more than fifty years ago, and in the time since, things hadn’t gotten a whole lot better. Computers were getting progressively faster and more powerful, beating grand masters at chess and champions at Jeopardy.

  Yet they were still largely just buckets of information unable to actually connect to a human in any meaningful way.

  The AIDAn project attempted to change that. We were essentially replicating a human brain using silicon connections rather than neurons and placing it into a body built of lab-grown cells. Looking at the body on the table in front of me, it was virtually indistinguishable from a real human, because for all intents and purposes, it was a real human, at least genetically speaking. Sure, his skin had a silver tone to
it, but the features, the nose, the ears, and especially the eyes, were all human. It breathed like a human and had a working heart and lungs. The only thing we couldn’t grow properly was the brain.

  It wasn’t from lack of trying, and if we had the time to raise our creation from an infant state, we could have created the brain organically. The problem is the brain, more than any other organ, relies on experience. We couldn’t grow a brain in a petri dish the way we could with a heart; it wouldn’t develop correctly. Instead, we had to use our knowledge of computer systems and algorithms.

  The ace up our sleeves was a revolutionary new AI used as the basis for AIDAn’s intelligence. It came out of a different project at the center, aimed as a sort of flirtation aid. The aid could interpret body language in a potential partner and give advice on how to respond to it. The AI couldn’t work miracles, it can’t make anyone fall in love with you, but it could be your wingman.

  This is where the intersectional nature of the Bernard Frankenheimer Research Center came into play. My background is in mathematics, though I was recruited for the lab because of my coding ability. I was brought in to modify the code as the original author moved onto other projects.

  When I first saw the AI software, it blew me away. It was, without a doubt, the most advanced program I’d ever seen. It was the first AI that could read and interpret human intent. My job was to use the built-in functions and my knowledge of machine learning methods to turn the code into something that could learn.

  I don’t know how most of the code works. Building it involved implementing sophisticated algorithms to train the artificial intelligence, but that’s just scratching the surface of what must have been necessary. As far as I was concerned, the bulk of the programming was what we refer to as a black box. You plug in some input and get something out as a result. How does it work? It doesn’t matter—it just does.

  My job, which was given to me when I joined the lab, was to use this code as the basis of our synthetic human. My advisor and I settled on the name AIDAn, Artificially Intelligent Android. You’ll notice there’s not a D in there, which is because we came up with the acronym before figuring out what it stood for. In science, a good acronym can make or break your research. The specifics of what each letter stands for is less important.

  The problem is the code wasn’t working. No matter what I did, AIDAn just lay there, seemingly asleep. I liked to imagine him as Sleeping Beauty, just waiting for the right prince to come wake him up. In my deepest fantasies, I cast myself as the prince, though I knew that wasn’t my role. Princes were handsome and strong. I was just a slimly built, Indian-American graduate student who worked his ass off to accomplish anything.

  I’d taken to working late nights. During the day, it could be difficult to get into the lab on account of the protestors. Nobody knew exactly what we were doing, but when word got out that we were growing human tissue from stem cells, various religious and moral groups were up in arms, outraged at what we were attempting. Their main argument was that it just wasn’t natural, that human material should be produced only through the natural process. But neither is flying or, for that matter, dying. Living to one-hundred isn’t natural either. One of the benefits of science is to produce outcomes that are better than the natural way of things.

  We could have built a synthetic human for the same reason that people climb Mt. Everest or NASA sent astronauts to the moon: to prove that we could. However, funding was tricky unless there was a practical application. We took advantage of the fact that we were using code, as advanced as it was, and added some routines to give us some control over how AIDAn ultimately turned out. You see, AIDAn was not just some run-of-the-mill robot, like something out of Asimov. No, we were working on something with a specific purpose in mind. We were building the first synthetic sexual and romantic partner.

  This was something I considered as I took the elevator up to the lab. My own sex life was non-existent and past experiences weren’t especially noteworthy. I thought back on them when I was looking for a reminder of why the AIDAn project was important.

  I met my first boyfriend, Troy, using an online dating app. I was nineteen and he was in his early thirties, though I never did find out exactly how old he was. There was a lot I didn’t know about him, in fact, though I pieced a few things together.

  He had a thin, pale area outlining the base of his left-hand ring finger. He said it was because he was recently divorced. Or that he and his wife were separating. The story kept changing and I was in love, so I believed whichever story he told me whenever I asked.

  She kept on calling him and he wouldn’t answer the phone. At least not when I was around.

  One night, he said he was busy, so I went to the movies, and wouldn’t you know it, he was there with a blonde woman, who must have only been a few years older than I was, with a prominent baby bump. Troy and I exchanged a look without saying a word and he never called me again. I didn’t bother calling him either.

  I put my keycard up against the door to the lab and waited for the beep before opening the door. AIDAn was there, lying on the sterile bed in a corner of the room, in a deep sleep. He was so beautiful. Really, he was the perfect human form: dark hair, deep grey eyes with a hint of blue in them, and muscles like an Olympic athlete. One of my roles has been to keep his body from getting stiff, which entailed moving his arms and massaging his legs.

  It’s the first thing I do when coming into the office and the last thing I do before leaving. I felt a little guilty because of how much I enjoyed it. I didn’t have any other men in my life and the physical contact felt good. Even though he wasn’t a real person, I felt like I might somehow be violating him by getting enjoyment out of performing a medically necessary procedure. I was always tempted to touch more than his legs, but when the impulse became too difficult to ignore, that’s when I’d cover AIDAn back up and return to my coding.

  The urge was strong this evening, as I dug my fingers into his lower calves, clenching the firm muscles as hard as I could, ensuring they received the circulation he needed.

  Ignoring issues of whether or not an unconscious robot can consent, AIDAn didn’t belong to me. Once he became conscious, he would belong to our lab’s primary investigator, Dr. Taylor Slickberg.

  Dr. Slickberg is, in a word, a genius. Perhaps the most brilliant man alive. A true polymath whose influence has crossed traditional scientific boundaries. The funding for the Bernard Frankenheimer Center for Interdisciplinary Research, housed here at the University of Northern California, came from research he had done into innovative antibiotic technologies. Rather than stay within the biological sciences, Dr. Slickberg wanted to do something that was important to him: explore human desire.

  I moved to the inside of AIDAn’s thighs, turning my hands into fists to really work the muscles and loosen them up. I felt a slight stirring, a completely normal response of arousal to my hands on this perfect man. The feelings didn’t mean anything and I’ve reminded myself not to feel guilty about them. I’m only human and plenty of researchers, particularly in the psychological sciences, are attracted to their subjects without violating research ethics.

  Of course, this wasn’t like any other research anyone else had ever done, which is par for the course at the Bernard Frankenheimer Center.

  Many of the projects we’re working on do bring ethical baggage along with them. With AIDAn, many people would object to the idea of a non-human sexual partner, which is part of the reason we were keeping things secret for now. Dildos and blow up dolls were one thing, but a robot virtually indistinguishable from a real human? Could this prevent genuine human connection? Again, it’s the naturalistic fallacy at work.

  In truth, synthetic partners could make the world a much better place.

  Think of all the pain that comes along with relationships. It’s impossible to love without experiencing heartbreak. And many of us, through the course of a relationship, are also exposed to abuse and selfishness. Research we’ve conducted
has shown that the concept of “true love” is rare to the point of being non-existent. Except in a few isolated cases, no matter how much two people love each other, at least one of them generally ends up bored, given enough time.

  With AIDAn, that wouldn’t happen. He’s someone designed to be exactly who you want to love and will devote his life to you, once he’s properly imprinted, growing along with you and your personal needs.

  And for those who do get sick of him, he’s just a robot, so abandon and replace him with a newer model. Does anybody feel bad for their obsolete phone when they toss it in the recycle bin after they upgrade? The same would be true with AIDAn, except if we did our job right, he would never become obsolete.

  People often have a strong reaction to the idea of an artificial partner. Sex dolls have a certain stigma around them, though so do many sexual practices. It’s true that even the best sex dolls on the market aren’t something somebody would mistake for a real person and, as a result, there can be a creepiness about them. It’s called the uncanny valley. People have no problem with sexual cartoons in art work or advertising, but as the images become closer and closer to reality, they become more and more unsettling.