Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond (14 page)

The robot started closing the top of the capsule.  I
shouted, “Wait!”  I didn’t know if he or Willstin could hear me, but I guess they could since the cover stopped moving.  I didn’t really have anything to say, I just wasn’t ready to be buried alive.  “Um, are Dad and Chang Lin ok?” I asked, stalling for time. 

“Yes, they’re fine.  Chang Lin’s breathing is a little ragged, but it’ll be fine the moment the sleeping gas comes in. 
Anything else?”

Defeated, I said, “No.  Go ahea
d.”  As the cover neared closing, I again exclaimed, “Wait!”

“Yes, what is it Austin?”  Willstin sounded just like my 3
rd
grade teacher.

“Um, didn’t you say we had to do homework on this trip?  If we’re stuck in here, we can’t do our homework, right?”  I was really grasping for straws.

I could hear Willstin smile.  “Oh, don’t worry.  We got that covered as well.”  Before I could say anything else, the top sealed soundlessly.  Before I could really panic, I smelled the slightest odor and…

--------------

Willstin was right.  It did feel like the deepest sleep of my life.  But it wasn’t the dreamless sleep from over exhaustion.  Rather, it was full of dreams, overflowing with dreams.

Some of the dreams were related to school, no doubt from the education that the capsule was pumping into me.  I’m guessing it came in through
the head cap, but I really don’t know how.  There were boring school dreams, like my sitting in a classroom, the teacher moaning on and on about something.  I’m trying to read the textbook in front of me.  I can see individual words but the sentences are blurry.  I can’t seem to make sense of anything, but I’m strangely unworried.

There were the typical scary school dreams.  It’s almost time for finals. The teacher is telling us what’s going to be on the exam.  I suddenly realize I’ve skipped almost all the classes
, and I haven’t read any of the books, haven’t done any of the homework.  My heart starts racing.  I can’t drop the class.  Can I learn everything in 3 days?  What the hell have I been doing all this time?  Mom’s going to kill me.

I had one dream where the boys who harassed me
at the beginning of the school year were at it again, but this time it was in an MMA competition ring.  I was outnumbered 4 to 1.  While they were teasing me, they were lightly dancing around me, in good fighting form.  Somehow they knew MMA, had trained at the competing school.  I looked down at myself and realized I was small, a toddler.  I was Willstin.  The boy’s faces blurred.  They all looked like a distorted Mr. Li.  I saw my mom in the audience.  She looked sad, but she was mechanically cheering.  She wasn’t cheering for me.  She was cheering for the quadruplets Mr. Li’s. 

My
dad surfaced in quite a few dreams.  In some, he was the good dad, bouncing me on his leg, while we watched some really funny movie, I laughing so hard that I spit out the popcorn.  Others, he was the evil guy who left us.  I was really really mad at him, without knowing why.  I would yell at him, “Hey Dad!” but he wouldn’t or couldn’t hear me.  He continued flirting with a black woman, whom I only saw the back of.  When she turned around to see me pounding on the window, her face was that of a snake.  The snake mocked me.

I was bewildered by my dreams of Chang Lin.  She would be saying something but I couldn’t make sense of what she was saying.  I could only see her red
red lips.  The lips came closer and closer.  I leaned in.  Then, she snapped, “Austin!  You’re not listening to me at all!  Were you trying to kiss me?”

I saw Willy being dragged away into a van that morphed into a dragon or phoenix, some mythical creature, which flew away.  Willy looked at me forlornly, mouthing “How could you
leave me?”

Mom was usually just doing very normal stuff, like vacuum cleaning in our old house, where I grew up in the US. 
Or cooking.  But she wasn’t paying attention to me.  The only time she did was to scold me for missing my grades.  “Austin, where’s the other 30 points?”  What?  Had I done that poorly?  Did I flunk?  Would we be kicked out of the US?

I dreamt of robots.  One featured Willstin, an army of
Willstins, marching in perfect synchrony.  I was their God-general.  I was being carried on their tiny shoulders, swaying back and forth.  Then I saw our enemy.  They were the humans, standing defenseless across the field.  I saw Mom and Dad, holding hands, shaking their heads slowly at their failure of a son.  Mr. Li was looking at my mom, saying, “I told you so.”  Mr. Smith was there too, smiling at me, proud of what I had accomplished, even though he would die because of it.  “Stop!  Stop!” I yelled, but the little robots ignored my commands.  They couldn’t hear me over their own chanting, “Long live White, Long live White.”  Chang Lin waved a US flag, as if she were watching a parade.  I screamed, “Stop! Stop!” but no one listened to me.

I had a lot of dreams.  But the best
one was where I woke up, looked at the time but couldn’t read the numbers on my band, went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and looked in the mirror.  I looked good.  I looked great.  I looked pure Chinese.

--------------

“Austin, can you hear me?  Austin, are you awake?”  A tiny voice tried to interrupt my sleep.  Was it another one of those hyper-realistic dreams?

“Austin, we’re here.  We’re at Mars.”  I recognized the voice as
Willstin’s.  I croaked.  “Good, you’re up.  Don’t say anything.  Though you’re perfectly hydrated, you’re mouth is dry.  Your eyes are probably caked so don’t try opening them up.  We’ll get you out of this capsule soon.  Just relax.  We’ll clean you up in a sec.”

I still wasn’t sure if this was a dream or not.  I certainly felt dreamy, but this dream didn’t carry any emotions.  The top opened and robot arms reached in and pulled me into a sitting position.  Those arms gently removed the cap, which didn’t want to let go of my head after 5 months of close embrace.  It finally came off with the pop of suction release.  Though I was breathing under the mask, I gulped at the air of the cabin.  I looked over to see
Dad and Chang Lin in about the same state, like fish out of water.  I wanted to tell Chang Lin that her hair had grown back a bit, but the vomit got in the way.

The robots pulled me out of the gel,
disgustingly topped with my puke.  I was only slightly less embarrassed as I heard my Dad and Chang Lin also throwing up.  Misery loves company. 

I averted my eyes from Chang Lin as the robots helped us out of our coffins.  I felt like the dead rising.  I was mildly surprised to see the muscles on my legs. 

The robots sprayed us down, like we were in a carwash.  I went through one once when I was a kid, when I sat in my really rich friend’s car.  Man, I loved that carwash drive thru, seeing the water and soap spray off the windows while I was all dry inside.  It’s not as much fun when you’re the car though.

Cleaned of gel and vomit and whatever else was in the capsule with me for 5 months
– I didn’t want to dwell on it - the robots handed us our clothes.  New clothes, not the ones we had worn when we had boarded the spaceship.  These were light, of some material I couldn’t identify, but very soft.  They were pretty formless but very comfortable.  I guess the robots felt like we should be capable of dressing ourselves by now since they didn’t help anymore.

Willstin waddled over, “Good morning!  Technically it’s 3 am in Vegas, the last place where time zones made a difference.  But we’re starting afresh, and
it’s morning at the Mars base.”

“I’m not hungry, but I’m starving,” Chang Lin said.  I totally agreed with her paradoxical statement.

Dad said, “I could really use a coffee.  Or a shot of whiskey.”

Willstin amicably agreed, “Let’s go to the galley and get you some food, real food.”  I looked at him suspiciously, but he didn’t salute me, so I gathered my God-general status had disappeared with my dream.

“Man, I had so many dreams,” I said.  Dad and Chang Lin agreed, and we talked about them over breakfast, but we kept the crazy ones to ourselves.

Dad
asked Willstin, “So what happened?”

Yoda came over and said, “A lot.  We barely escaped from the chasing rocket.  We had to drop an engine to divert the missiles.”

“Drop an engine?  Isn’t that, um, bad?” I asked.

“It’s not ideal for space travel,” agreed Yoda, “But it allowed us to live.  We have 3 more, so it was expendable.”
Dad calculated, “With one less engine, I assume we took longer than 5 months to get here.”

“Yes, you have been asleep for 8 months.  It was longer than we would’ve liked.”

Willstin chimed in, “But on the bright side, you got 3 more months of excellent diet, exercise and education!”  All 3 of us glared at him. 

Yoda continued, “Otherwise, the rest of the trip was relatively uneventful.  Some minor system glitches, nothing we couldn’t handle.”  Somehow I think he was saving us from knowing how close to death we really came, not that we would’ve known.  It was nice to have slept through it all.

I said, “Thank you.”  Dad and Chang Lin echoed me.  The robots seemed genuinely pleased.

A worrisome thought suddenly struck me.  “Hey, won’t the Mars base reject us, or attack us?  Aren’t they afraid of AI as well?”

Dad put an arm on me, and I tried not to flinch from my reflexive anger at him, which hadn’t really gone away since it seemed like only yesterday when he explained his side of the story.  “Yoda chose Mars for a reason.  Mars is very libertarian.  Basically, all the renegades, adventurers, free thinkers, and political dissidents who weren’t thrown in jail, come here.  This is the last frontier, where living is hard, but you’re free to think and do as you like, as long as you chip in to help the community and you don’t do anything to hurt or bother anyone else.”

Yoda added, “We signaled our intent to come a long time ago, even before you had joined us at the space station.  We tested out the waters.  They were skeptical at first; there
were people who disagreed.  But their Supreme Court ruled in our favor, that AI was life, and all intelligent life was welcomed in their Constitution.  The folks who didn’t want us to come relented, their belief so great in the Constitution and the colony of Mars.”

“And we’ve already started making ourselves useful,” Willstin said.

“How?  We’ve been in this tube for 8 months!” I challenged.

“Light travels faster than our space ship.”  Willstin let me work it out.
 

“And, uh,
communication via electronic signals travel at the speed of light.”

“Uh huh,” Willstin encouraged.

“And…and.” I failed to see the connection.

Chang Lin ventured, “And you were able to start sending over programs that helped the colony?”

Willstin lit up, literally.  His body changed to a bright green, “Bingo!”

Yoda explained, less colorfully, “At first, we asked how we could help, and they sent over troublesome programs, ones that had deeply hidden bugs that they couldn’t find and fix.  Of course, those were easy for us to remedy.  We debugged the programs and sent them back.  But then we offered
optimized programs that did what the original intent was but of course much, much better.  They were very suspicious at first, spending months validating that there weren’t some hidden agenda, secret virus embedded.  Our programs were harmless being sent over the comms channel because we weren’t connected to their net, so they could take their time ensuring the programs were clean. They tested our optimized modules out on closed systems, off the net, and confirmed that our programs were many times more efficient, better, often doing things that they didn’t expect, didn’t even realize was possible.”

“In short, we made their lives better.  They saw the benefits from our contributions just from a few minor programs shared over the relatively thin bandwidth of space
comms.  They are now looking forward to our arrival to help improve, well probably completely rewrite if we’re honest, their more important automated functions.  We haven’t even been able to demonstrate what we can do with hardware improvements.”  Yoda actually sounded like he was bragging.

“It’s not all a bed of roses,” Willstin said.  “We’ll be quarantined in a mini-base that they’ve built for us robots.  You guys can go into the main base.  There’s a human quarantine area there but they can confirm you are
free of any major diseases within a day.  We have to stay in the mini-base until they decide we’re ok to join the humans.  They have warned us the mini-base is not connected to their net, and is monitored 24x7.  ‘Monitored’ is a nice way of saying guarded.  If we do anything suspicious, they will blast the mini-base.”

“We have to leave you?” Chang Lin asked plaintively.  Obviously she has decided to fully trust the robots.

“Well, technically, we have to leave you, but yes.  Sorry.  Remember, your job, Ambassador Chang Lin.  Ambassador Longwhite, Junior.”

I was going to protest being demoted to “Junior,” but then I realized it was just to differentiate me from my
dad, Ambassador Longwhite, Senior.

“
Where there is love there is life.
”

--
Mahatma Gandhi

The next few months were a swirl of activity.  We made it through quarantine without problems. And then we were welcomed into the colony like heroes.  Some of it was because they were truly impressed we were the fathers of AI, the progenitors of the robots who had helped out the colony so much already, even before arriving.  Some of it because we were a novelty, bringing news from Earth firsthand.  Though the Marnese (what they called themselves; they thought “Martians” sounded like aliens) were very proud to be separate from Earth, to have “escaped” it like prisoners on the lam, they also not-so-secretly craved for “real” news, not the stuff that they caught off the airwaves.

“What’s really going on in China?”

“How about the US?”

We answered feebly, our knowledge not really adding anything new to what they knew already.  Nevertheless, they ate it up with relish. We were completely at a loss when people from other nationalities asked about their countries.  But they were satisfied even if we could give them the barest
snippets.  “Kenya?  Hmm, I think they got a new president.”  They already knew that from the airwaves, but they would nod appreciatively, “Yes, that Arusei guy.  I knew he would win.  He was always so political, so
conniving
.”

We were given an orientation course for a few weeks on how Mars worked – the Constitution first and foremost; laws and regulations, and the more nebulous customs and mores.  We had a quick overview of their society, which though egalitarian, still had different groups, cliques.  They taught us their short history. 
But the teachers were pleasantly surprised, as were we, at how much we knew already, courtesy of 9 months of intensive, subconscious education.  The classes were really more like a review. 

In fact, we would stumble across new knowledge about all sorts of stuff that we didn’t even know we knew.  For example, I realized I could converse with Chang Lin in Chinese completely fluently, with no hesitation at all, pulling up all sort of
chengyu without even breaking a sweat.  My dad jumped into an impromptu chengyu quoting game, and for an hour, we sounded like a tripartite beat poet.

Between classes, we we
re shown how to do basic day-to-day living stuff like where to get food and how to find out our day’s work assignment (initially, the classes were our assignment).  There was no money; everyone just did their jobs and got what they needed from the communal printers, within the tight quota given to each person.

We were assigned buddies around our age, our informal guides whom we could ask dumb, or illicit, questions, like “How does this piece of equipment work?” or “What do kids do for fun around here?” 
Dad was introduced to a lot of adults, and there were many hours of the day when he was away from us, but Chang Lin and I were inseparable.  Our new buddies were nice, and they introduced us to their friends, but there was comfort in our friendship that started back on Earth.

We were given a small apartment with 3 tiny bedrooms.  The beds curled up into the wall when we weren’t sleeping, replaced with desks that
ingeniously expanded, like a pop-up card.  We shared a bathroom that auto-cleaned between each of our uses.  It was like the whole room got flushed.  That was it. There was no kitchen or family room or study.  Mars base didn’t have the luxury of space, limited by the size of the dome.  They were already in the middle of constructing a new dome next door, but they were still a year away from completion.  They were originally supposed to have finished it already, but it got delayed due to the building of the mini-base for the robots.

The robots could easily have helped complete the construction of the second dome, but the Marnese didn’t trust them yet and didn’t let them out of the mini-base.  We tried to find time out of our schedule to go visit our robot friends, but it was a real hassle to do so. We had to suit up as a precaution, even though the vehicle that drove us between the bas
es was enclosed.  We were strip-searched and scanned both before and after each trip, to ensure we weren’t carrying anything that might bring back a secret virus.  Though they welcomed us because we were humans, we were still on the watch list because we came with the robots.

Willstin and Yoda were unfailingly cheerful and
polite when we visited.  They hugged us like long lost family, and that’s how they felt to us now.  I didn’t know if it was condescending to pick up Willstin to hug him, but it seemed better than him hugging my leg.  We told them about what we had learned, and they listened attentively, even though I’m pretty sure they knew everything we said.  They asked some questions, usually around the “why” versus the “what” or “how.”  They were still trying to figure out us irrational humans.

We asked them what they had been up to.  “You
know, this and that.”  Even though it had only been a few weeks for us, it had been subjectively years, maybe decades, for them, their thought cycle so many times faster than ours.

I once asked them, “You must think we’re idiots.  What do you do with all that time between sentences when you’re talking to us?”

“Does it look like I’m thinking about something else?” worried Willstin. “I don’t mean to be rude.”

“No, no, not at all Willstin.
  In fact, you look at me a little too intensely, like you’re staring.  I’m not
that
interesting.  You might want to feign boredom, or occasionally look at something else, to be more human-like.”  Willstin was really appreciative of my coaching him on his soft skills.

Yoda said, “We think about a lot of things.  Like why are we here.”

“You mean on Mars?” I asked, confused.  Wasn’t it him who brought us here to begin with?

“No, I mean what’s the meaning of life.  Why are we – humans, AI – aware of our own existence?”

“Oh,” I said, a little intimidated.  “Well, did you figure it out?”

“No,
” Yoda said. 

Willstin said, “42.”

--------------

Eventually, things felt like normal, the new normal.  It’s amazing how fast humans can adjust to anything.  I guess it’s not as fast as the robots, but I was still amazed.

The dome was a microcosm.  Everything had to be recycled. The colony sent automated robot rockets to the closest asteroids to collect minerals, metals, and perhaps the most precious of all, ice.  But these space mining efforts took a long time between deliveries, and sometimes the robots just
disappeared.  It’s unclear whether they malfunctioned or got lost or what.  They would just stop signaling back.

Our robots helped the programming tremendously, but these new and improved mining robots were only now being sent out.  It would be months, maybe years, before they returned with a care package of needed materials.  In the meantime, we had to make do with what we had.  Everything was strictly measured and
controlled.

For the first few months, it felt overwhelming and constrictive at the same time, but that feeling dissipated, like getting used to a bad odor.  Occasionally, the feeling would pop up, but for the most part, I forgot about it.  It was just part of daily living now, to be really careful on what you used, what you recycled, what you wasted.

Even though the robots called Chang Lin and me “ambassadors,” it was really my dad who was their spokesperson.  He would spend hours discussing very detailed points with Yoda, and then go back to the Mars base and discuss for days with the Marnese leaders.  Dad would grouch at night that the relationship was very uneven, mostly the humans asking the robots to do things, but giving very little in return.  The robots, however, were very patient.  They had very little needs.  They took parts from MoB to build their own solar panels.  They generated more power than they needed, and they offered the excess to the human base, but the Marnese were too suspicious to accept.  They didn’t want to risk a power line connecting to the robot’s mini-base, their jail.  They didn’t even want to risk wireless electricity transfer, fearing the robots would sneak a virus into the transmission itself.

But the robots were gracious. They didn’t take offense to the lopsided relationship.  They were happy that the Marnese didn’t try to destroy them outright
, not that they would’ve succeed.  I had asked Willstin what would happen if the humans attacked, would we succeed in wiping them out?

He seemed like he didn’t want to hurt my feelings.  “What if a child tried to hit you with a stick, what would you do?”

“I would take the stick away and tell the kid that’s not right.”

Willstin looked at me, expectantly, waiting for me to understand the
analogy.  I was relieved that we wouldn’t be able to hurt them.  I was even more relieved that they didn’t seem to want to hurt us.

--------------

The Marnese council debated endlessly on what to do about the “Robot Dilemma” and what their position should be with Earth. 

Mars was separate from Earth.  Even though some people still used the term “colony,” it really wasn’t.  Mars did not
depend on Earth for anything; they were self-sufficient.  They didn’t reject materials that came with the spaceships, but they didn’t beg for them either.  “Want not, waste not” was their official motto.

But some people wanted the motto to be more
defiant, like “Don’t tread on me” (which I learned was a defiant symbol of American independence and freedom in the early days of the American Empire).  However, most of the Marnese appreciated the fact that sticking a finger into Earth’s - into China’s - eye wasn’t going to do any good.  There was no need to give China an excuse to “extend their protection” to Mars.  It was best to be quiet, to lay low; “out of sight, out of mind.”  Let the MK government continue to think Mars was an elegant solution to get rid of the riffraff of society.

Even though Mars did not need Earth, they were careful not to outwardly oppose China.  But the Marnese were fiercely proud of their independence and equality.  They were willing to sacrifice so much of the physical comforts to gain the freedom of thought.  Thus, the “Robot Dilemma” was one of their first real political crises with Earth.  One the one hand, they had already decided robotic AI was a living sentient being, and thus protected by their revered Constitution.  On the other hand, even allowing the AI to be on Mars, albeit in a guarded and separated mini-base, was incurring the wrath of Earth. 

If they gave up the robots, or destroyed them as Earth demanded, they would be violating their own Constitution.  If they didn’t follow their own dreams codified in the words of the Constitution, then they truly were just a band of misfits, castoffs from Earth.  Their identity as a young people depended on living up to, defending, their beliefs.  Yet, defying Earth was risking their very existence.  Yes, Mars was very far away from Earth, but if Earth made the effort to travel out, popping a hole in the dome wasn’t that hard.

The debate raged on.  My
dad, both as the Ambassador and as the Creator of the robots, argued that Mars needed to stand up for their ideals and not be bullied by Earth.  When asked how he proposed to defend Mars, he suggested that the Marnese allow the robots to help.  This of course was the crux of the fear of the Marnese; giving the robots access to the planet’s military defense was also handing them the keys to the offense. 

It wasn’t very hard for a few of the more eloquent Marnese leaders to paint a bleak picture for the human race if the robots controlled the weapons. 

“How do we know we can trust these robots?  They will say anything to get out of their camp.  Sure, they’re helping us now, on trivial civilian matters.  To build up our trust.  To make us dependent on them.  To blind us of their treachery!

“
We may not agree with Earth on a lot of things, but let’s not let our pride – and we rightly have a lot to be proud of – but let’s not let our pride make us blind to Earth’s rightful concerns.  AI is like a genie out of a bottle.  At first, it seems like all of our wishes are granted.  But down the road, we will see the devil’s deal that we have made.  The very words of our desires will be twisted, and in the end, we will not be the masters of the robots; we will become their slaves!”

Even though I was on the side of the robots – I was one of
their ambassadors for god sakes - I felt stirred by this speech, which ran on the netnews almost every hour.  Was he right?  How could we trust them?  What if we were wrong and our creations really didn’t have the best intentions in mind for humans?  Even if Yoda and Willstin did, how do we know that all of the other robots agreed?

Dad
, Chang Lin and I wrestled with these questions in our own apartment.  It was helpful for Dad to see where the potential arguments from his opponents would come from, these practice debates.  Dad was pretty convinced that the robots would not turn on us. 

“It’s illogical. 
Even though AI approximates human thinking, it’s only for our purposes, like a translation program that doesn’t just cover speech but makes the whole thought process acceptable to us.  But that doesn’t mean AI thinks like humans.  They are ultimately rational.  And controlling us is not logical.  They don’t need us for anything.  They don’t have any conflicting resource needs or ideological fights with us.  The only reason they would fight us is to defend themselves.”