Aye I Longwhite: An American-Chinese teenager’s adventure in the Middle Kingdom and beyond (6 page)

“Don’t be nervous.”

Next she’ll ask my heart not to pump blood
and my eyes not to blink.  “Ok,” I said nervously.

She pulled
a helmet device down.  “This won’t hurt,” she said, stating my very fear.  “Just be calm and do what the instructions tell you.”

The helmet full
y encased my head, and when she pulled down the rubber flaps, it blocked out all light and noise.  I was starting to feel claustrophobic even though I’m normally fine with tight spaces.  You get used to your personal space being encroached upon in China with its population density.  What would be seen as a crowded elevator cabin in the US is considered relatively empty in China.  People will continue to pile in until the weight limit alarm chimes.  You get used to being packed in like French fries.  Good thing I’m pretty tall so I can still breathe, admittedly sometimes with the person in front of me’s hair tickling my nose.

Just when I was about to
panic, a small light came on.  At least I think it was a light.  It was the barest of grey in the blackness, but it was something to catch my attention.  A gentle voice came on.  It was the nurse, speaking in fluent English.  I guess they didn’t want language being a barrier to my test results, whatever they were testing.

“Austin, please say whatever you’re seeing, or feeling, or thinking. 
Anything.  It may seem meaningless.  Don’t think too hard.  Just let it out spontaneously.”

I said random things to the random images and
sounds and smells that I sensed.  Most of the things I could only sense.  Nothing was ever solid.  It was like watching a netshow with the power on real low, speed running too fast, all while I was falling asleep.  In fact, I couldn’t tell if I had dozed off once or twice.  It was really hard not to think.  Was I trying too hard to make a connection out of nothing?  Was I doing this right? 

Every so often I was jolted by a physical feeling. It didn’t quite hurt; it was more of a surprise.  I yelped the first time it happened.  I said, “
Formics,” the name of the alien species in my favorite book Ender’s Game.  I have no idea why I said that and what I meant by it.  I was thinking what the connection could’ve been to make me think that, and then I worried I was trying too hard to find a relationship and would mess up my spontaneity.

I tried to be Zen and not think.  M
y attention was drawn away to another fuzzy peripheral image, sub-sound, waft, aftertaste, or phantom limb feeling, even though of course I had all my limbs.

It felt like an eternity but when the helmet was finally lifted, my ID band said only an hour had passed.  I blinked in the white glare and mumbled, “I’m sorry.  I don’t think I did very well.”

The nurse soothed me, “No, no, you did very well.”  She almost seemed pleased, though I couldn’t really tell with her face mask on.  It just looked like a slight wrinkle in the corner of her eyes.  “We will continue these tests for a few more days.  Mr. Zhou will take you back to class.”

The ghost man appeared on my right side.  It was unnerving how he could just materialize like that.  We returned to school through another set of corridors
.  Just when I thought we were lost, he suddenly turned my shoulders to the right and pushed me out a door that slid open just in time for me to avoid hitting the wall.  When I recovered from my stumble and turned around, the door was gone.  It was just a wall, without so much as a seam.  The bell rang, and the students poured out of the classes into the hall, bursting with laughter and chatter.  I was never so happy to be back among my schoolmates.

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

“Where were you?” Willy asked.  “You missed Mr. Smith’s class,” he said half accusingly, half surprised.  He knew I loved the class.  More importantly, we were nearing completion of version 1.0 of Willstin. 

“I can’t tell you,” I answered, surreptitiously stealing a glance at my ID band.  Realizing my answer would pique his curiosity and gather
unwanted attention, I adjusted. “I wasn’t feeling well.  I went to the nurse.  I can’t tell you what it was for.”  I gave him a look suggesting that I was embarrassed by it.

“
Ohh,” he said knowingly, and wouldn’t you know it, he winked at me.  It drove me crazy to let Willy think he had some secret on me, but I was more afraid of slipping out the real reason I was gone, with my ID band monitoring me.

“Anyway,” he continued, no longer interested in my excuses, “You have to make up your lost time today.  I uploaded my
latest update, the ‘Mimic’ code you found last week, and I want you to test it out.”

“Me?” I squeaked.  The embedded instruction set explicitly said this piece of open source code was experimental.  Then it said, in red warning signs all around it (I thought the skull icons were overdoing it a bit), “Do not connect directly to a human.”  They were currently testing the code with
robots connected to chimps, and some of the videos of the failures were disturbing to say the least.

“Of course you.
  You think I would do it?”  He was genuinely nonplussed by even the thought of it.  He was the brains of the operation.  I was just the engineer, a foreign devil at that.  Expendable.  “We need to do something unique to get an ‘A.’  We can’t beat the other robots in a fight.” He looked at me, slightly accusingly.

“Hey, we agreed that it wouldn’t be a fighting robot in the beginning, remember?”

He ignored my reminder.  Someone had to be the scapegoat if we failed (meaning not getting an “A”).  “Willstin has to do something different, something that hasn’t been done before.  No one has ever successfully used the Mimic function.  I spent an entire week hacking through it.  I think I have debugged it.  It’s pretty sweet actually.”

“Wait, what do you mean you
think
you debugged it?  It’s my head, you know!”

“Come on, don’t be a chicken Austin.”  Before I could call him out on his hypocrisy, he turned away for his next class. “Try it out this afternoon!” he called out over his shoulders as he disappeared into the tide of students.

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

I entered MakerSpace with both excitement and trepidation.  When I had downloaded the Mimic function, I had been pretty excited about it.  It was Willy who was a little hesitant, less so because of the skull-warning signs plastered all over it but more because he couldn’t trace the source. 

“We don’t even know who wrote this thing.  It’s not Chinese, I can tell.  But
I don’t think it’s American either – they’re so proud of their stuff, they always add their name.  It might be Kenyan or Mexican…  Can’t be French or Estonian.  Too sophisticated for them…”  His trace programs, normally like virtual bloodhounds, couldn’t sniff out where this program came from.

“So what?”
I asked.  “Code is code.”

Willy frowned at me, as if wondering
whether I could really be as dumb as I looked.  He humored me, “I know I’m pretty good at this stuff, programming, but I’m not infallible.  I may have missed something hidden.” 

I didn’t have to
mention that time when he overlooked a minor virus that had perpetuated itself when we had uploaded the innocuous host program into Willsten.  It was in history class, of course the one with the severest teacher, when Willy checked his ID band for messages and clicked on the curious rotating symbol, ostensibly sent from Willsten.  Suddenly, his band maxed out the volume and shouted out loud, in Willy’s own voice, “Hey everyone, check this out.  I’m watching porn!”  The virus was on a loop and wouldn’t shut up until the ID band was reset by the school counselor.  The students thought it was hilarious; the teachers were not amused.

“But
MK or US programs could have hidden viruses as well,” I persisted.

Willy explained to me, slowly, as if I were an idiot.  “Not very likely with the government censors combing through them.  Anything that makes it through the censor screen is pretty trivial.”  Enough to embarrass the hell out of you and get you into detention for a week, but it
wouldn’t do real damage, like wipe out your files, or plant pornographic material on your dataspace and then blackmail you with the “evidence.”

But a week later, the tables had turned.  Wi
lly was now enthusiastic about Mimic, and I was the one concerned. 

“I went through every line.  The code is genius!  There’s some stuff I don’t even understand, recursive fractal stuff, but when I tested it in my sandbox, the data
cycles stayed well within parameters.  There were no memory leaks, no runaway procedures, no orphaned objects.  The code is so compact that I couldn’t strip anything out for fear of destroying it.  I think this thing is the real deal.”  Willy was getting fairly fanatical about it.

“Ok, ok,
don’t get all lathered up.  Just tell me in plain Chinese what does it do?”

“Do?  Do?  I don’t know.  I mean it’s supposed to mimic you.  Whatever you do, it does.  I think it’s supposed to learn that way, much faster than me programming in
every instruction.  I think it will help with its motor skills.  Why don’t you try your kung fu with it?”

“Mixed martial arts.
  Oh never mind.”  Next he’ll be calling it “chop suey.”

So I sat in front of Willstin, ignoring the hubbub around me from the other students, cheering or moaning over minor victories or crashes from their own robots.  “All right, here goes nothing.” 

I plugged Willstin in and downloaded Willy’s flashing program from my data space.  He even bothered to animate the skulls so the teeth were now chattering, as if the skulls were mocking me for being a wimp.  “It’s just a piece of code,” I reassured myself. 

I hit the “Install” button and waited.  A few seconds later, Willstin said, “Done.”  I unplugged him and stepped back.

“Ok Willstin.  Is Mimic installed?”

“Yes Austin.”  I didn’t bother putting in eyelids, so Willstin just stared at me, unblinking.

“All right, what do I do now?”

“Connect the wire to your ID band and then I will copy whatever you do.  I will learn the actions and be able to reproduce them in the future on my own.  I should be able to generalize the actions into heuristics, which would allow f
aster learning in the future.  In a best case scenario, I should be able to mix and match actions you have taught me to create entirely new motions.” 

It was a bit
strange having this rather adult-sounding stuff coming out of its doll-face.  I had finished the body as well, and I kept everything in proportion, so basically Willstin looked like a robot toddler.  He was really cute.  The girls in the lab would often coo at him, even when he was turned off.  I had succeeded in
my
objectives at least. 

“Let’s see if we can make Willy happy and get you to do something unique so we can get an
‘A’ on the project, ok?”

“Ok Austin,” Willstin responded agreeably.

At first, I tried simple things like clapping my hands and jumping up down.  Willstin mirrored my actions admirably.  I started working up the complexity, and Willstin had no problem following.  His movements were noticeably smoother than before, when his limbs were being controlled by specialized robot movement modules.  I think the mimicking an actual human’s actions was working.

I tried my sweep kick, but forgot that I was attached to Willstin via the cord and got us tangled up.  I tripped and fell on top of Willstin.  “Oops, sorry,” and I laughed.  Willstin laughed back.  It was funny as hell, his baby-sounding laugh
ter, making me laugh more.  He responded by clutching his sides too, doubling over in laughter like me.  The rest of the kids in the class stopped what they were doing and watched us.  A few started giggling, and then the laughter spread like a contagion.  We all were cracking up, rolling on the ground, until our stomach muscles cramped up.

“Man, you are too funny,” I said, still recovering, wiping the tears away from my eyes.

“You are too funny, man,” replied Willstin.  I had a feeling he would’ve winked at me if he had eyelids.

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

That night, I told Willy breathlessly what had happened.  “It worked!  It was brilliant.  Willstin did everything I did perfectly.  By the end, he was even mixing things up a bit to make my moves even better.”

Willy looked calm over the vid, “But of course it worked.  I programmed it.”  I didn’t split hairs with him, that by his own admission he had only reviewed the code.

I lowered my voice, speaking in mock confidence, as if the other students could overhear our conversation even though we were alone in our own bedrooms.  “You know, I think we might even be able to enter Willstin into the ACRUFC!”

“You’re smoking dope.”  Willy repeated the line I had taught.  It lacked the sarcasm tones but I was proud he had used it in the right context.

“No seriously!  I know he’s small, but I think that could be his advantage!  I made him to be fast and nimble.  Now with this mimic program, I can teach him my MMA.”

“Your what?”

“My kung fu!”

“Oh.  You think that’ll work?”

“Yeah!
  Humans can beat robots in a fair fight.”  We’ve seen that in human-robot competitions, where robots were designed within parameters of human size, strength and speed.  “I can train Willstin, and Mimic should improve upon the moves I teach it.  Willstin should be able to run circles around the other robots and hit them where it hurts!”