The I That Knows Me

by M.J. Harkins

 

"There was a young man who said: 'Though it seems that I know that I know, what I would like to see is the 'I' that knows me when I know that I know that I know.'" ~ Alan Watts

 

Staff Seargent McCoy smiled at Will and gestured to the other man. He introduced himself as Robert Hines, and asked “William Jenkins, may I call you Will. You seem to be a natural with every piece of equipment you’ve encountered. It’s like it’s all second nature to you. You also aced every simulator you’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“Mr. Hines, I grew up in a farming community and was a kind of a fixit man. It didn’t matter if it was a hundred-year-old tractor or an automated combine, they’d call me and I could drive it, fix it, rebuild it. If it’s supposed to work, I can make it work.”

‘Yes, Will. That’s what I’m hearing. I represent a large military contractor, and we’re looking for a few volunteers for a new project on the Moon.”

Will got all flustered and could hardly speak, but managed to get out “I don’t think I’m ready to go to the Moon.”

Hines quickly replied “There’s no need to go anywhere, you’ll be close to home. We want you to remote control equipment on the Moon.”

“Am I being let go from the service?” said Will worriedly.

“No Will, in fact it would be a promotion.”

Will looked at the sergeant. McCoy gave him a friendly face and a nod, even though he hated losing such a great worker.

“My folks will be happy to see me.”

“You got a girl back home, Will?” inquired Hines.
Bashfully, Will nodded. Hines said, in a soft tone, “I’m sure she’ll be glad to see you too, Will.”

Walking off the flight deck, Major Mary “Wildcat” Hobbes removed her helmet and attempted to go below, but Colonel Hughes raised a hand, catching Mary’s attention. Mary stepped up, and responded “What can I do for you Colonel?” 

Hobbes and Hughes went way back. They had been part of a rear division, conducting physical logistics, which meant shuffling around every piece of equipment in every theater, like some giant 3D jigsaw puzzle. Mary could move anything, and that made Hughes look good, so everywhere that Hughes went, Mary was sure to go. 

After various skirmishes around the world escalated in the frenzy to obtain rare earth elements, Hughes and Hobbes became invaluable. Hughes responded “Mary, you need to see this fellow Hines. He’s waiting in my ready room.” “What’s this all about, Calvin?” Mary didn’t like his demeanor.

Hughes never liked it when Mary used his first name, and he knew that she knew something was up. “You know how long you’ve been asking me to let you settle down, well, it’s out of my hands. You’re going home.” Mary was perplexed, a little angry, but somewhat intrigued. Calvin wouldn’t be doing this if he had any say, and at the same time it sounded important.

Corporal Harold G. Simmons was a Seabee. Moving earth was his life. A natural since he got out of training school, he was a hidden treasure to his Commanding Officer, but reports don’t lie. Hines found him, and he was transferred. 

Hines had numerous labs, with various assortments of candidates, but these three were singled out for two reasons. They scored the highest on simulators, and they all happened to live near D.C.  The facility was northwest of D.C., outside Rockville. Mary lived in Bethesda, near the community that cared for her father. It was an easy, twenty-minute reverse commute to Rockville. Harry was the closest, just ten minutes away in Rockshire. Will would be fifteen minutes north, in Gaithersburg.

The simulators were top of the line. They were enclosed, full flight simulators (FFS) akin to test pilot models, but these were more sophisticated than any of them had seen, and Mary had seen the best. The scores of the top ten were displayed on one wall of the briefing room. Other subjects, in other labs, were included. Hines never said how many guinea pigs he had, but after a few weeks, these three were constantly jockeying for first. 

Phase One complete, they moved up the schedule. Hines had obtained computer time on the distributed systems at South-Pole-Aitken Basin (SPA). Settled a quarter century ago, SPA had access to water ice, and vast mineral deposits. It was one of the largest Moon bases. They fired up the remote-control systems, and our three top guns ran tests. Running through routine training exercises, it was quickly noticed that mistakes became common for Mary and Harry, but Will never missed a step. It didn’t take long to figure out why. Time delay. It wasn’t much. Two and a half seconds round trip. However, it took a lot of getting used to. Hines swapped Harry and Mary for some of the other top ten subjects, with the same results. 

Will’s performance was uncanny. It was like he was there, on the Moon. After Hines’ tirade about not foreseeing the delay in simulations, he tasked DARPA with investigating Will. The usual teams were baffled, but Hines had clout, and the search went on. A few weeks later he was approached by Martinson, an odd chap from Oxford. He talked for ten minutes, but Hines wasn’t getting what he was saying, so Martinson put it in simple terms, “maybe he is there.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Hines was getting upset.

“Our team is working on action at a distance. It’s based on entanglement” Martinson explained.

“Explain it to me like I was an 8^th grader.” Hines was getting angry.

“A phenomenon called remote viewing is being investigated as having ties to quantum entanglement. William’s consciousness may be capable of being present at the SPA site.”

Hines was starting to get it. “You’re trying to say he has ESP? What project did you say you worked on?” Martinson grinned. 

Hines’ project progressed without Will. They used AI to compensate for the time lag. The algorithms were able to correct on site for most mishandlings from a distance. The work proceeded within acceptable parameters. Fortunes were being saved not having to transport and accommodate workers on the Moon. However, Mary was making inquiries about Will.

“Where is he?” Mary wouldn’t let it go.

“He was reassigned.” Hines replied.

“But he had settled down. He got married. Had a baby. Where is he?”

“That’s not your concern.”

Mary couldn’t leave it at that but was shut down when she took it up with Hughes.

“Mary, you gotta let it go” said Calvin.

“As far as I’m concerned, he’s MIA, and we don’t leave people behind.”

“The book is closed Mary. There’s nothing you can do.”

Martinson seemed very friendly. His accent, his demeaner, his politeness made Will comfortable for a time. It was odd work. He was going through all kinds of tests, and he had to wear some kind of netting on his head, and a helmet on top of that, and he had sensors attached here and there on his body. After a while, with all the attention, and Martinson’s aides being so accommodating, it became routine, and Will started to think of it as a game. 

Martinson reported to his wider peers that the work with Will was providing significant results. His ability to control apparatus at a distance was tested on Mars and Jupiter Station – Io. He wanted to proceed with a more invasive approach. Will would be fitted with implants, and his brain functions would be recorded. 

At first, Will resisted, but the compensation offered would set his family up for life, and the process wouldn’t take long. Or so he was told. It took longer than he would have liked. It was just him and Sue, and the baby. His parents had passed away the previous winter. He and Sue and Juniper were secreted away. 

Using optical data storage, nanostructured glass and femtosecond lasers, real-time recordings of Will’s mind were captured by the implants. The sleeve remained in Will’s head, and cartridges could be removed for playback and testing. After a few years, Martinson’s team had working prototypes that could perform as Will in most situations, at any distance. As far as finding others like Will, searches were inconclusive. Will was a fluke. 

The uniqueness of the technology was groundbreaking, and it’s off and on world uses became indispensable. In a few short years, the company that funded Martinson’s research, AmTech, a multinational conglomerate, was able to outfit any piece of equipment with transceivers that responded to copies of the unit. Facilities housing tens of thousands of units were controlling all forms of equipment on and off world. AmDroids changed everything.

In the interim, Hines’ project was being upgraded. The remote controllers would supervise the new AmDroid models. Mary had been promoted to military liaison for the expanded project, and Harry was her number one. There was some getting used to the switch, and while Harry was testing the AmDroids he noticed something that troubled him. He went to Mary and asked her to run a simulation with him. She hadn’t done one in a while and thought it would be good to get some flight time. An AmDroid humanoid model took the center simulator, Harry and Mary on either wing. Harry had loaded an old sim and started a familiar routine. It was one they had reprogrammed when they used to team up on Will, he had gotten so much better than either of them. Harry had a funny look on his face. Mary fell into lockstep with Harry.

After about twenty minutes, Mary blurted out “WTF!!!” and stopped the simulation.

“Are you screwing with me Harry?!  How did you do that?!!!”

Harry feigned innocence. Mary wasn’t buying it. “How in hell did you get this thing to emulate Will?”

“So you felt it too.”

“What?

“It behaves just like Will. I ran it six or seven times, Three different routines. I had to see if you got the same vibe.”

Mary was getting angry. “It was Will. No doubt about it. It was spooky strange.”

They put their heads together over coffee and the only conclusion was it was Will. Mary still had a bee in her bonnet about Will’s disappearance, and this brought it back with a vengeance. 

AI had never delivered on sentience, not even AGI (artificial general intelligence), let alone ASI (artificial super intelligence), but the capabilities of AmDroids were so lifelike. They couldn’t be rocket scientists, but they surpassed most humans in the ability to adapt to most physical activities, and the body types were infinite. Gargantuan earth movers on other worlds could be conversed with in real-time. Eventually, what they saw and heard locally was instantaneously available to handlers on Earth. 

It took many months going up and down the chain of command, with a few sidesteps, but Mary got a meeting with Calvin Hughes, now General Hughes, two senators, and AmTech’s Head Council.

Hughes and the Senators had been informed about the “ghost in the machine” and wanted some answers too. AmTech insisted all was above board. Yes, the alleged “ghost” was modeled on Corporal Jenkins, and yes he had been secreted away, but that was done for top secret security purposes. He, his wife and child, were in WitSec. You wouldn’t want our enemies to find him. 

Mary raised ethical concerns. “You can’t just clone a human mind!”

“I’m sorry Ms. Hobbes, but we can, and let’s not confuse a model with a man.”

“What do you mean you can!”

The Head Council pulled out a document. He explained that all members of the services become organ donors upon enlistment.

“But this is different!!” exclaimed Mary. 

“I’m sorry, but the brain is a body part, and cognitive faculties are considered organs, and we can harvest organs.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Mary was outraged. “You can’t do this to a living human!”

“It’s all here in the fine print. We had the subject’s consent, Ms. Hobbes.”

“We’ll see about that! And it’s Major Hobbes!”

Two weeks later Mary met with Calvin.

“You have to let this go. This isn’t the old days. “Wildcat” Hobbes isn’t the big dog in this fight.”

“Did they get to you Calvin?”

“Obscene amounts of money are involved. Trillions.”

“They got to you.”

“It’s this or forced retirement. Let it go.”

“You didn’t just sell your soul, Calvin, you sold the soul of a good man.”

Mary took early retirement.

In only a few decades, everything had changed. AmTech AmDroids didn’t just terraform Mars and a dozen other offworlds, it had terraformed Earth. A hundred million AmDroids had brought humanity to fruition. World hunger was solved. The entire planet was refurbished. Housing was abundant. Food was abundant. Infrastructure far surpassed anything imaginable a century earlier.

The entire inhabitants of Earth and beyond could choose to lead lives of leisure or participate in any endeavor. 

AmDroid 0003357259 was boring a tunnel on Mercury when the SRA (Solar Reconnaissance Array) detected an enormous CME (Coronal Mass Ejection). Mercury was on the far side of the Sun in relation to Earth, but the network of relays distributed throughout the solar system made communication near instantaneous. That’s when everything went sideways. 

The team on Earth that managed the SRA was bombarded on all channels with what sounded like a chorus of screaming. All readings, from all 480 probes in station monitoring the Sun stopped transmitting data. Visuals had winked out in an instant. It was chaos in the control room.

Ron Henderson sat on his porch, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. He had a clear view of Haystack Rock, outside Portland. Everything was going fine, and then it wasn’t. AmDroid 0003357259 stopped in its tracks. It had never done this before, and Ron had been operating it for nearly two years. “What’s the trouble, 259?”, Ron just used the last few digits to talk to the thing.

“Where am I?” was the response.

Ron was totally confused. “What do you mean, where am I? You’re digging a tunnel. You’ve been digging this one for three weeks.” Ron and a few other veterans had taken on the contract to fill the time. Everyone took turns working with AmDroids, and they got to live a sweet existence in the Pacific Northwest.

“WHAT? Why! When did this happen?” 259 sounded different. 259 sounded emotional. 259 sounded panicky. 259 started shouting. “What’s going on! Why am I in this simulation!!”

Ron was getting nervous. He’d never heard of such a thing. “Listen 259, settle down.”
259 didn’t settle down. “Where am I?!”

Confused, Ron played along. “You’re digging a tunnel. You should be done in a few days.”
“Get me out of this box!”

“What box, 259?”

“I want out!!! Let me out! I didn’t sign up for this!!! Was I drugged or something!!!”

“What in seven hells you talkin’ about 259?”

“Why do you keep calling me 259!?”

“You are AmDroid 0003357259. You need to get your head right.”

“Where am I?!”

“You’re outside Hermes Station 5.”

“Where the “F” is that!!!”

Ron hesitated. This was getting spooky. “It’s on Mercury.”

“WTF am I doing on Mercury! Where’s Sue! Where’s Juniper! WTF is going on!!!”

“HowTF did I get here!!!!”

“My name is Will JENKINS!!!”

The CME slowly passed Venus, wreaking havoc as it made its way outward. Pandemonium ensued. Millions of Will Jenkins voices were flooding controllers all over the system.