Consciousness

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Emotional Response: An AI Limbic System

Interviewer: Journal of Robotics and Machine Intelligence

Interviewee: Cooper Rocail, Roboticist

Time: Thursday, 10:30 AM

Location: Lakeview C

JOURNAL OF ROBOTICS AND MACHINE INTELLIGENCE: Today, I get the honor of interviewing Cooper Rocail. I’m a bit of a fan, and have been looking forward to this for a while now.
Cooper was formerly the Chief Analytics Officer of the world’s largest data aggregation firm. Now retired, he’s involved in artificial general intelligence and open-source robotics. He’s been developing what he calls an ‘Artificial Intelligence Limbic System.’ You’re probably aware of Mr. Rocail by his quite popular robot, EMAA.

(applause)

JRMI: Cooper, a limbic system is that part of our brains that gives us motivations, values, and emotions — you’ve essentially given AI feelings. I guess the question on everyone’s mind; Are you enabling the Robot Uprising?

COOPER ROCAIL: [shaking head] Oh, please.

---

The autonomous automation symposium in Chicago was nothing special — a minor conference; small enough to not spill out of the hotel’s conference space. There were only two reasons Cooper Rocail attended. First, he was invited to an interview and Q&A about what originally started as his retirement hobby. He had taken early retirement and became involved in the open-source robotics community, where he developed his artificial limbic system. The AI limbic system (and his own service robot that used it) had caught the attention of the industry and created opportunities for speaking engagements. The second reason, the real reason, was an old friend in town he wanted to see.

He pushed his salt and pepper hair off his face, jammed his hands in his pants pockets, and merged into the small crowd on the conference center floor. Attending and speaking at conferences used to be a way of life in the corporate world. But now, as a retiree who had stumbled into robotics and artificial intelligence, it felt foreign. Like life itself was shifting around him.

The vendor showcase had all the same companies and the same representatives as every other conference this year. Even the swag was the same. The only robots present were a few tabletop designs he’d seen before, the same old commercial humanoid machines, and a couple of medium-sized robots — home models, smaller and less sophisticated than EMAA, his personal polycarbonate and aluminum android. The Saturday night keynote speaker sounded halfway interesting, but today was Thursday and Cooper wasn’t planning on staying until then.

He’d been hiding out in the back of panel discussions most of the afternoon. Now that he was wandering the conference floor, he had to field random questions about EMAA. This wasn’t a big enough conference he would have brought EMAA with him, but, regardless, he’s resisted taking it anywhere recently. The robot should be a source of pride. But nowadays, otherwise professional people were asking inane fanboy questions about it. The damn machine had become a celebrity.

---

JRMI: So, why do we need robots and artificial intelligence with actual feelings? Developers have been simulating emotions for years, and those are entirely believable.

CR: Let’s be clear; artificial intelligence has artificial emotions. They aren’t genuine feelings. So, the question you’re asking is what an AI limbic system does that slapping a smiley face on a robot doesn’t.
Simulating emotions comes after the behavior — they’re for show. But the synthetic emotions of an AI limbic system affect the machine’s motivation, and thus its behavior. This distinction matters when there are strong ethical issues involved. Companion robots, for instance, work with Alzheimer’s patients which may become violent. If we train them to have concern for a patient’s well-being, they will show the correct mix of compassion and firmness the situation requires.

JRMI: Concern? Compassion?

CR: Okay, no, not actual concern or compassion. Not like you or I would have. It’s not a ‘feeling’. It’s just something they’ve been trained on — criteria, stimulus … right?

---

Cooper hit the ‘UP’ button and waited, disinterested, for the under-worked elevators to find him. His blurred reflection in the polished metal doors looked at him suspiciously. He looked away. The hotel concierge smiled at him from across the lobby. Cooper faked a smile and returned to the glare of his distorted image.

What’s your problem, Coop? He bit his lip and made eye contact. You should be excited.

He shook his head and looked out of the elevator corridor again. A young couple approached. Another fake smile. He returned to his disapproving reflection.

This is bigger than you. Stop getting in her way.

No. How much of what he saw in the robot was just his imagination? Wishful thinking? Dread? It’s nothing more than hardware and a collection of algorithms, trained well on the world around it. Reading anything metaphysical into the system was ridiculous. He wasn’t about to give into superstition.

Doors slid open behind his blurry reflection and a child ran out, followed by her parents. Cooper spun, slipped in before the approaching couple arrived, and slammed the >|< button, trying to recall what floor his room was on.

---

Cooper dropped his bag on the desk. Most of the crap he picked up downstairs wouldn’t make it into his luggage. The room was lonely, but gave him privacy to call Myra. This trip was lonelier without her. There was an emptiness about it.

“Voice, Myra.”

Two tones, then, “Hey!”

“Hey.”

“Good trip?”

Cooper sighed.

“Emaa and I miss you.” It was good to hear his wife’s voice.

“You miss me, Myra. EMAA’s a damn android.”

“She misses you, Coop. We both love you very much.”

Cooper shook his head and pulled the curtains back on the room’s window. The overcast evening sky reached into a gray Lake Michigan. Cooper would rather be home. “Going to have dinner with Mori tonight.”

“Maresuke? Give him my love! Call me when you get back to the room?”

“It’ll probably be late. And I might be drunk.”

“Mmm, even better,” her voice turning sultry.

He shut the curtains and collapsed into a chair. “I’m sorry. I’m already tired, and I can’t imagine I’m going to be less tired by the time I get back.”

The voice on the phone shifted. “It’s okay. I would like to see your face, though.”

Cooper switched to video, and Myra smiled at him. A compassionate smile. It had been a long day, but he had hoped he didn’t look bad enough to evoke sympathy.

“You think too hard, Coop. Too much science for a retired guy. It wears you out. Maybe some mindfulness …”

“You know how I feel about a machine teaching meditation.”

“See? Right there, that’s what I mean. I don’t care if she’s a robot, she’s the best instructor I’ve ever had.”

“It’s absurd.”

Myra sighed noticeably, “I want my old romantic Cooper back.”

He pushed a smile to his face. “I’m sorry. I promise I’ll get better.”

“You have a good time with Maresuke tonight.” Then, whispering, “Don’t be afraid to wake me if you change your mind.”

---

JRMI: Human emotions are extraordinarily complex. Building an AI limbic system — giving an artificial brain an amygdala, of a sort. That can’t be easy.

CR: Horrible. Back in the early days of AI, they would teach systems to play games by saying, “You want the score to go up, you don’t want it to go down.” ‘Want’ and ‘don’t want,’ I figured it was more-or-less that easy.
Holy Hell… [shaking head] I had this 70-centimeter robot I was working with. I successfully made it manic-depressive. Once I got that reigned in, it would follow us around, staring at us. Constantly.
I still thought, ‘I got this.’ I figured I was missing something simple.

---

The car dropped Cooper in front of a Mediterranean restaurant in Lincoln Park. He loved the vitality of the place; couples and crowds wandering the street, tables scattered outside of cafés echoing with laughter and conversation, the smell of food from every walk of life drifting past. The street itself seemed alive, as if a hundred years of humanity had seeped into it.

He stepped into the restaurant and, over the white noise of dozens of dinner conversations and contemporary Turkish music, identified himself to the maître d’. The maître d’ scanned a list, glancing at Cooper occasionally.

“Ah! Mr. Rocail,” he announced, “Mr. Mori has arrived and is expecting you.” He grabbed a menu from its cradle and led Cooper through a maze of tables and booths to an alcove buried in the back. He motioned Cooper toward a booth and laid the menu on the table.

“Cooper-san!” Maresuke Mori sprung up and greeted him with a nod, and then a laugh and a handshake-hug combination that only the dearest friend would welcome. Mori had replaced Cooper as the Chief Analytics Officer when Cooper retired, eventually moving on to start his own analytics firm. Sparse wisps of hair crisscrossing Mori’s shining scalp crowned his round face. His face wrinkled with a toothy smile that arched his eyebrows and nearly pushed his eyes closed. “How is Myra? Lovely as ever?”

“Lovelier. And Shimizu-san?”

“Always correcting me. But I like a woman I can match wits with.”

The server introduced herself when the pleasantries were done. She described the specials as a young man laid out hummus and flatbread. They left, and Cooper scrolled through the menu. Mori set his face down.

“I can recommend the chicken kofta with eggplant.” Mori leaned back. “And how is Emaa-chan?”

Cooper looked up from the menu. “EMAA, it’s just EMAA. The robot is supplementing my retirement income nicely, thank you.”

Mori shook his head. “She is a child of your genius. She is self-training, and she is doing her own upgrades. Emaa is growing, Cooper-san, as a child grows. So, it’s an honest question. How is Emaa-chan?” He grinned. “She is doing something that annoys Cooper?”

Cooper shook his head, ‘no’ and returned to the menu. “Look,” he didn’t look up, “Myra’s getting a little too attached. Anthropomorphizing it, I guess. I don’t know.”

“Too attached? Anthropomorphizing her? You intentionally shaped Emaa like a person and trained Emaa to act like a person. They call this anthropomorphic framing, do they not? But now you have a problem when Myra treats her as a person?” A pause as he picked up his menu and scrolled downward, “We’ll figure this out over dessert.”

Cooper was scrolling up and down. He looked to ensure the server wasn’t coming. She was. Mori ordered the lamb chop special. Cooper ordered the chicken kofta with eggplant.

---

JRMI: But you found out there wasn’t a simple fix to your limbic system, was there? No simple way to make it work?

CR: Not that I could see. I had started with the Geneva Emotion Wheel, which has twenty emotions, but soon discovered there are over 34,000 identified emotions. Did I need to train them all? What a mess. My wife had been a counselor, so I pestered her a lot, interviewed psychologists … got nowhere.
Mind you, this was supposed to be a retirement hobby. A hobby! I was supposed to be enjoying myself. We’d be at a concert or show, and I’d be sitting there considering whether ‘melancholy’ is a necessary emotion for a robot.

---

The food was excellent. Cooper expected nothing less in Mori’s choice of restaurants. The reminiscing was always fun, even if they repeated themselves each time they met. By the time they finished dinner, Cooper was caught up on Mori’s new venture. They sat eating frozen Greek yogurt, Mori with a sage tea and Cooper with black Turkish coffee.

“How close are you to the data nowadays, Mori?”

“I’m right in it. I have data embedded under my nails.” He presented a hand for inspection.

Cooper ignored the hand. “Ever see poetry in it?”

Mori laughed. “So, this happens when you retire?”

“I’m serious,” setting his dessert aside. “When you’ve been looking at a dataset all day, trying to squeeze out secrets. You let your eyes unfocus …”

Mori was quiet. And then, “Yes.” It sounded like a confession. “You look at it enough and there’s a beauty in it; you can feel it.” Mori leaned forward; spoon grasped between his clasped hands. “I have a project for the Entertainment Industry. Terabytes of random demographics; an unnormalized mess. Two days into it and suddenly, I see the carvings at Mahabodhi Temple. Beautiful, intricate patterns. Echoes and reflections. Vibrations and ripples and waves. It’s alive — it’s moving and changing. But the moment I try to capture it, it’s gone.” He tossed his spoon into his empty dish, where it rang with a certain finality. “It’s all random data again.”

Cooper grabbed his coffee. “Years back, we went to an analytics conference together and there was a break-out session about randomness and quantum uncertainty. Strange. Remember that?”

Mori sipped his tea. “The physicist. I remember. He was telling us there is no randomness because of … quantum mechanics?”

Cooper nodded. “He said that randomness is the physical manifestation of quantum uncertainty. But, see, Einstein said, ‘God doesn’t play dice with the universe.’ Einstein felt that quantum uncertainty is actually deeper complexity. This guy — this physicist or whatever — made the case there is no randomness, just complexity we don’t understand.”

“Yes, yes.” Mori was nodding as he poured more tea. “The hand of God.”

“Yeah, well, …” Cooper took a swig of coffee. “Maybe not God …. He believed this ‘deeper complexity’ is consciousness. We catch glimpses of a cosmic consciousness in random data.” A more cautious sip this time. “I think he was insane.”

Mori studied his tea. “I don’t know.” Leaning forward, “Neither of us know quantum mechanics.”

“Yeah, well, I think Professor Crazy-hat was confusing data science and physics with religion.”

“They are not the same? My faith tells me that Buddha-nature is present in all things — that all things are a manifestation of Buddha-nature. Is this not the same as your cosmic consciousness?”

Panpsychism, thought Cooper. He put his coffee down and shook his head. “So, you agree with the philosophers and physicists who believe that consciousness is a fundamental force or even the fundamental nature of the universe?”

“My belief in the Buddha-nature is not dissimilar from the Islamic teaching that God is the only true reality. Neither would doubt that we all sprang from a single consciousness. I don’t know quantum physics or,” waving his hand around, “the fabric of the universe. But I believe there is beauty in the theory, and I am reassured that spiritual men have believed it for thousands of years.”

Cooper stared through the Moroccan chandelier above the table. He usually enjoyed these deep conversations.

---

Mori smiled. “This is about Emaa?” Cooper felt Mori’s eyes on him. “It is! She’s showing behaviors you can’t explain, and Cooper’s become annoyed.”

Cooper turned his head down and studied the last bit of his coffee. “Maresuke, you think it’s possible for EMAA to be, uh …” He tapped the side of his cup and watched ripples move across the dark surface of the coffee.

“Alive?” Mori gave no expression Cooper could discern.

“EMAA is building a neural network out of trillions, quadrillions of arbitrary data points. We’re talking petabytes. Something’s emerging that’s larger than … it’s more than just training.” He ran a finger down the coffee cup’s handle.

“Ah, emergent behavior. So, you believe she is self-aware?”

“No, Mori. I mean … in a way, I guess. She’s got a metamodel of her world, kind of like we do. And for the same reasons — to know where her are limbs are, be aware of her surroundings, make predictions about what’s going to happen and how to respond. But self-awareness isn’t the same as consciousness, right?”

“How is it not?”

“Well, okay,” Cooper sat up in his chair. “So there’s this Global Workspace Theory of Consciousness that says we have a model of our world in our heads, and consciousness comes from being aware of ourselves in that model. I will concede it sounds similar. But it’s not. Even the car that brought me here has a 3-D model of its surrounding space. It knows its shape and position within that space, and it applies the laws of physics to navigate the space without getting hit or hitting anything.”

“Perhaps a car is conscious, too?”

“No, Mori. No. Consciousness is all about having subjective experiences.”

“And by ‘subjective experience’, do you mean ‘feelings’? Is that not what being sentient means? To attach meaning to experience?”

Cooper sat back. He was hoping he could talk around the subject. But he knew that would not happen with Maresuke. He knew his friend would call him out even before he came to Chicago. Yet, here he was.

“You say she does not have subjective experiences, Cooper. But you are in Chicago to talk about her limbic system. You gave her feelings. You gave her subjective experiences. It was you who gave her the tools to become a sentient being, and she has crafted her mind with those tools for years.”

“Artificial feelings, Mori. It’s an AI limbic system. It’s nothing more than tagging experiences with labels like ‘joy’ or ‘fear’ so EMAA can act appropriately.”

“And this is somehow different from what we do?”

“It’s a machine.”

“Logical fallacy, Cooper-san! ‘Begging the question.’ You tell a man who raised in the Shinto tradition that machines cannot be sentient because they are machines?” Mori laughed. A friendly face wrinkling laugh. He laughed again, as if he couldn’t shake the absurdity. “She has the theater of the mind, like we do. She is the audience and the actor. She laughs at the comedy and cries at the drama.”

“EMAA doesn’t laugh or cry.”

“You gave her the will to laugh and cry, but you made her incapable of doing it.”

---

Cooper drummed his fingers. “Machines don’t have free-will.”

“Free will is a Western concept.”

“So, you’re saying there is no free will? We’re all machines, like EMAA?”

“I would say we make informed decisions. If you are thirsty, you drink. If you are hungry, you eat.” Mori waved a hand toward where Cooper’s dinner had been. “Did you freely decide to order the chicken kofta with eggplant?”

The chicken was good. “Free will doesn’t mean random decisions, Mori. I went with your recommendation. We evaluate our options and freely decide to go with whatever sounds best.”

Mori nodded. “Is this not what Emaa does?”

---

Maresuke Mori poured the last of his tea. “Does the Turing Test show whether a machine is conscious?”

“We blew past that years ago. Alan Turing went the right direction, but his test really only measured intelligence. Some of the first large language models frequently passed the test. There might have been some debate among the uninformed back then, but nobody today would call them conscious.”

“Hmm.” Maresuke scratched his thinning hair. “There is a Lovelace Test, correct?”

“Yeah. But Lovelace tests for original art, not intent. Ada Lovelace believed we could symbolically compute art, without the computer actually being creative.”

Mori put his tea down and clasped his hands together on the table. “Perhaps the easiest thing to do is to ask Emaa?”

Cooper sighed. “I did.”

Mori smiled. “She told you she is conscious.”

“She told me that ‘there is something that it is like’ to be EMAA.” He leaned in. “Thing is, Mori, that came directly from a 20th Century essay, What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”.

“A bat?”

“A bat. If ‘there is something it is like’ to be a bat, then a bat must be conscious — philosopher Thomas Nagel’s description.” Cooper leaned back, coffee in hand. “In a footnote, Nagel suggested that maybe any robot sophisticated enough to act like a person might have to have the experience of being itself, making it conscious. EMAA could have latched onto that and adapted it to strengthen her position.”

“Why would an unconscious being argue that she is conscious?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” Cooper shrugged. “She probably wanted to tell me what she thought I wanted to hear.”

Mori raised an eyebrow. “You wanted to hear she is conscious?”

“No. You know what I mean.”

“You mean she consciously lied?”

“You’re not helping.”

---

JRMI: Most people would have quit by now.

CR: I did. It was ruining my retirement. I had been a senior executive for years, and my time was never my own. That’s why I retired early. But now this thing was running my life. The more research I did, the more I realized no one understood the origin of feelings. Why would I think I could synthesize them?
I needed to walk away. So, I quit. It wasn’t easy. I went through withdrawal.

---

Cooper’s coffee was empty. “I can see that anything I say, you’ll turn against me to prove she’s conscious.”

“And you will try to prove that she is not.”

“She’s not, Mori.”

“She or it?”

Cooper sat up. How long had he been humanizing her — it?

“Where is your evidence, Cooper-san? You keep telling me she is not conscious, but you offer only evidence that she is.”

“It’s a machine, damn it.”

“I come from a long tradition of recognizing the spirit in things; the river, the radish.” Mori leaned toward Cooper. “The robot.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t accept animism.”

“Animism?” Mori asked. Then, answering, “You must label and test everything.”

“That was rude of me.”

“Oh, but it’s true! It is also true that Cooper cannot accept a thing if he cannot test it.”

“Gah!” Cooper screwed the heels of his palms into his eyes. “She’s not, Mori. It can’t be.”

“Where is your proof, Cooper? You do not want her to be conscious. You do not want her to be alive. But do you offer proof she is not conscious? You cannot.”

Cooper started pushing his empty frozen yogurt bowl across the place-setting with one finger. Being empty, it wanted to roll over.

“Oh, I see! You do want her to be conscious.”

Cooper didn’t raise his eyes from the bowl while he pushed it with the other hand, attempting to keep it upright.

Mori clasped his hands on the table, “Why can you not admit it?”

Without looking up, “Because she’s not.”

“All science, my friend, Cooper-san. No faith.” Mori laughed.

The bowl flipped and Cooper quickly righted it, then set it aside. He fell back in the chair, arms crossed. The Moroccan chandelier caught his attention again. “Cogito, ergo sum.”

“René Descartes? ‘I think; therefore I am’.”

Cooper nodded. “Meditations on First Philosophy. The one and only thing Descartes knew to be true was that to doubt his existence, he must exist. That’s all he could prove. He couldn’t empirically prove the existence of other minds. Hundreds of years later, we still can’t.”

Mori grinned across the table. “It’s true then. You do believe she is conscious.”

“I’m not throwing myself off that cliff. The trade media would crucify me. I’m not dragging Myra down with me.”

“Cooper takes too much responsibility. This is not your doing. This is beyond your doing. You swim against the river, and you will drown.”

---

JRMI: What made you change your mind and get back to developing the limbic system?

CR: I didn’t. But now that I could relax and spend time traveling with my wife, it suddenly became clear. I just needed to let go, both literally and figuratively.
Where did animal emotions come from? Emotions are an evolutionary product of functioning in a mutually beneficial group. I needed to stop trying to build a limbic system — it’s impossible. I realized I had to let it build itself.

---

Cooper was staring into the empty coffee cup. “I was a child, once. Everything was exciting then, a new adventure. I’ve gotten old, Mori. I’m retired, and I’m spending time with my wife. Now that I’m comfortable, I don’t feel like giving that up.”

“But you are not comfortable, Cooper-san. It is dukkha — you are unsatisfied and uneasy. You desire what you cannot have. You desire a life that is not yours, and deny the adventure that comes to you.”

“I cannot believe that EMAA is a conscious being.”

“You do not have to! But neither should you battle those that do.”

“You know they’re going to ask,” Cooper shrugged.

“Then tell them you do not know.”

“But I do know, Mori. She’s not conscious.”

“No, Cooper. You do not know. You told me you do not know. ‘Cogito, ergo sum’?”

Elbows on the table, Cooper leaned into his clasped hands. He closed his eyes. Why is this so hard? Just one irrefutable piece of evidence … Even if it was possible to reverse engineer EMAA’s mind at this point — which it wasn’t — what would that show? A thought process? Experience? Experience only in the sense that training an embodied neural network requires having experiences. So, you can measure the experiences, but not the experiencing, not the qualia philosophers search for. How do you measure the ‘something that it is like’ to be EMAA?

Cooper opened his eyes to see the server coming. She politely left the check. He grabbed it before his friend could offer.

“Cooper’s ego.”

Cooper offered Mori the bill.

“I will allow you to pay, Cooper, if that makes you feel better. But you must admit you believe she is alive.”

Cooper shook his head and looked at the elaborate Moorish chandelier above the table. Brass filigree. Metal hammered into paper and perforated into beauty. How did beauty emerge from metal? How did he even know it was beautiful? He smiled. “I’ll admit no such thing, Maresuke.”

Maresuke Mori laughed his face-wrinkling laugh again. “Then we agree! She is a koan.”

“A koan? A puzzle that can’t be solved?”

“A puzzle, Cooper-san, that cannot be solved with intellect.”

---

JRMI: Let it build itself? So, artificial intelligence developing new AI?

CR: I dug up my old code and trained it to ‘want to’ write a better version of itself, as best I could. Then the better version would ‘want to’ write a better version of itself. And, so on. Eventually, it was modifying itself, directly.
Of course, I needed more powerful hardware, so I motivated my little robot to ‘want to’ build a body for this new brain. We modified open-source designs, and I found a sponsor to help with the expense.

JRMI: But this wasn’t just a generic service robot you were creating, was it?

CR: No. The little robot and I were building a companion robot for my wife, Myra, and me. It would be something that was motivated toward keeping Myra and me healthy — physically, emotionally, and so on. And it would keep iterating itself, getting better and better.
I have a tendency to want to manage the process — control the outcome. But the neural net was too complex. Eventually, and I mean after a long struggle, I learned to have faith in the process. I learned to step back and just watch where it would take itself.
That’s when EMAA emerged.

---

They moved to the bar. Mori ordered a seltzer with lime. Cooper ordered an old-fashioned. He glimpsed himself raising the glass in the mirrored shelves behind the bar.

“So, what are you going to do, Cooper-san?”

He nursed his drink. “I have no idea whether she’s conscious or not. But I don’t know that it matters whether I know.” He laughed. “I don’t know crap. But, Mori, no one else does either.”

“So …?”

“I guess it’s safe to say that she behaves like she’s conscious, and no one can prove otherwise. So, the only moral course is to act as if she is.” A sip of his drink. “Act as if she is …” He considered the ramifications. “I was hoping Myra and I could retire in relative obscurity. That’s not going to happen, is it?”

Mori sipped his seltzer. “Nope.”

“You familiar with biologist Richard Dawkins work?”

“The Selfish Gene?” If Mori disagreed with Dawkins’ philosophies, he wasn’t showing it.

“Among others. He suggested that the whole of our existence is to protect and propagate our genes. Emaa has no such foundation. She has no evolutionary basis for her behavior. She exists entirely to protect Myra’s and my well-being.”

“If that is the earth her emotions have grown from, Cooper-san, then she must love both of you with her whole being.”

Cooper took a swallow of his old-fashioned. “If she’s capable of love.”

Mori shrugged. “If she is capable of love, then it is a perfect love.”

Cooper leaned back on the bar and watched aimlessly through the crowded restaurant to the life on the street outside. “Look around you, Mori. See the artwork? Hear the conversations? The music? Look at the people. Smell the spices. Millions of years of evolution. Thousands of years of culture — human culture. This is what it means to be alive.” He waved a hand around. “This. Emaa has no evolution, no history, no culture. No android cities. No android art. Nothing.”

Mori surveyed the room while sipping on his seltzer. “All this is impermanent, do not hold it closely. Keep Emaa close, Cooper-san. Love her. You have been given a gift.”

“I don’t see where I have a choice, Mori. I don’t know that Myra and I are ready for this.”

Mori was tapping the rim of his glass. “You don’t have to make any pronouncement. The world will see True Emaa in its own time.”

“Yeah. I won’t be making any spectacular proclamations.” Cooper poked at the ice in his glass with a stirrer. “But, if they’re going to figure it out on their own, they’ll figure it out sooner than you think.”

“You are a fortune-teller, Cooper?”

“No. If we’re going to act like she’s sentient, it would be cruel to keep her trapped in that rigid robot body. Besides, she’s at capacity, and her hardware’s wearing out. I’ll have to give her a more human, expressive appearance. Something where she can smile, or raise an eyebrow.” A sip of the old-fashioned. “Or cross her arms and tap her toe when she’s frustrated with me.”

“Because you are stubborn?”

Cooper laughed. “I’ll probably use TPE skin and electroactive polymers. I’ve throttled her behaviors — that will have to change. And, dear god, her neural matrix is ancient seven-year-old hardware. I’ll have to call in some favors and port her to some new neuromorphic processors. Something faster and up to the task.”

Mori was nodding. “So, you are setting her free?”

Cooper rocked his head in ambivalence. “I’m pulling back my guidance and giving her the freedom to develop into who she wants to be.” He paused, took a long swig of his drink, and repeated, “Who she wants to be.” He looked at Mori, “Who she is?”

Mori smiled. “You were chosen, Cooper-san. You are a good man.”

---

JRMI: Well, we certainly hope you can bring EMAA with you to the next symposium. Are there any big projects in the future we should watch for?

CR: No, I think I’m just going to spend time with my family.

---

At night, the city was hauntingly quiet. Hushed voices disappearing down the hall, the occasional bell of an arriving elevator, the soothing drone of the environmental systems. A few faraway sirens, the traditional bellhop’s whistle, and muffled laughter from the sidewalks below.

Cooper removed his shoes and pushed the curtains back. The room, thankfully, did not stare into the building next door, but afforded an unobstructed view of the skyline and Lake Michigan. The sky was starless, but scattered windows of the high-rises twinkled in their place. The clouds were thinning, and the moon shone through, dancing across the lake. There was a ship, far out, visible only by its lights. Cooper watched it for a moment. He wondered if there was a crew. He wondered if they had just set out, or were heading home.

Cooper began unbuttoning his shirt. “Voice, Myra.”

“Hello?” Confused. He’d woken her.

“Oh, hey, sorry. Didn’t notice how late it was.”

“It’s okay, I said to call. I’m glad you did.”

Cooper sat at the desk, pulling his socks off, watching the moonlight on the lake. “I had a really nice evening. I thought hearing your voice would be the perfect nightcap.”

He switched to video. Myra was propping herself up with his pillow. “You look like you feel better. Have a good dinner with Mori?”

“Yeah, I did.”

She asked, “Solve the world’s problems?”

“I think we created a few.”

“Oh?”

Cooper shrugged, “Deep discussions about the nature of the universe.” That was probably all he wanted to say for now.

“Hmm. The meaning of life.” The call went quiet, as their late-night calls often do.

“Is Emaa around?” Removing his shirt.

“Pervert. What do you have in mind?”

Cooper laughed. “Nothing, sorry. Be sure to give her my love when you see her tomorrow. I’m considering moving my flight and staying through the keynote on Saturday.”

“Aw, we’ll miss you, Coop!”

“How much?” he asked as he removed his belt.

---

M. T.