Free Post-Human Trilogy by David Simpson Page B

the man had two lazy eyes. “Like you,” he continued, “I have recently arrived here in this reality. Like you, I thought I had an altogether different life. And like you, I had to accept that it is gone.”
    “You...” Craig began, a horrifying realization suddenly upon him. “You aren’t human, are you?”
    The man briefly looked disappointed, the corners of his lips turning down in a frown. Then, oddly and just as quickly, they turned up into an impressed smile. “What was it about me that tipped you off?”
    “Your eyes,” Craig answered.
    “Mm-hmm,” the man replied, suddenly taking on the manner of an objective researcher, questioning a subject. “That’s to be expected. The hologram is not calibrated correctly throughout the entire facility, so I find it difficult to meet someone’s eyes perfectly when we are moving from room to room. Results vary, depending where we are. I tried to hide it by keeping my gaze lowered, but that only works for so long. Anything else?” He seemed hungry for data.
    “Something’s off—just your whole manner, your reactions to things. You’re the A.I., aren’t you?”
    The A.I.’s smile returned. “Yes, indeed I am. I am sorry I didn’t tell you at the outset, but it’s extraordinarily rare that we have new people upon whom I can test my progress.”
    “Progress?”
    “Yes. As of yet, I haven’t been able to pass the Turing test. There are parts of my evolution that are incomplete. I was hoping I could keep up the ruse a little longer, but there are serious flaws remaining in the technology, most of them pertaining to the holograms. For one, the frame rate is too high. Did you notice that I appear in too high a definition?”
    Craig cocked his head to the side. “I hadn’t consciously noticed anything about your definition being too high, but there is certainly something unsettling.”
    “I haven’t mastered how to appear real. I’ve experimented with differing frame rates and was hoping to have found the right balance with you, but you reported the same unconscious feeling of unheimlich as everyone else.”
    “‘ Unheimlich’ ?”
    “Yes,” the A.I. replied. “I’m sorry, Craig. Sometimes I still have problems filtering information, and there are more connections than my human listeners can digest. The notion of the unconscious caused me to consider Freud, which then led to me thinking of his paper ‘The Uncanny’ which, in turn, made me think of the original German rendering. Unheimlich is a German word. It is translated into English as ‘uncanny,’ but there is something important missing in the translation that I feel makes it a poor one. You see, heim means ‘home’ in German, so unheimlich really means ‘unhomely,’ but of course, English doesn’t have such a word.”
    Something in the A.I.’s explanation caused Craig to turn away from the disturbing figure and put his hand over his eyes once again.
    “Have I overloaded you with extraneous information, Craig?” the A.I. asked in a tone that was not so much sympathetic or apologetic as inquisitive. “I do that sometimes. It is a problem on which I am working.”
    “No,” Craig replied, “it’s not extraneous. Unhome is exactly the right word.”

5
    A crowd of nearly 100 had gathered in front of the Planck platform in anticipation of the return of a small probe that had spent the last ten hours in a parallel universe. Aldous stood with the others, checking the time readout on his mind’s eye as the seconds ticked down to the probe’s hypothesized return.
    “If you turn out to be right,” Sanha Cho—formerly MIT Professor of theoretical physics, Sanha Cho—said in a low voice at Aldous’s side, “you’ll have written your name in the history books once again.”
    “Let’s just hope future generations will actually get to read about these events, Sanha,” Aldous replied. It was true; the last decade had been one that should have placed Aldous’s name amongst the best