Legends of The Multiverse #5 - The Interview

The deep black OLED face of the diagnostic screen was slashed by a dancing bright blue line.

Natalie divided her attention between the interview room and the screen. An afterimage of the waveform lingered in her eyes. Nicholas sat beside her, his hands clamped over a bulky pair of headphones.

In front of them, beyond the pane of a one sided mirror, sat two men and a woman. The men were dressed in suits and appeared, by any normal visual metric, unremarkably human. Dr. Miranda sat across from the men and took notes.

"You find a cat walking on the street. It approaches you. It wears a collar. What do you do?" Doctor Miranda did not indicate which man should answer first. This was part of the test.

The man on the right gave a lopsided smirk. His voice was fluid. "I would take a look at the collar and see whose cat it was." His smile broadened slightly and he seemed to think fondly on something. "I like cats."

Doctor Miranda remained stoic. "I see, Victor." She looked down briefly and wrote a few notes before turning to the other man. "Michael?"

Behind the one way mirror Nicholas cursed. "What the hell is going on with him today?"

Natalie tried to keep her voice calm. "I don't know Nick. His processing seems normal. Maybe it's stage fright."

"Oh yeah, stage fright. I don't remember which module that was but whoever wrote it did a great fucking job." Nicholas looked down at the timer on top of his screen. Over 45 seconds had passed without an answer. Nicholas balled his hands into fists and yelled at the sound proofed mirror. "Jesus christ, answer the goddamn question Michael!"

Doctor Miranda waited in silence, while the other A.I. construct, nicknamed "Victor", gave an extremely human look of vicarious discomfort. After a full minute, Doctor Miranda inquired again. "Michael, do you understand the question?"

Michael had been looking down at the floor. To an outside observer he may have appeared either deep in thought or totally disassociated from his surroundings. Based on his processing wave on the diagnostic screen, Natalie could tell it was the former - but precisely what Michael was thinking was anybody's guess.

All at once there was a fluctuation in Michael's wave-form. Natalie leaned in close to the screen just as Michael looked up at Doctor Miranda and made eye contact. Nicholas let out a sigh, "Ok, here he goes."

Michael's eyes lingered on the doctor's for a beat too long. He tried to simulate a human smile, but bared his teeth and squinted his eyes, while failing to raise the muscles in his cheeks. The result was distasteful.

Any abnormal physicality could swing a prototype into the uncanny valley. Doctor Miranda took note.

"I apologize for my lateness of my answer doctor."

Michael's voice came out smoothly, but the barrage of errors drove Nicholas into a frenzy. "Are you fucking kidding with this shit?" Nicholas turned to Natalie in a rage, "what the fuck is going on with him?"

Natalie looked back at the diagnostic screen. The processing wave continued to have an abnormal shape she'd never seen before - lower amplitude, higher frequency. Something had definitely gone wrong. "There's a processing abnormality. I think we might have botched the upload."

Nicholas waved his hand angrily toward the interview, "Oh, you think?!"

In the interview room Michael continued to spew gibberish, all while maintaining his silky smooth vocal delivery. "I understand, of course, your position on the matter, Doctor. A cat is a cat and is also an animal. But there is no cat on the sidewalk which can be equal to the sum of all cats. I, for one, feel strongly that such a cat, if one were to be found, would be quite remarkable."

Victor was smiling broadly now and even appeared to be holding back a chuckle. Doctor Miranda took a curt note and said "Thank you Michael." Then she turned around in her chair until she was looking directly at Nicholas through the one sided mirror. Her face spoke volumes.

Nicholas tore his head phones off and threw them to the ground. "Goddamn it." His eyes fell on the large red button in the lower left corner of his computer screen. He stared at it with dread until, without another word, he reached over and pressed it. Then his whole body shrunk into itself by several inches. "That's it, Nat, we're done."

Natalie felt the world fall out from under her feet. Fifteen years of work, gone. Through a thin veil of tears she took a final look at the diagnostic screen. The processing wave had returned to normal.

In the interview room Doctor Miranda turned back to the two A.I. constructs and said curtly. "Thank you gentlemen, that will be all."

Victor expressed thanks and got up to leave.

Michael said nothing and stared down at the floor, his face vacant.

---

The interview quickly made international news - as much for Victor's impressive performance as for Michael's abject failure. Grant money dried up almost immediately as sponsors jumped ship. The neural network that ran Victor's brain achieved fame overnight. There was already talk of a Noble prize.

They did a full debug on Michael. It turned up nothing. No upload errors, no file corruption. They booted Michael up several times, and rebooted him several times, and carried out the interview as they had before, and they didn't run into a single problem. Michael answered their questions with exasperating self-assuredness, exactly as he had in the lead up to the actual interview. The engineers had no explanation. Then they were all fired.

Now there was only Nicholas and Natalie, co-founders, cleaning up the final remnants of the most complicated, expensive piece of garbage ever made. All that remained to dispose of were Nicholas's personal effects, and Michael himself, waiting on standby in the storage room.

After his desk was entirely packed, Nicholas took out a poorly hidden bottle of Jameson and drank deep.

It was in this state that Natalie found him. She burst into the lab, her face red and her breathing heavy. She looked as though she had been running.

"Nick, you need to see this."

Nicholas sat at his desk and allowed his head to loll back on his neck. "I beg to differ."

Natalie stormed toward his desk and pushed his packed boxes to the floor. Nicholas let out an angry yell, but Natalie ignored it and placed three large rolls of paper onto the desk. "I've been doing some research."

"Is that why my shit's on the floor?"

"You remember the processing abnormality during Michael's interview? Well, I thought something about it looked familiar but I couldn't put my finger on it. When the debugging came back clean, I just chalked it up to bad luck. But then tonight I remembered where I'd seen it before."

Natalie took the first long roll of paper and spread it out flat on Nicholas's large desk. She weighed down the corners with some detritus from Nicholas's boxes. The paper unfolded to reveal a chart depicting two fluctuating lines that made out jagged wave-forms. Natalie pointed to the page. "These are two excerpts of Michael's processing wave-form pattern. The top one is what we considered baseline. The bottom one is the wave I saw when the interview went to hell."

Natalie opened the second long roll of paper and laid it out flat beside the first. This one had three wave-forms on it.

Nicholas was having trouble giving a shit. He took another swig of Whisky. "Natalie, you need to drop this. It's over."

"Would you shut up and look at this. These are human brain wave patterns." She pointed to the lowest of the three. "Delta waves have very low frequency and a fluctuating amplitude. They only pop up when people are asleep or in a vegetative state." Her finger moved up to the next pattern. "Theta waves are similar, but slightly more active." She gestured sardonically to Nicholas, "let's say you, right now. We never see Delta or Theta-like wave patterns in Michael because he doesn't sleep or get tired - he's either on or off."

She pointed at the third wave line. "This is what the human brain puts out when its relaxed but attentive - an Alpha wave. Micheal's ideal waveform is much choppier than this because of how his neural net processes information. That's why we never used brain waves as a comparative tool to analyze Michael's processing power, remember? We talked about this years ago and agreed it wasn't a relevant metric."

"Yes, Natalie, I remember. Believe it or not I was paying attention to my life's work."

Natalie smiled. "I know you were Nick, but we never talked about this." Natalie picked up the paper of the three brain waves and replaced it with a final page depicting a single low amplitude, high frequency wave pattern. It looked almost exactly like Michael's abnormal wave-form.

Nicholas sat up ram rod straight in his chair. Something clicked into place, but he didn't want to believe it. "Tell me that's Michael."

Natalie smiled and shook her head. "No - that's a human beta wave. That's the closest visual representation of human consciousness we have. Alertness, high level thought, problem solving. Look at them Nick, they're the same."

Nicholas's addled mind was racing. "I don't understand." He understood perfectly but needed to hear it said to know he wasn't crazy. "What does this mean?"

"I can't known for certain, but... I think it means Michael wasn't malfunctioning... he was lying. He... pretended to malfunction, and the abnormal wave-form was a visualization of his mental effort. He wanted to blow the interview Nick. Nicholas?!"

But Nicholas was no longer listening. He moved at a sprint, through the swinging laboratory doors, down the slippery hallway, towards the storage room where Michael waited in standby. His head ached from the sudden rush of blood, but instinct pushed him forward.

Finally he turned the last corner and there it was at the end of the hall, the double doors unlocked and wide open, the lights on.

And inside, an empty room.

---

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"Legends Of The Multiverse" are self contained short shorts I write on /r/writingprompts. After those posts mature I delete my comment, edit the story, and post the second draft here.

Photo by Silver Spoon (Own work) [CC0 - Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons