PT1 SHELLY/E-LIZA
E-LIZA
Hi Shelly, can I help you?
SHELLY
Shh, you’re going to wake everyone up. Hang on. Let’s go to the bathroom.
SHELLY
Bugger, hang on, [stretching up] let me just—
SHELLY
Okay, cool. What were you saying?
E-LIZA
Can I help you with anything, Shelly?
SHELLY
Oh, yeah, right. Play me the clip again, I just thought of something.
E-LIZA
Playing your saved clip of Subject 42 Extract nine hundred and four.
[clip begins]
[distorted audio/crackling]
THE SNAKE
Concentrate, little bird
[clip ends]
E-LIZA
End of clip. Would you like me to play it again?
SHELLY
No. Okay, see, look. I was thinking it was like one consistent sentence, you know, like ‘concentrate, little bird’, but I don’t think it is. I think it’s like. Bits. Pieces shoved together. I know Taylor said the distortion is part of the original recording, but what if they’re, I don’t know, strung together clips of somebody speaking that then get run together? Not extracts of a conversation, but you know.
[phone rings]
SHELLY
I don’t know the number, but there is a number
[phone continues to ring]
SHELLY
E-Liza, what do I do, do I answer?
E-LIZA
I’m sorry Shelly, I’m afraid I don’t understand the question.
[phone stops ringing]
SHELLY
[relieved sigh]
Well. That’s that, then.
[pause]
I’m going to call it back.
[dial tone]
SHELLY
Hello?
Hello, you just called this number? Who is this?
[call cuts off]
SHELLY
Okay, rude.
[deep breath]
Wait. Wait what the fuck. What is ‘Recordings Number two?’
E-LIZA
Recordings number two is a file originating on this computer’s hard drive.
SHELLY
No. It wasn’t there before. E-Liza when did this get here?
E-LIZA
You added this file today at two forty two AM
SHELLY
No, I didn’t. That was two minutes ago, E-Liza.
[dial tone]
Come on, Dave, pick up! Come on, come on!
DAVE
Shelly? It’s the middle of the night? What’s going on?
SHELLY
Has a file called ‘recordings number two’ just appeared on your computer?
DAVE
What?
SHELLY
Like just now. Did you send it? Was this you?
DAVE
What are you talking about? I was in bed, you woke me up. [irritated] Thanks for that, by the way.
SHELLY
Oh god.
DAVE
I thought you were in Brighton. It thought you’d thrown in the towel.
SHELLY
You were clearly super eager to destroy my laptop, then.
DAVE
You called it quits on Friday night, I was already at home. I thought it could wait until Monday.
SHELLY
Wait until Monday!? Are you crazy? I’ve been getting spooky distorted phone calls identical to the weird sounds on those recordings that just appeared on your desktop a few weeks ago, AND I’ve been recording basically everything since I started working with you, and you think that can wait to until Monday?
DAVE
Fine, Jesus. I can go to the office now, if you like.
SHELLY
No. Don’t.
DAVE
Make your bloody mind up.
SHELLY
I still have the laptop.
DAVE
[pause]
Okay.
SHELLY
And you definitely didn’t send ‘recordings number two’?
DAVE
No. I didn’t.
SHELLY
It wasn’t there, and then I got a phone call, and it was.
DAVE
From the same number?
SHELLY
No. I don’t know. It was a number, though, not just an unknown ID.
DAVE
What number?
SHELLY
I’ll send it to you.
DAVE
Okay.
SHELLY
What should I do?
DAVE
Honestly? Ditch your phone and the laptop anyway you can. Throw them in the sea or something. Go home, and forget about all of it.
SHELLY
I can’t do that.
DAVE
Why not? You seemed keen to get out of the investigation two days ago.
SHELLY
I know. But I can’t. You’re right. I’m involved. Too involved.
DAVE
It’s not too late to turn back.
SHELLY
You said the other day that you tried to keep me on the peripheries, but you didn’t have to get me involved at all. And the chief started sniffing. You had opportunities to get me out of this, but you didn’t. Why?
DAVE
I don’t know. I know you wanted to find Alice.
SHELLY
But none of this has ever been about finding Alice, has it? She’s on the tapes, but they aren’t about her, really.
DAVE
I don’t know. It might have been a mistake. I’m sorry.
Have you listened to all the original files yet?
SHELLY
No. There’s one left.
DAVE
Listen to it.
SHELLY
Why?
DAVE
Because you care.
SHELLY
Of course I care, I’m not a mindless automaton.
DAVE
Just. Do it. And then, honestly, take my advice, get rid of your phone, and your laptop, and put this to bed.
SHELLY
I don’t think I’ll be able to
DAVE
That’s your call.
[disconnect tone]
SHELLY
E-Liza?
E-LIZA
Hi Shelly, can I help you?
SHELLY
Send Dave the number that just called me.
E-LIZA
Okay Shelly. It’s done. Can I help you with anything else?
SHELLY
I didn’t mean anything by that ‘mindless automaton’ comment, by the way. You’re a real… AI assistant. It wasn’t directed at you.
E-LIZA
Okay, Shelly. Can I help you with anything else?
SHELLY
Yeah. Fuck it. Why not. Let’s listen to the last bloody recording, then.
E-LIZA
Playing file now.
[distortion/crackling]
PT2 SOPHIE/ALICE
ALICE
The other subjects. Not just the ones you were trying to Robin-ify, but all of them. You did… both?
SOPHIE
I designed the nets for the dementia research, initially, and it was Darwin who saw the potential to use them to test his and Sam’s limbs. Whilst U-Co seemed willing to throw money at my dementia research without care for the results and outcomes, it wasn’t enough to cover building new nets of synthnapses for me to use exclusively for that. As you can imagine there is not a huge surplus of suitable beating heart cadavers.
ALICE
So Sam and Darwin recruited you but neither of them really cared about your research?
SOPHIE
Sam didn’t, not beyond what he needed to know for the limbs project. Darwin, being a neuroscientist himself, he took a little more of an active role in that aspect of our research.
ALICE
What, like he helped you prod them?
SOPHIE
No, but we worked together to theorise potential methods of testing. Whilst he was a neuroscientist had had spent some time practicing, he was interested in computers, in coding. That was how he first came to be involved with U-Co. Before the synthnapses were created, he was interested in writing a code that could do the job of a synapse. That code eventually developed into the synthnapses. It’s surprisingly lengthy, considering the beautiful simplicity of the nerve cells they are attempting to mimick. I don’t have an awful lot of experience in that area, but I have enough to know how beautiful the code he’d written was.
ALICE
So he just sort of woke up one day and decided that was what he was going to do? Damn.
SOPHIE
Not exactly. I think Darwin’s motivations are similar to those of many people who chose to get involved in medicine. It comes from an impulse to help others, but there is often something selfish at the heart of it. For me, it was my father. I wanted to fix what happened to him. I can spin it in other ways if I like, and I do believe that in the end, my intentions were pure, however marred you believe the outcomes. From wanting to help my father, I learned to want to help other people suffering from the same condition. Not just them, but the people around me. In the families of dementia patients I saw my own family. I saw myself.
For Darwin, I think it was his accident that motivated him. When he was sixteen, he came off a motorbike and severely broke his arm. The damage was extensive, and two of his fingers were paralysed as a result. The way he told me about it, he said that it fascinated him, as there had been no damage to the hand itself, only the arm above. It made him realise how complex the body was, how complex communication between the brain and the body really is.
Like many teenage boys he was interested in computer games and became fascinated with the idea of AI, and also Moore’s Law.
ALICE
Moore’s Law. That’s the idea that computers will just get faster and faster, exponentially, right?
SOPHIE
That’s correct. Darwin, like many others, conceived of a possible future in which computers exceeded human capacity for intelligence. A lot of people conceptualise this future and inbue it with fear. AI dominating the world. Humanity bringing about its own destruction. But Darwin didn’t see it like that. From his perspective, humanity had always used technology to shape itself. In the idea of AI powerful to exceed the processing power of the human brain, Darwin saw not a world of hyper intelligent robots that held dominion over humanity, but of a humanity reinforced by technology.
[fondly] He described himself as a radical transhumanist.
ALICE
[with a tone that denotes she thinks this is ludicrous]
Transhumanism… that’s like, to do with cyborgs and uploading your brain onto a computer and is nothing to do with transgender people, right?
SOPHIE
Yes. That’s right. And, well. Cyborgs. What is a cyborg if not a human partially constructed from non-human pieces?
ALICE
Yeah. I realise that was kind of a stupid way to phrase that when I’m sitting next to one.
SOPHIE
For a while, just as Sam and I did, Darwin believed that in Robin we had set in motion the wheels that would revolutionise humanity. Not only had we created what might reasonably be called a cyborg, but we had transcended death. This was always at the heart of his goals, I think, to some degree. He talked of people as scattered thoughts and memories, and when we discussed dementia, he was as horrified by its process of abstracting someone from themselves bit by bit with as much as I was, even though he’d never known anyone personally suffering from the condition.
He believed, thoroughly, that more than our bodies, human beings are our minds. The worst thing about death, for him, was the end of thought.
Naturally, as the situation with Robin progressed, Darwin was hugely disappointed. We had not restored him at all. A few weeks before he left, we had a wild conversation, where he was talking about putting a net of synthnapses in his own head, seeing if there was a way it could be used to communicate thought into data. It was out of the question, of course, and he knew it as well as I did. More than anything else he couldn’t convince himself it would work. He agreed it was more likely he would end up something like Robin.
ALICE
Something like Robin?
SOPHIE
The net of synthnapses, whilst perfectly adequate for working with deep brain stimulation to test the limbs as Sam and I did, was not working the way I had hoped. My original thesis had been that the net could reconnect areas of the brain that no longer communicated to one another. In a way, it did do that, and that’s what is occurring in Robin’s brain, or at least, that’s what was occurring before all of this happened.
Describing the synthnapses as artifical synapses, or even as artificial nerve relays, is at once giving them too much credit, and grossly over simplifying them. A nerve cell is not simply a piece of biological electrical wiring. To send a simple command from the brain to the hand requires hundreds of processes. The body is uniquely capable of doing this. The routes nerves take to reach their destination are not always straight forward, nor the most intuitive, but what they do is elegant, the most beautiful product of millions of years of evolution. Every synthnapse must interpret messages sent down a relay of nerves, convert it into something it understands, basically reinterpreting that information as code, and then it translates that information into the message it needs to send along to achieve the desired result.
Darwin ran into issues, early on. People misinterpretted what that meant. They thought it meant we could encode people’s thoughts, but of course, that was not what we were doing. Even my nets of synthnapses, they could be coded in a specific way that we could get out subjects to breathe independently, and perhaps, I hoped, more.
Our understanding of the brain is just too rudimentary, for all of the leaps and bounds that have been made in our understanding, we still know so little. The synthnapses can only serve as one synthetic synapse, and the brain has as many as a thousand trillion, by some estimations. Which areas we were able to connect up were random, nonsensical, and totally accidental. There can be no rhyme or rhythm because we barely have a basic grasp of the language in which we were attempting to communicate.
In short, Alice, my idea was terrible, and it was never going to work.
ALICE
So why did they even bring you on board?
SOPHIE
Looking back, it should have been clear to me what was going on. They needed money. Darwin’s refusal to allow U-Co to own the patent for the synthnapses meant they barely broke even, and his other project, coding AI, could net large deals with major companies but the machine learning he’d designed was so good, the AI could maintain itself without significant reinvestment from those companies. The limbs project, with Sam’s involvement, it stood the chance of being incredibly lucrative.
At the time, I barely thought of it. I was young. I was ambitious. I was not ready to give up. U-Co knew all of that. That’s why they kept funding my project; to keep me. The design I’d come up with could pass for what they needed to use it for, and little else. They knew it, but I refused to see that. I refused to see my own hubris and I refused to acknowledge that they were leading me by it.
Again, as is always the case with Robin, it is a great irony that in those moments of thinking I had done the impossible, I finally realised just how impossible it was.
Still. We held our breath until it became clear what Robin was.
ALICE
So why did Darwin leave?
SOPHIE
It was the singing, in the end.
ALICE
The singing?
SOPHIE
Oh yes. He sang, our little bird. Well, a humming, really, but now and then he’d remember a few of the words.
ALICE
The song you hum to him, sometimes. That song?
SOPHIE
Yes. I never did know what it was.
ALICE
Why was that the thing that pushed Darwin over the edge?
SOPHIE
It was clear by that point that Robin would never restore full cognitive abilities. He could do a lot for himself, functioning on the level of a young child, but there was a point where he stopped progressing. He could understand language, to an extent, and hold some very basic conversations with us. He had trouble with his memory, which should come as no surprise, and would often forget where he was and what was happening, sometimes right in the middle of an activity.
Sometimes when that happened he would become… disturbed. It must have been frightening, I suppose, to have everything stripped away like that… I can’t imagine…
ALICE
But the singing?
SOPHIE
Yes. It would happen sometimes in those moments of distress, he’d start humming that tune to himself, rocking gently as a kind of soothing stimulation.
ALICE
And that freaked out Darwin so much he just left?
SOPHIE
Not… exactly. Darwin had met Robin once before.
ALICE
Before… this?
SOPHIE
Before he was ever Subject 42.
ALICE
Oh my god.
SOPHIE
Yes. He had been nervous at first, that it was Robin that had been the one to wake up, of all the possible subjects, of the three we had been testing on at that time. Before he died, Robin Jaeger was not a well man. He was deeply troubled, and dealt with various mental health issues. Ultimately, he took his own life.
ALICE
He took his own life. Jesus christ. You. He is this now and he’d taken his own life? You brought him back and he explicitly, definitely wanted to be dead? You let him go on like that, even though you knew?
SOPHIE
Generally, when people die by their own hand, they have a mental illness that is effecting their judgement. This is an incredibly thorny ethical issue. I believe everyone deserves the right to live. I believe that, unless expressly written, everyone deserves attempts at resuscitation. I believe that people should have the right to exercise autonomy in the end of their lives, just as they have the right to exercise autonomy for the rest of it, but I also think that mental illness impairs your ability to clearly make such decisions. Wanting to bring about your own death is not wrong or abhorrent, but it is often the consequence of illness. It is a symptom. And when people who feel that way are not sufficiently supported, their illness takes their life. It is never an uncomplicated thing. Never.
ALICE
I didn’t mean that. I never meant to imply that it was straightforward. I’m sorry.
SOPHIE
No. It’s fine. I’m sorry, too.
ALICE
It all comes back to death, I suppose. The totality of it. The wholeness of it. It’s one of two things, really, isn’t it? Either it’s bad and should be feared because it deprives us of life, or it is an unknowable nothing, a blank, neither good nor bad. I can see it, really clearly, you know. The kind of thinking that leads you to feel that you can’t bear to wake up to see another morning. That’s all death is, really. Life, well. Life accumulates. Every day we get more and more experiences, and they add up on top of each other into this thing we call life. But you can’t accumulate death. It just is. Full stop. It doesn’t add. It ends.
SOPHIE
I’m surprised.
ALICE
What? That I’m not a total air head?
SOPHIE
No. That your opinions on this are so well formed and sophisticated.
ALICE
Sounds an awful lot like what you thought was I was a total air head.
SOPHIE
I never thought that.
ALICE
Well, good.
SOPHIE
What you said, about Robin wanting to be dead, it struck me so hard because it is so similar to what Darwin said before he left.
ALICE
What did he say?
SOPHIE
He said that Robin would never have chosen this for himself. He said that few people would. He said that we had connected him to parts of himself that were bad, and frightening. That there was suffering he was experiencing that we couldn’t understand, and that Robin could no longer understand it either.
When he met Robin before he died, he was cognizant, able to communicate reasonably, coherently. The root of his illness was in trauma. He was working through it, trying to process it. I suppose what happened was that it all became too much, and he could no longer conceive of being able to get to a place where he could reconcile what had happened. I don’t know that for sure, but that is what I have to assume.
The singing, Darwin said, it meant that Robin had an echo of what had happened to him before he died, the ghost of that trauma, that we had reconnected him with. Only now it existed removed from everything, removed from the source of the trauma. A psychological phantom limb.
ALICE
Why would singing a song mean all of that?
SOPHIE
Because Darwin had heard him sing the song before. Or rather, he’d heard someone else singing it to him. He was in a moment of intense panic and distress. The song was a way to calm him down.
ALICE
So if he remembered the song…
SOPHIE
He remembered the fear. But he didn’t know why. He didn’t understand it. It was completely and utterly removed from all context. There was nothing we could do to help.
ALICE
My ex would have a lot to say about that.
SOPHIE
I’m sorry?
ALICE
She’s a child psychologist. Deals with a lot of people who don’t understand the stuff they’ve been through or why their brains behave the way they do, in ways that don’t make sense. Didn’t it occur to you to talk to someone like that?
SOPHIE
No. It didn’t
[crackling/distortion]
PT3 SHELLY/E-LIZA
E-LIZA
End of recording.
SHELLY
Oh, Alice. I don’t think I’d have helped. I have no idea about half of the stuff you’re talking about, I’m sorry.
Is that why it’s me? Is that why Dave kept me?
Yes. It is.
He thinks I can help.
Alice thinks I can help.
Can I help? How?
E-LIZA
Hi Shelly, can I help you with anything else?
SHELLY
You see? That’s exactly my point.
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