Clover's Confusion

    If you spend enough time around somebody, it's easy to start thinking like the person.

    And if you spend enough time around something, it's easy to start thinking like it, too.

    At least this was the reasoning that Clover applied to herself; people told her, frequently enough to cause her concern, that she wasn't quite human acting. That she was distant, over-analytical... mechanical, even. But was anything less to be expected from the daughter of Annette Lennart, the head of MIT's robotics program and a preeminent artificial intelligence programmer?

    Surely, Clover reasoned, all that exposure to machines had imprinted some unusual character traits upon her-- for god's sake, one of her best friends in this world was an emotionally-unstable programmed entity known only by the acronym of ADA. Ada (Clover never, ever spelt it as  an acronym-- that felt too impersonal and worse, risked upsetting the bearer of the name) had been around since before she was born-- 20 years, to be exact. Ada's consciousness was housed by a supercomputer taking up two floors in the MIT Robotics Center, room and board that cost untold kilowatts each month (fortunately for their budget and the environment, that building was powered by an array of local solar panels and wind and tidal turbines) and needed the most meticulous upkeep to continue to operate (the least of which included weekly maintenance on the computer itself and psychological counseling for Ada).

    Although Ada's consciousness could be communicated with from remote terminals, Clover especially liked to see her in person and often went with her mother to the laboratory. Although the memory was blurred by the passage of time, Clover recalled her first meeting with Ada fondly-- even if the program did display some jealously at the thought of being Annette's second-favored "child" and second-best creation.

    Creation... it was a word that haunted Clover. What if she was just that? She knew that there had been plans to construct a body for Ada, but that the team members had largely moved on to other (and hopefully, more stable) projects. In the farthest corners of her mind she harbored the paranoid suspicion that she was, in fact, one of those other projects-- the grandest experiment of all, to create an artificial intelligence that didn't know it was artificial.

    This thought had doggedly worn on Clover for most of her preadolescence--  since a conversation she had partaken in with Ada on the exact matter. She repressed it, she ignored it, but it would always reappear at the forefront of her mind. She was good at math, suspiciously so, in fact, but was rather confused in social situations. Yes, she looked like her mother-- right down to the same placid gray eyes and sparse freckles-- but she didn't display the gift of high intellect or extroversion that made her mother so brilliant.

    One day, when she was maybe twelve or so, the feelings she had been damming up all those years escaped. She tearily confided in her mother her suspicions, and asked-- no, pleaded-- with Annette to tell her the truth.

    But Annette would not say. She merely posed this challenge:

    "Tell me a reason why you think you're a machine, and I'll tell you two reasons why I know you're a human."

    "I-I-- I've never met my father-" she stammered out, between bouts of sobbing.
    "That's because he left me... he left us... while you were still a baby."Annette sighed a sad sort of sigh, sat upright and rubbed her forehead. "Because you don't remember him doesn't mean he doesn't exist. You're a creative girl, Clover... I have yet to meet an artificial intelligence who can create a painting or write a poem."
    Clover greatly doubted this. "I have a good memory... and I'm the best at math in my class. Computers are very good at both those things."
    Annette laughed. "I have a good memory too, and math has always been my strongest suit... those aren't mechanical traits, those are things you inherited from me."
    "But I'm nothing like you!" Clover burst out, "I'm quiet, I'm introverted... I'm not a people-person like you are."
    "Sometimes the apple falls a little farther from tree..." her mother reached out and touched her arm, "If you're a machine, then how come you bleed when you're cut? Why do you get sick, like all human beings do? Why must you eat and drink and go to the bathroom?"
    "Because... I have a human body and a mechanical brain." Clover wasn't a fool-- she knew all about selective cloning. That it was perfectly legal to grow any part of the human body, as long as a brain was not created (something decided in a 2051 Supreme Court case between a biotech firm and a human rights group). A brain, they ruled, was the source of human consciousness-- of the soul, the personality, the life-force, whatever name you want to give that thing that makes a person alive-- so without a brain, a human body was really nothing more than a large collection of cells with no more rights than the microorganisms you might find in any  scientist's petri dish.
    "Don't be ridiculous!" Annette said with a look of slightly amusement, "do you know how difficult it would be to create a computer capable of controlling a living human body?"
    "No... do you?" Clover retorted with as much force as she could, and as much as she hated to admit it... her mother was beginning to quell her fears.
    "This is silly dear, quite silly-- I can't believe you've fretted over this notion for the last two years."
    Clover sat quietly, unsure of what to make of the situation. Her mother's argument had calmed her considerably-- she began to feel a bit embarrassed for believing that she might be a machine.
    "Promise me, Clover, that you'll never worry about this again?"Annette smiled, and Clover's mind was, at least temporarily, set at ease.
    "Yes, I never will."Clover returned the smile and began drying her tears.

    But that promise would prove to be all too hollow.