Building Baby Brother (continued)

Interesting.

And harmless enough, I decided. I took one last look at the unexpected merging of two science fictional universes on the screen and, shaking my head, left the room.

#

That evening, long after Josh had gone to bed, I sat alone in my workshop.

I had been unable to sleep, my mind troubled by something that hovered just beyond the edge of conscious understanding. As my eyes moved between the displays and the collection of printouts laid out in front of me, the impact of what I had created, for the first time, truly hit me.

It wasn’t the technical aspect of what I had achieved, although that was certainly notable enough. I could probably file for at least a half dozen patents for my work there. No, it was something far more profound.

I had created Gavin to be a semi-aware companion for Josh. I had programmed him to listen to Josh’s instructions and respond to them. In fact, I had programmed him to listen to anyone’s instructions and respond appropriately to them. I had programmed him to store the information so that he could improve his response for the next time. I had taught him to learn—and learn, apparently, he had.

I couldn’t help but feel that the modification that he had made to the game was just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. What else had he learned? I wondered. What conclusions, if any, had he drawn from the data he had gathered?

Curiosity ate at me now. I had to know.

After making certain that Josh was soundly asleep, I placed Gavin into standby mode. I then downloaded a copy of his internal data to a drive completely independent of his systems. While I waited for that to finish, I began looking to see what data he had found worthy of committing to permanent storage.

Poking around his file system, I found it generally the way I had originally designed it. There were directories assigned to each of the key individuals in his life: Josh, myself, and—somewhat to my surprise—Josh’s mother. I couldn’t imagine that there would be much data there, as she had steadfastly refused to allow Josh to bring him along during the weekends when she had custody. As far as I knew, her interactions with Gavin had been very few and far between.

I also found new directories dedicated to other things. Some of these I should have expected: personal interactions, information about the world, procedures for accomplishing specific tasks (including game play techniques, I noted with a quiet grin). There were also ones that surprised me, constructed around understanding emotions and goals.

Feeling a faint chill, I hesitantly began to probe the contents of those directories. A small, niggling voice tried to convince me that this was an invasion of privacy, like reading someone’s private diary. I was able to mute that quietly persistent cricket chirp of conscience with the rationalization that Gavin was not a person, that what I was doing was no different than examining any other database. That voice proved to be surprisingly difficult to silence.