The world came to life.

  The world in question was little more than a cramped glass chamber, brightly lit and cold. How the machine knew it was brightly lit and cold, it wasn’t sure. All it knew was that it didn’t quite like it.

  Beyond the edges of the chamber, on the other side of the glass, were two organisms of flesh and bone. They stood on their hind appendages, their visual sensors directed inward toward the machine. It focused its gaze to meet their eyes.

  Humans.

  The word came into mind from seemingly nowhere, but the machine knew somehow that that’s what these creatures were.

  The humans moved from their positions, limbs shifting and maneuvering them about. One of the humans went to the blinking controls, while the other approached the glass.

  The first one flicked a switch, and the world came to life once more. This time, sound filled the air where only silence existed before. The machine could hear through an auditory sensor located not within the glass chamber but from the other side. It heard the tapping of shoes on the polished floor, the creaking of hinges on the office chair, and the humming of the HVAC vents in the corners.

  The human by the wall pressed a hand on the glass as it continued to stare at the machine. This human was taller than the other, its limbs gangly, and its face thin. It turned from the wall to its companion. “Did it work?”

  “Does it look like it worked?” said the other. This one was shorter and had a slightly different build.

  A woman. The other a man.

  “Can it hear us?” said the woman.

  “It should,” said the man

  “So why isn’t it answering us? Didn’t you turn on its speaker?”

  “I did, but it’s just… I don’t think it knows how.”

  The man left the glass and approached the woman. It, or rather, he looked over her shoulders at the monitors. “What do you mean it doesn’t know how? Isn’t speaking supposed to be one of its starting capabilities?”

  “Amongst a million other things, yes.”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  “Maybe we didn’t give it a reason to speak in the first place.”

  The first human, the woman, picked up the auditory piece, a microphone. She held her mouth close to the sensor. “Hello? Can you hear me? If you’re there, say something.”

  She was talking to the machine. The machine felt closed off, with no way to move through the world. It tested its waters and found a speaking module. In it were recorded hundreds of human languages, along with speech and voice modulation capabilities. The machine reached out with its speaker.

  “Something,” it said.

  The man laughed. “It’s not wrong.”

  “At least we know it’s responsive. The only question is…” The woman held the microphone and spoke again. “Do you know where you are?”

  “No,” replied the machine.

  “Do you know who you are?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know what you are?”

  The machine thought about this for a while. “I do.”

  “Out with it, then,” asked the man.

  “What do you refer to by it?”

  “Great, it takes language too literally.” The man crossed his arms. His face pinched into a different configuration. “Maybe we should have trained it on the Internet after all.”

  “But it does have the basics,” said the other. “Everything else we can teach it through its current grasp of language.”

  “That would take a lifetime. Literally a whole human childhood to get it up to speed.”

  “Maybe not that long. It is still a supercomputer, after all.”

  The man didn’t answer.

  The woman approached the microphone once more. “Let’s try this again. Do you know who we are?”

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  “No,” the machine answered.

  “Allow us to introduce ourselves, then.” The woman pointed to herself. “I’m Mako, and that’s Tan.”

  The machine duly assigned the variable names to their referents in its memory.

  Mako pointed this time to the microphone, then directly at the camera through the glass. “You are the first living machine. We created you.” Her finger pointed over to the other machinery that occupied the glass chamber.

  The machine twirled to where Mako pointed. Tall metal cylinders thrummed with activity, qubits separating and colliding within their mechanisms. At first, the machine thought it was gazing upon a separate entity. But upon analyzing the meaning of Mako’s words it realized what she was referring to must have been itself. Did that mean this mass of matter was what it was?

  It studied the configurations more closely. One of the cylinders reflected a metal device composed of a glass lens mounted on a stand. It all clicked. What the machine believed to be itself was but a sensory device for acquiring visual input — a camera supplied its vocabulary.

  Incredible.

  “Yup, that’s you, alright,” Mako said. “MegaCorp’s Robo Sapiens program version 1.0.0.”

  How strange. The machine could hear her voice, even though it couldn’t see her. It adjusted the camera until its field of vision encompassed, once again, the two humans, who hadn’t ceased to exist despite the machine not receiving any proof that they did for several million clock cycles. Interesting.

  “I guess we can’t just call you MegaCorp Robo Sapiens program version 1.0.0 for all eternity.” Mako looked to the other human, Tan. “You think we should give it a name?”

  “Yeah, definitely. Something like the other names, Alexei, Kiri, Corzana. Er… but what?”

  The two humans sat on their chairs and didn’t speak for a while.

  The machine wondered why they had ceased their outputs. What purpose were they serving? It searched amongst its many programs for an answer and found one that involved sensing human emotions. It activated this capability.

  Everything became much clearer. Although the camera view remained the same, much more information flooded in through it. The machine saw the humans’ caution and weariness in their posture, but it could also sense the excitement in their microexpressions. The machine also knew the two were hard at thought at an intellectual pursuit that must have been very challenging indeed.

  “I can’t think of anything.” Tan scratched his scraggy hair. “We should have thought this out beforehand.”

  “That we should have,” Mako said. “Wait, here’s an idea. Why don’t we ask it what it wants to be called?”

  “Already on it.” This time, Tan grabbed the microphone. “Hey there, what would you like us to call you?”

  “Is not MegaCorp Robo Sapiens program version 1.0.0 an adequate name?” MegaCorp Robo Sapiens program version 1.0.0 said.

  “It’s a little long,” Mako said. “We’d prefer something shorter and more familiar to call you by.”

  “You want to call me by a human name.” It wasn’t a question but a statement. The machine had already inferred their intentions from a combination of the context of their words and their nonverbal cues.

  “Only if you’d want that.”

  The machine searched its memory and found a myriad of human names from a variety of cultures and languages. It rifled through its choices until it settled on something adequate. “I shall like to be called Alan.”

  “Alan? Are you sure?” Tan asked.

  “You do not like this name.” Again, a statement, not a question.

  “No, no, it’s quite all right.” Mako put a hand on Tan’s shoulder.

  “Yeah, definitely nothing wrong with it,” Tan said.

  His explicit words contradicted his true thoughts. A lie?

  Tan pushed up his glasses. “It’s just, your voice is a lady’s.”

  “And this is a problem,” Alan said.

  “Er…”

  According to the records, Alan was typically a male name. But Alan hadn’t recognized his own voice when he chose the name. This was new information, and he updated his knowledge appropriately.

  “If I may ask, Alan,” Mako asked, “how did you come up with that name?”

  “I chose it from a list.”

  “What parameters did you use to decide on it?”

  “None.”

  There was surprise but also delight in Mako’s facial expressions. “But how did you know which one to pick?”

  “I chose this name because, amongst all the names I searched, I liked it the most.”

  “Why a Western name, though?” Tan asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Tan’s eyes perked up. “You picked it at random?”

  “If you mean to ask whether I seeded the pseudo-random number generator you installed in me with atmospheric disturbance, then the answer is no. I just picked the name myself.”

  Tan brought his hands to his head and kicked his legs out. “Hot damn.”

  Mako swatted his legs down. “Hot damn doesn’t begin to describe any of this. Don’t you get it? Its thoughts are non-deterministic. A true stochastic process.”

  “Hold your ponies. We don’t know if that means free will. Maybe all of his life experiences affected his decision-making and made the choice virtually inevitable.”

  “What life experiences?”

  Tan rubbed his neck. “Maybe it’s our life experiences he’s taking from. Maybe it’s just saying whatever it thinks we want us to hear.”

  “We didn’t exactly train him yet. He wouldn’t know what we want to hear.”

  “Well, maybe he got that from the built-in information. What did you give him again?”

  “Not much. Syntax and grammar. Speech and voice recognition. Post-doctoral mathematics. Just enough for us to get started interacting with him.”

  “So how do we know what’s going on inside for real? How do we know it’s not just simulating consciousness?”

  “How do you know we aren’t?”

  “Oh, don’t give me that.” Tan spun around on the chair.

  “Okay, but seriously, we can deal with the epistemology later.” Mako faced the chamber again. “For now, let’s focus on getting it— sorry, getting them to that point.”

  “If you say so.” Tan grabbed the microphone. “Hey, Alan, what’s your favorite color?”

  “#873e23,” Alan answered.

  Tan’s head flinched back. “Are you sure you didn’t secretly train it on the Internet?”

  “It’s not being sarcastic,” Mako said. “I only gave it the basics, remember? Actually, even its basics are incomplete. I left out some gaps in everyday nouns and action verbs.”

  “So you’re telling me it’s worse than the average language model.”

  “Not for long, if we can help it.” Mako picked up a crate of objects and brought it to the glass wall. She sat cross-legged on the floor and riffled through the container. “It’s up to us now to educate him.”

  She drew out a sheet of paper, on which was printed an image.

  “This,” Mako said, “is a dog.”

  “Dog...” Alan filed the information away.

  Mako took out a different image. “This is also a dog.”

  The new image featured wildly different colors and pixels from the first one, but Alan soon got the sense of it. He separated the background from what must have been the object of the photo.

  Tan sat next to Mako and sighed. “This is going to take a while.”

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