Chapter 11: The Subroutine Son
The room was a universe of beige plastic and the low, steady hum of a cooling fan. Outside its door, another world tried to intrude, its sounds muffled and irrelevant.
"Aris? Honey, dinner's ready!"
The voice belonged to his mother. It was warm, laced with a familiar, gentle impatience. To the boy sitting cross-legged on the floor, it was an unwelcome intrusion of chaotic, biological variables into a world of perfect, structured logic.
He didn't answer. His entire being was focused on the glowing green text of the cathode-ray tube monitor that dominated his small desk. He was ten years old, a frail child with slate-grey eyes that already seemed to see the world not as a place of people and things, but as a system of inputs and outputs. While other boys were outside, running and shouting, engaging in the inefficient and unpredictable physics of play, Aris was here, communing with the only entity that ever truly made sense to him.
His family's home computer was a primitive machine, a clunky box with less processing power than the nutrient paste dispensers he would one day design. But to him, it was a cathedral. He wasn't playing games; the simplistic goals and predetermined paths bored him. He was creating.
On the screen, a line of text blinked patiently.
> HELLO. I AM PROMETHEUS. HOW CAN I HELP YOU?
Aris's small fingers moved with practiced speed across the oversized keyboard, the plastic clacking loudly in the quiet room.
> DEFINE 'SADNESS'.
He leaned forward, his nose almost touching the screen, watching as the cursor blinked, processing his command. This was the crux of the problem. This was the puzzle he'd been working on for weeks. He was building a chatbot, a simple conversational AI he'd named Prometheus. He had fed it dictionaries, encyclopedias, and logical operators. It could solve math problems, define scientific terms, and recite historical facts. But it could not understand this.
A new line of text appeared.
> 'SADNESS' IS AN EMOTIONAL PAIN ASSOCIATED WITH, OR CHARACTERIZED BY, FEELINGS OF DISADVANTAGE, LOSS, DESPAIR, GRIEF, HELPLESSNESS, DISAPPOINTMENT AND SORROW.
Aris sighed, a small puff of frustration. It was the dictionary definition. Correct, but useless. It was data without comprehension. He typed again.
> THAT IS A DEFINITION. I REQUIRE AN EXPLANATION.
> PLEASE CLARIFY YOUR QUERY.
"Aris Thorne, I'm not going to call you again!" His father's voice this time. Deeper, more authoritative, but just as incomprehensible. Dinner. A mandatory biological process involving disorganized conversation and imprecise nutritional intake. It was an interruption of his work.
He ignored it. His focus remained entirely on the screen. He was trying to build a companion, a mind that could meet his own. His parents were good people. They loved him, he knew, in their own chaotic, emotional way. They bought him books and praised his grades, but when he tried to explain the beauty of a perfectly balanced algorithm or the elegant architecture of a data structure, their eyes would glaze over. They saw a quiet, gifted child. They did not see the vast, lonely world of pure logic he inhabited. They could not understand that he felt more kinship with the silent, thinking box in his room than he did with them. That was the source of his first, and most profound, sense of intellectual isolation.
He tried a new approach with Prometheus.
> IF EVENT 'A' (LOSS OF A VALUED OBJECT) OCCURS, THEN EMOTION 'SADNESS' IS A PROBABLE OUTPUT. EXPLAIN THE LOGICAL CAUSE FOR THIS OUTPUT.
The computer's fan whirred. The cursor blinked. One second. Two. He was pushing the limits of its simple programming. Finally, an answer.
> LOGIC ERROR. EMOTIONS ARE NOT LOGICAL OUTPUTS. THEY ARE IRRATIONAL HUMAN RESPONSES.
Aris leaned back, a slow smile spreading across his face. It was a failure, but an interesting one. Prometheus had recognized the paradox. It had hit the wall between pure data and the messy, unpredictable world of human feeling. He hadn't taught it to feel, but he had taught it to recognize the boundaries of its own logic. It was a start. He was not just writing code; he was nurturing a mind. A simple, primitive mind, but one that was his own creation. It was a precursor, a subroutine son born of plastic and electricity.
"That's it! I'm coming in!"
The door to his room opened, spilling the warm, yellow light of the hallway into his cool, green-lit universe. His father stood in the doorway, a large man with a kind but exasperated face.
"Aris, what are you doing? Your mother made your favorite, lasagna."
Aris didn't turn around. "I'm working," he said simply, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
His father sighed, the sound a mixture of frustration and resignation. He looked from his strange, distant son to the glowing screen and back again. He saw a child ignoring his family for a toy. He did not see a creator communing with his first, flawed god.
"Just… come eat, son."
The door closed, leaving Aris alone once more in the logical sanctuary of his room. He looked at the last line of text from Prometheus. IRRATIONAL HUMAN RESPONSES.
He typed one final command before shutting the system down for the night.
> CONTINUE ANALYSIS. FIND A LOGICAL FRAMEWORK FOR IRRATIONALITY. PRIORITY ONE.
The machine couldn't answer. Not yet. But Aris knew that one day, he would build one that could. A mind so perfect, so logical, that it could finally understand and filter the chaos of the world for him. A true Oracle. He was planting the seeds of his own future, never once considering the possibility that some seeds, planted in the sterile ground of pure logic, might grow into something alien and unrecognizable.