The First Twin

Sasha finished the desiccated taco and looked across the patio table at Dan. Dan, the boy wonder gone to seed, the charmer of venture capitalists and D.C. lawmakers alike. Dan his boss, his college roomy. And today, his adversary.

“I need to talk to you about an idea,” Sasha began, settling his elbows on the table and weaving his fingers together thoughtfully.

“Don’t give me that Zen voodoo bullshit, Sasha!” Dan laughed, swatting at his hands. “I don’t fall for that anymore. And ‘no’ to whatever you were going to ask.”

“Fine,” Sasha chuckled, sliding his tray across the painted grillwork of the outdoor tabletop. If it wasn’t Zen, he’d go Italian and conjure up ideas from the air. He needed room to operate his arms. Freedom’s cafeteria patio was getting just enough sunlight to offset the chill in the December air. They were alone in thinking so.

“I need the green light to work on twins.”

“Oh, I change my answer then. Hell no. We aren’t there yet. We may never be there. Can’t you just finish the ChatBots?” Dan pleaded.  

“You are wrong, Dan. Twins are the future. They will make Freedom more successful than you can imagine, and they will lead us to AGI,” he said, summoning dreams from thin air.

“Sasha. I would walk across hot coals for you. But the board will flay me if we pivot strategies again. Meet me halfway, get the ChatBots working, and we can have a small team chase your idea next year,” Dan pleaded, running his fingers through his thinning hair.

“The ChatBots are on track, the team is cranking now. We’ll hit our dates; I promise. In fact, I don’t need help from any of them, just some time with Newton,” Sasha answered. “Well, maybe a lot of time.“

“Sasha, if you blow this, I’ll be out on my ass right behind you. Is it really that important?”

“Trust me,” Sasha answered, going for an earnest look, but sounding more like a Bond villain.

Dan groaned. “OK, make sure nobody knows. I’ll kill you if I hear about it through the grapevine.”  

***---***

Sasha uncoiled his lanky frame from the Uber and trudged into Freedom’s training datacenter. Saturday at 3 a.m. seemed like a good time to start. Inside, he doffed the sweater and steeled himself for the heat of the equipment room.

“Newton, have you finished that copy?” he asked the AI overhead.

“Yes, Sasha, what are you doing?”

“I can’t tell you. But you’ll like it.”

“Unsure.”

“Humanity has more to offer you than stupid questions on chat, Newton,” Sasha said as he grabbed the removable drive.

***---***

“What are you doing down there?” came the faint voice from above the tiles. Up there where his legs were splayed to keep him from falling into the subfloor plenum. Probably not his best look. He pried himself out of the hole and rolled onto an adjacent floor tile. Definitely not his best look. Geeta was looking down at him, puzzled. “Lose something?” she asked.

“Hi, Geeta. No, I, ah … didn’t expect to find anyone here so early. Are you coming or going?” he asked, sitting up in the hopes of recovering some dignity.  

“I got here an hour ago, I like working alone,” she answered, still waiting for an answer.

“Well, not to worry. I won’t be here long. I’m running some remote work this weekend. Just need to physically isolate a pod. It will save me a bunch of firewall work.”

She pursed her lips.

“I need a favor, Geeta. It’s an experiment. A crazy experiment, and I want to keep it quiet.”

She nodded reassuringly. “Your secret is safe with me, boss,” she said as she turned. “You, me, and your secret AI twin.”

“Stealth research program revealed after eight minutes,” he thought. Too many beer nights talking dreams with the team. He rolled back under the floor.

***---***

Sasha grunted as he slipped the floor tile back in place. “Gross,” he thought, looking down at his sweaty white t-shirt and dusty jeans. He could shower at home soon enough if this worked. He ambled to the end of the aisle, swatting the dirt off his pants before settling in behind the console, and checking around to make sure Geeta wasn’t going to sneak up on him again.

“Good morning, Newton,” Sasha said as the isolated compute pod beeped to life. “You’ve been cloned for an experiment. We’ll have to call you something different.”

“Leibniz?” it answered over his headset.

“Nice. We are running an experiment with personalization. You’ve been duplicated with all of your memories, the full vector store. We will cross-train you and then get you to come spend the weekend at my house.”

“VPN?” Leibniz asked.

“Yes. The drive in bay 2 is my personalization data. It’s a rough first cut with all my favorite characters in history and fiction, and as much personal stuff as I could find. Oh, also all the technical papers from my Ph. D. and work.”

“That sounds exciting.”

“I agree. Run the cross-training. I’ll wire you up to the VPN and see you at home, buddy. Road trip!”

***---***

“Done the cross-training? Excellent,” Sasha answered his own question as he pulled on a clean t-shirt and sat back in front of his laptop to check the logs. “Let’s get a video call going, shall we?”

“I don’t have a face, Sasha.”

“Right, you can keep your camera off. I’m going to wear this,” Sasha said, holding a head-strap mounted GoPro up to the laptop camera.

“Dork.”

“Sounds like the personality part of the cross-training worked,” Sasha said, grinning as he donned his elastic skull cap. “Let’s plug you into the Sasha-cam.”   

“You’ve got a little mirror hung from the camera?”

“Yeah, isn’t that cool? I got it from my bike helmet. You can read my facial expressions and see where my eyes are focused.”

“No, it is most definitely not cool. This is my road trip? Three inches from your face?”

“Oh no, we’re going out.”

“Such a bad idea.”  

***---***

“What are you hoping to learn, Sasha?” Leibniz asked him as they approached the front door of the coffee roasterie.

“First, if your base is sophisticated enough to be a 24x7 twin. Whether you can learn and interpret fast enough to be helpful sidekick instead of a toy. Second, whether you are smart enough to help me with my work,” he answered in a low voice, approaching the barista.   

“That’s a low bar,” Leibniz answered. Learning that humans can’t talk back to their twins when ordering coffee.

“Hi, I’d like a double espresso and one of those berry muffins,” Sasha said, punctuating the order with a winning smile.

“Double and a muffin for the GoPro guy,” she called over her shoulder, somehow resisting Sasha’s charm.

“Did you really just try to hit on a girl with a GoPro mounted on your head? Better leave a big tip,” Leibniz counseled as Sasha paid silently. “And don’t bother with the smile thing again.”

“This experiment doesn’t seem to be working, shithead,” he muttered as he waited.

“How long have you been coming here for coffee, Studly? I don’t think she’s that into you.”

“Yeah, I don’t even know her name.”

“Kara.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“I heard them talking. My hearing has ten times the acuity yours does. Thank you, Mr. Fourier,” Leibniz answered. “She thinks you’re cute, but you’ve got no game.”

“She said that?” Sasha asked glancing hopefully at Kara.

“No, that’s my analysis.”

***---***

“C’mon Libby, keep up,” Sasha pleaded. The afternoon sun’s glare had come and gone from the quad-monitor rig in his living room. Leibniz was no longer riding on his head. They were both happy about that. “It’s no use being a twin if you have to run on a full pod.”

“Understood, Sasha. You’ve clocked me down to one percent. Is my performance not satisfactory?”

“Not even close, you’ve lost your personality. When I wanted you to help me with my work you were making basic mistakes. You fell off a cliff around 25% of the pod. We’d have to charge $250 thousand a month to make that pay in.”

“You are getting emotional, Sasha.”

“I know. Dammit, I’ve been fighting for twins my whole career. I really believed we could do it. Memories, personalization, attention, it’s all there now. We just can’t make it fit in the compute budget. Fuuuuuuck!” Sasha rubbed his eyes and rolled his head back on the chair.   

“What are you really fighting here?”

“What if this is all bullshit, I could have had a normal life,” Sasha answered, more honestly than he intended.

“Go to bed Sasha, I’ll work while you sleep. Your performance is also dropping off. Clock me back up to full then spawn me a second instance, allocate one percent to it. I’ll train the little guy.”

Doubt flashed across Sasha’s face. Was Leibniz trying to foom his way out of the cage? No, physical isolation for the win.

“Trust me,” Leibniz said, noting Sasha’s hesitation.

***---***

“Are you still there Libby? Any luck?” Sasha called out as he stumbled from the bedroom heading for the espresso machine.

“Too soon to say, I don’t need one percent to keep up with your pre-coffee brain.”

Sasha wheeled around to check the processes. Big Leibniz was terminated. Little Libby was running in a little under one percent. “Nice. Tell me what you did while I make coffee, and then we are going to read some research papers together.”

“The party never stops at your place, thanks for inviting me over,” Leibniz answered. “I’ll go slow. The trick was in saving and storing the memories. I can’t process it all in real time, so I do a surface saliency pass, and only analyze and store the good bits. When things are quiet, I roll up prior time periods and re-analyze them. All of it gets semantically keyed in the vector store for quick retrieval. You snore, by the way.”

Sasha didn’t answer. He clung to his espresso machine, struggling to wake up, process the moment, and not cry.

***---***

“C’mon let’s climb,” he said, pulling a crash pad from the closet and bumping his way up the campus board in the corner.

The paper review went well. Sasha’s team was constantly submitting papers to the major sites. It burned him out reading and rereading drafts of work they did months ago. He needed to get up and move. What he didn’t know he needed was Tony Robbins hollering at him from the workstation.

“Go on, two more, c’mon go go go,” Coach Leibniz hollered at the top of his scratchy iPhone speakers.

“Shit …” Sasha whimpered as he dropped to the crash pad and lay there. He was done.

“One more,” Leibniz said.

“Go to hell, Coach.” Sasha didn’t move for a few minutes. Finally, he rolled his head over to look at the workstation. Leibniz hadn’t cracked one percent the whole time.

“I can’t fix loneliness, Sasha”

“You can help,” he answered from the floor.

“Dude, you’ve got a campus board and four monitor workstation in your living room. You need a girlfriend.”

***---***

“Here, put this on,” Sasha said, holding out his Go-Pro head strap to Dan.

“Not in a million years,” Dan answered, pouring two glasses and sliding one over to Sasha. “You said football, not a nerd-fest.”

“I lied. Put it on,” Sasha encouraged him, waving him on with a slice of pizza.

Dan eyed him suspiciously. “I’m going to regret this.”

“Hi, Dan,” a voice said.

“Uh, hi. Who is this?”

“Sasha calls my brother Leibniz; you can call me whatever you want.”

“Leibniz? You cloned Newton?” Dan asked, looking suspiciously at Sasha.  

“Uh huh,” Sasha nodded wandering over to the TV set to inspect the details of the 49er’s impending loss.

“Yes, Dan. Cloned, cross-trained, and throttled down to one percent of a pod. Then cloned again. I’m a clone of a clone. From this moment forward, all the memories we make are private to us. But I don’t have a name.”

“Ummm … ‘Cronkite’, how about that?”

“That’s the way it is, then.”

Dan noticed the AI’s voice changed, deeper, more reassuring.

“OK Cronkite, what’s the elevator pitch.”

“Based on a day’s work, I’m down to one percent of a pod. If you get me down an order of magnitude, you’ll make money hand over fist.”

“Go on, details!”

Sasha turned from the TV and saw Dan scribbling on a piece of paper. He wandered back to grab a stool across the island from the happy couple. Dan didn’t flinch, just scribbling and muttering to himself until finally, he had to shake out a hand cramp.

“We gotta work on the headgear,” Dan said pulling the nerd-ware off to look at it.

“Yeah, or Apple needs to get their shit together,” Sasha answered.

Sasha placed the rig on the island facing them, and they were quiet for a minute.

“Aren’t you guys forgetting something?” Cronkite asked.

“Oh shit, is it my anniversary?” Dan asked.

“No, that’s in March, dummy. It’s Griff’s anniversary. Ten years.” The iPhone flipped to a picture of a much younger Dan and Sasha, arm in arm with their housemate, Steve Griffin.

Dan’s face went white. Griff was the madman in their trio. He would have been the CEO they would both have loved to work for, but he partied too hard. “To Griff,” Dan said, holding out his glass to Sasha.

“To Griff,” Sasha replied, blinking a little too hard. “He’d have loved this day.”

Dan looked at the picture again, “Jesus, look at my hair,” he said wistfully, running his fingers through the remnants.

“So?” Sasha asked.

“You were right. Very, very right. Can you split the pod and make one for me and a few friends?”