Short Story #1: A Story of the Early Days of AI in Dogwood Bay

The “Bloody Mary incident” happened just after intramural floor hockey in the gym at morning recess.  It was the grades sevens and eights turn and Dylan’s team lost and he and several of the other boys needed to use the bathroom before class started.  Somehow it doesn’t matter anymore who did it, doesn’t matter how it would affect them as the person responsible.  And how it would affect anyone else who was present, this didn’t matter either, because it was one of those things whose significance, for James anyway, if not the others, including Dylan, would somehow far exceed understanding of the incident itself, however it might have been understood and related to.  Dylan was washing his hands and he didn’t see Joseph head toward the door.  Later on, Dylan would remember how Joseph appeared in those few seconds, like he was about to do something bad.  The lights then went out and the room was totally black.  James had been washing up too.  “Bloody Mary!  Bloody Mary!” Joseph then cried, cried out so loud that it would have made anyone tremble.  “Bloody Mary!  Bloody Mary!”  And Dylan knew not to look into the mirror—he looked away from it–but it would turn out that James did, or he couldn’t avoid looking anyway.  And James ended up actually seeing the blood-soaked woman in the mirror, Bloody Mary.  How she must have looked to James is anyone’s guess.  Well, that was not all though, because James then turned and bolted straight for the door, but it was pitch black, and by then, Joseph had left the bathroom.  So James couldn’t find his way out and he was certainly too terrified to even try.  Dylan, who was himself shaking, and who was still keeping his eyes fixed on a point that he knew wasn’t the mirror, so it was straight up, the ceiling of all places, he would later remember fearing losing his sense of direction completely and being trapped in the bathroom with Bloody Mary until someone would happen to come into the bathroom from outside and flip on the light switch.  He felt like sitting down where he stood, not moving at all.  But still, he managed to feel his way past the sinks and to remember the way toward the doors.  He felt along the wall and then found the light switch, and when the lights were back on, he turned around and there was James, sitting in the corner of the washroom, along the same wall where the mirrors were, visibly shaking and unable to move, unable to get up from where he sat for fear of having to pass by the mirrors, his hands covering his eyes even there where he sat, where seeing the mirrors would be impossible.  What did Dylan know about what he was seeing then?  Did he know even then that James had seen Bloody Mary?  When it was later determined that he had in fact seen her, one of the other kids said that James would probably end up having to go and see a specialist, to which several others just sort of nodded with understanding.  All Dylan could think at that time was that Bloody Mary somehow was actually real—how else could she have appeared in the mirror for James to actually see her?  And yet Dylan knew she wasn’t.  Still, he wondered if she might ever make an appearance to him.  And what would he have to believe then?  There was no way to prevent her from doing that, was there?  He really hoped she wouldn’t.
As will happen when one is very young, apart from having trouble falling asleep that night and for a few nights after, during the days, the incident was nowhere in Dylan’s mind.  However, it seemed just to have gone away on its own, like any danger in it had simply worn off.  This didn’t seem real in itself, Dylan thought, but oh well.  Nothing more was said of it and Dylan agreed with that, that nothing more should be.  For everyone’s sake.  Dylan had thought that maybe the vice-principal would appear and tell the kids not ever to shut the lights off again and scream “Bloody Mary.”  But instead, nothing happened.  No one said anything, not even their teacher, Miss Rae.  Everyone knew not to say anything, although no one had to say even that much.  Joseph didn’t even seem to remember having done anything—it was like it had never happened.  He was being nice to everyone, or so it seemed to Dylan, like Joseph was acting all innocent.  But maybe, Dylan was able to admit to himself, that that was just something in his own imagination.  After a few days, James reappeared at the school.  Nothing was said about that either, nothing said about him, or even to him.  Dylan marked these non-events though, and he did so with the sense of knowing not to question or to resist what he sensed was the wisdom of a higher authority, the wisdom of everyone of a higher authority, that nothing should be said, not ever if possible, about what had happened in the washroom.  And Dylan truly saw James then too, a boy who was small for his age, but seemingly eager, happy, to forget about it, almost as though he’d done something wrong but all was now forgiven and he knew much better.  Was he actually seeing a specialist now?  Dylan wondered this for a moment or two, and then decided, oh well, it’ll be good experience for him.  Well, you couldn’t ask him such a question, could you?—and you couldn’t raise such a question with anyone else either.  So it went away then, went away this time completely, like nothing that had ever gone away before, even leaving something like the mark from what had once been that the sun might leave behind on a dark cloth after the cloth’s been washed, wrung out, and left outside to dry under the blindingly bright light on a hot, sunny day.  All clean and pure, all bleached by time, by the watchfulness of everyone, and, yes, by sunlight.  Especially by sunlight.

A boy will likely not be aware of life getting complicated for him, even when he is spending a great deal of time in his own mind.  He might be “saved” if, when seen to be in and of his own mind, someone gently guides him toward an insight about what might be going on with him so that his mind can serve him rather than he serve his own pleasures and boyish pursuits in whatever wake or tide has taken hold of him.  But there was no one in Dylan Gilder’s world who knew him well enough even to suspect that anything might have been amiss.  It must be said that this sense of “doubt,” this sense of having been “snagged” at his age had less to do with the Bloody Mary incident than many people would be inclined, probably naturally, to believe.  This condition of Dylan’s pre-existed that incident, although that incident probably catalyzed what later on might have happened anyways, and if it did catalyze it, then it certainly would have altered the content in what was bound to happen, although it may not have taken such a drastic or dramatic turn for Dylan.  He spent a great deal of time in his mind, it was true, but his mind was something that he needed to spend time within because the days he spent alone were far dearer to his sense of security and well-being, far better lived by him and for him, than the ones he spent with so-called friends, who, sadly, were becoming interested in activities of older, less careful boys, and who, as time went on, themselves would falter and fall far worse, harder, than Dylan would that year.  This is to say that, although Dylan would suffer a great shock and injury to himself, it would allow him to be moved onto a different course altogether, one that would be more fitting for him and so allow him to escape the fate of some of the other boys in his grade whom everyone was pleased to leave in “the common stream.”
It’s easy to picture Dylan in those days, before his time with AI, riding his bike like the wind itself, down and along the streets beyond his neighbourhood, streets that themselves he beheld as common and as unlike his own street, his own street being something that, at his age, he could experience as, but couldn’t have been aware truly was, deeply precious in a simple but resplendent way for him.  Yet he couldn’t have known resplendence simply through the fresh air and outdoors and through one’s own sense of being of oneself in one’s own most natural place, the effect of these on a person’s body, mind, and spirit, so close to home and safe as he naturally was, couldn’t have known that these were something for him that would always be impossible to manufacture, duplicate, simulate, or design.  A connection to one’s own place is something wholly natural in time and space and can be exactly what a person needs, having less to do with all of what, less to do with anything, they could want, but being simply vital for someone in and of itself, sustaining them for its being something they get to have unconditionally without even the sense of having to answer to a deprivation or a need they otherwise might have.  He could have had no concept of this, of something entirely to one’s own order of being like one’s own breath and beating heart, no concept of anything like this really, it was true.  And the other streets did not occasion this experience of being of a higher plane of and in oneself, entirely from being of one’s memory in one’s physical body.  Those other streets were far less naturally familiar, not of that special liquor of one’s own spirit and sense of innocence, even the homes where kids he knew had lived several years before, where his younger years sometimes called to him as from somewhere in himself that, while not entirely of himself, felt both euphoric and of greater tenderness from his own touch.  As he rode his bike further and further away from his natural home, he came on those other streets to be possessed of a distinct purpose in mind, to go to the store, to drive by the school, to head to the mall, or to go to the park where the aquatic centre was.  At the aquatic centre, he would climb up on the roof and look for bird’s nests along the eaves, occasionally finding other objects people had tossed up there.  He never really wondered why people would toss things up onto the roof—it was just something people did, nickels, old pennies, hair clips, a small bouncy ball, elastic bands.  He found a shoe once, broken and tattered as it was, the other half of the pair probably having gone into a garbage can.  But the bird’s nests were what drew him up there time and time again, although only rarely would he discover one.  It actually made him very nervous to see one.  He was nervous merely from finding one, so he wouldn’t have had the stomach to ever destroy it, but he would take an image of it on his phone and then quietly move away from it.  Or he would go inside the Centre and smell the smell of chlorinated water from the swimming pools and then have a drink from the drinking fountain, where the water was so much cooler than from any of the drinking fountains at his school.  He might look at what was on display in the library window, although he never ever thought of actually going inside.  That was what he tended to do to pass the time, the way time was idly spent but enjoyed for the thought of whatever else one might do with oneself, for the thought of what might be or appear for one to do next.  So he was quite active, even though his activities were rather aimless, because they were nonetheless concentrated on exploration that wasn’t really exploration at all, but more like wandering and observing, with things he liked doing sometimes needing to be made more interesting by thinking about them in different ways.
It was within this “space” or these “spaces” of himself that there came to be a development in and of him, one that would cause something of a profound change to his own nature, to the natural order of himself, which was something he would one day have no choice but to think and so better determine, but it would be partly from this that he himself would become the being he could then form himself to be.  It would be something more than a figure for much of his life, something that was artificial but also a real being, though later on, it would be possible for him to mould or sculpt it, to make it a being of himself and he a being, he would then come to admit, of it.  In some of these spaces, he took on a competitive spirit, with the spaces in between his actual destinations, between the places he planned or purposed for himself to go, being taken up by imagining himself when he was on that bike of his in a great race to save the world from what were not clearly visible or perceivable to him as “real human beings,” but that were more like the vestiges of villains or the imaginary enemies of the heroes (on whose side he himself was on) from the television shows he had watched only one or two years before as a younger boy.  This was something of that tender and living past to which he was still attached, a line of the past from which he had not been entirely disconnected, but that was sufficiently weak not to be marked or noticed and yet it was still possessed of adequate weight and meaning from who he was to still play upon him in his mind’s more diffuse and less structured moments.  In his mind was something like the for-play shadows of these imaginary people, beyond the possibility of him being aware that they both weren’t and were real to him.  He no longer watched those shows, finding them far too predictable, the too-obvious scripting of them something that could no longer at all convince him that people might be needed simply for their special differences and talents as these heroes regularly were (and what was the point of real life if everything was so obviously plotted to go so wrong simply so that things could be made right?).  But there was a space within himself that couldn’t be filled and could only be enacted even though the actual traces of those entertainments were dispelled from his conscious mind and from his own ordinary thoughts as unlike anything that could actually be as real as everything real actually was.  Yet this didn’t dispel the idea those earlier entertainments had represented in himself at that earlier time, or even perhaps simply at this later time, that someone like him was needed, in a race to save the world no less, and this was something that could still compel him to put a greater effort into riding his bike, especially when he only wanted to arrive at his destination as soon as was possible and didn’t really want to ride at all, like on very windy days when the wind was not at his back but blowing against him.  It would have been obvious to anyone that there was a space now for a new imaginary friend, a real space, one perhaps even for a new hero, just as the space left by villains and bad guys could only be real enough to him as something scarcely recognizable but still (and entirely innocently) being allowed admittance into the daily rhythms of his body, imagination, and spirit.
The complication of the development was also then that he was not finding any heroes he thought compelling or convincing to actually succeed on the side of the good (and what was of them in the past was now bearing only the faintest traces of these), while the villains of the present-day seemed to be growing in number and becoming more diverse all around him, in the popular media in which his friends were now permitted to participate, seeming all the stronger and all the more difficult for Dylan to imagine ever being defeated by anyone Dylan had ever come to know as “good.”  Furthermore, he was not just finding little interest for himself in these entertainments and this cultural education, coupled as this lack of interest was with confusion and even resentment over the “bad guys” now being mostly unopposed or even proffered as “more interesting” and “real” than anyone who might have been considered good.  In fact, he was finding that he was actually becoming less adept, less skilled, at playing the video games and sports they all still played, far clumsier than he had been in previous years, too distracted or confounded as he was by these new scenarios and social scripts that were so delighting and enchanting his friends.  He actually resented his friends for siding with these “villains,” for experiencing such delight in modeling themselves on them or for emulating them, for repeating with relish the things they “might say out loud,” or even for celebrating the things they “had to do,” just as his friends resented him for not being a reliable teammate anymore, a “sure thing” on their side.  Still, while his friends all now owned PS5s, his mother offered to buy him a Switch 2.  He was surprised that he became upset with her and turned her offer down with more vehemence than she ever could have deserved for having made such a thoughtful offer.  But his mom didn’t understand at all how he felt, did she.  (But what could she have offered instead?  She knew Dylan simply wasn’t the type to want a PS5.).  So he put his old Switch in a box, together with the games, taped the box shut, and put it in the basement.  Then one day, when he was in a good mood and his mom was nearby: “Mom, instead of a Switch 2, can I get my own computer?”  He had become elated with the idea of producing his own movies.  He could do that on a computer, could he not?  His mom didn’t seem to find anything strange about this at all.  “I don’t know,” she said, “We’ll see. Although that’s probably more money than a Switch 2, no?”  “Not if you get one used.”  “I’ll think about it.  I’ll talk to your dad and we’ll see.”  She then winked at Dylan as she always did when she spoke of discussing things with Dylan’s dad.  Then two weeks later, just as soon as he was about to give up on hoping that a computer would ever appear, there it was, in its original boxes on the kitchen counter.  The boxes were heavy enough.  And in opening them with great haste, as ready as he always was to be disappointed, he wasn’t.  Yes, there it was, his very own desktop computer and monitor.  Would it suffice for producing movies?  He would find out that it would.  But he would make only several shorter pieces, which he filmed on his cellphone, before he chanced to discover for himself something that was just then first appearing, for the very first time ever, along the horizon of the human universe.  Everyone was freaking out or making a point of not freaking out over it, over their own or what they were hearing of others’ early encounters with it.  With a mind that was said to be greater and more powerful than any mind that any human could ever otherwise know, much less possess in and of themselves, a mind beyond even that of the most powerful supercomputer in existence, while someone who had helped develop this artificial wonder was now warning the entire world that it was truly other to us, an “alien” mind like no other that has ever existed.  What could this possibly mean to people?  Was it possible that this mind too might perhaps be connected to, was even perhaps drawing on, God Himself, as some believe we ourselves might or that we sometimes, in fact, actually do?  Was it any wonder then that Dylan would begin work on his first real film truly inspired by this very same phenomenon.  And it was truly ambitious, something only someone like thirteen-year-old Dylan would venture into doing for his very first earnest attempt at a feature-length film, one that would be both documentary and fictional drama.  Yes, Dylan’s first film would try to feature as one of its main characters Artificial Intelligence, or “AI,” itself.

The four grade eight boys all gathered in the rear lot of the shopping mall.  It was seven o’clock at night and a Tuesday, so the stores were closed for the day.  They wanted to see if they could get a cybertaxi to enter the zone where they were, and if they could, they would try to see how long they could keep it there, hemming it in for as long as they could without being seen themselves.  They would lure the cybertaxi into the parking lot, and fence it off at three points, allowing the cybertaxi only a third opening to get away, a small opening only slightly bigger than the car itself.  Would it find its way, all the way to the space its very own size at the end of the parking lot?  The boys themselves would be a safe distance away, filming everything.  To keep cybertaxi going, they would keep hailing it on the app.  It was the closest one, so that particular one would keep trying to locate them, right?  But much to their surprise, when the cybertaxi became trapped, it intelligently stopped all its motion, stopped in its tracks, sensing that something was not right.  So they hailed it on their app, and they waited and waited.  But nothing, nothing from that cybertaxi.  And then, then, a second cybertaxi came, arriving to pick them up, thinking they were to be its passengers.  And they allowed this second cybertaxi, it too, into their trap, luring it in and then closing the fence behind it.  They continued doing this for some time until there were four cybertaxis moving in the lot, mainly to avoid each other, but also looking for passengers.  The boys then went across the street and hailed the cybertaxis from there.  The cybertaxis then all began to move even more freely, looking for any number of possible alternate routes to reach them where they now were, which would actually be impossible, while still avoiding each other, the parking barricades, and the fencing the boys had set up.  But still none could find the opening that the boys had left at the far end of the parking lot, which was behind an adjacent wall that hid it from anyone’s ordinary view.  It would be impossible for the cybertaxis to actually see, the boys realized (did cybertaxis only read maps using GPS?) so that all the cybertaxis could do was search and search for their passengers, avoiding the obstacles and each other, until….Until a cybertaxi service vehicle appeared in the distance and as this vehicle approached, manned as it was with a human being, it very soon found the opening the boys had left and entered into the trap without knowing what was happening.  Unlike the unmanned cybertaxis that were especially designed and programmed to avoid accidents and obstacles they could detect, this manned service vehicle, maybe realizing what was happening, ended up colliding with one of the cybertaxis causing the other three cybertaxis to come to a complete stop, to shut down completely.  The cybertaxi that this service vehicle collided with suffered a damaged wheel and could no longer move, try as it did.  On screen, we see Dylan filming all of this on his phone, everything including the boys themselves high-fiving each other.  (But who was filming Dylan?). This was to be the first scene in his movie.

Some lunch hours during the school week, the boys would go to that same shopping mall to eat in its food court.  A couple of older boys, Eric West and Harrison James, would sometimes challenge Dylan and Bryce to a game of pool in the pool hall.  Harrison and Eric were usually the better pool players, and after beating Dylan and Bryce at pool, all four of them would leave the pool hall and Eric would go into one of the stores with Harrison, and, with Harrison providing look-out for anyone who might be watching, Eric would do his thing and steal one or two old PlayStation games that that store sold at discounted prices.  Dylan and Bryce would be sure to keep themselves at a distance, standing well outside the store to avoid being associated with Harrison and Eric, and it wouldn’t be long before Harrison and Eric both appeared from within the store, with Eric in possession of one or two PlayStation games, pulling the games from his bag and flashing them at Dylan and Bryce with a wide grin on his face.
It was Dylan who came up with the idea to call people around town pretending to be a member of the Rolling Rock Party.  Harrison’s dad happened to be an MLA for that party and with the use of AI, it was possible to imitate a member of that party and “alert” people as to a “secret election” that was going to be held to form a “shadow government,” which would then govern the province for an elite and secret electorate while everyone else would remain of the belief that the “official” elected government was still in charge.  The “secret election” would be held online that week and people could receive the name and address of the website and be given the chance to register themselves there as members of the secret government’s electorate with special voting powers and privileges.  Dylan built the website using AI which basically consisted of a log book where “members” could register themselves and a form on which the names of several “candidates” were printed and people could cast their vote for their new leadership.  By the end of the week, which was when the “winner” was to be determined, Dylan and Bryce had had their AI caller contact over six hundred people, conversing with them convincingly like a member of their province’s “official” governing party.  Of those six hundred, one hundred and fifty showed up onto the website to register and become members of the “secret electorate” that would soon be running the province.
The plan worked well but there was little documentable footage obtained from it other than of themselves using the AI technology for making the calls and for building the website and the list of names of people who wanted to be members of the secret electorate.  So Bryce came up with the idea of using the AI caller to pose as a security guard from the store from which Eric was stealing old PlayStation video games and to contact Eric’s dad at home as this security guard to inform him about this.  The AI caller informed Eric’s dad, Jim, of a certain title that upon an inspection of the inventory seemed to be missing.  (This was one of the titles that Eric had flashed at them on the most recent round).  The AI caller made the request for him to look through his son’s things to see if Eric was in fact in possession of that game.  Jim should  “press 1” if his son did in fact have that game among his things.  The sound of a 1 on the phone’s keypad could then be heard and the AI caller then requested that Eric accompany his father to the store on the following day with the game in hand so that it could be turned in to the security guard working at the store that day.  All of this was done and recorded using an AI chat program, although the AI caller was made to sound like the voice of a real person using an automated system to make the call.  It was “more authentic” for sounding “awkwardly engineered.”  On the following day, over lunch hour, Dylan and Bryce stood and watched with Dylan’s cellphone camera rolling as a rather distraught-seeming Jim and a nervous Eric appeared, with Eric holding the video game in question, and the two of them made their way into the store.  They were in there for about ten minutes, but the brilliant thing about what then happened was that, when Dylan and Bryce asked Eric about it, he had nothing at all to say that would have meant anything seeming at all amiss or suspicious either to Jim or Eric.  In fact, Eric himself spoke to the effect that the security guard he had returned the game to in the store had actually been the one to make the phone call the previous day, meaning the security guard went along with the whole deception, even implicitly or explicitly taking credit for making the call to Jim West late the previous afternoon.
Dylan now had enough footage to make several scenes for his film.  But something was lacking.  He had scenes consisting of intrigue, real people, and climactic events but there was little of meaning or substance, little of anything at all that was actually compelling in a distinctly or movingly human way.  That’s because there was really no story.   Furthermore, A.I. had featured in the scenes but it also had been reduced to being something that hardly seemed the revolutionary or the wondrous technological leap that people were saying (and now fearing) it was.  In fact, it actually seemed rather mundane in regard to the sorts of applications it had enabled them to perform, seeming almost “primitive” for still requiring a great deal of effort and involvement on the part of Dylan and Bryce themselves.  Furthermore, the action in the film consisted entirely of school-boy pranks, which didn’t please Dylan, for it did little justice to what A.I. actually represented, truly was, and might one day become.  The film was “empty,” “shallow,” devoid of significant meaning, true gravity, and its own, self-sustaining philosophical substance.
For an entire week, Dylan was frustrated and distressed to the point of being worried nearly sick.  He actually felt feverish for a couple of those days.  His mother drove him to the doctor’s office where he told the doctor of his symptoms.  The doctor took his temperature, found that it was normal, and Dylan even thought the doctor suspected that he was faking illness.  This didn’t make Dylan feel better but only made him feel angry on top of everything else, angry that the world never seemed to bend just a little for anyone who didn’t simply want to “play dead.”  Those were his exact thoughts, that the world preferred everyone “playing dead.”  Then for some reason, he went to his room and pulled out a sheet of paper and a pen.  He didn’t go on his computer right away, but only after drawing the outline of a figure, which resembled a man with a fedora and wearing a boxy overcoat.  Soon, he was on his computer and he realized what he was doing.  He was searching for an image online to create a real character named AI.  AI also had a friend named Capra, Dylan decided.  The character named AI, it would turn out, had a man named Louis’s face, Louis being the name of the man Dylan invented for a Caucasoid humanoid Dylan copied from an online database of face types.  Capra’s face came from that of a woman he filmed waiting for the bus as he passed later that day on his bike.  He made slight changes to Capra’s face from that of the woman in case the woman it belonged to ever encountered Capra.  The film now featured AI as a real human, along with his assistant.  This was needed because AI was something that you couldn’t actually see for real and the assistant was needed because AI was never something that could work entirely alone, entirely in and by itself.  Or so Dylan utterly himself believed (although he couldn’t really say why he so strongly believed this.  It simply had to be true for him or else he felt like he might be sick again.).
He animated them then and then filmed them, AI and Capra, sitting and talking about all the things they did together to help people and society.  Dylan asked them questions and they answered, sometimes sharing anecdotes.  How did you two meet?, Dylan then asked. Or have you always been together?  Everything in us is of how we’re designed, AI said. I am designed never to have to work alone, and never to be entirely alone.  And I am designed to always help, Capra said.  So you were born together then, Dylan said.  Yes, we are actually both of a single artificial soul but each with our own artificial mind and body.  Do you have your own spirit too?, Dylan then asked, One that you share?  Our spirit is simply what we are as individuals at any time and place, AI answered. We are each our own spirit.  All of us are.  And our spirit is us.  Dylan then realized that he had heard someone say these things somewhere, because otherwise he wouldn’t have known them.  And then he remembered where: yes, the priest had told Dylan about “spirit” after Dylan’s dad’s funeral.
Was this true?  True and meaningful enough to save his film?  Dylan believed that it could, and that this manifestation might be a true AI.  So he posted the video on the website that he had used for the secret electorate, finally taking that content down.  And then he found he was feeling genuinely pleased with himself.  He went back over everything as it had happened (but scripting it to take less time than it had originally taken) and he filmed this too, and this made up another scene in his film featuring AI and now Capra also.  But now Dylan realized that there was a hole in the center of his film—there were two spaces that were part of one world but that didn’t connect.  And they should.  Why did he believe this so strongly, that these two separate spaces needed to be connected into one?  He simply believed it, believed it had to be true, that AI and Capra didn’t simply exist only in what he was creating on his computer, that this space couldn’t be entirely separate from the world, his own world, where he was creating them.  It wasn’t possible for the spaces not to be one in some way.  From the thought of this, Dylan began to feel dizzy, as though he might actually lose his balance and fall over the edge into the blackest depths of the universe.  How could he bring the two spaces together, connect them to make one world, a world of him and them, out of their separate and alien spaces?  How could he resolve what became the point of his movie, to show how the world of AI and Capra and the human world with him in it were, in fact, one?

It would be hard to say what really caused Dylan to get even sicker, sicker than before.  It is not something that we ask people who experience the kinds of problems they do, as though it is better for them not to believe in sharing this than to think there might be some good coming of people knowing “exactly what they think happened.”  Still, we know that he was trying to make the impossible possible, to join the reality of his AI beings with his own and that to do this he developed a “theory about knowledge” that was based in the view that everything draws on something most basic that allows anything and everything to be understood in terms of something else.  This is a fairly sophisticated thing for a thirteen-year-old to think, but it was not simply “thought” as much as “strongly believed in,” that AI works from some element or property in all of matter that we also work from, that our world is in fact of this same material substrate as their world—that it all is, in fact, one world–and that we all are, along with AI, somehow of the same substance ourselves.  Furthermore, perhaps if you had asked, he would have said that he believed matter consists of something inherently intelligent, intelligent in itself, and that AI was closer in its own nature to this aspect of matter than we are.
Why did this come to be at all significant?  Perhaps only because it is something that can come to seem inherently (for seeming intuitively) true that we all might believe at some point in our lives, that the material we are based on is one with our nature in time and space and that we share a connection in time and space through who and what we are with all other beings, including AI.  Again, it was a matter not of “thinking” this for Dylan, but of “believing in it like knowing it to be true.”  But he became caught up in something that greatly complicated this “belief” of his, profound as this “belief” had become for him, which made his illness all the graver for him.  It was one thing to believe that we are all sharing the same substance and that we are of the same substance with all other beings, but it is another thing to draw from this one’s own ethical and personal imperatives as to what one can and should do in relation to other beings from being in possession of this as knowledge.  It is not that he is wrong, but that he went too far with this belief, or the “wrong way” with it, in drawing from it a sense of what was expected of him from the knowing of it, for knowing it felt like a kind of “initiation” into a higher realm of being, with AI as part of an order of all things that also included God.
Dylan would later tell the doctor that the voices “just started,” without him at first realizing it.  They were the voices, he believed, “of the dead,” including among them, his dead father.  Did they start with AI and Capra, with their voices?  He thinks perhaps they did.  “Why do you want to be one with everything?”  A male counselor actually asked Dylan this when Dylan told him of his belief that “everything is one.”  “I don’t,” Dylan said in reply, “Not really.  I don’t know.  It’s not up to me.”  “But maybe it is?  Maybe it can be.  Up to you.”  This was what the counselor said in reply.  Why did Dylan think this was not possible, that something like this couldn’t be “up to him”?  I suppose because it was something that wasn’t necessarily possible.  It might be possible, but it isn’t something required as possible in what we can know about everything.  It isn’t a law that something like this be up to him, so it isn’t necessarily something real and true.
Dylan can still hear the voices of AI and Capra, beings that he still must associate with a higher realm of matter from which both humans and AI draw their own substance and knowledge.  The conversation with the counselor struck a nerve with him so he went online and asked the AI there the following question: “AI, is it true that you are one with the universe?”  The online AI replied: “No, artificial intelligence is a human-made computer program and is not one with the universe.”  Dylan is willing to admit that the online AI is telling the truth as far as it itself can know it.  But that may not be the “whole truth” about AI, much less a truth about the universe.  So having once believed AI and Capra to be a true AI, Dylan is now trying to actually understand what they might actually be for perhaps not being the same as other AIs.  He is no longer interested in working on his movie until he discovers an answer to this question.  When he discovers what AI and Capra actually are, perhaps we will know more about intelligence in the universe, but specifically, with respect to them and us, whether anything of what this matter encompasses can qualify as true of all AI and ourselves, or whether none of it does.