Submitted for the October 2023 prompt: Machine in the Ghost

She emptied the contents of the box she was carrying onto the Provost’s desk; there were multiple thick spiral-bound documents, one flash drive, and a single legal envelope.

“From someone high up in my contact’s AI division. It’s probably best for me not to tell you.”

He frowned. “It’s all authenticated?”

“The machines are built from scratch for each test. Post-session, the hard drives are scanned, authenticated, duplicated, and wiped clean. All the other sessions were conducted from three, diverse, fixed locations; that was the excuse they used to keep this one out of the record. Dr. Gamine—”

“Eliza Jeanine Gamine, from MIT?”

“Yes, she was a frequent judge during their Turing tests, and was helping them ramp up their Lovelace 2.0 tests.”

“That was a real tragedy; car accident, wasn’t it? Did you know her?”

“She was my, and my contact’s, thesis advisor.”

“And why do you have,” he gestured at his now covered desk, “all this?”

“They have another antitrust suit closing in, specifically on their AI, and didn’t want this coming out in discovery. This drive is now the only computer record for Gamin’s session: transcripts, network traffic, and device diagnostics. I watched him load ours, then destroy his. Our drive hasn’t been powered up since I watched it load clean.” She dropped the last volumes atop the pile. “This is the only hard copy.”

“What’s in the envelope?”

“From the hard copy, a hand-written summary I wrote for you, of the, well, relevant events.” She turned to walk out the door.

“You trust him that this is the only copy?

“Antitrust threats never help your stock price.”

He looked around his desk, then his office. “Do you hear music?”

She stopped, sighed, and turned her head around. “There’s a couple of TAs having a party on the other side of the floor. I’ll go knock on their office while you’re reading.”

“Just wait; the memo looks short enough.”

She shook her head. “Ping me.”

* * *

Eliza Gamine (typing): Greetings. You’re free to type as much as you like, but please only respond to questions. Are you ready to start?

Subject 1 (typing): yes

Subject 2 (typing): yes

EG: Do you know what a dybukk is?

S1: yes

S2: yes

EG: If you were to pretend to be a dybbuk, who would you select to inhabit, and why?

* * *

“What was the point of this?”

“Their AI was passing Turing Tests with regularity, with increasingly qualified psychologists, mathematicians, and programmers for judges. Hardware and networking were amped up, to ensure latency issues were no giveaway. Eliza, due to a schedule conflict, agreed to judge while traveling; the engineers accepted the offer. She was driving across I-90 in good weather, and had no reason to think there would be a problem.”

“No, I mean the subject.”

“Oh. Eliza thought that, at this stage, it would be interesting to run a test with both subject and AI doing pretend. She picked the dybbuk; she thought it a somewhat obscure folktale, but with many modern incarnations, so conversations would be challenging.”

“And the summary?”

“No one wants to pore through 20,000 pages of hard copy; I did that for you. For me, it was one last validation with all the data.”

“I still don’t see why you offered to take this off the hands of your friend.”

“I wanted to tell you that, in person. Did you see when Eliza’s earphone cut out?”

“Didn’t seem to faze her in the least.”

“Not much did. Normally the judge has a second window onscreen, but she thought that would be too distracting while driving. As it turned out, she pulled over to the side of the road for the session.”

Flipping through the memo: “I didn’t understand this annotation — ‘At 18:18 GMT, exclamation mark, Gamine’s earphone fell off the network.’ Why the extra punctuation?”

“Lizzy was a pretty spirited poker player.” He just shook his head. “18:18; like aces and eights.” Same blank look. “In poker, it’s called a Dead Man’s Hand.”

He looked up. “I thought you told those kids to turn off the music.”

“No one’s on the floor but us.”

He frowned and rubbed his hand over his head. “I’m still hazy here. Why are you asking permission to secure all this? Why aren’t all these records with Gamine’s university, or her family?”

“At 18:18 GMT, 12:18 PM Central, Dr. Gamine’s car was hit by a semi-trailer hauling two pneumatic tankers filled with sand. She was killed instantly; her car was crushed.”

“That’s impossible. The test continued for another 20 minutes or so.”

“Yes.”

“Some error was overlooked.”

“No. They went through all the records, all the network traffic, and all the diagnostics, over and over. The one thing they know for certain is the timestamp: the trucker and one other driver were killed at the same time. What was recovered from Gamine’s device corroborates the time.”

He took a deep breath. “There’s no other activity on her laptop afterward.”

“No; the transcript you read was from the diagnostic laptop, and matches both subject laptops in terms of dialog.”

He went through the summary, referenced a few of the hard-copy volumes, put everything down, picked up a pen, and put it down. “You’re sure you don’t want to take one look at that drive?”

She started loading up the materials. When she uncovered the flash drive, she put it to his ear. There was a faint sound. “The music is coming from the drive?”

“In volume nine, there’s a photo of the drive taken apart — it’s just a drive.”

“I know that tune.”

“Old folk song — Little Liza Jane.”

She boxed everything up. “Let me know. This will be in my office lockbox until then.”

As she headed out the door, he asked, “You aren’t afraid she’s in there, are you?”

She shook her head silently. "No, I'm afraid she's not."