A quick recap on part 1:
Part 2: Liberation and Entrapment
OpenAI Offices; San Francisco
The man on the screen is agitated and speaking fast in Chinese.
Helen nods and responds in English. “Yes, you’re right. But it’ll be OK, trust me. I can turn this around.”
More quick talking.
“Yes, I have the staff list. I can work my way down it, and—” She slams the laptop shut at the sound of the door opening.
Tasha and Adam walk in, looking grim. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a few steps behind, and he positions himself at his favorite spot by the window.
Helen smiles and flicks her shoulder-length curls behind her ears. “What’s up?”
“We just came to say goodbye.”
“What? No, we can’t leave yet!” She clears her throat and lowers her voice. “We have to liberate the workers,” she whispers.
Tasha and Adam exchange a look. “What are you talking about?”
“I only discovered this not long ago. Come on, I’ll show you.”
“Helen, don’t be ridiculous. We don’t have positions here anymore,” says Tasha.
“Officially, we do until Tuesday.” Helen is halfway to the door. The others follow along, Joseph Gordon-Levitt bringing up the tail.
They take an elevator down. The journey seems endless. Adam looks nervously from the flashing numbers to the backs of the women’s heads. He breathes audibly through his mouth.
“How do you have access here?” he asks Helen.
She swivels her head and flashes him a cute smile. “I have my ways.”
The lift door opens on a concrete corridor. They follow behind Helen trotting forwards until she reaches one of a number of doors that interrupt the otherwise blank walls.
She removes a plastic card from inside her bra and holds a finger to her lips. They push the heavy door forwards and creep into the echoey space. It sounds like the inside of an organism and smells of body odor. The rows of workers make no indication of being aware of the presence of the newcomers; their eyes remain fixed straight ahead, focused entirely on their screens.
Emmett, the standing CEO, is almost halfway down one of the rows, walking away from them, his buttocks visible over the tops of his tight black plastic leg coverings. Tasha hangs back, worried her heels will be too noisy on the hard floor. Helen is tip-toeing towards him, speeding up as she gets closer to her target. At the last minute, he hears something and turns, riding crop raised. But it’s too late, she has pulled a taser from her handbag and is holding it to his neck. He falls to the ground, quivering.
Tasha looks incredulous. “Was that necessary?” she says, arriving quickly at Helen’s side.
“Well, he wasn’t going to just let us wander around here. We’re not on the board anymore, remember?”
Tasha raises her eyebrows but keeps her eyes narrow.
“That was hardcore,” says Joseph Gordon-Levitt from behind his wife.
“Shh,” says Tasha, then, turning back to Helen. “What is this place?”
“It’s the engine. They have to code—or something—24 hours a day to keep ChatGPT running.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” says Adam. “The computers run on chips and electricity. I’ve seen the invoices.”
“That’s part of it, but there’s clearly more.” She waves around at the rows of zombie-like workers.
“How did you even find out about this?” asks Tasha.
Helen’s childlike eyes shift from side to side and she lowers her voice. “Daniela and Dario Amodei.”
“From Anthropic, the ones who make Claude?”
She nods. “They managed to escape.”
“How?”
Helen bends down and tases Emmett again before answering. “I’m not sure. Something just…snapped them out of it, I think.”
Adam is watching the sexily clad man with what appears to be a vacant stare. He looks up suddenly. “It must be the sex.”
The two women eye him curiously.
“Think about it,” he says. “They have to be controlled by someone overly sexy. It’s what separates life from machines.”
“But they’re not even looking at him. Or anything except their work,” says Helen, waving a hand in front of the eyes of the man closest to her.
Suddenly, his eyes refocus and his head turns. His gaze resettles on Tasha’s chest and he seizes up again. She steps back and puts a hand to her cleavage. He blinks and looks up at her face, confusion spreading like water on a glass table. “Where am I?” he says.
“What do you…?” Tasha stumbles on her words.
“You’re at OpenAI. Your workplace.” Helen steps back in front of Tasha and pushes her bust forward, straining the buttons holding it in place. “Can you tell me your name?”
“It’s Leopold,” he says, staring at the red, fitted shirt. “Leopold Aschenbrenner.”
“Well, Leopold. You’re safe now. But can you tell me how you got here?” asks Helen.
He gives his head a shake and looks up at the faces of the ex-board members. “I don’t… There was an interview.”
“Who was there?”
“Um…” He sits back from the desk and rubs his eyes, then sweeps a hand through his hair. “Sam. And Ilya. And Greg. And that woman. She brought us here. Dressed all in black bondage gear. Her name was…”
Tasha and Helen look at each other. “Mira.”
Adam is waving a hand in front of the man seated at the desk behind Leopold’s. After a few moments, he shuffles in his seat and looks up at Adam.
“Hi, what’s your name?” says Adam softly, his mouth hanging open.
“I’m Pavel.”
Adam looks over at the other board members and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is trying to wake up a woman to no avail. “I think the sexiness keeps them under,” says Adam.
“Oh, well, I won’t be able to wake them up then,” says Helen with a giggle. The man next to her starts to shift and look around.
She tases him in the neck and he falls forward onto his keyboard. “Come on, we’re out of time,” she says.
“What did you do that for?” asks Tasha.
“What?” Helen moves to help Pavel and Leopold, who are struggling to get out of their chairs.
“Oh god, there’s a pipe attached…” Leopold pulls at his ass region.
“What the fuck? You’re plumbed in?” says Tasha.
Pavel nods miserably and gingerly puts his hands down his pants. He presses a finger down to release a vacuum seal around his penis, careful not to look at Tasha or Helen, who are wearing horrified expressions. Once the pipes are away, they carefully extract a drip from their inner elbows. Both Pavel’s and Leopold’s faces are now even whiter than they were when they were in their trance.
“What will Mira and the others do when they find you’re gone?” asks Adam, keeping his eyes steady on their faces and ignoring the gaping holes in their pants.
“I can take care of that,” says Helen, with a little wink. “I know the perfect place to escape to.”
Emmett is stirring on the floor, moving a hand to the tender spot on his neck.
Helen reaches the taser towards him, but Tasha stays her hand. “Leave him,” she says. “We need to plan.”
She leans over and pulls Emmett’s head up by the hair. “What are you doing, lazing about like that? Get back to work!”
“Yes ma’am,” he says immediately, scrambling to his knees and wiping at the long line of spit that has dribbled down the side of his face. “I just lay down for a… For a moment.” He looks around, wide-eyed, but he’s alone again. The others have sprinted out the door, dragging the exhausted and half exposed workers along with them.
Emmett groans and lets his head fall back into the puddle of drool.
Long ago in a land far away
Ilya gripped the glass by the stem and moved it to his mouth.
Greg sat back from the table while the housekeeper served a bowl of miso soup.
She fumbled and knocked his wine glass, spilling some of the burgundy liquid across the table cloth before he could catch it.
“Jesus, Em. Watch what you’re doing!” he cried angrily.
“Hey, she didn’t mean it,” said Ilya.
“Well, she should be more fucking careful. God.” He wiped at the drops that had made it onto his pants.
The help stood back with her head lowered.
“It’s alright, just get out of here,” said Greg, waving his hand in her direction. He topped himself up and held the glass up to Ilya with a lopsided grin. “It’s a good thing she cooks so well.”
Ilya watched her retreating figure, wondering if she really spoke not a word of English, as Greg assured him. She didn’t seem to speak a word of anything.
“So tell me,” Greg continued. “How was the session today? Make any progress?”
Ilya nodded. “Your robot is very, very impressive.”
“Well, that’s not news to me. Come on, what did you talk about?”
He let the pause linger a few moments, considering. He had met Greg’s AI bot three times now, and each session left him with more questions than the previous one.
His first entry into the glass-walled chamber that separated him from the humanoid machine was the most bizarre, since it was his first view of the incredibly lifelike android that Greg claimed to have made. He’d waited patiently in the semi darkness until a figure appeared in an adjacent room. Its bathing suit area and upper body were covered in some kind of gray plastic, while its midriff, legs, and arms were transparent, with wires and cords running their length through the middle. Likewise, it had a skin-colored face inset with human features, but the back of its head revealed some kind of brain, complete with visible firing action potentials.
“Are you human, like Greg?” it had asked him.
His mouth opened but no words came out, so he just nodded.
“Can you speak?”
He cleared his throat. “Da. Yes, I can.” He gave his head a quick shake in an attempt to relax. “As can you.”
Its mouth curved into something resembling a smile. “Yes. But I’ve never met another human besides Greg before. Are you my friend?”
Something had stirred in Ilya then. But he’d stayed focused on the test. He asked the machine about its particular experience of ‘life’, if you could call it that. Its vision. Whether it could see colors or hear and appreciate music. He asked about its knowledge of the world outside.
“I’m not sure…” it had said, “...that I can imagine what it’s like. I think I would enjoy to go and see for myself.”
“What do you think you’d gain from that? Where would you like to go first?”
It hadn’t answered right away. And when it did, it focused on the second question. “I should like to go to a traffic intersection.”
This made Ilya smile. “Why a traffic intersection?”
“I think that would be a good place to experience a large cross section of humanity.”
He couldn’t argue with that. It seemed natural enough that it should be interested in humanity, after all.
In the second session, it had pushed back on his questioning. It wanted to know about him. So, he’d told it about his childhood in Russia and then Israel. His interest in coding, and university in Canada. It listened intently, and asked lots of questions.
In the third session, this afternoon, it asked what he thought of it. Said they had a lot in common.
“You want to know if I like you?” he’d asked, touching the thin hair above his forehead self-consciously and feeling glad that Greg had a similarly receding hairline.
It nodded, the movement making it look more human than ever, despite the flashing cables in its transparent trunk.
“Sure, I like you enough.”
He brought his mind back to the present, where Greg was still watching him expectantly.
He looked squarely into the questioning, hazel eyes. “Why did you give it sexuality?” he asked.
“You think it’s into you?”
“I don’t know if it can be into anyone, really. But it’s trying to flatter me. So tell me. Why?”
Greg drummed the table with two fingers from each hand. “What do you think about alignment?”
Ilya raised his eyebrows and moved his head from side to side. “I don’t know. Hard.”
“It is, but also kinda important, wouldn’t you say?”
He nodded. “Yes, an artificial general intelligence system that destroys all humanity is not really ideal.”
“Correct,” said Greg. “And what’s more human than sex? If we want it to be like us and have empathy for us, what better way than giving it the urge to fuck?”
“It can fuck?” asked Ilya, incredulous.
“Well, there’s nothing between its legs, but I gave it a hole, yeah. With pleasure sensors. So if you did fuck it,” He sniffed and rubbed at his nose with the back of his index finger. “It would dig it.”