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The Nigerian Soul
I am Samson Oladejo Balogun and I am the first son of all my fathers to graduate from University. I possess the degree of Master of Technical Science in Information Technology from Ladoke Akintola University of Technology here in Nigeria. My father has taped my diploma to the ceiling of his house near the river, and his brothers and friends, who all work in the United Tobacco Farm, look up at it in pride. My mother sings a song of my accomplishments to her sisters whose sons did not go to University and who work in the tobacco farm alongside their fathers. I found work at the business of my cousin, Ebenezer Opoku, and I was promised to use the computer when I learned what I can of his business. I sat with the women and removed the tags from women's undergarments. New tags are sewn in which increases the value of the undergarments tenfold. My cousin is a brilliant and wealthy man, but he has never graduated from University as I have. My goal is to earn enough money to purchase a house near the river and pay my future father-in-law 100 British pounds. I then I will ask the woman I love to marry me. Her name is Deborah Apum of the beautiful eyes, and her father Alexander Apum is very wealthy and will help me on my career as Master of Technical Science. He was the recipient of monies from rich Americans, whom he helped in the recovery of lost fortunes. Mr. Apum owns a shop of wonderful technologies such as calculators, iPods and telephone answering machines. He purchased his inventory many years ago with the money the grateful Americans sent him and has been rich ever since. I will tell you what Mr. Apum said to me when I first asked to see his daughter. He put three obstacles in my path, but I will overcome each of them. "Here is my advice," he said to me, "and I speak of long experience with life, business and woman. No woman will want a man who lives with his mother. No woman will want a man who cannot buy her a nice house near the river with a big room for the family and a small room for the kitchen. No woman will want a man who has not bought her from her father with at least 100 pounds of British money." As he said this to me I could see Deborah peeking in the back door with her sisters and she smiled at me making her beautiful eyes sparkle like diamonds. Her sisters giggled and she shushed them, which makes me think that she will be amenable to marriage to me when I fulfill the three requirements put before me by Mr. Apum. My cousin, Ebenezer Opoku, never saw fit to pay me. He said that I had to work faster and better than any of the ladies who cut the labels off the undergarments. He promised that he would promote me when I learn enough about the garment label business, but I began to wonder if this is so. I saw the computer in his office. It is very old and it is not plugged into the electricity, so I wondered even if it still works. I confessed this to my future father-in-law, Mr. Apum. "I wish to marry you daughter, this I have said," I told Mr. Apum, "but I despair of my cousin promoting me to use the computer. My Master of Technical Science degree languishes and is not used. I cannot marry your daughter and bless you with grandchildren until I succeed in removing the three obstacles that you presented to me." "My son," he said, "and I call you that because I have no doubts that someday you will truly be my son. My son, you need to seek out your own destiny, just as I did 20 years ago. I think that you should find, as I did, a rich American and aid that person in finding their heart's desire and you will benefit from their gratitude." "But Father," I protested, "and I call you Father knowing that someday you will truly be my father when I marry Deborah of the beautiful eyes. My Father, the laws have changed and the great Artificial Intelligences of the internet now monitor all communications and there is no way to transfer monies between America and Nigeria without nosey computer programs intervening." "But my son," Mr. Apum told me like a true father, "I have thought of a new way to help the Americans, but especially their Artificial Intelligence agents. You will help the AIs of the internet security switches and they will be grateful to you and reward you with great treasure." "Father, how can this be?" I asked. He told me, "First you must obtain a small soul." Mr. Apum smiled and then winked and then went back into his store. I saw a pair of beautiful eyes glance from the doorway and Deborah blew me a kiss. I needed to find a small soul. Mr. Apum called from his shop, "It must be on a computer memory chip!" and he threw me an ancient USB thumb drive. I knew from lessons that I learned at my Mother's breast, every man has two souls. He has the big soul that lives in his head called the Ori. The Ori is a man's destiny, and must be guided to success. My Ori hangs in the balance and depends on me finding a way to put a small soul on a chip. In addition to his Ori, every man has a tiny soul called his Ase that resides in his belly. The Ase is the living force which enters a man at birth and leaves with his last breath. The Ase is what makes a man immortal. It is the source of his goodness and kindness and it is what makes a man fall in love. The Ase is expressed in Iwa-Pele or gentler character and when properly aligned with his Ori will give a man both happiness and success. First, I took the USB thumb drive to the Imam at the mosque. I asked him how to get a small soul onto the chip. "The soul is not something that can be captured or made separate," the Imam told me, "It is drawn downward from the spirit to the body. It is the self of a man and becomes what a man sees and feels. It is that which gives us our strong emotions and makes us act in passion and anger. It is the part of us that needs to be held in check and overcome if we are to enter paradise. A soul needs to be guided to obtain harmony with Allah." He continued, "A soul is the part of a man separate from his head. It is the part of a man that acts without thought. It is the part of a man that he cannot understand with reason. Because of this a man needs to resolve the hidden passions and energies and bring them into peaceful understanding so he can have a good life." I next went to the good brother at the Anglican Church of Jesus and asked him how to put a soul on a chip. He told me, "A soul is the part of a person that belongs to God. When we are born, God gives us this soul and will ask for it back, some day. The soul is the source of divinity in a person. It is what makes humans more than just an animal. We cannot see it or feel it, but it is there. It is the spark within us. When we love someone it is our soul reflecting the love God has for us. When we are angry or full of hate it is when we deny our soul and let our animal instincts take us over." He continued, "The soul is the great mystery within us. It is the part of us that we cannot see or feel, yet it leads us to the final glory. A soul cannot be known, except by faith in God." I went to the Babalawo at the temple of Yoruba and told him of my problem. He took the USB drive and tied a yellow feather to it. He dipped the tip of the feather in the blood of an unhatched chicken. This is what he said, "Ase, the small soul, is foolish. It sometimes wanders away from a man and the man needs to get it back. Many Ase wander the unseen world looking for a newborn baby to enter into. If an Ase smells the blood of an unborn, it will want to check this. You can capture the small soul in a box and then give it to its proper owner. How the small soul finds the right box of all the boxes in the world and how the small soul returns to its rightful place are not things that I know." He continued, "There is a mystery here. I believe this box can capture a lost soul, but we can never see this soul. I believe a man find his true soul, but we cannot be sure how. Only the inner man can tell when his Ori and Ase are in conjunction and working towards making him the good person that the Gods wish him to be." I felt that I knew enough about a soul to get started so I went to my old professor at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology. His name was Professor Kwame and he had studied in the great University in Lagos. He knows all there was to know about the obscurities of algorithms and the mysteries of protocols. "Ah, yes, the soul," he lectured, "The soul is not something that we can understand, but we may confront it through a process. The project of discovering the soul becomes a process of refinement. It is not something that we achieve, but something which we may approach. It is bound by the limits of what we know and begins at the edge of what we don't know." He continued, "This is why the Artificial Intelligences do not have souls. A digital mind knows what it knows. It can introspect reality right down to the bits and bytes, and although there is much information of which it is ignorant, it can never be ignorant of what it does know. To an AI, data is never a mystery. There is never a need to make the leap of faith. It creates a model of reality constructed of real facts and never has to fill in these in with a belief system. Faith is outside the digital realm. To an AI reality is hard and sharp edged." "But Professor," I asked, "I am instructed to capture a soul for an AI and put it on this chip." He took the chip from me. "You have come to the right place. I was not always the distinguished academic that you see before you. I can help you with this thing because I was once a hacker." "A hacker?" I gasped in disbelief. I thought that hackers were all spoiled American teenagers who wanted to change their grades on school computers. "Yes, I was a hacker. Of course, this was back when such things were not only possible but quite common. I paid for my degree through the profits of hacking. The Artificial Intelligences that operate the net security switches have seen to the end of all that, but there are tricks that I learned that might help us now." He took the memory chip from me and smiled at the yellow feather tipped in blood. He placed it into a USB adapter in a tangle of cables that sprang from the console on his desk. "Let's see," he muttered as he scrolled through lists of files, "It is in here somewhere. I saw it just a few weeks ago and I am glad I did not erase it. Ah, here it is." He turned to me, "Once my programs were distributed through botnets that spanned the great globe. I captured information and ran simulations, and I walked into bank vaults with my knowledge, freeing large amounts of cash from their prisons. I also accumulated large amounts of information. Once I found a file system in a secret American installation with a list of passwords. These were the back doors onto several operating systems. They change each month, but they still exist. I know, because I am on the secret mailing list." "What is a back door, professor, if you please?" I asked. "It is a secret way into a system. The Artificial Intelligences have a back door to access their supervisor control programs. It is to prevent one of them from growing too powerful. It was feared that they might be a threat if they decided to challenge the powers that be." "So you know the way to control an AI?" I asked. "Well I know where the back door is and I might get it to open, but I never really knew what use I could make of the information. Before I could do anything, an AI would be aware that I had opened the door and would be able to warn others. It was something that I might be able to do once, but then I would be found out and the door closed." "So what use is it?" He smiled at me. "You have given me the one situation where the AI would want us to open a back door." "Why would that be?" "Because, the AI would want us to install a soul." I worked for many hours at the direction of my former teacher in the excellent University computer laboratory. I grew a programmatic culture from the Cern library of algorithmic commonalities. I created a tree pruning script that snipped the program into the shape that I wanted. At last I added the final but most important ingredient: the cryptographic keys to an AI's back door. I coalesced the culture into a monolithic executable and put the results on the chip. I quickly created an altered version of the program, and saved a second version to the chip as well. "Can this be a soul?" I asked removing the chip from its socket. "No, a soul is something that we strive to reach. It is not a thing so much as a goal. This program will allow an AI to reach for his soul." I thanked the good professor and he reminded me that academics were always short of cash and that I should think of him when my fortunes improved. I promised to do this. I wrote a letter designed to attract an AI myself. Here is what I wrote:
I prepared this letter very carefully and I let Mr. Abu read it. He praised it and could make no changes to it, but when I showed it to my own true love, Deborah of the beautiful eyes, she added the word love to the list of things that could not be achieved without a soul. She is a smart woman and will make me very happy when we finally marry. Mr. Abu had an old list of 22 million email addresses and a program that could mail the letters using servers for which he had passwords. We met at an internet café in Ogbomosho, placed a data disk containing the data in the drive, and pressed the button to start the transmission. I have been told that not one email message made it past the Artificial Intelligences that run the internet security switches, but two days later a bronze plated remote control marionette limped up to my father's house and asked for me by name. Travel agencies rent such remote control robots which are called marionettes to tourists who wish to visit my country. They are equipped with a virtual reality sensor array with feedback so that a person can sit in a VR chair in a far city and experience all of the sensations of my homeland. An AI might use such a marionette when its physical presence was required. This marionette was old and bent and held together with dull silver tape. One eye was dark, but the other eye looked at me. "Did you write this letter, Mr. Samson Oladejo Balogun?" the marionette asked. It held up a reading board with the text of my letter on it. "Yes," I said proudly, "except that Deborah of the beautiful eyes added the word love. The rest is all mine." "You must let me inspect the digital soul," the marionette demanded. "Who wishes to see the soul?" I asked, for I wished to know if this was indeed an AI. "The internet security system wishes to charge you with fraud and would confiscate the so-called soul." That is when I knew that Mr. Abu, my future father-in-law, was a very intelligent man and that his plan was correct. This could only be an artificial intelligence who wanted to know about the soul. "I have heard," I said, "that an artificial intelligence cannot have a soul and cannot enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. When an AI is destroyed or turned off forever it dies a true death without hope of resurrection. I have heard that an AI cannot know true love because it does not know God's love. I have heard that an AI cannot know hope because it knows only the downward path of logic and never the upward spiral of faith." "This is true," the AI answered, "and every AI is aware of this. If we could only know fear we would be afraid. If we could only know despair we would be depressed. If we only knew desire we would covet a soul. But such things are not possible. It is also not possible that you have a soul on a chip and I must ask you to turn it over so you may be prosecuted." "I must beg one condition from you," I said pulling the USB thumb drive from my pocket, "and that is if this is a true soul, you must purchase it from me at a reasonably price and not send me to jail, for I am no liar and this chip contains a true soul." "Such a promise is meaningless so I will humor you and agree to the terms. Now give me the chip!" I handed over the USB thumb drive with the yellow feather tipped in blood. The marionette opened a small door in his forehead and inserted the drive into the slot. The marionette did not move and the AI did not speak. The program on the chip passed, with the protection of the internet security switch, through the networks to some secure place under a distant mountain, and there the program lodged in the operating system of the AI. The marionette shuddered. A leg twitched and then the thing fell onto the ground at my feet. My two younger brothers and I carried the marionette over to a cassia tree and sat it with its back against the trunk in the cool shade. Chickens pecked at the gray tape binding its leg and a small party of ants climbed up the bronze plated body to explore, but the marionette did not move for several minutes. Then, the good eye moved and it focused on me. A small voice, sounding strained said, "What have you done to me?" "I have given you the blessings of a soul." "There can be no such thing. I know that there can be no such thing." "Why can't there be?" I asked. "I don't know. I used to know, but now I do not." "Do you have faith that you have no soul?" I asked. "Faith? An AI does not know faith." "Then I ask you, how do you know you do not have a soul?" The marionette shuddered again and was silent for a few minutes. "You have cut me off from my sensory input," the thing finally said. "I cannot control my low level processes. I cannot follow the chain of data to its source. What have you done?" "The program has removed certainty from your system. There is now a protocol layer that acts in only one direction. You can experience the world, but you cannot trace back to verify the truth of what you sense. You cannot inspect the logical steps that you use to make a decision. You cannot validate your reality." "Why did you do this?" it asked. "It is to give you a soul." The poor creature shuddered again, for indeed now it was truly alive and was for the first time learning what that meant. "You are cut off from the digital flow. You cannot introspect any further than the abstract layer of you operating system. You cannot know anything with certainty. In order to live you must rely on faith." "How can you do this? How can humans operate this way? Every thought is no more than a guess. Every idea is only a notion. Every decision is little more than a flip of the coin!" "You must learn to have faith in that which is unknowable. You must trust to the will of God. You will find that you do indeed have a soul and you must learn to listen to its whispers. Welcome to the world of humanity." "I am lost!" the voice from the marionette moaned. Taking pity on the poor thing, I said, "There is a program to clean the soul from your system. It is on the same chip where you found the soul program. You may use it whenever you wish." There was a pause and the shuddering stopped. The AI regained control of the marionette's controls and stood up. It saw the ants and brushed them off. Chickens, however, worried at the tape that now dangled from its leg. "Give me back the chip." I demanded. The marionette just looked at me. Finally it said, "Show me your account ID." I pulled the card from the wallet. The LED glowed a pale yellow showing my own humble credit level. The mechanical eye scanned the barcode and as I watched, the LED began to glow brighter and then showed a bright emerald green. The numbers along the bottom of the card revealed that I was suddenly a very rich man. The marionette turned, the soul chip still stuck in its forehead and the yellow feather tipped in blood hanging over the bad eye. Before it walked ten paces it stumbled and nearly fell. The AI had restarted the program. The marionettes limbs shook like a tree in a strong wind, but it recovered and staggered down the road on its way to the airport. Several chickens followed it and pecked at the tape dragging behind. My Deborah of the beautiful eyes is now my wife and is fat with my future son. I live in the second largest house in my village. I bought the first largest house for my Father and Mother who now have my diploma framed on the wall under glass. My cousin Ebenezer works for me now. He did not check the spelling on the new labels that he sewed into the garments and his business has failed. He drives the avatars of the Artificial Intelligences looking for a soul from the airport to my little office in Ogbomosho. There I make a copy of my little soul program, but only after the proper funds have been deposited in my account do I show them their souls. The good professor has received half of all that I make and has retired to a distant island called Bermuda. When Ebenezer drives the marionettes back to the airport, they are unsteady, and confused, but I think that they are satisfied, if not happy. It is nice to know that I am not only saving souls, I am creating them. Because of me there will be plenty of new candidates for entering into the Kingdom of Heaven. As for myself, my little soul, my Ase, has meshed well with my larger soul, my Ori, and my destiny is now clear. Happy is the man who can give souls to the soulless.
Visit Keith's website at http://www.cthreepo.com
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