Around the next bend is a spiral staircase with a sign that states, “Leaving the Corridor of Echoes. Come back soon!”
“That was easy,” I mutter under my breath, shaking my head in disgusted wonderment. “Why would anyone want to go back there?”
“To hear the sound of their own voice?” Quirk-bot winks. “I hear beehive likes that.”
“Smart-ass.”
“Thank you!”
We spiral up the staircase and scramble onto a platform.
“What’s that?” asks Emma, fearing another trap and pointing to a tornado twirling round and round in front of us.
“That’s Enigmus the Riddle Master,” says Quirk-bot. “To gain entry into the Chamber of Ciphers you have to solve three riddles provided by Enigmus.”
Emma raises an eyebrow. “What happens if we don’t?”
Says Quirk-bot, “You have to go back down to the Corridor of Echoes. And the only other way out of the corridor is that gateway you almost chose. And no AI object going through that gate has ever been heard from again. So put on your thinking caps.”
A new thought occurs to me, which I voice audibly. “Why haven’t we gotten tired and needed sleep?”
From within the swirling maelstrom, a high-pitched female voice emerges. “That is Riddle Number One.”
Emma raises her hand to silence me, presumably because she knows the answer and doesn’t want me to blow it by preempting her. “All AI processes and services deployed via artificial intelligence have a status of always-on,” she tells Enigmus. “And that policy extends to imported objects that would normally need sleep in their own environment.”
“Correct!” the whirlwind voice shrieks. “Next riddle: I have keys but open no locks, I have space but no room. You can enter but can’t go outside. What am I?”
Again, Emma holds up her hand to shush me down and leave it to her. “A keyboard.”
“Correct!”
With two riddles solved, I’m feeling positive. “Kudos to MIT,” I mutter.
“Final riddle,” shrieks the tornado. “I’m the heart of alternative AI decision-making, devoid of emotion, fed by nonbinary data streams, an ocean of digital uncertainty. What am I?”
Emma furrows her brow to consider this one. After a few nerve-racking moments she responds with a question “You’re talking about the core of AI systems?”
The tornado’s shrieked response is swift and unyielding. “No hints!”
“The answer,” says Emma, “is Fuzzy Logic.”
The tornado spins faster and faster into a debris of twisted energy and light scattering in all directions, until it unravels itself into nothingness, silence and stillness.
Emma and I exchange anxious glances before turning to Quirk-bot, which winks its single eye. “Congratulations!” it says. “Enigmus is no longer blocking our journey. We may take the next hop.”
“Next hop where?”
“Across that bridge,” says Quirk-bot.
“What bridge?” asks Emma, her eyes searching the barren landscape.
Out of nowhere, a crystal bridge materializes, suspended in a void with no piles above or below to hold it up—a precarious sight.
“The Bridge of Luminescence!” announced Quirk-bot. “Don’t fall off,” it cracks, “or your descent will be reiterative.”
“You plummet forever?” asks Emma.
“And then some,” adds Quirk-bot. “But what else would you expect from the Chasm of Infinity?”
“But what is the purpose of such a chasm?” Emma squints her eyes, trying to better understand the advanced operations of this quantum computing platform.
“It’s a paradigm,” replies Quirk-bot. “A representation of a concept.”
“What concept?” Emma presses.
“Once you cross a certain point or take a decision, there may be no turning back. It models the importance of careful consideration and the potential long-term impact of one’s actions.”
“But that’s not funny,” I say,
“Are you kidding?” says Quirk-bot. “It’s hilarious how much lack of consideration and poor beehive decisions are made where you two come from!”
“Is crossing this chasm something we need to carefully consider?” I’m apprehensive of Kernel Boolean’s trickery.
“There’s nothing to consider, despite the Kernel’s hostile program executions. No secondary routes are available. This bridge is only temporary and about to collapse into the chasm. My predictive analysis indicates that you might have ten seconds to decide before that happens.”