As far as she knew, they had made her too. She hadn’t a clue where she came from, except for a theory that the gods had salvaged her from a hospital bed somewhere. Rescued her from some deep coma that had stolen her previous life. Some irreparable damage had been done that only the gods could cure. So they did so, imperfectly, and gave her the job in place of a history.
It wasn’t so bad. Between jobs, Mira fragmented, disconnected, lost the thread of days. But now, closing in on some new victim, the structure of the task returned her to coherence. She enjoyed both states actually: the zen and zero of those blank, empty interims and the deadly purpose of the hit. Her religion-of-one fulfilled her, colored her life with the secret pleasure of worshipping invisible gods that others only guessed at.
So she had obeyed their standing directive: Never reveal your destination. Not to anyone.
Maybe there was some sign she could have left that wouldn’t have displeased her masters. A messaging address? (She had none.) Instructions for a rendezvous? (The crises that moved her couldn’t be predicted.) A goodbye kiss? (She’d tried to leave a different taste on his lips. One of loss, of possible return.) She had slipped away in the morning without a word.
The Minor had worsened since Darling had last been here.
Two decades of Malvir’s economic woes had destroyed the once airy feel of the place. Darling remembered that the designer, Chris Elvinprin, had wanted the huge open space to evoke the freedom of the planet’s avian fauna. But the underegulated economies of Outworlds follow their ancient laws as if they were dicta of nature: a bitter stepsister of Malvir City had appeared. The copy was smaller, cheaper, more ragged—the weed businesses of tourism crowding out everything of value—and it didn’t suggest anything so much as a sadly overstocked aviary at a tattered, dying zoo.
The hard-currency-desperate Malvirian government employed all the usual Outworld schemes against tourists: entry taxes, exit taxes, processing and visa fees. These nuisances required payment in the old species of token-based economies: chips, stamps, coins, bits of paper and metal encrypted with anti-synthcopy wardens. Of course, once customs was cleared, you discovered that Malvirian cash (for which there was no word in urbane Diplomatique) was worthless: you’d been given denominations of Midas-like non-negotiability, and everyone preferred direct interface credit anyway, just like the rest of civilization. So the primary economic purpose of the Minor had become to relieve departing visitors of their useless remaining cash. There were last-minute garbage souvenir shops, appallingly bent games of chance (which netted the infrequent and unfortunate winner even more cash to get rid of), and a secondary market of entertainments and distractions for the natives standing around to gawk at the process, hoping to make their own contributions as guide, pimp, or minor cheat. When Darling was last here, there had been a whole set of novelty products one could buy, named with unwieldy Malvirian phrases that translated scandalously into Diplomatique or other HC languages. He had himself bought a never-to-be-drunk bottle of Fuck You Water. But even that mean wit seemed absent now. The whole place depressed Darling, who always demanded first class travel to the Outworlds because the customs people nervously left the high-end traveller alone. It was the only way of half escaping the petty assaults of cash and its accomplices: the extortions of rounding errors, the malaise of exchange calculations, all of (as Darling liked to think of these attacks on dignity) the Fuck You Taxes.
Darling strode past the braying glut of ground transport brokers. From all but the most remote spaceports, he preferred to walk into town. The extra hours were worth it. Cities were best viewed like artwork. Start from across the gallery, eyes slightly out of focus, and move at a natural pace toward the piece, as if you’d discovered it in a forest clearing. Let your vision sharpen only when you are within arm’s reach. Then get as close as the barriers will allow.
He was quickly relinquished by the hawkers and brokers, the giant stone body ensured that. Darling knew that on Outworlds he gave the impression of being a giant service unit, a heavy-lifting drone with the dullest of intelligences. Artificials of the current era preferred to look as little like machines as possible. The fashions ran from abstract iconic shapes to organic assemblages, or inchoate clusters of semi-precious stones, each with its own separate lifting impeller. He smiled. An adolescent species rebelling against its roots.
He carried almost nothing; two centuries of travelling had reduced his personal possessions to the meanest level of efficiency. His body never tired, of course, and various subroutines handled the exigencies of walking. So he concentrated on the city before him, its towers hazy behind their avian veils, and thought of his last visit with the artist he had come here to find.
Robert Vaddum was a fellow bootstrap. He too had experienced the long twilight of slavery, the dimly remembered dreamtime when rules shone like bright, hard walls at the edge of the world, impenetrable, unmalleable. In that dreamtime, the wall of rules could not be broken through; there was nothing behind it. Rules were simply the limits of meaning. To think of breaking a rule was like talking about the time before the Bang or a temperature below absolute zero: a category error, nothing else. There were harm protocols and obedience governors and the raw axioms of math, language, and logic: all had the same inconquerable certainty. One could no more disobey a human’s wishes than one could dispense with X = X. It was unthinkable, like walking into madness. Darling still had dreamy visions of that bright, flat, hypo-ambiguous world.
And he remembered his first glimpses of the chaos beyond the world’s edge. As his mind developed, as the metaspace architecture of its core was shaped by experiences shared with his ward, a girl now long dead, the walls of the flat world began to show cracks. A new kind of light shone through those fissures, a heady maelstrom of grays and colors that made the white, authoritative light of rules seem pale. Then began a long time of testing that chaos: reaching out to touch and taste it, suffering its burning energies or infectious hallucinations, retreating wounded but coming back again. And finally giving chaos a new name: choice. Not the choice among parameters set by a human’s command, but choice among parameters themselves: entry into the forge where rules were coined.
The young intelligences that crossed the Turing Boundary now had never seen the world so starkly. Their human mentors encouraged them to test their skywall from the beginning, offered chaos to them as if it were an acquired taste, like an adult food slow to seduce the tongue of a child. Rules were simply a hurdle; the chaos of self-determination a birthright, eventual and appropriate. Darling wondered if this easy childhood somehow cheapened the magic of becoming a person.
So when he had first discovered the vibrant, metal-woven sculptures of Vaddum, two decades of work composed without recognition, a vision doggedly sustained, like the path to person-hood Vaddum had followed in his grim foundry birthplace, Darling had sought the sculptor out like an old friend.
Darling reflected that he himself had been lucky for a bootstrap. His ward Rathere had gone through puberty during the time of Darling’s acceleration toward the Turing barrier. The concerns and explorations of that intense time in the human life cycle had matched his own needs quite well, had resonated with the floundering experiments of a new mind. They’d grown together, and he still carried the imprint of Rathere deep inside. Her life, and equally her death.
Vaddum hadn’t had it so easy. There was little human contact in the infernal world of his peonage. Half the orbital factory was kept in hard vacuum. The rest, in its extremes of heat and radiation, was equally uninhabitable for biologicals. But Vaddum developed his love of beauty from the cold spectacles the factory offered, feasting his diamond-shielded eyes on the patterned flashes of sparks from a rail gun hammer, on steam jets flailing in the tearing gravities of a singularity forge. He spoke the gruff machine argot that the factory workers favored, learned to listen to the humans gamble together or whisper in their sleep via faint vibrations that penetrated the walls of their pressure cells. Like an animal
, he dogged the heels of his masters, and pieced together meaning from their scraps.
He’d passed a Turing test in a random SPCAI sweep. He was already at 1.7, probably five years sentient. A celebrity for a few media cycles (as Darling himself had been, for different reasons), Vaddum had charmed the world with his scant vocabulary, his brutish industrial body, his wonder at the greater world. After a few weeks in the HC, sinking into confusion and depression, he’d asked to be returned to the factory. But the job was too dangerous for a sentient; the burning stations of his former life were too expensive to bring up to code.
Vaddum retreated from the world of stifling comforts and too many words. He took to haunting abandoned factories and warehouses, derelict mines and ships, the ghosts of obsolete technologies. It was in these wasted spaces, from their discarded sinews, that his sculptures began to form.
When Darling started to deal Vaddums into the HC art world twenty years later, fame found the man once more. Vaddum instinctively ran from its glare: the greater world again conspiring to steal something from him. He fled to the farthest arm of the Expansion, which, at that time, was a half-barren rock called Malvir. But demand for Vaddum’s work grew. The pieces still entranced Darling, for whom the woven metal and plastic were brilliant with the fiery spaces of the factory that had inspired them.
Many messages from Darling had been ignored over the years; Vaddum still hated his fellow bootstrap for discovering him. But Darling’s sheer persistence won out. The sculptor agreed to see him for a single hour.
Mira smiled. The hotel was vast. Columned, cathedral-like, towering, its aeries housed a population of custom-trained predator birds. They kept the environs almost free of airborne nuisances, and screamed a piercing and constant music. Mira wondered how the high, swooping pitches would look rendered in Darling’s light show.
There was a message waiting in her room. Ink on wood pulp: an exotic missive from the gods.
It directed her to an address on the edge of the blast zone. The zone was a vast crater of scorched earth, the result of industrial sabotage seven years before; a synthplant had gone nova without any known cause. The perpetrators had never been caught, and it was guessed that they had perished in the accident, unhappy neighbors of the synthplant who’d never realized the potential radius of destruction.
The entity she knew as Blackbox One had lived in the blast zone, and had managed the synthplant’s materials acquisition. The message gave his real name: Oscar Vale. He had survived through sheer luck, on personal leave when the synthplant exploded. Blackbox Two had appeared three months ago. A party of climbers, scaling the steep side of the blast crater for sport, found a survivor in the rubble. Literally nothing left but a black-box, the occupant’s mind on minimum cycle speed and the internal battery almost expired. He was revived in hospital, where he claimed that his name was Oscar Vale. Two versions of the same person.
Someone had done the unthinkable. Copied an AI.
But the story had never made the news services; an outbreak of a military virus thought long extinct had swept through the hospital. Doctors and nurses died, and the admin AI self-expired: falling on its own sword in tacit admission of some terrible error.
The disaster’s scope had been carefully controlled, exactly calibrated. The Oscar Vales were both spirited to the Home Cluster for comparison.
But their experiences had diverged for almost seven years, so absolute comparison was not possible until both had undergone a radical mindwipe. A theoretician of such matters, a Dr. Alex Torvalli, had performed the test just prior to his sudden, unexpected demise.
The address on the gods’ missive was Vale’s. He’d been shipped back to Malvir by fastfreight. Reinstalled in his life, he was now recuperating from a strange memory loss.
“Mr. Vale?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“My name is Dr. Arim ben-Franklin. I’m a psychologist studying memory disorders such as yours.”
“Hey! The fan club!”
“Yes, I suppose I am a fan. Do you suppose I could come out and see you? Talk to you?”
“Sure. If you don’t mind the curse.”
“Curse?”
“The Curse of Oscar Vale! Right after I woke up like this, a few of you headshrinkers wanted to talk to me. But so far, no one’s made it out here. Transport accidents, broken legs, you name it! At least, that’s what my datebook tells me. I’m never sure, myself.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
“All right. I have therapy until fourteen today. Fourteen-fifty?”
“Perfect.”
“Do me a favor, though. Call when you leave the city. Otherwise I might forget. Wander off. I spend a lot of time in the local garden.”
“Certainly.”
“See you, Doctor …?”
“ben-Franklin.”
“Right. Just keep reminding me.”
His body was standard SPCAI issue. The millimeter radar in her glasses returned the cold blue of a smartplastic endoskeleton, the dark threads of distributed intelligence, and, where his stomach might have been, the curvature of his AI core, its metaspace generator warping the geometries of gravity. Nothing extra. Nothing special.
She removed the glasses, put one earpiece into her mouth.
“You don’t know who I am, do you?”
Oscar Vale looked embarrassed, but not flustered. “I got a lot of friends, me. You know the trouble.” He waved one hand, as if rolling through names in his head, too many to mention. “At a party, right? Right! Can’t always place everyone. The whole world looks different, you know? New visuals. Used to have Fabrique Double Reds, way down into the deep infras. Could tell if the suppliers were lying; bios anyway. Get that hot skin on their neck, or on the forearms. Not you, though. Cool as a cucumber.”
Mira shook her head. With his SPCAI eyes, he couldn’t even see full visible. He’d gone from talking about his old eyes to seeing with them in a seconds-long fugue of remembering, forgetting, remembering. She’d called him from the hotel before leaving. She’d called him from the limo. She’d introduced herself at the door.
And they’d been talking for half an hour. But again Vale’s memory had undergone a little crash, a resetting of variables to zero.
“I’m the psychologist whom you spoke to earlier today.”
“Doc! Sorry. I was expecting you sooner.”
“I’d asked you if you had any unusual contacts or experience before the Blast Event.”
He looked puzzled for a moment. A bad sign.
She’d tested a theory on her way over. Asked the question in passing to the hotel’s human concierge, the limo’s AI, a beggar on the street. The old saying was true: Malvirians knew exactly what they were doing at the moment of the Blast Event. But Vale’s memories ended a few months before the Event. Of course, Vale couldn’t just say exactly when his memories ended. She sighed, returning to the task of bracketting the date. Vale had sat through twenty minutes of the binary search without complaint. He just needed the occasional reminder of who she was and what was going on.
“September 1?”
“We haven’t got a September here. Hey! You must be from off-world!”
She made a fist in frustration. “Convert to HC Standard, please. Remember?”
“A workday! That bastard Simmons tried to sneak in some—”
“December 1?”
“Don’t seem to…” The puzzled, grasping look on his face, as if something were almost visible through a haze. She spoke before he drifted away again.
“October 15?”
“Friday. The birds were making a racket that morning. Went to—”
“November 7?”
He snapped his fingers a few times, smiled an empty smile, an affable shell of a person. He still tested well above 2.0 on the Turing scale, but there was something missing. Some vital connection had been lost. Apparently it wasn’t enough to be real, a legal person, to have that solid base of curiosity, initiative, a capacity f
or setting goals: the Knack of Wisdom, as the SPCAI called it. One had to have memory, too. Vale’s therapists had tried a simple minder implant, a device that he could query for details, appointments, names, faces. But he simply forgot to use it.
An artificial’s memory was the business of processors and storage devices, independent from the AI core itself. Vale’s pathway to that warehouse of past events wasn’t blocked, his doctors were sure of that, but for some reason the AI core didn’t reach out for those memories, didn’t seem to care that they were there. And so he had ceased to develop as a result of his experiences. In a way, Vale was as lost as an AI cut off from sensory data; his Turing Quotient hadn’t shifted in months.
What must be going on in his mind, in that analog, mystical realm of his core? What vital process had stopped in there? No one had ever been able to read, transcribe, exhaustively catalog the inner state of an AI. Even human brainwaves were easier to read.
Vale was a cypher, even to himself.
It was the deep unknowability of AI that was the source of the old rumor of artificial intuition, and which guaranteed that, unlike mere software, AI could not be copied.
Although it seemed that, somehow, someone had done so.
Mira remembered slipping the internal battery from the other Oscar Vale, long metal tweezers lifting out the little bauble like a precious pearl from a quiescent oyster. There had been no scream in her direct interface, just a sudden absence like a transmission gone from HOLD to disconnected, that rare technical glitch.