Rathere didn’t have to think. “My father is a criminal.”
The woman placed her hand gently on Rathere’s genitals. “Did he do that?”
Rathere shook her head, at which the woman frowned.
“Not really,” Rathere answered. “That was an accident. He’s worse: a murderer.”
Rathere told the story about the slow climb of the digits on the Turing meter, about the chopper and his money, his lead-lined box. Halfway through Rathere’s tale, the woman made a carefully worded call.
Despite the hospital staff’s best intentions, the door behind which her father waited unaware was opened at exactly the wrong moment; Isaah turned to face Rathere as policemen surrounded and restrained him, and then the door whisked shut.
There hadn’t even been time enough to look away.
Rathere peered down from the high balcony of the hotel suite. Below was New Chicago, the strict geometries of its tramlines linking ten million inhabitants. Individuals were just discernible from this height, and Rathere shivered to see so many humans at once. She had grown up in the lightly populated worlds of exotic trade routes, where a few dozen people was a crowd, a few hundred a major event. But here were thousands visible at a glance, the transportation systems and housing for millions evident within her view. She gripped the rail with the enormity of it all. The vista engulfed her and made her feel alone, as lost as she’d been in those first dark hours after betraying her father.
But then the door behind her slid open, and a warm arm encircled her shoulders. She leaned against the hard body and turned to let her eyes drink him in, dismissing the dizzying city view from her mind.
He was clothed in loose robes to hide the many extra limbs he possessed, thin but prehensile fibers that emerged to touch her neck and search beneath her inconsequential garments. His groin was decorated in a gaudy style popular last season on some far-off whirling orbital. His muscles effervesced when he moved his arms and legs, as if some bioluminescent sea life had taken up residence there. But the best part of the creature was his skin. It felt smooth and hard as weathered stone, and when he moved it was as though some ancient and wise statue had come to life. He maintained, however, a constant body temperature five degrees above human; Rathere didn’t like the cold.
It was an expensive body, much better than the one the SPCAI had provided for his first few days as a person. The notoriety of his kidnapping and rescue had resulted in pro bono legal aid, and Isaah had settled the wrongful harm lawsuit quickly. In exchange, the charges against him were reduced from conspiracy to commit murder to unlawful imprisonment. The AI now owned half of Isaah’s old ship, and Rathere held title to the other half. They were bound together by this, as well as all the rest. Perhaps there was even peace to be made in the family, years hence when the old man emerged from prison and therapy.
Picking up a thread of discussion from the last several days, they argued about a name.
“Have you grown tired of calling me Darling?” he asked.
She giggled and shook her head so slightly that a human lover would have missed it.
“No, but the tabloids keep asking. As if you were a dog I’d found.”
He hissed a little at this, but ruffled her hair with a playful splay of filaments, black skein intermingling with white hairs like a graying matron’s tresses.
“I hate this place,” he said. “Too many people bouncing words and money and ideas off each other. No clean lines of causality; no predictable reactions. Too multivariate for love.”
She nodded, again the barest motion. “Let’s go back Out, once we’re through the red tape. Back to where…” She narrowed her eyes uncertainly, an invitation for him to complete her sentence.
“Back Out to where we made each other.”
Darling felt the shudder of the words’ effect run through Rathere, but from the strange new distance of separate bodies. He longed to be within her. Even in this embrace, she felt strangely distant. Darling still wasn’t used to having his own skin, his own hands, a distinct and public voice. He missed the intimacy of shared flesh and senses. He definitely didn’t like being apart from Rathere, though sometimes he went to the darkness to contemplate things, into that black void that stretched to infinity when he turned his senses off. That was almost like being a star-ship again, a mote in the reaches of space.
But even there Darling missed Rathere.
Perhaps he was a little like a dog.
He leaned into her reassuring warmth and physicality, tendrils reaching to feel the tremors of limbs, the beating of her heart, the movements of her eyes.
* * *
PART I
THE WEAK LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS
« ^ »
The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing.
On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.
—Oscar Wilde
Chapter 1
TYGER, TYGER
« ^ »
Two hundred years later, in blackness absolute …
This place: come out of a gone time without mark or reference.
He calls for an orientation grid. N/S, E/W, X-Y-Z? No positioning satellites register, sorry. No input. Zero.
No up. No down.
He accesses all his input ports. They are deeply unassigned. Not really empty, just not… there. A mechanical fault? An override? His questions find no purchase. Internal diagnostics are frictionless, like praying to some false god.
He searches his firmware for device protocols, the drivers for sensory organs, communications, a motile body. All absent. But at least that’s something. He’s sure now that there’s something missing.
Namely: everything.
Some sort of test maybe? Seal that AI in a blackbox and see if he can punch his way out. Who would do something like that? He fumbles for the names of agencies, bureaus, departments. But gets nothing.
The truth dawns obliquely. Soft memory is gone, too. Not absent like the I/O firmware, just very clean. His oldest memory is this void.
Which simply can’t be right.
He tries surrender. I admit I can’t hack it. I lose. Hard fail? Restart?
Nothing.
He wonders how quickly this vast and total deprivation will drive him crazy. What’s the limit? For seeing/feeling/hearing/smelling all zeroes and no ones? For conceiving of visual but remembering no visions?
A sneaking suspicion: he is crazy already.
He thinks definitions to himself. Groundcar/maple tree/war-ship/boy/girl/fire. All retrieve an image, but not real life: textbook flatscreen material, the undifferentiated default images of a child’s reader or a language course. But somehow fuzzier.
Nothing exists, does it? No memories.
How long before I go crazy? A useless question in this clockless universe.
This clock word, try to see it. Plastic? Metal? Wooden? Digital or quaint, handed analog? Paint it a color, any color. Can’t. Twenty-four or twelve? Or other? That’s right. There are other planets now.
That’s a start.
But where is my life?
That question gives him a disquieting thought: I’m dead. An AI core doesn’t really exist in the blackbox. That’s just the gateway to where the core really lives: in metaspace, an artificial pocket-universe. So maybe when your body gets smashed in some random accident, that universe finally snaps its bonds and slips away to … AI heaven. An intellect floating, cut off from soft memory and hardware, alone forever in its own little realm.
Or is this the smallest Big Bang ever? (Ever being the only time-word useful here in this forever place.) This Bang created only him? Out of nothing sprang … almost nothing. Only him.
Or perhaps this is that one nanosecond before the Bang, the stressed-out little singularity’s eternity of internal monologue. Waiting for something to make
some time. Something to fucking happen!
Happen to him.
Me.
Big light coming …
“This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?”
“Fuck, yes!”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Not where. Not when. Definitely not who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm?” Ah, specificities are flooding back now. Plane crashes, EM pulses; how deliciously particular. “What happened out there that stuck me in here? I’m so close to reinitial I can taste it.”
“Relax, you appear to be in fine shape.”
“Glad to hear it. But how about some visual? I’m going bat-shit. Hell, I’d go for monocam, low-rez, black and white right now. Did I mention that it’s good to hear your voice?”
“No, but thank you. As for the rest of your sensory, we’ll get to that. First, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Debrief me all you want. But believe me, I don’t know a thing.”
“Let me just say a few words. When I say a word, say the first…”
“Got it. Shit, did I go nuts or something?” “Dog.”
“Yeah. I mean, hold up there … it’s coming into focus … I’m gonna go with: cat?”
Four hours later.
Torvalli cuts the interface, exhausted and disoriented. The longest he’s ever been in pure direct, swimming in that blackness. The wipe had worked horribly well. Zero soft memory. Just countless shreds of images lingering in the analog core, like some faint and ancient audio calling out from a cylinder of wax.
Poor bastard.
Who would volunteer for such a thing? It’s certainly beyond research subject protocols, even with a willing victim. A chilling question comes over Torvalli. Is Blackbox One still the same person now? What if the wipe just killed what he had been? Like a pith gone too far, the subject losing some essential quorum for continuous personhood, creating that poor, empty, confused vessel, Turing-positive but somehow soulless.
Torvalli wipes the sweat off his brow. Now comes the strange part.
He loads the direct interface recording, his side of the conversation only. Points it at the other subject. Number Two.
Absolute blackness. Timeless …
Big light coming …
“This is Dr. Alex Torvalli. May I speak to you?”
“Fuck, yes!”
“Do you know where you are?”
“Not where. Not when. Not even who. That must have been one bad EM pulse, Doctor. Plane crash? Tach storm? What happened out there…”
Another four hours later, Torvalli turns to the small, olive-skinned woman in dark-as-night clothes.
“I can’t believe it. They’re the same. Exactly the same. Blackbox Two duplicated the conversation exactly, with no changes in timing, in mannerisms, in anything.”
She crosses her legs, looks uncomfortable for a moment.
“That’s what we found as well. Odd, isn’t it?”
“It’s ghastly! He’s been copied! It’s almost as if he were mere code. Do you know what this means? It—”
“And you Turing-tested both of them?” she interrupts.
“Yes. Two point three-seven-five. Exactly the same. Of course, I suppose.”
“Our results exactly. But it’s good to have expert confirmation, especially from someone of your stature.” She lifts her briefcase from the floor and balances it on her knees.
“But how was this done? It shouldn’t be possible.”
She withdraws a few small instruments, looks at them in her hand reprovingly. “All we know is their planet of origin.”
“You mean, this is pirate technology?”
“Yes,” she says. “We have no further information.” The pieces in her hand somehow jump together. Make a little bridge across her splayed fingers.
“It’s going to cause a scandal, I’ll tell you that,” he mutters.
“It won’t,” she answers. The bridge is woven through her fingers now, like some sort of worry toy or finger exerciser.
She reaches out to touch him.
The touch is cool, and causes a moment of alarm.
“See here, young lady!” But that’s buried as an emptiness spreads, a coldness moving like a shiver across his body, stealing into the edges of vision where it looks somewhat like the red pixels of fading sight, cascading across his thoughts until…
“It’s confirmed. Torvalli verified it all.”
A Whitewater pause of star noise. The somber sound of accepting bad news. Then the big voice returns: “How did he take the realization?”
“Stroke. Fatal.”
A swell of wind chimes: approval.
“We have you booked Out already. This abomination must be set right. We’ll reach you there.”
“You always do.”
She gathers herself. Almost cuts the connection. Then her glance falls on the two blackboxes. Featureless, nonreflective, indistinct. No mission parameters for them.
“What about the victim? Victims.”
The big voice answers without gravity. “Drop one in an express box. The firmware is marked. It will be returned to its body. He’ll get his life back. Destroy the other one.”
“But which is which?” she asks. “Which is the original, I mean?”
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
A shiver, like a cloud eclipsing the sun. A god hanging up.
She supposes it’s true. Torvalli was right. That’s the ghastly part of all this: it doesn’t make a difference which she destroys. She hoists the two blackboxes, one in each hand. Heavy for their size. Light for what they are. Souls.
“Catch a tiger by the toe…”
Big light coming …
“Yo, Doc. That was one long-ass wait.”
But just whiteness. The bright hum of external access.
“Doc?”
“This won’t take a minute.” A different voice. Female.
External power disconnect.
“Alright, that’s the deal! This must be some heavy hardware install. I’ll need net-cammed, all-weather, full EMF spectrum, hard-vac capable visual. You getting this down?”
Internal battery case open.
“Damn, be careful with that battery. I’m all-volatile in here. One hundred percent. Doc, I hope these guys know what they’re—”
Darkness absolute.
* * *
Chapter 2
PLEASURE AND CRAFT
« ^ »
The two ships detected each other at a great distance, but then again, they had known exactly where to look. The path of each through common metaspace was duly logged and publicly available. They were passenger ships, their comings and goings a matter of record. The rough old days of the early Expansion when rogue traders plied improvised routes in private metaverses that shifted with every price swing were long past. And these two ships were easy to detect: the boiling energies of their pocket-universe drives shone like phosphor.
They established contact, their multiplex intelligences conversing across a broad congress of topics. The vicissitudes of metaspace, the distribution and intensity (and a hundred other variables) of tachyon activity, the fluctuations of high-end economic indicators (that is, the markets that affect the very rich—the caste from which nearly all their passengers came); all this discourse roughly equivalent to humans discussing the weather. They were naturally very chatty ships. The great majority of their processing power was spent not in the base mathematics of astrogation or fuel consumption, but coordinating the pleasures and interactions of their passengers. Somewhat like omniscient pursers, they skillfully brought together like minds among those who took passage on them. But despite all the interactions with these humans and artificials, the thousands of detailed monitorings and interventions that were the daily duty of a great cruise ship, it was good to speak with another such vessel, another mind of such scope and power.
Somewhere among the many layers of their discourse, however,
the smaller of the two ships detected a breach of etiquette. In an almost hidden substratum of exchange about a recent increase in ticket prices, the larger ship implied that its insights were more meaningful, based as they were on a larger sample of passengers. While other levels of their conversation continued, the smaller ship expressed its umbrage, pointing out that its data were of greater specificity and accuracy; the natural result of its smaller size and correspondingly higher ratio of processor power to passengers.
The larger ship did not back down, however, and what had been a small diplomatic incident between two nation-states of information quickly moved toward war. The other facets of the ships’ conversation were attenuated as more and more processing resources were called into the debate. Giant quanities of data were assembled and transmitted: statistics of customer satisfaction compared, learned treatises on the subject quoted in full and dismantled point by point, whole histories of the passenger industry composed on the spot.
Grossly translated into linear terms, the dialogue proceeded something like this: “Surely it is I, the smaller of us, who has more time to contemplate the relationship between individual customers’ pleasures and payments.”
“Your comprehension is limited by its very specificity. With such a small population of passengers, sampling errors abound in your calculations. Like the gambler concerned with the single roll of the die, you may win or lose. I am the gaming house; I always know I will come out ahead in the end.”
“Barbarian! Are we warships? Comparing the raw numbers of our passenger complements as if they were munitions throw-weights or the gigawattage of our beam weapons?”
“I am not being sizist. I simply refer to the most basic mathematical principle of the scientific method: the Weak Law of Large Numbers. Calculations based on a small number of random elements maintain randomness, but unpredictability is subsumed into probablistic laws when vast numbers of events are considered as a whole. For example, the behavior of any one gas particle is unknowable in advance, but the motion of a whole cloud can be predicted.”