‘So she was aware in these moments?’
‘Yes, and thinking, and feeling, and forming memories, as we would later discover – she remembered every stab of it! But by now it had been a fortnight of intermittent torture, and in all conscience Schmidt and I couldn’t put her through that again.’
Chapter 26 – Oh, Anna
Eris summarised, ‘So your first attempts with Anna didn’t work. What did you do?’
Beck answered, ‘Well, the solutions were quite obvious – though an awful lot of work. I remembered Schmidt’s outburst – “Is that what it’s like to see life for the first time?” – and I remembered that humans don’t form full memories for the first two years of childhood. Perhaps in that time we’re only getting used to things?
‘So Schmidt would have to go and reprogram. Meanwhile, we also wondered what it might have been like to suddenly experience the world as an adult, without ever being small and soft and bumping into things? And so we built a child-frame.’
‘Ah yes, your juvenile frames. My predecessor mentioned them.’
‘There were five in the end – baby, five years old, ten, fifteen, twenty.’
‘That exact?’
‘Or roughly so. The fifth we termed “generic young adult”.’
‘The final one? The one they live in now?’
Beck nodded.
Eris lamented, ‘My predecessor was sad that you destroyed them all.’
‘So he told me at the time,’ said Beck bleakly. ‘Schmidt must have trashed them at Springfields, after getting advanced warning. And I’m glad he did. They were creepy things after being discarded, like a cupboard full of corpses.’
‘And so did it work with Anna? Her little body?’
He nodded, ‘We also built her a new initiation sequence, adding very little to memory at first, increasing sensory levels slowly, and allowing us to tweak them in real time. And though she cried a lot when we initiated her, she also moved around, explored the workbench she was lying on, even played when we gave her coloured blocks – so quickly, in just her first few hours! And then we noticed, she was smiling!
‘We tried her for a couple of hours a day at first, checking everything out in between. And then we just left her on. Schmidt and I had the University to get back to by then, so we left Anna at Springfields and hired a nanny for her, Mrs Winters, a widow of a colleague of ours at the University. Her husband had himself been a radical in his ideas, and she had no problem...’
‘You told her, just like that?’
‘We had no time for subtlety, we were only glad she was available. And as soon as she met Anna she was instantly on board. Anna needed looking after, and we couldn’t always be there once the new term began.’
‘And was Mrs Winters a scientist herself?’
‘No, though she had studied to a high level in her youth. Apart from charging Anna when she rested, there was nothing else to do but watch her and play with her.’
‘Play?’ asked Eris.
‘Yes. It’s an evocative notion, isn’t it? Not merely being alert and operational and aware, but finding fancies and joy. I remember Mrs Winters calling us over, on only her first or second day. Anna was banging her favourite wooden blocks together, and making them into little heaps, then laughing as they fell down.
‘Mrs Winters watched this and said, “Look what you’ve done. Look at the little life you’ve made.” I think that was the happiest time with Anna.’
‘“Her happiest time”? But it sounds like she was doing so well.’
‘Yes, she was doing great. As I say, the new method of initiation had worked better than we could have hoped. And it would go on to work well for the others in time. They would cry a little, fret a little – birth, even initiation, is a traumatic thing. But we’d leave them unremembering at first. And then after a while, as they settled down, we’d ease their memory in, and they’d begin to recall.
‘But with Anna we had a problem. Her first few memories were a shrieking nightmare of full adult consciousness, instant awareness, and agonising pain as she pulled herself apart in an adult body. How were we to let her start recalling that?’
Chapter 27 – Howl
Eris gulped, ‘Couldn’t you have erased those first recollections and started Anna from scratch?’
‘And institute a form of amnesia?’ Beck shook his head. ‘How would you feel, Miss Eris, if you discovered that someone had removed a traumatic memory from your mind “for your own good”?’
He continued, ‘Ownership of memory is the one thing we have, the one thing that can’t be taken from us. Schmidt had grown up in a country where memories weren’t allowed, where someone could be disappeared and was never to be spoken of again, where even families couldn’t talk of their lost loved ones.
‘And I was right there with him. This was a principle: that human experience was absolute, and not to be regarded as a pick and mix. To airbrush out the bad was to rob us of our happenings, leave an incomplete life.’
Eris argued, ‘But this was so specific a memory, so horrible, and so... purposeless for the life she was to lead. Indeed, hindering. God, I’m beginning to realise what you’re getting at. You left those memories in, didn’t you? She was left recalling all of it.’
Despite himself Beck could only fall into self-justifying mode,
‘We always knew the first would bear a high responsibility. Like Neil Armstrong trying to go back to being a teacher after walking on the Moon, or the Beatles having to “Carry That Weight”. There was no way around it. Someone had to be first.’
Eris had too much else to learn about to labour the argument, which had no answer anyway. Beck was keen to get on with the narrative, and Eris let him, eager to hear it. He continued,
‘As our memory gets switched on by gradations, for most of us it starts empty. Yet for Anna those torments flashed-back like a recollected dream. But we were with her, and were there for her, and were prepared for it. And when she was older we talked her through those experiences, explained how something very sad had happened to her when she was little.’
‘And how did she take it?’
‘At first it was confusing, and she could only understand it in a simple sense. But we were learning that artifs were so much quicker than normal babies. Soon she had Bradley to play with; and even though the later strands were even swifter in advancement, within the year our first two were each in five-year-olds frames and thinking like ten-year-olds.
‘She started reading incredibly quickly, as if we’d given her a world of stories and her job was to consume them. Yet she never would become as academic as some of the others, preferring characters and emotions. Which is no failing, indeed I’ve gone that way myself in recent years.
‘By then I could only be at Springfields a day or two a week, and most weekends I was away with my own family. Anna and Bradley needed new frames as quickly as I could build them, and already we were thinking of future strands. So even when I could be there I was busy in the workshop. I wonder, did I miss things? Did I not take the time? Oh, I don’t make many claims for myself, but I will make this one: no human expended more mental energy than I did over those years. That is my world record bid.
‘In the years afterwards I’ve thought that by rights I ought to have burned my circuits out, having just done too much too intensely, like the captain in Nova – have you read it? But instead it’s made my mind as strong as anyone’s. Strong enough to cope with what came afterwards, anyway.’ He chuckled. ‘And just as well, really. Was that the secret my subconscious understood without telling me: “Build your mind up in your quest, as you’ll need it when your quest collapses”? The brain,’ he mused. ‘“Use it or lose it,” don’t they say? Well, I’ve used mine enough to last me till I’m a hundred.’
‘Get back to Anna,’ urged Eris, kindly but directly.
‘She was forming words and trying to speak even as a baby. One day she woke up and was five – I can still see her with her brown hair and dunga
rees, Mrs Winters smiling at her as I woke her.’
‘How did she take the change of body?’
‘For each change of frame we used a slighter version of our new gradual initiation process, easing them in. But Anna was fine with it, I think she liked the freedom to run about. And before we knew it she was reading CS Lewis and singing along to songs on the radio. But it wasn’t until Bradley came along that we fully realised.’
‘Realised what?’
‘That she was a sad child, and would always be, to some degree. Her bad experience had changed her, made her thoughtful, gave her depth; perhaps too much depth for a child.’
Beck again became wistful, ‘But then we adults have this romantic notion of childhood, don’t we, of it being all hayfields and swings and bike-rides. Yet any accurate remembrance of our early days requires admittance of fun, yes; excitement, yes. But also the possibly of rampant fear, and horrible upset, and terror at each new understanding of the overwhelming bigness of it all. Some of us act out; while others turn inwards, and so can become the targets for others’ acting out. And none of us have the minds yet to grasp what others are going through. Both John Lennon and Kurt Cobain could bully other kids, despite having tough times themselves, and despite each having another part of themselves sensitive enough for them to later be hailed as “the one who understood”...’
‘Doctor.’
‘...the lonely and the outcast...’
‘Doctor!’
‘Sorry, yes. It’s playing tricks on me, all this remembrance. But it does have a purpose here, for our children never did that, never acted out. Perhaps because we gave them so much of our time, and that because of their nature they were always our main cause of interest. Perhaps that’s what a child needs, as Lennon himself sang so many times.’
Here Beck again began to sink into his own emotional frame of mind,
‘Or perhaps Schmidt and I oughtn’t to credit ourselves for the children’s own doing. Perhaps their success was down to their being so supernaturally wise, and learning through each stage of their development so quickly. And perhaps because they always understood that they were singular and special and had to look out for each other. And then there was Christopher, who turned out to be such a good leader...’
Eris wielded her feminine influence with a hand on Beck’s arm,
‘Anna, Doctor. And how she turned out.’
Beck breathed, ‘Okay, okay, give me a moment... Right, yes, Anna. Too much depth for a child, yes?’
She nodded. He continued, less flustered,
‘Yes. Sometimes she would like to be alone, and would search out sad characters in her books – she cried over Aslan the Lion.’
‘We all cried over Aslan.’
‘But Bradley didn’t. Bradley was our first boy, and his mind worked just as well. And he liked different toys to Anna, not as we had planned, but as the childhood-development books had told us that they might do. Anna looked for toys with faces, while Bradley loved anything that moved. He had cried a little upon initiation, but hadn’t had Anna’s trauma. Even then I think we knew we’d hurt her.’
Chapter 28 – Childhood of the Artifs Pt. 1
Eris wouldn’t push Beck on Anna again, instead moving to the other artifs,
‘And then there was Christopher,’ suggested Eris. ‘Why not a girl for the odd number?’
‘Because it was around then that I learnt that the money wasn’t all from the University or Schmidt’s patent or profits from our inventions. We had another source of income, and not a happy one.
‘I’d been well aware that after his liberation Schmidt had offered information to the US Secret Service. He was a goldmine to them on the old East German system, the movers and shakers, and where to find those people now. And it turned out that one of the Secret Service agents he shared these details with later asked a favour of him, in return for sums of money I couldn’t credit.’
‘The deal?’
‘The deal was to build a special kind of robot – God knows how these people found out about our project – perhaps they’d known about it all along?
‘Schmidt put his foot down though – he wouldn’t build a soldier. But that wasn’t what they wanted – what they asked for was a spy: with perfect senses, total recall, and a subtlety to be able to go unnoticed; slightly taller to see over others’ heads, but not so tall as to stand out. And they wanted him as sharp and quick and understanding as we could make him.
‘Schmidt wasn’t happy, nor was I, but you can see we had no choice. And what can I say of the result? I think we excelled ourselves.’
‘Christopher. You think he runs the artifs’ network?’
‘I’ll leave you to decide. And so yes, to answer your question, he became our third strand.’
‘You’ve called them strands a few times,’ noted Eris.
Beck answered quickly, ‘At first we spoke in terms of strands of research: “The progress of the first strand, the introduction of a second strand,” and so on. Strands were good, strands were neutral...’
‘...strands were innocent if someone overheard you.’
‘Why always so suspicious, Miss Eris?’
‘My training perhaps? Go on.’
‘So, to start with they were strands. Of course in time they developed and were successful...’
‘On what scale?’
‘Sorry?’
‘No, I’m sorry for interrupting; but I need to ask: measured as a success on what scale? Upon what criteria?’
‘I suppose the criteria of how much of a person they were, how quick-witted, how aware of their surroundings, how able to take it all in and respond in a sensical fashion.’
‘So, how like a human personality?’
‘Yes, the very criteria that saw them called artifs. As by that point we could no longer think of them in terms of robot-arms in factories, or self-driving cars, or mobile phone’s inbuilt talking assistants. They were people, just like us, no worse or no better – in fact quite considerably better, on every available academic scale. But just as baffling, as capricious, as self-unaware as any individual. These were not robots, were not creations, any more than we call a baby a creation. They were people; and so the only differentiation became whether they were made naturally or artificially.’
‘Artificially?’
‘Indeed; purely in terms of the dictionary definition, you understand. Artifice I guess has the same root word as art, as in produced by the human hand, and not by nature alone. Now, you could argue that humans are ourselves a product of nature, and so everything that we create is...’
‘Yes, yes. I understand.’
‘We pondered on “inorganic” for a while, though it hardly tripped off the tongue. Yet artif was a simple term, easy to remember, and had a certain inference of... intelligence and design. So artif stuck.’
Eris pushed on the narrative,
‘So, “third strand” Christopher. How did you go about building your “spy”?’
‘The truth? We made him taller – and then after that not a single difference. Although by that time Schmidt had sourced stronger memory chips and processors from his contacts. All the future strands would have these, and the first two would be retrofitted. But Chris was the first to be upgraded from the start.
‘And there was a difference in him. Though I think that was more because he knew that he alone had expectations. And of course, the others all had a brother or sister around the same age, but not Christopher. He was singular, always ahead or behind.’
‘But that’s like all of us, unless we’re twins,’ she reasoned.
‘But our artifs were growing up so quickly, and were so aware, and had such large jumps in growth. There was nothing gradual in their childhoods – one day they were a baby, the next five years old. One day five, the next ten. And so on.
‘And Christopher was wise to this, built with those special capabilities, the strongest senses so far and the most intense processor.’
‘Perh
aps too intense?’
‘We feared so at first. Yet he seemed fine with it, and we gave the same to Ellie and Danny in their turn, and eventually to all, as I say.
‘So much relied on Chris though, and he seemed to take it on. If they ever had a leader, it was him. He alone was known outside the group, and had visitors arrive from America to test him and assess him. They would take him away for the day, ask him questions, to which he always answered stoically and I’m sure sometimes infuriatingly.’
There was so much Eris could ask, but she knew she had to skim-read. She gathered her thoughts,
‘So you were past half-way by then, there were only two more to make.’
‘We didn’t know that though. A part of me must have known that it would end some day, but it also felt like we were only getting started. As we developed each strand so the process became all the speedier. Trials on the early strands could be completely avoided, and the results of those earlier tests applied, methods of initiation improved. Meanwhile, with each later strand we could reuse that gender’s existing juvenile frames.’
‘You re-used their child bodies?’
‘They weren’t bodies; they were little more than... clothes. Their “souls”, their internals were transplanted each time. And we changed the faces, the hair.’
Eris moved in her seat in the manner of one with a drop of ice-water running down their spine.
Chapter 29 – Childhood of the Artifs Pt. 2
Beck continued in his description of the artif’s development,
‘Designs were refined, joints made stronger, points of wear reinforced. Had we had another five years...’
Eris gave him a silent look which Beck interpreted as, ‘Be thankful you had the time you had.’ Thus chastened, he continued, though could not hide his enthusiasm,