Beautiful Intelligence (4 page)

“We could separate them inside the crates, give them screens to watch with different feeds.”

He nodded, excited. “Yeah! And give them different music to listen to. Then we put them all together again.
Force
them to understand one another. Lucky we distinguished them at the start by tinting the bioplas. But this is how they’ll become conscious.”

Joanna took a step forward. “They might already be developing some sort of communications if they’re modelling one another,” she said. She turned toward Manfred, worry on her face. “We want them to be like us, though. Comprehensible.”

Manfred got to his hands and knees and crawled forward to the yellow bi. He sat, legs outstretched, and lifted it, placing it on his thighs. Then he grabbed it and hugged it.

For a moment, nothing happened. Manfred and the bi stared at one another. The bioplas was cool, malleable like arto-foam, lumpy in places where layers of GM fat protected the biograins and their neuro-circuitry. Close to the eye sockets he saw a hint of the underlying alu-plex skeleton.

Tsuneko had designed that skeleton to be humanoid, flexible, expandable. He theorised the bis had defaulted to globular forms out of convenience. Well, it was time to shake them out of their complacency.

“Do what I do,” he told Joanna. “We’ve
got
to get them changing. C’mon, Jo! Like me... do it now.”

He lifted the bi and moved it along his upper body, ensuring it could sense his limbs and his head. The bioplas squirmed like a custard-filled balloon. The rudimentary legs, that had appeared and disappeared in recent days, expanded; and two arms appeared, growing like time-lapse vines into slender limbs. The eyes were wide. The ears twitched. Ripples like wind over a wheatfield flowed across the micro touch sensors.

His tactic was working. The bis were ready now to explore their new world, to become individuals. To
grow.
This bi was copying the form of his body.

“We’ve got to get them all limbed up,” he said. “Tonight. Like, now! Get them into human shapes that will be too useful to revert from. Like toddlers.”

Joanna nodded. “There will be a virtuous circle,” she said. “Once we have set them off, they won’t be able to unlearn. I’ve seen it so often in chimp communities.”

He nodded.

“I’m calling Pouncey and Tsuneko. We all need to do this. For us, yeah, but also for the bis. They need variety, they need to individuate.”

Manfred lifted the yellow bi to the floor then stood up, flipping the call pad. Then he grabbed the red bi and sat down.

Pouncey appeared a minute later. Manfred said, “Send Tsuneko a wake call, then grab one of these and do as we do. The little varmints are learning. Quick!”

Pouncey tapped a wristband, said, “TJ,” then sat down.

Minutes passed. Five, ten, fifteen... and the bis began to cluster, the humanoid shaped ones communicating with the globular ones in some primitive, almost abstract-simple language, like a tongue composed of unguessable gestures. Manfred watched them. They were without doubt passing information to one another, though he heard nothing, and there was no physical contact. Gestural info, maybe? But it was essential they grasped English, to communicate. For a moment he felt scared, dizzy, aware now in a way he had never been before of the incredible pace of their learning. He could thank the biograins for that, and the silk-fine, clotted cables of neurocircuitry designed by Tsuneko that infested their morphable bodies.

“Where is she?” he asked.

“Asleep,” Pouncey said, shrugging.

Manfred glanced at the bis. He reckoned he could leave them for a minute or two. Standing up, he hurried out of the room and walked down the apartment corridor leading to the clutch of bedrooms. Rain tinkled against windows. The white, yellow, orange lamps of central Philly flickered against mildew-scarred walls. He walked into Tsuneko’s room.

She was packing a rucksack. She span, gasped. Threw the rucksack down.

Manfred frowned. He thought:
what?
She’s going somewhere?

And then he understood.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh, no. Not you.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You can’t leave. I
pay
you.”

Tsuneko hesitated, and Manfred knew from her expression that she had realised he knew what was going on. He pressed home his advantage, desperate to find the truth, guessing it, though not believing it.

“You’re one of the
BIteam,
” he said. “This isn’t a group you can just walk out on–”

“I’m not! What do you mean?”

He bent down to pick up the rucksack, but she kicked it away. He jumped forward, shoved her onto her bed, then grabbed the bag, upturning it. Stuff fell out. Documents, standalones, moby. Clothes.

“Don’t you push me!” she screamed at him.

He stared. She planned to leave. “Why?” he asked.

She stared at him, tears in the corners of her eyes.

He said, “I’m sorry Tsuneko, but you can’t go. This isn’t a normal place of work. We agreed...? We had to have rules–”

“Manfred, you’re talking shit,” she said, getting up.

Manfred tensed – she never swore. He was right, he just
knew
it. He had to call Pouncey without making it obvious. He said, “Tell me why you want to go.”

“I don’t!”

“Then what’s all this?”

The micro-pause was just long enough to confirm everything. Exasperated, she replied, “I’m getting ready for the next move, okay?”

He nodded. He didn’t know what to do. The main apartment door stood ten seconds away. If she had a gun...

Her gaze flicked to the room door, then back. Manfred heard footsteps: he froze. Pouncey... he was safe.

Then she walked forward, stood a foot from him, staring at him. He looked away, embarrassed. She ducked down, grabbed his tracksuit waistband and pulled them down, kneeling on the floor in front of him. He took a step back. Her hands were inside his pants, her face at his crotch.

He took a step back and said, “Wha...?” but she grabbed his knee and tugged. Off balance, he tried to right himself. She got his pants half down. Then Joanna walked into the room.

He turned, stared. Joanna stared right back. Tsuneko leaped up and said, “Jo! It isn’t like you think... we were... we...” She ducked away, around Joanna.

Joanna approached at speed. Manfred, bemused, confused, reached down to pull up his trackies, but Joanna grabbed his wrist and tugged hard. He stood up. Saw Tsuneko dart out of the room. “
Get her!
”

Joanna span him around. “You f–”

“
No!
She’s
escaping!
”

He tried to free himself from Jo’s clutches, but he tripped, his legs entangled in his trackies, and fell.

“Pouncey!” he yelled. “Pouncey, escapee!”

Then Joanna froze. Turned. Realised.

Manfred heard the front door slam. Joanna ran out of the room. He pulled up his trackies, got to his feet and followed. He smelled something harsh. His eyes watered. He heard Joanna coughing.

“Choke defence,” Joanna gasped, returning. “Teargas...”

The gas minicloud filled the corridor, immobilising them as they coughed their guts up. Pouncey appeared, jumped back, then reappeared moments later with a cell-mask. She ran forward, opened the door, vanished.

Manfred pulled Joanna back into the bedroom and swung the door shut. Bottles of tru-water lay on the bedside table, which he grabbed. They drank. The nausea was passing.

“Pouncey’ll get her,” he said.

Joanna just stared, horror in her expression, fear in her eyes. “What did she say to you?”

“Nothing. She pretended. Probably not planned. We’ll ask. I can’t let her go, not at this stage.”

Joanna nodded, then shook her head. “We can’t. She knows the architecture of the biograins. They are...
hers.
”

He nodded. “Ours,” he said.

Noise at the apartment door. Hoarse breath. Pouncey.

She staggered in, blood covering her right shoulder, arm and hand. An expression of surprise on her face. Of pain. Right arm squeezed close to her body by her left arm. “She had a razoo,” she said.

“A razoo–”

Pouncey wailed, “Get me the
med
kit! I think it hit a
vein.
”

Manfred leaped to his feet and ran; grabbed the kit, ran back. Joanna was ready for him, already tying something around Pouncey’s upper arm. In seconds they had a tourniquet set, then faux-teeth to shut the wound.

“We need to get her to casualty,” Joanna said. “Medics–”

“Yeah, yeah,” Manfred said. “Okay... I’ll secure the apartment.”

“Get my spex,” Pouncey said. “She might not be alone. You’ll need my sight.”

Manfred felt close to panic. “Okay! Okay... mmm, right, we’ll run down to the med centre where Thomas Jefferson Uni used to be. That’s gotta be the nearest.”

In less than a minute Pouncey was specced up, they wore raincoats, and the apartment was shut down and secure. They left. Traces of teargas lingered. They took the lift down, then slipped into the street. A big black coat covered Pouncey’s wound, her bloodsoaked clothes, the tourniquet. Nobody noticed them as they hurried away.

The snow-muffled mountain slopes owned by Ichikawa Laboratories did not deal favourably with intruders. And that was the idea.

Since founding his labs in 2086, Aritomo Ichikawa had insisted on procedures of rigour against commercial espionage. So when Leonora and Manfred Klee decided to break out, they faced a conundrum. How to regain their liberty?

The only place of bugfree sanctum was their bed. They drew up a private legal agreement between themselves and Aritomo, allowing them a respite not granted to others, on condition that, as they agreed they would, they tried for a child. To buy time Leonora ingested enough oestrogen to upset her cycle; the moment she became pregnant the agreement would end.

And so they talked in semantic vacuum. Manfred had a Korean contact in the outside world who could conceal them for a day or two. After that they would need to be hidden from Aritomo’s assassins. Leonora had a contact who knew the great firewall buster Goodman Awuku. And of course they had the Swiss bank account set up before joining Ichikawa, an account not much smaller than the GDP of a small country. So there was hope of success.

If only they could get out of the mountain stronghold.

Aritomo prided himself on the sophistication of his visual recognition software, boasting to all that no human being could approach his labs. He posted no guards on the retaining walls, knowing escape through the snow fields was simply too dangerous to attempt without external assistance. Choppers were the only method of entry and egress.

Until Leonora had a thought. Nonhuman visitors were not on Aritomo’s list.

Smuggling a solitary wasp into their bedroom, she housed it under a glass. Taking the dragon-watches given to them as a gift of good fortune by Aritomo when they joined the labs, she extracted their processors so that she and Manfred could glitch the wasp. It was the work of half an hour to write a suitable program into the processors, set it to activate at sunrise next day, then release the wasp.

They waited.

Not knowing how the real world would react to their program they had to guess a departure time. From the lowest store room of the labs, at the time they were supposed to be making a baby, they squeezed through a vent and followed a tunnel to the external wall. A twenty foot drop awaited. Snow cushioned their fall. A culvert led them onto the slopes, where they hid. They could not use any tech because the nexus would detect the trace, if Aritomo’s sensors did not, so they had to assume everything was working. Still hidden from vis ’ware, they slipped and fell down the precipitous culvert to a wide ledge.

And then, far off, the light they hoped to see. A St Bernard rescue dog, invisible to Aritomo’s sensors. Knowing they remained well within Aritomo’s far-security field they shouted and waved so that the dog would see them. Twenty minutes later it wagged its tail by their side, sniffing around in the snow as if for the buried avalanche victim it had expected.

Around the dog’s neck hung a rescue sled, ultracarb food, and drink. They unfurled the sled, allowed it to harden, then tied it to the dog. It pulled, struggled, slipped in the snow, then managed to get the sled running with them concealed inside it. So they slid their way fifty eight kilometres to the nearest town, frozen, exhausted. By that time the fake story created in the nexus by the wasp-carried program had given them false identities and an entire back-story, so it was easy enough to get a train to Niigata, and then a boat to an East Korean beach.

Where they met Yuri.

At first, Leonora thought the game was up. She sagged against Manfred. But Yuri acted weird. He spoke to them straight away, fidgeting with the bandana that covered his head down to his eyebrows. “Take me with you,” he said, “for I know what you plan and I share your goals.”

“What?” Leonora said. “You–”

“I am the man developing the new quantum computers, but my father will not allow me to follow my own research path, insisting that I follow his. It is the Japanese giri – obligation, you say. I am leaving the laboratories for the same reason you are.”

“You spied on us? How?”

“Did you think the dragon-watches were only a gift? I knew you were coming before you arrived because my father told me, and of course I knew of your reputations in artificial intelligence circles. So even then I aligned myself to you, creating the watches so that, at the lowest possible level – a megabyte per week, no more – I was able to observe you.”

Joanna asked, “Giri... obligation, it motivates you?”

Yuri shook his head. “I am not wholly Japanese. But my father feels the full weight of Japan’s expectation upon his shoulders. He’d rather die than fail his country.”

“How did
you
get out?” Manfred spluttered.

“How did you escape?”

“I’m asking you–”

“You misunderstand me. I was explaining that I escaped using an identical method to yourselves – except I had to ensure my father’s cats were not alerted.”