Beautiful Intelligence (7 page)

“For life.”

“Tortoiseshell knows no other way.”

Tsuneko sighed. She felt confused, upset. “What if I want to join the AIteam?” she said. “I didn’t like the way Manfred took his research. Would you stop me?”

“There will be no AIteam soon. You will either have to apply for a job with a Pacific Rim company, or, perhaps, you will join the team I work for. Too much is uncertain at the moment for me to make any meaningful guess. You mind me saying this?”

Tsuneko wiped tears from her cheeks. “It’s not how I imagined my contract ending,” she remarked. “I invented biograins, you
must
want me. You must help me.”

“You did not invent biograins, you developed them to the point that they became commercially viable. I say this not to denigrate your achievement. And, speaking personally, I think it is more likely than not that Tortoiseshell will want to employ you.”

“Some hope. Not much for me from the sound of it.”

“When we start out in life we do not imagine its end. Such is the way of things. Your circumstance is hardly unique.”

“You don’t sound very sympathetic.”

“If it’s sympathy you want, find a man. I am an employee of Tortoiseshell.” The Oriental stood up and bowed to her. “Goodnight.”

~

In her dusty Valletta hotel room Tsuneko took off her spex and wristbands, then all her clothes, which she put in the laundry basket. From crinkly leaf-plas wraps she took the clothes she had bought in Virenza village: underwear, shirt, trousers, socks, and a pair of hi-grip trainers. These clothes, she knew, could not have nexus bugs in them. She washed her hair in avocado shampoo; now that too would be bug-free.

She took a biro and a piece of paper. Paused. The biro had not been used for a decade or so, its transparent sheath misted with age, and split at the end. She herself had not written for a decade, the pen strange in her left hand.

She heard helicopters passing over Valletta on their way inland.

Dear Rosalind,

I’m writing to you from Malta. I need help urgently. I daren’t use ordinary methods, the nexus is hanging right over me and the place is crawling with Japanese. I’m in trouble. Sort of. I don’t know, but I do need help.

You saved me when mum and dad were killed, you’re the only one I can turn to, just now, anyway. Please please help.

Here’s the plan! I’m going to walk at night (solo) to Rabat, six miles inland from Valletta (where I am now) in the hills to the west of the island. I need you to pick me up there in the cyclo-wing and take me to London. I’ll be in Rabat market square from the sixteenth onwards. That gives this letter a week to get to you on the ferries, and you time also. If you can’t help, send a mini-robo with ‘No’ on it.

Love,

Tsuneko.

Pouncey took them to a new Hyperlinked hide far away from Center City East, a few strides from Vine Street, Franklintown, overlooking the greenery between Fairmount and the river. She wanted to settle a long way from Six-Fingers and the Hispanic – and Tsuneko, who now counted as a loose cannon.

Manfred struggled with his anger. Frustrated that they had moved before he had a chance to help the bis, he insisted that Pouncey give the BIteam a week in their new apartment. Pouncey shrugged, agreed, stroking the scabby wound on her right arm.

Joanna focussed on the bis. Something weird was happening to them.

The new apartment was a scuzzy wreck. At the top of a wasted office block, empty, dangerous in places where the metal exoskeleton had rusted and the glass shattered, the apartment sat like last-ditch eyrie. In the dogcrap-strewn chambers at the base of the block there was evidence of junkie habitation, but Pouncey said the traces were weeks old.

Manfred took thirty minutes out. Walking along a street he saw a black girl with a tray in front of her, spex pure white, retro fashion, a pistol displayed with ostentation in the holster at her shoulder. Tough area, Manfred thought.

But the girl was selling chocolate. Manfred stopped, checked it out. “This real?” he asked.

“Sure,” she replied.

“But, you know... the blockade.”

The girl shrugged. “Some of the warlords in Cote D’Ivoire didn’t sign up. They called it Pan African, but it wasn’t really. You don’t believe me, take a crumb. Free sample.”

“Expensive?”

“You get what you pay for, asshole. When you last see chocolate round here?”

Manfred nodded. Almost nobody bothered exporting to America any more. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take three bars. Nice meeting ya.”

He returned to the apartment with a grin on his face. This would cheer the BIteam up. The loss of Tsuneko had been a disaster.

Inside, all was quiet, but he noticed the look of concern on Joanna’s face. Handing her one of the bars he said, “What’s up?”

Pouncey dozed on a sofa. With a silent nod of her head, Joanna directed him into the bis’ room.

They were toddling around, happy enough, or so it seemed. Joanna pointed to the indigo coloured bi and said, “Watch.”

The bi did not seem to have the same dexterity and confidence of movement shown by the others. After a moment, Manfred thought of a reason. “It’s blind,” he said.

She nodded. For the bis they had bought the finest artificial eyes, made by the Korean masters, the finest ears from Singapore, the most sensitive micro touches from Tokyo. And other, less human devices. But the problem had been interfacing. Dirk Ngma, Manfred’s preferred choice, had vanished a long time ago, leaving Tsuneko to create interfaces for the BIteam; and now she was gone.

“If it is blind,” he continued, “there’s nothing we can do now.”

“They could be individuating,” Joanna said, picking up the nearest bi and holding it like a toddler in her arms. “We need to give them names.”

He nodded. “Okay... so you’ve got the red one. We’ll call it Red. The blind one is Indigo. That’s Grey, that’s White.”

Joanna shrugged, though with a smile on her face. “Practical, if simplistic,” she remarked.

“Thanks. Simple is best, I’ve found.”

“What shall we do with Indigo?”

“Oh, leave it. I read somewhere that blind people’s senses change to compensate for lack of vision. Maybe Indigo will do the same thing.”

Joanna nodded. “We shall have to let it... suffer, though.”

“Suffer?”

“The others need to try to understand why Indigo is different, why it is struggling. We cannot tell them.”

Manfred nodded, folding his arms and looking at the bis. “You’re right. But the bis aren’t much like kids–”

“I know, I know. I told
you
that, remember?”

“It’s easy enough for kids to understand they’re human because that’s all there is. They
know
they’re not living in a world of zombies, and they use themselves as an exemplar to work out what everybody else is doing. Theory of mind. But the bis won’t know their world isn’t elegant zombies. They’ll have to work it out for themselves, and if they don’t they won’t become conscious, and we’ll fail.”

Joanna sighed. “It is so difficult to
know
if they are conscious...”

“Two millennia of theories,” Manfred replied. “But think, Jo. What about love? You can’t detect that, you can’t prove it exists, but you know it when you feel it.” He shrugged. “Some things are like that. Emergent properties. It could be that we’ll never know for sure if the bis have subjective experiences. But my hunch is that we’ll know when we see it... when we feel it.”

She nodded. “That is not science, though.”

He said, “When you worked with chimps you were tempted to call them conscious.”

“You read all my papers.”

“Sure did. But you never
knew
the chimps were conscious, did you? Because you’re not a chimp, in chimp society.” He gestured at the bis and said, “This is the same. We can’t get around the fact that they’re artificial. But they got bodies and no direct access to anything. They got a society, including us... they could become human – maybe. Damn, Jo, this
is
the best chance. And we’ll bring it to the world.”

“Best chance... I think perhaps it is.”

Manfred led her out of the room. “We need to think about teaching them English,” he whispered. “They have some sort of simple communication now, though I’m damned if I can get it. Gestures, I think.”

“We have hypothesised that they do communicate,” Joanna said. “Perhaps it is gestural, emotional even.”

He nodded. “Hmm, that’s another hurdle. Emotions. They’re at least as important as language...”

~

Pouncey sat on a box in the tower block entrance, a standalone in her hand. The Hyperlinked was stored in this device. The standalone used local thermometer readings to generate random numbers, from which addresses of vacant rooms were later scavenged.  Truly the Hyperlinked was random, shielding them from the all-seeing eyes of the nexus, which could detect a pattern in any part of the world.

She glanced up into the rain and cursed the nexus. The BIteam needed food and water. Manfred had declared a moratorium on the use of his billions because of the Tsuneko incident and his own creeping paranoia, but Pouncey had little cash left. Her own accounts, along with her ID, had been killed when she joined the BIteam, and her fake credit line led to an empty account. As for Joanna, she was practically solo, using wristband and spex only when she needed to, and living off Manfred.

Pouncey stood up, put on her spex, and strode out into the night.

As ever, first thing she did was check Leonora and Yuri in San Francisco, but they had decamped for Seattle. Pouncey grunted to herself and whupped an umbrella. The BIteam knew these were decoys, but it was interesting nonetheless. Pouncey theorised that patterns might develop in this faux
-
hobo life, leading her to the location of the AIteam, which must, at the very least, include Leonora and Yuri. But she had never been able to make the facts coincide with her theory, and she did not dare allow the nexus to do the work for her. Aritomo Ichikawa would spot that calculation in an instant.

She sighed. The desertion of Tsuneko June handed Aritomo an ace card. Quite likely he knew already about Philly – assuming Tsuneko had run to him. Which seemed probable. Maybe it was time to scoot, leave Philly, leave the States, head Canuckwards, or maybe south to Lone Star lands where hiding was easy amidst the ruined refineries.

There was a lo-market a couple of blocks along. On damp, algae-greened tables lay piles of half rotten veg, bits of scavenged meat – some recognisable as dog limbs – and other provender verging on inedible. But cheap. Very cheap. She took a few coins from her pocket, her last dollars, buying some essentials. Cooking would leach too much of the nutritional value from this stuff, but nobody ate uncooked food in these parts. Way too dangerous.

The terrible argument they’d had when she discovered how much money Manfred had wasted on chocolate returned to her mind. She clamped down on her anger. Soon, she would have to do something about their finances.

And water? Back at the office block she ascended the stairs and checked the rain collectors. Enough there for a few days. Better start boiling it.

~

In bed, Manfred and Joanna talked.

“How can the bis have emotions if they are not human?” Joanna said. “At best they will be human-imprinted. Humanoid. Not real, like us.”

“Emotions
mean
something,” Manfred said. He lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “They’re sourced in the primitive brain, the reptile brain. I bet they’re more important than language to survival.”

“Really?”

“Listen,” Manfred said, “human action isn’t all one measure. Different actions, different aspects of reality, have a range of values according to how important they are.
Values,
you see.” He turned onto his side so that he could face her. “Hmm, imagine a prehistoric cave dweller. A particle of grit isn’t that important, but roots and fruit, they’re quite important, and other people are damn crucial to life. All this stuff gets a range of values, right?”

“In the human mind and in the culture that was springing from minds?” Joanna said.

“Yeah. So certain experiences are basic to human beings – the danger of death, the loss of people or things, good times too. We
evolved,
and the cave people encountered those experiences often, and then those experiences began to engender various states of mind. Emotions.”

“Which became universal states fundamental to the human condition,” Joanna said.

“If you wanna put it in socio-speak, yeah. An emotion is the symbol of a state of mind, you would say with your professor hat on.” He lay back, staring again at the ceiling, letting his thoughts flow free.

“What are you thinking?”

“The mind has to have some method of
communicating
significant knowledge to itself and to others,” he said. “Doesn’t it? It’s a dynamic system, after all – not static. Without emotion, my mind would have no way of informing itself, others too, of the relative values of life experiences. It’s a strengthening
and
a validation of the existing mental model.”

Now Joanna turned onto her side, excitement plain on her face. “You could be right. This explains something I have always wondered about. Why have tears? Why a red face if you are embarrassed?”

“I dunno. Why?”

“Emotions always have a physical component, Manfred. It is because of the importance of the knowledge they are communicating – as you said. It is a matter of value.”

“Value? How so?”

“To
force
the mind to become aware of the knowledge emotions carry,” Joanna said. “It is a mechanism that cannot be missed, as a thought or concept can be missed. Physical components
had
to appear as we evolved, and so all emotions have some physical consequence. You have seen me cry. In its intensity and in its physical effects that emotion is impossible to ignore.”

“You mean... emotion is communication
more
profound than usual?”

Joanna nodded. “A channel of connection between people and between people and the real world, a web of empirical knowledge flowing in all directions. We have been told for centuries that emotion is the lesser experience, that rational thought is more profound, but the opposite is true.”