Singularity's Children Box Set

by Toby Weston

  Stella considered the proposition. “Maybe. What is it?”

  “Nebel.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s my own mix. Mostly organic. The word means mist. You know, vague, hazy, nebulous…” The man’s pixelated eye winked very deliberately as he said the last word.

  “Oh, Nebulous.” Stella winked back. “Subtle!”

  She accepted the bong-like device and breathed gently as she petted the sheep distractedly. It was pleasant; cinnamon and vanilla, with a hint of skunk.

  She felt stress evaporating away. She took another gentle draw and handed the pipe back to her new friend.

  The Nebel was working. “That’s nice.”

  “Thanks. Its MDMA, THC, and a little psilocybin to extend the buzz.”

  A busty, sexualised anime hostess raised Jeno’s right fist as approximately half the crowd cheered and the other half scowled. Marcel stood giddily, cartoon birds and stars still orbiting his head in a cheerful, chirping halo. Coins began to visibly rain down onto him as the watchers rewarded him for showing spirit.

  Stella patted the sheep some more and it purred. She was pretty sure its programmers had gotten something mixed up. It was very good, though. She leant in to inspect its rubbery wool, which seemed to be made of many squishy tubes of something like over-soaked spaghetti.

  Stella and the man watched as Jeno and Marcel shook hands. Marcel’s anger and disappointment were mitigated by the small fortune of MeshCoin raining into his wallet.

  “It looks like your boyfriends have made up.”

  “I told you, he’s not…” But the man was joking, and she no longer felt like pointlessly fighting.

  “Want another toke before he brings your fans back?” the man asked, nodding at the two combatants, who were finishing up their ritual reconciliation.

  “No, I’m good.”

  “Sure thing. Maybe you two should make up as well? Friends are important, you know.”

  “You said you were not my therapist!” Stella said while her fingers curled through the sheep’s rubbery dreads. She looked into the creature’s strange, half-closed orange eyes and felt the vibration of its purring. Perhaps she had been a bit mean. “Yeah, okay, maybe.”

  While still watching Marcel and Tinkerbell, Stella briefly brought up her TeenLife™ dashboard and ran the possibility of reconciliation past its Sages. Her handlers were thrilled with the idea, even suggesting she collaborate with Sheena.

  “Hey, Jeno! Change of plan,” she called out to the oid. On a private channel, she messaged, “How about we try a bit of forgive and forget? Go and tell Sheena that, if she wants, we can do a joint stream. Let her arrange a mirror booth over in Mundo and we’ll do a link up.” Jeno nodded and headed for one of the exits, a conceit which allowed the virtually present to traverse the non-Euclidean geometry of the club.

  “I didn’t mean make up with the oids!” the man said.

  “Yeah, I know, but first things first,” said Stella. “This is just business.”

  Marcel and Tinkerbell negotiated the ninety-degree gravity flip. They stood a little away talking, glancing at Stella every few moments.

  A minute later, Sheena materialised, holding a glass of bubbly, looking as aloof and nonchalant as she could manage.

  “Sheena, I’m through fighting for tonight,” said Stella. “Let’s kiss and make up for once. Come join us.” She patted the red velvet next to her.

  “Kiss?” the dark-haired woman asked, husky with her strong Russ accent.

  “Figure of speech,” Stella explained.

  “Joint stream?” Sheena asked suspiciously.

  “Joint stream,” Stella confirmed, nodding.

  “Okay. Let’s do it,” Sheena replied warily. Still looking suspicious, she joined Stella on the velvet sofa.

  Marcel glanced around awkwardly, not sure what had happened. The atmosphere had changed; the pent-up anger seemed gone, Stella was even smiling, but he was not sure how he fitted into the new mood.

  “Marcel, I’ve been mean,” Stella said, finally turning to him. “Sit down here. Let’s all have a drink.” She patted the sliver of sofa between her and Sheena. “How about we start today again?”

  “Really? Of course! Sweet!” Marcel replied, clearly elated.

  “Mister Mystery? You? Will you join us for another bottle?” Stella asked.

  “Sorry, I’ve got to dash,” said the man from N. “But you kids have fun.” He smiled—or, at least, might have behind the frosted glass blur, which Stella had initially assumed was software, but which must be an actual physical mask. The man stood. He took and kissed Sheena’s gloved hand and repeated the gesture with Stella. Then he shared a virtual fist bump with Marcel.

  “I’ll be in touch, Stella. You’ve got something special. Don’t let the Man get you down!”

  The sheep machine gave Stella one last penetrating stare and trotted off to join him.

  “Bye,” Stella said with a final wave, then watched them disappear into the milling party crowd.

  Marcel, recently flush with his loosings and sandwiched between two beautiful, exotic Life stars, smiled happily and flagged down a waitress to order some booze.

  The party really picked up when the vocaloids Stella had arranged to meet showed up with their own eclectic entourage of humans and oids.

  The physical Earth turned, gradually pointing KL towards the sun. The party in Dunia wound down, but on the other side of the sphere, in Mundo, Sheena’s home town, it was just getting going. Sheena managed to persuade Stella to join her in a spontaneous number with the vocaloids. The flick was posted, shared and reshared ten million times before the revellers eventually called it a night and left the club.

  Chapter 3 – Truth to Power

  Ben was on time. He didn’t even have a hangover.

  “Is he in?” he asked the flesh and blood receptionist.

  “No,” she replied, “but they are on their way up. Some of Shaun’s team are in the outer office going through something with Strategy, but you can go on through.”

  Ben thanked her and pushed open the door. For a split second, before the occupants could react to his intrusion, he was confronted by an unintelligible wall of noise. The soundscape was reminiscent of an unattended classroom stuffed with over-caffeinated teenagers, arguing at full volume, voices like cartoon squirrels, as if they’d been inhaling from helium party balloons.

  The staccato stream of Spex-rendered glossolalia petered out. It had been impossible to extract content from the din, but Ben was left with the confused impression of words—the sonic equivalent of a fading image left by an extinguished light.

  The Sages were suddenly silent; their peaceful, smiling faces tracked Ben as he entered. They had been speaking English, but at such an accelerated pace that, to a human, it was nothing more than an undecipherable barrage. An eavesdropper might have caught the odd phrase or familiar soundbite amongst the fast and shrill syllables.

  Further exacting observation would have revealed that, despite being conducted in fast forward, the patterns of speech and body language were close to the human forms they had been copied from. Inter-agent communication was an engineering problem. Technically, the arguing Sages could just have well have conducted their dispute by whistling to one another, like twentieth-century dial-up modems; or, foregoing all conceit of being personified agents instantiated in reality, they might have swapped packets of zeros and ones like other networked pieces of software. But society had been primed for a hundred years with the dystopian vision of an electronic scream hailing in the machine apocalypse. Public opinion had balked at the idea of AIs whispering in private and plotting their secret robot uprising…

  The Forward governments relied heavily on synthetic media personalities pressing hot racial buttons and pulling social sexual triggers. Taboo and hysteria were ruthlessly exploited to keep outrage focused where it was most useful and least threatening; but crowds were tricky. If pressure was not periodically released, society’s dams mig
ht rupture. The Forward behavioural economists—or social engineers—managing the fickle currents of public opinion understood this. They monitored surges carefully, and periodically released carefully controlled floods of outrage; torrents of hate and mania, slowing becoming a creeping drift to be channelled into a nourishing irrigation of more palatable ideas.

  During one of these excursions into mass hysteria, a rising panic against the increasing numbers of Sages, mAIds, femBots, vocaloids, mOids, and all the other artificial people suddenly sharing their lives, had been allowed to boil over. The cooling residue had eventually been mopped up with legislation banning autonomous murder and insisting that all oids communicate using intelligible natural human languages.

  Ben walked in, glaring suspiciously at the huddle. They looked back politely, nodding or bowing slightly to recognise his presence. The room was decorated to his father’s taste: lots of leather and wood. Another door led from the anteroom into George’s office proper. The receptionist had suggested that he go through, but Ben felt uncomfortable, and looked for somewhere to sit so that he was out of the way of the artificial executives.

  Synthetic Cognition was the special sauce; the key differentiator at the cold silicon core of virtually every twenty-first century business model. The enforced bottleneck of human language was an inconvenient artificial restriction slowing down communication and sapping performance. When implementing their inter-agent data transfer protocols, to maximise communication bandwidth, the engineers had pushed the legal definitions to breaking point and exploited every available nuance of human communication. The huffs, sighs, shrugs, scowls and occasional profanity observed in Sage to Sage communication were not only intended to deceive eavesdropping humans into believing real people were talking, but they also served their original semantic purpose.

  After years of lobbying, BHJ’s legal teams had successfully challenged the ruling and argued that, when no humans were present, Sages should be permitted to employ a stretched definition of intelligible. For audit purposes, all conversations would be archived anyway and could be played back later at slow speed.

  Reacting to Ben’s presence, the Sages restarted their conversations at a more reasonable pace. Ben sat in a vacant leather and steel chair and stared absent-mindedly at a familiar painting on the wall. He remembered a snippet from a school history lesson. A master had once claimed that the gauge of railway tracks was—through some convoluted sequence of reasonable-sounding steps—a result of the standard wheel separation of ancient Roman chariots.

  Ben listened to the banal conversation. There was nothing about ‘killing all humans’. The synthetic corporate drones seemed just as preoccupied with deadlines and cost projections as the flesh and blood executives they had replaced. He knew Sages were tools; automata-running deterministic programs on commodity hardware, limited to their domain of expertise. These machines were not going to rise up—even so, he felt left behind. He was struck by an image of their distant descendants, spewing familiar English words and phrases between the stars, long after the idiosyncratic protocol’s origins were lost in clouds of obscurity—

  Mag-lev locomotives tearing along the routes first laid down by migrating herdsmen, tracking the retreating ice, thousands of years before the first rut was ever cut by a Roman chariot…

  The door banged open and Shaun walked in. He looked surprised to see Ben. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Waiting for George.”

  “He’s in there already.”

  “I didn’t see him go in.”

  “Well, those without bodies enjoy some benefits,” Shaun explained. “He said he was too tired to bother with pretending to walk.”

  “That doesn’t sound like George.”

  “I guess he must be in a pretty bad way.”

  As Shaun was crossing towards the second door, Ben stood. “Do you sometimes think they feel sorry for us?” he asked, catching up, waggling his fingers in the general direction of the staring Sages.

  Shaun stopped and looked at Ben for a few seconds, puzzled. “They don’t feel anything. They’re just oids. You know that, right?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “And that’s what they are. No doubt about it. Let’s go and join your father,” said Shaun, pushing on the door.

  Inside, George’s avatar was sitting at his desk, its eyes tracking them as they entered. But George wasn’t there. The mood of the room was wrong.

  Ben selected one of the comfortable chairs along the wall. Shaun took a severe wood and dark green leather chair at the desk. There was fruit in a bowl. It was for show. Ben had never seen anyone actually eat it, but he had been told to eat more vegetables by his doctor, so he reached forward with a hand, half expecting the colourful objects to be figments of his Spex; instead, his fingers brushed the surface of a pear and, satisfied that the fruit would deliver sustenance, he blew to dislodge a fly which was ambling along a banana and picked himself out an apple. He took a large, loud bite.

  “It just seems to me we are going to be obsolete soon,” said Ben, chewing the surprisingly succulent pulp. “I wonder if they will feel sorry for us?”

  “There is nothing there, Ben,” replied Shaun. “They are tools. Nothing to worry about.”

  “That would be even worse, wouldn’t it? Made redundant by machines that don’t know what they’ve done, who won’t even enjoy having beaten us.”

  “Yeah, that would be bad, I suppose.”

  “I wonder where he is?” Ben asked after another few minutes of waiting.

  “Maybe talking on another line?” Shaun offered.

  “Or taking a shit,” Ben suggested. “If he still does that.”

  Something subtle in George’s bearing announced that he had returned at this inopportune juncture.

  “I do still do that,” he rumbled. “But, I’ll give you that I am less involved in the process than I used to be.”

  Ben whipped around. Had the old man just made a joke? But as he studied his father’s face, he realised George was just thinking out loud. It was probably weeks since he had paid mind to his own grey flesh, and was simply musing; trying to remember the last time he’d wiped his arse.

  “Everything alright, George?” Shaun asked with clear concern.

  “Everything is fine. Stop fussing.”

  George’s avatar looked good; a healthy colour and upright posture. Ben knew his father’s self-destructing biological body would be looking far less chipper, pierced with catheters in its bag of synthetic snot.

  “Good to see you, Dad,” Ben said.

  “Good to see you too, son. Are you ready?”

  “For the town hall? Piece of cake!”

  “Good. This is not just for the firm. It’s an important opportunity for you.”

  “I got it, Dad. We’re good.”

  “Right, well don’t mess it up. These bastards are bleeding us dry.”

  “I’m not going to mess it up. But, you know, I think you are overreacting. What are the Klans really? A niche player?”

  “1.8% of manufacturing, 4.1% of emerging technologies,” Shaun said, who was probably just regurgitating the numbers that an eager Sage was directing into his Spex.

  “There you go,” said Ben. “Let’s not get too het up over these script bunnies.”

  “Up from 0.7 and 1.2 last year, though,” continued Shaun. “Projected 3.5 and 7.5 for 2039.”

  “I don’t like to be on the wrong side of growth numbers like that,” George said. “Sages and Persuasive Technologies were the disrupters we rode, but now I feel like the dinosaur in the room. That type of growth compounds quickly. Miss the early puffs of smoke and you will get burnt up in the wild fire!”

  “You’re right, Mr Baphmet,” Shaun said. “Your instincts have served the company well so far. This is the right time to stop turning a blind eye to unregulated criminal activity, and deliver our shareholders the value they expect…”

  Ben sighed. “Jesus, Shaun!”

  �
�It’s good to see that at least one person understands,” George said scowling at Ben.

  “Shall we go through some updates before we head down to the town hall?” Shaun asked.

  “Yes, but keep it brief,” said George. “What do you have?”

  “We are moving ahead,” replied Shaun, “integrating our recent acquisition of ANZDS. They have a lot of IP to audit, most of it off the books. We’ve got British and Australian security clearance for the M&A teams and they are working with our Cog groups to conduct a pilot. We think we can make it through the security audit. Unfortunately, we are suffering high levels of attrition from the senior scientists. This seems mostly politically motivated. Some object to our close ties to the Forward Coalition.”