Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Pretty good, if it’s true.”

  “Worth a skirmish,” Jon said, in New York. “That’s all in Boston.” He hung up.

  Allan didn’t break stride. “Figgy Pudding”—the cutesy name meant the talent was old, left over from the generation that could name a computer after a fruit and a communications language after a hot beverage. Still, some of those geezer geeks still had it. Worth a skirmish.

  “Your car is waiting at these coordinates,” his wristwatch said, displaying them along with a route map of Logan. “Thank you for using the Micro Global Positioning System.”

  Allan tacked through the crowd, past the fast-food kiosks, the public terminal booths, the VR parlors crammed with kids parked there while parents waited for flights. The driver, who had of course been tracking Allan through MGPS, already had the car door opened, the schedule revisions from Jon, the illax-effish route. No words were necessary. Allan sank into the back seat and unfolded his meshnet.

  This was Haller Ventures’ latest investment to come to market. Allan loved it. A light, flexible cloth meshed with optic-fiber wires, it could be folded almost as small as a handkerchief. Yet it could receive as much data as any other dumb terminal in existence, and display it in more varied, complex configurations. Fast, powerful, keyed both to Allan’s voice and to his chosen tactile commands for max effish, fully flexible in interacting with his PID and just about every other info-device, the meshnet was everything high-tech should be. It was going to make everyone connected with Haller Ventures rich.

  Richer.

  “Jon message,” Allan said to the meshnet. “Display.” And there was the in formation about Figgy Pudding: stock offerings, annual reports, inside run-downs put together and run through the Haller investment algorithms with Jon’s usual efficiency. Nobody on the information front could recon better than Jon, unless it was Allan himself. Carefully he studied the Figgy Pudding data. Looking good, looking very good. “Five minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his wristwatch said. A second later, the phone buzzed, then automatically transferred the call to the meshnet once it verified that the meshnet was unfolded. Cathy’s icon appeared on the soft metallic surface.

  “Cathy message,” Allan said. The driver, curious, craned his gaze into the rearview mirror, but Allan ignored him. Definitely no ground to be gained there.

  “Hey, love,” Cathy’s voice said. “Schedule change.”

  “Give it to me,” Allan said, one eye still on the Figgy Pudding projections.

  “Suzette made it. She’s in for the Denver Preteen Semi-Final Skating Championship!”

  “That’s great!” Allan said. Damn, but he had great kids. Although Charlie . . . “I’ll send her congratulations.”

  “Good. But she needs to leave Tuesday, on a nine-twenty a.m. plane. I have to be in court in Albuquerque on the Darlington case. Can you see her off at the airport?”

  “Just a sec, hon.” Allan called up the latest version of his schedule. “No can do. Patti’s got me in Brussels from Monday night to Tuesday afternoon, with a stop at a London biotech on the hop home.”

  “Okay,” Cathy said cheerfully. She was always cheerful; it was one of the reasons Allan was glad she was his wife. “I’ll get a driver for her, and Mrs. Canning can see her off. Consider it covered. Are we still on for dinner and hanky-panky Wednesday?”

  “Let me check . . . yes, it looks good. Five o’clock at the Chicago Plaza.”

  “I’ll be there,” Cathy said. “Oh, and give Charlie a call, will you? Today?”

  “What’s with Charlie?”

  “Same thing,” Cathy said, and for just a moment her cheerfulness faltered.

  “Okay,” Allan said. “Don’t worry.”

  “You on your way to Novation?” Cathy of course received constant updates of his schedule, as he did of hers. Although she had fewer updates; even consulting attorevs as good as she was sometimes stayed in the same city for as long as three days. “Novation is the biorobot company, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Allan said. “Patti’s pushing it pretty strong. But frankly, I don’t have much faith in radical tech that makes this many extravagant claims. Promise the moon, deliver a rusty asteroid. I don’t expect to be impressed.”

  “That’s my man. Make ‘em work for it. Love you.”

  “Love you, too,” Allan said. The Cathy icon vanished from his meshnet.

  “Two minutes until your first scheduled stop,” his watch said.

  Perfect.

  Allan was wrong. He might not have expected to be impressed with Novation, but, almost against his will, he was.

  As soon as he entered the unprepossessing concrete-block building, he could feel the data rush. Vibrating, racing, dancing. Whatever made a place blaze on the very edge of the information front, this place had it.

  His contact entered the lobby just as Allan did. On top of the moves. She was an Indian woman in her late thirties, dressed in khaki slacks and a red shirt. All her movements were quick and light. Her black eyes shone with intelligence.

  “Allan. I’m Skaka Gupta, Chief Scientist at Novation.” Although of course Allan already knew that, plus everything relevant about her career, and she knew that he knew. “Welcome to our Biorobotics Unit.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Would you like a max-effish print-out of our current status?” A courtesy only; Novation’s official profile would have been supplied to his firm yesterday. With an update this morning, if anything had changed overnight. And she’d know he’d prefer the figures and projections put together by his own people, in which the official profile was only one factor.

  “No, thank you,” Allan smiled. “But I am very eager to see your work directly.”

  “Then let’s do that.” She smiled back, completely sure of herself. Or of her work. Allan hoped it was of her work; he could sniff genuine success here. It smelled like money.

  “Let me babble about the basics,” Skaka said, “and you jump in with questions when you want to. We’re passing through the biolab now, where we build the robots. Or, rather, start them growing.”

  Behind a glass wall stood rows of sterile counters, each monitored by automated equipment. A lone technician, dressed in white scrubs and mask, worked at a far counter. Allan said, “Let me test my understanding here. Your robot bodies are basic mass-ordered cylinders, with electro-field intercommunication, elevation-climbing limbs, and the usual sensors.”

  “That’s right. We’ll see them in a minute-they look like upended tin cans with four skinny clumsy legs and two skinny clumsy arms. But their processing units are entirely innovative. Each circuit board you see here, in each clear box, is being grown. We start with textured silicon plate etched with logic circuits, and then seed them with fetal neurons, grown on synthetic peptides. The fetal tissue used comes from different sources. The result is that even though the circuit scaffolds are the same, the neurons spin out different axons and dendrites. And since fetal brains always produce more neurons than they ultimately need, different ones atrophy on different boards. Each processor ends up different, and so the robots are subtly different too.”

  Allan studied the quiet, orderly lab. Skaka merely waited. Finally he said, “You’re not the only company exploring this technique.”

  “No, of course not. But we’ve developed significant new variations-significant by several orders of magnitude. Proprietary, of course, until you’ve bought in.”

  Until, not if. Allan liked that.

  “The proof of just how different our techniques are lies right ahead. This way to the primate house.”

  “Monkeys?” Allan said, startled. This had not been in the prereading.

  Skaka, walking briskly, grinned over her shoulder. “P-r-i-m-e-E-i-g-h-t house. It’s a joke. Currently we have eight robots in each of two different stages of development. Both groups are in learning environments modeled on the closed-system forests once used with chimps. Follow me.”

  She led him out of the lab, down a long
windowless corridor. Halfway, Allan’s tie-tack beeped twice. “Excuse me, Skaka, is the men’s room—”

  “Right through that door.”

  Inside, Allan flipped over his tie tack. The PID icon for Charlie had stopped vibrating completely. Immediately Allan phoned his son.

  “Charlie? Where are you?”

  “What do you mean, where am I? It’s Friday, right? I’m at school.”

  “In. . .”

  “In Aspen.”

  “Why aren’t you in Denver?”

  “Not this week, Dad, remember?”

  Allan hadn’t. Mrs. Canning’s tutorial schedule for the kids’ real-time educational experiences was complex, although of course Allan could have accessed it on his meshnet. Maybe be should have. But Charlie’s physical location wasn’t the issue.

  “What are you doing in Aspen, son? Right now?”

  “Nothing.”

  Allan pushed down his annoyance. Also his concern. Charlie-so handsome, so smart, twelve years old-spent an awful lot of time doing nothing. Just sitting in one room or another, staring into space. It wasn’t normal. He should be out playing soccer, exploring the Net, teasing girls, racing bikes. Even reading would be more productive than this passive staring into nothing.

  Allan said, “Where’s Mrs. Canning? Why is she letting you do nothing? We don’t pay her for that, you know.”

  “She thinks I’m writing my essay about the archeological dig we did in the desert.”

  “And why aren’t you writing it?”

  “I will . . . look, Dad, I gotta go now. See you next week. Love you.”

  “But Charlie-” The phone went dead.

  Should he call back? When Charlie got like this, he often didn’t answer. Got like what? What was wrong with a kid who just turned himself off and sat, like a lump of bacon fat?

  Nothing. Nothing was wrong with his son.

  “Allan? Everything all right?” Skaka, rapping discreetly on the men’s room door. Christ, how long had Allan been staring at the motionless Charlie icon on his PID? Too long. The schedule would be all shot to hell.

  “Fine,” he said, striding into the corridor. “Sorry. Now let’s see the Prime Eight House.”

  “You’ve never seen data like this,” Skaka promised, and strode faster to make up for the lost time.

  He never bad seen data like this.

  Each of the two identical “learning environments” was huge, two point three acres, circled by a clear plastic wall, and furnished with gray platforms at various heights and angles, steps and ramps and potholes, mini-mazes and obstacles that could be reconfigured from outside the enclosures. The environments looked like monochromatic miniature-golf courses that had undergone an earthquake. In the first enclosure were eight of the tin-can robots, moving slowly and ponderously over the crazed terrain. Each was painted with a bright logo: “Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup . . . Chef-Boy-R&D . . . Lay’s Pareto Chips.”

  “Programmer humor,” Skaka said. “This batch was only activated yesterday. See, they haven’t learned very much about navigation, let alone how to approach their task efficiently.”

  “What is their task?” Allan said. Now they were getting to the maneuvers not covered in the prospectus.

  “See those green-gray chips scattered throughout the environment? The robots are supposed to gather as many of those as they can, as fast as they can.”

  Allan peered through the plastic. Now he could see the chips, each about the size of a small cookie, lying in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. The closest robot, Processed Corn, reached for one with its long-ended “arm.”

  It missed. The chip slid away, and the robot fell over. Trying to right itself, it thrashed too close to the edge of a large pothole and fell in, where it kept on thrashing. Allan laughed. “ ‘War is hell.’ ”

  “What?” Skaka said.

  “Nothing. How many chips have the robots gathered so far?”

  “One.”

  “And how long have they been at it?”

  “Six hours. Now come with me to Prime-Eight Two.”

  Allan followed her again. They passed Chef-Boy-R&D and Net-wiser Beer lammed up against each other. Each time one moved to the right to go around the other, the second robot did the same. They ended up deadlocked against the plastic wall, four spindly legs marching futilely against each other.

  Skaka unlocked a door and led Allan onto a catwalk overlooking the second enclosure. Identical to the first, it also contained eight painted robots, this group all motionless.

  “Watch,” Skaka said.

  She pressed a button. A shower of gray-green chips fell from the ceiling, landing in holes, on railings, between walkways, under ramps. Immediately the robots sprang to life. They marched, clambered, searched. Allan’s watch tingled on his wrist, and his tie twitched. Even outside the enclosure, his electrical biofield registered the enormous amount of data surging through the air as the robots communicated with each other. Within minutes all the chips had been gathered into a pile and shoved through a slit in the enclosure. They fell in a shower onto the corridor floor.

  “Jesus Turing Christ,” Allen said, inadequately. “Are you telling me this batch of robots learned to do that by themselves? That they had no additional programming over the first biobots?”

  “That’s what I’m telling you,” Skaka said, in triumph. “Six minutes, forty nine seconds. They keep beating their own record as they get more and more efficient at the task. This batch has been learning for five weeks, two days.”

  “Let me see it again.”

  Skaka pressed the button to release more chips, which fell onto different places than before. The eight robots sprang into action. Allan noted that instead of each robot searching a discrete area of the enclosure, each seemed to go for a chip according to complex factors of proximity, relative altitude, difficulty of retrieval, and even, it seemed to him, differences in agility that must have stemmed from the different fetal neurons in their processors. More than once he saw a robot start toward a chip, then veer off to go for a different one, while another robot seized the first chip.

  “That’s right,” Skaka said, eyeing Allan. “They’ve learned to increase efficiency by sharing knowledge. And they make cooperative decisions based, according to the mathematical analyses we’ve done, on a very detailed knowledge of their differences in capability. And they evolved all those techniques by themselves.”

  Allan watched Hot Bytes Saisa race on its spindly legs to the slit in the wall and shove the chips through.

  “Six minutes, thirty-four seconds,” Skaka said. “Allan, I’m sure somebody like you can see the breakthrough this represents in autonomous computer learning. It makes artificial intelligence-with everything that implies in terms of corporate or military systems-nearly within our grasp. Now, doesn’t that seem a potentially profitable investment for your venture capital firm?”

  Allan watched the plastic chips shower over Skaka’s feet. To the victor belong the spoils.

  “Yes,” he said. “Let’s talk.”

  After that, Figgy Pudding and Morrison Telecommunications were both anticlimactic. Figgy might be worth a small investment, just to establish a beachhead, but nothing major. Morrison Telecommunications was stodgy. Not anywhere near the front, not even really in the war zone. Same old, same old.

  Allan flew to DC and spent the night at the newly renovated Watergate. Jon had booked him into two skirmishes tomorrow with labs doing government work, and Patti had added two briefing sessions with firms already using Haller Ventures money. While he was at dinner, he studied the info on each that she sent him. By dessert, the figures had changed once and the meetings for tomorrow changed twice.

  Upstairs, Allan felt restless. There was nothing good on TV, not even with 240 channels. He couldn’t seem to concentrate on his favorite Net game, Battle Chess. Every time he moved a piece, the computer countered him with blinding speed. When be lost his lieutenant to the computer’s tank, which could move an
y number of squares through all three dimensions, Allan surrendered. It was a relief when Cathy called.

  “Allan? How’d it go today?”

  He told her about Novation-there was nothing he kept from Cathy. She was impressed, which cheered him a little. But then she said, “Listen, love, I’m going to have to reschedule our Wednesday rendezvous. I have the chance to go to Hong Kong after all.”

  “On the Burdette case? Great!” he forced himself to say. Cathy had worked for this for a long time.

  “I’m thrilled, of course. Lane is reworking my schedule. We’ll send it as soon as the snafus are out. Did you call Charlie?”

  “Yeah. He’s still just sitting a lot. Honey, do you think we should get him, well, help?”

  Cathy’s voice changed. “You know, I’ve been thinking that myself. Not that there’s anything really wrong with him, but just as a precaution. . ..”

  “I’ll have Jon research psychologists,” Charlie said heavily. “Listen, do you think we could reschedule our rendezvous to—”

  “Oops, gotta go, there’s Lane with another update on the Burdette case. God, me and international policy making! I can hardly believe it. Love you.” The Cathy icon vanished.

  “Love you, too,” Allan said to the blank meshnet.

  But there was no reason to wallow in gloom. He would call Suzette; his daughter was always a delight. Suzette, however, was not taking calls. Neither was Allan’s brother in Florida. His mother, her system informed him, was sailing in the Aegean and would return his call when she returned, unless it was an emergency. It was not an emergency. The icons on his PID all vibrated and shimmered, even Charlie’s, thank heavens. Allan went to bed.

  The next day, he felt fine. Meetings, the schedule, the flow of data and money and possibility. God, he loved it. A prosthetic device, almost invisible, to enhance human hearing through 30,000 eps. A significant gain in surveillance-satellite image resolution. Another of the endless small advances in nanotech, rearranging atoms in what would someday be the genie-in-the-bottle of the telecommunications and every other industry.