Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “Hello, Cassie, Mrs. McAvoy,” Jamie said, with one of his blinding smiles. Cassie, a nine-year-old in overalls and a T-shirt printed with kittens, smiled back. She was a prim little girl, eager to please adults. Well-mannered, straight A’s, teacher’s pet. “Never any trouble at home,” her mother had said, with pride. Ethan guessed she was not popular with other kids. But she was a valuable research subject, because MAIP had to learn to distinguish between genuine human emotions and “social pretense”—feelings expressed because convention expected it. When Cassie said, “I like you,” did she mean it?

  “Ready for the minuet, Cassie?” Jamie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then let’s get started! Here’s your magic bracelet, princess!” He slipped it onto her thin wrist. Mrs. McAvoy took a chair at the back of the lab. Cassie walked to the keyboard and began to play Bach’s “Minuet in G,” the left-hand part of the arrangement simplified for beginners. Jamie moved behind her, where she could not see him. Ethan studied MAIP’s displays.

  Sensors in Cassie’s bracelet measured her physiological responses: heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, skin conductance, and temperature. Tiny cameras captured her facial-muscle movement and eye saccades. The keyboard was wired to register the pressure of her fingers. When she finished the minuet, MAIP said, “That was good! But let’s talk about the way you arch your hands, okay, Cassie?” Voice analyzers measured Cassie’s responses: voice quality, timing, pitch. MAIP used the data to adjust the lesson: slowing down her instruction when Cassie seemed too frustrated, increasing the difficulty of what MAIP asked for when the child showed interest.

  They moved on, teacher and pupil, to Bach’s “Polonaise in D.” Cassie didn’t know this piece as well. MAIP was responsive and patient, tailoring her comments to Cassie’s emotional data.

  It looked so effortless. But years of work had gone into this piano lesson between a machine and a not-very-talented child. They had begun with a supervised classification problem, inputting observational data to obtain an output of what a test subject was feeling. Ethan had used a full range of pattern recognition and learning algorithms. But Jamie, the specialist in affective computing, had gone far beyond that. He had built, “by hand,” one complicated concept at a time, approaches to learning that did not depend on simpler, more general principles like logic. Then he’d made considerable progress in the difficult problem of integrating generative and discriminative models of machine learning. Thanks to Jamie, MAIP was a hybrid, multi-agent system, incorporating symbolic and logical components with sub-symbolic neural networks, plus some new soft-computing approaches he had invented. These borrowed methods from probability theory to maximize the use of incomplete or uncertain information.

  MAIP learned from each individual user. When Cassie’s data showed her specific frustration level rising to a point where it interfered with her learning, MAIP slowed down her instruction. When Cassie showed interest in a direction, MAIP took the lesson there. It all looked so smooth, Ethan’s and Jamie’s work invisible to anyone but them.

  At the end of the hour, MAIP said, “Well done, Cassie!”

  “Thank you.”

  “I hope you enjoyed the lesson.”

  “Yes.”

  “See you on Monday, then.”

  “Okay.”

  Mrs. McAvoy took Cassie’s hand, exchanged a few pleasantries with Jamie, and led Cassie out the door. It closed. In the corridor, the motion-activated surveillance system turned on.

  Jamie beamed at Ethan. “That went really well! Maip—”

  “I don’t want to come here anymore,” said the image of Cassie on the surveillance screen.

  “Why not?” Mrs. McAvoy said.

  “It’s no fun. Please, Mommy, can we never come here again?”

  Silence in the lab. Finally Ethan said, “I guess we need to work more on the ontology of social pretense.”

  Jamie looked crushed. “Damn! I thought Cassie liked coming here! She fooled me completely!”

  “More to the point, she fooled MAIP.”

  “All the subagents worked so well on yesterday’s test kid!”

  “There’s no free lunch.”

  Jamie had a rare flash of anger. “Ethan—do you always have to be so negative? And so fucking calm about it?”

  “Yes,” Ethan said, and they parted in mutual snits. Ethan knew that Jamie’s wouldn’t last; it wasn’t in his nature. There they were, yoked together, the Apollo and Cassandra of machine learning.

  Or maybe just Roo and Eeyore.

  The first time Ethan had heard about Moser’s Syndrome, he’d been chopping wood in the backyard and listening to the news on his tablet. Chopping wood was an anachronism he enjoyed: the warming of his muscles, the satisfying clunk of axe on birch logs, the smell of fresh wood chips on the warm August air. In a corner of the tiny yard, against the whitewashed fence, chrysanthemums bloomed scarlet and gold.

  “—coup in Mali that—”

  Also, if he was honest with himself, he liked being out of the house while Tina was in it. His year-old marriage was not going well. The vivacity that had originally attracted Ethan, so different from his own habitual constraint, was wearing thin. For Tina, every difference of opinion was a betrayal, every divergent action a crisis. But she was pregnant, and Ethan was determined to stick it out.

  “—tropical storm off the coast of North Carolina, and FEMA is urging—”

  Thunk! Another fall of the axe on wood, not a clean stroke. Ethan pulled the axe out of the log. Tina came out of the house, carrying a tray of iced tea. Although her belly was still flat, she proudly wore a maternity top. The tea tray held a plate of his favorite chocolate macaroons. They were both trying.

  “Hey, babes,” Tina said. Ethan forced a smile. He’d told her at least three times that he hated being called “babes.”

  He said, “The cookies look good.”

  She said, “I hope they are.”

  The radio said, “Repeat: This just in. The CDC has identified the virus causing Moser’s Syndrome, even as the disease has spread to two more cities in the Northwest. Contrary to earlier reports, the disease is transmitted by air and poses a significant threat to fetuses in the first and early second trimester of pregnancy. All pregnant women in Washington and Oregon are urged to avoid public gatherings whenever possible until more is known. The—”

  Ethan’s axe slipped from his hand, landing on his foot and partially severing his little toe in its leather sandal.

  Tina shrieked. In his first stunned moment, he thought she’d screamed at the blood flowing from his foot. But she threw the tray at him, crying, “You took me to that soccer game last week! How could you! If anything happens to this baby, I’ll never forgive you!” She burst into tears and ran into the house, leaving Ethan staring at the end of his foot. A chunk of toe lay disjointed from the rest, bloody pulp surrounded by chocolate macaroons. Vertigo swept over him. It passed. The newscaster began to interview a doctor about embryonic damage, nerve malformation, visible symptoms in newborns.

  Ethan shifted his gaze to the axe, as if it and not a maybe-living-maybe-not molecule were the danger to his unborn child. An ordinary axe: silver blade, hardwood handle, manufacturer’s name printed in small letters. Absurdly, a sentence rose in his mind from decades ago, a lecture from his first tech professor when he’d been an undergraduate: Technology is always double-edged, and the day stone tools were invented, axe murder became possible.

  Then the pain rushed in, and he bent over and vomited. After that, he pushed the chunk of toe back into place, wrapped his shirt around it, and applied pressure.

  If anything happens to this baby, I’ll never forgive you!

  They divorced eighteen months later.

  Social pretense was not a problem with one of Jamie and Ethan’s other research subjects, eleven-year-old Trevor Reynod. He barreled into the lab, shouting, “I’m here! Freakish! Let’s go!”

  “My man!” Jamie said, giving him a fist bump that
Trevor practically turned into an assault.

  “Jamie! And Dr. Stone Man!” That was the kid’s name for Ethan. Ethan didn’t object, as long as Trevor stayed well away from him. Trevor suffered from ADHD, although most of the suffering seemed to belong to the tired-looking mother who trailed in after him. A member of some sect that didn’t believe in medication, she refused to allow Trevor to be calmed down by drugs, but computer games were apparently allowed. Ethan suspected that these thrice-weekly sessions were an immense relief to her; she could turn Trevor over to someone else. Mrs. Reynod poured herself some coffee and slumped into the easy chair in the corner.

  Trevor pummeled the air and danced in place, knocking over a pile of blocks. Jamie got the bracelet onto his wrist (“Your superpower ring, dude!”) and settled both of them in front of a game console as carefully wired as Cassie’s keyboard. Trevor’s data began to flow down Ethan’s display. MAIP was silent during Trevor’s sessions, adjusting his game in response to his frustration or satisfaction levels but not instructing him. Trevor did not respond well to direct instruction.

  The game involved piloting a futuristic one-man plane, ridiculously represented as a bullet-shaped soap bubble. Its flight simulator was state-of-the-art, similar to the one used to train USAF jet pilots, who might eventually have MAIP incorporated into their training sessions. While flying over various war-torn terrains, Trevor had to shoot down alien craft to avoid being vaporized and to dodge falling stars that appeared from nowhere. Jamie’s role was to fire at Trevor from the ground. He almost never hit him, which allowed MAIP more control and Trevor merciless mockery.

  “Ha! Missed me again!”

  “You’re really good, Trev.”

  He was. Like most attention-deficit kids, Trevor could muster enormous powers of concentration when the activity actually interested him.

  They followed their plan of transitioning Trevor from the shooting game to one teaching math in the last fifteen minutes of the hour. Trevor’s levels of arousal and engagement fell, but not as far as they had the previous week. This was a new version of the math game, punchier and more inventive. In effect, Trevor was beta-testing Math Monkeys, while Ethan and Jamie gained learning-algorithm data from him.

  The session was a success. After Trevor left, shouting about his victory over the math monkeys, Jamie said, “Did you catch that? Maip tried a stutter-and-recover strategy on him! We didn’t program that!”

  “Not in quite that form, anyway.”

  “Come on, Ethan, she figured out for herself how to apply it! She learned!”

  “Maybe.” He would have to do the analysis first.

  But Jamie danced around the lab in an exuberant imitation of Trevor. “Freakish! She did it, Dr. Stone Man! You did it! Go, Maip!”

  Ethan smiled. It felt odd, as if his face were cracking.

  At midnight, Ethan let himself into the modeling lab in Building 6. The place was empty, even the most die-hard geek having gone out on a Friday night for beer and company. “Lights on low,” Ethan said. The lab complied.

  He’d told himself he wasn’t going to do this again. It only made everything harder. But he could not resist. This was the only place that felt meaningful to him now—or at least the only place where meaning felt natural, like air, instead of having to be manufactured moment after effortful moment.

  The lab contained, in addition to its staggeringly expensive machinery, three “rooms,” each with the missing fourth wall of a theater stage or a furniture showroom. The largest was an empty, white-walled box, used to project VR environments ranging from an Alpine village to the surface of the moon. The two furnished rooms represented living spaces with sofas and tables, onto which could be projected the VR programs: changing a chair from red velour to yellow brocade, setting out bottles on a table. Old stuff, but it was the starting point for the real challenge of modeling three-dimensional “reality” that could move and be moved, touch and be touched. This lab, already a huge profit-maker for MultiFuture Research, was usually the first one shown to visitors.

  Some of the programs, however, were private.

  Ethan slipped on a VR glove and put his password into the projector aimed at the smallest room. It sprang to life and Allyson was there, sitting on the floor, holding her stuffed Piglet. This was the Allyson he’d brought to the lab near the end of her illness, when it was clear that the doctors’ pathetically inadequate measures could not help her. Four more months, they said, but it had been only two. Ethan was grateful that Allyson had gone so quickly; he’d seen children for whom Moser’s Syndrome took its slower, crueler time.

  Tina had not been grateful. By that point, she had barely been Tina.

  Allyson had loved Winnie the Pooh. Kanga, Roo, and Eeyore had been her friends, but Piglet had been more: a talisman, an icon. Once she’d told Ethan that she hated Christopher Robin, “because his Piglet can talk to him and mine can’t.”

  The 3-D model of Allyson raised her head and looked up at Ethan. It was a tremendous technical achievement, that mobile action on a holographic projection. Right now, Ethan didn’t care. When he’d brought Allyson here, late at night on another Friday, she’d already begun to lose weight. Her skin had gone as colorless as the sheets she lay on at home. Her hair had fallen out in patches. Ethan had known this was his last chance; the following week Allyson had gone into the hospital. When Tina had found out what he’d done, she had raged at him with a ferocity excessive even for her. Although it should have been a warning.

  The model of Allyson—or, rather, the voice recorder in the computer—said, “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby,” Ethan said. And she smiled.

  That was it. Ten seconds of Allyson’s short life, and an enormous expenditure of bandwidth. He hadn’t kept his daughter in the lab longer than that; she’d looked too tired. Ethan hoped that the Biological Division’s Molecule 654-a could cure Moser’s Syndrome. But for him, there was only this.

  He called up the overlay programs, one by one. Allyson’s skin brightened to rosy pink. Her hair became thick and glossy again, without bare patches. Her little body grew sturdier. Her eyes opened wider. “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.” He reached out with the VR glove and stroked her cheek. The sensation was there: smooth, warm flesh.

  Over and over he played the enhanced, miraculously mobile model. Throughout, Ethan kept his face rigid, his hands under control, his thoughts disciplined. He was not Tina. He would never let himself be Tina.

  No one, not friends or colleagues, had known how to treat Ethan after Allyson, after Tina. “Call us,” friends had said while Ethan awaited Allyson’s diagnosis, “if anything goes wrong.” And later, after Tina, “Call us if you need anything.” But there is no one to call when everything goes wrong, when you need what you can never have back.

  “Hi, Daddy.”

  “Hi, baby.”

  When he’d had his fill, the fix that kept him from becoming Tina, he closed the program and went home.

  On Monday, Laura Avery waylaid him as he walked from the parking lot to Building 18. This being October in Seattle, it was still raining, but at least Ethan had remembered his umbrella. She had one too, blue with a reproduction of a Marc Chagall painting, which seemed to him a frivolous use of great art. Laura, however, was not frivolous. Serious but not humorless, she had made important contributions during her months at MultiFuture Research, or so he’d been told. The company, like all companies, was a cauldron of gossip.

  “Ethan! Wait up!”

  He had no choice, unless he wanted to appear rude.

  She was direct, without flirtatious games. Ordinarily he would have liked that. But this was not ordinarily, and it never would be again, not for him. Laura said, “I wondered if you’d like to have dinner one night at my place. I’m a good cook, and I can do vegetarian.”

  “I’m not vegetarian.”

  “I know, but I thought I’d just show off my fabulous culinary range.” She smiled whimsically.

  It was a
n attractive smile; she was an attractive woman. When they’d first been introduced, Laura had glanced quickly at his left hand, and her smile had grown warmer. He’d taken off his wedding ring the day after Tina had left him, long before she’d killed herself. Later, after someone had undoubtedly told Laura about Ethan’s story, Laura had grown more circumspect. But the warmth had still been there; he hadn’t needed MAIP to read her face. Now, a year after Tina’s death, this invitation—had someone told Laura it was exactly one year? Was she that coldly correct?

  No. She was an intelligent, appealing woman aware enough of her appeal to go directly after someone she liked. Why she liked him was a mystery; in Ethan’s opinion, there wasn’t enough of him left to like. Or to accept a dinner invitation.

  “Sorry. I’m busy.”

  She recognized the lie but hid any feeling of rejection. “Okay. Maybe another time.”

  “Thanks anyway.”

  That was it. A nothing encounter. But it left him feeling fragile, and he hated that. The only thing that had gotten him through the last year was the opposite of fragility: controlled, resolute, carefully modeled action.

  After his encounter with Laura, he threw himself into work, trying to figure out why MAIP hadn’t detected Cassie McAvoy’s social pretense of enjoying her piano lesson. He found a few promising leads, but nothing definitive.

  How far they still had to go was made clear by Jenna Carter.

  Jamie was good with the children who came to the machine lab. Sometimes Ethan thought this was because Jamie, brilliant as he was, was still a child himself: enthusiastic, sloppy, saved from terminal nerdiness only by his all-American good looks. Untested, as yet, by anything harsh. Other times Ethan felt ashamed of this facile assessment; Jamie was good with kids because he liked them.

  Not, however, all of them equally. While Jamie had no trouble with Trevor Reynod, he had to hide his dislike for Jenna, who wasn’t even a test subject, only the babysitter for her little brother Paul.

  They came in after school on Tuesday. Paul, at eight years old their youngest subject, went straight to the small table where Jamie had set out a wooden puzzle map of the United States.