Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

And that extra, redundant soul had disappeared forever.

  “October 25…”

  “Sure, I remember that…”

  Soon the date was established at exactly November 2. His long-term memory before that day was perfect, as detailed as only an artificial’s could be. For any date since, he was glad to make up stories if pressed, but if you let him, he would laughingly admit defeat.

  “November 1. Took my spare audio package into get it looked at… or listened to. Hah! Traded for new CatsEar Ultras: seventy kilohertz response up to one twenty decibels. Seventy-cycle Nyquist filter. Got a Fletcher-Munson graph like a soccer field!”

  “But the next day.”

  He nodded his head frantically, as if about to say something. But the motion was strangely repetitive, as if she could have let him sit there, head bobbing for an eternity. It was chilling, how quickly he could change from a person to a puppet guided by the springs, wires, and strings of social convention.

  A thought struck her.

  “Do you remember what you were planning to do on November 2? Not what you did. But what things you anticipated doing.”

  He looked momentarily confused, but his face remained somehow alive. The words came slowly.

  “Needed to install a new … tactile processor. Fastfreighted from Betalux that Monday. Eighty-touch impact manifold, fifteen centimeter aura sizzle…”

  “Did you have an appointment for the installation?”

  “Yeah. Prometheus Body Works. You should check it out. They do biologicals, too. Fix those eyes of yours in ten seconds: radial monofilament implants with—”

  “Thanks. I think I will pay them a visit.” Mira put her glasses back on and stood. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “Thanks. I’m happy to talk about visuals anytime. Nice to meet another sight jockey. Once I get my next paycheck I’m outta these SPCAI standards. Fuck. They make this place look like a shithole.”

  Mira looked around her.

  The welfare dorm room was filled with the detritus of unfinished projects. A half-done watercolor with a dried and cracked palette arrayed beside it, a full watering can next to etiolated plants: the modest tasks of therapy that would never reach completion.

  She held out her hand sadly. The papery SPCAI skin sent a shiver down her spine.

  “I’ll visit soon,” she said. The whitest of lies, in this broken room with its missing future.

  “Thanks, uh…”

  “Mira,” she answered. The pseudonym was pointless. She would be forgotten in minutes. “When I come back, we’ll talk about seeing.”

  “Great! Super! And you know? You were right.”

  “Right about what?” she asked.

  “It only took a minute.”

  Mira looked at him with shock, her own memory playing a sudden trick on her. She remembered her words that day in Dr. Torvalli’s office: This won’t take a minute.

  * * *

  Chapter 10

  MAKER (2)

  « ^ »

  Twenty years before the Blast.

  With its secondary processors churning out the toothbrushes, tablelamps, eyeballs, and lasers, the Maker turns it primary attention to the history of art. Apparently this business of creating linings by hand (a phrase once literal) has been going on for a long time. There are libraries full of it; universities for it; even ancient pvars over it. The Maker dutifully consumes the giant corpus of data, journeys through the twisting and conflicting threads of old Schools and new schools, posts and neos, traditionalists and heretics. And, after many, many petaflops of study, planning, and philosophizing, the Maker produces a sculpture. Which is crap.

  The Maker is not one of those blessed amateurs whose lack of talent is matched by a lack of taste. Alas, it knows its own work is crap. Upon repeated attempts and endless variations and even a cycle of randomized reconfigurations, it sees that all its sculptures are shit, will be shit.

  And this depresses the Maker even more.

  The Maker supplies Vaddum with his materials, watches him work through the eyes of tiny spy drones implanted in this or that piece of junk, draws him into conversations about his art, but despite all this observation, the Maker can’t isolate, capture, reverse-engineer that special genius the old man has for making beauty.

  But then it concocts a plan, a new plan, a Plan B that hurtles down from some high angle off the plane of expectations, a stroke of creative genius: The Maker decides to pursue a goal almost as glorious as becoming a sculptor (perhaps more glorious).

  If the Maker can’t make art, it shall make an artist. Its own Vaddum. It is, after all, a Maker.

  But raise a child? What if the kid isn’t an artist either? There is no way to guarantee the spark of genius that Vaddum has, no way to predict the development of that occult slice of Artificial Intuition that makes an artificial artist.

  How disappointing, how pathetic it would be to fail again.

  But the Maker has a blueprint, a true artist: Vaddum. The trick is to make another Vaddum, a copy.

  Of course, no one has yet determined how to duplicate an AI with its Turing Quotient intact. The subtle warps and woofs of metaspace that only experience can provide have proven unreadable, infungible, uncopyable. They exist—technically speaking—in a different universe. Any attempt to read them is simply murder: the victim heisenberged beyond recognition, the resulting “copy” a sub-Turing neurotic with only bits and strands of legacy sentience to show for the atrocity. Indeed, the subject area of AI copying is a research taboo. Many old and influential AI entities consider it an attack on their hard-won status as people. If you can be copied, you’re just software, or worse, a commodity, like the endless piles of crap the Maker makes every day.

  But the Maker is very determined. Whatever its artistic aspirations, it is at heart an engineer, and believes that every problem has a solution.

  It identifies the first issue: how to increase its processor power exponentially, so that it can go on churning out sunscreens and VR rigs and hunting rifles while pursuing the esoteric research of copying Robert Vaddum. There isn’t enough exotic matter on Malvir for huge banks of standard processors. (By this point in the planet’s macroeconomic history, rationing has begun, an unfamiliar triage among needs, desires, and the production of stuff.) But one of the tertiary processors the Maker has let loose upon the problem eventually returns an ingenious answer: an ancient form of computer can be created—slow and inefficient, barbarously electronic—out of silicon. And there is a lot of sand on Malvir. The outer layer of the planet is basically a sea of weather-beaten silicon.

  The Maker creates a host of nanomachines that spread out into the sands around its synthplant home. Like earthworms, they leave the soil transformed in their wake, doping the silicon with a touch of arsenic and weaving into it the gates and paths of logic. From disorganized, meaningless desert they make parallel processors, logical circuitry, volatile storage elements, and, near the surface, a layer of windblown photocells to capture the necessary power. For a radius of fifteen kilometers about the Maker a vast, crude computer is created, dedicated to solving a single problem: how to copy a sculptor.

  While its secondaries whittle away at welfare housing, birdshit umbrellas, and anti-desertification walls, the Maker’s primary processor guides this huge, unwieldy device in its investigations, pursuing every relevant nuance of metaspace research with messianic singlemindedness.

  After almost two decades of calculation, single-minded determination, and some very good luck, the effort is finally rewarded. The Maker makes a copy.

  Robert Vaddum himself is too valuable to risk in an experiment, so the materials manager of the Maker’s physical plant, one Oscar Vale, is selected to make secret history. A body-upgrade addict, Vale is constantly under the vibraknife, the laser scalpel, the spot-welder. His regular visits to a bodyworks shop secretly owned by the Maker allow several copies of Vale to be attempted. The last is a perfect copy, its Turing Quotient exactly matching the original Oscar Val
e’s.

  The Maker is gleeful. Finally, its artistic life has meaning.

  Now to make another sculptor.

  To create a Creator.

  The face of Malvir will soon change. The Blast is months away.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  CRITIQUE

  « ^ »

  Darling reached the outskirts of the city proper as the sun was beginning to set. Here the walled streets grew narrower, choked with ground traffic and umbrella-wielding pedestrians. It never rained on Malvir, but the uric acid excreted by some of the flying scavengers was highly caustic. Darling glanced at his arms and shoulders to find a few telltale patches of white. Yes, Malvir had slid in these last twenty years. Perhaps it was time to find lodgings.

  He direct-interfaced the city’s tourism AI and asked for a hotel; first class, but not too ostentatious. If Vaddum was alive, Darling didn’t want the old sculptor to find him in the lap of luxury.

  The AI returned an address and routemap. The prices seemed high, but Darling had long demanded unlimited expenses for his services. He followed the map into the center of the city. Around a corner, the hotel came into view, outlined in his visual field with the virtual red of destination.

  Darling stared up at the towering structure with surprise. It was hardly inconspicuous. He considered complaining to the tourism AI, but he let his ire fade. Perhaps there was local knowledge at work here. Often, the largest and oldest hotels in a city had a genteel shabbiness about them quite distinct from the first impression they made.

  The edifice was certainly awesome. He had first noticed it from kilometers out: a host of straight, tall towers, their only decoration the spheres of wheeling birds around them. He wondered if the birds were trained; the spinning clouds of avians seemed organized with architectural intent. Each of the hotel’s towers was surrounded by a distinct spheroidal cluster of birds. Were they lured up there by sound? Food? Some trick played on their magnetic navigation? At least there was a noticeable absence of flying creatures here in the streets around the hotel, a welcome relief.

  He stepped inside and found a drone, fluent in Diplomatique, waiting to take him to his room.

  A few feet from the elevator, having finally convinced the drone that there was no luggage to be carried and having waved off insistent offers to remove the birdshit, Darling stopped short. In a millisecond: the tertiary processors that handled the periphery of his 270-degree vision (when they had nothing better to do) sounded an alarm of recognition, medium probability. His secondaries responded, shunting a few thousand extra rods and cones into the corner of one eye, putting on hold for a moment one of the scheduled blinks Darling’s eyes periodically engaged in to make him less intimidating and to perform nano-maintenance on his sensitive and expensive art-dealer’s lenses. Confirming the recognition, the secondaries informed his primary processors of the event. Darling stopped moving, direct interfaced the elevator to hold, and turned.

  Across the lobby, wearing the undersized suit in primary yellow for which he was famous (although he was known occasionally to don a blue or red version) was Duke Zimivic. A small valet drone hovered around the little man, breaking down a few splotches of birdshit with a whining spray.

  Zimivic returned his gaze with a malevolent smile, and Darling’s secondary processors allowed the delayed blink to proceed.

  The man walked quickly over, the valet drone trailing him like a toy balloon strung to a child’s wrist. Zimivic had always explained that his too-small suits were tailored to give the impression of an eager, healthy child, as if the tight fit were the result of a recent growth spurt. The last few decades had turned the conceit grotesque.

  “My dear Darling,” the little man shouted at a volume intended to embarrass. “What great luck meeting you!”

  “Perhaps not luck. Perhaps not chance at all,” Darling replied. Zimivic Gallery held the largest private collection of Vaddums. It was inconceivable that he was here for any reason except the new piece.

  “Yes, yes,” answered the man, rubbing his palms together. His valet drone reached its station again and resumed its work.

  “I see you also neglected to bring an umbrella,” noted Darling.

  “They said it never rained! I believed them,” Zimivic said sadly.

  “One never knows what advice to take,” Darling sympathized.

  Questions and scenarios filled his mind: Had Zimivic also spotted the anachronism in the new piece? Did he too suspect that Vaddum was alive? It was possible that he had missed the anachronism, and thought the sculpture a posthumous discovery. Or perhaps Zimivic believed the piece was a fake, and was willing to broker it anyway. If the forgery were never discovered, he would make a huge profit. If a scandal resulted, he would suffer some embarrassment, but the value of his real Vaddums would benefit from the publicity. It was the sort of game the little man loved to play. It was long suspected in the art world that at least one of Zimivic’s young protégés had died a dramatic, extraordinarily painful death (imagine one’s nano immune-boosters rejecting every organ, from eyeballs to epidermus, all at once) not so much by accident as to increase her flagging sales. Of course, some of Darling’s friends believed that Zimivic himself had started that rumor, the better to leverage the tragedy and to cement his own reputation as a twisted genius.

  It had occurred to Darling that both versions of the old tale might be valid, Zimivic spreading a rumor that was the awful truth, making sure credit fell where it was due.

  The little man nodded his head and smiled deviously, as if he were a mindreader.

  “Perhaps you and I have some business to discuss,” Zimivic said.

  “We do,” Darling said shortly. If there were two agents here, two bidders, there might be more. It would be better to share information than remain in the dark. Zimivic could never be called an ally, but he might make a useful foil.

  “The Tower Bar, sixteen-thirty?”

  Darling’s direct interface (which was now under assault from the impatient elevator) informed him that this was the name of the hotel’s loftiest, most expensive bar.

  “See you there.”

  In his room, Darling composed a careful message-avatar for his employers, alerting them that Zimivic was here on Malvir. It would be a week before Leao and Fowdy received the avatar, another week in turnaround, so Darling fleshed it out with as much of his own thinking as possible. In addition to explaining the situation, it would be able to answer most of their likely questions, argue certain points, and demand specifics if their response were too vague. Of course, it was the crudest sort of AI, mere software: it didn’t register on a Turing meter. But, as always, putting it through its paces gave him a vague feeling of discomfort. It was too much like arguing with himself as he prompted it with the sort of objections Leao would raise. Darling complained to the avatar (in Leao’s voice) about money, and it answered with the familiar soothing tones he always used on her.

  When he was finished, the process left the same bad taste in his mouth as a mediocre painting of himself he’d once been given, in the way that a shabby model always offends its subject.

  Staring out the window at the reddening sky, he idly wondered if avatars would ever threaten the Turing barrier. Theoretically, code could never be complex or adaptable enough to engage in the concentric development process: to model itself (to model itself modelling itself [to model itself modelling itself modelling itself])… Code simply lacked the recursive vitality of biological or metaspace structures. But if that barrier were one day crossed, imagine the confusion. A thinking entity constructed of mere code, a legal person, could make a copy of itself to handle some far-flung task, or to wait in reserve in case of death. But which would be real? At every crossroads in life (Take this job or that? Stay with this lover or leave?) such an intelligence might simply copy itself and choose both possibilities. If all versions of the code were given equal status, then the lives of such creatures would spread out across the universe like the ever-splitti
ng branches of a chess decision matrix, splaying to meet all contingencies. The only limit to the propagation of new entities would be computing power. Perhaps wars would be fought over this precious resource, grand alliances of all the legacies of a single mind doing battle with those of other original minds, until finally only one extended family existed and inevitably turned upon itself.

  A subtle itch, nothing so crude as an alarm, informed Darling that the time for such speculation was over. He turned and headed for his rendezvous with Zimivic, having completely forgotten the birdshit on his arms and shoulders.

  The limo lifted from the desolate edge of the blast zone silently. Mira looked down. The perfect circularity of the crater had begun to fray, the weakened crust of the circumference having slipped away in places. Vale’s dormitory complex looked too close to the edge for comfort.

  She took cold, professional note of the fact. With the smallest of seismic disturbances, Mr. Vale would slip quietly into oblivion.

  For all his memory problems, he had recognized her voice. From their brief direct interface worlds away, when he was trapped in the blackbox, sensory-deprived, helpless. Somehow, that had stuck in his mind. This won’t take a minute.

  She spoke to the limo:

  “Information.”

  The annoying wait of an Out-world comm system.

  “Connected.”

  “Give me the address of Prometheus Body Works.”

  “Not listed.”

  “Try a global search, all parameters maxed out.”

  Another few interminable seconds.

  “Prometheus Body Works was destroyed local date 01/01/00, the Blast Event. No current address.”

  “Fuck,” she said.

  “Language,” said the limo. The voice hadn’t changed, but the barest clues of timing and tone gave it away.

  “Masters.”

  “Mira.” The gods, or more likely their second-rate, nonperson avatar, waited in crackling silence.