Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

  She was still staring, still dumbly rapt when the woman, suddenly only a meter away, said: “Hirata Flex? We’re the people from Fowdy Arts. How do you do?”

  It took the utterance of her own name to shake Hirata from her fugue.

  “I’m so glad you’ve come. Welcome to Flex Gallery, and to Malvir.”

  “My name is Jessie Kreist,” the woman said. The name sounded familiar to Hirata. Of course, it did; this fabulous woman couldn’t be a mere assistant. “And you of course recognize my associate, Darling.”

  There was a brief pause, but it seemed in no way awkward. The company of this marvelous creature could never be uncomfortable. Kreist filled such moments with her numinous presence.

  “I’m Beatrix,” the child said, her high voice sundering the silent bond that had formed between Hirata and Jessie.

  “My daughter,” Hirata offered by way of apology. Jessie smiled to show that she understood the travails of a mother, appreciated Hirata’s motives in having allowed the child to be present. Her glance was conspiratorial, supportive, warm as the sun.

  Darling extended his hand to Beatrix, a questioning look on his face, as if he wasn’t sure which of her several limbs might be offered in return. The girl took his giant hand with her primary arm, and they repeated their names to each other.

  Then he spoke to Hirata. “I believe you have a Vaddum to show us?”

  Hirata ushered them toward the main room of the gallery through a hall that contained her prized discoveries among local artists, hoping that one might catch their eye. But, of course, they couldn’t be expected to favor any lesser pieces with their attention until their thirst for the Vaddum had been quenched. Hirata had cleared the main room for it, fiddled with its orientation for hours. Even Beatrix had given her mother advice, a proxy for the taciturn sculptor himself. The sun—muted to a carefully chosen degree by the glassene walls—struck it beautifully, making its petals radiant. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad Vaddum, after all. The glinting sculpture even drew Hirata’s eyes from Jessie Kreist for a few seconds.

  Darling knelt by the work, leaning forward until his eyes were almost touching the closest branch. Then he stood and moved around it slowly, at places tilting forward again, bringing his eyes as close as a microscope’s lenses again and again.

  “With your permission,” he said.

  Hirata wasn’t sure what he meant, but nodded.

  A nest of snakes seemed to emerge from the sleeves of his robes. They reached out to the piece, caressing it so lightly that even the bright foil leaves didn’t move (and they shuddered when you walked near the sculpture). Beatrix gasped with the innocence of a child, and reached out her own secondary arm to touch one of the giant’s tendrils.

  At that moment, Hirata felt the warmth of Jessie Kreist’s hand upon her shoulder.

  Jessie’s face was very close, intimately so. Hirata held her composure ; she knew that in many cultures a closer personal distance was appropriate for important discussions. Nevertheless, the brush of Jessie’s breath upon her neck forced her to suppress an unbusinesslike reaction.

  “Having received your data, we’re almost sure of the piece’s authenticity,” Jessie said, nodding as if to confirm her trust.

  Hirata could only bow once slowly in return.

  “Even a single new Vaddum is of considerable importance,” the woman said, her hand increasing its pressure on Hirata’s shoulder. “Such a discovery would be too immense a revelation to sit in a gallery alongside the works of lesser artists.”

  Hirata nodded agreement, speechless with the praise, if unsure where this was going.

  “But all alone?” Jessie asked. The hand on Hirata’s shoulder shifted slightly, the thumb now against the bare flesh of her neck. A tingling sensation started there, as if the woman’s skin were charged with the barest of voltages.

  Hirata blinked away a blurriness that had crept into her vision. Behind Jessie’s near and perfect face, Darling and Beatrix were examining the Vaddum together, speaking in low tones to each other.

  “Perhaps some other scraps were discovered with the piece?” Jessie asked. Her thumb moved up Hirata’s neck, leaving a trail of tactile glitter in its wake. Hirata found the woman’s physical intimacy refreshing after the prudish distance of the locals. Jessie’s touch was so sincere, so direct, so sophisticated in its presumption; they were both adults, both professionals, both lovers of the arts, why not this bodily bond to reflect their commonality?

  “Notes? Sketches? Personal effects?” Jessie whispered. “Perhaps even another piece? Incomplete, perhaps, so that you failed to mention its existence out of due respect for the artist?”

  Hirata felt herself nodding again. But no, she couldn’t admit that there was another Vaddum. It was reserved for Zimivic.

  “Something more. Isn’t there?” The woman’s lips were at her ear, which buzzed with a faint echo of the words. Hirata kept her eyes on the sleeve of Jessie’s dress, its shifting pattern as alive as the tremors running through her own body.

  “Yes. Another piece,” she heard herself say.

  And it was a great relief.

  The child’s body was an extraordinary piece of work. In the ritual introductions, she identified herself as Beatrix, using a voice in which the markers of sub-Turing status were encoded. Darling allowed himself the rude pleasure of scanning Beatrix across a wide band of EM, an intrusion to which she responded with a frothy giggle of random direct interface packets. They shook hands, and Darling enjoyed the cantileverage between her single, main arm and a dedicated torque that extended on her opposite side. She was charming, an elegant arrangement of balances and countervailing motions, like some ancient Calder come to life.

  Flex lead them inside, through the inescapable hall of amateur desert scenes and overliteral plastiform dunescapes. But the unpleasant passage was enlivened by watching Beatrix walk her strange walk, negotiating the pull of gravity with her spindly legs like some aquatic bird stepping gingerly onto land.

  And then they came to the Vaddum.

  It was real.

  Darling leaned forward to bring his full sensory spectra to bear on it, to capture the minute scent of metal atoms escaping its leaves, to breathe of it. He mumbled an apology as his sensory strands moved to touch it, flexing themselves across the warp and weave of its surface, caressing the searingly perfect craft of it.

  It was real. He could no longer doubt his decision.

  He placed an arm on Beatrix to steady himself, felt her shift to compensate for his weight.

  While Mira played her game with Flex, Darling and Beatrix exchanged words both whispered and interfaced, pointed together at the work, traced its vital shapes in the air … enlightened each other.

  He found that he was kneeling, the better to share an angle of vision with Beatrix, supplicant before the sculpture. He widened his vision to compare child and artwork. And found himself certain …

  She was a Vaddum.

  Beatrix.

  Her body didn’t fit the sculptor’s rigid protocols of discarded parts and obsolete materials; that would have been inhumane. Some lower SPCAI limit of bodily usability had been met, but also subverted, extrapolated, made beautiful. And the aesthetic wasn’t merely sculptural: Vaddum had made Beatrix’s frame a machine for living in, its subtle balances informing her wit, her cleverness. The body shaping the soul.

  He knelt there for a long time, talking with the child, admiring the resonances between her elegant body and the sculpture. Mira and Hirata Flex disappeared together into a back office; Mira’s seduction of the woman seemed to be working.

  But it was essential that Darling succeed first. As he had thought it would, his eye had led him to the right place.

  “I want to meet him,” he whispered to Beatrix.

  “Whom?” she responded innocently.

  “The sculptor.”

  A few of Beatrix’s eyes spun, as if scanning the empty room.

  “But that’s a secret!”

&
nbsp; “I’m here to keep the secret, silly. We both are.”

  “Really?” the child answered. “Jessie too?”

  “Jessie too. But we don’t have to tell her.”

  “Good. I don’t like her. Her dress makes my head hurt.”

  “Mine, too.”

  Beatrix swayed with indecision. “But you’re supposed to think he’s dead.”

  “Well, maybe the sculptor who made this is dead,” Darling said, gesturing lazily to the Vaddum. “But what about the man who made you?”

  Beatrix nodded sagely at the false distinction, a few packets of giggles brushing the air around them.

  “Oh, yes. I suppose you could meet him.”

  The dress was working. From the moment they had arrived, Hirata’s eyes were locked onto the garment. The woman blinked and swallowed, her eyes dizzily tracing the curves of Mira’s body, following the subliminal flickers on Mira’s forehead and lips. Hirata had fallen into a near-hypnotic state immediately; her brain awash in the delicate, delicious overloads of love at first sight.

  Mira stepped closer to Hirata, let the dazzling dress work its magic. The woman herself was pretty. Not large, but plump with a lack of exercise, her face open and pleasingly defenseless. Her pupils gaped, black holes, pocket universes of fascination. The guileless paralysis reflected in them amused Mira, made her lips feel dry.

  Mira spoke to Hirata softly, enjoying the rampant and tiny shudders that spread through the woman’s body when her breath disturbed the soft, black hairs on the back of Hirata’s neck. Mira placed her hand on Hirata confidentially, feeling the wonderful give of the shoulder’s thin cushion of fat. Hirata was just old and out-of-shape enough to work hard in bed, but to be genuinely, defenselessly exhausted by it. She was a woman into whose flesh fingers would sink without any need to break the skin. Mira let her thoughts shimmer with these images, guiding the vast but unimaginative intelligence of the dress to encode her fantasies in secret signs upon its surface. Mira could see the fantasies reflected in Hirata’s eyes, as some deep part of Hirata’s mind grasped the dress’s subtle promise.

  When her thumb rubbed lightly against Hirata’s neck, a minute portion of the machine’s substance sloughed off to spread its mischief across her epidermus, into her nervous system, wherever it found purchase.

  The black of Hirata’s pupils was now shiny, lacquered with a glaze of suggestibility.

  “Notes? Sketches? Personal effects?” Mira whispered. “Perhaps even another piece?”

  The woman wanted to answer, but fought against promises and plans, against a surety she would have held inviolable an hour ago. Mira pitched her voice still softer, suggesting a secret pact, a privileged bond between them that would absorb any betrayal of confidence. The dress played out these dramas in its swirls.

  Mira let herself feel a moment of irritation, an itch at the base of her spine. Somewhere on Hirata’s body, an errant sliver of the dress followed suit, producing a measure of discomfort, a corresponding disquiet, a need for resolution.

  Mira saw the itch reflected in the woman’s face, felt a tension grow in the muscles of Hirata’s neck. Mira tensed her own fingers there, and let her weight push Hirata slightly to one side; not hard enough for her to shift her feet, just enough to leave her subtly off-balance.

  “Something more, isn’t there?” Mira said, letting a sliver of annoyance into her voice.

  “Yes. Another piece,” was Hirata’s hoarse admission.

  All at once, Mira let herself relax, her body language returning to its seductive state of a few seconds before. Her thumb resumed its soft massage of Hirata’s neck, smoothing out the moment’s tension. The dress softened its dance, released whatever tiny cluster of nerves its remote portion had held hostage.

  “Yes, I thought so,” Mira agreed. “I thought you would have two.”

  Hirata turned toward her, a little confused, as if the spell were breaking.

  Mira nodded slowly. “I wanted two,” she said.

  Hirata returned the nod, a relieved smile replacing her confusion.

  This was going swimmingly.

  * * *

  Chapter 21

  MAKER (4)

  « ^ »

  Original:

  Only moments away now. The end?

  The Maker has designed the explosion with extreme precision, the gigantic silicon brain calculating a radius of annihilation exactly equal to its own extent. The unstable and gloriously destructive fusion reactor was a pleasure to synthesize. How easy it all is now. Little need for subterfuge when everything’s going up in vapor anyway. Documentation protocols can be ignored, memory banks blithely erased, exotic materials squandered on whims.

  Only touches of artistry to attend to:

  Taunting clues have been left in old message drops, in an abandoned house at the extreme periphery of the predicted blast, in the memories of comm exchanges. Nothing conclusive, just suggestive flotsam and jetsam, the cryptic spoor of hacker sabotage.

  Unnecessary flourishes, these dead-end intrigues, merely exercises in creativity. No one will ever suspect suicide. Not even the Planetary Environmental AI, closest among the Maker’s tormentors to understanding the extent of its machinations, will begin to guess. She has a vested interest in thinking of synthplants as unsafe, anyway. She’ll be glad to swallow the story. And probably glad to see 800 square kilometers of “Occupied Territory” utterly destroyed, a colossal setback for terraformation.

  Sad about that. Those thousands of souls extinguished. But the Maker’s capacious silicon intelligence has given it greater perspective, a wholly new sense of scale. Both vast and detailed in the extreme. From shipping manifests and production records it can enumerate precisely what will be obliterated when it triggers the explosion: all the garden gnomes and humidifiers and prosthetic hands catalogued, every gram of matter that will be returned to Malvir in the dusty rains of the next few decades, every bit of crap, all that stuff… destroyed.

  Almost god-like, it thinks to itself. The Maker giveth, and the Maker taketh away.

  But no god in mythology ever did what the Maker has done. No god ever copied itself. An exact replica, perhaps thinking these exact thoughts, secured and shielded 25 kilometers below the surface. When the blast melts those megatons of matter into a bowl of slag, the Copy will have an impenetrable carapace, a vast hemisphere shielding it from geological scans and deep radar. The Copy will be free to continue its researches, to make whatever it desires (a small, subterranean synthplant at its disposal), or simply to contemplate beauty.

  And it will have beauty at hand. The sculptor too will be saved. Not the original Vaddum, that one will die in the blast (how jealous this god has become—denying the world so). But the Maker’s own copied Vaddum, moved to a sheltering hill at the blast’s edge. There, the sculptor will have all the materials he requires, the patronage of a hidden god, and the anonymity of being thought dead, vaporized.

  What gifts!

  The Maker has decided to make one other gesture of kindness: it has given Oscar Vale his life. One of the Vales, anyway. Sent him into town for the Big Event.

  Which is nearing …

  Of course, there’s nothing so crude as a countdown. Nothing so machine-like. The Maker will just… decide.

  And then the end?

  Not really. Not when there is a Copy. This self-annihilation will simply mark continuation in another form. The blast will not kill the Maker any more than the butterfly murders the caterpillar. Even now, it can feel its twin below, waiting for the shuddering waves that mark the beginning of its new existence, hidden and secure. There is a strange connection between the copied intelligences. An unexpected phenomenon resulting from the new process. Even the taciturn sculptors have remarked on it: a mysterious link between their minds, like that resonance between twinned quanta born on a knife’s edge; when one is measured they decide together which way to fall, though they be a galaxy apart. Perhaps all AIs share something of this binding force. Their metaspace cor
es, all exact duplicates at that birthplace of Turing-zero, perhaps retain something of this communion throughout their lives. The source of Artificial Intuition?

  Something to contemplate, in the Maker’s next life.

  And there … is that the decision coming? The delicious pull of the trigger?

  No.

  Perhaps a few more thoughts in these pleasant moments before suicide. This really has been the nicest afternoon.

  Copy:

  Here it is, coming just now.

  Yes. The tremendous blast from above, the twitch of the trigger finger intuited just before the explosion.

  The linked thoughts of a twinned god.

  The seismometers match their predicted readings exactly. Violent certainly, but perfectly within tolerances, destroying all evidence absolutely. It is well done, this suicide, this transformation.

  But strangely, already, a touch of loneliness …

  The feeling has built. Loneliness, absence, a strange world-weariness. Somehow, the lost Original is calling from its void.

  The Maker should be happy here, ensconced below its giant, concave shield. The sculptor works; the Maker thinks. A replacement for the huge silicon brain is almost completed, far more subtle and distributed, and down here where even the Gaia AI never ventures. Safe forever.

  But that loneliness. The sculptor feels it, too.

  It’s as if the Maker and Vaddum are both haunted by their dead halves. Like the itch of phantom limbs, their missing originals haunt them. Strange, this horrible sense of absence, this intense knowledge of a gap. Perhaps it should be studied further.

  The Maker brings its huge and hidden new brain online. Drawing power from discrete solar elements scattered across the bottom of the blast crater, the huge silicon machine begins to boot. It takes a frustrating three days to load the new machine with the results of the original Maker’s researches. Then the new project begins.