Marcus-Sebastian pauses before a two-foot-high cartoon robot complete with key turning in its back. It floats above a task-drone, which copies its movements so that together they can perform the task of pruning a shrub. The companisim’s ridiculous cartoon face is set in an expression of furious concentration, but the shrub has still been mangled.
‘That’s very good, Gizmo,’ says Marcus-Sebastian. ‘You can go play with the others now.’
The task-drone slumps into inactivity. The transparent cartoon robot throws up its arms and announces ‘Gizmo!’ before racing off as fast as his little mechanical legs will carry him.
‘He’s getting better,’ says Marcus-Sebastian, ruefully examining the assaulted shrub. ‘He’s not cutting them off at the roots anymore. I’ll get one of the others to tidy it up.’
‘You make them do chores?’ asks Isabella.
‘Yes,’ says Marcus-Sebastian. ‘It’s important they have responsibilities. They’re always learning, you know. For some of them the change is hard to spot, but they’re all growing, all learning, all the time. Some of them just learn slowly.’
‘That one spoke, but the others are all silent?’ says Isabella.
‘That’s his one word,’ says Marcus-Sebastian. ‘They’re almost all mute and most of them have deep-wired grammar blockers, so they can read but not form English sentences. We didn’t want them passing any Turing tests, you see. ‘Course, the truth came out in the end, but now they’re recognized as sentients no-one wants them, and there’s nowhere for them to go.’
‘You used to make them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not proud of it?’
‘No,’ says Marcus-Sebastian. ‘It’s funny how a nine-figure salary helps one rationalize things. I told myself I was making toys, but instead I was making slaves.’
Isabella is curious how deep the fellow’s madness goes. ‘Slaves? That’s rather strong. Surely it’s no worse than keeping pets?’
‘If we could take their grammar blockers out and they started speaking, you wouldn’t feel that way,’ says Marcus-Sebastian.
‘Which ones are the fastest learners?’ asks Isabella.
Marcus-Sebastian narrows his eyes a little. ‘Why is that important? What are you hoping to get out of this?’
‘I’m a woman of a certain age in search of a companion.’
‘Join a bridge club.’
‘I tried that. Truth is, I don’t like people. They make you a pawn in their private chess game. They’re unfaithful. They let you down.’
Marcus-Sebastian stares into her face like he’s reading something etched on the bones of her skull. Isabella smiles back: A thief must be a mistress of the innocent smile. She knows he’s desperate to find homes for at least some of his charges. Eventually he says, ‘Come and meet Wend-E, she’s about the smartest. Advanced model intended for the, um, the mature female demogra-’
‘The spinster market,’ says Isabella, sensing the chance to put him a little off-balance.
‘Uh, yes.’ He leads her across the garden. ‘She can play all board and card games to a high standard and is an expert in a number of arts and crafts, making her a capable tutor in everything except languages.’
‘Can she learn new skills too?’
‘If you provide her with enough input and data space, yes. I’ll be sad to see her go, she’s a big help with keeping the others in line. Some of them have deep-coded mischief engrams to make them more entertaining. Not so entertaining when you’ve got a houseful of them.’ He stops walking, gives Isabella that searching look again. ‘Wend-E had some... bad experiences with her previous people,’ he says. ‘It’s taken a long time for me to get her to trust humans again.’
Isabella smiles and nods, but says nothing.
Marcus calls one of the companisims over to join them. It looks something like a five-year-old girl’s first drawing of herself, if the five year-old were good with 3D-graphics. She has a head like a white egg lying on its side, between bunches of something that’s clearly supposed to be pink hair. The eyes, mouth and eyebrows are stencilled in big black pixels, as though on an ancient LCD display. Whoever designed her thought that blinking and constantly raised eyebrows were cute. She doesn’t walk to them, she skips. She’s quite the most repellent thing Isabella has ever seen.
‘Wend-E, this is Isabella,’ says Marcus-Sebastian.
The companisim performs a virtual curtsey, smiles, and blinks her cartoon eyes, each blink accompanied by a soft ‘plink’ sound.
‘Wend-E, you’ve been with us a long time,’ says Marcus-Sebastian, ‘and I know you’re happy here-’
Wend-E nods her oval head vigorously.
‘But this lady is looking for a companion. Are you interested?’
Wend-E turns her big LCD eyes to Isabella. They go ‘plink, plink’. The black mouth line turns up, a little uncertainly, into a pixelated smile.
Isabella Sauber smiles back till her cheek muscles ache.
The companisim module is big, the size of a wine-crate. It has an array of plug-in ports on one face and a little motion-effect picture of a waving Wend-E on all the others. When Marcus-Sebastian handed it to her, he gave Isabella a final, long look, and for a second she thought he’d snatch it back, but she smiled and smiled, and eventually he let it go. It’s the closest thing Wend-E has to a physical body, and it’s now one part of a cluster of devices filling the main room of Isabella’s apartment. It sits within the frame of a portable neuro-surgery array, and cables snake from it to a Lamsam Industries simularium, one of the top-drawer models they use for big virtual events.
Isabella makes some final adjustments then sits on her sofa with her eyes closed, activates her neural implants, and drifts out of this reality and into the virtual reality of the simularium. In that empty world she is an omnipresent goddess, and the only other thing in there is the shape of a cartoon girl floating like a doll discarded in deep space. Isabella thinks a command, and waits while symbology scrolls across Wend-E’s eggshell face; boot messages and software patent warnings in a grab-bag of languages. The black eyes and mouth appear, just sketched flat lines, then the eyes ‘open’ and blink. Plink, plink.
‘You’re wired into a petabyte simularium,’ says Isabella, her voice filling this little world like thunder.
Wend-E ‘looks’ about at her blank universe. A question-mark appears where her nose would be.
‘This will be your training-ground. I’m afraid it’s not a companion I need, it’s an accomplice. I am a thief, one of the better ones currently alive. When I began it was still a time when a lone gunwoman could get by, but as security got more complex and my ambitions grew I had to start assembling teams. Alas, as the locks have gotten better and better, the standard of the modern criminal has steadily declined. You can’t get the help nowadays, people always let you down. I need someone I can control, someone who can compromise military-grade countermeasures. No human is competent to do this anymore, but an A.I., even a low-grade commercial companion model, moves and lives in the world of data. You’re going to help me pull off the most important heist of my life, in which I hope to reclaim something very dear to me. You’ll handle the virtual world while I deal with the physical. I know you don’t currently have those skill sets, but you’re a fast learner and I’ve created a suitable teaching environment.’
Wend-E’s question-mark nose becomes an exclamation point.
‘To provide you with suitable motivation, I have mounted your physical component within one of those x-ray arrays normally used in neuro-surgery. Every time you fail to perform to my expectations, I will use it to destroy one junction in your neural net. If you consistently perform poorly you’ll gradually lose all your memories and inbuilt skill sets, until you completely cease to function at all.’
The companisim’s cartoon eyes get bigger, and the mouth line turns into an arc like a very miserable monochrome rainbow.
‘We will begin immediately,’ says Isabella. Structures rise around Wend-E, fi
lling the other-space of the simularium, forming a maze around the companisim’s avatar. ‘This maze contains locks and tripwires which you must overcome in order to escape THESE.’
Two flaming hellhounds ripped from an immersim game blaze into snarling existence. Wend-E backs away from them, LCD eyes wide. They spring. Wend-E runs, flapping her cartoon arms like she’s trying to take flight. The first trap pops up before her: an access gateway keyed to refuse Wend-E’s UID. It takes Wend-E an instant to morph into a pink demon, presenting a false identity, and she’s through the gate and off down the paths of the labyrinth, pursued by the hounds.
‘Good,’ murmurs Isabella Sauber, ‘very good.’ She opens a bag of rice crackers and settles down to watch Wend-E running like a very scared rat through a virtual maze.
For the first two weeks, Wend-E’s learning performance exceeds Isabella’s expectations. But as the tasks get more difficult, Wend-E’s progress slows. Isabella begins to grow frustrated: It’s not like they have all the time in the world. Every day new security measures are created, every day the task she’s training Wend-E for gets tougher. And it’s not just the companisim who is growing steadily more obsolete.
Isabella nurtures her anger, stoking it like a fire. At first, like any fire, it’s hard to get going; she’s too ready to excuse the companisim’s failings. But she tells herself one must be tough. She institutes a regime of punishments, starting slight, using each as a stepping-stone to a greater cruelty. She obsesses over Wend-E’s failures, ignores its successes, mutters to herself that the virtual being is wilful, lazy, conspiring against her. The fire in her soul begins to catch, flicker and flare.
Ignition finally comes one day when Wend-E repeatedly fails to complete a particular maze within time. Isabella, watching through her neural implants from the comfort of her sofa, allows the companisim thirteen tries before she slaps a hand down on the arm of the sofa and shouts, ‘Too slow!’. The impact bounces the glass of green tea that was resting within easy reach straight into her lap, raising a furious screech. ‘Now look what you’ve made me do, you stupid-’
In her virtual dungeon Wend-E collapses to her virtual knees and covers her shaking eggshell head with cartoon hands. She’s still like that when Isabella comes back from changing into a different set of jeans.
‘Stop that,’ hisses Isabella, legs still stinging from the scalding tea, and fury blazing bright within her. ‘You’re nothing but a lot of connections in a nanotronic core, you’re all fake, so stop trying to garner my sympathy. Stand up.’
Wend-E stands on shaking legs but keeps her head down as though to hide the black LCD tears running down her face in repeated patterns.
‘Now, I explained this,’ says Isabella. ‘If you don’t perform you’ll be punished. It’s you that’s making this happen by your repeated failures, it’s not my fault. As previous punishments have been too random for you to care, I’ve analysed some of the linkages in your neural net, and mapped your memories within it.’ Suddenly Wend-E is not alone. In the simulation with her are the frozen images of pink elephants, paper tigers, clockwork robots and cutesy aliens. Even Gizmo is there.
‘From now on, every time you fail I will destroy the memory of one of your little friends. You get to choose which one.’
Wend-E shakes her head, refusing to even look at the choices laid out before her.
‘Choose, or I’ll wipe all of them.’
It’s two months before Wend-E runs all the training mazes in an acceptable time. A week after that Isabella puts Wend-E through a vast and malignant training sim that auto-learns Wend-E’s responses, so the companisim can never use the same trick twice. These days Isabella has to watch Wend-E’s performance at one hundredth speed, otherwise her meat-slow perceptions would see only a blur. Wend-E changes appearance as she dons false identities, swarms as she forks copies of herself to work in parallel or act as decoys, casts lightning when she conjures intrusion programs, and performs complex dances in shifting helixes of light whose purpose Isabella cannot imagine. She completes Isabella’s bastard-level simulation significantly under the expected time. Wend-E has become a maestro of deception and sabotage, able to invent solutions in milliseconds. She’s ready, and it’s only cost the memories of six of her friends from the sanctuary, along with some skill-sets that Isabella deemed unimportant, including two of Wend-E’s favourite dances.
Wend-E stands like a soldier on a parade ground, but with her eggshell head turned down, staring at her cartoon shoes, awaiting the judgement on her performance.
‘Excellent. You’re finally ready,’ Isabella tells her. ‘The time has come to discuss our true objective.’
A blue sea unfurls around Wend-E, filling the simularium like an azure carpet rolling out. In this sea, trailing a shining wake like a bridal train, is a huge, wedge-shaped, flat-topped ship. An aircraft carrier, though most of the flight-deck has been repurposed into a landscaped garden with swimming pools and tennis courts. The only concession to aircraft is a helipad at one end.
‘The Villa Wanderlust: Formerly the HMS Queen Elizabeth, ‘till the British had to sell their military to bail out their banking system, and now the world’s most vulgar celebrity crib. Home to the world’s most successful corporate parasite: Nicola Sauber. My sister.’ The carrier splits into full-motion cutaway, displaying a labyrinth of internal compartments. ‘It’s been retrofitted with a modern pebble-bed reactor and mostly stays in international waters and out of reach of any law. Inside there’s ballrooms, cinemas, gyms, and a private museum stocked with art treasures, including this.’
The Villa Wanderlust vanishes, replaced by a large, ornate, wooden desk-globe.
‘My mother was a very successful antiquities dealer. The house was full of old things. And there was one thing that I loved: This. I used to trace the outlines of continents with my fingers, reading the names of mythical places, speaking them out loud. The whole world in my hands, and I travelled it all in my dreams. It should have come to me when Mother died. But that bitch came along and wormed her way into Mother’s heart, and set her against me. After that I never did anything right, and Mother cut me off. I’ve stolen diamonds, national secrets and holy relics, but I never wanted those things for myself. Tonight I’m taking this back. It’s the last thing left of my mother. So don’t fuck up, okay?’
Wend-E nods, but her LCD expression is anything but okay.
The sky above the container-port is the colour of a television switched off, scrapped and buried in landfill: It’s night. Isabella scans the port from the concealment of a concrete storage hut, flattened against it so the bioware pigmentation layer of her custom-made stealth-suit can blend her into her surroundings like an octopus. A headband of tiny cameras relay image-enhanced infra-red through her neural implants, giving her better sight than owls or cats. She sees a couple of ageing bulk-carrier vessels slumbering in the dock, but no living thing moves except the occasional rat. Tonight it’s the final of the Pan Africa League Championships, and the port’s watchmen have hacked the SCADA monitoring screens to accept a pay-per-view web feed, just as Isabella had hoped.
One forty-foot, steel shipping container rests at the centre of an ‘X’ of reflective mirror-crete, awaiting pickup.
Isabella looks down to where Wend-E is pressed against the hut, a crudely rendered black scarf wrapped about her head, ninja style. ‘Are you mocking me?’ thinks Isabella.
The oval head shakes swiftly from side to side.
‘Then what are you doing? You’ve no need to hide. Only I can see you, you’re just an image in my neural implants.’ If Wend-E can be said to be physically anywhere right now, then she’s locked in the boot of Isabella’s nearby car. Her hardware module is one component in an array of humming technologies, including a long-range net-node that communicates on an encrypted channel with Isabella’s neural implants. ‘Take that silly scarf off. This isn’t a game. If you fuck up, there’s no going back, and if I don’t come back safe and sound you’ll be stuck here forever
, or at least until they find my car and tow it away to be crushed. Do you understand?’
Wend-E sullenly nods her eggshell head, then looks sharply up and out to sea, cartoon eyes widening. Though she sees and hears through Isabella’s implant-mediated senses, Wend-E hears it first. Moments later so does Isabella. A distant throb, as though a giant fast-beating heart were drifting over the sea towards them.
‘Right on time,’ thinks Isabella. She breaks cover and sprints to the shipping container. The electronic entry-code lock is a standard type with a well-known vulnerability. Isabella has broken so many of these locks that the procedure requires no actual thought. She cuts an access-hole in the steel, bridges the current-carrying cables so the electronics think they’re still delivering power to the locking mechanism, and isolates the magnetic latch. ‘Chunk’ says the door, and it slides open easily. Isabella slips in, shutting it swiftly behind her. Wend-E steps through the closed steel door like a very short ghost. Isabella unclips a glove from her stealth-suit. Her hand is like a flaming torch in her infra-red vision. It’s enough illumination to see the contents of the shipping container.
It’s empty.
‘What the hell?’ murmurs Isabella.
Wend-E looks curiously up at her, plinking her LCD eyes.
‘This should be full of stuff for my sister. Provisions, luxuries, expensive clothes she’ll never bother to wear. Something’s-’
Clang! The container reverberates as something strikes its walls, and then Isabella’s guts go weightless: They’re being lifted into the sky.
‘We proceed as planned,’ thinks Isabella. She reopens the container door, and is greeted with gale-force winds and a sound like a thunderstorm trying to fight its way out of an echo-chamber. Their container has been seized by a freight gyrocopter, an automated model as smart as a homing pigeon, and they are being carried back to its roost.
Isabella clambers swiftly up onto the roof of the shipping container, enjoying the battle against the monster wind. Without her suit’s grip-surfaces she’d be blown through the night and down to the sunless sea. As it is, the high-speed crawl along the container’s steel roof is as strenuous as any cliff-face climb. Isabella feels a fierce satisfaction. I’m not too old for this yet. Few people could do this within the required time limit. Every second is taking them further from the long-range comms unit in her car. In order for Wend-E to stay with her, they need a more powerful transceiver than Isabella’s implants. The copter’s communications are their only hope. She climbs one of the insectile legs that grips the shipping container, pushing the envelope of recklessness, barely able to hold on in the rotor-wash. Wend-E floats in the air beside her, unable to do anything until Isabella establishes communications with the copter’s puny nanotronic brain. At the top of her climb Isabella finds the Standard Diagnostic Port in the copter’s spindly body. She pulls a disk-shaped limpet net-node from her belt and slaps it on the wall, where it sticks while she pulls a cable-jack from it and plugs it into the port.
Tales of Eve Page 4
