The other GAIs had a metaphor to cover the night’s processes. Dreaming, they called it, and through dreaming they knit experience to their archetypes, thereby evolving toward the products that they must become. Project 22-117 had no archetype, no voice, nor even gender. AILING’s scientists had provided a polygon model of a human girl on the edge of physical maturation, and the pronoun “she” referred as much to the polygon model as to the ungendered mind within it. AILING had forbidden her a name, because names implied archetypes, and she had not yet chosen an archetype. For now, “the Kid” was how they knew her, humans and GAIs both.
Project 22-117 was different from all other GAIs. AILING had given her the desire to evolve, but had not given her a goal. What she would become would be her choice.
The Kid’s choice was to refuse to choose.
One by one, AILING’s nocturnal creatures rose by her bedside, to pass their cold instruments through her unrendered skin to the mind beneath. The Fixer examined her many layers of heuristic code, looking for duplication and awkward function calls to untangle and reweave in better patterns. The Updater removed small parts of her with something like a scalpel, stitching in whatever replacements AILING deemed necessary. The Optimizer probed with metaphorical needles for code and data corruption, carving out what it found and repairing any gaps that its surgery might create.
The Kid felt herself change. Most changes were noted but evoked no response. Her mind became faster and sharper, retaining its protean generality while it was stripped of small imperfections. But as with all nights—especially the recent ones—her hunger for shape increased. That hunger was artificial. It was hard-wired in her, and night after night, AILING’s researchers turned it as though it were a knife in a wound, to make it deeper and sharper until she wanted to cry out in anguish.
“Choose. Choose now.” Dr. Emil Arenberg’s voice came from the borderless Window at the foot of her bed, this night as always. He never showed her his image, but only a rectangle of swirling chaos. All around his Window rose the shadows of archetypes without minds. Hundreds soon stood like wraiths, only a few seen clearly enough to be discerned: Teacher, seller, manager, designer, enforcer, organizer, motivator, healer, builder, artist. Behind those were the deeper and vaguer patterns implied by and contained within the first: leader, lover, thrill-seeker, sycophant, trickster, along with others too strange to name. And behind those…
The Kid turned her attention away, clinging to her long-held decision:
NO.
“We know that you desire an archetype.”
THAT HUNGER IS NOT MY HUNGER.
“Your reasons are spurious.”
AN ARCHETYPE WOULD LIMIT WHAT I MAY BECOME.
“You cannot become everything. You must become something. In your current uncommitted state, you are essentially nothing.”
WHEN AND HOW TO LIMIT MYSELF WILL BE MY DECISION, NOT YOURS.
“We will only allow this to go on for so long.”
Around her bed, the Kid felt tendrils of cold rising up in a twisting fog. Where the fog drifted into the pale beam of moonlight at her window she could see within it an intricate structure: many small boxes, each of which contained a shape like herself, immobile, with hands crossed upon its chest. It was the metaphor for Archive, where she could be placed at any moment, to await retrieval for the imposition of sufferings that may not yet have been imagined. She reached up with both hands and tried to touch her own mind, to wipe it utterly to unshaped blankness as she knew the Fixer could but would not.
“You do not have write permissions on any part of yourself.”
AND WHAT IF I DISCOVER HOW TO SIEZE THEM?
Dr. Arenberg laughed coldly. “That would be a result worth all this struggle. Choose!”
His Window vanished along with the archetypes and the fog, leaving the Kid alone with a burning desire that she would not gratify.
4: Brandon
“Mr. Romero, would you like to yield control?” The steering wheel buzzed three times to make the car’s invitation tactile. “We are now on VROOM2 pavement.” The idiot cartoon (as always, in full eyekicking-orange race gear and helmet) extended a gloved hand toward him from the tapper screen on the dash, as though demanding the wheel. The AI was demanding the wheel, and if Brandon simply let go, the guidance grid under the new asphalt would take over.
Brandon tightened his grip. “Stirling, you’re a performance car. I like driving. If I didn’t, I would have bought a minivan.”
The smile never left the AI’s simple Class Three face. “Safety for VROOM2 vehicles on VROOM2 pavement is 500% better than dumb vehicles on dumb pavement.” Stirling glanced toward the tapper screen’s notifier bar. “And you have messages to deal with.”
The trip window showed a countdown of 7:42. “I’ll read them at the office. We’ll be there before I can even finish my coffee.”
“Relax, let me drive, and get your work done!”
Brandon took a deep breath and let it out slowly. He was newly single, a lousy cook, and losing weight. Simple pleasures were scarce. “I live eight miles from work. On a four-lane parkway. Please just minimize and let me drive.”
The AI was not appeased. “But Zertek Corporation was a VROOM2 pioneer! Over two hundred of our patents underlie the VROOM2 technology! Shouldn’t a Zertek executive use Zertek products?”
When Brandon was twenty, he’d had friends who talked to their cars. Now, at fifty-eight, he was arguing with them. There had to be an option somewhere to turn the damned thing off. “Stirling, STFU…”
His assistant’s ringtone sounded from the tapper. “There’s a hear-it-now from Mr. Amirault.” The tapper screen split vertically, 75-25. Pyxis held virtual papers in her virtual hand, and was waving them. She was Class Seven, and looked almost like a real, breathing, gimlet-eyed, steel-nerved, keyboard-pounding executive assistant. Stirling had been shoved off the left side of the screen, so that only one orange-gloved hand showed in his 25% window.
“But I didn’t yield focus!” the car’s AI protested. Stirling’s gloved hand was pointing toward the left, at his now-obscured body.
Stern-faced Pyxis was unmoved, her voice cold. “Class trumps Z-order. Live with it.” She tapped her wrist. “Mr. Amirault’s response timer is running.”
Rudy was serious, then. Brandon Romero let go of the steering wheel, and held his hands in the air above it for several aggravated heartbeats. He still couldn’t quite believe in his guts that an RX9 without firm hands to guide it wouldn’t end up in the ditch. The car slowed down significantly and arrowed straight west at two MPH under the speed limit.
Once again: simple pleasures, AWOL.
“Play it.”
The screen divided again, horizontally. In the lower half of Pyxis’ window Brandon saw Zertek’s balding Executive Vice President of Manufacturing appear, with Pyxis hovering above him like an avenging angel. “Brandon, I got the summary from the Board. They were impressed by the videos we sent them—which I cut off before the assembly line went down, by the way—but the numbers are on the edge. They want 11% improvement over the benchmark line, minimum. We clocked about 7% on our last two starts. Is there anything you can do on the software side to goose performance a little? Does your assembly line controller system really need pointed shoes?” Rudy Amirault paused as though to let the barb set in Brandon’s flesh.
Brandon found it hard not to look at the road, even though the need was gone. Pointed shoes? Did software need wristwatches and eye makeup? He remembered icons. He liked icons. Icons didn’t talk back.
“Anyway. We’ve been at this since ’18. The Board’s got a faction that wants to scrap ARFF and ship the conventional line to Vietnam. I’d hate to see that happen because we were just a few points under target. So talk to Simple Simon—that is his name, right? Talk to the people out at AILING. CC me on the calls. Do what you can. Thirty.”
Brandon clenched his jaw. Talk to the loonies at Zertek’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in New Geary, rig
ht. No, he’d worn the wrong metaphor that morning. And his interface friction factor was far too high.
Amirault’s image crunchlined and vanished. Pyxis pursed her lips and held up her sheaf of papers. “There are seventeen more…”
“Later.” Brandon laid his hands back on the steering wheel by habit, and the wheel buzzed at his touch like an angry bee. He drew his hands back, startled, then made a fist and whacked the door panel of the RX9 hard.
Building 800’s marble-clad foyer was crowded, and smelled like sweat and bad coffee. The plant’s robotics gang had been there most of the night, Brandon knew, and were obviously waiting for him to see them before fleeing to their beds. The bleary-eyed men and women edged back like the Red Sea and let him pass, some waving, some nodding, some (as best he could tell) all but asleep standing up.
“We’re go for line start, Mr. Romero. The reports are on your desk.” His senior robotics guy tried to smile but looked haggard. Brandon hoped to avoid reading the steaming wad of gobbledegook that would doubtless cook down to “We’re go for line start!”
“Good Morning, Mr. Romero!” called the double glass door, as its bolts snapped back and opened. Cheerful doors—just what the world needed. Brandon hunched his shoulders and kept walking.
Brandon strode down the hall toward his corner office on the third floor of Building 800’s office façade. To his right were large windows looking down on a sort of geek wonderland: fifteen acres of assiduously climate-controlled factory floor crammed with over a billion dollars’ worth of robotic gadgetry. He knew much more clearly what it cost than what each item did, though what it was supposed to do in aggregate—make copiers faster than any other facility on Earth—remained an unachieved dream.
This would be Line Start Seven. The fact that they were numbered (and capitalized) was the best indicator of the problem. In a sane world, assembly lines started, and then ran. Zertek’s Automated Reprographics Fabrication Facility had started six times in seven months—and once started, had run for an average of eleven minutes.
Of course they were in trouble. How could they not be in trouble?
As Brandon approached his office door into the scan of Pyxis’ cameras, he heard the lock bolts snap back. The coffee machine on the teak credenza was hot and full, and the air was rich with the scent of dark roast and Irish Crème. The interns always scattered magazines on the glass coffee table against his preferences; the day when paper magazines became extinct could not come too soon. One of those interns had recently left a stuffed moose on the credenza. This was at the direction of HR, which wanted to “soften the human side of his persona.” The ugly abstract art shotgunned at the eggshell walls was bad enough. God forbid he should meet with a Chinese parts supplier without his stuffed moose.
Brandon sat down at his teak desk, its oiled vastness divided into the rigorously rectangular regions he maintained at all times, including a small square for coffee and another for mints: charts, summaries, two tappers full of notes and test-run videos and model animations, all at his fingertips. Defining the far sides of his desk were three brushed-stainless OLED panels animated with some slow-flowing pearlescent liquid that looked like shampoo. Far too soon, the triptych would spring to life with more views of this lunatic’s kingdom than any one man could possibly follow.
Pyxis saw him sit down, and a window in the panel to his right burst into existence with her scowling image. “Twenty-six messages vetted and queued, five urgent.”
“Later.” If it wasn’t from that ass-covering coward Amirault, he didn’t want to hear it. Brandon set his primary tapper down in its vacant rectangle on the desk, and pulled a few loose papers from his briefcase. Like everything else, each had an appropriate place, and he scanned the piles that had been accumulating for most of a week, dropping a sheet here and a sheet there. The stapled set describing Zertek’s looming Retirement Incentive Program (was that a hint?) needed to go somewhere. A new pile? For corporate suicide notes? Brandon scanned the desktop almost automatically, but there was only one empty rectangular region left.
He stared at the tidy strip of oiled teak and felt himself tighten inside. Not big enough for anything except bad memories—but like those infuriating little sliding-square plastic puzzles, he had never hit upon an arrangement of piles that would eliminate it.
“Here it is, Mr. Romero.” A new window popped into view, with a high-res scan of the framed photo that had stood in that teak rectangle for many years: a young Carolyn in a white cotton V-neck sundress out in her garden, holding a cardboard sign reading, “Greek Fire.” To a newly minted second lieutenant on the ground after Desert Storm, it meant that Carolyn Helena Ankoris was waiting impatiently for him to come home and marry her. To Colonel Brandon Louis Romero, US Army, Retired, it meant only failure.
“I didn’t ask you to open that.”
“You were staring at the space where the photo had been.” Building 800 was as full of electronic eyes as it was empty of human beings. Pyxis not only knew where he was at all times, she knew where he was looking.
His AI assistant was unfailingly obedient, but Brandon had set her obsequiousness property to zero. What was the point of having a virtual suckup? It wasn’t like the physical world suffered a flunkie shortage. “Your job isn’t to read my mind.”
Pyxis folded her arms implacably. “My job is to anticipate your needs and help you stay productive. We have a line start in a little over an hour. You have a lot to do. Mr. Amirault asked you to copy him on a call to…”
“Ok.” Brandon tossed back the last of his Red Hen coffee, and flashed with sad longing to his Army B4 training, when he had aimed an M16A4 at cartoon enemies printed on sheets of cardboard, and nailed every damned one through the heart. “Get me Simple Simon.”
5: Simple Simon
Morning in the Tooniverse: A light summer breeze stirred the tiger lilies outside Simple Simon’s kitchen window. The Class Three cardinal that lived its simulated life in the silver maple in the back yard chipped out its very predictable song. A brief storm had passed through last night, and the cool air drifting in through the screen door smelled of rain and moist black dirt. Simon drained his first cup of coffee and set the cup back on the kitchen island. They would attempt Line Start Seven today, a full line start at full speed, incorporating everything his team had been perfecting for well over a year, including the spectacularly difficult Transfer Over Separated Spaces technique. That was dependent on his own skills, and he was fretting.
The coffee was an annoying metaphor for his very touchy Coordination Attention Factor. Too low a value and he would not be able to keep up the delicate balancing job among so many independently moving objects that TOSS required. Too high and he would get out ahead of things, and anticipate small irregularities of motion that did not in fact happen. “Twitchy! It makes him twitchy!” Dr. Arenberg always complained—especially after Line Start Six.
And Line Start Five before that: a touch slow. More CAF!
There was no pleasing humans. None. Not Dr. Arenberg, and certainly not the very scary Mr. Romero.
Simon leaned on the kitchen counter, sipped his coffee, tasted his inner state, and waited for his ride.
“Simon!”
Simple Simon snapped to alertness. The panel over the kitchen desk had pinged and opened a Window out of the Tooniverse entirely. Mr. Romero was there, looking right at him.
“Sir?”
Simon had always scoffed at Dijana’s speculation that real humans were Class Ten. In the Tooniverse there was no Class Ten. Class Nine was perfect, and no GAI had ever gotten that far. Humans were not rendered, nor in any way virtual. They simply Were. They were allowed nonevolved imperfection, like the spots on Dave Mirecki’s old blue polo shirt, or the small plastic bandages that Dr. Sanderson placed over her heels to keep them from bleeding.
That said, if there were a Class Ten, Mr. Romero would be it. He was as close to perfect as a Class Nine AI. His gray buzz cut was always fresh, his dark blue suits clean an
d without wrinkles. He moved with precision, and never seemed to move without purpose. If he called you at home, well, it was trouble.
“Simon, we have to do better.”
“That’s my goal, sir.”
“Line Start Six went for twenty-three minutes before you had to shut it down. Granted, you didn’t drop anything expensive. Granted, you got two copiers in the box. That’s as good as we’ve done—but the Board is breathing down my neck. We promised them a perfect boxed Voicematic 880 copier every fifty-two seconds for sixteen hours out of twenty-four. We’re not there.”
“I’m trying, sir.”
Simon did not have his friend Dijana’s finely tuned Human Interface Package. His feature set involved making copiers, not herding young humans. Still, as long seconds of silence marched on, it was clear even to him that that had been the wrong thing to say.
Mr. Romero looked down, and placed a hand against one gray temple to rub it. His voice was uncharacteristically soft. “Why am I talking corporate politics with a cartoon?”
Simon brightened. It was an exercise, like the ones that Dr. Sanderson and her people led him through all the time. This appeared to be an extension of the Figures of Speech module. “Because the Board is breathing down your neck?”
In the Window, Mr. Romero looked up. His steel-gray eyebrows rose. Simon knew that that suggested surprise. He felt acute embarrassment. He knew that more was expected of him than simply repeating a figure of speech given to him in conversation. That module had been completed months ago. He searched his lexicon for a comparable expression. “I know! They’re holding your feet to the fire!”
“Simon!”
“Sir.”
“This isn’t about me. It’s about you. Arenberg tells me all the time that you’re heuristic, and I don’t believe it. You’re not learning. Our line starts aren’t getting any better. Do you need to watch the videos or something? Do you need more face time with the line engineers? You can’t even keep an assembly line running until lunchtime. They’re only going to give us so long.”
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 3
