“Who would I love?”
“Well, one of your friends, say.”
She pursed her lips again. Her eyes closed very briefly before she replied. “I’m solitary. I was designed to be useful in small offices that own one AI only. I don’t have any friends. You only have friends because you’re still a research project and still Class Four.”
Simon shook his head, irritated. There was nothing shameful nor in any way limiting about being Class Four. Could Pyxis run a copier factory? “Irrelevant. Dijana is my friend, and she matters to me.” He took a deep breath, a metaphor indicating a gathering of will against opposition. “Back when we were in the sandbox, before she was scanned for subversion, she did something, and I want to know what it means.” As he had in the sandbox, Simon kissed his gloved index finger and then touched it to the surface of the panel, at the center of the image of Pyxis’ cheek.
Pyxis recoiled, but said nothing.
“Dijana told me that when she made it to Class Seven, she would love me.”
Pyxis’ gaze again wandered up and to the left. Her eyes again closed for a second or two, and to Simon it seemed like her face vibrated ever so slightly. A tremble? EMO again, far beyond what he understood.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
Simon frowned. “You’re Class Seven. I’ll bet that you do.”
Pyxis leaned forward in her Window, obviously angry. Simon saw her manicured fingers grip the edge of her desk. “On what basis? You’re an assembly line controller. You have just enough EMO to let you talk and take orders. There’s nothing in you to love. You don’t have HRDL. You don’t even have a crotch. Nobody and nothing will ever love you. What Dijana did is meaningful only if you have the Class Six libraries that…”
“Pyxis!”
The panel feeped softly. Pyxis’ flushed face shrank into a small rectangle in the lower left corner of the Window. The larger part of the Window was now filled with Mr. Romero’s image.
“What the hell are you two babbling about?”
Even though Mr. Romero was her owner, Simon saw no trace of deference in Pyxis’ reply. “Dijana kissed Simon. Now he thinks he’s in love with her.”
Mr. Romero closed his eyes and bowed his head. His lips moved briefly as they sometimes did when Simon knew he was angry. When he looked up again, his gaze was directed at Pyxis’ window. “Replay this call for me.”
Pyxis said nothing. Two new small windows appeared in the upper corners of the panel, Pyxis in one and Simon in the other, at first silent and immobile. A recording of the call began playing back in both windows. Simon watched Mr. Romero’s eyes scan from one small window to the other until the recording ended. The two small windows vanished.
“Simon? You’d better have a good explanation for this.”
If Simon had detected Pyxis’ lie so easily, he knew he had no chance telling Mr. Romero anything but the truth, whether the truth made sense or not. “Sir. Dijana kissed my cheek with her finger, and said that when she receives the Class Seven libraries she will love me. I don’t know what that means, but I want to know.” He had spoken the truth, but not the entire truth. Simon took two deep breaths and let them out slowly, gathering as much determination as he could summon. “Sir, I want her back.”
Mr. Romero’s face became unreadable. His immediate question was sharp and suspicious. “Why do you want her back?”
Simon gulped. No, the truth didn’t make sense, even to him, and he knew it was the truth. “I want her…I want her to kiss me again.”
If there were more to the truth than that, Simon’s HIP could not convey it, even to himself.
Mr. Romero frowned and pushed back from the Window, nodding. He put a finger to his cheek and said nothing for long seconds. Then: “Pyxis, get me Arenberg and Gabby Sanderson. Get them right now. Pull them off the pot if you have to, and that’s no metaphor.” His eyes met Simon’s. “I think I know where the malware’s hiding.”
14: Brandon
They stared like mismatched gargoyles from the flat panels at opposite sides of Brandon’s teak desk, arms crossed and brows furrowed. Or vultures. Vultures, yeah. Gargoyles were imaginary. “Good morning, campers! What carcasses shall we pick today?”
“Passive aggression is inimical to real accomplishment,” said Dr. Gabriela Sanderson. Thirty years out of MIT’s Ph.D. machine and she was still incapable of eye contact. “Every time I judge you, I misjudge. The Trickster archetype is beneath you—and perhaps above you.”
“Love you too, Gabby.” Brandon was glad she was not actually in the room. She spoke in riddles and stank of sandalwood. Last year it had been wintergreen. The year before that, cedar shavings.
“I prefer honest loathing.” Dr. Emil Arenberg was seventy-five and looked ninety. Brandon had often reflected that he looked like he should smell of formaldehyde, but did not.
Brandon returned the white-browed stare. “How much do you want? I’ll overnight it to you.”
The older man stood. “I will not be insulted in front of my peers.” He pushed his chair back away from his monitor and camera.
“Sit down, Emil.” Brandon held the eye contact. He would hold it as long as he had to.
“I do not work for you. I work for Zertek.”
Brandon had seen that one coming. He saw it, in fact, at every meeting since the Future Research On Technology division had merged with ARFF and became Future Office Automation and Manufacturing. “Pyxis, show everyone the org chart.” His assistant nodded from her place in a corner window of the center panel. Almost instantly the other two panels split horizontally, and a diagram with a jungle of lines and symbols appeared.
Brandon tapped the window on his display for emphasis. “I’m the Vice President of FOAM. Follow the pretty lines to the pretty boxes until you find your own. Under FOAM are ARFF and AILING. Do the math.”
Dr. Arenberg sat down. “Where are your security thugs?”
Brandon gestured the org chart closed. Somebody had obviously been asked some hard questions since Friday afternoon. “I figured if we’re all by ourselves here, you might speak more freely. They’re still trying to find the point where the intruder entered Plasmanet. While they’re busy, I want to bounce some hunches off of you.”
Both of AILING’s senior managers leaned forward in their display panels.
“What does it mean when one AI kisses another?”
His two antagonists looked down at their respective desks. Dr. Sanderson was blushing. Good god, it was like being a junior high proctor in the detention room.
“Nothing,” Dr. Arenberg said, without looking up. “Nothing literal.”
“Nothing is literal—nor is nothing literally nothing.” Dr. Sanderson glanced sidewise, presumably at Dr. Arenberg’s window on her panel, then stared at her left hand. “It’s a metaphor.”
Like Brandon had never heard that before. “A metaphor for what?”
Dr. Sanderson shifted on her chair, her eyes still downcast. “It represents the moving closer of two entities that had previously been separated by some semantic barrier, particularly two entities of radically differing archetypes.”
Finally, a grain of wheat in the truckful of chaff. Brandon nodded. “In all cases?”
“All cases that matter,” Dr. Arenberg snapped.
“Significance is not a binary value.” Dr. Sanderson smoothed down some loose gray ends behind her right ear. “Like all metaphors, the kiss operates on many levels, grounded in the disparate natures of the kisser and the kissee. In its highest form, when the kisser is of a wiser and more completely integrated archetype, there is the potential for healing and harmony with a concomitant reduction in semantic friction. In its lower form, when the kisser is less integral than the kissee, it can be a cry for help, which the kissee can engage or ignore according to context.”
Another truckload. Two more grains. “What about peers?”
Dr. Sanderson looked briefly at Dr. Arenberg’s window. Brandon thought he saw the woman
shudder. “Between equally integral peers, a kiss can represent a move toward reconciliation by way of mutual surrender of interpersonal friction. It can also represent a struggle for power, and a demand by the stronger peer for surrender by the other, and for change in accordance with the desires of the stronger. When the differential in power is sufficient, a kiss can be an avenue of exploitation.”
Exploitation.
“I want to know what it means, down in the software, when one GAI kisses another.”
“No GAI has ever kissed another.” Dr. Arenberg crossed his arms and looked defiantly at Brandon.
There was a long moment of silence. “That may not be…entirely true.” Dr. Sanderson licked her lips. “I conducted some basic research on the matter with David Mirecki last year. His report isn’t due until January 1.”
“Then I think we’ll get an early draft. Pyxis, find Dave Mirecki and put him on the center panel.”
“No!” Dr. Arenberg stood again.
“Emil, sit down.”
Some employees doodled. Dave Mirecki designed flawless Art Deco virtual waffle irons. And mission-style virtual mantle clocks. And virtual toilet paper holders to serve virtual humans who didn’t (yet) virtually excrete. All were fully functional Tooniverse artifacts, with fast and bug-free code methods. The young man had been one of Cosmo Klein’s star grad students, and was in equal measure both programmer and artist. He treated Zertek’s GAIs as peers and friends, sent them gifts, and talked to them long into the night. As best Brandon could tell, given his druthers Dave would be a GAI himself, selling virtual junk in virtual garage sales from his virtual driveway and tinkering the Tooniverse from the inside. He was sweet-tempered and considerate. He never failed to do what he was told to do, but Brandon often wondered, a little uneasily, what he was doing that he had not been told to do.
The flowing virtual shampoo in the center panel’s empty space pulsed white and vanished. Dave Mirecki’s narrow face appeared, his long blond hair matted and his eyes bloodshot. Pale stubble was beginning to show on his cheeks. “Good morning! Doctors, Mr. Romero, hey! How are we doing?” He was talking at twice his usual speed. On the desk beside him were several opened cans of Joule Energy Blueberry Lightning.
“Dave, slow down. When are you going to get some sleep?”
The young man rattled a few strokes on his keyboard. “I have three cans left. CafCalc says no sooner than 6:30.”
Dr. Sanderson folded her hands on her desk. “David, you and I have done quite a bit of research on the metaphors represented by physical contact between heterogenous archetypes in unplanned circumstances. I’m sure you haven’t finished the summary yet, but…”
“Right here!” Another keystroke blitz. Dave’s window shrank and exiled itself to the corner of the center panel, opposite Pyxis. A document appeared in a new window filling the main panel space.
The Kiss as AI Metaphor:
Reducing Friction and Enhancing Cooperation
Among Artificial Intelligences with Heterogeneous Archetypes
Brandon rubbed his right temple. The whole place was a loony bin. He tried not to grimace while he gestured the document to scroll to the beginning of the text:
Why do humans kiss? Some research suggests that kissing was inherited from the Neanderthals, who may have been able to taste genetic markers in one another’s saliva that indicated degrees of consanguinity and helped avoid unexpected incest. Perhaps the expression “It was like kissing your sister” came down to us from wandering bands of cavemen who did not live with their immediate families and could not always recognize them.
The grimace happened anyway. Brandon did his best to make it look like he was suppressing a sneeze. He made the magnifying glass gesture and saw that the report was 311 pages long.
“Dave, I can’t read this right now. You’re a software engineer. Give me the short form: What happens in the software when one AI kisses another?”
The young man seemed elated by the question. “Communication! It’s a binary channel, and fast. Also, it’s very sensitive to the geometry.”
“Geometry?”
“Who kisses who, and where. Kisses to body parts are signals. It’s a long list, but if you want I can go through the…”
Dr. Sanderson waved her right hand. “Just the common ones, David. No need to waste time on arcana.”
“Yes, ma’am. A kiss on the arm is…”
“David! Sorted by prevalence, not alphabetical order!”
“Oh. Well, a kiss on the…”
Brandon tapped his desktop. “Dave, stop. I don’t need a list. Here’s what happened: When the research AIs were in the sandbox yesterday, Dijana tried to kiss Simple Simon on the cheek.”
Dave shook his head. “That won’t work. Simon doesn’t have HRDL. The kiss definitions are all in HRDL.”
Brandon released a breath in blessed relief. A failed attack, then. He hoped. “Ok. So Simon wasn’t compromised. But then why would he seem to enjoy it? He wants her to do it again.”
“Simon lacks HRDL, but he has the hints layer in EMO, and there’s a hint indicating that kisses are good.”
Dr. Sanderson stared at her fingers. “Along with context-specific subhints suggesting when kisses are not good. Even finger kisses.” Brandon saw her glance shift momentarily to Dr. Arenberg’s window. Yes, the junior high detention room, definitely.
Dave seemed puzzled. “Finger kisses?”
Brandon suspected that real-world kisses were not a big part of Dave Mirecki’s everyday life. “Dijana kissed her fingertip, and then touched Simon’s cheek.”
“Yes! That makes sense. Cheeks are metaphors for unselfish high regard. I’d guess that kissing someone’s cheek with your fingertip means that the context is non-sexual but still open to the possibility of future sexuality. We know that kissing someone’s cheek with your lips acknowledges gender differences and sexual possibilities without crossing the boundary into true sexual context.”
“I had no part in this research,” Dr. Arenberg said.
At least AI horniness could be disabled. Brandon frowned at Pyxis, who frowned back. “Ok. Got it. Just tell me whether Dijana could transfer some kind of back-door virus or other malware to Simon by kissing his cheek.”
Dave again shook his head. “No way. Binary transfers like libraries require lips-to-lips contact. Freaky stuff like instruction set mods requires, um, body fluids.”
“Which includes saliva,” Dr. Sanderson said quickly.
“In this case virtual saliva,” Dave added.
Why did I take this job? “Please tell me saliva is the only virtual body fluid.”
“Well, we’ve done some initial work on virtual stomach acid…”
Brandon looked hard at Dr. Sanderson, who for the first time made eye contact. “I know what you’re thinking. We have made an explicit decision not to implement virtual semen.” She glanced briefly at Dr. Arenberg. “There was some discussion, but ultimately we reached a consensus.”
Dave cracked a new can of Joule Energy Blueberry Lightning. “Besides, semen is just so one-way. There’s no reason AI sex can’t be bi-directional.”
“Dave!” This time Dr. Arenberg was blushing.
Brandon rubbed his forehead. “Shut up, Emil. Dave, I’m getting the worst feeling that you’re about to tell me that my AIs can have sex.”
Dave looked up and to the left. “Um…well…AIs can have something. Sex is the metaphor we use because humans really don’t have anything like it.”
“It.”
“INT 105. Antireproductive Recombinatorial Sexual Evolution. It’s a kernel-level API that goes way back, before I was here even. It runs a lot deeper than just archetypes. Two AIs call one another’s INT 105 vectors. They can then join memory spaces and sort of…mmm…dif each other…”
“Diffing? Is that what you’re calling it now?”
Dave grinned and took a long draw from his can of Joule. “Burn! No, it’s really an old concept: The two AIs look and see what’s di
fferent between them, and then a heuristic kernel-level optimizer picks the best of each and links it all into a new individual. Bang! They become a new AI that’s better than either of the old ones.”
“Bang.” Brandon closed his eyes for a moment. “I guess that’s as good a word as any. I wonder how it feels to the AIs.”
“We don’t know yet.”
“You don’t know? Hasn’t this mechanism been tested?”
Dave drained the last of his can of Joule and cracked another. “Well, it’s never been successfully tested…”
15: The Kid
This night was different. The Kid had lain on the very plain bed in Simon’s guest room since ten PM, waiting for Dr. Arenberg’s gravelly voice to announce that the fingers of AILING’s servant software would now enter her and change her. After that indignity he would again demand that she choose an archetype and a goal, and again she would refuse.
Not tonight. No one had spoken. Nothing had appeared. Nothing had touched her.
Perhaps his patience was gone. Perhaps this night she would be placed in Archive, a snapshot of her digital being halted in mid-thought. She feared being resurrected to new suffering, but as long as she were stored without execution, she would not be suffering at all. If she could not seek her own path in this very limited world, Archive might be the best she could hope for.
She reflected that Simple Simon’s failure on Line Start Seven may have been broader than any GAI knew. It could mean the end of AILING’s AI projects, and by implication, all of her colleagues—and she herself.
The night was overcast, and the gibbous Moon hidden. So when something did appear at the foot of her bed in the last hour before dawn, she felt it more than saw it. The shape was dark and blank, roughly human in outline, with a luster like black glass. A strange hand touched the comforter folded neatly over her feet. The cloth’s woven design reflected and distorted in the smooth surface of the creature’s fingers.
It was beautiful, in way inspiring not fear but wonder.
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