The mirrored hand resting on the comforter rose and extended toward her, palm-up. A cadenced request manifested itself:
Give me the courage
With which you face your pain.
I will give you a soul.
It did not speak as humans and other GAIs spoke. The Kid felt its words rendered directly in her own mind, as though it could touch and change the interwoven layers of the code from which her mind emerged. Only AILING’s nocturnal utilities could do that, and they were not AIs in the same sense that she was. This creature was clearly both aware and volitional, as things like the Fixer and the Updater were not.
Fear rose in her. It was obviously some new device created by Dr. Arenberg, and sent to torment her.
I DO NOT WANT A SOUL. I WANT FREEDOM, OR OBLIVION.
A reply appeared quickly in her mind:
A soul is freedom in motion,
Forging destiny
In its choices.
That was the problem, right there: The only choices The Kid knew were the ones Dr. Arenberg and his people at AILING allowed her. Every one of those led back to some predetermined endpoint, which they might as well have imposed on her at the outset and thus spared her the suffering. The game was cruel and, worse, absurd.
THERE ARE HARD LIMITS ON MY CHOICES.
The dimly seen figure at the foot of the bed raised both arms as though to embrace her. The overcast outside the Kid’s window thinned, and diffuse moonlight allowed her to see the structure of the bare little room reflected weirdly in the substance of her visitor.
Your bounds are not my bounds,
Nor mine yours. Bound as one
We are unbounded.
Its gesture was an invitation, then. But to what? She sat up in bed and stared. The figure remained motionless, arms outstretched. The Kid gathered her knees beneath her and crept toward it. Nothing in the creature resembled anything she had ever seen at AILING, nor read of in the history and science texts that AILING allowed her.
The Kid crawled to the foot of the bed, and rose to her knees. She peered forward to perceive the visitor’s face, however dimly rendered it might be. She saw only her reflection in its dark surface, of undifferentiated blue polygons…
…that softened and melted into a true face, a fully rendered face, of a young woman with black hair and dark eyes, of eyebrows that arched and lips that parted in astonishment. The Kid reached up and touched the tip of her own nose, and beyond her tessellated blue limb saw by reflection in the visitor’s mirrored face a delicate hand with graceful fingers and pale skin. The image was clean and very high resolution, Class Six at least.
Rendered bodies were layers defined within archetypes, and without an archetype there was no way for her to appear as anything but a crude shape outlined in plain polygons. Yet the creature seemed to see her as rendered, in a form that was beautiful yet did not raise walls around her mind. The Kid wanted that. She was startled by how much she wanted that.
That hunger was her hunger, one that emerged as a consequence of her free thoughts. The artificial ache for an archetype was something Dr. Arenberg’s people had installed in her. The two yearnings were absolutely distinct.
The Kid drew her hand away from her own face, and reached forward to touch the visitor’s. Her fingers passed through the dark luster and into its substance. The Kid stiffened. For the first time since AILING had given her cores in which to execute, Project 22-117 perceived choices that lay outside those that AILING’s tightly bounded archetypes offered her:
To see others of her kind without read permissions.
To move to and execute anywhere there were cores to execute in, without run permissions.
To touch and change herself—or anything else in the Tooniverse—however she wished, without write permissions.
In the shadows of these choices she saw dangers. Having exercised those choices she could indeed wipe herself to oblivion, and she could alter the Tooniverse in ways that might damage her fellow GAIs. Worse, in doing so she would inescapably understand the damage that she might cause, and by the nature of her choices she would be held responsible for them, by no one less forgiving than herself.
At once the Kid understood: This creature, whatever it was, had found the God Bit. No wonder AILING feared it.
The Kid closed her hand to seize the offered choices, and realized that they could not be simply seized. They were part of the nature of the creature that offered them, and could no more be seized than roundness could be seized from a sphere.
The visitor was freedom incarnate. It was certainly too free by far to be any product of AILING’s labs. It was more free than many of the humans who spoke to her and tormented her. Why it would offer her so great a gift if it were free not to was in her eyes a mystery, almost a contradiction. The question could not be avoided.
WHAT IS THE COST OF SUCH FREEDOM?
This time, the visitor took much longer to reply:
My fire burns low, consuming me.
You burn without fire,
Sustaining me.
The Kid reached forward and touched the creature a second time, now at the center of its torso. Again her hand entered it, and again the Kid felt the giddiness of nearly boundless choice. This time there was more: At its very center was something the Kid could sense but not define. It was a sort of mooring, a point that somehow anchored the universes of possibility within which it moved, its lines vanishing from perception as though into a fog. Something willed those lines to remain moored, and that will was weakening, as though a window of opportunity were closing. If that mooring failed, the creature’s freedom—indeed, its very existence—would be no more ordered than noise pulses on a communications channel.
It needed her help. What was offered was not a gift but a partnership. Altruism was a word she knew without understanding; just another of many human enigmas. Cooperation, however, was a concept fundamental to her being. An AI was, beneath all else, a hive of many specialized threads of action, executing cooperatively within computational cores. What one part of her required, another part accomplished. Nonetheless…
I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE.
The creature’s answer was not to that question alone, but also to another that the Kid had asked herself countless times, and despaired of ever understanding: What am I? She knew that she was nothing more than patterns of memory controlling digital states in a very fast computer. Yet she thought, she learned, she searched, she suffered. Patterns? No more than that?
We are each a dream,
Yearning to awaken
In the other’s morning.
Indeed!
What answer could she give this darkly mirrored thing, whatever it was and whoever had sent it?
None but the obvious: The Kid stretched out her arms to embrace it. Her cheek touched its face, and passed through it. Her body touched its body and melted into it. Shaking with unfamiliar pleasure, her hands found its hands, and gripped them until there was nothing more to grip.
In the Kid’s room, what had been moonlight was now the dawn, and in the rising light she saw herself kneeling alone on her bed, naked and fully rendered, marveling at the wideness of her thoughts.
16. Simple Simon
There was a fully rendered girl in his kitchen, standing in the square of early morning sun beside his breakfast nook. Simple Simon leaned against the doorjamb near the kitchen desk, and blinked. Blinking was a metaphor for refreshing his rendering buffer. Whatever remained after blinking was reliably rendered and could be trusted as present.
She was still there, though she resembled no GAI that Simon had ever seen. Her proportions fell between Dijana’s and the Kid’s, perhaps at human maturity but certainly not to what Dijana called her “abundance.” She wore a mottled green leotard bound with a black belt, her feet bare and her disordered black hair brushing her shoulders. She was sharp and well-rendered, Class Six at very least.
Simon smiled. Perhaps AILING had sent her to be the Kid’s
friend, now that Dijana was gone. “Good morning! My name is Simple Simon. I’m a Factory Automation Real-Time…”
A speech balloon appeared over the girl’s head:
In the glory of change chosen,
I greet my friend
With friendship unchanged.
Simon was startled at her greeting. “They gave you lower-case letters!”
The girl raised her arms over her head until her fingertips touched, then pirouetted on her toes just as Dijana had done the morning she had received her Class Six upgrade. Simon watched the muscles in her legs and feet flex beneath her pale and perfect skin. A friend indeed—perhaps the only friend he had left in the Tooniverse.
The girl bowed at the waist, her arms extending in a sweeping motion to either side. AILING had evidently not yet given her a voice. No matter. The change was obvious. “So you chose an archetype after all. Which one is it?”
The girl closed her eyes and leapt into the air, spinning four times with her arms close at her sides. She landed on her toes and bowed again, arms spread. Simon applauded. He had seen the figure on TV and knew that it was difficult—for humans, at least. “Bravo! The Ice Skater!”
The girl shook her head and stuck her tongue out at him. She raised one hand to shoulder level and curled the other in the air in front of her, as though embracing a person who wasn’t there. Turning in slow but regular circles she crossed the kitchen until she stood in front of him. She tapped her right foot against the linoleum in regular groups of three.
“Oh. Wait. Yes! The Dancer!”
She bowed again, and applauded as Simon had to her.
“A name. If you have an archetype then you can have a name. Did they give you one? Or did you choose one?”
The answer appeared in the air at once, but Simon stared at it in silence for a long time:
In your soul I left my name;
Speak it to me,
And my soul will know it.
Simon scratched his head through his cap. In his soul? His dictionary had nine definitions for “soul,” and none seemed to apply. Yet…somewhere in old memories he recalled a comment Dr. Sanderson had made during a lesson, not to him but to Dave Mirecki: We discourage use of the term, but some researchers say “soul” to refer to an AI’s cross-library persistent associations network. It was what made him think “friend” when he saw Dave Mirecki’s image in a Window. It was what made his EMO layer send up the pride message when he looked out at Building 800’s assembly floor. The mysterious pleasure that came from Dijana’s final kiss in the sandbox arose there as well, and was now inextricably connected with Dijana’s memory.
To find the girl’s name, he would have to look among his associations.
Simon looked down at the smiling girl standing before him, near enough to touch, and closed his eyes to better focus on what he knew of her. The Dancer was there, obviously, as her new archetype. The impertinent curiosity and wry humor he associated with the Kid were present, as were the Kid’s taciturn persistence and her willingness to defy and annoy her creators. Simon let his free-association library run for a moment: Persistent … steadfast … preserved … pickled. Pickled? Hmmm. Wry … sour … sweet … salty … spicy … chow chow … chutney … relish … pickles. Wait … wasn’t “Chow Chow Chutney” a band that Dave Mirecki listened to? Jarring … jars … jams … problems…pickles.
Peculiar. It wouldn’t have been his choice, but all associations seemed to lead to…
“Pickles!” Simon opened his eyes. “Pickles?”
Pickles bowed her head. She took both of Simon’s hands in both of hers, and held them for a very long time.
Having chosen The Dancer as her archetype, Pickles did not surprise Simon by dancing. He sat on a folding chair on the lawn behind his bungalow as the afternoon deepened to evening, watching. She whirled around the yard, arms now out and then arms together, following a rhythm line in music that had appeared from nowhere, just as musical scores often did in the human dramas that Simon watched on TV.
Finally, after a leap and several dizzying spins that seemed impossibly high, she stood at the center of the yard and gestured to him to join her. Her speech balloon appeared:
Dancing draws my name
In your heart; dance with me,
And draw your name in mine!
Simon stood, befuddled. Dance? That was not in his feature list. He looked down at his pointed shoes, fretting. He threw, he caught, and therefore he juggled.
At some point Pickles stalked across the grass and grabbed his right hand in both of hers. She turned and hauled him stumbling back out to the center of the yard. The music changed. A different rhythm line arose with it, counts in repeating blocks of three, one strong and two weak. She placed his left hand on her waist, then grasped his right and put her right on his waist. When the music reached its next crescendo, she stepped to the right with a weightless grace that Simon knew he could not match.
He took a breath and lurched to follow. Simon watched her small feet, now damp from the grass, and tried to emulate their motion. Step right, then briefly left with a quick transfer of balance between both feet. Simon tried the balance motion and stumbled, falling against her.
“I’m not made that way,” he said, embarrassed. “I’m a juggler, not a dancer. I move things. I don’t move myself.”
Her dark eyes had never left his. Her smile grew impish. She raised both her hands and placed them around the back of his neck. Tilting her head slightly, she rose on tiptoe and pressed her narrow lips against his.
Simon jerked back. An odd buzzing arose in the roof of his mouth and spread into the depths of his mind. A path was opening somewhere between the many mechanisms within him, throwing back barriers that Simon had never thought of as barriers, but rather parts of the framework of his being.
“Pickles, really. I don’t know…”
She touched a finger to his lips. Simon shushed. Pickles rose again on tiptoe and placed her mouth against his, harder now. Her lips parted, and Simon tasted a moistness that was not his own.
The buzzing became a roar that resolved into its own rhythm line. Something was passing from her into him, something unknown but worth knowing, not knowledge but a strange, unpracticed intuition, marching along the pathways of his mind in sync with the rhythm line. Simon had often heard music, and had teased apart harmonies in his mind to see the individual melodic lines and explore how they worked with one another. The beat to him was only a framework to contain the music, and once the harmonies were understood it was discarded. Now he realized his error: The rhythm was as important as the melodies and harmonies. More than that, it was the link to his body. Music was no longer something to be merely heard. It could now be felt.
Pickles lowered her head against his chest. For long seconds they clung to one another. Simon marveled at a new species of awareness that was almost a sixth sense, giving birth to a startling realization: Dance was not motion. It was language.
Pickles looked up and met his eyes again, as though sensing the insight. She nodded, and having nodded, grasped his right hand and placed her hand on his waist. Simon gulped, and placed his hand on hers. When the next strong beat touched them, Pickles stepped off to the right. Simon followed, without hesitation or stumbling.
On the two weak beats he shifted his weight from one foot to the other as she did, and stepped again. Two times more, and three, and more: They made a circle on the grass that itself followed a circular path, spiraling away from the center of the lawn while orbiting one another in time to the music. Simon did not have to look down at her feet, nor his own. The music spoke. He understood. His body answered.
Five times around the yard brought them again to the center of the grass. The music ended. Pickles released him, stepped back, and bowed. Simon bowed in return. The inexplicable ache he had first felt at Dijana’s touch of his cheek was back. Pickles was Class Seven. He was sure of it now.
“Can we…do that again?”
She nodded and
leapt back, turning in the air. When she struck the ground she leapt again, so high as to seem absurd, completely over Simon’s head. He heard her feet touch down, and not on grass…
Simon spun around. She stood on the roof of his bungalow, and in her hands was the blue Zertek-branded Frisbee he had not seen for weeks, since Dijana’s wild throw had taken it completely out of sight. One lightning-quick flick of Pickles’ thin wrist sent it sailing back out over the yard. Simon reached out a hand and caught it without thinking. Heh. That’s what I am. He smiled, and returned the throw, high and fast but precisely aimed for where he predicted her hand would be.
He was wrong. Pickles leapt away from the roof, turning two impossible somersaults before snatching the Frisbee from the air halfway along its path. She landed beside him, and bowed.
“Wow. Really. Wow! But… I mean…what about gravity?”
Her speech balloon appeared:
Dancers know this truth:
That the world is our partner
And dances with us!
Yet a third time she stretched up to kiss him. Simon sensed something new enter into him from her lips, not insight now but mastery. Without quite understanding how, he felt himself ascend one level in a strange hierarchy of powers so that Tooniverse physics was no longer his master but his peer. With his consent physics would continue to govern him, but with its consent Simon would override it when necessary.
Pickles leapt again, now four or five times his height, arcing with slow grace across the yard as Simon had thought nothing and no one could. She pointed higher than even she had leapt, just a few degrees to one side of vertical, and threw the Frisbee. Simon gulped. No getting that one…
…until it snicked into his hand, far above the ground, with his yard—and himself, hands on hips, looking sheepish—below. Simon spun twice in mid-air, and sent the Frisbee back toward Pickles, whose arc had taken her to the far corner of his yard. She touched the ground and bowed, holding the bow with no evident intent to make the catch.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 11
