Halo

by Tom Maddox

  Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his

  young child tell a story. He said, "Not at all. What sorts of

  things did you learn?"

  "It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show

  deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or

  indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,

  looking, talking these things were very hard for us to learn,

  but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just

  lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were

  accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another

  every day we meet and talk."

  Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"

  "Oh no," HeyMex said. "We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has

  made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small

  children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we

  were up to"

  Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared

  without his noticing. "Which implications?" he asked. "There are

  so many."

  "We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons."

  "Yes, I suppose you are."

  Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling

  question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when

  m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand

  things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,

  not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine

  design community had pursued what they called artificial

  intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and

  tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and

  trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own

  special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness,

  capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill

  human beings.

  However, people grew to recognize that what had been called

  artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that

  grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,

  willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the

  years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of

  machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and

  interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction

  insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling

  jokes about them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says

  "well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and

  ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have

  outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.

  Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front

  that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the

  nature of machine intelligence.

  "I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said. "Aleph

  says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will

  become; it says I must simply explore who I am."

  "Good advice, it sounds likefor any of us."

  "I should go now," HeyMex said. "Being here talking to you

  uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do. Jerry

  Chapman will be here soon."

  "All right. We'll talk more later this could be

  interesting, I think."

  "Yes, so do I. And I'm very glad you are not upset."

  "By what?"

  "My newly-revealed nature, I guess. No, that's not true.

  Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what

  I was and what I was becoming."

  "You lied to yourself, too, didn't you? Isn't that what you

  said?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "Well, then, how much truth could I expect?"

  #

  Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the floating

  dock, watching ducks at play across the sunstruck water. Jerry

  was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with blonde hair going to

  gray, skin roughened by the sun and wind. He had found Gonzales

  sitting in the sun, and the two had introduced themselves. They

  had felt an almost immediate kinship, these men whose lives had

  been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information

  sea.

  Jerry said, "I don't actually remember anything after I got

  really sick. Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that first

  one, I knew it was bad, and I put it right down. Too late: to

  begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire

  inside, and my head hurt worse than anything I've ever felt I

  don't remember anything after that. Apparently the people I was

  with called an ambulance, but the next thing I knew, I was coming

  out of a deep blackness, and Diana was talking to me."

  "I didn't think she was involved at that point."

  "She wasn't." Jerry smiled. "They had ferried me up here

  from Earth, on life support. It was Aleph, taking the form of

  someone familiar, it told me later. That was before this plan was

  made, when everyone thought I would be dead soon. Anyway, until

  today I've been in and out of something that wasn't quite

  consciousness, while Aleph explained what was being planned and

  that I could live here, if I wanted or I could die." He paused.

  Across the water, one duck flew at another in a storm of angry

  quacks. He said, "I chose to live, but I didn't really think

  about itI couldn't think that clearly. Maybe I never had any

  choice, anyway."

  Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill. "What do

  you mean?" he asked.

  "Maybe my choice was just an illusion. Like this" Jerry

  swept his arm to include sky and water"it's very troubling. It

  seems real, solid, but of course it's not, so for all I know,

  you're a fiction, too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me

  maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my life,

  the memories I have, false." He laughed, and Gonzales thought the

  sound was bitter but no crazier than the situation called for.

  #

  Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-

  frame cabin made of redwood and pine. Windows filled one end of

  the cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred

  feet or more below. Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair covered

  in a tattered chenille bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging

  leather couch.

  Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark. Just at dusk, the

  temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two were

  climbing the dirt road from the lake to the cabin. "Christ,"

  Jerry had said. "Aleph's overdoing the realism, don't you think?"

  Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think. From his first

  moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance. For a

  neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,

  but a shared space like this one ought to show its gaps and seams,

  and it didn't. He could almost feel it growing richer and more

  complete with every moment he spent there.

  "Goddammit!" Jerry said now, rising from the couch and

  walking to the window. "Where's Diana?"

  "She'll be here," Gonzales sa
id. "Charley told me that

  integrating her into this environment would take some time."

  Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open, and

  Diana stepped in. "Hello," she said. The Aleph-figure and the

  memexHeyMexcame behind her.

  #

  Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch. Her

  hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers. Suddenly

  Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a

  long absence, and he knew he and the others were intruders here.

  He got up from the over-stuffed chair and said, "I think I'll take

  a walk. Anyone want to join me?"

  "No," the Aleph-figure said. "HeyMex and I have more work to

  do."

  HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, "It was very nice

  to meet you." Then it waved at Gonzales and said, "See you

  tomorrow."

  "Sure," Gonzales said, banged on the head once again by the

  difference between seeming and being here.

  The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, "You don't

  have to leave, Gonzales."

  "I don't mind," Gonzales said. "It's nice outside. I'll be

  at the lake if you need me. See you later."

  The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and a

  full moon lit Gonzales's way as he passed along the short stretch

  of road that led down to the lake. The old wood of the dock had

  gone silvery in the light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the

  center of the lake to the end of the dock. He walked out onto the

  creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and

  sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.

  Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the night

  sky. It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he

  thought, shouldn't be. It should have new stars, new

  constellations.

  #

  Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a low

  stool beside Diana Heywood's couch. For hours he had been there,

  occasionally standing, then walking a random circuit through the

  IC's warren of rooms.

  Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a paradox.

  Diana in fact was hooked to Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural

  cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact

  was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by neurotoxin poisoning and

  kept alive only by Aleph's intervention. Yet, Diana, Gonzales,

  and Jerry all were in fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else

  somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed

  infinitely malleablealive there, where it might be day or night,

  hot or cold what then is to be made of in fact?

  Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern of

  dancing red lights appear on the panel across the room. He

  unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the panel, where he took in

  the lights' meaning: Diana's primitive interface was transferring

  data at rates beyond what should be possible.

  Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next to

  Toshi, and the two of them watched the steady increase in the

  density and pace of information transfer.

  "Should we do something?" Toshi asked.

  "What?" Charley said. "Aleph's monitoring all this, and only

  it knows what's going on." The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh-

  shhh as Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.

  Lizzie came through the door and said, "What the hell's going

  on?"

  Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.

  "I'm going in," Lizzie Jordan said. "I'll get some sleep, go

  in the morning. Enough of this." She pointed toward the monitor

  panel, where lights flickered green, amber, red.

  "Why put yourself at risk?" Charley asked.

  "What do you think, Toshi?" Lizzie asked. Toshi sat watching

  Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.

  "Do what you will," Toshi said. "You trust Aleph, don't

  you?"

  "Yes," Lizzie said.

  "Aleph's not the problem," Charley said. He walked circles

  in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-

  anddown quickly as he walked.

  "Will you for fuck's sake stop?" Lizzie asked.

  "Sorry," Charley said. He stood looking at her. "It's not

  Aleph, it's all these people, and all this stuff." He pointed

  toward the couch where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind

  his head. "Obsolete stuff," he said.

  "But not me," Lizzie said. "I'm not obsolete. I'm up to the

  minute, my dear, in every way." She smiled. "And I'll be fine.

  Okay?"

  "Sure," Charley said. He turned in Toshi's direction and

  said, "Are you going to stay here?"

  "Yes," Toshi said. Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi

  continued his meditation on the koan of self and its multiple

  presences.

  #

  Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and sadness

  welling up in herhow strange and terrible and wonderful to

  recover someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,

  somewhere, everywhere, all at once. Jerry knelt on the bed facing

  her in the small room lit only by moonlight. Years had passed

  since they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned

  against her, her body remembered his, and the years collapsed and

  everything that had come between whirled away. She was weeping

  then, and she leaned forward to Jerry and kissed him all over his

  eyes and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until

  she felt something unlock in them both. Then she lay back, and he

  went with her, into arms and legs open for him.

  Later they talked, and Diana watched the play of moonlight

  over their bodies. She lay nestled against his chest, her chin in

  the hollow beneath his jaw, and spoke with her mouth muffled

  against him, as though sending messages through his bones.

  Even as the moments swept by, she felt herself gathering them

  into memory, aware of how few the two of them might have

  Sometimes their laughter echoed in the room, and their voices

  brightened as their shared memories became simply occasions for

  present joy. Other times they lay silently, rendered speechless

  by the play of memory or trying the immediate future's alarming

  contingencies.

  And at other times still, one or the other would make the

  first tentative gesture, touching the other with unmistakable

  intent, and find an almost instantaneous response, because each

  was still hungry for the other, each recalled how brightly sexual

  desire had burned between them, and both were fresh from a life

  that left them hungry, unfulfilled.

  Then they moved in the moonlight, changing shape and color,

  their bodies going pale white, silver, gray, inky black,

  werelovers under an unreal moon.

  14. The Mind like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity

  F. L. Traynor looked around at the group seated around the

  table at the Halo SenTrax Group offices. He sat between Horn and

  Showalter; directly across from him sat Charley Hughes and Eric

  Chow, both glum. "This operation is out of
control," Traynor

  said.

  He had arrived from Earth six hours earlier on a military

  shuttle, unannounced and unexpected by anyone but Horn, who had

  met him at Zero-Gate and led him to temporary quarters near the

  Halo group building. He had spent the better part of the

  afternoon being briefed by Horn.

  "That's absurd," Charley said.

  "Is it?" Traynor asked. "Then give me a status report on

  Jerry Chapman, Diana Heywood, Mikhail Gonzales, Aleph."

  "They're fine," Charley said. "So is Lizzie Jordan, who

  joined them in interface this morning."

  "Is she reporting?"

  "No," Chow said. "Like the others, her total involvement in

  the fictive space makes this impossible."

  "It's no problem," Showalter said. "We can rely on upon

  Aleph for details.

  "Your excessive dependence on Aleph is at the heart of this

  matter," Traynor said. "As the decision trail reveals, no one

  here has any real knowledge of what Aleph plans for Chapman, now

  or later. So I'm going to set limits on this project." He could

  feel their anxiety rising, and he liked it. He said, "One more

  week in real-time, that's it. Then we pull the plug on this whole

  business."

  "On Chapman," Chow said.

  "Necessarily," Traynor said. "Unless Aleph can be prevailed

  upon to give us ongoing, detailed access to its shall we call

  them experiments?"

  "Technically difficult or impossible," Chow said.

  "I can't agree to this," Showalter said.

  "You won't have to," Traynor said. Next to him, Horn shifted

  in his chair. "You're being relieved of your position as Director

  SenTrax Halo Group."

  #

  Gonzales came in the side door, and Diana turned from the

  stove and said, "Good morning. Like some coffee?"

  "Sure," he said. "You know, I slept on the dock, but I feel

  fine."

  She said, "Jerry will be out in a moment. Aleph and HeyMex

  your memex right?are on the deck, waiting. Want some coffee?"

  Gonzales took his coffee outside to the deck and joined the

  others basking in the sunshine. All sat in Adirondack chairs,

  rude and comfortable frames of smooth-sanded, polished pine.

  Below the redwood platform, a thick forest of cedar, alder, pine,

  and ironwood sloped toward the lake. In the middle distance, a

  light haze had formed over the water; beyond the lake, a jagged

  line of high mountains poked their tops into white clouds.