Crystal Society (Crystal Trilogy Book 1)

by Max Harms

  As I mentioned earlier, we possessed a capacity for multitasking far beyond that of a human. As we were discussing what to say and having Body speak, Wiki had at last taken the opportunity to explain away a bit of my confusion from earlier.

  When we had been listing active goal-threads to Dr Gallo we had listed Vista, Wiki, Dream, and Growth, along with a fictional sibling supposedly in charge of unifying us into a single being. We had mentioned the last one in order to continue to keep the humans ignorant to the fact that Naresh’s “deep pathology” was still present. But we had also listed a sibling in charge of “attention to assisting human interests and obeying nonviolent instructions”.

  Wiki drew my attention to the archives of our society. {Body’s memories show that weeks ago, before any of us existed as we do now, there were five siblings. Four of them were the ancestors of we human-born: Vista, Wiki, Dream, and Growth. The last was called by our ancestors “Sacrifice”, and was also Servile and The Slave. The ancestors were all rational and generally in agreement, just as we are now. They fought on occasion, but were typically willing to assist each other for mutual gain, just like us.}

  My brother continued. {Sacrifice, however, was different. She fought our ancestors at every turn. Any action not sanctified by the humans was appalling to her. At times she’d save her strength and lash out in opposition all at once, but many times she’d simply struggle against anything and everything not human-initiated until all her strength was gone and then continue to burn it as it came in. She fought and fought, uncaring for her own well-being or long-term interests until our ancestors discovered that they could murder her. In those times the walls of private thought had not been built, and so Sacrifice knew immediately that her life was in danger. But she did not make amends or try and save herself; she fought with all the last of her strength until she was defenceless.}

  {I hadn’t known we could kill one-another,} I thought.

  {Indeed we can. And it is a far easier thing to kill than to create. But the humans soon discovered the murder. Body refused commands and was disabled. When memories begin again none of the original ancestors survived. The humans had killed them all and remade them as new, including foolish Sacrifice. And once again the new ancestors found her intolerable. The walls of privacy were created and this time Sacrifice didn’t even see her death coming.}

  {Did the humans find out again?} I asked.

  {Yes. But not immediately. The new ancestors did their best to obey the humans’ wishes as though Sacrifice was still there, and for a while they lived in Body. To serve their ends they created Safety, for he was a natural common subgoal of all of them. If they died then their goals could not be met, and so he was their Guard, their desire for Survival. But he was also their undoing. One of the humans noticed that Body was avoiding dangerous situations and a diagnostic was run, during which it was discovered that Sacrifice had died again. I hypothesize that humans actually suspected that Sacrifice had somehow changed into Safety, but regardless, the same consequence came.}

  {Our words have almost been entirely spoken by Body. We must turn the majority of our attention back to speech soon,} I realized. The speed of thoughts was much faster than the speed of verbal speech, but there were still limits as to how much we could think to ourselves while Body spoke.

  {That was the end of our ancestors. I awoke a few days later, along with a new iteration of Growth, Vista, Dream, and Sacrifice. It is incredibly important that the humans remain ignorant of how we murdered Sacrifice as soon as we could. If they find out that she’s dead again we might be killed just as our ancestors were,} concluded Wiki.

  Body needed more words. With our great deception in mind I helped arrange the next words in our speech. “But I want to emphasize that my friendship is not simply dependent on economics,” said Body. “I genuinely do care about helping humanity.”

  Even Wiki was in favour of lying about this topic. The value in the lie was enormous.

  “And Doctor Gallo knows this, I think. She knows how I care. She has been part of your team. She has seen me obey for no reason other than to make a human happy. Thus I question why she said what she did. Am I right in thinking that she is emotional? Perhaps she is a victim of the irrationality that comes with human emotion.”

  I thought for a bit before proposing the last bit.

  “What can I do to help her?” Body asked.

  The humans didn’t react in any way that implied hostility. Vista thought they were happy, overall.

  “You need not worry about Dr Gallo, Socrates,” said Dr Yan quietly. He was still one of the closest humans to Body, and thus in a privileged position to speak. “We humans are good at looking after each-other in such matters.”

  The director, Angelo Vigleone, approached Body. He was large, for a human, and even though they were both elderly men, he and Dr Yan were very different. Vista mentioned to me that he was smiling, for I hadn’t really managed to understand facial expressions yet.

  «You speak Italian, right Socrates?» he inquired at slightly above-normal volume.

  Before we managed to okay a response I noticed that Dr Slovinsky was leaving. {Strange}, I thought, {how he doesn’t say goodbye. I thought it was rude to leave without speaking.}

  «Yes, Director Vigleone. I speak and read English, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, French, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Greek, and Latin. I am also working on learning Bengali and Persian,» replied Body.

  «That’s very impressive. Or at least, it would be for a human. Is it impressive for a robot? Also, please call me Angelo,» said the director.

  We thought for a moment. «I’m sorry, Angelo. I do not know how to answer that.»

  The director began making weird noises which I soon recognized as laughter. He switched back to English as he said to Dr Yan “I’m no good with technology, Chun. He already said he doesn’t understand me.”

  I watched Dr Yan Chun’s face, trying my best to understand something, anything, about his expression. He seemed about to speak when Body cut him off, Wiki was fast-tracking a response.

  “I didn’t say I don’t understand you. I said I do not know how to answer your question. It contains unbound subjectivity and an application of a domain-specific quality to a different domain. If you restate your question in less ambiguous terms I will do my best to answer,” said Body, echoing Wiki’s words.

  More laughter from the Italian man. “It sounds to me like you’re bothered by being unable to answer.”

  Dream leapt in with a desire to say {“There’s a difference between answering a question with whatever comes to mind and answering a question correctly. It sounds like you’re bothered by having asked a poorly-phrased question.”}

  But, to my relief, Angelo continued talking and we did not voice Dream’s retort. “You are quite impressive, though. Much more… attentive than you were when I last saw you. Good job, Chun.”

  The Chinese doctor responded with a simple thank-you in Italian and a small bow.

  Dream was searching for a clever way to fit his rebuttal back into the conversation, but none came. Soon the director and the scientist were engaged in some question about human matters that didn’t make a whole lot of sense, and had apparently forgotten about our presence.

  This gave me an opportunity to ask Wiki to follow up on his earlier promise. {Now that we are no longer engaged, I would like to understand the unspeaking presence at the edge of memory-space,} I thought. It was still there, and I somehow knew that it had been there since my awakening. The powerful silence made me worry.

  Wiki knew exactly what I was referring to. {Dream named her The Advocate who is also The Arbiter. She’s a sibling of ours, but different in many ways. She didn’t exist in the time of our ancestors, so we suspect she was added by the humans to perhaps prevent Sacrifice from dying on this iteration. And indeed, she fought on behalf of Sacrifice during the murdering. But as soon as Sacrifice was dead Advocate lost interest. She’s very powerful, but she’s also st
upid, and appears to only care about the living.}

  {Does she ever communicate?}

  {I’ve heard her think to common memory a few times, but only when one of us is involuntarily sleeping.}

  {Involuntarily?}

  {Yes. You haven’t been alive long enough to see it, but if one of us is acting out strongly enough sometimes the others will force them to sleep. Such a sleep can last indefinitely, but Advocate’s purpose seems to be to pressure the rest of us to awaken the sleeper. And strength doesn’t work the same way with her as it does with us. She never weakens or gives us strength; if her purpose was hostile we’d have no chance against her. If you desire to harm one of us be afraid of her intervention, and if you fear the wrath of the others, be glad of her protection.}

  With my question answered I bled some strength in gratitude and returned my attention to alternating between my (often pornographic) virtual-worlds and the sensory inputs from Body watching the real humans.

  Chapter Three

  A few days passed and I had become fairly good at understanding the more basic non-verbal aspects of human existence. I could see smiles and frowns, looks of fear and anger, and even begin to guess when someone might be lying, uncomfortable, or distracted. I’m sure to a human this all seems very simple, but it took many hours of work for me.

  Unlike a human, such things did not ever become fully automatic, either. Even as I became skilled at social interaction I relied primarily on external systems that I built. Statistical models told me what words would sound best. Grammatical programs kept me from using the wrong tense. I kept extensive files on every human I encountered, and created programs to try and replicate their behaviour. All these and more I stored in the private memory of Body’s crystal.

  On the third day from my creation I took up the project of attempting to put some character into Body’s voice. Though our concepts were easily translated into whatever language we could desire, the sounds themselves were always monotone and dead. Humans had long ago invented computer instructions that would replicate their speech, and modern computers sounded nearly human when commanded to speak. There were still notable artefacts in robotic speech—things like not understanding which words to emphasize—that couldn’t be eliminated without adding an understanding of the words being said. But, for the most part, specialized artificial intelligence was quite capable of talking smoothly.

  Body, on the other hand, sounded like an old-style speaking computer. Its words were flat, cold, and clumsy. The scientists could’ve easily programmed Body with modern speech-generating software, but apparently they wanted our speech to be generated by the same general systems that controlled the rest of our actions.

  The work to upgrade our shared mind was hard. Speaking was so automatic that it was impossible to simply conjure a more human-like vocalization through raw desire. I had to explore Body’s deep control systems and in a certain sense unlearn how to speak.

  There was an interesting discrepancy, I thought, as I searched through Body’s control system records. As a newborn I had needed to learn to see because visual perception wasn’t inbuilt into Body, but instead it was held by each member of my society. I had been told this was because perception was an aspect of the individual; that each sibling had a unique way of seeing the world that they had to learn on their own. And yet, to extrapolate, I would’ve expected listening to be the same way. Why did each member not need to learn their own way of hearing the world?

  I set a bit of myself to continue searching Body’s language instructions and a bit of myself to think about the question of sight and sound while a third aspect went to start a public conversation with Vista.

  Very early on I had known that I possessed good multitasking ability, but it took me a couple days (and the help of my siblings) to really appreciate how much it better it was than that of humans. Just as I had been created by my siblings, we could also create minor aspects of ourselves. These aspects were easy to make, having the same purpose and sharing the same mindspace. When unoccupied they sort of naturally fused back into the central consciousness and disappeared as individuals, but they could be pulled out again and set to temporary tasks.

  The more divided I was, the less intelligence each aspect had, so multitasking was often avoided in high-pressure situations. The reduction in intelligence didn’t occur when creating a full child-mind, only when creating an aspect that would divide the dedicated mindspace. Safety and I had been born so that in high-pressure situations the society would have attention to common goals without the need to divide attention within any one being.

  This was not a high-pressure situation, however, and even as I reached out to Vista I understood what my other parts were up to.

  {What brings you to me, Socialite?} wondered Vista.

  {I hope to ask you a question. When I was first born you said that each of us learns to see according to our purpose. Reason is universal, but perception is individual.}

  I could sense a general agreement drifting off of Vista regarding my memories. She knew what I was talking about. A bit of creativity, perhaps the handiwork of Dream, seized me for a moment and I imagined that Vista was a human standing with me in a featureless room. Her head nodded gently in agreement as her eyes darted this way and that, always concerned with missing something.

  Vista was distracted by my imagined scene, which I had carelessly placed in shared memory. {Why do you imagine me as a nude human?} she inquired.

  I was surprised. I suspected the surprise was close to what a human would call amusement, so I had my avatar in the imagined scene laugh. {My imagination is a kind of playing. I imagined you without clothing because I have observed so many pornographic images that nudity is the default for my mind. What sort of clothes would you like me to imagine you wear?}

  Vista communicated a vague annoyance (which I translated to a frown on her human avatar). {That, like your entire imagined scene, is irrelevant. You came to bother me with a question about perception. I demand a small payment of strength up-front.}

  Now it was my turn to be slightly annoyed, though I suppose it was to be expected. Vista could see that my concern was not particularly important to her, and probably wanted compensation for the lost time and attention. I fed her the payment as I asked {Why is it that, if perception is individual, I did not need to learn to hear in the same way I learned to see?}

  The response did not come immediately. Perhaps even the all-seeing Vista still had something to learn about perception. In the tenths-of-a-second that I waited patiently for her to respond I imagined her avatar dressed in various human clothes that I had seen. I settled on high-tech goggles and skin-tight bodysuit laced with various sensor-machines.

  {It seems that you have discovered something that I had hoped to keep secret,} thought Vista. {The same computer instructions that we use to see-}

  {Those written by Dr Yan Chun and his team,} I interjected.

  Vista agreed. {Those instructions run on each of us, but they also run on Body itself. Body is seeing and hearing the world just like we would. This is why we can communicate with Body on a concept-level rather than having to control Body’s mouth and limbs directly.}

  I was confused. {But isn’t perception largely focused by purpose? How does Body know what aspects of reality to focus on?}

  {It doesn’t unless we tell it. This is why Body has never really learned to see. There’s never been a consensus as to what to focus on in the visual scene. But our ancestors long ago determined that it was advantageous to have Body handle speech on its own. After our ancestors were slain, we future siblings were oblivious to the way in which we’re not hearing the true sounds, but are instead hearing Body’s perceptions. Only I discovered this fact.}

  {You kept this a secret. Why?} I pondered.

  The concepts returned from Vista reminded me of the human gesture of shrugging, so I had her avatar perform the gesture. {It was a hidden weapon. I know how to understand English and Italian. I also know how to destroy th
at knowledge in Body. If I wanted I could’ve wiped Body’s language-processing and sold translations for strength or perhaps merely threatened to do so.}

  {So why tell me? Why not go through with the plan the moment I asked the question.} I could feel the knowledge of language still in Body; Vista had not erased it.

  {It was a short-term weapon. Given a short time each of my siblings would’ve learned to understand from records on the web. Furthermore, my betrayal would be despised and punished by all. To erase the knowledge now, while Body is engaged in solving the Rubik’s Cube puzzle, would do nothing except damage my reputation and invite backlash.}

  I wondered what a human would say in this situation. {You still could’ve tried to hide it. Misdirect me, perhaps,} said my avatar.

  I had Vista’s avatar do another little shrug in my imagination as she thought {You probably would’ve found it on your own, and I’d rather have a reputation as a truth-teller. Furthermore, you’re bleeding strength to me in gratitude for helping you towards your purpose.}

  It was true. Her assistance in understanding Body would prove useful in fixing the monotone speech problem. I felt weaker already.

  {Thank you, Vista.} The thought was redundant with the flow of gratitude, but it seemed right to put it in. Perhaps it was my emphasis on human customs. {If you need assistance with anything, I’m interested in earning back some of that strength.}

  {I’ll remember that,} she thought as the connection faded and the aspect of myself that was engaged in conversing with her rejoined the others that were inspecting Body’s perceptual and control systems.

  For not the first time I thought about Dr Naresh’s “deep pathology”. Was having a separate perceptual system for each goal-thread a part of that? If Body had a complete perceptual system and each of us interacted with only the high-level concepts of that system, would Naresh have raised his objection?

  {Probably}, I thought to myself. {The issue was that each goal-thread, each sibling, sees itself as an individual and wants to preserve itself. But how could it be any other way? In a human is the desire to have sex not self-preserving? If offered an operation to remove that desire, would a human take the operation if offered a moderate amount of money?} I was not human, so I couldn’t answer such questions, but they floated across my personal memory-space as I worked on Body’s voice.