Beautiful Intelligence

by Stephen Palmer

  Dirk nodded, standing up. “I gotta go to da can. I won’t be a mo.”

  Leonora nodded. Sadness took her, and her vision misted behind tears. Swifts cried as they flew through the air catching insects. She waited.

  And waited. After ten minutes she began to worry. Fifteen… then she heard bootsteps, and she relaxed. But it was Hound.

  At once he said, “Where’s Dirk?”

  “He went to… you know.”

  “Waz?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  She shrugged. “Fifteen minutes, perhaps?”

  He paused, fingers tapping wristbands, and she knew he was hurtling through the nexus, plying data seas, grabbing info. “Nothing,” he said.

  “Nothing?”

  “I… I…”

  “What?”

  “I didn’t think I’d need to tag us AIteamers,” he said.

  She shook her head. “What does that mean?”

  “He’s gone. Can’t follow. He must’ve planned it a while.”

  Leonora stood up and walked towards him, stopping when she was a metre away. Something about his manner, some micro-tic, alerted her. “That’s a lie, isn’t it?”

  He took a deep breath. “Sorry. Yeah. I could trace him.”

  “But there is no point.”

  He shook his head. “You was right, his job’s over.” He smiled. “Man, you’d better stop paying him.”

  Leonora sagged. “Yes. Can you see to that?”

  Somehow, this blow was softer. Dirk had been redundant for some time, and perhaps had become argumentative because of that. She felt no surprise, only a mild sense of betrayal.

  She glanced at Hound. “What about you?”

  He grinned. “I’m good. A team can be two.”

  “You do not want to leave me?”

  “Hey, I’m good. This ain’t over yet. I wanna see what Zeug does.”

  Leonora wiped tears from her eyes. “You are loyal,” she said. “You could have been a self-serving waster, but you are still here.”

  “Loyalty’s an under-rated quality,” he said. “Like perseverance is.”

  She sighed. “You can start speculating about Zeug again if you want to.”

  He threw a package at her. “Not before you put this lot on.”

  “What is it?”

  “Pretty clothes. Sorry if they’re not your colours.”

  ~

  Hound led Leonora to the freeway, which they crossed alongside a dozen Euro-vagrants: good cover. Then he led her into a warren of passages where the flats were rented out for next to nothing and nobody asked any questions. Scabby adverts in Italian, French, Spanish, German and English delineated ghettos; flags spray-painted warned and welcomed in equal measure. Africa had become a kind of promised land, but here he saw the dark side of the European dream.

  Then a green dot flashed three times in the right corner of his vision.

  He stopped. “Hey…”

  “What is it?”

  He tapped wristbands to mod the resolution of the signal, until its associated infos wrapped themselves around his spex. “Zeug,” he whispered. “Man, he’s been spotted. Wait, wait… it’s an Islamic posting service. I’m not sure now. Could be coincidence.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s some sort of reference to a superman… like, a really ripped guy. With bad skin. What I don’t understand is how the poster knows Zeug’s not human. Calls him étre personne japonais. That means Nippandroid.”

  “Zeug’s bad skin could be the fake tan and dirt.”

  “Exactly.” Hound considered the info. He had put out a nexus request for all of Annaba, keeping it general, hunting down references to strong men, unusual behaviour, oddities and strange speech, especially that overloaded with numbers. This was the first match to hit the accordance level.

  “Well?” She sounded excited.

  “We definitely need to investigate this one. I think Zeug will move to escape people – maybe he’ll want to find camels. But he could still be in the city.”

  “Where does the signal locate him?”

  Hound applied the virt-compass, then walked to the next crossroads and orientated himself. He pointed. “There. North, two three-twenty metres. Maybe twenty minutes walking. The nexus’ll guide us.”

  They walked at slow pace through the dingy alleys of the locale, emerging on to a main shopping street, dodging through the solbuses to get to the other side, then walking on. Faux-crippled traders tried to stop them, but Hound brushed them aside without a word, leading the way, with Leonora slipping through in his wake. Then they were out of the warren, before them a power station, a hulk of metal and brick, grey on grey beneath rain-threatening sky.

  He turned his collar up and set all his proprietary nex alarms. The snub-nose and the flechette lay ready. “C’mon,” he said, “let’s see what’s what.”

  One hand in pocket – snub-nose charged – he walked around the side of the station, chainmail fence to his right through which he saw anonymous grey walls, brick to his left covered with moss and algae. He paused, peered through the fence, saw a couple of padlocked doors. Listened. Nothing.

  “You hear anything?” he whispered.

  “Just city noise, and not much of that.”

  “The post was dated 6am. Three hours ago.”

  She nodded.

  Hound sucked his teeth. The tension in his body departed as he realised the trail was already cold.

  Then somebody walked out of a shallow doorway, hands up. He whipped out the snub-nose.

  “Don’t shoot!” A woman’s voice.

  He stood, frozen.

  “I am unarmed. Is that you, Hound?”

  He stared. She knew his name?

  “Is it?” the woman repeated.

  Leonora grabbed his arm and hugged him close. She was scared again, he could tell. But he was not scared. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

  She pulled down her hood and took a step forward. “Tsuneko June.”

  For a moment Hound’s sensory world seemed to vanish as shock made him see only her face, hear only her name, think of the impossibility… but it was Tsuneko June.

  “I didn’t know where you were,” she said. “But I knew about the artificial intelligence you made. So I had to lure you in.”

  “How did you get here?” Hound said, trying to clamp down on his anger. “How did you–”

  “Don’t blame yourself, Hound. Your artificial intelligence was monitoring you, and as it did it left a trail in the nexus.”

  “Ah. So. I was right about that.”

  Tsuneko turned and said, “You must be Leonora Klee. I am very pleased to meet you.”

  Leonora, stunned, said nothing.

  Hound felt his feet begin to itch. “I wanna get outa here. Let’s find a caf. Do the tourist thing. We got a lot to catch up on. Whatcha doing for a data incarnation?”

  Tsuneko approached. “I am fully fake, not a soul knows I am here.”

  “Man, why are you here?”

  She glanced over her shoulder. Hound tensed, put his hand in his pocket, but then she said, “Let’s find that café. I need tea.”

  Five hundred metres away they found Le Percolateur, and a table for three at the very rear of the place, out of sight from the street. They ordered tea, coffee and croissants. Hound checked the can for escape routes, then set up a few more auto-alarms in case Tsuneko was playing some sort of meta-game. He knew she wasn’t though.

  She said, “There’s a man in England called Mr Bloodhound.”

  Hound nodded. This was a name and reputation he knew. “So Mr B located me through the nexus?”

  Tsuneko nodded. “I was looking for the AIteam, not you. I’ve kind of defected, I suppose.”

  “You do not sound very sure,” Leonora said; and Hound heard the suspicion in her voice.

  “Shh, shh,” he said, patting her shoulder. To Tsuneko he added, “We’ve had a bad coupla days. Zeug’s awol. Yuri Ichikawa
’s dead. Dirk Ngma’s vanished.”

  Tsuneko nodded. “I knew none of this. But I’m not here out of curiosity. I know what you’ve been trying to build–”

  “Why were you a mole for us?” Leonora interrupted.

  Tsuneko sipped her tea. “I knew you would ask that. Well, at first it was professional.”

  “Biograins.”

  “Yes. But then, with Manfred following such a weird path, and me knowing what the AIteam were planning, I felt like I was in the wrong team. So I jumped ship.”

  “Simple as that?” Hound asked.

  “Yes. I hope that’s not too simple for you to believe.”

  Hound shrugged. He’d guessed this a long, long time ago. He’d not guessed however that Tsuneko June would actually track the AIteam down. He decided to say nothing so that Tsuneko would stay in suspense. He didn’t want her comfortable.

  “Obviously there is a lot more detail to fill in,” Tsuneko said, glancing down into her teacup as if shy.

  Hound glanced at Leonora. “What you reckon?”

  Leonora would understand the implication of him asking that question in Tsuneko’s presence. The AIteam was shorn of talent. This was raw, young talent, the girl not yet twenty five, biograins not yet commercially exploited, though Leonora of course was wedded to the quantum computer future.

  Leonora said, “Maybe, Hound.”

  He nodded, turned his gaze back to Tsuneko. “And your patents?”

  “Still mine. Still safe, for the moment.”

  “And you say Mr B knows who I am?”

  “He’s guessed.”

  He nodded. Tsuneko had not volunteered that info. He wanted her to believe she had, so he could probe her story; but her honesty was encouraging.

  “He called you Goodman–”

  “Shhh! Never say that name. He’s dead.”

  She nodded, then whispered, “Mr Bloodhound guessed who you were. That’s all I know.”

  “How did you get involved with Mr B?”

  “My friend Rosalind.”

  Hound tapped codes and names into his wristband. He felt like impressing her now that he was beginning to trust her. “Rosalind James, born six ten twenty sixty two… unmarried, living at Oak Manor, Winterbourne Stoke, Wiltshire. That her, Tsuneko?”

  “Yes!”

  He smiled. “I ain’t lost my touch.”

  Then a red dot spex left side, flashing twice.

  “Police,” he said. He tensed, hands gripping the table, watching the info unfurl. “They’ve clocked your lure, Tsuneko. The fake Zeug. We’ll run now.”

  “Wait,” Leonora said, grasping his arm as they stood up. “She’s coming too?”

  “No problems here, man.”

  “You trust her?”

  He turned. “I trust her just enough for her to tag along. No fuss. C’mon now. You ladies gonna see the inside of a gents.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Ghosts of the distant nexus began to float into Manfred’s sensorium as they penetrated the band of forest that lay in the western regions of the mountains. It had been an odd experience, this nexus-featherweight America, for he was used to the ever-present augmentation of reality. Now he knew what life was like as a solo: a life adrift, a life shorn of artificial meaning, a life without directions, paths, signposts. And in America’s shattered landscape his human life had also been lacking signposts.

  Joanna found the experience easiest to cope with, he noticed. Pouncey, wired to the max, struggled, though she did enjoy the sensation of independence. But he hated the feeling of floating free and isolated which came when the nexus faded. Joanna, though… she had even enjoyed some of their madcap road trip – or so she claimed. Manfred was not sure he believed that claim. Wedded to the bis, to the theory of bi society, to the great goal in their lives, she could never suggest that solo life was good for them. Yet Joanna was an introvert. The wildness of the real world bothered her. Hiding from the world, nearly nexus-free… that would appeal to her. In contrast, he, an extrovert, never felt at ease with the hush of the inside of his skull.

  And so outliers of nexus culture began to appear in his spex. They all resided to the west: West Coast. It lay nearby. He saw geographical pointers, topological menus, hints of music culture, of restaurants, of a myriad of sub-cultures all trying to deal with the decline of the Western world. And the Pacific Rim lay to the west of this west.

  As yet he was too distant to meaningfully use these infos. The nexus grasped that he was as yet not a part of the world it presented, and so, to it, he was irrelevant. But it was reassuring to see flocks of luminous sigils and a few Apple-style menus in the e-distance.

  Pouncey drove them onward, dodging potholes in the terrible road. Water, frost and tree roots had made a mess of the tarmac and road-stone, but the soltruck had fat tyres and mega-suspension, so it survived.

  ~

  One evening they halted in a picturesque lay-by, built in decades past for tourists to enjoy views of the Columbia River as it thundered over a ridge. Huge conifers reached up to the sky – the sun was a hint of a gleam between them. Boulders lay everywhere, part blocking the road, but wild animals had made a muddy path around it. The air was cool.

  Manfred, sitting on damp grass, watched as all nine bis wandered the lay-by. Joanna sat frowning, tense and uneasy. Pouncey stood nearby, her buttered bread supper in one hand, a rifle in the other. On guard for rednecks.

  “They’re truly starting to individuate,” Manfred remarked.

  Joanna glanced at him. He smiled at her. He recognised the look in her eyes that told him she was more interested than annoyed. “What evidence?” she asked.

  “Red is lazy. Look at it, lying on the ground. You’d think it was enjoying the feel of the breeze on its fronds.”

  Joanna uttered a single laugh. “I thought we decided never to anthropomorphise them? This is not a Disney film, Manfred.”

  He laughed back. “Sure! I know that. But you can’t deny it. Red is a hedonist, it feels its body, and it likes it.”

  “Nonsense.”

  Manfred continued, oblivious to her skepticism. “Orange… that’s the leader bi.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, yeah! Right from the start, when we were in Philly. Don’t you remember? When we started to really stimulate them, they all watched what Orange was doing.”

  “Crap.”

  “Yellow,” Manfred said, “now I think that one realises you and me are more than bis. It knows we’re somehow like a bi, yet different. It hangs around us more.”

  “You have observed that, have you? I watched chimps for decades. I have not observed what you have.”

  “You’re just denying it to look cool. You’ve got preconceptions, you always had–”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, Manfred! I have not got more preconceptions than you have. You are giving the bis human characteristics they do not have. They are not little cuddly mini-people, they are artificial intelligences. They are aliens, okay? We do not even have proof yet that they are conscious-“

  “Yeah,” Manfred interrupted, “and we both agreed that might never come. What’s it like to be a bat… remember?”

  Joanna scowled, then looked away.

  Manfred continued, “Green, now that one I think is pretty carefree. It likes to goof around.”

  “What, like Goofy?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “And I suppose Blue, with half an arm, is the tragic Fisher King?”

  Manfred smiled. That was funny. “Nice one! But no. Blue’s a bit of a mystery to me, though I noticed it hangs out with Violet a lot. Indigo, well, hmmm, Indigo is always going to be special, nobody could ever deny that. Somehow its blindness has changed its consciousness–”

  “If it is conscious.”

  “Yeah… if it’s conscious. Agreed. But I’d bet any money that Indigo is the one that ends up speaking English first.”

  “Speculation. Nothing more.”

  Manfred replied, “Oh, I don’t deny
it. A guess. But useful. An educated guess, mmm? We can’t just ignore the future.”

  “Really.”

  “Violet,” Manfred continued, “seems to be the caring one. Blue’s pal.”

  “Seems? So you don’t know for certain.”

  “No, Jo. I do not know for certain.”

  “Well that is useful. What about Grey and White? The poor, demoted, wretched, colour-free bis, god help them.”

  “Now you’re getting all anthropomorphic,” said Manfred, choosing to ignore her sarcasm. “White is always interested in its environment. But Grey, well… I’ve noticed Grey seems somehow isolated. I see it alone more often than any of the others.”

  Joanna laughed again. “If we go past whatever is left of Hollywood, I will recommend you for a film script post. You are good. Really good. You can invent stuff out of pure imagination.”

  Manfred stood up. “Thank you. Well, I’m done. Let’s drive.”

  As he spoke, he saw in the corner of his vision a movement. He saw Pouncey jump, then raise her rifle. He turned to face her.

  She aimed upwards. A huge hawk dove down and grabbed White in its talons.

  Pouncey fired. Missed. Fired again.

  “Don’t hit White!” Manfred cried.

  As he shouted he saw White’s head come loose. It fell like a quartz globe, pearly pale in the last of the evening light. The hawk, baffled, stalled in the air then dropped the spasming body as the arms broke free. Pouncey fired again, winging the bird. With a squawk it flew away, vanishing between trees.

  Manfred stood frozen. The necks of the bis were bridges between artificial brain and artificial body, grown dense with microcables over the weeks. There was no repairing that damage.

  “Oh, no, no…” he wailed as he ran to where White had fallen.

  Pouncey reached the bi first. She knelt. “It’s a goner,” she said.

  Joanna ran up. “I told you, Manfred!” she said. “Too much danger out in the wild. And you did not listen!”

  “Don’t milk it!” Manfred said, anger making him spit. “Shut up! Accidents happen–”

  “Not to the bis. The bis are our property. We had the chance to keep them safe in their cages.”

  Manfred refused to answer. There was no arguing with this – no point to arguing with it. Safety was boring and meaningless, that was what he thought. Life was risk.