Beautiful Intelligence

  Some Reviews of Stephen Palmer’s Books

  “Memory Seed (is) a notable debut novel.” SFX

  “Stephen Palmer is a find.” Time Out

  “Stephen Palmer has concocted a beguiling adventure that draws on some of the best sf of recent years for its basic themes…” Starburst

  “Stephen Palmer’s imagination is fecund…” Interzone

  “…an intriguing dystopian ecological-catastrophe novel, diverging from the recent trend of socially-driven catastrophes in British sf.” Foundation

  “Stephen Palmer takes biotech to its farthest extreme, and beyond into entropy, yet he offers a flicker of hope.” Locus

  “This latest novel confirms that in Stephen Palmer, science fiction has gained a distinctive new voice.” Ottakar’s

  “This is a brilliant second novel and makes, like its predecessor, a welcome change in a genre clogged with tat.” SFX

  “Give him a try; his originality is refreshing.” David V Barrett

  “The author of Memory Seed and Glass offers a challenging and thoughtful future world that should satisfy readers with a love for far-future sf and New Wave fiction.” Library Journal

  “…(a) supremely odd yet deeply rewarding experience.” CCLaP

  Contents

  Beautiful Intelligence

  About the author

  More from infinity plus

  BEAUTIFUL INTELLIGENCE

  Stephen Palmer

  Published by

  infinity plus

  www.infinityplus.co.uk

  Follow @ipebooks on Twitter

  © Stephen Palmer 2015

  Cover image © Steve Jones

  Cover design © Stephen Palmer

  No portion of this book may be reproduced by any means, mechanical, electronic, or otherwise, without first obtaining the permission of the copyright holder.

  The moral right of Stephen Palmer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  Books by Stephen Palmer

  Memory Seed

  Glass

  Flowercrash

  Muezzinland

  Hallucinating

  Urbis Morpheos

  The Rat and The Serpent

  Hairy London

  Beautiful Intelligence

  To Miriam:

  a northern light

  For marvellous support and advice, many thanks to:

  Keith Brooke, Jonathan Laidlow and Steve Jones

  CHAPTER 1

  Everybody was a scavenger in the post-oil world. South of Tunis, Hound gazed into mirror bright nu-desert fields. Beads of sweat trickled down his black, scarified skin. He twisted his beard into plaits, then untwisted them. He did not like what he saw. The farmers he owned had been attacked by mash kids from the wrecked baobabs in the centre of the old city, leaving sand-orange trails of destruction through the greenery. A few farmers lay dead, the remains of their bodies picked over by vultures. It seemed however as if the plants themselves were untouched; the only positive aspect of the disaster.

  Hound turned to the elegant black man standing beside him. “So they was after metal? Plastic?”

  Sandman Entré glanced at him. “Who knows? Tunisian gangs cannot be controlled, it’s Muslim versus animist, like it used to be. Nothing changes since one thousand years, ami.”

  Hound ground his teeth together, fighting the urge to inform Leonora and the AIteam immediately. Safer to tell them in person. Though he was free of com, the nexus still weighed down on him, though it could not see him.

  “You appear worried, ami.”

  Hound nodded. “But look, man. The plants survived. My land is still fertile. You can get more farmers?”

  “From the lowlying shanties to the west. But they will need to be inducted into the religion soumis, which, as you know, is expensive.”

  Hound’s anxiety began to turn into anger. “This your fault, man. I pay you to keep order? You screw up. I know security, that’s my game. I see no security, I see a screw up.”

  “Okay, so we do a deal. Bon.” Sandman Entré shrugged, brushing specks of sand off his white flannel trousers. “Your attitude does not surprise me, monsieur.”

  So they weren’t friends any more. Hound snorted, then said, “Biz is biz.”

  “I will arrange for the plant-plastic shipment to reach you in Malta by the end of the week. These plants take only two or three days to process. You will not go short, that I promise – and I can make such promises. You know me, monsieur. My rep goes before me. It’s why you chose me.”

  Hound didn’t want to listen to any more. “Bill me through the nexus. I ain’t got time to come here again.”

  “Merci.”

  He walked to the two-seater flexbike, unfurled the solpanels and sat astride the rear seat. Indicating the front seat, he shouted, “Drive, man!”

  Sandman Entré drove him back to the screeport, where Hound strode off without an au revoir, visiting the nearest can to unscrew his boot heels, take out microthin Tunisian hack shirt and trousers, and put them on: essential disguise. Dreads in hat, he walked to the terminus and looked for the nearest solbus to the coast.

  It had been weird, living days without the weight of the nexus on his mind. Weird… but not bad. Sometimes he regretted getting into the security game. Just to see sun shimmer on sand without augmented info was a joy. A mirage, he had discovered, could be just a mirage; and sometimes it was good not to automatically be told why it existed.

  He was thirty, but getting old. Kids, viciously networked, would laugh at him for thinking such things.

  The boat he had chartered from Malta was a mini-nuke running on hooked plutonium. Dangerous, yes, but the quickest return trip from coast to coast. And it was free of the nexus – he had paid with niobium, amongst the scarcest metals, leaving his wristbands and spex in a portside locker. The sun set flaring red as his data incarnation settled around him.

  ~

  Leonora Klee sipped whiskey tea and looked at Hound. He seemed tired.

  “You saw that with your own eyes?” she said.

  His grin appeared forced. “Very funny. Yes, Sandman Entré took me right into the fields. But we get the plas next week.”

  Leonora nodded. The four day wait had been interminable, every hour without Hound a nightmare. She thought: you pay for the best, you get the best. But when you work with the best you do not want him gone.

  “You all managed?” he asked.

  The sound she made was half sigh, half laugh. “We sat tight.”

  He shrugged and began fiddling with his beard. “Had no choice, man. And no choice but to go naked. The nexus… it weighs heavy. You know that.”

  He was trying to mollify her, she knew, but her nerves were screaming raw. And she suspected he was beginning to turn, becoming a ’nik. A little thought at the back of her mind on four-day repeat: what if he never comes back?

  “There were no scares?” he asked.

  She waved a hand in the direction of the computer. A holo lit up, which he watched. “We didn’t dare do anything,” she said. “At least, nothing that left a trail.”

  “What ’bout the geologists?”

  Involuntarily she glanced in the direction of the cave entrance. “Still chipping away.”

  The geologists were their data sink into the nexus, two men and two women from the University of Fez, set up by Hound to explore the geology of the region around the cave mouth. The data they sent back masked the truth. Watched by satellites, by students, by random speccies, the geologists were normal. They were boring. But they were real, and they filled the void in the nexus that would otherwise appear and become suspicious. It was the price of
secrecy, of privacy.

  Her AIteam could not function without secrecy.

  “How’s Zeug?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Allow me to show you Zeug,” she said.

  Hound’s expression froze. “Man, I don’t like the sound–”

  “Shush! It is a surprise.”

  She led him through cellophane barriers into the research pods at the rear of the cave system, the way as soft as neoprene, humming like a beehive. Density of machinery. Inside the rearmost pod – a theatre, behind glass – stood the operating table, on which Zeug lay: face down, on his belly, legs outstretched. Snow white skin, Greek physique, no body hair. But the great gash at the back of his head had been sewn up.

  “Man!” Hound breathed. “You did it?”

  Leonora nodded. “His brain is within. The whole damn thing…”

  “We whupped the Singularity.”

  Leonora laughed. “What did Kurzweil know? He knew nothing. Anyway, his Singularity was a couple of decades ago, or it was meant to be. But he didn’t know who we know… he didn’t know Yuri.”

  The theatre door opened and in walked Dirk. Leonora’s heart raced for a second, then calmed. If it had been Yuri she would have freaked, for Yuri walked around the cave system like a camouflaged cat.

  Dirk and Hound hugged: “Man!” “Dude.”

  Hound indicated Zeug. “So Yuri fixed the quantum.”

  “He did,” Dirk replied. “It inside. Now we gotta link da quantum to da nerve system. I do da visual system first. Den we get going.”

  “And that is not going to be a lengthy process,” Leonora said. She pointed to the neuromap on the wall, twinkling with red mote-lights. “Dirk has mapped almost half of what Zeug’s neural networks know. Of course, it is only a map, not the real thing. But that is the point… we don’t want to know precisely what Zeug knows. We want him to have an unconscious.”

  Dirk nodded. “Like mine. Hidden.”

  “And we want him to tell us what he knows,” Leonora concluded. “Language is the key. He cannot communicate in a sophisticated way except through language – this I am certain of. He cannot become conscious unless he speaks, unless he thinks.”

  “Turing was a fool,” said a voice from the doorway.

  Leonora turned to see Yuri: thin as Dirk, but stretched tall where Dirk was short, pale where Dirk was coffee-skinned, bald where Dirk was Afro’d. A kind of anti-reflection of Dirk, in character as well as in physique; and otherworldly. In the middle of his forehead lay a real third eye, lab grown and bulging, the bone sculpted into an orbit, the sclera bloodshot, the eyelashes thick and black. IR and UV enhanced. Yuri had accompanied them when she and Manfred escaped from Ichikawa Labs all that time ago, but, still, her skin crawled whenever he stood nearby.

  “Dude!” Dirk coughed, twitching his fingers in that motion he made when he craved a smoke. “You say, what?”

  “Turing was a fool, a brilliant fool, a genius according to what they knew back then, but a fool nevertheless.” He paused. “Mr Ngma, if you light up in here I will hurt you.”

  Dirk blew an imaginary smoke ring through orange teeth. “Weren’t gonna.”

  “You were saying?” Leonora encouraged.

  Yuri approached Zeug and wrapped four manicured fingers around the back of the skull. “The Turing Test is a nonsense. An ape apes, Mr Ngma. What does the Turing Test say? If an observer cannot tell the difference between an artificial intelligence and a human intelligence then the artificial intelligence must be conscious. But is this merely a simplistic thought experiment?”

  Dirk nodded. “Well you and me agree on dat, for sure.”

  “Precisely, for it is merely a matter of processing power to copy to a level where a human being cannot distinguish real from artificial.” He cradled both of his hands beneath the sugar-white skull, lifting it a centimetre. “Here we have the world’s most powerful quantum computer. You map it Mr Ngma, but you know your creation is not even the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Da neuromap is Zeug’s identity,” Dirk said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  “I do not doubt it.” Yuri let the skull rest on its foam mount. “But we will create a true artificial consciousness here. For the first time a computer is fast enough, deep enough, wide enough.” He smiled at Leonora. “Yes, Ms Klee, Kurzweil’s Singularity was a joke, but the kernel of truth lay inside it.”

  And Leonora shuddered.

  ~

  Hound and Dirk stood at the bank of computers outside the theatre, gazing as if through a shop window at the quiescent form within. “We still gotta get him da audio,” Dirk said.

  Hound nodded. Though visual systems had in recent years approached the acuteness of the human eye and visual cortex – particularly in the gene-tubs of Pacific Rim countries – audio systems were proving difficult to engineer, and even the best Japanese labs struggled. “It’s because music is emotion,” Hound said. “You can’t engineer emotion.”

  Dirk clicked his tongue against his teeth and took a drag at his cheroot. “Bull. Sound is math. Music is math. We just got to get da calculation right. Dat my job.”

  “Will she help?”

  Dirk shrugged. “Ain’t heard from her for a time. But I don’t think her team is interested in tech. Dey follow different path.”

  Hound nodded. “What you want me to do?”

  “Take a hop into Valletta and buy me some music. Not download, buy. You dig? Gotta be local. New. Nothing commercial, Western. I hate dat shit anyway. See, I had an idea. When you come back I engineer something for Zeug, something nice. He’ll like dat.”

  “Okay man.”

  Hound walked alone to the external cellophane shield, where he glanced up at the cave mouth monitor screen. It was early evening and the rock crew had departed for their base in the village at the bottom of the valley. He shook his head – he had become nocturnal since joining Leonora’s team, like a vampire; and he missed the sun. He tweaked his main wristband to fade in his data incarnation so the nexus would not be alerted by his sudden appearance, then walked out into a muggy evening vibrant with stridulation. Bats and moths.

  Hidden under morph-tarps lay his solbike. The batts were fully charged. It hadn’t been used for a week. He brushed the dust and insect crap off the seat and handle grips then powered up. With a wheeze the engine caught. He rode it down desert-dry hill paths to the main Valletta road.

  He put his spex on. The weight of the nexus – info over-overload – settled upon his brain, and his privacy vanished.

  He sighed. He was getting too old for this job. His gaze strayed to a tanker on the horizon and he grinned. So the Saudis had found a few more drops to make the Chinese happy.

  Through outlying districts: Qormi, Hamrun, Floriana. In the dayglo-fried outurbs of Valletta he parked the solbike, chaining it to a bollard then pulling out its comchip. The streets were alive with revellers, some from Sicily – black hair and black attitude – but most were from West Libya and Tunisia, their desert robes gold-embroidered khaki. Some of the Tunisians were Muslims: a minority. Hound ignored them all.

  The plastic sellers lined the streets of the old town, Valletta Central, where the weight of information pressed down on him like an incubus. Augmented reality, dense and sparkling, ever-ready, perpetual. Each seller had a code name, a virtual shopfront, a credit rating – hovering info like so many digital seagulls, coming into focus when he looked at a seller, fading when he glanced at the next. A madness of subtle activity.

  “Not tonight,” he said, mechanically, as he passed the urchins. “I don’t need no plastic.”

  “You sleep with homos!” the urchins screamed as they sought out their next customers.

  Hound grinned. One of these days he would let the plastic sellers meet his data incarnation, just so he could see them melt into puddles of fear. It would be like Hannibal in an orphanage. Then the urchins would learn a lesson.

  On the seafront he spotted the old musical instrument shop that Waylon McLeod had set up
in the 2070’s, when music became so computerised a groundswell of revulsion, beginning in the Balearics, swept the Mediterranean, bringing a new era of romanticism. In those idealistic days real music flourished, Hound recalled. But the nexus soon brought mere romanticism under control.

  Old McLeod though, he was ancient enough to remember compact discs. He would know what was shiny and new.

  The man sat at the back of his shop, plucking a kora. “Yo, Hound.”

  Hound nodded back. McLeod’s spex were the newest, straight out of Tokyo – light as a feather and almost invisible on his face. His right arm was concealed from wrist to elbow by a jangle of bands.

  “Man, you got wired,” Hound said. “You used to be a solo.”

  McLeod shrugged. “Ain’t no messing with the modern world.”

  Hounded nodded again. “I need music,” he said. “Something local. New. The newest you got and not nexified. Say?”

  McLeod frowned. “Okay, but…?”

  “I’m bored, man. Bored with downloads. So I’m getting old. Like you used to feel–”

  “Me, I came out the other side,” McLeod interrupted. “Nothing real is real any more, Hound. It’s all data.”

  “Anyway…”

  McLeod shrugged, then reached out for a dot of memory. “Try him. It’s a live rec. Teen lad from Seafront Lite. You know, the church kids? Well, I say church, there ain’t no church there any more.”

  Hound smiled. There certainly wasn’t.

  “Let me know what you think of the lad’s tunes,” McLeod concluded, taking up his kora. “Com me. You know you want to, old man.”

  Hound left the shop without replying.

  The journey back was peaceful. He listened to the night birds and the insects, and wondered if Dirk could use those sounds as music. Back at the cave, he handed over the dot and awaited developments.

  Leonora and Yuri were both asleep: the men had the place to themselves. Dirk lit a cheroot and said, “So dis some local kid? Who not hit da nexus?”

  Hounded nodded. “You got that.”

  “See,” Dirk said, grinning, “dis is da beauty of it. Da nexus, it flavour all music, takes most of da humanity out. Not like da internet, which was in comparison neutral.” He put the dot on his thumbtip and raised his hand. “So dis… dis is straight outa da brain. At worst it’ll be culturally unoriginal. Trite. But da kid who did dis didn’t get his music flavoured.”