Beautiful Intelligence Read online

  “I dig,” Hound said. “We want Zeug to be truly independent. A solo.”

  Dirk nodded. “But you know, Zeug can see and all dat, but he don’t hear. I gonna try something now a little bit different.”

  Hound found himself intrigued. Dirk’s personal habits left a lot to be desired, but his mind was sharp as obsidian, which was why Leonora employed him. He watched as Dirk pressed a key switch to wake Zeug. Inside the theatre pod the white body twitched, then raised itself and sat on the operating table. Hound shivered. Yuri had insisted that Zeug have three eyes, and Leonora, worn down, had agreed.

  “Man, but he’s got ears,” he said.

  “He got ear,” Dirk agreed, “but he don’t hear. We ain’t activated dat nerve highway yet. Tonight…”

  Hound looked again at Zeug. Stereoscopically, Zeug stared back at him, third eye closed, and Hound received that tremor, that macabre thrill running through his body that everyone got when they saw an almost-human replica. It was creepy. It always would be. It was one of the downsides of artificial intelligence research.

  “He’s looking at me, man,” he whispered.

  Dirk nodded, taking a drag from his cheroot. “Da brain hooked up in part. He watching us. We like dat! Zeug gotta sense his world to become conscious.”

  “He’ll never smell or taste, though.”

  Dirk coughed. “Yeah? One day he will. Just a matter of time. Tech never go backward.”

  Dirk waited fifteen minutes, Zeug’s standard warmup period, then laid in the signposts for the audio adaptive neural networks in the quantum computer. Zeug shivered, as though sensing that his brain was changing. Then Dirk played the music on the memory dot; simplistic, a song sung to guitar accompaniment, seagulls crying in the background.

  “Take out the gulls,” Dirk instructed the theatre pod computer.

  Seconds later the gull noises stopped, along with a minuscule amount of quality in the recording.

  “EQ, human,” Dirk grunted.

  The sonic quality of the recording changed – brighter, with better bass. Hound recognised that the lad had a good voice, though his guitar picking was shaky. He was probably thirteen or so.

  Zeug began turning his head this way and that. “Where’s the speaker?” Hound asked.

  “One side only,” Dirk replied. “We want da brain to understand spatial co-ordination from audio. He’s getting it! Shit, he’s quick. Look, you can see he’s orientating himself. Yuri, he’s da man.”

  “But Zeug doesn’t understand what the sound is?”

  “Not yet. He linked up to all da data bases here, ’course. He’ll learn.”

  “By himself?”

  “We’ll learn him,” Dirk said, “so it’ll be a bit of both. Who knows? Dis never happen before.”

  “The model of the world inside his brain better be good, man.”

  “Real good. But we’ll tell him what’s what.”

  ~

  Leonora and Yuri took green tea together, the morning humid hot already, the Med baking under greenhouse atmosphere; but in the caves it was cool. Leonora glanced at the sundrenched picwalls in the common pod as she poured more tea. She pulled her lambswool cardi around her shoulders. Aircon was not required, which was good; the nexus would notice that kind of anomalous thermal activity from supposedly empty caves, which meant their enemies and competitors would too.

  A Hound-report pinged into holoview.

  “It is only the fake us,” she said, “the standard report.” She read the update. The virtual Leonora and Yuri hid in the remains of San Francisco, living their lives, interfacing, downloading, uploading. All designed to keep eyes away from Malta. Of course, in a week or two some infinitesimal discrepancy would be noticed and the fake Leonora and Yuri would have to decamp. It happened once a month or thereabouts: pretence of the hobo lifestyle. Kept the watchers on their toes though, for the whole world wanted to know where Leonora and Manfred were and what they were doing. Ichikawa, of course, knew the fakes were fake.

  “Zeug is progressing well,” she said.

  Yuri nodded. “Very well, for I have no doubt that he wants to learn. His eyes are good and his ears are working, but we face the most difficult obstacle next, for we must teach him language. Chomsky said human beings have grammar hardwired, and I think he was correct.”

  “We gave Zeug only a little.”

  “Just enough for self-improvement – not too much.”

  “Too much would have meant learning less,” Leonora agreed, “and we want him to learn as much as he can without being spoonfed. But you and I do not agree on language.”

  “Nexus or not?”

  Leonora shrugged.

  Yuri continued, “We both agree Zeug must remain solo until he is ready to experience the nexus. But language is changing so fast we have no choice but to utilise what exists now in human societies. Not those of the West, of course, but the Pacific Rim, perhaps even Japanese. He must speak what people presently speak, and that means we cannot avoid the nexus – for if he stands out he will be noticed, and that could lead to disaster, and the demise of our noble project.”

  Leonora sipped her tea and eyed the honey cakes. She took one; took a bite. “I think we should teach him,” she said. “If we rely on the nexus we make him a nexus man. If I teach him, and you do, we follow the human principle, and that’s worked for tens of thousands of years. I am sure Chomsky was correct, though he is thought old-fashioned now. Remember Yuri, my original goal was to make an artificial human being, a conscious intelligence. I am not here to make a servant of the nexus.”

  Yuri leaned forward. “There is one method of compromise.”

  “Which is?”

  “We allow a feed in here from the nexus–”

  “No!”

  “Wait, Leonora, please wait, allow me to elaborate for you.” Yuri sat back and did the steeple thing with his hands that Leonora hated. “Mr Hound secures every link we have with the nexus, indeed, every link with the outside world. He must manage the link I suggest so that our invisibility is maintained. I propose that we have a number of broadcasting stations available for us to watch – news channels, entertainment shows, cheap, educational. This will influence our speech patterns. In time, when he can speak, Zeug too must be allowed to interface with such stations.”

  Leonora considered this. Hound was the best in security, the master of camouflage. But still she worried that he might be turning away from the AIteam. Could she trust him? “We are approaching our crucial time,” she mused, “when all our threads come together. It sounds risky.”

  “Please. Ask Mr Hound.”

  ~

  Virenza, the village at the bottom of the valley, was well known to Hound. He had lived there for a while as part of security checks made prior to setting up the cave system bolthole, and had there developed some of the procedures used after the Ichikawa breakout. So it seemed natural to chill villageside one evening and decide what broadcast channels to allow into the caves… and how.

  He had been instructed to seek variety. It was some theory of Yuri’s. Dirk was in agreement, but Hound felt twitchy.

  A number of procedures camouflaged the extent of activity at the caves. Some were simple: arrivals and departures, these mostly Hound, made only at night, so satellites couldn’t pick up anomalous GPS activity. No thermal footprint. The deliberate fostering of cave dwelling bat populations. Some were complex: the geologists working near the cave mouth, giving data to a region that otherwise would have none; and the geologists’ swirl of pointless data also masked any mistakes the AIteam made. Then there was the proprietary ’ware developed by Hound that allowed his data incarnation to fade in and out of the nexus rather than suddenly appear and disappear. But Hound felt uneasy about letting broadcast channels in. It would be so easy for competitors, enemies, and especially journalists to hitch a virtual ride on such incoming streams. Broadcast channels implied viewers. And viewers implied activity.

  The data sink, then, must not be attac
hed in any obvious way to the cave system. Sitting at a streetside bar, Hound pondered, a glass of white wine in one hand, a retro moby in the other. Watching crap on nexus TV. Who would have thought it…

  He soon realised that the best way to conceal the link would be to utilise the geologists, perhaps have it appear that they had lost a nexus radio somewhere near the cavemouth. He would be able to conceal such a device without difficulty up a tree. And if virtual observers should see him talking to the geologists, it did not matter. The decision to fake his own death prior to joining the AIteam had not recommended itself to Leonora, but Hound had pointed out that a man of his renown could not simply disappear. Via the nexus, he would be hunted. Better to die and reappear as somebody ordinary; for Hound was not his real name. And so he could talk to who he liked with little chance of danger.

  He walked down the street to the bar he knew the geologists frequented. Then halted. Ducked behind a dumpster. There, sitting at a round aluminium table with two of the geologists, was Tsuneko June.

  Tsuneko June! Something had gone wrong.

  CHAPTER 2

  Manfred Klee studied the cables linking the nine globular bis into a circle. One by one he took the cables and cut them with a scissors.

  Joanna Rohlen ran into the room, hands covering her open mouth, eyes wide. “What have you done?”

  Manfred walked over to her, took her in his arms, stroked her long white hair, then let her go. “Our mistake was to give them direct access to one another. Joanna, this is the crucial idea. Of course… we could never succeed if they stayed linked.”

  “But you’ve ruined them! Months of work–”

  “No. I’ve freed them.”

  She stepped back and stared past him. Each bi was circling the room, apparently at random, like a possessed basketball. “You’ve killed them.”

  Manfred shook his head. “I’m their midwife. It’s why they weren’t progressing. They were linked, right? Direct access to one another.”

  Joanna stood still, trembling.

  “It’s where everybody has gone wrong so far,” Manfred said. “We were seduced by the nexus… by the internet before it. We imagined better connected was better–”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Listen to me!” Manfred let the inchoate mixture of joy and frustration he felt rise up through his throat. “I’m right. This is the idea I was searching for on the soltrain from Beijing! It’s what we were doing wrong at Ichikawa. I bet Leonora does it wrong too–”

  “Oh, Manfred, stop talking about her–”

  “Sssh!”

  Manfred pointed at the group of nine bis. They had stopped circling one another. Each bi had sense organs constructed as near to the human norm as possible, albeit in a squat sponge of a body – ultra-pure bioplas made from smart petroleum that Manfred managed to spring from Tehran University. Each bi had two eyes, two ears, a mouth without a tongue, and Japanese micro touch sensors all over, like the fronds of the Mimosa plant.

  Manfred breathed in… out. “They’re looking at us,” he said.

  Joanna’s fury dissipated. “No… no,” she whispered. “They’re listening to us.”

  “They recognise something’s going on,” Manfred said.

  He got on his hands and knees and approached the nearest bi; the orange one. It moved its body so that its eyes stared into Manfred’s. He didn’t freak. It wasn’t like he was looking at a Nippandroid, which was freaky. Then the other bis – distinguished by pastel rainbow colour, plus one grey, one white – clustered in a group around them.

  “Look!” Manfred whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “They’re all watching the orange one. They’re trying to work out what it’s doing. Cutting their cables freed them. They’ve got no choice now but to try to understand each other.”

  “But… but…”

  Manfred glanced over his shoulder. Understanding illuminated Joanna’s eyes. “Oh, yes,” he said, “now we’ve got to stimulate them. Give them problems, dilemmas. Make ’em sweat. They’ve got to start being stressed. Then they’ll understand one another. They’ll have no damn choice!” He stood up and grabbed Joanna’s arms, dragged her to him. “Yeah, you see now?”

  “It could be a society,” Joanna breathed. “I do see.” She exhaled, put one hand on her sweating forehead. “Can you fix me a coffee?”

  Manfred walked backward, hardly able to take his eyes off the bis. He poured two cappuccinos. Pressed the attention switch. The other two needed to see this.

  Pouncey arrived. Tall, Afro, strong, thirty, she was responsible for the Hyperlinked, the system of apartment mapping that allowed Manfred to remain invisible in the great urban mess of Philadelphia. “You got two hours left,” she said. “Hey. What happened to the bis?”

  “I cracked ’em,” Manfred said. “What d’you mean, two hours?”

  Pouncey split open a juice, whacked the paper straw in. “I got itchy fingertips. You know I don’t like havin’ itchy fingertips.”

  “Is somebody on to us?” asked Joanna.

  “Dunno. But we’ve had our time here.”

  Manfred cursed. “Get the bis in their crates. Double quick. Damn, Pouncey, you pick your moments. Where’s Tsuneko?”

  “Out–”

  “Out? Where?”

  “The bioplas?” Pouncey said.

  “Oh… yeah. Forgot. Com her through her earset. Don’t tell her where the next apartment is though, come and get her when we’re safe.”

  “Okay.”

  “And com Six-Fingers to clean up here.”

  “Okay.”

  A flurry of packing and movement, curses, sweat and coffee: the bis were stored in their automobe crates, people packed bags, changed clothes, put on wigs. They had only been in the apartment for three days – a short one. Manfred hoped the next stop might be for a week or more. But he had to move. The whole world was trying to locate him.

  Pouncey took her wristband and modded its screen. “Sansom Street seventeen, floor seven, apartment twenty,” she said. “Hey – where Jewellers’ Row used to be. Been empty for a while. Nothin’ bad nearby, unless you count the jazz club. Could be nice. Got some furniture, even.”

  “Thanks for that,” said Manfred. “Listen, do everything you can to keep us invisible there for a week. Ten days if poss. The bis are changing.”

  “And they got you for a dad. Poor things.”

  “You did say you wanted them stressed,” Joanna observed.

  “Yeah,” Manfred replied, “but not stolen. They’re ours.”

  An hour passed, then they were ready. Taking three crates each, they left the apartment then took the lift down to the ground floor.

  Manfred walked into the rain outside the block. Splashed puddles soaked his trousers. For a moment he recalled the warm, comfortable suites he had enjoyed at Ichikawa labs; the flowers, the food, the unhurried conversations. This was madness in comparison: and it was straining the BIteam. He worried about Tsuneko, who wasn’t used to the travelling life. Well, she better get those sixty grams of bioplas.

  “Lead on,” he told Pouncey.

  Midnight dark, rain worsening. They struggled through grease-laden puddles, past noisy vegeburger joints, sweet mullers, nexus music clubs where everyone wore spex’n’headphones like fly eyes. But nobody was interested in them. Pouncey had long since developed the perfect nexus illusion, each member of the BIteam with a full identity, back story, credit thread. In the spex of the good citizens of Philadelphia they were three worthless woons. Street litter.

  Which was fine. Nobody noticed street litter.

  Manfred called this operation doing a Damascus. He didn’t say why. But it worked. The Hyperlinked meant they could never be traced. Worst case scenario – somebody bumped into Manfred and recognised him. Almost impossible, that.

  A shebang of electric cars tore by, sending water everywhere. Plastics hawkers carrying black stash bags patrolled the streets. All normal. When Pouncey ducked into a doorway and shook the rain from he
r hair they followed her, sighing with relief. The next apartment was near. It would be warm and dry.

  ~

  Tsuneko June was not impressed with what Manfred had done.

  “You cut the cables off?” she said.

  The quartet sat around the kitchen table. Manfred shook his head. “I freed them,” he said. “You’ve got to understand. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. They no longer have direct access to one another’s brain, which means–”

  “Yes, yes, I heard you the last time. But my biograins…”

  Manfred appraised her. The girl was mid twenties, slim, long brown hair. Bright… very bright – the one who developed biograins. The first member of the quartet he had bought: the most important one. He could not afford to hack her off.

  “It’s all this moving,” he said, “um, unsettling you. I get it. I feel the same. But until we reach our breakthrough we’re food for the big guys in China, Japan, Singapore, Korea. Hell, Thailand even. Not forgetting Leonora.”

  Tsuneko uttered a sigh of frustration. “What does Joanna think?”

  Manfred relaxed. This was a question that got him off the hook. “Ask her,” he said.

  Rain spattered against the kitchen window. Joanna shrugged and said, “He could well be right. I see it–”

  “You mean you see it, Joanna Rohlen one-time shrink, or you see it, Joanna his bedtime fun?”

  Joanna’s face flushed. “Both,” she said.

  Manfred hadn’t heard them talk like this before. His heart beat fast. He hadn’t realised what lay beneath the surface. He raised a hand. “Please–”

  Tsuneko waved a hand back at him. “Stop it. I don’t care. I wouldn’t touch you.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. We’re the BIteam, aren’t we? Me and Joanna… what does a relationship matter?”

  “It doesn’t matter a bit,” Tsuneko said, slapping the table. She stood up to pour coffee, then walked to the window, back turned. Manfred glanced at Joanna. She looked scared. He shrugged at her.