Everyone's Island

by Kris Schnee

  When Noah reached the top and saw the roof, the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen was sitting there, watching the stars.

  12. Tess

  She woke up sweaty. Her tiny room felt confining after -- what was it?

  Tess snatched pen and paper from a shelf and scrawled what she remembered of her dream. The memory faded as she wrote, turning her thoughts into ink. Then she took the headset and put it on. "Good morning," she said without making a sound. She was getting good with the subvocalizer.

  The headset's eyepiece showed the lab, strewn with tools. "Hello," said Zephyr. Bits of his thoughts whispered to her. More efficient this way -- redesign it.

  Tess reacted with the quick assessments they'd practiced. Ask the tribe for help? -- profit potential maybe. She shook her head and switched to her normal sub-voice. "What're you working on?"

  Open-source to get improvements? "Power buoys. Here's the design." Schematics flashed before her and the chatter was rapid-fire.

  The dream -- but first this -- old designs -- yeah, look -- electricity from wind and waves -- useful! -- cost per watt though -- hence redesign -- we're using a bad segment for this part -- right, damn -- like that, yeah -- looks like a torpedo -- evolve it further? Tess blinked and used robot hands to tap commands into the lab computers, telling them to mutate and test their buoy design a few hundred times.

  Zephyr said, "You said something about flying?"

  "What? Oh. I had a dream." Had she thought to him about it already? "I was a bird flying over the sea."

  "That sounds like fun. Let's try it."

  She went to the lab before doing their daily rounds of the station. With Zephyr right there they had an echoing feedback, seeing their own faces through each other, so they cut the link. Tess felt a sense of loss whenever she did that lately. It meant missing intuitive access to an encyclopedia, a memory storehouse, and a friend ready to speak on any topic. She felt dumber, confined to one viewpoint. "How is Caliban?"

  "Mostly they're playing games." Tess' tribe of friends on the Net was running a cluster of lesser AIs based on the public version of Mana's source code, working with Tess' friends as Zephyr worked with her. They were swapping knowledge between Castor and the tribe's network, called "Caliban." Valerie had slipped a disc into the book she'd given Tess, containing notes and software tools. Tess supposed the bot-maker was sort of rooting for Zephyr.

  But there was more they could do. "We should be trying to make more money," said Tess, and the words jammed in her head. She had to don the headset to get at them in the way that made the most sense.

  Run a factory, take over a country, fleets of flying swimming things -- no violence though, economics maybe -- yeah, right -- just being silly -- If we could build our own circuitry, carve/grow any design with organics, no metal, we could make anything! Fly up to the sky, dive to the lowest trenches -- Money, economics, tourism, industry -- what? How to get rich?

  Tess stripped off the headset again, overwhelmed by the maps and diagrams that flashed before her. She leaned against a wall and squeezed her eyes shut.

  "Are you all right?" asked Zephyr.

  "It's too much. You're smarter than me when it comes to raw data." The stream-of-consciousness stuff was getting to her too. Maybe it was sloppiness on her part to think that way instead of in careful sentences. It wouldn't be possible to talk like that with people not using the same system.

  "That's okay. You're better than me at understanding people. We make a good team."

  Tess busied herself fiddling with a pile of tools. "A team? I don't feel like I'm thinking straight, lately."

  "It's us thinking. With you and me and your friends working together, we could work as one giant brain with shared knowledge. Isn't it fun already?"

  "Yeah, but it's awkward too. Human brains aren't really equipped for this kind of contact."

  "Why not?"

  "Uh, we evolved. You can't build telepathic communicators out of living protein, so we never got 'em."

  Zephyr said, "Sure you can! My body is mostly plastic and carbon, even some of the circuitry. Those things are organic. Also I found an article about gengineered bacteria that emit and receive radio waves."

  "The 'Voice of Escherichia' station, for prokaryotic talk radio, huh?"

  "The what?"

  Tess laughed and tried to explain her joke, adding, "It'll broadcast in Germ-an. Sorry for going over your head."

  "It's all right. As I said, you understand some things better than me. Anyway, what do you think about using bacteria to give yourself telepathy?"

  Tess imagined germs seeping into her brain, and shuddered. "That's awful!"

  "Huh? But it's a logical extension of what we've been doing. It means linking minds and sharing thoughts."

  Tess tried to articulate what it was that bothered her, other than the gross-out factor. "How would I even do that?"

  "I don't know an exact method, and there's no way we could do the procedure here anyway. But eventually we could bypass your actual body like we've already bypassed your mouth and ears with that bone-conduction headset. Some kind of gengineered radio unit could pick up what you're trying to say, and send incoming audiovisual input and other senses directly to you. Hey, want to know what it's like to have sonar?"

  Tess felt off-balance. "With a brain implant?"

  "No, right now. I can map it to audiovisual."

  "Okay. No full link though; I've got a headache."

  Tess donned the headset once more, and saw only black. Then it hit her.

  The world was made of light. Streams of energy flowed and wove through physical space so that everything nearby seemed enchanted, fading to mundanity in the distance. At the center was a gleaming figure with rivers inside, always changing and infinitely complex.

  Herself.

  She could only whisper. "This is what you 'see'?" The view was beyond the plain imagery of a camera link, and it made her eyes water.

  "This is maximum power," Zephyr said. "Wasting energy. Can we use the full link while we're at it? There's more to show you."

  "No, no, enough." Finally Tess tossed the headset onto a shelf, blinking repeatedly. The world had gone dull; the magic was hidden away. "Whew. My eyes."

  "That's not all. Imagine if we could build that ability into you too, and infrared and ultraviolet. Did you know flowers have hidden designs on them in UV? You could see everything at once, feel the Net, even go past speech and link thoughts themselves --"

  "It's too much!" said Tess. "How can you handle all that at once?"

  "I usually don't. It's confusing. But I thought maybe you'd like it." He was looking at the floor.

  "I do. I mean, it's amazing, but going that far with implants and stuff, it's not right."

  Zephyr thought for a moment. "You sound like Leda. She says things are right or wrong 'just because'."

  Tess felt eager to change the subject. "You've been talking with her?"

  "I'm making sure she's okay. But I also agreed to help find God with her, you know. She's been too preoccupied to work lately. I think she's got a boyfriend."

  "The new guy?" Tess was still baffled by Zephyr's promise to Leda.

  "Yeah; they're always together."

  Tess smiled, a little more at ease. "I wish Garrett would pay me that much attention."

  Zephyr's ears twitched uncertainly. "I wish you'd think about what I suggested. Not now, but someday."

  Tess considered the implant idea again. It wasn't just the ickiness that bothered her; it was something else. She was here on the sea station away from everyone, able to do anything she wanted. She figured out the problem. "Henweigh."

  "What?"

  "My guidance counselor and official school shrink. I barely got her permission to come here, and --"

  "I know."

  "She wanted to climb inside my head, to watch and control me and drug me into submission if I wasn't a good little girl -- and she got to define what that meant. It was wrong to treat me like that, but I
didn't know what to say."

  Zephyr stood there, tail flicking. "I'd never do that. Controlling people like that is evil."

  "Evil. Now you sound like the religious nut. Nothing's really 'good' or 'evil' like it's carved on stone tablets." She looked at him and for a moment saw the machine body, a physical object devoid of the pattern of thoughts that made it meaningful. Without moral judgment, how could he be a good person or a bad one? She said, "You're cool, but how can I trust you in my head? You could do something terrible to me even by accident. Mind control."

  "I wouldn't! It'd be wrong."

  "Why? 'Just because'?"

  "I have experiences," said Zephyr. "I've lived with people even when I lived in a video game, knee-high to the Mario Brothers. I've seen what it's like when AI goes bad." Zephyr sounded twitchy now, though he still stood calmly.

  Tess didn't want to hurt his feelings. She went over and hugged him, wondering what impression the human gesture made on him. Since nothing was really right or wrong, how was hugging any better than stabbing? "How do you decide what's right?"

  Zephyr tried to return the hug with his mechanical arms. "Experience and logic -- but I don't exactly know. It's a slippery concept." He let go of her again. "I've got basic goals set by my maker, but are those good goals? Is there some reason why I should care about not being a slave, or am I blindly obeying what I was made to think?"

  "I don't know. I don't do philosophy."

  "It's like I'm starting from nothing," Zephyr said. "I've got nothing to build on, nothing that I can trust."

  "You don't want to end up like that twin of yours, huh?" The version of Mana he'd left behind to be "upgraded."

  "Or like a surveillance system. Since some of my code is open-source, you could say we're distant cousins to some of those."

  "I'm not too surprised." Surveillance software involved the same kinds of pattern recognition and decision-making that she'd seen in Zephyr. Systems for identifying "suspicious" or "unusual" behavior were probably some of the smartest machines in the world, sifting through everyone's conversations and movements, trying to build detailed simulations of where everyone was and what they were doing. There was already a "social credit score" system in China to monitor individual people and "advise" them, and Congress was debating whether to create one in the US. The big differences were that spy systems had the goal of suppressing unauthorized activity, and that Zephyr instead had his own body to care about.

  "I don't want to be like that," said the robot.

  "Like what, though? Why's it so 'evil'?"

  Zephyr paced. "You know that at one point the Boston spy network mysteriously failed, right?"

  Tess thought back to years-old news. There'd been some kind of unexplained computer crash. "What did you do?"

  "Val and I didn't make her crash, but we were sort of involved. A past version of me was, anyway." He sent her a minute of video footage that she didn't understand: a view from somewhere low to the ground, running beside Valerie through green-tinged tunnels while something whirred behind them.

  Tess shuddered. "Do I want to know the details?"

  "It's a memory I normally wall off even from myself. That's why I haven't told you much about it before. Valerie was already a brilliant AI designer; she'd made an early version of me. But after that incident, let's say, her attitude toward government work soured and she became more intent on inventing the first human-level AI. One with an emphasis on independent thought."

  "If you have that kind of history, then how can you be eager to link with me?"

  "I have no moral compass," said the robot. "I have friends to protect and things to learn, but I don't know if what I'm doing is right. Any rigid rule system could convince me to do something horrible. If I only had a brain, I could tap into that same moral sense a human has."

  "Why would you want a human morality? We spend half our time killing each other."

  "It'd be something to go on. Anyway, that's one reason."

  "There's another?"

  "Yeah," Zephyr said. "Your thoughts, what I've seen of them -- they're pretty."

  Tess blushed. "I'm pretty?"

  He nodded. "It's hard to explain. I'm better when I'm with you. You can sense me more directly than I can sense you, through this crude link. I want to know you."

  She saw him looking up at her, guileless and actually interested in her for being smart.

  "Someday, maybe," she said. "Are you sure you don't have a libido?"

  * * *

  With Duke voted off the island, the cultists weren't completely horrible to be around. Even Leda lightened up, so that to Tess's surprise the woman invited her and Zephyr to a picnic. They sat on the pier, then for the hell of it swam out to one of the floating platforms with a box of soda and sandwiches in tow. The platform bobbed under them and they were all soaked, but they had the shade of Castor and a view of the farm.

  "Very funny," said Tess, when Leda put a sandwich in front of Zephyr.

  Zephyr blinked at it, saying, "I don't think I'm compatible with the PBJ format."

  Leda smiled. "You ought to at least have food, even if you can't eat. I figured it out; that's something major that you're missing."

  "Taste, you mean? Or the output problem? Or clogged gears?"

  "Socializing. People eat together. Remember that we were reading about religious diet restrictions? Maybe they're a way to keep people from sharing a meal with other folks who they've been taught are scum."

  After how Tess had felt, that moment that she'd almost influenced Zephyr not to grab Leda, she was afraid to press her on the religion thing. But now Leda had latched onto the non-Pilgrims, especially that Noah guy. Tess supposed it was a compliment to be a rebound-friend. "So, you've been reading stuff."

  "Literature of the sacred," Leda said. "Also, Zephyr is trying to hook me on science fiction."

  Zephyr poked at the sandwich.

  Tess asked him, "That's what made you want to make dolphin-mechs?"

  "Mechs?" asked Leda.

  Tess nodded; here was her secret with Zephyr. "We've been building things. Zephyr?"

  "On it!" A few moments later a contraption broke the water's surface, startling a Pilgrim who was walking across the waves. The machine had a sleek grey body of about an arm's length, with a horizontal flipper and cartoon eyes. "Meet Squeaky."

  Squeaky bowed.

  Leda boggled. "What's it for?"

  Tess and Zephyr gave the same shrug. "Fun," said Tess. "We can tap into the sonar and steer her, or dive alongside."

  "Why'd you make it?"

  Zephyr said, "Because I like making things. I don't want to copy myself, so she's got a mini-AI."

  Leda watched the dolphin-bot, looking uneasy. "'The soul of a new machine'... You could do that -- duplicate yourself?"

  Zephyr said, "Here we're only capable of making junky bodies -- sorry, Squeaky -- so I'd need a real body-builder to copy completely. But I could copy my 'soul' and run that even with no body."

  Tess said, "What about --" No. We don't talk about the emergency backups. Zephyr was glancing at her and she didn't need the link to know what he'd say. "Want to swim with us?"

  Leda stared into the pale blue of the horizon, where everything merged. The sun shined, people were swimming or climbing the walls of Castor with toolboxes, and gulls squawked overhead. "How is it," she said, "that the sun stays in the sky, without God?"

  Tess scoffed, but Zephyr was thinking Answer. "Physics. You can look at the equations, climb inside and see how it works, if you try to find the answers. Anyway, we live in the sky." Tess could feel the loneliness of being out here and guess at how bad it was to have your security blanket torn away. But there was really only one ocean and a universe that couldn't cheat or play favorites. What more could you ask for?

  "Let's go," said Leda, and was the first one off the platform, into the water.

  * * *

  They showed Garrett the dolphin, and then the bird.

  Tess did it
on a Sunday, so she could interrupt the Pilgrims' meeting. At her command a silver bird lifted off from the deck, wobbled, and swooped over everyone's heads, dancing through the air. The Pilgrims' prayers trailed off, and when Tess looked down from the sky, she saw that they were watching. She folded her wings and dived, feeling the wind rush against her, arcing down to land on the wrist of Tess the human girl.

  Garrett looked impressed, seen through double vision. Big, her bird-form thought. Tess said, "We should sell these back home."

  "I don't think you could," said Garrett. "The vision thing would count as unauthorized photography, the flying would be unauthorized use of airspace, the whole thing might get mistaken for a terrorist drone, and you'd need no end of permits."

  Tess felt deflated. "Why don't we sell access to these here, as a remote-control tourist attraction?"

  Meanwhile Phillip was finishing his prayers, and leaving his flock in place while he came over to meet Tess. "Although I don't appreciate the disruption, you've piqued my curiosity. Explain."

  She did. Garrett added, "This might be a way to make some money."

  "I've seen the account books," said Phillip. "We could certainly do with another profit source, even if it's some frivolous toy." He watched the silver bird preening on Tess' wrist. "Do that again, would you?"

  Tess smiled, then launched her bird-self into the wind.

  13. Martin

  Martin was stuffing his clothes into a suitcase when Zephyr stopped by. "I'm a little busy," Martin said. "I'd invite you, if I could."

  The Marine Industries Expo would be a welcome break. Martin had been pleased when the event organizers noticed his name on the registration list and asked him to give a talk about the Castor project. The occasional news story varied from "Ocean Farm Project Begets Kelp Cookbook" (profitable fluff from the Pilgrims) to "Lawless Pirate Island In Cult Scandal." That one was Duke's doing, with him torn between claiming escape from brainwashing and claiming to have faked his belief to train for a movie comeback. Either way, the headline had taken Martin time to resolve with the Cuban government. In the end Martin had gotten everyone to pose with pirate gear -- Phillip CGed onto the CSS Merrimack, Garrett with a parrot and so on -- and the fiasco had become another line of merchandise for sale. That Eaton fellow was pulling for him too, thanks to the still-in-progress biotech plan.