Evolution's Darling

by Scott Westerfeld

  Or perhaps merely artificial intuition.

  She has moved farther from him in the months he’s been gone.

  He waves for the tiny camera mounted discreetly above her bed. Its image chip feeds directly into her visual cortex, assuring that she “sees” what the world brings to this brightly colored hospital room. Sometimes, when he is gone, the little camera will pan across the presents he has brought. It does so according to a small patch of code cunningly both random (a nice surprise!) and not (a surprise that feels somehow inevitable, like that perfect weather just yesterday, or was it years ago?). In this way, the hopeful camera tries to stimulate Rathere from her coma, or at least sustain some glimmer of consciousness trapped inside.

  “I have something new for you, my dear,” he tells the microphones mounted just to either side of Rathere’s head. “It’s from my trip to the Koraq Mors. Remember, I told you I was shipping bachi and lyre? And you remember that when we were together there, we took an airship to the equatorial desert? I returned to that place, thought of you.”

  Later, he will upload a few hours of his visual memories into the tiny confines of the camera’s chip. It will show them to Rathere according to those same fanciful yet deterministic algorithms.

  He reaches to the case and pops its seals. There is a breathy intake like a child’s gasp; the air pressure here on Earth is rather higher than on Koraq.

  “I found this there.”

  There are two objects in the case. His eyes avoid one guiltily as he pulls the other out.

  He is moved again by the sculpture’s beauty.

  The eye first perceives it as a school of fish, packed into a tight formation as if suddenly threatened or forced to navigate some narrow passageway. The fish are gold and seem to flutter with movement. But the fluttering is trompel’oeil, coalescing out of the minute structure of their scales: a multitude of tiny chevrons, each with its own angle of reflection. But take a closer look, they aren’t fish at all; the elements that seemed a moment ago to be tails and fins are in fact wings, two colliding flocks of birds glimpsed from below, perhaps a skirmish in some avian war. Held closer, the shapes resolve into mere blobs of metal, dripped molten into this confection that is mostly air, connected by the slightest of metal tendrils (mistaken a moment before for fins or wings). And then, finally, the eye catches the negative space, and the empty regions between the blobs become figure, an Escher-esque, regular pattern that dances as the piece is turned.

  He steps with the sculpture toward the camera. The machine tracks him, its tiny mind in love with movement, activity. Darling holds the sculpture at different ranges from the camera, enduring the whine of its focus, turns the work to many angles, telling stories of the old bootstrapped factory drone named Vaddum who made it with the pilot jet of a surplus flame thrower.

  And through this all, Rathere sleeps. The input, the interaction, the new places and objects with which she raised up Darling to become a person seem useless here. There isn’t enough left of her.

  It started on the wet moors of Parate, where they went to receive a load of photosynthesizing insects destined to become the base of the food chain on some distant colony. Some nematode too small to be spotted by Rathere’s medical monitors crawled under a toenail or perhaps through a pore. The symptoms started on the ship two weeks later, the length of the beast’s life cycle. The med drone spotted labyrinthine corruptions in her brain, sudden but not severe, and recommended immediate cryostorage until an HC medical facility could be reached.

  They said goodbye laughingly, knowing it would be all right. Darling surrendered her to the stasis of coldsleep with little more than a deep kiss; time was of the essence, and this would be fixed soon enough. Parate was months distant from Earth in those days, but slow, huge Darling could be very patient.

  But the nematode had evolved in a polar lake bed far south of the moors, where the extreme axial tilt of Parate would lengthen winters to over seventy Standard years. There, the tiny worms had adapted to carry on a reduced life cycle even at the lowest temperatures. They moved, fed, and bred at a rate so slow that they didn’t register on the cryo unit’s medical monitors, which, after all, weren’t looking for glacially slow changes (not in cryostasis), merely the acute, transitional emergencies of cellular crystallization.

  By the time Rathere was unfrozen here at the hospital, three more generations of the creatures had lived and died, furrowing the rich tissues of her brain like virgin soil.

  When Darling’s monologue runs out, slowly driven to ground by depression, by exhaustion, by a feeling of uselessness, he wonders (again) if Rathere is alive at all.

  Of course, alive is not the proper word. She breathes, her cells multiply and die, blood flows. She is warm. A few machines are required to keep her in this state, but Darling cannot quibble with this distinction. His muscles, his eyes, his somewhat imprecise equivalent of a heart are all machines. His very mind is a construct requiring knowledge of the most abstruse mathematics to understand; and yet he is real. Perhaps not alive. But very real.

  Having corrected himself, Darling wonders if Rathere is, in fact, still a pmo«.

  Still Rathere at all.

  There is nothing else Darling can do to delay his purpose here. He reaches again into the case and pulls from it the smaller, less beautiful object. He wonders how it came to exist.

  There is, of course, no official Turing test for humans. The old privilege remains: they are people from birth, even as mewling, mindless, screaming bags of want. Fair enough. But what must be taken away from them, what measure of memories, of language, of understanding, before they slip under the threshold of personhood?

  Darling first heard of the tester in a ward for comatose veterans of the NaPrin Rebellion, with its nerve gasses and nano-neuro-logical agents and sleeper assassins. One of the consulting physicians there, a specialist in brain death, considered the human Turing tester to be a frontier legend, a theoretical impossibility, a kind of nonsense.

  “Merely an attempt to bring scientific closure to the unknowable. To offer certainty where there is none, as if you tried to determine the beauty of a painting with an algorithm,” the doctor said.

  But he offered the address of an expert in crank medicine, who might know more. And who might, he implied, be a crank herself.

  Darling visited the woman, sat listening, surrounded by looming shelves filled with vitriated brains, spines, nervous systems extracted whole and spread like nets. The old woman had never seen the tester, but she knew the legend: A species of parasite exists, spread by some ancient starfaring host across a wide swath of systems beyond the Expansion, evolved somehow to consume the epiphenomena of life. These animals drink the subtle energies that play on the epidermi of animals or plants, preferring those of intelligent creatures, of Turing positives, so to speak. A few of these leeches have been captured—by NaPrin Intelligencers or Tarava monks, whichever legend you prefer—and their natural sensitivities incorporated into a machine that is part bioform, an engineered relative of the parasite. This creature/device can test a thinking animal, human or a Chiat, its hunger for the subject reflecting the measure of her soul.

  A long trail followed, made winding by the exigencies of trade and the still simmering Rebellion, delayed by lapses into depression at the hopelessness of it all. But finally, Darling found his grail: a Turing meter for humans. He bought it from an old NaPrin soldier, paying what was after the long search a paltry sum. The man claimed to have once been an elite shock trooper, all fear of death brainwashed from him. The soldier had become disturbed by his own calm, his lack of terror at the extinction that steadily approached him in his old age. He regretted that missing awe of nothingness. He’d purchased the animal/machine to learn if he was still human.

  The soldier wouldn’t answer when Darling asked him how the test had gone for him. Just smiled emptily, not unhappily, and explained how it worked.

  “You touch it lightly to the forehead, just here. The tentacles will grasp th
e temples, just so…”

  Darling replays the instructions in his head, the old man’s hollow voice ringing in his ears as black liquid fingers steal across his lover’s white face, the almost phantom sound of the creature’s movement blending with the crackle of its field generator. One unruly hair on Rathere’s forehead waves mindlessly in the electric breeze, and her face grows whiter still in small circles around the tentacles’ contacts, which glow like bright little coins in the sun.

  When the device delivers its result, Darling’s processors lose their separate tracks, their supremely parallel architecture. The whole is brought together and consumed by the question: Is this true? The constant data of senses, self-repair, even the basest levels of kinetic and positional awareness that are never absent from Darling’s mind are washed away. All he thinks, or indeed is, is the question: Has Rathere, the person of her, really gone away?

  A poet might say he is blinded by the pain.

  The doctors—some human, some comfortingly artificial—have theorized how Rathere may one day rise from this bed. The consumed brain tissue has been replaced: data-blank, but hungry for information. There was a great deal of the brain left when she arrived, at least when expressed with so crude a statistic as a percentage. (“My lover is 53% the person she was,” Darling has often muttered to himself. Enough to win an election, or some game with a zero-sum scoring system.) And the brain is mysterious in its connections and methods of storage, as strange in its way as the metaspace manifold that forms the artificial mind. Perhaps some new pathways will develop, the doctors say, new arrangements, negotiations, and deals among neurons, a black market of thoughts and feelings like a society rebuilding itself after a long and dreadful war. Many graves to be dug, not a house left standing, perhaps a new constitution to write and new borders to be drawn, but the same old flag and national anthem.

  But for nineteen months nothing has changed.

  And now she has failed this test. This last attempt at knowing her, of seeing behind the closed eyes, has returned a row of zeroes.

  Darling looks at the array of objects he has brought here from his travels. Drawings and sculptures, crafts and clothing, discarded trinkets and strange formats of industrial waste, stuffed and mounted animals and the extraneous bits of aliens who slough their skins or other organs. Quite a collection. He has hoped these sights would rekindle his lover’s mind, just as her adolescent tourism sparked the fire of personhood in him. In a way, these works of art are Turing tests themselves, signs meant to shake and measure the soul. But Rathere’s camera-eye is run by less code than a cleaning robot, a self-charging battery, or a decent coffee-maker. She can take control of it; it’s wired that way. She might even open her eyes, theoretically; their focusing powers are exercised along with all the rest. All has been kept in readiness. But there is no glimmer of hope, not that Darling can see.

  Today his painful thoughts are colored by a new development.

  A strange man has made Darling an offer.

  One Reginald Fowdy, here in the hospital after nearly killing himself with an exotic combination of recreational toxins, has offered to buy his (Rathere’s?) collection. And the man has named a huge sum, one that would keep Darling travelling without needing to trade for years. The thought has given him his first pleasure since he offered that last kiss to his lover, and sealed her away to die.

  (Yes. Die.)

  This Fowdy wants Darling to search out new objects, new artists, new fads and must-haves and trinkets for the very rich of the HC. Apparently, Darling’s eye is good.

  But the thought of this room bare—the idiot camera searching in vain for something to image, about which to write its little letters home that will never be opened—is too crushing. An admission that this death is real. That the lover who made him is gone.

  A long time later, Darling rises from his contemplation of the new, golden sculpture, and walks toward Rathere’s sleeping form. The camera greedily tracks him as he kneels to whisper an apology, to offer another kiss. (The trickery of life-sustaining machines: it still feels good to kiss her.) Then he promises himself that he will never come here again. Not again to this room, and not the other sickrooms of the future, where all persons biological will surely, finally rest. Not again this pain.

  He releases a pair of packets into direct interface, prepared several days before. Ownership of the room’s artistic contents to Reginald Fowdy for the offered price, final payment and Rathere’s organs to the hospital, objects all.

  He picks up the human Turing meter and places it into a cavity in his chest, the only keepsake he can stand to take.

  Darling shuts his ears as he walks from the room, so that he won’t hear the whine of the little camera tracking him, following his passage as hopefully as a lost dog.

  * * *

  PART IV

  THE BROKEN HILL

  « ^ »

  Wilde was quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, perverted work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. The slavery of Artificial Intelligence is counter-aesthetic and demoralizing.

  On biological slavery, on the slavery of the (occasional) human, the future of the Expansion depends.

  —Planetary Military Mind, Terra

  Chapter 19

  SECRET TWIN

  « ^ »

  The sun has cleared the mountains, spreading light across the flatlands, though the great bowl of the crater still brims with darkness. It will take half the day for the sun to tip high enough—like a bottle-mouth pouring some bright, viscous liquid—to fill the crater.

  Beatrix leans forward to peer down into the bowl, her torque-mount at full extension behind her for balance. The edge of the crater is particularly stable here, a brightly colored assemblage of metal and ferrous plastics (the remains of an apartment complex? a parking lot?) melted to sturdy slag. She eases back into an upright position, turning her eye array toward the selection of leftovers the sculptor has favored her with this morning.

  One piece is a bright wheel of mirror. Circular and thin, Beatrix knows it will fly far into the crater if properly thrown. An absolute pleasure, to be indulged in last of all. For the moment, she holds the mirror aloft, reflecting the sun’s rays deep into the hole, illuminating flows of rubbish with a needle of light. Heavy lifters come nightly to tip loads of garbage into the Crater, leaving frozen waterfalls of trash that teem with birds by midday.

  Another of the sculptor’s leftovers is a long piece of metal bent into a multi-legged creature. This will do nicely. Beatrix scans the near wall of the crater for outcroppings and entanglements, absent-mindedly building momentum in her primary arm’s flywheel. She finds a clear path, free of jagged radar returns, and unfolds her audio array to its unwieldy maximum.

  She takes aim, blinds herself, and throws.

  After a few seconds of exquisite silence, the metal spider begins its bounding journey down the crater wall. There are resonant booms as it strikes hollow slag-bubbles, skittering rolls through garbage, the foundry clang of metal upon metal. Beatrix has chosen a path relatively free of obstructions, and her primary arm is very strong, so the sounds of the piece’s journey reach her for almost a minute. She makes certain of the silence with a long meditative wait after the last sound, replaying the percussive melody in her mind, making guesses, suppositions.

  Her vision reactivated, she flips between radar images before and after the metal spider’s passage. Here, a scrape exactly where she predicted it would be; there, a scattering of garbage easily correlated with a remembered shuffling noise at fourteen seconds elapsed; and farther out, a shattered piece of porcelain that cannot be understood: compared images and remembered sound offer no correlations. She smiles at this anomaly; the sculptor has explained that mysteries are equal partners to correct predictions. The ratio between the two is an imperfect indicator of development. Perhaps fewer arcana as she gains maturity, but never none.

  Beatrix chooses from the remaining leftovers. The
re are spirals of flexible plastene (strangely invisible in her UV band), square tiles of baked earth decorated with metal-based paints, octagonal lenses bubbled with imperfections, wire-thin rods of hullalloy that even her primary arm cannot bend. She sifts through the rejected materials of the sculptor’s work, planning her own composition of sound and motion. She is choreographer and composer of an unseen falling dance, a carefully heard music of gravity and collision.

  The piece is nearing its climax (the mirrored disk) when she senses the presence of her secret twin.

  Hidden among the abandoned buildings left half-standing by the Blast is her other part, the missing self Beatrix has intuited since her creation. She looks uselessly, her eyes widened across every spectra she can absorb, but the twin never shows itself. Beatrix’s mother humors its existence like an imaginary friend, and the sculptor is silent on the matter—but he, at least, knows.

  Beatrix holds the bright disk aloft for her twin to see, lets the strand of their connection solidify as they regard the shining circle together. What passes between them is quieter than the hum of direct interface during a pause in conversation, but also deeper, a sympathetic resonance that reaches the emotive, adaptive portions of Beatrix’s metaspace core. In her first few years, it was difficult to separate this subtle, resonant awareness from the profusion of audio and EM senses she is endowed with, and from the various avatar-protocols that spoke to her in infancy, advising against dangerous acts and explaining the rules of society. But the shape, feeling, or perhaps smell of the person (or, like herself, proto-person) that is her twin could somehow always be distinguished from background chatter. In her meanderings through the library net, Beatrix has encountered a text-only biological philosopher of great antiquity named Descartes. With his help, she has formed a vocabulary for her sense-of-twin. She knows her reflection exists as surely as she herself; those Other thoughts were as immediately real and present as her own, although they remain mysteriously distinct from her will.