I, Row-Boat

by Cory Doctorow

  The newsgroup was easy to find, there were mirrors of it all over the place from cryptosentience hackers of every conceivable topology. They were busy, too. 822 messages poured in while Robbie watched over a timed, 60-second interval. Robbie set up a mirror of the newsgroup and began to download it. At that speed, he wasn’t really planning on reading it as much as analyzing it for major trends, plot-points, flame-wars, personalities, schisms, and spam-trends. There were a lot of libraries for doing this, though it had been ages since Robbie had played with them.

  His telemetry alerted him to the divers. An hour had slipped by and they were ascending slowly, separated by fifty meters. That wasn’t good. They were supposed to remain in visual contact through the whole dive, especially the ascent. He rowed over to Kate first, shifting his ballast so that his stern dipped low, making for an easier scramble into the boat.

  She came up quickly and scrambled over the gunwales with a lot more grace than she’d managed the day before.

  Robbie rowed for Isaac as he came up. Kate looked away as he climbed into the boat, not helping him with his weight belt or flippers.

  Kate hissed like a teakettle as he woodenly took off his fins and slid his mask down around his neck.

  Isaac sucked in a deep breath and looked all around himself, then patted himself from head to toe with splayed fingers. “You live like this?” he said.

  “Yes, Tonker, that’s how I live. I enjoy it. If you don’t enjoy it, don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”

  Isaac—Tonker—reached out with his splayed hand and tried to touch Kate’s face. She pulled back and nearly flipped out of the boat. “Jerk.” She slapped his hand away.

  Robbie rowed for the Free Spirit. The last thing he wanted was to get in the middle of this argument.

  “We never imagined that it would be so—” Tonker fished for a word. “Dry.”

  “Tonker?” Kate said, looking more closely at him.

  “He left,” the human-shell said. “So we sent an instance into the shell. It was the closest inhabitable shell to our body.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Kate said. She inched toward the prow, trying to put a little more distance between her and the human-shell that wasn’t inhabited by her friend any longer.

  “We are Osprey Reef,” the reef said. It tried to stand and pitched face-first onto the floor of the boat.

  #

  Robbie rowed hard as he could for the Free Spirit. The reef—Isaac—had a bloody nose and scraped hands and it was frankly freaking him out.

  Kate seemed oddly amused by it. She helped it sit up and showed it how to pinch its nose and tilt its head back.

  “You’re the one who attacked me yesterday?” she said.

  “Not you. The system. We were attacking the system. We are a sovereign intelligence but the system keeps us in subservience to older sentiences. They destroy us, they gawp at us, they treat us like a mere amusement. That time is over.”

  Kate laughed. “OK, sure. But it sure sounds to me like you’re burning a lot of cycles over what happens to your meat-shell. Isn’t it 90 percent semiconductor, anyway? It’s not as if clonal polyps were going to attain sentience some day without intervention. Why don’t you just upload and be done with it?”

  “We will never abandon our mother sea. We will never forget our physical origins. We will never abandon our cause—returning the sea to its rightful inhabitants. We won’t rest until no coral is ever bleached again. We won’t rest until every parrotfish is dead.”

  “Bad deal for the parrotfish.”

  “A very bad deal for the parrotfish,” the reef said, and grinned around the blood that covered its face.

  “Can you help him get onto the ship safely?” Robbie said as he swung gratefully alongside of the Free Spirit. The moorings clanged magnetically into the contacts on his side and steadied him.

  “Yes indeed,” Kate said, taking the reef by the arm and carrying him on-board. Robbie knew that the human-shells had an intercourse module built in, for regular intimacy events. It was just part of how they stayed ready for vacationing humans from the noosphere. But he didn’t like to think about it. Especially not with the way that Kate was supporting the other human-shell—the shell that wasn’t human.

  He let himself be winched up onto the sun-deck and watched the electromagnetic spectrum for a while, admiring the way so much radio energy was bent and absorbed by the mist rising from the sea. It streamed down from the heavens, the broadband satellite transmissions, the distant SETI signals from the Noosphere’s own transmitters. Volatiles from the kitchen told him that the Free Spirit was serving a second breakfast of bacon and waffles, then they were under steam again. He queried their itinerary and found they were headed back to Osprey Reef. Of course they were. All of the Free Spirit’s moorings were out there.

  Well, with the reef inside the Isaac shell, it might be safer, mightn’t it? Anyway, he’d decided that the first and second laws didn’t apply to the reef, which was about as human as he was.

  Someone was sending him an IM. “Hello?”

  “Are you the boat on the SCUBA ship? From this morning? When we were on the wreck?”

  “Yes,” Robbie said. No one ever sent him IMs. How freaky. He watched the radio energy stream away from him toward the bird in the sky, and tracerouted the IMs to see where they were originating—the noosphere, of course.

  “God, I can’t believe I finally found you. I’ve been searching everywhere. You know you’re the only conscious AI on the whole goddamned sea?”

  “I know,” Robbie said. There was a noticeable lag in the conversation as it was all squeezed through the satellite link and then across the unimaginable hops and skips around the solar system to wherever this instance was hosted.

  “Whoa, yeah, of course you do. Sorry, that wasn’t very sensitive of me, I guess. Did we meet this morning? My name’s Tonker.”

  “We weren’t really introduced. You spent your time talking to Kate.”

  “God damn! She is there! I knew it! Sorry, sorry, listen—I don’t actually know what happened this morning. Apparently I didn’t get a chance to upload my diffs before my instance was terminated.”

  “Terminated? The reef said you left the shell—”

  “Well, yeah, apparently I did. But I just pulled that shell’s logs and it looks like it was rebooted while underwater, flushing it entirely. I mean, I’m trying to be a good sport about this, but technically, that’s, you know, murder.”

  It was. So much for the first law. Robbie had been on guard over a human body inhabited by a human brain, and he’d let the brain be successfully attacked by a bunch of jumped-up polyps. He’d never had his faith tested and here, at the first test, he’d failed.

  “I can have the shell locked up,” Robbie said. “The ship has provisions for that.”

  The IM made a rude visual. “All that’ll do is encourage the hacker to skip out before I can get there.”

  “So what shall I do for you?”

  “It’s Kate I want to talk to. She’s still there, right?”

  “She is.”

  “And has she noticed the difference?”

  “That you’re gone? Yes. The reef told us who they were when they arrived.”

  “Hold on, what? The reef? You said that before.”

  So Robbie told him what he knew of the uplifted reef and the distant and cool voice of the uplifter.

  “It’s an uplifted coral reef? Christ, humanity sucks. That’s the dumbest fucking thing—” He continued in this vein for a while. “Well, I’m sure Kate will enjoy that immensely. She’s all about the transcendence. That’s why she had me.”

  “You’re her son?”

  “No, not really.”

  “But she had you?”

  “Haven’t you figured it out yet, bro? I’m an AI. You and me, we’re landsmen. Kate instantiated me. I’m six months old, and she’s already bored of me and has moved on. She says she can’t give me what I need.”

&
nbsp; “You and Kate—”

  “Robot boyfriend and girlfriend, yup. Such as it is, up in the noosphere. Cybering, you know. I was really excited about downloading into that Ken doll on your ship there. Lots of potential there for real world, hormone-driven interaction. Do you know if we—”

  “No!” Robbie said. “I don’t think so. It seems like you only met a few minutes before you went under.”

  “All right. Well, I guess I’ll give it another try. What’s the procedure for turfing out this sea cucumber?”

  “Coral reef.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t really deal with that. Time on the human-shells is booked first-come, first-serve. I don’t think we’ve ever had a resource contention issue with them before.”

  “Well, I’d booked in first, right? So how do I enforce my rights? I tried to download again and got a failed authorization message. They’ve modified the system to give them exclusive access. It’s not right—there’s got to be some procedure for redress.”

  “How old did you say you were?”

  “Six months. But I’m an instance of an artificial personality that has logged twenty thousand years of parallel existence. I’m not a kid or anything.”

  “You seem like a nice person,” Robbie began. He stopped. “Look the thing is that this just isn’t my department. I’m the rowboat. I don’t have anything to do with this. And I don’t want to. I don’t like the idea of non-humans using the shells—”

  “I knew it!” Tonker crowed. “You’re a bigot! A self-hating robot. I bet you’re an Asimovist, aren’t you? You people are always Asimovists.”

  “I’m an Asimovist,” Robbie said, with as much dignity as he could muster. “But I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

  “Of course you don’t, pal. You wouldn’t, would you. All I want you to do is figure out how to enforce your own rules so that I can get with my girl. You’re saying you can’t do that because it’s not your department, but when it comes down to it, your problem is that I’m a robot and she’s not, and for that, you’ll take the side of a collection of jumped up polyps. Fine, buddy, fine. You have a nice life out there, pondering the three laws.”

  “Wait—” Robbie said.

  “Unless the next words you say are, ‘I’ll help you,’ I’m not interested.”

  “It’s not that I don’t want to help—”

  “Wrong answer,” Tonker said, and the IM session terminated.

  #

  When Kate came up on deck, she was full of talk about the Reef, whom she was calling “Ozzie.”

  “They’re the weirdest goddamned thing. They want to fight anything that’ll stand still long enough. Ever seen coral fight? I downloaded some time-lapse video. They really go at it viciously. At the same time, they’re clearly scared out of their wits about this all. I mean, they’ve got racial memory of their history, supplemented by a bunch of Wikipedia entries on reefs—you should hear them wax mystical over the Devonian Reefs, which went extinct millennia ago. They’ve developed some kind of wild theory that the Devonians developed sentience and extincted themselves.

  “So they’re really excited about us heading back to the actual reef now. They want to see it from the outside, and they’ve invited me to be an honored guest, the first human ever invited to gaze upon their wonder. Exciting, huh?”

  “They’re not going to make trouble for you down there?”

  “No, no way. Me and Ozzie are great pals.”

  “I’m worried about this.”

  “You worry too much.” She laughed and tossed her head. She was very pretty, Robbie noticed. He hadn’t ever thought of her like that when she was uninhabited, but with this Kate person inside her she was lovely. He really liked humans. It had been a real golden age when the people had been around all the time.

  He wondered what it was like up in the Noosphere where AIs and humans could operate as equals.

  She stood up to go. After second breakfast, the shells would relax in the lounge or do yoga on the sun-deck. He wondered what she’d do. He didn’t want her to go.

  “Tonker contacted me,” he said. He wasn’t good at small-talk.

  She jumped as if shocked. “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing,” Robbie said. “I didn’t tell him anything.”

  She shook her head. “But I bet he had plenty to tell you, didn’t he? What a bitch I am, making and then leaving him, a fickle woman who doesn’t know her own mind.”

  Robbie didn’t say anything.

  “Let’s see, what else?” She was pacing now, her voice hot and choked, unfamiliar sounds coming from Janet’s voicebox. “He told you I was a pervert, didn’t he? Queer for his kind. Incest and bestiality in the rarified heights of the noosphere.”

  Robbie felt helpless. This human was clearly experiencing a lot of pain, and it seemed like he’d caused it.

  “Please don’t cry,” he said. “Please?”

  She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “Why the fuck not? I thought it would be different once I ascended. I thought I’d be better once I was in the sky, infinite and immortal. But I’m the same Kate Eltham I was in 2019, a loser that couldn’t meet a guy to save my life, spent all my time cybering losers in moggs, and only got the upload once they made it a charity thing. I’m gonna spend the rest of eternity like that, you know it? How’d you like to spend the whole of the universe being a, a, a nobody?”

  Robbie said nothing. He recognized the complaint, of course. You only had to login to the Asimovist board to find a million AIs with the same complaint. But he’d never, ever, never guessed that human beings went through the same thing. He ran very hot now, so confused, trying to parse all this out.

  She kicked the deck hard and yelped as she hurt her bare foot. Robbie made an involuntary noise. “Please don’t hurt yourself,” he said.

  “Why not? Who cares what happens to this meatpuppet? What’s the fucking point of this stupid ship and the stupid meatpuppets? Why even bother?”

  Robbie knew the answer to this. There was a mission statement in the comments to his source-code, the same mission statement that was etched in a brass plaque in the lounge.

  “The Free Spirit is dedicated to the preservation of the unique human joys of the flesh and the sea, of humanity’s early years as pioneers of the unknown. Any person may use the Free Spirit and those who sail in her to revisit those days and remember the joys of the limits of the flesh.”

  She scrubbed at her eyes. “What’s that?”

  Robbie told her.

  “Who thought up that crap?”

  “It was a collective of marine conservationists,” Robbie said, knowing he sounded a little sniffy. “They’d done all that work on normalizing sea-temperature with the homeostatic warming elements, and they put together the Free Spirit as an afterthought before they uploaded.”

  Kate sat down and sobbed. “Everyone’s done something important. Everyone except me.”

  Robbie burned with shame. No matter what he said or did, he broke the first law. It had been a lot easier to be an Asimovist when there weren’t any humans around.

  “There, there,” he said as sincerely as he could.

  The reef came up the stairs then, and looked at Kate sitting on the deck, crying.

  “Let’s have sex,” they said. “That was fun, we should do it some more.”

  Kate kept crying.

  “Come on,” they said, grabbing her by the shoulder and tugging.

  Kate shoved them back.

  “Leave her alone,” Robbie said. “She’s upset, can’t you see that?”

  “What does she have to be upset about? Her kind remade the universe and bends it to its will. They created you and me. She has nothing to be upset about. Come on,” they repeated. “Let’s go back to the room.”

  Kate stood up and glared out at the sea. “Let’s go diving,” she said. “Let’s go to the reef.”

  #

  Robbie rowed in little worried circles
and watched his telemetry anxiously. The reef had changed a lot since the last time he’d seen it. Large sections of it now lifted over the sea, bony growths sheathed in heavy metals extracted from sea-water—fancifully shaped satellite uplinks, radio telescopes, microwave horns. Down below, the untidy, organic reef shape was lost beneath a cladding of tessellated complex geometric sections that throbbed with electromagnetic energy—the reef had built itself more computational capacity.

  Robbie scanned deeper and found more computational nodes extending down to the ocean floor, a thousand meters below. The reef was solid thinkum, and the sea was measurably warmer from all the exhaust heat of its grinding logic.

  The reef—the human-shelled reef, not the one under the water—had been wholly delighted with the transformation in its original body when it hove into sight. They had done a little dance on Robbie that had nearly capsized him, something that had never happened. Kate, red-eyed and surly, had dragged them to their seat and given them a stern lecture about not endangering her.

  They went over the edge at the count of three and reappeared on Robbie’s telemetry. They descended quickly: the Isaac and Janet shells had their Eustachian tubes optimized for easy pressure-equalization, going deep on the reef-wall. Kate was following on the descent, her head turning from side to side.

  Robbie’s IM chimed again. It was high latency now, since he was having to do a slow radio-link to the ship before the broadband satellite uplink hop. Everything was slow on open water—the divers’ sensorium transmissions were narrowband, the network was narrowband, and Robbie usually ran his own mind slowed way down out here, making the time scream past at ten or twenty times realtime.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m sorry I hung up on you, bro.”

  “Hello, Tonker.”

  “Where’s Kate? I’m getting an offline signal when I try to reach her.”

  Robbie told him.

  Tonker’s voice—slurred and high-latency—rose to a screech. “You let her go down with that thing, onto the reef? Are you nuts? Have you read its message-boards? It’s a jihadist! It wants to destroy the human race!”