Limit of Vision

by Linda Nagata

  Virgil did not talk much about these things. Who did? But he believed in a strictly natural world, and that was enough to set him off in an isolated psychological space, to make him alien. Most of the time he could hide his alienness from those who did not want to see it. Not always.

  His father was a corporate executive with secular leanings, but after the divorce he had married a devout Christian, who was quite sure Virgil was a damned soul. Virgil thought of her as sweetly disillusioned. His mother understood him better, but even she squirmed at the idea that the brain was a machine running a program that generated the Self.

  Panwar understood these things. They were alike in that, as in so many ways.

  So why had they not talked to each other since Kanaha left?

  Virgil rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Then he forced himself up. When he looked into the hallway he was surprised to see the cindies lined up against the wall, three smooth insect carapaces each twice the size of a football. Apparently they were under quarantine too.

  The scent of coffee was a blessing on the air. It led him past the open door of Panwar’s office. Panwar was there, his feet up on the desk, his LOVs glittering above his dark eyes. “Have you seen the news yet?” he asked, nodding at a small flowscreen built into the wall. “It’s all public now. The first round from the op-eds is a call for our heads.”

  “I’ll take responsibility for it,” Virgil said. “Don’t worry about that. It was my project.”

  Panwar slipped his feet off the desk. “Shut the fuck up, okay? As soon as I can talk to my dad, he’ll get us a lawyer. Don’t give up, Virg. It doesn’t end here.”

  Virgil nodded. He did not come in. “Gabrielle was engaged in a two-way visual link with the colony.”

  Panwar scowled, glancing meaningfully at the aerostat floating in the corner of his office. Everything they said and did could be used as evidence against them. Aloud he said: “That’s no secret. I gave Kanaha a copy of the log before he left.”

  “We need to talk about why.”

  “No. We don’t.”

  “I do.”

  Early in their work, Virgil had proposed the idea of a cognitive circle: Why not let our LOVs interact while we brainstorm a problem? Enhanced brain chemistry spawned fiery ideas. In a cognitive circle that effect was amplified as LOV spoke to LOV, communicating emotional energy across the circle in microsecond flashes of light. It was a powerful feedback loop that drove their brainstorming sessions forward with furious energy. Whenever Virgil had sat with Panwar and Gabrielle in a cognitive circle, he had felt like his mind was on fire, a sacred instrument designed to receive signals from some holy mental space.

  They had talked about interacting with one of the LOV colonies in the same way, but they had not done it. Not before this weekend. “She was involved in a cognitive circle with E-3,” Virgil said. “There’s no other explanation.”

  The door to the suite clicked open. Virgil turned to look down the hall. Had Detective Kanaha found a cell to put them in? He could hear one of the police officers talking outside the door: “… under observation at all times. If there’s any trouble we’ll be inside within seconds.”

  A woman’s low voice answered, sounding mildly amused. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Then she stepped past the door: a slender woman of moderate height in a calf-length brown dress and matching jacket trimmed in green. Her brown hair was gathered in a loose ponytail, framing a face of uncertain age. The eyes behind her farsights were startlingly familiar.

  “Summer Goforth,” Virgil said, after a second’s hesitation.

  Panwar lunged out of his seat, leaning out the office door to get a look.

  Summer Goforth had invented the original LOVs, and then become their most vocal opponent. She looked on them now, and she did not smile. “Hello, Virgil. Randall.” She offered her hand; all very cordial. She took an extra few seconds to peer at Panwar’s LOVs.

  Virgil had met her only once before, less than a month after he’d joined EquaSys. He’d come up from the beach, salt dry on his skin and the sun setting behind parallel lines of docile swells. Summer had been leaning against his car. He thought he’d been cornered by a fanatic … but by the time she said good-bye, uneasy doubts had been stirring within him, and he’d found himself wondering just who the fanatic really was.

  “Why are you here?” he asked her. “You’re not with the police.”

  “You’re not in police custody anymore.” The lens of her farsights had taken on a gold-green hue. “The International Biotechnology Commission has taken over your case. They’re creating an ethics committee to advise on your actions, and to rule on the status of the LOVs. I live here. I’m acquainted with the LOVs. So I’m on it.”

  “The status of the LOVs is already defined,” Panwar said. “They’re an artificial life-form.”

  Summer’s farsights flushed a deeper green as she looked at him. Mood gloss? She said: “An artificial life-form legally confined to the Hammer, but you see they’ve escaped—which makes it an IBC case.”

  Virgil had not thought he could contain any more worries, but he’d been wrong. The International Biotechnology Commission had been dreamed up in the wake of the Van Nuys incident, receiving its authority as a law-enforcement agency within the United States less than six months ago—making it younger than the crime he and Panwar had committed. The IBC’s youth did not translate to weakness. Under the guidance of Director Daniel Simkin, the agency had already built a reputation for hard-nosed enforcement. A case like this would sear its existence into the consciousness of every licensed lab around the world.

  Panwar looked as if he’d taken a blow. He shook his head. “You’re twisting the truth. You know the LOVs didn’t escape.”

  “Are you sure? The LOVs were supposed to be confined to the Hammer, but they got out. You can call it kidnapped if you like, or stolen, or smuggled, the fact remains, they are here. And an artificial life-form that cannot be controlled will be sterilized. That is clearly stated in the interim guidelines.”

  “Is that the position you’ll be taking?” Virgil asked.

  “That’s the position I’ve taken ever since Van Nuys—because I’ve been down this road myself. I know what it feels like when you’re close to a project. So close you can’t see the stop signs. You keep telling yourself, ‘just a little farther, just a little more.’ Until reason and good judgment are left far behind.”

  The color had been fading from her farsights as she spoke, until now they became a translucent white veil. “The two of you don’t have to talk to me. You don’t have to cooperate in any way. You can wait for a lawyer to show up, and you can pretend you’ve got a chance in court. But the truth is, you don’t. You’re both facing life sentences, and you are not going to have a lot of friends speaking on your behalf. This committee will include top names in biotechnology from around the world, and every one of them will be concerned foremost about one thing: saving their own projects. Your actions have conjured a wildcat mad scientist image that is going to haunt them for years if they don’t quash it now. Your hubris has put the world at risk. That’s how they’ll play it.”

  “But that isn’t true,” Virgil said. “We were taking chances with ourselves. No one else.”

  “Prove it. Show me your work.” She tapped her farsights. “From now on I’m recording. Make me—and the rest of the world—understand. That’s the only way you’ll buy leniency for yourselves.”

  PANWAR poured coffee while Virgil cleaned up. He ate a nutrient bar, and then another. A clock in the lunch room said 3 A.M.

  Nothing felt real.

  There was an awkward moment in the conference room when Virgil started to offer Summer a seat at the oval table—and remembered. “Gabrielle,” he said softly. “She was right here just a few hours ago.”

  Panwar met his eyes. He had a hunted look, but he set his hands firmly on the back of Gabrielle’s chair. “The cindies have been all over this room,” he muttered. “There’s no
trace of her left here. Nothing.” He edged around the chair as if it held a sleeping rattlesnake. Then he sat down.

  Virgil imagined Gabrielle’s ghost, startled to discover how quickly it had fallen into the past.

  Still, it was good to have someone to talk to, and something to talk about. “When you left,” he asked Summer, “the LOVs were only being cultured as individual specimens, right?”

  She nodded, sitting across the table from him, with Panwar in between.

  “That changed when they were brought to the Hammer. They form colonies easily”—Virgil mimed the size and shape of a colony by pressing his fists together—”always roughly spherical. Imagine a piece of newspaper crumpled into a ball. The crumples are channels that allow liquid to circulate to the inner levels—but you must know all this already.”

  Summer shrugged. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

  “All right then. But we’ll need access to the project ROSA, and a link to E-3—the Epsilon colony, on the Hammer.”

  Summer spoke with someone over her farsights. “All right. You’re connected.”

  Panwar pulled a keyboard out from under the table, while Virgil set to talking. The coffee—or maybe it was his implanted LOVs—had set his mind racing, so that his words ran light and smooth as he laid out his defense. “All right. Here’s the reason the LOVs aren’t dangerous; why no one was at risk but ourselves. LOVs need octopine for reproduction. Withholding octopine lets us control the size of a colony. That’s important. The practical upper limit seems to be roughly the size of a grapefruit. Larger than that, and the circulation of fluids to the interior is compromised, and the original LOVs die. But octopine is rare in nature. In the wild, a LOV could never get enough to reproduce.”

  He broke off his explanation as the room lights dimmed and the screen came to life. “Here’s Epsilon-3,” Panwar announced as he balanced the keyboard in his lap. “Our most advanced colony. I’ve given it a two-way link. Narrow field.” He turned to Summer. “That means it can see Virgil, but not us.”

  Virgil turned to gaze at the crumpled blue-green globe, fascinated as always by the suggestion of meaning in its scintillating lights. What was it thinking? If thinking was the word for what the LOVs did. “Is it active?” he asked Panwar.

  “It’s been roaming the Hammer, pestering the cafeteria staff.”

  “Roaming the Hammer?” Summer echoed.

  Virgil smiled. “Nothing sinister. The colony itself is confined, of course, to the LOV lockdown aboard the EquaSys module. But it has control of an aerostat camera that can roam through public areas in the station. I’d love to set up a camera for it here as well, but the charter forbids the system to have ‘mechanical control’ of anything on Earth. It’s a paranoid restriction, but we’ve abided by it.”

  “Settling for the minor violation of smuggling the LOVs?” she asked.

  “They aren’t dangerous,” Virgil said again. “We wouldn’t have done it if there was any threat.” His fingers moved compulsively to touch the LOVs hidden beneath his hair. “We were able to do it because the LOVs continue to be viable as individual organisms. They’re not dependent on the colony structure. Each one is quite capable of surviving on its own …”

  He frowned at the screen, at the scintillating lights. “You know,” he said softly, “this is the last thing Gabrielle ever saw.” He turned to Panwar.

  “Talk about the project,” Panwar said.

  Virgil sank back in his chair. He had not had enough sleep. Or maybe he’d had too much coffee. He forced himself to return to the subject. “Our method of selection does favor those LOVs that can most efficiently link with one another and operate together as a distributed system—like a billion tiny computers linked on a network. Change comes fast. Of the twenty colonies in the LOV lockdown, most are obsolete generations. Nearly all our cognitive work involves the apex colony, the one that is most advanced at any given time. Right now that’s Epsilon-3. It’s our thirtieth generation, the third in Epsilon tank.”

  Summer frowned. “So you’ve culled the first two Epsilon colonies?”

  “No choice. We only have so many tanks. We do keep some older specimens, though. Alpha-1 is the original colony. It still exists, but more as a museum piece than anything. Its development stagnated a long time ago. I’m not sure its LOVs are even compatible anymore with the apex strains.”

  “They’ve changed that much?”

  “I think they have. We’ve been pushing development hard.”

  “How is reproduction accomplished?”

  “LOVs are extracted at about ten thousand evenly spaced points throughout the parent colony, on the theory that this will pull some LOVs from each thought ‘module.’ All the work is done via a robotic remote known as Lucy.”

  Summer smiled. “By a ‘thought module,’ you mean those teams of LOVs specialized for verbal skills, calculations, three-dimensional modeling, time sense, etc.?”

  “Exactly. There are thousands of thought modules of course. Maybe tens of thousands, all of them almost certainly built on simpler modules, which in turn are based on even simpler formulas and so on. The interesting point is that LOVs, being individual organisms, can retain and reproduce their own special skills when they’re transferred, so that they can construct a new module through their progeny.”

  “So after the samples are taken … ?”

  “The extracted LOVs are injected into a clean tank. They cling to one another and begin to reproduce. If things go well, we get an initial visual-modeling sense within a few hours. The LOVs are good with vision.”

  Summer nodded. “So what happens when things don’t go well?”

  Virgil looked to Panwar again, hoping he would take it. But Panwar shook his head. Virgil sighed. “There are a lot of failures,” he conceded. “In the early generations, ninety percent of new colonies performed worse than their parent, so we culled them, concentrating our resources on the more successful combinations. Now our failure rate is down to forty percent, and even the failures perform at a level far above Alpha-1.”

  “So selection is based on the colony’s performance, not on individual LOVs?”

  Virgil nodded. “Essentially each team of LOVs is being evaluated on how well it interacts.” It was a test his own project team had failed. He shook his head. He’d been aware of Gabrielle’s ambition. He should have guessed she would try to move ahead of the team. Why had he failed to see the danger?

  “Virgil,” Panwar said. “Are you still with us?”

  Virgil jerked upright in his chair, unsure how long he’d been silent. “Sorry.”

  Summer looked sympathetic. And why shouldn’t she? She had started this thing after all. She had made the first LOVs. She should feel a pride in their development. She should feel touched with wonder at this proof that cognition truly could grow from simple units.

  Instead it frightened her.

  He spoke carefully. “What we are seeing evolve in the LOV colonies is a growing ability to learn about the world, and to interact with it.”

  Summer turned skeptically to the glittering projection of Epsilon-3 on the center screen.

  Virgil understood her doubt. “You’re thinking it’s the classic brain-in-a-bottle, with no connection to physical reality. But the same could be said of any one of us. All that we know of the world comes to us through our nervous system. The eyes are our visual sensors. The ears are our auditory sensors. Our body’s mass and mobility give us a sense of space. The LOVs are similar. They see through cameras. They hear through microphones. They explore physical space through the aerostat. You should talk to the station personnel. They’ll tell you that the aerostat sometimes acts just like a puppy, or a baby. It will fix on someone and follow them around for hours. Or it will purposely get in the way, over and over again, as if it’s testing what it takes to get a reaction out of the world. When there’s music playing it will hover in front of the speakers, exploring different zones of sound.”

  “And E-3 can speak,�
� Panwar said. “After a fashion.”

  “Silicon computers can speak,” Summer countered. “And quite well.”

  “Certainly far better than our LOVs,” Panwar conceded, an edge to his voice.

  “That’s right,” Virgil said. “Speech is hard. The LOVs don’t pursue it on their own, like they pursue vision. Vision seems to come naturally to the LOVs. Language doesn’t.”

  Summer arched an eyebrow. “Is ‘natural’ the right word?”

  “I’d like to think so.” He sighed. “If you’re expecting a slick performance, you’re going to be disappointed. The colony doesn’t do anything well. It just does lots of things in very interesting ways.”

  “And forgets in fascinating ways as well,” Panwar added, a bit sharply. “That’s the price we pay for fluid connections between the LOVs.”

  Virgil nodded. “When a cognitive path dissolves, though, it’s not all lost. Relearning the skill is far easier than acquiring it.” He looked at Panwar. “Can we get it talking?”

  “It is talking,” Panwar said. “I’ll raise the volume.” He tapped at his keyboard. Then he looked at Summer, a half smile on his face. “Hear it now? This is the first step in regaining speech. Epsilon-3 is speaking in tongues.”

  Summer cocked her head as babbling sounds emerged from the speakers in a voice that sounded remarkably similar to Virgil’s. Only an occasional English word could be discerned. She turned to Virgil with a baffled look.

  He shrugged, feeling a bit embarrassed, but nothing could be done. E-3 always started this way. No one knew why. “It is frustrating,” he mused, “but fascinating too. Why does it organize at all? Why does the organization fail? It’s almost as if it’s trying out different ways of being—”

  Here Panwar chuckled.

  Virgil sighed. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  Within a few minutes all the sounds were English words, but only now and then did two pull together in a sensible way: Speak quick, clean air, arm reach, man move, remote talk.