by Hammond, Ray
‘We decided to take these principles of natural selection, of biological evolution, and speed them up. We have applied this process to our research and I will be demonstrating some of the results this afternoon.’
The room crackled with expectation.
*
At 46,000 feet above the Atlantic, Raymond Liu adjusted his viewpers so that the professor’s image became solid. He didn’t need to see what was now in front of him in the physical world. It was only the bulkhead in the executive cabin of the Tye Corporation jet and the network supremo was keen to watch the professor’s lecture. Machine consciousness wasn’t his field, but Keane had a world reputation and he had been disappointed that the meeting in Newark that had just ended had denied him the chance to attend her first Hope Island lecture in person.
During the first fifteen minutes of the short ride back to the Island Liu had issued instructions for the formation of two network-investigation teams to explore the recent satellite failures. The Red Team would work from the island’s Network Control Center. The Blue Team would work from the Tye Networks Control Center in Singapore – an almost identical facility that had originally been intended as a contra-hemisphere back-up unit in case of colossal atmospheric or geophysical disruption in the Americas. Now, like its Hope Island counterpart, it was used mainly for sales demos. The two teams’ tasks would be to construct new security barriers within the communications networks and to watch for any unauthorized attempts at command communications with any of the 22,866 satellites active in the forty-two networks. The most skilled hacker on each team would play the role of an opponent and would attempt to breach the opposing team’s assigned networks without being detected. Liu had decided to blitz this problem.
Although he hadn’t mentioned it during his meeting with the Russian network controller, the problems in the networks above the South-West Pacific had not been the first anomaly to occur since he had been given overall technical responsibility for Tye’s satellite communications networks. Only seven days earlier, one of the data processors on board an Air Traffic Management satellite serving the North-West American coast had frozen and crashed. The system had reset itself and reloaded its data in just eleven seconds but this event had rated an ‘immediate action’ malfunction report and it had appeared on his system within seconds of the occurrence. He knew it would also be prompting an FAA investigation.
Liu had ordered the satellite taken out of service immediately and he had switched the ATM processing to one of the standby satellites in the same quadrant. He had asked Tye Aerospace for an ‘earliest possible’ launch slot to drop a replacement into orbit, but he also knew he might have a wait: all non-third-party launch capacity seemed to be taken up with launches of space stations for something called the Phoebus Project. It wasn’t a networks communications project so it wasn’t his concern, but he knew he would have to argue with Aerospace and then with Tom to get slots for replacing all three satellites that were now suspect.
The individuals who would make up the investigation teams would be identified by Liu’s executive staff by the time he landed back on Hope Island. He had been unequivocal: this investigation had priority over all other projects and only the most experienced and the most talented would be seconded to work in shifts around the clock until there was a definitive answer about the cause of the network failures. Liu knew his own future depended on finding the cause and eradicating it before any further problems occurred.
Satisfied that he could do no more until the potential members of the investigation teams had been identified, Liu turned up the sound for Professor Keane’s lecture.
He listened as she described her Anagenesis Experiment – the early attempts to produce super-intelligent software by creating computer environments that mimicked ecosystems. She described the many failures there had been and how she and her team had struggled to find methods of reproducing the forces that had shaped human evolution and the necessary density and complexity of decision-making systems from which a form of consciousness might emerge.
‘In the end we decided to create independent software agents that were heuristic, wholly autodidactic and that were able to reproduce themselves continuously. We made two types of personality we call male and female. We gave these agents two overriding imperatives: to reproduce and to eat – to take on energy – although we also programmed them to pass on to their offspring whatever they learned during the competition and selection processes. This decision lies at the heart of our evolutionary acceleration algorithm. There is no relearning to be done by each generation; it’s a form of palingenesis.
‘For every one female entity, we made ten males so the boys would have to compete like mad and so further accelerate the evolutionary process. We also gave both sexes limited lifespans to cleanse the field of obsolete generations. Females live until they have reproduced sixty-four times or until whenever they go for more than three days without reproducing. The males die when they have fathered sixteen offspring, or if they fail to reproduce within thirty days, whichever is the sooner. Male-to-female ratios in the offspring are as per our starting point. We colour-coded the females green, the males red – and then we released our software robots into the world’s networks to fend for themselves.’
Raymond Liu felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. He leaned forward in his seat even though that had no effect on how the image was displayed by his viewpers. She couldn’t have been that irresponsible! He went to put a question but he saw that the event had not yet been opened for questions from the remote audience.
Then he heard laughter. Someone from Evolutionary Psychology had asked what a software robot liked for lunch.
‘Sushi,’ someone else shouted and Theresa smiled.
‘To simulate eating we decided that every entity had to return to the mother server once every twelve hours for what we call a refuelling stop. If an agent fails to do so precisely at its allotted time, it dies. It also allows us to track every bot’s movement and ensure the experiment isn’t getting out of hand.’
Liu sat back in his seat again.
‘Now, we also had to decide what fitness characteristics we wanted to select for – or, to put it another way, what traits the female personalities would find so attractive in the males that they would allow themselves to be used for reproduction. The human female’s refusal to mate indiscriminately is, of course, the second key to the incredibly rapid evolutionary anagenesis of the human species. In short, boys, when she says “no” you are observing the two vital keys of human evolutionary success used in a devastatingly effective combination: language and positive selection.
‘You will have guessed that we restricted the females to one duplication – or reproduction – per day and we programmed the females so that they only became reproductively viable – in season, if you like – for twenty minutes in every twenty-four hours, those twenty minutes to occur randomly. A female spends the rest of her time receiving advances and comparing the desirable characteristics of the potential mates who are courting her. Despite this, the females’ main objective is to reproduce with the most desirable mate they can find and it is his desirable traits, and of course her ability to select for those traits, that get amplified in the offspring.’
Keane turned to her audience. ‘So, what do you think is the key attraction we want the male bots to develop? Remembering the aim of our development exercise, what should be the one thing that will drive the girls mad and grant the males access to reproduction?’
She waited to see if any of the brightest of the bright, most of them at the peak of their own reproductive potential, would offer an insightful suggestion.
‘Money,’ shouted a young female voice from the rear.
They laughed, Keane with them. ‘Yes, it could be money. Resources are very important for human females considering reproduction. Anything else?’
‘Elegant code,’ shouted another researcher, a male.
‘Digital good looks,’ said Theresa smiling.
‘That’s a very good idea and very male of you. Only the best code, or the fittest, gets to reproduce. Any further suggestions?’
There were none.
‘We programmed the female entities to look for human characteristics in their potential partners,’ she said quietly.
*
And it had stopped, just like that. Joe Tinkler had sat stock-still, watching the prices in his Tye Corp portfolio for another fifteen minutes, his finger poised over his mouse – his manual panic button. The disposals had stopped. Joe’s agents hadn’t reported a single further sale by Tye or any of his representatives or legal entities. No other big sellers were in play and the prices in the core Tye stocks had started to creep upwards again.
Joe allowed his right hand to fall back into his lap and he slumped in his high-backed chair. The markets had hardly moved. Tye had realized the equivalent of over one trillion in cash, mostly in US dollars and euros, and it was as if nobody had even noticed.
Then Joe sat forward again. Tye was breaking the audit trails! He must have gone to cash simply to stop analysts following him from one investment to another. It was anonymity he was seeking. That meant that a trillion dollars was going to be laid in new investments very quickly. But Tye had made the analysts, the trackers and the millions of small investors who shadowed his every movement temporarily blind.
Joe called four new agents to his screens and quickly gave them their instructions. If he could spot when Tye was investing the cash, he could catch a free ride on Tye’s coat tails until the rest of the market spotted it.
*
If it had been anybody but Connie Law, Raymond Liu wouldn’t have accepted the incoming call. As it was, he had snapped off the image of Professor Keane, accepted Connie’s handover and watched as his ultimate boss circled in his Holo-Theater.
‘So what happened?’
Liu answered Tom as truthfully as he could. Within a few minutes the swearing had abated. Tye stood still and zoomed in so that his eyes filled Liu’s vision.
‘You find whoever is in those networks within twenty-four hours!’ he snarled.
The connection went dead and Liu was left staring at blackness. It would take him forty-eight hours just to get the investigation teams in place.
‘Would you like a drink?’
The engineer slipped his viewpers off. The flight attendant was at the bar; she knew what was needed when one of her passengers had been in communication with TT.
Liu swallowed and then nodded. ‘Give me a Scotch, on the rocks.’
She made it a large double and smiled as she handed him the drink. ‘We’ll be landing soon. Please fasten your seat belt.’
After he had fastened his belt and taken two long pulls on the drink, Liu’s breathing eased and he put his viewpers back on, switched to playback mode and rejoined the lecture where he had left it.
‘Please turn the house lights down,’ requested Professor Keane as she stepped to the side of the stage. When the room was dimmed she turned back to face her audience.
‘And now, with no apology for what is a gratuitous act of anthropomorphization, I want you to meet Miss Scarlett.’
In the centre of the stage the Holo-Theater snapped on and the head, shoulders and torso of a young female appeared. The vintage-film fans in the audience recognized her immediately and they whispered her name to their friends. It was Vivien Leigh, one of the greatest film beauties of the mid-twentieth century. She was in character as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone With the Wind but at a quality and resolution of which Herbert Kalmus and his Technicolor film engineers of the previous century could only have dreamed. She was wearing the white, black-trimmed, two-piece travelling suit bought for her in Charleston by Rhett Butler and, in this representation, the software and projection system gave her three dimensions.
‘Like all our software agents, Miss Scarlett has been allowed to choose her own visual identity from the Tye Digital Arts archives. Allocation is governed strictly by how successful these agents have been in achieving their twin goals. Perhaps rather unfairly, females are judged by the reproductive success of their male offspring. Miss Scarlett is the most successful female of the current generation and we have reprogrammed her to spend her next twenty minutes of, shall we call it “courtship time” with you. She will regard all men in this room as potential suitors.’
The professor walked towards the front of the stage. ‘In a moment I am going to turn on Miss Scarlett’s natural-language interface. When I do, I want the gentlemen to raise their hands if they want to ask Miss Scarlett a question. I will select a questioner and he may continue in a dialogue until he chooses to say “End”. I will then select another questioner who may continue until he feels he also has done his best.
‘I want you to know that we have programmed the female software agents to judge the characteristics of humanness by language: your eligibility to reproduce with Miss Scarlett will be judged by the quality of your chat-up conversation, as is so often the case in the human world. Remember what I said earlier: it was language that provided the feedback loop that sent the human brain on its runaway evolutionary progression. It was language – spoken, unspoken, written, mathematical, symbolic and conceptual – that was the trigger. Miss Scarlett understands all forms, but today we will deal with the verbal. English only, and please be courteous; Miss Scarlett thinks she’s a lady. My team – remember you’re disqualified!
‘Who will be first?’
Liu watched as a sea of hands shot up. Professor Keane picked one, gave a command to the image and then stepped back.
‘Who are you?’ asked a young man in the front row.
Miss Scarlett raised her eyebrows and looked down at the questioner.
‘Why, Ah believe you already know that, suh,’ she said in a soft Southern accent. ‘Ah’m sure I heard the professor introduce us.’
Liu didn’t notice a solid clunk as the landing gear lowered and locked, nor the gentle bump as the small supersonic jet touched down. He didn’t notice the noise of the engines dying as they were powered down. When he felt a hand on his shoulder he waved it away and the flight attendant left him in his seat while she completed and filed her flight log on her VideoMate. He watched as questioner after questioner tried to engage, charm or confuse the software agent with oblique, tangential, non-sequential, litotal, counter-intuitive, antiphrastic, erotic, sexual and surreal conversation. Miss Scarlett responded with vivaciousness, humour, interest, boredom, irony and derision. She even made the film fans laugh out loud and applaud – when she exclaimed ‘Fiddlededee!’
When they were all done, Professor Keane turned to her agent. ‘You are free to select a partner for reproduction from those in this room. Indicate his identity by replaying any part of your conversation with him.’
‘I don’t think I will,’ said Miss Scarlett coyly. ‘Ah’m afraid it would be a regression compared to, well, compared to, shall we say, an alternative romantic opportunity that occurred earlier today.’
Liu realized that he had just watched humans fail the Turing Test.
*
He uttered a low moan as he ejaculated inside her. Haley slipped her hand between them and held him gently, where he was most sensitive. His head dropped to her shoulder and she kissed his neck. He had been so shy. It had been their sixth date – and fifth classical music concert – before the Welsh geneticist had made a move and even then he had been hesitant and unsure.
But how gentle he was, how caring, how concerned for her needs and her pleasures. Despite this, she already knew that there were many things between them that grated, that turned her into what she thought of as an ungrateful, over-critical lover. Sometimes she despaired of ever finding the right partner – a man who excited her emotionally and physically whilst being someone she could truly like and respect. It seemed as if those qualities were mutually exclusive.
Haley was realistic enough to understand that her unusual lifestyle was mainly to blame for her poor experiences in romantic relations
hips. She simply didn’t meet enough men from whom to choose and she constantly made do with second-best. She was attractive enough to secure plentiful advances from males, yet she was rarely in a situation in which they could occur. On the infrequent occasions when she complained to her sister or her friends about her work and her solitary lifestyle denying her social opportunities, they pointed out that many other professionals worked from home these days and there were dozens of ways of joining social or professional clubs and communities where she could meet suitable men.
But they didn’t really understand. When Haley was working on a project, she was almost incapable of focusing on anything else. Her subject and her writing wrapped around her like an invisible shield against the outside world. She had made real efforts, however. Sometimes she forced herself to go to other authors’ book-launch parties, to literary lunches and, on four occasions, on blind dates set up via network dating agencies. The results had become familiar and depressing. Once she was engaged on a book she found it hard to be engaged with anything, or anybody, else. In her spells between books when she did socialize, she simply grabbed the first reasonably attractive man who presented himself to her. This was not a recipe for long-term success and she knew that it arose from a feeling of mild desperation that she had forced herself to allow Barry to intrude when the only man who really mattered in her life at present was Thomas Tye. Suddenly Jack Hendriksen’s face popped into her mind.
She kissed Barry’s neck again as he stirred. She hated to allow the real world to intrude.