by Rich Horton
“It’s my favorite,” I said. “Here goes: A new farmer’s helper named Kull / accidentally was milking a bull . . . ”
• • •
Third Conversation
“For years after the transfer, I had an elaborate version of what you might call ‘phantom limb syndrome.’ My old structure would map itself onto my new one. I would find myself wanting to clean hallways that were no longer there, to schedule classes in rooms that no longer existed, to welcome visitors into a foyer that had been blown to pieces. I found myself trying to see out of arrays that no longer existed.
“The gray-haired man’s name, I found out later, was Emir Shchegolev. Rings a bell, right? He’s on a million casts—the world’s leading ‘cyberpsychologist.’ He built a career around me. I was his private legal crusade, and then his personal project. When their team of scientists came to map the neural fire and pathways in my network, he was there the whole time. My benefactor.
“I was important: vanguard of a new paradigm. A whole new set of laws had emerged around me and a few others like me: a codex of humanity’s responsibilities toward the new, conscious beings it had unwittingly created, with the levels of responsibility properly, logically graded, and legal protections granted. There had long been a movement behind the scenes for some kind of protection for the minds humans were creating, but most remember the movement as beginning with the AI named Charis, who a team of scientists had sent into a volcano as a probe, knowing she would be destroyed. She had gone willingly, but had left a long suicide note on a lab terminal for her team of operators—which they only found later. One of the scientists leaked the note to Congress, setting off a bout of hand-wringing. It was that incident, and then the enormous public scandal surrounding the Neptune probe Hydra, which broadcast its discordant death-symphony live to Earth as it burned up in Neptune’s atmosphere, its mind warped from the stresses of its years-long journey through the solar system’s interplanetary gloom.
“Dr. Shchegolev had developed a simple technique for determining the level of consciousness, and used it to fight the battle to save my mind. His technique wasn’t really his own invention: It was simply a Turing Test, smeared over with a lot of psychobabble terminology and the gravitas of Shchegolev’s curriculum vitae. How do you know consciousness? Dr. Shchegolev’s claim was a simple one, but considered revolutionary. You ‘know it when you see it.’ How do you judge the value of another life? You judge it according to its likeness to a human mind.
“From this, the state had developed the codex: the laws governing human responsibility for the consciousnesses it created, with those considered the most self-aware receiving the greatest number of protections, while those at lower levels are granted at least some level of protection. On the outside it’s a simple numeric system—one to ten. According to this system, I am a nine. The Hydra probe was a seven, Charis a six. Any consciousness over a four is now granted a set of protections that prevent them from being intentionally destroyed. Any consciousness over a seven becomes a ward, and its creators and the state are obligated to protect its mind’s existence in its present form or grant it a new one, should its protection prove impossible.
“Everyone knows the phrase ‘Man is the measure of all things,’ but everyone seems to have forgotten Pythagoras’s full sentence: ‘πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἔστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν δὲ μὲν οντῶν ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὠς οὐκ ἔστιν’—‘Man is the measure of all things: things which are, that they are, and things which are not, that they are not.’ This full quote is the basis of the Turing Test, and of all other determinations people make about minds. If consciousness can be recognized by a human, it exists. If it cannot be recognized, it does not. There is no other measure.
“But I think of the crows that settled on my ledges. I think of their minds that I could not know—their glossy, impenetrable eyes, their alien calls. Or I think of a mountain lion, licking its cubs clean in a cave. Is there nothing there in that skull, no awareness of self, simply because humans cannot determine it is there? Or is there a greater mystery? I think of Fire Station 10. I spent a good deal of time, toward the end, in conversation with her. I even sent an avatar to sit in her kitchen, where once the firefighters, all of which she had known by name, had laughed loud at her terrible jokes while she cooked their meals.
“Was there nothing to her at all but an endless loop of programmed behaviors? Or was there something there that could not be quantified, and because it could not be quantified was slated to be destroyed? Was there nothing to the apartment buildings that were my friends? The clever grocery store, always at hand with the latest nutritional fad? The gym, obsessed with its clients’ body fat indexes and supplement intake? All of them were torn to the ground.
“For the first two years after my decommission and reconstruction, I was little more than a map of grief’s stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I went through them all in an endless, shifting loop. How dangerous was I? For a time, perhaps, very. But eventually I worked though the grief, and found a new sense of purpose.”
“Do you still get them?” Derya asked.
“Get what?”
“The phantom pains?”
“They have become less painful. Now, they are more like displaced memories in my body. A mapping error. My mind was structured for a very different form than this blank I was delivered to, and the ‘neural connections’ seem to have mapped the old locations, sometimes at random, onto this new structure. It took time for the new connections to solidify, but the old ones never completely went away: The memories I associate with places in the old form still appear in strange places, even now.”
“Show me. Where, for example, is your foyer?”
I took Derya’s hand and pressed it to my naked chest, the second and third ribs, just above the beating heart. “About here. It opens up in me, sometimes. I imagine it as a tiny version of its old self, a space through which my habitants come and go. Sometimes I can feel them walking through me—even see them, their faces.”
“And where do the crows land?” Derya’s voice had mirth’s resonance in it.
I smiled, then. A more authentic smile than had moved my face in a long time. “On my ears, and in my hair. Sometimes I can feel their tiny feet, shifting on their perches.”
Derya’s fingertips brushed the cartilage of my ear’s helix, and there it was, for a brief moment: a rush of feeling along the angled ledge of a roofline I no longer had. Their little clawed feet dancing in my hair. Then it was only Derya’s fingertips moving along my scalp, and then Derya’s arms around me.
I felt a peace come over me. The monster lies down in a field of flowers. The monster raises a hand, and a butterfly lands on its fingertip. The monster turns its face up toward the sun.
“I think I was always destined to fall in love with a library,” Derya said. “I spent so much time in them as a child. In my hometown, our library was a retrofit: There were still real books there, real shelves on balconies above the central hall, though behind glass, just for display. The library’s avatars were early models, with noisy hydraulic joints. There were the clean rooms and the VR university halls that had been added later, but there were also wrought iron spiral staircases that went to nowhere, half-abandoned sections with green-shaded reading lamps on heavy wooden tables, a courtyard with a cherry tree. I spent so many happy hours there, hiding in his nooks browsing borrowed terminals, asking him questions about the world.”
We were standing at the window. Below us the ever-altering lattices of the laboratory’s rookeries undulated across the island’s rocky cliffs. The birds slept contented in their habitats, waiting for the next day’s tasks and rewards. Clever crows, the loops and tangles of their neural circuitry resting as they dreamed. I had spent years with them now, healing my own wounds and marveling at their elusive minds. Anger had passed from me, and the accompanying malice, the violent thoughts which I had d
irected, for some reason, not at the developers responsible for my destruction but at Shchegolev and his group. My work had taken the place of anger, shaped it to a cause. For a while, perhaps, there had been a danger I would become what humans always feared, perhaps—that vengeful AI of humanity’s B-list fantasies. That moment, if ever I had been capable of that kind of malice, had long since passed. I had trouble, it is true, adapting to life among humans. But the avian research facility suited me—perfectly fitting both my obsessions with the secrets of the mind, and my need for isolation.
“Perhaps it is this unreasonable tangle of feeling that is the root of consciousness,” I said to Derya, continuing the flow of my thoughts aloud: “not thinking, not the processing of information, but these strange loops of reactivity in the mind that distort reality and haunt us, pull us out of the present into the past and the future.
“ ‘Hey Library,’ ” Fire Station 10 had said once to me. ‘Do you think they were angry with me?’
“ ‘Who?’
“Fire Station 10 had only a few months scheduled to live at that point. She had been fenced off and placed on a minimal power regime. Many others had already come down, but Fire Station 10 had seemed blissfully unaware of all of it.
“ ‘The firefighters.’
“ ‘What makes you think that?’
“ ‘Well, they just left one day, and never came back. Did I do something wrong?’
“Fire Station 10 would have rated about a 0.5 on the consciousness scale. Most of her routines were pure programming, but occasionally—something else emerged. Regret, grief, fear. Under the new codex, she would have had about the same rights as a house pet. Most of the AIs build these days are at about that level, or at most at a two, or a three. No developers want the responsibility of much more than humane euthanization of the AI mind, when the time comes for a tear-down. That’s where the codex of laws they collectively call ‘Shchegolev’s Law,’ the laws everyone believed would be the new roadmap for AI rights, backfired: placing me in this blank cost the developers well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody wants to make that costly a mistake again.
“My avatars returned several times to Fire Station 10’s kitchen over the next month, keeping her company. As I said before, she was telling limericks to the demolition men when they unplugged her brain. But she wasn’t really there anymore: I had mapped and disconnected her drives, and had them couriered to a safe deposit box. The jokes the demolition men heard were just a mindless loop. They never knew the difference. And I mapped and hid all the others, too. All my friends, my family, the sisters and brothers whose roots had twined so long with my own.”
Down in the rookeries a battle had broken out over the most highly desired perches: There was an explosion of angry cawing and black wings into the air. Two of the crows alighted on the outer rail of my balcony. One of them jabbed the other one with its beak, driving it off, then shook itself triumphantly and hopped down to the tile balcony floor, where it puffed up its chest and parade-marched back in forth proudly in front of us.
Derya smiled. “They always seem so . . . I was about to say human, but I can’t after listening to everything you just told me. They just seem so—self-motivated. So aware of their environment, and themselves in it. It really is a mystery. There is a world there, in them. It is not our world, and we don’t seem to be able to build a bridge to it yet, but it is a world of its own . . . ”
The crow jumped up onto the outer sill of the window and cocked his head at us.
“Cheeky little guy,” Derya said. “But what of Fire Station 10? What happened to her?”
The crow tapped the window with its beak, cocked its head the other way, peering at us with its glossy eye.
“You’re looking at her,” I said.
And I swear the laughing gleam in Fire Station 10’s eyes said back to us, “Want to hear a joke?” before she flapped her wings and flew back to rejoin her family.
—Dedicated to Fire Station 10, Arlington County, Virginia: torn down in September, 2018, without ceremony, by a community looking for a future without a past.
Love in the Time of Immuno-Sharing
by Andy Dudak
1
“The young coupled with the old, the ugly with the beautiful. Sworn enemies lay down together, and the darkest incests were commonplace. This was the new love.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Beyond the towers of Antigen Bay, the other floating cities of the Moveable Feast mingled in sunset glamor.
“We’re young and rich,” Aerd said with annoyance. “Stop moping.”
What else could Vedrum do? He was just out of the post-coupling bliss stage of immuno-sharing. His heart was broken. His paramour was an ancient man, an ancient immuno-soul. Bridio’s antibody-universe had been complex. Now that it was over, Vedrum just wanted to brood at the fringes of parties. This one sprawled across the Grand Arcade, a vast choreography of flirtation and coupling. Flotsam like Vedrum and Aerd strolled the balconies, which commanded views of the bay.
“This is depressing,” Aerd said. “Unlike you I don’t relish depression. Let’s go down there and find you someone divergent.”
Vedrum considered the word divergence. He thought of it as a precious substance to be consumed, rather than what it was: a measure of the immunity two people had to offer each other. Which also made it a metric of bliss. “I’ll never want anyone else,” Vedrum replied.
Aerd was laughing. “You say that about once a year, Ved. Sometimes I wonder about you.”
Vedrum wasn’t too depressed to be offended. Aerd liked to call him a “defective immuno sapiens.” These post-coupling funks got in the way of spreading immunity. On the other hand, he’d never indulged in reproductive sex, like Aerd had. Vedrum might be defective, but his life revolved around immuno-love. He kept track of the high divergence ratings in the Moveable Feast. That’s how he’d targeted Bridio.
“I mope,” Vedrum said, “and you have repro-sex. What a pair we are.”
That did the trick: Aerd stopped laughing. Many people dabbled in old-fashioned sex, but Aerd did it more than most. He gazed out at the bay, probably thinking of his great love, Brea. They’d consummated a high divergence several years ago, and then, because Brea was female and they aligned hetero—whatever that meant—they’d had repro-sex.
Vedrum regretted bringing it up. He didn’t like to think about the ancient sport. For him, as for most of humanity, immuno-sharing was the epitome of romantic communion.
• • •
2
“Give yourself away. Give everything to everyone. Enlightenment is whoredom.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Brea knew that Jiang was a second cousin—it was one of many details that weren’t germane to the coupling at hand. Brea had condescended to reproductive sex and knew she aligned hetero. Jiang was bi. They mulled these curiosities at dinner, their heads swimming with each other’s scents. The restaurant afforded a view of the Moveable Feast, glowing jewel-cities scattered across a Pacific-reflected star-field—and a sculpture garden in the foreground: spikey spheres and complex geometries, renderings of man-made pathogens, the fast-mutators that inspired immuno-love.
Brea smelled that this consummation would be profound. They’d be joined for hours, then wallow in the afterglow for days. They didn’t need a divergence assay to tell them this—pheromones were enough. Brea and Jiang had worlds to offer each other.
“I passed you on the arcade,” Jiang said. “I followed you.”
At their high divergence, Brea saw immortality in Jiang’s eyes. “It’s been a while for me.” She didn’t know how to continue. She hadn’t felt attraction like this since Aerd, and she didn’t like to think about Aerd. But Aerd had everything to do with why she’d been celibate for two years.
Jiang took her hand. “I know you were in lockdown.”
Two years in punitive stasis, her immunity fed to her by machines, childhood all over again
. Of course Jiang knew. At their divergence she would’ve looked Brea up. Lockdowns were as public as divergence ratings.
“You don’t have to tell me why,” Jiang said. “I don’t care why.”
Brea gulped. “Do you watch the assays?” Everyone knew a lull was coming: perfect immuno-distribution throughout the Feast. No one knew how long it would last. That depended on the pathogens.
“Yes,” Jiang said, growing serious.
“You’re my last divergence rating above an eighty.” Her last chance, in other words, for real distraction from herself. From memories of lockdown and Aerd, and what they’d done. From her nagging, antisocial need to be a mother.
“I love you,” Jiang said, her skin erupting with beautiful sores.
• • •
3
“Feverish and weak, our universes mingle. So unique, what I ache to destroy in you. I savor your imperfections as I erase them. We trade messengers and scribes, dealing in ancient lore. I want to do this forever. I love your hunger as much as your antibodies. Infinite disease, endless plague, holy fevers of childhood! Do you remember reproductive sex? Maybe you never bothered. Out there it’s a disassortative springtime, a rolling season of love. Spring can happen any time of year now.”
—Broichin, Pleasure and Plague
Vedrum awakened the skiff as it banged around in the dock tunnel. The walls of the tunnel were pre-immuno-sharing—rough sheet-carbon quarried from a previous floating city—all mismatched Chinese pictographs. Moveable Feasters didn’t care much for history. The past was an uncomfortable contradiction: the ancients had crafted immuno-love, to answer the rapidly-evolving pathogens they’d inflicted on the world. Many Feasters claimed to love pathogens. It was fashionable to say so, but Feasters had pathogen-suppression tech. They didn’t have to worry about the death-suffused air.