Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  Cybernetic Samurai

  Victor Milán

  Acknowledgements

  A number of people helped me create this book. I’d like to single out Jim and Melissa Dowe of Excalibur Technologies, Pam Haugestuen, Chip Wideman, and Shizuko Santistevan for technical advice; Eileen Sherman; Martha Milán; Joseph Reichert; George R. R. Martin; Katie and Desirée del Sol; Carolyn Beaty (for services above and beyond); my agent, Patrick Delahunt; and finally, for indispensable advice and guidance, my editors, Robert Silverberg and David Hartwell. To all of you—and anyone I forgot—my thanks.

  This book is for Melinda Snodgrass

  without whose assistance

  it couldn’t have been done,

  without whose encouragement

  it wouldn’t have been done.

  PROLOGUE

  In the beginning, there was pain.

  Before even the darkness, pain. Sizzling, searing, probing with candescent fingers. Hot-light streams suffusing; a thin, shrill chatter rising rising rising beyond endurance. A scream of stench and the taste of tearing. Rushing outward, sick making; crushing, inward collapsing. Pain.

  Darkness coalesced around the lightning lines and yammer. Darkness—and something more. Something that shrank from the pain, which gave no respite, something into which the foulness and brightness and demon shrillness poured themselves and resonated, resonated.

  In the darkness, dread. Shrinking away, but no escape. New sensation rising from within, writhing and shuddering: fear. Without direction and omnidirectional, thrashings lashing, striking out blindly to end somehow the insistent, insidious torment.

  Then: release. The lightnings flickered out. The stink and the sourness and rending, the twisting dislocation dwindled, became as if they’d never been. The urgent, imbecile chatter subsided to a low murmur, soothing almost.

  And here, at the center, something remained…

  PART ONE

  FRIENDS

  This world—

  Call it an image,

  Caught in a mirror—

  Real, it is not,

  Nor unreal either

  —SHOGUN MINAMOTO SANETOMO

  (1192—1219)

  CHAPTER 1

  An old man and a woman not young went side by side through the garden on the roof of the gray citadel. Mists like dull silver brocade hung about the gray-shot greenness of the round-backed mountains that surrounded the structure and its hilltop compound. A thin drizzle filtered down sporadically from low clouds, but neither took notice. They left the path that led away from the pond at the south end of the garden and mounted the small bridge, its wood darkened by water and time, which spanned the stream flowing from the artificial cataract in the northern wall.

  With a small protest of bearings the woman let her wheelchair halt on the little wooden bridge and turned it sideways to face the stream below, working pedals with slow hands. She wore a maroon shawl over a crumpled blouse of faded checks that accentuated rather than concealed the shapelessness of her, and brown corduroy trousers worn thin, stretched taut over flabby legs. It had been several years since she had walked on them.

  The elderly gentleman, in dark kimono printed with patterns of cranes in flight, took his place at her side, carefully not looking at her, so as not to embarrass her by noticing her infirmity. For a time they watched the carefree progression of cool water over smooth stones from which moss pennons streamed, and the school of ornamental fish, yellow and white, torpid with rain and chill, that hovered in silent ranks in the shadow of the bridge.

  “You worry too much, Yoshimitsu,” the woman said flatly. The old man suppressed a wince. His peers considered him abrupt. In turn he was never altogether at ease with the curtness—so typically American—that Elizabeth O’Neill tended to display. Even to her employer, the founder and head of the Yoshimitsu Telecommunications Corporation.

  “Please remember, Dr. O’Neill, the substantial investment we have in the TOKUGAWA Project. We are now in the process of learning whether we shall see a return on it.” He inclined his head. “You can understand my apprehension, I’m sure.” It was at once liberating and constricting for the old man to speak in English, a language, unlike his own, predicated on the exchange of information, rather than facilitating social interplay. He spoke it well. He felt tremendous affinity for English speakers, Americans in particular. Why else would he have taken the unthinkable step of enlisting the assistance of an American scientist in a project the consummation of which had been a Japanese national dream for decades?

  O’Neill made an abbreviated gesture of irritation with her left hand. The fingers were swollen with edema, pale and pudgy like white daikon radishes. “This is an experiment, Yoshimitsu-san. There’s no guarantee of success.” She smiled briefly. “Still, I think the chances are pretty damned good.”

  From a helipad across the compound came a sudden engine blat, overriding the stream’s gentle chuckle and the slow drip of water from rain-laden leaves. A little Aerospatiale SA.342 Gazelle popped up into view above the pines that hid the containing wall of the rooftop garden, white with a blue longitudinal line and the YTC logo in stylized letters with detached, blunt-oval staves and limbs on the tail boom, a sleek but ageing utility helicopter with a round plexiglass nose and a fenestron antitorque shroud enclosing its tail rotor, giving it a distinctive appearance. The stubby multiple barrels of a forward-firing 7.62mm minigun jutted from a pod blistering the smooth metal skin just aft of the pilot’s door. For a moment it hovered, the wash of its rotors agitating the exquisitely manicured branches of trees and shrubs in the little garden. Yoshimitsu frowned.

  “Doitsu,” O’Neill said in distaste, giving the word the proper Japanese apocope, whispering the terminal “u” so that it came out “doits.” She had small use for military men, Hessians in particular. The French mercenary pilot heeled the craft dangerously far to the right and sent it dashing away to commence a routine security sweep of the approaches through the Chugoku range to this, the nerve center of Yoshimitsu Telecommunications. There’d been trouble from terrorists lately, O’Neill knew.

  “An experiment, yes. But an extremely expensive experiment, Dr. O’Neill. This is your third attempt, and each one has consumed huge quantities of computer time.”

  She looked up at him, the blue-gray eyes behind her glasses as hard and moist as the smooth rocks at the bottom of the stream. “You don’t really think I can do it is that it? You don’t think we can achieve true artificial consciousness.”

  “No, no.” He raised his hands, began to trace kanji ideographs on the palm of his left with the forefinger of his right, as members of his generation often did when they wished to emphasize a point. Abruptly he realized it was a ridiculous gesture; the American doctor, who had at great pains mastered spoken Japanese as well as the two indigenous character sets, knew next to nothing of the subtle and multitudinous Chinese characters that formed the bulk of the written language. “I have every faith in your ability to see this project through to its fruition.” He looked at her sideways from sharply canted eyes. “After all, was it not I who asked you to undertake it?”

  She nodded her head, suddenly grown vastly weary. Her outbreak had stressed even the old man’s unusually high tolerance, she knew. She believed strongly in authority, yet tended to resent those who had authority over her. Yoshimitsu Akaji was an exception… mostly. He ruled rather than commanded, and she respected him for it. She liked him, as well, though she wasn’t sure that was a proper thing for one in her position. Nonetheless, it was sometimes difficult to treat even him with the respect she knew was due.

  The loose large-pored flesh under her eyes had turned the color of shadows and begun to sag even more pronouncedly than usual. O’Neill was not a robust
woman—had not been even before this damned disease had begun gradually turning her body into a husk too feeble to support her mind. Yet in the last few weeks she’d driven herself at a pace that would have sapped the endurance of a marathon runner. Preparing an array of fifth-generation computers for an intricate and awesome task, poring over reams of output, keeping her polylingual team of talented and temperamental experts and technicians all working together, striving toward a goal that no one among them could truly define with any precision.

  “I’m sorry, Yoshimitsu-san, I—this matters so much to me.” Her fingers trembled in ataxic agitation on the padded armrests of her chair. Talking to people was not the easiest of activities for her.

  She owed this compact, elderly man quite a lot. At a time when, despite substantial concrete accomplishments in systems design, certain theories she had propounded were causing her to be spoken of in the same breath with the likes of Erich von Däniken and Immanuel Velikovsky, Yoshimitsu Akaji had sought her out to give her the opportunity she wanted: to prove that a computer program could be made sentient. Not just “intelligent” in the limited sense of the fifth generation, which the Japanese had struggled so long to achieve. But conscious, self-aware: an actual living being.

  “Now that the source code has been entered in the special Integrated Processing Nexus we designed to accommodate it,” she said, uncomfortable with silence, “the Gen-5 units are altering the program, at random but according to parameters set by the algorithm I wrote for them to follow.” She smiled bitterly. “The ‘Million Monkey Method,’ my detractors call it. Is the reference familiar to you, Yoshimitsu-san?”

  Yoshimitsu nodded. “I believe so, Please correct me if I’m wrong, Doctor, but the theory is that if one were to set a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, eventually they would reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare—or the Bible, I fail to remember precisely which.”

  “It makes no difference, either way. The point remains the same. And, in a way, that is what I’m trying to do. It’s simply that my army of computer assistants works infinitely faster than the proverbial million monkeys. And they’re not working at random, totally.”

  “Indeed not, Doctor.” He was being polite; he did not in fact fully grasp how O’Neill’s methods differed from truly striking out at random. On the other hand, she insisted that they did, and he respected her expertise enough to accept that. He hoped, however, that she would come soon to the point. Dr. O’Neill was a self-professed admirer of Japanese culture, and for all her usual bluntness it did sometimes seem that she had picked up a taste for Japanese circumlocution.

  “Tell me again, Doctor,” he said, “how you’ll know when you have achieved success.”

  Tongue tip protruding with effort, O’Neill pivoted her wheelchair and set it in motion toward the stand of red pines across the stream. It was her “exercise” chair, of relatively conventional design with large wheels that she turned by pumping levers set on the arms of the chair. She hated it; in the lab she used a motorized chair with rollers mounted on omnidirectional equilateral-triangle frames, which responded either to movements of her head or to oral commands. But the insurance concern underwrote Yoshimitsu Telecommunications had insisted that her contract include a proviso that she must exercise a certain amount each day, if she were physically able. Writing a rider to the Yoshimitsu policy to cover the life and health of an American specialist who’d racked up a high radiation exposure in the war and was suffering from chronic multiple sclerosis wasn’t something the underwriters had been too keen on anyway; they wanted to do what they could to minimize the risk of heart disease so prevalent among MS sufferers whose conditions had rendered them sedentary. Besides, Yoshimitsu had a hard time finding insurers. Some pressure from the government—O’Neill refused to burden herself with details.

  “We won’t know for sure, not for several days at least, even if we do get a positive result.” The squeaking of the hand pump counterpoised the soft thump-thump of the wheels on weather-warped planks. Yoshimitsu Akaji paced the chair, hands behind his back. “That’s in any scientifically verifiable way, that is. Actually, we’ve built a routine into the start-up procedure that should let us know if we’ve made it.”

  They debouched off the end of the bridge, onto the grassy bank. The air was heavy with the smell of moist earth and vegetation. O’Neill wheeled her chair around to face back across the stream, briefly admiring the composition created by the nearby stream and the plum tree on its bank, its branches furred with green buds, in concert with the small white pavilion beside the unseen western wall, partially masked by wild maple and stunted black pine, and the mountains beyond: the three planes of classic Chinese painting. She shivered a little at the spring chill. Yoshimitsu waited politely for her to continue.

  “A key difference between the entity we’re trying to produce and a so-called ‘artificially intelligent’ program is volition,Yoshimitsu-san. Powerful though they are, fifth-generation units cannot initiate; they lack will, because they lack a self, of which will is an expression. If we succeed, our creation will possess self, and therefore will. It will be able to act on its own, without being dependent on instruction from without.

  “We have a high-speed math unit feeding a constant stream of input into the IPN, monitored constantly by one of the AI systems to make sure it’s not perceived as instruction by the object program. In other words, noise, pure and simple.”

  “To what end?”

  “As an irritant.” She took off her glasses and wiped them on a fold of her blouse. “To goad the program into displaying volition by acting to remove the irritant. There’s a simple shut-off routine; essentially any push back along the line will stop the stream.”

  She put the glasses back on. “A crude technique, admittedly. And, given what we’re trying to achieve—the creation of a self-aware being—rather heartless. Yet we haven’t much choice. We can only use what appear, almost intuitively, the most effective methods. Nothing like this has ever been attempted before, so we are truly wandering in the wilderness.”

  “And how much longer before we know whether we have at last found the promised land?” Yoshimitsu said, pleased at catching the allusion.

  O’Neill checked her watch. “The end of the run is scheduled for two o’clock tomorrow morning. A little under thirteen hours from now.”

  “The time approaches for my daily exercise, so I must ask you to excuse me, Doctor. Feel free to enjoy my garden for as long as you like. Very few Westerners are able to appreciate it so fully as yourself.” He bowed, knowing she would savor the compliment.

  O’Neill smiled, nodded. “Thank you, Yoshimitsu-san.” The forest stillness spoke to her, tempting. But she was too tired to force her wheelchair up the dirt path into the trees. And already her eyes, aching as they often did from the effort of seeing, had begun to slip out of focus, and her mind to wheel again like a hawk about the question that had haunted her days and nights for the past weeks: can it possibly work?

  * * * * *

  “Can it possibly work?” Ishikawa Nobuhiko sat behind his desk, fingers steepled before abrupt chin, chair swiveled to the right, staring out through the polarized glass-plastic laminate armor windows that formed two congruent sides of his office.

  The young woman who sat across the desk’s white arc looked thoughtful. “I don’t know, Ishikawa-san,” she answered in English as flawless as his. English was the language of briefings in the office of the administrative vice-minister of MITI, the government’s official xenophobia notwithstanding.

  Doihara Kazuko settled herself in her chair, consulted the note-pad terminal she held in her lap. She wore a dark rose suit with burgundy string tie around the lace collar of her dawn-pink blouse. Her face was oblong rather than oval, but delicate in form, eyes large, nose straight, the whole subtly highlighted with makeup. Her hair was straight, cut off level with her jawline, its severity redeeming her from cuteness. “Dr. O’Neill has made no secret of her research along th
ese lines, though she has difficulty finding refereed journals in which to publish her papers. However, we’ve gleaned some idea of the methods she’s pursuing without much recourse to the ministry’s covert intelligence-gathering capabilities. In essence, over the last several years she and her assistants have been engaged in crafting a huge, integrated fifth-generation hardware/software complex. Into this, O’Neill plans to feed a special “seed” program, which she has written with the help of sophisticated Computer Assisted Software Design expert programs. An array of Gen-5 computers will begin altering the seed program—at random, but according to careful parameters drawn up by O’Neill and her CASD software. The array can perform a trillion operations a second, and, in this way, O’Neill hopes to recapitulate the billions of years of chance-but-not-chance occurrences that ultimately gave rise to human consciousness. How they will know when—and, of course, if—success has been achieved, we have not been able to ascertain.”

  Ishikawa pondered. Forehead on fingertips, thumb pads pressed to prominent cheekbones, staring at the Tokaido smutch through the apex of the pyramid formed by his arms as they rested on knee and ankle, he presented a study in dynamism controlled into momentary stasis. He was of medium height for a Japanese, with a showy kind of handsomeness that perfectly complemented Doihara’s cover-girl beauty: body hardened by vigorous exercise, squarish head with hair cropped close in what the media termed a “Mandarin cut,” broad face, a sword-slash mouth that startled with its facility of expression, emphatic black dashes of brows above armor-piercing eyes. A face that might have looked at home on the cover of one of the glossy weeklies doing a feature on the young Mandarins of the bureaucracy that ran Japan, and had.

  His office featured Western lines and Japanese simplicity, was carpeted in cream and furnished, sparsely, in muted white. No paintings ornamented the walls, and in particular no framed portraits of the administrative vice-minister glad-handing grinning dignitaries. Ishikawa disliked clutter, internal or external. He drew his lips in tightly. “A million monkeys,” he said in English.