Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  “Did I—do well—Doctor?”

  O’Neill gazed blankly at the camera for a long moment, feeling the sort of breathless hollowness in her chest she associated with long dips on the roller coaster at Elitch’s Garden in Denver, back in childhood days. “Yes,” she said. “You did very well indeed.”

  * * * * *

  O’Neill sat near the buffet, half listening to several of her staff talk with some people from another lab. At the moment she wanted nothing more than to go back into the gallery and converse with her creation. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to do that with all these others around. Besides, she thought, tomorrow we start running the scenarios. Then I’ll have more than enough time with TOKUGAWA.

  Takai’s hard-edged voice chipped into her consciousness.

  “—understand, of course, that that’s impossible. We Japanese evolved separately from the rest of humanity. Our thought patterns aren’t duplicable by outsiders.”

  She glanced around. Takai stood near the buffet conversing with Nagaoka, Wali Hassad, and Ito Emiko. The normally vague and self-effacing Nagaoka had begun looking considerably more focused than usual, his brow furrowed into a V behind his dark horn-rims. This was a cherished disagreement among O’Neill’s assistants. They chased one another’s tails around and around the same patch of ground without ever actually getting anywhere or resolving anything.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” Wali Hassad said in his Palestinian-accented English. “There’s absolutely no scientific foundation for such a belief.”

  Takai favored him with a superior smile. “You’re a foreigner; you wouldn’t understand, It takes a Japanese to truly understand the essence of being Japanese.”

  “We’re Japanese,” Nagaoka Hiroshi said. “I’m also a scientist And I know that what you’re saying is simply untrue. Humanity descended from a single stock.” He spoke rapidly, words stumbling over one another as if in a hurry to spill out.

  “But Dr. Tsunoda clearly demonstrated the fact in his book as early as the 1980s. And don’t forget the arguments in favor of separate evolution put forward in Dr. Kilbride’s important work, Humanities: The Many Species of Genus Homo. He makes the case most persuasively.”

  Hassad snorted. “Nonsense. Kilbride’s a mountebank, a latter-day von Däniken. His book—”

  “Are you enjoying the festivities, Dr. O’Neill?” She looked up. Yoshimitsu Shigeo stood over her, swaying slightly. Like Nagaoka’s, his speech was slurred, but for a different reason.

  “As much as could be expected. And yourself, Mr. Yoshimitsu?”

  His eyes narrowed. Technically, she’d showed no disrespect. But she invariably addressed his father as Yoshimitsu-san. The son, never. O’Neill became aware that several members of the Yoshimitsu board had come up with the younger Yoshimitsu—his stooges, Fujimura and that middle-aged ditherer Hosoya, but also, to O’Neill’s surprise, Suzuki Kantaro, who usually had even less use for Shigeo than O’Neill herself did. I wonder what sort of psychodrama the chubby little fools got up his sleeve, she thought.

  “Well, Doctor, you’ve got your scientific triumph—at considerable expense to the corporation. But can you tell me when—or if—we can expect to see some manner of return on our considerable outlay?”

  “Never!” barked Fujimura. His eyes were road maps, and he glowered at her as if about to bite her.

  “But, Yoshimitsu-san,” Takai said quickly, “think of the great honor this discovery will bring to our YTC—”

  O’Neill cut him off in mid-effusion. “Aren’t you forgetting what’s written in the Ha Gakure, Mr. Yoshimitsu? ‘To think only of the practical benefit of wisdom and technology is vulgar.’”

  Shigeo flared a look of pure hatred at her. He himself couldn’t have quoted a word of Hidden Leaves, a classic text on bushido and the samurai ideal, to save his life.

  “Allow me to congratulate you, Doctor,” Suzuki said. He smiled. “This is certainly one of the cleverest displays of artificial intelligence I’ve seen. Things have come a long way since the Turing test was first propounded.”

  She frowned at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Why, simply that you’ve managed to write a program that could easily convince all but the most sophisticated that you’ve gained the Philosopher’s Stone of the modern world, a machine that truly thinks.”

  O’Neill felt a burning at the backs of her eyes. “But that’s exactly what we’ve done!” she said.

  Smiling, Suzuki shook his head. “I know better than that, Doctor. A clever illusion, even a brilliant one. But an illusion, nonetheless.”

  Fujimura thrust his chin forward. “What’s this?” he barked in Japanese. His grasp of English was never firm at the best of times, and now he was clearly inebriated. “A sham? Better not be. If you cause Yoshimitsu Telecommunications to lose face with your trickery, things will go poorly for you, gaijin.”

  O’Neill’s cheeks sagged. There it was, that word: gaijin. Outside person. Foreigner. It hurt as much as the imputation of fraud. “You—you shortsighted fools. Don’t you see what we’ve done? TOKUGAWA is a real, living person, not a trick.”

  Her outburst doused conversation like a bucket of water on coals. She spun her wheelchair around, and in the heavy silence the tiny whine of the servomotors pierced like the roar of an engine lathe. She rolled for the door of the lab, her eyes flowing tears, her mind throbbing around an image of Shigeo, smirking at her from behind those dark glasses.

  Heads turned away from her as she passed, and then she was gone.

  CHAPTER 3

  “Are we ready?” Dr. O’Neill called from her console. Her terminal screen had been swung around on its extensor arm so she could divide her attention between it and the three-by-three-meter color LCD screen hung on the north wall of what everyone now termed TOKUGAWA’s lab. Affirmations rattled briskly back through her headset. Her five assistants and a dozen technicians hunched expectantly at stations lining the four sides of the gallery.

  “We’re ready, Doctor,” Kim Jhoon’s voice said in her ear.

  She looked up. A ready cursor blinked patiently in the upper-left corner of her console screen. The big screen was blank.

  “TOKUGAWA.”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  Already the voice emerged with more confidence—and was that a hint of inflection? O’Neill felt a strange shudder of apprehension, doubt, and wonder. Is Suzuki right? Have we really created a program expert enough to dupe us?

  No. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. She moistened her lips. “Dr. Kim and Dr. Ito have been giving you lessons, drilling you in your various capabilities. Today, we begin lessons of a different kind.

  “A person matures over a period of years, and the things he experiences in that time are what make him into a whole person. We want to make you into a whole person, TOKUGAWA, and we don’t have years to do it.”

  “I am not”—hesitation—“whole?”

  O’Neill bit her lip. I’ve hurt his feelings, she thought. Then: but that’s ridiculous. And, finally: or is it?

  “’You’re a child, TOKUGAWA. You’re newborn—though already you can do vastly more things than a week-old human. But you need experience. And that’s what we’re going to begin today: providing you experience. In a concentrated form.” She tapped keys. Scenario one ready appeared on her personal screen.

  “We’re going to be feeding you a flow of input. It shouldn’t cause you any discomfort—if it does, let us know, and we’ll stop it at once. For the duration of the lesson, we’ll be blanking out your visual and auditory sensors. Don’t be afraid.” Why did I say that? “Are you ready?”

  “Yes, Doctor.”

  “Very well.” She typed out ISOLATE. FUNCTION COMPLETED.

  She typed: INITIATE SCENARIO ONE.

  TIME COMPRESSION FACTOR?

  REALTIME, she typed and settled back in her wheelchair to watch the large screen.

  +

  A small boy stood on earth solid and cool beneath bare feet.
Spring breezes eddied softly around him, carrying the fresh smells of growing things, of leaf buds and shoots and early blossoms. In his small hands he held a ball made of rags. Some impulse made him toss it upward, into the air. He watched it rise till from his small point of vantage it had topped the stand of green bamboo next to the yard of the little hut, soared dark against the puffy white clouds layered above the mountains on the horizon until it broke through into the blue of midday, almost painful to the eyes, where it hung, and hung, and hung for a breathless instant, and then fell back again. As though of their own volition, his hands moved, caught the ball smoothly. It had a soft and rumpled feel; a bit of silk from some fine lady’s long discarded gown caught at the whorls of his fingerprints.

  In delight, he laughed aloud. He threw it upward again, all on his own accord. This time it veered off at an angle, not sailing upward with such splendid insouciance, but arching off to land on the ground near a weathered old stone lantern.

  He stood a moment, perplexed, then began to waddle forward on his chubby little legs.

  A fat old bearded man in a much-patched robe, walking with the aid of a staff, with a pack and a flat Chinese-style hat slung over his back, stopped in the road that ran past the hut and stood watching the boy over an indulgent smile. The boy ignored him, intent on his ball. He recovered his treasure, once again tried to make it soar like the birds squabbling among the bamboo.

  Once again it flew off in a seemingly random direction. His eyes grew moist. His vision beginning to blur, he teetered forward toward the ball. He picked it up, threw it with all his might, as if that might make it fly true.

  It arched out into the road. He stood, blinking, then was overwhelmed with frustrated tears. In a moment, he became aware of the fat old man making his way toward him, holding the ball out in one gnarled hand.

  He blinked away tears, stood looking up at the old man with awe and apprehension. Gravely, the old man handed him the ball and patted him once on the head. Clutching his ball to his breast, the boy turned and raced for the elevated porch of the modest hut where his family lived.

  When he reached the sanctuary of the porch he turned. The old man was hobbling off down the road. His mother emerged and knelt down beside him, and he turned gratefully to accept her hug, returning it as best he could with his short arms. She was a warm enfolding softness, and the smell of her was marvelously clean. She gave him a dab of bean paste nestled on a leaf. It was sweet and sticky and delicious. The frustration of the ball was forgotten; he was content, and happy.

  -

  The large screen went blank. “Well, that’s all she wrote,” Dr. O’Neill said. “Good job, everybody.”

  A polite smattering of applause broke out. O’Neill marveled a little; had the first test of a new system gone so well at an American laboratory, the technicians would be practically tearing the walls down in jubilation. She appreciated the Japanese reserve in many ways, but still…

  She wheeled her chair about. “I take it everyone got their measurements?”

  Kim showed her a rare smile. “Yes, Doctor. We’ll begin analyzing the data at once.”

  Hassad sat at his work station not far from O’Neill’s, rubbing a cheek that remained stubbly despite repeated applications of a razor. “I almost thought you’d intervene, there where TOKUGAWA couldn’t get the ball to go where he wanted it to.” Though air conditioning kept the lab cool, sweat stood in relief on his forehead.

  “A little frustration is good for him.”

  Hassad looked away. “Yes, Doctor. I understand frustration” He tasted his cigarette. “Very well.”

  * * * * *

  Later, O’Neill sat with her assistants in her office, sipping tea and discussing the day’s events. Takai Jisaburo perched on one corner of O’Neill’s cluttered desk—an informality unthinkable under most circumstances, but today Takai had a reason: using the citadel’s sophisticated CASD systems, he was the one who had written the actual code for today’s interactive scenario. He’d had a good deal of help, of course—a battery of computer-graphics experts had designed the scenery according to O’Neill’s specifications, with a good deal of advice from Nagaoka Hiroshi. But the really difficult work, that of integrating the various digitalized sensory-analog input routines into a scenario with which TOKUGAWA could react, and that would, in turn, be modified by his reactions, was all Takai’s. He was temperamental sometimes, but his experience with ICOT in its latter days made him invaluable; no one O’Neill had ever known could get quite so much out of a fifth-generation system. Had he been less erratic, O’Neill would have been happy to make him her first assistant. But Kim and the dour Ito Emiko were no less brilliant than Takai, and their stability better suited them for more administrative responsibility. Nonetheless, this was Takai’s party as much as anyone’s, and O’Neill was pleased to see him enjoying it so.

  “One thing I still find rather curious, Doctor.” Takai eyed O’Neill through the steam rising from his coffee, which he drank well laced with domestic cream, a luxury kept expensive by government subsidy. “Why did you choose to have TOKUGAWA cast in the role of a child in medieval Japan in this first scenario?”

  O’Neill’s brow creased slightly. “We decided a child would be the most suitable ego surrogate. After all, it’s well established that play behavior is an important formative of character”

  Takai shook his head. “Apologies, but why not a modern child? It would seem far more… pertinent.”

  O’Neill’s face set. “I thought you agreed with my intention to inculcate TOKUGAWA with traditional Japanese values.”

  “Why, yes, Doctor. Of course.” His eyebrows rose. “Ah. And you feel that we modern Japanese have forsaken these values?”

  O’Neill nodded.

  Takai regarded her a moment, produced a sketchy smile. “Perhaps you’re right, Doctor. Yet I hope the end product of our solicitude isn’t confusion for our subject—who must exist, after all, in our modern milieu.”

  “If we were worried about that,” Ito said, “then we’d hardly be making the poor thing learn English and Japanese right at the outset. Why not have it learn Zuñi and Euskara, as well?”

  The others laughed. Except for O’Neill, who sipped her coffee through tight lips.

  * * * * *

  “—claimed credit today for the destruction of a Japanese cargo dirigible carrying a load of high-tech electronic components into L.A. Freeport.” The voice of the female NHK radio announcer whined thin and disembodied in the gloom of O’Neill’s room. Despite the increase in official xenophobia over the last few years, there was sufficient demand both from Japanese and resident English-speaking aliens that even the nationally owned Japan Broadcasting Corporation found it expedient to broadcast several English-language channels. O’Neill could have picked up a broadcast from North America, from SoCal or the Eastern Seaboard Coalition via satellite, but Japanese news, in English or otherwise, tended to be much more comprehensive. “In Seattle, capital of PEACE, a spokesperson for that government’s Monkey wrench Bureau claimed full credit for the blast, which took the lives of twenty-three crewpersons and cargo handlers and left at least seventy injured, saying, ‘This will serve notice that we’re on our guard against capitalist exploiters attempting to import their technological toys to continue their rape of this continent.’

  “SoCal has announced it will take undisclosed retaliatory measures. The Eastern Seaboard Coalition, Mexico, and the People’s Republic of Western Canada have declared a joint embargo against shipments to and from PEACE. In the past, however, the Alliance has ignored such strictures.

  “Ishikawa Nobuhiko, administrative vice-minister for International Trade and Industry, issued a strong statement deploring the wanton destruction of human life. NHK 6 will be bringing you an English-language simultranslation of his press conferences scheduled for 2300, Tokyo time.

  “In other news, European Front forces claim to have recaptured Vienna, in Austria, from the PanEuropeans. Traditional capital of t
he Hapsburg and Holy Roman empires, Vienna has a special significance—”

  O’Neill ordered the computing/communication console to shut off and leaned back in her chair, allowing her eyes to savor the darkness, remembering a line from a song heard in childhood: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

  In a way, her story recapitulated that of the classic American computer nerd: dumpy, brilliant, poorly socialized, and unpopular child grows into dumpy, brilliant, poorly socialized, and unpopular computer scientist. Elizabeth Christine O’Neill was born to comfortably middle-class parents in Colorado Springs, comfortably near the midpoint of the century. Her father was a civilian clerk with the Department of Defense, working in one of the secret installations dotted all around the Springs. Elizabeth didn’t remember much about him. When she was three, he shot himself in the bathroom of their little two-bedroom tract home near Petersen Field in the southeast part of town. Elizabeth’s mother, before that an average sheltered housewife of the epoch, had to leave the nest to work as a civilian clerk for DOD. To make ends meet, and have someone to look after Elizabeth while she was off at work during the day, Sarah O’Neill had moved in with her mother in a drafty Edwardian house toward the center of town.

  Sarah O’Neill was a woman of exceptional intelligence, a fact of which her daughter was never truly cognizant until she came down with the cancer that killed her while Elizabeth was at school. Sarah had spent most of her life hiding her intelligence well away from outside eyes. Her husband, James, had been a much-decorated fighter pilot in the Korean War, a hard-charging man’s man who wanted a quiet little woman to tend the nest for him, feed him his meals, and agree with him—especially after he found himself locked behind a bureaucrat’s trivial desk.

  After Jim O’Neill pulled the plug on himself, the job of whipping Sarah’s native intelligence back into its hole was ably taken over by her own mother, Anna McConnachie. When her own husband died of a heart attack, Anna McConnachie had brought herself and her four daughters intact through the Great Depression by sheer force of will, a fact she never let any of them forget.