by Robin Craig
One other pair of eyes watched with rare perception. The eyes were dimmer than they had been, the body no longer so agile and responsive, but the mind was still keen. They saw another replay of the scene in the street, saw another replay of Miriam being feted by the Mayor, and understood. He felt sorry for Beldan’s pain, sorry even for Hunter’s pain, knowing few others watching her triumph would see it. He could see it, he could see it in the set of her shoulders and in the smile that looked thin as new ice on black water, covering unseen currents and waiting to break under the fall of a tear. But then, he knew it was there to be seen. He knew why she had done what she had done, that her empathy was one of her greatest strengths: and who could stand when their own strength was the weapon wielded against them?
The irony was fitting, he thought, that those who could not see beyond what a body was made of would fail to think outside the limitations of their own. Samuels had seen it, and more, had helped do what he could not do unaided. It had been hard to lose so much of himself, harder to see it, so much harder to feel it yet live through it: for no less intimate a link could achieve the precision remote control required. But what was life, if not to do what one had to do, careless of cost?
He sighed and flexed his fingers, stiff and strange. This new body was still strange to him, he had yet to fully make it his own; but that was merely a matter of time. And he now had plenty of that.
Book II: The Geneh War
Chapter 1 – Thief
The thief spun through the open window and landed silently on the floor, crouching on her fingertips and the balls of her feet.
She paused: listening, watching, sniffing the air. The house was quiet except for the occasional creaking of a chair and other faint sounds of a presence. It was dark but she could see well enough, for the dark was softened by a faint light spilling into the hallway from a room out of her line of sight: the same room from which the sounds emanated. She smelt man, a faint musky sweaty odor, and a ripple of liquid desire ran down her belly to her thighs. She smiled at her own reaction. The excitement of her latest adventure was spawning excitements of a different and distracting kind. She tightened her stomach and her resolve: she had not lived this long by letting her focus fall prey to such distractions.
She smiled again, more sharply, and moved silently towards the room. She waited just out of sight, but there was no sign that the man knew she was here. The creaking and rustling continued as before. She extended a small mirror unobtrusively into the doorway at floor level and saw him. He was seated facing away from her, immersed in an interactive holographic display as he manipulated a maze of complex diagrams and images. She slowly crept into the room but the man must have had surprisingly acute senses, or perhaps he had always known she was there, for he turned sharply and stared at her.
He saw a long, lithe woman with dark straight hair, dressed in a skintight suit patterned in grey and black, its waist accentuated by a belt holding an assortment of tools and pouches. Her most striking feature, he thought, was her large golden eyes, luminous like a cat’s. Though perhaps some would consider the long black tail even more remarkable.
He smiled at her and she smiled back. “I’m glad to see you back in one piece, Katlyn,” he said. “How did it go?”
“The usual,” she said with a light shrug, and presented him with a handful of diamonds and emeralds. She often brought him things of beauty like this, little tributes from her nightly adventures. But while valuable, they were never more than a fraction of what she could have taken, and hardly commensurate with the risks she took in acquiring them. Those risks were for something else entirely.
She sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck, wiggling seductively. “Ah Katlyn,” he sighed, “You are a temptress. Aren’t you too young for me? Shouldn’t you find someone your own age?” She grinned. “Pah! Boys my age are so immature. I like a man with some years behind him. Someone with experience. Someone who knows what a girl likes.” She emphasized the point by doing something with her tail that a normal woman couldn’t.
“You’re going to be the death of me one day, Katlyn,” he laughed, picking her up and carrying her off to his bedroom.
Chapter 2 – Lover
Katlyn woke with the sun streaming onto the bed through the one-way glass window, stretching luxuriantly. She hummed to herself. Life was good. She had excitement, the thrill of a long, dangerous and grand quest, and a man who knew how to make her quiver. Daniel had already gotten up and was probably working on one of his projects. She would have liked more of him. But she could be happy having any of him.
She thought back to how they had reached this point. He had been her guide, her teacher, her mentor. She knew what the world thought of her kind. But he had raised her as his own, and all he had ever shown her was love and understanding. Growing up had been difficult. She had studied genetic engineering herself. Not like he had, but she was quick to grasp ideas and had a fair understanding of the field if not its more intricate details. She knew that her making had not been without risks, but it had been a fair gamble. There had certainly been pains both physical and psychological as she grew. But she had survived and she could not resent it. She was alive, happy and healthy. And what more could man or beast want? She smiled again, wondering: and which are you, Katlyn?
The hardest part had been puberty. She had the same needs as any human woman, only more so because of her exquisite nervous system. She had about twice the number of nerves and they were twenty percent faster than normal. The world felt wondrous to her touch, but that came with the price of frustration when her nerves wanted stimulation she couldn’t have. What stimulation she could have was glorious, but sometimes she would wake at night with her nerves screaming for the kind of release she knew could be had, and was had, only not by her.
Finally she could bear it no longer and confronted him. “Listen, Daniel, I don’t understand you! You still think of me as if I’m a twelve-year-old girl, but look at me! I’m a woman! You treat me as if I am your daughter. But look at me! I’m not! You of all people should know I’m not! And I know you love me and not as a child, I know you want me, I can smell it! And that drives me crazy too! You are some crazy noble idiot who wants me and knows he wants me but hides it from himself!”
“Oh, Katlyn,” he’d sighed. “Surely you know I can’t. I might not be your father, but I raised you like one and you are still a little girl in my eyes. I just feel it would be monstrous. I feel I would be using you, betraying you.”
“Oh you fool!” she had shouted. “You have taught me to think. You have always told me to use logic, reason, facts! Tell me which of those are on your side! Do I have to tell you again? You are not my father! I am a grown woman, able to make my own choices: a woman you have taught to make her own choices. At least give me the respect to give me a good answer. Are you ashamed of me? Despite all you’ve done for me – do you too think of me as some kind of monster, some kind of thing it would defile you to touch?”
“No! You know that isn’t true!”
“And don’t you get it? I love you! And not in the way I loved you as a child! Then I loved you as if you were my father, too. Yes, I was a child – then. But I am a woman now, and I love you as a woman. I want you as a woman. And if you reject me – then who else is there for me to love?”
“Oh Katlyn, my unique, lovely child, don’t you see? That’s the problem. We’re thrown here together, I’ve looked after you and I’m the only man you really know, the only man you’ve ever really known. How can I take advantage of that without using you? You deserve better than that. One day we will be free and you’ll find a man you can truly want and love, not just someone who will feel he raised you to become his personal sex toy!”
She hissed at him. Then she stopped. “Oh you sweet, darling idiot. But you are torturing me to be kind! Please just think about what I’ve said. I understand what you’re saying. But your love for me is not using me. I know what I want, in full knowledge of what I want and wh
y. You have taught me to do that above all else. How many times have I heard you rail against the people in power who think they know better than anyone else, who think they are so wise they deserve to rule others? Then what are you doing to me? I am no longer a child, Daniel. I need you. I want you. I love you. Think about it. Please.”
She could feel the tears forming in her eyes and she didn’t want him to see, so she spun and bounded from the room. Then she curled up in her bed, crying softly.
But that night he had knocked quietly on her door, and when she opened it had simply said “Oh Katlyn”, and held her in his arms. Then she learned that her dreams had been true, and she knew the joy she had never been able to hold once the dreams had fled. They had been together ever since.
Chapter 3 – Hunter
It was her first day on the job. She had graduated from the Police Academy with high honors, had excelled in the theory and practice of detective work, and on the strength of that had been assigned to the Special Crimes Unit. It was an exciting opportunity and she was looking forward to putting her skills to work. Fighting crime was a passion many kids shared but few turned into a career, and she faced this day with high anticipation.
Four hours later she was bored. Or frustrated. She couldn’t quite decide which.
True, there was a lot of crime fighting going on. Unfortunately none of it involved her. Well, none of the exciting part of actually investigating. They had put her on the cold case program. “Yes,” her new Chief had said, “you did well at school (school! she’d thought). But we have a lot of experienced detectives here and a lot of work so important it must be done: just not important enough for those experienced detectives to waste their time doing it.” When he made it clear that the important work would be in a back room with a computer, her attempt to impose calm on her facial muscles must have been slower than her feelings’ revelation of the contrary. He had fixed her with a stern look then calmly told her that if she was as good a detective as maybe she might become one day, she should probably come to her own conclusions from what he had just told her.
What could you say to that? She decided she liked her new boss, even if he was a bastard.
He had then shunted her off to the IT department for more details. These were imparted by a young man with intense blue eyes and red hair, which tried to be well behaved except for random swatches that insisted on creating their own contradictory styles. His name was Fergus, he possessed a quick intelligence, and she decided he was quite cute in his geeky way. She was also amused to notice that he had a polite way of checking out newly met women that was mildly complimentary if you liked it, but too subtle to be sure about if you didn’t. His ready and harmless smile no doubt helped him get away with it. She wasn’t even sure he knew he was doing it himself.
Cold cases, he explained, were those where leads had dried up and there was no obvious way forward to a resolution, so they had been shelved in favor of more immediate work. Shelved but not forgotten, as you never knew when you might get a break. But if nobody was looking, who would recognize the break when it came?
And, he added, blue eyes twinkling, before the project could happen it first had to be funded, and to be funded had to be sold to people whose main concern in life was budgets. But budgets had an in as well as an out, and higher case-solving rates were good for publicity and therefore good for funding. However, he had noted, finger raised: while they had originally sold the project on the cold case aspect, there was a more speculative and exciting side. The same processes needed to fish for new evidence on old cases could also uncover unexpected new ones. There were many relatively minor crimes barely worth investigating on their own merits – if merits were the correct term for crimes – but you never knew when they were the visible signals of something larger buried out of sight, like the swirl of a crocodile in the Nile. With luck, they would detect a few crocodiles or if not at least be alerted to where they might be lurking. The importance of the unimportant had been indelibly impressed on the collective consciousness of lawmen early in the century: when a failure to notice oddities such as men learning to fly jets but not land them, had meant failing to stop them returning to earth indirectly by first flying into buildings.
Some bright spark had had the brilliant idea of pooling all crime data into one database and letting an advanced artificial intelligence loose on it. While AIs were now common they were most effective at tasks with clear limits and definitions. So they were usually seen in roles such as automated doormen or reception services, medical diagnosis and the more straightforward legal services. A task like this one needed open-ended data analysis, correlation and pattern recognition with no predefined structure or assumptions. This was something humans were good at, but no human could absorb or process the amount of data an AI could. They had no way yet to give a person the data capacity of an AI, but perhaps they could get an AI to think more like a person.
Her job would be working on the interfaces for getting information into the AI and also training it on how to interpret the data in useful ways. The powers above wanted all records back at least 20 years to be in the system. Cold cases went back even further and some crime careers went even longer than that undetected: but the further back you went, the more unreliable memories became and the less evidence and witnesses you could actually find. So 20 years was chosen as the best compromise between wishes and reality.
She did not have to worry about current or recent data, he told her. That was already in a suitable format and the aim was a direct real time link still to be perfected: a challenging project which IT themselves were looking forward to. For the immediate future that would require human oversight, and there was so much of it that her “current” data feed would be at least two weeks old. Her job would be the older data, some of which existed only on paper.
“Paper!” she exclaimed, “You’re kidding, right?” He laughed. “Oh, it’s not as bad as it sounds. Like most advanced AIs, this one has lower level subsystems that are specialized AIs in their own right. One is already expert in image to text conversion; others have been configured as trainable data format translators – the system will have to deal with many incompatible formats. So your future doesn’t hold years of typing but it does hold a lot of paperwork scanning and tweaking of format conversion utilities.”
“I don’t suppose the department has some low level flunky we can recruit to help with all this hack work?” she asked hopefully.
“Yes of course, what do you take us for?” he replied. Then he added with a grin, “I’m looking at her.”
She groaned. “OK, I can see where I stand around here. So between us we’ll be filling the AI’s head with random data. How do I go about training it to make sense of it all?”
“What I would like is for you to train it positively, by examining the data yourself and telling the AI what it means. But if you could do that we wouldn’t need the AI in the first place. So what I’ll get is the other way around: the AI will tell you its findings then you will analyze the reasoning behind them and explain where it is right or wrong. Eventually that process will generate principles to guide it.”
“What if I make a mistake?”
“Try not to. But even if you do make a mistake, you’ll just slow things down a bit, not completely derail them. The AI doesn’t give anything a one hundred percent rating, not even your sage advice. It will occasionally retry ideas you’ve rejected in the past and look for contradictions in your responses; if it finds any it will complain to you. You can then refine the rules. If you keep rejecting something, it will recheck less and less until it eventually gives up.”
She agreed the idea was brilliant. She agreed its time had come. She even thought that her initial impression might have been hasty, and this work could be exciting and important. So armed with her reignited enthusiasm, she went to work.
It wasn’t long before her enthusiasm drowned under the unhappy confluence of enormous volumes of random data flowing into an AI of invisible
intellect, which then poured the resulting stew onto her head. It might be the most advanced AI the department could afford, she thought, but it still bore out the ancient wisdom of the wag who’d first said AI meant not “Artificial Intelligence” but “Artificial Idiot”.
At first she had thought that analyzing the AI’s correlation reports and training the AI would be interesting, but the AI soon trained her otherwise. When her new boss had dropped by and asked what she had discovered, she had wearily replied “Garbage, rubbish and creative nonsense.”
Part of the problem was that the AI was still in the early stage of its learning curve. The other part was she had to be careful. Despite Fergus’s assurance that mistakes weren’t fatal, the AI made enough mistakes of its own without her adding to them. She couldn’t just reject the machine’s wrong correlations: she had to think of some way to explain, in a way the AI would understand, why the correlation was meaningless. Otherwise she ran the risk of throwing out a good principle just because a specific example didn’t work. Generally that required analysis of why the AI thought there was a link and how to explain its error. But how did you explain to a computer that the presence of red roses in a held-up florist, a vase in a robbed bank and the garden of a burgled house was not relevant, whereas a single red rose placed on each of several murder victims was?