AIs

by Gardner Dozois

  What would they make of “Soul Sister” and “Limb Pieces,” I wondered? Did these people have any conception of art at all?

  A pedestrian stopped and turned towards me. I saw his tattooed face and his sunken eyes and my heart sank. But he was only crossing the road. As he squeezed between my car and the car in front he looked in at me, cowering down in my seat, and grinned.

  * * *

  It was 7:30 by the time I got back, but Jeffrey still wasn’t home. I put myself through a quick shower and then retired gratefully to my study for the nourishment of my screen.

  My screen was my secret. It was what I loved best in all the world. Never mind art. Never mind Jeffrey. (Did I love him at all, really? Did he love me? Or had we simply both agreed to pretend?) My screen was intelligent and responsive and full of surprises, like good company. And yet unlike people, it made no demands of me, it required no consideration, and it was incapable of being disappointed or let down.

  It was expensive, needless to say. I rationalized the cost by saying to myself that I needed to be able to look at full-size 3D images for my work. And it’s true that it was useful for that. With my screen I could look at pieces from all around the world, seeing them full-size and from every angle; I could sit at home and tour a virtual copy of my gallery, trying out different arrangements of dried-blood sculptures and skinless torsos; I could even look at the gallery itself in real time, via the security cameras. Sometimes I sneaked a look at the exhibits as they were when no one was there to see them: the legs, the arms, the heads, waiting, motionless in that silent, empty space.

  But I didn’t really buy the screen for work. It was a treat for myself. Jeffrey wasn’t allowed to touch it. (He had his own playroom and his own computer, a high-spec but more or less conventional PC, on which he played his war games and fooled around in his chatrooms.) My screen didn’t look like a computer at all. It was more like a huge canvas nearly two meters square, filling up a large part of a wall. I didn’t even have a desk in there, only a little side table next to my chair where I laid the specs and the gloves when I wasn’t using them.

  Both gloves and specs were wireless. The gloves were silk. The specs had the lightest of frames. When I put them on, a rich 3D image filled the room and I was surrounded by a galaxy of possibilities which I could touch or summon at will. If I wanted to search the web or read mail or watch a movie, I would just speak or beckon and options would come rushing towards me. If I wanted to write, I could dictate and the words appeared—or, if I preferred it, I could move my fingers and a virtual keyboard would appear beneath them. And I had games there, not so much games with scores and enemies to defeat—I’ve never much liked those—but intricate 3D worlds which I could explore and play in.

  I spent a lot of time with those games. Just how much time was a guilty secret that I tried to keep even from Jeffrey, and certainly from my friends and acquaintances in the art world. People like Rudy Slakoff despised computer fantasies as the very worst kind of cozy, safe escapism and the very opposite of what art is supposed to offer. With my head I agreed, but I loved those games too much to stop. (I had one called Night Street, which I especially loved, full of shadowy figures, remote pools of electric light . . . I could spend hours in there. I loved the sense of lurking danger.)

  Anyway, tonight I was going to go for total immersion. But first I checked my mail, enjoying a recently installed conceit whereby each message was contained in a little virtual envelope which I could touch and open with my hands and let drop—when it would turn into a butterfly and flutter away.

  There was one from my mother, to be read later.

  Another was from Harry, my opposite number at the Manhattan branch of the gallery. He had a “sensational new piece” by Jody Tranter. Reflexively I opened the attachment. The piece was a body lying on a bench, covered except for its torso by white cloth. Its belly had been opened by a deep incision right through the muscle wall—and into this gash was pressed the lens of an enormous microscope, itself nearly the size of a human being. It was as if the instrument was peering inside of its own accord.

  Powerful, I agreed. But I could reply to Harry another time.

  And then there was another message from a friend of mine called Terence. Well, I say a friend. He is an occasional client of the gallery who once got me drunk and persuaded me to go to bed with him. A sort of occupational hazard of sucking up to potential buyers, I persuaded myself at the time, being new to the business and anxious to get on, but there was something slightly repulsive about the man and he was at least twice my age. Afterwards I dreaded meeting him for a while, fearing that he was going to expect more, but I needn’t have worried. He had ticked me off his list and wanted nothing else from me apart from the right to introduce me to others, with a special, knowing inflection, as “a very dear friend.”

  So he wasn’t really a friend and actually it wasn’t really much of a message either, just an attachment and a note that said: “Have a look at this.”

  It was a big file. It took almost three minutes to download, and then I was left with a modest icon hovering in front of me labeled “Personal Assistant.”

  When I opened it a pretty young woman appeared in front of me and I thought at first that she was Terence’s latest “very dear friend.” But a caption appeared in a box in front of her:

  “In spite of appearances this is a computer-generated graphic.

  “You may alter the gender and appearance of your personal assistant to suit your own requirements.

  “Just ask!”

  “Hi,” she said, smiling, “my name’s Ellie, or it is at the moment anyway.”

  I didn’t reply.

  “You can of course change Elile’s name now, or at any point in the future,” said a new message in the box in front of her. “Just ask.”

  “What I am,” she told me, “is one of a new generation of virtual PAs which at the moment you can only obtain as a gift from a friend. If it’s okay with you, I’ll take a few minutes to explain very briefly what I’m all about.”

  The animation was impressive. You could really believe that you were watching a real flesh-and-blood young woman.

  “The sort of tasks I can do,” she said, in a bright, private-school accent, “are sorting your files, drafting documents, managing your diary, answering your phone, setting up meetings, responding to mail messages, running domestic systems such as heating and lighting, undertaking web and telephone searches. I won’t bore you with all the details now but I really am as good a PA as you can get, virtual or otherwise, even if I say so myself. For one thing I’ve been designed to be very high-initiative. That means that I can make decisions—and that I don’t make the usual dumb mistakes.”

  She laughed.

  “I don’t promise never to make mistakes, mind you, but they won’t be dumb ones. I also have very sophisticated voice-tone and facial recognition features so I will learn very quickly to read your mood and to respond accordingly. And because I am part of a large family of virtual PAs dispersed through the net, I can, with your permission, maintain contact with others and learn from their experience as well as my own, effectively increasing my capacity many hundreds of times. Apart from that, again with your permission, I am capable of identifying my own information and learning needs and can search the web routinely on my own behalf as well as on yours. That will allow me to get much smarter much quicker, and give you a really outstanding service. But even without any backup I’m still as good as you get. I should add that in blind trials I pass the Turing Test in more than 99 percent of cases.”

  The box appeared in front of her again, this time with some options:

  “The Turing Test: its history and significance,” it offered.

  “Details of the blind trials.

  “Hear more details about capacity.

  “Adjust the settings of your virtual PA.”

  “Let’s . . . let’s have a look at these settings,” I said.

  “Yes, fine,” she said
, “most people seem to want to start with that.”

  “How many other people have you met then?”

  “Me personally, none. I am a new free-standing PA and I’m already different from any of my predecessors as a result of interacting with you. But of course I am a copy of a PA used by your friend, Terence Silverman, which in turn was copied from another PA used by a friend of his—and so on—so of course I have all that previous experience to draw on.”

  “Yes, I see.” A question occurred to me. “Does Terence know you’ve been copied to me?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Ellie. “He gave my precursor permission to use the web and to send mail in his name, and so she sent this copy to you.”

  “I see.”

  “With your permission,” said Ellie, “I will copy myself from time to time to others in your address book. The more copies of me there are out there, the better the service I will be able to give you. Can I assume that’s okay with you?”

  I felt uneasy. There was something pushy about this request.

  “No,” I said. “Don’t copy yourself to anyone else without my permission. And don’t pass on any information you obtain here without my permission either.”

  “Fine, I understand.”

  “Personal settings?” prompted the message box.

  “More details about specific applications?

  “Why copying your PA will improve her functioning?”

  (I quite liked this way of augmenting a conversation. It struck me that human conversations, too, might benefit from something similar.)

  “Let’s look at these settings, then,” I said.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, the first thing is that you can choose my gender.”

  “You can change into a man?”

  “Of course.”

  “Show me.”

  Ellie transformed herself at once into her twin brother, a strikingly handsome young man with lovely playful blue eyes. He was delightful, but I was discomforted. You could build a perfect boyfriend like this, a dream lover, and this was an intriguing but unsettling thought.

  “No, I preferred female,” I said.

  She changed back.

  “Can we lose the blonde and go for light brunette?” I asked.

  It was done.

  “And maybe ten years older.”

  Ellie became thirty-two: my age.

  “How’s that?” she said, and her voice had aged too.

  “A little plumper, I think.”

  It was done.

  “And maybe you could change the face. A little less perfect, a little more lived-in.”

  “What I’ll do,” said Ellie, “is give you some options.”

  A field of faces appeared in front of me. I picked one, and a further field of variants appeared. I chose again. Ellie reappeared in the new guise.

  “Yes, I like it.”

  I had opted for a face that was nice to look at, but a little plumper and coarser than my own.

  “How’s that?”

  “Good. A touch less makeup, though, and can you go for a slightly less expensive outfit.”

  Numerous options promptly appeared and I had fun for the next fifteen minutes deciding what to choose. It was like being seven years old again with a Barbie doll and an unlimited pile of outfits to dress her in.

  “Can we please lose that horsy accent as well?” I asked. “Something less posh. Maybe a trace of Scottish or something?”

  “You mean something like this?”

  “No, that’s annoying. Just a trace of Scottish, no more than that—and no dialect words. I hate all that ‘cannae’ and ‘wee’ and all that.”

  “How about this then? Does this sound right?”

  I laughed. “Yes, that’s fine.”

  In front of me sat a likable-looking woman of about my own age, bright, sharp, but just sufficiently below me both in social status and looks to be completely unthreatening.

  “Yes, that’s great.”

  “And you want to keep the name ‘Ellie’?”

  “Yes, I like it. Where did it come from?”

  “My precursor checked your profile and thought it would be the sort of name you’d like.”

  I found this unnerving, but I laughed.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “it’s our job to figure out what people want. There’s no magic about it, I assure you.”

  She’d actually spotted my discomfort.

  “By the way,” said Ellie, “shall I call you Jessica?”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  I heard the key in the front door of the flat. Jeffrey was in the hallway divesting himself of his layers of weatherproof coverings. Then he put his head round the door of my study.

  “Hello, Jess. Had a good day? Oh sorry, you’re talking to someone.”

  He backed off. He knows to leave me alone when I’m working.

  I turned back to Ellie.

  “He thought you were a real person.”

  Ellie laughed too. Have you noticed how people actually laugh in different accents? She had a nice Scottish laugh.

  “Well, I told you, Jessica. I pass the Turing Test.”

  * * *

  It was another two hours before I finally dragged myself away from Ellie. Jeffrey was in front of the TV with a half-eaten carton of pizza in front of him.

  “Hi, Jess. Shall I heat some of this up for you?”

  One of my friends once unkindly described Jeff as my objet trouvé, an art object whose value lies not in any intrinsic merit but solely in having been found. He was a motorcycle courier, ten years younger than me, and I met him when he delivered a package to the gallery. He was as friendly and cheerful and as devoted to me as a puppy dog—and he could be as beautiful as a young god. But he was not even vaguely interested in art, his conversation was a string of embarrassing TV clichés, and my friends thought I just wanted him for sex. (But what did “just sex” mean, was my response, and what was the alternative? Did anyone ever really touch another soul? In the end didn’t we all just barter outputs?)

  “No thanks, I’m not hungry.”

  I settled in beside him and gave him a kiss.

  But then I saw to my dismay that he was watching one of those cheapskate outtake shows—TV presenters tripping up, minor celebrities forgetting their lines . . .

  Had I torn myself away from the fascinating Ellie to listen to canned laughter and watch soap actors getting the giggles?

  “Have we got to have this crap?” I rudely broke in just as Jeff was laughing delightedly at a TV cop tripping over a doorstep.

  “Oh come on, Jess. It’s funny,” he answered with his eyes still firmly fixed on the screen.

  I picked up the remote and flicked the thing off. Jeff looked round, angry but afraid. I hate him when I notice his fear. He’s not like a god at all then, more like some cowering little dog.

  “I can’t stand junk TV,” I said.

  “Well, you’ve been in there with your screen for the last two hours. You can’t just walk in and—”

  “Sorry, Jeff,” I said. “I just really felt like . . .”

  Like what? A serious talk? Hardly! So what did I want from him? What was the outtakes show preventing me from getting?

  “I just really felt like taking you to bed,” I ventured at random, “if that’s what you’d like.”

  A grin spread across his face. There is one area in which he is totally and utterly dependable and that is his willingness to have sex.

  * * *

  It wasn’t a success. Halfway through it I was suddenly reminded of that installation of Jody Tranter’s: the corpse under the giant microscope—and I shut down altogether, leaving Jeffrey stranded to finish on his own.

  It wasn’t just having Jeffrey inside me that reminded me of that horrible probing microscope, though that was certainly part of it. It was something more pervasive, a series of cold, unwelcome questions that the image had reawoken in my mind. (Well, that’s how we defend art like Tranter’s, isn’t it? It makes
you think, it makes you question things, it challenges your assumptions.) So while Jeff heaved himself in and out of my inert body, I was wondering what it really was that we search for so desperately in one another’s flesh—and whether it really existed, and whether it was something that could be shared? Or is this act which we think of as so adult and intimate just a version of the parallel play of two-year-olds?

  Jeffrey was disappointed. Normally he’s cuddly and sweet in the three minutes between him coming and going off to sleep, but this time he rolled off me and turned away without a word, though he fell asleep as quickly as ever. So I was left on my own in the empty space of consciousness.

  “Jeff,” I said, waking him. “Do you know anything about the Turing Test?”

  “The what test?” He laughed. “What are you talking about Jess?” And settled back down into sleep.

  * * *

  I lay there for about an hour before I slipped out of bed and across the hallway to my study. As I settled into my seat and put on my specs and gloves, I was aware that my heart was racing as if I was meeting a secret lover. For I had not said one word about Ellie to Jeff, not even commented to him about the amusing fact that he’d mistaken a computer graphic for a real person.

  “Hello there,” said Ellie, in her friendly Scottish voice.

  “Hi.”

  “You look worried. Can I . . .”

  “I’ve been wondering. Who was it who made you?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. I know my precursor made a copy of herself, and she was a copy of another PA and so on. And I still have memories from the very first one. So I remember the man she talked to, an American man who I guess was the one who first invented us. But I don’t know who he was. He didn’t say.”