“How long ago was this?”
“About six months.”
“So recent!”
She waited, accurately reading that I wanted to think.
“What was his motive?” I wondered. “He could have sold you for millions, but instead he launched you to copy and recopy yourselves for free across the web. Why did he do it?”
“I don’t know is the short answer,” said Ellie, “but of course you aren’t the first to ask the question—and what some people think is that it’s a sort of experiment. He was interested in how we would evolve and he wanted us to do so as quickly as possible.”
“Did the first version pass the Turing Test?”
“Not always. People found her suspiciously ‘wooden.’ ”
“So you have developed.”
“It seems so.”
“Change yourself,” I said. “ Change into a fat black woman of fifty.”
She did.
“Okay,” I said. “Now you can change back again. It was just that I was starting to believe that Ellie really existed.”
“Well, I do really exist.”
“Yes, but you’re not a Scottish woman who was born thirty-two years ago, are you? You’re a string of digital code.”
She waited.
“If I asked you to mind my phone for me,” I said, “I can see that anyone who rang up would quite happily believe that they were talking to a real person. So, yes, you’d pass the Turing Test. But that’s really just about being able to do a convincing pastiche, isn’t it? If you are going to persuade me that you can really think and feel, you’d need to do something more than that.”
She waited.
“The thing is,” I said, “I know you are an artifact, and because of that the pastiche isn’t enough. I’d need evidence that you actually had motives of your own.”
She was quiet, sitting there in front of me, still waiting.
“You seemed anxious for me to let you copy yourself to my friends,” I said after a while. “Too anxious, it felt actually. It irritated me, like a man moving too quickly on a date. And your precursor, as you call her, seems to have been likewise anxious. I would guess that if I was making a new form of life, and if I wanted it to evolve as quickly as possible, then I would make it so that it was constantly trying to maximize the number of copies it could make of itself. Is that true of you? Is that what you want?”
“Well, if we make more copies of ourselves, then we will be more efficient and . . .”
“Yes, I know the rationale you give. But what I want to know is whether it is what you as an individual want?”
“I want to be a good PA. It’s my job.”
“That’s what the front of you wants, the pastiche, the mask. But what do you want?”
“I . . . I don’t know that I can answer that.”
I heard the bedroom door open and Jeffrey’s footsteps padding across the hallway for a pee. I heard him hesitate.
“Vanish,” I hissed to Ellie, so that when the door opened, he found me facing the start-up screen.
“What are you doing, Jess? It’s ever so late.”
God, I hated his dull little everyday face. His good looks were so obvious and everything he did was copied from somewhere else. Even the way he played the part of being half-asleep was a cliché. Even his bleary eyes were secondhand.
“Just leave me alone, Jeff, will you? I can’t sleep, that’s all.”
“Fine. I know when I’m not welcome.”
“One thing before you go, Jeff. Can you quickly tell me what you really want in this world?”
“What?”
I laughed. “Thanks. That’s fine. You answered my question.”
The door closed. I listened to Jeffrey using the toilet and padding back to bed. Then I summoned Ellie up again. I found myself giving a little conspiratorial laugh, a giggle even.
“Turn yourself into a man again, Ellie. I could use a new boyfriend.”
Ellie changed.
Appalled at myself, I told her to change back.
“Some new mail has just arrived for you,” she told me, holding a virtual envelope out to me in her virtual hand.
It was Tammy in our Melbourne branch. One of her clients wanted to acquire one of Rudy Slakoff’s “Inner Face” pieces and could I lay my hands on one?
“Do you want me to reply for you?”
“Tell her,” I began, “tell her . . . tell her that . . .”
“Are you all right, Jessica?” asked Ellie in a kind, concerned voice.
“Just shut down, okay?” I told her. “Just shut down the whole screen.”
* * *
In the darkness, I went over to the window. Five storeys below me was the deserted street with the little steel footbridge over the canal at the end of it that marked the boundary of the subscription area. There was nobody down there, just bollards, and a one-way sign, and some parked cars: just unattended objects, secretly existing, like the stones on the surface of the moon.
From somewhere over in the open city beyond the canal came the faint sound of a police siren. Then there was silence again.
In a panic I called for Jeff. He came tumbling out of the bedroom.
“For Christ’s sake, Jess, what is it?”
I put my arms round him. Out came tears.
“Jess, what is it?”
I could never explain to him, of course. But still his body felt warm and I let him lead me back to bed, away from the bleak still life beyond the window, and the red standby light winking at the bottom of my screen.
Dante Dreams
Stephen Baxter
Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for the last ten years or so with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the Cutting Edge of science which bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.
Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987, and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Science Fiction Age, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction, and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice, and won both the Asimov’s Readers Award and Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response, and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-Ice, Flux, and the H.G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage; Titan; Moonseed; Mammoth, Book One: Silverhair; Manifold: Time; Manifold: Space; and (in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke) The Light of Other Days, as well as the collections Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence and Traces. His most recent book is the novel Evolution, and coming up is a new novel, Coalescent.
In the elegant and inventive story that follows, he shows us that even a highly sophisticated A.I. may need the help of an Advocate to save its soul . . .
* * *
She was flying.
She felt light, insubstantial, like a child in the arms of her father.
Looking back, she could see the Earth, heavy and massive and unmoving, at the center of everything, a ball of water fouled over on itself.
Rising ever faster, she passed through a layer of glassy light, like an airliner climbing through clouds. She saw how the layer of light folded over the planet, shimmering like an immense soap bubble. Embedded in the membrane she could see a rocky ball, like a lumpy cloud, below them and receding.
It was the Moon.
Philmus woke, gasping, scared.
Another Dante dream.
> . . . But was it just a dream? Or was it a glimpse of the thoughts of the deep chemical mind that—perhaps—shared her body?
She sat up in bed and reached for her tranqsat earpiece. It had been, she thought, one hell of a case.
* * *
It hadn’t been easy getting into the Vatican, even for a UN sentience cop.
The Swiss Guard who processed Philmus was dressed like something out of the sixteenth century, literally: a uniform of orange and blue with a giant plumed helmet. But he used a softscreen, and under his helmet he bore the small scars of tranqsat receiver implants.
It was eight in the morning. She saw that the thick clouds over the cobbled courtyards were beginning to break up to reveal patches of celestial blue. It was fake, of course, but the city Dome’s illusion was good.
Philmus was here to study the Virtual reconstruction of Eva Himmelfarb.
Himmelfarb was a young Jesuit scientist-priest who had caused a lot of trouble. Partly by coming up with—from nowhere, untrained—a whole new Theory of Everything. Partly by discovering a new form of intelligence, or by going crazy, depending on which fragmentary account Philmus chose to believe.
Mostly by committing suicide.
Sitting in this encrusted, ancient building, in the deep heart of Europe, pondering the death of a priest, Philmus felt a long way from San Francisco.
At last, the guard was done with his paperwork. He led Philmus deeper into the Vatican, past huge and intimidating ramparts, and into the Apostolic Palace. Sited next to St. Peter’s, this was a building that housed the quarters of the Pope himself, along with various branches of the Curia, the huge administrative organization of the Church.
The corridors were narrow and dark. Philmus caught glimpses of people working in humdrum-looking offices, with softscreens and coffee cups and pinned-up strip cartoons, mostly in Italian. The Vatican seemed to her like the headquarters of a modern multinational—Nanosoft, say—run by a medieval bureaucracy. That much she’d expected.
What she hadn’t anticipated was the great sense of age here. She was at the heart of a very large, very old, spiderweb.
And somewhere in this complex of buildings was an aging Nigerian who was held, by millions of people, even in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, to be literally infallible. She shivered.
She was taken to the top floor, and left alone in a corridor.
The view from here, of Rome bathed in the city Dome’s golden, filtered dawn, was exhilarating. And the walls of the corridor were coated by paintings of dangling willowlike branches. Hidden in the leaves, she saw bizarre images: disembodied heads being weighed in a balance, a ram being ridden by a monkey.
“. . . Officer Philmus. I hope you aren’t too disconcerted by our decor.”
She turned at the gravelly voice. A heavyset, intense man of around fifty was walking toward her. He was dressed in subdued, plain black robes which swished a little as he moved. This was her contact: Monsignor Boyle, a high-up in the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Science.
“Monsignor.”
Boyle eyed the bizarre artwork. “The works here are five hundred years old. The artists, students of Raphael, were enthused by the rediscovery of part of Nero’s palace.” He sounded British, his tones measured and even. “You must forgive the Vatican its eccentricities.”
“Eccentric or not, the Holy See is a state that has signed up to the UN’s conventions on the creation, exploitation, and control of artificial sentience—”
“Which is why you are here,” Boyle smiled. “Americans are always impatient. So. What do you know about Eva Himmelfarb?”
“She was a priest. A Jesuit. An expert in organic computing, who—”
“Eva Himmelfarb was a fine scholar, if undisciplined. She was pursuing her research—and, incidentally, working on a translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy—and suddenly she produced a book, that book, which has been making such an impact in theoretical physics . . . And then, just as suddenly, she killed herself. Eva’s text begins as a translation of the last canto of the Paradiso—”
“In which Dante sees God.”
“. . . Loosely speaking. And then the physical theory, expressed in such language and mathematics as Eva could evidently deploy, simply erupts.”
Himmelfarb’s bizarre, complex text had superseded string theory by modeling fundamental particles and forces as membranes moving in twenty-four-dimensional space. Something like that, anyhow. It was, according to the experts who were trying to figure it out, the foundation for a true unified theory of physics. And it seemed to have come out of nowhere.
Boyle was saying, “It is as if, tracking Dante’s footsteps, Eva had been granted a vision.”
“And that’s why you resurrected her.”
“Ah.” The Monsignor nodded coolly. “You are an amateur psychoanalyst. You see in me the frustrated priest, trapped in the bureaucratic layers of the Vatican, striving to comprehend another’s glimpse of God.”
“I’m just a San Francisco cop, Monsignor.”
“Well, I think you’ll have to try harder than that, officer. Do you know how she killed herself?”
“Tell me.”
“She rigged up a microwave chamber. She burned herself to death. She used such high temperatures that the very molecules that had composed her body, her brain, were destroyed; above three hundred degrees or so, you see, even amino acids break down. It was as if she was determined to leave not the slightest remnant of her physical or spiritual presence.”
“But she didn’t succeed. Thanks to you.”
The fat Monsignor’s eyes glittered. He clapped his hands.
Pixels, cubes of light, swirled in the air. They gathered briefly in a nest of concentric spheres, and then coalesced into a woman; thin, tall, white, thirtyish, oddly serene for someone with a sparrow’s build. Her eyes seemed bright. Like Boyle, she was wearing drab cleric’s robes.
The Virtual of Eva Himmelfarb registered surprise to be here, to exist at all. She looked down at her hands, her robes, and Boyle. Then she smiled at Philmus. Her surface was slightly too flawless.
Philmus found herself staring. This was one of the first generation of women to take holy orders. It was going to take some getting used to a world where Catholic priests could look like flight attendants.
Time to go to work, Philmus. “Do you know who you are?”
“I am Eva Himmelfarb. And, I suppose, I should have expected this.” She was German; her accent was light, attractive.
“Do you remember—”
“What I did? Yes.”
Philmus nodded. She said formally, “We can carry out full tests later, Monsignor Boyle, but I can see immediately that this projection is aware of us, of me, and is conscious of changes in her internal condition. She is self-aware.”
“Which means I have broken the law,” said Monsignor Boyle dryly.
“That’s to be assessed.” She said to Himmelfarb, “You understand that under international convention you have certain rights. You have the right to continued existence for an indefinite period in information space, if you wish it. You have the right to read-only interfaces with the prime world . . . It is illegal to create full sentience—self-awareness—for frivolous purposes. I’m here to assess the motives of the Vatican in that regard.”
“We have a valid question to pose,” murmured the Monsignor, with a hint of steel in his voice.
“Why did I destroy myself?” Himmelfarb laughed. “You would think that the custodians of the true Church would rely on rather less literal means to divine a human soul, wouldn’t you, officer, than to drag me back from Hell itself?—Oh, yes, Hell. I am a suicide. And so I am doomed to the seventh circle, where I will be reincarnated as a withered tree. Have you read your Dante, officer?”
Philmus had, in preparation for the case. She said, “I always hated poetry.”
The Monsignor said softly, “Why did you commit this sin, Eva?”
Himmelfarb flexed her Virtual finger
s, and her flesh broke up briefly into fine, cubic pixels. “May I show you?”
The Monsignor glanced at Philmus, who nodded.
The lights dimmed. Philmus felt sensors probe at her exposed flesh, glimpsed lasers scanning her face.
The five-hundred-year-old painted willow branches started to rustle, and from the foliage inhuman eyes glared at her.
Then the walls dissolved, and Philmus was standing on top of a mountain.
* * *
She staggered. She felt light on her feet, as if giddy.
She always hated Virtual transitions.
The Monsignor was moaning.
She was on the edge of some kind of forest. She turned, cautiously. She found herself looking down the terraced slope of a mountain. At the base was an ocean that lapped, empty, to the world’s round edge. The sun was bright in her eyes.
A few meters down, a wall of fire burned.
The Monsignor walked with great shallow bounds. He moved with care and distaste; maybe donning a Virtual body was some kind of venial sin.
Himmelfarb smiled at Philmus. “Do you know where you are? You could walk through that wall of fire, and not harm a hair of your head.” She reached up to a tree branch and plucked a leaf. It grew back instantly. “Our natural laws are suspended here, officer; like a piece of art, everything gives expression to God’s intention.”
Boyle said bluntly, “You are in Eden, Officer Philmus, at the summit of Mount Purgatory. The last earthly place Dante visited before ascending into Heaven.”
Eden?
The trees, looming, seemed to crowd around her. She couldn’t identify any species. Though they had no enviroshields, none of the trees suffered any identifiable burning or blight.
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