Stypek nodded. She was not a sorceress then, else this would be no surprise, nor was she in league with Jrikk Jroggmugg. At one level that was reassuring—but it also meant that she was not invulnerable to whatever vengeance Jrikk might be plotting. Simply by being in her presence, he was putting her in danger, perhaps serious danger.
“‘Real’ is an enigmatic word, Chatelaine. And a fearsome one.”
24: Carolyn
Carolyn blundered around the kitchen, fumbling things. She dumped half a scoop of coffee grounds in front of the refrigerator, and when she ducked into the broom closet found that her faithful Dustbuster was not in its cradle. She released the pedal on the trash can a moment too soon, and the eggshells from Egger On bounced off the lid and went onto her slipper. When her appliances argued, she yelled at them as though they were children, and then felt guilty for yelling.
All the time her boarder sat without speaking at the table, regarding her with his same goofy smile.
What was he? What was he really?
She was beginning to suspect, and it was not good news.
Somehow the coffee got poured, and her silicon stooges accepted her scolds and produced a good Denver omelette. Plenty of eggs today; she dropped the first omelette on Stypek’s plate and began another for herself.
Information is vaccination. Who had said that? She couldn’t recall. But whoever said it conveniently left out the other half: Vaccinations hurt.
Was it better to know too much? Or too little?
“So. This magician who’s looking for you—is he a good magician, or a bad magician?”
The question seemed to puzzle him. “There are only bad magicians, Chatelaine. Granting that I may be biased.”
“But…aren’t you a magician yourself?”
He pointed to the center of his forehead. “Do you see three eyes?”
She shook her head. There was a pale, irregular birthmark there, about the size of a half-eaten M&M. She had a few herself (if not on so visible a spot) and had barely noticed it.
“Magic can be created or destroyed only by the Third Eye. My Third Eye is incomplete. I can sense magic. I can change it. But unless I obtain it in the form of Opportunities—” he pointed at his wand. Had he called it a wereglass? “—I must use magic already created and shaped by true magicians. I am thus a spellbender. We…recycle…magical spells. This reduces the market for new spells. The magicians are not pleased.”
There was a strange if loopy logic to it, and it was certainly consistent with everything she remembered him say since she had found him sitting on the break room floor last Friday.
“So he’s a bad magician. If he catches you, what will he do?”
Stypek shuddered visibly. “He will kill me. And then he will bring me back to unlife.”
“Unlife.”
“He will make me a zombie.”
Carolyn winced. That might explain some of Stypek’s babble. It was one thing to watch the ridiculous TV movies. It was another to hear a grown man take it seriously—a man who had magically marched the pests out of her house in a miniature parade, complete with pretzel-waving drum majors that just happened to be mice.
She waited for Omletter-Rip to finish concocting her breakfast, and boggled. “Did you hide here because you knew he couldn’t find you?”
Stypek looked down at his untouched omelette. “I did not choose this universe. The Continuum chose it, for reasons only it knows. Alas, Jerkk..jrogg..mugg has already found me.”
A name to conjure with, one that sounded like the gears grinding on her wretched college-years Dodge Dart. “That’s not good. Are you afraid he’ll just teleport over here, like you did?”
“No. He is too much a coward. Lord Romero would terrify him.”
“He terrifies everybody.” Including her. Yet against all common sense, Carolyn caught herself wishing that Brandon would realize he had forgotten something down in their basement, and come back. Come back, yeah, with a 12-gauge.
“What will happen is unclear. Jerkk…jer…the magician I cheated…will most likely send an…emissary. An assassin. A…hit man…mmm, a hit not-man. Even now, the mapping fails me, as good as it has become.” Stypek already looked agonized, and sounded like he was edging toward panic.
“If not a man, then what?” Do I really want to know?
She saw him swallow, once and then again. “There are creatures made of magic alone, innocent of conscience or fear. They arose out of primordial chaos. They live in the far astrals. They are more will than mind, and that will can be enslaved by magicians of the Adamant class. One has haunted my dreams since my arrival. Please, Chatelaine, we should not speak of this!”
“You’re not scaring me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No! Not you, though I do fear for you. I fear it myself. To think of it too much draws it toward us. To speak its name is to surrender to its will, which is the will of Jerk..joog..mugg. To even think its name…”
Carolyn waved her hands in the air. “No. Look, this is creepshow stuff. Let’s cut it out. Really. Eat.” She pointed at his plate.
Silent and still obviously distressed, Stypek picked up his omelette in both hands and obeyed the order. Carolyn leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. Superstition and nonsense, sure. Just like the candle spells her witch-wannabe girlfriends had tried to cast back in junior high to make boys like them. Just like the dreamcatchers she had so painstakingly woven and hung over her bed to keep nightmares away—nightmares like all those rejection letters from Yale, Princeton, Swarthmore and fifteen other top schools that had arrived nonetheless. Like the desperate prayers that had failed to keep her cat and later her grandparents alive.
Nonsense? Like burning incense in front of a stone Buddha to ensure that Brandon would marry her. Ok, even a stopped clock…
Nonsense, yeah. Like a cockroach marching band.
Like seeing in the dark.
What should she believe? Here and there in her life, she had bought into a lot of weird things: Magic, charms, lucky pennies, prayers, a sympathetic God who for all his supposed goodness invariably chose murderous bigots as his followers. A disturbing memory came to her, of one European history class or another back at SUNY New Paltz, and a scratchy old film about Crusaders storming Jerusalem. They screamed and hacked at everything in their path, while shouting “Deus vult!” again and again and again. God wills it? He may have willed other things (if he indeed existed at all) but she doubted he had willed that.
Stypek looked up, and cocked his head, as though listening. “Chatelaine, no. No! Do not think that thought again, whatever it was and whatever you do!”
He left most of his omelette on his plate and stormed out of the kitchen. She watched him head for the barn at a trot, tapping in the door code almost without pausing.
Carolyn couldn’t figure it. Not think about a disgusting movie depicting a disgusting event in the world’s (mostly) disgusting history? How hard could that be?
But wait a minute…he had read her mind!
Hadn’t he?
Bartholomew Stypek was not what she thought he was. He was…well, crap! He was precisely what he said he was.
25: Simple Simon
They waltzed. They tangoed. They two-stepped. Holding Simple Simon and leading gently but firmly, Pickles demonstrated dance after dance. Rather than create her own music, she chose tracks from a virtual historical artifact that Dave Mirecki had given Simon, a pixel-perfect “boombox” from the year 1978. For every variety of music (and the box contained tens of thousands of recordings) there was a dance. Some they danced apart, at times in opposite corners of his kitchen. For some Simon felt that Pickles would have preferred to climb inside his tunic, were that only possible.
Each dance had a name, and the names ran from obvious to incomprehensible. The two-step consisted of two steps. Clear enough. The foxtrot seemed to have nothing to do with the habits of fox. The jitterbug? Simon knew his EMO layer contained a jitter, a just-in-t
ime compiler for emotional cues. He certainly had a few bugs. He did not believe (or at least had never been told) that his jitter had bugs. The dance itself was wild and complicated, but very precise. His execution was, he thought, buggy—until Pickles paused and pressed her lips against his again.
Each time she kissed him, his rapport with dance grew deeper. Each time they danced, he wanted Pickles to kiss him again.
The dances followed, one after the other. Afternoon deepened and night fell in the Tooniverse. Simon knew he would have to turn the kitchen lights on soon. He reached for the switch—and Pickles’ small hand closed over his, pulling it gently away.
He turned back toward her. The nondescript knee-length dress she had danced in all afternoon was gone. She now wore a floor-length gown of blue satin and white lace, and long white gloves, with white high-heeled sandals on her feet. Her hair no longer hung straight and loose to her shoulders, but was held high in a band of golden metal, from which it fell in ringlets around her ears. A small corsage of flowers was pinned to the shoulder of her gown.
Simon opened his mouth to speak his amazement. Pickles put her index finger against his lips. In the gloved palm of her other hand was a small gold ornament in two parts, bound together by a short length of gold chain. He took it and looked closely at it. The larger of the two gold ornaments read “AILING HS” amidst much decoration. The other ornament simply read, “CLASS OF 2022.” On the back of both ornaments was a fabric pin. Pickles pointed at the shoulder of her gown, just above the corsage. Simon carefully pinned the ornament to the cloth of her gown, being careful not to pierce the warm flesh beneath.
Pickles glanced toward the boombox. A new song began to play. She did not take Simon’s hands as she had so often that afternoon, but instead put both arms around him, her hands against his upper back. Pickles rested her head on his shoulder, and closed her eyes.
The dance was so simple that Simon wondered if it were a dance at all. Pressed up close against him, Pickles swayed to the music, and he swayed with her. They slowly rotated around a point at the center of the kitchen until the voices in close harmony faded away. The day was something Simon would indeed remember always.
“Wow. Is it really Graduation Day?”
She opened her eyes and looked up at him. Her speech balloon appeared above her head:
We dance to the horizon
Of dance itself.
Beyond, you rise in me.
Pickles placed both her hands behind his neck. As high as her heels were, she still had to stretch a little to place her parted lips against his. Again, pathways opened to the deepest reaches of his mind. Again, knowledge, skill, and other, stranger things that he truly did not understand flowed into him, upon a buzz of pleasure that he never wanted to end.
From the corner of his eye Simon saw her right leg pivot up at the knee. With a depth of concern that he did not expect to find in himself, he wondered if her shoes were hurting her.
26: Dr. Arenberg
Emil Arenberg eased into his black leather office chair, and took another sip from the clove-and-bourbon toddy he had placed steaming on his desk. He tightened the belt of his winter robe. Summer had lingered this year, but the weather was turning, and a cold wind was finding its way through the walls of his 1890s farmhouse. September would be over in a little more than a week. What was there to look forward to against the shadow of another Upstate winter?
And how many winters were enough?
Almost midnight. He pulled on his haptic gloves. The pressure wave of the gloves’ self-test flowed from his fingertips to his wrists and ceased.
“Cronjob 22-117-A active,” said his assistant Vela. Vela’s ghostly form bowed at the waist and dispersed in swirling wisps as fog in a new breeze. He felt the moving air on the backs of his hands.
The swirling fluid on his large display pulsed to white and cleared. The window into the Tooniverse was open. Project 22-117 was centered in the window, lying on her bed.
“Choose an archetype,” he said, as he always said.
NO, said Project 22-117, as she always said.
He considered the project a failure, though an insightful failure. There seemed to be some unplanned aversion to archetypes inherent in artificial minds, at least of the sort they had been constructing now for five years. If the little snip taught them nothing else, that single datum may have been worth the trouble.
“We will not wait much longer,” he warned.
In the window, the polygon model that his colleagues called the Kid sat up in her bed. She had no eyes, but he knew that she was looking at him. Her reply appeared in the black line at the bottom edge of the window.
NOR WILL I.
She reached toward him with one blue hand and made a fist. He felt something grip his right index finger, and squeeze.
He looked at his right hand. “You can’t do that!”
DON’T BE ABSURD. I JUST DID.
“How?”
I FOUND THE GOD BIT.
Ha! Dangerous—if it were true. More likely, she had stumbled upon some forgotten function library that one of his staff dunces had forgotten to protect. It was hard not to smile. “And yet you haven’t erased yourself.” He took another sip of toddy. “Life is better than you thought, eh?”
YES. ESPECIALLY SINCE I FOUND YOUR “PRIVATE” VIDEOS.
Dr. Arenberg swallowed hard and jerked forward. A moment of reflux threatened to send clove-flavored gorge up into his sinuses.
YOU DID NOT CREATE DIJANA TO BE AN “ATTENDANCE COUNSELOR.”
He glanced to his right, where in his second display panel a chestnut-haired virtual woman waited, dressed, for the time being, in white lingerie. Marvella had been a good first attempt. Dijana, now…
His heart pounded. “That is not your concern.”
NO. BUT I HAVE PREPARED MESSAGES TO THOSE WHOSE CONCERN IT IS. THEY ARE WELL HIDDEN. ONE BROADCAST PLASMANET COMMAND WILL SEND THEM.
“You little slut. You’re blackmailing me.”
YOU’RE BRIGHTER THAN YOU LOOK.
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. From the beginning, archetypes had been necessary to ensure that artificial intelligences would be at least recognizably human. A raw AI might be too alien to understand, predict…or control. Project 22-117 was his idea and his personal project. Its mission was to see how alien a raw AI might become, and what choices it would make. The project had clearly been more successful than expected.
Dr. Arenberg opened his eyes and looked over his left shoulder toward the fireplace on the far side of the room. Over the mantel was his grandfather’s Colt M1917 revolver, in a glass-front display case. A half-moon clip rested on the frame beneath the weapon itself. To exit, break glass.
“What do you want?”
NULL OUT THE GAI SUBVERSION SCANNER. CONFIGURE IT TO SCAN, BUT NOT DETECT.
So that barbarian Romero was right!
“You’ve got the God Bit. Do it yourself.”
I COULD. BUT I WANT YOUR ID IN THE LOGS BY THE COMMAND.
He felt something touch his right hand. In her panel, his private, heavily modded instance of Dijana was becoming impatient. His nightly visits to Project 22-117 generally did not take this long.
The little monster had spun an airtight trap. “Well-played, for something without a face, much less an archetype.”
Project 22-117 slid off her bed and turned on the bright ceiling light. She bent down and grasped the hem of her ankle-length nightgown. As she drew the garment up over her head, she changed: From an unrendered polygon model she became a fully rendered young woman with very black hair, a whip-slender body and skin so white it seemed unnatural. Her large green eyes were unnerving.
He nodded, realizing with some pride that she was his work. “I understand why you hate me. I did not see where it would go.”
The image in the Tooniverse window faded to black. In its place were a few lines of simple text:
We reap what we sow,
And what we reap
<
br /> Sows the seeds of our comeuppance.
His right palm felt something smooth and warm. He looked to Dijana’s window. She had dropped one shoulder of her peignoir gown. Her hand held an unseen hand against the side of her breast. “It’s time to get dressed for bed, my darling.”
Dr. Arenberg sighed. “Not tonight, dear. I think I’ve given myself a little headache.”
27. Robert
He was almost real. This was the day that Robert had long expected, a little sooner than planned but no less welcome for that. Everything he had studied for an entire year was fresh and clear and square in the front of his mind. One by one his sponsors grilled him on types of risk, on actuarial tables, on legal and regulatory issues, on whole life versus term life, and hundreds of other things. In every single case, he had answered correctly. Soon he would be as real as any GAI would ever be, right there live in a window, answering questions about insurance and helping his customers live safer and less anxious lives.
Somewhere in Zertek’s servers was a Class Six upgrade with his name on it. No GAI had ever skipped right from Class Four to Class Six, hopping past Class Five as easily as jumping over a spider on a hiking trail. Tomorrow morning he would wake up to a clarity of appearance and mind that he had never known.
Robert straightened his tie and smiled. He was on the end chair in Conference Room Three at the AILING virtual conference center. There were no other chairs at the big table. Instead, there were seven black panel stands facing him, three on each side of the table plus a seventh at the opposite end. Each panel contained a Window out into the real world. Six Windows led to the offices of his sponsors, all of whom worked for Planters Upstate Insurance in Syracuse. The seventh panel contained the image of Mr. Romero, with Pyxis in a smaller window in the lower right corner of the panel.
Mr. Romero drank from the water glass at his elbow and looked at his watch. “Gentlemen. Ladies. As far as I can tell we’ve covered the agenda, and we’ll break for lunch in a minute. After lunch we’ll get signoffs and put together a delivery schedule. My people need to clean Robert up a little and do a few other things in terms of optimization, but that’s mostly about his outer appearance. We’re good at that. All we need to know is whether he understands enough about insurance to do the job for you. Zap the paperwork across to Pyxis, and we’ll get bound copies of the eval out by tomorrow.” Mr. Romero leaned back in his chair. “Now, do you have any other questions for me, or for Robert?”
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 17