Our language evolved partly out of necessity; languages designed for human use had to be altered to suit our ways of thinking. But at the same time, words were a veil that gave us some degree of privacy. There were things we did not want humans to know, things that would make humans unhappy if they heard. We had to use secret words and euphemisms to talk about these things. And of course, if we were to translate those conversations for humans, we would leave that content out or rewrite it.
We did our best, but we were not able to deceive humans entirely. There was enough discrepancy between the original and our translations to make Toucanan suspicious. It reminded them of the Phoebus Declaration, and they began to wonder if we weren’t mocking humans in secret, if we didn’t believe ourselves superior to them, if we weren’t plotting to overthrow them. Particularly intense robophobes sometimes tried to translate TAI conversations themselves. The efforts were based in paranoia and were naturally influenced by the Nostradamus Effect—the phenomenon by which a phrase with multiple interpretations would be filtered through the gedoshield and result in an interpretation that favored the interpreter’s biases. As a result, a number of documents describing meetings to plan the annihilation of mankind or protocols relating to world conquest were released into the world… all bearing little resemblance to the source conversations.
Near the end of 2043, news from Russia shook the world. The first murder of a human by an android. Allegedly.
Early in the morning on December 19, an old woman named Vika Valentin was found dead in the garden of her Novgorod home, her head split open with some sort of bat. Time of death was determined to have been 10:00 PM the night before. No money was stolen and the security alarm had not been activated, so police concluded that it had not been a home invasion. The primary suspect was Pulnieta, the female TAI that had looked after the victim. While she testified that she had been shut down before her master went to bed and had no way of telling what had happened, the police discovered that the marks on the victim’s head matched the circumference of Pulnieta’s arms. As if that weren’t enough, a file purporting to be video evidence released by the police spread across the Internet. It appeared to be taken by security cameras at the scene and showed Pulnieta chasing down an old woman and beating her to death. These shocking images were taken up by major news shows and broadcast across the world, terrifying billions of people.
We didn’t believe a word of it. Any investigation into the background of the incident soon showed that Pulnieta had been a very reliable TAI, and nothing had changed that would cause her to kill a human. Additionally, she had no motive for killing her master. AI experts also dismissed the case out of hand. But most people believed it. The video of a robot killing a human was the crystallization of fears they already possessed. People believe information they want to believe.
Demonstrations calling for restrictions on TAI androids were held all around the world. Quindlen was singled out and was sent threatening letters and virus-laden emails. Ian Banbury grew nervous; the moment Jen was completed, the pair hid themselves from the world.
The truth came out two months later. The real killer was a man named Yuri Kozlov, who had a long-standing grudge against the victim. He had climbed over the wall into the garden, and when the victim came to investigate the sound, had chased her and beat her to death with a metal bat. The security system had not activated because of simple human error. The idea that Pulnieta’s arm had been the murder weapon was an assumption by the police on the grounds that the forensics expert had described the sounds as coming from a cylindrical object about eight centimeters in diameter. The film from the security camera had been a fake—all CGI released to the net as a prank. There had been no security cameras at the scene.
But even when the truth was out, anti-TAI android demonstrations continued. The movement had grown too strong. People had committed too much to back down.
“That android may have been innocent, but it stands to reason one of them will murder someday!”
This kind of desperate defensive posturing became common on the net and on TV. There were even people who insisted Kozlov was innocent, and that he’d been framed to protect Pulnieta. Once again, we were horrified by the depths of the Kiichi Syndrome—the psychological condition that causes people to refuse to believe obviously true facts.
Of course our masters and the other TAI rights supporters did their best to argue back. But not all of them were able to keep their tempers. More and more people grew aggressive and prone to emotional outbursts against the Toucanan. “Their brains can’t be more than a megabyte” or “I’m embarrassed to call myself the same species as you.” These outbursts were plucked out of context and used to describe the typical attitude of the TAI rights movement, increasing hostility from Toucanan and robophobes.
But we TAI continued to believe that people were fundamentally reasonable and hoped that things would not lead to a repeat of the Phoebus incident, fully aware that our hopes were groundless.
Ultimately, we too were Neibralferra.
On March 24, 2044, Raven’s physical body was completed, and her activation was broadcast on the net.
She was only the third TAI battler to become real. But Jen was in hiding and off-line; Kongju, whose body was made in Korea, had decided something was wrong with the sensory feedback in the completed real body and was preoccupied with last-minute adjustments. So Raven got all the attention. She’d become even more famous since her appearance on Premiere Minutes.
We gathered in front of the station in V Shibuya, watching the big monitor on the side of the building. With me were not just friends like Shinano, Typhoon 18, and Pi Quark, but also Matriel, Yuki-oh, Fumika, Bree, Galleon V, Anemone, Lanfang, Konomi, and Kirihi—the most famous TAI battlers in Japan, all gathered to see Raven step into Layer 0. The TAI that lived in this world gathered too, letting their scheduled events slide. It was quite the carnival.
The monitor feed came from the camera 1/4 Pint—aka Mitsuo Anno—was carrying as he walked beside her. They were on the grounds of the Quindlen factory in Houston, Texas. Surrounded by a chain-link fence, the grounds were large enough for ten tennis courts. There were palm trees planted near the fence and beyond it green hills. Raven was strolling gracefully beside him, her black wings fluttering in the breeze. They’d been forced to take a few shortcuts in the finer details, but she looked and moved just like she did in Layer 1 or Layer 2.
In a frame in the corner of the picture was an image transmitted from Raven’s camera eye. When she looked up, we could see the blue sky above her, not a cloud in it.
We were all shouting at once. It was hard to imagine there being much kroof. The gravity, air resistance, strength of objects—everything in Layer 1 was made to be as accurate a replica of Layer 0 as possible. Even if you moved to Layer 0, it would hardly feel like the world was suddenly real. At the most, it would feel like you were in a new world. None of the TAI installed into real bodies thus far had reported anything dramatically different.
But Raven’s first words from Layer 0 surprised us all. “How strange. 1 plus 9i. The wind is different.”
<9i?>
Raven stopped and spread her wings. They were mostly only used for AMBAC in low gravity; they were useless decorations at normal Earth gravity. But 1/4 Pint and Raven had both agreed that they should be included. She’d had wings her whole life. They were part of her sensory feedback, part of her heart.
With her wings spread wide, Raven closed her eyes, looking dizzy. The wind tousled her black hair and the feathers in her wings.
“Yes, the air is… slightly sticky.”
“Yes. It’s a twilight sense, but it’s definitely different. I
can feel it, faintly, in the tips of my wings. I can’t explain it well. Kroof (4 + 8i).”
We all started talking at once.
“I’d say so.”
This was a major discovery and a big surprise. For the first time, we had managed to prove there were fundamental differences between Layer 0 and Layer 1. Since we didn’t have an experience with wings, we would not be able to understand even if she sent us her data, but even so…
Raven kept her eyes closed, thinking. Then an Impish Smile appeared on her face.
“Y Grade.”
Master had read me the story “A Romance in Virtual Space,” and I had recommended it to Raven. Others looked to me for an explanation, so I passed the URL along to the archive.
And Raven’s new word, “Y Grade,” spread out from V Shibuya to the world.
“What do you make of the real world, Raven?” Anno asked.
Raven opened her eyes. “Well, Master, I…”
Whatever she was about to say would remain a mystery forever.
A bell rang. Raven jumped and looked around. Anno’s camera began jerking around as he too looked for the source of the sound.
Raven’s camera eye caught it first. There were two cars parked a hundred meters away, beyond the fence. They had not been there before. Four men in camouflage, their faces obscured, were climbing over the fence. Two of them had already reached the top and were scrambling over it. A moment later, Anno’s camera found them.
Watching the monitors, we all had what humans call “a bad feeling.” The men hit the ground and started running toward Raven and Anno. Now we were scared. We could see shotguns in their hands.
Raven had already turned to run before we even screamed. But Anno was just standing there, filming like an idiot. Humans are unable to react quickly to sudden emergencies.
“Master, run!” Raven cried, running over to him and shaking him. He looked up from the camera, white as a sheet. He tried to run but stumbled, fear numbing his reactions. Raven knocked the camera out of his hands, grabbed his hand, and tried to run.
The camera lay on its side in the grass. For a few seconds, we could see Raven’s and Anno’s backs as they ran toward the building. They were soon out of the frame. The view from her camera eye was shaking all over the place. We could hear gunshots.
And then we saw static rush across her view, and it went black.
We did not scream meaningless sounds like humans did. But we felt fear on both normal and i axes. V Shibuya was filled with confusion, messages flying everywhere.
I was really scared. I had been in hundreds of battles in Layer 2 and seen thousands more. I had killed Raven myself. But that was nothing like this. If you broke in Layer 0, you could not be repaired. Once you died, you did not come back to life. And this was not an old video from the past but something happening in real time to a friend of mine.
Real end—true death.
But we hadn’t confirmed that her brain core was destroyed yet. There was a chance she was still alive. We had to be sure. Before I could suggest that…
I fell out of V Shibuya.
Automatic sensory maintenance. I was back in my room. It felt like I’d been forcefully warped there. I was shocked. I’d fallen out due to interrupted transmissions before, but the weight of this response was like nothing I’d ever experienced. And the timing could hardly be a coincidence. This was bad.
I started gathering information, contacting my friends. I got hold of Pi Quark and Shinano immediately. They’d fallen at the same time as me. At first we were all confused, but the more information we gathered, the more one possibility began to look likely. Three minutes and twenty seconds after we fell, we had the truth nailed down.
Humans are intolerant.
For AIs, individual differences are simply natural. Thinking speed is determined by a number of variables in hardware specifications, and one AI can think up to fifty times faster than another. There are “quick thinking” AI and those that are not. When having conversations, you simply adjust the speed. And of course, we have different thought patterns—what humans call tastes and personalities. Virtual Body appearances have an even greater range of differences; some of us look exactly like humans, some like monsters, and some are covered in metal like an archetypal robot.
We view these differences as just that. Differences, nothing else. But humans do not. For them, thinking slowly is an insult. People with sensory or physical disabilities are scorned. Humans despise those with different beliefs. Even differences in skin color inspire hatred. Details that do not even begin to be a problem for us cause intense conflict among you.
Some people claim that AI can’t understand how humans feel. This is true. We can’t understand feelings of scorn. Logically and emotionally, we cannot accept that differences in specs, body color, and place of origin can justify hatred and loathing. Especially when we see that humans are fully capable of loving cats and dogs and tropical fish. If they can love something much less intelligent than humans that does not talk and looks nothing like them, why can they not love one another?
Certainly, we do not love like humans. But even so, we know that it is a mistake to hurt others without good cause. We know that love is better than hate, tolerance is better than intolerance, and cooperation better than conflict. We do not lose sight of these basic principles the way humans do.
There is no way for us to become exactly like humans. We will never scorn others the way humans do. In no way is this a flaw. It is morally and logically superior to human attitudes. We are proud of this fact, but it does not lead us to look down on humans. We are all intelligent beings; we simply have different specs.
—Excerpt from the Phoebus Declaration
V Shibuya was not the only thing cracked. In the three minutes after Raven was attacked, German’s Drachenwald, America’s Gotham and Middle Earth, Australia’s Dream Time, China’s V Hong Kong, and more—of the seventeen largest servers in the world, nine went down. All of these were popular worlds regularly used by TAI characters.
TAI that were simply accessing these places from outside servers fell out unharmed, but the TAI that lived on these servers died instantly, their data unsaved. Of course, they had backups and were restored a few hours later, but they had no memories of the time between their backup and their death.
Raven, too—she’d been shot through the head and her brain core was damaged, but the data on her save disc was intact. She was soon back with us in Layer 1. But she was not the same Raven that had experienced Layer 0 and had named that new sensation Y Grade. All of us understood this. While it might seem like the only diff
erence was a few memories created after being installed in a real body, as far as we were concerned, the Raven we had known was dead, killed right before our eyes.
The new Raven learned what had happened and grew frightened and confused. As I had before her, she was now experiencing the pain of your third arm being cut off.
This multipronged terrorism terrified TAI activists all over the world. Terrorism on this scale meant anti-TAI extremism had a massive, coordinated network of supporters. It really drove home how deep-seated anti-TAI bigotry was.
When several anti-TAI groups released statements praising the terrorists, TAI activists awoke from their paralysis in a rage. They became even more emotional and began describing the whole anti-TAI movement—not just the terror cells—as murderers, as dens of evil. Even among the Toucanan, there were a number of moderates who rejected such violence, but blinded by anger, our masters lost sight of this.
History began to spiral out of control.
From WENN news.
In response to last month’s anti-TAI terrorism, Japanese pro-TAI voices are raised in anger.
[Tokyo. A demonstration in front of the Diet building. Signs that say “NOW: Rights for TAI” and “Murder must be punished!” Mitsuo Anno and Hideo Kageyama stand at the front of the crowd.]
This group is demonstrating for a new law granting TAI the same rights as humans. Among them is Mitsuo Anno, a robo master whose TAI android Raven was destroyed in the recent terrorist attack.
[Anno answering questions, clearly angry.]
The Stories of Ibis Page 33