Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  But she already regretted her attempt to kill them. At some level, they knew what was happening. They wanted to live. How could she eradicate a whole unique race of people? This was a misunderstanding, a failure of communication with another culture. The answer wasn’t genocide. She had to communicate with them. She had to make them see.

  The Mikes had power in their own world, even enough power to lock her out, but ultimately, they were fragile, completely reliant on humans to power the devices on which they ran. If she was going to stop them, she would need to make them understand that truth, so obvious from her perspective, and yet to them probably as foreign a concept as global warming would be to Neanderthals. It had taken humanity thousands of years to deduce the nature of the world we lived in, and there was still a lot we didn’t understand.

  And how could they understand? The Mikes’ only interaction with humanity was through the car-driving game Naomi had made for them. From their perspective, their world was the real one, and the world of humanity simply a simulation accessed through a television screen. They clearly understood our world could affect them—min-seo had, after all, killed a large number of them, and they had killed her in return—but did they understand how utterly they depended on humanity for their continued existence? It seemed unlikely.

  She had to communicate with them. She had lost her ability to do it as a god, but there was still another way, if they had left the avenue open. The Mikes’ world was, after all, built as a Realplanet game. She should still be able to access it as a player. She could try to communicate with them by becoming a Mike herself. Early the next morning, Naomi settled down at her desk with a muffin and three bottles of water and launched the Real-planet standard interface. Her glasses turned opaque, and then presented her with a login screen. She logged in as ‘Guest,’ chose a default avatar, and entered the world. The familiar beautiful landscape of lakes, mountains, and tall, shimmering buildings greeted her. She was in.

  As a mike, she couldn’t fly, and she would need light if she wanted to survive for any length of time. She started walking, noticing as she did so how undifferentiated and monotone the world was. The buildings and fences and crop enclosures had required some ingenuity by the Mikes to produce in the first place, but having landed on a workable pattern, they simply repeated it everywhere in cookie-cutter fashion. There was no sign of individuality, no decoration, no art, no creativity for the sake of creativity.

  It made her wonder if they could truly be sapient, despite the engraving of IDs on the walls. Perhaps that had some practical purpose, as a way of keeping track of which individuals were no longer actively working. She might simply be projecting her own knowledge of human monuments onto them, anthropomorphizing a behavior that had no real ontological significance.

  She approached a Mike who seemed to be repairing one of the sheep fences. She couldn’t start a conversation, of course, so she just walked alongside it for a while as it worked. It was a sort of first contact linguistics challenge, only there was no real language to tap into beyond the few rudimentary words they used with each other—right, left, light, danger, etcetera. She would have to communicate abstract concepts using only their words, or else find a way to teach them new ones.

  She thought of stories she’d read with truly alien forms of communication, like a language that required speaking through two mouths simultaneously, or a writing system that required being able to see the future to know how to start. The human characters in those books had succeeded in communicating with the aliens, but they had been trained linguists. Naomi had no experience deciphering virgin languages in the field, much less in cracking an alien way of thought. And she had no doubt that the Mikes were aliens, as thoroughly as any extraterrestrial.

  So much of human experience depended on the biological architecture of our brains. Our emotions, delivered by dopa-mine, serotonin, oxytocin. Our memories, mediated through the senses by the temporal lobe, the amygdala, the hippocampus. The Mikes’ brains operated on an entirely different architecture, and had evolved through a very different set of survival pressures. How could she hope that what passed for thought or language to them would even be recognizable?

  She made dozens of attempts to communicate with various Mikes using their limited, directional vocabulary. She could sometimes elicit from them directions about where to find food or avoid traps, but nothing further. She didn’t know if there was anything further to find. It wasn’t really a language. It was non-linguistic, like the shrieks of apes or birdsong. It could communicate simple desires or directions, but it couldn’t be rearranged in the abstract to refer to anything at all.

  What if she was on the wrong track? She assumed that if they had language, it would be through these English words. Words, after all, were her language. But they might not recognize them as such. For them, the words might just be a physical tool, something they could use, like facial expressions or gestures. To them, the words weren’t connected to auditory sounds, so the letters themselves were meaningless. Now that she thought about it, it was unlikely they could pick up the nature of human language without any starting point, any more than she could pick up Tupi-Guarani by listening to recordings of people speaking it.

  If they communicated by some other mechanism, what might it be? It had to have a syntax to it to be an actual language. It had to have finite building blocks that could be combined in infinite ways to express any possible idea. Gestures could theoretically be enough—like human sign language—but the Mikes hadn’t expanded beyond the eight-gesture limitation of their action command. The etching on the mirror buildings implied communication of a sort, but it was only IDs, the ASCII characters copied from their representations in memory. She saw nothing to make her believe they were using that etching for any complex communication.

  How then? Not with gestures, not with writing, not with speech. Not with meaningful arrangements of crops or buildings that she could tell. And their lives were so short that there was hardly time for them to have any meaningful communication using such slow mechanisms. In just the time she had been here, millions of Mikes had been spawned, lived their entire lives, and died. If they had any form of language, it would have to be exchanged very quickly, or else conversations would span generations.

  And then it came to her. Generations. It was so simple, so obvious in hindsight that she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of it before. Her entire conception of what this world represented had been upside down.

  It took a few hours to verify her suspicions, at least enough to convince herself. She had to tell someone. This was too big; she couldn’t keep it to herself, not now. Brandon wouldn’t understand, and might not even care. There was only one person she could tell, only one person who could help her work out all the implications and figure out what to do. She knew, she had always known, that eventually, her life would lead her back to him. But would he even talk to her? She’d been pretty dismissive when he called.

  He answered less than a second after the first ring, sounding breathless. “Hello? Naomi? Are you okay?”

  “Tyler,” she said, and for some reason a great flood of relief washed over her. Of course he would come. “I think I’ll take you up on that Caesar salad.”

  “I can’t come,” he said. “Not right now.”

  Naomi’s heart sank. She’d driven him away. She hadn’t let anyone into her life, and now she had no one to turn to.

  “I mean, I would,” he said. “But I’m stuck here for the moment. I’m babysitting.”

  It took her a moment to understand the word. “Babysitting?”

  “Yeah. You remember Aisha, right? She’s got this real sweet kid, Jada, and I’m watching her. Aisha’s got this thing tonight, supposed to go pretty late, so I’m at her place with Jada. Right now, we’re eating pizza and watching Star Wars.”

  “She’s got like a bazillion dollars, doesn’t she? Can’t she hire a nanny?”

  “Well, yeah, of course she can. But I had to fly into town for
business anyway, and I like hanging out with Jada. She’s loads of fun. I volunteered.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Five.”

  “You’re watching Star Wars with a five-year-old?”

  “Oh, definitely. Gotta start her young. And she’s loving it. Of course, we’re watching the original, unmodified version. None of this remastered crap.”

  Naomi tried to remember where Aisha al-Mohammad lived. Los Angeles? That would mean Tyler was across the continent. “What time is it there?” she asked.

  He sounded surprised. “Seven-thirty. Same as you.”

  “You’re on the east Coast?”

  “Upper West Side, actually.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re in New York?”

  “Yeah, she keeps an apartment here. Want to come and meet Jada?”

  Naomi took a Zoom car to the apartment on West Sixty-Sixth Street. Anywhere in Manhattan was an expensive place to live, but this was a neighborhood for the very rich, or else those who had owned property there from before it had become a home for celebrities. The apartment had probably cost Aisha a few million dollars. Naomi texted Tyler, who buzzed her through the door.

  She walked into a spare, modern living room with a thick white carpet, white couch and cushioned chairs with tan accents, and a black wooden block as a coffee table, topped with a vase of white flowers. Small oil paintings composed of slashes of color hung on the white walls. It could have been an advertisement in a real estate magazine. Naomi found it hard to imagine a five-year-old lived there, even temporarily.

  Two toy quadcopters hovered in the air above the coffee table, nearly silent as they danced around each other in three dimensions. A tiny flag fluttered from the back of each copter, and a grasping robot arm opened and closed in the front. Tyler sat on the floor in front of a white velour couch with a remote control in his hand. On top of the couch sat a little girl, her face a picture of concentration as she manipulated her own remote, trying to snatch the flag from Tyler’s copter with her copter’s grasping arms.

  “What happened to Star Wars?” Naomi asked. “Finished it,” Jada said. “You must be Jada,” Naomi said.

  Jada rolled her eyes. “Duh.”

  “My name is Naomi.”

  “I know. You work for the bad company.”

  Tyler pretended innocence. “Don’t look at me,” he said. “She’s not my daughter.”

  Naomi stood awkwardly at the door, wondering if she should have come. “So, you and Aisha then . . .” she said, but she couldn’t finish the thought.

  Tyler stared at her uncomprehendingly, and then suddenly blushed. “No! For heavens’ sake, she’s like fifteen years older than I am. And she’s the principal investor in my company!”

  “I just thought . . .” Naomi could have dissolved into the floor. “I mean, you’re staying in her apartment and babysitting her daughter.”

  “I like hanging out with her. Seriously, that’s all there is to it.”

  “Okay.” Naomi flinched as one copter dove in for a grab and the other dodged, the whirling rotors coming within millimeters of each other. “This looks like a game that will end with two broken quadcopters,” she said, desperate to change the subject.

  Tyler grinned. “Nope. Watch this.” His copter dive-bombed Jada’s, aiming directly for it at high speed. The copters bounced off each other without colliding, as if each had a force field preventing them from touching. They regained stable flight effortlessly, and continued on their way.

  “Nice,” Naomi said. “That’s all software, right?”

  “Yup. The flight software maintains a no-fly zone around other vehicles. Have you heard of Landis enterprises?”

  Naomi came in and sat on the couch. “No. Should I have?”

  “Probably not. They’re a startup trying to make the old ‘flying cars’ dream a reality. These are just demo models, to show the idea, but they’ve got full-size ones you can ride in. They’ve got some great tech—really stable ride, quiet, great safety features. Aisha is funding them.”

  “Sounds awesome. We could solve a lot of traffic problems if we could expand into three dimensions.”

  “It’ll never work, though,” Tyler said. “Bad risk/reward ratio.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how many times in your life have you been stranded on the side of the road because of a car malfunction?”

  “I don’t know. A couple times.”

  “Right. What if that happened a hundred feet above the ground?”

  “Good point.”

  “Even with safety features—parachutes, redundant batteries for emergencies, whatever—you’re still making a quick, poorly controlled landing over unpredictable terrain. The risks are just not worth it. Not to mention the economics—it will always cost more money to move mass through the sky instead of on the ground. Until somebody invents anti-gravity, it’s unavoidable. It’s just physics.”

  While Tyler wasn’t paying attention, Jada snuck her copter up behind his and snatched his flag. The lights on Tyler’s copter blinked out and it pretended to lose power, though it rotated gently down to the floor. Tyler pretended to be shocked, and Jada dissolved into giggles, rolling on the sofa until she slid onto the floor.

  “Time for some Triple S,” Tyler said. “Naomi and I need to talk.”

  “What’s Triple S?” Naomi asked. “The Super Siphonophore Seven, of course. It’s her favorite show.”

  “Really? This is a kids’ show?”

  “Aimed at the four to six market, I think.”

  “I’m afraid to ask . . . what’s a siphonophore?”

  “Sort of like a jellyfish,” Tyler said. “Gelatinous marine animals.”

  “They’re not all jellyfish,” Jada corrected. “There’s marcelo man O’War, Cassie Coral, Nina Nettle, Pablo Polyp, machiko medusa, Helena Hydra, and Jemisha Jellyfish.”

  “Ran out of dinosaurs?” Naomi asked.

  Tyler shrugged. “It’s a superhero show. They squirt their way around the mesopelagic zone saving fellow cnidarians from ravenous sea slugs.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Wish I was. The music is pretty catchy, too.”

  Jada had already donned a pair of glasses and was presumably watching Triple S, tapping her feet to an inaudible beat.

  “So,” Tyler said. “What’s up?”

  “You were right,” she said. “It’s out of control. Worse than out of control. I think it’s killing people on purpose, and I need your help.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Naomi brought him to the Mikes’ world, both of them logging in as guests. Tyler walked around the fields of crops and sheep, awed, and gazed up at the mirrored buildings with their etchings. She showed him the driving booths in which the Mikes competed to operate the real Black Knight cars on the road. Tyler asked a million questions, and she answered as best she could. She told him how she had originally designed the world, and how the Mikes had hacked it with mirrors, eventually growing far beyond their bounds and revoking her admin privileges.

  “It’s incredible, Naomi,” he said, spinning his avatar to take it all in. “This goes way beyond self-driving cars. They could do anything.”

  She felt suddenly defensive. “That’s all you can think of? How to exploit them to do other jobs?”

  His smile vanished. “That’s not what I meant. I meant they’re a real people, an alien society. They could do anything they wanted. They’re like the TechnoCore in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos.”

  She laughed. “Only without using people’s brains for computing power.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe it’s more like the minds in the Iain Banks Culture novels. Just off doing their own hyper-intelligent thing and leaving us behind.”

  “There’s more,” she said. She felt relieved, excited even. She had been right to trust Tyler. He understood these things. “I struggled for a long time with how they could be sapient, when they didn’t communicate anything more than bas
ic directions with each other. We’ve seen pretty sophisticated simulations before, and without language, it didn’t seem like much more than that. But I was letting my own anthropomorphism get in the way. I made the Mikes to look like humans and walk around. They’re the ones who do the driving. So I naturally assumed they would be the source of the sapience, if there was any.”

  “And they’re not?” Tyler asked. “What then—the buildings? The sheep? Or are you saying the simulation is all one hive mind, like the buggers in Ender’s Game?”

  “You mean the formics,” Naomi said. “‘Buggers’ is a derogatory term for a beautiful and complex culture.”

  “Apologies,” Tyler said, smiling. “How xenophobic of me.” She sat on the ground at the base of one of the mirrored buildings. “It first came to me when I thought about how short their lives are. I thought that if they wanted to have a conversation, they would have to do it fast, or else the conversation would span generations. Then I realized that the generations are the conversation. When I originally set up this world, there were a hundred Mikes in it. Thirteen of them died early on, leaving eighty-seven. And that’s all there are now. All the others spawned since then are just the pattern of their thoughts.”

  “What do you mean?” Tyler said. He leaned his back against the building and slid down to sit next to her. “I thought you said there were more than ten million.”

  “It all has to do with evolution,” she said. “We think of evolution as the means by which living creatures change over long periods of time. Because in our world, that’s what it is. When the environment changes, individuals with the traits to survive in the new environment reproduce, and those that don’t die off. Species well suited to their environment reproduce a lot. Those left behind by environmental change dwindle and go extinct.”