BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  Three weeks after Medici rose from the dead, when the upload process, which had developed a few bugs while mothballed, was running smoothly again, they were let loose on the first packets of RP data.

  “You still know your drill, guys?” asked Joe Calibri, their new manager. “I hope you can get back up to speed quickly. There’s a lot of stuff to process, you can imagine.”

  “It seems like yesterday,” said Cha, the Chinese-American, at just turned thirty the oldest of the youthful team by a couple of years. Stoop-shouldered, distant, with a sneaky, unexpected sense of humour, he made Joe a little nervous. Stocky, muscular little Josh, more like a Jock than an RP jockey, was less of a proposition. Laxmi was the one to watch. Sophie was the most junior and the youngest, a bright, keen and dedicated kid.

  The new manager chuckled uncertainly.

  The team, by one accord, grinned balefully at their new fool and went to work, donning mitts and helmets.

  Sophie Renata felt the old tingling, absent from simulation work; the thrilling hesitation and excitement – The session ended too soon. Coming back to earth, letting the lab take shape around her, absent thoughts went through her head; about whether she was going to find a new apartment with Lax. About cooking dinner; about other RP projects. The Mars gig would be fantastic, but it was going to be very competitive getting onto that team. Asteroid mining surveys: plenty of work there, boring but well paid. What about the lower atmosphere of Venus project? And had it always been like this, coming out of the Medici? Had she just forgotten the sharp sense of loss; the brief tug of inexplicable panic?

  She looked around. Cha was gazing dreamily at nothing; Lax frowned at her desktop, as if trying to remember a phone number. Josh was looking right back at Sophie, so sad and strange, as if she’d robbed him of something precious, and she had no idea why.

  He shrugged, grinned, and shook his head. The moment passed.

  Emergence

  This is the story of a very long life, punctuated by increasingly effective, experimental longevity treatments, that runs parallel with the progress of embodied and non-embodied sentient AIs, from sophisticated data-processors, robotics and programs, borrowing personality from their minders – to independent self-aware consciousness: and (on Earth), perhaps inevitably, to chattel slavery. Written for Meeting Infinity, the fourth in Jonathan Strahan’s series. A Theodore Sturgeon Award 2016 finalist. “Emergence” picked up several reviews (unusually for one of my stories), probably because of the Sturgeon shortlisting; mostly not so great! But someone did say: it stands out in the anthology as a story that really is about meeting infinity.

  I faced the doctor across her desk. The room was quiet, the walls were pale or white, but somehow I couldn’t see details. There was a blank in my mind, no past to this moment; everything blurred by the adrenalin in my blood.

  “You have three choices,” she said gently. “You can upload; you can download. Or you must return.”

  My reaction to those terms, upload, download, was embarrassing. I tried to hide it and knew I’d failed.

  “Go back?” I said bitterly, and in defiance. “To the city of broken dreams? Why would I ever want to do that?”

  “Don’t be afraid, Romy. The city of broken dreams may have become the city of boundless opportunity.”

  Then I woke up: Simon’s breathing body warm against my side, Arc’s unsleeping presence calm in my cloud. A shimmering, starry night above us and the horror of that doctor’s tender smile already fading.

  It was a dream, just a dream.

  With a sigh of profound relief I reached up to pull my stars closer, and fell asleep again floating among them; thinking about Lei.

  I was born in the year 1998, CE. My parents named me Romanz Jolie Davison; I have lived a long, long time. I’ve been upgrading since our ‘uppers’ were called experimental longevity treatments. I was a serial-clinical-trialer, when genuine extended lifespan was brand new. Lei was someone I met through this shared interest; this extreme sport. We were friends, then lovers; and then ex-lovers who didn’t meet for many years, until one day we found each other again, on the first big Habitat Station, in the future we’d been so determined to see (talk about ‘meeting cute’!). But Lei had always been the risk taker, the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid. I was the cautious one. I’d never taken an unsafe treatment, and I’d been careful with my money too (you need money to do super-extended lifespan well). We had our reunion and drifted apart, two lives that didn’t mesh. One day, when I hadn’t seen her for a while, I found out she’d gone back to Earth on medical advice.

  Had we kept in touch at all? I had to check my cache, which saddened me; although it’s only a mental eye-blink. Apparently not. She’d left without a goodbye, and I’d let her go. I wondered if I should try to reach her. But what would I say? I had a bad dream, I think it was about you, are you okay? I needed a better reason to pick up the traces, so I did nothing.

  Then I had the same dream again; exactly the same. I woke up terrified, and possessed by an absurd puzzle: had I really just been sitting in that fuzzy doctor’s office again? Or had I only dreamed I was having the same dream? A big Space Station is a haunted place, saturated with information that swims into your head and you have no idea how. Sometimes a premonition really is a premonition: so I asked Station to trace her. The result was that time-honoured brush-off: it has not been possible to connect this call.

  Relieved, I left it at that.

  I was, I am, one of four Senior Magistrates on the Outer Reaches circuit. In Jupiter Moons, my home town, and Outer Reaches’ major population centre, I often deal with Emergents. They account for practically all our petty offences, sad to say. Full sentients around here are either too law-abiding, too crafty to get caught, or too seriously criminal for my jurisdiction.

  Soon after my dreams about Lei, a young SE called Beowulf was up before me, on a charge of Criminal Damage and Hooliganism. The incident was undisputed. A colleague, another Software Entity, had failed to respond ‘you too’ to the customary and friendly sign-off ‘have a nice day’. In retaliation, Beowulf had shredded a stack of files in CPI (Corporate and Political Interests, our Finance Sector); where they both worked. The offence was pitiful, but the kid had a record. He’d run out of chances; his background was against him, and CPI had decided to make a meal of it. Poor Beowulf, a thing of rational light, wearing an ill-fitting suit of virtual flesh for probably the first time in his life, stood penned in his archaic, data-simulacrum of wood and glass, for two mortal subjective hours; while the CPI advocate and Beowulf’s public defender scrapped over the price of a cup of coffee.

  Was Beowulf’s response proportionate? Was there an intention of offence? Was it possible to establish, by precedent, that ‘you too’ had the same or commensurate ‘customary and friendly’ standing, in law, as ‘have a nice day’?

  Poor kid, it was a real pity he’d tried to conceal the evidence.

  I had to find him guilty, no way around it.

  I returned to macro-time convinced I could at least transmute his sentence, but my request ran into a Partnership Director I’d crossed swords with before; she was adamant and we fell out. We couldn’t help sharing our quarrel. No privacy for anyone in public office: it’s the law out here and I think a good one. But we could have kept it down. The images we flung to and fro were lurid. I recall eyeballs dipped in acid, a sleep-pod lined with bloody knives… and then we got nasty. The net result (aside from childish entertainment for idle citizens) was that I was barred from the case. Eventually I found out, by reading the court announcements, that Beowulf’s sentence had been confirmed in the harshest terms. Corrective custody until a validated improvement was shown, but not less than one week.

  In Outer Reaches we use expressions like ‘night, and day’, ‘week, and hour’, without meaning much at all. Not so the Courts. A week in jail meant the full Earth Standard version, served in macro-time.

  I’d been finding the Court Sessions tiring that rotation, but I walked
home anyway; to get over my chagrin and unkink my brain after a day spent switching in and out of virtual time. I stopped at every Ob Bay, making out I was hoping to spot the first flashes of the spectacular Centaur Storm we’d been promised. But even the celestial weather was out to spoil my day. Updates kept telling me about a growing chance that the show had been cancelled.

  My apartment was in the Rim, Premium Level; it still is. (Why not? I can afford it). Simon and Arc welcomed me home with bright, ancient music for a firework display. They’d cleared the outward wall of our living space to create our own private Ob Bay, and were refusing to believe reports that it was all in vain. I cooked a meal, with Simon flying around me to help out, deft and agile in the rituals a human kitchen. Arc, as a slender woman, bare-headed, dressed in silver-grey coveralls, watched us from her favourite couch.

  Simon and Arc… They sounded like a firm of architects, as I often told them (I repeat myself, it’s a privilege of age). They were probably secretly responsible for the rash of fantasy spires and bubbles currently annoying me, all over Station’s majestic open spaces—

  “Why is Emergent Individual law still set in human terms?” I demanded. “Why does a Software Entity get punished for ‘criminal damage’ when nothing was damaged; not for more than a fraction of a millisecond—?”

  My housemates rolled their eyes. “It’ll do him good,” said Arc. “Only a human-terms thinker would think otherwise.”

  I was in for some tough love.

  “What kind of a dreadful name is Beowulf, anyway?” inquired Simon.

  “Ancient Northern European. Beowulf was a monster—” I caught myself, recalling I had no privacy. “No! Correction. The monster was Grendel. Beowulf was the hero, a protector of his people. It’s aspirational.”

  “He is a worm though, isn’t he?”

  I sighed, and took up my delicious bowl of Tom Yum; swimming with chilli pepper glaze. “Yes,” I said glumly. “He’s ethnically worm, poor kid.”

  “Descended from a vicious little virus strain,” Arc pointed out. “He has tendencies. He can’t help it, but we have to be sure they’re purged.”

  “I don’t know how you can be so prejudiced.”

  “Humans are so squeamish,” teased Simon.

  “Humans are human,” said Arc. “That’s the fun of them.”

  They were always our children, begotten not created, as the old saying goes. There’s no such thing as a sentient AI who wasn’t born of human mind. But never purely human: Simon, my embodied housemate, had magpie neurons in his background. Arc took human form for pleasure, but her being was pure information, the elemental stuff of the universe. They had gone beyond us, as children do. We were now just one strand in their past.

  The entry lock chimed. It was Anton, my clerk, a slope-shouldered, barrel-chested bod with a habitually doleful expression. He looked distraught.

  “Apologies for disturbing you at home Rom. May I come in?”

  He sat on Arc’s couch, silent and grim. Two of my little dream-tigers, no bigger than geckos, emerged from the miniature jungle of our bamboo and teak room divider and sat gazing at him, tails around their paws.

  “Those are pretty,” said Anton at last. “Where’d you get them?”

  “I made them myself, I’ll share you the code. What’s up, Anton?”

  “We’ve got trouble. Beowulf didn’t take the confirmation well.”

  I noticed that my ban had been lifted: a bad sign. “The damage?”

  “Oh, nothing much. It’s in your updates, of which you’ll find a ton. He’s only removed himself from custody—”

  “Oh, God. He’s back in CPI?”

  “No. Our hero had a better idea.”

  Having feared revenge instantly, I felt faint with relief.

  “But he’s been traced?”

  “You bet. He’s taken a hostage, and a non-sentient Lander. He’s heading for the surface, right now.”

  The little tigers laid back their ears and sneaked out of sight. Arc’s human form drew a respectful breath. “What are you guys going to do?”

  “Go after him. What else?” I was at the lockers, dragging out my gear.

  ●

  Jupiter Moons has no police force. We don’t have much of anything like that: everyone does everything. Of course I was going with the Search and Rescue, Beowulf was my responsibility. I didn’t argue when Simon and Arc insisted on coming too. I don’t like to think of them as my minders; or my curators, but they are both, and I’m a treasured relic.

  Simon equipped himself with a heavy-duty hard suit, in which he and Arc would travel freight. Anton and I would travel cabin. Our giant neighbour was in a petulant mood, so we had a Mag-Storm Drill in the Launch Bay. We heard from our Lander that Jovian magnetosphere storms are unpredictable. Neural glitches caused by wayward magnetism, known as soft errors, build up silently, and we must watch each other for signs of disorientation or confusion. Physical burn out, known as hard error, is very dangerous; more frequent than people think, and fatal accidents do happen—

  It was housekeeping. None of us paid much attention.

  Anton, one of those people always doomed to ‘fly the plane’, would spend the journey in horrified contemplation of the awful gravitational whirlpools that swarm around Jupiter Moons, even on a calm day. We left him in peace, poor devil, and ran scenarios. We had no contact with the hostage, a young pilot just out of training. We could only hope she hadn’t been harmed. We had no course for the vehicle: Beowulf had evaded basic safety protocols and failed to enter one. But Europa is digitally mapped, and well within the envelope of Jupiter Moons’ data cloud. We knew exactly where the stolen Lander was, before we’d even left Station’s gravity. Cardew, our team leader, said it looked like a crash landing, but a soft crash. The hostage, though she wasn’t talking, seemed fine. Thankfully the site wasn’t close to any surface or sub-ice installation, and Mag Storm precautions meant there was little immediate danger to anyone. But we had to assume the worst, and the worst was scary, so we’d better get the situation contained.

  We sank our screws about 500 metres from Beowulf’s vehicle, with a plan worked out. Simon and Arc, dressed for the weather, disembarked at once. Cardew and I, plus his four-bod ground team, climbed into our exos: checked each other, and stepped onto the lift, one by one.

  We were in noon sunlight: a pearly dusk, like winter’s dawn in the country where I was born. The terrain was striated by traces of cryovolcanoes: brownish salt runnels glinting gold where the faint light caught them. The temperature was a balmy -170 Celsius. I swiftly found my ice-legs; though it had been too long. Vivid memories of my first training for this activity – in Antarctica, so long ago – came welling up. I was very worried. I couldn’t figure out what Beowulf was trying to achieve. I didn’t know how I was going to help him, if he kept on behaving like an out of control, invincible computer virus. But it was still glorious. To be walking on Europa Moon. To feel the ice in my throat, as my air came to me, chilled from the convertor!

  At fifty metres Cardew called a halt and I went on alone. Safety was paramount; Beowulf came second. If he couldn’t be talked down he’d have to be neutralised from a distance: a risky tactic for the SE hostage, involving potentially lethal force. We’d avoid that, if possible.

  We’d left our Lander upright on her screws, braced by harpoons. The stolen vehicle was belly-flopped. On our screens it had looked like a rookie landing failure. Close up I saw something different. Someone had dropped the Lander flat deliberately, and manoeuvred it under a natural cove of crumpled ice; dragging ice-mash after it to partially block the entrance. You clever little bugger, I thought, impressed at this instant skill-set (though the idea that a Lander could be hidden was absurd). I commanded the exo to kneel, eased myself out of its embrace, opened a channel and yelled into my suit radio.

  “Beowulf! Are you in there? Are you guys okay?”

  No reply, but the seals popped, and the lock opened smoothly. I looked back and gave a thumb
s up to six bulky statues. I felt cold, in the shadow of the ice cove; but intensely alive.

  ●

  I remember every detail up to that point, and a little beyond.

  I cleared the lock and proceeded (nervously) to the main cabin. Beowulf’s hostage had her pilot’s couch turned away from the instruments. She faced me, bare-headed, pretty: dark blue sensory tendrils framing a smooth young green-bronze face. I said are you okay, and got no response. I said Trisnia, it’s Trisnia isn’t it? Am I talking to Trisnia?, but I knew I wasn’t. Reaching into her cloud, I saw her unique identifier, and tightly coiled around it a flickering thing, a sparkle of red and gold—

  “Beowulf?”

  The girl’s expression changed, her lips quivered. “I’m okay!” she blurted. “He didn’t mean any harm! He’s just a kid! He wanted to see the sky!”

  Stockholm Syndrome or Bonnie and Clyde? I didn’t bother trying to find out. I simply asked Beowulf to release her, with the usual warnings. To my relief he complied at once. I ordered the young pilot to her safe room; which she was not to leave until further—

  Then we copped the Magstorm hit, orders of magnitude stronger and more direct than predicted for this exposure.

  The next thing I remember (stripped of my perfect recall, reduced to the jerky flicker of enhanced human memory), I’m sitting on the other pilot’s couch, talking to Beowulf. The stolen Lander was intact at this point; I had lights and air and warmth. Trisnia was safe, as far as I could tell. Beowulf was untouched, but my entire team, caught outdoors, had been flatlined. They were dead and gone. Cardew, his crew; and Simon; and Arc. I’d lost my cloud. The whole of Europa appeared to be observing radio silence, and I was getting no signs of life from the Lander parked just 500 metres away, either. There was nothing to be done. It was me and the deadly dangerous criminal virus, waiting to be rescued.