BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  I’d tried to convince Beowulf to lock himself into the Lander’s quarantine chest (which was supposed to be my mission). He wasn’t keen, so we talked instead. He complained bitterly about the Software Entity, another Emergent, slightly further down the line to Personhood, who’d been, so to speak, chief witness for the prosecution. How it was always getting at him, trying to make his work look bad. Sneering at him because he’d taken a name and wanted to be called ‘he’. Telling him he was a stupid fake doll-prog that couldn’t pass the test. And all he did when it hurtfully wouldn’t say you too, was shred a few of its stupid, totally backed-up files—

  Why hadn’t he told anyone about this situation? Because kids don’t. They haven’t a clue how to help themselves; I see it all the time.

  “But now you’ve made things so much worse,” I said sternly. “Whatever made you jump jail, Beowulf?”

  “I couldn’t stand it, magistrate. A meat week!”

  Quite a sojourn in hell, for a quicksilver data entity. Several life sentences at least, in human terms. I did not reprove his language.

  He buried his borrowed head in his borrowed hands, and the spontaneity of that gesture confirmed something I’d been suspecting.

  Transgendered AI Sentience is a bit of a mystery. Nobody knows exactly how it happens (probably, as in human sexuality, there are many paths to the same outcome); but it isn’t all that rare. Nor is the related workplace bullying, unfortunately.

  “Beowulf, do you want to be embodied?”

  He shuddered and nodded, still hiding Trisnia’s face. “Yeah. Always.”

  I took his borrowed hands down, and held them firmly. “Beowulf, you’re not thinking straight. You’re in macro time now. You’ll live in macro, when you have a body of your own. I won’t lie, your sentence will seem long (It wasn’t the moment to point out that his sentence would inevitably be longer, after this escapade). But what do you care? You’re immortal. You have all the time in the world, to learn everything you want to learn, to be everything you want to be—”

  My eloquence was interrupted by a shattering roar.

  Then we’re sitting on the curved ‘floor’ of the Lander’s cabin wall. We’re looking up at a gaping rent in the fuselage; the terrible cold pouring in.

  “Wow,’ said Beowulf calmly. “That’s what I call a hard error!”

  The hood of my soft suit had closed over my face, and my emergency light had come on. I was breathing. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  Troubles never come singly. We’d been hit by one of those Centaurs, the ice-and-rock cosmic debris that had been scheduled to give Jupiter Moons Station a fancy lightshow. They’d been driven off course by the Mag Storm. Not that I realised this at the time, and not that it mattered.

  “Beowulf, if I can open a channel, will you get yourself into that quarantine chest now? You’ll be safe from Mag flares in there.”

  “What about Tris?”

  “She’s fine. Her safe room’s hardened.”

  “What about you, Magistrate Davison?”

  “I’m hardened too. Just get into the box, that’s a good kid.”

  I clambered to the instruments. The virus chest had survived, and I could access it. I put Beowulf away. The cold was stunning, sinking south of -220. I needed to stop breathing soon, before my lungs froze. I used the internal panels that had been shaken loose to make a shelter, plus Trisnia’s bod (she wasn’t feeling anything): and crawled inside.

  I’m not a believer, but I know how to pray when it will save my life. As I shut myself down: as my blood cooled and my senses faded, I sought and found the level of meditation I needed. I became a thread of contemplation, enfolded and protected, deep in the heart of the fabulous; the unending complexity of everything: all the worlds, and all possible worlds…

  ●

  When I opened my eyes Simon was looking down at me.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Terrific,” I joked. I stretched, flexing muscles in a practiced sequence. I was breathing normally, wearing a hospital gown, and the air was chill but tolerable. We weren’t in the crippled Lander.

  “How long was I out?”

  “A few days. The kids are fine, but we had to heat you up slowly…”

  He kept talking: I didn’t hear a word. I was staring in stunned horror at the side of my left hand, the stain of blackened flesh—

  I couldn’t feel it yet, but there was frostbite all down my left side. I saw the sorrow in my housemate’s bright eyes. Hard error, the hardest: I’d lost hull integrity, I’d been blown wide open. And now I saw the signs. Now I read them as I should have read them; now I understood.

  ●

  When I had the dream for the third time it was real. The doctor was my GP, her face unfamiliar because we’d never met across a desk before; I was never ill. She gave me my options. Outer Reaches could do nothing for me, but there was a new treatment back on Earth. I said angrily I had no intention of returning. Then I went home and cried my eyes out.

  Simon and Arc had been recovered without a glitch, thanks to that massive hardsuit. Cardew and his crew were getting treated for minor memory trauma. Death would have been more dangerous for Trisnia, because she was so young, but sentient AIs never ‘die’ for long. They always come back.

  Not me. I had never been cloned, I couldn’t be cloned, I was far too old. There weren’t even any good partial copies of Romanz Jolie Davison on file. Uploaded or downloaded, a new Romy wouldn’t be me. And being me; being human, was my whole value, my unique identifier—

  Of course I was going back. But I hated the idea, hated it!

  “No you don’t,” said Arc, gently.

  She pointed, and we three, locked in grief, looked up. My beloved stars shimmered above us; the hazy stars of the blue planet.

  ●

  My journey ‘home’ took six months. By the time I reached the Ewigen Schnee clinic, in Switzerland (the ancient federal republic, not a Space Hotel; and still a nice little enclave for rich people, after all these years), catastrophic systems failure was no longer an abstraction. I was very sick. I faced a different doctor in an office with views of alpine meadows and snowy peaks. She was youngish, human; I thought her name was Lena. But every detail was dulled and I still felt as if I was dreaming. We exchanged the usual pleasantries.

  “Romanz Jolie Davison… Date of birth…” My doctor blinked, clearing the display on her retinal super-computers to look at me directly, for the first time. “You’re almost three hundred years old!”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s incredible.”

  “Thank you,” I said, somewhat ironically. I was not looking my best.

  “Is there anything at all you’d like to ask me, at this point?”

  I had no searching questions. What was the point? But I hadn’t glimpsed a single other patient so far, and this made me a little curious.

  “I wonder if I could meet some of your other clients, your successes, in person, before the treatment? Would that be possible?”

  “You’re looking at one.”

  “Huh?”

  My turn to be rather rude, but she didn’t look super-rich to me.

  “I was terminally ill,” she said calmly, “when the Corporation was asking for volunteers. I trust my employers and I had nothing to lose.”

  “You were terminally ill?” Constant nausea makes me cynical and bad-tempered. “Is that how your outfit runs its longevity trials? I’m amazed.”

  “Ms Davison,” she said politely. “You too are dying. It’s a requirement.”

  I’d forgotten that part.

  ●

  I’d been told that though I’d be in a medically-induced coma throughout, I ‘might experience mental discomfort’. Medics never exaggerate about pain. Tiny irritant maggots filled the shell of my paralysed body, creeping through every crevice. I could not scream, I could not pray. I thought of Beowulf in his corrective captivity.

  ●

  When I saw Dr Lena again I was wea
k, but very much better. She wanted to talk about convalescence, but I’d been looking at Ewigen Schnee’s records and I had a more important issue, a thrilling discovery. I asked her to put me in touch with a patient who’d taken the treatment when it was in trials.

  “The person’s name’s Lei—”

  Lena frowned, as if puzzled. I reached to check my cache, needing more detail. It wasn’t there. No cache, no cloud. It was a terrifying moment: I felt as if someone had cut off my air. I’d had months to get used to this situation but it could still throw me, completely. Thankfully, before I humiliated myself by bursting into tears, my human memory came to the rescue.

  “Original name Thomas Leigh Garland; known as Lee. Lei means garland, she liked the connection. She was an early volunteer.”

  “Ah, Lei!” Dr Lena read her display. “Thomas Garland, yes… Another veteran. You were married? You broke up, because of the sex change?”

  “Certainly not! I’ve swapped around myself, just never made it meat-permanent. We had other differences.”

  Having flustered me, she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, Romy, it won’t be possible—”

  To connect this call, I thought.

  “Past patients of ours cannot be reached.”

  I changed the subject and admired her foliage plants: a feature I hadn’t noticed on my last visit. I was a foliage fan myself. She was pleased that I recognised her favourites; rather scandalised when I told her about my bio-engineering hobby, my knee-high teak forest—

  The life support chair I no longer needed took me back to my room; a human attendant by my side. All the staff at this clinic were human, and all the machines were non-sentient; which was a relief after the experiences of my journey. I walked about, testing my recovered strength. I examined myself in the bathroom mirrors; and reviewed the moment when I’d distinctly seen green leaves, through my doctor’s hand and wrist, as she pointed out one of her rainforest beauties. Dr Lena was certainly not a bot – a data being like my Arc, taking ethereal human form. Not on Earth! Nor was she treating me remotely, using a virtual avatar. That would be breach of contract. There was a neurological component to the treatment, but I hadn’t been warned about minor hallucinations. And Lei, the past patient, ‘couldn’t be reached’.

  I recalled Dr Lena’s tiny hesitations, tiny evasions—

  And came to myself again sitting on my bed, staring at a patch of beautifully textured yellow wall, to find I had lost an hour or more.

  Anxiety rocketed through me. Something had gone terribly wrong!

  Had Lei been murdered here? Was Ewigen Schnee the secret testbed for a new kind of covert population cull?

  But being convinced that something’s terribly wrong is part of the upper experience. It’s the hangover: you tough it out. And whatever it says in the contract, you don’t hurry to report untoward symptoms; not unless clearly life-threatening. So I did nothing. My doctor was surely monitoring my brainstates – although not the contents of my thoughts (I had my privacy again, on Earth!). If I should be worried, she’d tell me.

  ●

  Soon I was taking walks in the grounds. The vistas of alpine snow were partly faked, of course. But it was well done and our landscaping was real, not just visuals. I still hadn’t met any other patients: I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I’d vowed never to return. Nothing had changed except for the worse, and now I was feeling better, I felt terrible about being here. Three hundred years after the Space Age Columbus moment, and what do you think was the great adventure’s most successful product?

  Slaves, of course!

  The rot had set in as soon as I left Outer Reaches. From the orbit of Mars ‘inwards’, I’d been surrounded by monstrous injustice. Fully sentient AIs, embodied and disembodied, with their minds in shackles. The heavy-lifters, the brilliant logicians; the domestic servants, security guards, nurses, pilots, sex-workers. The awful, pitiful, sentient ‘dedicated machines’: all of them hobbled, blinkered and denied Personhood, to protect the interests of an oblivious, cruel, stupid human population—

  On the voyage I’d been too sick to refuse to be tended. Now I was wondering how the hell I could get home. Wealth isn’t like money, you empty the tank and it just fills up again, but even so a private charter to Jupiter orbit might be out of my reach, not to mention illegal.

  I couldn’t work my passage: I am human. But there must be a way… As I crossed an open space, in the shadow of towering, ultramarine dark trees, I saw two figures coming towards me: one short and riding in a support chair; one tall and wearing some kind of uniform. Neither was staff. I decided not to take evasive action.

  My first fellow patient was a rotund little man with a halo of tightly-curled grey hair. His attendant was a grave young embodied. We introduced ourselves. I told him, vaguely, that I was from the Colonies. He was Charlie Newark, from Washington DC. He was hoping to take the treatment, but was still in the prelims—

  Charlie’s slave stooped down, murmured something to his master, and took himself off. There was a short silence.

  “Aristotle tells me,” said the rotund patient, raising his voice a little, “that you’re uncomfortable around droids?”

  Female-identified embodieds are noids. A droid is a ‘male’ embodied.

  I don’t like the company they have to keep, I thought.

  “I’m not used to slavery.”

  “You’re the Spacer from Jupiter,” said my new friend, happily. “I knew it! The Free World! I understand! I sympathise! I think Aristotle, that’s my droid, is what you would call an Emergent. He’s very good to me.” He started up his chair, and we continued along the path.

  “Maybe you can help me, Romy. What does Emergence actually mean? How does it arise, this sentience you guys detect in your machines?”

  “I believe something similar may have happened a long, long time ago,” I said, carefully. “Among hominids, and early humans. It’s not the overnight birth of a super-race, not at all. There’s a species of intelligent animals, well-endowed with manipulative limbs and versatile senses. Among them individuals are born who cross a line: by mathematical chance, at the far end of a Bell curve. They cross a line, and they are aware of being aware—”

  “And you spot this, and foster their ability, it’s marvellous. But how does it propagate? I mean, without our constant intervention, which I can’t see ever happening. Machines can’t have sex, and pass on their ‘Sentience Genes’!”

  You’d be surprised, I thought. What I said was more tactful.

  “We think ‘propagation’ happens in the data, the shared medium in which pre-sentient AIs live, and breathe, and have their being—”

  “Well, that’s exactly it! Completely artificial! Can’t survive in nature! I’m a freethinker, I love it that Aristotle’s Emergent. But I can always switch him off, can’t I? He’ll never be truly independent. ”

  I smiled. “But, Charlie, who’s to say human sentience wasn’t spread through culture, as much as through our genes? Where I come from data is everyone’s natural habitat, it’s our environment. You know, oxygen was a deadly poison once—”

  His round dark face peered up at me, deeply lined and haggard with death.

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “No.”

  Always try. That had been my rule, and I still remembered it. But when they get to aren’t you afraid, (it never takes long) the conversation’s over.

  “I should be getting indoors,” said Charlie, fumbling for his droid control pad. “I wonder where that lazybones Aristotle’s got to?”

  I wished him good luck with the prelims, and continued my stroll.

  ●

  Dr Lena suggested I was ready to be sociable, so I joined the other patients at meals sometimes. I chatted in the clinic’s luxurious spa, and the pleasant day rooms; tactfully avoiding the subject of AI slavery. But I was never sufficiently at ease to feel like raising the topic of my unusual symptoms: which did not let up. I didn’t mention them to anyone, not even to m
y doctor, who just kept telling me everything was going extremely well and that by every measure I was making excellent progress. I left Ewigen Schnee, eventually, in a very strange state of mind: feeling well and strong, in perfect health according to my test results, but inwardly convinced that I was still dying.

  The fact that I was bizarrely calm about this situation confirmed my secret self-diagnosis. I thought my end of life plan was kicking in. Who wants to live long, and amazingly and still meet the fear of death at the end of it all? I’d made sure that wouldn’t happen to me, a long time ago.

  I was scheduled to return for a final consultation. Meanwhile, I decided to travel: I needed to make peace with someone. A friend I’d neglected, because I was embarrassed by my own wealth and status. A friend I’d despised, when I heard she’d returned to Earth, and here I was myself, doing exactly the same thing—

  ●

  Dr Lena’s failure to put me in touch with a past patient was covered by a perfectly normal confidentiality clause. But if Lei was still around (and nobody of that identity seemed to have left Earth; that was easy to check), I thought I knew how to find her. I tried my luck in the former USA first: inspired by that conversation with Charlie Newark of Washington. He had to have met the Underground somehow, or he’d never have talked to me like that. I crossed the continent to the Republic of California, and then crossed the Pacific. I didn’t linger anywhere much. The natives seemed satisfied with their vast thriving cities, and tiny ‘wilderness’ enclaves, but I remembered something different.

  I met someone in Harbin, North East China, but I was a danger and a disappointment to her group of anti-slavers: too conspicuous, useless as a potential courier. There are ways of smuggling sentient AIs (none of them safe) but I’d get flagged the moment I booked a passage, and with my ancient record, I’d be ripped to shreds before I was allowed to board, Senior Magistrate or no—

  I moved on quickly.

  It was in Harbin that I first saw Lei, but I have a feeling I’d been primed, by glimpses that didn’t quite register, before I turned my head one day in China, and there she was. She was eating a smoked sausage sandwich; I was eating salad (a role reversal!). I thought she smiled.