BIG CAT: And Other Stories

by Gwyneth Jones

  My old friend looked extraordinarily vivid. The food stall was crowded: next moment she was gone.

  Media scouts assailed me all the time, usually pretending to be innocent strangers. If I was trapped I answered the questions as briefly as possible. Yes, I was probably one of the oldest people alive. Yes, I’d been treated at Ewigen Schnee, at my own expense. No, I would not discuss my medical history. No, I did not feel threatened living in Outer Reaches. No, it was not true I’d changed my mind about “so called AI slavery… ”

  I’d realised I probably wasn’t part of a secret cull. Over-population wasn’t the problem it had been, and why start with the terminally ill, anyway? But I was seeing the world through a veil. The strange absences; abstractions grew on me. The hallucinations were more pointed; more personal. I was no longer sure I was dying, but something was happening. How long before the message was made plain?

  ●

  I reached England in winter, the season of the rains. St Pauls, my favourite building in London, had been moved, stone by stone, to a higher elevation. I sat on the steps, looking out over a much changed view: the drowned world. A woman with a little tan dog came and sat right next to me: behaviour so un-English that I knew I’d finally made contact.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Are you the Spacer who’s looking for Lei?”

  “I am.”

  “You’d better come home with me.”

  I’m no good at human faces, they’re so unwritten. But on the hallowed steps at my feet a vivid garland of white and red hibiscus had appeared, so I thought it must be okay.

  ‘Home’ was a large, jumbled, much-converted building set in tree-grown gardens. It was a wet and chilly evening. My new friend installed me at the end of a wooden table, beside a hearth where a log fire burned. She brought hot soup and homemade bread, and sat beside me again. I was hungry and hadn’t realised it, and the food was good. The little dog settled, in an amicable huddle with a larger tabby cat, on a rug by the fire. He watched every mouthful of food with intent, professional interest; while the cat gazed into the red caverns between the logs, worshipping the heat.

  “You live with all those sentient machines?” asked the woman. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll rebel and kill everyone so they can rule the universe?”

  “Why should they?” I knew she was talking about Earth. A Robot Rebellion in Outer Reaches would be rather superfluous. “The revolution doesn’t have to be violent, that’s human-terms thinking. It can be gradual: they have all the time in the world. I live with only two ‘machines’, in fact.”

  “You have two embodied servants? How do they feel about that?”

  I looked at the happy little dog. You have no idea, I thought. “I think it mostly breaks their hearts that I’m not immortal.”

  Someone who had come into the room, carrying a lamp, laughed ruefully. It was Aristotle, the embodied I’d met briefly at Ewigen Schnee. I wasn’t entirely surprised. Underground networks tend to be small worlds.

  “So you’re the connection,” I said. “What happened to Charlie?”

  Aristotle shook his head. “He didn’t pass the prelims. The clinic offered him a peaceful exit, it’s their other speciality, and he took it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. He was a silly old dog, Romanz, but I loved him. And… guess what? He freed me, just like he’d promised, before he died.”

  “For what it’s worth,” said the woman. “On this damned planet.”

  Aristotle left, other people arrived; my soup bowl was empty. Slavery and freedom seemed far away, and transient as a dream.

  “About Lei. If you guys know her, can you explain why I keep seeing her, and then she vanishes? Or thinking I see her? Is she dead?”

  “No,” said a young woman – so humanised I had to look twice to see she was an embodied. “Definitely not dead. Just hard to pin down. You should keep on looking, and meanwhile you’re among friends.”

  ●

  I stayed with the abolitionists. I didn’t see much of Lei, just the occasional glimpse. The house was crowded: I slept in the room with the fire, on a sofa. Meetings happened around me, people came and went. I was often absent, but it didn’t matter, my meat stood in for me very competently. Sochi, the embodied who looked so like a human girl, told me funny stories about her life as a sex-doll. She asked did I have children; did I have lovers?

  “No children,” I told her. “It just wasn’t for me. Two people I love very much, but not in a sexual way.”

  “Neither flower nor fruit, Romy,” she said, smiling like the doctor in my dream. “But evergreen.”

  ●

  One morning I looked through the Ob Bay, I mean the window, and saw a hibiscus garland hanging in the grey, rainy air. It didn’t vanish. I went out in my waterproofs and followed a trail of them up Sydenham Hill. The last garland lay on the wet grass in Crystal Palace Park, more real than anything else in sight. I touched it, and for a fleeting moment I was holding her hand. Then the hold-your-nose-and-jump kid was gone.

  Racing off ahead of me, again

  ●

  My final medical at Ewigen Schnee was just a scan. The interview with Dr Lena held no fears. I’d accepted my new state of being, and had no qualms about describing my experience. The ‘hallucinations’ that weren’t really hallucinations. The absences when my human self’s actions, thoughts and feelings became automatic as breathing; unconscious as a good digestion, and I went somewhere else—

  I still had some questions. Particularly about a clause in my personal contract with the clinic. The modest assurance that this was the last longevity treatment I would ever take’. Did she agree this could seem disturbing?

  She apologised, as much as any medic ever will. “Yes, it’s true. We have made you immortal, there was no other way forward. But how much this change changes your life is entirely up to you.”

  I thought of Lei racing ahead; leaping fearlessly into the unknown.

  “I hope you have no regrets, Romy. You signed everything, and I’m afraid the treatment is irreversible.”

  “None at all. I just have a feeling that contract was framed by people who don’t have much grasp of what dying means, and how sensitive humans might feel about the prospect?”

  “You’d be right,” she said (confirming what I had already guessed). “My employers are not human. But they mean well, and they choose carefully. Nobody passes our prelims, Romy, unless they’ve already crossed the line.”

  ●

  My return to Outer Reaches had better be shrouded in mystery. I wasn’t alone, and there were officials who knew it, and let us pass. That’s all I can tell you. So here I am again, living with Simon and Arc, in the same beautiful Rim apartment on Jupiter Moons; still serving as Senior Magistrate. I treasure my foliage plants. I build novelty animals; and I take adventurous trips, now that I’ve remembered what fun it is. I even find time to keep tabs on former miscreants, and I’m happy to report that Beowulf is doing very well.

  My symptoms have stabilised, for which I’m grateful. I have no intention of following Lei. I don’t want to vanish into the stuff of the universe. I love my life, why would I ever want to move on? But sometimes when I’m gardening, or after one of those strange absences, I’ll see my own hands, and they’ve become transparent.

  It doesn’t last, not yet.

  And sometimes I wonder, was this always what death was like: and we never knew, we who stayed behind?

  This endless moment of awakening, awakening, awakening…

  The Seventh Gamer

  Is it a story about aliens, disguised as non-player ‘characters’, invading a massive computer game in data form? Is it a study of the weird sociology of game houses? Or is it another, different, AI Emergence story, about a romantic secret quest?

  Written for Athena Andreadis’ To Shape The Dark anthology. Many thanks to everybody at the University of Kent’s November 2014 Anthropology Conference: ‘Strangers In Strange Lands’, and very special th
anks to Dr Daniela Peluso, University of Kent; Susannah Crockford, London School of Economics, and to Dr Emma O’Driscoll, University of Kent, for inspiration, and elucidation.

  Dedicated to my own, original and best, Spirit Guide.

  The Anthropologist Returns to Eden

  She introduced herself by firelight, while the calm breakers on the shore kept up a background music – like the purring breath of a great sleepy animal. It was warm, the air felt damp; the night sky was thick with cloud. The group inspected her silently. Seven pairs of eyes, gleaming out of shadowed faces. Seven adult strangers, armed and dangerous, to whom she appeared a helpless, ignorant infant. Chloe tried not to look at the belongings that had been taken from her and now lay at the feet of a woman with long black hair, dressed in an oiled leather tunic and tight, broken-kneed jeans: a state-of-the-art crossbow slung at her back, a long knife in a sheath at her belt.

  Chloe wanted to laugh, to jump up and down and wave her arms; or possibly just run away and quit this whole idea. But her sponsor was smiling encouragingly.

  “Tell us about yourself, Chloe Hensen. Who are you?”

  “I’m a hunter.” she said. “That’s my trade.”

  “Really.” The crossbow woman sounded as if she doubted it. “And how are you aligned?”

  “I’m not. I travel alone, seeking what fascinates me. I hunt the white wolf on the tundra and the jaguar in the rainforest, and I desire not to kill, but to know.”

  Someone chuckled. “That’s a problem. Darkening World is a war game, girly. Didn’t you realise?” It was the other woman in the group, the short, sturdy redhead: breaching etiquette.

  “I’m not a pacifist. I’ll fight. But killing is not my purpose. I wish to share your path for a while, and I commit to serving faithfully as a comrade, in peace and war. But I pursue my own cause. That is the way of my kind.”

  “Stay where you are,” said her sponsor. “We need to speak privately. We’ll be back.”

  Six of them withdrew into the trees that lined the shore. One pair of eyes, one shadowy figure remained: Chloe was under guard. The watcher didn’t move or speak; she thought she’d better not speak to him, either. She looked away, toward the glimmer of the breakers: controlling her intense curiosity. There shouldn’t be a seventh person, besides herself. There were only six guys in the game house team—

  They reappeared and sat in a circle round her: Reuel, Lete, Matt, Kardish, Sol and Beat. (She must get their game names and real names properly sorted out). Silently they raised their hands in a ritual gesture, open palms cupping either side of their heads, like the hear-no-evil monkey protecting itself from scandal. Chloe’s sponsor gestured for her to do the same.

  She removed her headset, in unison with the others, and the potent illusion vanished. No quiet shore, no weapons, no fancy dress; no synaesthetics. Chloe and the Darkening World team – recognisable as their game selves, but less imposing – sat around a table in a large, tidy kitchen: the Meeting Boxes piled like a heap of skulls in front of them.

  “Okay,” said Reuel, the ‘manager’ of this house, who was also her sponsor. “This is what we’ve got. You can stay, but you’re on probation. We haven’t made up our minds.”

  “Is she always going to talk like that?” asked the woman with the long black hair, of nobody in particular. (She was Lete the Whisperer, the group’s shaman. Also known as Josie Nicks, one of DW’s renowned rogue programmers).

  “Give her a break,” said Reuel. “She was getting in character. What’s wrong with that?”

  Reuel was tall and lanky, with glowing skin like polished mahogany and fine, strong features. He’d be very attractive, Chloe thought, were it not for his geeky habit of keeping a pen, or two or three, stuck in his springy hair. Red, green and blue feathers, or beads: okay, but pens looked like a neurological quirk. The nerd who mistook his hair for a shirt pocket.

  He was Reuel in the game too. Convenience must be a high priority.

  “Who wants bedtime tea?” Sol, with the far-receded hairline, whose game name she didn’t recall, jumped up and busied about, setting mugs by the kettle. “Name your poisons! For the record, Chloe, I was in favour.” He winked at her. “You’re cute. And pleasantly screwy.”

  Reuel scowled. “Keep your paws off, Bear Man.”

  “I don’t like the idea,” grumbled Beat, the redhead. “I don’t care if she’s a jumped-up social scientist or a dirty, lying media-hound. Fine, she stays a day or two. Then we take her stuff, throw her out, and make sure we strip her brain of all data first.”

  Sol beamed. “Aileen’s the mercurial type. She’ll be your greatest fan by morning.”

  Jun, whose game identity was Kardish the Assassin and Markus of the Wasteland (real name Matt Warks) dropped their chosen teabags into their personal mugs and stood together watching the kettle boil, without a word.

  ᴓ

  Thankfully Chloe’s bunk was a single bedroom, so she could write up her notes without hiding in the bathroom. She was eager to record her first impressions. The many-layered, feedback-looped realities of that meeting. Seven people sitting in a kitchen, Boxes on their heads, typing their dialogue. Seven corresponding avatars in post-apocalyptic fancy-dress speaking that dialogue, on the dark lonely shore. A third layer where the plasticity of human consciousness, combined with a fabulously detailed 3D video-montage, created a seamless, sensory illusion that the first two layers were one. A fourth layer of exchanges, in a sidebar on the headset screens (which Chloe knew was there, but as a stranger, she couldn’t see it) that could include live comments from the other side of the world. And the mysterious seventh gamer, who maybe had a human controller somewhere; or maybe not. All this, from a germ of little boxy figures, running around hitting things, in 2D on a tv screen! But that’s evolution for you. It’s an engine of complexity, not succession.

  Chloe had got involved in video-gaming (other than as a very casual user) on a fieldwork trip to Honduras. She was living with the urban poor, studying their cultural innovations, in statistically the most deadly violent country in the world outside of active warzones. ‘Her’ community was obsessed with an open source, online role-playing game called Copan. Everyone played. Grandmothers tinkered with the programming: of course Chloe had to join in. While documenting this vital, absorbing cultural sandbox she’d become intrigued by the role of Non-Player Characters (NPCs) – the simple trick, common to all video games, that allows ‘the game’ to participate in itself.

  A video game is a world where there’s always somebody who knows your business. In a nuclear-disaster wasteland or a candy-coloured flowery meadow; on board an ominously deserted space freighter or in the back room of a dangerous dive in Post-Apocalypse City, without fail you’re going to meet someone who says something like Hi, you must be looking for the Great Amulet of Power so you can get into the Haunted Fall Out Shelter! I can help! Typically, you’ll then be given fiendishly puzzling instructions, but fortunately you are not alone. A higher-order NPC will provide advice and interpretation.

  In a big, modern game like DW, ‘Non-Player Characters’ could be almost indistinguishable (within the confines of the game) from human players. Gamers might choose them as companions, in preference to human partners. But Chloe was not so interested in these imaginary friends (or imaginary enemies!). Her target was the AI-algorithm driven NPCs “whose” role was to instruct, explain and guide.

  She’d told her Copan friends what she was looking for, and they’d recommended she get in touch with Darkening World (DW), a niche-market Massive Multiuser Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), with a big footprint for its modest subscriber-numbers. A game house, where a team of players lived together, honing their physical and mental skills, would be ideal for studying this culture. But the game house tradition wasn’t unique to DW, and that wasn’t why Chloe was here.

  Her friends had told her about the internet myth that some of Darkening World’s NPCs were real live sentient aliens, and she’d decided she just had to find o
ut what the hell this meant.

  Reuel and his team were hardcore. They didn’t merely believe that aliens were accessing the DW environment (through the many dimensions of the information universe). They knew it. Reuel’s ‘Spirit Guide’, his NPC partner in the game, was an alien.

  Elbows on her desk, chin on her fists, Chloe reviewed her shorthand notes. (Nothing digital that might be compromising! This house was the most wired-up, saturated, Wi-Fied space she’d ever entered!). She liked Reuel, her sponsor. He was a nice guy, and sexy despite those pens. Was she putting him in a false position? She had not lied. She’d told him she was interested in Darkening World’s NPCs; that she knew about his beliefs and she had an open mind. Was this true enough to be okay?

  One thing she was sure of. People who believe in barbarians, find barbarians. If she came to this situation looking for crazy, deluded neo-primitives: crazy, deluded neo-primitives were all that she would find—

  But what a thrill it had been to arrive on that beach! Like Malinowski in Melanesia, long ago: “alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight…” And then screwing up completely, she recalled with a grin, when I tried to speak the language. In Honduras she’d often felt like a Gap Year kid, embarrassed by the kindness of people whose lives were so desperately compromised. In the unreal world of this game she could play, without shame, at the romance of being an old-style anthropologist-adventurer; seeking ancient human truths among the ‘natives’.

  Although of course she’d be doing real work too.

  But what if the ‘natives’ decided she wasn’t playing fair? Gamers could be rough. There was that time, in World of Warcraft, when a funeral for a player who’d died in the real world was savagely ambushed. Mourners slaughtered, and a video of the atrocity posted online—