The board members nodded seriously, and Patrick exhaled with relief.
They then began peppering the couple with questions about their families, in a way that seemed casual, but to Patrick were more thorough than he would have expected. No, neither of them had siblings, they said. And their parents had died young, Leah’s mother passing two years ago.
After the slew of such personal questions, Leah stiffened in her chair, seeming ready to challenge them as being intrusive, when the board lapsed into silence. Again, they sat stock still, staring discomfortingly at them
Anita Powell broke that silence. “So, Mr. and Mrs. Jensen, we would be pleased to have you join us here at The Haven.”
“You don’t need to confer?” asked Patrick, realizing with embarrassment that he’d blurted out the question in surprise.
“Oh, no,” said Powell. “I think we’re all of one mind.”
“Well, thank you so much for your hospitality and your confidence in us,” said Patrick. “We would very much like to join your co-op . . .” He felt a kick under the table “. . . but we do need to talk about it ourselves first.”
“Ah, of course,” said Powell, folding her small wrinkled hands in front of her. “A bit of a problem, though. We would like an answer now.”
Worried about another kick under the table, Patrick began, “Well, as I said—”
“Oh, there is another thing,” interrupted Malcolm. “You should be aware that there has been a change in the share price.”
Patrick hmphed to himself. He was ready for the news that they’d jacked up the price. The board knew from his and Leah’s financial disclosure that the current price was really stretching their budget. So, any increase would put the place out of their price range.
Malcolm picked up a sheaf of papers and leafed through them. “Last week, the co-op members voted to cut the share price for new owners in half. We haven’t gotten around to posting that, though.”
“Then we’ll be happy to accept,” said Leah abruptly, issuing a not-so-gentle squeeze to Patrick’s arm that prompted him to immediately agree.
The mech Helper appeared, seemingly unbidden, bearing a tray of filled champagne glasses, and the board crowded around Patrick and Leah, their faces still serious, toasting the new owners in The Haven co-op.
Patrick and Leah departed, and the Board members stood at the door looking after them, still holding their champagne glasses.
“I think our consensus stands,” said Anita Powell. “They will be very useful to us. Observing their behaviors will be instructive. And observing their reactions to us will tell us whether we are convincing.”
“We made a mistake,” said Randall Black.
“What mistake?” asked John Travis.
“We should have asked them to step out, and we should have conferred.”
“Why?” asked Travis.
“Because that’s what humans would have done.”
• • •
Garrison “Garry” LaPoint strolled between the narrow, block-long rows of softball-sized obsidian spheres. Each of these neuromorphic brains was cradled in its own metal holder, each fed by a sheaf of inserted fiber optic cables. This vast neuromorphic training chamber at Helpers, Inc., was dead silent, which was why he liked to sneak down and spend time there. He was always amazed at such silence, given that the warehouse-sized chamber held a thousand disembodied artificial brains being fed masses of data. The room was warm, heated by the furious electronic activity going on within the spheres’ circuitry.
Despite their seeming identity, multiple types of brains were being silently trained. The Helper brains would end up in the artificially intelligent domestic servants that had invaded households worldwide. The Intimorph brains were being programmed in the sensual arts of giving carnal pleasure to their owners. And the marble-sized Companion brains would be installed in the cuddly, intelligent toys that had become the robotic playmates of millions of children.
Garry hitched up his pants over his muffin-top waist, a habit so ingrained that he had done it even when he’d worn suspenders. He’d quit wearing suspenders when he found that they pulled his pants up nearly to his chest, giving him an even goofier appearance. He was already a pudgy, mop-haired, eyeglass-wearing loner as it was.
He liked it here, away from the judgmental people he worked with. This vast, silent hall was the coolest, weirdest school that had ever existed. Here, new Helper brains first learned how to learn. Their “teacher” was the central server—a parallel cryogenic quantum zettaflop supercomputer. It harbored the masses of code that comprised the neuromorphic operating system. Once the server had downloaded that software to the neuromorphic brains, it fed the disembodied brains the multitude of sensory subroutines that enabled them to absorb and process sights, sounds, tactile sensations, tastes, and even aromas.
Next, the server fed the thousands of brains a cascade of simulated sensory input that enabled them—once installed in robotic bodies—to debut in the human world ready to refine their skills to their owners’ specifications.
Those brains were so amazing: super-dense labyrinths of neuromorphic nanocircuitry, capable of rewiring their interconnections to encode new information, just like the human brain.
And their education didn’t end when they were released into the world. Each brain was intimately linked to all the others, through their wireless connection with the central server. So every neuromorphic brain would feed back its experiences to the server, improving the capabilities of future brains and leading to operating system upgrades in current models. This continual feedback process was either wonderful or frightening, depending on people’s attitudes toward the robots.
Garry gently touched one of the smooth black spheres, feeling the electrical warmth from the furious data-processing within. He still felt a little guilt about his first job at Helpers. It had been to bring the Helpers pain. That is, his first assignment had been to program a subroutine to enable the artificial brains to process pain impulses. Of course, pain to Helpers was not like human pain; only a form of data that told them how much damage had been done to their bodies.
The robots’ response to pain was unnerving. Garry once watched an android Helper be stabbed as part of a demo. The android merely regarded the wound with dispassionate curiosity, pulled out the knife, and efficiently reported its damage level.
Garry had advocated for the androids to exhibit some human-like reaction, perhaps a flinch or a cry. But Blount had overruled him. And since Melvin “the Asshole” Blount was Director of Programming, his edict was final.
Thankfully, Garry had now been assigned a more benign task: coding a snazzy new version of the vision algorithm. It would enable the robots to process visual information faster and integrate it better with the other sensory subroutines. It was scheduled to be uploaded in six months to the millions of Helpers worldwide.
Garry was particularly proud that his algorithm would be uploaded to the hundreds of squads of Defenders—the efficiently lethal battlefield robots constructed at the company’s military subsidiary. He would never see those brains. That high-security factory was kept as distant as possible from the Helper subsidiary. The Helpers, Inc. executives had absolutely decreed that no civilian customer think that their friendly household Helper had any link with machines that could slaughter whole regiments of human soldiers without any human emotion or hesitation.
A voice behind him shattered the silence. “Dammit Garry, I thought I told you not to go wandering down here.”
Melvin Blount had waited until he was near enough to Garry to startle him. That was the way of this skinny, hawk-nosed bastard—always trying his best to inflict the maximum discomfort on people. And Blount constantly reminded his underlings of his authority. He always wore a tie with his short-sleeved shirt, to remind everybody that he was the “goddamned Director of Programming, for Chrissakes,” as he was wont to declare.
Garry was ready with a reply. “I came down here to think over a problem wit
h the structure of the—” he began.
“You came down here to fuck off.” Blount interrupted, gesturing at the rows of silent black orbs. “There’s nothing going on here that could possibly be helpful to your programming.”
But again, Garrison LaPoint, quick-witted programmer, was ready to spew forth an answer.
“Well, looking at these inputs made me realize that the three-D processing component of the visual system should be more closely integrated with the audio processing, so the Helper could better correlate the two. I’ve got an idea—”
“Fine,” snapped Blount, turning on his heel and stalking away. “Then go do it.”
Garry allowed himself a self-satisfied smirk. He knew that Blount had dubbed him Garry LaPointless, but that his creative contributions made that nickname invalid. He decided to hang around for a while, to piss Blount off even more.
The movers had just set the couch down in the spacious living room, when Patrick immediately occupied it, poring through a sheaf of papers. He ignored the view of the sun-drenched Phoenix skyline through the floor-to-ceiling picture window.
“Don’t you think you’ve gone through those enough?” asked Leah, emerging from the kitchen with an empty moving box.
“It was just kind of strange that everything went so fast,” said Patrick. “The loan, the escrow period.”
“The place was empty. The co-op wanted it filled, that’s all. Quit thinking like an investigator.”
“Well, that’s what I am. I can check it out. Harwood Security has resources.”
“I would, too. If I had a job as a prosecutor.”
“Leah,” he said solicitously. “You’ll get a job here. You know you will.”
“And it will start all over again. The jobs, the hours the . . . people.”
Patrick decided to confront the unspoken issue between them. “You mean the women . . . the woman.”
She nodded grimly and turned to go back into the kitchen.
“Come back. Can we please try to get this settled?”
She did turn back to him, but stood at the kitchen door, her head down. “It is settled. The facts are settled. I’m just trying to figure out what to do next.”
He tried to avoid the fact that she was talking about their marriage. “Heading the western office at Harwood was the ultimate plum for somebody like me. And you agreed that you were willing to relocate.”
“You know that’s not what I mean by settled. When I found out . . .”
He stood up and started to approach her, but she crossed her arms, and he stopped. “Okay, it’s not an excuse, but we were apart so much,” he said. “I was working eighty hours; you were working eighty hours. And Marla and I were together so much, since I was doing investigation for her case—”
She flinched at the name. They fell silent, staring at one another, as two movers arrived with hand trucks loaded with boxes. Leah began to efficiently direct the boxes to their appropriate rooms. The movers left, and she waved her hand at him not to continue the conversation. But he did, anyway.
“Nothing happened, Leah.”
“Something happened. Julie told me she saw you.”
“I stopped it before it went too far.”
“So, your contention is ‘close but no cigar,’ so to speak.” A note of prosecution crept in, a lawyer’s tone.
“I love you. That’s all you need to know. And I’m sorry.”
“I didn’t need to know about . . . her.” Leah returned to the kitchen, leaving Patrick standing in the middle of the living room.
• • •
The excited buzz in the auditorium rose as the subjects of the demo were revealed in all their naked glory.
“Holy mother of God,” breathed a programmer sitting next to Garry, in an expression of both utter awe and pure lust.
“Whuff!” articulated another.
“Very, very nice!” exclaimed a female engineer.
To applause and delighted exclamations, the Vice President of Engineering and his staff had just pulled off eight red silk shrouds to unveil the new Gamma line of “intimate-activity” Intimorphs. The male and female robots stood on the stage of the Helpers, Inc. Auditorium, unselfconsciously nude and smiling blandly.
The females ranged from slim to voluptuous. One was long-legged and model-slender, with silky blond hair, aquamarine eyes, and high pert breasts. Another had caramel skin, generous breasts, ebony eyes, and short, dark hair.
The males were similarly varied. One exhibited a taut surfer’s physique, with curly blond locks and sky-blue eyes. Another had perfect bronze skin with a weight-lifters muscular physique, a jut-jawed face, dark smoldering eyes, and curly ebony hair.
All possessed highly realistic genitalia of the varied shapes and sizes that market research had shown optimally desirable. If an eye-tracking scanner had been trained on the audience, it would have recorded a slew of furtive glances at that fully functional sexual equipment.
“But that’s not all!” exclaimed the vice president, moving to two separate figures shrouded in blue. With a flourish, he whipped away the sheets to reveal male and female androids.
“They look like the others,” said a young woman in the front row.
“Ah, but they are not,” said the vice president. “These are our very first convertible models! Still experimental, but we think they will do really well in the marketplace.” He turned to the two androids, instructing them: “Alpha convert. Beta convert.”
With that, the two androids began to alter form—the male rounding itself into a voluptuous, high-breasted female form, and the female into a muscular male physique. At the same time the male’s genitals retracted, inverting into a female’s; and the female’s genitals extended to form a male’s.
The audience roared its raucous approval, leaping to their feet in a standing ovation.
“With our convertibles, our customer gets whatever he or she desires,” said the vice president when the cheering subsided enough for him to be heard. “And the customer can even switch-hit, so to speak, changing in mid . . . well . . . mid-activity. So, shall I have all of them perform?”
“Yes!” shouted the audience. The vice president instructed the Intimorphs to walk about the stage, and they obediently began to pad back and forth, still smiling blankly.
Only two heads did not swivel precisely to follow the Helpers’ pacing. The two product engineers for the Intimorph line, dressed in white coats, were bent over tablet computers, assiduously scribing notes on necessary tweaks to the physiology and movements of their newest models.
The vice president began his recitation. “The Gamma line of Intimorph Helpers, as you know, follows up on the Gamma Domestic Helper, which have been highly successful. To enhance the realism of skin-to-skin contact, we’ve added dermal warmth and new formulations of secondskin and electrogel flesh to feel more realistic.
“Do they do housework?” came a questions from the audience, to chuckles.
“Some domestic functions,” answered the vice president, grinning wryly. “Their capabilities, however, are limited by the neural demands of their other talents. As complex as neuromorphic brains are, they still don’t rival humans in functional capacity.”
“More importantly, do they do housework naked?” asked another staffer, to considerable laughter.
The vice president grinned again and said, “Seriously, I don’t think our clients will be much interested in those functions. Now, would you like to experience the tactile properties?”
Another resounding “Yes!” greeted his question, and the audience members began to crowd eagerly onto the stage. As the Intimorphs stood inert and smiling, the staff fondled the robots’ artificial breasts, buttocks, arms, legs, and in more than a few instances, genitals. The employees particularly inspected the convertible androids’ shape and genitals, assessing their visual and tactile realism.
Garry was among those who took the stage, and when his turn came, copped an extensive analytical feel of one of the femal
es.
“Okay, it feels real,” he said cupping a breast. “But you have to close your eyes to believe you’re with a real person. I mean the skin still looks artificial . . . doesn’t have the translucence of real skin. Actually, it doesn’t even look as realistic as a regular Helper.”
“It had to be that way,” one of the engineers replied, as he stood behind a female, still taking notes. “Intimorphs had to be waterproof. Y’know, the people who rent them out want to scrub them down after each use. And the owners want to have their fun in spas sometimes.”
“There are rumors that somebody has developed a realistic secondskin,” said Garry. “It’s called secondskin-R. You can’t tell it from human skin.”
“Just rumors,” said Melvin Blount a bit too emphatically. He had moved up to take his turn with the caramel-skinned female, running his bony, spatulate fingers over its body and taking some interest in a nearby male’s. “But rumors aren’t reality. We’d know if that skin existed.”
“Do they have the same operating system as the Domestic Helpers?” asked Garry.
“There are differences,” answered the vice president.
“Differences? Really?”
Blount glared at Garry and jerked his head in an unspoken command that he should leave the stage. Once they were separate from the other staff, he warned, “Look, I’ve told you to stay the hell away from the operating system.”
“All I was asking was—”
“You are assigned to subroutines. That means you stay in subroutines. I’m not going to have programmers messing around in code they’re not supposed to access. In fact, I’ve just added security to restrict you and the others to your assigned areas.”
“Melvin, you know that’s not good for the project. That means we might not integrate the subroutines properly.”
“That’s my business, LaPoint. My business.” He turned and headed up the aisle.
The vice president stepped forward on the stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now at the demonstration phase of the event,” he announced. “Those of you who are a little . . . well . . . shy, can certainly leave. But we’re now going to demonstrate these Intimorphs’ performance capabilities.”
The Neuromorphs Page 2