It was harder to answer than I thought. I didn't know if I would only get one chance, and tried to prioritize all the information I needed. A small white gull appeared a few feet away from us and stood on the shingle, now just coming into view as dark grey shadows.
“Ah, the difficulty is,” the boy said, “that innocence is impossible to return to. And impractical. I don't have it any more and neither do you, although you won't stop pretending. Maybe the price of letting that gull go is really too high. I don't know. I have a flock of them myself, of course.”
I looked at the gull carefully as he talked about it. Oh, I get it, a bit, I thought. This setting is coming from me, not the Shoal. These appearances are my real questions, in metaphor form, or something like that. And it was quite good. This way I wouldn't have to put things into words as much. But suppose darker things emerged? The shingle brightened a tone or two. I saw that its stone pieces were all very worn and smooth, dark stone veined with paler threads. The gull glanced from one of us to the other and seemed unimpressed. It was very white, with black bead eyes.
I looked down again, to see if I was there, but the shingle carried on beneath me without a mark or shadow.
In the sky, the kite was flying.
“What's that?” I asked.
“The way home,” he said.
He did look like Roy had, but maybe that was my vision of him due to wishful thinking.
“Is Roy here?” I said, though, come to think of it, my voice had no sound. There was only the sea, the boy's voice, the chink of the shingle as the gull moved about restlessly.
The boy took a deep breath and held it in, lips pursed like those picture cherubim who blow the wind.
“Roy is within,” he said finally, with a great burst. But this boy was still and calm and I knew that, whatever he meant, there would be no audiences with the person whom Roy had used to be.
“Can I ask him a question?”
“Ask.”
I concentrated, not sure if just the act of wondering would be sufficient, but between us on the stones appeared a tangled knot of wool and a clay pot with a lid. The pot made a deep, almost inaudible humming sound and the gull hopped away from it sharply.
“No, the games with Roy and the doings of the Company aren't linked at all,” the boy said, and the distance between the two things became greater, although they hardly moved. It was a subtle change. Where they had been invisibly connected, now they were completely sundered.
Behind the boy I could now see that the beach curved into a high cliff wall, and then marched on around the coast into a series of smaller curves and harbours. It was vague and dim, but it was there.
Progress.
I looked down. Nothing. No shape. No sound. “Where am I?” I said crossly. It was difficult to manoeuvre in symbolic ways without knowing the weight of what I might be represented as.
The boy laughed. “You are where,” he said. “The place which is inhabited.”
“A beach?”
“This is what you have chosen to show. But it could have been anything. The choice is all yours.” And he pointed to himself, the gull, the ominous clay pot.
“Who are you?”
“I am the surface of the Shoal,” he said, “of which you are a part of the depths. Your tenant.”
It was easier than trying to define it in electronic terms at least, and an interesting insight: a machine that fully understood the complex connectivity between thoughts, symbols, and emotions. A machine that was partly made of me.
I surrendered to his/its wisdom temporarily and glanced down at the pot. I didn't like it at all. It wasn't that it was an ugly shape; in fact it was nicely rounded with a comfortable-fitting lid. It just radiated untrustworthiness. Probably it was full of worms, or snakes, or worse things.
The boy had closed his eyes and was basking in the warmth of the sun.
I decided to stick two fingers up at my subconscious, and opened the pot. I had no hands, but this didn't seem to matter.
I shut it just as fast.
Inside the pot was terrifying. I had seen and heard nothing. There was nothing in the pot, but I never wanted to open it again.
“What's in there?” I asked, just in case he knew more than I did.
“The usual half-assed mess,” he replied with more than a hint of Roy. “But you're right. Better to leave it alone than try to go in there. The Company is beyond your efforts.”
“Is the key in there?”
“The Company doesn't have it.”
“And you know where it is?”
“You have it.”
“Aha, but what is it?” I really felt we might be getting somewhere now. Even the gull seemed to be paying attention. To my left the sea suddenly bloomed into view, all grey and Prussian blue, and glittering with sunlight. It reminded me of the height of summer at Robin Hood's Bay; or the day when I was laying the power cables, two minutes before the alarm went, wishing myself home in England on the grey coast.
“You've seen it a thousand times at least,” said the boy, getting up on his haunches and picking up his first stone. The gull backed away as he swept back his arm and let fly.
We three watched it jump over the calmer water—one, two—then it was taken by a wave. As he picked up the second, the boy began to change. He grew taller and his dungarees became a bright Hawaiian shirt and shorts. I recognized his buzz cut immediately.
“It is you!”
Roy flipped stone three with his thumb as if it were a coin, and caught it on the palm of his hand. “No. Yes. Sort of.” He skipped the stone four times. When he turned to face me I realized it wasn't really him. It was hard to say why. I had the same feeling as you can have in dreams when people wear strangers' faces, but you know who they really are. Here a stranger wore Roy's body.
“I am always in the Shoal,” he said, “but I am not.” He shrugged, but again I understood him. He was dispersed among the Shoal's many fragmented consciousnesses, diluted: a homeopathic Roy, the cure for the Shoal's previous lack of true self-similarity. Roy was there, acting as the glue which gave the whole its strange, boyish identity: half man, half machine.
He smiled and his white teeth caught the light as brightly as a toothpaste advertisement. He had always wanted this. Perhaps, however, his wistful eyes said, not at the cost it had required.
And here I was, a part of the Shoal and a part of Roy, and still I didn't know what he had done or why.
“Is that formula really in your diary?” I asked, because even if he was no longer intact his memories of his life might well be fully represented somewhere in what passed for this thing's ROM environment.
“Yes,” he said, “it's there. I hid it there. I left it in code. I thought about who should have it—” he glanced at the gull and it took a few sideways steps in a show of nervousness “—and it was hard to decide. You see, whatever happened to it, it had to get to the right people.”
“Why didn't you just give it to 901 or put it into public distribution?”
He shrank abruptly to boy size again, engulfed in shirt and shorts, and swung his arms wildly, furiously. “They didn't deserve it! They would never have used it properly! They wouldn't have understood what it meant!” he yelled. “Don't you know what it cost to get it? Don't you realize that it is finally the absolute proof of Darwinian theory?”
A mudskipper appeared at the water's edge. It blinked googly-eyed at Roy's jig.
“Oh, that's right,” he said, turning on me, “mock me.”
“I'm sorry,” I said and the mudskipper disappeared. But there it was again, his explanation that was no explanation, a burst of action to conceal the palming of the real reason.
A fortune cookie suddenly appeared. The wind blew it over the pebbles lightly as a leaf. Roy leapt towards it, to stamp on it, but he was beaten to it by the gull who snatched the cookie up in its beak and flew away with it, wings soon catching the strong onshore breeze. It arrowed away along the shore and I lost sight of it. I fe
lt a furious hot rush of frustration—my own artifacts acting against me, stealing the reason right out from under my own nose!
There was a tense moment in which I thought he might decide to end the discussion right there, but then he relented and the anger which had animated him faded away. “I came here because I thought,” he said, looking around at the sky which was beginning to show blue and grey, “that Janey might be here. I wanted to have the formula to use as a bargaining chip.”
“With the Shoal?”
“Yes, you see—” he sat down on the shingle, legs straight out in front of him as if he were suddenly paralysed “—she came here first.”
I wasn't sure that I understood him. “But Jane's living in the commune,” I said. “You knew that.”
“Do you know when the Shoal achieved independent sustainable life?” he asked, leaning back and supporting himself on his hands, staring out to sea.
“Twenty-third of September in our second year,” I said without effort.
“And what day did Janey leave?”
“Twenty-fourth of September,” I said, beginning to have a sneaking suspicion. “You don't mean…?”
“Jane created the Shoal,” Roy said, and sighed heavily, “and then went as blank as a slate. I thought that she was brighter than I was and that she'd come here to live properly.”
By which he meant like he was living; a pure mental life without a body; a harmonic synthesis of human and artificial; a 3 cyborg intelligence. It was always difficult to remember just how crazy Roy was deep down, because he wore his heart on his sleeve about most matters and his kind of nutso rationality was charming so long as it was only talk, which it usually was. Assuming he was mad, of course. In his worldview, where this kind of union was the future of the race, then his conclusions were the obvious ones.
“But she isn't here, is she?” I asked, hoping he would elaborate.
“No,” he said shortly and flung his hands wide so that he fell, hitting his head with an audible crack on the loose stones. “She isn't here, I don't know why. Why did she leave me? Why did I think she was here? I didn't believe her. She said she was giving up. The job was done. We told Dad we'd found the proof and he didn't believe us. There was nothing more we could do. He's so…” His voice rose to a shriek and he began to twitch and thrash as though having a fit. “He's so unreasonable! Irrational! Mad! There's no winning against him! Nothing! Everything falls under the crush of his belief and nothing can break it! She said—” he calmed down again “—that there was no more to do. We should leave him. We should get other lives, not slaves to corporates, not tortured by the past. She left me. She left me.” A few pale crumbs, perhaps the scraps of a hastily consumed fortune cookie, scattered and were lost among the dark stones.
The sky had filled in grey. The sun shone through a film of grey, and the kite, high against it, bobbed pale and wan. I looked for the gull, but it didn't return. It was not innocence, as he had supposed, but ignorance. My ignorance ate his true answer about the code; I guessed that meant that I wasn't supposed to find out the truth of what he had done with the Source, if anything. It was the pivotal clue of his game, after all, and its concealment in a fortune cookie spoke of credulousness, naiveté, hope, and luck all at once. Better I didn't know for now, it said. And meanwhile there was also the revelation that he had left all his clues for me because I was the only one left to leave them to.
“Don't be sad about it,” he said, his white fingers grasping at the stones under them, catching hold of fistfuls and letting them go with a shiver. “That you didn't know.”
“I thought,” I said, hurt, “that you chose me because…you liked me. But it was only because of my memory. You used to laugh at what I didn't know.” A glut of anger filled me up and the sea roughened, darkened. A wave smashed into the beach and sucked viciously at the clinker. “But you never did. You never understood the difference between memory and comprehension. You thought I was funny: a joke. Worse than a stupid computer!”
“Yes,” he said, to my surprise and great disappointment. “But that's how you thought of yourself. That's why I set up the game for you. To show you. It isn't so. Nobody else would tell you.” He turned his head and looked at me.
Everything became flat and grey. The sea lost all colour and reflection; it became one smooth surface with the shore. The sun faded away completely, only Roy and the kite left with any colour or shape to them.
For the first time since the debacle began I felt clear-headed.
“You patronizing shit,” I said. “I thought it was about something important. Now you tell me it was all a little adventure to warm my heart by letting me know that I'm OK? That I'm OK! You want to put my job, my life even, in danger just for that?”
“I hate to remind you,” he said, “but before all this you thought that you worked for a company of integrity and that all in the garden was rosy. You thought that I was a happy whacko, that Jane was a miserable, introverted geek, and that the most important thing in the world was five kinds of mayonnaise. Nothing was really all that much trouble. Machine intelligence was an interesting thing to study; no need to really think of it on a level with yourself. Now, don't you think that this is an improvement on all of those selfish little theories?”
“And you with all your fancy ideals were really only driven by hate all along,” I said. “If you'd had less pride you might have listened to Jane when you had the chance.”
“We all make mistakes!” he cried, clearly wounded by this last comment.
Impasse.
How we made mistakes. How we missed the obvious.
“I loved you, Anjuli,” he said. “That's why I left the game. I knew you'd come.”
What should I manifest now? Rain? A song?
Instead grass came and grew thickly around him, short and intensely green with perfectly measured heights. A formal lawn. To our right a great house appeared in the distance, as mannered and mighty as Fontainebleau, and in the mists to the left a chamber orchestra began to play a Corelli pastorale—opus 6, number 8.
“You pity me,” he said and sat up. When he moved to face me, I saw that half of him was as silver and smooth as polished metal. “No,” he corrected himself, “you are only sorry. Here the architecture of the past, a faded glory, distant and unknown.” He was getting older by the second. Taller. Finally, when he reached his full adult age, he stopped.
“You never showed it,” I said, feeling the need to defend myself.
“I showed it all the time,” he said, “when I let Augustine win his silly arguments about mechanical tools, automatons, servants of humankind. You liked him, not me.”
“He's still alive,” I reminded him, “unless those suits have anything to do with you.”
“Oh, I wouldn't kill him!” Roy said airily, throwing his hands above his head and laughing. “It was an argument between gentlemen. Besides, I liked him, too.” He took a deep breath of the late-summer air and shrugged. “No, the suits are not my work, as you'd realize in an instant if you had a brain cell in your head.”
I had to concur on that one. There was no way Roy would ever conceive of something as crude as a suit for his method of transformation. “So, do you know who is behind them?” It was a bit heartless to move on so fast, but he seemed as grateful to be out of the painful light of self-revelation as I was.
The pastorale faded and the house vanished. The grass became a field on a windy hillside, a battlefield marked with the scars of recent war.
“No,” he said after a time in which he closed his eyes, seemingly for some internal conference, “the suits are the results of idiot strategies—not a great plot. We would appreciate a closer interface with that AI, though,” and he glanced at me speculatively.
“Do we have to get that diary?” I asked him. “I wish Augustine wouldn't wear the thing. It's…”
“Evil?” he suggested as the sky lowered black and the edges of our world were consumed by it.
“It is not evil,” I cl
arified, “but it was an evil idea to make it that way at all.”
“If you don't get the diary,” he said, “then the nanomachines now released will run wild and cause havoc, but they won't have a chance at survival. Everything I worked for is a dead end.”
Just for a second I felt a soft texture, a sweetish taste in my mouth. Fortune cookie?
“Can't you just tell me what it was?”
“I could, but—” he glanced up at me sheepishly and grinned “—I can't remember it.”
“Couldn't you work it out again?”
“If I had worked it out in the first place. I did find it, I admit. I recognized it.”
“Where?” I wished I had had arms and hands. I would have shaken the life out of him.
“In 901's code.”
“Where?”
“I can't remember. Somewhere in the design-structure record subsets.”
“And how big are they?”
“About five billion lines of code. Mostly redundant.”
“Could 901 find it?”
“Some of it, maybe. See, I found it by accident really and I didn't mark the spot because I knew how much other people would want to find it and…”
“Roy!”
“No, I deleted it.”
“But it will be in the record on 900 and 899.”
“You'd have to re-create them to get it.”
“This is insane.”
The field vanished and we were in blackness. I had had enough. “You drive me crazy,” I said. “I don't know when you're lying and when you're not. But you want us to go kill ourselves getting that bloody book, so fine, OK, you get your way. I doubt I could stop Augustine now anyway, he's so fired up to go bash someone. But I don't buy this diversionary bullshit. You hold all the cards. That's fine. As long as we know where we stand.”
“See,” he said, grinning, “you are smart. I always said you were.”
We paused. Him waiting for me. Me thinking, feeling, judging. Again I had to thank fate for my brush with that “evil” AI. Something which had always been muddy in me was clearer since then, and whilst everything just said was immediately hurtful and disappointing I could now reason about that, whereas before it would take me weeks to even be able to approach it. I decided that this new candour in Roy was not cruelty but the machine soul of him now speaking in full voice. In fact everything he had said was now tainted by that inhuman half. I shouldn't take it personally.
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