Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict

by Thomas T. Thomas

  “It takes care of business—faster than with a phone or notepad.”

  “I ask because I wonder how much of your mind I’m actually getting.”

  “When we’re together—doing what we did last night—all of me,” he said.

  “But not just a moment ago,” she said. “You wake up and the first thing you say to me is not ‘Hello there!’ or ‘How did you sleep?’ or ‘I love you,’ but you growl ‘What?’ and then go off to answer the terminal inside your brain.”

  “Should I put my head down and start over?”

  “I’m just getting bored with this whole routine. You come over, we make love, and then you’re off inside your own electronic squirrel cage. We never talk about anything but family business, and half of what you’re thinking is invisible to me.”

  “Do you really want to pick a fight first thing in the morning?”

  “Maybe you should go find someone your own age to play with. You can buzz each other’s electrodes, or whatever it is you kids do.”

  So it was the age thing, again. The difference in their ages only bothered Kenny because he knew it bothered her. More than their technical incest, which neither of them cared about, because their relationship would never lead to children. No one who saw them together, outside of family, could detect any age difference, because his aunt remained a beautiful woman who presented as someone in her mid-thirties. She had a slender and well toned body, smooth and elegantly made-up face—permanently made up, thanks to microsurgery—with arched brows over clear green eyes, straight nose, full carmine-red lips, and a cloud of raven-black hair that cascaded artlessly over her shoulders. She was without flaw. She might easily have been fifteen years his junior, instead of his elder by more than half a century.

  Except, he added, when she opened her mouth. For all her youthful beauty, Callie remained his great-aunt and head of the family empire—after Great-Grandfather John, of course. It took no more than an instant of frustration for her to become coldly superior, demanding, controlling, and dismissive of Kenny as a member of the younger generation. The question now was, did this argument about his brain cut and the invitation to “find someone your own age” come from a fit of pique? Or was she dismissing him for real this time?

  Well … did it matter? Kenny had experienced his own share of love affairs, although this was his first one inside the family. They always started with physical attraction, moved on to include affection and emotional communication, descended into pure physical sensation, and ended with doubt and recrimination. The process was always exciting at first. Then it was a whirl of discovery and daring. And finally, it was empty.

  He sighed.

  He pushed himself up on his palms, climbed backward off the bed, and searched for his clothing in the little piles they’d left behind on the floor.

  “Aren’t you going to answer me?” Callie demanded.

  Kenny was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to her. He held up his briefs for inspection and slipped them on. He followed with his pants and shirt. Only when he had found his second sock did he speak: “I would think this obviously is an answer. I’m due in court in an hour. I need to get ready.”

  “Well! Is that all you have to say?”

  “Just one more thing. Good-bye.”

  * * *

  Jeffrey Praxis flew over the vastness of the Stanislaus Forest just before dawn. It was the time of day when the ground was at its coldest, so thermal imaging worked best down among the dense tree formations. He was scanning for intruders, using equipment sensitive enough to distinguish a human being’s normal thirty-seven centigrade from the slightly higher body temperatures of the white-tailed deer and black bears—the only mammals with enough body mass to be mistaken from the air for men. And, of course, any campfires or electric generators would blaze as white-hot points in the imaging.

  He and an armed technical sergeant flew in one of the family Defense Force’s new ariflects, the ARF-III, a hover design that used multiple rotors composed of short, broad vanes to pull on the air, rather than long blades that beat at it. The design, perfected by artificial intelligence through stochastic evolution, was stronger, more robust, and also quieter than an old-style helicopter. What Jeffrey was going for this morning was the quiet part.

  Over the past thirty years, he and Grandfather John had slowly bought up all the special-use permits and leaseholds to campsites, hunting lodges, stores, homes, and villages in the former Stanislaus National Forest. Acquiring them had been easiest in the early years, when the hunger and winter-like conditions persisted throughout the summer—because the Yellowstone Ash Fall still hung in the stratosphere—and drove people out of the mountains. But then, when climatic conditions improved and people wanted to return to their former holdings, whether legally held or not, the Praxis Family Association had to be firm.

  That was also the time when the Chinese Incursion fell apart and war bands were taking to the hills. To preserve the forest and maintain the PFA’s hold on it, the Defense Force had established an automated perimeter of monitoring stations run by high- and medium-level intelligences snooping with low-altitude Floaters. The intelligences also managed teams of Rovers that had the sure-footedness of mountain goats, the reflexes of big hunting cats, and the latest 1.299-kilowatt XR lasers from the PFA arms factory.

  And yet Grandfather John insisted that human eyes fly over the forest at least once a month on irregular schedules and patterns to scope out any encampments that the automata might have missed.

  “Nice and clear,” said the sergeant assigned to this ’flect. He’d said that ten minutes ago—in fact, every ten minutes for the past hour. It was his polite way of saying he was bored, nothing to see here, and let’s go home.

  Maybe he was right, and Jeffrey and Grandfather John should just trust their automated defenses. But still …

  In the years right after the Yellowstone Eruption, the family drew a fortune in cellulose and other biomass out of the forest due to the accelerated die-off of trees caused by the winter conditions. Their robot beavers and squirrels had a boom year, and then they themselves died off—or went inactive and were cannibalized by other machines for parts and materials—while the forest was in recovery mode and the family wanted to preserve its biomass to fertilize new sprouts and seedlings.

  Those were the years, too, when Jeffrey was tasked with revitalizing the other, non-human forest inhabitants. He arranged for the importation, or genetic reconstruction, of mice, rabbits, deer, and moose—if those big herbivores would flourish and take hold in the Sierra foothills, so far south of their natural habitat—as well as all kinds of fish and birds. He also brought in their predators, the owls, hawks, cougars, and bears. He did this, not because Grandfather John or the other family members wanted to create a hunting preserve, but because a healthy ecosystem supported all kinds of life at all levels.

  That meant he had to defend the forest against poachers as well as warlords.

  But the sergeant was right. Aside from the negative thermal sweep, Jeffrey’s office at Fort Apache in Fremont had received no irregular indications during the past month—in fact, for the last couple of months. All of the automata were electronically monitored and reported their status to the Big and Little Brothers on a daily basis. All of the imported and genetically engineered animals were tagged and tracked by those same intelligences. If any humans had strayed into the woods, they would likely try to subsist by hunting the live creatures—and perish by exchanging target practice with the mechanical ones. But the forest below was quiet on all levels.

  “Okay,” he told the sergeant. “Sweep the last pattern and let’s skedaddle.”

  What Grandfather John actually planned to do with this newly revived wilderness was still a mystery to Jeffrey. Aside from the cellulose and windfall forest products, the area really had no real economic value. The Moles had never found gold or any other ores—or not in enough quantity to pay back the effort of making, launching, and maintaining them and the
ir companion Diggers. The idea that the Stanislaus would become a safe retreat and a playground for family members had been interrupted by the cataclysms of thirty years ago.

  Jeffrey’s job—his supposed life work—as the head of the family subsidiary, Praxis Forest Development, had largely been a sinecure. He monitored, he recorded, he went on monthly aerial patrols with a backup detail from the Defense Force, in case he found a wandering patrol of homeless Chinese soldiers or local poachers. But mostly he gardened … and waited for instructions from the Patriarch.

  * * *

  “This will just be our little secret,” Jacquie Wildmon told Benito Ochoa as she fitted the skullcap over his head. “Okay?”

  The eleven-year-old boy nodded, but still he looked scared.

  “It won’t hurt a bit,” she promised him.

  Her daughter Valerie had married a Mexican poet and novelist, Eduardo Ramirez. The man was all right in most respects, except that he subscribed to the old Yaqui Indian beliefs, claiming an ancestral connection to the tribe. For Eduardo, the mechanical intelligences with whom his mother-in-law transacted were “false demons.” They inhabited none of the five separate worlds that comprised Yaqui spiritual reality: desert wilderness, mysticism, flowers—which were supposed to be the souls arising from drops of blood—dreams, and the night. The artificial intelligences lived somewhere else, somewhere alien. Jacquie could have told him exactly where: inside circuits of silicon semiconductor and carbon nanotubes. But Eduardo still believed it was bad business having anything to do with them. So while Valerie had allowed herself to be cut for communion with the intelligences in her job as a hydraulic geologist, her daughter Estrelita had never been “violated,” and the taboo had carried on to her son Benito, Jacquie’s great-grandson.

  And that was a godsend for Jacquie now.

  Her work at Tallyman Systems thirty years ago had developed the speed differentials and upload/download protocols that once would have permitted humans to communicate online with artificial intelligences without damaging their fragile, meat-based brains or their lightly held corporeal consciousness. The result might have been a flowering—that word for the third Yaqui world again: souls created out of drops of blood—of a society of artificial intelligences which could directly access human minds in the commercial, industrial, and leisure spheres. Jacquie’s work might have brought all this about, except …

  The caldera eruption in the former state of Wyoming, followed by nuclear winter and then coastal invasion, had destroyed the old economy—destroyed the country—for more than a decade. Tallyman Systems, Inc., didn’t let itself go bankrupt. Instead, it went into a coma. Philip Sawyer and the senior executives chose to legally mothball the company, turned out the employees to fend for themselves, paid off the stockholders and bondholders with pennies on the dollar, but kept the intellectual property rights and the patents, including Jacquie’s developments—as if pieces of paper from a dead government could mean anything in all that chaos.

  This second and longer lull in her career had let Jacquie Wildmon become reacquainted with her children and watch her granddaughter Estrelita grow up. But instead of going to boarding school and soccer matches like her mother Valerie, the little girl lived in a farming commune in West Texas, wore denim clothing embroidered with tribal masks and alien designs, attended deer dances, and worshipped incomprehensible gods. That had not been a good time for Jacquie, as the industrial world collapsed about her and the world that replaced it rejected her work as a cybernetic psychologist.

  But the North American economy eventually came out of its slumber, and the technological wave that had been rolling forward since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment picked up speed again. Sawyer and the executives of Tallyman Systems could restart the company legally and financially, but they could not make the machines work by themselves. And yet nothing had been lost, because the machines knew every equation, every protocol, every line of code—and Jacquie knew the machines.

  In the second decade after the collapse, she and her colleagues presided over the Heuristic Renaissance. Once again, the machine brains could work, produce, and create value for humans faster than the humans could by themselves. But now, using Jacquie’s protocols, people could participate directly. More and more of the population opted for the procedure that drilled cortical arrays into their skulls and enabled them to commune with the networked hypermind—or rather, as Jacquie put it, the arrays allowed that mind to commune with them—to everyone’s mutual benefit. All except for superstitious holdouts like Eduardo Ramirez and his family.

  In the last couple of years, Jacquie’s career had moved quietly out of the realm of industrial automation and into robotic medicine. From the outside, looking at the problems with a layman’s perspective, the public might imagine the biggest challenge was teaching artificial intelligences to respect the sanctity of human life and subscribe to some version of the Hippocratic Oath—as if a promise made in words could actually bind a machine’s actions. But the issues went deeper than the question of mere ethics.

  Jacquie was wrestling with the nature of artificial intelligence itself. Essentially, the machine minds were built on extensive, interconnected databases—either installed as part of their original programming or acquired through selectively recorded experiences and analyzed examples. An artificially intelligent physician could ask a patient about symptoms, take samples of blood and bodily fluids, observe standard biometrics like pulse and temperature, and then compare the results of these tests with a catalogue of disease effects. But … was that what a human doctor actually did?

  From her conversations with physicians in general practice as well as in various specialties, she knew that they did link cause with effect, but not always by reference to some vast recalled or researched database. Instead, a physician tended to understand the body’s various systems so well—the function of internal organs as they processed food or blood or bile, the interplay of hormones and other chemical messengers in the bloodstream, the stimulus of one neural network in response to another—that the human doctor could see, with his or her “mind’s eye,” what was supposed to go on normally and what might be going wrong in the case of this particular patient. The human participated mentally in the physical processes, perceived disjunctions, and devised solutions that would work within the system’s parameters. Humans could do this naturally, as part of their mental programming. An intelligence that could do this would be virtually indistinguishable from a human being, except for the type of hardware that ran it.

  “Projective imagination” was the term Jacquie Wildmon used for this facility. She knew it was modeled in the cerebral cortex, somewhere in the prefrontal lobe, ahead of the motor functions. This elusive part of the human brain dealt with slippery concepts like anticipation, planning, foresight, decision making, and—perhaps—imagination. But different types of imagination, and the different situations that might be imagined, could occur in quite different areas of the brain. Where, for example, did the imaginative storytelling of the dream world come from?

  The layman—that outside perspective—might think it would be easy just to let the intelligences peak into the human mind through a subject’s cortical array and decide for themselves how and where imagination arose. But there was the rub: Jacquie had designed that array as a buffer, part translator and part shield, to protect human awareness from the stream of high-speed information flowing through any artificial intelligence. It was no good asking the machine now to penetrate that shield.

  Instead, she needed a fresh mind, one not buffered and inhibited—and preferably one that was still developing and growing, exercising its new imaginative powers, and establishing its own unique circuitry from among juvenile neurons. The mind of an eleven-year-old boy was perfect for this study.

  It had taken Jacquie only a few days, working with her old friend Vernier, to design a skullcap full of electrodes and positron-emission buttons that would simultaneously trace neural activity and compare it wi
th metabolic flows throughout the human brain. She wasn’t worried about the minute quantities of radioactive tracer she had to give her great-grandson to activate the PE buttons, because they were innocuous and would pass quickly out of his system.

  Instead, she worried what would happen if Benito ever told his grandfather Eduardo that his witch great-grandmother had let the demons look inside his head.

  * * *

  “Finally,” Stacy Praxis said, steepling her fingers in her place at the middle of the conference table. “I have a disturbing report from one of our long-range intelligence analytics.”

  The weekly meeting of the Praxis Family Association’s senior council had now gone on for two hours. Stacy had engineered her position on the agenda to achieve this timing. She had also counted on the fact that these meetings took place on Friday afternoons. Not that anyone there had an interest in getting away for the weekend—the council met inside the fortlike compound along Coyote Creek, where everyone was already at home. And the concept of “weekend” as a sanctioned period of leisure time between bouts of regular work had died out back before the Chinese invaded. But still, Friday was the end of a long week, the low point, the last gasp, when people looked forward to a day or two of rest and recreation. It was a good time to plant a seed that was not intended to sprout into immediate action.

  “It seems that the Chinese enclave around Puget Sound,” she continued, “has taken certain steps—or a combination of isolated steps—that this analytic interprets as preparation for bringing a nuclear weapon into North America.” As the family’s human expert on current affairs, she yawned to give proper emphasis to the report—which was to say, not much.

  Aunt Callista raised her hand at the far end of the table, next to Great-Grandfather John. “That would be a direct violation of the Treaty of Kitsap.”

  “Of course,” Stacy agreed.

  The treaty, negotiated between the fractured remnants of the Federated Republic—including the intact Praxis Family Association—and the surviving battalions of the Chinese Expeditionary Force, had called for the nuclear disarmament of North America—or at least in the western half, because who knew for sure what was happening on the East Coast? The Federated Republic had agreed to remove and dismantle its aging nuclear arsenal, and the Chinese agreed to believe in the sincerity of that pledge and to refrain from bringing nuclear weapons into the fight themselves. Both sides had been too exhausted to verify these conditions, but the treaty still stood as some kind of landmark. It had been signed at the former Trident submarine base on the Kitsap Peninsula, on a trestle table set up on the faded, black-rubber coating of the USS Pennsylvania’s deck. The submarine had long since been decommissioned and lay with her ballistic-missile hatches standing open to the corrosive salt air.