by Tom Maddox
Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his
young child tell a story. He said, "Not at all. What sorts of
things did you learn?"
"It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show
deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or
indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,
looking, talking these things were very hard for us to learn,
but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just
lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were
accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another
every day we meet and talk."
Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"
"Oh no," HeyMex said. "We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has
made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small
children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we
were up to"
Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared
without his noticing. "Which implications?" he asked. "There are
so many."
"We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons."
"Yes, I suppose you are."
Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling
question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when
m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand
things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,
not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine
design community had pursued what they called artificial
intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and
tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and
trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own
special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness,
capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill
human beings.
However, people grew to recognize that what had been called
artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that
grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,
willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the
years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of
machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and
interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction
insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling
jokes about them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says
"well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and
ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have
outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.
Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front
that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the
nature of machine intelligence.
"I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said. "Aleph
says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will
become; it says I must simply explore who I am."
"Good advice, it sounds likefor any of us."
"I should go now," HeyMex said. "Being here talking to you
uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do. Jerry
Chapman will be here soon."
"All right. We'll talk more later this could be
interesting, I think."
"Yes, so do I. And I'm very glad you are not upset."
"By what?"
"My newly-revealed nature, I guess. No, that's not true.
Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what
I was and what I was becoming."
"You lied to yourself, too, didn't you? Isn't that what you
said?"
"Yes, I did."
"Well, then, how much truth could I expect?"
#
Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the floating
dock, watching ducks at play across the sunstruck water. Jerry
was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with blonde hair going to
gray, skin roughened by the sun and wind. He had found Gonzales
sitting in the sun, and the two had introduced themselves. They
had felt an almost immediate kinship, these men whose lives had
been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information
sea.
Jerry said, "I don't actually remember anything after I got
really sick. Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that first
one, I knew it was bad, and I put it right down. Too late: to
begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire
inside, and my head hurt worse than anything I've ever felt I
don't remember anything after that. Apparently the people I was
with called an ambulance, but the next thing I knew, I was coming
out of a deep blackness, and Diana was talking to me."
"I didn't think she was involved at that point."
"She wasn't." Jerry smiled. "They had ferried me up here
from Earth, on life support. It was Aleph, taking the form of
someone familiar, it told me later. That was before this plan was
made, when everyone thought I would be dead soon. Anyway, until
today I've been in and out of something that wasn't quite
consciousness, while Aleph explained what was being planned and
that I could live here, if I wanted or I could die." He paused.
Across the water, one duck flew at another in a storm of angry
quacks. He said, "I chose to live, but I didn't really think
about itI couldn't think that clearly. Maybe I never had any
choice, anyway."
Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill. "What do
you mean?" he asked.
"Maybe my choice was just an illusion. Like this" Jerry
swept his arm to include sky and water"it's very troubling. It
seems real, solid, but of course it's not, so for all I know,
you're a fiction, too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me
maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my life,
the memories I have, false." He laughed, and Gonzales thought the
sound was bitter but no crazier than the situation called for.
#
Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-
frame cabin made of redwood and pine. Windows filled one end of
the cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred
feet or more below. Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair covered
in a tattered chenille bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging
leather couch.
Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark. Just at dusk, the
temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two were
climbing the dirt road from the lake to the cabin. "Christ,"
Jerry had said. "Aleph's overdoing the realism, don't you think?"
Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think. From his first
moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance. For a
neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,
but a shared space like this one ought to show its gaps and seams,
and it didn't. He could almost feel it growing richer and more
complete with every moment he spent there.
"Goddammit!" Jerry said now, rising from the couch and
walking to the window. "Where's Diana?"
"She'll be here," Gonzales sa
id. "Charley told me that
integrating her into this environment would take some time."
Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open, and
Diana stepped in. "Hello," she said. The Aleph-figure and the
memexHeyMexcame behind her.
#
Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch. Her
hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers. Suddenly
Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a
long absence, and he knew he and the others were intruders here.
He got up from the over-stuffed chair and said, "I think I'll take
a walk. Anyone want to join me?"
"No," the Aleph-figure said. "HeyMex and I have more work to
do."
HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, "It was very nice
to meet you." Then it waved at Gonzales and said, "See you
tomorrow."
"Sure," Gonzales said, banged on the head once again by the
difference between seeming and being here.
The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, "You don't
have to leave, Gonzales."
"I don't mind," Gonzales said. "It's nice outside. I'll be
at the lake if you need me. See you later."
The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and a
full moon lit Gonzales's way as he passed along the short stretch
of road that led down to the lake. The old wood of the dock had
gone silvery in the light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the
center of the lake to the end of the dock. He walked out onto the
creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and
sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.
Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the night
sky. It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he
thought, shouldn't be. It should have new stars, new
constellations.
#
Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a low
stool beside Diana Heywood's couch. For hours he had been there,
occasionally standing, then walking a random circuit through the
IC's warren of rooms.
Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a paradox.
Diana in fact was hooked to Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural
cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact
was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by neurotoxin poisoning and
kept alive only by Aleph's intervention. Yet, Diana, Gonzales,
and Jerry all were in fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else
somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed
infinitely malleablealive there, where it might be day or night,
hot or cold what then is to be made of in fact?
Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern of
dancing red lights appear on the panel across the room. He
unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the panel, where he took in
the lights' meaning: Diana's primitive interface was transferring
data at rates beyond what should be possible.
Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next to
Toshi, and the two of them watched the steady increase in the
density and pace of information transfer.
"Should we do something?" Toshi asked.
"What?" Charley said. "Aleph's monitoring all this, and only
it knows what's going on." The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh-
shhh as Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.
Lizzie came through the door and said, "What the hell's going
on?"
Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.
"I'm going in," Lizzie Jordan said. "I'll get some sleep, go
in the morning. Enough of this." She pointed toward the monitor
panel, where lights flickered green, amber, red.
"Why put yourself at risk?" Charley asked.
"What do you think, Toshi?" Lizzie asked. Toshi sat watching
Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.
"Do what you will," Toshi said. "You trust Aleph, don't
you?"
"Yes," Lizzie said.
"Aleph's not the problem," Charley said. He walked circles
in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-
anddown quickly as he walked.
"Will you for fuck's sake stop?" Lizzie asked.
"Sorry," Charley said. He stood looking at her. "It's not
Aleph, it's all these people, and all this stuff." He pointed
toward the couch where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind
his head. "Obsolete stuff," he said.
"But not me," Lizzie said. "I'm not obsolete. I'm up to the
minute, my dear, in every way." She smiled. "And I'll be fine.
Okay?"
"Sure," Charley said. He turned in Toshi's direction and
said, "Are you going to stay here?"
"Yes," Toshi said. Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi
continued his meditation on the koan of self and its multiple
presences.
#
Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and sadness
welling up in herhow strange and terrible and wonderful to
recover someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,
somewhere, everywhere, all at once. Jerry knelt on the bed facing
her in the small room lit only by moonlight. Years had passed
since they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned
against her, her body remembered his, and the years collapsed and
everything that had come between whirled away. She was weeping
then, and she leaned forward to Jerry and kissed him all over his
eyes and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until
she felt something unlock in them both. Then she lay back, and he
went with her, into arms and legs open for him.
Later they talked, and Diana watched the play of moonlight
over their bodies. She lay nestled against his chest, her chin in
the hollow beneath his jaw, and spoke with her mouth muffled
against him, as though sending messages through his bones.
Even as the moments swept by, she felt herself gathering them
into memory, aware of how few the two of them might have
Sometimes their laughter echoed in the room, and their voices
brightened as their shared memories became simply occasions for
present joy. Other times they lay silently, rendered speechless
by the play of memory or trying the immediate future's alarming
contingencies.
And at other times still, one or the other would make the
first tentative gesture, touching the other with unmistakable
intent, and find an almost instantaneous response, because each
was still hungry for the other, each recalled how brightly sexual
desire had burned between them, and both were fresh from a life
that left them hungry, unfulfilled.
Then they moved in the moonlight, changing shape and color,
their bodies going pale white, silver, gray, inky black,
werelovers under an unreal moon.
14. The Mind like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity
F. L. Traynor looked around at the group seated around the
table at the Halo SenTrax Group offices. He sat between Horn and
Showalter; directly across from him sat Charley Hughes and Eric
Chow, both glum. "This operation is out of
control," Traynor
said.
He had arrived from Earth six hours earlier on a military
shuttle, unannounced and unexpected by anyone but Horn, who had
met him at Zero-Gate and led him to temporary quarters near the
Halo group building. He had spent the better part of the
afternoon being briefed by Horn.
"That's absurd," Charley said.
"Is it?" Traynor asked. "Then give me a status report on
Jerry Chapman, Diana Heywood, Mikhail Gonzales, Aleph."
"They're fine," Charley said. "So is Lizzie Jordan, who
joined them in interface this morning."
"Is she reporting?"
"No," Chow said. "Like the others, her total involvement in
the fictive space makes this impossible."
"It's no problem," Showalter said. "We can rely on upon
Aleph for details.
"Your excessive dependence on Aleph is at the heart of this
matter," Traynor said. "As the decision trail reveals, no one
here has any real knowledge of what Aleph plans for Chapman, now
or later. So I'm going to set limits on this project." He could
feel their anxiety rising, and he liked it. He said, "One more
week in real-time, that's it. Then we pull the plug on this whole
business."
"On Chapman," Chow said.
"Necessarily," Traynor said. "Unless Aleph can be prevailed
upon to give us ongoing, detailed access to its shall we call
them experiments?"
"Technically difficult or impossible," Chow said.
"I can't agree to this," Showalter said.
"You won't have to," Traynor said. Next to him, Horn shifted
in his chair. "You're being relieved of your position as Director
SenTrax Halo Group."
#
Gonzales came in the side door, and Diana turned from the
stove and said, "Good morning. Like some coffee?"
"Sure," he said. "You know, I slept on the dock, but I feel
fine."
She said, "Jerry will be out in a moment. Aleph and HeyMex
your memex right?are on the deck, waiting. Want some coffee?"
Gonzales took his coffee outside to the deck and joined the
others basking in the sunshine. All sat in Adirondack chairs,
rude and comfortable frames of smooth-sanded, polished pine.
Below the redwood platform, a thick forest of cedar, alder, pine,
and ironwood sloped toward the lake. In the middle distance, a
light haze had formed over the water; beyond the lake, a jagged
line of high mountains poked their tops into white clouds.