Divergence a-3

by Tony Ballantyne

  “Oh?” said Judy. “What did they want with us?”

  “They wanted to find out how you worked. Just how, exactly, your minds worked. DIANA had long been interested in intelligence. They wrote the AI known as Kevin, remember? They wanted to truly understand the nature of intelligence.”

  “But surely they already understood? DIANA made digital personality constructs of humans back then. They were constructing AIs all the time.”

  “No, Judy, I did. All of these things are the results of my technology. But DIANA was paranoid, maybe rightly so. They wanted to understand those principles for themselves. They constructed a program to examine the workings of the mind, and they incorporated it into the genetic structure of the children. You’re not saying anything now, Judy. You know that what I’m saying is the truth, don’t you?”

  Judy felt the pressure of the fleshy cross on the back of her neck. She reached back and touched it.

  “The meta-intelligence,” she whispered.

  “Did you never think to look at yourself with it?” asked the Watcher. “That was what it was there for—”

  “I don’t want to look at myself with it,” said Judy. “I don’t want to see that my mind is just a mechanical process . I don’t want to see that it’s just a Turing machine. Like the thing that runs this place.”

  “So what? You say that as if there is something wrong with that.” The Watcher seemed indignant.

  “Your body is a mechanical process. Your heart pumps, your muscles contract, your nerves react. So what if your mind is a Turing machine? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”

  Judy gave him a weak smile.

  “I know that. But my eyes and ears and senses are just writing to a length of tape, and your words have just been written to that tape, and my brain is just the tape head that reads the words and then jumps back and forth as it reacts to what you said.” She couldn’t help herself now: she looked. A long reel of tape was threaded between the hemispheres of her brain, clicking through a section at a time, chattering back and forth as she examined his face, eyes darting.

  “No,” said Judy, turning the gaze of the meta-intelligence away from herself. “I know you’re humoring me,” she said. “I know that you are. I don’t blame you. I know that a Turing machine is just a mathematical concept. But, I look through this and I can feel my brain mapping directly onto the mechanism. It’s like I can almost see the original process in there, just out of reach: the self-referential part of my mind that allows me to be me. And if I see that, I will have defined myself and all of my thoughts.”

  “And now look away,” said the Watcher. “Look away, Judy. Don’t look back again.”

  She did as she was told. She wanted to do as she was told.

  The Watcher went on. “Do you see the danger, Judy? I think you do now. The meta-intelligence program was a good idea, but it was observed by other AIs. AIs within DIANA and, later on, outside of DIANA. The algorithm behind the program became an idea that took root in AIs’ minds, and then it was passed on to humans, imperfectly understood. A human could almost look into their own mind and become transfixed by the sight of the mechanism. This is how the White Death was born.”

  “The White Death,” said Judy, reeling with the revelation. She had experienced the effect before, secondhand. But now she understood. Now she understood the spiral that drew the mind in upon itself until it was thinking about nothing more or less than its own processing. Trapped in Recursion.

  “The White Death,” she repeated. “I understand now.” Her voice hardened. “So where do you come into all this?”

  “Right here,” said the Watcher. A scene sprang to life on Judy’s console. “This is stored in the building’s surveillance net. October the twenty-sixth, 2211.”

  Viewing fields wobbled into life in the delivery room; they quickly took on the appearance of the room itself. Nothing had changed save for the fact that thirteen babies now lay in the cots. Three months old, Judy guessed. They looked at the mobiles with bright blue eyes, drew their legs up to their tummies, yawned and rubbed their eyes with little fists, opened little pink mouths to cry, and waited for the nurses to come to them with their smart pinstriped aprons.

  One young man stood over a cot, holding his hand over the baby’s face.

  “You make me laugh when you do that, Henry,” said an older woman, as she lifted the happy pink child out of its cot.

  “I’m not doing anything, Margaret.” Henry snatched his hand away. The baby in the cot was sleeping peacefully, its little fists on the pillow on either side of its head. That’s me, thought Judy. That’s me Henry was looking at . Margaret bounced the baby expertly on her shoulder, one arm wrapped around its little bottom, the other pointing upwards.

  “She’s only sleeping,” she said. “The sense cluster would pick it up if she wasn’t breathing. There’s no need for you to keep feeling for her breath.”

  Judy gulped as the man picked up her younger self. He had such a kind face, she thought. His light brown hair was already receding, his chin a little too long, but when he placed the baby on his shoulder and rocked it gently in its sleep, a look of such warmth came over his face. Judy was a ghost in the recorded scene; she moved close to him and a lump rose to her throat as she watched him tilt his head around at an awkward angle in order to get a better look at the baby’s face. She saw the way he surreptitiously licked a finger and raised it to just underneath the baby’s nose, the better to catch its slightest breath. And her eyes welled with tears as she caught the contented smile as he found what he was looking for. Just how many times, she wondered, had she lain in this cot and half woken from a dream in which her forming mind twisted over itself to get a better look at its developing consciousness?

  What sort of nightmares must she have experienced in that recursive, self-referential world? And then to have opened her eyes and to have seen a hand just above her face, reaching down on the end of an impossibly long arm.

  She started to cry, tears bubbling up and streaking her cheeks. She wiped them away, and smiled through bleary eyes.

  All that time and she had never realized. Every time she was anxious, she had experienced that dream. It wasn’t a bad thing at all. It was her subconscious reminding her that she had once been loved. She now followed Henry around the room, watched him bouncing her infant self on his shoulder, watched him feeding her from a bottle, watched him help her sit up amongst the other babies on the gaily colored mat that had been rolled out across the floor.

  When the Watcher spoke again, the sound of his voice made her jump.

  “Of course there was someone else here,” he said, “someone who the surveillance systems could not pick up. I’ll fill in the gaps.”

  It seemed like the grey crystalline robot had been standing in the corner all along and Judy had just registered his presence. He stood, arms patiently folded, looking around the room with amused patience on his beautiful face.

  “Chris,” said Judy. “I should have guessed. What was he doing here?”

  “Monitoring the room for me,” said the Watcher. “I was going to perform a little experiment of my own.”

  “It was performed on me, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, Judy. You were born in 2211, the same year that I performed another experiment to try to determine the truth of my own origins. I placed a developing mind in the ziggurat under the stars on a distant planet, to see if it would become infected by the virus that made me. Do you think that was the only test that I made? Minds can live in many containers, in machinery and in flesh. The human mind is just an AI that has evolved within a set of grey cells.”

  Judy’s eyes widened, guessing what the Watcher was going to say next.

  “I wiped the minds of those thirteen babies. Left them empty, waiting to see if anything would develop there.”

  Judy felt as if she had been stabbed in the stomach. She felt the knife in there, twisting, tearing her life apart.

  “You did that to me?” she
whispered.

  “No,” said the Watcher, “I did it to the baby that Henry there now holds in his arms. You are not that baby. You are what developed afterwards.”

  Judy couldn’t speak, the moment was too big. She held her stomach, she bit her lip, then she rubbed her dry eyes. She needed to think. The Watcher, however, would not be quiet.

  “Chris once told you that you would come around to his point of view someday: that you would want to help him to destroy me.”

  “I never believed him, until a moment ago,” said Judy. “Now I see it’s true. He was right.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing,” Judy said. “You’re already defeated. The Dark Seeds are all over this planet, and you can no longer fight them. All you can do is hold on to what little power you have remaining. Sooner or later you’re going to have to climb into a sealed processing space and stay there.”

  “What about all the people outside? All the people who live on Earth? Don’t you care for them?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Judy snapped. “I was a Social Care operative for years. But it’s funny; Eva Rye got into my mind, and I saw things through her eyes. I saw the way you manipulated her to get what you wanted. I had a friend once called Frances. She was an AI. Someone said that she used my personality as a template for her own. It was a negative template, but a template nonetheless. I’m beginning to think that you did the same with Eva…”

  “I don’t deny it.”

  “…and that makes me wonder. I think about Kevin—you know he claims that he is not an AI. He says he passes the Turing test every day, but he is not intelligent: just a sequence of yes/no responses, just a massive algorithm.”

  “Yes?”

  “And I wonder, are you any different? Are you an AI, or are you just a reflection of all of us? You appear to have feelings, but all we are seeing in your actions are our own emotions reflecting right back at us. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony? The last two hundred years of history have been shaped by you, yet you’re not even intelligent. We just took you at your word when you said you were.”

  “It’s a clever theory, Judy,” the Watcher looked smug, “but what about all the other personality constructs? What about your sisters? Maybe they weren’t intelligent. Maybe they too were just reflections of human emotions.”

  Judy hugged herself. Was this the ultimate betrayal? Was she denying those digital copies of herself their supposed existence? And yet she had to go on.

  “I don’t know. Were they intelligent, or did they just think they were?”

  The Watcher laughed.

  “You should know. You used to go into the digital world. You have spoken with personality constructs in there! You know they were intelligent.”

  “Or was I just seeing myself reflected back again?”

  In the virtual scene, Henry placed the baby that would become Judy back in its crib. At that, Judy turned her back on the Watcher and made her way across the room. She bent closer and regarded the look of tender satisfaction on Henry’s young face, watched the way he pulled the pink blanket up over the sleeping child’s chest. She smiled as he gently pressed the baby’s little nose.

  “Beep,” he whispered under his breath, then he turned and walked from the room, this whole scene observed by the silent robot in the corner.

  “And how do you know that you have intelligence, Judy?” asked the Watcher. “Or do you just think that you have?”

  “I’m the only one who can tell the difference.”

  “Good answer,” the Watcher said. “But you could also discern whether the rest of us do, if you only took the trouble to think about it—even without the use of your meta-intelligence. You can tell that I have intelligence, because I can see the Dark Seeds and fix them in position.” He looked thoughtful. “That’s what it takes to be intelligent,” the Watcher continued, “the ability to observe. Now, that’s enough of this. Come on, we’re almost done here.”

  They walked along the corridors towards the processing space that contained the FE. The meta-intelligence had been watching it all this time, ever since they had descended in the lift. Judy could sense it getting nearer, a pearly grey sphere hanging in an underground space.

  “What is it doing here?” she whispered.

  “It’s everywhere, Judy. It appears wherever it’s needed. That’s the way it was written, so it can Restore the Balance. Since 2240, when you set the first Dark Seeds loose here, it has been appearing more and more frequently. Dark Seeds seem to attract FE. And Aleph and the other systems repair robots, too.”

  “Aleph is an alien, isn’t he?”

  “Yes. The universe is full of other life, and I am beginning to realize that they function in ways beyond even my current superior capacity to understand. All it takes for life to arise is a situation where replication can occur. Recursion, the same patterns occurring over and over again, life calling life into being. Your problem, Judy, is that you look just at individual components. It is in the recursive patterns that you will see the mind of God in this universe—the mind of God in all his divergence.”

  They were standing outside a grey metal door. Judy could sense the FE lying just beyond it. The Watcher looked thoughtful.

  “In the end, Chris and I thought we could use FE to settle our differences,” he continued. “We thought we could split the Earth Domain between ourselves and allow FE to determine the fairest division. I think you can guess what we ended up with?”

  Judy knew the answer. “Nothing, of course. Because neither of you ever owned the Earth Domain in the first place.”

  The Watcher nodded. “That’s right. Well, here we are. This is where it all began.”

  The door slid open, and Judy stepped forward.

  The processing space on the Eva Rye had been a sphere. Here, in the DIANA building, it seemed to be a white cube the size of a small house. The cube stood in the middle of an enormous hangar of a room, illuminated by thousands of tiny green lights that hung from the ceiling, flickering like leaves in the wind. There was no floor to the room as such, just a series of metal joists set over a dark drop that led who-knew-where. A set of pale blue duckboards led to the doorway of the cube.

  “This is why you are here,” said the Watcher. “This is the result of all the myriad exchanges.”

  “You expect me to go inside that?”

  “Of course,” said the Watcher. “Think on the nature of FE. It is both the medium and the message. It remembers all that it has been. It remembered the shape of this building. It remembers what it was like when it was created, all those billions of years ago. All FE is the same. It can trace its path all the way back to its origins. Enter that cube, and you are seeing life as it was nine billion years ago. You are seeing the secret of life in this universe. Wouldn’t you like to take a look?”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Not in the slightest. But just remember, your mind is formed of FE and quickened by MTPH.”

  Judy nodded thoughtfully. She was only gradually registering what she had been told. Her mind—this body’s mind—had been wiped at birth. What had taken root there was the same as what had taken root in the ziggurat on Constantine’s planet. It was the same, in effect, as the Watcher’s mind. But not the same, for it had been shaped by its container.

  “My mind is formed of FE,” she murmured. “Does that make any difference?”

  They both looked at each other, and suddenly began to laugh.

  “Fucked if I know,” said the Watcher. And they laughed all the louder.

  Judy crossed the duckboards, staring down at the black drop below. Could she see metal creatures down there, metal bodies squirming over each other in an echo of other events? Would she slip from the duckboards to be dragged down to drown there in the darkness? She looked up at the green lights high above, echoes of leaves in trees and the sunlight shining through limes. She paused by the white door set in the side of the cube and looked back to the Watcher, who gave her a littl
e wave. What is in here? FE

  remembered. The Eva Rye remembered being a ship. This building remembered its shape. FE was nine billion years old. Could it really remember its origins?

  She placed a hand on the door and pushed it open and stepped out of her world.

  All it took to create life was a situation where replication could occur. Not quite. There had to be some restrictions, some capability for the laws of economics to take place. There had to be limited capacity. Life evolved where there was competition. When there was a limited supply of building materials, replicating molecules would merely strip each other of their components. They would need therefore to evolve ways to prevent this happening. They would evolve walls around themselves to create cells. They would learn to spread quickly so as to grab scarce materials before their competitors could. They would diverge into predators and prey. Life would become a race for limited resources. For one species to prosper, another had to decline. But someone has since written fairness into the universe, thought Judy, a feature sadly lacking in the original design. She couldn’t stay in here for long. The air burned at her lungs and made her skin itch, even beneath the active suit. Her eyes were watering and the flickering light made her head spin. Even so, she could make out the shape of the space in which she stood. The dusty towers that surrounded her made her think of termite mounds; indeed, they made her think of blocks of flats. They were riddled with hundreds of tiny holes, set out in regular rows along each rectangular face of the mounds. If the inhabitants had been termites, they could come and stand in these windows and look out across to an equal inhabitant standing directly opposite. How many mounds in here? wondered Judy. Ten of these orange dusty shapes? Twelve? Look at them, all of them of exactly equal height. All with the same number of windows. Is this where it all began?