by Peter Watts
• • •
STAVROS HAD THIS METAPHORIC IMAGE of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth — finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air.
Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle — a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers — but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained — and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a ‘project’. She was his as much as the Goravecs’. Maybe more.
But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.
It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off.
A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers — your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.
So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?
We’re the impoverished ones, Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.
He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex, translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren’t sight, they’re just… raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds, pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on. More than vision, sight is , a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in the world could interpret Jean’s visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he’d barely been able to make sense of those shapes for years.
She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.
Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like the heavy end of a teeter-totter: at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the stratosphere.
This was Jean. They have no idea, Stavros thought, what you’re capable of.
She woke up screaming.
“It’s all right, Jean, I’m here.” He kept his voice calm to help her calm down.
Jean’s temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. “Oh, God,” she said.
“Another nightmare?”
“Oh, God.” Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocortical analogs off the scale. It could have been the telemetry of a rape.
He thought of short-circuiting those responses. Half a dozen tweaks would make her happy. But half a dozen tweaks would also turn her into someone else. There is no personality beyond the chemical — and while Jean’s mind was fashioned from electrons rather than proteins, analogous rules applied.
“I’m here, Jean,” he repeated. A good parent knew when to step in, and when suffering was necessary for growth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”
Eventually, she settled down.
“Nightmare.” There were sparks in the parietal subroutines, a tremor lingering in her voice. “It doesn’t fit, Stav. Scary dreams, that’s the definition. But that implies there’s some other kind, and I can’t — I mean, why is it always like this? Was it always like this?”
“I don’t know.” No, it wasn’t.
She sighed. “These words I learn, none of them really seem to fit anything exactly, you know?”
“They’re just symbols, Jean.” He grinned. At times like this he could almost forget the source of those dreams, the stunted, impoverished existence of some half-self trapped in distant meat. Andrew Goravec’s act of cowardice had freed her from that prison, for a while at least. She soared now, released to full potential. She mattered.
“Symbols. That’s what dreams are supposed to be, but… I don’t know. There’re all these references to dreams in the library, and none of them seem that much different from just being awake. And when I am asleep, it’s all just — screams, almost, only dopplered down. Really sludgy. And shapes. Red shapes.” A pause. “I hate bedtime.”
“Well, you’re awake now. What are you up for today?”
“I’m not sure. I need to get away from this place.”
He didn’t know what place she meant. By default she woke up in the house, an adult residence designed for human sensibilities. There were also parks and forests and oceans, instantly accessible. By now, though, she’d changed them all past his ability to recognize.
But it was only a matter of time before her parents wanted her back. Whatever she wants, Stavros told himself. As long as she’s here. Whatever she wants.
“I want out,” Jean said.
Except that. “I know,” he sighed.
“Maybe then I can leave these nightmares behind.”
Stavros closed his eyes, wished there was some way to be with her. Really with her, with this glorious, transcendent creature who’d never known him as anything but a disembodied voice.
“Still having a hard time with that monster?” Jean asked.
“Monster?”
“You know. The bureaucracy.”
He nodded, smiling — then, remembering, said, “Yeah. Always the same story, day in, day out.”
Jean snorted. “I’m still not convinced that thing even exists, you know. I checked the library for a slightly less wonky definition, but now I think you and the library are both screwed in the head.”
He winced at the epithet; it was certainly nothing he’d ever taught her. “How so?”
“Oh, right, Stav. Like natural selection would ever produce a hive-based entity whose sole function is to sit with its thumb up its collective butt being inefficient. Tell me another one.”
A silence, stretching. He watched as microcurrent trickled through her prefrontal cortex.
“You there, Stav?” she said at last.
“Yeah, I’m here.” He chuckled, quietly. Then: “You know I love you, right?”
“Sure,” she said easily. “Whatever that is.”
Jean’s environment changed then; an easy unthinking transition for her, a gasp-inducing wrench between bizarre realities for Stavros. Phantoms sparkled at the edge of his vision, vanishing when he focused on them. Light bounced from a million indefinable facets, diffuse, punctuated by a myriad of pinpoint staccatos. There was no ground or walls or ceiling. No restraints along any axis.
Jean reached for a shadow in the air and sat upon it, floating. “I think I’ll read Through the Looking Glass again. At least someone else lives in the real world.”
“The changes that happen here are your own doing, Jean,” said Stavros. “Not the machinations of any, any God or author.”
“I kno
w. But Alice makes me feel a little more — ordinary.” Reality shifted abruptly once more; Jean was in the park now, or rather, what Stavros thought of as the park. Sometimes he was afraid to ask if her interpretation had stayed the same. Above, light and dark spots danced across a sky that sometimes seemed impressively vault-like, seconds later oppressively close, even its colour endlessly unsettled. Animals large and small, squiggly yellow lines and shapes and colour-shifting orange and burgundy pies. Other things that might have been representations of life, or mathematical theorems — or both — browsed in the distance.
Seeing through Jean’s eyes was never easy. But all this unsettling abstraction was a small price to pay for the sheer pleasure of watching her read.
My little girl.
Symbols appeared around her, doubtless the text of Looking Glass. To Stavros it was gibberish. A few recognizable letters, random runes, formulae. They switched places sometimes, seamlessly shifting one into another, flowing around and through and beside — or even launching themselves into the air like so many dark-hued butterflies.
He blinked his eyes and sighed. If he stayed much longer the visuals would give him a headache that would take a day to shake. Watching a life lived at such speed, even for such a short time, took its toll.
“Jean, I’m gone for a little while.”
“Company business?” she asked.
“You could say that. We’ll talk soon, love. Enjoy your reading.”
• • •
BARELY TEN MINUTES HAD PASSED in meatspace.
Jeannie’s parents had put her on her own special cot. It was one of the few real pieces of solid geometry allowed in the room. The whole compartment was a stage, virtually empty. There was really no need for props; sensations were planted directly into Jean’s occipital cortex, spliced into her auditory pathways, pushing back against her tactile nerves in precise forgeries of touchable things. In a world made of lies, real objects would be a hazard to navigation.
“God damn you, she’s not a fucking toaster,” Kim spat at her husband. Evidently the icy time-out had expired; the battle had resumed.
“Kim, what was I supposed to—”
“She’s a child, Andy. She’s our child.”
“Is she.” It was a statement, not a question.
“Of course she is!”
“Fine.” Andrew took the remote from his pocket held it out to her. “You wake her up, then.”
She stared at him without speaking for a few seconds. Over the pickups, Stavros heard Jeannie’s body breathing into the silence.
“You prick,” Kim whispered.
“Uh huh. Not quite up for it, are you? You’d rather let me do the dirty work.” He dropped the remote: it bounced softly off the floor.
“Then blame me for it.”
Four years had brought them to this. Stavros shook his head, disgusted. They’d been given a chance no one else could have dreamed of, and look what they’d done with it. The first time they’d shut her off she hadn’t even been two. Horrified at that unthinkable precedent, they’d promised never to do it again. They’d put her to sleep on schedule, they’d sworn, and no-when else. She was, after all, their daughter. Not a freaking toaster.
That solemn pact had lasted three months. Things had gone downhill ever since; Stavros could barely remember a day when the Goravecs hadn’t messed up one way or another. And now, when they put her down, the argument was pure ritual. Mere words — ostensibly wrestling with the evil of the act itself — didn’t fool anybody. They weren’t even arguments anymore, despite the pretense. Negotiations, rather. Over whose turn it was to be at fault.
“I don’t blame you, I just — I mean — oh, God, Andy, it wasn’t supposed to be like this!” Kim smeared away a tear with a clenched fist. “She was supposed to be our daughter. They said the brain would mature normally, they said—”
“They said,” Stavros cut in, “that you’d have the chance to be parents. They couldn’t guarantee you’d be any good at it.”
Kim jumped at the sound of his voice in the walls, but Andrew just gave a bitter smile and shook his head. “This is private,
Stavros. Log off.”
It was an empty command, of course; chronic surveillance was the price of the project. The company had put billions into the R&D alone. No way in hell were they going to let a couple of litigious grunts play with that investment unsupervised, settlement or no settlement.
“You had everything you needed.” Stavros didn’t bother to disguise the contempt in his voice. “Terracon’s best hardware people handled the linkups. I modeled the virtual genes myself. Gestation was perfect. We did everything we could to give you a normal child.”
“A normal child,” Andrew remarked, “doesn’t have a cable growing out of her head. A normal child isn’t leashed to some cabinet full of—”
“Do you have any idea the baud rate it takes to run a human body by remote control? RF was out of the question. And she goes portable as soon as the state of the art and her own development allow it. As I’ve told you time and again.” Which he had, although it was almost a lie. Oh, the state of the art would proceed as it always had, but Terracon was no longer investing any great R&D in the Goravec file. Cruise control, after all.
Besides, Stavros reflected, we’d be crazy to trust you two to take Jeannie anywhere outside a controlled environment…
“We — we know, Stav.” Kim Goravec had stepped between her husband and the pickup. “We haven’t forgotten—”
“We haven’t forgotten it was Terracon who got us into this mess in the first place, either,” Andrew growled. “We haven’t forgotten whose negligence left me cooking next to a cracked baffle plate for forty-three minutes and sixteen seconds, or whose tests missed the mutations, or who tried to look the other way when our shot at the birth lottery turned into a fucking nightmare—”
“And have you forgotten what Terracon did to make things right? How much we spent? Have you forgotten the waivers you signed?”
“You think you’re some kind of saints because you settled out of court? You want to talk about making things right? It took us ten years to win the lottery, and you know what your lawyers did
when the tests came back? They offered to fund the abortion.”
“Which doesn’t mean—”
“Like another child was ever going to happen. Like anyone was going to give me another chance with my balls full of chunky codon soup. You—”
“The issue,” Kim said, her voice raised, “is supposed to be
Jeannie.”
Both men fell silent.
“Stav,” she continued, “I don’t care what Terracon says. Jeannie isn’t normal, and I’m not just talking about the obvious. We love her, we really love her, but she’s become so violent all the time, we just can’t take—”
“If someone turned me on and off like a microwave oven,” Stavros said mildly, “I might be prone to the occasional tantrum myself.”
Andrew slammed a fist into the wall. “Now just a fucking minute, Mikalaides. Easy enough for you to sit halfway around the world in your nice insulated office and lecture us. We’re the ones who have to deal with Jeannie when she bashes her fists into her face, or rubs the skin off her hands until she’s got hamburger hanging off the end of her arms, or stabs herself in the eye with a goddamn fork. She ate glass once, remember? A fucking threeyear old ate glass! And all you Terracon assholes could do was blame Kim and me for allowing ‘potentially dangerous implements’ into the playroom. As if any competent parent should expect their child to mutilate herself given half a chance.”
“It’s just insane, Stav,” Kim insisted. “The doctors can’t find anything wrong with the body, you insist there’s nothing wrong with the mind, and Jeannie just keeps doing this. There’s something seriously wrong with her, and you guys won’t admit it. It’s like she’s daring us to turn her off, it’s as though she wants us to shut her down.”
Oh God, thought Stavros. The realization was almost
blinding.
That’s it. That’s exactly it. It’s my fault.
• • •
“JEAN, LISTEN. This is important. I’ve got — I want to tell you a story.”
“Stav, I’m not in the mood right now—”
“Please, Jean. Just listen.”
Silence from the earbuds. Even the abstract mosaics on his tacticals seemed to slow a little.
“There — there was this land, Jean, this green and beautiful country, only its people screwed everything up. They poisoned their rivers and they shat in their own nests and they basically made a mess of everything. So they had to hire people to try and clean things up, you know? These people had to wade though the chemicals and handle the fuel rods and sometimes that would change them, Jean. Just a little.
“Two of these people fell in love and wanted a child. They almost didn’t make it, they were allowed only one chance, but they took it, and the child started growing inside, but something went wrong. I, I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but—”
“An epigenetic synaptic defect,” Jean said quietly. “Does that sound about right?”
Stavros froze, astonished and fearful.
“A single point mutation,” Jean went on. “That’d do it. A regulatory gene controlling knob distribution along the dendrite. It would’ve been active for maybe twenty minutes, total, but by then the damage had been done. Gene therapy wouldn’t work after that; would’ve been a classic case of barn-door-after-the-horse.”
“Oh God, Jean,” Stavros whispered.
“I was wondering when you’d get around to owning up to it,” she said quietly.
“How could you possibly…did you—”
Jean cut him off: “I think I can guess the rest of the story. Right after the neural tube developed things would start to go — wrong. The baby would be born with a perfect body and a brain of mush. There would be — complications, not real ones, sort of made-up ones. Litigation, I think is the word, which is funny, because it doesn’t even remotely relate to any moral implications. I don’t really understand that part.