Beautiful Intelligence

by Stephen Palmer

  “Thanks. Simple is best, I’ve found.”

  “What shall we do with Indigo?”

  “Oh, leave it. I read somewhere that blind people’s senses change to compensate for lack of vision. Maybe Indigo will do the same thing.”

  Joanna nodded. “We shall have to let it… suffer, though.”

  “Suffer?”

  “The others need to try to understand why Indigo is different, why it is struggling. We cannot tell them.”

  Manfred nodded, folding his arms and looking at the bis. “You’re right. But the bis aren’t much like kids–”

  “I know, I know. I told you that, remember?”

  “It’s easy enough for kids to understand they’re human because that’s all there is. They know they’re not living in a world of zombies, and they use themselves as an exemplar to work out what everybody else is doing. Theory of mind. But the bis won’t know their world isn’t elegant zombies. They’ll have to work it out for themselves, and if they don’t they won’t become conscious, and we’ll fail.”

  Joanna sighed. “It is so difficult to know if they are conscious…”

  “Two millennia of theories,” Manfred replied. “But think, Jo. What about love? You can’t detect that, you can’t prove it exists, but you know it when you feel it.” He shrugged. “Some things are like that. Emergent properties. It could be that we’ll never know for sure if the bis have subjective experiences. But my hunch is that we’ll know when we see it… when we feel it.”

  She nodded. “That is not science, though.”

  He said, “When you worked with chimps you were tempted to call them conscious.”

  “You read all my papers.”

  “Sure did. But you never knew the chimps were conscious, did you? Because you’re not a chimp, in chimp society.” He gestured at the bis and said, “This is the same. We can’t get around the fact that they’re artificial. But they got bodies and no direct access to anything. They got a society, including us… they could become human – maybe. Damn, Jo, this is the best chance. And we’ll bring it to the world.”

  “Best chance… I think perhaps it is.”

  Manfred led her out of the room. “We need to think about teaching them English,” he whispered. “They have some sort of simple communication now, though I’m damned if I can get it. Gestures, I think.”

  “We have hypothesised that they do communicate,” Joanna said. “Perhaps it is gestural, emotional even.”

  He nodded. “Hmm, that’s another hurdle. Emotions. They’re at least as important as language…”

  ~

  Pouncey sat on a box in the tower block entrance, a standalone in her hand. The Hyperlinked was stored in this device. The standalone used local thermometer readings to generate random numbers, from which addresses of vacant rooms were later scavenged. Truly the Hyperlinked was random, shielding them from the all-seeing eyes of the nexus, which could detect a pattern in any part of the world.

  She glanced up into the rain and cursed the nexus. The BIteam needed food and water. Manfred had declared a moratorium on the use of his billions because of the Tsuneko incident and his own creeping paranoia, but Pouncey had little cash left. Her own accounts, along with her ID, had been killed when she joined the BIteam, and her fake credit line led to an empty account. As for Joanna, she was practically solo, using wristband and spex only when she needed to, and living off Manfred.

  Pouncey stood up, put on her spex, and strode out into the night.

  As ever, first thing she did was check Leonora and Yuri in San Francisco, but they had decamped for Seattle. Pouncey grunted to herself and whupped an umbrella. The BIteam knew these were decoys, but it was interesting nonetheless. Pouncey theorised that patterns might develop in this faux-hobo life, leading her to the location of the AIteam, which must, at the very least, include Leonora and Yuri. But she had never been able to make the facts coincide with her theory, and she did not dare allow the nexus to do the work for her. Aritomo Ichikawa would spot that calculation in an instant.

  She sighed. The desertion of Tsuneko June handed Aritomo an ace card. Quite likely he knew already about Philly – assuming Tsuneko had run to him. Which seemed probable. Maybe it was time to scoot, leave Philly, leave the States, head Canuckwards, or maybe south to Lone Star lands where hiding was easy amidst the ruined refineries.

  There was a lo-market a couple of blocks along. On damp, algae-greened tables lay piles of half rotten veg, bits of scavenged meat – some recognisable as dog limbs – and other provender verging on inedible. But cheap. Very cheap. She took a few coins from her pocket, her last dollars, buying some essentials. Cooking would leach too much of the nutritional value from this stuff, but nobody ate uncooked food in these parts. Way too dangerous.

  The terrible argument they’d had when she discovered how much money Manfred had wasted on chocolate returned to her mind. She clamped down on her anger. Soon, she would have to do something about their finances.

  And water? Back at the office block she ascended the stairs and checked the rain collectors. Enough there for a few days. Better start boiling it.

  ~

  In bed, Manfred and Joanna talked.

  “How can the bis have emotions if they are not human?” Joanna said. “At best they will be human-imprinted. Humanoid. Not real, like us.”

  “Emotions mean something,” Manfred said. He lay on his back, hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “They’re sourced in the primitive brain, the reptile brain. I bet they’re more important than language to survival.”

  “Really?”

  “Listen,” Manfred said, “human action isn’t all one measure. Different actions, different aspects of reality, have a range of values according to how important they are. Values, you see.” He turned onto his side so that he could face her. “Hmm, imagine a prehistoric cave dweller. A particle of grit isn’t that important, but roots and fruit, they’re quite important, and other people are damn crucial to life. All this stuff gets a range of values, right?”

  “In the human mind and in the culture that was springing from minds?” Joanna said.

  “Yeah. So certain experiences are basic to human beings – the danger of death, the loss of people or things, good times too. We evolved, and the cave people encountered those experiences often, and then those experiences began to engender various states of mind. Emotions.”

  “Which became universal states fundamental to the human condition,” Joanna said.

  “If you wanna put it in socio-speak, yeah. An emotion is the symbol of a state of mind, you would say with your professor hat on.” He lay back, staring again at the ceiling, letting his thoughts flow free.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “The mind has to have some method of communicating significant knowledge to itself and to others,” he said. “Doesn’t it? It’s a dynamic system, after all – not static. Without emotion, my mind would have no way of informing itself, others too, of the relative values of life experiences. It’s a strengthening and a validation of the existing mental model.”

  Now Joanna turned onto her side, excitement plain on her face. “You could be right. This explains something I have always wondered about. Why have tears? Why a red face if you are embarrassed?”

  “I dunno. Why?”

  “Emotions always have a physical component, Manfred. It is because of the importance of the knowledge they are communicating – as you said. It is a matter of value.”

  “Value? How so?”

  “To force the mind to become aware of the knowledge emotions carry,” Joanna said. “It is a mechanism that cannot be missed, as a thought or concept can be missed. Physical components had to appear as we evolved, and so all emotions have some physical consequence. You have seen me cry. In its intensity and in its physical effects that emotion is impossible to ignore.”

  “You mean… emotion is communication more profound than usual?”

  Joanna nodded. “A channel of connection betwee
n people and between people and the real world, a web of empirical knowledge flowing in all directions. We have been told for centuries that emotion is the lesser experience, that rational thought is more profound, but the opposite is true.”

  “You’re damn right. Objective observation isn’t enough to bring understanding. Only surface features can be noticed objectively.”

  “I’ll tell you another thing,” Joanna said. “Emotion is rooted in personal human experience, in some mental model of reality.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well… two people can experience the same event but feel different emotions. A woman standing at the edge of a sea cliff, who has dived in before… she feels elation. But a novice feels afraid. Those evaluations are immediate, but they are different-”

  “And,” Manfred interrupted, “although they’re generated by the same true stimulus, they’re dependent on the experiencer’s model of reality. That’s why they’re different. So emotion must be cognitive, then.”

  “Yes – the fundamental way the mind experiences a coherent inner world, its model of reality. All those physical consequences, like tears, seem to halt the smooth experience of consciousness, but they are forcing the mind to experience itself in a different, more profound, mode. It wells up uncontrollably as it imparts its message.”

  “Like your crying…”

  “And my excitement now! I feel jittery, I’m breathing fast.”

  Manfred grinned. “Me too, babe.”

  ~

  Pouncey prowled the alleys of dark Philly, four in the morning, when nexus-blurring particles of solar interference were becalmed and even the dwoobs were asleep. Like a graveyard of concrete, grime and weeds, the place was dead.

  Down a narrow street she stumbled across a row of shops, all barred and showing biohazard signs, though Pouncey knew these must be for show, designed to deter. Any real biohazard would have the local PD guarding it, or an FBI stick. It was work of a few minutes to use her nexus-raiding skills to locate weaknesses. There – a password on an encrypted back door lock, shining bright in augmented space like a neon sign. No sign of a username though. She ran around to the front of the shop, read: Brian Dean, e-Goods, Cellphones, Tasa.

  She typed in: briandean, fortunatimes2067. The lock clicked open. Lucky!

  Better not take too much, just enough to buy a week’s food; then maybe Mr Dean, 30, wouldn’t bother calling the cops. She grabbed a U-Fit interface and some microcables, then shut and locked the back door.

  She waited until the sun rose and the lo-market dealers were about. An hour later she had a price, not good, but enough to buy bread, veg, tins of meat, all of which she put in her backpack. Time to go.

  Three local lads eyed her, but they didn’t approach. She ignored them, padding down the passage that linked the lo-market street with Vine Street. Then two of the lads, the smaller two, popped out in front of her. She stopped.

  Noise behind her. The big guy.

  One of the smaller lads stepped forward, approached to a couple of metres. He stank of beer. “How much you charge for a ride, doll face?”

  “I don’t screw juvie trash,” she replied.

  He took steps forward. “Where you get that circuitboard you just passed on to Red Sam?”

  “Don’t mess with me if you’re keepin’ that nice trim beard, boy.”

  He launched himself towards her. She sidestepped, hit out, but he bundled himself into her, so she kicked out, then kneed and downed him. The big guy stepped forward. She pulled out her high-vel.

  “Wanna?” she said.

  He made to reach into his pocket. She fired. He fell.

  Something moved in the corner of her vision. She glanced up to see a CCTV cam pointing at her.

  “Shit!”

  Kicking the little guy again and dodging the other, she ran. Out into Vine Street; pause, calm, walk like an ordinary woman. Head tilted down, look at the pavement, conceal face. In minutes she stood beside the tower block, checking the area, looking for street woons, listening for PD sirens. Nothing.

  Then she noticed her wrist looked different. Three wristbands… no, two.

  “Shit,” she said.

  The first little guy had done a classic distraction. And he was still alive.

  A red pinpoint flashed in the right side of her spex. PD alarm.

  “Shit!”

  The anthropo-software running the cam had recognised the scene and reported it to the cops. Her face would be stored now, awaiting investigation. But far more dangerous was her missing wristband.

  Nothing for it. She couldn’t let that get into the wrong hands. Three fake identities – weeks of work, care, maintenance – lay vulnerable to hacking if any half intelligent crim got that wristband. She accessed her security soft and navigated it through her spex. But now she faced a dilemma. If she killed the wristband, blanking it with a nex-bomb, she would send out a signal to all and sundry that could not be misread. Blanking a wristband meant ID manipulation: illegal, a common procedure, dangerous, essential if you wanted to avoid nexus eyes. Aritomo would be scanning twentyfour-seven for such events, and if he linked it to the passage job… when he linked it, the BIteam was dead.

  No choice. She set the code, modded her wristband and set off the bomb.

  Trembling, headachey, she walked up the steps to the apartment. Exhausted, now. Locking the door behind her, she took a deep breath and relaxed. Manfred appeared out of the bis’ room.

  “You okay?”

  She hesitated, wondering if she should take a chance, leave it… or take a lead. “Itchy fingertips,” she said. She took the cash out of her pocket and jingled it. “You know how difficult it is to get this?”

  A look of annoyance passed across his face. “I’m getting tired of hearing you drone on about itchy fingers,” he said. “I told you, we need a week. So if you feel anything a bit stronger than an itch, you let me know, mmm?”

  “Aye, I’m tellin’ you–”

  “No more damn itches! When you see a man with a gun on the stairs pointing it at us, sure, fire up the Hyperlinked. Until then, chill.”

  Pouncey stared, horrified by his retort.

  He approached, slapped something wrapped in silver foil into her hand. “Have some more chocolate, Pouncey. And maybe run a hot bath.”

  ~

  Over the next two days Joanna did what she could to stress the bis. She turned off the apartment’s only functioning solar-heat driver and opened a skylight so that it became too cold for them, their bioplas bodies stiffening like vulcanised rubber. Then she scavenged a heater from a dead office a few floors down, had Pouncey get it working, then set it to maximum so that they baked. All this time she allowed them the use of low-level English databases. Some of the bis seemed interested, others not. Indigo, she noticed, was not.

  Manfred spent a lot of time stressing the bis’ limbs, pulling them this way and that, stuffing the bis into confined spaces then waiting for them to struggle out, setting them high on bookshelves with no obvious means of getting down. All this made the bis aware of their bodies, and the limitations of those bodies. They acted by and large as a nine member group, but there were fracture lines. Indigo was a loner. The three warm spectrum bis hung together, as did the other three coloureds. Grey and White were not gregarious. But there was no sign of speech. The bis had no tongues, instead multiform speakers designed by Singaporean audio specialists, yet these speakers remained silent.

  “Don’t worry,” Manfred counselled. “I want to see them cry and blush first.”

  Joanna spent almost every waking minute with the bis. Each nuance of behaviour she compared with what she remembered of her chimp work, trying to tease out hints of consciousness, looking for that special spark. She even tried the reflection test, dabbing paint on them then setting them down in front of a mirror, but not one of them touched their own skin; each saw their reflection as a different bi, another creature, mysteriously conjured from thin air.

  But they remained sponges
for knowledge. She began to notice that a few of them grasped that a huge world lay outside their room door. Red, Orange and Yellow took to hunching by that door, like sulking cats hoping to escape a house. She began to take extra care. An escaped bi could not be countenanced.

  “We need a key,” she told Manfred. “If they have figured out how the door handle works, we could be in trouble.”

  “True,” he agreed. “Listen, the bedroom by the main door’s got a small bolt on the inside. I’ll unscrew it and try to put it on the outside – if it’ll fit. Then we can lock ’em in.”

  “And we should keep the crates outside,” Joanna said, “for emergencies.”

  He nodded. “You’re taking this seriously.”

  “I’m sure they’re communicating. I just can’t prove it. It’s like siblings who invent personal languages.”

  “Perhaps they don’t yet see the importance of English. Perhaps they see us as totally different and don’t feel the need to communicate with us. But their own group… that’s different. They’ve got to communicate there.”

  “I worry they could go out of control,” she said. “They need to be pretty much like us if they’re going to function in society. If they become… well, aliens, then things could get impossible.”

  Manfred glanced back at the room. “Those crates are only just big enough for them,” he said. “And if we got more bioplas we could grow ’em again. Then they’d be too damn heavy to carry. Yeah, you’re right, we gotta think about all this. What if Pouncey’s right about her itchy fingers?”

  “Why not make leather harnesses for the bis? Most of them can walk now, or toddle at least. I suppose we would look like a circus troupe walking down the street, but it might just save us if they used their own feet.”

  Manfred sighed and shook his head. “Good idea, but too much scope for chaos. What if one got loose? Got stolen? But you’re right. We can’t crate them forever. We need a vehicle.”

  “That is dangerous, and Pouncey has always advised against it.”

  “I know. I believe her. She knows the score. But this is different, we never knew they’d develop like they have. Maybe it’s time to leave Philly, eh? Risk it out in the sticks, give the bis time to develop, then when they’re ready introduce ’em to the world.”