Beautiful Intelligence

by Stephen Palmer

Pouncey wiped her mouth with one hand, then adopted a casual pose, resting on the heel of one foot. “The attenuators,” she said.

  At once Manfred said, “The what?”

  “Aye, you’re wearin’ one now.”

  “What? Without my knowledge?”

  Pouncey chortled. “My brief was security.”

  Again Manfred glanced at Joanna. He felt like his world was leaking away, leaving him high and dry in the mouldy apartment. “You didn’t tell us?”

  “Course not.” Pouncey strode over to him, put a hand on his head, then felt his hair. Then she stepped back and took out a bug detector – FBI style. It beeped once. “Yep,” she said. “Workin’ fine.”

  Joanna stepped forward and said, “What do these attenuators do?”

  “It’s a way of diminishin’ certain electromagnetic communications waves,” Pouncey replied. “I always use them.” She turned to Dirk, adding, “What com method did Hound use?”

  Dirk looked baffled. “Encrypted multi-frequency radio,” he said.

  A look of triumph appeared on Pouncey’s face. “Then, like I said. No way.”

  Dirk looked angered. “But we did! Shit, I saw it myself. Hound, he call her, classic unhappy mole. Yes! Light on info he said. But we talk da talk, I swear!”

  Manfred felt faint – he sat on a chair. “She must’ve had Aritomo’s help to find you in Malta.”

  Dirk shrugged. “Maybe.”

  “This is not possible,” Pouncey said. “No radio communication could take place comin’ out of the BIteam.”

  Manfred nodded. To Dirk he said, “What date did the coms stop?”

  Dirk pondered. “Hard to say. Long time.”

  “Was it sudden?”

  “Well… Tsuneko, she com in bursts. But, yeah, it all stop sudden.”

  Manfred nodded. “I bet it was August twentieth.”

  Dirk shrugged. “Summer, for sure. Late August, dat sound about right.”

  Pouncey looked at Manfred. “How come that day?” she asked.

  “Only one possibility,” he replied. “The bis. I cut them off that day. Remember?”

  “You mean, they… they…”

  “Acted as a gestalt entity. Without conscious knowledge, without instinct – surfing the nexus like a big old computer, probably through the gateway of Indigo. They took everything they found locally, including Tsuneko’s coms, and spread it far and wide. They knew nothing about what they were doing, though. And Tsuneko didn’t know either – she wore an attenuator and didn’t know, like we didn’t know.”

  Dirk nodded. “We not know about da cutting. Though I knew da score with da BIteam philosophy – societies, not Zeug loners. So! You cut dem apart, make dem work hard to understand each other. And dat save your lives.”

  Manfred nodded. “Aritomo may even have spotted us in Philly, thinking the bis were some weird new kind of computer.”

  Pouncey said, “Not early enough, if he did.”

  Manfred leaned forward. “Listen, Dirk, you’re messing with our heads, yeah? What if this Luigi – what if Aritomo – followed you to America?”

  Dirk laughed. “You think me stupid? Ha ha!”

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “I learn lots from Hound. Truly, he da best in da world.” Dirk glanced at Pouncey. “No offence, lady.”

  Pouncey shrugged.

  Dirk continued, “I make sure take rich boy solplane to America. Exceeding expensive. Dat good. Aritomo, he know I poor. I make sure my destination got two locations – Birmingham, see?”

  “Alabama?”

  “Ha ha! Immediate duality. Maybe Birmingham, Britain.”

  Manfred nodded. He’d used this trick himself. “And then…?”

  “Oh, all da Hound tricks. He cunning basta’d. Make my reservation, all dat, in Brit speak. No American word. Like, no sidewalk, yeah? Pay through anonymous account, den shut account. Do it camouflaged, via local orphanage boss ID – loose security. Nexus trace den defaulted to Brit location.”

  “What about cams at the Monte Carlo airport? You’ve never disguised your appearance.”

  “You joke? I shave my Afro off! Wear big girl’s earrings. But dat easy too. Check map of airport for cam blind spots. But, none. Set up decoy with two local girls – kids, dey always need cash, you know? Dat make sure anthropo soft see dem cut fence, which is what I tell dem do. Den tip-toe through created blind spot to da can. Take long dump, see? Den out da window into rich boy corridor, where no cams. Rich boys, dey not like look-see on nexus.” Dirk shrugged. “Easy.”

  “What about checking in?” Manfred insisted. “You’re not telling me there’s no cams there.”

  Dirk snorted, waving one finger at Manfred. “You suspicious lack of trust, Mr Klee. Dat easy too. Hound, he tell me one time – Dirk, da thing with da cam is faces. Anthropo equal human face, is it? Big danger is no trace of me in da airport. Empty space as suspicious as my big face. So I scan passenger list, spot guy wear clothes like me. I copy him, den three-D print his face on neoprene mask at museum kids’ booth. Play mask, sure, but it look real funky, no bull! Den walk to check-out like I own da place, off to Birmingham Britain.”

  Manfred turned to look at Pouncey. She shrugged. “We’ve all done the mask trick in the security biz. No computer is human.”

  Dirk smiled. “Aritomo not look at Monte Carlo airport. Dat da sleight of hand, see? But if he did, he see dat Anglophile guy in reception. No biggie.”

  Manfred sat back. “You’d better be on the level, Dirk, or we’re all fucked.”

  Dirk shrugged. “I wanna see da bis now. We got a big deal with Indigo.”

  ~

  They all sat in Pouncey’s room, where she kept Grey, Violet and Green. Grey was wearing clothes.

  It was not quite a garment, Manfred noted, more like Grey had adapted a roll of plastic-backed cloth to make a body wrap. But the implication was clear to him. “Grey doesn’t want his patterns to be seen.”

  Joanna fixed him with yet another skeptical stare. “You think?”

  “Yeah. My guess. It’s not like that’s adornment.”

  “We do not know what adornment is for the bis,” Joanna said.

  Manfred raised his eyebrows, glancing at Dirk. “Emotion concealer, I think. He doesn’t want the other bis to know what’s going on inside. He was always the reclusive one. You can dig that, Joanna.”

  “Have you quite finished speculating?”

  Manfred turned to Dirk. “What d’you think, Dirk?”

  Dirk glanced at Grey. “What you use for dere arm and hand muscles?” he murmured.

  Manfred replied, “Probably the same as Leonora. Layers of conducting carbon grease separated by a stretchy polymer film.”

  Dirk nodded. “Like Zeug.”

  “Why’d you ask?”

  “I can’t make da bis write. Will have to be speech only.”

  Manfred nodded. “Okay.”

  “Da muscle and nerve control for handwriting, even typing – dat complex.”

  “Speech it is then.”

  Dirk handed Pouncey an e-slate. “Dat my list of requirements,” he said. “On back of da slate I write da account details. Dollars! No bull, see?”

  Pouncey studied the list. Then she laughed. “Is that all?”

  “And hurry,” Dirk said.

  “He’s giving us his dollars,” Manfred said. “Go spend ’em.”

  Pouncey departed with no further word. Manfred asked Dirk, “That list, it’s do-able?”

  “Sure.”

  Manfred grimaced. “A spending pattern will be set up,” he said. “That could be traced. Computers might link the bought items into possible final objects. If they label even one object interface, we’re sunk.”

  “Pouncey’ll steal da majority of da gear,” Dirk replied without hesitation. “She sure got her shit together. I wish we’d had her in Malta.”

  Joanna said, “Even if someone identifies interface components, that does not mean anything. There will be thousands, maybe mi
llions of interfaces built on the West Coast this year alone.”

  “That’s the sort of trace Aritomo’ll be looking for,” Manfred said.

  “He not following da thief,” Dirk said, lighting up a cheroot. “Only da shop sale. Besides – lo-market? Dat all black, you know? No traces in nexus.”

  Manfred sighed. “Maybe.” He glanced at Grey. “It’s just that we’re so close to success here. I don’t wanna crash now.”

  ~

  Dirk worked without sleep for thirty hours before sitting back and announcing, “I think I got it.”

  Manfred – half asleep on a couch – was startled, woken up by the statement. “Mmm?” he said.

  Dirk nodded. The room stank of smoke and there was a collection of coffee-stained mugs on the floor beside him. But in his hand he held what appeared to be a silk headscarf.

  Manfred woke Joanna, then opened the door to call Pouncey. The quartet gathered in the largest apartment room, lit by a single green bio-cell, the window blacked out double thickness. The atmosphere was eerie, like being underwater. All eight bis sat in the room – the warm spectrum bis dark, the others appearing pale in the single wavelength green light.

  Dirk said, “Dis headscarf contain all da processing power to make da interface work. ’Cos risk of external hack – I build English database into it. Self-powered and self-sustaining.”

  “Powered by?” Manfred asked.

  “Battery. If dis work okay, I put in a solar cell array instead.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Dirk continued, “Long, thin bio-processors from Caltech Corporation. Very strong too.” He indicated a nylon thread, which he pulled out. Manfred saw that it had an earpiece on the end. “Dis line da speech out. Bis hear dis with no sound problem, even on a noisy street. Noise-cancelling software. Dere inbuilt Singapore mouth-speaker what we listen to. Stereo camera on scarf match bi eye gaze direction, yes?”

  “That’s the tech side,” said Manfred. “What about the difficult bit?”

  Dirk grinned. “You’re too impatient,” he said. “I notice dat when I meet you. Now, I can’t match human capacity to learn. So I do it by rote learn and concentrated reinforcement by repetition. Hope da bi make mental model of dat audio activity, den grasp da symbolic side as it models new experience. We begin with nouns only.”

  “Why do they need the headscarf, then?” Joanna asked. “They have Singaporean ears, they have known for weeks that humans use sound. They may even have stored some English words.”

  “Ha! I hope so. But my scarf also make model of environment, in parallel with bi. It constantly reinforce what da bi sees. Also, Singapore ear hear up to ninety thousand kilohertz. I use dat extra bandwidth to squeeze in much more info. I estimate twenty to thirty times da amount of info we human deal with.”

  “So,” Manfred said, “this is based in part on image recognition software? Environment recognition? Your interface knows what the bi is looking at and constantly reinforces the English word for it? Like a teacher?”

  “Hence, nouns first,” Dirk replied. “Long streams of words for objects – like babbling babies!”

  “Then we have to assume that my first hunch was right,” said Manfred. “If the bis are modelling their environment in their heads, as I’m sure they are, they’ll model the streams of speech information. With luck, and some positive reinforcement, they’ll spot the links. Then they’ll take off! Symbolic learning…”

  “Dat da goal,” Dirk said. “Shall we try Orange first?”

  “No,” Manfred said at once. He looked at the bi. “No, not him. He’s already got too much swagger. No, choose…”

  “Indigo?”

  Manfred shook his head. “He’s already a special case. He scares me. No, choose Yellow. We already think he’s more focussed on us than the other bis are. That may give you a head start, Dirk.”

  “Sure. Yellow it is. Fetch me da little guy, Joanna please.”

  Joanna shepherded Yellow to Dirk. It stood before him, staring, as so often the bis did. Manfred nodded to himself. These creations of his needed to be sponges for knowledge – sponges for the reality of the external world. Staring was good.

  “What language acquisition theory d’you go with, Dirk?” he asked.

  “Well, see, I know we all carry a mental model in our heads. I assume bis do too. So dey have social relations – dat your basic idea.”

  “You’re a social interactionist?”

  “Sure. It down to social interaction between us and dem. We dere parents now. We use feedback and reinforcement – just like my interface – to make bi mental models more sophisticated.”

  “And they experience it in terms of what they already know about the world.”

  Dirk nodded. “Dey already got much more nous dan even you realise. I hear da flower on da grave story, I hear it good! Dey know dere is an environment out dere, with me and you and dem in it. All learning take place in dat model. Now we got to increase da symbolic sophistication. We got to make ’em realise cow means a cow, see?”

  Manfred nodded. “As a group.”

  “All eight of ’em.”

  And so the work began. Minutes, hours, days passed quicker than any Manfred had known. Dirk manufactured seven more headscarves, and on one momentous morning they put them on the bis’ heads and switched them on.

  Red, Yellow and Blue ignored theirs. Orange resettled his, pulling out some of his frond-like touch sensors from beneath the fabric as if for maximum comfort, while Green took his off and threw it away. Grey also took his off, but then held it in his hands, as if trying to orient the stereo camera – he kept the earpiece in his ear, Manfred noticed. Violet began walking around the room, stopping in front of objects, then moving on. Soon, Blue tagged along too.

  Dirk gestured with his head at Violet, his eyebrows raised and a grin on his face. But Manfred was too busy watching Indigo.

  They had known from the early days that Indigo’s Korean eyes had failed. As soon as Manfred heard Dirk’s description of the mechanics of the headscarf interface he knew it might not work for Indigo. Yet, deep down, he felt sure Indigo was already different to any of the other bis – different in a radical way. He could not pin the feeling down since intuition alone told him he was correct. He glanced at Joanna. She thought little of intuition.

  Indigo walked up to him, his fronds rustling, as if sensing air currents. Joanna theorised that in such ways, and through grasping the notion of sound reflecting from surfaces, Indigo was able to model the topography of his environment. Manfred agreed. Yet now Indigo seemed to be staring at him, and at nothing else.

  “Listen, guys,” he said. Indigo took a step back, as if startled. “We need to take one bi each. Forget Red, Yellow and Blue. I’m not even sure Red is conscious. It behaves like a kitten. So does Green. Dirk, you take Indigo. Joanna – Orange. Pouncey, you have Grey. I’m taking Violet.”

  “Why one each?” Pouncey asked, as she lifted Grey in her arms.

  “Dirk’s right. We gotta reinforce everything now, use speech to name things, hammer home the message that little bits of audio equals meaning. We’ll have to work with the ones that show most aptitude – the ones that want to learn, yeah?”

  Dirk lifted Indigo. Manfred watched. The bi struggled, then tried to clamber out of Dirk’s grip. Anxiety on his face, Dirk put the bi on the floor, whereupon it ran straight to Manfred.

  “It knows who you are,” Dirk said. “I told you.”

  Manfred looked down. His heart sank. Dirk lifted Violet and began walking around the room as if carrying a baby, speaking names for objects: couch, wall, window, cup, plate. Joanna followed suit, then, looking embarrassed, so did Pouncey. The other bis watched, except Red, who lay down, and Green, who sat by the lamp staring into it.

  Manfred looked again at Indigo. The bi stared up at him. It was impossible not to imagine the thing whimpering like a snotty-nosed kid.

  “This is why you scare me, Indigo,” he said. “You know too much.”

&nb
sp; From Indigo’s mouth there came a crackle as the internal speaker came to life. “This is why you scare me, Indigo. You know too much.”

  Manfred screeched and jumped back. Dirk span around. “Manfred!” he said. “Chill. It parroted.”

  “Yeah… parrot,” Manfred said.

  Indigo spoke again. “Yeah… parrot.”

  “It’s relating your utterances with da utterances in its ear,” Dirk said. “Just copying. Don’t freak out, Manfred.”

  “Why hasn’t it done it before?”

  “It understands we’ve done something conceptually different to its body. It grasps dat what it’s been hearing all dis time means something to you. And it knows your voice, like a lamb knows its mother’s voice. Derefore it want dat sound to mean something to it. It’s babbling.”

  Manfred nodded. His pounding heart quietened. With some reluctance he lifted Indigo and began walking around the room, naming objects as the others were.

  Dirk said, “We have to get dem to understand dat what da earpiece say, we also say, only with our mouth. Make da equivalence in dere mental model, see?”

  Minutes passed. None of the other bis copied the speech of the person carrying them. Indigo’s surface patterns span like Moiré kaleidoscopes as Manfred repeated word after word.

  They paused for supper. Manfred noticed that Dirk looked worried. Flipping pancakes and cracking eggs, he gestured Dirk over to the cooker. “You expected them all to be speaking, didn’t you?”

  Dirk glanced over at Violet. “Yep,” he said.

  “Give ’em time. We don’t know anything about the symbolic frameworks they might be using.”

  “We do know dey have copied human ones,” Dirk replied. “Da flowers on da grave.”

  “Yeah, agreed. But that’s deep stuff. They know they’re alive, so they know death. All this semantic analogy though – knife equals a knife, plate equals a plate – that’s tough to get. Maybe they never will.”

  “You told me you thought dey used gestural language,” Dirk said. “I agree. Spoken language, dat’s conceptually da same as gesture, like signing for deaf people.”

  Manfred glanced through the kitchen door. He saw five of the bis, sitting like kids all together on a couch. “We can forget Red and Green,” he said. “I think they’re virtually embryos compared to the others.”