Beautiful Intelligence

by Stephen Palmer

  Hound obliged. The task was easy – use a cam on the building to record five hundred secs of stork sound, then send the aiff file off to a public lab in Algiers. The result came back within seconds.

  “Artificial,” he said. “Repeating every hundred and twenty seconds. This is Zeug’s aerial, I betcha. That signal I first spotted is hidden in the noise somewhere. Cunning bastard! Man, he knows half the tricks I know.”

  “You may have taught him without realising it,” said Leonora.

  Remembering the events of the desert hike, Hound nodded. “Wish I hadn’t,” he muttered.

  “What now?” asked Tsuneko.

  “Indoors.”

  “You’ve mapped it out?”

  Hound rolled his eyes. “Course. We go in through the can. Man, I’ve found that’s most often got an open window.”

  The two women looked at him with blank expressions.

  “’Cos of the stink?” he said.

  Using a cam opposite the charity building he ascertained that one of the ground floor lavatories had an open window. There was a covered route to it, crossing the road using an underground water pipe, then following hedges and a line of date palms to the building itself.

  “Follow me,” he said. “Do what I do.”

  They followed him in silence, crouching when he crouched, running when he ran, like ducklings following their mother. Two minutes later they were ready to enter, pressed against the side of the building like limpets. Hound listened. The can was empty, though he heard wailing patients not far off.

  He flipped open the window to maximum, leaped up, then peered in. As he’d suspected: empty. He rolled in, the pulled the other two inside.

  Leonora took his hand, then Tsuneko’s. “Remember,” she told him, “only you and me and Dirk know what Zeug looks like. It is very likely that the residents here believe Zeug to be human. He may have disguised himself.”

  Hound grinned. “I’ll spot him, don’t you worry about that.” He took out a bolas-gun. “Then I’ll disable him gaucho style and we’ll take him to the roadside. I’ve set up a taxi call – driver thinks he’s waiting for a patient. We’ll fox him, then I’ll knock him out and drive the thing out of town. Man, I sure wanna get a good look at Zeug before we decide what to do next.”

  Leonora nodded, so Hound led them to the can door. The corridor outside was empty. A map of the ground floor flipped into view via his spex. Red dots marked active cams, green marked security features (safes, com links, alarms) while blue labelled the charity’s nexus computers. All clear so far.

  “Early morning,” he whispered. “Nice ’n’ quiet.”

  He led them along the corridor to the door at the end, pausing when he noticed an optical port. Without hesitation he linked his spex to it, running a simulation of Zeug’s signal on the charity’s ancient AI-soft in an attempt to locate where in the building it might be.

  A room on the map winked yellow. He smiled. The building’s computers, though they did not know what the signal was, had noticed and stored it. There it lay, like a minuscule pearl in a gigantic oyster.

  “I got him,” he said.

  He led the way to the room. They hid behind laundry baskets when a pair of blue-clothed nurses walked by. Somewhere nearby a patient screamed.

  The door was labelled Room 12.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  They nodded.

  “Use the stun crackers I gave you… man, that’s if anyone stops us. This place is quiet as a boneyard. Stun grenade – emergency only.”

  “Ready,” said Leonora.

  “Ready,” Tsuneko echoed.

  The door knob was round. Hound turned it. Locked. He took a deep breath then karate-kicked it. It swung aside on ruined hinges.

  He span, ran forward, pointed his bolas-gun at the figure standing inside.

  “It’s Zeug!” he said, firing the gun.

  At once a flock of faces flew into his spex. Japanese faces. Zeug whirled on one heel, his arms and thighs locked into place by the weighted ropes tying him.

  The faces peeled off like fighter jets, vanishing into virtual space. A voice sounded in his spex speakers.

  “Do not kill the AIteam. Leave them to me.”

  Hound whirled around. Two Japanese men stood at the door. Shoving Leonora and Tsuneko inside, they raised and fitted the door to its frame, then sealed it with ultracaulk.

  The room’s single window showed a shadow, then the silhouette of a head, made dark by the sky outside. It opened.

  A face appeared. It was Aritomo Ichikawa.

  Moments later Aritomo was raised by an aide outside, then dropped into the room. A third agent followed, and then a small herd of cats.

  Hound stood still, knowing he’d failed. He felt quite calm. No point making a bid for glory. He wasn’t the suicidal type.

  He turned to Leonora. “Sorry,” he said.

  Aritomo grinned. “You did well, Mr Awuku. You should not feel disappointed with your performance. But, you should know, I always succeed in the end.”

  “What do you want?” Leonora asked. “Me?”

  Aritomo shook his head. “You long ago ceased to be of use to my corporation. No, I want Zeug. And now you have led me to him. I thank you most sincerely!”

  CHAPTER 20

  It was like a dam breaking when Indigo and Blue acquired the rudiments of language.

  Joanna cried, which made Manfred cry. Dirk grinned for days. Pouncey said very little – she found it difficult to believe, or so she claimed.

  Joanna felt as though she was floating on air. For decades she had researched the acquisition of novel skills in chimp societies, and she had tried to use some of her discoveries to make hypotheses about the bis, then test them. As a strong supporter of the social intelligence theory of consciousness she grasped that almost everything learned by chimps was done in the context of their societies – exactly the same as human beings. There was no “learner”, rather “a learner and a teacher”.

  She berated herself for not realising that the bis might teach one another. Like Manfred, like Dirk, she had assumed that humans – the parents of the social group – would do the teaching: human to beautiful intelligence.

  Dirk was fond of telling a story: Imagine a kid. Born outa artificial womb. Grows up, but no other people in da world. Not one, see? But all its body needs – dey sorted. Food, water, warm, whatever. Does it become conscious? I don’t think so. Dis my objection to da language only method. Da baby not become conscious because no social interaction. I think consciousness between people, not in a brain. It between us all, like water for fish.

  They all got the analogy. But now the dam had burst, and they had their hands full with new family members.

  Indigo taught Blue. The day after, Orange began to speak nouns. None of these three bis put together grammatical sentences, however; they listed nouns like chimp sign-speakers did, creating some novel combinations but not using those primitive sentences to speak creatively with one another. And when she realised this, Joanna’s heart sank. In AI circles it was known as Washoe Syndrome.

  But those days did not last. On day three, she watched Indigo taking Orange and Blue around her room.

  Indigo said, “Couch, chair, high window.”

  Orange used the chair to peer through the higher of the two windows, which because they did not look out over the main street remained unblocked.

  Orange said, “Couch, high window,” whereupon Indigo and Blue stood on the couch. Violet stood nearby, as if afraid Blue might fall off and injure himself.

  Then Indigo said, “Light bright.”

  Joanna realised something. The light levels in the apartments were low. The bis’ power sources would be running down, and like as not their minds were aware of this through various inbuilt monitoring mechanisms. She nodded to herself, considering options. Those monitoring mechanisms would now be so far below the level of symbolic manipulation they would be unconscious, never noticed by the conscious minds of the bis,
which were akin to the tip of an iceberg. The so-called Strange Loop of Hofstadter would be operating.

  She smiled. It was all coming together at last.

  She said, “We shall need to take them outdoors today for some sun. These apartments are too gloomy.”

  Pouncey nodded, her face grim. She had, Joanna knew, developed a number of secure methods of undertaking this difficult procedure. “Two at a time like naughty school kids,” Pouncey said. “I’ll take Indigo and Orange first.”

  “No,” said Manfred. “Each of the speakers goes outdoors with a non-speaker. We can’t afford to lose two together.”

  “You ain’t gonna lose any,” Pouncey replied, as if insulted.

  Manfred glanced at her. “You know what I mean. Nobody’d blame ya for an accident, okay? A solbus can run over anyone.”

  Pouncey grunted something, but it was inaudible.

  “How do we teach them verbs?” Joanna asked Dirk.

  “Same as da noun,” he replied. “Do, watch, repeat, reinforce. It da only way.”

  Two quicksilver-fast days passed by. They slept little. Joanna noticed that the bis did not sleep, but that they copied parts of human behaviour as a consequence of living in human company. Yellow in particular, the most human-focussed of the bis, copied everything his parents did, even to the extent of mimicking Dirk’s smoking hand-movements – though without a cheroot. The other bis became less active at night, without losing consciousness.

  On the third day Pouncey flagged up a potential problem. “The school class has been assessed,” she said.

  Manfred sat up at once, fear on his face. “Assessed?”

  “By a services bot from the local education authority.”

  “They know about the bi class?”

  “Don’t forget it’ll be listed on their canteen provision roster,” Pouncey replied. “That’s how I got in. But don’t worry, I’ve replied in the negative, told ’em there’s not enough progress for a full inspection.”

  Manfred sat back, his hands clasped atop his head. “That’s not necessarily a real person’s bot,” he said. “That could be Aritomo’s soft disguised as a services bot.”

  Pouncey sucked her teeth, then pursed her lips and nodded. “Aye. Could be.”

  Indigo walked up to Manfred, then climbed into his lap. Then Indigo said, “Bot Portland.”

  Joanna felt her eyes widen. She glanced at Manfred. There could be little doubt that Indigo had somehow parsed Manfred’s sentence and grasped something of its meaning, if only from the nouns.

  Manfred said to Indigo, “Bot Portland?”

  “Bot Portland,” Indigo replied. He did not look at Manfred as he said this – he looked at the window.

  “It knows the location of Portland,” said Joanna. “It is looking out, as if through the window.”

  Manfred nodded. “Half gestural, half verbal communication.”

  Indigo squirmed in Manfred’s lap and said, “Bot Portland. Aritomo Japan.”

  Manfred stood up, placing Indigo on the floor. “We four need to talk in private,” he said. “Pouncey, take the bis to their rooms. Put our three in with Dirk’s. Then lock the doors.”

  Pouncey did as she was bid, returning a few minutes later with the all-clear.

  Manfred said, “Indigo is nexus savvy, I’m sure. We’ve got to decide what to do. One slip and Aritomo will be onto us.”

  Joanna agreed. “Indigo has somehow grasped that Aritomo is an entity in Japan. It knows the concept of Japan, which it must have pulled from a nexus database.”

  “Maybe the school’s digital encyclopaedia,” said Pouncey. “It could’ve compared name styles, worked out that Ichikawa is a Jap name.”

  “Good point,” said Manfred. “Indigo will be aware of your school class cover story, I’m sure, even if only in a rudimentary way.”

  “Do we go the aluminium foil route, then?” Pouncey asked. “Stop all electromagnetics from impingin’ on Indigo ’til we can talk sense to him?”

  Manfred sighed. “I don’t know. That seems so cruel.”

  “We can’t let Aritomo spot us,” Pouncey insisted, “so we don’t have much choice.”

  Manfred paused for thought. “We’re close to speaking abstract sense to him,” he said.

  Joanna shook her head. “Basic language so far, Manfred – the most basic. Though, I admit, we have seen intentional communication. They will speak eventually, I believe.”

  Manfred nodded. “Listen,” he said, “Indigo’s out there in the nexus, and may have been for a long time – albeit in ultra-primitive form, hmm? A bot, let’s say. How about we have a hunt around for a data incarnation, created for it by the nexus?”

  “Da nexus will think it a computer,” said Dirk. “Maybe not link to fake class.”

  “Yeah,” Manfred replied. “We need to search for, let’s say… unusual computers that appeared around about the end of August. Or maybe we search for the gestalt entity they seem to have created before I cut them apart, using that as a jump-off point. But we gotta do something to fence Indigo in.”

  Dirk agreed. Joanna nodded in assent. Then Pouncey said, “I’ll begin the search. Dirk, you better help me. We ain’t got much time.”

  Joanna stood up. She could leave that work to the experts. But when she opened the door into Dirk’s room she saw a blue smudge on the floor, metal prongs poking out of it, a pool of fluids soaking into the carpet. The brain looked like a piece of sugarloaf soaked in fountain pen ink. Blue had been pulverised into nonexistence.

  ~

  They dared not leave the bis alone now. In the lounge of Manfred’s apartment Pouncey rigged up a construction of wood, glass-fronted and covered in blankets, which acted as a sound barrier. Inside this kennel (as with black humour they called it) the seven bis sat in crates, looking out through the glass like dogs admonished by their masters.

  Manfred felt sick. He had been sick. The demise of Blue was technically murder.

  They held their discussion in low voices, aware that the bis, not least Indigo, could grasp simple concepts by parsing sentences. They ensured no nexus-linked devices had their audio recorders on.

  “What do we do now?” Manfred asked.

  Dirk spoke up without delay. “One of us on guard twenty four seven. New crates so we can separate dem if need be.”

  Manfred nodded, glancing at Orange, who never let his gaze move from Manfred. “Obvious enough.”

  “We’ll have to separate them now,” Pouncey said. “Keep them–”

  “No!” Manfred interrupted, slapping his hands together. “That’s no better than putting them in solitary in jail – and what good does that do? These are social beings. They need each other. But something’s gone wrong, yeah? For some reason one of them has snapped.”

  Pouncey sat back. She looked surprised at his vehemence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to scold. But we gotta see the truth here. These are like kids. Alone, they die. They go feral. Whatever.”

  “But if we keep them together,” Joanna said, “they could simply kill one another until only one is left.”

  “We’ll guard ’em all day, like Dirk says,” Manfred replied. “Maybe soon we’ll be able to explain why killing is wrong. But if we can’t…”

  “I’ll work out a guard rota,” said Pouncey.

  Manfred sighed, looking with horror and gloom at her. “Yeah,” he said, glancing down at the floor. “You do that. Six hours each.”

  Joanna glanced at Manfred, then said, “Which one do you suppose did it?”

  Manfred shrugged, uneasy with the question. Was she mocking him? Her face suggested not. At length he replied, “My guess? Not Red nor Green, nor Yellow. I think we all agree those are the dumb ones, or maybe they’re not even conscious. It’ll be one of the bright ones. Indigo. Orange. Grey.” He laughed, unable to keep the human association from his mind. “Yeah, Grey – he’s a loner. Keeps himself to himself, y’know?”

  Joanna sighed, her face a picture o
f anguish. “Babe, I didn’t mean to–”

  “I know, I know. But this is kinda… unexpected. And you know I like gallows humour.”

  Dirk murmured, “Dey kids, and kids cruel. Dat a fact.”

  “Blue was one of the three we heard using proper English,” Manfred said. “My guess is Indigo or Orange did it. Those two and Blue have been acting like little people. Petty, self-centred… and unfortunately not bound by any moral rules yet.”

  “We need to give them some,” said Joanna.

  “How?”

  She glanced at the crates behind the glass. “They will know already that something is wrong in their social group, because of events happening now. They will be aware that a negative consequence has happened after Blue’s death.”

  “Aye, and they’ll remember what happened to White,” Pouncey added.

  Manfred nodded. “We’ll have to reinforce non-killing behaviour. Goodness knows how, though. I’m stumped.”

  “We not need to isolate dem,” said Dirk. “Keep stupid Red and Green with Orange, so he don’t get bored and lonely. Keep Yellow and Grey with Indigo. Violet can shuttle.”

  “You mean,” Manfred said, “keep Orange and Indigo apart?”

  Dirk nodded. “Just in case. Two head – dey better dan one.”

  Manfred nodded. That was true enough. “And what about Indigo?” he said. “Pouncey’s not even begun her nexus trawl yet.”

  “Begin dat now,” Dirk replied. “But I have an idea! Give Indigo big project, fill him up with things to do. Dat act as a cover.”

  “What sort of things do you mean?” asked Joanna.

  “Oh, I dunno… some kinda massive data project. Keep his nexus brain happy, see? Den everyone who spot him think him autonomous computer. Even Aritomo.”

  Joanna looked doubtful.

  “Hey, listen up,” Dirk said. “Indigo da audio guy, being blind? Dis whole city, Seattle too, it full of da music. So, why not drown Indigo in music, make him collect all da bands, da musos, who make dis area. Make him build up da whole picture.”

  “Yeah, but that would take years,” said Manfred.

  Dirk shrugged. “Exactly.”

  ~

  Early next morning they modified Indigo’s crate so that it contained perpetually playing music – a standalone media-player showing endless local band video clips, all the way back to Seattle grunge.