Proof of Concept Read online

  I’m not compatible. I can’t like the Tourists, even for Margrethe’s sake. Why not? Because I hate what they do for a living!

  But who are you to judge? Would you be as angry if they were playing Cowboys and Indians for the global audience? That was an unjust war too, you know.

  Huh. Heading off to kill another living world. I don’t care that there isn’t a chance they’re going anywhere. I hate them for wanting to.

  They don’t mean any harm.

  The Giewont Abyss Installation was a mystery wrapped around an enigma. The enigma was the Needle in its isolation chamber, sunk into bedrock and shielded above and below by trellised lines of force. This was the experiment that was finally going to crack the deep code of Einstein’s Universe (or Space-Time, or the “whole multiverse,” or whatever you want to call it). And if that task took another three hundred years to complete, it would still be time gloriously well spent. . . . The mystery was the hollow framework set around the Needle’s chamber: four sides of a square, holding living quarters, support systems, the cold-sleep dorms, and the labs. Kir knew why the scientists had to live and work in the Abyss. This was the deal Margrethe had made with the Wilderness Authority: leaving the Giewont surface, and the Abyss, as pristine as possible. She even understood the madly expensive complications that had ensued. It was the kind of irony that always happened when you turned a beautiful experimental idea into reality, just on a massive scale. But what had happened to the spartan, comfortable quarters in the original plans? Why the tiny coffin-like berths, where nobody could work or relax, and all the stupid great communal spaces? The oversize canteen, the games rooms, the gym, a strolling mall?

  Why did we need vegetable gardens? We could have survived for a year without salad! We won’t be able to get away from them. We’ll be all messed up together, all the time—

  Maybe that was the idea.

  You mean Orsted’s idea, and Margrethe had to say yes, because we need the money. She must have set up the deal with him long before she told us, I’ve realized that. It must have been the only way—

  Kir had been born under the open sky. Confinement horrified her, and unlike her teammates, docile hivizens, she was lawless by nature (a trait Margrethe had never tried to erase). She’d spent hours, like a rat in a new maze, exploring the code of the Frame, and had located an inspection hatch, left soft when the assembly was complete, that could be finessed. She was on her way there now. In the chill of the outer regions, behind a row of food storage units, she found the material form of her glitch, wormed her way through the baffling, and crawled out into the void. The Giewont Abyss was not completely dark; the Frame and its cables were permanently lit. The air was dry, cool, and very still. Netted ropes of cable soared upward, twinkling with a scatter of marker lights, until they disappeared.

  Kir sat down to unpeel the feet of her inner, tucking the slippers up above her ankles. The rock felt good underfoot. She headed due south for a while, and then looked back. The Frame, half a kilometer away by her watch, was already lost and tiny, as if floating in space. She turned away from the lights and tipped her face up, imagining upside-down towers of stalactites, glassy curtains of dripped stone, like the video she’d seen of the caverns far above: fantastically magnified. But the Giewont Abyss had no features. It was an empty magma chamber, a scoured, flask-shaped hollow from which the molten rock had seeped, long ago. A black, unfathomable distance roared away from her puny light, in silent waves.

  The air was good; it had been good before the lid of the jug was blasted open, but the cavern had no exits—except for the shaft that would soon be sealed. I can’t get out, thought Kir with a thrilling shiver. I am alone on a sunless, inside-out, unexplored alien planet.

  A hundred meters farther south she reached the break in the cavern floor she’d found on an earlier expedition. The drop wasn’t deep. She lowered herself and stood on fine gray sand. It glimmered when she kicked at it with bare feet. Luminous bacteria? I’m destroying a world, she thought. Destroying ancient fossil air, with her every breath . . . But the Needle was safe from her intrusion, and, if truth be known, the “pristine environment” had been doomed since the moment Deep Throat breached the apex. It couldn’t be helped. The level sand stretched off in either direction, like the bed of a dry river, but her visor beam couldn’t discern the other shore. Maybe there wasn’t one; the floor of the Abyss had yet to be mapped in detail. She set off eastward at a fast jog, pounded sand for two kilometers, and turned back, following her own footprints to her starting point. She’d met no obstacles, but there was a mysterious pressure in the empty darkness. There came a point when you couldn’t dare it any further. Under the overhang of the little cliff she crouched on her heels, her blanket around her shoulders. I’m never alone. . . . She still felt hot with shame about that gaffe.

  The masses don’t like to think about quasi-autonomous AI. WHY did I risk provoking them? I wanted attention. I didn’t like standing there being ignored, like a pet animal. Hey, Da Jue! I’m a dump rat, I’m a scav. I’m the lowest form of life, but I have something very important stuck inside my skull!

  Kir heaved a sigh, rubbing the permanent calluses across her brow and around her ears, from when Linda had forced her and little Vel to wear their hated face masks, far too tight, day and night.

  Why at night? What good does it do when I’m asleep?

  You don’t stop breathing when you’re asleep, said Linda’s voice, harassed and tired. The air’s full of pollution, it’ll wreck your lungs.

  Why don’t you wear one?

  Because I haven’t got one. Shut up and do what you’re told.

  Linda and Vel, long gone, long gone, way before Margrethe’s scouts turned up—(I think I once had a mother and a brother, but I can’t be sure.)

  Kir had let the scouts take her away, without a fight; she couldn’t remember why, although she remembered being sick with fear. Because she was in trouble? She’d done something, stolen something, and Ureck was going to kill her? Or was she ill, so ill she thought she was dying? She knew she’d had a bad attack of wormy runs going on. The scouts had been disgusted at the results for their nice sanitary-sealed van. Or was it because they’d tested all the lone children they could catch, but they’d chosen Kir? And she liked being chosen.

  The scouts were working for a special customer. They took Kir to Dr. Margrethe’ s clinic, where she was cleaned up, doctored, fattened, and put through more tests. Finally Margrethe, who was not a medical doctor but something better, a chief scientist, came and told Kir she was a suitable host. She wanted to cut open Kir’s skull and put a supercomputer inside. “It won’t hurt,” said the beautiful, incredibly ancient old lady. “It won’t harm you, and it will help me in work that will benefit the world. But you must choose. Either way, you’ll get an education and you’ll live with me for as long as we agree. For your whole life, if that suits you: I promise.”

  . . . I had no idea. I said yes because it was easier, and I was sure they’d do what they liked, whatever I said. I thought I was going to be organ-farmed. Or womb-farmed. Or raped about a million times, until I died of it. Instead I got an education, and my mind felt like a universe bursting into life. I got kindness; I got so many brilliant things. You are my father and my mother, Margrethe. Fingers reached into her scanty hair, behind the headset visor, to trace the scars of wormy boils and the faint ridges where her young skull had annealed again. That’s where he is, he’s in there. . . .

  Years later, vast ages later in her new life, she’d decided to ask Margrethe a few questions. Kir was, by medical reckoning, about thirteen. They were in Geneva, in a Sealed Enclave. The AI that Margrethe’s team had built, the “quasi-autonomous artificial intelligence” implanted in Kir’s brain, had been hired for some calculations by a not-too-evil MegaCorps division. Kir knew nothing about the job. When people accessed the quaai they did it remotely: she never knew it was happening. But she’d been reading stuff, and thinking about stuff that gave her the shiver
s. She and Margrethe were alone on the terrace outside their apartment; the poisoned lake a gleam of dark blue, through the Enclave’s exclusive veils of greenery. She had asked, as if casually, why Altair was called “he.”

  “Because I loved my father,” said Margrethe, smiling . . . and Kir had been disconcerted. This answer did her no good at all.

  “Didn’t you love your mother?”

  “I loved her very much. But we were rival powers.”

  “Oh.” Subterfuge was getting her nowhere. “Can he read my thoughts?” Kir blurted. “Is he a person?”

  “No, he can’t read your thoughts. Altair is contained by what we may call firewalls, and blocked from access to your personal thoughts. He can neither sense the words that you intend to speak, nor retrieve the imagery your brain invokes for ideas you don’t intend to express. As for your second question, think a little harder. Tell me, what is a Turing test?”

  “It’s a philosophical koan,” said teenage Kir, unnerved by Margrethe’s stern expression, carefully repeating what she’d been taught. “Like Schrödinger’s cat. It doesn’t mean what people think it means. It means you decide if you’re talking to an AI, or a person you can’t see, or even if it’s a sexually differentiated man or woman, by the signs you think you’re getting. It’s your decision, not what the AI, or the person, really is.”

  “So you have your answer.”

  The conversation had ended there, as far as Kir remembered. She’d backed off and never raised the topic again, because she’d realized that her benefactor felt guilty. Not for having kidnapped a scav kid, of course not, but for having opened a child’s skull and implanted computer hardware, when the child was way too young to give informed consent. Margrethe had done nothing illegal. Nobody in Kir’s new world even disapproved: scav kids had no legal status, and Kir now had a much better life. But guilty feelings don’t listen to reason, as Kir knew from personal experience. It was better just to accept the voice she sometimes heard in her head, and show her gratitude by becoming a brilliant scientist. She would do something stunning for the Needle experiment, and Margrethe would know it had all been worthwhile.

  Crouched in subterranean night, Kir fisted her eyes to make the darkness sparkle. She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, her own breath warm and moist on the backs of her fingers. But just between you and me, I’m not alone, am I?

  No comment from her imaginary friend.

  Kir scrambled up the miniature cliff and jogged back to the Frame, taking pleasure in the way it grew, like a floating mirage in its net of stars. She wondered if she should harden the glitchy hatch. Or report it—but decided on balance to leave its fate to chance. If I can get out, she thought, I’ll explore the Abyss: for my own entertainment. If I can’t I’ll learn to love my miserable coffin, like a proper little hivizen. But the cables and the lights would stay in place, in case of emergencies. They would still be shining, when Kir was sealed inside the box.

  If I fell down a crevasse and lost my headset (she wondered, as if she was asking someone beside her). If my watch stopped working, and I was unconscious, and nobody knew where I was, would you let me die? Rather than contact somebody to come and save me, and risk letting them know what you really are?

  But the quaai was not a person, and couldn’t understand speech or read thoughts, so naturally nobody answered.

  1

  The Tourists came down with Margrethe and Dan and other special members of the expedition. The Needle Voyager was launched with fun and ceremony for the global audience. Final speeches were made, final questions were answered, last gifts and messages delivered. The VLDMT team raced around, shouting and clowning for their fans. The casting of the cables came later and was a quieter affair. Everyone was in the canteen, their all-purpose meeting room, to see the glittering ropes withdrawn, including Sergey in his support chair. Up and up, until the last, faintest speckled shining vanished. Voices from Mission Control alternated with hissing pauses and fell silent. The LDMs had done the countdown joke at the official event, but Dan began again, orchestrating with wide arms: Ten . . . nine . . . And the LDMs roared with laughter when none of the Needle team joined in. “Come on, you guys!” shouted Dan. “Don’t be shy! It’s a tradition!”

  “Eight—!” bawled Margrethe.

  Seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . .

  Nobody at Mission Control could hear them. Connectivity had already been severed; the world above was out of reach.

  Three . . . two . . . one . . . zero!

  The blackness of the Abyss vanished; the canteen’s big screen went blue-blank. And that was it, for a whole year.

  “I thought the cables would stay,” whispered Kir to Lilija.

  “Not necessary,” said the other Needler absently. “There are procedures, if we need rescuing. The cables get guided and locked onto us remotely, and then the cars come down. . . .” Lilija sighed in contentment, counting the riches of uninterrupted work that lay ahead. She had no family commitments; nobody would be lost without her. She did have a life, thank you. It was this, the greatest adventure in the world. And then the first live test, a rush of excitement and everybody at full stretch, in these perfect conditions. Bliss.

  There was an uproar, bodies flailing: some kind of mock fight going on in the other team.

  “We have to keep those LDMs out of the labs,” said Lilija urgently. “They’re the price of admission, I realize. But—!”

  “We can tell them everything’s radioactive in our part of the Frame.”

  “No, no! Don’t mention danger, Kir, whatever you do! The guys are highly trained daredevils!”

  They burst into smothered giggles, and the knot of tussling bodies came apart. A grinning quartet of LDMs jumped up and down, flapping their arms and hooting: delighted at the Needler appreciation. Karim came over to join the two women. “Margrethe won’t protect us,” he muttered. “These are the masses in person. Our employers, you remember? We’ll have to build our own firewalls, and do it fast.”

  * * *

  But the two tribes shook down together well. The VLDMT team, expansive as bullies on a playground, instantly took control of the communal spaces, and it didn’t matter. The Needlers preferred their lab-habitats, anyway. Sharing the housekeeping might well have led to friction, but the LDMs, who never had support staff, quickly absorbed this territory as well, and the Needlers had no objection. The canteen was common ground. The LDMs sprawled over the rest of the communal spaces. The labs and the scientists’ berths were sacrosanct, untouched until the Needlers themselves couldn’t stand the mess—and everything was settled, without a shot being fired.

  The IS analysts went back to work refining Needle search methods, getting ready for the live test in a year’s time: as if nothing had changed. Kir practiced her refraction technique. Lilija, alongside, screened what they called the “nonspecific data.” Across the room, Karim monitored the lab’s Direct Cognitive working record in real time, looking out for problems, while Terry and Jo tinkered with one of their IS qubit filters. Liwang, a visitor from Volume, was borrowing an empty desk. . . . Kir’s template, a childhood memory, filled the center of her field of view. Rusty water ran between rusty rocks, over mucky rainbow blocks of congealed plastic, just as it had, long ago. Upstream, out of sight, was the abandoned Nuclear Plant. Downstream, broken-teeth towers of the abandoned city. There were tiny fish in the stream, but you mustn’t eat them; they were radioactive. Abandoned, radioactive, city, Nuclear Plant: words she didn’t understand but used all the time: familiar, comfortable. The stenches of the hunting ground surrounded her, the murky sky was hot on her back, the hated face mask chafed. Feelings, things, hurts, unassociated recall cascaded through the myriad dimensions of this ambered moment, as Kir focused and refocused, in pursuit of another tiny increment of integration. Uncertainty—an expression she had heard used very carelessly at the “launch”—had nothing to do with the shift. It was all about precision. If Kir could track every live synapse in the information
state of a moment of awareness (a staggering operation), she’d have reached “integrated definition”: an important technical term. If they could do that for the Volume, in Information Space, the Needle would no longer be lost in that haystack. It would be going where it was sent, returning to its origin; and the journey verifiable.

  They weren’t there yet, but they were on their way—

  There was a dearth of visible high-tech in this cutting-edge PSM lab—apart from the wireless Direct Cognitive skullcaps, which didn’t look like much, if you didn’t know. Kir stared at pictures that only she could see, a sketchbook and colored crayons her only aids. Karim tapped occasionally at a basic manual calculator. Lilija preferred an augmented reality, mediated by her DC cap, but also used graph paper and map pens. Terry and Jo had a toy percussion set, a chiming array of child-size gongs, xylophones, cymbals. . . . My scav family, she thought (intense mental effort, like a constant sense of danger, buffered and soothed by the familiar presences). Karim’s our weatherman, sitting up on a big rock watching for ominous clouds. Lilija’s the dust bunny, sifting dried-out stinky muck. She’ll find gold. Terry and Jo are our “toolers,” artisans of odds and ends: they earn their share. And Liwang’s in here prospecting, looking for new hunting grounds for his own guys (because nothing lasts). That’s why he’s always mooching around, snooping.

  Sergey, the IS Analysis boss, disabled by degenerative brain disease, was one of the puzzling names on the roster. He wasn’t in the lab today. He’d sent his paybot, right now curled up on the workbench at Kir’s elbow, to keep an eye on them. Sensing her attention, it cocked an ear and winked. Sergey is our god, she decided. Immobile, prophetic. Every scav tribe has a god. Or in real life, maybe he’s a closet VLDMT fan? Maybe he begged to be allowed to come, to spend time with the glorious gang? Kir sniggered, and Lilija looked over with a wrinkle-nosed frown. “Tell you later,” muttered Kir. But she wouldn’t. If you thought of something that would amuse the chief, you hoarded it.