Beautiful Intelligence (2 page)

“Okay man.”

Hound walked alone to the external cellophane shield, where he glanced up at the cave mouth monitor screen. It was early evening and the rock crew had departed for their base in the village at the bottom of the valley. He shook his head – he had become nocturnal since joining Leonora’s team, like a vampire; and he missed the sun. He tweaked his main wristband to fade in his data incarnation so the nexus would not be alerted by his sudden appearance, then walked out into a muggy evening vibrant with stridulation. Bats and moths.

Hidden under morph-tarps lay his solbike. The batts were fully charged. It hadn’t been used for a week. He brushed the dust and insect crap off the seat and handle grips then powered up. With a wheeze the engine caught. He rode it down desert-dry hill paths to the main Valletta road.

He put his spex on. The weight of the nexus – info over-overload – settled upon his brain, and his privacy vanished.

He sighed. He
was
getting too old for this job. His gaze strayed to a tanker on the horizon and he grinned. So the Saudis had found a few more drops to make the Chinese happy.

Through outlying districts: Qormi, Hamrun, Floriana. In the dayglo-fried outurbs of Valletta he parked the solbike, chaining it to a bollard then pulling out its comchip. The streets were alive with revellers, some from Sicily – black hair and black attitude – but most were from West Libya and Tunisia, their desert robes gold-embroidered khaki. Some of the Tunisians were Muslims: a minority. Hound ignored them all.

The plastic sellers lined the streets of the old town, Valletta Central, where the weight of information pressed down on him like an incubus. Augmented reality, dense and sparkling, ever-ready, perpetual. Each seller had a code name, a virtual shopfront, a credit rating – hovering info like so many digital seagulls, coming into focus when he looked at a seller, fading when he glanced at the next. A madness of subtle activity.

“Not tonight,” he said, mechanically, as he passed the urchins. “I don’t need no plastic.”

“You sleep with homos!” the urchins screamed as they sought out their next customers.

Hound grinned. One of these days he would let the plastic sellers meet his data incarnation, just so he could see them melt into puddles of fear. It would be like Hannibal in an orphanage. Then the urchins would learn a lesson.

On the seafront he spotted the old musical instrument shop that Waylon McLeod had set up in the 2070’s, when music became so computerised a groundswell of revulsion, beginning in the Balearics, swept the Mediterranean, bringing a new era of romanticism. In those idealistic days real music flourished, Hound recalled. But the nexus soon brought mere romanticism under control.

Old McLeod though, he was ancient enough to remember compact discs. He would know what was shiny and new.

The man sat at the back of his shop, plucking a kora. “Yo, Hound.”

Hound nodded back. McLeod’s spex were the newest, straight out of Tokyo – light as a feather and almost invisible on his face. His right arm was concealed from wrist to elbow by a jangle of bands.

“Man, you got
wired,
” Hound said. “You used to be a solo.”

McLeod shrugged. “Ain’t no messing with the modern world.”

Hounded nodded again. “I need music,” he said. “Something local. New. The newest you got and not nexified. Say?”

McLeod frowned. “Okay, but...?”

“I’m bored, man. Bored with downloads. So I’m getting old. Like you used to feel–”

“
Me,
I came out the other side,” McLeod interrupted. “Nothing real is real any more, Hound. It’s all data.”

“Anyway...”

McLeod shrugged, then reached out for a dot of memory. “Try him. It’s a live rec. Teen lad from Seafront Lite. You know, the church kids? Well, I say church, there ain’t no church there any more.”

Hound smiled. There certainly wasn’t.

“Let me know what you think of the lad’s tunes,” McLeod concluded, taking up his kora. “Com me. You know you want to, old man.”

Hound left the shop without replying.

The journey back was peaceful. He listened to the night birds and the insects, and wondered if Dirk could use those sounds as music. Back at the cave, he handed over the dot and awaited developments.

Leonora and Yuri were both asleep: the men had the place to themselves. Dirk lit a cheroot and said, “So dis some local kid? Who not hit da nexus?”

Hounded nodded. “You got that.”

“See,” Dirk said, grinning, “dis is da beauty of it. Da nexus, it flavour all music, takes most of da humanity out. Not like da internet, which was in comparison neutral.” He put the dot on his thumbtip and raised his hand. “So
dis...
dis is straight outa da brain. At worst it’ll be culturally unoriginal. Trite. But da kid who did dis didn’t get his music flavoured.”

“I dig,” Hound said. “We want Zeug to be truly independent. A solo.”

Dirk nodded. “But you know, Zeug can see and all dat, but he don’t hear. I gonna try something now a little bit different.”

Hound found himself intrigued. Dirk’s personal habits left a lot to be desired, but his mind was sharp as obsidian, which was why Leonora employed him. He watched as Dirk pressed a key switch to wake Zeug. Inside the theatre pod the white body twitched, then raised itself and sat on the operating table. Hound shivered. Yuri had insisted that Zeug have three eyes, and Leonora, worn down, had agreed.

“Man, but he’s got ears,” he said.

“He got ear,” Dirk agreed, “but he don’t hear. We ain’t activated dat nerve highway yet. Tonight...”

Hound looked again at Zeug. Stereoscopically, Zeug stared back at him, third eye closed, and Hound received that tremor, that macabre thrill running through his body that everyone got when they saw an almost-human replica. It was creepy. It always would be. It was one of the downsides of artificial intelligence research.

“He’s looking at me, man,” he whispered.

Dirk nodded, taking a drag from his cheroot. “Da brain hooked up in part. He watching us. We like dat! Zeug gotta sense his world to become conscious.”

“He’ll never smell or taste, though.”

Dirk coughed. “Yeah? One day he will. Just a matter of time. Tech never go backward.”

Dirk waited fifteen minutes, Zeug’s standard warmup period, then laid in the signposts for the audio adaptive neural networks in the quantum computer. Zeug shivered, as though sensing that his brain was changing. Then Dirk played the music on the memory dot; simplistic, a song sung to guitar accompaniment, seagulls crying in the background.

“Take out the gulls,” Dirk instructed the theatre pod computer.

Seconds later the gull noises stopped, along with a minuscule amount of quality in the recording.

“EQ, human,” Dirk grunted.

The sonic quality of the recording changed – brighter, with better bass. Hound recognised that the lad had a good voice, though his guitar picking was shaky. He was probably thirteen or so.

Zeug began turning his head this way and that. “Where’s the speaker?” Hound asked.

“One side only,” Dirk replied. “We want da brain to understand spatial co-ordination from audio. He’s getting it! Shit, he’s quick. Look, you can see he’s orientating himself. Yuri, he’s da
man.
”

“But Zeug doesn’t understand what the sound is?”

“Not yet. He linked up to all da data bases here, ’course. He’ll learn.”

“By himself?”

“We’ll learn him,” Dirk said, “so it’ll be a bit of both. Who knows? Dis never happen before.”

“The model of the world inside his brain better be good, man.”

“Real good. But we’ll tell him what’s what.”

~

Leonora and Yuri took green tea together, the morning humid hot already, the Med baking under greenhouse atmosphere; but in the caves it was cool. Leonora glanced at the sundrenched picwalls in the common pod as she poured more tea. She pulled her lambswool cardi around her shoulders. Aircon was not required, which was good; the nexus would notice that kind of anomalous thermal activity from supposedly empty caves, which meant their enemies and competitors would too.

A Hound-report pinged into holoview.

“It is only the fake us,” she said, “the standard report.” She read the update. The virtual Leonora and Yuri hid in the remains of San Francisco, living their lives, interfacing, downloading, uploading. All designed to keep eyes away from Malta. Of course, in a week or two some infinitesimal discrepancy would be noticed and the fake Leonora and Yuri would have to decamp. It happened once a month or thereabouts: pretence of the hobo lifestyle. Kept the watchers on their toes though, for the whole world wanted to know where Leonora and Manfred were and what they were doing. Ichikawa, of course, knew the fakes were fake.

“Zeug is progressing well,” she said.

Yuri nodded. “Very well, for I have no doubt that he wants to learn. His eyes are good and his ears are working, but we face the most difficult obstacle next, for we must teach him language. Chomsky said human beings have grammar hardwired, and I think he was correct.”

“We gave Zeug only a little.”

“Just enough for self-improvement – not too much.”

“Too much would have meant learning less,” Leonora agreed, “and we want him to learn as much as he can without being spoonfed. But you and I do not agree on language.”

“Nexus or not?”

Leonora shrugged.

Yuri continued, “We both agree Zeug must remain solo until he is ready to experience the nexus. But language is changing so fast we have no choice but to utilise what exists
now
in human societies. Not those of the West, of course, but the Pacific Rim, perhaps even Japanese. He must speak what people presently speak, and that means we cannot avoid the nexus – for if he stands out he will be noticed, and that could lead to disaster, and the demise of our noble project.”

Leonora sipped her tea and eyed the honey cakes. She took one; took a bite. “I think
we
should teach him,” she said. “If we rely on the nexus we make him a nexus man. If
I
teach him, and you do, we follow the human principle, and that’s worked for tens of thousands of years. I am sure Chomsky was correct, though he is thought old-fashioned now. Remember Yuri, my original goal was to make an artificial human being, a conscious intelligence. I am not here to make a servant of the nexus.”

Yuri leaned forward. “There is one method of compromise.”

“Which is?”

“We allow a feed in here from the nexus–”

“No!”

“Wait, Leonora, please wait, allow me to elaborate for you.” Yuri sat back and did the steeple thing with his hands that Leonora hated. “Mr Hound secures every link we have with the nexus, indeed, every link with the outside world. He must manage the link I suggest so that our invisibility is maintained. I propose that we have a number of broadcasting stations available for us to watch – news channels, entertainment shows, cheap, educational. This will influence our speech patterns. In time, when he can speak, Zeug too must be allowed to interface with such stations.”

Leonora considered this. Hound was the best in security, the master of camouflage. But still she worried that he might be turning away from the AIteam. Could she trust him? “We are approaching our crucial time,” she mused, “when all our threads come together. It sounds risky.”

“Please. Ask Mr Hound.”

~

Virenza, the village at the bottom of the valley, was well known to Hound. He had lived there for a while as part of security checks made prior to setting up the cave system bolthole, and had there developed some of the procedures used after the Ichikawa breakout. So it seemed natural to chill villageside one evening and decide what broadcast channels to allow into the caves... and how.

He had been instructed to seek variety. It was some theory of Yuri’s. Dirk was in agreement, but Hound felt twitchy.

A number of procedures camouflaged the extent of activity at the caves. Some were simple: arrivals and departures, these mostly Hound, made only at night, so satellites couldn’t pick up anomalous GPS activity. No thermal footprint. The deliberate fostering of cave dwelling bat populations. Some were complex: the geologists working near the cave mouth, giving data to a region that otherwise would have none; and the geologists’ swirl of pointless data also masked any mistakes the AIteam made. Then there was the proprietary ’ware developed by Hound that allowed his data incarnation to fade in and out of the nexus rather than suddenly appear and disappear. But Hound felt uneasy about letting broadcast channels in. It would be so easy for competitors, enemies, and especially journalists to hitch a virtual ride on such incoming streams. Broadcast channels implied viewers. And viewers implied activity.

The data sink, then, must not be attached in any obvious way to the cave system. Sitting at a streetside bar, Hound pondered, a glass of white wine in one hand, a retro moby in the other. Watching crap on nexus TV. Who would have thought it...

He soon realised that the best way to conceal the link would be to utilise the geologists, perhaps have it appear that they had lost a nexus radio somewhere near the cavemouth. He would be able to conceal such a device without difficulty up a tree. And if virtual observers should see him talking to the geologists, it did not matter. The decision to fake his own death prior to joining the AIteam had not recommended itself to Leonora, but Hound had pointed out that a man of his renown could not simply disappear. Via the nexus, he would be hunted. Better to die and reappear as somebody ordinary; for Hound was not his real name. And so he could talk to who he liked with little chance of danger.

He walked down the street to the bar he knew the geologists frequented. Then halted. Ducked behind a dumpster. There, sitting at a round aluminium table with two of the geologists, was Tsuneko June.

Tsuneko June! Something had gone
wrong.

Manfred Klee studied the cables linking the nine globular bis into a circle. One by one he took the cables and cut them with a scissors.

Joanna Rohlen ran into the room, hands covering her open mouth, eyes wide. “What have you done?”