Beautiful Intelligence (27 page)

“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.”

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.”

Dirk glanced at the couch, lowering his voice to reply, as if for fear of controversy. “Agreed,” he said. “And Yellow – he remind me of a cat. He sit on a lap, but don’t do much else. Grey, he loner. Agree with you dere.”

Manfred nodded. “Don’t tell Joanna that. She’s reductionist science, yeah? Behaviour, facts, theories, testing, lots of damn testing. She don’t go a bundle on guesswork.”

“I notice,” said Dirk, smirking. “You got your hands full with dat chick.”

“What about your bi?”

“Violet? Nah. Stupid one.”

“We thought he was the caring bi. He went straight for Blue when Blue was shot.”

“So? Big ol’ elephant, she help her calf if it hurt. Don’t mean a thing.”

Manfred nodded. “Then it’s Orange and Indigo we’ve really got to watch.”

“Yep. And Blue.”

“Blue? Why?”

“He got da half arm. It make him think – scarred by life.”

Manfred stifled a chortle. For a moment he saw how he must appear to Joanna. Nodding, he said, “Well, I guess all views are valid here until disproven.”

“Dey certainly are. Blue and Violet – dem two real friendly.”

Manfred nodded. He had observed that the pair kept close by each other, as they had done since Blue’s arm was shot off. “
No
anthropomorphising,” he told himself as he cracked open more eggs.

~

A week passed with no confirmed use of language. Manfred began to wilt under the stress. Dirk chain-smoked cheroots, and Pouncey had to set up an extractor with an exit pipe leading up to the rubble-strewn roof of the apartment block. Joanna watched, watched and watched, with all the patience of her chimp observing days.

Then, one evening, with Pouncey out scavenging and Dirk asleep, Manfred heard something in the middle apartment – Dirk’s. He heard voices.

For a moment a list of possibilities scrolled through his mind: wi-fi radio; AI alarm clock; old television; burglars. But the voices were high-pitched and seemed inflected like old Oriental animations.

He put his ear to the apartment door.

Voice one: “Dirk bed. Manfred big room. Pouncey Portland.”

A second voice: “Joanna big room.”

First voice: “Joanna big room. Manfred room. Joanna room.”

It had to be the bis!

Manfred felt his throat constrict with shock, with awe, as he envisaged in his mind’s eye what could be happening in Dirk’s room. He’d left Dirk asleep – surely the man was still snoozing. If he was watching this, he would have found some way to alert the others.

Manfred pressed down on the door handle, as slow and quiet as he could, but there was a clink and at once the voices stopped.

He heard rustling, then: “Door. Handle.”

The second voice said, “Door, handle.”

Was that first voice
teaching
the second voice? Or had the bis noticed the handle moving? Manfred held his breath – they must not hear him. Either Indigo was teaching Blue or the other way around.

“Door. Corridor.”

“Door, corridor.”

Manfred shut his eyes as the dilemma reached fever pitch. He was desperate to see what was going on, but he dared not interrupt the flow. What he was hearing could be the time-lapsed, superfast acquisition of English by one bi from another; and if that was a social endeavour, as they all suspected, him beating the door down would gatecrash the lesson in the worst possible way.

He stood back. Thought for a moment. Dirk carried a NearRange Texter – they all did, gifts from Pouncey to be used in emergencies. He tip-toed down the corridor then took his out from his jeans pocket, flicking it on, typing, DIRK WAKE UP! QUIET! then sending it out.

He walked back to Dirk’s door. The Texter would have beeped. The bis would hear that, but they had heard the noise before, and hopefully would ignore it.

He put his ear to the door. He heard a grunt, then a cough.

Then Dirk said, “Yes!”

The boat, Hound was pleased to observe, carried only the old man. It floated fifty metres out from the plastic tide line. There were no locals nearby – it was only an hour after dawn – and the sun hung low over the ocean to the east. Hound put his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Can you come in any nearer?”

The old man waved at them, started the boat’s engine then approached to a distance of ten metres. “You will have to wade over, monsieur, mademoiselles.”

This they did, clambering into the boat with his help. He looked happy, even serene, as if the tetchy haggling of the previous day was all forgotten. They stowed their rubber plas spheres in the back of the boat, then sat on wooden benches dressed with old leather car seats.

“Man, am I glad to see you,” Hound said.

“The pleasure is mine too. Who are these?”

“This is Anita and this is Catherine.”

The old man bowed. “I am, as you say, le Diable.”

Hound gestured at the old man with a thumb. “A comedian, ladies, like I said. Fire up the engine, grandad, let’s head outa here before the gulls arrive.”

As the old man flicked fingers at the boat’s nex hub, Hound checked their appearance. They wore nondescript clothes and broad brimmed straw hats to hide them from satellite watchers. A long boat trip might be deemed unusual by nexus computers. They could be spotted, watched. Anthropo soft might become involved.

The old man glanced over his shoulder. “You wear the summer hat anglais, mademoiselles.”

Leonora replied, “I burn easily in the sun.”

“Oui!” the old man said, laughing. “I have heard that before!”

Hound shrugged. This was all part of the cut-and-thrust of banter, he and the old man both wishing to prove themselves the superior wit. The open, sarcastic quality of the comments reassured him that the old man was genuine.

For a while they all sat in silence, watching the waves churn up behind them then fade to a pale, choppy wake. Refugee camps dotted the seashore. Jellyfish feeding on African nitrate blooms choked some areas, which the old man steered around.

“La méduse, she is not to be entangled with,” he said.

Hound nodded. Though Leonora and Tsuneko – and indeed le Diable himself – seemed relaxed, he could not afford to let his guard down for a moment. This trip carried a small risk.

The sun rose high. Seagull flocks swooped in off the sea, heading for Francophone refugee camps. The boat engine acquired a reassuring hum as the angle of incidence of the sunlight increased. The boat sped up.

An hour east of Bejaïa, Hound noticed something. He stood at the back of the boat, raising, lowering, then raising his spex. Leonora noticed him, and came to investigate.

“What can you see?” she asked.

“Check it out,” Hound replied. “Thought I saw a bit of an echo on the surf.”

“An echo?” Leonora said.

“An augmentation delay – between real and nexus image.”

Leonora tried the spex trick, but saw nothing. “It all looks simultaneous,” she said.

Hound tried again. In his spex, the wavetops appeared a fraction of a second delayed, giving the merged vision a distinct after-image. “That’s odd,” he said.

“It is just a nexus artefact,” Leonora said. “They hypothesise that the nexus has a diurnal rhythm, don’t they?”

Hound nodded. He had heard that theory too. “At night, and in Europe – man, then I’d expect there to be a delay in representation. You can understand that. The computers go a bit inefficient ’cos power’s low and most people are asleep. Latency, they call it. But this is daytime. In Africa.”

“Why would it be your spex only?”

Hound glanced back at the old man. “Sometimes if you pull a feed off someone’s spex without them knowing, the spex can’t process everything in real time. Minuscule delay. But human brains are good at noticing a delay like that. We see it as a visual echo.”