Beautiful Intelligence (20 page)

“Sure ’nuff, boss.”

Pouncey ran off. Manfred knelt down and said, “Jo, we need to watch what they do. You agree?”

Joanna bent her head forward, then sighed. “Yes. Unfortunately.”

“Okay... move back. Let’s watch for a while, see how they react. C’mon... stand by me.”

The pair retreated for a few metres, then sat on a fallen tree. Orange and Violet were the first on the scene. They circled White’s remains, their touch-fronds flat at their sides, the striations on their surfaces quiescent. Manfred noticed at once that neither Yellow nor Indigo went close; they seemed to be watching Orange and Violet, not the body. Then Indigo turned around, located Manfred, and walked over. Like a cat, it leaped up into Manfred’s lap.

Manfred, surprised, did nothing for a while, before setting Indigo on the ground. “You’d better be with your own kind,” he said, tapping Indigo on the back.

Indigo turned and leaped up again.

Joanna said, “It wants to be with you. You were correct about one thing – it is the most human aware of the bis.”

Manfred nodded, awed by this. “Yeah... it is. Weird.”

“Strange indeed.”

“Jo, I know we’ve disagreed about this, and I’m sorry about that... a little... but the bis
are
manifesting personalities. We’ve got to interact with them as if they’ve got character. If we don’t, if we ignore that or pretend it doesn’t exist, we diminish them.”

“I do not deny that,” Joanna replied. “I do deny they are human in any way.”

“Do you deny that each one has some kind of meaning framework inside it, that’s subtly different to the rest? That maybe manifests as character? Identity?”

“Um... perhaps.”

“Okay, that’s good enough for me. Let’s observe.”

Now the three bis stood around White’s body, all of them looking at the armless, headless object. Blue and Red joined them. Manfred held his breath as the five bis closed in on each other, making a huddle, before – suddenly, as if following a prearranged plan – leaping back and hurrying away.

Jo made to stand up, but Manfred held her back. “They’re making towards the head and the two arms,” he said. “They’re not running away.”

“They’re
communicating,
” Joanna said, her voice taut with emotion, “I
know
they are. But this is not like chimps. It took me years to grasp chimp vocalisations. This is different. The bis are a whole new species and there is no frame of reference for me.”

“Yeah, that’s not wrong,” said Manfred. “They speak alien.”

In less than a minute the bis returned carrying White’s remains. Manfred leaned forward, aware that this could be a pivotal moment in his scheme. Would the bis grasp that White was like them, yet no longer in existence? Or would they stroll away, like bioplas animals?

Indigo sat on his lap, alert (it seemed) to what was happening within the bi group; in response Manfred tried to relax. He could be sending all sorts of gestural signals to Indigo without realising it. Indigo might already have picked up on human body language, the way dogs did from their owners.

Then Orange bent down to pick up one of the arms. Manfred watched, observing that the hawk’s talons had somehow disarticulated the alu-plex joint. That was bad luck. Orange put down the arm, then picked up the head, and as it did Violet and Blue picked up the two arms. At once the dye patterns returned to the body surfaces of all the bis. Manfred glanced down. Indigo too presented oscillating Moiré patterns – and now a few of the bis looked back at it. Manfred calmed himself. He was almost trembling. This was communication, this was proof of inter-bi relations, and it was proof too that Indigo used senses he was unaware of to socialise with the bi group. It was
proof!

“They’ll not be able to wear clothes,” he observed.

Joanna frowned at him. “Shhh!”

Orange lay the head on the grass. Violet and Blue did likewise. There was the sound of a twig snapping as Pouncey returned, carrying Grey and Green.

“Put them down by the group,” Manfred instructed, “then move back.”

Pouncey did as she was bid, returning to the soltruck, where she lit up a smoke. Manfred returned to watching the bis.

For a moment they circled aimlessly around the body parts, Grey and Green nearest the remains, until all of them slowed their movements, then halted. Red stepped back and lay down. Green wandered off, following a butterfly. But Violet knelt beside White and, in a gesture that took Manfred’s breath away, tried to pull off its own right arm. Blue followed suit. Grey stepped away from the group, walking backwards until it tripped over a branch; then it sat down, watching from a distance.

Manfred pointed to Orange. “Gone quiet,” he whispered.

“It might be planning what to do.”

“Let’s hope so, mmm?”

As they spoke Yellow moved away from the group, returning to Joanna, where it paused, glanced back, then leaped up, so that it sat on Joanna’s knee. Manfred found himself entranced. They
were
real creatures, aware of their environment, of themselves, thinking, maybe even feeling.

He shook his head. He tried to calm himself. Jo was right about one thing – they must at all times resist the temptation to think of the bis as Disney’s Nine Dwarves. And yet, watching Yellow sit on Joanna’s lap, it was impossible not to humanise it. Yellow was just like a little kid. He held his breath, trying to reduce his heart rate, tortured by the conflict inside him. The bis had been immersed in human culture since he used scissors to separate them on that formative day in Philly. They
would
have some human characteristics. But which?

Compromise, that was the way forward. Most likely the bis would end up half human, half alien. He looked down. Indigo would be key. This bi must
never
be grabbed by a hawk; on that he agreed with Jo.

Orange bent down once again, lifting White’s body. For a few moments it looked at the head and arms, before kneeling down to try to pick them up. But the whole bundle was too much to carry. It dropped the body then picked up the head and the arms, then dropped those and again lifted the body. It took the body to a flat stone, where it knelt, lifting the stone. It let the body drop, then allowed the stone to fall back, so that White was part concealed.

The other active bis watched. Red appeared to be resting – perhaps recharging. Green chased insects around a tree.

Violet then took the head and carried it to the stone. Blue brought the arms. But the stone was smaller than White’s torso.

Manfred waited, hardly daring to breathe. Orange turned to look at him. He stared back. It was a kind of pointless, meaningless telepathy.

Violet fetched dead leaves and used them to cover the limbs, but Orange kicked the leaves away. Blue also brought leaves, grass too, then a piece of stone. Orange brushed away the leaves, then took the stone and dropped it on the arms.

Manfred thought: they’re trying to hide it, they’re trying to
bury
it. The bis are trying to conceal what has happened. They know White is gone and they’re trying to find an appropriate response to that fact.

Only Orange, Blue and Violet seemed bothered by the presence of the inactive White; only they seemed compelled to do something in reply. Indigo, Grey and Yellow watched, but did not act. Perhaps Red and Green were as yet unaware of themselves as conscious individuals, like infants younger than eighteen months. Orange by contrast seemed mature, its acts deliberate, even measured.

Manfred shook his head. What he observed seemed to verge on the miraculous. Eight little enigmas.

Orange hurried away, followed, after a pause, by Violet and Blue. The bis spent some time gathering flat stones, which they used to cover White’s remains, until nothing could be seen. But Violet was still dissatisfied. It walked down to the river, gathered an armful of mud, then used the mud to plug all the holes through which glimpses of white bioplas could be seen.

And so, half an hour later, the deed was done; the bis were satisfied.

Manfred glanced across at Joanna. “I don’t think there’s any doubt as to what happened there,” he said.

Joanna nodded. “We could make various hypotheses,” she replied, “but the core remains. They wanted to hide White. They didn’t like what they saw.”

“They found themselves compelled to respond,” Manfred said. “They have basic consciousness, I’m sure. I’ve
seen
it in action.”

Joanna sighed. “I believe you’re right.”

Manfred stood up. “C’mon. We need to make Portland. Indigo is gonna be sending out all kinds of signals to the nexus.”

“And the nexus will be manufacturing meaning from that,” Joanna replied, “meaning that could be picked up by anyone.”

“Yeah. Well, we’re almost there. Another damn day out here in the wild. Pouncey! Time to go.”

Manfred walked to the soltruck, Indigo in his arms, pleased to see that the bis followed – except Grey, who hung back, and Orange, who had vanished for a moment. With six bis in the crates, Indigo in the comp and the soltruck engine revving, he looked around for Orange. No sight of it. He walked back into the trees surrounding the open lay-by, then saw Orange standing beside bushes.

He walked over, then halted. He whistled, and Orange turned around. He whistled a second time, exactly the same notes, then walked back. Orange followed.

That would be a useful trick, he realised. He could whistle to the bis as if they were sheepdogs. All three of them should learn to do that.

Pouncey manoeuvred the soltruck onto the road, the vehicle’s suspension groaning as it bounced. Manfred took a last glance at the lay-by, at the rocks beneath which White was buried. The bioplas would revert to complex petroleum chemicals, he knew, and a whole lot more in a matter of days. Shorn of the intelligence directing it, it would decay as did human flesh.

“Pouncey, stop!”

The soltruck skidded to a halt. Manfred opened the comp door and jumped out, leaping over tree roots and stones to reach the bis rocks.

There, on the top stone, he saw a white flower and an orange flower.

~

Pouncey needed to create a new fake ID before heading down into lands where the nexus ruled. From her position on the bonnet of the soltruck she looked across at the orange street lamps and neon fritzers of Portland, thirty klicks distant. In her spex she saw what appeared to be a wall of mist – an artificial threshold created by the nexus to imply the liminal structure between the high-tech coastal region and the no-tech US interior. They had passed through a similar, though less obvious boundary when leaving Philly.

The first thing to manufacture was fake money lines. Nobody nexus-savvy lived without money: money-free was a solo norm. Via her wristband she sent out a tracer line, which stole its way through the threshold until it found a small local bank. There, it lay quiet: a sleeper.

An hour passed. Pouncey let it. No hurry. Sub-routines that she attached to a local gardening club she allowed to mutate autonomously, following the local cultural norms, so that after a couple of hours they looked 100% Portland. Into these software structures, using the tracer line, she sent a modded program called P, to which she attached a single fifty-seven character password; the name and address of an imaginary character she wrote about in English class when she was nine. Unguessable – unknown to the nexus.

She waited some more. In the comp, Manfred and Joanna were snoozing. Indigo sat on the front ledge, leaning into the windscreen, as if listening. Creepy little thing, that Indigo.

A beep sounded in her spex hub. She sent out a query, received an answer: Polly Siedlaczek, 40 years, dob 11-24-2052, resident of Portland since 12-01-2084, Caucasian, $94077.67, single, no dependents.

Good! Her kernel ID was sorted. Later, she would sophisticate it, make it invisible to snoops. But for her entry into local society she only needed approximate cover – she’d be doing nothing dangerous.

She jumped off the bonnet and tapped on the side window. Manfred woke, then let the window down a few centimetres. “Yeah?” he said, yawning.

“I’m ready. Found an old pushbike somebody threw into a hedge. Gonna use rubber compound to tyre it up, then rattle off. You okay with that?”

“Yeah. Be careful.”

“Hey, you’re talkin’ to Polly Siedlaczek. And she knows her stuff.”

Manfred nodded. “She’d better.”

Pouncey spent fifteen minutes preparing the pushbike tyres, then cycled off down the hill, finding her way to the main highway into Portland by the light of an almost full moon. The 30k ride took her a couple of hours.

In the outskirts of the city she was pleased to encounter all the complex, insane debris of human life in the faded West: greasy lo-markets, groups of narcotics brats selling GM-modified bacteria, people in ancient electric cars, on ancient electric bikes, or pushing pedals, like she was. Nobody even glanced at her, let alone spoke to her. She was anonymous already, having sunk over the top of her head into an environment where nobody had the time or the energy to care much about anything.

In her spex the swirl of info overload was like a familiar balm, interpreted by her metaphor-hungry brain as a homely smell that she had missed: stagnant water, fried food, plastics, piss and shit. It took a few minutes for her brain to reacquaint itself with that hallucinatory mix, but it did, because she was a pro.

Dawn broke. She stowed the bike behind a pile of ripped tarpaulins, then strolled the streets. Down an old avenue she noticed a huge mound of rubble – steel and glass and concrete – and beside that some algae-greened lo-rise towers which showed no lights. She checked them out via the nexus: decayed apartments marked with the six-pointed biohazard sign. Okay... not ideal. But that biohazard mark was from 2082 – ten years ago. What would survive a decade worth worrying about?

Pouncey sat down on the pavement, her boots in the water-filled gutter. Bits of old fried chicken skin floated by alongside a crumpled wrapper. Syringes twinkled in the light of the moon. She began an investigation of the apartment blocks, using one of the classes in a nearby school as a disguise: ‘Social research’ for a ‘school project’.