Beautiful Intelligence (8 page)

“You’re damn right. Objective observation isn’t enough to bring understanding. Only surface features can be noticed objectively.”

“I’ll tell you another thing,” Joanna said. “Emotion is rooted in personal human experience, in some mental model of reality.”

“Go on.”

“Well... two people can experience the same event but feel different emotions. A woman standing at the edge of a sea cliff, who has dived in before... she feels elation. But a novice feels afraid. Those evaluations are immediate, but they are different-”

“And,” Manfred interrupted, “although they’re generated by the same true stimulus, they’re dependent on the experiencer’s model of reality. That’s why they’re different. So emotion must be
cognitive,
then.”

“Yes – the fundamental way the mind experiences a coherent inner world, its model of reality. All those physical consequences, like tears, seem to halt the smooth experience of consciousness, but they are forcing the mind to experience itself in a different, more profound, mode. It wells up uncontrollably as it imparts its message.”

“Like your crying...”

“And my excitement now! I feel jittery, I’m breathing fast.”

Manfred grinned. “Me too, babe.”

~

Pouncey prowled the alleys of dark Philly, four in the morning, when nexus-blurring particles of solar interference were becalmed and even the dwoobs were asleep. Like a graveyard of concrete, grime and weeds, the place was dead.

Down a narrow street she stumbled across a row of shops, all barred and showing biohazard signs, though Pouncey knew these must be for show, designed to deter. Any real biohazard would have the local PD guarding it, or an FBI stick. It was work of a few minutes to use her nexus-raiding skills to locate weaknesses. There – a password on an encrypted back door lock, shining bright in augmented space like a neon sign. No sign of a username though. She ran around to the front of the shop, read:
Brian Dean, e-Goods, Cellphones, Tasa.

She typed in: briandean, fortunatimes2067. The lock clicked open. Lucky!

Better not take too much, just enough to buy a week’s food; then maybe Mr Dean, 30, wouldn’t bother calling the cops. She grabbed a U-Fit interface and some microcables, then shut and locked the back door.

She waited until the sun rose and the lo-market dealers were about. An hour later she had a price, not good, but enough to buy bread, veg, tins of meat, all of which she put in her backpack. Time to go.

Three local lads eyed her, but they didn’t approach. She ignored them, padding down the passage that linked the lo-market street with Vine Street. Then two of the lads, the smaller two, popped out in front of her. She stopped.

Noise behind her. The big guy.

One of the smaller lads stepped forward, approached to a couple of metres. He stank of beer. “How much you charge for a ride, doll face?”

“I don’t screw juvie trash,” she replied.

He took steps forward. “Where you get that circuitboard you just passed on to Red Sam?”

“Don’t mess with me if you’re keepin’ that nice trim beard, boy.”

He launched himself towards her. She sidestepped, hit out, but he bundled himself into her, so she kicked out, then kneed and downed him. The big guy stepped forward. She pulled out her high-vel.

“Wanna?” she said.

He made to reach into his pocket. She fired. He fell.

Something moved in the corner of her vision. She glanced up to see a CCTV cam pointing at her.

“Shit!”

Kicking the little guy again and dodging the other, she ran. Out into Vine Street; pause, calm, walk like an ordinary woman. Head tilted down, look at the pavement, conceal face. In minutes she stood beside the tower block, checking the area, looking for street woons, listening for PD sirens. Nothing.

Then she noticed her wrist looked different. Three wristbands... no, two.

“Shit,” she said.

The first little guy had done a classic distraction. And
he
was still alive.

A red pinpoint flashed in the right side of her spex. PD alarm.

“Shit!”

The anthropo-software running the cam had recognised the scene and reported it to the cops. Her face would be stored now, awaiting investigation. But far more dangerous was her missing wristband.

Nothing for it. She couldn’t let that get into the wrong hands. Three fake identities – weeks of work, care, maintenance – lay vulnerable to hacking if any half intelligent crim got that wristband. She accessed her security soft and navigated it through her spex. But now she faced a dilemma. If she killed the wristband, blanking it with a nex-bomb, she would send out a signal to all and sundry that could not be misread. Blanking a wristband meant ID manipulation: illegal, a common procedure, dangerous, essential if you wanted to avoid nexus eyes. Aritomo would be scanning twentyfour-seven for such events, and if he linked it to the passage job...
when
he linked it, the BIteam was dead.

No choice. She set the code, modded her wristband and set off the bomb.

Trembling, headachey, she walked up the steps to the apartment. Exhausted, now. Locking the door behind her, she took a deep breath and relaxed. Manfred appeared out of the bis’ room.

“You okay?”

She hesitated, wondering if she should take a chance, leave it... or take a lead. “Itchy fingertips,” she said. She took the cash out of her pocket and jingled it. “You know how difficult it is to get this?”

A look of annoyance passed across his face. “I’m getting tired of hearing you drone on about itchy fingers,” he said. “I told you, we need a week. So if you feel anything a bit stronger than an itch, you let me know, mmm?”

“Aye, I’m tellin’ you–”

“
No
more damn itches! When you see a man with a gun on the stairs pointing it at us, sure, fire up the Hyperlinked. Until then, chill.”

Pouncey stared, horrified by his retort.

He approached, slapped something wrapped in silver foil into her hand. “Have some more chocolate, Pouncey. And maybe run a hot bath.”

~

Over the next two days Joanna did what she could to stress the bis. She turned off the apartment’s only functioning solar-heat driver and opened a skylight so that it became too cold for them, their bioplas bodies stiffening like vulcanised rubber. Then she scavenged a heater from a dead office a few floors down, had Pouncey get it working, then set it to maximum so that they baked. All this time she allowed them the use of low-level English databases. Some of the bis seemed interested, others not. Indigo, she noticed, was not.

Manfred spent a lot of time stressing the bis’ limbs, pulling them this way and that, stuffing the bis into confined spaces then waiting for them to struggle out, setting them high on bookshelves with no obvious means of getting down. All this made the bis aware of their bodies, and the limitations of those bodies. They acted by and large as a nine member group, but there were fracture lines. Indigo was a loner. The three warm spectrum bis hung together, as did the other three coloureds. Grey and White were not gregarious. But there was no sign of speech. The bis had no tongues, instead multiform speakers designed by Singaporean audio specialists, yet these speakers remained silent.

“Don’t worry,” Manfred counselled. “I want to see them cry and blush first.”

Joanna spent almost every waking minute with the bis. Each nuance of behaviour she compared with what she remembered of her chimp work, trying to tease out hints of consciousness, looking for that special spark. She even tried the reflection test, dabbing paint on them then setting them down in front of a mirror, but not one of them touched their own skin; each saw their reflection as a different bi, another creature, mysteriously conjured from thin air.

But they remained sponges for knowledge. She began to notice that a few of them grasped that a huge world lay outside their room door. Red, Orange and Yellow took to hunching by that door, like sulking cats hoping to escape a house. She began to take extra care. An escaped bi could not be countenanced.

“We need a key,” she told Manfred. “If they have figured out how the door handle works, we could be in trouble.”

“True,” he agreed. “Listen, the bedroom by the main door’s got a small bolt on the inside. I’ll unscrew it and try to put it on the outside – if it’ll fit. Then we can lock ’em in.”

“And we should keep the crates outside,” Joanna said, “for emergencies.”

He nodded. “You’re taking this seriously.”

“I’m
sure
they’re communicating. I just can’t prove it. It’s like siblings who invent personal languages.”

“Perhaps they don’t yet see the importance of English. Perhaps they see us as totally different and don’t feel the need to communicate with us. But their own group... that’s different. They’ve
got
to communicate there.”

“I worry they could go out of control,” she said. “They need to be pretty much like us if they’re going to function in society. If they become... well, aliens, then things could get impossible.”

Manfred glanced back at the room. “Those crates are only just big enough for them,” he said. “And if we got more bioplas we could grow ’em again. Then they’d be too damn heavy to carry. Yeah, you’re right, we gotta think about all this. What if Pouncey’s right about her itchy fingers?”

“Why not make leather harnesses for the bis? Most of them can walk now, or toddle at least. I suppose we would look like a circus troupe walking down the street, but it might just save us if they used their own feet.”

Manfred sighed and shook his head. “Good idea, but too much scope for chaos. What if one got loose? Got stolen? But you’re right. We can’t crate them forever. We need a
vehicle.
”

“That is dangerous, and Pouncey has always advised against it.”

“I know. I believe her. She knows the score. But this is different, we never knew they’d develop like they have. Maybe it’s time to leave Philly, eh? Risk it out in the sticks, give the bis time to develop, then when they’re ready introduce ’em to the world.”

Joanna raised her eyebrows. “Nice little fantasy,” she said.

He nodded. “Yeah. Maybe.”

Joanna took a deep breath. “Why not forget bioplas?” she said. “I know it was your desire to have them walk as tall as a human being, but things have not turned out as you hoped. If we restrict them to child size at least we can control them better.”

“But should we control?” he said, raising two hands into the air. “Is that right? Ethical?”

And Joanna shrugged.

~

“You need a what?” Pouncey said.

They all sat in the kitchen, a pot of coffee between them.

“A soltruck,” Manfred said. “A small one.”

Pouncey looked at them both. “We’re leavin’?”

“Maybe. Not yet. But me and Jo’ve been talking, and it’s getting to that time when...”

He left the rest of the sentence implied.

Pouncey shook her head. “Boss, I’ve always said no to solcars. Aye... too easy to smash up. To follow – from the air, f’rinstance. What’s new?”

“We’re thinking ahead.”

Pouncey nodded once, drank her coffee dregs, sighed then stood up. “Gimme a couple of hours.”

She left.

Manfred glanced at Joanna. “That was too easy,” he said.

“She knows something. She is nervous, I have seen it before.”

“Yeah... I think you’re right. Wanna pack a few things, just in case?”

“You mean it?”

Manfred glanced at the external apartment door, just visible through the kitchen doorway. “I feel vulnerable without her. C’mon,
I’ve
got itchy fingers now.”

“I will check the bis.”

Joanna walked to the bis’ room, pulling the bolt and opening the door. There came a sensation at her legs of something brushing past, and she glanced down to see a blue form scurry past.

She slammed the door shut. “Manfred! Indigo’s out!”

The bi ran away from her, bumping into walls, stopping, turning, then running again. Joanna halted. Manfred crashed into her from the bathroom corridor, but she grabbed his arm and held him back.

“No,” she said. “Wait! It orientated itself.”

“What? You–”

“It did! I’m sure.”

They followed Indigo into the lounge, watching from the doorway. The bi stumbled around the room, but kept a constant direction.

“It can’t see objects,” Manfred said. “Should be easy to catch, then.”

“
Watch,
Manfred. Use
your
eyes. It is tracking something. It knows what it is doing.”

“Tracking? What, that fly smacking against the window? C’mon, Jo...”

Joanna moved forward. Indigo had climbed onto the couch beside the window. She picked it up and set it on the floor a metre or so away. It turned. Walked away. Then it reached out with one arm and began patting the air.

Jo gasped as understanding made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. One hand covered her mouth. “Manfred, look! It
knows
the couch is there. It is trying to feel for it. It has modelled this room into its... mind.”

Manfred stared at Indigo. “Jeez... you’re right.”

They watched, astonished, as Indigo located then clambered upon the couch, climbing cushions at the back to kneel upon the windowsill.

“Mmm, it really wants that fly,” Manfred said.

They walked forward. Joanna lifted Indigo and held it against her, cuddling it as she might a child.

Manfred reached out to grab the fly. He looked at it.

She saw his face go white. He froze. Stared down.

Turned to face her. “It’s glitched,” he said.

The AIteam ran through the laser-punched tunnel at the side of the cave system, emerging into a fake boulder pile engineered by Hound when he first prepared the base. Around the hillside, less than a hundred metres away, two copters hovered at the cave entrance: dust mushrooming, engines roaring, rotor wind spattering debris against the micro-goggles they wore to protect their eyes.

Leonora, Dirk, Yuri, Zeug. Hound checked they were all behind him.

“Run like I do,” he said. “The thermo sheets will protect you against satellite eyes. Think positive. Don’t dawdle. Just run like me. Assume you’re going to make it, okay?”