Words failed in the face of such a structure. And the failure was not merely linguistic. It arose instead from the very architecture and processes of the human brain, which was a child of entanglement, born of the intimate, irreducibly complex interlacings that bound all macroscopic systems to the Newtonian realm of classical physics. The vast structure looming overhead belonged to that realm, but it also existed in the quantum realm—and, if quantum cosmologists were to be believed, its subatomic existence was not confined to this universe, but feathered ineffably through every quantum branching of the multiverse.
You couldn’t see the parts of the Datatrap that resided in other universes. You couldn’t access them in any way, although the Datatrap’s processing power in some part depended upon them. Yet—be it mere optical illusion or figment of the imagination—they seemed almost to glimmer on the edge of consciousness, in the gaps between what the human mind could see or conceive of seeing.
The only thing that limited a datatrap’s processing power was power itself. The cosmic branchings of its folded databases could process any equation, calculate any number, prove any theorem. Except, of course, for the really tough problems: the knots that still had not been cracked four centuries into the information age. Simply performing those calculations would require more power than was contained in the universe. More power or more time, which—as Cohen would have been the first to point out, had he been here—ultimately amounted to the same thing.
Datatraps were not AIs. But neither were they less than AIs. They were something entirely other, something that had arisen not in the laboratories of cognitive science researchers or the dark foundries of military AI, but from another source entirely. They had once been called Quants. They had blossomed in the last vibrant season of pre-Migration free-market capitalism, before Earth’s long-abused biosphere suffered its own fatal crash and cut the feet out from under all the merely human modes of production. They had been built to store and process the vast stores of information, sifting through mountains of data in order to discern the subtle patterns that prefigured the shapes of the emerging economies and collapsing commodities. They had not been built to think or feel or decide or imagine. They had only been built to feed, piling bits on top of that, datum on top of datum, sucking the whole analog world into the powerful engines of their analytics programs.
The Freetown Datatrap shared nothing with those ancient Quants: not hardware, not software, not algorithms or long-obsolete coding languages. It shared only their hunger. And it was a mark of the fear and respect that UNSec held for that hunger that every other datatrap in UN space was relegated to the dark and starless reaches of the Deep, and the only one anywhere near a human settlement was the Freetown Datatrap: the living, calculating symbol of the UN’s oldest and largest Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Outside the port authority, Freetown was barely a city by normal UN standards. The streets were antiseptically clean and emptier than the streets of any human city ever could be. The only buildings really designed for humans were the high-rise luxury hotels flanking the glass and steel canyon of Hakim Bey Boulevard. There were guest worker living quarters somewhere in the TAZ, Li had read, but most workers preferred to commute in from the nearby human colony. Allegedly the rare AIs who chose to hire live-in domestic help had to pay extra to persuade employees to stay in-TAZ after dark. Superstition was an odd disease. And, at least in the case of AIs, familiarity didn’t seem to alleviate it.
Such was Freetown. Either it was a blip on the evolutionary radar or it was a first glimpse of post-humanity’s post-organic future. And Li was damned if she could even begin to figure out which.
The address the ALEF agent had given Li was in one of the TAZ’s several residential zones—a rich one judging by how often it appeared in the streamspace ads for domestic help. As Li neared the address, the neighborhood began to look more and more like Cohen’s posh Ringside neighborhood in the Zona Angeles. The same high-walled, shuttered houses. The same empty streets. The same occasional humans, always in a hurry and often dressed in formalized parodies of Old Earth domestics’ uniforms. Li had never understood that. That Cohen, whose original human memories went all the way back to twenty-first-century Earth, would cling to old habits was comprehensible. That younger AIs, many of them with no human memories at all, would do so seemed bizarre. She’d always suspected it was some kind of subtle joke—but, like a lot of AI humor, it didn’t seem to translate.
The house she was looking for seemed relatively modest at first glance. Until she was buzzed through the front gate and realized that what she’d mistaken for the main building was merely a kind of carriage gate–cum–security post. Beyond it, lush green lawns swept down to a glittering lake and a curving avenue swooped toward the ornate marble porte cochere of a mansion that Cohen would have called a monstrosity.
She paused at the gatehouse, wondering if someone was going to come out and escort her. They didn’t. So she strolled down the long drive between the golf-course-green lawns. As she stepped under the porte cochere, she could see down the next immaculate sweep of driveway toward a long, low set of old-fashioned garages, where a silver automobile glimmered in the artificial sunlight. A Rolls Silver Ghost. A nice one, from back before they got ugly. There was a boy polishing it, but he wasn’t putting much elbow grease into the job. He made a pretty picture, though, and you could see he knew it. It was obvious what he’d been hired for—and you didn’t have to be nearly as cynical as Li to wonder if he even knew how to drive the car. Apparently even though
ALEF’s member AIs might not respect humans much, they had a good eye for their recreational uses.
She walked up the front steps, smelling wet earth and hearing the smooth scuff and echo of her feet on flagstone. She didn’t even have to raise the ornate brass door knocker. A butler pulled it smoothly open before her hand hit the polished wood. He had a pinched face and a look in his eye that was as plain to read as a
DO NOT TOUCH
sign. She had a perverse urge to clap the knocker anyway, just to see if he’d whip out a rag and start polishing off her offending fingerprints.
“I’m here to see—”
“I know.”
He turned smoothly and retreated into the house’s shadowy interior. Li was used to AI homes and their twilight dimness. Most AIs used shunts only sporadically. The need for decent reading light—let alone the prey animal’s psychic need for emotional defense against the encroaching darkness—was purely theoretical. AIs didn’t need light, any more than they needed caves or castles. They didn’t get headaches. They weren’t afraid of the dark. And they didn’t have instincts.
The majordomo led her under an elaborate wrought iron balcony—very Hollywood, Li thought—and down a long tiled corridor. Chairs stood to attention on either side, their hardwood arms carved with lions and smelling of beeswax. The majordomo’s feet ticked along, smooth and steady as a metronome, their rhythm unaltered even as he turned into an open doorway and stopped to let her pass by him.
There was something wrong with those feet, she realized. Something wrong with his whole way of moving. As she stepped through the door she looked up into his face and confirmed the suspicion. There was a certain not-quite-rightness about the set of his jaw. A certain blankness in his eye. A set quality even in the prissy frown.
He wasn’t a real person—at least not at the moment. An AI was shunting through him.
She realized suddenly just how silent the great house was all around them. Was there even anyone else in it? She wondered if she was even going to meet a real person. And then she wondered why she’d even thought she would.
The room she found herself in was more Hollywood set, vintage 1930s. Oriental carpet—but not a real one. Overstuffed furniture that looked like no one had ever sat in it. A carefully swept fireplace that looked like it had never held anything more warming than the vase of hothouse flowers sitting in front of the polished firedogs.
The majordomo walked across the room and sat down in a sleek club chair beside the fireplace.
He gestured to the matching chair that faced it across the hearth. “Sit down,” he said in a voice from which all trace of warmth or hospitality was conspicuously absent. “You’ve come a long way. You must be tired.”
“You know why I’m here then.”
“Of course. We summoned you.”
“No you didn’t—” Li bit her tongue, realizing she’d jumped into a silence that could have taught her something.
The majordomo gave her a curious look—the first time he’d actually looked at her instead of gazing superciliously into the air over her shoulder. And then he froze.
Li waited through the pause, watching the subtle movements of the shunt’s eyes that told her whether the controlling AI was actively operating the shunt or merely a passive rider in the rented body. It was hard to tell, but the distinction was critical.
It hadn’t only been the intimidation factor that had made Li want to take this meeting in realspace. There was another, deeper problem. You could call it a matter of overclocking or clocking speeds. Or you could face the facts and just call it Time.
Human consciousness, with its flowing, linear, rhythmic time sense, was a flesh-and-blood predator’s consciousness. It was an evolved artifact: a tool to help a hairy biped catch more meals and seek shelter from nocturnal predators looking to make it into a meal. It didn’t tell you what time actually was. It didn’t even count time in any meaningful sense. That wasn’t its job. There was, in fact, no human organ that did that job.
AIs, on the other hand, experienced the passage of time in ways so profoundly different from humans that it could be difficult even to
communicate across the chasm. Partly it was a question of clocking speeds: a sort of artificial version of the same disconnect that plagued relations between the Ring-based UN bureaucracy—operating on its blisteringly fast BE network—and their far-flung colonies—operating at the glacial pace of speed-of-light communications and slow-time RAM scoop freighters. AIs just lived faster. In AI time, ages could pass and entire ideologies could rise and clash and fall, all in the time it took a human being to smoke a cigarette and drink a cup of coffee.
But it was more than that. It was also a matter of the subjective experience of time, of how organic and artificial minds cobbled the underlying quantized structures of spacetime into the kinds of flowing, riverlike, classical experience of passing time that was a necessary underpinning of consciousness and volition. Humans had no access to this process. It happened in fractions of time so much shorter than the turnover speed of their sensory apparatus that it was almost irrelevant to talk about it. AIs, on the other hand, cut closer to the quantum bones of the universe. The most sophisticated AIs
were
quantum computers, and even though they might not have what a human would consider conscious awareness of their quantum operations, they were still immersed in a universe that humans could only access through the most rarefied theoretical mathematics. AIs used classical time, just as humans did. But for AIs it was a tool—to be picked up and put down at will—and not an unquestioned condition of existence.
He came back to life with a jerk.
“Of course,” he said. “You were already on your way here when we took the vote. It was so long ago, the details had escaped us. But never mind. It doesn’t really matter why you think you’re here, does it?”
“Who are you?” Li asked.
“Really? You lived with an Emergent for two decades and you’re still playing the name game?”
Li waited.
He sighed. “If you can’t do without a name, you can simply call me Aleph-Null.”
Li prodded her limited knowledge of set theory into action. “So … you’re the set of all possible combinations of ALEF associates?”
“Just the cardinality of our natural numbers. Only the smallest of infinities. Even a human ought to be able to handle that.” His lips narrowed. “By the way, I ought to take this opportunity to tell you that I—that is to say, I-the-user-interface, not I-Aleph-Null—don’t approve, and I didn’t vote for this. However, my associates have decided, for reasons that largely elude me, that I’m the appropriate user interface to tender our offer to you.”
“And what offer is that?”
“Well, offer and information.”
Li tensed.
Information
was a word that had many meanings when AIs spoke it. It could mean information pure and simple. It could mean information-rich physical objects—which were most physical objects, really, when you took a broad view of the universe. It could mean money, since AIs mostly paid each other with information instead of human tender. It could mean anything. But whatever it meant, it was always something AIs cared about. And something they didn’t give away without good reason, despite all the high-flying talk about information seeking its own freedom. Cohen had once told her, with one of those fairy-tale parallels he so delighted in, that AIs hoarded information like dragons hoarded gold.
“First, we offer information,” Aleph-Null told her. “Cohen went to New Allegheny to do a job for us.”
“You mean for ALEF,” Li said, confused as ever by the fluidity of AI pronouns.
He nodded, but he didn’t elaborate. Li got the feeling that he was drawing things out because he couldn’t bring himself to part with the precious information a moment before he had to.
“The Navy had a little problem,” he said at last. “A wild AI outbreak in the New Allegheny shipyards. They asked us to deal with it for them.”
Li narrowed her eyes, questions seething in her mind. But she bit them back for fear of shutting off the obviously reluctant flow of information.
“We sent out two agents. Neither of them was able to suppress the outbreak. And then they both … disappeared.”
“What do you mean, disappeared?”
“Stop boring me. You’ll have the files when you agree to take the job. The information’s there, and I’m getting tired of babysitting.”