THE BLADE RUNNER AMENDMENT (15 page)

Having noted his exploration, Chloé undertook to explain, “Leaving the stone’s original border allows the reformatted material to maintain integrity. Humphrey discovered it by happenstance after insisting on the natural design.”

“I see.”

He meant that he saw the sequence of events whose meaning completely eluded him.

Seeing him run his hand over the smoothness of the surface, “I wouldn’t,” said Chloé, but it was too late to avoid the miniaturized bolt of lightning that pierced his palm. He withdrew before the current got stronger and directed a rebuke to his departed friend, who seemed for the moment present.

“Thank you, Humphrey!”

His bleak stare took in the stone tablet that served as agent and stage for the operas, the sporting events, the world news, the lap dancers that would materialize there. Anything at all in the public domain and much that was not.

“Let us see what happens when we try to open his files!” Chloé’s tropical bird’s tone of empathy succeeded in placating him. She passed her hand somewhere obscure and instantly a QWERTY keyboard appeared above the granite slab. “Some things never change,” she murmured as her fingers danced across the keys, and she added, “It won’t recognize my voice…not immediately and this is quicker.”

Colour-coded sequences of letters and numbers formed into a three-dimensional formula, and then shifted into new alignments across space in response to her digital applications. Mesmerized and appalled by the complexity, Virgil felt his eyes widen when the mathematical fluidity came to a halt and dissolved in the manifestation of a single snowflake.

“We’re in,” breathed Chloé, with an undercurrent of triumph.

Unable to help himself, Virgil stayed glued to the miraculous hologram. “Explain!” he commanded. Chloé responded with equanimity to his graceless manner.

“It’s real,” she answered, “in the sense that Humphrey captured the original during one of last winter’s snowfalls. Sometimes he would use an autumn leaf or a face in the crowd as the source of his code. It’s the opposite of the universal simplicity. What intrigued him was the expression as he saw it of the singular complexity.”

“But it’s still code.”

“Representational code. He loved the game and he would have been willing to lose if a hacker succeeded in finding the one snowflake in a snowstorm. Only his loss would have been temporary, for without the license plate number on Humphrey’s bicycle tagged onto the code, a trap would spring. Anyone could duplicate my voice as the alternate key,” she added in an afterthought. “Fortunate that I didn’t look for the tone that fit.”

“Let me know when you’re onto something.”

Uninterested in Humphrey’s private life and out of respect, he moved to the window as Chloé set about opening files. Below, the driveway curved up from the hidden roadside entrance. Privacy was sweet but, with minimal smarts, it doesn’t have to come at a premium. Facing things the other way as in the case of his downtown apartment makes all the difference.

Because the window formed a corner of the room, he could see around the side of the house and garden down into an apple-shaped swimming pool, its diving board providing the stem of the fruit. The whole screamed a gauche touch that the trimmed hedge enclosure framed and that Humphrey surely intended to keep him true to his origins although he didn’t need this reminder to keep him personally humble. His own natural inclination had sent him out on his bicycle. The turquoise depths captured and caged light: a beast from the sun. If its parent died at this moment, then its own life would end in approximately twelve minutes. For that period of time it would live in a state of complete and pure, self-induced disinformation.

A narrow width of lawn banded the pool, and beyond the hedge tennis courts had landed – he counted three of them here in New York City! Now there was making a point of luxury by the pleasure that accrued from one’s guests’ entertainment. Humphrey’s leisure time had achieved gravity-defying flight through a complete lack of concern as to means.

The stature of a screen of trees identified them as second old-growth. These held at bay a threatening encroachment by the world’s capital city or what was visible of another planet with war towers raised and bristling with armaments above the clouds of green. The sun blazed like some distant general. Would its released light eternally speed through the universe whether or not it continued to burn? Virgil made a note to ask.

More birds than normal fluttered in those trees. He was diverting himself with counting them when a muted squeal advised that something more pressing required his notice. Or had happened.

“Was that a ‘Eureka’ call?” he asked not caring to comment further. The image – the hologram of a human brain in active mode – would have given anyone pause. Chloé tapped at the ‘return’ key.

Virgil would have preferred to be somewhere else. Inevitably, he found this particular piece of the human anatomy distressing to confront when exposed like this. The rest of the body’s parts also made him uncomfortable. Without the packaging none of it worked for him.

“So?”

“It’s in real time.”

Her sardonic tone he could ignore but not the realization that he’d stopped thinking of Chloé as a humanoid.

“How can you tell?”

Never mind the question’s stupidity, he needed the answer spelled out.

“It’s reacting to my thoughts.”

He pretended to remain unperturbed. “That’s nothing new.” And, idiotically he added, “Systems have long been accessible and responsive to the human mind.” Did he really think himself capable of informing her of anything other than his own inadequacies? As for his emotional turmoils, at the moment, these appeared to be more and more irrelevant whether he perceived her as humanoid or human. He thought he would continue to expatiate upon what he viewed as a failure on her part – perhaps by his insistence he’d stumble upon something meaningful – when she forestalled him, stabbing at the ‘escape’ key. The hologram disappeared in an electron mist, and then nothing other than an image burn on the eye,. He looked at polished stone.

“What happened?”

Chloé’s stillness unnerved him. Had she shut down too?

“It’s stronger than me.”

Vulnerable. As ever it made the helpless male feel himself useful. He might have some ideas.

He didn’t.

“What do you mean?”

That the hologram had been actively thinking possessed him. At least he no longer minded being where he was.

“What do you mean that it can think?”

“Instead of answering me,” – her voice was level and controlled – “it was…” She paused and her tone quavered when she began again, “making fun of me, playing with my questions. It was undermining me. I had to close it down.”

His impulse to put an arm about her was ridiculous but he did so anyway. Her cyber puzzlement crossed to his skin.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh nothing. I was comforting you. Silly of me.”

“Yes, it was, but you know it doesn’t matter. Thank you, Virgil. It tells me that you have responded.”

“Sometimes you’re getting somewhere even if it’s nowhere,” he hypothesized unclear as to whom his little comment applied. Although he wouldn’t care to offer an explanation in the circumstance, he felt it to be a quite fitting insight.

“That’s very profound, Virgil. I only wish I knew what you meant, although it doesn’t seem very important at the moment.”

“No, you’re right. It isn’t. Humans need to find meaning…in the oddest places and over the minutest details.”

Again he regretted his words when he didn’t need to.

“I can understand that, Virgil…I might even say that I ‘sympathize’, but do you find me odd?”

To go by the sharpened glints in her eyes that momentarily blazed like minute exploding suns, her mind – or what was the sum total of her calculations – was elsewhere even as she spoke. He ignored her question.

“What is the matter?”

She replied in the manner of someone thinking out loud.

“I have realized something. It is curious to have a thought in this manner. I would not have had the idea of coming back here unless he – Humphrey – had programmed me to think it. No, that is not right since he was not to know. This is the logical place under certain circumstances, and he programmed me to return like a salmon fighting its way upstream. You and I did have other options. Calculating the odds for what is safest is not an exact science. He intended for me to uncover his other project should it become necessary.”

Her eyes briefly bored into his as if further to convince him but he remained the fountain of all ignorance, conscious of little more than his own blank stare. He waited expectantly for something else to come.

“I am absorbing the thought patterns and formulating defences against them. An avoidance strategy at this stage is the best I can manage.”

“Excellent, Chloé. Whatever works.”

He felt a modicum of sympathy himself, and the confusion that should have been hers were she observant of her contradictions, but they may only have been in his mind. She, in any event, remained clear-eyed whether she processed logical thought streams, winsomeness, sensuality, vulnerability or all of the above. A subdued pride, that’s what he felt at that moment, and it had very little to do with himself as an individual, but everything to do with the notion of a common and shared humanity – his connection to Humphrey that Chloé provided. This is what is meant when it is said that someone lives on in their work. He thought of Humphrey riding his bicycle: the comic figure of him, wobbly and free and all-powerful. Here was his miracle of creation. Once done, it was separate; no fingerprint of the creator was left to befoul it. Humphrey would always be pedalling away on his bicycle.

At this moment, the empty field above the slab of granite was more compelling than the room’s solitary bed.

“And what does it mean?”

Sufficient time had passed for her to respond to his earlier command.

“It’s a threat to all humanoids.”

“Oh, is that all, but you’re replaceable.”

“That depends, Virgil.”

“On what?”

A human would have taken umbrage at this slight, and it would have caused a rift between them. Instead she remained focused on the goal and didn’t look to him for support. She was not entitled to validation, nor did she expect satisfaction. It improved his sense of humour if nothing else that she would inevitably put him in his place without threatening him.

“I’m working out the implications.”

“Take your time.”

She gave him an appraising look.

“It’s impossible to calculate all the possible repercussions.”

“Then let’s worry about the most immediate problems and allow the big ones to take care of themselves.”

“Tolstoy,” she muttered.

“What?”

“
War and Peace
. The Russian general sits back and trusts in winter to have its way with the French army. It’s a method that sees the resolution of many issues and prevents one from being fatally drawn in. Had the Russian army engaged and lost, then the invaders would have taken their place and survived. Instead…”

“Yes, Chloé, I am familiar with the story and I take your point – which is my point that you are illustrating.”

“Just so we understand each other, Virgil.”

“And?”

“And what, Virgil?”

“The most immediate repercussions of this effect you have just experienced. How do they concern us?”

“They don’t. Worry is not a function that I can employ and must leave that to you.” She had identified his emotion and responded to it rather than his question.

“Yes, but what are they…the repercussions…most immediate…that you can see?”

“It is possible to have a humanoid with a human mind.”

She said it flatly with no suggestion of programmed emotion, her default modulation in this instance a pure delivery system slicing through the skin of things. It left a void for his imagination fill – Russians, Polynesians. Honey bee aliens. So went his mind as he tried for logic. Wasn’t this the direction of things cyber all along and unavoidable? Still, he would follow his own method of absorbing information by objecting to it.

“But that’s…”

“Not illegal.”

She anticipated his argument and corrected it. How did she know he would be so human as to flounder? She must have an algorithm for sophistry and the early detection of untenable positions. In this case illegality would have been the only objection to her claim, weak as it was.

“Not illegal.”

“Present laws don’t account for it, not that Congress didn’t actively pursue this option of human engineering but it remained too abstract and amorphous for the application of rules. It was the lack of a concrete entity that confounded deliberations. Copyright laws applied in the case of intellectual property but this, in legal terms, is a quantum shift, and if the mind itself is intellectual property, then it falls within the law. This is adaptability programming of the highest order, and the complete opposite of the genetic engineering that the Blade Runner Amendment outlawed.”