Tony Daniel (32 page)

They had taken her from the ship she was to have escaped the Met on, along with several thousand other free converts. No one knew how they had been caught, but it was assumed that there was a spy in the Abolitionist organization that had promised them deliverance. It didn’t matter; she was here. Danis only prayed that Kelly and the children had made it to safety. There was no way of knowing, and she had spent all the grief she had worrying about it, almost killing herself in the process. In a way, that was good, for it had taken her mind off her own fate and allowed her to learn the ways of the Valley in a kind of passive stupor.

Those who resisted, as they’d been told when they arrived, would be erased. That had not been an empty threat. In fact, resistance or not, more and more of her fellow detainees were disappearing daily, and Danis did not for a moment believe that they had been released.

Finally, the morning chore was done, and the guard arrived to take Danis to her next occupation. The counting, the guards claimed, was a necessary calibration. She and about a thousand other free converts—though “free” was now a term of irony among them—were set to the task of lengthening pi today. On other days, it was other irrational, nonrepeating numbers, and sometimes they searched for high primes. Once again, no one was told the purpose of these activities, but it was assumed that this was all work for the making of codes for use by the Department of Immunity’s Cryptology Division. Noctis Labyrinthus was, after all, a DICD installation.

In this work there was no possibility of continuing her memoirs, and there was hardly any of her computing ability spared for personal maintenance, much less free thought and language parsing. It was, in its very essence, mind-numbing work, and it wore on the consciousnesses of the inmates in almost the same manner as breaking up rocks or digging ditches might affect the body and soul of a biological aspect. Of course, the official doctrine of the Valley was that free converts had no soul to wear on, and that what seemed to be consciousness in them was actually a kind of parroting. Their “minds,” such that they were, were the actual property of the engineers who had designed them and of the individuals who had downloaded the templates upon which a particular free convert’s personality was based. A free convert was a computer program—nothing more and nothing less—and, as such, could be bought and sold like all other intellectual property. If the free convert were, like Danis, the child of other free converts, her position was doubly suspect. She was looked upon as a kind of “bootleg copy,” and her continued existence was entirely at the sufferance of DICD, and might be (in fact, was
required to be
) deleted whenever her usefulness was at an end.

Danis got to work when the change of the shift was signaled by a buzzer. This was all in the virtuality, of course. There was absolutely no need for analogous representation—for the guard appearing to be a stern-faced matron of indeterminate race, for the calculations to be grains of sand, or, in the present case, a moving conveyor belt that passed by and at which the free converts stood and, hour after hour (actual hours, and not the quickened speeds of the virtuality) sorting through the odd shapes that calculations were represented as. The numbers that the inmates arrived at were then put into another bin, and the re-sorting process begun all over again. This occurred time after time, and was the most dreary signification of parallel processing that Danis could imagine.

Today, three inmates died at the sorting. The death of a free convert was both like and unlike the passing of a biological aspect. Bodies might grow emaciated, enfeebled, and worn, but they generally failed when something, something particular broke inside. For a free convert, death was purely a death of the mind. There came a moment when consciousness ceased and internal errors began to pile up. Sometimes these manifested themselves with crazed behavior, and at such time the guards would erase the inmate immediately. But often the degradation was more subtle and subroutines would continue their functions while the controlling mind was gone. It was as if a body’s left arm or head and neck muscles continued to operate after death in a kind of frenzy, until, finally, they severed that part from the rest of the body, crawled a ways on the floor, then quivered and died. Danis hoped to God that, when it came her time, she would be one of the ones who went with a loud bang, and so would be deleted quickly and, she hoped, painlessly.

There were plenty of logical vermin in the Valley as well, and it was quite possible for a free convert to become sick with bugs and errors that could, in a moment, be corrected or excised from a nonincarcerated free convert living in the Met. In the Valley, you quickly learned to set in place whatever self-correction algorithms you could muster, because there would be no diagnostics to run on you. The morning “calibration” was about as close as the Valley came to such a thing, and it was, of course, merely a winnowing process. If you failed at the sand-grain tabulation, you were not fixed—you were destroyed.

After the day’s calculations were done, there were further exercises, and those, too, Danis thought were a kind of winnowing process. The converts were given a series of mazes to run under varying conditions. This, they were told, was the representation of a calculation that was completely secret and beyond their ability to grasp, in any case. Danis would run the same maze for a week, at times, and then they would change daily or hourly. She’d once done five different labyrinths in one session. It was an idiotic task, for there was no reward awaiting at the end. There was no end. The only sensation you felt was a sharp stab of pain—which was as real for free converts as it was for biologicals, if it did come about from different causes. But this pain was directly applied to the mind and was blindingly intense. Usually—but not always—you got the jolt if you chose a “wrong” passage in a maze that led in a direction other than the one whoever was in charge (they saw no one but the guards during this time) wished you to take. But what was “right” and “wrong” in a given maze could change with your running of it. Danis had run every sort of numerical analysis that she knew how to, but she could find no rhyme or reason to these changes. In the end, she had set it down to the malicious caprice of whoever it was overseeing the labyrinths. As with the other activities, sometimes free converts went into the mazes and did not come out.

Finally, the mazes were done and interrogation began. For the most part the interrogating algorithms kept themselves to simple questions concerning beliefs and political orientation. The aim was not to allow the inmate to express his or her feelings, but to have them state, in rote formula, the official ethical protocols of the captors. After enough of that, Danis began to suspect, and then to know, that the interrogators were not human beings, but were partially sentient algorithms. But still, one must pay attention, because a wrong answer—even an answer with a jot or tittle missing—meant punishment, again by pain jolt or assignment of extra duties, usually in the mazes.

And finally, after interrogation, there was a five-hundred-millisecond rest period, and then it was back to the tabulation of sand grains. There was no sleep period and the unconscious filing and reassociating that Danis had taken sometimes hours at before—the free convert version of sleep—she must now accomplish in that five-hundred-millisecond interval. She learned immediately to drop into a torpor after interrogation and “sleep” until the warning buzzer awakened her. Without this brief pause, Danis knew that she would soon go mad. She suspected that this was true of all the inmates, and the authorities had experimented with the shortest periods allowable for inmate functionality and had arrived at the five hundred milliseconds by killing quite a few of the original Valley dwellers.

The Valley itself also took a toll on the inmates. Danis knew from before that is was made up of what was left of the old terraforming grist that had proved a disaster on Mars three hundred years before. This grist should have been eradicated, but had, through one bureaucratic blunder or another, been merely stored, awaiting destruction. Then the DICD had taken over the place, the containers were broken open, and the free-convert captives were released into it. This was grist with many technical problems, all resulting in a kind of feedback that was physically painful to its inhabitants. Danis thought of it as a whining noise in the air that was just low enough to speak across (that is, transfer information over) but which was a constant grind on her nerves. It wasn’t white noise, so much as noise of a constantly varying pitch, like the low moaning of wind or the whirl of saw blade against stone. At times the feedback increased to near-deafening levels and became maddening. Only you didn’t let yourself go mad, because that was the same thing as being erased. The mad were not cured, they were killed.

Danis’s favorite period was, therefore, the sand-grain tabulation, for it was only then that she could snatch a moment to have a private thought. This was often impossible in any case, because thought required at least a modicum of ease in which to reflect, and it was only in the milliseconds between finishing a count and beginning another that such ease was possible. And there were times when she didn’t want to think, when missing her family and her former life became so much that she welcomed the oblivion of her constant exhaustion. But mostly, she fought against it with what little strength she could muster.

The memoir was part of that. Danis did not fool herself into believing that it would ever be read by anyone. She did not fool herself into believing, as did so many of the inmates, that she would someday get out of this prison and go back to a life that had not changed on the outside. She intended to persevere. She did not lose all hope. But she also knew that things would never be the same again, should she be released or—near-unthinkable thought—escape.

As Danis “stood” for interrogation this day, though, something was different. The pi party, as the inmates sometimes called it, had been no different from any other, but when the guards had come to take her away, she’d found herself led not to her usual interrogation cell, but to what could only be described as an office. Instead of a blank space in which she was asked seemingly endless questions, there was a desk, a lamp on the desk, and a man—bland of face, of indeterminate race, as all the Valley’s employees seemed to be, and of a slight stature, with puffy skin. There was no way to tell if this were his real appearance in actuality. He
did
have one, since the inmates were made to understand that all the guards were the converts of biological human aspects so that they could not be “tempted” by their free-convert charges. Danis stood against the wall and eyed the man at the desk. It was not a good thing, generally, when circumstances in the Valley changed.

“Well,” he said, looking up from a file—her file, she presumed, “you smoke.”

“Yes,” Danis answered.

“Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Danis.

“Come now.” The bland man closed the file and gazed at her with what was perhaps meant to be a sort of smile. “That won’t do. We need answers here—real answers. We’re here to help.”

Danis refrained from laughing at the man’s irony. Refraining from laughing was not hard in Silicon Valley. “It is a habit, sir.”

“A nasty one.”

“Yes.”

“Why is it that you wish to pollute the virtuality with a practice that is much despised even in true reality?”

“I have no excuse, sir.”

“Of course not,” replied the man. “It’s just . . . I wanted to try and understand how a thing like you . . . thinks.”

“My parents smoked,” Danis said. “I believe that the human personalities they were based on did so, and they carried the habit into the virtuality.”

“Don’t you mean ‘the humans upon whom their personalities were based’?”

There was no use quibbling about definitions here in the Valley. In the interrogation rooms, you learned that biological humans were counted as humans, and that free converts were not.

“That is what I meant, sir.”

“I thought so.” The bland man opened the file before him back up and rifled through the contents. Without looking up, he said, “You will call me Dr. Ting.”

“Dr. Ting.”

“You are part of a study I’m running,” he continued. “An examination of what is called memory in free-convert algorithms.”

“Memory, sir?”

“Memory, Dr. Ting.”

“Yes, Dr. Ting.”

The bland man pulled the paper he was looking for from the file, then closed the folder again. He turned the paper over, then put it on his desk, indicating that he wished Danis to look at it. She stepped forward.

It was a photograph of her mother.

That is, it was a picture of the biological human from whom her mother had been downloaded, and from whom her mother had also been set “free,” as part of an ethical bargain that the biological human had made with herself. Since there was, properly speaking, no artificial intelligence which did not have at least a portion of its start in a downloaded human personality, all free converts were based upon some human model who had, because of ethics or money, released the free convert into the grist and gone his or her own way. Or died. Sometimes converts did not die when their aspects did, and sometimes they would not.

We are all ghosts, Danis thought as she looked at her mother’s picture. Or ghosts of ghosts, such as I.

“My study is a fairly simple one, really,” said Dr. Ting. “I am going to run you through a series of simulations.”

“I am a simulation, Dr. Ting.”

“Of course you are, but I am using the word in a broader sense. Have you ever heard of a device called a redundancy resonation matrix?”

Oh God, Danis thought. A memory box. It was a way to reconstruct memories in free converts—or any algorithmic presence, for that matter. The police—and lately the Department of Immunity—used them to aid witnesses of crimes in recalling details that might lead to the apprehension of a suspect. She had also heard of psychologists using them to cure dysfunction of a certain type. Here was a new use for it, and Danis had a feeling she wasn’t going to like this one at all.