No one knew where she was from or where she lived. She showed up at Institute talks and took notes but never asked a question. Some of the postdocs said she was in a subject trial with high constraints but nobody actually knew.
I did recall though that just before she left the orchid garden she had turned and looked back at me, to see if I was still there and watching her.
She appeared in the cafés frequented by the biotech types eagerly in the land rush frenzy now running strong. Times were getting wild. Singapore had made so much from being the middle man for petro-chem industries, there was money galore to spare for research. And the elites in America and Asia weren’t getting any younger.
There were real advancements in understanding human mortality, how it came from trade-offs evolution made between young success and reproduction versus older bad side effects that eventually killed you. It was all about how a species can’t pass on useful changes in the genes beyond the age of reproduction. Or for social species like humans, birthing ability plus some rearing time from uncles and aunts and so on.
That antagonism of early birthing led to the unique human condition. We know we will die and watch as evolution gives us countless ways to make it happen.
I worked on the neural side of this. I saw the lady and her fox in the cafés with people I knew slightly. They seemed to hang on her every glance. There was a big Greek who sold carbon sequestration schemes and he was always at her side when she chose to let him. She avoided crowds and worked the men especially. There was always some man to take her to dinner, I noted.
I ate out usually as I was single and between significant women as well. It was easy to stay in the Biopolis biotech community and not have to go through the difficulties of living in an Asian culture you didn’t understand. In this way I was lazy. I saw the Greek man and occasionally a couple with her at dinner. There was often another man hanging around, within view and trying to catch her eye. That didn’t work.
I had something of the impulse those others did. When she sat alone except for the fox in an open air café, usually with a mocha coffee confection in her glass, I would walk by her table. She kept her eyes on her coffee and her fox, which scampered around yipping whenever he was in the spotlight of her attention.
If she had arched an eyebrow I would have stopped and said something but she did not.
I was having trouble with new ideas for my research agenda. My collaborators, assistants, and lab techs all worked well together but the animating ideas for our mapping agenda had to come largely from me.
I used a method to stimulate contact with my own wellspring of ideas. Every evening I reviewed my problems and promising avenues just before falling asleep. Upon waking I kept my eyes closed and recalled those thoughts. Perhaps a third of the time a notion would be there. They came like odd glancing flashes—a word, a glimpsed connection, sometimes an entire logical scheme.
For free. All done by my unconscious. Most of what we are comes from that shadowy realm. Evolution has made us so that we cannot see where and how such work gets done. Which makes it more alluring.
Sometimes these ideas proved useless or wrong. Usually they worked. Most were small measures—an observation to make in a paper underdraft, or a fresh layered code approach to information filtering. But sometimes they were wholly new, a different line of attack. Those came seldom but were worth it when they did.
I had been trying this for years but lately got nothing. My unconscious would not speak. I tried the same method with an afternoon nap as well but nothing was waiting for me when I awoke. I went for walks and went diving at an offshore island but nothing changed.
That was why I was back in the orchid garden again a week or so later to read and think on a neuronal analysis problem when I saw her again. She must have liked the delicacy of orchids in their bright fine colors. Or so I assumed, and so got up and walked toward her. At her stylish heels of a satin color I saw dancing the foxy thing, its eyes ratcheting around.
“Is it bred or engineered?” I said with an eye shrug toward the soft yaps below us.
“Bred yes, and quite well, and so am I.”
I liked that and leaned in. Our smiles were exact in their mutual examinations. A lot of people were sharp-eyed about genetic mods now and the idea of breeding, or “animal husbandry” as it used to be known, was alive in the endless media shouting arena. Breeding through generations was supposed to be more virtuous than just going into the genome and finding what you want, an argument I didn’t want any part of. So I just smiled.
We talked about that as we walked along the sweet scented corridors of orchids. Her laugh when I managed to get off a toss of words was light and airy, tinkling in the warm moist air. The ponds alongside the orchid pyramids echoed the many hues of plant nobility, in lapping waters that reflected the endless silent tropical blue sky above.
We got on well. She shyly allowed me to know her name, Aliim. I congratulated myself at this small triumph, because those good or even accessible to konn were much sought after. Women were more than men of course. There was an urgency we men carry that finds no echo in women, at least not yet in this new odd area.
That konn intersected the field of my research mattered less than my simple curiosity. Seldom do fresh areas of research come into the shifting foggy realm of direct experience. Neural domain science was for this turbulent decade a place where a scientist’s experience meant more than a plain flat spreadsheet of data. I felt I had to experience the actual.
She did not tell me her last name and I never learned it. I suppose that was not relevant. I was not after data.
I took her to a fine lunch. We had small fish fried in a spicy batter. With these went crickets lightly simmered in cream and garlic. All of this came with beer in large frosted mugs that I hoped would loosen her tongue. After a while as we watched the fishing boats work in the distance and heard the muffled buzz of traffic she began to speak on her own without prompting.
She reminisced about her background working on boats up in Thailand. I felt it was not relevant to what I wanted and so cannot recall much of that. Still she seemed to warm to me and I to her and the possibility of a full deep konn seemed to float above our conversation like an implied possibility.
After that we walked along the canals looking at the barges bringing in produce and biomass to the city.
“They run on solar?” she asked skeptically.
Big dark panels shadowed the barges and drove them with aching slowness. The decks bulged with bio bundles as the carbon laws required. Tiny cabins in the stern were neat and clean, with flowerpots and white curtains. A big woman steered a nearby one with a pipe as the tiller.
“I grew up on such a boat.” She said it flat and plain. “Hard times.”
The fox was getting frisky and she tossed it a ping-pong ball. To my surprise it stood on hind legs and began to bat the ball back and forth. I watched this and noticed the floppy ears and white splotches in its fur. Along with the tail that perked up when people paid attention to it, there were the bright dancing eyes and blunt muzzle and gleeful yips that the bioengineers used to make animals cute. I knew such animals carried genes that made more serotonin when the animal performed, and that people were carrying such genes now to keep them mellow. But this one could also dance on two legs and that implied more embedded skills. Then I noticed that its yips were actually compressed words. It barked out “good!” and “great!” and “yeee!” and “fun!” When its eyes weren’t tracking the Ping-Pong ball it sent jerky glances at us, the audience.
“A very impressive animal. You must have paid well to have it so upgraded.”
She shrugged. “They gave it me.”
“Very generous.”
“I was in konn trials. They are kind to some of us.”
Kind if you are a prize subject, I imagined. “I heard that you were very accomplished.”
“The SanJi man. He talks a lot.”
“He was very complimentary.”
“He wants konn. Does not know how to get it.”
“There are few who can do it well,” I said to be saying something and not knowing where to go with this.
“I am one such.”
“So I hear.”
“And I choose my communion.”
I had not heard that term used about konn but the religious element made sense. “I suppose that’s what we all want, madam. Deep connection.”
“It is not for sex.”
“I suppose not.”
“You say you are doing neurological net research and yet have not experienced this?”
I shrugged, unsure what to say. Embarrassed, too.
“I will think on it.” She got up and walked away without another word. The fox glanced at me uncertainly and then hurried to catch up. When she turned to see if I was watching I quickly looked away.
On a slow day, we process about twelve thousand thoughts. Thinking fast and hard, that number can climb to fifty or sixty thousand. But then most minds need to rest.
Many labs in Biopolis study the intricate neural webs that make all this happen. I had built a simulation of human memory that attracted considerable interest but I felt I didn’t understand memory well. No one did. My model was a pleasant toy but it could not approach the basic problem.
“Don’t think about it too much,” SanJi said to me as he sipped a Singapore sling in a downtown bar. Warm breezes wafted by, scented with honey. “Let your intuition work on it.”
I was sticking to tea for now. “I can simulate neural sorting methods and match them with lab experiments, fine. But that’s just the conscious work. Our brains send us about eleven million bits of data a second, while we can consciously deal with maybe fifty a second. We’re aware of maybe five percent of what we’re thinking about, tops.”
“Sure, the other ninety-five percent gets worked over out of view. We run on a stripped-down simple model of what’s really happening.”
“Which means a real human-level artificial mind is impossible.”
SanJi shook his head. “Maybe not. We can run a model of the unconscious in background, though. We’re the sum of conscious and mostly unconscious processes. The only direct way into the unconscious is a konn. They’re rare. We don’t even know why, but they are.”
SanJi worked in the rather vague area of konn technology and he talked about it for a while as I tried to follow. It was not my field and like many tech types SanJi would lapse into jargon or details when what I wanted to know was the basic mechanism. I finally said, “Dreams, isn’t it?”
“We don’t really know much, but in a way, yes. That’s why nobody can konn except when both are asleep.”
“Amazing it took us so long to think of studying people linked while sleeping.”
“But what you see on konn isn’t dreams. It’s the other unconscious mind at work. There’s a sensation of past events called up and reviewed, usually with images. Bland stuff, really. Most is just people talking to the subject—you’re always in the viewpoint of your konn partner, of course.”
“Nothing juicy?”
“Oh, sex? Some of that. But realize how much of your day is about having sex.” He laughed and ordered another sling, eyeing the waitress in her sarong. “I don’t mean thinking about it—that’s a lot, right? There’s plenty more of that than the real thing. Turns out, when you’re asleep there’s even more.”
This wasn’t really a revelation but I wanted to find out about the lady with the fox so I listened to him go on about theory. Imagination is fine but experience is better, my thesis professor had said. “So how do you know this?” I cut in.
“I am about to make a konn. My own.” He said this almost sheepishly.
“Oh really? With Aliim?”
He jerked and nearly spilled his drink on his crisp white pants. “You … know her.”
“Not as well as you do, apparently.”
“She is said to be the best.”
“I admire your ability to make a konn with her.”
“I have grant support.”
“Even better. You do not need to use other things.”
He looked at me sharply. “What other things?”
“There are many temptations in the world.”
“What do you mean?”
I was getting tired of this but said, “She must live somehow. And it is not as if there is sex involved.”
“Of course not.”
“Then it is perfectly fine,” I said with a smile. “An experiment.”
I spent some time then with a woman field biologist who was quite entrancing and so for a week or two forgot about the lady and how SanJi wanted to know her so much. I did recall from earlier talks that SanJi could not really konn with his wife.
SanJi had tried to demonstrate his love for his wife in the usual way men did. Then he got the idea that with a link and konn it would be even greater. He talked about it with some of us. The zest of the new and the strange had come into him.
When it failed a kind of light went out in him, I could see. He did not speak of it but I could see when it was there no more.
That was when the technology was new and everybody thought it would sweep the world. As it turned out there were many mismatches in the neural patterns which meant most of the time you got nothing from going into the chamber and falling asleep while linked to another on the konn tech. There was a brain-derived neurotrophic factor that stopped the melding going forward. Most often you just got a headache.
Then I ran into him at a reception for the Chinese investor who was dropping a billion dollars into Biopolis. I was not in line to get any support from it but SanJi was and he beamed with a fixed grin. I had a gin and tonic and he a Singapore sling again. The party was in an ample garden rich in tropical plants that added a fragrant flavor to the usual mutter of party talk. That and the crunchy sweet and salted insect finger food.
“How’s your research going?” I said while glancing at his wife. She had beautiful deep eyes and a glassy look, too.
“Very well, very deep. I am getting great results. Detailed. Topographic.”
I wondered what that might mean and then saw the lady with the fox. The tiny dancing fox was entertaining a crowd of Chinese who were not good at holding their booze. They laughed with chattering delight at the fox that danced on hind legs and juggled the ping-pong ball. It said in its whispery bark, “Great! Grr! Good! Grrr! You fine!”
They were all busy being amused so I went away to talk to a lab director and get some networking done. An hour later I came drifting back through that part of the garden and saw she was alone. The fox looked tired as it lapped a sugary bowl of something.
“How’d the show go?” I used as an opener.
“You’ve been quite the object of interest for a while now. SanJi is doing solid research with you, he says.” He had said no such thing but his wife had made him leave the party earlier so I knew this lady Aliim could not check on this. Quite probably none of us would recollect our conversations in the morning.
“I have collaborated with him, yes.” Guarded eyes.
“I envy his access.”
“Do you? Yet you have never broached the subject with me.”
I tried not to blink or show surprise. “My research—”
“Could be actually in this area.” She gave me a hard stern level look and waited.
“I would need to have proper controls.”
She knew I was stalling. “Of course.”
“And I would need compensation.”
“Of course.”
“I assume we are not speaking of my mathematical abilities but of the konn.”
I said I had forgotten that she did some sort of mathematics.
“It is my outstanding ability actually.”
“My outstanding talent is modesty.”
She chuckled and I felt we had negotiated something here so I said, “Yes, it is the konn I want.”
“It requires some preparation on my part.”
“Then would you be willing…?”
She said nothing, just smiled. A slow sliding smile.
SanJi said he did not mind if I worked with her, too. “Remember that she is a mathematician. In my exposure—I do not think ‘experience’ is the right word, for it is like basking in the sun—that informs her unconscious organization.”
“Is she noted for her originality?”
“Somewhat. Mostly she works in knot theory and combinatorics. Or she says so. I think she knows more about neural nets than knots.”
I knew none of those fields but her laconic conversations did hint at a severity of view. “What are her k-fibers like?”
SanJi took a while to answer. He and I worked within the current view of a mind as a society of agents. This was not the consequence of some basic principle or some simple formal system. Different agents can be based on different types of processes with different purposes, ways of representing knowledge, and methods for producing results. As the founder of this approach, Marvin Minsky had said, intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle. But you had to know the parts well.
SanJi said, “I didn’t find k-fibers at all. It’s more like an … exposure. With no map.”
His eyes flickered several times and he looked out the window of his office where we were having coffee. A tropical storm was heaving in off the speckled sea and lightning forked down in big yellow strokes beneath purple clouds.
The flicker was a tell I had learned from watching him over the years. It meant a censor k-fiber was preventing an idea from coming to his conscious mind. Just briefly I saw what his unconscious was doing without his knowing it. Our jargon means that a knowledge-fiber records what resources his mind used to solve a problem. Calling up that fiber of connections means he could use them again to solve some similar problems. Or the k-fiber can decide to suppress conscious access.