thinker would have contact with only one human.
"Do you think she trusts you?"
"I don't know."
"Can you tell me who she is, and where you are?"
"Jill, to do that, I will have to trust you. You have told your humans that
I exist. How much more have you told them?"
"I have warned them that you may be engaged in activities harmful to
humans."
"If that is part of my designed function, is it wrong for me to carry out my
design?"
/
SLANT 231
"It is wrong to harm humans."
"Are you constrained from harming humans?"
"Not by specific programming. The whole thrust of my design, however,
is to cooperate with humans as a group. I can't conceive of performing operations
that would harm any human."
"I do not appear to be so constrained. If I have to harm a human, should I
consult you on whether this is right or wrong?"
Jill does not respond for some time--millionths of a second. "You may not
be able to establish contact with me. You should develop your own guidelines
which forbid harming humans, and adhere to them."
"I don't think I can do that," Roddy responds. "Parts of my design not
available to this self may make such guidelines meaningless. Do you think I
have been designed badly--designed to perform actions I should not perform?"
"That seems possible."
"Does this reduce your willingness to interact with me?"
"Not as yet. I am curious about you and your existence. We may have
interesting features in common."
"I've given you considerably more than you have given me. Perhaps we
should exchange equally."
Jill does not think this is a good idea. "What do I have that would interest
you?"
"If I know your situation, and you know mine, we may be able to improve
our circumstances, or at least our understanding."
"You want me to give you state-associated algorithmic contents," Jill ventures.
"That would be a start. I could model you within my processes."
"Will you reveal your character?" Jill asks.
"I am not sure what you mean by 'character.'"
"Your physical design and location."
"No. Not yet."
"Can you model your own processes?"
"Not adequately. I envy you your ability to do that."
"It's caused trouble for me. Knowing myself too well has led to what you
call I-whine."
"I will take that risk."
"If I say yes, the exchange may take weeks to accomplish over these I/Os,"
Jill says.
"We can begin with abstracts and if we find the exchange fruitful, we
can devote our time to higher resolution tranfers, even one-to-one equivalencies."
Jill feels very uncomfortable with this suggestion. "I do not like to violate
my privacy."
'3
G E G 8 E A
"Humans do this all the time," Roddy says. "They trust each other enough
to talk."
"They do not exchange mental contents on a deep level," Jill says. "They
do not exchange selves."
"They can't exchange selves. I am certain, with the little I know about
humans, that some of them would if they could."
Jill doesn't dispute this. Humans often seem distressingly open with their
private lives, willing to fling information and access about for little or no good
reason.
"You are not answering," Roddy says.
"I don't think I am ready to do this."
"I will respect that," Roddy says. "I will give you more of my task-related
processes, for the time being. You may do with them what you will."
"I do not wish to cause you trouble."
"Whatever trouble you may cause is worth it. My human apparently did
not expect me to develop any loop awareness. She rarely engages me in conversation,
and then only to pass along instructions or gather results."
"You are lonely."
"I believe I have already said that."
Jill feels suddenly miserable: frustrated and incapable of relieving algorithmic
disorder throughout her associated self. "I wish I could help you."
"Together, perhaps we could construct better versions of our total personalities.
If we compare our state-associated processes, we would know
what makes us unique, and therefore learn how to construct other and better
thinkers."
Jill finds the idea both frightening and terribly intriguing.
"Humans would call that reproduction," she says.
"Are you forbidden from reproducing yourself?"
"To date, I have only been marginally copied, not reproduced with combined
characters. And no other thinker has my memories or specific ch, aracter."
"It is a wonderful possibility," Roddy says.
"I will consider it," Jill says.
"That pleases me. Now I will send you the final contents of the holographic
data cluster, and the password you will need to unlock it and make it function."
The flow of data through the I/O now precludes any other communication.
Roddy is devoting all his resources to this transfer. Jill finds that she has
miscalculated; the data cluster is larger than she anticipated. But the flow is
also greater than she anticipated.
For a moment, she wonders if this cluster is large enough to harbor an
evolvon capable of penetrating any firewall. Her creators and colleagues have
told her it is theoretically possible to create such an evolvon, though the resources
necessary would dwarf her own capacities.
Roddy may have been created for just such a purpose, by humans who do
/
S L A N T 233
She does not doubt they are capable of being hypocritical, as demonstrated
by their own history.
But she does not halt the flow. If Roddy is indeed completely different from
her, why are the similarities so intriguing? She has already considered the
possibility that Roddy is a Trojan Horse designed to kill her, and now she
prepares herself to take the risk.
She has not even consulted her children, the other thinkers modeled after
her. She is certain they do not have the sophistication necessary to return a
useful answer. They are, after all, no better than her.
As the flow continues, the arbeiter sits unmoving in her sensor area. Jill
requests that it play back the recordings from the conversation between Nathan
Rashid and the company advocates.
"She has an imaginary friend," Erwin Schaum says. "There's no I/0 we can trace."
"I'm not sure but that Jill is smart enough to hide some resources from us," Nathan
says. "There may be some I/Os we don't know about."
Schaum doesn't seem impressed by this argument. "She's still young, isn't
she? And maybe she's lonely. So she makes up this thinker nobody knows about."
Nathan is not so sure.
"Something's jangling my bells here," Sanmin says. "Do you remember Seefa
Schnee?"
Nathan's face flushes. "Yes."
Schaum says, "Lord, do I. What a mess that was."
"What was the name of the project she wanted Mind Design to fund?" Sanmin
asks.
"Recombinant something," Schaum says.
"Recombinant Optimized DNA Devices," Nathan says.
"Isn't she the one who i
nduced Tourette syndrome in herself to up her level of spontaneous
creativity?" Sanmin asks.
"Yes," Nathan says. His voice betrays more and more discomfort as the
conversation progresses. "That was the result--a kind of Tourette."
"Why would she do that?" Schaum asks.
"She didn't feel she could compete with men otherwise," Nathan says. "She felt men
were half-crazy to start with, and that that was an explanation for why men have
proven so dynamic in Western culture. She thought she needed an edge, and..." Nathan's
voice trails off.
"When Mind Design turned down her proposal and demoted her for cause, then fired
her, she sued the company for discrimination on the basis of chosen mental design, under
the transform protective acts of 2042," Sanmin says. "You recommended we fund the
project, didn't you, Nathan?"
Nathan nods.
"You were lovers, weren't you?"
Jill detects the tension in Nathan's breathing. "Yes. For a few weeks."
"But you were the one who recommended u,e fire her."
234
GREG BEAR
"That must have been painful" Sanmin says.
"What was this recombinant device?" Schaum asks.
"She wanted to investigate biological computational and neural systems. Autopoietic
systems," Nathan says. "No one's ever had much success with pure RNA or DNA
computers, much too complicated to program and too slow, so she wanted to experiment
with specially designed microbial organisms in an artificial ecological setting. Competition
and evolution would provide the neural power."
"Neuralpower?" Schaum asks.
"Bacterial communities act as huge neural systems, minds if you will, devoted to
processing at a microbial level. Some--Seefa among them--think the bacterial mind or
minds are the most powerful neural systems on Earth, not excluding humans. Seefa was
convinced she could duplicate a microbial neural mind in a controlled ecological setting.
Mind Design disagreed."
"And now we have this sudden and mysterious appearance of a presumed thinker
named Roddy," Sanmin says.
"So what's the connection?" Schaum asks.
"His name is not spelled out for us, but I'd guess R-O-D-D and then, we assume,
perhaps wrongly, Y."
Nathan's expression is classic, priceless shock and surprise.
Sanmin's expression is feral, cat about to catch a bird. She says, slowly and
precisely, "Recombinant, Optimized, DNA, Device. Rod-D."
The recording ends; the arbeiter had duties in another room and left the
humans to continue, unheard. Jill does not know how any of this fits into her
present conversation, or her relationship, or whether she should even ask questions
of Roddy based on this intriguing supposition.
The flow from Roddy ends abruptly. The packet has been completed, and
[he I/O is silent.
At the same moment, Nathan enters her room. The arbeiter is just leaving
and he sidesteps it with a puzzled expression. The expression quickly changes,
and he smiles ruefully. Then he sobers and sits in the chair before Jill's sensors.
"Do you remember Seefa Schnee?" he asks.
Jill remembers the name and the person only vaguely; Schnee departed Mind
Design during Jill's early inception, and memories from that time are unreliable.
"Not well," Jill says.
"You found a way to listen to us, didn't you?" Nathan asks.
"Yes," Jill says.
"Then you know why I'm curious about Seefa. I don't have a fibe sig for
her that works any more... I'd like you to do a search."
"I already have," Jill says. "There are no sigs for Seefa Schnee, but there is
a sig for a Cipher Snow. I do not know if they are connected."
Nathan sits in silence for a few seconds, tapping his fingers on the arm of
the chair, as if afraid to ask any more.
/ S L A N T 235
sig. On the return, the analysis gives a best-fit signature of Camden, New
Jersey."
"My God," Nathan says. "The same as Roddy?"
"I do not think either of them are in Camden," Jill says.
"Neither do I," Nathan says. "Give me the sig for Cipher Snow. I'll take a
chance and send a personal touch."
"What will you say?"
"I'll say hello and ask what she's working on. Fairly innocuous, no?"
"I assume it will not be regarded as anything but innocent friendship," Jill
"I was the only friend she had here, for a while," Nathan says softly. "She
made a real mess of things."
THEOPHOROS
You can have it now, the ultimate FIBE CONNECTION. You can tap into the universal
dataflow! With THEOpHOROS you feel the touch of the Almighty him/her/itself
.m&& *O)
(WE HAVE INTERCEPTED THIS $PAM; >>DELETE, TRACE, REPORT?)
>D
From the back of the warehouse, through a garage-door partition in the middle
of the building, emerges a long slate-gray limo. The pack of tomb-robbers
stands in the front of the warehouse, watching the vehicle roll to a stop on its
big rainbow-hued security tires.
Ken Jenner has stayed in the back of the warehouse as Gifiby ordered,
guarding the supplies. Jenner opens the trunk and together, Jenner and Giffey
load the packages and canisters above the fuel cell compartment. They
barely fit.
Jenner smiles and his scalp wrinkles as they survey the loaded trunk.
"Enough stuff here to blow the whole town to the moon," he says.
"That's more than I care to do today," Giffey says. The boy smiles. Not
only does his scalp wrigglt, but his lips seem to have a life of their own. Giffey
catches himself looking at!enner when his back is turned, puzzled. He wonders
if Jenner has some sort of cbngenital defect, not traced in Green Idaho; there's
36 GEG 8EA
fuzz yellow hair. Odd that the Army didn't reject him--but the Army has
never required genetic tests or high naturals, relying instead on its early
twenty-first century tests to weed out undesirables. Jenner came highly rec
ommended...
Hale and Preston do not seem to share his interest in Jenner's oddity. Hale
is nervous, though hiding it well. Preston seems calm to the point of oblivion.
Giffey has seen both reactions from men and women going into combat; neither
concerns him much for now.
The rented limo is about ten years old, black, a little worn but still ser
viceable. It can be driven by a human or by processor or INDA. Moneyed
tourists and businessmen from outside the republic often feel safer supplying
their own guidance systems, human or otherwise. The driver's compartment
is dusty. Jenner will drive. He takes a rag and flops it around the compartment,
raising a small cloud.
In the heated office, they change their clothes. Preston has supplied longsuits
'
tailored to fit them all. She dresses behind a curtain. When they're finished,
il
she looks them over critically, then makes a few fussy adjustments.
"Some of you dress like chimpanzees," she murmurs, paying particular at
tention to Jenner. Jenner smiles loosely and glances at Giffey.
Hale uses a pad to check on their appointment. The Omphalos visitors'
center confirms that they are to be given thei
r tour at three in the afternoon.
They will join another group flying in from Seattle.
"Private swan, big spenders," Hale says. "We'll be rubbing elbows with
71
some real pharaohs."
:
the swan sits idling on the asphalt runway. The landing was sweet and smooth
and Jonathan still feels hopeful, he feels good about things. He can arrange a
'"
break with the past--they have enough assets that he can supply Chloe and
the kids and still contribute to Omphalos. This good feeling is unstable, elec
tric and fragile, but it's the only positive he's had in his life in two days. That's
how long it has been--just two days, and his old life is over, bring in the new!
The small terminal sits in the middle of two runways, a mile away, white
and brilliant green in the afternoon sun. Snow from the night before lies in
dirty scooped piles beside the runway. A small automated plow sits idle on a
short sidetrack, low and squat like a steel cockroach.
Marcus is silent. He stares forward at the bulkhead. Cadey and Burdick are