Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld
Rathere’s reaction to the holographic advertising on the agency’s wall had matched the AI’s prediction wonderfully: the widened eyes, the frozen step, the momentary hyperventilation. The machine’s internal model of Rathere, part of its pedagogical software, grew more precise and replete every day. The software was designed for school tutors who interacted with their charges only a few hours a day, but Rathere and the AI were constant companions. The feedback between girl and machine built with an unexpected intensity.
And now, as the pressure lock hissed and rumbled, the minder relished its new configuration; its attenuated strands spider-webbed across Rathere’s flesh, intimate as never before. It drank in the data greedily, like some thirsty polygraph recording capillary dilation, skin conductivity, the shudders and tensions of every muscle.
Then the lock buzzed, and they swam out into the crushing, planet-spanning ocean, almost one creature.
Isaah paced the tiny dimensions of his starship. The elections could be a gold mine or a disaster. A radical separatist party was creeping forward in the polls, promising to shut off interstellar trade. Their victory would generate seismically vast waves of information. Prices and trade relationships would change throughout the Expansion. Even the radicals’ defeat would rock distant markets, as funds currently hedged against them heaved a sigh of relief.
But the rich stakes had drawn too much competition. Scoops like Isaah were in abundance here, and a number of shipping consortia had sent their own representatives. Their ships were stationed in orbit, bristling with courier drones like nervous porcupines.
Isaah sighed, and stared into the planetary ocean’s darkness. Perhaps the day of freelance scoops was ending. The wild days of the early Expansion seemed like the distant past now. He’d read that one day drones would shrink to the size of a finger, with hundreds launched each day from every system. Or a wave that propagated in metaspace would be discovered, and news would spread at equal speed in all directions, like the information cones of lightspeed physics.
When that happened, his small starship would become a rich man’s toy, its profitable use suddenly ended. Isaah called up the airscreen graphic of his finances. He was so close to owning his ship outright. Just one more good scoop, or two, and he could retire to a life of travel among peaceful worlds instead of darting among emergencies and conflagrations. Maybe this trip …
Isaah drummed his fingers, watching the hourly polls like a doctor whose patient is very near the edge.
Rathere and the AI swam every day, oblivious to politics, following the glitter-trails of the behemoths. The huge animals excreted a constant wake of the photoactive algae they used for ballast. When Rathere swam through these luminescent microorganisms, the shockwaves of her passage catalyzed their photochemical reactions, a universe of swirling galaxies ignited by every stroke.
Rathere began to sculpt lightstorms in the phosphorescent medium. The algae hung like motes of potential in her path, invisible until she swam through them, the wake of her energies like glowing sculptures. She choreographed her swimming to leave great swirling structures of activated algae.
The AI found itself unable to predict these dances, to explain how she chose what shapes to make. Without training, without explicit criteria, without any models to follow, Rathere was creating order from this shapeless swarm of ejecta. Even the AI’s pedagogical software offered no help.
But the AI saw the sculptures’ beauty, if only in the expansion of Rathere’s capillaries, the seemingly random firings of neurons along her spine, the tears in her eyes as the glowing algae faded back into darkness.
The AI plunged into an art database on the local net, trying to divine what laws governed these acts of creation. It discussed the light sculptures with Rathere, comparing their evanescent forms to the shattered structures of Camelia Parker or the hominid blobs of Henry Moore. It showed her millennia of sculpture, gauging her reactions until a rough model of her tastes could be constructed. But the model was bizarrely convoluted, disturbingly shaggy around the edges, with gaps and contradictions and outstretched, gerrymandered spurs that implied art no one had yet made.
The AI often created astrogational simulations. They were staggeringly complex, but at least finite. Metaspace was predictable; reality could be anticipated with a high degree of precision. But the machine’s model of Rathere’s aesthetic was post-hoc, a retrofit to her pure, instinctive gestures. It raised more questions than it answered.
While Rathere slept, the machine wondered how one learned to have intuition.
The elections came, and the radicals and their allies seized a razor-thin majority in the planetary Diet. Isaah cheered as his craft rose through the ocean. A scoop was within reach. He headed for a distant and obscure ore-producing system, expending vast quantities of fuel, desperate to be the first scoop there.
Rathere stood beside her rejoicing father, looking out through the receding ocean a bit sadly. She stroked her shoulder absently, touching the minder still stretched across her skin.
The minder’s epidermal configuration had become permanent. Its strands were distributed to near invisibility in a microfiber-thin mesh across Rathere. Its nanorepair mechanisms attended to her zits and the errant hairs on her upper lip. It linked with her medical implants, the ship’s AI taking control over the nuances of her insulin balance, her sugar level, and the tiny electrical jolts that kept her muscles fit. Rathere slept without covers now, the minder’s skein warming her with a lattice of microscopic heating elements. In its ever-present blanket, she began to neglect sub-vocalizing their conversations, her endless one-sided prattle annoying Isaah on board the tiny ship.
“Zero point-five-six?” muttered Isaah to himself at the next customs sweep. The AI was developing much faster than its parameters should allow. Something unexpected was happening with the unit, and they were a long way from home. Unless Isaah was very careful, the AI might reach personhood before they returned to the HC.
He sent a coded message to an acquaintance in the Home Cluster, someone who dealt with such situations, just in case. Then he turned his attention to the local newsfeed.
The heavy element market showed no sudden changes over the last few weeks. Isaah’s gamble had apparently paid off. He had stayed ahead of the widening ripples of news about the ocean planet’s election. The economic Shockwave wasn’t here yet.
He felt the heady thrill of a scoop, of secret knowledge that was his alone. It was like prognostication, a glimpse into the future. Elements extracted by giant turbine from that distant world’s oceans were also mined from this system’s asteroid belt. Soon, everyone here would be incrementally richer as the ocean planet pulled its mineral wealth from the Expansion common market. The markets would edge upwards across the board.
Isaah began to place his bets.
The dark-skinned boy looked down upon the asteroid field with a pained expression. Rathere watched the way his long bangs straightened, then curled to encircle his cheeks again when he raised his head. But her stomach clenched when she looked down through the transparent floor; the party was on the lowest level of a spin-gravitied ring, and black infinity seemed to be pulling at her through the glassene window. The AI lovingly recorded the parameters of this unfamiliar vertigo.
“More champers, Darien?” asked the fattest, oldest boy at the party.
“You can just make out a mining ship down there,” the dark-skinned boy answered.
“Oh, dear,” said the fat boy. “Upper-class guilt. And before dinner.”
The dark-skinned boy shook his head. “It’s just that seeing those poor wretches doesn’t make me feel like drinking.”
The fat boy snorted.
“This is what I think of your poor little miners,” he said, upending the bottle. A stream of champagne gushed and then sputtered from the bottle, spread fizzing on the floor. The other party-goers laughed, politely scandalized, then murmured appreciatively as the floor cleaned itself, letting the champagne pass through to the hard v
There were a few moments of polite applause.
Darien looked at Rathere woundedly, as if hoping that she, an outsider, might come to his aid.
The anguish in his dark, beautiful face sent a shiver through her, a tremor that resonated through every level of the AI.
“Comeon, dammit!” she subvocalized.
“Two seconds,” the minder’s voice reassured.
The ring was home to the oligarchs who controlled the local system’s mineral wealth. A full fifteen years old by now, Rathere had fallen into the company of their pleasure-obsessed children, who never stopped staring at her exotic skin and hair, and who constantly exchanged droll witticisms. Rathere, her socialization limited to her father and the doting AI, was unfamiliar with the art of banter. She didn’t like being intimidated by locals. The frustration was simply and purely unbearable.
“The price of that champagne could have bought one of those miners out of debt peonage,” Darien said darkly.
“Just the one?” asked the fat boy, looking at the label with mock concern.
The group laughed again, and Darien’s face clouded with another measure of suffering.
“Now!” Rathere mind-screamed. “I hate that fat guy!”
The AI hated him, too.
The search cascaded across its processors, the decompressed data of its libraries clobbering astrogation calculations it had performed only hours before. That didn’t matter. It would be weeks before Isaah would be ready to depart, and the exigencies of conversation did not allow delay. The library data included millennia of plays, novels, films, interactives. To search them quickly, the AI needed vast expanses of memory space.
“Maybe when my little golden shards of champagne drift by, some miner will think, ‘I could’ve used that money,’ ” the fat boy said almost wistfully. “But then again, if they thought about money at all, would they be so far in debt?”
The fat boy’s words were added to the search mélange, thickening it by a critical degree. A dozen hits appeared in the next few milliseconds, and the AI chose one quickly.
“There is only one class…”
“…that thinks more about money than the rich,” repeated Rathere.
There was a sudden quiet throughout the party, the silence of waiting for more.
“And that is the poor,” she said.
Darien looked at Rathere quizzically, as if she were being too glib. She paused a moment, editing the rest of the quote in her head.
“The poor can think of nothing else but money,” she said carefully. “That is the misery of being poor.”
Darien smiled at her, which—impossibly—made him even more beautiful.
“Or the misery of being rich, unless one is a fool,” he said.
There was no applause for the exchange, but Rathere again felt the ripple of magic that her pilfered pronouncements created. The ancient words blended with her exotic looks and accent, never failing to entertain the oligarchs’ children, who thought her very deep indeed.
Others in the party were looking down into the asteroid field now, murmuring to each other as they pointed out the mining craft making its careful progress.
The fat boy scowled at the changed mood in the room. He pulled aside the gaudy genital jewelry that they all (even Rathere) affected, and let loose a stream of piss onto the floor.
“Here you go, then. Recycled champagne!” he said, grinning as he waited for a laugh.
The crowd turned away with a few weary sighs, ignoring the icy baubles of urine that pitched into the void.
“Where was that one from?” Rathere sub-vocalized.
“Mr. Wilde.”
“Him again? He’s awesome.”
“I’ll move him to the top of the search stack.”
“Perhaps we’ll read some more of Lady Windemere’s Fan tonight,” she whispered into her bubbling flute.
Although Rathere knew how to read text, she had never really explored the library before. After that first week on the ring, saved from embarrassment a dozen times by the AI’s promptings, she dreamed of the old words whispered into her ear by a ghost, as if the minder had grown suddenly ancient and vastly wise. The library was certainly bigger than she had imagined. Who had written all these words? They seemed to stretch infinitely, swirling in elaborate dances around any possible idea, covering all of its variations, touching upon every imaginable objection.
Rathere and the AI had started reading late at night. Together they wandered the endless territory of words, using as landmarks the witticisms and observations they had borrowed that day for some riposte. The AI decompressed still more of its pedagogical software to render annotations, summaries, translations. Rathere felt the new words moving her, becoming part of her.
She was soon a favorite on the orbital. Her exotic beauty and archaic humor had attracted quite a following by the time Isaah decided to ship out from the orbital ring—a week earlier than planned—wary of Rathere’s strange new powers over sophisticates who had never given merchant-class Isaah a second glance.
On board their ship was one last cargo. Isaah’s profits were considerable but—as always—not enough. So the ship carried a hidden cache of exotic weaponry, ceremonial but still illegal. Isaah didn’t usually deal in contraband, especially arms, but his small starship had no cargo manifold, only an extra sleeping cabin. It wasn’t large enough to make legitimate cargos profitable. Isaah was very close now to reaching his dream. With this successful trade, he could return to the Home Cluster as master of his own ship.
He spent the journey pacing, and projected his worry upon the rising Turing level of his ship’s AI unit. He spent frustrated hours searching its documentation software for an explanation. What was going on?
Isaah knew, if only instinctively, that the AI’s expanding intelligence was somehow his daughter’s doing. She was growing and changing too, slipping away from him. He felt lonely when Rathere whispered to herself on board ship, talking to the voice in her head. He felt… outnumbered.
On the customs orbital at their goal, Isaah was called aside after a short and (he had thought) perfunctory search of the starship. The customs agent held him by one arm and eyed him with concern.
The blood in his veins slowed to a crawl, as if some medusa’s touch from Petraveil had begun to turn him to stone.
The customs official activated a privacy shield. A trickle of hope moved like sweat down his spine. Was she going to ask for a bribe?
“Your AI unit’s up to 0.81,” the official confided. “Damn near a person. Better get that seen to.”
She shook her head, as if to say in disgust, Machine rights!
And then they waved him on.
The women of the military caste here wore a smartwire garment that shaped their breasts into fierce, sharp cones. These tall, muscular amazons intrigued Rathere endlessly, heart-poundingly. The minder noted Rathere’s eyes tracking the women’s bellicose chests as they passed on the street. Rathere attempted to purchase one of the garments, but her father, alerted by a credit query, forbade it.
But Rathere kept watching the amazons. She was fascinated by the constant flow of hand-signals and tongue-clicks that passed among them, a subtle, ever-present congress that maintained the strict proprieties of order and status in the planet’s crowded cities. But in her modest Home Cluster garb, Rathere was irrelevant to this heady brew of power and communication, socially invisible.
She fell into a sulk. She watched restlessly. Her fingers flexed anxiously under café tables as warriors passed, unconsciously imitating their gestural codes. Her respiratory rate increased whenever high-ranking officers went by.
She wanted to join.
The AI made forays into the planetary database, learning the rules and customs of martial communication. And, in an academic corner of its mind, it began to construct a way for Rathere to mimic the amazons
When the plan was ready, it was surprisingly easy to execute.
One day as they sat watching the passing warriors, the minder began to change, concentrating its neural skein into a stronger, prehensile width. When the filaments were thick enough, they sculpted a simulation of the amazons’ garment, grasping and shaping Rathere’s growing breasts with a tailor’s attention to detail, employing the AI’s encyclopedic knowledge of her anatomy. Rathere grasped what was happening instantly, almost as if she had expected it.
As women from various regiments passed, the minder pointed out the differences in the yaw and pitch of their aureoles, which varied by rank and unit, and explained the possibilities. Rathere winced a little at some of the adjustments, but never complained. They soon settled on an exact configuration for her breasts, Rathere picking a mid-level officer caste from a distant province. It wasn’t the most comfortable option, but she insisted it looked the best.
Rathere walked the streets proudly bare-chested for the rest of the layover, drawing stares with her heliophobic skin, her ceaseless monologue, and her rank, which was frankly unbelievable on a fifteen-year-old. But social reflexes on that martial world were deeply ingrained, and she was saluted and deferred to even without the rest of the amazon uniform. It was the breasts that mattered here.
The two concealed the game from Isaah, and at night the minder massaged Rathere’s sore nipples, fractalizing its neural skein to make the filaments as soft as calf’s leather against them.
The deal was done.
Isaah made the trade in a dark, empty arena, the site of lethal duels between native women, all of whom were clearly insane. He shuffled his feet while they inspected his contraband, aware that only thin zero-g shoes protected his feet from the bloodstained floor of the ring. Four amazons, their bare breasts absurdly warped by cone-shaped metal cages, swung the weapons through graceful arcs, checking their balance and heft. Another sprayed the blades with a fine mist of nanos that would turn inferior materials to dust. The leader smiled coldly when she nodded confirmation, her eyes skimming up and down Isaah as black and bright as a reptile’s.