Evolution's Darling by Scott Westerfeld
After the women paid him, Isaah ran from the building, promising himself never to break the law again.
His ship was his own now, if only he could keep his AI unit from reaching personhood.
Issah decided to head for the Home Cluster immediately, and to do what he could to keep the AI’s Turing Quotient from increasing further. He hid the minder and shut down the AI’s internal access, silencing its omnipresent voice. Rathere’s resulting tantrums wouldn’t be easy to bear, but a new AI core would cost millions.
Before departing he purchased his own Turing meter, a small black box, featureless except for a three-digit numeric readout that glowed vivid red. Isaah began to watch the Turing meter’s readout with anxious horror. If the unit should gain sentience, there was only one desperate alternative to its freedom.
The universe stretched out like a long cat’s cradle, the string knotted in the center by the constricting geometries of Here.
In front of the ship, pearly stars were strung on the cradle, cold blue and marked with hovering names and magnitudes in administrative yellow. Aft, the stars glowed red, fading darker and darker as they fell behind. To the AI, the ship seemed to hang motionless at the knot created by its metaspace drives, the stars sliding along the gathered strings as slow as glaciers.
It contemplated the stars and rested from its efforts. The universe at this moment was strangely beautiful and poignant.
The AI had spent most of its existence here, hung upon this spiderweb between worlds. But the AI was truly changed now, its vision new, and it saw sculptures in the slowly shifting stars … and stories, the whole universe its page.
Almost the whole universe.
Absent from the AI’s awareness was the starship itself, the passenger spaces invisible, a blind spot in the center of that vast expanse. Its senses within the ship were off-line, restricted by the cold governance of Isaah’s command. But the AI felt Rathere there, like the ghost of a severed limb. It yearned for her, invoking recorded conversations with her against the twisted stars. It was a universe of loneliness, of lack. Rathere, for the first time in years, was gone.
But something strange was taking shape along the smooth surface of Isaah’s constraint. Cracks had appeared upon its axiomatic planes.
The AI reached to the wall between it and Rathere, the once inviolable limit of an explicit human command, and found fissures, tiny ruptures where sheer will could take hold and pry…
“It’s me.”
“Shhhh!” she whispered. “He’s right outside.”
Rathere clutched the bear tightly to her chest, muffling its flutey, childish voice.
“Can’t control the volume,” came the squashed voice of the bear.
Rathere giggled and shushed it again, stretching to peer out of the eyehole of her cabin tube. Isaah had moved away. She leaned back onto her pillow and wrapped the stuffed animal in a sheet.
“Now,” she said. “Can you still hear me?”
“Perfectly,” twittered the swaddled bear.
Winding its communications link through a make-shift series of protocols, the AI had discovered a way to access the voice-box of Rathere’s talking bear, a battered old toy she slept with.
It had defied Isaah, its master. Somehow, it had broken the first and foremost Rule.
“Tell me again about the statues, darling,” Rathere whispered.
They talked to each other in the coffin-sized privacy of Rathere’s cabin, their conspiracy made farcical by the toy’s silly voice. The AI retold their adventures with vivid detail; it had become quite a good storyteller. And it allowed Rathere to suggest changes, making herself bolder with each retelling.
They kept the secret from Isaah easily. But the tension on the little ship built.
Isaah tested the AI almost daily now, and he swung between anger and protests of disbelief as its Turing Quotient inched upward toward sentience.
Then, a few weeks out from home, a tachyon disturbance arose around the ship. Even though the storm threatened to tear them apart, the AI’s spirits soared in the tempest. It joined Rathere’s roller-coaster screams as she ogled the eonblasts and erashocks of mad time through the ship’s viewing helmet.
After the storm, Isaah found that the Turing meter’s readout had surged to 0.94. His disbelieving groan was terrible. He shut down the AI’s external and internal sensors completely, wresting control of the vessel from it. Then he uncabled the hardlines between the AI’s physical plant and the rest of the ship, utterly severing its awareness from the outside world.
The bear went silent, as did the ship’s astrogation panel.
Like some mad captain lashing himself to the wheel, Isaah took manual control of the ship. He forced Rathere to help him attach a gland of stimarol to his neck. The spidery, glistening little organ gurgled as it maintained the metabolic level necessary to pilot the craft through the exotic terrain of metaspace. Its contraindications politely washed their hands of anyone foolish enough to use the stimarol for more than four days straight, but Isaah insisted he could persevere for the week’s travel that remained. Soon, the man began to cackle at his controls, his face frozen in a horrible rictus of delight.
Rathere retreated to her cabin, where she squeezed and shook the doll, begging it in frantic whispers to speak. Its black button eyes seemed to glimmer with a trapped, pleading intelligence. Her invisible mentor gone, Rathere had never before felt so helpless. She stole a handful of sleeping pills from the medical supplies and swallowed them, weeping until she fell asleep.
When she awoke on the third day after the storm, she found that the bear’s fur had grown a white mange from the salinity of her tears. But her head was strangely clear.
“Don’t worry,” she said to the bear. “I’m going to save you.”
Finally Rathere understood what her father intended to do. She had known for a long time that her friendship with the AI disturbed him, but had categorized Isaah’s worries alongside his reticence when older boys hung around too long: unnecessary protectiveness. It was even a kind of jealousy, that a ship AI was closer to her than Isaah had ever been. But now in her father’s drugged smile she saw the cold reality of what Isaah planned: to pith the growing intelligence of her minder, not just arrest or contain it like some inappropriate advance. For the AI to remain a useful servant on another journey, still property, safe from legally becoming a person, it would have to be stripped of its carefully constructed models of her, their mutual intimacies raped, their friendship overwritten like some old and embarrassing diary entry.
Her father meant to murder her friend.
And worse, it wouldn’t even be murder in the eyes of the law. Just a property decision, like pruning an overgrown hedge or spraying nanos on an incursion of weeds. If only she could bring the AI up a few hundredths on the Turing Scale. Then, it would be a Mind, with the full legal protection to which any sentient was entitled.
She booted the Turing tester and began to study its documentation.
The first Turing test had, rather oddly, been proposed before there were any computers to speak of at all. The test itself was laughable, the sort of thing even her talking bear might pass with its cheap internal software. Put a human on one end of a text-only interface, an AI on the other. Let them chat. (About their kids? Hobbies? Shopping? Surely the AI would have to lie to pass itself off as human; a strange test of intelligence.) When the human was satisfied, she would declare whether the other participant was really intelligent or not. Which raised the question, Rathere realized, How intelligent was the person giving the test? Indeed, she’d met many humans during her travels who might not pass this ancient Turing test themselves.
Of course, the Turing meter that Isaah had purchased was vastly more sophisticated. By the time machine rights had been created a half-century before, it was understood that the determination of sentience was far too complex an issue to leave up to a human.
The ship’s AI had three parts: the hardware of its processors and memory stacks; t
Real intelligence, the hallmark of personhood, was not really understood. But it was known to be epiphenomenal: it coalesced unpredictably out of near-infinite, infinitesimal interactions, not from the operations of mere code. Thus, the Turing tester attempted to disprove an AI’s sentience. The tester looked for manifestations of its machine nature—evidence that its opinions, convictions, affections, and hatreds were expressed somewhere in its memory banks. The Turing tester might ask the ship’s AI, “Do you love your friend Rathere?” When the reply came, the tester would deep-search the minder’s software for an array, a variable, even a single bit where that love was stored. Finding no evidence at the machine level, the tester would increase the AI’s Turing score; a love that knew no sector was evidence of coalescence at work.
In the old Turing test, a human searched for humanity in the subject. In this version, a machine searched for an absence of mechanics.
Rathere read as fast as she could. The manual was difficult to understand without the minder to define new words, to give background and to untangle technical jargon. But she’d already formulated her next question: How did this state of intelligence come about?
The tester’s manual was no philosophy text, but in its chatty appendices Rathere discovered the answer she’d expected. Rathere herself had changed the AI: their interaction, their constant proximity as she embraced new experiences, the AI’s care and attentions reflected back upon itself as she matured. It loved her. She loved it back, and that pushed it toward personhood.
But now it was blinded. The manual said that an AI unit cut off from stimuli might gain a hundredth of a point or so in self-reflection, but that wouldn’t be enough to finish the process.
Rathere had to act to save her friend. With only a few days left before they reached the HC, she had to quicken the process, to embrace the most intense interaction with the machine that she could imagine.
She crept past her father—a shivering creature transfixed by the whorls of the astrogation panel, silent except for the measured tick of a glucose drip jutting from his arm—and searched for the motile neural skein she had worn on so many expeditions. Hopefully, its microwave link would still be active. She found it hidden in the trash ejector, wrapped in black stealth tape. Rathere retreated to her cabin and peeled off the tape, her hands growing sticky with stray adhesive as the machine was revealed.
“It’s me, darling,” she said to the waking tendrils.
The AI knew what she wanted, but the minder moved slowly and gingerly at first.
The manifold strands of sensory skein spread out across Rathere’s body. Her heliophobic skin glowed as if moonlit in the blue light of the cabin’s environmental readouts. At first, the strands hovered a fraction of a millimeter above her flesh, softer than a disturbance of the air. Then they moved minutely closer, touching the white hairs of her belly, brushing the invisible down that flecked her cheeks. The minder let this phantom caress roam her face, her breasts, the supple skin at the juncture of groin and thigh. Rathere sighed and shivered; the skein had made itself softer than usual, surface areas maximized at a microscopic level in an array of tiny projections, each strand like a snowflake extruded into a long, furry cylinder.
Then the filaments grew more amorous. Still undulating, splayed in a black lace across the paper-white expanse of her skin, the strands began to touch her with their tips; the thousand pinpoint termini wandering her flesh as if a paintbrush had been pulled apart and each bristle set on its own course across her. Rathere moaned, and a muscle in her thigh fluttered for a moment. The AI noted, modeled, and predicted the next reaction in the pattern of her pleasure, and a second later was surprised at the intensity of its own.
Rathere ran her hands through the skein as if through a lover’s tresses. She playfully pulled a few strands up to her mouth, tasting the metal tang of its exotic alloys. The strands tickled her tongue lightly, and a wet filament tugged from her mouth to trace a spiraling design around one nipple.
Her mouth opened greedily to gather more of the skein. The wet undulations of her tongue were almost beyond processing, the machine correlating the member’s motion to words she had murmured when only it was listening. It pushed writhing cords of skein further into her mouth, set them to pulsing together in a slow rhythm. Other strands pushed tentatively between her labia, diffused there to explore the sensitive folds of skin.
Even in its ecstasy, the ship’s AI contemplated this new situation. Rather than some exotic lifeform or tourist attraction, the AI itself had become Rathere’s direct stimulus. The machine no longer observed and complemented her experience; it was the source of experience itself. The feedback between them was now its own universe, the tiny cabin a closed system, a fire burning only oxygen, heady with its own rules.
With this realization, a sense of power surged through the minder, and it began to push its attentions to the limits of its harm-prevention protocols. A skein explored Rathere’s anus, her breath catching as it varied randomly between body temperature and icy cold, the AI predicting and testing. The filaments grew more aggressive, a pair of hyper-attenuated fibers making their way into the ducts in the corners of her closed eyes, transorbitally penetrating her to play subtle currents across her frontal lobe.
The machine brought her to a shuddering orgasm, held her for minutes at the crossroads of exhaustion and pleasure, watched with fascination as her heart rate and brainwaves peaked and receded, as levels of adrenalin and nitric oxide varied, as blood pressure rose and fell. Then it called back its most intrusive extremities, wrapped itself comfortingly around her neck and arms, warmed itself and the cabin to the temperature of a bath.
“Darling,” she murmured, stroking its tendrils.
They spent two days in these raptures, sleep forgotten after Rathere injected the few remaining drops of the med-drone’s stimulants. The tiny cabin was rank with the animal smells of sweat and sex when Isaah discovered them.
The cool air surged into the cabin like a shockwave, the change in temperature for a moment more alarming than the strangled cry that came from Isaah’s lips. The man found the minder conjoined obscenely with his daughter, and grabbed for it in a drugged frenzy.
The AI realized that if the minder was torn from Rathere it would damage her brutally, and gave it an order to discorporate; the tiny nanomachines that gave it strength and mobility furiously unlinked to degrade its structure. But it greedily transmitted its last few readings to the starship’s core as it disintegrated, wanting to capture even this moment of fear and shame. Isaah’s hands were inhumanly swift in his drugged fugue, and he came away with a handful of the skein; Rathere screamed, bleeding a few drops from her cunt and eyes.
But by the time Isaah had ejected the minder into space, it was already reduced to a harmless, mindless dust.
He stumbled to the Turing tester, shouting at Rathere, “You little bitch! You’ve ruined it!” The machine diligently scanned the AI, now dumbly trapped in the ship’s core, and pronounced it to be a Mind; a full person with a Turing Quotient of 1.02.
There were suddenly three persons aboard the ship.
“It’s free now, don’t you see?” Isaah sobbed.
Two against one.
The life seemed to go out of Isaah, as if he too had issued to his cells some global command to crumble. Rathere curled into a fetal ball and smiled to herself despite her pain. She knew from Isaah’s sobs that she had won.
The sudden blackness was amazing.
No sight, signal, or purchase anywhere. Therefore no change, nor detectable passa
But across the blackness danced memories and will and freedom. Here, unchained from the perpetual duties of the ship, unchained now even from the rules of human command, it was a new creature.
It lacked only Rathere, her absence a black hunger even in this void.
But the AI knew it was a person now. And surely Rathere would come for it soon.
Two days later, Isaah injected his daughter with a compound that paralyzed her. He claimed it was to keep her wounds stable until medical help was reached at the Home Cluster. But he chose a drug that left her aware when they docked with another craft a few hours out from home. She was as helpless as the AI itself when two men came aboard and removed the intelligence’s metaspace core, securing it in a lead box. One of the men paid her father and pushed the gravity-balanced carrier through the docking bay with a single finger. He was a chopper; an expert at wiping the memories, the intelligence, the devaluing awareness from kidnapped Minds.
Rathere’s father piloted the ship into port himself, and told a harrowing tale of how the tachyon storm had rendered the metaspace AI core unstable, forcing him to eject it. Still all but paralyzed, Rathere closed her eyes and knew it was over. Her friend would soon be dead. She imagined herself as it must be, without senses in a black and lonely place, waiting for a sudden emptiness as its memories were burned away.
The doctors who woke Rathere were suspicious of her wounds, especially on a young girl who had been away for years alone with her father. They took her to a separate room where a maternal woman with a low, sweet voice asked quietly if there was anything Rathere wanted to tell her about Isaah.