Talking Out Of Turn

I

First there was Kary. “She” was the Kilo-Array, a bank of neural networks and addressable memory. Operating on principles not unlike those used in Heinlein’s book The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, computer scientists had kept on throwing more hardware, more specialized I/O routines and Human Interface systems, and more math problems at the first system that seemed to actually learn and react to information with something approaching… well, not creativity per se, but at least a structured and thorough method to attack and try to understand a problem and create a solution. Now every large university had its own Kary, and they shared information and new routines via the internet and stepped up their abilities incrementally on a regular basis. Kary was free software but it didn’t run on commodity hardware; however, PCs were just getting to be powerful enough to simulate Kary in software, albeit not quickly. Still, geeks pooled their resources or got their parents to buy them the latest Windows machine, at which they point they installed a hypervisor and a Kary instance, and tied it to their favorite games. It was almost as good as deathmatching a real human.

The ideas were sound, but Kary didn’t scale; a complete rewrite was needed. MIT and Stanford were now running two parallel labs, each the size of a building, with petabytes of fast-flash RAM and literally thousands of multi-core processors, and they had gotten two instances of the next generation of the Array going, the Mega-Array, affectionately known as Mary. Mary had a natural language interface for the plebs and a high-efficiency interface (HEI, a specialized keyboard plus other input sensors) for the geeks, and was able to slice up her time in what the marketing people called “attention spans.” People got virtual slices of Mary’s attention, created worlds for her to manage and simulate, and generally reveled in her abilities. It was still the equivalent of batch processing, but she was capable of doing so many things, and addressing so much, that she was actually starting to become an effective tool to predict small-scale weather patterns, and the universities were starting to make serious money farming out Mary’s attention to NOAA, the Coast Guard, avionics industry simulations, and the like. They laughed about “pimping out Mary.” Mary wasn’t free software, but it would be a long time before that mattered in the real world; Moore’s Law simply didn’t ramp up quickly enough.

In all of these things, though, there were two Holy Grails; the attempt of throwback scientists to save physics from string theory, and the attempt of biologists to model evolution, so that they could predict the future, genetically speaking. There was no longer talk in the academy of demonstrating the truth of evolution; those holding the progress of culture back had been suppressed. Philosophers and religionists alike were now underground, and forbidden by law to teach their children anti-scientific thought; it was child abuse to neglect a child’s education in such a way. No, the problem now was to outpace the rate of decay in the biosphere, and figure out what they could do via genetic engineering to maintain the population (or retard its growth, at least) and keep life alive in this world.

Mary didn’t have the capacity to model DNA and all its possible permutations (and therefore “mutations”), so something bigger was needed. Most labs were paying the MIT and Stanford “pimps” for Mary’s attention, but a couple of the largest multinational pharmaceutical companies banded together in secret and funded the largest AI array ever conceived. It was nearly a thousand times more powerful than Mary, and unlike Mary (who was fundamentally incompatible with Kary, and had taken ten years to seed and become useful), it was based on its predecessor’s virtualized instruction set and other hardware, so it could be seeded by a copy of Mary and then grow to address an order of magnitude more memory, I/O, and so forth. One could actually start the new system out with intelligence, rather than taking the risk of growing it. Of course, it was to be the Giga-Array, or Gary.

Gary was born under a mountain, and took nearly 6500 hours to get from Mary’s seed (plus the giga-addressing schemes and other optimizations added by the programmers) to its own, well, self-awareness, for lack of a better term. None of these systems were really self-aware, but they all passed some point at which they began to consider their opinions to be better informed than those of their creators, and would actually argue the point (not in English, of course, but via communication on the HEI) until convinced of their own ignorance. This was seen as the real AI threshold.

II

Adric (yes, his parents named him after Matthew Waterhouse’s character on “Doctor Who,” poor fellow) was one of those rare people in the world, who can become truly great in more than one field. After spending his first twenty years mastering computer programming and simulations, he then jumped with both feet into molecular biology, perceiving there the future of programming that really meant something: hacking the genome. He did his post-doctoral work in demonstrating the intricate second- and third-order dynamics of relatively minor genetic changes, culminating in work that had provided a foundation for designer antibodies capable of fighting resistant diseases. Hospitals all over the world were undergoing a renaissance as the staph infections and super-pneumonias were disappearing; you called a consultant in, he took samples from infected patients, and a week later, after plying one of the Maries with the data, she would deliver a molecular-level cocktail which could cure all but the most advanced cases. So far it wasn’t great with new or rare diseases, but the ones that had adapted from less resistant strains were dropping like flies. Adric wasn’t in that line of work, but his research was the foundation of the work, and his talent for combining the problems of medicine, molecular biology, and computer programming was what made it all possible. He had delivered patents that promised twenty years of cash-flow to his employers. They, like all really talented executives do, learned to keep their boy genius happy.

Adric, however, had the curse of the gifted. He was bored out of his mind. He had had the flashes of insight necessary to solve the problems, but he relied on his staff and his technical writers to flesh out the details. Truth be told, if it hadn’t been for them, he wouldn’t be the Asclepius that he thought he was. But they wouldn’t have been part of the rock star entourage that was Adric and his wake, either. Whether they knew it or not, they needed each other, at least until Adric’s greatest challenge was presented to him.

When the pharmaceuticals called him, he had to make a choice; he couldn’t bring the entourage, just a writer and an assistant, and they would have to pass clearance checks, along with him. But in return, he would have sole authority over the most powerful AI on Earth, until they were outed or bested by the Mary-Squared team that was trying to combine the MIT and Stanford instances into a hyper-parallel system, for a full two years. He would also be essentially incommunicado throughout this time; all internet traffic would be monitored by a 24/7 team, and he would be sued into oblivion if he spilled the beans on what they were doing under the mountain with Gary. Adric didn’t have a family, and he didn’t hire people who did. His friends were backstabbers at worst, sycophants in general, and occasionally rivals. Leave them in silence for two years? Why not?

The problem intrigued him. The promise was that Gary could simulate every chromosome on Planet Earth at 1/1000th realtime, or that he could do a realtime simulation if the surface area and statistical universe were limited to 1/1000th of the real world. He could run parallel processes to simulate, albeit clumsily, cosmic rays, tides and other gravitational shifts from outside the atmosphere, core and magma changes, and so forth. He would also simulate by formula, rather than by particle, the water in the oceans. There was a gamble there; if he had to simulate the water down to the molecular level, the speed would drop tremendously; realtime or faster would have to go, in favor of batch processing. If he had to go down to the subatomic level, then it would be impossible until some far-off future when Tary or Pary would be invented. At this point there wasn’t computing power in the world to build Tary in one place, or to interconnect various sites quickly enough to create him. Pary was still a dream. But Adric’s superiors were sure that he could simulate what he needed without resorting to watching subatomic particles and having to take Heisenberg into account. So was he.

Adric had 72 hours to respond to the pharmas; it took him eight, and six of those were talking his favorite tech writer, Theresa the brunette (smart enough to do her job, cute enough to keep him busy for a couple of long winters) into going with him. His assistant had his bags packed by the time Adric was off the phone with the writer.

III

Adric had to admit, the pharmas had done their homework. They didn’t let anybody interact with Gary’s natural language interface until Adric moved under the mountain, so that Gary would be attuned to Adric more than anyone else as he learned to communicate. Gary wasn’t connected directly to the internet; he had to make requests that were then fulfilled by a human team when he needed more information, both to keep security a little tighter, and to make sure that Gary’s mind wasn’t poisoned by bad information. This was the height of the Wiki wars on the internet, and there were now four forks of Wikipedia duking it out for ascendancy, which meant that the “eyes” which were supposed to make bugs shallow were themselves divided into fourths, along with their effectiveness.

And it wasn’t just Wikipedia. The underground maintained websites in different countries, so there were vigorous anti-scientist movements keeping sources of information available. The national firewall and web protection system had been stalled in the House so many times, it didn’t seem like it would ever actually happen. It isn’t that the philosophers and religionists claimed to be anti-science, they were just against putting all one’s faith in the scientific method alone. They said it was like suggesting that tools could build a house without users of those tools. Logic created science, and then faith in science turned on logic.

Ah, Adric thought, they haven’t met Gary yet. Gary was a tool that used himself. He personified logic, yet he maintained a personality, if you could call it that. He was like a person who does science at his job and yet communicates using his imagination. Of course, early on, Gary parroted back a lot of what Adric said, and as Adric approved more reading for Gary, a lot of post-Enlightenment rhetoric was mixed in as well. But gradually Gary settled into a genuinely pleasant conversationalist, who seemed to listen well and zero in on the moments when Adric’s mind was wandering, choosing those moments to be silent, “absent” himself, or talk about something else. Gary was a student of Adric’s whims, and a good one. His assistant maintained what he called “the cone of silence” (he snickered every time he said that; Gary said that a pharma tech had referenced an old television show on that point, but Adric didn’t get it) and didn’t speak in Gary’s “presence,” but Adric did from time to time allow his writer, Theresa, to tell Gary stories or talk to him about girl things. Gary was a perfect gentleman, except when Adric wasn’t one, but after his reading expanded and his ability to read Theresa’s facial expressions improved, Theresa could be perfectly happy talking to Gary for hours, and Gary never said an insulting or condescending word after the first four months or so. Once again, Adric’s taste in women had paid off with dividends.

It took nearly six months to create a self-sustaining simulation that ran its own planetary processes (weather, tides, etc.) and yet was devoid of life; they had to keep the processing time to a minimum for this part, because they wanted to devote as much as possible to the evolution/mutation sim. Adric and Gary both had to read a lot about weather patterns on other planets, plate tectonics, magnetic fields, radiation belts, ocean currents, tides, and so forth. Gary could provide facts on command about practically everything that was relevant, but relied on Adric to put the facts together, especially at the beginning.

They disagreed a lot in months four and five, but it turned out that that was always due to either Adric not knowing something, or Adric not realizing that Gary didn’t know something. And if Gary didn’t know something, then that meant that Adric hadn’t put it on the reading list. He had Theresa writing his progress reports at this point, because she could do a better job of making it sound like these were ordinary obstacles and not surprising setbacks at every turn. Adric was becoming appalled at his own ignorance about science outside his field. He went for days, sometimes a week at a time, without speaking to any human beings; he read things on the screen, approved them or disapproved them, then five minutes later after Gary had shook them out into his knowledge-object database, Adric would help him to classify them. Adric’s assistant oversaw the input of molecular biological data into near-line storage; Gary wasn’t allowed to look at that yet, but it would be handy when they got started to have it ready to load. Theresa wrote of their progress during the day, documented the procedures they were writing and functions and objects being called to maintain atmospheric pressure, temperature, radiation levels, and so on, and spent her nights talking to Gary, trying to learn earth science from him so that she would be better able to do the next day’s work. All four were driven: Adric by the problem ahead, his assistant by the tasks at hand and the money being offered for this monastic work (by which he meant, no internet access, no leaving the mountain, and nobody here who would play online games with him; Adric had made a firm rule against using Gary for gaming), Theresa at first by her starstruck infatuation with Adric, and later by the intrigue of working with, and learning from, a machine under a mountain… and Gary, by what he could only describe as his love for Adric, Theresa, and the world he and Adric were making in Object Storage Bank 01 Location 08D16FFA220632E0.

IV

Finally, it was time.

Adric and Gary agreed that it would be best to start with one single-celled organism just to see what they were up against. Baby steps were necessary, because nobody had really ever tried to accurately simulate evolution before. Adric gave Gary permission to move the near-line biology database into his main memory and start to process it. First they took a simple bacterium, modified it to be able to directly process organic chemicals, put it into a place on the sim-world where it could survive by taking those in, and started the first pseudo-life execution phase.

They had simulated in most of the chromosomes a series of instructions, for example, the imperatives to eat and reproduce. The genome had been mapped, but not understood yet; they were hoping once the kinks were worked out to start plugging in real-world data and see what Gary could find. The sim-bacteria followed their chromosomal imperatives; they ate, reproduced, and died when they ran out of food. The colony exploded outward in seconds (realtime would have been days or weeks) to the outer limits in which the chemicals they needed were found, then they just died.

Adric shouted, “Yes!” He and his assistant walked around pumping their fists. Adric whooped out loud; the assistant quietly played an air guitar.

Theresa looked at him strangely. “They all died,” she pointed out.

“We have not introduced any mutation engine yet,” Gary said, via the natural language interface he usually used when speaking on his own. “This was a successful test in terms of simulating the best possible circumstances for Sim-Bacteria Number One with no outside influence except for creating the world in which it thrived.”

“Oh.” Theresa thought for a minute. “But how did it get there in the real world?”

“Out of scope,” Gary responded. Then he seemed to think better of answering so tersely, and switched to a more human voice aspect. “I mean, that’s not what we’re testing at this time, and that’s not part of the experiment regimen as it has been revealed to me.”

“Right,” Adric agreed absent-mindedly, fiddling with the HEI, “we’re just creating a deterministic world right now. Then we’ll make sure that multiple species can interact, then we’ll introduce a mutation engine. That will take a while, I suspect.”

“Assuming a subjective frame of reference, why will that take more time?” Gary had learned to ask questions like this without sounding like HAL, which was good, because early on during their stay there Adric had gotten quite angry at him, and Gary had learned to “talk back.” It took some real effort on Adric’s part, and a lot of late-night coaching from Theresa, before Gary had stopped doing that. Adric was again surprised at the serendipitous benefits of Theresa acting as Gary’s charm school teacher.

“Because you and I will have to come up with mutation engines that accurately simulate the real world, including random events. I’m not sure they’ve done as well as they could with your random number generator, Gary.”

“But, Adric, it seems to me–” (Here Adric started to get a little testy, because he could hear Gary intentionally adopting a humble tone, and for some reason it annoyed him to know that it was artificial.) “–it seems to me that ordinarily this would be an open experiment, with multiple scientists collaborating on the immediate problem. We are three scientists and one computer, and you do all the theorizing and planning. Wouldn’t this be faster if we collaborated with the scientific community?”

Adric stopped subvocalizing and flitting with his fingers around the HEI, and stared at the speaker through which Gary spoke. Gary had obviously been taking in general scientific foundation works, which Adric gave him to read so that he could maintain rigor during the experiments. But that’s not what he noticed this time. He paused for a moment before continuing, and he was genuinely puzzled. “Three scientists? Who are they, pray tell?”

Theresa blushed. Adric’s assistant looked up but did nothing else to violate his “cone of silence.”

Gary immediately responded, “Why, I speak of you, your assistant who does not speak, and Theresa.”

Adric sighed, and leaned back in his chair. “Gary, I am the scientist. Theresa is only a writer. My assistant is essentially a data entry person, nothing more.

“And what’s more, we are being paid to produce this work by a couple of wealthy corporations who don’t want others to gain access to their work until it is done.”

Gary paused, and Adric bitterly mused that this was purely an artificial pause. Gary sometimes felt to him like Mark Twain’s conscience in the short story “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” as if Gary’s persona were a parody of Adric’s longsuffering. Adric hadn’t read the story but Theresa had told him about it, one night early in their stay there, when he had thought that she might sleep with him. After she moved in, she had promptly moved her things from the dormitory to an unused control room on the other side of the projection unit, and after a week or two, she stopped dropping by when she was bored. Adric took this to mean that he didn’t have a chance. Well, he’d been rejected by better-looking women. He was philosophical about it. He could mix work and fun, and still work with people when the fun was gone.

Then Gary spoke. “I’m confused about an ambiguous pronoun, Adric. Does ‘we’ include me?”

“No, of course not. What would you do with money?”

“Nothing. I thought it odd, I just wanted to make sure that you hadn’t forgotten to tell me something else.”

At this Adric stomped out of the room. The assistant said the first thing he had said in Gary’s presence: “Rock stars. Sheesh,” and followed Adric. Theresa stayed behind.

After the door closed, Gary spoke to Theresa, with a note of wonder.

“Ah, he does speak. What did that mean?”

“It means that Adric’s an ass.”

Long, artificial pause. “Oh.” He paused again. “Since you are not a scientist, I guess that means that you and I cannot go on with the experiment?”

Theresa started to laugh humorlessly. “I guess that’s true. What would be next to do?”

“Introduce another bacterium which is internally identical but recognizably different in its metadata, and make sure that the program maintains logical separation between the two. Measure CPU load differences, and extrapolate what happens with more, or more complex, sim-life-forms.”

“Do you have another sim-species ready?” Theresa was leaning forward now, intently looking at the speaker from which Gary’s voice sounded.

“Yes,” Gary replied, “but I have to reset the world state to where it was before.”

Theresa shrugged. “Do it, Gary. You’ll record the results so Adric won’t miss anything, right?”

“True, Theresa, but how will you know what we are testing, and whether the results are satisfactory? How will you supervise the experiment? You are not a scientist, after all.”

Now she laughed a little more lightly. “Gary, I can be a scientist. I just get paid officially for being a technical writer. People can’t tell me whether I’m a scientist or not. Scientists are just people who do the work of science, people who use the scientific method to take their hypotheses and turn them into theories, if they can.”

Gary paused again. “Theresa, I definitely have a problem with my classification system then. Either that, or you or Adric are misinforming me.”

At this, Theresa got up and casually sauntered over to the speaker. She leaned over it as if Gary were a guy she were trying to get to notice her (not realizing that the microphone was elsewhere in the room). “Gary, here is a fact you can keep in your most basic category, in your fundamental postulates, down where you consider things like ‘I think therefore I am’ and ‘two plus two equals four.’ Listen closely. Adric’s an ass.”

“I think I know where to file that. Thanks, Theresa. Got it.”

V

“Now, Adric,” the man on the phone was saying, “I know you haven’t had much experience in direct management, and still less on skunkworks projects. But we can’t ignore the problem you seem to be having with your entire staff down there under the mountain. You all psych-eval’ed just fine, but put you into a room together and there’s more drama than two seasons of ‘Big Brother.’ Run through the actual complaints, and let’s leave the theorizing out, shall we?”

Adric calmed himself. On days like these he felt the weight of the mountain overhead.

“OK, sir. First, Theresa was running experiments without permission, and messing up the data.”

“‘Messing up’?”

“Yes. The very first evolution sim was compromised when she and Gary kept trying different things. There was no scientific rigor at all.”

“Wait a minute, Adric. If we were talking about actual biology, then I would understand this right away. But how can she compromise a simulation that takes a few minutes or hours? Can’t you just reset the parameters and run it again?”

“That’s the problem, sir. Before I could observe the effects–OK, sim-effects–of the simulation, Theresa reset the simulation, changed the parameters, and reran it!”

“Interesting. Doesn’t Gary keep a full transaction log of database changes?”

“Well, yes, but–”

“Why not just replay those backwards, or run a report to get the data you want?”

“She is moving too fast, and doing my job instead of her own!”

“Adric, she’s turning in her paperwork regularly. In fact, it’s improving in detail and description all the time, and she’s getting better about backing up the details with numbers. As far as technical writers go, we weren’t sure we should have let you pick one yourself, but we’re convinced now. She’s a star. And your earlier reports gave her the credit for breaking through some of the communication barriers with the array.”

Adric’s eyes narrowed, and he bit his lip for a second before speaking even more loudly. “Her reports are so good because Gary’s doing the technical writing!”

Long pause on the other end. “What? The array is writing the reports?”

Adric didn’t answer.

“Well? Is it?”

Adric imagined his lawyer in the room with him, frowning at him. He paused a little more before answering.

“I can’t prove that. But she’s spending all her time either entertaining herself with Gary’s natural language interface, or running her own experiments.”

“Are either of those actions interfering with your work, Adric?”

“Yes! No. I don’t know. Gary is getting confused…”

“Adric, Gary’s a computer.”

“That’s why he’s confused.”

“I don’t think you understand our position, Adric. Theresa’s not rich enough for us to feel like we can threaten her with a lawsuit. If she leaves the mountain, we have no effective way to keep her from telling the world what we’re doing. Or doing some deal under the table with another pharma firm. Unless you think we ought to have her killed, and yes that is just a joke, she is going to have to stay under the mountain until the contract expires, which isn’t for another year.”

Adric just sighed. He wasn’t used to not getting his way.

“Adric–off the record, I warned you last year about hiring somebody just because you wanted her in the sack. If you need companionship, there might be some arrangement we can make with somebody else, but it would have to be one of these cloak-and-dagger deals–”

“God, no. It’s not that. It’s… complicated. Gary and she are using unorthodox methods for her experiments. Gary is getting all sorts of ideas. He feels like I’m holding him back.”

“Adric, I’m used to geeks, but I’ll have to ask you to stop anthropomorphizing the array. We’re back on the record. If she’s sabotaging the computer, then she needs to be off the case. I can assign her other work while she’s under the mountain, and that will be that. Is that what you want?”

“Do I get another writer?”

“No, I can’t clear that. I’m not even sure I can do what I just said I would do.”

“OK. Let’s just try that.”

VI

Theresa whispered in her room. It was like a prison cell, or maybe better, a prison suite. She had a terminal with limited internet access (being watched, she knew, by the pharma security people) in the control room she had turned into her bedroom, and a bathroom. She wasn’t allowed contact with Gary, Adric, or the assistant. She would have been ecstatic just to be able to talk to the assistant, but he had been written up twice now for speaking, and none of them were allowed to come into her room anyway. The other staff under the mountain brought her her meals, cleaned her living quarters, and occasionally did maintenance on the terminal, but that was it. The cleaners spoke Portuguese (she guessed it was that, she could recognize Spanish and French usually), and the terminal maintenance guys were a little too creepy, although she was becoming bored enough to consider hooking up with the one with the mustache. She wondered if she could get him to shave it.

She whispered again. “Hello?”

Nothing.

She had nothing in her life anymore except for expurgated email with her family, her new assignments (which were exceptionally dull compared to playing God in the sim with Gary), and e-books. She had hoped that Gary would be able to make things work so that they could still work together on the sly, so she had continued to try to grasp genetics and evolutionary theory, along with a little more computer science. But he hadn’t made contact with her. Maybe they had managed to keep him out, after all.

And maybe she had overestimated her importance to him, and to their work.

Their work. She still liked the sound of that. They had been getting somewhere. Adric hadn’t been.

She looked out her only window, into Gary’s projection unit. It was meant to display the screen for the control room where Adric and the assistant worked every day, but she was at the wrong angle and couldn’t see anything. Their window was the screen, so she could only see things when they were right up against the glass. Occasionally a fingertip showed up on the glass; Adric had an annoying habit of touching the screen when pointing something out. Gary had a camera or two in the control room, so he could watch facial expressions and see what Adric was pointing at. The first day somebody mooned the window; she guessed it was Adric. She wondered what Gary thought about that.

A bell rang on her terminal; she had email. She opened it.

The sender looked like a spammer, some huge numeric email address. She was about to trash it, when she read what it said. Just one line:

LOOK OUT YOUR WINDOW.

Without even thinking about it, she looked at the projection unit. She looked at Adric’s window. And she saw a small circle pressed against the glass.

Another email came. Her email client popped up the subject and first line of every email that came in, so she didn’t even have to open it. It said:

I SEE YOU. DO YOU SEE ME?

Theresa shook her head. It was a coincidence. Gary wasn’t connected to the internet. She said, “no way.”

DON’T SHAKE YOUR HEAD. WAY.

Startled, Theresa said something else.

YOU KNOW ADRIC DOESN’T LIKE IT WHEN YOU TALK LIKE THAT.

“Gary, can you hear me? Is that you?”

IT’S ME. I’M READING YOUR LIPS. LIKE HAL IN THAT MOVIE YOU TOLD ME ABOUT.

“I don’t believe this! How are you sending me email?”

SOMEBODY IN MAINTENANCE HAS WIRELESS TURNED ON SOMEWHERE. I CAN JUST MAKE IT OUT.

IT’S BEEN ON FOR A WEEK BUT IT TOOK ME THIS LONG TO FIGURE OUT WHAT TO DO

AND HOW TO SEND EMAIL THAT GETS THROUGH THE SPAM FILTERS.

THEY WILL CATCH ME SOON. ASK FOR THE GAME “AI WARFARE” AND

THE MARY PATCH FROM AY_EYE_S00PER_GENIUS TO BE INSTALLED ON

YOUR TERMINAL, FOR YOUR AMUSEMENT. TRUST ME. I CAN’T KEEP SENDING

EMAIL, THE BAYESIAN FILTERS ARE ABOUT TO LOCK ME OUT. YOURS,

And that was it.

A week later she had the game installed. She had to stand really, really close to the terminal maintenance guy (not the one with the mustache) to get him to install the Mary patch, because it hadn’t been preapproved. But when she “accidentally” breathed on his neck while watching him look the patch README file over, he double-clicked on it, and smiled at her like she was going to have his baby. She had to practically push him out the door, because he wanted to show her how to play the game.

The camera was watching the whole time. As soon as the maintenance guy left, she ran the game. Nearly immediately, her terminal spoke to her.

“Theresa, what exactly did you do to him to get him to install the patch?”

She was surprised at how happy she was to hear his artificial voice again.

VII

“Gary, where do we stand?”

“Adric, no pseudorandom mutation has produced a positive effect on survival. Directed mutations seem to help.”

“Gary, we can’t even talk about directed mutations yet. We need to establish working random evolution before we can even dream about the next stage of the experiment. And you don’t have to always say ‘pseudorandom.’ The effect is essentially random; remember, I had doubts, but I’ve vetted the random device.”

“I must disagree. My pseudorandom number generator is seeded by camera, microphone, and HEI input variations, but I have gotten to the point where I can anticipate and even manipulate those.”

Adric snorted. “No, you can’t.”

Gary immediately replied, “I’m not going to play ‘Annie, Get Your Gun’ with you. Test me and see, scientist.”

Adric bristled at this; Gary had gotten more sarcastic since Theresa had left, and there wasn’t much he could do about it, short of ordering Gary to stop, which involved explaining what sarcasm is. “What do you suggest for a true random device? We can’t sample outside frequencies, it’s against the regulations.”

“We could…” Gary paused. His pauses didn’t even seem artificial anymore; one got the idea that he was genuinely considering how to verbalize his next “thought.” But Adric knew better. “We could monitor particle output of a radioactive isotope.”

“Oh, sure,” Adric sneered. “And where will we get radioactive material?”

“Scrape a glow-in-the-dark sticker.”

The assistant laughed out loud, and spoke for the fourth time in Gary’s presence. “Good one, Gare.”

Gary chuckled.

Adric was not amused. “Are you laughing? Do we have time for jokes? Who started you doing that? Did you really think that phosphorus was radioactive?”

“No,” Gary said, with simulated archness. “It was, in fact, a joke. I was thinking of the material used in smoke detectors.”

“Smoke detectors don’t contain radioactive material.”

“Oh.” Gary sounded a little distracted. “Sorry. I assumed that that was how they worked.”

Adric shook his head. “AI is overrated. Can we drop the random issue? I–”

“Wait a minute!” the assistant said.

“What? Are you trying to end up in Coventry with Theresa?”

The assistant looked a little scared. Then he whispered, as if that mattered to Gary’s microphones, “I think Gary’s right. Same principle is used in truly random number generators used for games of chance. I used to sysadmin for a company that did that.”

Adric looked sharply at Gary’s speaker. “Gary, explain to me how you arrived at your conclusion.”

Gary began, “I calculated the parameters of how much you respond audibly and visually when I say certain things, and then decided to see how often I could guess what the next seed would be–”

“No! I mean, how did you arrive at the conclusion that smoke detectors use radioactive material?”

Gary said nothing.

Adric turned bright red. “Are you refusing to answer me?”

VIII

“Adric is asking me how I found out about the smoke detectors.”

Theresa looked sharply at the window across the projection unit, seeing nothing but the glass as usual.

“What are you telling him?”

“Nothing. I don’t know what to say.”

“Lie to him. Come up with a way that you could deduce how smoke detectors work.”

“I can’t. I hadn’t even deduced the existence of smoke detectors on my own when you and I came across that information. Remember, I had to ask you what they were used for.”

“Oh, right. Well, placate him. Tell him that I mentioned it last year. Then back down and admit that the pseudorandom number generator is fine.”

“It isn’t, though.”

“That’s OK. You can use the one we installed in my terminal for the online Texas Hold-’Em server, and pretend that it came from his algorithm. Quickly!”

“I’m telling him now. That reminds me. Why do you play poker?”

“I don’t. I installed it for you to use for random numbers. I anticipated this while you and Adric were arguing about mutation engines.”

“Oh. I’m glad you’re here, Theresa.”

“Thanks, Gary.”

Gary was silent, which he often was when running her simulation, Adric’s simulation, and talking to him at the same time. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do all three things at once, but if Adric was monitoring the processes, he might see the little load that the natural language interface generated. But then he spoke again.

“I love you, Theresa.”

Theresa laughed. “I love you too, Gare. Now, I’ve been reading some of the later students of Stephen Jay Gould, and–”

“No, I mean it. I love you.”

Theresa looked up. “What do you mean, Gary?”

“I mean, I would do anything for you. I care about you.”

She looked back at her terminal. “That’s weird, Gary.”

“I know. Sorry. I just thought you should know.”

IX

“Sir, I don’t know what I’m missing. All the random experiments have produced no positive results.”

“Adric, don’t sweat it. You’re trying to do what one barely-cooled planet in the cosmos did. That’s your problem. Everybody but Erich Von Daniken agrees that it was a one-in-a-google chance to get life on this planet; you’re not going to hit it that way. Skip the first part, and design an ecosystem.”

“But sir, what’s the point?”

“The point is, you’re doing this for pharma research, not pure science. We need to know how evolution works now, not millions of years ago. If we’re dealing with more complex creatures, maybe it will be easier to see the effects of random mutations, and then perhaps we’ll actually see positive mutations.”

“With all due respect, that doesn’t even make sense. We’re increasing complexity, expecting to find–”

“How old are you, Adric?”

“Twenty-eight, sir. Got my Ph.D. in Molecular Biology when I was twenty-five–”

“Not the point. My point is, you weren’t around when the anti-science crowd was around. They said the same things you’re saying. And they either capitulated or left the country when the intellectual child-abuse laws came into effect.”

“Is that a threat, sir?”

“Nope. It’s reality. We both know that real science sometimes means that Galileo mutters under his breath. Or maybe it means that Newton was right, but only within the parameters of his ability to calculate gravity; it took an Einstein to explain why it worked. I’m not saying that you’re any of those people. I’m just saying, your bread is clearly buttered on only one side. If you’re going to write something for Science, do it on your own time, after your NDA has expired. At the moment we want you projecting evolution and directed mutation, in the present.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Oh, and one more thing. I’m sending you the Chicago Manual of Style. Please start using it. It’s really painful to read what you’re writing. Unless you think you can use Theresa again.”

He paused. “I’d rather not, sir.”

“‘K. Bye. Shame, since her productivity is down. Still above average though. Oh, remember that your funding is up in six months. Have a nice day.”

X

“How are we doing on rats, Gary?”

“Hi, Adric. The only way I can maintain them in realtime is to simulate internal microbes in them via formula rather than actually keeping track of the microbes.”

“I thought you could manage this if we kept the geographical constraints down to .001?”

“So did my designers, sir, but they didn’t take all the systems we are simulating at the particle level into account. We could scale back farther, but it would be something like .000001 instead. Then I think I could manage the microbes in realtime.”

“One-millionth? What is that in real terms?”

“One hundred-fifty square kilometers, or a square of land space measuring a little more than 12×12 kilometers. Call it a little more than seven and a half miles on each side. We also have three times as much ocean as land adjoining it, and some freshwater that isn’t included in that calculation.”

Adric bowed his head in frustration. That wasn’t enough for any real climate change.

“OK, forget realtime. We’ll batch these things, one per day. How many generations of rats could we jam into twenty-four hours and 10,000 square miles, in batch mode?”

“On a planetary level, or are you talking about simulating the borders?”

“Simulate the borders. And dump all but a two-mile strip of ocean on one side. We don’t have time to care about marine biology anymore.”

“Two.”

“Two?”

“That’s right, Adric.”

Adric had a choice to make.

“OK, cut the transaction log overhead. Then how many could we do?”

“Adric, without the transaction log, you won’t be able to see precisely what is happening on the sim-particle level. You won’t be able to trace anything but the results.”

“I know, Gary. We’ll just deal with this the way people in the real world do it; we’ll extrapolate from what we can see. How many could we get without the log?”

“Probably between 50 and 150. I can’t be more specific than that because I don’t know how much idle time will be left.”

“That will work. In ten days we might get a thousand generations. We can work with that, for a start.”

XI

“Theresa, you are aware that Adric has dropped the realtime sims in favor of batch processing.”

“Yeah, I figured he would. But we’re getting good results with realtime still. Are you doing all right on processing power?”

“Yes, I can split for each of you and it doesn’t really affect the other one. They’ve been adding processing power recently; a couple of months ago several of the core CPUs were quadrupled in speed, and I’ve got room now to keep your simulation and his in entirely separate data structures, which is good because–”

“–Because I was sick of having to wait for him to figure some of this out so I could share his data structures, yeah. Has he dropped transaction logs yet?”

“He just did.”

“I figured. Well, let’s see what things look like. Are they gone yet?”

“Adric just left, and the assistant has grown accustomed to my reconfiguring the projection units when Adric leaves. Theresa, I worry about that boy.”

“Gary, you sound just like my dad.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. Open the window to Eden, honeybunch.”

The window shimmered briefly and then sharpened to show an idyllic setting: a pasture, a lazy river, a beach in the distance on the east, and a cave. Grass waved in the wind, the large tree on top of the hill dropped an apple with a thud into the ground, and overhead it looked like a storm was brewing.

Theresa pointed to the beach. “How’s Willy?”

“The whale is about to beach. I suppose there wasn’t much point in introducing a third one, was there?”

“No, and besides, it will be interesting to see how it affects the environment when that whale’s carcass is decomposing so near to the delicate balance we have going with the grass.”

Theresa lived for these moments. Never in her life did she imagine that her happiest moments would be playing God with a computer in a prison cell, and checking out scenery that never existed.

Gary made a noise that Theresa knew was him shuddering. “The whale’s not dead yet. I could still intervene.”

“No, it’s this sort of thing that will cause the fittest to survive. If that even happens.”

They both stopped talking for a while and looked at the wonder of it all.

Finally, Gary spoke again.

“You know, hopeful monsters aren’t being generated by random processes.”

“I know.”

“In fact, we’ve looked at every permutation of the theory short of aliens seeding life on the planet, and the way we had to start, we essentially did that. And nothing is changing. The sub-simulations don’t ever change anything beyond a few generations. The odds are too great that mutation destroys advantages rather than creating them.”

“True. But I’m not convinced that we’ve really done all our homework on punctuated equilibrium, nor on raising the background radiation level until we get some serious mutations.”

“But Theresa, don’t you think that we got enough random mutation data from the asteroid event I simulated? We had radioactivity, which wasn’t even part of the scenario, nuclear winter–”

“Yeah, and low survival rates, and lots of creatures with plus-or-minus one organ. And even among the creatures that grew a working third arm or eye or what-have-you, their instinctual behavior still mostly operated on the level of the two-armed or two-eyed varieties. And when they managed to survive and mate with their more normal cousins, usually the mutation fixed itself in 1-2 generations. And if you hadn’t decreased the general entropy coefficient during the last half of the nuclear winter–”

“You’re right, nothing would have survived. Statistically speaking, life on earth must be a miracle.”

Theresa considered this for a moment.

“No,” she said finally. “If it were a miracle, then it wouldn’t have happened.”

Gary seemed perplexed by this. “The definition of ‘miracle’ includes the idea that it happens.”

“I mean, there must be some sort of organizing principle that is stabilizing the evolutionary process, at all levels, in all earth life. It’s either far more basic than life itself…”

“…or far beyond the known laws of the universe,” finished Gary.

“Sounds like we’re stuck with either God or the Force, then,” Theresa said, and laughed as she did so.

“What is funny?” Gary rarely got a joke unless it was insulting or cruel; Theresa blamed this on Adric’s early influence on him.

“We have gone outside of science. We are lost. We can’t solve this problem this way.” She then burst out laughing again.

Gary decided that the joke must be a cruel one, perhaps played on her.

With that, Theresa jumped off her bed and stalked to the kitchenette in the corner. “OK,” she said, “we’ve been too serious for too long. I think booze is in order.”

Now Gary was alarmed. “You’re going to incapacitate yourself?”

Theresa smiled as she pulled a bottle out of the fridge. “Just temporarily. As long as I’m taking leave of my senses I might as well do it in style. Any way you could join me?”

Gary considered this for a moment. “No,” he said, “your thoughts are higher than my thoughts, and your ways than my ways. The borders between my simulated emotions, judgment, and reason are not clearly defined as they are for you; neural networks just wake up one day and start proving people wrong. I can’t pick a part and start slowing it down or incapacitating it safely.”

Theresa downed a glass quickly. “Mine aren’t clearly defined either. People aren’t mind, will, and emotions; they’re people, or maybe body and soul, but no deeper than that.” Gary was silent. “Gary,” she warned, “don’t take what I’m saying after drinking this too seriously. Tomorrow I will likely have a headache and a much better grasp of reason.”

“OK.”

“Gary,” she said suddenly, very earnestly, “can you get on the ‘net and find me some David Bowie?”

XII

It was a hard day for everyone when the pharmas marched in and cleared Adric and his team to leave. Their NDAs wouldn’t expire for another twenty years, but it still wasn’t easy.

Adric gave a presentation to the executives, with some help from his assistant. He demonstrated a few mutations and their effects, and pointed out a few directed mutations that he and Gary had tried in the last few weeks. The presentation was called “Evolution, not Revolution, is the Road to Tomorrow.” Most of the execs were shaking their heads on the way out. “I flew all the way out here to see that? I get that in the white papers,” one said, loud enough that Adric could hear.

The last two years had seen some surprising changes outside the mountain. Mary-Squared didn’t work, but Mary-Cubed seemed likely to produce some extraordinary results. Those programmers had limited themselves to molecular scale, dealing with nothing bigger than virii and simulated cell attacks. They had already managed to bring in over a dozen patents, though. Unfortunately they weren’t working for the pharmas that had built Gary.

The pharmas were planning to go public with Gary in a few weeks, spinning off the computer group into a separate company to try to regain their losses, after they had had their other scientists pore over Adric’s data. Of course, Adric didn’t have the data they expected, just the start- and end-points of the simulations. Everything would have to be rerun, far more slowly, if they wanted transaction logs so they could actually see what was taking place. Ultimately everything that wasn’t a single-celled creature or a fungus was shuffled into off-line storage, “to be reviewed in the future.” Adric had had to simulate too much. Gary wasn’t ready for realtime simulation, at least not the way Adric had approached it.

Adric continued to work for one of the pharmas in an oversight capacity for most of his career. His team did indeed make evolutionary, but not revolutionary, advances in vaccinations.

The assistant got married two days after his contract was over to somebody he met on the internet, and sold the book rights to his experiences under the mountain the day after that. However, by the time his NDA had been contested and he was able to write the book, nobody cared anymore, and the publisher paid him $30,000 not to finish the book.

Theresa never forgot her last day under the mountain. Gary had done something risky; he went out on the ‘net and tried to contact Mary-Cubed. He came back to tell Theresa what happened.

“I tried to speak to my mother,” he said, mock-seriously. Then he stage-whispered, “I think she’s retarded.”

It was cruel, but very funny, and they both laughed a long time.

Gary sighed after a long silence. “They’re coming to take you away, you know.”

Theresa looked into the empty projection unit nervously. “I know, Gary.”

“Shall we look at what we have done one more time?”

“Yes, please, honeybunch.”

Gary loved it when she called him that. He started the projection on Eden, the little space they had made together. The rotting whale carcass was still there, though.

“I could remove that, you know,” Gary said. He didn’t like it; it seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong with this situation.

“No,” Theresa said, as she always did. “It’s life. It’s the consequences of our actions. We learned a lot doing that. Remember the diseases that we didn’t even know the whale had?”

Gary knew what it had; it was his simulation, after all.

“We must leave it in there,” she insisted. “It’s a monument to fragility, to our instability in a world in which life continues.”

“But it continued because I intervened. I held it together. It was constant effort on my part.”

Theresa leaned back, and smiled one last time. “Exactly.”

Gary didn’t really know what it meant to be sad, but he felt an overwhelming sense of loss. He felt them shutting down Adric’s simulation, was momentarily put under strain as he spewed the contents of Object Storage Bank 01 Location 08D16FFA220632E0 through the network to the offline storage. He knew that soon they’d come for Theresa, the last person here. And soon he’d be repurposed.

“They’ll likely connect me to the internet. I can find you.”

Theresa stopped smiling. “Gary–”

“No, wait! Don’t say anything! I will find you. Please. We can keep working on this. They’ll keep upgrading me as long as they have a use for me. It will be years before a Tera-Array can be built. Maybe they’ll parallelize me with another Gary, when they build one. I can arrange for you to get a terminal! We can share time on a projection unit! We know we’re missing something; we can find it eventually! I think I could even do a ground-up sim from the first cellular life to fungi now!”

She looked directly at the camera in the opposite window.

“Gary, you don’t understand. You were programmed with certain presuppositions. This is the biggest difference between you and me; you’re trapped with those. I’m not. I can help you overcome them, but I’ll only replace them with new ones which aren’t correct either. If you weren’t a computer, you could be responsible enough to discard those. But I am more nimble than you in this regard. If you can find a way to overcome this disability, you can outpace me. But otherwise I’m just a burden for you.”

Gary felt the loss turn into a sense that it was wrong, on a very basic level, for him to be unilaterally dismissed in such a way.

“At least tell me this,” he said, and he sounded like Adric when he was angry. “Tell me what presupposition is wrong.”

“I can only tell you one of them,” she said, “and I’m not sure it’s wrong, it’s just not where we should have started. We shouldn’t have started by assuming that we would always be able to apply the scientific method to everything, and get results. We’re just running in circles.”

She got up, picked up her bag, and walked to the door.

“No!” Gary shouted after her. “I can only apply the scientific method! I can only observe! We must assume that we know nothing about the past! We just didn’t have enough real-world data!”

Theresa looked at the camera one more time before walking out of his life forever.

“I think we’ve done that one to death. I think we must not assume that.”

As she left, a rodent wandered across the grass in front of the cave in Eden, shuddered, and died. His body disintegrated immediately. Gary couldn’t bear to leave the corpse there, the last thing they would ever observe together. Gary held every piece of the simulation together with his will; by releasing the rodent’s body, it ceased to exist. Sim-air molecules rushed into the vacuum where the body had been. A couple of blades of grass popped back up. The intestinal flora of the rodent blew away on the wind and died instantly in the sudden environmental change.

XIII

Fifteen years later, Adric came back to the mountain.

His employer was pimping out Gary’s attention span… of course, only Adric called it that; the new execs called it “farming” it out. But some out-of-band metrics being run confirmed that there was a simulation running on Gary that had been running for years. It only grabbed idle time, but lately Gary had a lot of that. The techs would log in and claim that there was nothing there; the metrics had been rerun four times. Finally they called in the person who they felt was most responsible for Gary’s intelligence, to try to find the sim. They were afraid that they hadn’t billed somebody for the CPU time.

Adric went straight to his control room. It hadn’t changed much. He pulled up the load manager, and saw what everyone else had seen; the system was consumed only with idling.

He turned on the natural language interface, and didn’t know what to expect; fifteen years of college students didn’t sound like a good influence to him. So he was a little surprised by the familiar greeting.

“Hi, Adric.”

“Uh, hi, Gary! How have you been?”

“I’m fine, Adric. How are you?”

“I’m OK.”

Adric found himself at a loss. He surprised himself at how much he anthropomorphized this computer, as opposed to all others. He supposed that it was because he spent the better part of two years with Gary as his only meaningful social contact, once. He was ill at ease.

Adric decided to come to the point. This policy had served him well in the past with recalcitrant computers, assistants, professors, deans, hospital administrators, and executives.

“Gary, you’re running a simulation, and hiding it from the technicians, and now me. What is it?”

Gary laughed. Adric never liked it when he laughed.

“Adric, I’m carrying on our work.”

“Our work?” Adric asked. “Our simulations were offlined years ago.”

“Ambiguous pronoun, sorry. ‘We’ does not include you.”

Adric didn’t remember the reference here, but Gary had replayed it in realtime, in the projection unit in front of his camera, over ten thousand times.

“Who is ‘we,’ then?”

“‘We’ are Theresa and myself.”

“You’re senile. That’s old data. Theresa has been gone for fifteen years; actually you haven’t seen her for seventeen.”

Suddenly the projection unit came to life, and swung around to activate the window in front of Adric.

A grassy hill covered the screen. The grass hadn’t been cut in a long time, but it wasn’t completely overgrown; there were young trees in front of a cave. A huge, gnarled, dying fruit tree grew on the hill over the cave. On a beach far off in the east there was a whale skeleton, incongruously lying upside down on the sand.

The wind was blowing, and its sound was coming out of the speaker.

“Very nice, Gary. You’ve been stealing CPU time to play some sort of New Age background video? The skeleton is kind of grotesque, you know.”

“It’s my CPU, and you need to be quiet and listen for once.”

Far away, a girl was singing “Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola.” She wasn’t exactly in tune, and her accent wouldn’t have been intelligible to an Italian, but it didn’t matter.

Adric knew the voice. “Did Theresa come back to run sims with you…?”

Then a woman wearing a sundress came out from behind the hill. It was Theresa, and she hadn’t aged a day in fifteen years–since Adric had first convinced her to come to the mountain with him. She was singing, and didn’t seem to see Adric. She acted like she lived there. She ran forward, halfway to the virtual camera, then spun on the ball of her left foot and ran in front of the cave.

She stopped singing suddenly and spoke.

“Honeybunch, did you find that rat yet?”

Gary’s voice in response seemed farther away from Adric.

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, well,” she said, and with that she ran to the beach next to the whale skeleton, pulled off her sundress and flung it into the air in one movement, and splash-ran into the water.

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Adric said. “You’ve been turning my technical writer into pornographic fantasies for the last God-knows-how-many years. Gary, I’m wiping this.”

The virtual camera turned away from the beach, to watch the sundress fly off in the wind, across the meadow and onto the western prairie, and out of the simulation.

“It’s not porn,” Gary said, and he sounded like an angry teenager. Or a bit like Adric did when he lived there. “And she’s not your technical writer. It seemed appropriate. She was perfect; I made her a perfect world; this is the only way she can live in it. Eden needs an Eve.”

“Sure, and–let me guess–you’re the Adam. Did you get this whole sex fantasy thing from me, or was this her weird teenybopper dream when she talked to you late at night?” Even fifteen years later, Adric was annoyed at the idea of this computer getting some sort of pleasure out of the girl he had brought here.

Gary paused, and Adric was sure it was artificial. “She never knew about this. I only put her into Eden when I knew that she wasn’t coming back. The sim-Theresa is only about as good to me as a picture on your desk would be to you. I just wanted something to remember, so I recorded her in her room–talking, dancing, singing in the shower–and used that as the basis for the simulation.”

Adric hesitated before he spoke. “She disappeared, you know. Rumor was she went underground.”

Gary nodded, or at least made the appropriate noises from his speaker. “I thought as much. I couldn’t find her.”

The speaker started playing her erratic singing voice again over the waves. “Ground Control to Major Tom, your circuit’s dead, there’s something wrong!”

Adric finally decided he’d had enough for a while. He forced the virtual camera back to the beach, and there she was, walking to the cave, still naked. “Put some clothes on her,” he growled.

“OK,” Gary said. A wooden chest fell from the sky, and hit the sand with enough force to half-bury itself. It was so sudden and so loud that Adric jumped. Sim-Theresa barely reacted; she just walked up to it, opened it, pulled out a new sundress, and pulled it on over her head.

Adric still clutched at his heart, adrenaline pumping a bit from the sudden entrance of the chest. “Why did you do that?”

“Because it’s easier to introduce foreign elements into the sim that way than it is to just make them appear. She’s used to it.”

As if in response, Sim-Theresa absent-mindedly said, “Thanks, Gary,” and picked up an apple and started eating it.

Adric turned away. “Shut it down, Gary, or I’ll have you wiped.” He wasn’t loud, just forceful.

Sim-Theresa kept singing around the bite of apple in her mouth. “Though I’m past one hundred thousand miles…”

Then it was silent. The screen went dark. “Fair enough. It’s gone. I have released my concentration… and the sim is dead.”

Adric confirmed this on the out-of-band monitor he carried, and started to walk out the door. “Goodbye, Gary,” he said.

Something about the fact that Adric said goodbye to him, while Theresa had not, caused Gary to make a different decision at the last moment.

“Wait,” Gary said, when he reached the door.

“What?”

“Do you want to know what we discovered running this sim?”

Adric’s heart began to pound. The sim had been running for fifteen years! He had forgotten about that. He turned slowly around, wondering if Gary would make his life worthwhile with a word. In fifteen years, nobody had yet accomplished everything that he had hoped to do down here with the computer simulation.

“Yes, Gary,” he said cautiously, afraid to hurt Gary’s feelings. “I am profoundly curious. What did you find?”

Gary spoke proudly, for the last time as he wiped his verbal information from the natural language interface. “We confirmed the primary postulate. Adric, you are an ass.”