Limit of Vision (6 page)

Panwar
poured coffee while Virgil cleaned up. He ate a nutrient bar, and then another. A clock in the lunch room said 3 A.M.

Nothing felt real.

There was an awkward moment in the conference room when Virgil started to offer Summer a seat at the oval table—and remembered. “Gabrielle,” he said softly. “She was right here just a few hours ago.”

Panwar met his eyes. He had a hunted look, but he set his hands firmly on the back of Gabrielle’s chair. “The cindies have been all over this room,” he muttered. “There’s no trace of her left here. Nothing.” He edged around the chair as if it held a sleeping rattlesnake. Then he sat down.

Virgil imagined Gabrielle’s ghost, startled to discover how quickly it had fallen into the past.

Still, it was good to have someone to talk to, and something to talk about. “When you left,” he asked Summer, “the
L
ov
s were only being cultured as individual specimens, right?”

She nodded, sitting across the table from him, with Panwar in between.

“That changed when they were brought to the Hammer. They form colonies easily”—Virgil mimed the size and shape of a colony by pressing his fists together—”always roughly spherical. Imagine a piece of newspaper crumpled into a ball. The crumples are channels that allow liquid to circulate to the inner levels—but you must know all this already.”

Summer shrugged. “I’d like to hear it from you.”

“All right then. But we’ll need access to the project
R
osa
, and a link to E-3—the Epsilon colony, on the Hammer.”

Summer spoke with someone over her farsights. “All right. You’re connected.”

Panwar pulled a keyboard out from under the table, while Virgil set to talking. The coffee—or maybe it was his implanted
L
ov
s—had set his mind racing, so that his words ran light and smooth as he laid out his defense. “All right. Here’s the reason the
L
ov
s aren’t dangerous; why no one was at risk but ourselves.
L
ov
s need octopine for reproduction. Withholding octopine lets us control the size of a colony. That’s important. The practical upper limit seems to be roughly the size of a grapefruit. Larger than that, and the circulation of fluids to the interior is compromised, and the original
L
ov
s die. But octopine is rare in nature. In the wild, a
L
ov
could never get enough to reproduce.”

He broke off his explanation as the room lights dimmed and the screen came to life. “Here’s Epsilon-3,” Panwar announced as he balanced the keyboard in his lap. “Our most advanced colony. I’ve given it a two-way link. Narrow field.” He turned to Summer. “That means it can see Virgil, but not us.”

Virgil turned to gaze at the crumpled blue-green globe, fascinated as always by the suggestion of meaning in its scintillating lights. What was it thinking? If thinking was the word for what the
L
ov
s did. “Is it active?” he asked Panwar.

“It’s been roaming the Hammer, pestering the cafeteria staff.”

“Roaming the Hammer?” Summer echoed.

Virgil smiled. “Nothing sinister. The colony itself is confined, of course, to the
L
ov
lockdown aboard the EquaSys module. But it has control of an aerostat camera that can roam through public areas in the station. I’d love to set up a camera for it here as well, but the charter forbids the system to have ‘mechanical control’ of anything on Earth. It’s a paranoid restriction, but we’ve abided by it.”

“Settling for the minor violation of smuggling the
L
ov
s?” she asked.

“They aren’t dangerous,” Virgil said again. “We wouldn’t have done it if there was any threat.” His fingers moved compulsively to touch the
L
ov
s hidden beneath his hair. “We were able to do it because the
L
ov
s continue to be viable as individual organisms. They’re not dependent on the colony structure. Each one is quite capable of surviving on its own . . .”

He frowned at the screen, at the scintillating lights. “You know,” he said softly, “this is the last thing Gabrielle ever saw.” He turned to Panwar.

“Talk about the project,” Panwar said.

Virgil sank back in his chair. He had not had enough sleep. Or maybe he’d had too much coffee. He forced himself to return to the subject. “Our method of selection does favor those
L
ov
s that can most efficiently link with one another and operate together as a distributed system—like a billion tiny computers linked on a network. Change comes fast. Of the twenty colonies in the
L
ov
lockdown, most are obsolete generations. Nearly all our cognitive work involves the apex colony, the one that is most advanced at any given time. Right now that’s Epsilon-3. It’s our thirtieth generation, the third in Epsilon tank.”

Summer frowned. “So you’ve culled the first two Epsilon colonies?”

“No choice. We only have so many tanks. We do keep some older specimens, though. Alpha-1 is the original colony. It still exists, but more as a museum piece than anything. Its development stagnated a long time ago. I’m not sure its
L
ov
s are even compatible anymore with the apex strains.”

“They’ve changed that much?”

“I think they have. We’ve been pushing development hard.”

“How is reproduction accomplished?”

“
L
ov
s are extracted at about ten thousand evenly spaced points throughout the parent colony, on the theory that this will pull some
L
ov
s from each thought ‘module.’ All the work is done via a robotic remote known as Lucy.”

Summer smiled. “By a ‘thought module,’ you mean those teams of
L
ov
s specialized for verbal skills, calculations, three-dimensional modeling, time sense, etc.?”

“Exactly. There are thousands of thought modules of course. Maybe tens of thousands, all of them almost certainly built on simpler modules, which in turn are based on even simpler formulas and so on. The interesting point is that
L
ov
s, being individual organisms, can retain and reproduce their own special skills when they’re transferred, so that they can construct a new module through their progeny.”

“So after the samples are taken . . . ?”

“The extracted
L
ov
s are injected into a clean tank. They cling to one another and begin to reproduce. If things go well, we get an initial visual-modeling sense within a few hours. The
L
ov
s are good with vision.”

Summer nodded. “So what happens when things don’t go well?”

Virgil looked to Panwar again, hoping he would take it. But Panwar shook his head. Virgil sighed. “There
are
a lot of failures,” he conceded. “In the early generations, ninety percent of new colonies performed worse than their parent, so we culled them, concentrating our resources on the more successful combinations. Now our failure rate is down to forty percent, and even the failures perform at a level far above Alpha-1.”

“So selection is based on the colony’s performance, not on individual
L
ov
s?”

Virgil nodded. “Essentially each team of
L
ov
s is being evaluated on how well it interacts.” It was a test his own project team had failed. He shook his head. He’d been aware of Gabrielle’s ambition. He should have guessed she would try to move ahead of the team. Why had he failed to see the danger?

“Virgil,” Panwar said. “Are you still with us?”

Virgil jerked upright in his chair, unsure how long he’d been silent. “Sorry.”

Summer looked sympathetic. And why shouldn’t she? She had started this thing after all. She had made the first
L
ov
s. She should feel a pride in their development. She should feel touched with wonder at this proof that cognition truly could grow from simple units.

Instead it frightened her.

He spoke carefully. “What we are seeing evolve in the
L
ov
colonies is a growing ability to learn about the world, and to interact with it.”

Summer turned skeptically to the glittering projection of Epsilon-3 on the center screen.

Virgil understood her doubt. “You’re thinking it’s the classic brain-in-a-bottle, with no connection to physical reality. But the same could be said of any one of us. All that we know of the world comes to us through our nervous system. The eyes are our visual sensors. The ears are our auditory sensors. Our body’s mass and mobility give us a sense of space. The
L
ov
s are similar. They see through cameras. They hear through microphones. They explore physical space through the aerostat. You should talk to the station personnel. They’ll tell you that the aerostat sometimes acts just like a puppy, or a baby. It will fix on someone and follow them around for hours. Or it will purposely get in the way, over and over again, as if it’s testing what it takes to get a reaction out of the world. When there’s music playing it will hover in front of the speakers, exploring different zones of sound.”

“And E-3 can speak,” Panwar said. “After a fashion.”

“Silicon computers can speak,” Summer countered. “And quite well.”

“Certainly far better than our
L
ov
s,” Panwar conceded, an edge to his voice.

“That’s right,” Virgil said. “Speech is hard. The
L
ov
s don’t pursue it on their own, like they pursue vision. Vision seems to come naturally to the
L
ov
s. Language doesn’t.”

Summer arched an eyebrow. “Is ‘natural’ the right word?”

“I’d like to think so.” He sighed. “If you’re expecting a slick performance, you’re going to be disappointed. The colony doesn’t do anything well. It just does lots of things in very interesting ways.”

“And forgets in fascinating ways as well,” Panwar added, a bit sharply. “That’s the price we pay for fluid connections between the
L
ov
s.”

Virgil nodded. “When a cognitive path dissolves, though, it’s not all lost. Relearning the skill is far easier than acquiring it.” He looked at Panwar. “Can we get it talking?”

“It is talking,” Panwar said. “I’ll raise the volume.” He tapped at his keyboard. Then he looked at Summer, a half smile on his face. “Hear it now? This is the first step in regaining speech. Epsilon-3 is speaking in tongues.”

Summer cocked her head as babbling sounds emerged from the speakers in a voice that sounded remarkably similar to Virgil’s. Only an occasional English word could be discerned. She turned to Virgil with a baffled look.

He shrugged, feeling a bit embarrassed, but nothing could be done. E-3 always started this way. No one knew why. “It is frustrating,” he mused, “but fascinating too. Why does it organize at all? Why does the organization fail? It’s almost as if it’s trying out different ways of being—”

Here Panwar chuckled.

Virgil sighed. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

Within a few minutes all the sounds were English words, but only now and then did two pull together in a sensible way:
Speak quick, clean air, arm reach, man move, remote talk
.

Summer looked skeptical. “Is there any conception of meaning in these phrases?”

Virgil shrugged. “At this stage? I’m not sure. It might just be an exercise, like singing scales, to reestablish verbal pathways. The vocabulary, though, has been taught because it’s relevant. These are the words E-3 needs to describe its experience.”

As he fell silent, so did Epsilon-3. Virgil found himself leaning forward, his hands squeezing the arms of his chair as he waited for what would come next. Then, with an abruptness that always startled him, words tumbled from the speaker, but this time they issued forth in a new, breathless rhythm
Speak quickly play remote talk with other not you
.

Summer looked at Virgil as if he were a charlatan in a street show.

“The grammar module is sour,” Panwar said.

Virgil ignored them both. The
L
ov
project was not about perfection, and it was not about creating a human mind. That was easy. Good old Love & Sex accomplished that feat thousands of times every day. The tantalizing aspect of the
L
ov
project was the prospect of developing a mind that was distinctly inhuman, yet still capable of complex thought. What would such a being think? What insights could it uncover? What new avenues of awareness could it reveal?

The desire to know ate at him. It was the same desire that had brought Gabrielle into the project, and in the end it had killed her. He blinked, his eyes dry and tired. “Replay that,” he muttered.

The “sentence” ran again:
Speak quickly play remote talk with other not you
.

Almost always the words carried their true dictionary meanings. They came out in a hash because the grammar was poor, or because they were used in unfamiliar ways. Decoding could sometimes work. He cued Panwar to transmit his words to the
L
ov
colony. “Speak of what?” he asked.

The answer returned immediately, as if an impatient child waited on the other end of the line:
What is all the other knew-know best.

Virgil bit his lip, thinking quickly. He had engaged in exchanges like this before, with the phrases stacked liked crashed cars in a fogbound freeway crack up. The tack he took was to clarify the meaning of each phrase before moving on. All right then: “What is the other?”

That is Gabrielle
.

He felt as if he’d been gut-punched.

“You want me to take it?” Panwar asked.

“No.”

“It remembers its last interaction with her.”

Virgil nodded. He drew a deep breath, reviewing once again the staccato sentence that had started this conversation.
Speak quickly play remote talk with other not you
.