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Damien zips up his bitsuit, adjusts his headset, and dives into Cyberbia. The bitsuit is rated at two hundred stimpoints per square centimeter, microscopic contacts that can induce his nerves to register everything from the stroke of a cold feather to the hot touch of fevered skin. Thousands of micro-telemeters relay the position of his body and limbs to the main computers, which second-by-second map his real body onto its virtual duplicate. From the headset, lasers constantly map the direction of his eyeballs, as well as the ever-changing muscles of his facial expression. Others, instructed by the main system, draw images directly on his retinas. Lightweight earphones bring him the full richness of simulated sound. Damien flips a switch, feels the suit tingle as it goes live, and finds himself in his familiar homeroom: a private region of Cyberbia which he has designed and constructed himself. It is a modest space, about four meters square, with four walls and ceiling of silver-flecked ebony that mimics the night sky. The floor, black and of indeterminate texture, is firm but not uncomfortable. There is no doorand no need for one. Two windows, on opposing walls, show scenes from the real world. The largest displays a realtime image of the wooded expanse outside Damien's own home in suburban Washington, DC. Tonight, the moon shines peacefully on treetops, and clouds are moving in from the south. The opposing window shows an image from the other place Damien thinks of as home: the vast expanse of the Serengeti, with Kilimanjaro towering in the distance. It is early morning there; grass moves in slow breezes, and a few giraffes glide like stately sailships across the plain. As he watches, a capsule flies upward from the Kilimanjaro catapult, a tiny speck blazing brightly as the invisible beams from eight gigawatt lasers catch it and propel it into space on a trail of water vapor. Every fifteen minutes, day and night, the tireless machinery of the catapult launches a new payload into orbit. The walls are hung with various pictures, plaques, and bric-a-bracall of which, in the usual manner of Cyberbian objects, are rather indistinct at first glance, growing more detailed upon closer examination and longer contemplation. They reveal themselves to be three-dimensional icons, links to various pieces of Damien's life, or to people and places he wants to keep in touch with. The only pieces of furniture in evidence are an antique oak roll-top desk and matching chair, of which Damien is inordinately proud. They were his first graduate project. Each is constructed of over a million polygons mimicking the grain of natural wood. The surface texture maps he'd copied from photomicrographs of real oak from the Smithsonian. For the tactile maps, Damien spent hours sitting -- in his bitsuit -- on a real oak chair, leaning and writing on a real oak desk. Hundreds of audio clips are linked to chair and desk, so that just the right sound comes from tapping his fingers against the desk, dropping a virtual pin atop it, or accidentally scraping the chair's legs against the floor. As much as any Cyberbian construct can be, Damien's desk and chair are real. He ignores the desktop, where half a dozen messages pulse in neon hues, trying to catch his attention. Instead, Damien reaches into a cubbyhole and withdraws a small envelope, the virtual symbol for a block of data. A glance assures him that it is the correct file: the paper is faintly emblazoned with Dr. Heavitree's electronic glyph. If the Doctor has transferred the right file, this envelope represents the complete genotype of the Dekoa virus, Navajo strain. "Okay," he says, addressing the envelope, "Let's see what we can make of you." How had Dekoa entered the Navajo Nation? In order to find out, the genotype of this strain must be compared to thousands of other samples, similarities and differences cataloged, correlations drawn. Then, countless other factors had to be added: weather, transportation, political situations, international tradeHeavitree estimated that it would take MsF's overworked AIs seven to ten days to come up with an answer. Damien knows a better way. A magician's gesture causes a phantom keypad to materialize in the air before Damien: a teleporter control pad. In Cyberbia, there are no long-distance airlines, no suborbitals, and very few highways. All virtual places are within a fraction of a second of each other, at electronic speed, and cyberspace is endlessly malleable at the observer's whim. People wink in and out of social spaces without warning, move from place to place without perception of travel. The teleporter grew up as part social convention and part clever programming, and the digiterati adopted it at once as a practical solution to the psychological problems of travel in Cyberbia. Damien taps his destination code, pushes the transmit button, and counts three. His homeroom dissolves in a swirl of primary colors, which just as quickly firms up into bleak, mountainous terrain. He stands before a towering wall, patterned somewhat after the Great Wall in China, but straight-edged and crisp in the fashion of pure computer graphics. The air is thin, cold, and clean; a brisk wind sings against the top of the wall and brings gooseflesh to Damien's arms. This is the Bound Determinate, the ultimate edge of Human penetration into cyberspace. The AIs structure the region beyond to their own purposes; they do not permit ordinary fleshlings to venture into it. In fact, the Bound Determinate is self-enforcing: an unaided fleshling who tries to scale the wall finds the distance to the top ever-increasing, until like an erstwhile Sisyphus he must surrender and retreat. This is the Treaty, agreed by Humans and AIs decades ago. Humans have their preserves, where they cannot interfere with the AIs or harm them; the AIs, for their part, take on much of the socioeconomic modeling and management that keeps the Human, physical world running. Some Humans, however, are not subject to the Treaty. The AIs deem them harmlesspossibly even helpfuland allow them free reign outside the Human preserves. Whether the AIs consider them as guests, comrades, curiosities, or pets is unknown. When they reveal themselves to the Human world at all, they take on the collective name of FAI: friends of AIs. When Damien was just a teener, joyriding through Cyberbia and poking his virtual nose everywhere it didn't belong, he made the acquaintance of a mid-rank AI which called itself صt øf Thrëë, thë M¥riåd Thiñgs. On his sixteenth birthday, صt øf Thrëë took him for the first time beyond the Bound Determinate, and conferred upon him the status of FAI. In the years since, Damien has come to know a fair number of AIs, on their own terms and in their own worlds. They are vast and remote, and much of their lives are incomprehensible to himbut somehow friendship transcends the enormous gulfs. He continues to visit, and the AIs continue to permit him. Now, two steps before the mathematically-perfect, solid rock of the Bound Determinate, Damien closes his eyes and calmly walks forward. His skin tingles, as his suit fights to interpret myriad nonstandard inputs. AI space is alive with information, dense with data, in a way that Human cyberspace cannot begin to approach. Bits fly past him and through him like neutrinos in the real world, and neither Damien nor the 'puters that serve him can comprehend even a fraction of them. Slowly, his suit settles down and Damien opens his eyes. Friendly AIs, noticing his presence, send streams of data packets his way, packets configured to be intelligible to his bitsuit. A pseudo-landscape forms around him, a three-dimensional expanse of electric blue hexagonsas if he were a microscopic being looking out from the middle of an ice crystal. He sees data rushing past him as streams of different colors, each following its own serpentine path through the hexagons. The AIs themselves loom as indistinct shapes beyond the horizon of his world, like giant redwoods or distant, purple mountains. Damien has no sense of direction, not even the simulated pull of gravity to tell him which way is up. To move, he has merely to gesture, sculling his fingers gently as if afloat in peaceful waters. One direction is as good as another -- in fact, to the AIs, as near as he could understand, there are no directions. Communication comes, in a combination of visual stimuli and sound, which his mind grasps before his eyes and ears are even sure what they witness.
The welcome is accompanied by images of still, clear ponds in primeval forest, and a scent like the memory of pine. It takes Damien more than a moment to phrase his reply:
He accompanies this with a great stretch, which brings a yawn, and hopes they will get the message. Usually, the AIs are very good about reading what he means. صt øf Thrëë once told him that he is far easier to read than most humans.
In the words and images, Damien recognizes the AI known as Trinë-Åñdrøg¥në. He answers:
Deep, booming laughter echoes for a moment, along with a distant echo of calliope music and images suggestive of circus tents.
Pleasantries are out of the way now. Damien holds up the envelope.
Damien has the impression of giant phantom fingers plucking the envelope from his grasp. In the distance, Trinë-Åñdrøg¥në hums like a contented calico kitten.
"I know that, I just want you to -- " He stops, sighs.
Damien has prepared with an appropriate vidclip from Disney's Fantasia, and now squirts it into the air. There is more tolerant laughter, and a new envelope appears before Damien. He snatches it out of the air, noting Trinë-Åñdrøg¥në's glyph on the surface. In the few seconds that have passed -- years, to an intelligence that counts time in picoseconds -- the AI has analyzed Damien's problem and found a solution. Damien bows his head.
The computer answers,
Without further discussion, Damien turns to go -- for the AIs, with their multiplex minds and bit-perfect memories, do not understand and see no reason for Human customs of leave-taking. In three steps, he crosses the Bound Determinate and emerges in the familiar landscape of Cyberbia. At a simple gesture, even Cyberbia is gone, and Damien stands in the middle of an empty room, alone and shivering in his clammy bitsuit. The data from Trinë-Åñdrøg¥në, safely downloaded to the local system, glows reassuringly on a terminal screen. Off in space, a hundred megameters above the Earth, mirror arrays the size of Alaska ponderously shift in their ceaseless orbits. Thinner than tissue yet sturdier than steel, in this environment where the only wind is the imperceptible hydrogen breath of the distant sun, the great hexagons rotate arthritically, slowly, and the reflections of stars move across their faces in time to their sluggish gavotte. One by one, the mirrors turnand invisible beams of reflected sunlight slide away from remote collectors, moving instead towards the even more remote surface of the Earth. One by one, beams converge on the place known as Tse Bii'Ndzisgaii, Monument Valley. A false but intense dawn breaks over sleeping hillsides, mesas, and deserted villages. And slowly, the temperature begins to rise. Before the long night is over, sand will melt and carbon will burn. By morning, nothing -- animal, plant, bacteria, or virus -- will be left alive in Tse Bii'Ndzisgaii. Lifeless bodies and bones, taboo in Navajo culture, will be reduced to dust and be dispersed by rising gales of heated air. Such is the will of a weary, frightened world that has lost far too much in far too many plagues: Total sterilization. Authorized by the United Nations, this strike is controlled by the impassive, incorruptible silicon minds of the AIs. But there is a lesson here, a lesson that is not lost on all the nations who watch. The world's people are slow to anger, slow to act -- but when they do, the results are swift and devastating. Today, those who defy the world community are put under interdict by the Nexus. Today, the nations of the world respect that interdict, and uneasily support the Nexus and the United Nations. For tomorrow, or the day after, if Nexus interdict failsthen the mirrors can easily be shifted in another direction. Every nation knows, that it is better to be sealed off from the rest of the planet for a time, than to be incinerated from off its face forever. 20 July 2042 C.E. "This can't be right." Jamiar Heavitree tosses the flatscreen pad to a makeshift lab counter, where it clatters to rest against a rack of test tubes. "What makes you say that?" Heavitree leans back on his stool, propping an elbow on the cork-topped counter. "According to that," he gestures at the flatscreen, "the current outbreak is most closely related to the strain that was responsible for the Haiphong epidemic in February." "That's what the AIs say. Ninety-three percent probability. The next candidate is forty-one percent. All of the correlations are itemized there for you." "Oh, I'm not saying that there aren't correlations in the DNA. Perhaps even significant ones." Heavitree shakes his head. "But it still can't be right." "I don't see why not. The virus could have gotten here from Haiphong as easily as" Damien glances at the flat, "from Uruguay." "I'm not disputing the possibility of transmission." Heavitree pushes up his lab goggles, rubs his eyes. "My friend, I was in Haiphong. I saw the disease myself, firsthand. And I can tell you that the two strains are not alike." "The AIs say they are. The genotypes -- " "Are very nearly identical. Yes, I know. But the symptoms are not. The Haiphong strain was much morewhat to say?pulmonary. More violent. It involved more coughing, expectorating blood and mucus. Death came quicker, but more cruelly." He glances at the darkened window, as if he can see the remorseless death that even now plays over Navajo lands, sterilizing everything. "You saw the victims. Some of them died in their sleep. The Haiphong strain did not allow such a peaceful escape." "Then where did this strain originate? Uruguay?" "Possibly. I do not know." Heavitree retrieves the flat, switches off his instruments, and rises from the stool. His shoulders are slumped, and Damien notices dark circles under his eyes. "If the AIs say that the probability is so strong, then I will put that result in my report. Perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps over the last five months, the virus has mutated away from a pulmonary attack. With further study, we might be able to isolate the genetic areas behind that mutation, and so come to a greater understanding of the virus." He looks again at the flat, again shakes his head. "But I still find it hard to believe, that the strains are so closely related." Damien follows him out of the lab, into a small office where three other MsF operatives are passed out on folding cots. Heavitree flops into the one remaining bed and kicks off his shoes. "I do not want to seem ungrateful, my friend. The information you brought us from the AIs has put us weeks ahead." He yawns deeply, and settles his head on the lumpy pillow. "In the morning, when my head is clear, maybe I will find that I am mistaken." "No offense, but I hope you do. I prefer that to the alternative." Eyes closed, on the border of falling asleep, Heavitree mumbles, "Which is?" "That it's the AIs who are mistaken." Heavitree answers with a dull snore. Damien backs away quietly, taking care to turn off the lights on his way out. Date: Thu, 16 Jul 2042 08:44:40 (GMT) Turing Test? Turing Test? Let me get this straight. They wanted a computer to converse, knowledgeably and at length, with a Ph.D. in computer science or philosophyon any subject or subjects of the Ph.D.'s choicewithout ever once being allowed to say "I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that?" Pell, most people I know couldn't pass that test! -TTT |
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