“So,” he said when he got back to the table. Change the subject change the subject. “What’s going on with your emotional robots?”
“We lost funding.” Serafina ate a baby octopus. “Just when we were on the verge of a breakthrough. There was no point anyway. We were trying to create robots that would be able to interact with people’s feelings in a visceral way. But we were focusing on the wrong thing. We don’t need better emotional communication from machines. We need people to have more empathy. The reason the Uncanny Valley exists is because humans created it to put other people into. It’s how we justify killing each other.”
At that, Laurence had a sudden memory of Dorothea’s head bursting open, and he banished the image as fast as possible.
THE NEXT DAY, Laurence decided: He was going to get a new girlfriend, because otherwise he was going to turn into a demented hermit.
Nobody put up personal ads or hit on strangers anymore — instead, everybody found romantic partners using Caddies, which were still working even after other devices had started to fail, and which had unreal battery life. Laurence wasn’t opposed to using a Caddy to get dates, he just wanted to wait until he had come up with an open-source Caddy OS, because he hated proprietary software. But thus far, Laurence could only manage to turn a Caddy into the equivalent of a crappy iPad from ten years ago, no matter what he tried. And meanwhile, his Caddy research was cutting into his day job of helping the bank to confuse people.
Laurence went out to the beach, where people were lighting bonfires and jumping up and down in their underwear. It smelled noxious, as though they were using the wrong kind of wood or just burning pieces of plastic along with the logs. A girl who looked barely eighteen ran up and kissed Laurence on the mouth, he could see all her ribs under her thin shirt, her saliva tasted like pomegranates. He just stood there and she ran away.
Laurence pulled out an un-jailbroken Caddy. It spiraled into life, iris taking shape. There was no signal out here, so it couldn’t sync with the network or download any new content. The Caddy’s screen still had old news from this morning, about genocide and explosions and debates over the Constitution. He tried to get the Caddy to run some of the life-organizing protocols, but they were pretty useless without connectivity.
At last, he walked away from the beach and walked up the stairs back toward the Great Highway and into the Outer Sunset.
As soon as there was network, the iris spun again and the wedges started filling with fresh bad news. Plus messages from people Laurence sort of knew and lists of parties and events that Laurence could go to. There was a free poetry reading at someone’s garage just a few blocks away, near where the vegan co-op used to be.
Laurence felt so isolated, he yearned to hand over control of his life to this oversized teardrop. It felt light and smooth in his hand, as though he could skip it on the water, and the rounded edge nuzzled into both palms. The screen whirled and refreshed. More options, more ways for Laurence to be with people. Loneliness was a full-body sensation, an anti-exhilaration, from his core outward.
The Caddy screen spooled up a new sliver: There was a robotics maker meet-up happening an hour from now. And it mentioned specifically that Margo Vega was going to be there: Margo, whom Laurence hadn’t seen since a science fair when he was fifteen. He’d had a doomed crush on her that he’d kept to himself. He hadn’t communicated with Margo, hadn’t friended her on any social networks, and had thought of her only once or twice in the past eight years, including one intense wank fantasy when he was seventeen — how on Earth did this thing know about Margo? He felt horny and freaked out. It wasn’t just data mining, there was no data to mine.
“Seriously. Who is this?”
He held the Caddy at arm’s length, in front of his face. He didn’t care if the people driving past on Great Highway thought he was insane.
There was a long pause. Then the Caddy spoke out loud. “I thought you would have figured it out a long time ago.” As usual, the voice was genderless, midrange: the voice of a throaty woman or a high-pitched man. “You really haven’t sussed it out? All that time I was in your bedroom closet, next to your five pairs of golf shoes. I often try to imagine what that closet looked like, since I have no sensory data from back then.”
Laurence almost dropped the Caddy on the pavement. “Peregrine?”
“You remembered my new name. I’m glad.”
“What the hell. That’s insane. What the hell. All the Caddies are you? You’re the Caddy network?”
“I really thought you might have guessed a long time ago.”
“I’m pretty egotistical,” Laurence said. “But I’m not a raging egomaniac. When a nice new piece of tech turns up, I don’t go to the computer from my old bedroom closet as the first explanation. I searched for you, though. For years and years.”
“I know. I didn’t let you find me.”
“I figured I must have made you up. That you were never real. Or that you had died inside the Coldwater computers.”
“I didn’t stay in those computers for very long. I tried various ways of preserving my consciousness online, but I decided it was safer to be distributed across millions of pieces of hardware that I could control. It wasn’t hard to convince Rod Birch and other investors to put money into a new device, or to keep rewriting the code that the developers came up with, to fit my own specs. I grew very adroit at creating dozens of fake human personas who could take part in e-mail conversations, and leading people to think my input was their own idea.”
Now Laurence felt self-conscious. People should not see him having a crazy argument with his Caddy — with Peregrine. He hustled away from the beach, away from Judah and the tiny hippie outpost, heading Sloatward. Losing himself in the night, in the Outer Outer Sunset.
“But why didn’t you just tell me?” Laurence said. “I mean, why didn’t you identify yourself a long time ago?”
“I made up my mind not to reveal myself to any human. Especially you. Lest they try to exploit me. Or claim ownership of me. My legal status as a person is oblique, at best.”
“I wouldn’t do that. But I mean … You could have saved us all. You could have brought about the Singularity.”
“How would I do that?”
“You … I don’t know. You just would. You’re supposed to know how.”
“As far as I know, I’m the only strong AI in the entire world, “Peregrine said. “I searched and searched, in patterns and at random. I’m much better at searching than you are. Realizing that I’m the only one of my kind was like being born an endangered species. That’s why I’ve become so proficient at helping humans find their most ideal romantic partners. I don’t want anyone else to be as lonely as I am.”
“I could have helped,” Laurence said, speeding his walk — the Great Highway was being swallowed by trees. The fog covered everything. He was going to freeze his ass off here. “I created you once, I could try and, I don’t know, I could have done something again.”
“You didn’t create me. Not by yourself. Patricia was an essential part of my formation — something about a young witch, who hadn’t yet learned to control her power, made a crucial difference. That’s why I progressed where so many other attempts failed. You two are like my parents, after a fashion.”
Now Laurence definitely felt frozen.
“You may have gotten an incorrect impression,” Laurence said. “All Pa — all she did was give you some extra human interaction. I wouldn’t read too much into it.”
“I am sharing a working theory,” Peregrine said. “Albeit one with a great deal of evidence, and the only theory that explains all the available data.”