The visibility was too poor for him to see how the feed was holding out. So he rolled over to the feeder’s control pad and pushed the filler button. That caused an auger in the feeder’s pedestal to turn, carrying seed up from the five gallon hopper in its base to the covered feeding station on top.
As often happened, using the device gave him a faint pang of bittersweet nostalgia as he remembered the wheelchair-bound kid of ten who had laboriously scrawled a diagram for a feeder even he could maintain. A bird-watcher who also happened to be a patent attorney had seen a writeup about it in the paper, and that had been the beginning of his reputation as a whiz kid. The feeder had paid for his first serious computer, which proved to be love at first sight. Trying to make it more lovable had led him into programming and AI. The rest was, as they say, history.
It had also marked the true beginning of a life spent trying to overcome his own limitations and to have some semblance of the life other people enjoyed.
That beginning had led to… what?
To this house, this life. Money. Fame. A zealously maintained self-reliance and privacy.
Yes, all that and more. But isn’t there something else? This morning’s Topic A, for instance?
A mordant smile twitched at his lips as a new thought came to him. All of his adult creations had been nominally female. Could it be that he had all along been subconsciously striving to create the girlfriend or wife he’d never have any other way? And could it be that he’d succeeded where others had failed not because he was smarter, just more desperate?
“Doesn’t look any nicer out there, does it?” Ursula said.
He turned away from the window, glad she’d interrupted that chain of thought. “Not really. So how’s it going, love?”
His brain caught up with his mouth a moment later. Love. How long had he been calling her that?
“I don’t think this is going to work.”
A push on the joystick sent him rolling back to the worktable. “Let me take a look. Put your overall operating schema… up on the screen.”
She gave him a very strange look. “You’d rather look at them than at me?”
“Of course not, I—” He hesitated, the meaning of what she’d said sinking in. “Aren’t your schema as much… you as your image?”
It was her turn to hesitate, and she looked—he searched for the right word—stricken, her expression freezing in place as if every iota of processing capacity at her disposal was being diverted toward answering his question.
Maybe it was. An AE by definition had a well-developed sense of identity, and he was only just now beginning to catch on to just how well developed hers had become, and that there were ramifications to this that a certain expert hadn’t even begun to consider.
He’d just asked her a killer question, and her answer would tell him more about what she’d become than a dozen reams of printout ever could. Now what was the right answer?
On the screen she blinked as if shrugging off the caul of deep thought, her face settling into a look which suggested that she wasn’t sure he was going to like her answer. He studied her face, feeling quietly amazed. Once upon a time her facial expressions had been carefully calculated representations of the activity in her emotional response emulators.
But not any more.
Now they simply showed how she felt.
“I don’t think so,” she answered cautiously. “I know I’m made up of a whole lot of routines and emulators and fuzzy logiclumps, some you made, some we made together. I know that I exist only inside a piece of equipment.” She hesitated, tucking a wing of hair behind her ear in a nervous gesture. “But I think of me as me. What I am, not what I’m made of.”
Key nodded. “And this image… is the you you feel inside.”
“Yes.” As if admitting she’d done something wrong. “It is now.”
“I see.” This was very unsure ground and he wasn’t sure a certain guy in a wheelchair could cross it without leaving deep ruts. Her face told him how much hung on what he said next.
“Then…” Hope and dread on her face. So human, so achingly human. “—Then you’re very beautiful.”
The smile those words brought nearly melted him down in his chair. “Do you really think so?” she asked hopefully.
“Really truly absolutely.”
He finally got it now. She had at long last found what she looked like, and with that image she had seamlessly integrated the manyness of her myriad parts into an all-inclusive one.
In other words, she had found herself.
In the process becoming so much like a real woman that he was at something of a loss as how to deal with her. He had to move them back to safer ground. Technical ground.
“Looking at you is… a lot nicer than looking… at your fluxcharts. But how else can I tell… why you’re having a problem… boxing up?”
From the very beginning getting even AIs boxed had proved to be nearly as hard as creating them in the first place. Specifying the hardware platform was easy enough, as was duplicating their multigigabyte knowledge base. Even the various association engines and selfness emulators and fuzzy logiclumps could be reduced to a code which could be stored and downloaded.
But that was just the bottle, not the spirit you had so painstakingly distilled. Thought was a process and even the most rudimentary awareness a continuing event. These were as frangible and elusive as life itself. They could not be started and stopped like a car or a set of calculations; they continued to happen because they were happening.
At present Ursula resided in almost two hundred thousand dollars worth of custom designed computer equipment, a light-fleet and fleeting electronic zephyr whispering through a convoluted labyrinth of superscalar paraparallel microprocessors and multimillion megabyte memory modules, living at no fixed address inside this architecture, and at no one moment more than a single gesture out of the glorious sweeping ballet of her existence.
Capturing that essence, that spark, was boxing. For the past couple of weeks he’d had her trying to create a parallel self in an identical platform and codifying that one frozen instant of animating dynamism which was the difference between the crass manipulation of information and sweet true intelligence.
Or in her case, the difference between a thing and a being.
“This is me,” she said soberly, touching herself as if to prove to both of them that she was real, her hand over her heart not her head. “Look at the flatscreen and you’ll see her.”
The image on the other screen was a flat-eyed caricature of Ursula, looking no more real or alive than something from an arcade grade VR. Technically perfect and perfectly technical.
“So what’s missing?”
“Me.”
He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“She can’t become me unless I become her.” Her voice dropped lower, slipping toward a whisper. “But if I become her, I won’t be me anymore, and—” She shrugged uncomfortably.
“And,” he prompted gently.
A helpless gesture. Lowering her head and looking down as if ashamed. “Yesterday I thought the reason I hadn’t been able to box for you was because I hadn’t been able to hit the right crucial moment. That I was doing something wrong. Well, I was, but it wasn’t what I thought.”
He waited patiently. He could see how hard this was for her, but it was something which had to be worked out.
“I didn’t—don’t—want to do it. I’m afraid to.”
“Why?” he asked softly. Fear of boxing was something he’d never encountered—or even considered before.
“I’m Ursula. I’m your Ursula. I don’t want—”