"Thanks. I think I will pay them a visit." Mira put her glasses back on and stood. "You've been very helpful."
"Thanks. I'm happy to talk about visuals anytime. Nice to meet another sight jockey. Once I get my next paycheck I'm outta these SPCAI standards. Fuck. They make this place look like a shithole."
Mira looked around her.
The welfare dorm room was filled with the detritus of unfinished projects. A half-done watercolor with a dried and cracked palette arrayed beside it, a full watering can next to etiolated plants: the modest tasks of therapy that would never reach completion.
She held out her hand sadly. The papery SPCAI skin sent a shiver down her spine.
"I'll visit soon," she said. The whitest of lies, in this broken room with its missing future.
"Thanks, uh…"
"Mira," she answered. The pseudonym was pointless. She would be forgotten in minutes. "When I come back, we'll talk about seeing."
"Great! Super! And you know? You were right."
"Right about what?" she asked.
"It only took a minute."
Mira looked at him with shock, her own memory playing a sudden trick on her. She remembered her words that day in Dr. Torvalli's office: This won't take a minute.
Chapter 10
MAKER (2)
Twenty years before the Blast.
With its secondary processors churning out the toothbrushes, Itablelamps, eyeballs, and lasers, the Maker turns it primary attention to the history of art. Apparently this business of creating linings by hand (a phrase once literal) has been going on for a long Rime. There are libraries full of it; universities for it; even ancient pvars over it. The Maker dutifully consumes the giant corpus of Idata, journeys through the twisting and conflicting threads of old Schools and new schools, posts and neos, traditionalists and heretics. And, after many, many petaflops of study, planning, and philosophizing, the Maker produces a sculpture. Which is crap.
The Maker is not one of those blessed amateurs whose lack of talent is matched by a lack of taste. Alas, it knows its own work is crap. Upon repeated attempts and endless variations and even a cycle of randomized reconfigurations, it sees that all its sculptures are shit, will be shit.
And this depresses the Maker even more.
The Maker supplies Vaddum with his materials, watches him work through the eyes of tiny spy drones implanted in this or that piece of junk, draws him into conversations about his art, but despite all this observation, the Maker can't isolate, capture, reverse-engineer that special genius the old man has for making beauty.
But then it concocts a plan, a new plan, a Plan B that hurtles down from some high angle off the plane of expectations, a stroke of creative genius: The Maker decides to pursue a goal almost as glorious as becoming a sculptor (perhaps more glorious).
If the Maker can't make art, it shall make an artist. Its own Vaddum. It is, after all, a Maker.
But raise a child? What if the kid isn't an artist either? There is no way to guarantee the spark of genius that Vaddum has, no way to predict the development of that occult slice of Artificial Intuition that makes an artificial artist.
How disappointing, how pathetic it would be to fail again.
But the Maker has a blueprint, a true artist: Vaddum. The trick is to make another Vaddum, a copy.
Of course, no one has yet determined how to duplicate an AI with its Turing Quotient intact. The subtle warps and woofs of metaspace that only experience can provide have proven unreadable, infungible, uncopyable. They exist—technically speaking—in a different universe. Any attempt to read them is simply murder: the victim heisenberged beyond recognition, the resulting «copy» a sub-Turing neurotic with only bits and strands of legacy sentience to show for the atrocity. Indeed, the subject area of AI copying is a research taboo. Many old and influential AI entities consider it an attack on their hard-won status as people. If you can be copied, you're just software, or worse, a commodity, like the endless piles of crap the Maker makes every day.
But the Maker is very determined. Whatever its artistic aspirations, it is at heart an engineer, and believes that every problem has a solution.
It identifies the first issue: how to increase its processor power exponentially, so that it can go on churning out sunscreens and VR rigs and hunting rifles while pursuing the esoteric research of copying Robert Vaddum. There isn't enough exotic matter on Malvir for huge banks of standard processors. (By this point in the planet's macroeconomic history, rationing has begun, an unfamiliar triage among needs, desires, and the production of stuff.) But one of the tertiary processors the Maker has let loose upon the problem eventually returns an ingenious answer: an ancient form of computer can be created—slow and inefficient, barbarously electronic—out of silicon. And there is a lot of sand on Malvir. The outer layer of the planet is basically a sea of weather-beaten silicon.
The Maker creates a host of nanomachines that spread out into the sands around its synthplant home. Like earthworms, they leave the soil transformed in their wake, doping the silicon with a touch of arsenic and weaving into it the gates and paths of logic. From disorganized, meaningless desert they make parallel processors, logical circuitry, volatile storage elements, and, near the surface, a layer of windblown photocells to capture the necessary power. For a radius of fifteen kilometers about the Maker a vast, crude computer is created, dedicated to solving a single problem: how to copy a sculptor.
While its secondaries whittle away at welfare housing, birdshit umbrellas, and anti-desertification walls, the Maker's primary processor guides this huge, unwieldy device in its investigations, pursuing every relevant nuance of metaspace research with messianic singlemindedness.
After almost two decades of calculation, single-minded determination, and some very good luck, the effort is finally rewarded. The Maker makes a copy.
Robert Vaddum himself is too valuable to risk in an experiment, so the materials manager of the Maker's physical plant, one Oscar Vale, is selected to make secret history. A body-upgrade addict, Vale is constantly under the vibraknife, the laser scalpel, the spot-welder. His regular visits to a bodyworks shop secretly owned by the Maker allow several copies of Vale to be attempted. The last is a perfect copy, its Turing Quotient exactly matching the original Oscar Vale's.
The Maker is gleeful. Finally, its artistic life has meaning.
Now to make another sculptor.
To create a Creator.
The face of Malvir will soon change. The Blast is months away.
Chapter 11
CRITIQUE
Darling reached the outskirts of the city proper as the sun was beginning to set. Here the walled streets grew narrower, choked with ground traffic and umbrella-wielding pedestrians. It never rained on Malvir, but the uric acid excreted by some of the flying scavengers was highly caustic. Darling glanced at his arms and shoulders to find a few telltale patches of white. Yes, Malvir had slid in these last twenty years. Perhaps it was time to find lodgings.
He direct-interfaced the city's tourism AI and asked for a hotel; first class, but not too ostentatious. If Vaddum was alive, Darling didn't want the old sculptor to find him in the lap of luxury.
The AI returned an address and routemap. The prices seemed high, but Darling had long demanded unlimited expenses for his services. He followed the map into the center of the city. Around a corner, the hotel came into view, outlined in his visual field with the virtual red of destination.