‘But who’s happy? Not the person who used the mod; they no longer exist.’
‘That’s pretty old-fashioned. Change equals suicide.’
‘Well, maybe it does.’ She laughs suddenly. ‘I suppose I must sound like a total hypocrite. If a little moral nanosurgery creates a whole new person, then my one-and-only mod probably makes me a member of a whole new species—’
I cut her off quickly. ‘You mustn’t discuss that here.’
She frowns. ‘Why not? This is a company restaurant. Everyone here works for ASR.’
‘Yes—but there are twenty-three separate projects going on in this building. Different staff have clearance for different projects. You have to keep that in mind.’
‘All I said—’
‘I know what you said. I’m sorry. But it’s part of my job to make sure that security is maintained.’
She seems angry for a moment, then says, ‘I suppose I should take comfort in that.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’d rather believe that your job is to keep me from opening my mouth in the wrong place, than believe that I’m really in need of a bodyguard.’
The apartment is deep in the core of the building, so it has no true windows, but the real-time holograms in their place have such fine resolution and such wide angles of view that the difference is academic—except for the security advantages. I search each room quickly; it doesn’t take long to be sure that there are no human intruders, and it’s not worth looking for anything more subtle. A thorough sweep for microrobots would last a week, and cost several hundred thousand dollars. As for nanomachines and viruses, forget it.
I bid Ms Chung good night, and sit in the anteroom, watching the entrance. There’s no sound from within — I think she’s reading—and if anything’s happening in the adjoining apartments, it’s lost to the insulation. Even the airconditioning is inaudible. In fact, all I can hear is the faint mixture of insect noises—probably synthetic—that’s piped throughout the building for some fashionable pseudo-psychological reason; imitation Arnhem Land eco-ambience to keep us all attuned with Nature. Random at one level, but with enough order to keep it from becoming infuriating; in any case, P3 has no problem blocking it out. I slip into stake-out mode. Hours pass, uneventfully. Lee arrives to take my place.
Chung Po-kwai’s chant invades my dreams. I instruct Boss to filter it out, but it keeps sneaking in, disguised; a random telegraphy of dots and dashes in every sound, every rhythm, every motion… from myself as a boy, bouncing a basketball, swapping hands: right, left, right, right, left, right, left, right, left, left, left… to the mining robot in the warehouse, lurching in and out of its container—a subject itself supposedly forbidden.
Flaws in P3, flaws in Boss… what have I got, a brain tumour? I run the integrity checks in every mod in my skull, and all declare themselves perfectly intact.
The experiment continues, day after day, with no apparent progress. Po-kwai sounds as patient as ever as she calls out the data, but outside Room 619 her usual cheerfulness starts to take on a defensive edge, and I soon learn not to antagonize her by talking about her results. I can’t really tell if Leung, Lui and Tse are disappointed; they argue amongst themselves, mainly in English, but use jargon that I find incomprehensible. There’s no question of asking them about the project; to them, I’m basically just another component of the building’s security system, no more to be kept apprised of the state of the experiment than a camera on the ceiling, or a scanner in the corridor. And rightly so; that’s what my role should be.
Coming on duty one evening, though, I find myself alone with Dr Lui in the elevator. He nods at me and says, awkwardly, ‘So, how are you finding the work, Nick?’
I’m astonished that he even knows my name. ‘Fine.’
‘That’s good. I hear you were… recruited specially.’
I don’t reply. If discussing BDI is out of bounds, I’m hardly free to start chatting about the loyalty mod and the circumstances which led to its imposition.
It doesn’t take long to reach the sixth floor. Just before the doors open, he says quietly, ‘So was I.’
He steps out ahead of me, and passes through the security check without looking back. As I follow him down the corridor—a few steps behind, in silence — I feel, absurdly, like some kind of conspirator.
7
‘Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Down. Down. Up. Up. Up. Down. Up. Down. Down. Up.’
Ten in a row is rare enough to notice, but it still means nothing. Toss a coin ten times, and the odds are less than one in a thousand that you’ll get ten heads—but toss it nine hundred times, and the odds are better than one in three of at least one run of ten or more. Toss it nine thousand times, and the odds are almost ninety-nine in a hundred.
I glance at the histograms. Some are clearly distorted in the aftermath of the run, but already I can see them beginning to drift back towards their usual shapes.
I’ve long given up any pretence of trying to ignore the data. Fighting it only makes it more seductive—and in the unlikely event of an intruder getting past all the other layers of security and bursting into Room 619, I doubt that my reaction time would be significantly impaired just because I’ve let myself notice the latest illusory pattern in Chung Po-kwai’s chant. It feels like a kind of heresy to make this excuse; the priming mods are all about being in the optimal state of preparedness, nothing less. But given the apparent bug in P3, ‘optimal’ means something different now; I have no choice but to accept that. Lee and I have both dutifully informed Tong of the problem, but nothing will come of that; neither Axon—makers of P3 and Sentinel—nor ASR (who clearly have plenty of neural mod expertise of their own) are likely to waste their time and money investigating such an obscure flaw.
‘Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Down. Up. Up. Down.’
Sixteen! A new record. I plug numbers into the tiny program I’ve written for von Neumann. I’ve been present at forty-one fifteen-minute sessions, or thirty-six thousand nine hundred events… in which there’s a twenty-five per cent chance of a run of sixteen. But I have no time to ponder this —
‘Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up..’
My concentration falters, and I lose count. I turn to the histograms again. All the familiar ragged shapes have vanished, replaced by narrow spikes, growing steadily narrower.
‘Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up. Up..’
Dr Leung laughs and says, ‘P has hit ten to the minus fourteenth. I believe we have an effect.’ Dr Lui looks away from the screen, visibly overcome by emotion. Dr Tse glances at him, and scowls.
The strange thing is, there’s no hint in Po-kwai’s voice that she’s noticed her triumph. She just keeps calling the data as patiently as always—and the sound of her voice, even without the hook of randomness, is just as hypnotic as ever.
Three minutes later, the run ends, decaying into the usual noise for the rest of the session. When Po-kwai emerges, sans dark glasses, she stands in the doorway for a moment, shielding her eyes with her forearm, then she squints about the room, looking dazed.
And then, dejected.