“Right here.” Always, like an interface left on standby; just wiggle your fingers and it flickers to life. “And yes, Genie's fine. About Min-xue—”
I'm getting there. You never did tell me why our conversation about Hercules made you jump like a shocked colt.
“I'm still running equations. I don't want to raise any false hopes until I know it can be done.”
Richard— But he's adamant, and I can feel it. The bastard always did like to spring surprises. And if he's still working on it, it's one hell of a problem. Something I've noticed lately about him and his mostly-silent alter ego. “Gabe, does Richard seem faster to you lately?”
“Gossiping, Jen?”
I can't be talking behind your back when you're in my head.
“Fair enough,” he says, as Gabe checks his step a half-stride to let me catch up with him and gives me a thoughtful look. Patty looks up as well, hazel eyes glittering under a mahogany fringe. “Yes,” Gabe says. “And I can tell you why.”
“All right. Patty, do you want something to drink now that we're out of the crush?” Not that a couple of handfuls of people is really a crush, but I remember how claustrophobic the wiring made me at first. And I had what they call a good adaptation.
“No, thank you, Jenny.” The kid's had entirely too much respect for authority stomped into her. And I don't even think it's all Fred Valens's fault.
“Well,” I say, “I do. Let's go find a chair in the lounge nobody uses, and Gabe can tell us his theory. What do you say?”
Gabe's got that raised eyebrow like he knows I'm up to something, but he nods, the corners of his mouth writhing with the effort of wrestling his smirk back into the cage.
I manage to get Patty to take a Coke, once we're seated in the fat, plush chairs of the smaller crew lounge. She draws her feet up under her butt with enviable flexibility and holds the unbreakable cup in both hands, staring past me and out the porthole. I never get tired of looking either, but I don't think the view really has her attention.
“Okay. Tell me about the AIs, Gabe.”
“Well,” he says, and threads his fingers together. “Based on my conversations with Richard, what's going on is that, in addition to acting as directors for the nanites as they breed through Earth's ecosystem, Richard and Alan are running on the spare cycles in the nanocritters themselves. It's a distributed network in the truest sense — no, it's a distributed brain; neurons and synapses and glial cells, or a mechanical approximation of the same.”
“A planet-sized brain,” Patty says, suddenly engaged.
“So the more the worldwire breeds, the more processing power Richard and Alan have available.”
“Yes,” Gabe says. He grins at me, and grins a little bit wider at Patty. He knows perfectly well I don't have a handle on this stuff; hand me a wrench and I'm happy. “But more than that. When we created the two Richards and remerged them, and then created Alan and gave him a direct link to Richard, what we did was build a multithreaded personality.”
“Elspeth called it disassociative identity disorder.”
“Elspeth's training is biased toward the conclusion that everyone is crazy,” Richard said. “Gabe's on the money so far.”
Gabe's a smart boy.
“So are we all,” Richard says, with the air of somebody quoting something. “All smart boys—”
Gabe's still talking, mostly to Patty now. I hope he didn't see me glaze over. “—got is a system where Richard and Alan have learned to divide themselves at will, to spawn self-directed processes that are, to all intents and purposes, new AIs, and then reabsorb these threads of themselves or each other, or allow different threads — I'm calling them personas, and I'm calling the whole AI structure an entity, for lack of a better name — allow different threads to rise in importance in the hierarchy as their job becomes more urgent or demands more system resources. So what's the zeroth persona at one moment can be the one-hundred-fifty-ninth tier a picosecond later, and then pop back up, and they all can spawn subprocesses and subpersonas customized to the task at hand. It's all interconnected. A true nonlocalized intelligence of almost infinite adaptability.”
Richard grins in my head. “He's figured out more than anybody except Min-xue has. Except he hasn't realized that we have an emotional connection to continuity of experience and personality, the same as you meat folks. So we're a bit less fluid than all that. But he's got the essentials down.”
You're not going to kill us all for having uncovered the evil AI plot to take over the world?
“Don't panic when I say this, Jen, but we don't need a plot. We've already conquered the planet. You're stuck with us now.”
Yeah, I say. I know. I finish my Coke and set the cup aside. I'll pitch it at the recycler on the way back out the door. Come on, Dick. Let's get this kid tucked in.
Gabe Castaign lay on his lofted, half-height alcove bed, ankles crossed, staring at the bulkhead — all two meters square of it. Or more precisely, staring at the porthole that pierced it. The bed was not quite broad enough for his shoulders. The only other furniture was a wall-mount swivel chair and a professional grade interface crammed into a third the normal space.
There was almost enough floor space to do push-ups. He'd seen solitary cells that were bigger, and had bigger windows.
But not a better view.
Genie's room was on the other side of the wall, her bed in the alcove immediately under his, so that he effectively had the top bunk and she the bottom, although they could not see or speak to each other.
He'd spent the first three weeks that they'd shared a wall teaching her Morse code — and he had to be the last man on the planet who knew it. It tickled her to learn, like knowing the Victorian language of flowers or something. She just knocked on the ceiling of her bunk when she wanted him, and he in his turn knocked on the floor. They'd become curiously formal with each other since Leah's death and the separation that had followed, and Gabe hadn't had the heart to press her as he knew he probably should. Kids were always funny around that age anyway, just moving toward adulthood, womanhood, and secrets. It was a strange, sad, and mysterious thing.
And he was too much of a damned coward to reach out and grab her before she got away. Irritated, he swung his feet down, ducking the edge of the bunk, and slithered to the floor. Half the covers followed him, rasping his jumpsuit pockets; he tidied them with military reflexes. He didn't even have to step across the room to reach his chair, just turn around and sit.
“Richard,” Gabe said, settling back, eyes trained on the revolving view through the porthole. “Remember when we were busting our asses trying to fix Ramirez's hack job on the Montreal's operating system?”
“Intimately,” the walls answered, as if the conversation had been ongoing rather than abruptly and unceremoniously commenced. “There haven't been any disturbances since we declared it clean.”
“I keep thinking it was too easy.” Reinforced aluminum creaked under Gabe's weight, even in partial gravity.
“You thought at the time that there might be a second saboteur.” Which, Richard didn't say, was a hypothesis they'd examined thoroughly and discarded. Richard was not the sort to disregard hunches, or discrepancies that nagged at the back of your mind for days, or weeks, or months.