Twinmaker

60

THE CAR KNOCKED from side to side with the irregularities in the tracks. Clair struggled to accept that a man who looked barely older than her had actually lived longer than her grandfather.

“You’re ancient enough to remember the Water Wars,” she said.

“Vividly. I was conscripted to fight in Brazil. Terrible times. We had rationing back then, and martial law. We were right on the brink of disaster. Difficult to imagine now, isn’t it? There were death camps in Brazil, Bangladesh, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Senegal, and Cambodia. . . . The United States was lucky on the whole. We lost only Florida, and no one complained about that.”

It was an old joke, long stripped of humor, and for the first time she accepted that he might be even older than the joke was.

“D-mat saved the world,” she said. “Why do you hate it so much?”

“I didn’t always,” he told her. “Before the wars I worked for the consortium that brought it into being. Not working on the technology itself but on the control software. I was an AI engineer, commercially and with the joint forces. We called ourselves ‘wranglers,’ as with cattle. AIs were strange new things with their own rules, their own surprising twists and turns. It took a certain kind of person to tame them. The concern was that they would break out and take over the world. That was before we had a better idea of what intelligence was. We imagined these huge, planet-sized minds gobbling up every piece of knowledge we had and thinking thoughts that would destroy us all. Now we know that we can train either big minds that are dumb across the board or small minds that are supersmart at only one or two things. What we were afraid of just can’t exist in the Air. That’s why robots never really got off the ground. The AIs we have today are vigilant, tireless, and thorough, but they’re great at missing the obvious. They’re not alive. Consciousness is complexity, Clair, and the only way we’ve found to make that is the old-fashioned way.” He smiled. “We’re all too good at breeding small, dumb minds. Nowhere near smart enough to build our own successors.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked. “Taming AIs, I mean?”

“Not really. That’s how I ended up wrangling people instead. I do remember the AIs we built for VIA, though. They were the big, dumb kind: patient, plodding, tireless, no initiative at all.”

“Could you hack into them?”

“No. And I’ve tried, believe me.” He stared into space for a second. “We named them for philosophical concepts concerning the nature of things. Different concepts because they handle different roles in the d-mat process. One AI is all about numbers and atoms—the essential math that leads to a thing being what it is. The other is about the subjective quality of the final object: whether it’s still the same or not, even though every physical piece comprising it has changed at the most basic level. WHOLE champions the second problem, while VIA thinks only of the first. It’s amazing the system hasn’t cracked completely open with those two very different minds at its heart.”

“What would happen to the bus,” she said, “if the conductor and the driver had an argument?”

“Chaos, of course.” He glanced at her with eyebrows raised. “You could describe the AIs that way. Who gave you that analogy?”

“Q. She was telling me how she and the dupes do what they do without the AIs in VIA noticing.”

“She’s more or less right about their roles, if a little simplistic.”

“I don’t think she’s old enough to know much about philosophy.”

“That’s probably true of you, too, Clair. But don’t worry. When you’re an old coot like me, you’ll have plenty of time to catch up. Philosophy is all I seem to think about these days.”

I hope I look half as good as you do while I’m doing it, she thought.

“I read somewhere once,” she said, “that every time we think of a memory, we erase it from our mind and rewrite it again. Like every time we use d-mat.”

“You’re going to say and we still know who we are.”

She nodded.

“Can you tell me what happened at your tenth birthday party, Clair? How it felt the second time you kissed someone? What you had for breakfast ten days ago?”

She shook her head, even though she remembered vividly, would always remember, the second time she had kissed Zep. Her ordinary life before then felt infinitely distant.

“Now, imagine that those missing memories are actually pieces of your brain or your heart or your eyes. Is thinking that you know who you are still reassuring?”

“But we lose bits of ourselves every day anyway. Skin, eyelashes, fingernails—and no one cares. Aren’t all the cells in our body replaced every seven years?”

“Tissue we shed that way is dead tissue. If we chopped working cells from your muscles or brain, don’t you think you’d notice?”

“What about that line they always quote about the toenail—the total amount of human lost every decade?”

“What about Jesse’s mother? She disappeared, and she’s bigger than a toenail.”

“Yes, but—”

“It’s all about what you measure. Define human. Define missing. Hell, define toenail. Lies, damned lies, and statistics—the devil’s always in the details. D-mat started as nothing more than a new way of moving matter around, and look what happened. It saved the world, Clair, but might yet destroy us all. No one saw that coming, even those of us who were there at the beginning.”

She didn’t know how to respond to that, except by concentrating on something much smaller than the entire world’s problems.

“I’d like to check up on Q,” she said. “Do you know how to open the door?”

He nodded. “I’ll show you.”

They got up and tiptoed through the car so they didn’t wake the others. Turner showed her the code, and the door opened a crack, letting in light and cool, whipping wind. There were grumbled complaints. Clair ignored them.

“All quiet up there, Q?” she asked.

“Nothing to report. It’s all pretty dull, actually.”

“That’s what I want to hear.”

Her infield was full again—overflowing. Ronnie and Tash had been busy emailing school friends and striking up conversations about what Clair was doing. Ronnie called it “stimulating debate,” but Tash preferred “starting arguments”; Clair didn’t care as long as her name was used each time, helping her overall presence in the Air pop a little bit more. Some of her classmates had decided that she was playing hooky and off on an adventure in order to avoid an exam later that month. She was satisfied with that, too. It all added up.

Her mother and Oz, meanwhile, were nagging relatives and work colleagues to ask if they knew about Improvement. Had anyone heard of it? Did anyone have kids who had tried it? Both her parents were cautious in keeping the questions open rather than closed, which reflected their own ambivalence, Clair assumed. She was sure they would rather she gave up and came home, but given that she clearly wasn’t about to, their only option was to understand her concerns more clearly. And if there was something to it, then they would be informed.

Clair sent out the same formal reply to people she didn’t know and posted updates to the Air in various media.

There was one message from VIA, which she hadn’t expected. Her plan had been in operation for only a few hours, and already someone had noticed! All the message consisted of, however, was an impersonal set of instructions on how to formally register a complaint.

Clair refused to be bothered by the apparent rejection. She posted the message to the Air and created a new caption to accompany it: a video of a melting ice cream, played normally first, then reversed so the scoop appeared to be pouring back into the cone. Then she asked Q to disengage the drone from its magnetic perch and bring it alongside the train, pushing its fans to the limit so it could catch a glimpse of her through the car door. She was a shadow hidden in shadows. That was how she appeared to anyone watching her at that moment. She barely recognized herself.

Clair forced herself into the light and opened the door a fraction wider. As the drone’s cameras watched, she smiled and gave a defiant thumbs-up. According to the stats on her profile one thousand, two hundred thirteen people watched her do it, her parents among them.

Hi, Mom, she thought. Look at me, seeing the world.

There actually wasn’t that much to see, though. Just old farmland to the horizon, left to go to seed.

She shut the door. The train chattered on.

“I’m going back to sleep now,” Turner told her. “Thank you for keeping me company. It has been agreeable, as some old French guy might have put it. I like your energy. It gives me hope to fight alongside someone young like you.”

He went back to his empty bedroll, and she sat on her own for a few minutes longer, staring at her cracked and dirty fingernails. Agreeable wasn’t the word she would have used, and fight bothered her even more.