Perion Synthetics (6 page)

Cam shuddered.

“Anyway, I go to town on this fazool, cut
all the ingredients myself, and serve it to the suits in our best bowls. Mr.
Perion takes one bite and shits his pants—pardon my language. Best fucking meal
he’s ever tasted, he says to me. Offers me a job on the spot, says he’ll give
me my own restaurant. Only catch is I have to move from San Fran to this place.”

“Most people I talk to can’t wait to get out
of there.”

“You’re not from an Italian family, Mr.
Gray. You don’t just up and leave ‘em because some moneybag wants to make you
his personal cook.”

“And yet you’re here.”

“You noticed that, huh? Just because I stay
here doesn’t mean the money does. At least I know Ma is taken care of.”

“Does she know about
them
?”

“No,” said Cosimo. “I’m not supposed to talk
about that kind of stuff with outsiders.” He stepped in closer, perhaps afraid
of who might hear him. “I’ve tried to drop hints, ya know, but Ma don’t
understand so well anymore.”

“And you? What do you think about Gerard
here?”

Cosimo slapped the synthetic on the
shoulder; it barely moved.

“They creep me the fuck out sometimes, but
they take orders well. No creativity though. They make the same thing over and
over again; it’s never different. It doesn’t matter much here, but at my
restaurant, I’ll only trust ‘em to prepare the bread.”

“You ever get nervous with them handling
knives?”

“Ha! I’ve heard stories about the first
synnies, about how they were uncoordinated, not blessed with the fine touch it
takes to prepare food. Now the eggheads come and swap out my staff every four
or five months, so they keep getting better. Gerard here has been working for
me for two and hasn’t cut himself once. Neither have the others. It’s like
they’re
learning
.”

He let the word hang in the air.

Cam made a few notes in his phone and
extended his hand.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Castelluccio.
And you too, Gerard.”

“Gerard, directive. Say goodbye to our
aggregator friend.”

The synthetic came to a sudden stop and
cocked his head. “Goodbye, Mr. Gray.”

Cam raised an eyebrow.

“Oh yeah,” said Cosimo. “Sneaky bastards,
huh? You think they’re not listening to every word you’re saying? Bullshit. And
if they’re listening, then someone back in the Spire is listening too, bet on
it.”

“Someone always is,” said Cam, reading a message
on his phone.

“Ask him if he knows Vinnie the Mouth,”
Banks had texted. Evidently, the big boss was tuned into Cam’s raw feed. It
wasn’t unheard of for engineers or QA to listen in when aggregators were out on
the job, but usually they had the decency to give prior notice.

Cam nodded politely and exited the kitchen
through the swinging doors. The crowd in the cafeteria had swelled since he
arrived; the tables to his left were full of children, but on the right, a mix
of humans and synthetics sat eating lunch. At least, the humans were eating. It
was the only tell Cam could identify, seeing how synthetics behaved more or
less like humans, nodding their heads to the conversation, smiling when
appropriate, and even responding with what, their opinions?

Before he could join one of the tables to
listen in, Cam felt a hand on his arm.

“Where were you?” asked Sava.

“In the kitchen, interviewing the automated
cooking robots. I’m going to call them AutoCookBots, ACBs for short.”

Sava glanced over the serving line. “Well, I
hope you got something of value. Chuck’s not going to be able to make it to
lunch. He’s working on some project he can’t tear himself away from, so we’ll
have to meet him at the office later. You hungry?”

Cam nodded and followed Sava to the plastic
trays.

“So how long have you two been dating?”
asked Cam.

Sava’s blush came on fast. “What? What makes
you think…?”

Cam pushed his tray along the metal bars.
“I’m an aggregator. I pick up on things.”

“So it was in my file, wasn’t it? His too,
maybe?”

“Nope. Two parents, one sister, a dog, but
no mention of a boyfriend.”

“Then how did you know?”

The smile on Cam’s face grew. “It’s in the
way your voice drips with affection when you say his name. Chuck. Not Mr.
Huber, but
Ch-uuuuuck
.”

“Goddamn outland feeders,” grumbled Sava.
She nodded to the synthetic behind the counter and asked for a salad.

“Banks Media presents
Love in the Desert
,
the story of a PR flack and an engineer who defied all odds. He discovered
universal truths, she made hers up, and yet in each other’s arms, they found
happiness.”

“Sounds like the kind of bullshit Banks
Media is known for,” said Sava. “Though if you feed any shopped pictures of me
and Chuck holding hands in some lab, I’ll send an army of synnies after you.
Don’t think I won’t.”

“You mean, if they could get past the PNR
without dissolving from the inside out, right?”

Sava’s blue eyes stared back. “Yeah,” she
said. “Right.”

Cam nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

“What can I get for you today, sir?” asked
the synthetic.

“Pasta fazool,” said Cam.

“The world as we understand it is fundamentally flawed.”

Chuck Huber’s hands moved like those of a
conductor in front of an orchestra, but instead of emphasizing the first beat
of the measure, they came down hard at the end of his sentences, as if to drive
home the point that what he had just said was the most important statement the
world has ever known.

Cam tried to keep his eyes on Chuck’s face,
on the wireframe glasses resting on a hooked nose, on the deep black eyebrows
that stood in contrast to the salt and pepper hair on his head, but there was too
much activity taking place in the air between them.

“In that, I mean it is an incomplete system,
one without finite rules to govern its occupants. You may think we humans have
progressed to a point where we understand how everything works, but you’d be
quite mistaken. Science is about expectation. I set two identical tops
spinning, and nine times out of ten, I expect them to fall down simultaneously.
We have expectations about all facets of life, even those we cannot personally
observe.”

No kidding, thought Cam, looking from Chuck
to Sava and back again. Sava was a good six inches taller than her loquacious
boyfriend.

“The average human has a radial
consciousness of barely twenty meters. Beyond that, we are guessing what is
happening by projecting our expectations onto the world based on previously
observed outcomes. The reason we do this is simple: to counteract a crippling
uncertainty about the reality we live in. As we grow older, we learn to
discount or ignore this uncertainty.”

The only uncertainty was where the
conversation was going.

Cam looked down at his phone to ask one of his
prepared questions, but he was too slow to speak.

“A synthetic mind, on the other hand, cannot
process uncertainty, which we represent with a null value. We briefly tried
ternary computation with a variant of our Epsilon line—this was prior to our
current astrological designations—but it would have required a complete shift
in synaptic architecture to implement fully. Null values don’t agree with our
modern, binary synthetics, the same way dairy doesn’t agree with me. If a
synthetic’s directive is to exist in this world and respond to stimuli, then
they must have a complete understanding of the world in order to make the most
accurate decision. This was not planned, of course. We didn’t know that by asking
our synthetics to consider the possibility of a null value, we’d be opening
Pandora’s Jar of Indeterminate States. That’s what we call them in synth
parlance, those bits that are neither one nor zero, but something in between.”

“I’ve heard infinity exists between one and
zero,” mumbled Cam.

Chuck flinched at the interruption. “Yes,”
he stammered, “I mean no. Nonsense, absolute nonsense. Indeterminate states are
a purely human concept. There’s no room in the code for them. To have a
synthetic understand null values, you’d need to invent a truly artificial
intelligence. Simulating ternary computation is not enough.”

Chuck trailed off, his mind processing some internal
piece of data.

Cam typed a few adjectives into his phone,
catching Sava’s eyes as he did so.

“He’s really quite brilliant,” she insisted.
“People with the brainpower to keep up find him fascinating.”

Cam raised his eyebrows to challenge her.

“I usually can’t, but then he doesn’t talk
much about work outside of the lab. That’s why I wanted to meet at lunch, so
you could speak to person Chuck, not engineer Chuck. Once he’s here in the
Spire, he becomes very focused on the prize.”

“And what is the prize?” asked Cam.

“Assumed intelligence,” said Chuck,
approaching a whiteboard. He cleared away some space with the sleeve of his lab
coat. “Artificial intelligence is a rush fantasy, a dream birthed by
men
who think themselves
gods
. We don’t understand the miracle of
consciousness, so how can we ever hope to bestow it upon something we’ve
created? All we can do is program a crude mimicry to make a synthetic
seem
human. And we’ve done that, to a certain extent, done it better with each
revision of software.”

“Are you saying your synthetics are capable
of carrying on an in-depth conversation? The few I’ve encountered didn’t have
much to say.”

Chuck looked to Sava, who explained about
the cooks at the cafeteria.

“Did you get a look at their wrists?

“No,” said Cam. “Should I have?”

“We tag each synthetic,” explained Chuck.
“Knowing their astrological sign would have told you which revision they were.
I’m guessing the cooks you encountered were specialized. Their job functions
probably didn’t require advanced speech synthesis. Did you try saying their
name followed by
directive
and then a command?”

Cam shook his head. “No, but I saw it done.
I thought that was a little weird. It reminds me of voice-actuated elevators
like the ones we have at the BMP Tower in Los Angeles.”

“Ugh,” said Chuck, “such a horrible
comparison. Those cooks were built for a specific purpose: to make and serve
food. They take orders from a human overseer, I imagine?”

“Cosimo,” replied Cam. “Funny guy.”

“I’m sure,” said Chuck, writing the chef’s
name on the board. He stared at it for a moment, as if wondering why he had
written it down, and then promptly erased it. “Are you sure
he
wasn’t a
synthetic as well?”

“Well now I’m not.” He shot a questioning look
at Sava. “You would have pointed that out, right?”

“Savannah is a beautiful and talented woman,
but she is not infallible in the judgment of synthetic versus human.”

Sava shrugged in agreement. “The technology
advances so quickly. Every day, there’s a better model coming off the assembly
line and integrating into the population. Checking their wrists is usually the
only way to tell, since not all of us get the memo when a new revision is
introduced.”

“But you do, Mr. Huber?”

“I
write
the memos,” said Chuck.
“Well, I mean to say, my assistant writes them, but that’s semantics for you.
Michelle doesn’t have the subject matter expertise to describe our latest
advancements, so I simply feed her the information. If we called her in here
right now, she could easily recite the specifications and capabilities of our
latest model. And if you heard her speak without knowing I had briefed her
prior, would you not think she knew what she was talking about?”

“I would… not?”

“That, Mr. Gray, is assumed intelligence. It
is all a function of interface versus implementation. Your phone there, for
example, has a calculator application, I assume? And when you ask it what two
plus two equals, it gives you the correct answer, as if it knew. But without
using your calculator, let me ask you this question: what is four plus four?”

“Eight!” said Cam. He made a show of
counting on his fingers to confirm.

“See what you did there? The answer is
indeed eight, but how did you arrive at it? You spoke before you counted on
your fingers, so obviously you knew the answer even without your digital
calculation.”

“I just knew. Or actually, I remembered.”

“Yes, you remembered.” Chuck wrote the
simple equation on the board. “You’ve answered the question so many times that
you simply pulled the data from memory. But if I asked you to calculate the
square root of seventy-six thousand, four hundred and twenty-nine, you wouldn’t
have a similar table of figures to refer to, would you?”

“You don’t know that for sure,” said Cam.

“I’m almost certain of it. When faced with a
more difficult problem, you have to fall back to calculation. However you
decide to come up with the answer—whether a calculator or pencil and paper—is
what we call the
implementation
. When you ask a synthetic what two plus two
is, for example, it actually does the calculation every time by representing
the numbers in binary and performing a basic add operation on them. But that’s
simple mathematics, a finite system of rules. So I’ll ask you a different
question. How are you feeling today?”

“Fine,” replied Cam. Truthfully, the pasta
fazool wasn’t sitting right with him; he made a note to give Cosimo a piece of
his mind if he saw him again.

“How do you know?” asked Chuck. “How do you
know you’re feeling fine? And what does that even mean,
fine
?”

Cam smiled. “I see your point.”

“Do you? Do you really?” There was no
sarcasm in his voice; he seemed genuinely interested in the answer.

“Well, I think I do.”

“Yes, you accept the possibility I have a
point and you are willing to concede its veracity without fully understanding
it. So that’s how I know you’re not a human, er, not a synthetic. Pardon me.”