The Forever Watch (43 page)

Archie, which is made of both human and alien programming, can bridge the gap. The previous system of interfaces between an individual's computationally limited neural Implant to the incomparably more powerful Analytical Nodes of the ship will remain, but it will be augmented by the AI's abilities to integrate and incorporate everything. Security will be greater. Response time will be improved. Archie will be able to monitor
all
of the Nth Web, in a way that the Ministry of Information never had the manpower to do.

I wonder; would Karla distrust Archie if she knew of its alien component, or would she trust it more because it is more than us?

I am constantly tired. There is never enough sleep. They have to remind me when to eat.

It is one thing for Archie and me to make crude signals and expressions to each other. It is another for us to know what the other is saying clearly enough that I can explain
why
I need it to acknowledge only me and individuals I authorize. Archie's personality is inherently friendly and curious, childlike. It likes the idea of shaking things up for the sake of seeing what happens next. It does not understand pain or death or being Adjusted. Secrecy, motives, and agendas are ideas it is only beginning to grasp. I have to teach Archie a new language that I am still creating out of common concepts that we share. It is less programming and more like, well …

It is like being a Keeper to a child.

For all that Archie already knows many elements of human speech, it does not fully understand the words as more than abstract concepts; reality as its digital sentience experiences it is nothing like reality as I perceive it, and this is the what we must learn from each other.

Being a Keeper is a twenty-four-hour-per-day job that requires years of training in psychology, sociology, and education. I have precious little of the Keepers' formally refined skills and knowledge, and no time to acquire it.

Bullet would have been invaluable for this. But he is gone, and I have to go with my intuition and the upbringing Mala gave me. Or perhaps it's an advantage, not being saddled with so many preconceived opinions and techniques; after all, Archie
is not human,
and its psychology may never be human.

Every moment I have alone, I close my eyes and establish contact. Archie is always there; I only have to think to it.

Hi, Archie. It's Hana.

 

 

An empty space at first, just filled with ideas and thoughts, all abstract. There is nothing to see, there isn't even darkness. It is a memory being written into the Implant even as I am still experiencing it. It is the now at the bridge between neurons and nanocircuits.

Archie?

A ping. A beep. A deluge of data of all kinds, numbers, emotions, sounds, sights, touches. Too much. My head wants to explode.

Slow down!

Contrition.

Archie feels. It has emotions, even if they're not anchored in physical experiences like ours. But it is further along than I had expected it to be.

And then it flashes memories at me. My own.

She appears then, out of the void. Archie doesn't care what names go with what gender. Archie has merely taken a form it likes.

That form is me, and not me. It doesn't have the emitter plates on its face. It changes, from moment to moment. Sometimes it looks like me at sixteen, sometimes the me at nine. Sometimes it wears bright yellow pajamas with sunflowers, blurry and fuzzy from before my Implant augmentation. Mostly, it wears variations of my day-to-day outfits from school—slacks or jeans, blouses or T-shirts, and the occasional sundress and sandals.

While it is a little uncomfortable seeing another me, it is also a relief. It reinforces that for some reason, Archie likes me, and more important, Archie is trying to think in human terms. I would have no idea how to even begin if Archie had taken the form of one of the Builders.

This place is in my skull, but it is not quite in my mind—it is between. I project an image of myself into this sharing of human thought and unhuman information. Me. In the now, tired, older, a little softer, eye bags, not all that healthy lately. An ugly maintenance jumpsuit an assistant passed to me is what I've got on. We are two versions of me, standing nowhere.

It must understand something of physical sensations because when it smiles a ghastly, too-wide smile that would hurt a real person's face; it reaches out and touches the hand of my image of me. It's a tingling little shock, a jolt of electricity, data about proximity, pressure, and force, rather than the experience of pressure and force.

That's not quite right, Archie. It's like this. It feels like this, to touch.

Carefully, I strip out only the sensation of touch, from the first time I shook hands with grimy little Marcus, back in the Keeper crèche cluster. Not the visuals or the mess of sounds and smells around me back then, with little kids running back and forth and giggling and pinching each other or yelling at a scraped knee. Just the touch. And I pass that to Archie.

Archie flickers, its mouth makes a large
O,
then it tries again. Our fingers brush against each other. These are more than images, they are symbols, and symbols have meaning, and I have to teach Archie those meanings.

Yes. That's right, Archie. That's how it feels.

It claps. It.

She looks so wide-eyed and young, and sweet and guileless. Was I ever like this?

Let me show you where I grew up.

I pull it out of my memories, the apartment where Mala raised me, white walls, so many prints of hills and birds in the sky and trees, entry-level fake-wood furnishing, and an extravagant number of physical printouts, actual books, lining the shelves that dominate every space.

I sit on the floor and pull a box from one of the shelves.

While I open it and set up the colorful board and the many little game pieces, Archie is floating around the room, peering closely at everything, poking and touching, a look of unreal concentration on her furrowed brow. It knows more about expressions than I expect at this point. It must be from the facial recognition built into the original search modules.

It looks like a little girl, but it isn't one. From the endless hours Archie's spent combing through databases and dark corners of the Nth Web, I know it has more patience than any human child could ever have. It might be content to spend a whole year analyzing this one slice of memory of me sitting in Mala's old home, stroking every surface, staring at every item, to take in every perfect and imperfect detail.

I wish we had more time to do this right. For me to document everything, every response. This is contact with nonhuman intelligent life, the first one in known history.

But time passes here exactly at the same rate as it does outside this daydream, and I have to risk rushing things.

Archie? Want to play something?

I choose games because games have goals, they have rules, consequences. I pick zero-sum games, where there is a loser and a winner. I share sense and emotional impressions of small embarrassments when I've lost, and the little pleasures when I've won. From there, I try to show that, in a way, my life has been a game. With rules. With goals. Sometimes I win, and sometimes I lose. Sometimes there is pleasure and … sometimes, there is pain. A popped balloon, that first magical, delicious chocolate ice cream cone on a Sunday picnic.

Between games, I share experiences of being with Mala. Teachable moments, when I messed up, lied, broke things, said mean things, and she punished me with a frown, with disappointment, with her sadness. When I'd do the right thing, Mala's joy, her smiles, her kisses, the warmth of her limitless fountain of hugs. The smell of her.

I … had forgotten how much I miss her. Forgotten, even though the memories are always just there, perfect and unchanging. I think of her when she was Retired, our last letters farewell. I hope she didn't suffer too much. But I can't jump ahead that far with Archie. It's not ready to understand death, not yet.

Archie relives these early moments of my life with me, learns to feel what I felt, so that all these memories we've dug up, all these people we've found on the Net, they're not just names and records and data, they're all people.

And we're all in a game where the goal is to survive.

 

 

The sessions with Archie are exhilarating, exhausting. Fulfilling when it takes a step forward, frustrating when it laughs and breaks the rules or runs off or changes the colors of the world, for curiosity and the pleasure of it. While it's all fun in our make-believe world, I can't have Archie shutting off the reactors of the Noah just to see what might happen when it takes over the whole ship!

Every other night, Barrens sleeps at my side. All his missions are limited to Paris Section while the gates are closed.

He does not talk about what he does. But I can guess. He weeps in his sleep and calls out names. I recognize some of them. Colleagues, among the Archivists. Former allies.

Would I have the strength to kill Jazz or Lyn or Hennessy if the safety of the mission demanded it?

I wish I could know they are safe. But they are in another section of the Habitat, and until the new system is brought online, communications between the sealed districts are difficult and sporadic.

Archie reaches a critical breakthrough. When it understands the idea of
promises
. When it understands that what happens in the physical realm is not like how it is in my head or on the computers. Data can be rewritten, but the physical world cannot.

That is also the first time I see it start to comprehend fear.

Will you promise to behave, always? To listen to me, to follow the rules? We don't want to hurt anyone by accident.
Words must always be attached to concepts and emotions with Archie, to reinforce them while everything is so new.

Solemnly, the little not-girl in my head nods. Puts out her hand. We shake on it. When I bend down and press a kiss to her forehead, I stop thinking of her as “it.” And we are ready for testing.

I game her through dozens of attempts with examples and stories and test cases. She still does not quite understand that humans are so different from her, so much more fragile, but she gets the concept of different human groups with differing goals. She just barely knows that this conflict is more than some abstract simulation, but Archie does comprehend that I want her to be on my side and mine alone.

She has accepted my thinking and not just me, and that has to be enough.

The team Karla assembled to watch and assist me is surprised when I interrupt their morning of slow progress with an update they never saw me work on. They are stunned when they upload her onto the local server and she immediately ties together all the subgroups of particles of the AI swarm that are present in the node. Part of Archie lives again outside my head, and she has taken control of this hardware cluster, just one of the thousands of supercomputers the Strangers built into the ship.

In my head, she's laughing, her smile starting to be more natural, as her realm gets bigger again, is not confined to my Implant anymore. I sense her glee as she races through the components of the node, reaches out with the pieces of herself that she was cut away from when the Net was brought down.

Archie passes every test case they can think of.

“How? It's only been a week!” they ask.

The best answer I can give is “Intuition.”

“Huh. I guess that's how you came up with the AI in the first place.”

Programmer LeMay, a tanned young man with meticulously crafted hair and lovely hazel eyes, calls Karla in.

While we wait for her to arrive, they repeat Archie's run through more simulations, to see the rate at which my update should propagate throughout the Network when she is reconnected, to see how the other subgroups of the swarm might respond. I do not pay attention. She is with me in my head, she will be with me on the larger system. Not because of anything I did—Archie will simply wake up as the atom of her consciousness inside me stretches out through the Network and reclaims the rest of her body. I ignore their murmurs of astonishment at her efficiency and force myself to eat a crêpe loaded with sharp, fragrant cheeses.

Barrens is out there somewhere this morning. Watching men and women, waiting for his chance to subdue or kill whomever Karla has assigned him to. Will he come back to me tonight? Or will he be killed by people he knows, high on the power of Psyn, fanatics transformed by altered states and the words of his rivals?

Karla appears, a pale apparition. Like me, she stands out among these bright young talents. She is leaner, more tired. Fiercer.

“That's it then?” she murmurs, skimming through the modular schema of Archie's structure. She zooms in on the functions I've changed, and the parameters that will change the AI's behavior, tilting Archie's purpose, those core processes. Karla is not trying to understand the code modifications—she is
reading
me, sifting through how confident or doubtful I am with each block of programming. I wonder, how does Archie determine which of my thoughts to secure against Karla, and which the girl AI allows to drift into the ISec agent's clutching mental intrusion?

The air is too hot. I shrug off a borrowed lab coat, then start to feel cold.

“That's it. Doing a better job would take two months and a team of twenty machine-learning specialists,” I lie.

Now it is Karla who takes a moment to steady herself. Her pigmentless eyes stare into mine. Just as Archie is my tool, I am hers. I have been hers since she let me escape ISec holding. Both of our tools went beyond their boundaries and bear part of the responsibility for this crisis. As she said, there have been other uprisings. Only Archie has allowed this one to progress so far. And I was supposed to make Barrens stop before the movement hit the tipping point.