True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier (39 page)

Ery—even now he couldn't think of her as Debby—nodded. “I've been watching the Coven. They've grown, these last months. I think they take themselves more seriously now. In the old days, they never would have noticed what the Limey warned you about. But it's not the Mailman he saw, Slip.”

“How can you be sure, Ery? We never killed more than his service programs and his simulators—like DON.MAC. We never found his True Name. We don't even know if he's human or some science-fictional alien.”

“You're wrong, Slip. I know what the Limey saw, and I know who the Mailman is—or was,” she spoke quietly, but with certainty. “It turns out the Mailman was the greatest cliché of the Computer Age, maybe of the entire Age of Science.”

“Huh?”

“You've seen plenty of personality simulators in the Other Plane. DON.MAC—at least as he was rewritten by the Mailman—was good enough to fool normal warlocks. Even Alan, the Coven's elemental, shows plenty of human emotion and cunning.” Pollack thought of the new Alan, so ferocious and intimidating. The Turing T-shirt was beneath his dignity now. “Even so, Slip, I don't think you've ever believed you could be permanently fooled by a simulation, have you?”

“Wait. Are you trying to tell me that the Mailman was just another simulator? That the time lag was just to obscure the fact that he was a simulator? That's ridiculous. You know his powers were more than human, almost as great as ours became.”

“But do you think you could ever be fooled?”

“Frankly, no. If you talk to one of those things long enough, they display a repetitiveness, an inflexibility that's a giveaway. I don't know; maybe someday there'll be programs that can pass the Turing test. But whatever it is that makes a person a person is terribly complicated. Simulation is the wrong way to get at it, because being a person is more than symptoms. A program that was a person would use enormous databases, and if the processors running it were the sort we have now, you certainly couldn't expect real-time interaction with the outside world.” And Pollack suddenly had a glimmer of what she was thinking.

“That's the critical point. Slip:
if you want real-time interaction.
But the Mailman—the sentient, conversational part—never did operate real time. We thought the lag was a communications delay that showed the operator was off-planet, but really he was here all the time. It just took him hours of processing time to sustain seconds of self-awareness.”

Pollack opened his mouth, but nothing came out. It went against all his intuition, almost against what religion he had, but it might just barely be possible. The Mailman had controlled immense resources. All his quick time reactions could have been the work of ordinary programs and simulators like DON.MAC. The only evidence they had for his humanity were those teleprinter conversations where his responses were spread over hours.

“Okay, for the sake of argument, let's say it's possible. Someone, somewhere had to write the original Mailman. Who was that?”

“Who would you guess? The government, of course. About ten years ago. It was an NSA team trying to automate system protection. Some brilliant people, but they could never really get it off the ground. They wrote a developmental kernel that by itself was not especially effective or aware. It was designed to live within larger systems and gradually grow in power and awareness,
independent
of what policies or mistakes the operators of the system might make.

“The program managers saw the Frankenstein analogy—or at least they saw a threat to their personal power—and quashed the project. In any case, it was very expensive. The program executed slowly and gobbled incredible data space.”

“And you're saying that someone conveniently left a copy running all unknown?”

She seemed to miss the sarcasm. “It's not that unlikely. Research types are fairly careless—outside of their immediate focus. When I was in FoG, we lost thousands of megabytes ‘between the cracks' of our databases. And back then, that was a lot of memory. The development kernel is not very large. My guess is a copy was left in the system. Remember, the kernel was designed to live untended if it ever started executing. Over the years it slowly grew—both because of its natural tendencies and because of the increased power of the nets it lived in.”

Pollack sat back on the sofa. Her voice was tiny and frail, so unlike the warm, rich tones he remembered from the Other Plane. But she spoke with the same authority.

Debby's—Erythrina's—pale eyes stared off beyond the walls of the apt, dreaming. “You know, they are right to be afraid,” she said finally. “Their world is ending. Even without us, there would still be the Limey, the Coven—and someday most of the human race.”

Damn.
Pollack was momentarily tongue-tied, trying desperately to think of something to mollify the threat implicit in Ery's words.
Doesn't she understand that DoW would never let us talk unbugged? Doesn't she know how trigger-happy scared the top Feds must be by now?

But before he could say anything, Ery glanced at him, saw the consternation in his face, and smiled. The tiny hand patted his. “Don't worry, Slip. The Feds are listening, but what they're hearing is tearful chitchat—you overcome to find me what I am, and me trying to console the both of us. They will never know what I really tell you here. They will never know about the gun the local boys took off you.”

“What?”

“You see, I lied a little. I know why you really came. I know you thought that
I
might be the new monster. But I don't want to lie to you anymore. You risked your life to find out the truth, when you could have just told the Feds what you guessed.” She went on, taking advantage of his stupefied silence. “Did you ever wonder what I did in those last minutes this spring, after we surrendered—when I lagged behind you in the Other Plane?

“It's true, we really did destroy the Mailman; that's what all that unintelligible data space we plowed up was. I'm sure there are copies of the kernel hidden here and there, like cancers in the System, but we can control them one by one as they appear.

“I guessed what had happened when I saw all that space, and I had plenty of time to study what was left, even to trace back to the original research project. Poor little Mailman, like the monsters of fiction—he was only doing what he had been designed to do. He was taking over the System, protecting it from everyone—even its owners. I suspect he would have announced himself in the end and used some sort of nuclear blackmail to bring the rest of the world into line. But even though his programs had been running for several years, he had only had fifteen or twenty hours of human type self-awareness when we did him in. His personality programs were that slow. He never attained the level of consciousness you and I had on the System.

“But he really was self-aware, and that was the triumph of it all. And in those few minutes, I figured out how I could adapt the basic kernel to accept any input personality.… That is what I really wanted to tell you.”

“Then what the Limey saw was—”

She nodded. “Me…”

She was grinning now, an open though conspiratorial grin that was very familiar. “When Bertrand Russell was very old, and probably as dotty as I am now, he talked of spreading his interests and attention out to the greater world and away from his own body, so that when that body died he would scarcely notice it, his whole consciousness would be so diluted through the outside world.

“For him, it was wishful thinking, of course. But not for me. My kernel is out here in the System. Every time I'm there, I transfer a little more of myself. The kernel is growing into a true Erythrina, who is also truly me. When this body dies,” she squeezed his hand with hers, “when this body dies,
I
will still be, and you can still talk to me.”

“Like the Mailman?”

“Slow like the Mailman. At least till I design faster processors.…

“… So in a way, I am everything you and the Limey were afraid of.
You
could probably still stop me, Slip.” And he sensed that she was awaiting his judgment, the last judgment any human would ever be allowed to levy upon her.

Slip shook his head and smiled at her, thinking of the slow-moving guardian angel that she would become.
Every race must arrive at this point in its history,
he suddenly realized. A few years or decades in which its future slavery or greatness rests on the good will of one or two persons. It could have been the Mailman. Thank God it was Ery instead.

And beyond those years or decades … for an instant, Pollack came near to understanding things that had once been obvious. Processors kept getting faster, memories larger. What now took a planet's resources would someday be possessed by everyone. Including himself.

Beyond those years or decades … were millennia. And Ery.

Afterword

Marvin Minsky

This volume's dedication to Marvin Minsky, as “godfather to a new age,” is but a small acknowledgment of the enormous role Minsky has played in the development of new technologies, new concepts—and, perhaps most important, radically new ways of looking at the world. He has long been considered the “father of artificial intelligence.” He has earned this designation by his research, his writing, and his work at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, which he cofounded and where he has fostered the development not only of new technology, but also of a number of creative and innovative scientists, many of whom were students of his. This is not to suggest that his influence has been limited only to those with whom he works directly. Far from it. His visionary work has been a beacon to countless others who have worked in the field of artificial intelligence and related areas for over forty years.

As Vernor Vinge suggested in his Introduction, Minsky is the source of much original and insightful commentary on science-fictional topics that relate to Minsky's field. A few months after the first publication of
True Names,
Minsky was the keynote speaker at the annual Nebula Awards banquet of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and his speech was about “True Names.” He spoke with such eloquence, understanding, and clarity that when the Bluejay Books edition of
True Names
was in preparation, his was the first name that came to mind as the person most suited to write an Afterword to the work.

What follows is that original Afterword, first written in 1983. It is still as valid today as it was then, and its message seems entirely fitting as the endcap to this book of ideas.

 

 

 

In real life, you often have to deal with things you don't completely understand. You drive a car, not knowing how its engine works. You ride as passenger in someone else's car, not knowing how that driver works. And strangest of all, you sometimes drive yourself to work, not knowing how you work, yourself.

To me, the import of
True Names
is that it is about how we cope with things we don't understand. But, how do we ever understand anything in the first place? Almost always, I think, by using analogies in one way or another—to pretend that each alien thing we see resembles something we already know. When an object's internal workings are too strange, complicated, or unknown to deal with directly, we extract whatever parts of its behavior we can comprehend and represent them by familiar symbols—or the names of familiar things which we think do similar things. That way, we make each novelty at least appear to be like something which we know from the worlds of our own pasts. It is a great idea, that use of symbols; it lets our minds transform the strange into the commonplace. It is the same with names.

Right from the start,
True Names
shows us many forms of this idea, methods which use symbols, names, and images to make a novel world resemble one where we have been before. Remember the doors to Vinge's castle? Imagine that some architect has invented a new way to go from one place to another: a scheme that serves in some respects the normal functions of a door, but one whose form and mechanism is so entirely outside our past experience that, to see it, we'd never think of it as a door, nor guess what purposes to use it for. No matter: just superimpose on its exterior, some decoration which reminds one of a door. We could clothe it in rectangular shape, or add to it a waist-high knob, or a push-plate with a sign lettered “EXIT” in red and white, or do whatever else may seem appropriate—and every visitor from Earth will know, without a conscious thought, that pseudo-portal's purpose, and how to make it do its job.

At first this may seem mere trickery; after all, this new invention, which we decorate to look like a door, is not really a door. It has none of what we normally expect a door to be, to wit: hinged, swinging slab of wood, cut into wall. The inner details are all wrong. Names and symbols, like analogies, are only partial truths; they work by taking many-levelled descriptions of different things and chopping off all of what seem, in the present context, to be their least essential details—that is, the ones which matter least to our intended purposes. But, still, what matters—when it comes to using such a thing—is that whatever symbol or icon, token or sign we choose should remind us of the use we seek—which, for that not-quite-door, should represent some way to go from one place to another. Who cares how it works, so long as it works! It does not even matter if that “door” leads to anywhere: in
True Names,
nothing ever leads anywhere; instead, the protagonists' bodies never move at all, but remain plugged in to the network while programs change their representations of the simulated realities!

Ironically, in the world
True Names
describes, those representations actually do move from place to place—but only because the computer programs which do the work may be sent anywhere within the worldwide network of connections. Still, to the dwellers inside that network, all of this is inessential and imperceptible, since the physical locations of the computers themselves are normally not represented anywhere at all inside the worlds they simulate. It is only in the final acts of the novella, when those partially-simulated beings finally have to protect themselves against their entirely-simulated enemies, that the programs must keep track of where their mind-computers are; then they resort to using ordinary means, like military maps and geographic charts.