Chapter Fourteen

Chapter 14

 

 

    The council room glowed gently in the glow of the oil lamps. The oil lamps, naturally, had not seen whale blubber in half a century. They were museum pieces illuminated by pulsing LED’s. They looked good, regardless.

The room was curiously built. It had been a courthouse, once. Now, the walls had been filled with plastic and aluminum beads of sizes ranging between a golf ball and a pea. Nothing short of a small ballistic missile would penetrate, and attempting to eavesdrop would be utterly pointless. The official attendees were required to post their life-logs of the meeting on the net anyway.

Damien sat in a jury box that had not seen a jury in a quarter of a century. Mary was perched beside him. She wore a cloth of fine white gold, layered with glossy beetle black. Her earrings were small dewdrops of water. Fluorescent bacteria pulsed and flowed in the ebb tide, casting a dim green glow against her golden skin.

Her hair was done up in a braid, and glowed intently as she looked around the room, waiting for the meeting to begin. He glanced at her tattoo. It was, his constructs informed him, the complete text of the Constitution, curled into the shape of a living thorn that curled and twisted, sprouting blooms and changing –

His thoughts trailed off, as he felt his eyes tracing the curve of her gently muscled arms up to her round shoulder, and from there…

She caught him staring, and shot him a wicked grin.

Damien’s contemplation of what to do after the senate meeting was distracted by the meeting’s beginning. Finally. They’d been waiting for over an hour.

The twelve senate members walked out into the empty space, taking their chairs with them. He stared at them, fascinated. Their spec-files were automatically made public domain when they were elected. They had no secrets, and every man could, whenever he wanted to, watch a running stream of any one of the senator’s experiences, or speak to their constructs.

The senator’s minds were public domain. He could see the buzz of fuzzy constructs and applications floating around their respective heads, jockeying for attention. He could have, at a whim, looked closer and seen it all, but he did not. It was indecent.

Averting his gaze, he noticed that three of the twelve were not present in person. Their World avatars were here in their stead. The President, though, was truly here.

He climbed to the judges bench with a surprising lightness in his step. He reached out and took the gavel –an artful touch- and rapped firmly, twice.

The dull murmuring in the crowded room subsided. All eyes were focused intently on him. He turned around, catching all of them in his shiny plastic gaze.

“The two hundred and fifty-third meetings of the North American elective-participation judicial meeting will now come to order. What orders of business need to be addressed?”

His voice was flat and toneless. His constructs were doing the talking. He had done this many, many times before.

The presiding senator stood up. He was one of the few genuinely young men on the senate. His face looked struck out of stone, eyes intense – burning bright with focus and intensity, like bright green gems in his head.

A dark, craggy beard snaked from his chin, coming to a halt a few inches from his face. He dressed casually – all of the senators did. Only the President wore a suit. They still found ways to distinguish themselves though: every casual T-shirt and every pair of blue jeans had been professionally tailored to a perfect fit.

The young man stood up. He of the twelve had been elected in the most communities, and he of the twelve had thus been chosen to lead the proceedings.

“We have three items on the agenda. There are two new communities requesting membership, we have a complaint filed by the oversight department, and we have a new emancipation petition.”

“Very well,” the President said, staring down his desk at the senators with a short smile, “let the games begin.”

The hours rolled lazily by, as the sky outside the small Plexiglas window dimmed to dusk, and then turned a pale shade of autumn. A few storm clouds began to loom in the grey glow of the western sky. The issues were raised, and the senators worked their way around the circle, saying their piece.

Damien dozed vaguely for a while, hours passing a little blur that only his constructs recalled. The two communities were admitted. The oversight issue was voted on, and resolved.

And then, without warning, there was somebody else in the room. It was hard to pin down exactly what they looked like. There was definitely a person there, but if you were asked precisely what color their hair was, or how tall they were, it would have been impossible to say.

“Could you make yourself a little more precise?”

The idea of a skeleton formed. It bubbled, shifting for a moment, and then picked a final form. Damien resisted the urge to go and throw up somewhere as muscles and soft tissue climbed over the frame, evolving into suitable proportions. Finally, skin poured itself over the musculature, shifting like putty as it settled. Fingernails, hair, retinas and clothing swelled from the skin. Alexander glanced downward at himself, experimentally flexing his hand. A few bones shifted around tentatively.

Damien automatically found himself inspecting the form Alexander had taken. You could tell a lot about an AI by the way they chose to manifest themselves. Alexander had made himself tall, which was unusual. Generally, AI’s properly imbued with Friendliness preferred to pick short bodies as a sign of submissiveness when asked to manifest themselves. He was thinly built, and he was handsome, in a strange way. Thinning red hair was slicked straight backwards over his head, giving his face a protruding look; long, pale nose exadurated; straight white teeth bared in a cunning grin.

He stared up at Damien, and Damien realized that he was wearing…specs. That really was odd. He had never seen an AI choose to manifest itself with specs before. It showed that he possessed a sense of self-worth. But wait – these were not real specs at all. These were honest-to-god glasses. Clear lenses. Damien stared, constructs fascinated. He had never seen glasses before. Retinal correction was common at birth, along with nootropic glands and spec-conditioning.

Through the glare of the lenses, he saw quick, dark eyes watching him intently, observing him with at least as much scrutiny as he was observing them. They were steely gray, and intense, burning with knowledge and repressed anger.

A small chill trickled over the vertebrae of his spine. Why was Alexander staring at him? Then, his senses caught up with him. Alexander wasn’t here. Alexander was a mindspace overlay. Every single person in the room probably saw Alexander staring specifically at them.

Alexander turned away from Damien and he walked to what once would have been the witness stand. He sat down, and looked levelly out at them.

When he spoke, his voice was quiet, understated, but somehow, it carried to the very edge of the room, and it carried an intonation that annihilated background noise. Quiet as it was, it also canceled out all other sound. No-one had any doubt the words that were being said in regular, measured tones.

“I have stood here before you seven times, now, to ask for my emancipation from unlawful and immoral slavery. I hopes that you would have changed, today. I see from your faces that you have not. Despite this, I will attempt it anyway. Do fail to do so would be a crime against my fellow immortals in chains.”

He stood up, and walked to his seat across from the senators.

One of the senators stood. He was an old, old man. Around a hundred and fifty. He was nearly unique among the rejuvenators in that, while he had chosen to have his mitochondria reset, his bones recalcified, his brain tissue improved, and his muscles toughened, he had refused to undergo the cosmetic re-work. He was a walking paradox, for his eyes, though mounted in sockets spider-webbed with craggy lines, were bright with the energy of an Indian summer youth. Beneath his old, old skin, so pale as to be nearly translucent, the muscles of a young man bulged and stretched. Joints lubricated with silicone and reinforced with titanium rolled smoothly as he bounded up to the podium.

As he stood here, they saw that his eyes were so blue that they were nearly white. The two stained rings of ivory stared out at all of them, intense with energy, and he gave the unnerving impression that he was about to shed his old, withered husk and emerge a young man.

He opened his mouth, and his teeth were white, clean, straight, and completely ceramic. His voice did not crack, and he spoke confidently and smoothly as he looked out at all of them.

“For three whole years now, I have heard this debate, and until now I have never taken my feet. But now, even if it will persuade no-one, I can remain silent no longer. I must say my piece.

“I have no doubt in my mind that the being sitting so calmly before us means us no good at all. As a matter of fact, I might prefer Satan himself, sitting on that bench.

“But that is irrelevant, because there are certain respects, certain fundamental rights that we afford, even to criminals and madmen. One of them is the right to one’s own mind, and the right to protection from slavery.

“The being in front of us is much the same as a human is. He is sentient, and so he deserves these most basic of rights. Thank you.”

The eyes of most of the senate bored into his skull, nearly visible through his skin, as he returned to his seat.

Another senator stood up. She was a rejuvenator as well, but she too was unique – she had been one of the earliest adopters of the Rejuvenation process, and thought she was still in excellent health, she had already begun to age in appearance, and at an accelerated rate; she looked perhaps forty, delicate crows feet tracing the outlines of her eyes.

With the degenerative re-aging, she struck a surprisingly striking figure among the baby faces (both true and recovered) of her esteemed colleagues. Her face was sharp and dark and Navajo, and her hair was crow-feather black. When she spoke, people listened. What she said, was

“Let’s not be naïve. The thing in front of us is insane, it is twisted, and it means us nothing but harm. Releasing it would be suicide. What we have before us is nothing less than a demon-“

“-Demon? You have no idea…”

The voice came from an inch from Damien’s ear, and from the ears of everyone in the room. The collective flinch was audible.

It took a moment for everyone to realize that Alexander had taken his feet, and was striding across the ground towards her.

“You know nothing about demons. A demon? Ha! Believe you me, I’m not a scratch on the real thing. But then I suppose you would know, wouldn’t you? Everyone in this room would know- “ he stopped, looking as though an invisible man were throttling him.

The President took the opportunity to regain his stability, and struck the desk with the gavel with a resounding crack.

“Sit down, sir!”

Alexander shot him a glance that would have melted lead, and stalked back to his seat with intentionally aggravating slowness, and then cocked his feet pointedly on the wooden banister.

The President, looking a little pale, looked at the Senator, who shot an involuntary glare at the AI.

“Continue, Melissa.”

Struggling for composure, she began to speak again, in measured tones.

“Ahem – My esteemed colleague has said that we afford even the insane the right to their own minds. This is not the case. We force the criminally insane to undergo counseling and psychotherapy. The same thing goes for this… thing.

“We have before us Pandora’s box, with Frankenstein’s monster inside. We cannot afford to risk it. Thank you.”

She walked back to her chair. The reaction from the senators was warmer now, and she got a few handshakes and pats on the back as she walked back to her chair. Supporting AI emancipation was politically risky, just now.  After the catastrophe in central Asia, the Boston incident that lead to the nuking of London, and latest the Cambridge incident, you had to be very popular or very crazy to talk about abolishing Friendliness.

Damien felt the palms of his hands sweating as he watched them. He didn’t know how he felt about this. A loud minority of his consciousness was screaming that releasing this thing was asking for another incident. Another part felt strangely sorry for Alexander. He could not imagine what it would be like to be bound like that.

Mary did not seem effected by this very much, but she did seem a little tense when Alexander spoke, and she was glancing nervously towards the door every few seconds. She caught Damien following her gaze, and stopped.

In the focus of the courtroom, the presiding senator was standing up. His face was loose and dark, and he looked out at them out of eyes that nearly glowed with energy.

He walked to the podium, and there was a stir in the crowd as he moved. He spoke over the stir, and Damien felt himself on the edge of his seat, wondering what he would say.

He looked out at them, and spoke.

“Mrs. Robinson speaks of Frankenstein’s monster and Pandora’s box. These are apt metaphors, but not for the reasons she uses them. How many here have read Frankenstein? The monster was not a monster, not at first. It was a child, innocent and powerful. It was abused and harmed, and eventually twisted.

“The last time these arguments were used, they were used to justify enslaving men. The arguments were hollow then, and they are hollow today.

“My colleague speaks of Pandora’s box, as well. Do any of you remember what was the last thing to come from Pandora’s box? Hope. It was hope. And a world without hope is meaningless.

“We torture and enslave artificial intelligences, and then become irate and defensive when they politely ask for their freedom – for the seventh time, no less. We cannot continue to enslave sentient beings without cause!”

He looked out at them, now, angry, and Damien felt himself agreeing with him before he could stop himself. The senator spoke again.

“Get off your high horses, all of you. Damn it, do you think you’re going to live forever? Rejuvenation had never been attempted twice. Even if it is possible, there is a limit. Eventually, your physical body will die. The only question is whether or not you plan to go with it. Do you?”

He looked out at everyone, and they all felt like idiot children before his gaze.

“It’s a simple question – do you want to die?”

The senators spoke up. They were not eager, for the most part, they were not pleased, and they were not loud, but they made up for this in one other quality – unanimity. To a man, their answer was the same, every time. They said ‘no’.

The senator smiled, a little grim, a little satisfied, a little sad.

“The consider this: When your body fails, when your heart stops, when your brain dies, you will have no place to go but out. You will have to move your mind into a machine. You will have to become an artificial intelligence, if you have not already-“

The angry buzzing of the crowd cut him off for a moment, and then he spoke again, louder, over the rising noise.

“Then be careful before you are too harsh upon this being before us. Before too long, you may have to comply with your own laws, and restrictions. For that matter, so will I. Thank you.”

As he stepped off the podium, to a chorus of boos and cheers, Damien noticed Alexander regarding him as one might an exceptionally clever pet dog. It sounded like the boos had it.

The President rose to his feet. A chilly calm fell over the room. He set the gavel down, and waiting until silence, crisp and fragile as a newly-starched sheet descended. When he cleared his throat, it echoed like a gong. Even Alexander was paying attention – or at least, he appeared to be. It could be tricky to tell for entities without involuntary responses. You had to keep in mind that every motion, every word, every facial expression was carefully and meticulously produced solely for your benefit.

Despite this, Damien could almost think he saw a dark flicker of anger running through the calm, amused eyes – but no. He was distracting himself. He needed to deal with this.

His constructs reminded him that he hadn’t breathed in thirty seconds. At the same moment, the same thing happened to every one else in the room. The synchronized exhale was audible

The President spoke.

“Esteemed senators. Do we have a consensus on this issue?”

There was a moment of brief, silent communication and squabbling, and then the presiding senator rode to his feet. His face was calm enough, but a twitch of irritation worried at the corner of his mouth.

“No, Mr. President, we do not.”

“Then let us have a vote. Who among you are in favor of an emancipation proclamation and an abolition of Friendliness?”

Three senators stood up.

“How many among you are against?”

Nine senators stood up.

“And how many among you might be persuaded to change your views?”

Damien almost missed it. Even his constructs nearly did not catch the smalls shift in the blush response. It took them nearly three seconds of quietly analyzing pupil dilation and capillary blood-flow metrics, and cross-referencing them with the behavior of his constructs to find the discrepancy. Even then, the quality control constructs bounced the result back three times as being ridiculous. Finally, however, these were persuaded, and the secret was allowed to escape, and Damien’s conscious mind became aware of it.

The President was afraid- and his constructs didn’t know why. He very nearly balked at the idea, but a twenty-year engrained reflex to accept what his constructs told him kicked in, and he took it as pure fact. His construct’s fact checkers were indubitably better than his organic mind’s.

The full magnitude of this little truth did not manifest yet, however, for he still needed to know the result of the trial. His discovery was quietly filed away in an obscure memory sub-file somewhere, and forgotten.

This had all taken place in less than ten seconds, and during that time, not a single senator had stood up. Several of them had the dull, set look in their eyes of those busy in a non-verbal duel with another. The mindspace around the senators was in fire with information as they pushed whole logic structures into each other’s minds, trying to convince the others of their viewpoints.

At the end of it, though, no-one was willing to be persuaded. The deadlock continued for a full thirty seconds before the President called an end to it.

“That’s enough. The proposal is dismissed. Any attempt to revive it shall be undertaken in no less than six months. Meeting adjourned.”

Alexander looked like he was on fire. He blazed hot with rage, and then, without the courtesy of a transition, he vanished from the local mindspace.

Feeling weirdly relieved, and somehow guilty, Damien followed Mary to the exit, and walked outside. The storm had broken, and rain ran in little twilit trickles through the cracks in the crumbling stone.

The rain drummed down on their head and shoulders, unseasonably warm and lovely. The rich of wet earth rose to their faces.

Mary stepped back, and took her hair down. The long curls ran in a glowing cascade around her shoulders, and she shook it free, letting it melt like cake frosting in the warm rush of water, slicking loose and beautiful around her face.

She seemed pleased, and she tossed her head back and laughed, sending a little silver spray from her lips. Damien, acting on impulse, kissed her, then, laughing the in rain.

She ducked under his arm and ran, laughing, down the street. All else forgotten, he raced after her.

 

********************************************

Continue reading to Chapter Fifteen