autónoma Dave Jarvis autónoma iii Contents 1 Till . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 2 Sow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 1 Till 1 Till Xander Angelos autónoma 2 Wherein disturbances emerge Xander Angelos (December 19, 2064) S kopós flagged my unborn daughter because of a future she may have unleashed. That was some twentytwo years ago, when an obstetrician’s secretary dictated my wife’s pregnancy details into a hospital database to authorize creation of her conception record, which might as well have launched an airstrike at my young family. Skopós received the data immediately, and—based on my daughter’s genealogy, genetic health, family network, affluence, plus hundreds of other factors—that lifeless, tireless machine marked her for deep analysis. A single machine reduced lives into numbers, giving governments every insight necessary to protect the capitalistic regime. We’d later learn that its inference algorithm took scant nanoseconds to conclude with eighty four per cent certainty that Chloé Irene Angelos would destabilize the global economic system. That’s my girl. Skopós raised an alarm at the Agency of Defence. Standard Agency procedure to inhibit the social progress of foretold oppositionists, like Chloé, involves covert operations. This policy raises far fewer suspicions than murder without jeopardizing their finely fabri cated façade of free will. Our daughter would never ascend beyond the middle class, her voice would be lost in the bedlam of being, and the Agency would trample her existence into mundanity. Hangs a sour note over one’s life, that. You see, nearly everyone believes the reigns of kings and corporations are as certain as death. Now Chloé’s idea, suppressed by the Agency, could have dethroned them both. Maybe it still can. Her mother and I have grown too old to ignite another rebellion. The Agency’s smoke of 1 Till Xander Angelos autónoma 3 deception has suffocated our ability to light a path to freedom. It’s time we help share Chloé’s idea—an idea that, in capable hands, could disperse the smog of the ultrawealthy. This is Chloé’s story as told by her mother, me, and Yūna. Let’s get the spoiler out of the way. Cassandra and I won’t escape. We’re recording our daughter’s story from an abandoned log cabin, far from street cameras and Agency spies. There are no nearby towers, no digital blips to give us away. If they’re still hounding us, it’ll be by some other scent. When we power on the satellite uplink to transmit what you’re now reading, we will have compromised our position. As for Yūna, well, I’d be loathe to glue a label on that one. Let’s begin at the beginning, long before Yūna exploded into our lives. On the day we learned we would soon be a family of three, my wife interlaced her gloved fingers with mine and skipped away from the obste trician’s office. She swung my arm with unfettered excitement while I halfcantered in tow to keep pace. I wanted to blanket myself with her joy, let it infect me with smiles; however, knowing the likely future that awaited us all tempered my jubilance. I thought about how I would show our child the world, point her towards the light, and watch her grow. Assuming a worthwhile world awaited. Later that year, another Antarctic ice sheet calved into the ocean, pre cipitating a halfmetre sea level rise over the following decades. Climbing hightides—king tides—submerged formerly coastal homes and flooded the real estate market with hundreds of new oceanfront listings across the Atlantic seaboard. People pushed inland from seaside cities the world over. Even so, a smattering of weak voices continued to adamantly deny that humans could influence the Earth’s climate. It’s too bad greenhouse gases aren’t tinted green. Bathing in pessimism wasn’t on my agenda, though. At the time, I had a centuryold, retrostyled crib to sand and robots to build before the blistering summer of 2042. 1 Till Yūna Futaba autónoma 4 Yūna Futaba (June 8, 2064) A sentrybot levelled its turret at me. I turned towards my interviewer, General Felix LeMay of the Agency of Defence, on our tour of the Beale Air Force Base perimeter. “It’s lethal,” he said, revealing serrated yellow teeth that prowled behind a tightlipped smile. A small battalion of shiny medals stretched out along his broad chest. They marched on top of pins that lay flat upon his service uniform. He stood at least a foot taller than my petite frame. Off in the distance sat four windowless drones, lined up in a row, each ready to fly pending verbal orders, without a human at its helm. That last part was why I was here. Not sure if I’d outlive the day, though, with stubby rolling wardens ready to weave me out of existence. No doubt sensing my uneasiness, LeMay pointed a finger at the sentrybot then flipped a hitcher’s thumb. Obediently, the machine returned to its patrol. We had the base virtually to ourselves; a modest staff was on hand for defense, maintenance, site authorizations, and emergency treatment. The main building was a series of slanted wedges that resembled a set of enormous toppling dominoes stopped midfall. Each wedge was wrapped in a material that deceived my eyes. In daylight, its texture was not dissimilar to a reptile pelt with a silveryolive sheen. When viewed from above, the material would bend light, blending the building into nature’s scenery, rendering it invisible. If not for the drones, sentrybots, fences, and a small storage shed, there’d be nothing for a pilot passing overhead to note. This place, the whole endeavour, was off the map. As we approached the far left fin, a hidden door slid open to reveal a short, white hall. I followed LeMay inside. Behind us, the door shut with a barely perceptible hiss. At the end of the hall, we entered a spartan war room. He said, “Staff Sergeant, move.” I stepped aside. He traced a U shape in the air with his index finger. Several broad white tiles slid apart. A metal e-table rose out of the floor, 1 Till Yūna Futaba autónoma 5 dividing us. LeMay stood on the opposite side, facing me. Vids of my past achievements and awards ceremonies appeared on the e-table alongside my résumé. “No,” he said, finally providing his biased opinion to the problem he had presented when I’d first arrived. “Our only way to avoid everlasting war is autonomous weaponry. My team knows that. I was told to bring in help. Why’d you even bother applying for transfer?” Was he slighted by his supers telling him how to do his job? I leaned over the e-table and hesitated a moment before I bit. “You need lateral ideas to meet your timeline and your team is floundering. Ice them. I’ll have at least one selfaware system running within a few months, Sir.” LeMay sneered and furrowed his broad eyebrows; his eyes never left mine. I was right. His shoulders slumped, probably under the pressure from his superiors to build a prototype. His only choices were extending the head hunt or hiring me. He didn’t want more meetings, interviews, employment validations, authorizations, and other time leeches. Enemy nations weren’t about to pause their efforts to militarize titanium brains until our nation had finished building one of its own. Sure, he had his choice of neuroscientists, yet finding one with enough multidisciplinary experience to finish the job had limited his options. Two dozen existed in the world; the résumé that floated within the e-table between us mostly a formality. Not that this behemoth appeared to be one for rules, formal or otherwise. From LeMay on up, they all thought that the first player to build such a machine would win any war. In my biased opinion, they were all blind. Our race to build the first ultraintelligent weapon ensured no winners. At best, it’d be a perpetual standoff between nations. The ceaseless war they wanted to avoid. My heart hammered whenever I thought that maybe there’d be nobody left to pass the finish line. So. Apply for the job, right? In his throaty baritone voice, LeMay said, “Prove yourself.” His team, formed from the Agency’s brightest stars, was stumped. The 1 Till Yūna Futaba autónoma 6 Agency wanted intelligent machines—metal brains referred to as sophonts around here—with reasoning abilities surpassing humanlevel aptitude that would obey us. Somewhere up the food chain, apparently, LeMay’s chieftains sought unalloyed certainties that their pets would fight for us and die for us, while remaining loyal to us. They wanted to leash their beasts; my new job was to tether them. Perhaps what the Agency needed was a shift in what it meant to rope them in. “Sir?” I said, “Why not ally—” “Duplicity,” he answered. “We build them. They explore, they learn, they teach us neutralization strategies. Then what? Entreat them to join our fight, share our allegiances? Lean into our naïvety that they’ll have no ulterior motives? We don’t bet lives on wishes, Staff Sergeant Futaba. When our autonomous sophont is ready, it won’t be released with mutual trust, but with my hand hovering over a detonate button.” So. LeMay wanted slaves; I wanted their emancipation. I doubted this would end well for anyone, especially the machines. 2 Sow 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 8 Wherein contingencies originate Xander Angelos (February 6, 2042) M y older halfbrother, Tyfós, stood just inside of my bedroom doorway, pillow in hand, his shape a shadowy black figure in the void, scarcely illuminated by a red nightlight. Only effervescent memo ries of that evening remain: I hadn’t turned four. I lay in bed, paralyzed, eyes straining, trembling inwardly, unable to yell. Stealthily, he walked slowly to me, each step a calculated measure, avoiding discarded toys. At the bedside, his pillow approached my face with equal tempo. I felt its soft touch and the smothering, gradually increasing pressure; its cheap potpourri smell still haunts. My body reacted, legs kicking, arms pushing, body twisting, head turning, chest burning for breath. A gap! I filled my lungs and screamed “Ma!” over and over in terror until cotton was all I could taste. Footsteps pounded in the hall. Light vanquished the dark. That was the first year my father started to both study calligraphy and write me letters of advice for my birthday on his own handmade paper. When I was five, and we were alone, he told me they were for my eyes only. So after food was devoured and games were re-shelved, I’d dash to my bedroom, shut my door, and read the letter. Dutifully, gently, I’d store each one away in a small box I had hidden in my closet. Every so often I’d lock my door and re-read them all. He never went to such lengths with his stepson. I didn’t think Tyfós knew. Fastforward to the night of my father’s wake. Two envelopes rested on our mantel. I pulled mine down, walked to my bedroom, and quietly closed the door. My thirteenyearold self was torn between reading it and leaving it unopened. Momentarily delaying that decision, I walked into the closet to fetch the other letters. When I pulled the box out of its hiding spot, it was nearly weightless. My heart sank. 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 9 I kicked the door open, stomped to the living room, and spotted Tyfós across the crowded floor. Hard to miss in his white suit and black tie. He noticed me immediately. Without breaking eye contact, he drooped a hand in front of his sternum—fingers extended and open, resembling a spider—then raised it with a small wiggle, closing his fingers on ascension. A sign for going up in smoke. He grinned. Of course he knew. As I thrust my way through the throngs of people, my mother seized my arm. Scowling, she said, “Bedroom. Now. Regain your composure.” Protesting was pointless. Sitting on my bed, still teeming, I slipped a letter opener along the envelope and carefully drew out the folded, hand crafted sheets. I cherished his last piece of wisdom. My father had inked a pangram in a boxy, calligraphic style: Cowering, figuratively cloaked by tech, requires no jumps of brazen mental dexterity. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ About four years later, Cassandra entered my life. On our second date, she professed that asking her out in person had piqued her interest in me far beyond what she felt for the other young admirers who had asked for dates behind the shields of their comms. When she said she’d enjoy seeing more of me, my heart bust a rib. Was she wearing auglenses to see my pulse quicken? My skin felt flushed enough that it probably wasn’t necessary. I asked, “Hey, would you like—” “Absolute!” she said, her eyes wide and eager. “—to retro a third date?” “A who what?” When next we met, her gleaming, smokyblack hair was draped over her left shoulder. She’d parted it down the middle; pin curls and finger waves framed her oval face. Sloping eyebrows arched above her eyes and a pinkishivory powder accentuated her high cheekbones. Every vein in my body ached. A royal blue evening dress with a plunging back and sweeping asymmetrical hemline graced her form; synthetic spidersilk 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 10 fabric flowed as water down her contours. I neglected to breathe. I’d also dressed up in the 1930s style: a loosefitting navy blue suit with broad shoulders, my father’s old fedora, and a pair of tan gloves to match my twotoned taupe and tan wingtips. She looped her slender arm through mine as we meandered to the car. My father had left me advice and a manualdrive, twodoor silver coupé sporting spacious front seats, white leather and heated. I slid into the driver’s side and jetted us to our evening’s first stop: a juke joint reënactment. Not far out of town, a wooden shack called the Blue Rain Juke Joint stood alone on a dirt field, its slipshod plank siding was cracked and aged gray from exposure. A strong sneeze could have knocked it down. Cass looked at me, turned her head towards the long, skinny house, then back to me. “Books and covers,” I said. Expensive cologne, layered perfume, and topshelf liquor enveloped us upon entering. Members of a mixed audience of all shapes, sizes, and colours were dressed to the nines. Everyone sat around round, candlelit lounge tables. As we walked in, several people turned and caught an elec trifying glimpse of Cassandra. We found our chairs as the overhead lights went out and the tabletop candles dimmed, hushing the burbling room into silence. The stage presented a rustic backdrop. Wooden rafters topped rickety walls. Bare light bulbs were strung together with sagging black cables. Colourful, twisted paper streamers had been tacked along the ceiling from corner to corner. An undercurrent of musty old pine wafted along invisible heated air currents. Two dozen funnels of swirling ebony smoke strewn with tiny glinting diamonds rose out of the floor and coalesced into translucent dancers. They partnered up and embraced each other, barely moving, eyes closed, waiting. Tucked away in the far corner of the stage, a blues band materialized into view, the entire ensemble scintillating with the same ghostly appear 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 11 ance as the dancers. The vocalist, tall and thick, wore a rubycoloured, rhinestoneencrusted dress; she was joined by a guitar player, a pianist seated at an upright, a trumpeter, and a percussionist poised to strum five thimblecapped fingers along a washboard bib with one hand while blowing into a jug held with the other. All of them had thrown off the blazers from their black twopiece suits and had long since lost their ties, leaving them in unbuttoned white shirts with suspenders crisscrossing their backs. Standing in front of the instrumentalists, the singer raised a finger in the air. She took a breath and sang the first line a capella , in a guttural, whiskeyborn drawl: “I never seen such a real hard time before ...” Her words set the dancers in motion. With a flick of her hand, eyes never leaving the audience, she pointed first to one side, then to the other, vivifying her band. The dancers choreographed their own performances on-thefly for the audience, each pair interpreting the music differently. There were shoulder shimmies, quick turns, sinewy arms, stylish dips, body rolls, and more. I couldn’t tell if the dancers were taking cues from the music, or the musicians were timing their melodies to the downward pulse of the dancers. Cassandra leaned her leg against mine. From every blue note forward, I sat stock still, petrified to budge, feeling our heat exchange, fearing to break the bond building between us. She turned to me at intermission, one elbow on the table, scooched my way, and asked, “Wanna skill that dance?” “Absolute,” I said, borrowing her affirmative. “You game for part two?” I asked, standing to offer my hand while smiling broadly. “And leave this warm party palace?” “Return on another retro date?” I asked, seeking a compromise. She hesitated. “Part two better be tops,” she said with a knowing smile, grabbing her overcoat, and taking my hand. Outside the building, the nearby metropolis smeared its everpresent 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 12 nighttime halo across the Milky Way. The waning moon was obscured by clouds and smog. I reached into my jacket to pull out my volaura . “Don’t look into the light,” I said, tossing it into the air. Hovering directly above us, the fingersized machine lit a dazzling green spotlight in the shape of a heart on the ground, pointing at our feet. We stole away from the juke joint, shoulders touching, hands clasped, following the broad swath of superbrilliant light through the brisk air back to my father’s old car. After settling into the driver’s seat, I put the way finder down on the console’s charging plate. Cassandra looked at the small device. “That was impossicredible. How’d you bottle daylight?” she asked. “A bit brighter than,” I said, keying the ignition. “Resolved a few minor photon flux inefficiencies in consumergrade solidstate electronphoton conversion. Attached the beamer to my microdrone and combined it with a radiolocator. A little machine learning tracks whoever chucked it.” Cassandra tussled my hair. “My, my, Mr. McGenius, haven’t we met?” Several farms later, down an old country road, electric vehicles were jockeying for position on an overfull field in front of a towering white screen. Most cars didn’t need drivers. Years earlier, lobbyists for Mothers Against Drunk Driving had pushed forward laws that allowed robocars to chauffeur young drivers home after midnight. Parents loved giving their kids a choice: be in the car when it leaves or walk home. My mother, overprotective as always, had told me to be back by 11 PM ; I looked over at Cassandra. Yeah, I’d be late. During the endless roll of advertisements, Cassandra shifted over to ask, “What kind of cars drive themselves out of X-rated drive-in movies?” As she drew closer, my heart rammed. I looked at her and said, “I give.” “PG Cruisers.” “Cass, if you were a book, I’d have put you down.” She pressed in so near that her breath warmed my ear. She whispered, “Xander, d’you find car puns—” 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 13 I grimaced. “Please, no.” “— tire -some?” As she pulled away, our eyes locked, then lips met for the first time. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Psynæris, the first quasitelepathic home gaming system, had the bend of black market brain stimulators. Passing government regulations to get to market must have taken either years or backroom bribes. Two hulking units crowded our apartment’s not-so-spacious living area. The game translated speech, signs, even Sumerian Cuneiform script in realtime. We need only be confused about what something meant for translation to occur. Writing flipped over to English when we stared at it. Whenever a player spoke—human or otherwise—an English translation played over the low murmur of their foreign tongue, in their own voice. Cassandra was in our bedroom perfecting a thirdyear oceanography report for university. I was crouched over a magnifying lamp, upgrading and shortening wires to reduce the power consumption of my volaura’s wings when a familiar fragrance filled the air: It was the same lemony scented bodywash Cass wore on our first retro date. I’d have stood beside her for an eternity to linger in those memories. “D’you wanna play Psynæris before we trounce our growlies?” she asked, as if it was even a question: A new saga had just been released with over a decade’s worth of stories and timelines. “We both could use a brain drain, right?” “Right. Because foreign language immersion is so relaxing.” She laughed. At least travelling from the living room spewed fewer emissions than flying. Besides, time travel was still otherwise impossible. I stepped onto a shallow concave disc segmented into several copper triangles, strapped into a harness that hung like a limp noose from the platform’s overarching arms, crowned my head with a black leather head 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 14 band, tugged slipsoles over my shoes, and donned ferrofluidiclined gloves to receive haptic feedback. The gloves gave any virtual objects we interacted with a sense of texture, weight, temperature, and solidity. Cass geared up beside me. More expensive models hijacked auglenses, which Cass used sometimes, but I couldn’t stand the feeling of anything touching my eyeballs. I pulled opaque augmented reality lenses down over my eyes, whereupon Psynæris instantly displayed a scene. We were in Old Kyōto, Japan. Cassandra’s avatar wore a powder blue cotton kimono embroidered with small, repeated flowers of yellow silk and black thread. Her long sleeves fluttered in the breeze. She stood some paces ahead of me, underneath the entrance sign to Nijō Castle, not far from its outer moat. I peered into a puddle to catch the reflection of a lowclass samurai, garbed in a man’s dull indigo kimono with charcoal grey padding. A long, curved sword swayed at my left side. The telecognos captured the essence of my fiancée’s thoughts and flirtatious undertones then transmitted— transed —them via directional audio, in a remarkable mimicry of her voice. Why hello there Officer , she transed. Kyōto in Psynæris echoed reality. Distant bird calls emanated from picturesque autumn trees. Quiet patters of rain tapped upon the leaves. Aimless footfalls of commoners wearing wooden shoes clickclacked nearby. Foliage carpeted the hills in vivid gold and red hues. Winds rippled through lush green grass. Computergenerated faces within the simulation hadn’t quite left the uncanny valley—unnatural twitches, eye lids that didn’t quite contact the eye, lips that never wet the teeth—the flaws could be fixed, given enough time. Knowing this, I had purchased the two machines along with a twenty year software upgrade plan. All that money was not well spent. ⋆ ⋆ ⋆ Cassandra walked into the apartment after school sporting disheveled 2 Sow Xander Angelos autónoma 15 hair and a disgruntled face. She let her backpack drop to the floor with a thud. Three steps towards me and the keyless entry system automati cally locked the deadbolt behind her. The first two years of her doctorate program had been a grind. Today seemed super stressful. I said, “We knew—” “Not now,” she interrupted. Taking up the clue, I left for the kitchen to start cooking. Halfway there, my comm buzzed. Tyfós had written, with autocorrect disabled: gave ur creds 2 some chick b gr8 2 live in same city, bruh ive changed alot His linguistic abominations remained on my comm for an entire second before I fingerbrushed across the device. The words disappeared. It’s funny how formative years with siblings can forge false bonds. Blood and water and mental abuse. Surely he had outgrown his malevolent nature by now. Maybe an old dog can change its spots. Twelfth time’s a charm, as no saying goes. We later learned that a recruiter had asked him if he knew a robotics guru who’d be interested in an entrylevel position. Given the emotional and physical distance I had with my halfbrother, he couldn’t have known my state of mind. He definitely couldn’t have known that, at my current job, I felt like I was feeding into the capitalistic system that was pushing life to extinction. At the time, I surmised that he passed along my résumé for the finder’s fee and a chance to put me in his debt. Cassandra caught my expression and returned it with a probing stare. I answered her with a leading question. “Is this the lot you want, Cass?” Her eyes shifted from probing to distant. If we were in Psynæris, her strongest feelings and effervescent hints as to her thoughts would have 2 Sow Yūna Futaba autónoma 16 immediately transferred into my mind. Instead, I was left to wonder why her eyes began to well. I could see that a tsunami of words threatened to drown her. “I can’t,” she said. “I need time to knit my thoughts. When I’m ready, Xan, keep your calm because what I need to say isn’t just and it won’t be made just from you becoming infuriated. To put it in your terms, this stupid system won’t reverse polarity no matter how electrifying the tongue lashing you’d rush to dole out, so please, please hear me when I say that any angry responses will only aggravate my quandary. I’m not looking for solutions, at least not yet, okay?” My breath grew shallow and I felt my brows furrow despite efforts to quell the possibilities that ran through my mind. I asked her, “When?” Yūna Futaba (June 15, 2064) Three metal brains—layer upon layer of thin, round iridescent titanium wafers—topped desks at the far end of a spacious cleanroom, which was otherwise almost empty. Just white tiles and white walls with a podium in the middle. A translucent gesture translator was perched on the podium; it was a state-of-theart input device that mapped hand waves and finger motion into orders for the machines. When I stepped within arm’s reach of the podium, an elaborate mesh of lines labelled Prôtos materialized in the air a few metres ahead. Probably a neuromorphing perception lattice: the support systems for the brain’s wiring. The display showed spindly, extruded lines of varying lengths, as though they were needles tossed haphazardly along a massive table; a mess of thin threads that represented the smallest of slices for just one of those three etched titanium marvels. If that was true, then this was far more advanced than I had imagined. I opened with a simple probe, “Prôtos?” Parts of the projection sprang to life. The lines lit up and a new window appeared. In it I saw the dissonance of how the machine interpreted its 2 Sow Yūna Futaba autónoma 17 reality: images of tessellating shapes reminiscent of Escher drawings or Penrose tiles; a tartan of weapons, deformed faces, and towering spires; a distorted and tinted jumble of disjointed visions. Peeping behind the mirror of its thoughts was only possible by using a simpler neural net, itself an extensive interwoven webbing built to illuminate what would otherwise defy understanding by human minds. I motioned a few deft hand movements in front of the projector to bind a set of vital neuropath ways. The dissonance blended and morphed into a lucid impression of its deliberations, a live vid, fuzzy yet intelligible. A voice floated out of the podium’s embedded speakers. “Not safe.” “Why?” I asked the metal brain, with some trepidation. “Not safe,” Prôtos said, audibly distressed and insistent. A wide swath of lines throbbed with luminous intensity before me: unvoiced thoughts. The vid went dark, as though the machine had shut its eyes. From fear? Door opened behind me. I turned from the podium. LeMay bowed his head to pass through the door frame. This is how a weaver ant must have felt at the whim of a giant ape. I stood at attention. “At ease.” His long strides brought him next to me in a heartbeat. He stared down at me. “Why did it speak to you?” Shrugged and opened my palms upward. “I don’t know, sir.” “Find out,” he said, his voice laced with imperative. “Yes, sir.” He left the room. Door slid into place behind him, silently. Prôtos whispered in its strained, young voice, “You are not them, yet.” “Prôtos, may we try some word play a for a minute?” “Yes.” “What do bananas and oranges have in common?” Prôtos replied in hushed tones. “You peel them before eating. You’re silly! My turn now?” “Please.”