Peter Watts - Beyond the Rift

The screaming child didn’t turn, her back a defiant slap at Kim and Andrew Goravec. Stavros had a better view: Jeannie’s face was just a few centimeters away from the southeast pickup. For all the pain it showed, for all the pain Jeannie had felt in the four short years of her physical life, those few tiny drops that never fell were the closest she ever came to crying.

“Make it clear ,” she demanded, segueing abruptly from anger to petulance.

Kim Goravec shook her head. “Honey, we’d love to show you outside. Remember before, how much you liked it? But you have to promise not to scream at it all the time. You didn’t used to, honey, you—”

“Now!” Back to rage, the pure, white-hot anger of a small child.

The pads on the wall panel were greasy from Jeannie’s repeated, sticky-fingered attempts to use them herself. Andrew flashed a begging look at his wife: Please, let’s just give her what she wants .

His wife was stronger. “Jeannie, we know it’s difficult—”

Jeannie turned to face the enemy. The north pickup got it all: the right hand rising to the mouth, the index finger going in. The defiant glare in those glistening, focused eyes.

Kim took a step forward. “Jean, honey, no!”

They were baby teeth, still, but sharp. They’d bitten to the bone before Mommy even got within touching distance. A red stain blossomed from Jeannie’s mouth, flowed down her chin like some perverted reenactment of mealtime messes as a baby, and covered the lower half of her face in an instant. Above the gore, bright angry eyes said gotcha .

Without a sound Jeannie Goravec collapsed, eyes rolling back in her head as she pitched forward. Kim caught her just before her head hit the floor. “Oh God Andy she’s fainted she’s in shock she—”

Andrew didn’t move. One hand was buried in the pocket of his blazer, fiddling with something.

Stavros felt his mouth twitch. Is that a remote control in your pocket or are you just glad to—

Kim had the tube of liquid skin out, sprayed it onto Jeannie’s hand while cradling the child’s head in her lap. The bleeding slowed. After a moment Kim looked back at her husband, who was standing motionless and unhelpful against the wall. He had that look on his face, that giveaway look that Stavros was seeing so often these days.

“You turned her off,” Kim said, her voice rising. “After everything we’d agreed on, you still turned her off?”

Andrew shrugged helplessly. “Kim…”

Kim refused to look at him. She rocked back and forth, tuneless breath whistling between her teeth, Jeannie’s head still in her lap. Kim and Andrew Goravec with their bundle of joy. Between them, the cable connecting Jeannie’s head to the server shivered on the floor like a disputed boundary.

Stavros had this metaphoric image of her: Jean Goravec, buried alive in the airless dark, smothered by tonnes of earth—finally set free. Jean Goravec coming up for air.

Another image, of himself this time: Stavros Mikalaides, liberator. The man who made it possible for her to experience, however briefly, a world where the virtual air was sweet and the bonds nonexistent. Certainly there’d been others in on the miracle—a dozen tech-heads, twice as many lawyers—but they’d all vanished over time, their interest fading with proof-of-principal or the signing of the last waiver. The damage was under control, the project was in a holding pattern; there was no need to waste more than a single Terracon employee on mere cruise control. So only Stavros remained—and to Stavros, Jeannie had never been a project. She was his as much as the Goravecs. Maybe more.

But even Stavros still didn’t know what it was really like for her. He wondered if it was physically possible for anyone to know. When Jean Goravec slipped the leash of her fleshly existence, she awoke into a reality where the very laws of physics had expired.

It hadn’t started that way, of course. The system had booted up with years of mundane, real-world environments on file, each lovingly rendered down to the dust motes. But they’d been flexible, responsive to the needs of any developing intellect. In hindsight, maybe too flexible. Jean Goravec had edited her personal reality so radically that even Stavros’ mechanical intermediaries could barely parse it. This little girl could turn a forest glade into a bloody Roman coliseum with a thought. Unleashed, Jean lived in a world where all bets were off.

A thought-experiment in child abuse: place a newborn into an environment devoid of vertical lines. Keep her there until the brain settles, until the wiring has congealed. Whole assemblies of pattern-matching retinal cells, aborted for lack of demand, will be forever beyond recall. Telephone poles, the trunks of trees, the vertical aspects of skyscrapers—your victim will be neurologically blind to such things for life.

So what happens to a child raised in a world where vertical lines dissolve, at a whim, into circles or fractals or a favorite toy?

We’re the impoverished ones , Stavros thought. Next to Jean, we’re blind.

He could see what she started with, of course. His software read the patterns off her occipital cortex, translated them flawlessly into images projected onto his own tactical contacts. But images aren’t sight, they’re just… raw material. There are filters all along the path: receptor cells, firing thresholds, pattern-matching algorithms. Endless stores of past images, an experiential visual library to draw on. More than vision, sight is interpretation , a subjective stew of infinitesimal enhancements and corruptions. Nobody in the world could interpret Jean’s visual environment better than Stavros Mikalaides, and he’d barely been able to make sense of those shapes for years.

She was simply, immeasurably, beyond him. It was one of the things he loved most about her.

Now, mere seconds after her father had cut the cord, Stavros watched Jean Goravec ascend into her true self. Heuristic algorithms upgraded before his eyes; neural nets ruthlessly pared and winnowed trillions of redundant connections; intellect emerged from primordial chaos. Namps-per-op dropped like the heavy end of a teeter-totter; at the other end of that lever, processing efficiency rose into the stratosphere.

This was Jean. They have no idea , Stavros thought, what you’re capable of.

She woke up screaming.

“It’s all right, Jean, I’m here.” He kept his voice calm to help her come down.

Jean’s temporal lobe flickered briefly at the input. “Oh, God,” she said.

“Another nightmare?”

“Oh, God.” Breath too fast, pulse too high, adrenocortical analogs off the scale. It could have been the telemetry of a rape.

He thought of short-circuiting those responses. Half a dozen tweaks would make her happy. But half a dozen tweaks would also turn her into someone else. There is no personality beyond the chemical—and while Jean’s mind was fashioned from electrons rather than proteins, analogous rules applied.

“I’m here, Jean,” he repeated. A good parent knew when to step in, and when suffering was necessary for growth. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Eventually, she settled down.

“Nightmare.” There were sparks in the parietal subroutines, a tremor lingering in her voice. “It doesn’t fit, Stav. Scary dreams, that’s the definition. But that implies there’s some other kind, and I can’t—I mean, why is it always like this? Was it always like this?”

“I don’t know.” No, it wasn’t .

She sighed. “These words I learn, none of them really seem to fit anything exactly, you know?”