Elizabeth Bear - Future Visions - Original Science Fiction Inspired by Microsoft

“You can supervise her,” I said. “Just try to keep her from disconnecting. I can make this stop, but I need to go.”

“Then go,” said Angie. I’d be hearing about this later. I knew that, just like I knew I was making the right call. Taking Billie away from the computer wouldn’t stop this woman from breaking into my sister’s house and calling us, and one police report could see Tasha branded a security risk by the company, which couldn’t afford to leave software patches that were still under NDA in insecure locations.

Tasha lived fifteen minutes from us under normal circumstances. I made the drive in seven.

Her front door was locked, but the porch light was on, signaling that she was home and awake. I let myself in without ringing the bell. She could yell at me later. Finding out what was going on was more important than respecting her privacy, at least for right now. I felt a little bad about that. I also knew that she would have done exactly the same thing if our positions had been reversed.

I slunk through the house, listening for the sound of Billie’s voice. Tasha kept the speakers on for the sake of the people who visited her and used her computer to make calls. She was better at accommodation than I was. The thought made my ears redden. My sister, who had spent most of her life fighting to be accommodated, made the effort for others when I was willing to focus on just her. I would be better, I promised silently. For her sake, and for the sake of my children, I would be better.

I didn’t hear Billie. Instead, I heard the throaty croaking of a crow from somewhere up ahead. It continued as I walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen doorway. And stopped.

The pied crow that Tasha had been rehabilitating was perched on the back of the chair across from the computer, talons digging deep into the wood as it cocked its head and watched Billie’s image on the screen. Billie’s mouth moved; a squawk emerged. The crow croaked back, repeating the same sounds over and over, until the avatar was matching them perfectly. Only then did it move on to the next set of sounds.

I took a step back and sagged against the hallway wall, heart pounding, head spinning with the undeniable reality of what I had just seen. A language the neural net didn’t know, one that depended on motion and gesture as much as it did on sound. A language the system would have been exposed to enough before a curious bird started pecking at the keys that the program could at least try to make sense of it.

Sense enough to say “hello.”

An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.

“All right, Paulson, this was a funny prank, but you’ve used up over a dozen computing hours,” said Mike, pushing away from his own monitor. He was one of the researchers, and had been remarkably tolerant so far. “Time to pack it in.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Just…just wait, all right? There’s one thing we haven’t tried yet.”

Mike looked at me and frowned. I looked pleadingly back. Finally, he sighed.

“Admittedly, you’ve encouraged the neural net to make some great improvements. You can have one more try. But that’s it! After that, we need this lab back.”

“One more is all I need.”

I’d been hoping to avoid this. It would’ve been easier if I could have replicated the original results without resorting to re-creation of all factors. Not easier for the bird: easier for my nerves. Angie was already mad at me, and Tasha was unsettled, and I was feeling about as off-balance as I ever did.

Opening the door and sticking my head out into the hall, I looked to my left, where my wife and children were settled in ergonomic desk chairs. Angie was focused on her tablet, composing an email to her work with quick swipes of her fingers, like she was trying to wipe them clean of some unseen, clinging film. Billie was sitting next to her, attention fixed on a handheld game device. Greg sat on the floor between them. He had several of his toy trains and was rolling them around an imaginary track, making happy humming noises.

He was the first one to notice me. He looked up and beamed, calling, “Mama!”

“Hi, buddy,” I said. Angie and Billie were looking up as well. I offered my wife a sheepish smile. “Hi, hon. We’re almost done in here. I just need to borrow Billie for a few minutes, if that’s okay?”

It wasn’t okay: I could see that in her eyes. We were going to fight about this later, and I was going to lose. Billie, however, bounced right to her feet, grinning from ear to ear as she dropped her game on the chair where she’d been sitting. “Do I get to work science with you?”

“I want science!” Greg protested, his own smile collapsing into the black hole of toddler unhappiness.

“Oh, no, bud.” I crouched down, putting myself on as much of a level with him as I could. “We’ll do some science when we get home, okay? Water science. With the hose. I just need Billie right now, and I need you to stay here with Mumma and keep her company. She’ll get lonely if you both come with me.”

Greg gave me a dubious look before twisting to look suspiciously up at Angie. She nodded quickly.

“She’s right,” she said. “I would be so lonely out here all by myself. Please stay and keep me company.”

“Okay,” said Greg, after weighing his options. He reached contentedly for his train. “Water science later.”

Aware that I had just committed myself to being squirted with the hose in our backyard for at least an hour, I took Billie’s hand and ushered her quickly away before anything else could go wrong.

The terminal she’d be using to make her call was waiting for us when we walked back into the room. I ushered her over to the chair, ignoring the puzzled looks from my colleagues. “Remember the lady who kept calling the house?” I asked. “Would you like to talk to her again?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers,” said Billie, eyeing me warily as she waited for the catch. She was old enough to know that when a parent offered to break the rules, there was always a catch.

“I’m right here this time,” I said. “That means she’s not a stranger, she’s…a social experiment.”

Billie nodded, still dubious. “If it’s really okay…”

“It’s really, truly okay.” Marrying a physicist meant that my kids had always been destined to grow up steeped in science. It was an inescapable part of our lives. I hadn’t been expecting them to necessarily be so fond of it, but that worked out, too. I was happier raising a bevy of little scientists than I would have been with the alternative.

Billie nodded once more and turned to face the monitor. I flashed a low “okay” sign at Mike and the screen sprang to life, showing the blandly pretty CGI avatar that Tasha’s system generated for Pitch. We’d have to look into the code to see when it had made the decision to start rendering animals with human faces, and whether that was part of a patch that had been widely distributed. I could see the logic behind it—the generic avatar generator was given instructions based on things like “eyes” and “attempting to use the system,” rather than the broader and more complex-to-program “human.” I could also see lawsuits when people inevitably began running images of their pets through the generator and using them to catfish their friends.