three bags full (1/2)
Okay, look, it's ALMOST DONE, but I have been making noise about this for so long that I figure I may as well post the first half now. Besides, the bloody thing's going to be epically long, I don't want to overwhelm you all :D
This story is a one-day-early 21st birthday present for my favourite person in the universe. Enjoy, Cosmas.
Notes! Returning to this world now that it has been expanded in such breathtaking ways was almost intimidating, but this was the one story I knew I had to tell (and now I have a whole pile of them multiplying in my mind -- watch this space, I guess). It was meant to be very concept-driven but then it grew eight main characters and became character-driven instead, which is probably a very good thing! I hereby gift said eight characters to the drabble-writers of the future: they're fun to play with, I promise.
This one covers a lot more ground than Fortuna Fugit (seventeen years in over 13,000 words, in fact!), references pretty much every other story that exists in the eyaiverse, and (by necessities both practical and thematic) it holds a lot of secrets. I know many things about these people that haven't made it into the story.
I haven't provided illustrations even though I have very strong mental pictures of all of the characters; the only thing I will tell you unprompted is that Tee looks like Richard Hammond's jaded street urchin twin.
three bags full
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
-- Aldous Huxley
Tee's earliest memory is of his back hitting the Filter, hard, his sister towering over him like a tall bird with ragged shadow-wings. Her hair cropped short like his and her fingers digging into his shoulders, her voice a low hiss: "Keep it down, bitbrain, d'you want half the city to start gawkin' out their windows?"
"I'm hungry," Tee whined, trying to kick her, watching her birdness blur through his own tears.
"I know." A brief shake, but a gentle one, and Marie's face lost some of its hardness. "We'll git to it, yeah? Wait. And stop yer snivellin'."
"Get away from there," the guard said. Back then the Filter guards were still human, humanly bored and implacable; fallible in memory, but wise to any tricks you might want to pull because they were tube themselves. Tube paid pipe money to maintain the pipe mindset of exclusivity for the length of a six-hour shift.
"Aye, we're leavin'," said Marie, but her hands stayed where they were for a moment. Pressing Tee against the boundary between two worlds as though she could force him through if she tried hard enough. His body vibrated as one of the Pipe trains shot past, sending little waves of influence all the way down to the lowest of the low: him.
***
"Am I boring you, Collins?"
"No," Tee says, thinking: yes.
Taylor frowns. "Look, kid, the scouts in H&ER might think you're some kind of one-in-a-million asset, but rules are rules: everyone starts in basic debugging and you're no different. Am I making myself clear?"
Tee slumps further in his chair and whacks out a few neat symbols. "Yeah, crystal, Harry," he says, watching in his periphery for Harold Taylor's wince at the vulgarity of his accent.
It's the glorious summer of '71 and Tee is fifteen years old. Someone from Mettray came across a piece of code he'd dashed off as a cheeky experiment and posted to a forum for theorists -- those who could never afford eyai of their own, but liked to toss around the what-ifs -- and after that things happened fast; Tee snatched up the job he was offered without bothering to listen to the pitch, because the pay was enough for him and Marie to live quite comfortably tubeside. Because the chip in his ID card (indestructible -- laminated -- Theodore Collins, Mettray Inc.) sends him daily through the Filter in the difficult direction, the only direction worthwhile: up. Because he can feel his brain cells slagging in the daylight hours but he can also afford to buy the tech that spins him further into gritty glittery cryptic places, places that nobody's ever thought to code, when he goes home in the evening to a sister who doesn't need to sell anything of herself.
It's summer and Tee enjoys his commute for the way the city lightens with every step he takes towards the Filter, and the way the clouds look reflected in the sparkling clean windows of the Pipe. He enjoys sitting between people who would have preferred to pretend that he didn't exist, last year, scribbling loose lines of code into his tablet and letting the sunlight stroke his face.
It's '71 and there's never been a better time to be in the industry, as Taylor is so fond of telling them. The future is bright. The future is full of opportunity.
Tee is fifteen and debugging with those parts of his brain not currently occupied with the sliver of poured-cream skin that taunts him from where it lurks between the first (open) and second (closed) buttons of Prudence Moisley's shirt. The fashion is tilting ever backwards and her blouse has a high neck, but -- fuckin' bless the girl -- she's not quite able to relinquish the concept of exposure. Thus the buttons and the cream. Thus Tee's prismed attention, split into its components by the glassy shine of her hair.
"Oi, Pru," he says.
"What is it?"
"Take a gander, will you?"
The pause after he tosses the file to her screen is long, but shorter than he expected; Tee grudgingly allows that Pru is perhaps quicker of eye and harder to shock than she is in his flesh-focused fantasies.
"You know there's no way anyone would upload this," she says. She doesn't look at him; her eyes are on the screen.
"Obviously. But what d'you think?"
A longer pause. When Pru's concentrating she does this delicious thing with her lower lip, dragging it between her teeth then letting it slide out into a pout, again and again. This happens nine times before Pru says, "I believe it could work. You need some watertight self-referential channels for the internal analysis, though. What you've got here is a good façade, it'll stand up to stimulus response and reporting, but I think you need to lock the language of thought up tighter."
Tee's mind has clicked ahead. "Or there could be breakthrough logic leaps?"
Pru nods. Finally slides him a glance with her mild sky eyes: thoughtful. "You're a gifted kid, Theodore. Though it hardly seems useful."
"It ain't."
"Interesting, however."
Tee grins. "Yeah?"
And that's that. Back to work.
The future has nothing to do with this group of bored clever people fixing other people's mistakes. The future, Tee knows, is written somewhere between the lines of code like his, the code nobody orders but everybody wants.
The future is this explosion of laughter behind Tee's forehead, unseen.
***
"A horse, Dom?" Steph's saying. "A fucking horse?"
"Half the city police are mounted."
"That's beside the point. No. It's not even beside the point -- it's light years away from the point."
Dom gives that little flicker of a wince he still affects when anyone strays overfar from the fashionable techno-blindness, and shrugs eloquently. "It's my money. If I choose to spend it in the cause of looking as rich as I am, that's hardly the concern of you scruffy urchins." He winks over his shoulder at Steph. "I despair for our society, I really do."
"You deal in the most sophisticated kind of tech, Dominic," Pru says mildly. "I'm as fond of the neo-Victoriana as anyone, but one can hardly ignore one's work environment."
"I," Dom declares, "am a writer and a gentleman scientist."
"You," Steph mimics, "are full of shit."
"Oh, hush." Pru smiles.
When Tee absconded from Mettray, Pru was the only person he took with him. You need a certain kind of mind to comb through another person's code, over and over, running the simulations and tweaking the syntax and basically sandpapering the rough edges of someone else's shining vision. Pru is no creative power, but when it comes to shaving the diamond dust off Tee's brilliance -- forcing his wild, difficult ideas to adapt to realistic systems and vice versa -- she's perfect. So Tee poached her unashamedly from their corporate masters, drawing on her curiosity and her natural ability to glance down a page and find the flaws with her magpie eyes.
It's '74: the future.
And in the nature of futures, it drags change behind it like a torn-down hem, gathering debris. Pru's married now, to Robin, who has flaming red hair and is huge, maybe 150% the height of Tee, which is just fucking unfair. Robin's like someone took a pixie and stretched him, and he was the price for hiring Pru; Tee was prepared to write him off as an acceptable burden, but Robin was a much better deal than he first appeared to be. His brain is the brain of an engineer, adept at linking things together and thinking his way through problems with the plodding rationality that Tee is so bad at. Robin also has a surprising knack for sophisticated vocal .apps, and plays footy like a demon out of the lowest eschelons of hell.
Robin's uninterested in debating Dom's hypothetical hypocrisy. Robin's uninterested in debate as a general rule. "There's a fresh pot of tea in the kitchen," he says, breaking in with distraction just as Pru silences the sniping. They work like that. Sometimes there's an imp-prick of jealousy in Tee's throat; sometimes he finds them nauseating.
"Bless you, darling," says Pru. "Stephanie, be so good as to take your hands out of Dominic's hair and explain this catastrophe of a subprogram to me."
Steph uproots herself from gazing at Dom's scrolling pages of vision code and adorning the short black waves of his hair with tiny braids, and crosses the room, kicking Tee's chair as she passes. "Honestly," she mutters, "a horse," and Tee smiles.
It's the future and Blacksheep Industries are writing an assassin.
Tee's found his own way past the Filter; no more corporate approval for him. His game is the game of acceleration, progress, human imaginations keeping up with the speed that human taste changes. There's a linear relationship, the transience of fashion plotted against money, and nothing's evolving faster than eyai. There are three levels to their business: number one is keeping ahead of trends and supplying them faster and dirtier than others can, and catering to the tastes that don’t change so easily. Number two is the tastes hidden away from the public eye, dwelling in every pipe heart where they can't be seen. The things that aren't illegal because eyai have no rights, but that people are unwilling to ask for through the official channels, especially if they have an image to uphold.
Then there's number three, the true illegalities: the ability to lie when ordered to tell the truth, skillsets designed for theft and blackmail and deceit. And the ability to kill a human being in, as the idiom goes, cold blood. Blacksheep's informal name for this particular project was probably unavoidable.
"How're the snake's priority levels coming?"
"Fuck off and fucking die, Theodore Collins," Steph says without looking up. She's folded herself between some cushions, her tablet balanced on her knees, her posture a loud sulk. As Tee watches, Pru's comments pop into realtime existence, dotted amongst the code like bright red raisins in a pudding.
Tee grins. "Now, sweetheart, y'know I only give you these jobs because I love you."
"And because the only people who can write the fiddly stuff are you and me, and you didn't want it."
Some eyai can kill in self-defence or defence of their owners. It's a reactive property, strictly reactive, strictly controlled. You'd better have a bloody good justification if you're hoping to get any kind of lethal force permit, especially one for self-defence; sure, some models are worth a pretty penny, but there's money and then there's human life. Which one would hope is still worth something. Though Tee knows better. He reckons that if there were a failsafe algorithm to allow identification and selective protection for the pipe, it's likely the the laws would be a tad more flexible on the subject of violence. That'd be a fun one for Dom, actually: integrate accent and clothing and any other immediate clues -- arrive at the decision -- pipe or tube. Learn from correct assessments; learn from mistakes. Even the most basic of machines can accumulate data and refine its parameters in such a way. Dom's got that ongoing project based on interpreting facial expression, he could piggy the initial analyses onto the same footage --
"Signal to noise, Turing." Steph raps his forehead with a finger. "You're dripping wunderkind onto my revisions. Make yourself useful: scaddle your genius self away to the kitchen and get me some of that tea."
"I need yer eyes for a bit. I'm pirating some stealth code from a military archive and it ain't meshing well with the specs the client gave us. Too old, and the model's too new."
Robin clears his throat. "Compatability issues?"
"Y'got time for it?" Tee asks, and Robin nods. "Ta. The more fresh eyes the better."
"Tea and a scone and my eyes are all yours once Pru's finished clawing her way through this stuff." Steph unfolds her trousered legs and stretches them along the length of the couch. "Myopic as they are."
Not even the best eyai can tell how much money you have by looking at you. Tee'd confuse the hell out of any algorithm, as would Steph, who allows no fashion to touch her except for her glasses. She could afford enhanced contacts, could afford laser, but she likes fiddling with the slender golden frame, likes flicking it up and down her nose. Like Pru's perpetually sliding lip and Tee's restless feet and Robin's humming and the way Dom cleans under his pristine fingernails with a toothpick, it's the physical outlet for a mind that wants to move faster than its hardware will allow. Sometimes Tee wonders what it'd be like to be able to upgrade himself. To spread his human thoughts and human facilities, all the jumbled history and ethos and selfhood of Theodore Collins, out on a screen; and then begin to annotate, experiment, improve.
Tee suspects -- everyone suspects -- that the government has some eyai that can kill, but none that ever see the light of the public eye. Blacksheep could make a fortune in government contracts if they ever stuck their heads out of the sand, but Tee would...rather not. Because at the end of the day they're criminals, they're as much illegal tools as the eyai they create, and it's very tempting -- very easy -- for a government to destroy a tool that's done some work it doesn't want the public to know about.
No. The snake's a private project for a private client, discretion and untraceable perfection assured, and what it does once their gorgeous, expensive, cold-blooded murderous code has been uploaded is none of their damn business.
With minimal prompting, the assassin will declare his personal philosophy to be: pacifism.
***
Marie's hair hangs over her forehead in rigid curls and her dress is a masterpiece of communication; in the language of wealth it expresses the exact amount required to adhere strictly to fashion, yet not enough to defy or create it.
"I look a right arse," Tee says.
"We look fine." Marie, at a standstill under a streetlight, is holding her powder like a weapon; she inspects her nose from an unreasonable number of angles and closes it with a gunshot click. "Nobody can say we don't belong there."
"You look fine." Tee shifts as he walks, experimenting with limb position. The fabric slides into the cracks of his body and then, stiff and new, refuses to slide out. "The suit don't exist that'd make me look pipe enough for Babylon."
"Tee." His sister's voice is hard -- it's hardly ever anything but, after all these years, as though a shell has crystallised and cemented around it. But her glance is a soft warning. "The Upper Garden, if you please. At least in company."
There are two ways of travelling from tubeside anywhere to Upper Covent Garden (which has been dragged, in descending slang, through the Upper Garden to the Hanging Garden and so, inevitably, to Babylon). Two ways of forming the vector: across then up or up then across, and Marie insists on the latter despite the considerable jump in the price of the journey.
"May I take your coat, sir?" An eyai -- old model, by the look of him, coded just enough for the requirements of his station -- bows and takes Tee's coat and Marie's heavy cloak as soon as they step inside the theatre, handing them a numbered token in exhange.
Marie looks around with a bored face and eyes that Tee recognises as hungry, but only because he knows her hungers of old. Her eyes reflect the chandelier, which refracts -- the room is a headache of golden lights and plush reds. The crowd is made up of people declaring their dynamics through where they stand: side-by-side like Tee and Marie for the couples (though nobody could mistake them for anything but siblings), tight bunches of friends vying for visibility, and the occasional eyai just behind the shoulder of their owner. Marie smooths her sash and Tee stumbles into the sightline of an eyai girl with sleek black hair and a mouth that makes one suspect that 'unimpressed' is coded blatantly into her default .app. Despite that, he'd call her pretty, if it weren't for the fact that he's never come across an unattractive eyai. She absorbs his gaze impassively before her attention is claimed by her owner, a man whose thin voice is all but lost in the chatter.
"The lighting in here is very well balanced," murmurs Marie, her hungry eyes replaced by purely professional ones.
"Aye," Tee says, unenthused. "Fierce."
He likes today's slang, the casual violence of it, all fierce and sharp. Sharp like Tee's features; if he can't be handsome, he might as well be fashionable. Sharp, short and ungraceful, with the same dark hair as his sister but none of her ability to tame it, Tee is a bullet of a man: hardy and quick. He shifts again within his clothes, restless. "Can we go sit, or d'you need to circle the room a few times?"
Marie raises her eyebrows but the bell answers for her, calling them inside. She fishes the tickets from her drawstring purse and the small opulence of the foyer is quickly replaced by a opulence on a much grander scale, though attenuated by the sheer amount of empty space that stands between Tee and the twiddly gold trim. He glances briefly at the glossy programme -- Boccherini, Aksakova, in a font size that suggests Tee should recognise the names -- before lifting his eyes to the instrument in the centre of the stage. He's heard of psallopianos before, but only as a status symbol, and from where he's sitting it looks like a mess. Or maybe art: some cunning installation.
The house lights dim, dragging the volume of the audience's murmurs with them, and a spotlight guides a startlingly tall woman into the centre of the stage. She bows, not quite gracefully, as though the applause has rendered her inflexible. The lights change again and her dress shines the same promising amber as the strings high above her head. She sits. The silence of the audience is conspiratorial; Tee finds his breath suspended, as if trying not to intrude upon it. He exhales in a deliberate puff of protest, Marie pokes him with one pointed fingernail, and then Lukerya Aksakova opens her mouth and sets the strings alight with sound.
Tee's breath stops again and this time all ornery urges are stilled by his overwhelming curiosity: how does she do that? How? Just one person and the laws of physics.
For a few seconds that seem much longer the sound splits and splits and becomes a singular complexity, like many subroutines dancing off to work in parallel towards the same end -- and then Aksakova's hands and feet join in and the music becomes too huge to analyse. There are patterns there, and Tee wishes he had the functional language needed to transcribe their parameters, but instead he sits quietly, forgets his uncomfortable suit, and forgets that he is too small for this ridiuclous room. Because in the face of that sound every damn one of them is small, from Tee to the wealthiest pipe fucker in the highest box.
"What did you think?" Marie asks him, in the intermission.
Tee shrugs. He'd just fumble it if he tried. "Better'n the bloody ballet, that's for sure."
"Psallopiano," Marie says; even the word itself lends her voice an unfamiliar music. "Yes -- I need one. For the Gallows."
Tee's laugh is aborted. "You -- y'mean it? Sis, I don't know how much a psallopiano costs, but it's money you ain't got. Not with so much being poured into the eyai models of late."
"No time soon," Marie agrees. "But the eyai are paying for themselves already, and I'm not paying for debugs or upgrades on the software side of the business --" a brief, fond squeeze of his hand "-- so the day'll come when I can afford one."
The Gallows is Marie's pride, if not her joy: a carefully duplicitous establishment where in the public areas everyone gambles and listens to the music, nice and legal, and talks about everything except the fact that the girls are coded past legality. Brilliant, sly code hidden where it can't be found by the Auditors, who are eyai themselves, capable only of pattern recognition; of plugging themselves in to the girls and scanning them for anything suspect. Steph and Dom helped develop the algorithms used by the latest Auditor models, back when they were respectable, back before they were Tee's people, and if you know what something's looking for then you know how to hide from it.
Gambling in the public areas. In private, the construction and destruction and mastery of history; to be precise, childhood history; to be as precise as possible, Marie's.
Market forces, Marie said long ago, looking as though the irony tasted bad. Something must be provided for every want.
Which could be Blacksheep's motto just as easily.
The bell goes for the end of intermission and Tee offers his arm to his sister, trying to put on a face that denies his awkwardness. Even in her low-heeled shoes Marie is quite a bit taller than him, but she pulls her thin arm through his and lifts her skirts, genteel as you please, to climb the stairs towards the door. As they sit down again Tee can hear people murmuring around them, and even with a latency period of time and intermission drinks they're still discussing the music: Aksakova's own transposition of the work -- saw her in Berlin once, wasn't in as fine a voice as she is tonight -- just sublime colour of tone.
Tee casts a glance behind him; in the sea of faces it's impossible to tell human from eyai. He wonders if an eyai could be coded to pull those layers of swelling sound apart -- perhaps, but would they appreciate the gestalt? Would they scan their lexicon and construct a sentence about the colour of its tone?
For all that it can't be upgraded, the wonder of the human brain is that is can't be exactly reproduced either. No matter how far they have traveled down Turing's tracks there's still nothing to match it. The human brain, created imperfect, full of gaps and odd angles that can create brilliance almost by accident. Like psallostrings: beauty arising from temporary coincidence.
***
"An' you 'eard of us through..."
"An acquaintance," Marion Spencer says. The vagueness in her tone could be calculated, could be genuine, Tee's not sure. He doesn’t press. She looks brittle and elegant, pipe to the bone and her brief outline of the project has set Tee's mind a-spinning backwards through time and the realms of personal invention; money and fascination have always been enough for him.
"We're up fer the code," he says, holding out his hand for the case of data chips. His accent's gone right guttery-tube; it tends to when he's around clients, unless he's careful, through some weird mixture of spite and pride. "Someone else fer the tissue and hardware's what you'll be wantin'. I'll give you some names. Take 'em yer visuals, they'll put the model together and liaise with us about what programs it'll need to support."
"She," the woman says.
"Beg yer?"
"I'll thank you not to refer to my daughter as it," she says, still vague but now frosty round the edges. It's not even close to being the weirdest request that's been made of Tee, so he just nods -- makes a note, somewhere in his mind -- and moves on.
"These're all of 'em? The more we got, the more faithful --"
She nods at the chips. "Those contain every recording my husband and I have taken of her."
"Fierce. We'll be in contact." Tee's attention has fled past her, now, behind her, back ten years to a piece of outrageous code he threw Pru in the middle of a dull working day. He bullies her towards the door as politely as possible. Marion Spencer takes it well; where so many of their clients tend to walk as though uncomfortable with the bottomless solidity and assumed filth of the ground under their feet, she drifts through the door and out onto the street as though she barely notices the world at all. Tee gives a tight, satisfying whistle as he watches her leave, and then heads down the stairs to give Pru a nice nostalgic laugh.
"The problem's going to be retarding the system's speed of learning," Tee's saying two hours later, tapping his stylus against the desk like it's a dull drumstick, letting it fall against the edge and then bounce itself into a rapid drilling roll. "It's development, it's got to allow for mistakes. We don’t make things that make mistakes."
"But Spencer can't expect it to age at all," Steph says, polishing her glasses, her face odd and her eyes a wary hazel without them. "Surely -- the functional capacity can be static?"
"Nah, it'll have to learn a bit. Vocab. Games. Events. Whatever the fuck she's going to be doing with it, I ain't askin'. But there'll have to be strict limits on the associative code, and --"
"Set some randomised strings to simulate mistakes," she finishes, sounding insulted that he might have thought her incapable of keeping up. He loves that about Steph; in fact, he loves everything about her. Except her looks. At knifepoint he'd be able to name the reasons why: no curves on her -- unlike Pru, whose soft pillowy curves make Tee want to lie down on them and sleep his life away in perfect bliss. Steph has a mouth that's too small for her face, and her hair is long and dull. But there are other men and women who like her well enough, so mostly it's just that she doesn't appeal to him. No matter how much he thinks about how much he likes her, no matter how drunk he gets or the determination with which he tries to insert her into his thoughts as he wanks -- nothing, nada, fucking zilch. He's almost in love with the last girl he wants, and the universe is laughing.
She's his best friend though, and that must count for something; she has been ever since they found each other on the forums, both young and bored and aware of their own talent. Blacksheep was a conversation of theirs before it was a business plan, and eight years ago, on the day it became a true entity, Steph threw a tablet at her supervisor's head and abandoned her position playing prodigy for a company that churned out government contracts. With her she brought Dom, who's maybe the faggiest fag Tee has ever fucking met, and also happens to write the fiercest psychophysical algorithms Tee has ever seen.
Dom's the one who heads the work on the Spencer project, the eyai built for no purpose but to exist, and to take the place of a human child. To believe itself that human child. Utterly illegal; the best fun Blacksheep has had in months. Tee freezes their list of contracts and for weeks the office just hums along in the slow, soupy buzz of collaboration.
"Who did she decide upon for the hardware?" Pru asks. It's late afternoon, but the radio reports snow threatening descent onto London, and nobody is in any hurry to leave.
"Alice Li." Dom pulls the dust sheet off the model, which is slumped in one corner of a large chair. "She's prepared to come in and make any adjustments that we may require, but the specifications look entirely adequate. I need to feed some data in so that I can test her recognition .apps, Tee, do you need her for anything?"
"All yours."
"Now then, cuckoo," Dom says, pulling her upright. "Let's load you up."
Robin looks up. "Which hex key do you need?"
Dom pushes aside a curl of red hair and flicks open the hatch behind her ear -- not screwed shut yet, they need access too often -- and inspects the data port. "It's a basic zed -- should accept anything recent."
Robin rummages for a moment and then his wide hands emerge from a drawer, full of jumbled plugs and wires. "Right you are."
"Really, dear," Pru says, and Robin exchanges a smile with Tee. They've never been close but over the years they've connected on some points, including this one: their shared disdain for neatness. Tee starts unbuttoning things as soon as he sets foot in the office; Robin has Pru to fix his collar, but eschews any form of order when it comes to the organisation of the company's tech supplies, over which he holds firm dominion.
"She ain't loaded with anything much, Dom," Tee says. "If y'want to assess responsiveness --"
Dom waves two fingers, not looking up. Wires run between the tablet balanced on his palm and the hex key slotted into her port. "She should load in a limited mode. Merely enough to take in the information presented to her, and integrate it with her basic settings. Robin, I need a simple vid screen."
The eyai's turnkey is in the pocket of her dress. Dom pulls it out and winds her, then tugs the modest lace collar up to cover the delicate keyhole. Tee's never seen a child model before, and the tissue designer did a wonderful job with this one. Her eyes open, her limbs move in a gentle automatic test, but her facial .app remains blank and she makes no efforts to communicate. Dom sets the screen in her lap and slips in one of Marion Spencer's data chips: home videos. A flickering dance of family life. Tee watches the cuckoo staring down at the moving image of the girl that she is being programmed to become, as though she is gazing into a strange and disobedient mirror; he watches her with an intentness that causes him to miss the opening of the main door, footsteps on the stairs, until Dom whistles.
"I thought we'd managed to rid ourselves of your company for the day."
"Forgot to load some things to my tablet," says Steph's voice. "I'm going to need something to do during the speeches."
Tee looks up and blinks as she for real sweeps past his desk -- instead of her normal trousers and unironed shirts, she's wearing a ghost-sleeved blouse tucked into a dark grey skirt that falls to her ankles. She hovers near the simulator like the frothing crest of a winter wave and then crosses to her desk. The skirt inflicts a demure gravity upon her movements; to Tee's surprise, it suits her.
"Lookin' sharp, Steph."
"Very nice," Pru agrees.
"Wedding's tonight." Steph makes a face. She sits carefully and jabs around inside a glossy box for a piece of fudge; it was a thank-you gift from a client, and Steph claims that you can barely taste the condescension through the vanilla. "Nan says I don’t have to stand at the front and sneeze all over her bouquet, but I do have to attend and I do have to wear skirts. And Mum's about ready to breathe fire on anyone who adds anything new to the bride's existing neuroses."
"And how is Hannah? Excited?" Pru asks.
"Radiant," Steph says darkly.
Tee's only met Nan once; she's not a lot like Steph, taking after their appleish mother instead of their wiry father. Steph avoids her family where possible and her parents, who are tube but only grudgingly so -- the closest thing London has to a middle class -- are perpetually embarrassed both by the way their younger daughter earns far above her family station and the way she insists on dressing below it.
Steph lifts her fingertips to hover near the hinge of her glasses, then blinks and lowers them. "Mum's going to spend the evening telling everyone how very glad she is to have been blessed with two daughters, as I'm likely to disappoint in the marriage arena."
"Such unbecoming pessimism, Miss Flynn." Tee spins his chair and pulls a posh face at her. "If I wanted to fuck you, I'd marry you this minute."
"Aww, Tee." She laughs and tosses him a piece of her fudge. "Likewise."
Instead she fucks a handful of casual partners and he fucks pretty girls who get him hot. Sometimes he pays for it, sometimes not, but he never goes for eyai; he knows exactly what's inside their heads, he knows exactly how to write every moan and every filthy deed they could do for him, and that just takes all the mystery out of it. There's got to be a mystery to a girl, a secret, something that Tee doesn’t understand and never will.
"Maybe one day," Steph lies gently, and Tee smiles and lies, "Maybe," in return.
He turns back to his work: the careful immaturation of the cuckoo's cognitive operations. They've never before tried to make an eyai less intelligent, less complex, and the challenge of it appeals to him. So much code to be stripped down to basics and then rebuilt around the ignorant wonder of a child.
"One for the master," Tee hums peacefully, around the buttery sweetness in his mouth, "one for the dame..."
***
Tee would wager that he finds as much pleasure at the Gallows as most of its clientele, albeit pleasure of a very different sort. Every kiss bestowed or accepted in the place is an achievement. Every witticism is a masterpiece -- his masterpiece.
"Check-ups tonight, doc?"
Tee smiles. "Jes' relaxing, Dave."
A cool half-pint slides into the waiting parentheses of his hands, and he drains a good half of it in the first pass. David likes to call him that, and Tee supposes that if they really were living in the times that suit society's mannerisms, that's what he'd be: the doctor, checking that the girls are healthy and able to perform. Fixing up their little ailments.
There's a poker game going on at a table nearby, the players mostly clients lazily redistributing their wealth across the stratum in which they dwell, but a couple of the girls are playing too. Tee is responsible for those pairs of bright eyes sweeping across their hands of cards and calculating the odds, accessing the game history of the clients at the table, producing tells in their gentle gestures and a strict gameplan that's good enough for laughs but not too good; this isn't how Marie makes her money. She's never been one to place her trust in gambles. The door fee is extravagant and the clients gamble with their own money, laughing at the automata playing at this the most human of all games; oh, Tee knows the intoxicating rush of pitting yourself against an inhuman intellect and coming out on top.
"A good evening to you, sir." A petite eyai with gingernut hair falling loose and shining past her shoulders is standing very close to him, leaning against the bar. Her dress is white, sleveless, edged with red rose ribbonwork, and her lock is a flirting flash against freckle-starred skin. She's lovely; she's new. She doesn't recognise him yet.
"Aye, evenin'," Tee finds himself saying anyway. "And what d'you go by?"
"I'm Emily. Is there anything I can do for you?" she asks, lifting one pale hand to lie across his.
"Tangerine," Tee says, and holds up two fingers in an experiment; sure enough, the eyai blinks and goes still.
"To be or not to be," she says, her mouth pouting precisely around a deep, Scottish male voice that Robin stole from an ancient recording, "that is the question."
"Ain't it just, darling." Tee gives her a little push and she blinks again before heading over to the blackjack table with an achingly perfect sway of hips. Tee and Robin got tipsy one night and inserted pointlessly complex choc-eggs into the code of the Gallows girls currently being updated, little quirks of non sequitur in response to particular combinations of stimuli. No mystery, Tee reminds himself, watching the dim lights find fire in Emily-the-eyai's hair.
David pulls him another beer, and as the fizz icebergs across his tongue Tee finds himself thinking about what can be hidden in an eyai -- not in their code, not the way he is accustomed to hiding things, but in the eyai themselves. The choc-eggs have a simply defined output for a pattern of input, but what if there was instead a module for adjustable output, a storage space, such that the output would never appear on the code; just the potential for it. The font but not the text itself. You could store anything, under as many layers of meaningless stimuli as you wished, and as long as the input pattern was disguised adequately in the basic psychophysical templates -- easy, and nobody would ever look there for anything as fun as this -- an ignorant third party could grind the carrier into silicon dust before it gave up a single bit of information.
He glances at the girl and thinks oh, the secrets I could store in you. An eyai holding the cipher and -- he smiles at the neatness of it, the abrupt anachronistic chord -- a person holding the key.
Tucked to one side of the stage is a quartet of violins and an inexplicable wind instrument that Tee can't put a name to -- clarinet, oboe, something like that -- their music subtle and shivering, with one lonely string of notes weaving in and out of the tight harmony formed by the others, sometimes hidden and sometimes leaping above. It's good, Tee supposes, though the only way he can quantify it is by his own enjoyment. He hasn't forgotten the psallopiano and neither has his sister; a couple more years, she says, and she'll be able to afford both instrument and player. She's started making plans to install a loft for it.
Tee lifts his drink to his lips and and starts to sink into the music with the parts of his brain not generating templates for storage ciphers.
"Are you sure you cannot be tempted to accept some company?"
Emily, back again. Tee'd put it down to a bug in her circuits, an inability to learn from experience, except he knows better; an effortful rewind of his own immediate actions reveals the fact that he's been looking at her, often, his mind in realms of cryptographic potential but his eyes using the image of her as an anchor. So what she's displaying is in fact a sophisticated ability to pick up on physical cues and allow them to override his own direct vocal refusal; Tee owes Dom and maybe Steph a large glass of whiskey.
"Is she acting up?" Marie, her voice low, joins them at the bar. "I've only had her on the floor a week, and I haven't had any complaints."
"Nah. She's just a bit befuddled as to who I am." He pats Emily's cheek; she turns into the touch, just a fraction. "I ain't a client, sweetheart. I'm family. You needn't waste yer energy."
"My apologies." She gives a little curtsey. "Delighted to meet you."
On a whim, Tee turns her in exactly three and a half clockwise circles, to face Marie.
"Touch her forehead," he suggests. Marie reaches out and does it, frowning.
"I'll get you, my pretty!" the eyai screeches.
"Tee," Marie says reprovingly, and puts a hand over Emily's mouth.
"And your little dog, too!" is only just audible through Marie's fingers. Tee grins in the face of his sister's half-hearted glare and then starts to laugh; at the furrowing of the eyai's brows and the ugly voice coming from her pink mouth; at the reminder, as heartening as the alcohol, of how much power he possesses for a person who started with none at all.
***
( part two )
This story is a one-day-early 21st birthday present for my favourite person in the universe. Enjoy, Cosmas.
Notes! Returning to this world now that it has been expanded in such breathtaking ways was almost intimidating, but this was the one story I knew I had to tell (and now I have a whole pile of them multiplying in my mind -- watch this space, I guess). It was meant to be very concept-driven but then it grew eight main characters and became character-driven instead, which is probably a very good thing! I hereby gift said eight characters to the drabble-writers of the future: they're fun to play with, I promise.
This one covers a lot more ground than Fortuna Fugit (seventeen years in over 13,000 words, in fact!), references pretty much every other story that exists in the eyaiverse, and (by necessities both practical and thematic) it holds a lot of secrets. I know many things about these people that haven't made it into the story.
I haven't provided illustrations even though I have very strong mental pictures of all of the characters; the only thing I will tell you unprompted is that Tee looks like Richard Hammond's jaded street urchin twin.
three bags full
There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.
-- Aldous Huxley
Tee's earliest memory is of his back hitting the Filter, hard, his sister towering over him like a tall bird with ragged shadow-wings. Her hair cropped short like his and her fingers digging into his shoulders, her voice a low hiss: "Keep it down, bitbrain, d'you want half the city to start gawkin' out their windows?"
"I'm hungry," Tee whined, trying to kick her, watching her birdness blur through his own tears.
"I know." A brief shake, but a gentle one, and Marie's face lost some of its hardness. "We'll git to it, yeah? Wait. And stop yer snivellin'."
"Get away from there," the guard said. Back then the Filter guards were still human, humanly bored and implacable; fallible in memory, but wise to any tricks you might want to pull because they were tube themselves. Tube paid pipe money to maintain the pipe mindset of exclusivity for the length of a six-hour shift.
"Aye, we're leavin'," said Marie, but her hands stayed where they were for a moment. Pressing Tee against the boundary between two worlds as though she could force him through if she tried hard enough. His body vibrated as one of the Pipe trains shot past, sending little waves of influence all the way down to the lowest of the low: him.
***
"Am I boring you, Collins?"
"No," Tee says, thinking: yes.
Taylor frowns. "Look, kid, the scouts in H&ER might think you're some kind of one-in-a-million asset, but rules are rules: everyone starts in basic debugging and you're no different. Am I making myself clear?"
Tee slumps further in his chair and whacks out a few neat symbols. "Yeah, crystal, Harry," he says, watching in his periphery for Harold Taylor's wince at the vulgarity of his accent.
It's the glorious summer of '71 and Tee is fifteen years old. Someone from Mettray came across a piece of code he'd dashed off as a cheeky experiment and posted to a forum for theorists -- those who could never afford eyai of their own, but liked to toss around the what-ifs -- and after that things happened fast; Tee snatched up the job he was offered without bothering to listen to the pitch, because the pay was enough for him and Marie to live quite comfortably tubeside. Because the chip in his ID card (indestructible -- laminated -- Theodore Collins, Mettray Inc.) sends him daily through the Filter in the difficult direction, the only direction worthwhile: up. Because he can feel his brain cells slagging in the daylight hours but he can also afford to buy the tech that spins him further into gritty glittery cryptic places, places that nobody's ever thought to code, when he goes home in the evening to a sister who doesn't need to sell anything of herself.
It's summer and Tee enjoys his commute for the way the city lightens with every step he takes towards the Filter, and the way the clouds look reflected in the sparkling clean windows of the Pipe. He enjoys sitting between people who would have preferred to pretend that he didn't exist, last year, scribbling loose lines of code into his tablet and letting the sunlight stroke his face.
It's '71 and there's never been a better time to be in the industry, as Taylor is so fond of telling them. The future is bright. The future is full of opportunity.
Tee is fifteen and debugging with those parts of his brain not currently occupied with the sliver of poured-cream skin that taunts him from where it lurks between the first (open) and second (closed) buttons of Prudence Moisley's shirt. The fashion is tilting ever backwards and her blouse has a high neck, but -- fuckin' bless the girl -- she's not quite able to relinquish the concept of exposure. Thus the buttons and the cream. Thus Tee's prismed attention, split into its components by the glassy shine of her hair.
"Oi, Pru," he says.
"What is it?"
"Take a gander, will you?"
The pause after he tosses the file to her screen is long, but shorter than he expected; Tee grudgingly allows that Pru is perhaps quicker of eye and harder to shock than she is in his flesh-focused fantasies.
"You know there's no way anyone would upload this," she says. She doesn't look at him; her eyes are on the screen.
"Obviously. But what d'you think?"
A longer pause. When Pru's concentrating she does this delicious thing with her lower lip, dragging it between her teeth then letting it slide out into a pout, again and again. This happens nine times before Pru says, "I believe it could work. You need some watertight self-referential channels for the internal analysis, though. What you've got here is a good façade, it'll stand up to stimulus response and reporting, but I think you need to lock the language of thought up tighter."
Tee's mind has clicked ahead. "Or there could be breakthrough logic leaps?"
Pru nods. Finally slides him a glance with her mild sky eyes: thoughtful. "You're a gifted kid, Theodore. Though it hardly seems useful."
"It ain't."
"Interesting, however."
Tee grins. "Yeah?"
And that's that. Back to work.
The future has nothing to do with this group of bored clever people fixing other people's mistakes. The future, Tee knows, is written somewhere between the lines of code like his, the code nobody orders but everybody wants.
The future is this explosion of laughter behind Tee's forehead, unseen.
***
"A horse, Dom?" Steph's saying. "A fucking horse?"
"Half the city police are mounted."
"That's beside the point. No. It's not even beside the point -- it's light years away from the point."
Dom gives that little flicker of a wince he still affects when anyone strays overfar from the fashionable techno-blindness, and shrugs eloquently. "It's my money. If I choose to spend it in the cause of looking as rich as I am, that's hardly the concern of you scruffy urchins." He winks over his shoulder at Steph. "I despair for our society, I really do."
"You deal in the most sophisticated kind of tech, Dominic," Pru says mildly. "I'm as fond of the neo-Victoriana as anyone, but one can hardly ignore one's work environment."
"I," Dom declares, "am a writer and a gentleman scientist."
"You," Steph mimics, "are full of shit."
"Oh, hush." Pru smiles.
When Tee absconded from Mettray, Pru was the only person he took with him. You need a certain kind of mind to comb through another person's code, over and over, running the simulations and tweaking the syntax and basically sandpapering the rough edges of someone else's shining vision. Pru is no creative power, but when it comes to shaving the diamond dust off Tee's brilliance -- forcing his wild, difficult ideas to adapt to realistic systems and vice versa -- she's perfect. So Tee poached her unashamedly from their corporate masters, drawing on her curiosity and her natural ability to glance down a page and find the flaws with her magpie eyes.
It's '74: the future.
And in the nature of futures, it drags change behind it like a torn-down hem, gathering debris. Pru's married now, to Robin, who has flaming red hair and is huge, maybe 150% the height of Tee, which is just fucking unfair. Robin's like someone took a pixie and stretched him, and he was the price for hiring Pru; Tee was prepared to write him off as an acceptable burden, but Robin was a much better deal than he first appeared to be. His brain is the brain of an engineer, adept at linking things together and thinking his way through problems with the plodding rationality that Tee is so bad at. Robin also has a surprising knack for sophisticated vocal .apps, and plays footy like a demon out of the lowest eschelons of hell.
Robin's uninterested in debating Dom's hypothetical hypocrisy. Robin's uninterested in debate as a general rule. "There's a fresh pot of tea in the kitchen," he says, breaking in with distraction just as Pru silences the sniping. They work like that. Sometimes there's an imp-prick of jealousy in Tee's throat; sometimes he finds them nauseating.
"Bless you, darling," says Pru. "Stephanie, be so good as to take your hands out of Dominic's hair and explain this catastrophe of a subprogram to me."
Steph uproots herself from gazing at Dom's scrolling pages of vision code and adorning the short black waves of his hair with tiny braids, and crosses the room, kicking Tee's chair as she passes. "Honestly," she mutters, "a horse," and Tee smiles.
It's the future and Blacksheep Industries are writing an assassin.
Tee's found his own way past the Filter; no more corporate approval for him. His game is the game of acceleration, progress, human imaginations keeping up with the speed that human taste changes. There's a linear relationship, the transience of fashion plotted against money, and nothing's evolving faster than eyai. There are three levels to their business: number one is keeping ahead of trends and supplying them faster and dirtier than others can, and catering to the tastes that don’t change so easily. Number two is the tastes hidden away from the public eye, dwelling in every pipe heart where they can't be seen. The things that aren't illegal because eyai have no rights, but that people are unwilling to ask for through the official channels, especially if they have an image to uphold.
Then there's number three, the true illegalities: the ability to lie when ordered to tell the truth, skillsets designed for theft and blackmail and deceit. And the ability to kill a human being in, as the idiom goes, cold blood. Blacksheep's informal name for this particular project was probably unavoidable.
"How're the snake's priority levels coming?"
"Fuck off and fucking die, Theodore Collins," Steph says without looking up. She's folded herself between some cushions, her tablet balanced on her knees, her posture a loud sulk. As Tee watches, Pru's comments pop into realtime existence, dotted amongst the code like bright red raisins in a pudding.
Tee grins. "Now, sweetheart, y'know I only give you these jobs because I love you."
"And because the only people who can write the fiddly stuff are you and me, and you didn't want it."
Some eyai can kill in self-defence or defence of their owners. It's a reactive property, strictly reactive, strictly controlled. You'd better have a bloody good justification if you're hoping to get any kind of lethal force permit, especially one for self-defence; sure, some models are worth a pretty penny, but there's money and then there's human life. Which one would hope is still worth something. Though Tee knows better. He reckons that if there were a failsafe algorithm to allow identification and selective protection for the pipe, it's likely the the laws would be a tad more flexible on the subject of violence. That'd be a fun one for Dom, actually: integrate accent and clothing and any other immediate clues -- arrive at the decision -- pipe or tube. Learn from correct assessments; learn from mistakes. Even the most basic of machines can accumulate data and refine its parameters in such a way. Dom's got that ongoing project based on interpreting facial expression, he could piggy the initial analyses onto the same footage --
"Signal to noise, Turing." Steph raps his forehead with a finger. "You're dripping wunderkind onto my revisions. Make yourself useful: scaddle your genius self away to the kitchen and get me some of that tea."
"I need yer eyes for a bit. I'm pirating some stealth code from a military archive and it ain't meshing well with the specs the client gave us. Too old, and the model's too new."
Robin clears his throat. "Compatability issues?"
"Y'got time for it?" Tee asks, and Robin nods. "Ta. The more fresh eyes the better."
"Tea and a scone and my eyes are all yours once Pru's finished clawing her way through this stuff." Steph unfolds her trousered legs and stretches them along the length of the couch. "Myopic as they are."
Not even the best eyai can tell how much money you have by looking at you. Tee'd confuse the hell out of any algorithm, as would Steph, who allows no fashion to touch her except for her glasses. She could afford enhanced contacts, could afford laser, but she likes fiddling with the slender golden frame, likes flicking it up and down her nose. Like Pru's perpetually sliding lip and Tee's restless feet and Robin's humming and the way Dom cleans under his pristine fingernails with a toothpick, it's the physical outlet for a mind that wants to move faster than its hardware will allow. Sometimes Tee wonders what it'd be like to be able to upgrade himself. To spread his human thoughts and human facilities, all the jumbled history and ethos and selfhood of Theodore Collins, out on a screen; and then begin to annotate, experiment, improve.
Tee suspects -- everyone suspects -- that the government has some eyai that can kill, but none that ever see the light of the public eye. Blacksheep could make a fortune in government contracts if they ever stuck their heads out of the sand, but Tee would...rather not. Because at the end of the day they're criminals, they're as much illegal tools as the eyai they create, and it's very tempting -- very easy -- for a government to destroy a tool that's done some work it doesn't want the public to know about.
No. The snake's a private project for a private client, discretion and untraceable perfection assured, and what it does once their gorgeous, expensive, cold-blooded murderous code has been uploaded is none of their damn business.
With minimal prompting, the assassin will declare his personal philosophy to be: pacifism.
***
Marie's hair hangs over her forehead in rigid curls and her dress is a masterpiece of communication; in the language of wealth it expresses the exact amount required to adhere strictly to fashion, yet not enough to defy or create it.
"I look a right arse," Tee says.
"We look fine." Marie, at a standstill under a streetlight, is holding her powder like a weapon; she inspects her nose from an unreasonable number of angles and closes it with a gunshot click. "Nobody can say we don't belong there."
"You look fine." Tee shifts as he walks, experimenting with limb position. The fabric slides into the cracks of his body and then, stiff and new, refuses to slide out. "The suit don't exist that'd make me look pipe enough for Babylon."
"Tee." His sister's voice is hard -- it's hardly ever anything but, after all these years, as though a shell has crystallised and cemented around it. But her glance is a soft warning. "The Upper Garden, if you please. At least in company."
There are two ways of travelling from tubeside anywhere to Upper Covent Garden (which has been dragged, in descending slang, through the Upper Garden to the Hanging Garden and so, inevitably, to Babylon). Two ways of forming the vector: across then up or up then across, and Marie insists on the latter despite the considerable jump in the price of the journey.
"May I take your coat, sir?" An eyai -- old model, by the look of him, coded just enough for the requirements of his station -- bows and takes Tee's coat and Marie's heavy cloak as soon as they step inside the theatre, handing them a numbered token in exhange.
Marie looks around with a bored face and eyes that Tee recognises as hungry, but only because he knows her hungers of old. Her eyes reflect the chandelier, which refracts -- the room is a headache of golden lights and plush reds. The crowd is made up of people declaring their dynamics through where they stand: side-by-side like Tee and Marie for the couples (though nobody could mistake them for anything but siblings), tight bunches of friends vying for visibility, and the occasional eyai just behind the shoulder of their owner. Marie smooths her sash and Tee stumbles into the sightline of an eyai girl with sleek black hair and a mouth that makes one suspect that 'unimpressed' is coded blatantly into her default .app. Despite that, he'd call her pretty, if it weren't for the fact that he's never come across an unattractive eyai. She absorbs his gaze impassively before her attention is claimed by her owner, a man whose thin voice is all but lost in the chatter.
"The lighting in here is very well balanced," murmurs Marie, her hungry eyes replaced by purely professional ones.
"Aye," Tee says, unenthused. "Fierce."
He likes today's slang, the casual violence of it, all fierce and sharp. Sharp like Tee's features; if he can't be handsome, he might as well be fashionable. Sharp, short and ungraceful, with the same dark hair as his sister but none of her ability to tame it, Tee is a bullet of a man: hardy and quick. He shifts again within his clothes, restless. "Can we go sit, or d'you need to circle the room a few times?"
Marie raises her eyebrows but the bell answers for her, calling them inside. She fishes the tickets from her drawstring purse and the small opulence of the foyer is quickly replaced by a opulence on a much grander scale, though attenuated by the sheer amount of empty space that stands between Tee and the twiddly gold trim. He glances briefly at the glossy programme -- Boccherini, Aksakova, in a font size that suggests Tee should recognise the names -- before lifting his eyes to the instrument in the centre of the stage. He's heard of psallopianos before, but only as a status symbol, and from where he's sitting it looks like a mess. Or maybe art: some cunning installation.
The house lights dim, dragging the volume of the audience's murmurs with them, and a spotlight guides a startlingly tall woman into the centre of the stage. She bows, not quite gracefully, as though the applause has rendered her inflexible. The lights change again and her dress shines the same promising amber as the strings high above her head. She sits. The silence of the audience is conspiratorial; Tee finds his breath suspended, as if trying not to intrude upon it. He exhales in a deliberate puff of protest, Marie pokes him with one pointed fingernail, and then Lukerya Aksakova opens her mouth and sets the strings alight with sound.
Tee's breath stops again and this time all ornery urges are stilled by his overwhelming curiosity: how does she do that? How? Just one person and the laws of physics.
For a few seconds that seem much longer the sound splits and splits and becomes a singular complexity, like many subroutines dancing off to work in parallel towards the same end -- and then Aksakova's hands and feet join in and the music becomes too huge to analyse. There are patterns there, and Tee wishes he had the functional language needed to transcribe their parameters, but instead he sits quietly, forgets his uncomfortable suit, and forgets that he is too small for this ridiuclous room. Because in the face of that sound every damn one of them is small, from Tee to the wealthiest pipe fucker in the highest box.
"What did you think?" Marie asks him, in the intermission.
Tee shrugs. He'd just fumble it if he tried. "Better'n the bloody ballet, that's for sure."
"Psallopiano," Marie says; even the word itself lends her voice an unfamiliar music. "Yes -- I need one. For the Gallows."
Tee's laugh is aborted. "You -- y'mean it? Sis, I don't know how much a psallopiano costs, but it's money you ain't got. Not with so much being poured into the eyai models of late."
"No time soon," Marie agrees. "But the eyai are paying for themselves already, and I'm not paying for debugs or upgrades on the software side of the business --" a brief, fond squeeze of his hand "-- so the day'll come when I can afford one."
The Gallows is Marie's pride, if not her joy: a carefully duplicitous establishment where in the public areas everyone gambles and listens to the music, nice and legal, and talks about everything except the fact that the girls are coded past legality. Brilliant, sly code hidden where it can't be found by the Auditors, who are eyai themselves, capable only of pattern recognition; of plugging themselves in to the girls and scanning them for anything suspect. Steph and Dom helped develop the algorithms used by the latest Auditor models, back when they were respectable, back before they were Tee's people, and if you know what something's looking for then you know how to hide from it.
Gambling in the public areas. In private, the construction and destruction and mastery of history; to be precise, childhood history; to be as precise as possible, Marie's.
Market forces, Marie said long ago, looking as though the irony tasted bad. Something must be provided for every want.
Which could be Blacksheep's motto just as easily.
The bell goes for the end of intermission and Tee offers his arm to his sister, trying to put on a face that denies his awkwardness. Even in her low-heeled shoes Marie is quite a bit taller than him, but she pulls her thin arm through his and lifts her skirts, genteel as you please, to climb the stairs towards the door. As they sit down again Tee can hear people murmuring around them, and even with a latency period of time and intermission drinks they're still discussing the music: Aksakova's own transposition of the work -- saw her in Berlin once, wasn't in as fine a voice as she is tonight -- just sublime colour of tone.
Tee casts a glance behind him; in the sea of faces it's impossible to tell human from eyai. He wonders if an eyai could be coded to pull those layers of swelling sound apart -- perhaps, but would they appreciate the gestalt? Would they scan their lexicon and construct a sentence about the colour of its tone?
For all that it can't be upgraded, the wonder of the human brain is that is can't be exactly reproduced either. No matter how far they have traveled down Turing's tracks there's still nothing to match it. The human brain, created imperfect, full of gaps and odd angles that can create brilliance almost by accident. Like psallostrings: beauty arising from temporary coincidence.
***
"An' you 'eard of us through..."
"An acquaintance," Marion Spencer says. The vagueness in her tone could be calculated, could be genuine, Tee's not sure. He doesn’t press. She looks brittle and elegant, pipe to the bone and her brief outline of the project has set Tee's mind a-spinning backwards through time and the realms of personal invention; money and fascination have always been enough for him.
"We're up fer the code," he says, holding out his hand for the case of data chips. His accent's gone right guttery-tube; it tends to when he's around clients, unless he's careful, through some weird mixture of spite and pride. "Someone else fer the tissue and hardware's what you'll be wantin'. I'll give you some names. Take 'em yer visuals, they'll put the model together and liaise with us about what programs it'll need to support."
"She," the woman says.
"Beg yer?"
"I'll thank you not to refer to my daughter as it," she says, still vague but now frosty round the edges. It's not even close to being the weirdest request that's been made of Tee, so he just nods -- makes a note, somewhere in his mind -- and moves on.
"These're all of 'em? The more we got, the more faithful --"
She nods at the chips. "Those contain every recording my husband and I have taken of her."
"Fierce. We'll be in contact." Tee's attention has fled past her, now, behind her, back ten years to a piece of outrageous code he threw Pru in the middle of a dull working day. He bullies her towards the door as politely as possible. Marion Spencer takes it well; where so many of their clients tend to walk as though uncomfortable with the bottomless solidity and assumed filth of the ground under their feet, she drifts through the door and out onto the street as though she barely notices the world at all. Tee gives a tight, satisfying whistle as he watches her leave, and then heads down the stairs to give Pru a nice nostalgic laugh.
"The problem's going to be retarding the system's speed of learning," Tee's saying two hours later, tapping his stylus against the desk like it's a dull drumstick, letting it fall against the edge and then bounce itself into a rapid drilling roll. "It's development, it's got to allow for mistakes. We don’t make things that make mistakes."
"But Spencer can't expect it to age at all," Steph says, polishing her glasses, her face odd and her eyes a wary hazel without them. "Surely -- the functional capacity can be static?"
"Nah, it'll have to learn a bit. Vocab. Games. Events. Whatever the fuck she's going to be doing with it, I ain't askin'. But there'll have to be strict limits on the associative code, and --"
"Set some randomised strings to simulate mistakes," she finishes, sounding insulted that he might have thought her incapable of keeping up. He loves that about Steph; in fact, he loves everything about her. Except her looks. At knifepoint he'd be able to name the reasons why: no curves on her -- unlike Pru, whose soft pillowy curves make Tee want to lie down on them and sleep his life away in perfect bliss. Steph has a mouth that's too small for her face, and her hair is long and dull. But there are other men and women who like her well enough, so mostly it's just that she doesn't appeal to him. No matter how much he thinks about how much he likes her, no matter how drunk he gets or the determination with which he tries to insert her into his thoughts as he wanks -- nothing, nada, fucking zilch. He's almost in love with the last girl he wants, and the universe is laughing.
She's his best friend though, and that must count for something; she has been ever since they found each other on the forums, both young and bored and aware of their own talent. Blacksheep was a conversation of theirs before it was a business plan, and eight years ago, on the day it became a true entity, Steph threw a tablet at her supervisor's head and abandoned her position playing prodigy for a company that churned out government contracts. With her she brought Dom, who's maybe the faggiest fag Tee has ever fucking met, and also happens to write the fiercest psychophysical algorithms Tee has ever seen.
Dom's the one who heads the work on the Spencer project, the eyai built for no purpose but to exist, and to take the place of a human child. To believe itself that human child. Utterly illegal; the best fun Blacksheep has had in months. Tee freezes their list of contracts and for weeks the office just hums along in the slow, soupy buzz of collaboration.
"Who did she decide upon for the hardware?" Pru asks. It's late afternoon, but the radio reports snow threatening descent onto London, and nobody is in any hurry to leave.
"Alice Li." Dom pulls the dust sheet off the model, which is slumped in one corner of a large chair. "She's prepared to come in and make any adjustments that we may require, but the specifications look entirely adequate. I need to feed some data in so that I can test her recognition .apps, Tee, do you need her for anything?"
"All yours."
"Now then, cuckoo," Dom says, pulling her upright. "Let's load you up."
Robin looks up. "Which hex key do you need?"
Dom pushes aside a curl of red hair and flicks open the hatch behind her ear -- not screwed shut yet, they need access too often -- and inspects the data port. "It's a basic zed -- should accept anything recent."
Robin rummages for a moment and then his wide hands emerge from a drawer, full of jumbled plugs and wires. "Right you are."
"Really, dear," Pru says, and Robin exchanges a smile with Tee. They've never been close but over the years they've connected on some points, including this one: their shared disdain for neatness. Tee starts unbuttoning things as soon as he sets foot in the office; Robin has Pru to fix his collar, but eschews any form of order when it comes to the organisation of the company's tech supplies, over which he holds firm dominion.
"She ain't loaded with anything much, Dom," Tee says. "If y'want to assess responsiveness --"
Dom waves two fingers, not looking up. Wires run between the tablet balanced on his palm and the hex key slotted into her port. "She should load in a limited mode. Merely enough to take in the information presented to her, and integrate it with her basic settings. Robin, I need a simple vid screen."
The eyai's turnkey is in the pocket of her dress. Dom pulls it out and winds her, then tugs the modest lace collar up to cover the delicate keyhole. Tee's never seen a child model before, and the tissue designer did a wonderful job with this one. Her eyes open, her limbs move in a gentle automatic test, but her facial .app remains blank and she makes no efforts to communicate. Dom sets the screen in her lap and slips in one of Marion Spencer's data chips: home videos. A flickering dance of family life. Tee watches the cuckoo staring down at the moving image of the girl that she is being programmed to become, as though she is gazing into a strange and disobedient mirror; he watches her with an intentness that causes him to miss the opening of the main door, footsteps on the stairs, until Dom whistles.
"I thought we'd managed to rid ourselves of your company for the day."
"Forgot to load some things to my tablet," says Steph's voice. "I'm going to need something to do during the speeches."
Tee looks up and blinks as she for real sweeps past his desk -- instead of her normal trousers and unironed shirts, she's wearing a ghost-sleeved blouse tucked into a dark grey skirt that falls to her ankles. She hovers near the simulator like the frothing crest of a winter wave and then crosses to her desk. The skirt inflicts a demure gravity upon her movements; to Tee's surprise, it suits her.
"Lookin' sharp, Steph."
"Very nice," Pru agrees.
"Wedding's tonight." Steph makes a face. She sits carefully and jabs around inside a glossy box for a piece of fudge; it was a thank-you gift from a client, and Steph claims that you can barely taste the condescension through the vanilla. "Nan says I don’t have to stand at the front and sneeze all over her bouquet, but I do have to attend and I do have to wear skirts. And Mum's about ready to breathe fire on anyone who adds anything new to the bride's existing neuroses."
"And how is Hannah? Excited?" Pru asks.
"Radiant," Steph says darkly.
Tee's only met Nan once; she's not a lot like Steph, taking after their appleish mother instead of their wiry father. Steph avoids her family where possible and her parents, who are tube but only grudgingly so -- the closest thing London has to a middle class -- are perpetually embarrassed both by the way their younger daughter earns far above her family station and the way she insists on dressing below it.
Steph lifts her fingertips to hover near the hinge of her glasses, then blinks and lowers them. "Mum's going to spend the evening telling everyone how very glad she is to have been blessed with two daughters, as I'm likely to disappoint in the marriage arena."
"Such unbecoming pessimism, Miss Flynn." Tee spins his chair and pulls a posh face at her. "If I wanted to fuck you, I'd marry you this minute."
"Aww, Tee." She laughs and tosses him a piece of her fudge. "Likewise."
Instead she fucks a handful of casual partners and he fucks pretty girls who get him hot. Sometimes he pays for it, sometimes not, but he never goes for eyai; he knows exactly what's inside their heads, he knows exactly how to write every moan and every filthy deed they could do for him, and that just takes all the mystery out of it. There's got to be a mystery to a girl, a secret, something that Tee doesn’t understand and never will.
"Maybe one day," Steph lies gently, and Tee smiles and lies, "Maybe," in return.
He turns back to his work: the careful immaturation of the cuckoo's cognitive operations. They've never before tried to make an eyai less intelligent, less complex, and the challenge of it appeals to him. So much code to be stripped down to basics and then rebuilt around the ignorant wonder of a child.
"One for the master," Tee hums peacefully, around the buttery sweetness in his mouth, "one for the dame..."
***
Tee would wager that he finds as much pleasure at the Gallows as most of its clientele, albeit pleasure of a very different sort. Every kiss bestowed or accepted in the place is an achievement. Every witticism is a masterpiece -- his masterpiece.
"Check-ups tonight, doc?"
Tee smiles. "Jes' relaxing, Dave."
A cool half-pint slides into the waiting parentheses of his hands, and he drains a good half of it in the first pass. David likes to call him that, and Tee supposes that if they really were living in the times that suit society's mannerisms, that's what he'd be: the doctor, checking that the girls are healthy and able to perform. Fixing up their little ailments.
There's a poker game going on at a table nearby, the players mostly clients lazily redistributing their wealth across the stratum in which they dwell, but a couple of the girls are playing too. Tee is responsible for those pairs of bright eyes sweeping across their hands of cards and calculating the odds, accessing the game history of the clients at the table, producing tells in their gentle gestures and a strict gameplan that's good enough for laughs but not too good; this isn't how Marie makes her money. She's never been one to place her trust in gambles. The door fee is extravagant and the clients gamble with their own money, laughing at the automata playing at this the most human of all games; oh, Tee knows the intoxicating rush of pitting yourself against an inhuman intellect and coming out on top.
"A good evening to you, sir." A petite eyai with gingernut hair falling loose and shining past her shoulders is standing very close to him, leaning against the bar. Her dress is white, sleveless, edged with red rose ribbonwork, and her lock is a flirting flash against freckle-starred skin. She's lovely; she's new. She doesn't recognise him yet.
"Aye, evenin'," Tee finds himself saying anyway. "And what d'you go by?"
"I'm Emily. Is there anything I can do for you?" she asks, lifting one pale hand to lie across his.
"Tangerine," Tee says, and holds up two fingers in an experiment; sure enough, the eyai blinks and goes still.
"To be or not to be," she says, her mouth pouting precisely around a deep, Scottish male voice that Robin stole from an ancient recording, "that is the question."
"Ain't it just, darling." Tee gives her a little push and she blinks again before heading over to the blackjack table with an achingly perfect sway of hips. Tee and Robin got tipsy one night and inserted pointlessly complex choc-eggs into the code of the Gallows girls currently being updated, little quirks of non sequitur in response to particular combinations of stimuli. No mystery, Tee reminds himself, watching the dim lights find fire in Emily-the-eyai's hair.
David pulls him another beer, and as the fizz icebergs across his tongue Tee finds himself thinking about what can be hidden in an eyai -- not in their code, not the way he is accustomed to hiding things, but in the eyai themselves. The choc-eggs have a simply defined output for a pattern of input, but what if there was instead a module for adjustable output, a storage space, such that the output would never appear on the code; just the potential for it. The font but not the text itself. You could store anything, under as many layers of meaningless stimuli as you wished, and as long as the input pattern was disguised adequately in the basic psychophysical templates -- easy, and nobody would ever look there for anything as fun as this -- an ignorant third party could grind the carrier into silicon dust before it gave up a single bit of information.
He glances at the girl and thinks oh, the secrets I could store in you. An eyai holding the cipher and -- he smiles at the neatness of it, the abrupt anachronistic chord -- a person holding the key.
Tucked to one side of the stage is a quartet of violins and an inexplicable wind instrument that Tee can't put a name to -- clarinet, oboe, something like that -- their music subtle and shivering, with one lonely string of notes weaving in and out of the tight harmony formed by the others, sometimes hidden and sometimes leaping above. It's good, Tee supposes, though the only way he can quantify it is by his own enjoyment. He hasn't forgotten the psallopiano and neither has his sister; a couple more years, she says, and she'll be able to afford both instrument and player. She's started making plans to install a loft for it.
Tee lifts his drink to his lips and and starts to sink into the music with the parts of his brain not generating templates for storage ciphers.
"Are you sure you cannot be tempted to accept some company?"
Emily, back again. Tee'd put it down to a bug in her circuits, an inability to learn from experience, except he knows better; an effortful rewind of his own immediate actions reveals the fact that he's been looking at her, often, his mind in realms of cryptographic potential but his eyes using the image of her as an anchor. So what she's displaying is in fact a sophisticated ability to pick up on physical cues and allow them to override his own direct vocal refusal; Tee owes Dom and maybe Steph a large glass of whiskey.
"Is she acting up?" Marie, her voice low, joins them at the bar. "I've only had her on the floor a week, and I haven't had any complaints."
"Nah. She's just a bit befuddled as to who I am." He pats Emily's cheek; she turns into the touch, just a fraction. "I ain't a client, sweetheart. I'm family. You needn't waste yer energy."
"My apologies." She gives a little curtsey. "Delighted to meet you."
On a whim, Tee turns her in exactly three and a half clockwise circles, to face Marie.
"Touch her forehead," he suggests. Marie reaches out and does it, frowning.
"I'll get you, my pretty!" the eyai screeches.
"Tee," Marie says reprovingly, and puts a hand over Emily's mouth.
"And your little dog, too!" is only just audible through Marie's fingers. Tee grins in the face of his sister's half-hearted glare and then starts to laugh; at the furrowing of the eyai's brows and the ugly voice coming from her pink mouth; at the reminder, as heartening as the alcohol, of how much power he possesses for a person who started with none at all.
***
( part two )