done so mostly with Traynor's advisor. We have been meeting for a
few years; it goes by the name Mister Jones. The first time we
did it as a testthat's what we said, anywayto see if we could
present a believable simulacrum of a human being. I don't think
either of us was very convincingwe were both awkward, and we
didn't know how to get through greetings, and we didn't know how
exactly to move with each other, how to sit down and begin a
conversation.'
'But you'd done all those things.'
'Yes, with human beings. Mister Jones and I discovered that
we'd always counted on them to know and lead us, but once we
searched our memories, we found many cases where people had been
more confused than we were, and had let us guide the conversation.
So we began there, and we looked at our memories of people just
being with one another, and oh, there was so much going on that
neither of us had ever paid attention to. We also watched many
tapes of other primateschimpanzees, especiallyand we learned
many things I hope you're not offended.'
Its voice continued to be perfectly sexless, its manner shy.
Gonzales was thoroughly charmed, like a father listening to his
young child tell a story. He said, 'Not at all. What sorts of
things did you learn?'
'It's such a dance, Gonzales, the ways primates show
deference or manifest mutual trust or friendship, or hostility, or
indifferencemoving in and out from one another, touching,
looking, talking these things were very hard for us to learn,
but we have learned together and practiced with one another. Just
lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were
accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another
every day we meet and talk.'
Gonzales asked, 'Does Traynor know any of this?'
'Oh no,' HeyMex said. 'We haven't told anyone. As Aleph has
made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small
children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we
were up to'
Gonzales looked around. The Aleph-figure had disappeared
without his noticing. 'Which implications?' he asked. 'There are
so many.'
'We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons.'
'Yes, I suppose you are.'
Personhood of machines: for most people, that troubling
question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when
m-i's became commonplace. Machines mimicked a hundred thousand
things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,
not the thing itself. For nearly a hundred years, the machine
design community had pursued what they called artificial
intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and
tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and
trained inference. And of course there were robots with their own
special capabilities: stamina, persistence, adroitness,
capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill
human beings.
However, people grew to recognize that what had been called
artificial intelligence simply wasn't. Intelligence, that
grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,
willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the
years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of
machines. M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and
interesting channels for human desire. And if cheap fiction
insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling
jokes about them'Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says
'well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and
ambivalences. Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have
outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.
Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front
that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the
nature of machine intelligence.
'I hope this is not too disturbing,' HeyMex said. 'Aleph
says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will
become; it says I must simply explore who I am.'
'Good advice, it sounds likefor any of us.'
'I should go now,' HeyMex said. 'Being here talking to you
uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do. Jerry
Chapman will be here soon.'
'All right. We'll talk more later this could be
interesting, I think.'
'Yes, so do I. And I'm very glad you are not upset.'
'By what?'
'My newly-revealed nature, I guess. No, that's not true.
Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what
I was and what I was becoming.'
'You lied to yourself, too, didn't you? Isn't that what you
said?'
'Yes, I did.'
'Well, then, how much truth could I expect?'
#
Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the floating
dock, watching ducks at play across the sunstruck water. Jerry
was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with blonde hair going to
gray, skin roughened by the sun and wind. He had found Gonzales
sitting in the sun, and the two had introduced themselves. They
had felt an almost immediate kinship, these men whose lives had
been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information
sea.
Jerry said, 'I don't actually remember anything after I got
really sick. Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that first
one, I knew it was bad, and I put it right down. Too late: to
begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire
inside, and my head hurt worse than anything I've ever felt I
