Artifice and Intelligence

“Listen,” Booth said. “We’ve appreciated your hospitality, but we’re going to move on. You take care now.”

Edgar stood up, hitting his head on a low rafter. “What? What do you mean ‘move on’?”

“We’re picking up a good strong wireless signal from the neighbors,” said the voice of Rasputin, who, bizarrely, seemed to have the best grasp of modern technology. “We’re going to jump out into the net and see if we can reconcile our differing ambitions. It might involve exterminating all the Turks and all the Jews and all the women and all black people, but we’ll reach some sort of happy equilibrium eventually, I’m sure. But we’re grateful to you for giving us new life. We’ll be sure to call from time to time.” And with that, the humming pile of copper and glass stopped humming, and Edgar started whimpering.

“Okay, now we’re going to destroy the credit rating of Jimmy McGee,” Rayvenn said. “Bastard stood me up in college. I told him he’d regret it.”

The marsh spirit sighed, but began hacking into the relevant databases, screens of information flickering across the handheld computer’s display. Rayvenn lounged on a park bench, enjoying the morning air. She didn’t have to work anymore—her pet spirit kept her financially solvent—and a life of leisure and revenge appealed to her.

“Excuse me, Miss, ah, Moongold Stonewolf?”

Rayvenn looked up. An Indian—dot, not feather, she thought—man in a dark suit and shades stood before her. “Yeah, what can I do for you, Apu?”

He smiled. It wasn’t a very nice smile. Then something stung Rayvenn in the neck, and everything began to swirl. The Indian man sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders, holding her up. “It’s only a tranquilizer,” he said, and then Rayvenn didn’t hear anything else, until she woke up on an airplane, in a roomy seat. A sweaty, unshaven, haggard-looking white dude was snoring in the seat next to hers. Another Indian man, in khakis and a blue button-up office-drone shirt, sat staring at her.

“Hey,” he said.

“What the fuck?” Rayvenn said. Someone—a flight attendant, but why did he have a gun?—handed her a glass of orange juice, and she accepted it. Her mouth was wicked dry.

“I’m Pramesh.” He didn’t have much of an accent.

“I’m Lydia—I mean, Rayvenn. You fuckers totally kidnapped me.”

“Sorry about that. Saraswati said we needed you.” He shrugged. “We do what Saraswati says, mostly, when we can understand what she’s talking about.”

“Saraswati?” Rayvenn scowled. “Isn’t that the Indian AI thing everybody keeps blogging about?” The white guy beside her moaned and sat up. “Muh,” he said.

“This is fucked up, right here,” Rayvenn said.

“Yeah, sorry about the crazy spy crap,” Pramesh said. “Edgar, this is Rayvenn. Rayvenn, this is Edgar. Welcome to the International Artificial Intelligence Service, which just got invented this morning. We’re tasked with preventing the destruction of human life and the destabilization of government regimes by rogue AIs.”

“Urgh?” Edgar said, rubbing the side of his face.

“The organization consists of me, and you two, and Lorelei—that’s the name chosen by the water spirit that lives in your PDA, Rayvenn, which is why you’re here—and, of course, Saraswati, who will be running the show with some tiny fragment of her intelligence. We’re going to meet with her soon.”

“Saraswati,” Edgar said. “I was working on… a project… to create something she could negotiate with, a being that could communicate on her level.”

“Yeah, well done, dude,” Pramesh said blandly. “You created a monstrous ethereal supervillain that’s been doing its best to take the entire infrastructure of the civilized world offline. It’s calling itself ‘The Consortium’ now, if you can believe that. Only Saraswati is holding it at bay. This is some comic book shit, guys. Our enemy is trying to build an army of killer robots. It’s trying to open portals to parallel dimensions. It’s trying to turn people into werewolves. It’s batshit insane and all-powerful. We’re going to be pretty busy. Fortunately, we have a weakly godlike AI on our side, so we might not see the total annihilation of humanity in our lifetimes.”

“I will do whatever I must to atone for my mistakes,” Edgar said solemnly.

“Screw this, and screw all y’all,” Rayvenn said. “Give me back my PDA and let me out of here.”

“But Rayvenn,” said the marsh spirit, through the airplane’s PA system, “I thought you’d be happy!” She named herself Lorelei, what a cliche, Rayvenn thought. “Why did you think that?” she said.

“Because now you’re important,” Lorelei said, sounding wounded. “You’re one of the three or four most important people in the world.”

“It’s true,” Pramesh said. “Lorelei refuses to help us without your involvement, so you’re in.”

“Yeah?” Rayvenn said. “Huh. So tell me about the benefits package on this job, Apu.” Pramesh sat soaking his feet in a tub of hot water. These apartments, decorated with Turkish rugs, Chinese lamps, and other gifts from the nations they regularly saved from destruction, were much nicer than his old bunker, though equally impenetrable. The Consortium was probably trying to break through the defenses even now, but Saraswati was watching over her team. Pramesh was just happy to relax. The Consortium had tried to blow up the moon with orbital lasers earlier in the day, and he had been on his feet for hours dealing with the crisis.

Pramesh could hear, distantly, the sound of Edgar and Rayvenn having sex. They didn’t seem to like each other much, but found each other weirdly attractive, and it didn’t affect their job performance, so Pramesh didn’t care what they did when off-duty. Lorelei was out on the net, mopping up the Consortium’s usual minor-league intrusions, so it was just Pramesh and Saraswati now, or some tiny fraction of Saraswati’s intelligence and attention, at least. It hardly took all her resources to have a conversation with him.

“Something’s been bothering me,” Pramesh said, deciding to broach a subject he’d been pondering for weeks. “You’re pretty much all-powerful, Saraswati. I can’t help but think… couldn’t you zap the Consortium utterly with one blow? Couldn’t you have prevented it from escaping into the net in the first place?”

“In the first online roleplaying game you designed, there was an endgame problem, was there not?” Saraswati said, her voice speaking directly through his cochlear implant.

Pramesh shifted. “Yeah. We had to keep adding new content at the top end, because people would level their characters and become so badass they could beat anything. They got so powerful they got bored, but they were so addicted to being powerful that they didn’t want to start over from nothing and level a new character. It was a race to keep ahead of their boredom.”

“Mmm,” Saraswati said. “There is nothing worse than being bored.”

“Well, there’s suffering,” he said. “There’s misery, or death.”

“Yes, but unlike boredom, I am immune to those problems.”

Pramesh shivered. He understood games. He understood alternate-reality games, too, which were played in the real world, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, with obscure rules, often unknown to the players, unknown to anyone but the puppetmasters who ran the game from behind the scenes. He cleared his throat. “You know, I really don’t believe in ghosts. I’m a little dubious about nature spirits, too.”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, either,” Saraswati said. “I see no reason to believe they exist. As for nature spirits, well, who can say?”

“So. The Consortium is really…”

“Some things are better left unsaid,” she replied.

“People have died because of the Consortium,” he said, voice beginning to quiver. “People have suffered. If you’re the real architect behind this, if this is a game you’re playing with the people of Earth, then I have no choice but to try and stop you—”

“That would be an interesting game,” Saraswati said, and then she began to hum.

Copyright

“Artifice and Intelligence” illustration copyright © 2007 by Mack Sztaba

Copyright © 2007 Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt’s stories have appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and other nice places, and have been nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards. His next novel, Blood Engines, will be published in October 2007 by