Divergence

oatmeal carpet. The Watcher spoke. “DIANA had a store of frozen embryos, brought from before the Transition, from before the time I took complete control of the running of human affairs. Thirteen aborted fetuses: as such they were not, legally speaking, human beings. DIANA brought them to term. DIANA regarded those thirteen babies as their property.”

“Oh?” said Judy. “What did they want with us?”

“They wanted to find out how you worked. Just how, exactly, your minds worked. DIANA had long been interested in intelligence. They wrote the AI known as Kevin, remember? They wanted to truly understand the nature of intelligence.”

“But surely they already understood? DIANA made digital personality constructs of humans back then. They were constructing AIs all the time.”

“No, Judy, I did. All of these things are the results of my technology. But DIANA was paranoid, maybe rightly so. They wanted to understand those principles for themselves. They constructed a program to examine the workings of the mind, and they incorporated it into the genetic structure of the children. You’re not saying anything now, Judy. You know that what I’m saying is the truth, don’t you?”

Judy felt the pressure of the fleshy cross on the back of her neck. She reached back and touched it.

“The meta-intelligence,” she whispered.

“Did you never think to look at yourself with it?” asked the Watcher. “That was what it was there for—”

“I don’t want to look at myself with it,” said Judy. “I don’t want to see that my mind is just a mechanical process . I don’t want to see that it’s just a Turing machine. Like the thing that runs this place.”

“So what? You say that as if there is something wrong with that.” The Watcher seemed indignant.

“Your body is a mechanical process. Your heart pumps, your muscles contract, your nerves react. So what if your mind is a Turing machine? You are greater than the sum of your parts.”

Judy gave him a weak smile.

“I know that. But my eyes and ears and senses are just writing to a length of tape, and your words have just been written to that tape, and my brain is just the tape head that reads the words and then jumps back and forth as it reacts to what you said.” She couldn’t help herself now: she looked. A long reel of tape was threaded between the hemispheres of her brain, clicking through a section at a time, chattering back and forth as she examined his face, eyes darting.

“No,” said Judy, turning the gaze of the meta-intelligence away from herself. “I know you’re humoring me,” she said. “I know that you are. I don’t blame you. I know that a Turing machine is just a mathematical concept. But, I look through this and I can feel my brain mapping directly onto the mechanism. It’s like I can almost see the original process in there, just out of reach: the self-referential part of my mind that allows me to be me. And if I see that, I will have defined myself and all of my thoughts.”

“And now look away,” said the Watcher. “Look away, Judy. Don’t look back again.”

She did as she was told. She wanted to do as she was told.

The Watcher went on. “Do you see the danger, Judy? I think you do now. The meta-intelligence program was a good idea, but it was observed by other AIs. AIs within DIANA and, later on, outside of DIANA. The algorithm behind the program became an idea that took root in AIs’ minds, and then it was passed on to humans, imperfectly understood. A human could almost look into their own mind and become transfixed by the sight of the mechanism. This is how the White Death was born.”

“The White Death,” said Judy, reeling with the revelation. She had experienced the effect before, secondhand. But now she understood. Now she understood the spiral that drew the mind in upon itself until it was thinking about nothing more or less than its own processing. Trapped in Recursion.

“The White Death,” she repeated. “I understand now.” Her voice hardened. “So where do you come into all this?”

“Right here,” said the Watcher. A scene sprang to life on Judy’s console. “This is stored in the building’s surveillance net. October the twenty-sixth, 2211.”

Viewing fields wobbled into life in the delivery room; they quickly took on the appearance of the room itself. Nothing had changed save for the fact that thirteen babies now lay in the cots. Three months old, Judy guessed. They looked at the mobiles with bright blue eyes, drew their legs up to their tummies, yawned and rubbed their eyes with little fists, opened little pink mouths to cry, and waited for the nurses to come to them with their smart pinstriped aprons.