“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing,” Judy said. “You’re already defeated. The Dark Seeds are all over this planet, and you can no longer fight them. All you can do is hold on to what little power you have remaining. Sooner or later you’re going to have to climb into a sealed processing space and stay there.”
“What about all the people outside? All the people who live on Earth? Don’t you care for them?”
“Yes, of course I do,” Judy snapped. “I was a Social Care operative for years. But it’s funny; Eva Rye got into my mind, and I saw things through her eyes. I saw the way you manipulated her to get what you wanted. I had a friend once called Frances. She was an AI. Someone said that she used my personality as a template for her own. It was a negative template, but a template nonetheless. I’m beginning to think that you did the same with Eva…”
“I don’t deny it.”
“…and that makes me wonder. I think about Kevin—you know he claims that he is not an AI. He says he passes the Turing test every day, but he is not intelligent: just a sequence of yes/no responses, just a massive algorithm.”
“Yes?”
“And I wonder, are you any different? Are you an AI, or are you just a reflection of all of us? You appear to have feelings, but all we are seeing in your actions are our own emotions reflecting right back at us. Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony? The last two hundred years of history have been shaped by you, yet you’re not even intelligent. We just took you at your word when you said you were.”
“It’s a clever theory, Judy,” the Watcher looked smug, “but what about all the other personality constructs? What about your sisters? Maybe they weren’t intelligent. Maybe they too were just reflections of human emotions.”
Judy hugged herself. Was this the ultimate betrayal? Was she denying those digital copies of herself their supposed existence? And yet she had to go on.
“I don’t know. Were they intelligent, or did they just think they were?”
The Watcher laughed.
“You should know. You used to go into the digital world. You have spoken with personality constructs in there! You know they were intelligent.”
“Or was I just seeing myself reflected back again?”
In the virtual scene, Henry placed the baby that would become Judy back in its crib. At that, Judy turned her back on the Watcher and made her way across the room. She bent closer and regarded the look of tender satisfaction on Henry’s young face, watched the way he pulled the pink blanket up over the sleeping child’s chest. She smiled as he gently pressed the baby’s little nose.
“Beep,” he whispered under his breath, then he turned and walked from the room, this whole scene observed by the silent robot in the corner.
“And how do you
“I’m the only one who can tell the difference.”
“Good answer,” the Watcher said. “But you could also discern whether the rest of us do, if you only took the trouble to think about it—even without the use of your meta-intelligence. You can tell that
They walked along the corridors towards the processing space that contained the FE. The meta-intelligence had been watching it all this time, ever since they had descended in the lift. Judy could sense it getting nearer, a pearly grey sphere hanging in an underground space.
“What is it doing here?” she whispered.
“It’s everywhere, Judy. It appears wherever it’s needed. That’s the way it was written, so it can Restore the Balance. Since 2240, when you set the first Dark Seeds loose here, it has been appearing more and more frequently. Dark Seeds seem to attract FE. And Aleph and the other systems repair robots, too.”
“Aleph is an alien, isn’t he?”
“Yes. The universe is full of other life, and I am beginning to realize that they function in ways beyond even my current superior capacity to understand. All it takes for life to arise is a situation where replication can occur.