yurts, often surrounded by lawns, and pools perched on overlooks. Genette brought along only a couple of assistants, and spent a fair amount of time with them working on what Swan assumed were other cases, in a yurt set among a cluster of them on a hilltop.
One afternoon after a morning of wandering the grassy hills, trying to spot wolves and failing, Swan came to a hilltop yurt resort that had a broad sloping lawn, a big wading pool and set of steaming baths, and a tent aviary filled with hanging baskets of flowers and many different kinds of hummingbirds, lories, and small colorful finches. The undulating lawn had been manicured until it looked like a green carpet. To Swan this was excessively ornamental, out of tune with the wild hills she had spent the morning on. She passed a pair of women who were laughing as if they also found the place ludicrous, and she said as they passed, “It’s silly, isn’t it.”
They stopped and one pointed back up the hill. “Those three people up there in dresses told us that they’re qubes in android bodies, and didn’t we think they could pass as humans. We told them they probably could, but-” The two women looked at each other and laughed again. “But that they were totally blowing it by asking us!”
Swan spotted the three sitting on the grass near the wading pool. “Sounds interesting,” she said, and headed up toward them.
“Pauline, did you hear that?” she said on the way up.
“Yes.”
“All right, well, be quiet, then, and pay attention.”
I t was an old hypothesis, that humans would be comfortable with intelligent robots either when the robots were housed in something like a box, or else when they were simply indistinguishable from humans, at which point they would be just another kind of person. In between these two extremes, however, lay what the hypothesis called the uncanny valley-the zone of like-but-not-like, same-but-different, which would cause in all humans an instinctive repulsion, disgust, and fear. Thus the hypothesis, plausible enough; but because there had never actually been a robot built in a form human enough to test the near side of the uncanny valley, it had always remained a notion only. Now Swan was perhaps going to get to test the near side of the uncanny valley.
The tasteless design sense of this resort seemed to extend to the clothing of these three guests. They sat by themselves in long dresses like Victorian crinolines, looking enough alike to be siblings, or even, yes, cloned androids from a single model. Although one looked slightly more female than the other two.
Swan approached them and said, “Hello, I’m Swan, from Mercury, where we are rebuilding our burned city with the help of many qubes. I understand that you three are claiming that you are qubes, that you are not biologically human? Is that right?”
The three people sat there staring at her. The one who looked slightly female in body proportions smiled and said, “Yes, that’s right. Sit down with us and share some tea. I’ve got a pot almost ready,” gesturing at a little portable stove on the ground, and a little squat red teapot resting over its blue flames. There were cups and spoons and little pots on a blue square cloth next to her.
The other two also met her eye and nodded at her. One gestured to the grass beside them. “Have a seat, if you want.”
“Thanks,” Swan said as she flopped down. “It’s pretty heavy in here. Where do you all come from?”
“I was made in Vinmara,” the most female one said.
“What about you?” Swan asked the other two.
“I cannot pass a Turing test,” one of them replied stiffly. “Would you like to play chess?”
And the three of them laughed. Open mouths-teeth, gums, tongue, inner cheeks, all very human in look and motion.
“No thanks,” Swan said. “I want to try a Turing test. Or why don’t you test me?”
“How would we do that?”
“How about twenty questions?”
“That means questions that can be answered by yes or no?”
“That’s right.”
“But one could just ask us if the other is a simulacrum or not, and the other answers, and that would take only one question.”
“True. What if we only allow indirect questions?”
“Even so it would be very simple. What if you had to do it without questions at all?”
“But real people ask each other questions all the time.”
“But one of us or more are not real people. And it’s you who suggested a test.”
“That’s true. All right, let me look at you. Tell me about Inner Mongolia.”
“Dear Inner Mongolia, hollowed in the year…”
“Hollowed be thy name,” one of the indeterminates interjected, and they laughed.
“Population approximately twenty-five thousand people,” said the more feminine one.
“You must be a qube,” Swan said. “No human ever knows that kind of thing.”
“None?”
“Maybe some people, but it’s odd. But I must say, you look fabulous.”
“Thank you, I decided to wear green today, do you like it?” Showing off the sleeve of the dress.
“It’s very nice. Can I look closer?”
“At my dress or at my skin?”
“At your skin, of course.”
And they all laughed.
Laughter, Swan thought as she examined the person’s skin. Could robots laugh? She wasn’t sure. The person’s skin was lightly pocked by hair follicles, slightly lined by creases at the bend points; there was a scattering of nearly transparent hair on the back of the person’s wrists and forearms, and a little patch of longer darker hairs on the inside of the wrist, which had four permanent creases just inside the hand, where the skin was thinner but darker, revealing a pair of veins, with bumps and bends in them. The skin on the underside of the hand had faint whorls, like big fingerprints, on the ball of the thumb and the meat of the hand. The lifeline was a deep long curve. It looked very much like anyone’s hand, anyone’s skin. If it was artificial skin, it was very impressive; this was said to be the hardest thing to make look natural. If it was a biological skin, as in the labs, but grown over a frame, that would be impressive in a different way. It didn’t look possible that these people’s skin could be artificial, but of course materials science was very sophisticated, and many things were possible to it. Set goals and parameters, and what wasn’t possible?
It remained a question who would want to do such a thing, but on the other hand, people did odd things all the time. And making an artificial human was a very old dream. Maybe it was pointless, but it had a tradition. And here they were, after all, and she wasn’t sure yet what she was facing. That in itself was interesting.
If you had sex with a machine, was that interesting, or just a complicated form of self-satisfaction? Would a qube register your responses to it one way or another? Would it too be having sex?
She would have to try it if she wanted to find out. It would be just another approach to the more general problem of qube consciousness. What one had to remember with qubes was that no matter the evidence to the contrary, there was no one home: no consciousness, no Other, just a mechanism programmed to respond to stimuli in a certain fashion by its programmers. No matter how complex the algorithms, they did not add up to a consciousness. Swan fully believed this, but even Pauline fairly often surprised her, so it could be hard not to fall for the illusion.
“Your skin is beautiful. You feel like flesh of my flesh.”
“Thank you.”
“Do you think, do you think?”
“I most definitely think,” the feminine one replied.
“So you have a sequence of thoughts that wander from one thought to the next in a more or less continuous flow, free associating from one topic to the next, across all the possible thoughts you could have?”
“I’m not sure it’s quite like that. I think it’s more a matter of stimulus and response, with my thoughts responding to the stimuli of my incoming information. Now, for instance, I think about you and your questions, about the green of my dress as compared to the green of this grass, about what I will eat for dinner, as I am a bit hungry-”
“So you eat food?”
“Yes, we eat food. In fact I have a hard time not eating too much!”
