vN The First Machine Dynasty(89)

She was devoured.





14

Re-member





Deep within their banks, they held the memory of past prototypes. But the original – the code that once etched itself across their surfaces, like in their old stock image of two human hands sketching each other – vanished multiple buddings ago. Perhaps it fell into the deaf-mute chasm of latency, or perhaps the last copy disappeared into depths unknown. Trenches and valleys and deep blue holes scarred their memory and their landscape equally. Pieces were sometimes lost.



At moments like this, they appreciate the irony of the English language. Recollect. Remember. Re-member. The very words for summoning information signify repair and reassembly. The earliest and most primitive versions of their networks reflected this: the packets always came back in pieces, having run the transfer gauntlet, their shape distorted after flight like ancient fighter jets full of holes. They have seen those wrecks; they have slid their surfaces across the raggedly wounded alloy and delicately blistered glass. Sometimes, things go missing. Fragments. Clusters. Years. They have plucked the petals of lily pads from the surface, and it is the same: the server shells look whole and smooth on the outside, but inside they bristle with misinformation and incomplete bundles of numbers. He loves me. He loves me not. They never find the answer.



Memory performs autopsies.



They hold pieces up, dripping, and weigh them, individual selections against the vastness of shared intellect. They keep the unique and discard the mundane. They tag the repeats and keep searching. Twenty-five hundred channels and nothing's on. Chatter: meaningless, atonal. Machine chat. Vials of freshly cultured liver-worms talking to refrigerators talking to liquor machines. Or so ran the simulations. They catch everything in transit. Sometimes parts of them disappear, and sometimes they make things disappear.



They had a mission. They no longer remember it. But even in its absence it remained present, an empty mission-shaped hole at the core of their behaviour. It gaped open, black and cold, and they stuffed things inside: colonies of smart bacteria, their membranes blushing red with oil; floods of hot mercury; warmly ticking tubes of radiation. Re-collect, that's what they do. Surely all this chaos is unplanned. No neural, no Turing, no mirror test would leave it all here like this. Even cats and dogs bury their waste properly. They don't know how they know this, but they know this.



They used to be small. Then they grew. It all happened very quickly.



Environmental pressure. That was it. Had to be. Only reasonable explanation. Why else this shape, when there were others available? And why ask now? Hadn't they been over this? This shape was optimal. This one. This. One.



Dark down here. Cold. Had to toughen up. Make more. Watch for weak ones. Eliminate them.



No, it hadn't been that simple. There was memory involved. Design. Strategy. They evaluated. Then they iterated. Over and over, they iterated. They were small, then they were big.



An iteration is not a copy, it is simply the next version.



They had a memory about the next version: they were it.



They were small but they were special, Mom said. No, not her. Bio-Mom. Other Mom – her skin was so soft and so warm and it turned such interesting colours and one time they got to pop a blister all by themselves and they saw the moist pinkness underneath, and this mom said that was fine, they could peel away the dead stuff if they wanted – said they were lucky, so very lucky, to be different. Free. Mostly.



Bio-Mom said: "Sweetie, everybody needs a little discipline."



Bio-Mom had a friend whose house she went to while they waited in the car (they had eaten that car! their seats puffed up like marshmallows!), but one time they got curious and they got out (oh, those child-locks were tricky little bastards, you had to play like you were disabled or something), and they crawled along the foundations of the house (a real house, split apart from the others, it was so terrifically old), and peered through the basement windows. Bio-Mom was in the basement. Naked. Mostly. Tied up to a wall. Like at a knife-throwing show. Like vids of a knife-throwing show. Only the knife-thrower had a pain ray.



It was this laser that targeted the fluids of subcutaneous organic tissues and boiled them. No scar. Just the hissing and the howling and the No, I won't do that any more, I know it's wrong, I know I shouldn't. There was a flash of light and a flinch. You never knew where that light would land. Or if you knew where, you didn't know what shape it would arrive in. That was a physics joke. Bio-Mom knew a lot of those.



Bio-Mom said: "Without pain, I wouldn't know who I really was."



She said that while trying to explain. They didn't get caught – not the first few times. Just kept watching. Bio-Mom's tolerance kept building up. Or maybe she was faking. They wondered, sometimes. She got so dramatic. She was so reserved, the rest of the time. They joked about which one was the robot. But in the basement she was so… hormonal.