Beautiful Intelligence Read Free

a little bit different.”
    Hound found himself intrigued. Dirk’s personal habits left a lot to be desired, but his mind was sharp as obsidian, which was why Leonora employed him. He watched as Dirk pressed a key switch to wake Zeug. Inside the theatre pod the white body twitched, then raised itself and sat on the operating table. Hound shivered. Yuri had insisted that Zeug have three eyes, and Leonora, worn down, had agreed.
    “Man, but he’s got ears,” he said.
    “He got ear,” Dirk agreed, “but he don’t hear. We ain’t activated dat nerve highway yet. Tonight...”
    Hound looked again at Zeug. Stereoscopically, Zeug stared back at him, third eye closed, and Hound received that tremor, that macabre thrill running through his body that everyone got when they saw an almost-human replica. It was creepy. It always would be. It was one of the downsides of artificial intelligence research.
    “He’s looking at me, man,” he whispered.
    Dirk nodded, taking a drag from his cheroot. “Da brain hooked up in part. He watching us. We like dat! Zeug gotta sense his world to become conscious.”
    “He’ll never smell or taste, though.”
    Dirk coughed. “Yeah? One day he will. Just a matter of time. Tech never go backward.”
    Dirk waited fifteen minutes, Zeug’s standard warmup period, then laid in the signposts for the audio adaptive neural networks in the quantum computer. Zeug shivered, as though sensing that his brain was changing. Then Dirk played the music on the memory dot; simplistic, a song sung to guitar accompaniment, seagulls crying in the background.
    “Take out the gulls,” Dirk instructed the theatre pod computer.
    Seconds later the gull noises stopped, along with a minuscule amount of quality in the recording.
    “EQ, human,” Dirk grunted.
    The sonic quality of the recording changed – brighter, with better bass. Hound recognised that the lad had a good voice, though his guitar picking was shaky. He was probably thirteen or so.
    Zeug began turning his head this way and that. “Where’s the speaker?” Hound asked.
    “One side only,” Dirk replied. “We want da brain to understand spatial co-ordination from audio. He’s getting it! Shit, he’s quick. Look, you can see he’s orientating himself. Yuri, he’s da man. ”
    “But Zeug doesn’t understand what the sound is?”
    “Not yet. He linked up to all da data bases here, ’course. He’ll learn.”
    “By himself?”
    “We’ll learn him,” Dirk said, “so it’ll be a bit of both. Who knows? Dis never happen before.”
    “The model of the world inside his brain better be good, man.”
    “Real good. But we’ll tell him what’s what.”
    ~
    Leonora and Yuri took green tea together, the morning humid hot already, the Med baking under greenhouse atmosphere; but in the caves it was cool. Leonora glanced at the sundrenched picwalls in the common pod as she poured more tea. She pulled her lambswool cardi around her shoulders. Aircon was not required, which was good; the nexus would notice that kind of anomalous thermal activity from supposedly empty caves, which meant their enemies and competitors would too.
    A Hound-report pinged into holoview.
    “It is only the fake us,” she said, “the standard report.” She read the update. The virtual Leonora and Yuri hid in the remains of San Francisco, living their lives, interfacing, downloading, uploading. All designed to keep eyes away from Malta. Of course, in a week or two some infinitesimal discrepancy would be noticed and the fake Leonora and Yuri would have to decamp. It happened once a month or thereabouts: pretence of the hobo lifestyle. Kept the watchers on their toes though, for the whole world wanted to know where Leonora and Manfred were and what they were doing. Ichikawa, of course, knew the fakes were fake.
    “Zeug is progressing well,” she said.
    Yuri nodded. “Very well, for I have no doubt that he wants to learn. His eyes are good and his ears are working, but we