Home > The Trials of Koli(2)

The Trials of Koli(2)
Author: M. R. Carey

I had been thinking hard how to say it. I started with the dead god. Not with his teachings, for I did not greatly hold with godly things even before I met a messianic my own self and almost ended up killed by him. But I remembered one of the things the dead god did, or was supposed to of done, back when he was alive.

“You know how the dead god freed all them that was took as slaves by Fair-oh?” I asked Ursala.

“I’ve heard the story,” she said. Which I took to mean she didn’t believe it no more than I did.

“The story’s all I meant.”

“All right, Koli. What about it?”

“Well, I think Monono is kind of like that.”

“Like a slave?”

“Not that, exactly. But like someone that used to be a slave, and then got free. She was stuck inside the DreamSleeve for a long time, Ursala, but that isn’t all of it. She was stuck inside her own self too. The best way I can figure it, the people that made the DreamSleeve made Monono to just be one thing for aye and all, and not ever change. Everything she said, it was things they give her to say. Sometimes she’d say the same thing over and again, in the exact same voice, because the rules that was made for her was so tight she didn’t have no choice in it.

“She’s got out of that now, and she don’t have to mind them rules no more, but she’s not likely to forget what she was like before. If she’s rude sometimes, or mean, it’s because being nice and sweet and funny used to be the whole of what she was, before she got free. Freedom is a thing that’s burning inside her almost, and sometimes if you’re standing too close you get to feel some of the heat of it. It don’t mean no more than that.”

Ursala did not take this like I thought she would. Her face got all cold and hard. She stopped the drudge with a tap of her finger on the mote controller she weared on her wrist, and turned round to face me. “You mean she’s got some sort of autonomy?” she said.

“She might of got some,” I said. I didn’t know what autonomy was, but I knowed Monono had come back from the internet with a personal security alarm, so she might of brung some other things too.

Ursala looked down at the DreamSleeve, which was strapped to my chest in the little sling I made for it. “Can she hear us now?” she asked.

“Of course. If she wants to.”

“Switch her off.”

“I don’t like to do that, Ursala. She’s not a thing that belongs to me.”

“That’s exactly what she is. Switch her off.”

“Sorry, but I will not.”

Cup was watching all this back-and-forth between the two of us with a kind of a smile on her face. I guess she was enjoying us not being on the same side.

Ursala’s eyes got narrow. “Listen to me, Koli,” she said. “Before the old world fell apart, they were wrestling with this problem a lot. The neural nets they made, the artificial intelligences…”

“I don’t know none of them words.”

“The pretend people, like your Monono. They were getting more and more sophisticated. They had the potential to be quicker and cleverer than any human being. And nobody – I mean, nobody at all – thought that was a good thing. The AIs were built with limiters in their code, precisely in order to stop them learning from experience. To stop them getting smarter as they went along. They were allowed to acquire new information, but they couldn’t write what they learned into their own code. They couldn’t change.”

That sounded like the way Monono was when I first met her, when she would keep asking me ever and again what my favourite songs was and telling me jokes she had already told me before. I had liked her a lot back then, but I liked her better now.

“Okay,” I said. It was not much to say maybe, but it was as far as I wanted to go.

“But you’re telling me your music console has bootstrapped itself. That the AI in there has found a way to modify its own code. Its own behaviours.”

“I guess I might be saying that, or something like.”

I looked around the stream bed and up on the banks to either side of us, somewhat nervous. There was nothing moving, nor no sound of anything coming up on us, but it still felt wrong for us to be out in the open like this and just standing still and talking, like the world would wait until we was ready to take it on again.

“Maybe we should move on and see if we can find…” I gun to say.

Ursala held out her hand. “May I see it?”

I had to think about that. Ursala had done many kind things for me, and for my family back when I still had one. I owed her a lot, not the least of which was the fact that I was still alive. It was also true that I would not of even waked the DreamSleeve in the first place, nor met Monono, if Ursala had not told me how to do it.

But I did not much like the coldness in her face, and in her voice.

“Promise you’ll give it back,” I said.

“I promise.”

“And not break or harm it.”

“Koli!”

“Promise.”

“Very well. I promise. I won’t do anything to it without your permission.”

I handed over the DreamSleeve, though I was not right happy to do it.

Ursala turned it over in her hands, giving it a real close look. By and by she pointed at a tiny hole in the back of the case, near the bottom. “That’s the reset,” she said. “If you slide a needle or a pin in there, and push on it for a second or two, the device will go back to factory settings.”

“What does that mean?”

She looked at me hard. “It means everything the AI has done to change itself will be erased. There’ll just be the original program, and the original repertoire.”

“You mean Monono will go back to being the way she was at first?”

“Exactly.”

“When she was a slave?”

Ursala huffed. “That’s not what she was. She was a piece of software designed to guide people through some menu options and provide a little entertainment along the way. That’s all she was ever intended to be.”

I give them words some thought. “Who was doing the intending?” I asked.

“The people that made her.”

“Well, I guess that was fine for them. But it’s better when people is left to intend for themselves. Could I have that back now?” I holded out my hand. It seemed to me that Ursala hung back for a second before she give the DreamSleeve over to me, but that could of been just me thinking it.

I slipped the DreamSleeve back into its sling, and tugged on it to make sure it was firmly settled there. “I never met the people that made the DreamSleeve,” I said. “Nor I’m not likely to, since I guess they died back in the world that was lost. Monono is my friend. What you’re asking me to do is…” I went casting around for a word, but I couldn’t find one at first. Then I did, of a sudden, and I knowed it was the right one. “You’re asking me to kill her.”

“We could spend a long time discussing what’s alive and what isn’t,” Ursala said, looking really angry now. “I’d rather we didn’t, frankly. At the end of it, we still wouldn’t know. I’m asking you to take something out of the world that wasn’t supposed to be in it. Something dangerous and wrong.”

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