Beautiful Shining People, page 22
I can’t keep living with this. I won’t.
My shadow, it’s the only thing that knows how I feel.
It’s the only thing that has the answers.
I work a splintered shard free, mirror-me gripping it like a dagger.
Amputate yourself, it says.
A globule of blood erupts like oil from a well as the shard’s tip punctures the rubbery bundle of flesh pinched between my fingers. The shard penetrates deeper, widening the laceration as red fluid mixes with yellow fat and tears cascade over my cheeks.
I slice, that dark shadow enveloping all.
I need this off me. Now. I won’t keep living with this.
No one knows what it’s like. Unless you have a body that’s abnormal, you can’t possibly understand what you’d do to be freed from the alienation it wraps you in—
And as the tears run down my face, I stare at the splintered reflection of my violent act.
I stare at it with that realisation in my mind for a long, long time.
*
It’s mid-afternoon when I hear the clang of the bell again. Inu’s at his perch on the counter, and he gives me a little yap.
‘Irasshaimase,’ Goeido says reflexively from the kitchen, his eyes cast down, concentrating on something in front of him.
‘Konnichiwa … Goeido.’
When he looks up, it’s the first time I’ve ever seen surprise on his face. ‘Konnichiwa…’ he says, gaping at me. Yet his line of sight soon drifts.
Neotnia’s entered the foyer. She wears a long denim skirt with a white T-shirt that exposes her bare arms. And I’m relieved to see nothing about those arms looks ashen.
She stares at me with such a stunned expression I worry the dishes she’s collected might slip from her grasp.
Beneath my hoodie, my bandaged wound stings.
‘I’ll try,’ I say. ‘If you still want me to, I’ll try.’
She blinks as she processes my words. And right there, those clear blue-grey eyes, they break my fucking heart. They stare upon me for several silent moments more as if contemplating whether she’s heard right. Then the edges of her mouth curl into a smile so slight most people would miss it.
‘OK…’ she nods. ‘Yes.’
And as if suddenly remembering he’s here, too, she looks at Goeido who’s gazing at us like he’s watching a foreign soap opera. She nods to him. ‘Hai,’ she says, that slight smile growing brighter.
For a moment, Goeido considers the word as if it’s hanging from Neotnia’s lips, still waiting to be read. But then a big grin breaks his face. ‘Hai!’ he shouts, slapping a kitchen towel across the partition. He grabs the dish he was preparing and delivers it to the dining area, repeating ‘hai’ as he passes.
Neotnia follows his trajectory with her eyes, then turns to me. Their clearness scans my face.
‘Could we talk in private for a second?’
For perhaps a beat too long, I say nothing.
‘I think it’s best to focus on the issue at hand,’ I finally reply, lost for other words. ‘I … we don’t know much about what we’re dealing with, and if any of this has a hope of working, it’s going to need every ounce of our attention.’
Neotnia’s gaze breaks from mine. ‘Hai,’ she gives a stiff nod. ‘Of course.’
Goeido returns from the dining area, and it’s decided they’ll shut early, in an hour. They ask if I want some food in the meantime, but I tell them I’ll come back.
When I return the closed sign is up. I fold my phone out into a laptop and set it on the counter by Inu and launch my translation app.
‘We’re all alone now?’ I say, and the app overlays a Japanese voice on my own.
‘Hai,’ Goeido nods, and his Aussie English voice says, ‘Yep.’
‘OK, good,’ I say, suddenly feeling like I’m a high-school football coach giving the team the play before they retake the field. ‘Well, look, there’s so much I don’t know. I don’t know if we’ll even be successful, to be honest,’ I shrug, and Neotnia casts her eyes down, giving a nod so slight I barely catch it. ‘But I’m gonna try. However, if we’re doing this, we need to do it right. I’m going to need to know everything. And I’m going to need him, too.’
And realizing the three of us are suddenly staring at him in some unexpected way, a low ‘grrr’ escapes Inu’s mouth.
‘It’s OK,’ Neotnia whispers in his ear as she lifts him from his perch. We head back into the kitchen, placing Inu on the stainless-steel counter next to the big sink.
‘We’re not going to electrocute him, right?’ Goeido says in Aussie English.
‘What?’ I give him a look. ‘No. Jesus.’
Goeido shrugs.
I roll my eyes. ‘Look, Neotnia’s father said she and Inu have a somewhat similar makeup – physiologically anyway. So, before we resort to electrocuting anyone, I want to know as much about everyone as possible – because maybe there’s another way to access her systems. Makes sense?’
They both nod. Neotnia reaches under Inu’s collar, and I again hear that soft pop right before she bends his head backward, exposing the cross-section of his neck. Over the next several hours, I examine Inu with Neotnia at my side. Occasionally, she’ll stroke his upside-down head, calming his little growls of annoyance. Sometimes Goeido stays in the kitchen with us, observing. Sometimes he goes to the foyer to get some cleaning done, or to shoo away a customer who’s banging on the door.
Here’s what I know so far: Inu’s bones appear to be made from graphene. It’s why they have that dull blackness about them. An elephant could literally step on him and wouldn’t break a single bone in his body. His skin is synthetic, obviously. It’s more advanced than ordinary synthetic skin, but not as advanced as Neotnia’s. But, thanks to his fur, that’s hard to tell. This makes me think Inu may have been an early attempt at trying to create the technologies that eventually went into Neotnia. Like he was a first step, and once that was done, her father moved on to something more advanced.
The silvery-blue cords that course through his synthetic muscles appear to be a combination of artificial veins and nerves that transport some type of biovoltaic gel. I assume they carry electrical signals to give Inu’s muscles movement. Further down, a dull grey structure lies behind a knot of synthetic muscles. It looks to be made from some type of quantum material, but I don’t know which. Perhaps it’s a power source, but I can’t imagine what it could be converting energy from. Then again, it could be something else entirely.
What’s interesting is there’s a universal input next to the exposed graphene vertebra. You have to push a bundle of cords out of the way to see it, but it’s there. And it means I can literally plug my laptop into Inu using the same cable I’d plug into a server or any other terminal, which is precisely what I do. And like that, ‘I001’ appears as a connected device on my screen.
I open my terminal app to have a look at the device’s – Inu’s – code. It’s definitely quantum. It’s complex, but readable – if you know a lot about quantum coding, anyway. It’s entirely local, too. That is, Inu’s not running the quantum code from a remote hive somewhere, which is incredible. It now makes me think that dull grey structure deep inside him is some kind of tiny, self-contained quantum computer – an astounding breakthrough in itself.
Quantum processors require specific quantum materials and architecture to run inside devices, like hives, and those components are both delicate and relatively large – not to mention extremely costly. So far that’s ruled out shrinking a quantum computer into something small enough to fit the form-factor of a phone or laptop. And even though you could probably stuff a weak quantum computer into some types of bots – if they’re big enough – the quantum computer could be too easily damaged by the bot’s movement. Besides, a quantum computer inside a bot simply isn’t needed since standard AI can run directly on it using far cheaper and more practical classical components, which is all a bot needs to carry out its tasks.
All this has been true … until Inu, it seems. And, if it’s true for Inu, it’s likely the same for Neotnia.
I show Goeido Inu’s code and ask if it’s what Neotnia’s code looked like, but he shakes his head. He tells me what Neotnia said he’d seen: her code shifted around on the screen, and chunks of it seemed to teleport from one place to the next. Regardless, I sift through Inu’s code for some time. There’s an insane amount of it, but the more I examine it, the more I glean a few reasonable assumptions.
First, Inu’s quantum codebase is tens of millions of lines long. But the quantum nature of the code, the quantity of it, and the fact he seems to have a quantum computer inside him probably explains why Inu can produce micro-movements like a biological dog can. Accomplishing that with AI on classical computers would require trillions of lines of binary code, which would take hundreds of years to write and debug – and even then, there’d still be no guarantee the AI would be able to produce realistic micro-movements.
Second, since Neotnia revealed they were both androids, I’ve wondered if Inu was like her. By that I mean she clearly seems to have awareness – of herself, of the world, of everything. Does Inu possess the same awareness, or is he just mimicking the awareness and independence a biological canine has? From his code, I can now see it’s likely Inu is just a mimic of a real-life dog. He’ll fetch the ball for you and look like he’s enjoying it, but not because of any separate internal essence or desire to play. In other words, he’s doing it because his code tells him that a person who looks at him with a ball, and then throws it, wants him to retrieve it and look happy doing it.
On the stainless-steel counter, Inu’s nails make tiny little taps as his feet shift. Neotnia gives him a scratch on the top of his upside-down skull, which calms him. Yet soon enough, he releases another annoyed ‘grrr’.
‘Sorry, little buddy,’ I say as I continue scrolling through his codebase. ‘Almost done. I just want to try one more thing…’
The day I came looking for Neotnia, Goeido told me to follow Inu because he’d take me to her. The spiralling red waves on Inu’s visibility collar sped up as we neared and turned solid red when Inu found her. I ask if he knows how that tracking process works, but he says he only knows how to activate it – by touching Inu’s collar, which Neotnia’s father obviously modded with a DNA authenticator. Indeed, Goeido says her father had him register his biometrics on the collar when he dropped them at the café.
But I’ve discovered that Inu’s collar is physically part of him, too. A thin cord runs underside the back of it and into his body, which suggests the collar is merely the access point that allows an authorised person to activate Inu to find Neotnia, and it serves as visual feedback for whoever is following him. In other words, the collar isn’t itself the tracking device that locates Neotnia – Inu is. And that suggests there’s some unseen connection between them.
‘Did your father explain how Inu can do this?’ I ask.
Neotnia shakes her head. ‘He just said he’s a way to find me should I ever get lost.’
I return Inu’s head onto his neck but don’t press down to seal it in place – I still allow the cable to run from the input by his vertebra to my laptop so I can monitor his code in action. I touch Inu’s collar, but as expected, the collar stays black. Yet when I ask Goeido to touch it, the collar spirals in waves of red and Inu rises on all fours, turns around, and faces Neotnia. When he sees her, his collar turns a solid red.
I search my terminal for any changes in Inu’s code while he’s in this tracker mode, but nothing stands out. Then I remember something. After Brobrah showed at the Mossman shrine, when I looked back to Neotnia and Inu on the bench, his collar had stopped glowing red and turned black again.
‘Was that automatic?’
Neotnia shakes her head. ‘No. When I touch his collar, if he’s been activated, it deactivates him.’
I have her do just that, and Inu’s collar goes back to black. Yet I still don’t see any change in his code. ‘And I guess you can activate Inu in this way, too?’
‘Not by touching his collar.’
‘I don’t understand. You can activate him another way?’
‘Hai.’
‘How?’
Neotnia twists her mouth up a little. ‘By thinking it.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I think it, and it activates him. It tells him to come find me.’
‘I don’t—’
‘Here,’ she cuts me off. She picks Inu up and turns him away from herself. Then she retreats a few paces down the counter. And next she simply closes her eyes and, a moment later, Inu’s black collar spirals in waves of red. He turns and walks to her, dragging my laptop as the cable goes taut. His collar turns solid red as he stands in front of Neotnia at the steel counter’s edge.
‘Jesus.’
I look at the terminal, yet there’s still no sign of any code triggering this tracking protocol. No GPS. No Wi-Fi triangulation. No UWB. Nothing.
‘But how does that work?’
‘I don’t know,’ Neotnia shrugs. ‘Father just said it’s for if I ever get lost, I’ll have a way of letting whoever Inu is with know.’
‘How far does it work?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says. Then she stifles a little grin. ‘I’ve only ever done it in the café. It comes in handy at night when Inu’s down here and I’m in bed upstairs and want him to come cuddle. I don’t have to get my feet cold walking downstairs to get him.’
My mind reels thinking how this is even possible. Best guess: the particles from some quantum structure inside her and the particles from some quantum structure inside Inu are engaging in quantum entanglement. It would allow them to ‘talk’ to each other, no matter the distance. Regardless, I’d hoped the fact that Inu could locate Neotnia remotely might reveal some means of accessing her systems without electrocuting her, but it’s a dead end.
From the way Neotnia’s looking at me, I think she can sense my disappointment.
It’s now dark outside, and we decide to take a break. As Neotnia and Goeido fix some dinner in the kitchen, I ask to use the bathroom. Cutting through the foyer, the hallway’s inky blackness envelopes me. I run my hand along the wall until my feet stub the steps. The upstairs is small, and the bathroom itself is tiny and seashell pink. The tub brings back memories of Halloween night.
Instead of using the toilet, I lift my hoodie and peel the blood-crusted gauze aside. My laceration is long, red and I don’t know how deep. It burns and, in the mirror, my shadow lingers across my face.
Back in the foyer, Neotnia’s placing three beef donburi at the booth. Goeido enters carrying a salad bowl.
‘You know, a light in the hall really wouldn’t hurt,’ I say.
‘I’ll clean up a customer’s mess after they eat their tucker, but I draw the line at wiping their slash,’ Goeido cuts in in his Aussie voice. ‘The darkness keeps blokes and Sheilas from looking for the dunnie.’
Neotnia gives me a look that conveys she and Goeido have been through this before, and it’s a no-win situation.
We eat and discuss where things stand. I go through everything I can think of. I ask anything that may give me some idea of another way to access her systems. My bluntness catches Neotnia off guard, but she confirms her body is whole – it’s not like Inu’s, where you can take a head off. There’s no jack or flaps or anything I could plug my laptop into – but that’s something I knew already.
I ask them to explain again how she appears as a device on Goeido’s laptop after she’s electrocuted. But they both say the same things Neotnia’s already told me. Now there’s no doubt in my mind there’s some kind of quantum firewall around her, acting as a sort of encrypted ‘force field’ that keeps her invisible to networks. It’s likely her father’s the only one who knows how to temporarily shut the field down without electrocuting her.
I ask how she’s powered. She doesn’t know. She eats and drinks and goes to the bathroom. Obviously, only number two. She may convert food into energy like we do. Maybe. Regardless, how she acquires energy doesn’t appear to be a vector we can exploit. Besides being able to trigger Inu remotely to come find her, it doesn’t appear Neotnia is connected to anything else. She says she’s not connected to any intranets. She can’t download data on the fly. She can’t suck up information from an online encyclopaedia and know its entire knowledgebase in an instant. She was ‘born’ knowing how to speak Japanese and English, but besides that, she seems to acquire information and understanding like the rest of us do – through experience and study.
In short, it appears there really is no way to access her systems other than by electrocution. So, after finishing the mochi-ball dessert Goeido’s made, we take our plates to the kitchen and then, like some kind of ultra-dysfunctional, sadistic family, we decide to electrocute Neotnia’s arm so I can see what happens.
Neotnia shuts off the tap as the water approaches the rim of the big sink. Across the kitchen, Goeido unboxes one of the new toasters, which sit on a shelf by a freezer. Neotnia pushes her right T-shirt sleeve above her shoulder and Goeido plugs the toaster into the socket near the sink.
I can’t help but shake my head.
‘It’s OK,’ Neotnia says. ‘When it’s just my arm, it doesn’t hurt much. Besides, it’s nothing compared to what I’m constantly feeling inside.’
Goeido asks if she’s ready. She gives a firm nod, then submerges her arm all the way to her elbow. I unfold my phone into a tablet and open the network settings. Goeido moves his hand in a swatting motion, telling me to take a few steps back, then presses the lever on the toaster. Seconds later, its coils glow red hot. He looks at Neotnia once more, and she nods. And like that, he drops the toaster into the sink.
There’s an almighty pop and the kitchen’s rear lights flash out. But even in the shadows, I can see Neotnia clench her jaw in pain. It’s only when her eyes find mine that I realise I need to be looking at my screen. And indeed, ‘NEOTNIA’ has appeared as a device. I tap it and it begins establishing a connection, but before anything more shows, ‘NEOTNIA’ blinks from existence.
