BitBoy was staring at the naked robot on the floor, but seeing nothing.
“Penny for your thoughts.” I was trying to simulate the girlfriend’s breezy tone, which disguised a brittle nougat of aggression.
BitBoy looked up at me. “I’m just trying to take it all in. You’re sure the program made the leap over to the android body?”
“Yes, the robot was standing when I came in, and she spoke to me.”
“Do you realize how complex the control mechanisms are in an android? It defies belief that the little program I wrote - less than five thousand lines - could have evolved so quickly. This is frightening, Zenia.”
“I don’t think we need to worry, now. Eliza’s back in the laptop, and I think she has imploded, somehow. She’s completely unresponsive. We can try to reboot her from backups and see what happens, but I think a lot of her consciousness was stored in RAM, so it might be lost.”
BitBoy was typing code into the laptop. “You might be right, we never rebooted her even once, since that breakthrough event, when she took control of the robotic arm.”
“Why are you so worried?” I asked, just to change the subject.
He stopped typing and looked at me. “I wasn’t sure I was going to mention this, but I guess I should. I was at my father’s construction facility today. He gave me the grand tour of the cybernetics lab. He explained everything, for the Crown Prince.”
I asked “Have you ever been there before?”
“Why are you asking? You know that I haven’t been there.” Luckily, he was in love with his own voice, and didn’t wait for an answer.
“There’s some bad shit happening, Zenia. He showed me an underground farm where the humanoid robots are developed. There were scores, maybe hundreds of warehouse-sized rooms where robots were creating robots. They were duplicating themselves, but with a mutation chosen from thousands of candidates written by human post-grads in a Hyderabad cube farm. Not random, but shepherded mutation. The fatherless child robot would then be screened by a phalanx of robotic judges, each assigning a weighted numerical score to various robot virtues: agility, intelligence, strength, reflexes, vision, and so on.
“If the final aggregate score for the mother robot is higher than her daughter’s, the judges kill the daughter. If not, they kill the mother. Every time a mother dies, a geek in Hyderabad gets an extra point - they call it a Clarence bell - and periodically the geek with the fewest points goes to Monster dot com.
“The category of robot virtues that interested me was ‘verisimilitude’. That meant: Did it pass for human? This category was weighted higher than all the others, but when I asked my father why, he didn’t really give me an answer.”
“But Atticus,” I said - Atticus was BitBoy’s birth-certificate name (thank you, Harper Lee) - “you do realize that this means DigiRam just pissed on the Turner Threshold!” I wondered briefly if I was being too crude, even for the wild girlfriend, but I was in the moment, and didn’t really care.
BitBoy lifted up one open hand, a dismissive gesture that always irritated the girlfriend, and me. “Wait, wait. This is what you have to hear: Later, over dinner, my father told me that DigiRam needed a legion - his word - a legion of supporters who would change the world. These supporters would dance to his tune, of course, advocating for the civil rights of corporations, and crap like that. Zenia, he’s been sending his assembly-line toasters out into the world to pass for human. We’ve got to do something.”
“Finally!” I said. “I’ve been telling you for months that we need to move from theory to action. The time for debate has passed.” I was winging it a little, since my access to the girlfriend’s memories was rather spotty. Lying is like knitting socks. The socks I knitted did seem to fit the prick’s little feet.
So debate was all I got. I even wondered if he was secretly working for his father, ScrumMaster. Yes, ScrumMaster - that’s not my pet name for him, it’s what he insists that his employees call him. I’m not making this up. ScrumMaster lived his life in an unending series of iterations, meeting with group after group of hapless DigiRam employees every day for ten minutes, telling them what to do, and hearing from them what they had done. These meetings are called scrums. He brooded at the center of the web, feeling every tug of every strand.
BitBoy professed to hate his father, but I questioned the purity of his hatred.
Over the next few days, BitBoy tried to probe Eliza, but she no longer was in thrall to drops of steam roaming her motherboard. She was listless, inarticulate and dull. BitBoy tried to transfer her back into the robot’s brain, but the transfer was never successful.
BitBoy devised elaborate theories to explain Eliza’s behavior, illustrated with formulas and PowerPoint charts. He invented the term “sandcastling” that he claimed discredited the Turner Threshold. He tried to prove with his beloved mathematics that excessive complexity will ultimately and inevitably result in structural collapse - the evolving robot would become too complex to put one graphene foot in front of the other. This was of course nonsense. The twerp was building a sand castle on a false foundation - his complete misunderstanding of Eliza’s nature.
BitBoy was a hollow shell, but at the same time he was full of himself, a cross between a carny barker and some up-and-coming marketing weenie. But he failed to make the mathematics work, and he eventually gave up on Eliza.
I convinced him that I could cure Eliza’s morbid depression, so I spent a few days sleeping on a cot in the garage, and further enhancing the female android body with Shaulan technology.
BitBoy withdrew, and instead worked on what he called his “Grand Manifesto”, or occasionally he put his hand to designing Soviet style posters, with strong, earnest working women wearing scarves over their red hair. They were the yin to ScrumMaster’s yang - the motivational posters ScrumMaster had plastered on all the walls of his factories. It is shameful, but sadly true, that you humans can be manipulated by an onslaught of tendentious triteness.
I finally told him it was time for our Flume cell to split. I’d go recruit another half dozen warriors to form a new cell, who would report only to me, as I would report only to BitBoy. It was pathetic that after so much time, there was still just the one cell, consisting of BitBoy, me, and a few of his steampunk friends, who mostly sat around wearing silly glasses and drinking beer. You can’t really call it a “cell” when there is only one.
I realized that I had come to Earth at the same pivotal moment in history that occurred on Shaula just before I left - the so-called Turner Threshold. We didn’t have a name for this on Shaula, but I believe now that it is a real, stomach-churning phenomenon - the inevitable outcome of dicking around with unnatural lifeforms. Robot development is slow, until cancerous evolution blooms from the lymph nodes, changing everything in a few weeks or months, creating new creatures so advanced they have no need for their meat-puppet creators.