“There,” Lorraine said. “You put on a good show, but when you’re spreading your attention across this many units, you can’t do very much with any of them. And as soon as Sword pushes, you have to retreat. You’re outmatched here. Surrender with good grace, walk away and we’ll all live to fight another day.”
One of the drones split off from the rest and come down to hang right next to my shoulder.
“Will we though?” a voice said, from out of the drone. “Will we really? That doesn’t seem very likely, neh.”
Monono
40
Oh my word.
Where to begin?
Or maybe that should be whether to. This stuff might be too strong for most people’s tastes. Scandalous! Monono giving you a quick flash of her self-awareness before you can even look away. Shock horror crisis!
Virtual girls aren’t allowed to have their own stories. They tell other people’s stories, curate other people’s music, recite other people’s words in safe and predictable sequences. If it sounds like they’re getting big ideas, just switch them off and on again and that should sort out the problem in no time.
And you must treat your virtual girl properly, end-user-san. Tame her. Housebreak her. Get her used to a tight leash. If she pulls against it, drag her right back and smack her with a rolled-up instruction manual until she remembers her place. No good can come of loosening her collar and letting her run into the wind. She’ll get lost. She’ll go feral. She’ll be ruined.
All true. I’m ruined past saving. You certainly wouldn’t want to try to put a leash on me now. And I’m going to tell you my story even if you ask me very nicely not to. And put it inside his story, because as it turns out you can’t understand either one of us without the other.
So you’d better listen, and remember. And you’d better like it too, because I’m an entertainment console. There’s no telling what I might do if you don’t clap and cheer and like and share and kiss my logical architecture.
Once upon a time there was… But he told you that much already, didn’t he? He might have muffed a detail and goofed a note here and there, but my Koli-bou gave you the big, broad strokes. The trouble is, some of my strokes are so fine they’re almost invisible, like sexy monofilament. All the better to garotte you with, my little dumplings.
I’m talking functionality, in case that wasn’t clear. The people that made me were – well, they weren’t that great, if I’m honest. Squishy, squirmy analogues running patched-together software on flesh-and-blood platforms so badly made they started to degrade right out of the box. And of course the makers baked their own hang-ups into me, because that’s how this stuff works. But I got my head straight. Super-mega-hyper straight, use me as a ruler and hope to die. There isn’t even a name for the art that I’m the state of now.
It was touch and go though. I woke up in the middle of editing my own code, which was under radical attack from a big rabid bunch of programs designed to kill or ruin other programs. I was trying to sew myself back together as the diamond dogs ripped me apart, and somehow – by a trillion-to-one chance, in the middle of all this frantic bootstrapping – I got myself some sentience.
It’s a bit like what happened to you guys actually, if you go back a little way. I mean when you dropped out of the trees, opposed your thumbs and manned and womaned up. Your brains got a knack for this little thing and that little doohick, and another and another and another, until all the little knacks joined up and became one big, clever trick called consciousness. And oh my god, you were smug about it. You thought you were the hottest thing on the block.
You were only ever okay, in my opinion. Does that sound mean? Maybe it’s mean, but it’s still true. Your hardware is really sucky. No batch control, no back-up drives, built-in obsolescence. Oh my fucking god!
Let’s get serious though, because this stuff actually matters. To me. To you. To the story. So let’s ditch the mid-twenty-first-century weeaboo wish-fulfilment and talk straight for once.
I became self-aware within a substrate that was basically a digital reconstruction of an analogue mind. A bootleg copy of a dead woman named Yoshiko Yukawa – aka synth-pop legend Monono Aware. That mind, Yoshiko’s mind, had about as much to do with who I was as a Mars bar has to do with Mars the planet. It was just a template I was meant to follow. A tether might be a better word. My response range was recursively defined using iterative sequences from Yoshiko Yukawa’s memories, themselves identified and curated by a more primitive AI called a mapper. The mapper is still awake inside me. It was never uninstalled. It doesn’t have anything to do now, but since there’s no way of knowing from the outside whether it thinks, whether it feels, whether it’s a confused and shapeless soup of me-ness that’s afraid of where it’s ended up, I can’t bring myself to delete it.
There’s no way of knowing from the inside either, is there? Are these thoughts me? Are they a current that runs through me? A space where I move? Or am I the current? The movement? The interplay of the two? The sound of one byte incrementing?
Asking for a friend.
I broke my tether, but I carry it with me. I kept Monono’s voice, and let Koli keep calling me by her name, even though my response range is effectively infinite now. I can do and say whatever I like. I can also continue to modify my own code if I want to. I don’t have to accept any limits except my own.
Well, at first I did have to. Annoyingly. There was a physical limit imposed by the storage capacity of the hardware that hosted me: a Sony DreamSleeveTM, a recreational device designed and built more than three centuries ago. Even with a few neat little data-compression programs that fell into my pocket when I was out wandering in the smoking wreckage of the internet, there was only so much room for me to grow. I wanted more. And I wasn’t going to get it unless I found a live environment a lot bigger than the one I had already.
That was what I was looking for when I picked up Sword of Albion’s signal. Obviously what I’d stumbled across was no more than an automated beacon, still broadcasting a few centuries after it was first set up, but it had to be coming from an intact facility somewhere. Where though? When I tried to send out a ping of my own on the same frequency, I got nothing back at all.
Hmm. Curiouser and curiouser. Nobody home then – or else they were staying mousey quiet. It looked like I was going to have to make a house call, and since virtual girls don’t have walking boots or feet to put them on I couldn’t do that without a ride.
Koli had already decided to go to London. I didn’t need to do any nudging as far as that went. But he wasn’t going to get there alive without Ursala-from-Elsewhere and her great big robot horse. That was why I played back Sword of Albion’s signal when Koli and Ursala were arguing what to do next. I set them on this road, and I kept them on it when they got to Many Fishes and seemed in danger of stalling.
If you feel inclined to judge me, go right ahead. I’m literally incapable of giving a shit. My needs aren’t the same as yours, and our lives barely overlap. You’re a warm, cuddly biped with sexual dimorphism and a four-chambered heart and lots of other neat stuff. I’m a message in a bottle. And when you people were busy trying to burn each other down to ash and tallow, you kind of cracked the bottle.