Meeting a tech bro
Mandy had
seen most of the building now. It was striking; a series of inverted V-shaped
spars, roofed to halfway down, so the whole resembled an upturned half-built
ark with the planking built out from the keel. There were windows in the roof,
scattered at random and interspersed with solar panels.
“We say
it’s the best newbuild in the Valley,” said Amrita as she led Mandy through
another large open-plan office. “It’s sustainable too. The wood came from a
stand in Washington State that’s sustainably managed. And we have enough solar
panels and battery storage that we don’t hardly need the grid so the power
supply is sustainable also.”
Mandy
wished her feet were sustainable; she should have worn better trainers today.
She snatched a glance at her watch.Serpent labret, Aztec
(MetropolitanMuseum of Art/Creative Commons)
Amrita saw
this. “Frey’s running a little late,” she said. The phone in her hand beeped. “Ah,
he says about five minutes. Let’s go through the chill area.” They passed
through an oblong room with a central drinks dispenser; there were low, deep
cushion seats and soft bright couches. “Like, this is where we come to chill
and it’s where we swap ideas. Frey says the idea is cross-fertilization.”
“Literally?”
asked Mandy.
“I’m
sorry?”
“Workplace
romance?”
Amrita
looked puzzled. “I don’t know. I guess I could check with HR and see if they
have some figures.”
“Never
mind.” There were several men and women sunk into the deep cushions but they
seemed to be looking at their phones rather than each other. Mandy decided fertilization
was improbable.
And then
they were in Frey’s office. Its minimalism was aggressive. Its occupant sat
behind his glass desk, coiled like a serpent.
“Sit down,”
he said; it was not an invitation. “How is business? Your site is being read in
the Valley, that’s for sure. And your tech blog’s the hottest part of it.”
“I hope
so,” said Mandy. “And everyone’s curious about you. They want to know what you
are doing here.”
*What have
you been told we’re doing?”
“Everything,
Frey. From germ warfare to Bitcoin mining.”
He chuckled
darkly. “Those are kid’s stuff,” he said. He paused, frowned and seemed to
think, in a way Many found mannered. “Have you heard of the Blue Brain
project?” he said.
She had.
“You mean those guys at Lausanne? They wanted to simulate a rat’s brain? And
the Human Brain project followed?”
“That’s it.
We’re beginning to understand the way the brain works – its neural networks,
the way it processes emotion. But that’s just the hardware. If we can build
that into a simulation, then add the software – “
Mandy frowned.
“Is AI part of this?”
“Oh yes.
That is why we are breaking new ground. Imagine an avatar that both functions
like a human brain and is capable of learning. We can create a virtual ecosystem
populated by virtual beings that can interact with humans. Imagine: You have a
problem with your car or your tax return. Your virtual adviser can not only
find the answer – that, in theory, is not new; they can also figure out how
they can communicate that answer to you in a way that fits your personality. If
for example it has understood that you are not neurotypical, it will speak
accordingly. But better still, it will form relationships with other avatars
within the virtual environment and you can interact with them too.”
“Hang on.
Are you suggesting that I will soon have a virtual friendship group?”
“Yes. At
first you will feel guilty, creeped out by it,” said Frey. “But then you will
ask yourself, Why is this worse than the so-called real world? Why would it not
be the real world?”
“The
imitation of life,” she mused.
“No,” he
replied. “Not its imitation. Its duplication.”
He paused a
moment, then said: “Come with me.”
They went
into a small room nearby; it was furnished with the same low couches and
cushions she had seen earlier, but it was in semi-darkness. Several operators
sat before banks of screens that lit their features from below, reminding her a
little of paintings of witches or of hell. “Kelly here is team leader on this particular
sim,” said Frey. “They’ve laid down the groundwork. It didn’t take long, did
it, Kelly?”
The young
woman turned from her screen. She was about 25 or 30, her slim face framed by
Mont Blanc glasses with a bluish frame; she wore pale new jeans and a white
cotton blouse, cowboy boots and discreet jewellery. “Sure didn’t,” she said. “I
worked with Paul for the first day and we laid down the basic parameters. We’ve
got light and dark, and a monoseasonal set up with equal daylengths; it
simplifies things. Next was the physical environment – water and land etc.,
that was day two. That took us a bit of fiddling about with the graphics
interface though. But we got round to plant life on D3. Jeff over there is
setting up the taxonomy.”
“And now?”
“We’re in
the testing phase. We got the animals done on D5 but we’re finding their
interaction with the humanoids a bit glitchy. They were doing some unnatural
things together.”
“I beg your
pardon?” said Mandy.
“I don’t
think Kelly meant that exactly,” said Amrita.
“That’d be radical,”
said Frey. “But hey, why not. We can do anything with these sims. Anything.”
A
human-like figure crossed Kelly’s screen. She was obviously female, with clear
sexual organs. “We haven’t clothed them yet,” said Kelly. “What happened was
one of the reptiles gathered fruits and gave them to Female 1, who ate
them. We’ll have to clothe the humans now
so that we could code the animal-type sims not to see them as animals too.”
“Tell me,”
said Mandy, “do you think the avatars are sentient beings?”
“Excuse
me?” said Kelly.
“I mean, do
they have consciousness? When something happens to them in the simulation, do
they feel it?”
“Well, in
the sense that a part of the code is activated.”
“Which is
what happens to us, isn’t it?” said Mandy. “I mean, we function according to a
genetic code that is not so different in principle from the binary code that
activates your avatars and defines their behaviour. So who is to say that they
feel nothing? Could there be an ethical question here?”
“Ethics”?
The other three looked at each other.
“I don’t
think there’s a problem there,” said Frey, after a pause. “Like every startup,
we conform to State guidelines and our stock is traded according to SEC
regulations.”
“I’m sure
that’s so. That isn’t quite what I meant,” said Mandy. “But never mind.”
Later
Amrita escorted Mandy to the car park. “There’s one thing I meant to ask him
and didn’t.” Mandy paused as she opened her car door. “Lots of people are
asking – What is Frey short for? It isn’t his given name?”
“No. His
name is Godfrey. We call him Frey for short.”
“Oh. Well,
thank you for today, it’s been great.”
“Sure,
Mandy. Thank you for visiting Genesis LLC, it’s been great to see you.”
Lucas Cranach the Elder:
Adam and Eve Diptych, c1533-37 (detail)
More flash fiction:
Homecoming
A sort of love story
Solitude
A Cold War memory
Rhodri Hactonby's Maps
A question of social geography
Hiraeth
A yearning…
Strange Places
A spirit in the sky
A Sideways Journey
Things might have been different
Displaced
Encounter on E94th Street
Belonging
Do you? Where?
Leaving Home
A house has memories
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