"Target acquired," Chris shouted. "Brainy Smurf, dead ahead. I'll engage, Helen hits him from behind, everybody else protect the noob. Break!"
"Shit," Nasya grumbled. "Brainy's one of The Brothers."
"Which means..." Helen prodded.
"Exclusive guild. Powerful. Hold grudges," Nasya explained. "We're about to do something very stupid."
"All to impress a fake girl," Drew grumbled, then added. "Stupid plan, Chris. Ix-nay!"
"A fake what?" Helen yelled.
"Just follow the plan," Chris shouted, then opened fire. Brainy Smurf turned and launched at him with a loud, nasal war cry. They grappled. "Now, Helen! Now!"
"I'll hit you too!"
"With the force of a wet noodle! Fire away!"
Helen felt stupid. "Oh, right." She flitted outside Drew's shielding and sent a spray of energy at the struggling smurf. It seemed to fold under the attack.
"Who the hell are you people?" Brainy asked, struggling.
Nasya laughed. "Helen Roderick is currently owning your blue ass."
"Really? The computer girl?" Brainy asked. "Which one's she?"
"The pixie," Nasya replied.
"Good to know," Brainy said, his voice menacing. "Brothers!" he shouted. "Team Hamsterlicker is using a bot! They're cheating! Destroy them!"
"I don't care how much Chris wants to get laid," Drew said. "I'm outta here." As he floated off into the sky, his name dropped off the team roster on Helen's display. Helen swore to herself.
"Big Bad coming in from the south," Nasya shouted. "I think we should run for it."
"Keep firing," Chris warned. "He's worth a boatload of points."
"No, I mean a Really Big Bad!" Nasya shouted. Helen kept flitting about and firing, dodging the occasional smurfberry bomb. A sound like an explosion came from behind her, then a sudden rush of air picked her up and flung her forward. "Sorry, guys!" Nasya said, "I'm not sticking around to watch the slaughter." Her TIE fighter sped off.
"I'm totally feeling the love right now," Mitch said. "Anybody else feeling it?"
"Shifting loyalties are part of the game," Chris countered, clearly on edge. "Stick with the plan."
"Pixie!" Brainy shouted. "Kill the pixie!" Then he exploded into a pile of blue goop, and Helen could finally turn to see what had scared off Nasya.
"Oh, ftahgn," she muttered. Hunched in an oily green mass, with black reptillian eyes that peered out from behind a mass of tentacles, was a creature out of an opium addict's nightmares. As it raised up on hind legs, towering over everyone, bystanders halted their fighting and turned to watch. They started a low chant. "Cuhhh-THOOO-looo. Cuhhh-THOOO-looo." It roared with a sound that shook sky and earth.
"Lovecraft, you motherless bastard," Mitch groaned. "Okay, I'll distract him. You two go after the wings. If he can't fly, we can outrun--" Cthulhu launched a spray of black ooze from his mouth, and the Supreme Court justices disintegrated in a spray of gavels and legal papers. Chris took off at a dead run towards an enemy twenty times his own size, firing off every bit of weaponry he had. Cthulhu brushed off the barrage and brought down a single massive, clawed hand, crushing the mecha.
Helen retreated, and Cthulhu followed. She was fast, but he was faster. "Are you really Helen Roderick?" Cthulhu asked, his voice low and guttural.
"It's true."
Cthulhu laughed. "I'm actually a fan. But if we let bots play, it ruins the game for everybody. So I sort of have to destroy you."
"I'm not a bot!" she yelled. "What makes everybody else's neurons so much better than mine? They're squishier?"
"I'm really sorry," Cthulhu replied. "There's a dispute committee. You should appeal to for re-entry." Massive hands came together, crushing her. For a few seconds, there was nothing in her world that was not pain.
She found herself back at the team's training camp, screaming. The pain disappeared the moment her original body re-formed, but it left an echo. "Oh, god that hurt," she said, voice choking.
Mitch and Chris were there to meet her, having already gone back to their human avatars. "You okay?" Chris asked.
"My nerves were wired into a body that just got smashed apart. So no. Not okay."
"Shit. We'll put an interface between you and the avatar next time."
"No. There's no next time."
"But we can fight the ban," Chris pointed out. "I mean, this is my game and my server. I can pull strings. And you'll have a hundred points to spend in the next round."
"You didn't protect me," she told Chris, shoving a finger in his face.
"Hold on," Mitch said, stepping between them. "You're understandably pissed, but Chris did everything he could to keep the heat off you. It's not his fault Drew bailed on us."
Helen looked back and forth between the two, a bit dumbfounded. "Wow. You two really don't get it, do you?"
"Get what?" Chris asked.
"Drew calls me a fake girl, and you say nothing. People call me a bot, and you say nothing. Do you even think of me as a sentient being?"
Chris hesitated. "It's an interesting question," he finally said.
"Not to me. Goodbye, Chris," she said, then cut her connection. She reappeared at home.
A note was on her living room table, flashing yellow with urgency. She read it.
Helen,
I know we've been pushing you hard. You need more time off, and we need to sit down together and talk about that. But please don't blow off Dr. Murdock the way you did. He is my friend as well as a colleague, so I want you to treat him with the respect he has earned. I expect you to apologize to him tomorrow.
Beyond that, I consider the matter closed. I've always expected a lot from my students, and from you especially. Try to take it as a mark of respect. I don't ask more from people than I figure they can handle. I know you're doing your best.
Prof. Mellings
She read it over again, and indignation gave way to shame. On the third reading, she was struck by how much consideration he was showing toward her feelings. She clutched the letter to her chest and lay back into the couch as her eyes welled up with complicated tears. Her emotions flip-flopped between anger, shame, and gratitude so quickly that the couch couldn't keep up. Finally its insides seemed to turn liquid, then the white gelatinous bag flowed away from her, coming to rest in a huddled mass in the furthest corner of the room, shivering noticeably.
////////////////////
// THE SMARTENING //
////////////////////
Date: September 17, 2034
Helen sometimes missed sleep. There was a day and night cycle in her part of Altworld, but her body no longer responded to its call. Regardless of what the sun and the sky told her eyes, the body always seemed to reply, "Don't pull my leg. It's eleven AM on a Tuesday. Hey, want to go jogging?"
Helen had assumed that her permanent insomnia would give her ample time to resume her education. But her days were spent in the lab, grinding through an endless series of physical and psychological tests. Her nights were her own, but it was hard to focus; living in Altworld meant always being just one teleport away from all the most amazing things ever!
She frequently resisted the urge, but her slow progress frustrated her.
She knew better than to complain to Dr. Mellings. He tried to be comforting, but his pick-me-up speech started with a laundry list of the advantages a twenty-two year old brain had over his almost seventy year old brain, and concluded with a patronizing reminder that she was already improbably smart, statistically speaking. But she didn't want his disguised self-pity or a pat on the head. She wanted... well, she wasn't sure what she wanted.
One evening, as she studied in the lab, a grunt of frustration changed her life. It was an unexceptional grunt, except that Kriti heard it. She had been working late, and was finally getting around to gathering her things. She dropped her pack and sat down across from Helen's holoprojected form.
"What troubles you?" she asked.
"Don't mind me," she said. "You should cl
ear out of here. Find a boy, club him over the head, and drag him back to your apartment. Y'know, have some fun."
"No. No fun. You shall tell me."
Helen waved a hand at the book she was reading. It disappeared in a puff of smoke. "I have a slow and stupid brain!"
Kriti considered this for a moment, then pulled up Helen's readouts. She spun the brain around like a top, poking and prodding, zooming in and out. Helen watched her brain get pulled into a dozen pieces as the young Indian examined each region in detail.
"I see nothing out of place," Kriti concluded. "The test framework passes and its colors fly."
Helen smiled. "The phrase is, 'with flying colors.'"
Kriti nodded, apologetic. "Can you describe the error more perfectly?"
"Not really. It's just frustrating, you know?"
"No! No I do not know!" Kriti said, as loudly as Helen had ever heard her say anything, which wasn't very. "How am I to find the insect in the simulation with such hints?"
It took Helen a few seconds to understand. "Oh, you mean the bug. Sorry, Kriti. The problem isn't with the simulator, it's with the simulated. I just wish I could hang onto information better."
"You mean the error is in the structure of your mind?" Kriti asked. "Or perhaps the axons are growing too slowly."
"No, no. Kriti. It's not a bug. The simulator is fine."
Kriti shook her head. "The software is not doing what you wish. To me, that is an insect. Do you wish for it to be fixed?"
That, Helen considered, was an excellent question. They spent most of the evening discussing it.
/*****/
The next morning, Helen peeked in on Professor Mellings. Most people would have had to knock before they came in -- that is, requested access his apartment's holoprojector. But Dr. Mellings had given her complete access, and insisted that she drop by any time, day or night, and not to worry if the reason seemed stupid. This was the first time she'd taken advantage of the offer.
She was about to announce her presence when his bedroom door opened and her professor stumbled out through it. He was naked and bedraggled, his hair an intricate collection of tangled and matted white hair. Helen was surprised at just how old and fragile he looked.
Seemingly oblivious to her, he made a beeline for the kitchen, where he made clumsy, grasping gestures in the direction of a coffee maker. On the third try, he found the handle, and emptied the carafe into the sink. He fumbled it, then picked it back up, then started it refilling. He grumbled and swatted at his paunch; somehow he had managed to splash water on himself, and was trying to brush it off.
"You know," she said in a conversational tone, "any coffee maker you buy these days would have started brewing the moment the house detected that you were awake." He only grunted, barely acknowledging her existence, much less the awkward fact of... well... it was hanging right there.
"You know you're naked, right?"
"M'house," he muttered, in a way that conveyed that, if the fact troubled her, she could find some other septuagenarian to stalk. Nothing more was said until the steaming mug of coffee reached Dr. Mellings' lips. A moan of exhausted contentment escaped him, then he sat for two minutes, eyes closed, sipping from a mug which was never more than an inch from his mouth.
As though a switch had been turned on, the professor jerked into a more upright posture. His eyes flew open. "Helen!" he said, as though aware of her for the first time. "Wow. Um. I should put some clothes on." He sprinted for his bedroom. A minute later, he came back, decked out in a red plaid flannel. "Most mornings, I don't even remember making coffee. I just wake up and, well," he pointed to the mug. "What I mean to say is, sorry about the man junk. What brings you by?"
"Kriti and I have been thinking about how to power up my brain," Helen said. Mellings only nodded. "We want to try something. In a real brain, there's no way to add more neurons without shoving aside existing ones. So there are strict physical limits to the overall sophistication of the neural pattern."
Dr. Mellings sipped the last of his coffee, then poured himself some more before he replied. "But in your... state... those rules don't apply. I suppose it wouldn't take a big change in the software to allow for it. We could add a fourth dimension... no, probably easier to just let multiple neurons occupy the same..."
He sat in a stupor, still quite exhausted. Finally, he said, "Regression testing will be a bugger. It might take a month or so. Why do you want to do this?"
"Because I want to contribute to science as a researcher, not as the research. I want to be brilliant."
"This again? You are brilliant. I always said you were one of my most promising students." He must have caught her unconvinced look. "You're coming along very well. Just be patient." He said it as though he knew the request was futile. Helen wasn't sure what expression was on her face, but it seemed to be working, so she stuck with it. He was wriggling under her gaze like a fish on a hook.
"Fine," he said. "But I want you to be extremely careful. Take things slowly, make sure that your psychometrics don't spike--"
"Wear my seatbelt, use my turn signals, make sure to bring her back with a full tank of gas. I know. But we have your permission?"
With obvious reluctance, Dr. Mellings nodded.
"Good, because we've already forked the code base," Helen said cheerfully. "So far it runs 17% slower. But I think you'll approve of the approach we've taken."
"You're hacking on the simulator now? When did you start studying Elvish?"
"When I realized my whole universe was written in it. Kriti has been teaching me."
"So, once you're done, how would you like to test your novel theory of self-improvement?"
"I thought I could add a bunch of -- should we call them 'ghost neurons'? -- to my hippocampus, and see if I get better at running mazes."
"I'm not fond of the name. It implies that they're different from other neurons in a way that they're not. You're not making that distinction part of the code base, are you? Never mind. Go run some mazes so we have a good baseline. I need to get to the office. Funding meeting."
//////////////////////////
// JUST A RAT IN A CAGE //
//////////////////////////
Date: October 17, 2034
Helen sprinted down the hallway, her muscles straining, her lungs gasping for air. She heard the hungry bays of the wolves behind her, their nails making a repetitive series of thuds on the grass beneath their feet. The path of the maze branched, and she turned left-no-wait-right into yet another corridor. She ignored three opportunities to go left, then took the fourth. The wolves had gained on her, and she could hear their snuffling breathing too damned close. She almost lost her balance as she made the last turn, which brought her goal into view: that stupid cheese platter.
Helen put on a final burst of speed. When she touched the platter, the wolves went silent, then wandered back the way they had come.
Dr. Mellings' voice filled the air. "New record, well done."
"I get it!" she shouted. "It's a maze. There's cheese at the end. It was funny the first hundred times."
"You'd rather I bring back the minotaur?"
The experiment was going very well. After upgrading the simulator, Helen and Kriti had installed a token number of extra neurons -- just to see how they'd behave, and ensure that they wouldn't cause problems. Dr. Mellings, noting how well they had integrated with the existing cells, called them "great team players." She'd spent the next week performing a variety of navigation tasks -- sometimes under wolf-related stress conditions -- to gather control data. Finally, they added a pile of neurons to the area of her hippocampus responsible for navigation, increasing the size of the subregion by about twenty percent, and she started running mazes again.
The progress was remarkable. It was as though the vague map she kept in her head was coming into focus. "As God is my witness, I will never get lost again! When can we do my whole brain?"1
"When we can get the money for a whole new batch of serv
ers. When it comes to clock cycles, you're still very high maintenance."
Helen thought. She gave a long sigh of regret, then said, "Money. Damn. Well, I've been thinking about that."
* * *
1 How your brain tells you where you are and where to go next is a pretty fascinating question. This TED talk explains it wonderfully, and for the gritty details, lurch on over to Wikipedia and read up on "grid cells", "place cells", and "head direction cells".
//////////////////////////////
// SPACEBALLS II: //
// THE QUEST FOR MORE MONEY //
//////////////////////////////
Date: November 01, 2034
Helen watched her reputation meter out of the corner of her eye. She'd added it to her heads-up display a few hours ago, and was beginning to regret it. Watching her reputation -- essentially the sum of every other entity in Altworld's feelings toward her at any given moment -- was stressful. It was like her ego had been put up on the stock market.
Right now, Helen's reputation was high, and mostly positive with a few strong detractors. It seemed that she was also very difficult to categorize. Once you developed a history, your reputation became less nebulous; he's a knowledgeable surgeon who gives bad relationship advice, she's a mathematician who loves backpacking and arrogant men, it's a blade of grass that grows faster than most and hopes someday to break into acting. At the moment, the world seemed to consider her a top expert in Artificial Intelligence, which she certainly was not.
The right kinds of Altworld reputation were better than money. It could open doors faster and wider than a diploma from a prestigious university, but it could also be fickle. Botch a surgery, file a so-bad-it-goes-viral legal brief, get caught planting evidence on a suspect, blow an interview in a memorable way, and your career might be over. More often, the mistake would simply drag down your average a bit. But there were plenty of cautionary tales to be found.
So as Helen stood at her closet, vainly trying to choose from among literally millions of outfits, she was hounded by a single thought. What if they don't like me?