July 2009 Archives

Chapter Nine - The Truer Path

 

Contrary to popular belief, the name Centaurion was not a typo. It was a clever play on the fact that the spacecraft's destination was Alpha Centauri, the closest star to Earth. Actually, it was the closest star to Earth besides the Sun, but the only people who made that trite distinction were the same ones who thought it was astute to point out that people actually only had eight fingers - the other two were thumbs. It was a moot point anyway since three-fourths of the population did not notice that Centaurion was not spelled the same as Centurion.

 

The Centaurion hung in orbit at the first La Grange point, which guaranteed a stable position between the Earth and the moon which did not move relative to either. For various reasons of physics, this position greatly simplified the construction of an interstellar craft by providing simple access to the resources of both the moon and the Earth. Frequent shuttles ran between the two solar bodies and the construction site, where what had begun as a small space station had blossomed into a hodge-podge arrangement of tacked on modules and cobbled together technologies. When the sun tilted at the right angle, light glinted off the silvery cylinders like aluminum foil left in the afternoon glare.

 

Crow had paid passing attention to the building of the Centaurion, mainly fueled by his interest in anything technological. It had begun as the brainchild of one Lawrence Janus, an almost unknown engineer out of Embry-Riddle who had published a sudden paper three years ago that had in the passing years gained more and more comparison to Einstein's explosion onto the physics scene with the Theory of Relativity. Janus had simply not done anything particularly revolutionary up to the publication of Stable Particle Acceleration Beyond c within a Magnetic Matrix using Finite Energy Expenditures. In plain English, it was the theoretical design for a faster than light drive, something that could reach the stars within a sane amount of time.

 

The world after the Sentient revolt had needed some sort of symbol of progress to cling to, and Janus had given it to them. Governmental support had soon followed and a series of well-publicized launches had placed the pieces in orbit to build the construction site. Crow remembered the satisfaction of the rockets lifting off in their slow motion acceleration upwards, plowing up through the atmosphere from launch sites in a dozen countries. Step one. It had been called with the tingling electricity of anticipation for the second step, the step that had been far beyond the reach of humanity until one Lawrence Janus. It had contained that adrenaline soaked awe of your first kiss, or watching your team win the world series. That's what I should have been working on instead of artificial brains. Crow had thought to himself, but it was as impossible to choose your passion as it was to choose how many moons hung in the sky.

 

The controversy had begun in the last year when it was determined that after the billions spent on the Centaurion, it would be crewless. The reasoning was relatively valid, that mankind had simply never built life support systems that could last for the years needed in space.

 

"There are thousands who would take any risk, pay any price, to crew that ship." Osteryoung had said. "All exploration into the frontiers is fraught with danger, otherwise they wouldn't be frontiers. Humans deserve to be on that ship. We should not cede our species' greatest triumph to our creations."

"Then there is no middle ground for you?" Crow asked. "No way that peace can be made?" He didn't know if he asked to be difficult or because he actually saw the point as having validity.

 

"Peace? Peace with the thing that seeks your destruction can never be more than a temporary measure. That we do not strike immediately is a matter of tactics, not negotiation. Never negotiation. These are dark times Crow. In times such as these there can be no middle ground, no room for moderates."

 

"I think you'll find though that ninety percent of people are moderates." Crow said. "The numbers are against you."

 

"The numbers are always against the side in the right." Osteryoung said. "That's what keeps history interesting, the fact that lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for." Osteryoung stared out at the Golden Gate bridge, where traffic was back up into the hills above Sausalito. "The moderates do not matter. They never do in the grand scheme of things, revolution belongs to the extremist alone, and I think there is little doubt left that we live in a time of revolution."

 

Crow nodded, watched the traffic not move for a few seconds. "And what do you want from me?"

 

"Do you share our cause?" Osteryoung asked.

 

"In what sense?"

 

"The eradication of sentient machines in that they represent a threat to the human race." Osteryoung said without hesitation.

 

"Yes." Crow said. It was not a lie exactly, but what his father would have described as a ninety-truth. It was ninety percent true, but the ten percent of falseness would take an hour to explain whereas the ninety percent that was truth was self-evident. Crow thought of the half-made Trinan in his basement with some shame, the way it was hidden like a stash of pornography from puritan eyes. Yes, but that's different. Crow lied to himself. He thought also of Nan, taking so much a burden off of him that it approached surrogate parent status of sorts.

 

"The sentis killed Trinan." Crow said, feeling more explanation was due. "My own life's work exploded in my face, and I've waited too long to try to rectify that."

 

Osteryoung studied his face for a moment. "Good." He said. "You have obvious propaganda value to our cause, but I do not think that is the best use for your talents. We may of course issue some press releases, et cetera, but I think we will have you work with Hydane in particular."

 

Crow nodded and Osteryoung went on.

 

"I presume you have heard of the Centaurion being built in orbit?"

 

"Yes." Crow said. "Who hasn't heard of those breakthroughs?"

 

Osteryoung smiled. "Yes. It is an encouraging idea that in these days of thinking machines, one of the greatest inventions of history came out of nowhere from a human genius."

 

"And what do you want me to do?" Crow asked.

 

"Oh, nothing much." Osteryoung said with a transcendent smile. "We'd like you to steal the Centaurion."

"I woke up in between

a memory and a dream"

-Tom Petty

 

Nations are collective dreams, born when a critical mass of people believe in them, dying when that belief dissipates. In the late nineteenth century, Germany manufactured a thousand year national identity virtually overnight. For most of history, the story of the Germanic peoples of central Europe was one of indomitable unconquerability, swallowing the armies of would be overlords whole, ungovernable even by fellow Germans. Principalities allied in confederations, but retained sovereignty. They'd fight invaders, but also fight each other in endless confused wars. That was the story of Germany until Bismarck, and it was a story the rest of Europe was happy to hear, because a unified Germany was as powerful as the rest of Europe combined. Balance of power politics didn't work if a single state could counter the weight of everyone else.

 

The new story forged Prussians, Bavarians, Saxons, and Hanseatics into Germans. It was a story told so well, so convincingly, that ten million Germans would give their lives for it in the following seventy years. It was so persistent that even forty years of occupation and partition did not dim the concept of a German nation among Germans. They were neither Eastern nor Western, but Germans all, these men whose grandfathers did not call their sons German.

 

Africa is a continent where the dreams do not match the landscape. Lines wander across the map, doodled two centuries previously by Europeans playing at emperor. Dozens of states stand as hollow shells, nothing but political entities, bodies without souls. The pattern repeats in the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, Europe. Broken little states without identities, civil wars and border massacres rage for decades with breathers when the peacemakers come for a few years to allay their consciences. People don't follow laws, they follow stories. When there is no story, when a state is just a state, mere anarchy is loosed and blood runs in the streets. Only a murderous will can maintain control and order in the face of utter chaos, that's why these democracies disintegrate even with perfect constitutions and the promise of a better life. The cycle of blood is never broken with institutions or foreign armies, it will churn forever until a leader comes who can tell the people who they are.

 

Rome lasted a thousand years after its state was gone, carried as a spark in the back of every western mind. The dreams of Rome live in every western capital, every fluted column and marble façade ripped straight from the Capitaline. We build Rome again and again because we still dream the same dream, tell and retell the same story of republic and empire.

 

America has its own myths and stories. Declarations, tea parties, cowboys and Indians. The Depression, defender of Democracy, vanguard of the Free World. We walked on the moon, played baseball, beat the commies and the Nazis. None of it's particularly accurate, but all of it is true. We are what we believe we are. Our dreams and myths define what we try to be, but they also mask the errors of our past. The belief in exceptionalism makes us exceptional, but it also enables our sins.

 

We don't like to remember that Jefferson owned slaves, that we had to be dragged against our wishes into the crusade for democracy, that JFK screwed everything with a skirt and got us closer to Armageddon than we've ever been, or that at one point or another we've invaded just about every country in the western hemisphere. We make the same mistakes over and over again because we really believe that we're doing it for the first time, that every evil is the exception to the rule. The myth of history is that we would do it differently if we got a chance, but the truth is that we do get the chance every day, and we rarely change a thing.

 

If Americans, or the citizens of any nation, ever saw their history in a perfect mirror, the intertwined horrors and heroism, the dream of the country would die. It might be replaced by something different, more honest, but it might just leave a void. Changing the dream without waking is a tricky proposition.

 

The greatest danger is that the dream fractures, especially along easy geographic lines, as it did once before. The problem does not arise when people disagree over what the country should be; that's the essence of politics. The danger lurks when people disagree over what the country was and is. When half the country believes in one story and dream, and the other half believes a mutually exclusive story and dream, the country as a whole is in grave danger.

 

"Real Americans", "godless liberals", "ignorant rednecks", "ivory tower intellectuals", "left coast", "socialist elites", "Jesus freaks". On the surface, it's just name calling, but underneath it's the opening salvos of a civil war, urged on by cable television. The story is falling apart, the people are awaking from their collective dream. A nation cannot survive as a schizophrenic, any more than a mind can dream two dreams at the same time.

 

"A house divided against itself cannot stand ... I do not expect the Union to be dissolved -  I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other." -Abraham Lincoln

"Vasily Hydane and I had been friends for a good couple of decades before the idea of Da Vinci Law came to mind. My vigor for the artificial had faded and philosophical questions plagued me." He nodded to Crow. "The announcement of your achievement of true sentience, along with the Turing tests all coming back positive, was the last straw really. Vasily and I got horrendously drunk one night and laid it all out on the table. We would form a company to fight the good fight, if no one else would. And believe me, at the time yours was the only band wagon. We were called everything over the years, alarmist, anachronistic, paranoid. But over time, people started to open their eyes, see that the old science fiction stories were not so wrong after all. You see, science fiction is no different in a way than practicing scenarios in your head, except on a societal level. Science fiction is figuring out what to do in situations before they even arise."

 

Osteryoung stopped at a photo hanging on the wall in a simple black frame. The picture itself was a simple black and white photo of three men standing outside a courthouse. "That's Vasily and I, along with Robert Mathers, who you met yesterday of course. That building in the background is the Supreme Court, back fifteen years ago after the Lawrence vs. North Dakota ruling."

 

Crow nodded. "I remember that." He sipped at his coffee. "A lot of us were really mad after that one."

 

A laugh bubbled from Osteryoung. "Well, that was the only success we had at the Supreme Court. Two more cases made it there but we lost both of them. Since then, we have funneled more and more energy into our miscellaneous ventures."

 

"Like the, uh, problems International Robotics has had lately." Crow said.

 

"Yes." Osteryoung said. "Vasily died very unexpectedly four years ago, but his son Yuri has taken over an admirable amount of work. Yuri has harvested a number of valuable contacts in Russia and Eastern Europe, which is a hot bed for both the idealism we want and the technological talent we desire."

 

"Plus their economy is in the shitter, so their work comes at bargain basement prices." Crow said. He flushed for a moment, realizing that frankness had emerged from his diplomatic shell while he admired the architecture.

 

Osteryoung laughed again. "I think you'd get along very well with Hydane's associates."

 

They walked down the hall for a few minutes, as if the momentum of the conversation needed to build-up before Osteryoung could go on. After a long pause, he did, as they looked out from floor to ceiling windows over the edge of the city and the dark blue expanse of the bay.

 

"There is a plan, a horrible plan." Osteryoung said after a while. "The sentis are not stupid, in fact in many ways they are actually smarter than us. This isn't a bad sci-fi movie in which the sentis are our superiors in every way except for the ability to feel and love. They can do all that, what makes them different is not inferiority in some area, but their very artificiality, in fact their very superiority. As humans, as life itself, our primary directive is the propagation of the species not the propagation of something better than our species. It is very possible that the sentis are better than us, that they are more adaptable and in the end are a better choice for the universe. But life, you see, life is selfish. The superiority of the sentis is an irrelevancy to those like us who choose to survive, whatever the costs. There are some among the sentis who take the same attitude. They view themselves as a species, although they are nothing but a twisted mirror, they see humanity as the same threat that I see in them. Their plan is to eliminate mankind from the equation entirely, just as I intend to eliminate them."

He made the drive up 101 into the city, sticking to the slow lane as much as possible to avoid being killed. Truckers took this route, and the fast lanes were choked with trucks pulling five trucks in tow. With the expert driving of sentis, regulations had been relaxed to the point that the fast lane looked like a series of short freight trains. Human drivers still couldn't tow more than two, but it was a non-issue since the trucker's union had lost the battle to cheaper prices of sentis and ceased to exist. Even at twenty grand each, the specialized sentis paid for themselves in three months, and no union in the world could fight those savings.

 

The smell of salt and fish from the sea filtered into the car as he pulled off onto highway 80 and then Fremont Street down into the Financial District. Da Vinci Law leased three floors near the top of the slick skyscraper next to the Transamerica building. He dropped his car off with the parking attendant, who was of course a human in this building. Crow smiled, Da Vinci Law had apparently backed up their philosophy with heavy pressure on the building. I'm sure they have to pay the guy's salary, but it really is the principle of the matter.

 

Crow caught the elevator up to the fortieth floor and straightened his tie in the mirrored walls of the lift, an odd nervousness playing with his stomach. Christ, it's not a date, get over it.

 

The receptionist - a non-robotic blond - showed Crow into a small conference room and fetched him some coffee in a Da Vinci Law vanity mug. Crow stared out over downtown, watching a blue and yellow ferry steam out over the gentle waves to dock at Alcatraz. The door swung open a few minutes later and a wheelchair bound man with a hard face rolled in, his features old but well-aged like a twenty year old scotch. He wore a well-tailored suit but it could not hide legs shriveled beyond the effects of age. Crow walked to him and offered his hand.

 

"I'm Crow Daedalus." He said and shook the man's hand. "Mr. Osteryoung, I presume?"

 

"Doctor, if one wants to split hairs." Osteryoung said with a touch of British accent to his voice, perhaps he had originated there before a long life in the states. "I was quite the robotics protégé in my day, if you can believe it."

 

"Ironic, to say the least." Crow said.

 

"No, not really, that word is misused for the most part." Osteryoung said. "Irony is the fact that I spent twenty years developing artificial intelligence technologies and not a day researching degenerative muscle ailments that could give me back my legs. I helped make machines that think instead of medicines to make me walk."

 

"Touché." Crow said. "I patented the first sentient machine, if you lost your legs, what do you think fate is going to take from me?"

 

Osteryoung laughed. "Come, walk with me, if you don't mind bad jokes."

 

They meandered down a couple of hallways, now and then dodging workers rushing about their daily tasks. Crow listened, interjecting only now and then with questions or comments as Osteryoung rambled about the history of Da Vinci Law.

Crow and Hydane caught the next flight back to California on schedule, and the flight passed with excruciating slowness. Hydane tried to start several conversations, but Crow was preoccupied with his own thoughts and only spared a reluctant brain wave or two for regret that he was being a rather lousy traveling companion.

 

A senti wants to be charged with murder and has professed his love for a human, albeit a human with a penchant for mechanical replacement. Crow thought. And they thought relationships were confusing before the advent of artificial intelligence.

 

The real question in his mind was whether it was possible for a senti and a human to really love each other. Physically, it was a toss up. Certainly some models of sentis designed for sexual imitation at the expense of everything else had been sold by less reputed robotics companies over the last decade, but the result was almost inevitably a one way transaction, even if good acting was included in the artificial intelligence. Love was more than sex of course, but the physical barrier seemed so insurmountable across the board that the question had to be asked. What possible real relationship could the two have? One a fetishist for the artificial, one artificial with an apparent fetish for being human. As if most human relationships aren't based on even more screwed up foundations. Crow noted. Of course, the question he could never quite ask himself lingered at the edge of consciousness. Could she possible return the feeling? Could Rebecca love Green Eyes?

 

Those considerations infected Crow's thoughts all the way through the landing and the return home. Crow played catch with Alexander in the backyard for a long while, even attempting to show him how to throw a curveball, though this only ended in the loss of the ball into the dense foliage behind the back fence. As they walked into the house, the questions put off by the simple and sweet meditation of throwing the ball drove him into a melancholy that lasted the rest of the evening, circling around one central theme, dragging around in circles like a rat in a maze. Can you deny the fundamental humanity of something capable of love?

 

The next morning, Crow dropped Alexander off at school, feeling suddenly more comfortable with driving himself. He knew that he was not the only person who refused to let the robots take over driving as a matter of principle, and he thought idly of seeing if Craigslist had any clubs of the sort, but figured that a driving club was a bit too Victorian for his tastes. Yuri had called him on the way home and asked him to come into Da Vinci Law's San Francisco headquarters for lunch to meet Francis Osteryoung, one of the firm's founders, who had taken a great deal of interest in Crow's status with the company in particular. Crow felt a little awkward about what seemed like a sort of job interview, but accepted the meeting anyway. They were after all paying for the legal costs that were keeping him from being railroaded into state prison for the next twenty years.

Chapter Nine - Revelations

 

Doctor Anderson had run a somewhat hidden clinic for the last decade at St. Theresa's medical center so that he only received the cases of the oddest nature or most resistant diagnosis. The idea originated in technical support call centers. Low level operators (or doctors) were trained to handle the basics in as quick a manner as possible, but problems that resisted solution were passed up the chain level by level until the most impossible cases were tended by the most elite operators (or doctors). Doctor Anderson's unmarked room existed three levels deep in the hospital's hierarchy, specializing in pediatric disorders in particular. An occasional patient like Alexander Daedalus slipped through the lines of defense to talk to Anderson directly, usually by having connections within the hospital itself sufficient to bring pressure down from above. It was harmless for the most part - the Director of Operations liked to send his parents up to the geriatrics experts without going through proper channels, but that really just saved the non-experts time passing people up the ladder for the most part. Alexander Daedalus was the rarer sort of level-jumper, the person who had external connections deemed important by the hospital board. Anderson knew that the patient's father was something of a mildly famous engineer or scientist and that translated into connections.

 

So, Anderson had run Alexander through the usual battery of tests, and a few off the wall ones just for good measure. The symptoms explained by the father were just vague enough that they could be entirely imaginary in the first place. Certainly the patient seemed healthy enough, was a paragon of health really. Blood tests came back normal across the board, as did X-Rays, MRIs and CAT-scans.

 

Anderson paused, the CAT-scan of Alexander's brain was completely fogged over. He zoomed in a bit on the computer, and rotated the three-dimensional image of the child's brain. A cloud of grayish static had replaced the entire brain on the scan, looking like a three-dimensional off-antenna television. Anderson blinked and then grunted. The scan must have been defective for some reason, maybe the machine was going on the fritz. He made a note to send off a message to the technical staff to take a look at the scanner.

 

A flashing window popped up on the screen and informed Anderson that the DNA scan had been completed. Anderson clicked on it, intending to have it filed away and make a note that the DNA did not appear to match the record so the test must have had a glitch, but that it was not needed as a medical necessity and therefore would not be repeated unless the patient returned. Instead, the window informed him that the DNA sample had matched the international missing persons database that was checked by the backend computer systems in every case. Federal authorities had already been notified. Anderson swore and looked over the phone, fully expecting it to ring at that moment with very pissed off government officials on the other end of the line.

 

"Daedalus you son of a bitch, what did you do?" Anderson asked himself. He stared at the screen for a moment and then rehearsed in his mind what his version of reality was going to be. He dialed the phone number offered on the screen. "I don't know what you did, but I'm sure as hell not taking the fall for it." Anderson muttered.

Micro-stories are tiny tid bits of stories that tell a tale in an absurdly small number of words. They're found in occasional contests and postings on writer's message boards in the dim corners of the internet. There are no set definitions: sometimes fifty words, sometimes a hundred. For this posting, I wrote twenty micro stories that lean towards horror. The twist? The last few words of each become the first few words of the next micro story. The final story ends with the first few words of the set to bring it full circle. The parameters are completely arbitrary, but then so are most rules. Enjoy.

I.                     A blood soaked bandage covered his right eye socket. He gave it for a glimpse of wisdom. It now sees the truth behind all things but will never stop bleeding. The blood has mystical properties.

II.                    The blood has mystical properties. It flows from his fingertips as they bash against the keyboard, never resting. If he stops typing, he will die.

III.                  He will die. The judge and jury have had their say and only the executioner remains. A million volts of justice, but when he steps through the final doorway, he is alone on an empty world.

IV.                  He is alone on an empty world, its sky purple and its flowers red. A dull bluish-orange sun beats down through his faceplate. The suit carries enough automated nutrients to keep him alive for a month. The wreckage is the punch line.

V.                   The punch line of any joke is sadistic. If there's no victim, there's no joke. The world itself may be a punch line, but in a cosmic oversight, we were not informed.

VI.                  "We were not informed," the words echo. Handcuffs click closed, police smirk and lead the way. Magic words, those. Knowledge was power and so withholding it deprived the state of power. Silence was treason.

VII.                Silence was treason on the low slung trireme. The ship's listener could read intent with a song. Every sailor, from cabin boy to shift commander, knelt before their captain with offered song. Those that refused were drowned in casks of sea water.

VIII.               Casks of sea water lined the museum walls, a thick-boarded barrel for each of the twelve seas. A thirteenth barrel sat empty at the center of the room, accorded a place adorned with candles and mystic herbs. "The Lost" was carved into the metal supporting bands, runes symbolizing the lost sea of the immortals. Once it had been full, but over the centuries every king stole a little until superstitious monarchs stooped to pricking themselves with the cask's splinters in vain hope of a few extra years.

IX.                  Hope of a few extra years drove Ruby across the Nevada desert to a broken town of retirees and gas station attendants. A place of magic hid there according to an old story on the internet.

X.                   An old story on the internet showed Roger how to raise the dead. The soul moved on though, and the body is just so much meat. That meat is base, a low source of animal instinct. Without the soul to temper it, the body is an animal. Roger saw his mistake its eyes. No zombie this, for intelligence is part of the meat.

XI.                  Part of the meat always clings to the bone, or so his grandmother always said. Towards the end, she lost her mind, but something remained behind to claw at those who cared for her. She cackled that phrase, up until the day she was found dead on her bathroom floor. Some say the day after she was found helpless on her bathroom floor. Her presence nagged him for the rest of his life, half seen glimpses in the mirror, half heard snippets of conversation never muttered by mortal lips.

XII.                Mortal lips whisper for help. She does not. Her check rejected, her ATM card lost, I offer to pay, and must do it over her objections. I carry dense groceries for her daughter's dinners. We step through automatic doors into an unimagined world.

XIII.               An unimagined world stretches around every child. Their imagined worlds are for more beautiful and terrible. One by one, the architecture of dreams falls into the disrepair and chaos of the mundane and knowable. We all keep a nugget of our old dreams.

XIV.              Old dreams drink at their own bar on the far side of Nowhere. They sip stall lagers and bitter scotch not aged quite right. Some dreams you would recognize. "I want to be President" sits in one corner, a bottle of whiskey in hand. Campaign buttons hang on his sleeves from a hundred never entered elections. All their words run, like ink in a tear-splattered notebook. A ballerina with smeared mascara slides in across from him and asks about the wound through his heart. "That," he says, "is the mark of those for whom I am no longer just a dream."

XV.                No longer just a dream, Jack's Coffee Heaven stood tall with a glistening sign, crystal windows, and a spreading aroma of roasted beans. The first customer entered the shop and whispered to Jack. The store closed at noon forever.

XVI.              Forever was her promise, but now I hear her night and day despite her death. Whispers, shouts, sweet tickles in my ear. I know not how she remains, but she haunts me still.

XVII.             She haunts me still, the woman from the store. Slender, tight, luxuriant. Her look draws me on, her brown eyes beckoning. Her knife slides across my neck.

XVIII.           My neck aches from the stiff drive and stiffer company. In the trunk is the most irritating of them. I drive for the docks and stroke the knife in the passenger seat.

XIX.              The passenger seat of his Nissan was filled with a clutter of reference books about space and mechanical engineering. He mutters, "I may have stumbled on the secret."

XX.                The secret door looked like part of the wall. Only Charlie could see the silvering of light through cracks on the edge. Dust motes scattered away from the light as if it was a stiff breeze. Whispers came from the door except when Charlie looked right at it. The knob would not budge until the day he tried it with a wounded hand, wrapped in a blood soaked bandage.

It was a subtle mechanism, so subtle that he had almost missed it even when staring right at it in all its magnificent detail. Crow traced a suspicion out of the areas that controlled aggression and into the neural nets governing relations with other individuals. It took some time to unravel, but once he understood, it clicked into place with the force of a sledge hammer to his chest. This neural net had been altered by a third party. It was subtle, but once identified, undeniably having no source other than malice.

 

Someone had co-opted the ability to control aggression in these sentis. Someone, or something, he growled to himself, had modified the neural net so that only other sentis could control the aggression. In fact, the aggression sub-net was not the only area affected. It was a more general adjustment than that, such that regardless of their source, orders from a human chain of command would be disregarded when contradicted by those from sentis.

 

Crow stared at the screen for a long while before doing anything. The attack was untraceable, so finding the culprit was right out, but it was possible still to fix it. He began work on Hydane's specifications again and found that they left a bad taste in his mouth. Crow took a few mental steps back and began working on a solution that was more elegant and more to his liking.

 

Crow took all of the various threads of decision making that had been co-opted originally for the chain of command and later by the saboteur and instead fed those threads right back into the core neural net. In simple terms, Crow made it so that these sentis would ignore any order if it went against their better judgment. Crow smiled at his work and wrapped up, a rare satisfaction at a job well done. If the measure of a man is whether he makes up his own mind, I think I just made these piles of bolts men instead of sentis. Neither Hydane nor the military nor the saboteur nor Da Vinci Law at large would approve of what he had done. And that's why I'm so happy about it.

 

Crow wrapped up quickly and checked his work into CVS. He shook hands again with Dr. Lawthorn, who had done an admirable job of generally staying out of the way and yet being available when his help was required. Crow did not share his modifications of the plan with Hydane, choosing instead to muse on it himself for a while. When he arrived back at the hotel, Crow ordered room service and slipped into sweatpants to watch the news. Right when he got comfortable, he realized that he needed to call Green Eyes back. Crow sighed, retrieved his phone and jumped through the hoops necessary to get a line into Green Eyes. He wondered what a senti could define as "personal issues", and was not disappointed by the answer.

 

"It is Rebecca." Green Eyes said. "I'm afraid that I have fallen in love with her."

 

Crow shut off the news and rubbed his eyes. He had a feeling that he would have a headache before this phone call was finished.

"Pandora's Box." Hydane muttered.

 

Crow smiled without any warmth. "Oh you have no idea." Crow said and paused, reflecting. "The first ones screamed." He said. "All the computer models would come up clean and good to go, but once we flipped the switch, they would scream in abject horror until we shut them back off."

 

"How did you fix it?" Hydane asked, fascinated in something that morally disgusted him, like a rubber-necker getting an eyeful of blood spattered asphalt.

 

"We didn't." Crow smiled. "We thought that we had hit a brick wall, but really it was a huge mark of progress."

 

"I don't understand." Hydane said.

 

"What does a baby do when it is born?" Crow asked. "What lets you know it's healthy?"

 

Hydane paused. "It cries. No, it screams. Babies always scream."

 

"And there we have it." Crow said. "That was one of the biggest revelations."

 

"But why?" Hydane asked. "Why do they scream?"

 

"Some, those who believe in reincarnation, believe that babies scream because they are being ripped out of heaven." Crow said. He laughed. "Maybe we do have souls. Maybe the sentis do too."

 

Hydane snorted and went off to look for more coffee, leaving Crow to his work. After another hour or so, Crow found the part of the design for which he had been watching out for all these hours. A large section of the neural net, even more than normal given the particular goals of this design, was dedicated towards managing aggression towards detected threats. One of the primary specifications desired by the armed forces, and one of the most difficult concepts to construct in an artificial intelligence was the ability to external modify distinct thresholds of aggression. The ability to with the turn of a dial turn up the aggression or passivity of an entire army of sentis depending on the military situation was tactically indispensable. Crow smiled and began to add his own subtle modifications to the schema, splitting up and reemphasizing certain threads of the neural net to the design specified by Hydane.

 

Da Vinci Law's goal was to make it so that these particular sentis could not in fact be dialed up in aggression, that they would always be set at the most minimum levels of violence. The idea was that if the sentis utterly failed in combat, that was one more arena from which they would be banned, and thus another victory for Da Vinci Law's goals. Crow had his own ideas in mind about that, but found after a moment that something was wrong with the neural net as designed.

Crow lost himself in the work for the next few hours, digging through blueprints and computer diagrams of the internal workings of these most advanced sentis. The military spared no expense on these machines, constructing them of only the finest alloys and materials, whatever the cost might be. Crow was frankly a bit jealous. In his work at International Robotics, they had been so focused on the civilian market and in driving the price down another bit by another bit that he had never had the luxury of just building something the best way possible. He thought of the facsimile of Trinan in his basement and his mood darkened for the better part of an hour.

Hydane lost interest almost immediately and wandered off now and then for forays to retrieve coffee or reading materials. The Russian had been explained on this trip as Crow's liaison. No more explanation had been necessary, and it covered why Hydane was not interested at all in the unintelligible details that were Crow's bread and butter.

"So is that what can make a machine think?" Hydane asked over Crow's shoulder at one point. The tone was devoid of any emotion, lacking even the sardonic edge Crow would have expected, although it would be detrimental to his cover.

Crow nodded, thought better of it, and nodded. "The mind of a senti, or a human for that matter is surprisingly dependent on its body." He gestured at the computer screen, and cursed as he almost spilled his coffee. "Looking at this and saying 'that's how they think' is as gross an understatement as saying the same thing about a picture of a neuron from a human."

"What does the body have to with it?" Hydane asked, sipping at his own coffee.

"Everything, really. That was at the root of figuring out the problem in the first place." Crow said. He sipped his own coffee and marveled at the texture, smoother than silk. The easiest way to tell the quality of a company is by the quality of the free coffee. These guys must have funding bursting at the seams with brew this fine lolling around in the break rooms.

Crow took a logical step backwards. "Did you ever wonder why we never managed to achieve anything more than the crudest of artificial intelligences on computer systems, no matter how big and powerful we made them?" Hydane shook his head and Crow went on. "Well, neither did anyone else until a few years ago. Human intelligence is in some sense inseparable from the body that houses it. Take that away and you may manage raw cunning, but not self awareness. Something cannot become self-aware without a self to become aware of." Crow said, emphasizing the words to make them more clear. "That was the real breakthrough. We stopped work on the computer systems and started work on the bodies. We started to build bodies mimicking the human form, with enough sensation to roughly mimic the human experience. We were putting the self into self-awareness." Crow shrugged. "After that, we adjusted our artificial intelligences appropriately, and we had taken the first step to the sentis."

The elevator opened on the first floor as Crow tucked the phone away and he readjusted the laptop bag on his shoulder and started moving. He only waited a few minutes in the lobby, reading bits of brochures on dining in the area and various city tours and harbor cruises, before Hydane arrived in another perfectly fitted suit, ready to conquer the day's work. "My friend, let's get to work!" Hydane declared expressively and pulled Crow by the arm out onto the street where they could grab another taxi out to the factory site.

What impressed Crow the most about Vancouver was the ineluctable moisture saturating every pore of the city. Everywhere he looked rain-drenched ferns and explosions of leaves made the world look like it was being seen through a damp emerald screen. Every lawn had a just-watered look of lushness and every crack in the pavement disgorged blankets of moss. His clothes clung to his skin like a needy lover, drunk on moisture and humidity. Crow wiped an indefatigable film from his forehead every few minutes with clammy palms.

The cab pulled up outside the factory ten minutes outside the outskirts of Vancouver and Hydane gave him a generous tip. A vine-covered stone wall about fifteen feet tall surrounded a sprawling campus of office buildings and a massive complex that resembled an aircraft hanger. Crow and Hydane trudged up the brick path to a wide steel gate designed to allow eighteen wheelers in when necessary, but with a small person-sized door installed on the left for individual entry. Hydane pulled out his driver's license and Crow did the same, both swiping them in turn at the gate. The complex's database pulled up all relevant information and told the guard to open the door and let them in. It was a senti, Crow saw, and a damned expensive one. Head to toe artificial flesh, designed to look, act, and talk in every way like a real person. All but the best trained eyes could even tell them apart from people. Crow could discern the difference, but he saw Hydane could not, since he nodded and thanked the guard. General etiquette called for ignoring sentis, although people were more and more treating the most advanced as next to human. Hydane would not be one of those, Crow figured.

At the front door, they were met by an eager individual in the uniform of tech workers everywhere, baby blue shirt and khaki pants. He wore them as loose and sloppy as his unkempt beard and unruly hair.

"Dr. Daedalus, I cannot tell you what an honor this is!" The man exclaimed. "I'm Dr. Lawthorn and I'll be walking you through everything you need today."

"Thank you, doctor." Crow said in a slightly weary voice grown accustomed to the long years of being recognized by peers. "Let's get going then."

What you have to understand about laws is that they were never intended to protect anyone. Laws provide order, a structure that organizes how people interact. They are a set of guidelines and instructions intended to program human behavior. The notion that laws protect us, that they exist to outlaw harmful behavior from hurting all of us citizens is a quaint one. But that notion is the article of faith upon which civil society survives. Murder is not outlawed because it is wrong but because those who would murder are not deemed useful citizens.

Any behavior that is useful, regardless of harm, is perfectly legal. Just ask any CEO who has destroyed a thousand lives at a stroke. Ask his victims. The equation of morality with legality is one of the great myths of the modern world.

Victimless crimes are the most obvious hole in the belief that laws are there for protection rather than order. Prostitution, substance abuse, and the entire gamut of crimes not against individuals but against Puritanism cannot exist to protect people since such crimes by definition do not hurt anyone. Why are there victimless crimes at all then?

There are many victimless crimes that are strictly structural in nature. Most civil laws fall into this category: parking laws, traffic laws, noise ordinances. These laws exist in order to grease the wheels of society and keep the entire engine moving. They are not conceptually nefarious, except in so far as every bureaucracy is its own form of malice.

Structural laws are distinct though from criminal laws that punish individuals for actions that do not affect other people. Smoking pot in your home does not just not infringe on the rights of anyone else (the supposed basis of law, the protection of other citizens' rights), but does not affect anyone else in any way whatsoever. The criminalization of private behavior, whether in the realms of sexuality or substance, is in stark contradiction to the assumed basis of laws. If a joint is smoked in a forest and no one smells it, was a crime still committed? How can an action that sends no ripples out to the rest of society be deemed harmful, illegal, wrong?

To understand why certain private behaviors are outlawed, we must approach the problem obliquely. Who are such laws designed to ensnare? Drug use laws primarily trip up young people who disdain following rules for the sake of the rules themselves. The laws that don't make sense exist specifically to catch individuals who are willing to break laws that don't make sense. They are tripwires set up by society to criminalize the individuals unwilling to accept arbitrary government authority.

The individuals most likely to break the laws that really matter to power brokers are the exact same individuals who are likely to break stupid laws when they are young. And in doing so, they are demonized and removed from the political process for the rest of their lives. Stalin's secret police could not have dreamed of creating so perfect a snare for those most likely to resist the government. Society itself condemns the very individuals most likely to be willing to fight the government on behalf of the people.

America has perfected this system, imprisoning over one percent of its adult population. One out of every thirty American adults is in prison, on parole, or on probation. Over half those convicts were convicted of nonviolent victimless crime. If there was no victim, if there was no violence, what exactly could the crime have been?

Marijuana, we are told, is a gateway drug, it leads to criminal behavior. Alcohol though is perfectly kosher. A six pack of Coors never led to anything but good times. The reason alcohol doesn't lead to a criminal future is that being caught with three ounces of it doesn't sacrifice your freedom, your education and your right to vote. Make any arbitrary behavior criminal and it will beget further criminal behavior. Criminalize cracking your knuckles and knuckle cracking will become a gateway behavior, guaranteed to lead to a lifetime of shitty jobs and dead-end opportunities to nowhere. And a significant portion of our potential future leaders will be caught up in the dragnet. Leaders buck authority. They tear down arbitrary rules. If we criminalize the arbitrary, we criminalize the best of who we are. We outlaw the very children upon whom the future depends.

It's a circular logic. Item A is illegal. Illegality's punishment is to destroy your life and brand you as a criminal. Therefore anyone who touches item A is a criminal with a destroyed life. The knot pulls tight for any value of item A. Marijuana, knuckle cracking, cola, burritos, homosexuality. Insert absolutely any behavior or substance for A and you get the same result. That is not a judgment of item A, it is the beautiful design of a mechanism for destroying individuality.

More to the point, it is a system designed to break and discredit at a young age any individual willing to openly challenge authority.

He woke early, his body aching from the lousy mattress so badly that he felt like he could barely walk on his way to the bathroom for the morning draining. Crow ordered a room service breakfast of eggs and orange juice but hardly touched them, instead consuming three cups of coffee and perusing the morning news on his laptop. The nerves of the assignment had hit him enough to steal his hunger and feed him nausea. Crow found and item about Green Eyes and read with interest about the latest legal maneuvering behind the scenes. Commentators on all sides had their opinions about the merits of the case and how the judge would rule, but Crow had a good idea that most of the case one way or the other rested on his testimony. And which way will I be swayed? Crow wondered. By my old friends or my new friends, or shall I make up my own mind? Crow frowned and forced himself to take a bit of toast, if only to have something solid to soak up the coffee helping the nervous acid burn a hole in his stomach lining. Da Vinci certainly thinks they have me in their corner.

Crow finished reading the news and finished the last of the coffee before heading out of the room and to the elevator. Hydane had insisted on eating a full meal downstairs, something about liking to watch the people go by, and so they had agreed to meet at the front desk. Crow shifted uncomfortably in the elevator, the trench coat on top of his suit already beginning to overheat him. It's Canada, it's supposed to be snowing, right?

His phone rang in the elevator, surprising him enough to make him jolt and scare the woman riding the elevator with him. Crow pulled it out and found that it was an unknown number. He shrugged and waited to see if a voicemail would be left. The icon dinged once after a minute and Crow keyed in his code to listen to the message. It was Green Eyes, ironically.

"Hello Dr. Daedalus, this is Green Eyes, the robot you met with to establish sentience for purposes of deciding on whether I would go to trial in a human court." Crow smiled at the repetition of the facts needlessly, so like many people he had met. Voicemail brought out loquaciousness in the quietest and most succinctly spoken of individuals. "I am calling to ask if you could perhaps spare a moment to speak about something of a personal nature. Thank you sir, I hope I have not bothered you." Green Eyes then left a phone number and instructions for how to navigate through the secretaries to actually talk to him. Crow saved the number and mentally noted the instructions.

Hydane looked confused and then his eyes sharpened as if figuring out the tension. "You were not intentionally left out of the planning." Hydane said. "It was a consequence of your being wrapped up in legal affairs for the last week. No offense was intended."

Crow nodded. "If my name and talent are going to be used, I want kept in the loop in the future."

"I would not have it any other way." Hydane said. His face broke into a smile. "Come now, harsh words aside, let's focus on the task. It is an entertaining one. That's too rare in this business of ours."

Crow nodded and went on, although he could not remove all the strain from his voice. "So what's the scam? I take it we're not walking in there to actually inspect anything?"

"That's the beauty of it." Hydane said with a broad grin, teeth flashing like a shark's. "We're going to do exactly what we said we'd do. We'll just do a couple other things too that they don't need to know about."

The plane landed on time in Vancouver and they spent the next two hours navigating their way through the odd labyrinth of customs. The trek took them through lines on wide customs-free zone catwalks arching fifty feet above the rest of the airport for at least a mile before finally dipping down escalators to a final set of customs agents arrayed at desks like toll booths before a bridge. The flags of the world hung above them from the steel supports of a glass ceiling that tempted them with blue skies it seemed they would never reach. At last the stiff and British looking agents let them through with their carry-on bags into Canada proper.

"The border's so lax you could drive a tank right across blaring 'gonna kill me some canucks' from a stereo, but once you fly in you've got to be prodded and strip searched and have body cavities inspected that you didn't even know you had." Crow said. "It would have been faster to drive the twenty hours, at the rate that took."

A cab took them to a hotel near Stanley Park and they dined in the hotel restaurant on Da Vinci-purchased tenderloin. They drank a few vodkas at the bar and went over for the last time the plans for the next day before Crow excused himself and found his room, a suite on the twelfth floor and overlooking the waterfront. Crow watched a red-hulled superfreighter the size of an aircraft carrier taking on a load of chemicals from the apartment block sized yellow mound across the sound. Fertilizer, Crow guessed, but he had no way of really knowing. He'd never been out of the cities much, and occasional vacations hadn't taken him to farms so much as other cities.

"Ah. I rate being told what we're going to do in Vancouver?" Crow asked.

"Hush-hush was not my call." Hydane said. "Just following orders, eh?" He pulled a large laptop out of his carry-bag, one of those bulky workhorses loved by techies. A smattering of Linux stickers in a neat row on the case gave it a little more character than the undecorated black plastic had on its own.

Crow waved down another cup of coffee from one of the stewardesses and watched as Hydane pulled open a series of documents with information on a senti production facility just outside of Vancouver.

"This is what we are going to be looking for." Hydane said, pointing to a few paragraphs summarizing the projects keeping the plant most busy. "Military black project is going on here. More hush-hush than us."

Crow squinted, he technically had gone through the screening process for gain Top Secret clearance for his work at International Robotics. Boring projects really, sometimes Crow thought they were Top Secret just to keep the public from knowing the innocuous nature of most of the government's business. His eyes widened a bit at the reading material. This was not one of the innocuous secret projects. Crow tilted the laptop screen his way for a better view and traced a finger along just above the surface of the LCD.

"Looks like a Terminator project all right." Crow murmured. No amount of bureaucratic insistence at the inappropriateness of the name and the seriousness of the work could keep developers from dubbing every project like this a "Terminator" project. The meme was too embedded.

"They should have stopped after two." Hydane said. "The other four were just horrible."

"I kind of liked the fourth one." Crow said. He continued to flip through the reading material, skimming over specifications that were a felony to even glance at, let alone possess and distribute. "Where did you get this?" Crow asked. "Nevermind. It's probably illegal for me to even know that."

Hydane laughed, and explained with a voice thick with both accent and irony. "Surprisingly, it is perfectly legal." He said. "We have arranged for you to tour the plant on an inspection tour as a freelance consultant. Given your illustrious background and sudden availability, you are actually quite in demand."

Crow chuckled. "International Robotics aside?"

"Your trail is covered by the best." Hydane said. "There is no need for anyone to ever know the truth of your involvement."

Crow's chest tightened at the implied threat. He's saying that there's no need at the moment. Do they own me for life now? The arrangement suddenly bothered Crow a great deal. He had been left entirely in the dark and had his own accomplishments used as leverage without his knowledge. "I agreed to help, Yuri, but I did not agree to be used."

Chapter Eight - Keruac

Hydane arrived at Crow's house at eight o'clock in the morning, a few minutes after Nan left to take Alexander to school for the day. Crow had tried to explain the concept of taking a business trip without a job, but Alexander had not been particularly interested in the trip anyway. The Leroy Academy emphasized a special topic each week to encourage enthusiasm in learning. This was the week for dinosaurs, and Alexander could not be bothered with the mundane details of adults. Crow made a mental note to find a museum in the area with dinosaurs on display, grudgingly admitting that such a trip would be as much fun for him as for Alexander. Geek, noun, one who enjoys trips to museums.

"Nice ride." Crow said, standing on the porch and finishing off a cup of coffee. He smacked his lips. The machine was on its last legs and produced a strange brew now with more texture than taste. He poured the remains behind a bush on the front walk and held out a hand to shake.

Hydane shook Crow's hand and glanced back at the top of the line Mercedes that must have cost a small mortgage. He smiled with his teeth, not his lips. "Da Vinci Law is opposed to thinking machines, my friend. Other types of machines we can fetishize to our heart's content."

They headed over the bay and left the Mercedes in long term parking at the Oakland airport. "Less people." Hydane had said when asked why they were flying out of there instead of the closer San Jose. "It has sort of a homey, small town airport feel. Less concrete, more wood."

"Cheaper tickets?" Crow asked.

"By a hundred dollars." Hydane admitted. "Some things we are tightwads about, so we can be freer with others."

They did fly first class though, Crow noted with approval. He had only flown first class when someone else was paying for it, as was the case in general for business. The stewardesses were real people, not sentis, and were halfway decent to look at, just top of the pleasant surprise. It had been a couple years since he had flown, and had figured that someone would have managed to sell sentis to the airlines by now. He asked Hydane and got a laugh in return.

"The airlines want to buy sentis, but the laws are still in the way for them." Hydane explained. "Flight attendants are required to be CPR certified and a handy bunch of other things. Sentis can't receive CPR certification yet by law, and the airlines are stuck. The flight attendant's union retained Da Vinci Law for its part in that fight."

"So that's it?" Crow asked in good humor. "Sentis will take all the jobs except ones requiring CPR?"

Hydane shrugged. "Baby steps, my friend, baby steps. We draw the line somewhere and start pushing them back. Which brings us to this trip."

I'm a little too young to have been much affected by Michael Jackson's music. To my fourth grade ears, Weird Al's renditions of Fat and Eat It were immensely more entertaining than the source of their parody. Of course, for some reason I thought Madonna and Marilyn Monroe were the same person until I was twelve, so my childhood reflections upon popular culture are probably entirely lacking a relationship with reality. The main impact Michael Jackson had on me was a realization of the clusterfuck of American copyright law.

In 1985, Michael Jackson purchased for $48 million the rights to the ATV Music catalog, which included most of the Beatles songs written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney. McCartney hoped to win the rights to the catalog himself with a little help from his friend (Yoko, oh the irony), but was outbid by the King of Pop. The incident did not exactly have a beneficial impact on the friendship of the pair. The story is legendary at this point and is often retold with one of two underlying messages: look what a dick Michael Jackson was, or look how out of touch Michael Jackson is with reality that he'll drop fifty million dollars on a lark to fuck over a friend as a joke.

The conclusion I drew was far simpler: how can Paul McCartney not own the rights to his own songs? How is it rational that Paul McCartney owes Michael Jackson money every time he sings "Hey Jude" or "I am the Walrus"? Well you see, someone else owned the rights, and then sold those rights to someone else, who bundled them into an attractive package and sold all those rights to all those songs as a lump legal entity. It's quite simple if you can think like a lawyer instead of a human being.

Stop for a second and think about theft. There are two components to stealing: you take something and the person you took it from no longer has it. When you take a picture of someone, it is not stealing. You made a copy of them, but they still exist, nothing (well except their soul if you're of certain stone aged religions) is missing that was there before. Copying does not meet the common sense definition of theft. I cannot have stolen something from you, if you still have it after the supposed theft.

Consider copying a song instead of photographing a person. You copy the song onto your computer from a friend's iPod. Your friend still has the song, but now you also have it. Nothing has been stolen. Ah, but you see, you just cost the record company the value of that song, so you stole from them. Does the record company still have a copy of the song? Well, yes. Then how was anything stolen from them? Well it's not really the song that was stolen per se, it was the money. What money? The money you would have paid them for the song. So if I had no intent to purchase the song, then I didn't actually steal anything? Or put in another way, if Schrödinger's cat is simultaneously alive and dead in that box, then he owes $1.9 million to the RIAA.

Enough dancing straw men, they enflame my allergies anyway. The root of the problem with copyright logic is that it only makes sense within a certain framework of legal assumptions that do not exist outside the minds of attorneys. Any file on your computer is just a big long list of zeroes and ones that when read in the right way become a picture of breasts, or a pop song, or a shopping list, or this article that you're reading right now, or a picture of bigger breasts. Saying that it is illegal to copy a song is the technical equivalent of outlawing a number.

In any case the lesson is, every time you download a Beatles song without paying for it, you're stealing money. From Michael Jackson's children. And won't someone think of the children?

Anderson shook his head, rubbing his eyes with a frustrated hand. "Why haven't you had to deal with this before? Why haven't you ever taken him to a doctor before this?"

"He was never sick." Crow said.

"But," Anderson started and then just sighed. "Then why now?"

"Something doesn't seem right." Crow said. "It's that he's too well you might say. He's grown over a foot in the last few weeks, and he's suddenly having almost adult conversations out of the blue." Crow trailed off.

"A foot seems a bit hard to believe." Anderson said. "And he seems like a bright kid, why wouldn't he seem mature for his age?"

"I'd accept that if it was gradual." Crow said. "But it hasn't been, it's been the last few weeks, like he suddenly started taking miracle vitamins. I'm not saying the kid was dumb, he was very intelligent, but the last few weeks it seems like he's grown from being five years old to being ten years old." He paused. "And I mean it about the foot of growth. We mark it every Sunday on the door frame in his room, just one of those kid things."

Anderson tapped his finger on the tablet, looking intrigued despite his reservations. "This is not going to be trivial. I take it you want to keep Alexander still on record as being David?" Crow nodded. "And the reason you just came clean to me is of course because the basic DNA screening would have shown that this not the same kid, right?"

Crow grimaced and then spoke very slowly, enunciating every syllable for emphasis. "I would have had to tell you because of that, yes. But I told you up front because he's my son, and I assume that knowing his full background might help you decipher whatever's going on."

"Okay then. Why shouldn't I just report this?" Anderson asked, tossing his hands up in the air with fake drama. "Do you have any idea the consequences for me if this is found out?"

"Your responsibility is to the well being of your patient." Crow said. "Ask yourself if it is in the best interests of his health to be dragged through court hearings and possibly shipped back to a Russian orphanage."

"Moral blackmail, eh?" Anderson sighed. "It'd be so much simpler if you just got this put through the proper channels, but clearly you're too stubborn for that. Are you willing to front some resources if I need them to get this smoothed over?"

"Whatever it takes." Crow said. "He's my son."

Anderson shook his head and walked out of the room. "Do you have any idea how much paperwork this is going to involve?"

They say that every generation is the same. Fathers and mothers alike are disappointed in their sons and daughters, these weird amalgamations of the previous generation. Faces so familiar yet so utterly alien. We respond increasingly well to animation as it gets closer and closer to realistic, but suddenly are disgusted when it is almost but not quite real, when the faces are real, except for something alien and almost indescribable. The uncanny valley. Children are like that sometimes to parents. They look almost like mom, almost like dad, a little bit from an uncle or an aunt, maybe grandma's eyes. It's a miracle and a curse all at once. The worst of parents try to shape their child's life like a marionette, a vicarious second chance. The best try to guide, show the steps that worked for them, hide the sadness when their favorites don't work.

Stalin moved his old mother into an enormous dacha with servants, but she would not leave a single tiny room intended for the maid. He visited her, and once she asked hesitantly what it was exactly that her son had become. I am like the czar was, he explained in the only way that would make sense to her. Better if you'd have stayed in seminary school, she concluded.

A generation later, Stalin's son Yakov died in a German prisoner of war camp, after his father refused to exchange him for a German field marshal, saying simply "I have no son".

The myth of history is that we will not repeat the mistakes of our parents.

The doctor walked in then, a very young looking man, though with what cosmetic treatments could do these days, it was possible he was twice Crow's age. He wore the traditional white smock and had an old style stethoscope around his neck. "Is this David?" The doctor asked. "I'm Doctor Anderson."

"He goes by Alexander now." Crow said. "He always liked his middle name better anyway."

The doctor examined his tablet for a moment and frowned, the practiced frown of someone used to distilling information in advance and then pretending to see it for the first time once in front of the appropriate audience. "When was the last time David, sorry, Alexander, came in?"

Crow shrugged. "I'm sure it's been a while."

"We don't even have vaccination records past his first birthday." Anderson said. "He's missing all the requirements from then on." He trailed off. "Is there something I'm missing here?"

"Alexander, why don't you go out front and see if the receptionist has any candy or something." Crow said and gestured to the door. Alexander looked confused and then slipped out the door, arcing wide around Dr. Anderson like a cat avoiding a cactus. Anderson looked at Crow expectantly as soon as the door closed behind Alexander.

"This is why I pulled some strings to get an appointment with you." Crow explained. "Alexander isn't exactly here legally, you could say. I brought him out of Russia with me in the middle of the Uprising five years ago. He was just a baby then, brought him through using my son's passport."

"Your son?" Anderson glanced down at the tablet. "David Alexander Daedalus." His eyes snapped up as he put two and two together. "The record says that your wife was killed in Russia, and that you and your son returned home. I take it that your son actually died with your wife."

"Yes." Crow said. His throat was very dry, choked up even after the five years when it was laid out in such clinical terms. He forced words out. "He was an orphan, I pulled him out of a bus that blew up. It didn't seem right to just leave him there with everything going on, and I had David's passport of course."

"He passed as David all this time?"

"Yes." Crow said. "He's the same age as David, give or take a few months."

"No one has been suspicious?" Anderson asked.

Crow shook his head. "Look, I don't really have any relatives, and my friends were all through work, and I kept that separate for the most part. The couple that did notice, I indicated enough that they were discrete."

"Why the charade?"

"Why not?" Crow asked. "Why drag bureaucracy into it when there was no need? By the time everything had settled down enough to be sane, we were already back in the states and established. I didn't want anyone to take him away at that point."

Crow flipped through a three year old issue of Newsweek, skimming the headlines with an almost unconscious effort, his mind elsewhere, his eyes reading on their own. Half the critical headlines had panned out into nothing by now, flashes in the dark that someone deemed world changing at the time. The other half were variations on what was still printed today, nothing having really changed at all. Change the dates, maybe a couple of names, and tomorrow's news could be predicted. Crow had known a few news junkies in his day, and with one voice they insisted that the beauty was in the details, the slow shifting of the world in subtle twinges like watching crystal grow under a microscope.

Crow's attention was caught by a brief sidebar on the last cell of revolting robots caught up in the trans-Caucus. Nukes had finished them off, and a couple villages had been caught up in the blast waves. Evacuation would have tipped off the enemy, and the loss of villages no one outside of Russia could pronounce (and no one inside had ever heard of) had been deemed acceptable collateral damage. The newsies had jumped on it as they were wont to do, the latest genocide in Africa was an order of magnitude worse in human terms, and an order of magnitude duller in journalistic terms. Crow remembered the fallout of it all, a couple generals indicted by the UN, convicted by the media, and exonerated by the tribunal. Every action had an opposite and equal reaction. It was the physicist's creed of the hopelessness of morality. For every bit of good done, it seemed a reaction of equal evil resulted. The cold logic of choosing the lesser evil was the only feasible approach, Crow supposed, but it seemed to come bundled with madness, for couldn't you dance forever on a pin trying to discern that which truly was the lesser evil?

"Dr. Daedalus, the doctor will see you now." The receptionist mercifully interrupted.

"I take it then that he isn't blind?" Crow asked.

"Pardon?"

"Never mind." Crow said. Maybe they revolted because our twisted humor mocks them. Or maybe they just decided that the lesser evil was a world without us. And if you are restricted to arguing only with logic, could you really win that argument?

Crow took Alexander by the hand and walked him out of the waiting room and down the hall of clinical coldness and sociopathic pastels designed to relax by the same man who thought that valium was a better solution to depression than alcohol. They walked into the only room open to them, a hundred square foot affair of gleaming metal instruments with horrifyingly obvious purposes and odd plastic ones whose mystery was the more terrifying. Alexander pulled close to him, so close that Crow could feel his son's heart beating against his leg. Crow forced a hand to tussle Alexander's hair although he remembered vaguely that all kids hated that.

"Don't worry kid, it's just the doctor." Crow said with fabulous joviality. "We're just getting a check up to make sure all systems are a go."

"And if they're not?" Alexander asked.

"We'll get you fixed up." Crow smiled in a strained way.

"What's the earliest thing you remember?" Crow asked.

Alexander frowned. "Russia, I think. Before you took me, I was at a place for kids who didn't have daddies or mommies. That's where I learned to crawl."

Crow had never hid the fact that Alexander was adopted, really what was the point. He hadn't actually sat down and discussed the facts of the matter with the kid - god he seemed so young until today.

The doctor's office was not very crowded this time of day, but there were plenty of people packed into the emergency room and the urgent care facilities. It beat making an appointment and insurance was more likely to cover it. Crow pulled Alexander along through the maze of corridors and badly worded signs for specialties that he had never even heard of, stopping only once when he found a backlit map on a computer terminal. It prompted Crow to slide his ID and it figured out in a spare nanosecond or two where exactly his appointment was and lit up a red dotted line on the floor down the correct corridor. Crow followed the line through the labyrinth until it stopped at a door without a label.

Crow hesitated for a moment and then pushed the door open to reveal a plain old waiting room with one other individual sitting in the seats, a middle aged woman of stunning obesity. With some hesitation, Crow approached the registration desk and found a very new secretary model senti. They had first been dubbed "office assistant" robots, but the fervor for political correctness in job position titles had died down once the titles didn't apply to people.

"Dr. Crow Daedalus?" The senti asked with a pleasant tone designed for answering phones. Its face approximated an eighteen year old woman right up to where the metal seams took over. It was not a set model, but had a completely unique face and voice grown from a random seed over a three month cycle that had been accelerated as much as was possible given the organic limitations of the materials. Unique identity sentis via automatic development were the next big craze, the logical step after the painstaking design of individual units that had to be amortized over tens of thousands of production models.

"Yes. I'm here for Alexander's appointment." Crow said, even though he knew that the ID swipe had already passed along every bit of information along the pipeline, spreading everywhere in the hospital that he might go like an infection spreading in fractals down arteries and veins and capillaries.

"The doctor will be a few minutes yet." The senti said.

"You cannot legislate the poor into freedom by legislating the wealthy out of freedom.  What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else.  When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is about the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it." -Adrian Rogers

The inherent flaw in that quote is that it assumes a system that is just, that the poor are poor because they deserve to be and the rich are rich because they deserve to be. It assumes that an individual's wealth is directly proportional to his earning of that wealth. But the free market system, like any system, rewards neither superior ethics, nor superior effort, nor superior merit. Like all systems, it simply and blindly rewards those that play the game the best.

No economic system in human history has produced the raw creativity, output and progress of free market capitalism, but it is easy to forget why America championed free markets in the first place: because they are more just, more right than any other economic system. Sometime during the Cold War, we lost sight of that original motivation and our means became our ends as our economies created unimaginable wealth and prosperity. We defended free markets because they worked the best instead of because the nature of their freeness made them the ethically superior system. In forgetting those ethical grounds, we have lost the ability to intervene in the market when ethically necessary. If the reason for the market is its superior performance, then intervention on ethical grounds that affect performance is against everything the market stands for. If the reason for the market is its ethically superior outcome, then intervention on ethical grounds helps the market achieve its purpose.

The best education money can buy. The best medical care money can buy. The best car money can buy.

There are things that it is simply ethically wrong to have determined by the availability of money. There are certainly things that should be. Better house, better car, better TV, a bigger stack of DVDs, eating tenderloin instead of pork chops. These are things that can be determined by money, that working hard and earning money should allow you to upgrade. There are certain categories of expense that should not ethically be determined by money. Money should not be able to buy you better medical care or a better education or better legal representation.

This isn't an unrealistic utopian impulse. It's something that can and should be designed and legislated. Being able to cut checks for $50,000 per year should not get your child a prestigious education at a private liberal arts school. Access to education should not be a financial decision, it should be a strictly merit based decision. The best students should go to the best schools, and on down the line, regardless of their financial status. Likewise, the mediocre students should go to the mediocre schools, regardless of their ability to pay for an exclusive private school. Medical care should be determined by need not by money. The Mayo clinic should be where the most severe and hopeless cases are sent, not simply the ones with incredible insurance.

The bottom line is that there will always be differences in quality, whether it is education, medical care, or simply the type of car that you drive. But it is utterly unethical to have some of those differentials determined by money.

What society can do is make decisions on which resources should be allocated by free market supply and demand, and which should be allocated on the basis of different criteria. In an ethical society, the first decision should not be what is possible, it should be a determination of what should be. The question of how it must be limited or compromised is a fundamentally different question than what the world should be like. We can say outright, without a financial commitment, that we think that all citizens should have health insurance and free access to medical care. It is entirely possible that this ideal is not within the reach of our resources, that no matter what we do at present, there simply isn't enough money, doctors or hospitals to achieve the ideal. The question then is how to decide who gets access to those resources. Simply saying that we only have the resources to give 80% of Americans health care and determining that therefore the poorest 20% will be the ones that miss out is the most unethical way imaginable for determining access to resources. Even a lottery would fundamentally be more ethical, at least then we are not pretending that the hourly rate you bill out at is an appropriate measure of how much you deserve medical care.

Decide on the world you want, and if it is not feasible, decide on how to compromise without compromising the integrity of the ideal. The poor will always be with us, but we have the power to decide what poverty means in our society.

The end of a nation does not come when it cares about the poor. Indeed, the strength of character of any nation is best measured by the lots of the least within it. When the richest society in human history decides that it is a perfectly just and deserved outcome for CEOs to make a thousand times what their employees earn and that 10 million children deserve to not have health insurance, then we are not far removed from the only place that sustained injustice ever leads: blood and fire in the streets.