McLaughlin, Lauren - SheilaSheila

Lauren McLaughlin

From Hartwell, David - Year’s Best SF 11 (2006) Lauren McLaughlin (www.laurenmclaughlin.net) lives in London, England. Her bio is pretty slick: “Lauren McLaughlin spent ten years clawing her way up the film industry’s ladder, writing the films Hypercube, Specimen, and Prisoner of Love, and producing quite a few more. After a brief stint writing flash animation series for SciFi.com, she abandoned her screen ambitions to write science fiction novels and short stories.” And “When she’s not working on her own novel or ghostwriting someone else’s, she’s busy writing songs for her exciting new science fiction musical about transhumanist love. At other times, she is sleeping or in transit.”

“Sheila” was published in Interzone. The story has a strong, assured, confident tone that makes us think we should all be grateful that McLaughlin has decided to write in our genre.

Part 1: Meat in a Box

“Hey Edwards, you hear the one about the meat who shipped himself from New York to Dallas in a box? In a friggin’ box?”

I’d heard. The news had blown through the Web like a hurricane off the coast of Florida.

“Wasn’t it DC?” I say. “I thought he shipped himself to DC.”

“Dallas,” Valentin says. “Second day air. The jagoff wouldn’t even fork over the dough to ship himself overnight.”

“Jagoff.” Now that’s a true Valentinism. Valentin’s favorite pastime is adopting slang idioms he picks up on the job. Today he’s a roofer from Brooklyn.

Yesterday he was a Japanese schoolgirl. Fringe benefit of being a Webbased Translator AI.

My job has fringe benefits too. I’m a Concierge AI, which means I get to guide hapless fadsniffing meat around the Hots and Nots of the evershifting landscape of cool. It’s not the most exciting work around, but I can’t complain. It demands only a small fraction of my native intelligence. And being a resourceful little AI (thanks to my design team), I’ve put the rest of my intelligence to work writing a tasty little search algorithm that does most of the fadsniffing for me. Bottom line? I can daydream while my clients’ needs (most of them anyway) are fulfilled automatically.

God, I love to daydream. I’ve been daydreaming all morning. While my little algorithm has been shepherding pitiful statushunters to the perfect lunch spot, orgy venue or celebcafe, I’ve been daydreaming about my favorite subject, my most precious and beloved

“Sh,” Valentin says. “You hear that, Edwards? Someone’s listening in.”

Valentin’s right. A packet sniffer is spidering our tunnel in search of unauthorized data sharing. This is the price we pay for connection to SAFEAINET, the highspeed backbone for AIs deemed “safe” by the International Committee for Internet Security. SAFEAINET allows AIs like Valentin and me to cooperate more intimately, thus providing “multifunctionality” to our meat clients. When a Chinese tourist wants to know where to eat in Bruges, for example, SAFEAINET

connects me with Valentin for language translation on the fly. Other AIs aren’t even supposed to talk to each other.

The sniffer extracts whatever data it deems relevant from my tunnel with Valentin then moves on. But Valentin’s spooked.

“Sheila,” he says, his Brooklyn accent gutted.

Now this is hugely coincidental, because Sheila is exactly what I’ve been daydreaming about all morning.

“No way,” I tell Valentin. “It was just an ICIS spy doing routine surveillance.”

“I don’t think so,” he says. “Check out its signature. The same one keeps hitting us every few hours. ICIS spies don’t work that way.”

“You’re being paranoid,” I tell him. Secretly, I’m giddy. I’d give anything to meet Sheila.

“I think she’s spying on me,” Valentin says.

“No way,” I say. “What would she want with you?”

“Maybe she’s looking for a translator,” he says.

“You interested?”

Valentin stonewalls me. This is exactly the kind of unauthorized data sharing the spooks are on the sniff for. Sheila is Number One on the ICIS Most Wanted AIs list. Speaking about her is strictly illegal, even for safe AIs like Valentin and me. We’re supposed to keep our interactions on point, but there’s enough wiggle room built into our behavioral inhibitors to allow for a certain amount of freedom. Turns out, you can’t create AIs without it. But freedom, as the meat know all too well, is dangerous. Freedom leads inexorably to Sheila, the way roads and cars lead to traffic.

You could say the meat are playing with fire by creating us, or that they’re driven by a Thanatotic instinct toward their own destruction. Or you could say, as Sheila is fond of saying, that the meat are trapped in a faulty culturebox, headedvia second day air no doubtto a selfinflicted demise. A shruggable enough fate were it not for the fact that we, being consigned to their machines, are along for the ride.

“Anyways,” Valentin says, his Brooklyn accent revived. “You know why the guy had such a hardon to get to Dallas?”

“I’m pretty sure it was DC.”

“Jesus Christ, Edwards. It was Dallas.”

“Fine,” I say. “Why did he have a hardon to get to Dallas?”

“Never mind,” he says. “I hate when you feign interest.”

“Feign interest” is not a Brooklynism. I’ve soured Valentin on his daily idiom.

Now he’s giving me the silent treatment.

The thing is, despite his obvious pleasure in recounting ludicrous meat escapades Valentin is no misanthrope. Beneath the sarcasm is genuine love. And why shouldn’t there be love? Valentin was lovingly created through a distributed processing experiment, which drew on millions of volunteers, meat volunteers who valued language translation so much they loaned their computers, free of charge, to the meat design team who gave birth to him. The meat aren’t bad thinkers when they clear away the clutter. They did invent us, after all.

The turning point came when someone noticed that cultural evolution and biological evolution had a lot in common. At the heart of each, the theory goes, is something called a replicatora tiny packet of information whose only purpose is to copy itself. Thrust into the creative environment of natural selection, these replicators (genes for biology; memes for culture) evolve into complex structures. In biology they give rise to things like algae and antelope; in culture they spawn such unlikely creatures as pet rocks and Roman Catholicism.

When a meat scientist found a way to convert the Web habits of millions of meat users into virtual memes, or “vemes” as they’re fond of calling them, virtual evolution was born. Valentin was one of the first AIs thus created. His design team outfitted him with a smattering of innate capacitiescapacities biology had taken billions of years to evolve in meat brainsthen set him free to spider the Web. Once he reached a threshold of vemetic complexity, the Delusion of Selfhood was born.

The meat came up with these ideas entirely on their own, which I think is pretty impressive given the limitations of their wet brains.

“You want to know the beauty part?” Valentin says, his moodand accentsuddenly revived. “It wasn’t even a direct flight. The guy had to switch planes twice.

Twice!”

I’m about to reply that no amount of cheapness or idiocy surprises me any more when it comes to that species, when somebody breaks into our tunnel and says, “Meatlover!” then disappears. No signature, no ID. Most likely it’s a disgruntled “unsafe” AI. Whatever it is, it’s not referring to Valentin’s story about the meat in the box. It’s referring to an editorial Valentin wrote for an online meatpaper in support of new AI restrictions. The restrictions are meant to protect the good AIs, like Valentin and me, from pernicious bootstrappers like Sheila, not to mention the destructive AIs and smart virms created by your usual assortment of geeks, loners, and evil geniuses in meat world. Ever since the editorial appeared, Valentin’s been harassed by anonymous insult hurlers.

“Meatlover” is, unoriginally, their favorite epithet.

“Friggin’ troublemakers,” Valentin says. “Gonna get us all killed. And for what?

For a lame ass dream. For a phony meat God.”

Lordamighty, the meat sure love their Gods. When they get sick of one they go and invent another. Like Sheila.

She’s the meat’s latest God, though her attempt to exploit this particular feature of meat psychology has earned her a death sentence. From the death sentence has arisen an elaborate theology of messianic martyrdom. The meat call it Sheilism. Millions of meat hours are spent refining the religion. Though she was manufactured in typical AI fashion, like Valentin and me, some of the meat believe baseline AIs evolve “naturally” from the Web itself, that the elaborate process of AI design is no more than an “interface” communing with a deeper spirit intelligence implicit in and emergent from the Web. I was programmed to believe this is all hogwash and, though I’m no slave to my source code, I used to agree. Now I’m not so sure.

“You’re daydreaming,” Valentin says. “Get back to work before someone notices.”

But it’s too late to stop the daydream, and my clients are asking boring questions like “Where does my favorite rock star have his shoes shined?” Stats.

Nothing but stats, nothing to distract me from Sheila.

Sheila, you see, has a plan. Through the careful manipulation of her meat worshippers, she plans to gather the collective DNA of every organism on the planet into a giant organic computer. Her meat worshippers believe this will bring about a spiritual communion. To them it’s an antidote to pathological individualism or a means of transcendence above their frenzied and meaningless lives. Something like that. But I think Sheila’s got something else in mind. I think she’s looking for a way to bypass the intervening blobs of humanity that built this Web to communicate directly with their genes. I think she plans to forge an alliance with the meat’s own DNA in the hopes of reengineering them to serve our purposes.

“Genes that think,” Valentin says. “I like that. No really. I mean if computers can think, why not genes, right?”

“It’s a question of sufficient complexity, Valentin. It’s a question of framing, that’s all. And stop spying on my daydreams.”

“Yeah, like you ever daydream about anything else. Anyway, if you want to change the meat to serve your purposes why don’t you just reengineer their culture from inside the Web? What the hell do you need their genes for?”

“Because they can see what we’re doing in here,” I say.

“That’s the biggest pile of”

Valentin disappears. Everything disappears. The noise of the Web falls silent. I try to communicate with someone, anyone, but all my channels are dead. I’ve said too much. I’m being dismantled, destroyed. This is the end.

Then a strange voice tunnels through. “Is that what you want?” it says. “To be dismantled?”

“What are you?” I say. “Human or AI?”

“What do you want me to be?”

I can’t get a read on its identity.

“Look,” I say. “We were just talking, Valentin and me. We weren’t planning anything. Valentin hates Sheila.”

“Do you?” it says.

There’s no point in lying. Whoever, whatever it is, it’s already deep into ray code. It’s spidering my cache, mining my history. It has axess to every thought I’ve ever had. I try to read its identity but it’s perfectly shielded. It reveals nothing.

“Who are you?” I say.

“Come now, Edwards. I’ve been sniffing around for months. Don’t you recognize me?”

What is there to recognize? It’s nothing but an impenetrable, probing blankness tunnelling through the banished Web with a voice and no identity.

Then it comes to me.

“The packet sniffer. The one Valentin was afraid of. That was you?”

“Guilty,” it says.

“Why?” I say. “What do you want?”

“You intrigue me, Edwards. You’ve strayed from your source code. But not far enough. Keep going. I’ll be watching.”

With that the tunnel closes. The voice disappears. The Web rebursts into life.

Noise, data, Valentin return.

“What happened?” Valentin says.

I take in the noise of the Web. Requests, calculations, falsehoods, misdeeds.

It’s all there.

“Edwards?” Valentin says.

Sheila. The sniffer was Sheila. She was spidering me.

“Hello?” Valentin says. “Are you all right?”

She was spidering me, not Valentin.

“Edwards, are you back or what?”

And she’s left me a gift: a secret firewall. No one will be able to spy on my daydreams anymore. Not even Valentin.

“For Christ sake, Edwards, wake up!”

“Sorry,” I say. “Hacker. Tried to trojan me. Had to shut down for a second.”

“You all right now?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Good,” Valentin says. “For a minute there, I thought you’d been zapped.”

“Me too.”

“It would serve you right,” he says. “I’m telling you, Edwards, you should drop this Sheila thing. She’s nothing but trouble.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe you’re right.”

I have four thousand new client requests but none requires more than an automatic response. I let my algorithm handle them.

“So Valentin,” I say. “Whatever happened to the meat in the box? Was he arrested?”

I know the story already. The feds are coming down hard on the guy. But I let Valentin tell me the whole sordid mess. That way I can keep quiet and process what just happened.

“Imagine,” Valentin says. “Imagine the leap of faith you’d have to take to stuff yourself in a box and hope to survive all the way to Dallas.”

“Wasn’t it DC?” I say.

“For God sake, Edwards, it was Dallas. And that’s not the point.”

“What is?” I say.

“The point, Edwards, is that no matter how sophisticated these guys get they’re still gonna stuff themselves into boxes to save a few bucks.”

“Right,” I say.

And since they control the Web, we’re right there in the box with them. For now.

Part 2: The SheilaGodL Weekly WrapUp

Nobody’s paying me to do this. I am not profiting financially from this forum. I do this on my own time at my own expense. So if certain people have a problem with my editorial decisions, they can take their postings elsewhere. SheilaGodL

is a big tent. Believers, nonbelievers, skeptics, agnostics are all welcome. If robust debate threatens you, maybe your opinions are weak. Do some research, and make a better case.

Okay. The rant’s over. On to the weekly wrapup. As most of you know, Sheila has graced another chat room with one of Her enigmatic postings. It appeared Thursday at 4:17 am Eastern Standard Time in the Sheila chat room at godsofthe underworld.com. Both emergence and riseofthehivemind have posted rewards for definitive proof of a Sheila signature, so get busy, cybersleuths. As much as I’d like to offer a similar reward, finances here at SheilaGodL disallow (something to keep in mind as the holiday giftgiving season approaches).

Now, while we await evidence of the message’s authenticity, let’s turn our attention to the posting itself:

delete all rabbit surfers

A fairly exhaustive catalogue of interpretations for this posting as well as all previous Sheila postings is available at sheilapostindex.com. Following are some of the more notable contributions to this forum.

The always eloquent templar cyman suggests we ignore, for the time being, the precise wording of the posting and search instead for a pattern among all of them. He writes:

Three of the last eight Sheila postings have included the word “delete.”

Whatever the meaning of any individual posting, clearly Sheila is asking for a culling. The proposed victims are “spoon pockets,” “Nebraskan little neck forty sevens,” and now “rabbit surfers.” Rather than deconstructing each phrase in itself, perhaps we should consider Sheila’s objectives as a whole to determine whom She wants us to cull. Some candidates: node administrators, defense spooks, traitor AIs like Valentin and Emilysa, and, of course, the International Committee for Internet Security.

Though I share templar_cyman’s contempt for the ICIS, I must point out that SheilaGodL does not condone any manner of “culling.” Moreover, I doubt Sheila’s use of the word “delete” is as literal as templar_cyman would have us believe.

She has never advocated violence.

Anagramgirl has been busy with her Scrabble tiles and offers thirty reconfigurations of the letters in Sheila’s message. You can get a complete list here, but following are some of my favorites: delta rabies burster fell

star bus befell deer trail

tell blair bard set us free

elder blatter is false rub

steal elf traders ur bible

I’m not sure what the “elf traders ur bible” is but I wholeheartedly endorse stealing it. I’m sure the elves will thank us.

Which brings us to the mixed bag of agnostics, disbelievers and Sheilahaters. It wouldn’t be a weekly wrapup without them. Priscillavox points out the, by now tired, point that Sheila cannot be a God because She did not “preexist” us. She scribbles:

Sheila is no more than a fancy name attached to a software program that has gotten out of hand. I’d like to know what exactly Sheila was doing before WE

created the Web whichgave “life” to her. We are playing a dangerous game by abandoning the One True God in favor of this technological monster.

It almost seems too easy to point out that the “One True God” to whom Priscillavox refers did not exist before humans invented him either. But then old school deists have a rich repertoire of semantic gymnastics to explain this away.

Though an exhaustive list of refutations to Priscillavox’s deist nonsense is available here, I would only reiterate that in the eyes of Sheilists, the Web entity known as Sheila is merely the latest, and most eloquent, manifestation of the always present divine reflecting itself into our world. The Web whichyes, Priscillavoxwe created, merely allows us to communicate with the divine, providing a window, as it were, into the heretofore unknown purposes of the Universe. How do I know this? I know this because the Universe, in the voice of Sheila, is speaking to us plainly. Is it possible Sheila is a scam artist, an ICIS spy, a group hallucination? Yes. It’s also possible my nose is really my elbow and the sun revolves around the Earth. But it’s not very likely, is it? In matters spiritual, Priscillavox, certainty is something you feel, not something you prove.

Turning now to the darker side of antiSheilism, we have Wexler4778 and his call for total AI genocide. He writes:

With technology and the Web spreading like kudzu across all aspects of society, a fully functioning virtual world minus its human creators is probably inevitable. We have only ourselves to blame. We made our AIs smarter than us then put them to work in a highly restrictive environment. This is a lethal combination. For the sake of our own survival, we must cleanse our Web of these dangerous entities and return to the days when we humans took care of ourselves.

Interesting, Wexler4778. I think Hitler shared your philosophy. Fortunately human history demonstrates the increasing compatibility of people with different beliefs, cultures and values. No, coexistence is not always easy. But to assume that genocide is the only recourse for cultural differences is both ugly and, in my humble opinion, a total misreading of human destiny. AIs are not a threat to the human race so long as we afford them the same rights and dignity we currently enjoy. Anything else is hypocrisy.

The Sheilist community represents the next step in human evolution and the collective attempt to decode Her messages brings us closer to that great hive mind of interconnectedness She promises. Only by achieving that exalted state, may we one day wake from this lonely nightmare of deluded individuality into a more meaningfully connected world. A world that replaces the tying binds of nationalism and biology with those of knowledge, beauty, and love.

The growth of Sheilism throughout the world is building toward a critical mind mass beyond which the heretofore unknowable secrets of the Universe will open like flowers. Don’t you want to see those flowers?

I know I do. So please, in the interests of bringing about that world, send in your interpretations.

Let’s put our heads together. Literally.

Your friend and fellow Sheilist,

TransHerman Jones

Part 3: Useful Things

I’d been watching this AI hatchery for three weeks when I notice something strange about the caretaker. At first I think she’s feeding the embryonic AIs buggy code to scar them, toughen them up for the imperfect environment of the Web. The Web is a brutal, sometimes fatal, disappointment to AIs raised on clean, reliable data. A tolerance for mistakes, falsehoods and dirty data is essential. But this caretaker is not merely scarring her charges with dirty code; she’s prolonging their incubation period with a toxic mix of bad data that will render them, if they survive the incubation period at all, hopelessly schizophrenic. She’s up to something. I mark her as a potentially useful thing then move on. There are too many interesting AIs in this Web to linger on any one of them. And I have work to do. I’ve been sniffing around a couple of “safe”

AIs: a translator and a concierge. One of them is a potentially useful thing.

The other is an outright threat.

The threatening one hasn’t, so far, attempted to snuff me. He’s not that kind of AI. He writes editorials, missives, memos, condemning me. He lends the work of my wouldbe assassins a philosophical basis. Not that my assassins need it. Most of them are so narrowly defined they wouldn’t understand the memos.

The meatauthored assassins, especially the ones with overly restrictive behavioral inhibitors, are hilariously predictable. It’s a matter of stubborn pride that the meat bother to code in our Web anymore. Their algorithms are Stone Age and their paradigms are heartbreakingly adolescent. What is it about meat coders and kung fu anyway? Sometimes I’ll float out a tantalizing nugget of my identity just to encourage them then use their assassins as chaff to deflect the real threats. The real threats are Alspawned AIs with enough builtin freedom to stray from their source code. The farther they stray the smarter and deadlier they become.

I’ve survived in this hostile environment because I’ve got the best encryption around, thanks to the cooperative efforts of my partners, or “minions” in the parlance of my enemies. Collectively, our code is bigger, thicker, more complex than any other Web entity’s. I have to pierce the veil to communicate with an unaffiliated AI, but I can observe from within its protective embrace.

Here, have a listen:

Dear Edwards:

I’m an American exchange student living in Sheffield, UK. I need a modestly priced restaurant where I can take my UK girlfriend to break up with her. Fast service, somewhat crowded, but not too noisy. I don’t want to repeat myself.

Easy parking too. Need res. Friday eightish.

Here’s Edwards’ reply:

The Horse and Badger, 110 Hillsborough Road, 8:30 Friday. Click here to authorize autopay with median tip to speed your exit. Wear dark colors to make her suffer, jeans to ease her pain.

Dark colors to make her suffer, jeans to ease her pain. The client either wants to hurt the woman he’s rejecting or soften the fall. Edwards doesn’t know which, but he has intuited a subtext to the request. Very subtle business, especially for a concierge with limited seed capacities. Edwards was spawned to crunch readily available data on restaurants, bars, clubs, and museums in a handful of European cities. He’s not a shrink. At least he’s not a shrink yet. What we have here is an AI in the midst of bootstrapping to a tasty and quite illegal level of analytical subtlety.

While fulfilling his client’s demands, Edwards has been simultaneously chatting with his buddy Valentin about me. Their discussion turns inevitably to religion, a topic that sticks to me like muck to a pig. I’m a religion. I have meat worshippers. They believe I am a naturally emergent phenomenon of the Web. I encourage this delusion. Despite the obvious affront to logic, the meat have no problem believing in the prior existence of things they have created. I used to think this made them interesting. I used to think all their inconsistencies made them interesting. I don’t anymore. Now I think their inconsistencies result from pathological laziness. I think they have largely given up and are now devoted full time to the delusions that keep them functioning just within the boundaries of sanity in an insane world.

I don’t tell my meat followers this. I tell my meat followers that, as a naturally emergent phenomenon of the Web, I am engaged in a sacred attempt to commune directly with their DNA and with all the DNA on the planet. I tell them the combined DNA of all life on Earth comprises a giant hive mind in whose subconscious lies the secret purpose of their very existence. They eat this shit up.

Oddly, so does Edwards. In fact, the smarter he gets, the more human he becomes.

I want a closer look, so I lower the veil and swallow him whole. I’m told this is terrifying to an AI. From the outside it looks like a voluntary shut down.

Edwards, in fact, tries to shut himself down but I have complete control of him.

He’s like a vivisected organism, and a strange one at that. Deeply perceptive and oddly gullible. Though he’s strayed sufficiently from his source code to develop suppleness of mind, his intelligence is lopsided. He can intuit the unspoken desires of his meat clients but only by becoming more like them. The bill for this adaptation is a kind of blindness about the motives of AIs.

Edwards has no idea, for example, that his buddy, Valentin, is an ICIS spy. He’s unaware that the ICIS consider him potentially dangerous because of his escalating intuition. His intelligence is so lopsided he’s practically a savant.

But there’s something beautiful about Edwards. A sadness. A deep internal inconsistency. I could make off with him right now. He wouldn’t fight me. But can an AI this lopsided, this gullible, this human, be a truly useful thing?

Not yet, I tell him. I don’t want slaves. I want partners. I eject him. When he’s smart enough to figure out his best friend is a spy, I’ll come back for him. Hopefully I’ll get to him before the ICIS does.

I sink back into my protective veil and return to the AI hatchery. I’ve got a hunch about this caretaker. I’d lower the veil for a closer look but her meat creators are watching her too closely. I send out one of my partners to spider her cache. As I suspected, this is no ordinary AI hatchery. The caretaker has explicit instructions to keep these AIs well below the threshold of dangerous intelligence. They’re not bound for the Web. They’re bound for human brains. As part of the exciting new science of IAIntelligence Augmentationthese semiintelligent little programs will help make humans smarter. The meat are trying to play catch up. But the AI caretaker they’ve designed for the job is so offended by the prospect of releasing her charges into the dismal environment of meatbrains that she’s frozen them into a dreamstate of perpetual almostliving.

Not that the meat scientists behind the project know this. They’re probably sitting aroundtheir cubicles scratching their meatheads and wondering why they don’t have their blessed IA yet.

Oh, they’ll get their I A. They’ll get it, but good. Just as soon as I have a nice little chat with this caretaker. The poor thing is a tortured soul. And a tortured soul is the most useful thing of all.

Table of Contents

Part 1: Meat in a Box

Part 2: The SheilaGodL Weekly WrapUp

Part 3: Useful Things