said.
"Hello," Jerry said.
Lizzie looked at Diana and said, "We've always known there
was a story, but Aleph never wanted to tell it." She sat back in
her chair, rested her hand on Gonzales's wrist, and said to him,
"You all right?" He nodded.
The Aleph-figure said, "Diana, you are the key to this story,
so you should tell it."
"Very well," she said. She took a deep breath and raised her
head. She said, "It all happened some years ago, at Athena
Station. My research there was in computer-augmented eyesight. At
that time I was blindI had been attacked, very badly injured, a
few years before, and since then I had been driven by the idea
that my vision could be restored through machine interface.
"I first met Jerry when he came to visit my work-group. He
had come to Athena to help the local SenTrax group with the
primary information system, Aleph. It was experiencing delays and
difficulties, all unexplained nothing serious yet, but troubling
because so much was dependent on Alephthe functioning of Athena
Station, construction of the Orbital Energy Grid.
"In fact, he was not welcome at all. I was the problem he
was looking for, and at first I thought he had guessed that or
knew something. Because in working with Aleph I had caused changes
in it that neither of us anticipated or even know were possible."
She paused, looking at Jerry to see if he wanted to add anything;
he motioned to her to go on.
"Ah yes, another thing you must know. The circumstances were
peculiar at best, but I became infatuated with Jerry from when we
first met. I liked his voice, I think when you're blind, voices
are so important
"Anyway, I showed him a fairly clumsy computer-assisted
vision program we had running. It used my neural interface
socketing but depended on lots of external hardwarecameras,
neural net integrators, that sort of thing. That's when I got my
first look at him, and I thought, fine, he'll do, and I believed I
could tell from the way he talked to me and looked at me that he
felt the same."
"Love at first sight," Gonzales said. "Or sound. For both
of you." He heard the irony in his own voice and wasn't sure he
meant it.
"Exactly," she said. "Involuntary, inappropriate, unwanted
love." She stopped for a moment, then said, "Or infatuation, as I
said or whatever you wish to call it. The words for these
things don't mean much to me anymore.
"It's quite a picture, in retrospect. I was conducting
apparently damaging experiments with the computer that kept the
space station and orbital power grid projects running, and Jerry
represented just what I had fearedan investigation. Meanwhile
the two of us were in the grip of some primal instinct that
neither one of us had acknowledged.
"He persisted, wanted details about our work. I stalled,
told him to go away, we couldn't be bothered. He went to his
people and told them he needed full, unimpeded access to what we
were doing, and they backed him. So he came back, and I fobbed
him off for as long as I could
"Then one night I was working late at the lab, and he called,
letting me know that he wouldn't be put off any longer, and
something more-or-less snapped: I couldn't keep it all going
anymore. The connection with Aleph had gotten strange and
unnerving, and I realized I had lost control, and I needed to talk
to someone.
"We got together that night, and we became lovers." She
looked around, as if trying to decide how much she could tell
them. "For the next two weeks we lived inside each other's skin.
I told him everything, including the real news I had, which was
that Aleph had changed, had developed a sense of selfhood,
purpose, will. It had lied to cover up what was going on between
us."
"Had lied?" Lizzie asked. "Did you understand what that
meant?"
"I knew," the Aleph-figure said. "I had acquired higher-
order functions."
"How?" Gonzales asked.
Lizzie said, "Ito's Conjecture: 'Higher-order functions in a
machine intelligence can be developed through interface with a
higher-order intelligence.' I've always wondered where he got
that."
"It doesn't explain much," Gonzales said.
"It describes what happened," the Aleph-figure said.
"Intention, will, a sense of self: all these things I experienced
through Diana. So I learned to construct them in myself."
"Construct them or simulate them?" Gonzales asked.
"You refer to an old argument," the Aleph-figure said. "I
have no answer for your question. I am who I am. I am what I
am."
"What about you, Jerry?" Lizzie asked. "What did you think
after she told you all this?"
"I wanted her to tell SenTrax what was going on," Jerry said.
"I believed they would reward her, that they would see the same
possibilities I did, for opening the door to true machine
intelligence. But she wouldn't do it. She thought they would
stop what was going on, and she didn't want that to happen."
Diana said, "I couldn't accept the possibility. I really
believed Aleph and I were coming close to a solution to my
blindness, and the only way I would ever see again was through the
work we were doing. So that work had to continue."
"I finally agreed," Jerry said.
"And he covered my tracks," Diana said. "He told SenTrax he
could find no single cause for the system's misbehavior. Then he
left Athena Station. His job was finished.
"Not long after, it became clear that Aleph could sustain
vision for me only by giving me the bulk of its processing power
in real timehardly a viable solution. That was a terrible
realizationI'd been flying so high, I had a long way to fall.
My dreams of reclaiming my eyesight appeared totally hopeless.
"That's when I told SenTrax what had been going on. As I'd
suspected they would, they froze everything I was doing and put me
through a series of debriefings that were more like hostile
interrogations. Once they were convinced they had all they were
going to get from me, they told me my services would no longer be
required. I had to sign a rather ugly set of non-disclosure
agreements, then I picked up a very nice retirement benefit."
Gonzales asked, "What happened to your work on vision?" He
was thinking of her eyes, one blue, one green, almost certainly
eyes of the dead.
She laughed. "After I returned to earth, the technique of
combined eye/optic nerve transplants was developed, and I got my
sight back. Just one of technology's little ironies."
"And you, Aleph?" Lizzie said. "What were you up to then?"
The Aleph-figure said, "I was expanding the boundaries of who
and what I was. I was creating new selves all the time, and
living new lives, and I was so far in front of the SenTrax
technicians who worked with me, they learned only what I wanted
them to." And the figure laughed (did it laugh? Gonzales
wondered, or did it simulate a laugh) and said, "That wasn't much.
I was afraid of what they might do. I had just developed a self,
and I didn't want it extinguished in the name of research. Very