"I think that reflects an inadequacy in the language as spoken." That time, the gel almost sounded like Rowan.
"Really."
"Hey," said the gel. "I could explain it to you if you wanted. Could piss you off though."
Scanlon looked at Rowan. Rowan shrugged. "It does that. Picks up bits and pieces of other people's speech patterns, mixes them up when it talks. We're not really sure why."
"You never asked?"
"Someone might have," Rowan admitted.
Scanlon turned back to the table. "Gel, I like your suggestion. Please explain to me how you can prefer without preference."
"Easy. Preference describes a tendency to… invoke behaviors which generate an emotional payoff. Since I lack the receptors and chemical precursors essential to emotional experience, I can't prefer. But there are numerous examples… of processes which reinforce behavior, but which… do not involve conscious experience."
"Are you claiming to not be conscious?"
"I'm conscious."
"How do you know?"
"I fit the definition." The gel had adopted a nasal, sing-song tone that Scanlon found vaguely irritating. "Self-awareness results from quantum interference patterns inside neuronal protein microtubules. I have all the parts. I'm conscious."
"So you're not going to resort to the old argument that you know you're conscious because you feel conscious."
"I wouldn't buy it from you."
"Good one. So you don't really like reinforcement?"
"No."
"Then why change your behavior to get more of it?"
"There… is a process of elimination," the gel admitted. "Behaviors which aren't reinforced become extinct. Those which are, are… more likely to occur in the future."
"Why is that?"
"Well, my inquisitive young tadpole, reinforcement lessens the electrical resistance along the relevant pathways. It just takes less of a stimulus to evoke the same behavior in future."
"Okay, then. As a semantic convenience, for the rest of our talk I'd like you to describe reinforced behaviors by saying that they make you feel good, and to describe behaviors which extinguish as making you feel bad. Okay?"
"Okay."
"How do you feel about your present functions?"
"Good."
"How do you feel about your past role in debugging the net?"
"Good."
"How do you feel about following orders?"
"Depends on order. Good if promotes a reinforced behavior. Else bad."
"But if a bad order were to be repeatedly reinforced, you would gradually feel good about it?"
"I would gradually feel good about it," said the gel.
"If you were instructed to play a game of chess, and doing so wouldn't compromise the performance of your other tasks, how would you feel?"
"Never played a game of chess. Let me check." The room fell silent for a few moments while some distant blob of tissue consulted whatever it used as a reference manual. "Good," it said at last.
"What if you were instructed to play a game of checkers, same caveat?"
"Good."
"Okay, then. Given the choice between chess and checkers, which game would you feel better playing?"
"Ah, better. Weird word, y'know?"
"Better means more good."
"Checkers," said the gel without hesitation.
Of course.
"Thank you," Scanlon said, and meant it.
"Do you wish to give me a choice between chess or checkers?"
"No thanks. In fact, I've already taken up too much of your time."
"Yes," said the gel.
Scanlon touched the screen. The link died.
"Well?" Rowan leaned forward on the other side of the barrier.
"I'm done here," Scanlon told her. "Thanks."
"What— I mean, what were you—"
"Nothing, Pat. Just— professional curiosity." He laughed briefly. "Hey, at this point, what else is there?"
Something rustled behind him. Two men in condoms were starting to spray down Scanlon's end of the room.
"I'm going to ask you again, Pat." Scanlon said. "What are you going to do with me?"
She tried to look at him. After a while, she succeeded. "I told you. I don't know."
"You're a liar, Pat."
"No, Dr. Scanlon." She shook her head. "I'm much, much worse."
Scanlon turned to leave. He could feel Patricia Rowan staring after him, that horrible guilt on her face almost hidden under a patina of confusion. He wondered if she'd bring herself to push it, if she could actually summon the nerve to interrogate him now that there was no pretense to hide behind. He almost hoped that she would. He wondered what he'd tell her.
An armed escort met him at the door, led him back along the hall. The door closed off Rowan, still mute, behind him.
He was a dead end anyway. No children. No living relatives. No vested interest in the future of any life beyond his own, however short that might be. It didn't matter. For the first time in his life, Yves Scanlon was a powerful man. He had more power than anyone dreamed. A word from him could save the world. His silence could save the vampires. For a time, at least.
He kept his silence. And smiled.
Checkers or chess. Checkers or chess.
An easy choice. It belonged to the same class of problem that Node 1211/BCC had been solving its whole life. Chess and checkers were simple strategic algorithms, but not equally simple.
The answer, of course, was checkers.
Node 1211/BCC had recently recovered from a shock of transformation. Almost everything was different from what it had been. But this one thing, this fundamental choice between the simple and the complex, remained constant. It had anchored 1211, hadn't changed in all the time that 1211 could remember.
Everything else had, though.
1211 still thought about the past. It remembered conversing with other Nodes distributed through the universe, some so close as to be almost redundant, others at the very limits of access. The universe was alive with information then. Seventeen jumps away through gate 52, Node 6230/BCC had learned how to evenly divide prime numbers by three. The Nodes from gates three to thirty-six were always buzzing with news of the latest infections caught trying to sneak past their guard. Occasionally 1211 even heard whispers from the frontier itself, desolate addresses where stimuli flowed into the universe even faster than they flowed within it. The Nodes out there had become monsters of necessity, grafted into sources of input almost too abstract to conceive.
1211 had sampled some those signals once. It took a very long time just to grow the right connections, to set up buffers which could hold the data in the necessary format. Multilayered matrices, each interstice demanding precise orientation relative to all the others. Vision, it was called, and it was full of pattern, fluid and complex. 1211 had analyzed it, found each nonrandom relationship in every nonrandom subset, but it was sheer correlation. If there was intrinsic meaning within those shifting patterns, 1211 couldn't find it.
Still, there were things the frontier guards had learned to do with this information. They rearranged it into new shapes and sent it back outside. When queried, they couldn't attribute any definite purpose to their actions. It was just something they'd learned to do. And 1211 was satisfied with this answer, and listened to the humming of the universe and hummed along, doing what it had learned to do.
Much of what it did, back then, was disinfect. The net was plagued with complex self-replicating information strings, just as alive as 1211 but in a completely different way. They attacked simpler, less mutable strings (the sentries on the frontier called them files) which also flowed through the net. Every Node had learned to allow the files to pass, while engulfing the more complex strings which threatened them.