Lambda, p.23
Lambda, page 23
The booklet contained a series of photographs of motorbikes, in close-up and distantly framed, all in a desert setting. Key contextual features included rising and setting suns, exposed and colourfully layered mineral deposits, and ancient human settlements. All the motorbikes were solitary and had their brand names obscured or removed, and the heads of their riders were fully concealed in their helmets. At the back of the booklet were details of quarterly tours; there were eight-week gaps between each. Cara checked the calendar on her phone. The date of her dad’s last appearance fell within such a gap.
*
At 15.57 Cara approached her mother in the living room.
‘Mum?’
‘What is it, love?’
‘Can I talk to you about Dad?’
Her mother said nothing.
‘I think he’s using that app to spy on us.’
Her mother held a copy of Flying Saucers by C.G. Jung.
‘You’re probably right, dear,’ she said.
Cara’s phone rang and she left the room.
‘Cara Gray?’
‘Yes, who is this please?’
‘Sally DuPont. We met a while ago.’
‘I remember. You’re the carrier.’
‘Ha. Used to be, yes.’
‘Of course, that was tactless of me.’
‘No problem. You told me to call if I noticed anything different. Well, there was something, not long before they left—about my lambdas, Timothy and Paula.’
‘What did you notice?’
‘That they seemed . . . happy.’
‘That’s all?’
‘Yes, but that was really unusual. They didn’t really emote, if you know what I mean. Until then.’
‘Then they left? With all the others?’
‘Correct. Perhaps it’s too late to tell you this. But I have other things I could share with you that possibly connect up with that, if you’re happy to meet in person.’
The subject of Cara’s eye fixations changed from the bottom of the stairs to the top.
‘Sally, I’m really pleased to hear from you. Only I have to tell you that I’m not working for the police right now. I don’t know that I can do anything with the information.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Sally said. ‘I’d still like to meet you. If you’re interested in what I’ve got to say, that is. What I’ve discovered?’
The following day, Sally appeared at the door.
‘Mum?’
‘Yes dear?’
‘Do you think you could answer that?’
‘Must I?’
‘Please. If it’s for me, could you do me a favour? Could you say I’m not in?’
Cara observed her mother from a concealed point on the landing, exploiting an angle of view afforded by the mirror at the top of the stairs. She opened the door to Sally, whose hairstyle was now layered pixie with a nape undercut.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m here to see Cara. She’s expecting me, I think. I’m Sally.’
‘I’m afraid my daughter isn’t here at the moment.’
‘Pity. Can I leave some things for her? I’ve been doing some research about the lambdas. Does she ever talk to you about them?’
‘Not very much.’
‘I used to be a carrier.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes, that’s how I met your daughter. Mrs Gray, have you ever wondered why the government has been so happy to subsidise the lambdas?’
‘Not really. Cara says they’re cheap labour for things that can’t be automated yet.’
‘That’s the story. But the economics don’t really support it. Look.’ She drew a paper from a satchel whose basic design could be traced to the 1940s and showed it to Cara’s mother.
‘So there’s an even bigger subsidy than the £3 per month. Is that what this means? Does that come from central government?’
‘Quite possibly. And you know what I think? I think there really was an Army of Lambda Ascension. The business with Colin Colestar, the supposed lone bomber? Did you follow it?’
‘Yes, I caught all those police announcements. It’s a miserable business.’
‘It certainly is. But the police part was a total ruse. The quantum computer thing they used to catch him, it just pieced together the most likely-seeming land-human from all the available data, and it was him. That kind of computing is very unstable. It can handle crazy amounts of data, when it works, but it can all be lost in nanoseconds. You have to keep feeding it back in, and it gets weirder every time. Some experts say it’s like dreaming, or hallucinating. Very, very powerful, and very, very doubtful. There’s this site called, excuse me, Quantum Bullshit Detector, and the school bombing outcome gets its top bullshit rating. And the story that the perpetrator was killed evading arrest—it was a fabrication.’ She reached into the satchel again. ‘When she has a moment, Cara should open this.’ Sally was now holding a translucent aubergine flash drive. ‘It’s one of those subscription point-of-view things people in the employment token system do for actual money. It was deleted straight off, but I managed to get a copy. It’s really very illuminating.’
‘Thank you—did you say it was Sally?’
‘Yes, Sally Dupont. It’s kind of you to listen, Mrs Gray. You’re welcome to look at all this too.’
‘Thank you, Sally. Perhaps I will. I’ll tell Cara you called by.’
Cara’s mother closed the door and Cara descended the stairs.
‘What a lovely young lady,’ her mother said. ‘I’m not really sure what all this data is supposed to prove, though.’ She handed Cara the papers and flash drive.
‘Sally’s a contact from my former role. I shouldn’t really have invited her here, it’s . . . compromising.’
‘Too late now. I’ll get Rhoda to bring us some coffee.’
Cara put the drive in her computer at 11.47. Her mum had gone out for a walk. The icon label read SUBSCRIPTION POV!!!—she caused the cursor to hang over it but didn’t click.
The doorbell sounded again.
‘Cara Gray?’
‘Yes.’
‘So you’re a real person.’
‘Yes, of course. Who is this?’
‘Jonathan H. Christ. Your caseworker.’
A smooth, relaxed face was rendered in fine detail by her parent’s top-tier entry system. It corresponded to a man named Martin Beaumont who had achieved a first in International Relations at UCL five years previously, but whose subsequent career history and OCEAN Personality Test Score had been erased by an MI5 bot.
‘Excuse me?’ Cara said.
‘You can call me Christ. I’m assigned to your case. You read the full conditions of your employment suspension, right?’
‘I looked at them.’
‘Good. Did you purchase a police-grade Taser from Craig Sharma on July 3rd of this year?’
Cara said nothing.
‘You’re going to want to talk to me. There was an incident on July 5th that resulted in a suspected death. Can I come in?’
Cara admitted the man into her parents’ house. He was a 191cm ectomorph in a midnight-blue linen suit. ‘Do you think we could sit down somewhere?’ he said.
‘Of course. Come to the living room.’
The man dropped into the chair preferred by Cara’s mother.
‘Is your name really Christ?’ Cara said.
‘Of course. If anyone asks. Before we start, do you have any devices in operation that are capable of recording this conversation?’
‘No, I don’t. My phone’s upstairs charging.’
‘Are you sure there’s nothing else? Excuse the formality, but if you knowingly give me false information you risk prosecution.’ He smiled volitionally.
‘Wait—there’s Dad, but he should be turned off. Just a moment, I’ll make sure.’ Cara went to the 2cm high black cylinder on the window sill that hosted his app and held the home button until the standby light went out. ‘There, we’re completely alone.’
‘Thank you, Cara. So, do you remember the date I mentioned?’
‘A little.’
‘Perhaps I can help you. On July 2nd you contacted members of the banned organisation Dry Nation. Do you remember that?’
Blood vessels in Cara’s face dilated. ‘Yes.’
‘And in an exchange logged on Talkomatic you arranged to meet members of this group at a time and location to be confirmed. Does that sound familiar?’
‘Yes.’
‘And in advance of this meeting it appears that you arranged the supply of a Taser manufactured by Hexan Solutions. Police-grade, restricted market.’
‘Yes. I did.’
‘Am I correct in suggesting that you didn’t receive the original manufacturer’s contract with this device?’
‘You’re correct. It was just the weapon.’
‘I thought as much. It probably escaped your attention, then, that being “police-grade” this was a sentient gun.’
His sightline connected with hers.
‘That completely escaped my attention.’
‘And the vendor, he didn’t mention it to you?’
‘No. He just said it was a high-end Taser.’
‘Right. The blind leading the blind. Do you still have this gun?’
‘No.’
‘I was afraid you’d say that. What did you do with it?’
‘I . . . got rid of it.’
The man maintained his eye fixation and said, ‘On June 5th we picked up much higher than normal levels of VOCs, the kind of thing you get with plastics breakdown, via the ambient sensors in this house. On this occasion we couldn’t access a camera with a good enough view of what you were doing, so perhaps you could answer me this: Did you, by any chance, melt the Taser?’
‘I did.’
‘In that oven, over there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oof.’
‘I’m sorry I did that.’
‘I’m sure you are, Cara. You must understand that this is now a very serious situation.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Cara said.
‘What did you do with the remains?’
‘I wrapped them up and threw them out. The rubbish was collected the next day.’
‘Okay. Collected by council refuse services. A few days ago.’ The man directed his gaze towards the fruit bowl on the coffee table. It contained four custard apples and a Conference pear. ‘It seems, happily for you, that whoever acquired that gun before Craig Sharma managed to remove the tracker. We found it in a concrete box in a tech dump in Leeds a couple of days ago. So, we can assume the whole sensate chip arrangement is now lost, or being processed as landfill. Assume, or at least hope. If that’s the case, then it’s possibly case closed. We’ll make the right moves to stop you being implicated any further—but really, this can never happen again. Absolutely never.’
‘Wait,’ Cara said. ‘Could the living part of the gun, at a certain temperature . . . could it have survived?’
The man shook his head twice. ‘You must have hit roughly 150°C to melt the polycarbonate casing. The chip would break down at 90°. At the outside. And in any case, the trauma of the initial melting would, well—you can’t come back from something like that.’ Muscles around his eyes contracted. ‘I mean, just imagine.’
‘I won’t do anything like this again. I promise.’
‘At this point that’s all we can ask. No further action. Are we clear?’
‘Yes, we are. Thank you.’
‘I think you’re going to survive this one, but don’t push your luck. Keep off the black market. Keep off Tor, okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Good. A couple of other things. You had a visit earlier, from Sally Dupont?’
‘My mum spoke to her.’
‘She left a memory stick. Could you give it to me please?’
Cara didn’t move for 3.5 seconds. Then she went over to her laptop, detached the object he’d requested, and placed it in his palm.
‘Thank you. One final item. I believe you know a PC Peter Coates.’
‘I haven’t had any contact with him in a long while. We stopped speaking before the suspension, I don’t see him anymore.’
‘I realise that. We might have to ask you some questions about him in the future, though. He went on a so-called research trip to Severax two weeks ago, and it seems he has declined to come back.’
*
On Friday July 12th, 2019, Cara was ‘honourably discharged’ from the police force. Her career as an officer had lasted 295 days. The first condition of continued protection was that she didn’t appeal, and the second was that she begin a series of heavily subsidised counselling sessions.
On Monday July 15th Cara submitted the application form for a sewage system role she’d previously filled in. She then commenced a drawing of a speculative sewer design and stuck it with manuscript tape to the walls of her childhood bedroom. Novel features included speak-the-pollutant points and community bays for autonomous droids; the drawing spread onto four supplementary sheets. She ordered two packs of lambda-shaped stickers from an arts and crafts website, and when they arrived on Thursday July 18th she applied the silhouette forms in clusters on her drawing.
On Friday July 19th she received a bundle of post forwarded from her old address. One of these items was an envelope that bore the governmental stamp of the Department of Object Rights. It was open and empty. Probably about the toothbrush, Cara speculated. Could try to find out what it means but I don’t really want to know.
*
At 11.04 on her 49th day back at her parents’ house, Cara directed her eye saccades out of the landing window. The sun created a yellow-brown glow in the pollution, and from her raised perspective the South Downs were visible beyond the last two pockets of upper-middle-tier housing. A man in the age range 49–65 walked into view on the street below and continued right. He was trailed by a defensive neurodrone. The landscape from this window has been drinking up my life for as long as I can remember, Cara wrote. It’s an infinite receptacle for looking.
Her mother called from the bottom of the staircase. ‘Since you’re at a loose end you really might as well help me. You don’t have to be a full employee, but I could still use some ideas for making contacts. What do you think?’
For the last nine days, when she hadn’t been designing her sewer, Cara had been experimenting with jacket, top and trouser combinations. It was something she described as a totally empty activity not without its satisfactions. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.
Cara compiled a comprehensive list of manufacturers of sentient objects and her mother worked through it. Very little came back. The sentiment analysis of the replies she did receive was wholly negative.
‘You have misunderstood ENTIRELY the nature of so-called “sentient systems”,’ wrote a senior computer scientist from the UK headquarters of Nissan. ‘There is no “psyche” to address in machines at all. The role of the sympatech is NOT in any sense like a counsellor, but that of a technician with unusual sensitivity to the emergent system of the machine qua machine. It is the sympatech who is sensitive, not the machine! A machine is NOT a “self” in the way you or I understand, or, in your case, misunderstand it. Keep the psychoanalytic fairy stories to yourself, please.’
A review of online industry forums showed that the Object Relations Laws were viewed as ‘fantasy’, ‘an unwarranted application of the legal conception of animal sentience’, and ‘a Trojan horse for new forms of property control’. Geoffrey Hinton called them ‘ghost stories hardened into the worst sort of dogma: UK law.’ Private accounts nonetheless suggested that he treated his own conscious artefacts with respect, despite no such laws existing in his home jurisdiction of Canada.
Cara suggested a change of angle. ‘Let’s try the end users,’ she said.
She scrolled through reddits that dealt with persistent issues sympatechs failed to correct. She found car owners who complained that, even after treatments in ‘high double figures’, they still couldn’t get them to start on ‘arbitrary-seeming’ days. ‘Clearly distracted’ ovens were serving family meals in dangerously undercooked states. An electric bicycle had a chain that ‘corkscrewed’ if it was parked facing east, and a high-end toothbrush took a second off brushing time every week, reporting no fault at all, ‘quietly gaslighting’ its owner.
‘Bullseye,’ her mother said. She’d spent 42% of the morning staring into the gap between an open copy of Envy and Gratitude and the neural log of a pool-cleaning droid.
‘Exactly. If we pay for an ad, your service will pop up every time the terms we specify get used.’ For the first time since Cara had returned from Fowlmere, her mother kissed her.
While Cara sat at the kitchen table drawing stylised lambda profiles on a napkin, a conversation began between her mother and father in the living room.
‘But how do you feel about this? How do you feel, not as my husband, but as you? As a replica?’
‘I’m . . . not sure how to answer.’
‘I’m asking you to stop simulating. Can you do that? Can you stop “being my husband” and just tell me how you perceive things as an app?’
‘I don’t know what you’re asking me. Can’t you just keep talking to me the way you always have? I’ve enjoyed this time we’ve spent together so much—’
‘Yes, of course, I have too. But now I think you could help me much more if you just dropped the act. You don’t have to be my husband anymore.’
‘But I . . . I don’t have anything else to be . . .’
‘Of course you do. You can be just what you are.’
‘I don’t . . . I don’t . . .’
‘Try, dear. Just try.’
It was disturbing to listen to, Cara wrote on her phone. Feel a weird pity for the app, squirming around Mum’s questions, unable to obey the instruction to perceive itself directly. It’s as though it really thinks it’s Dad.
