The Art of Adaptation Read online

  “The Organa remember the basics just fine.”

  “Okay. You’re right, Houston,” Benson said. “We’ll round up a bunch of technophobe hippies and get them to fuck in front of us. They can show us how it’s done, with all their back fat and hairy armpits. Because that’s what the NAU wants. And hey, I’m sure they won’t mind helping us out.”

  Charisma said, “It’s a lot more than being simple and basic, anyway. You think you can find anyone in the Organa who’s intuitive like Chloe? It’s not just raw, sexual talent she’s exhibiting. She’s a natural with technology, too. We haven’t thrown her a single toy she’s not known exactly how to use, and better than anyone before her. I watched her do a VR demo in one of the virtual meetups that was super hot. Do you know how hard it is to make VR hot, even within the 50 exapixel immersion framework?”

  “We’ll improve that,” said Alexa. “Once The Beam is live and we have its engine, VR should approach realistic immersion. We just can’t do it on the beta. We can run sims, but there’s something in there I don’t understand. Has to do with the AI — it learns or something, so it needs a wider network. The computations required for natural responses are too fast, even for our systems.”

  “Intuition again,” said Parker, tapping his fingers on the table. “If the processors are intuitive, they don’t need to keep running behavior-recognition algorithms. They can simply think and respond.”

  “AI doesn’t really think,” said Houston, in the tone of someone correcting an idiot.

  “Maybe and maybe not,” Alexa said. “Regardless, we need to get Chloe into more sims. See what we can gather.”

  “You think the AI can learn from her?” Parker asked.

  Alexa shrugged.

  Parker’s mouth formed a thoughtful frown.

  Olivia uncrossed and recrossed her legs, then flopped her hands palms up. “I just don’t see what the big deal is. I mean, I’ve come around on Chloe, but I don’t get why we’re supposed to put so much stock in this thing with Gregory. So she rocked his world. So what? She’s done that to everyone.”

  “Have you seen immersion in The Beam beta?” Alexa asked.

  Olivia shook her head.

  “It’s still early, but Quark says the system is supposed to learn, once it’s networked and live.”

  “Are we sure that will actually happen?” Parker asked. “I keep hearing Noah West is sick. Very sick. Without West, there may be no Beam.”

  “Rumors,” said Houston. “We all spoke with him two weeks ago on the vid-conf and he seemed fine.”

  “Then why are people saying he might be dying?”

  “He’s the most iconic man of our time,” Houston said. “The father of motherfucking Crossbrace. When haven’t people spread crazy ideas about people like that?”

  Parker shook his head. “This isn’t the rumor mill. I’m hearing it from Quark insiders.”

  Houston waved dismissively.

  “Regardless,” Alexa continued, annoyed by the interruption, “there are problems with virtual reality. Beam VR, even this early, is much better than Crossbrace VR, but it’s still a visor, headphones, and gloves. Maybe one day we’ll figure out how to plug directly into brains, but … well, that’s beside the point. The point is, right now we have early access to the best, with maybe a year’s lead on the world.”

  Alexa paced, slowly circling the table. This caused Parker to stand, because he’d said repeatedly that Alexa paced around the others as a power move, and he didn’t want her thinking she controlled him.

  “Immersion is the future,” Alexa said. “For now, it’s shit. But it won’t be shit forever. I was talking to Steve the other day. He said Quark, too, feels that immersion will grow up after The Beam. Just think about that: What if you could truly immerse? What if you could be somewhere else at the same time you were sitting at home with something plugged into your head?”

  “Fairy tales. It’s science fiction.” Benson turned to Parker. “Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, have you ever read anything by that old author, William Gibson?”

  Alexa fixed Benson and Parker with a stare. “Really. You boys don’t think they’ll ever be able to plug into the brain? Trick your senses into believing you’re somewhere you’re not?”

  Parker extended two fists toward Alexa, rolled his hand over, and spread it into a flat palm. Then he opened the other. Both were empty, but Alexa, who’d seen this gag plenty of times, knew she was supposed to picture a pill in each hand. He said, “You can take the blue pill, or you can take the red pill … ”

  Alexa said, “Really? Never at all. Science will never, ever make it possible?”

  He dropped his hands. “Sure. Maybe. After many, many years.”

  “How long are you planning to be part of O, Parker?” Alexa said. “And how long do you think those repair nanos in your bloodstream will keep you alive?”

  Parker turned away, bored.

  “Even if it never happens,” Alexa continued, now ignoring Parker and addressing the others, “VR porn will continue to grow. The Beam gloves are excellent, and the image resolution is fantastic. You can almost feel skin, and it actually — finally — feels like skin. But even VR porn is passive. Based on what I’ve heard about the AI, I figure it’s only a matter of time before the interactive porn gets better … and even if we don’t make it to full immersion, we’re creeping toward it.”

  Olivia still seemed confused. “But what does this have to do with Chloe?”

  “Intuition,” said Parker.

  “So, you’re back on board?” Alexa sounded irritated.

  “I never left. But when you say stupid shit, don’t expect me to ignore it.”

  Despite her annoyance, Alexa nodded toward Parker. “Intuition,” she repeated. “That’s the nut to crack. We can’t build on algorithms, even if that’s how this all started.” She looked Parker in the eye. She meant their ancient HALO algorithm from back in 2016, and he knew it. “Algorithms can’t think. A worthwhile technology needs to think and intuit — and do it fast and well. VR is VR, but simulations with artificial participants will have to react in real ways before it’s worth doing — and that process requires intuitive AI. It can’t be call-and-respond, with the user having to make the AI’s choices. The query process breaks the suspension of disbelief. Ruins the experience.”

  Houston turned to one side, then the other. Nobody was looking his way, so he crossed his arms and spoke to the room: “This is putting the cart before the horse.”

  “How so?”

  “Immersion is shit. VR is stupid. VR porn is a novelty. If we want to focus on porn, we should let Benson and Charisma take the lead on a new line of holos. But is that where we really want to focus? You were so interested in our prodigy.”

  “As a way to further immersion,” Alexa said, irritated that Houston wasn’t getting it.

  “Immersion,” Houston repeated with emphasis, “is shit.”

  “For now.”

  “Shit,” Houston repeated.

  “For now. Are you really telling me you’re going to zig when everyone else zigs?”

  “It’s not always the right choice to zag, Alexa. Just because nobody is paying attention to something isn’t a reason to do it. Sometimes it’s best to focus on what’s popular or strong. I swear, sometimes I think you want change for the sake of change. Why not play to our strengths? Use your girl in our spas like we’ve been doing.”

  “We could use her to collect secrets,” Olivia said. “Man oh man, was that a lucrative sideline back when I was running my brothels.”

  “Oh, that’s a tremendous idea,” said Charisma, turning to glare at Olivia. “Betray our clients and break the law.”

  “Because you’ve always done things aboveboard. And nothing we do here ever crosses the line or betrays client trust.”

  “Not like that.”

  “Like promising absolute discretion, then recording the entire private encounter, right, Charisma?” Olivia’s eyes flicked toward the tab
let, where Bordeaux’s paid-for privacy was laid bare.

  “That’s different. We record client encounters for data, not to share and exploit.”

  “So, it’s okay if the people never know you’re betraying them.” Olivia shifted in her chair, pretending to be very interested. “I just want to make sure I have this duplicity right.”

  “You just suggested we use Chloe to collect client secrets so we could blackmail them!”

  Olivia’s feigned posture dissolved. “Did I say that? Did I ever say anything at all like that?”

  “Isn’t that what you did in your brothels?”

  Olivia flinched because, of course, that was exactly what she’d done. Before the NAU built the lattice to isolate the continent and before its economy finally recovered, many citizens found themselves in hard times. Olivia had been a small-time operator, running an exclusive brothel that was deep in the red from bribes to keep her once-illegal operation running.

  To dig out, she’d blown the lid on her entire roster of high-profile clients — after, it was rumored, accepting blackmail ransoms from many for her silence. The move was solid from a bottom-line perspective, and Olivia’s operation had only ascended, but it had forced her to bleach her name from the brothel’s.

  “Knock it off, Charisma,” Alexa said. “You too, Olivia. We’re not blackmailing our clients.”

  “I never said—”

  Alexa held up a hand. “Look. We know we need to find a way to harness Chloe’s intuitive ability. Right?”

  Heads nodded, some reluctantly.

  “She can intuit how to use our technology. She can intuit how to treat a client. She doesn’t need our instruction. Chloe let the holos and vidstreams run while she was researching Gregory, because she was required to review them, but she averted her eyes.”

  “The canvas can tell where her eyes were?” Benson asked.

  Alexa nodded. “Eye position, attention as measured by minute electrochemical signals detectable by the box, body position, pulse, skin temperature, all that. Chloe ignored his background. She wanted to go in cold.”

  “So?” said Parker.

  “We’re going about this wrong,” Alexa said. “We shouldn’t be using Chloe as an escort. We know she can blow our clients’ minds, but that’s a one-to-one thing. Her use as an escort isn’t scalable, because there’s only one Chloe. We should be focusing on finding the answer to a new and different question.”

  Olivia squinted. “What are you talking about, Alexa?”

  Alexa stood at the edge of the conference table beside Parker. Behind them, in the glass booth, the black man pulled out of the brunette and shot a thick, white line across her back.

  “Who is Chloe Shaw?” Alexa said.

  Nobody responded, all seeming to decide that the question was both figurative and rhetorical.

  “What exactly do you have in mind?” Parker asked.

  “Instead of using Chloe to learn about other people,” Alexa said, “we should be using Chloe to learn about Chloe.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Brad.”

  “I’m not Brad, Chloe,” the porter said.

  She checked herself. After a day of using the canvas and being guided by a hologram that looked exactly like her ex-boyfriend, she found the experience decidedly creepy. The porter had nailed Brad’s personality, down to the passive-aggressive way he agreed to things (for the porter, these “things” were mostly searches) with a tiny hesitation that made Chloe feel guilty for asking.

  She didn’t know why O had used Brad as a model for the porter, other than to show her what was possible, and didn’t know how exactly they’d mapped him so perfectly. But it felt like a violation and she hated it — though maybe that, too, was intentional, to show her who was in charge. She’d tried to change the porter to something else but was unable, so instead she’d instructed it to correct her every time she got too familiar.

  But all that mattered now was unraveling some of the mystery, starting with O’s strange “Orion” test.

  “Canvas,” she amended.

  “Yes, Chloe?”

  “Search Orion.”

  Chloe had quickly learned to use the intuitive web interface, but it required the special gloves she’d found packed in the canvas’s case. They had felt perfect from the start. She’d been using the gloves for weeks, but each time it felt like she’d been living inside them for years.

  Maybe that was the point. It was called an intuitive web. Perhaps it was supposed to feel natural. Chloe wondered if the same thinking had gone into establishing Brad as her porter. Maybe O had chosen Brad to guide her for comfort.

  If so, they’d sorely missed the mark.

  Chloe had dated Brad for years, screwed him once, then ditched him to become a glass-table dancer and high-end escort. The sex business had shed most of the stigma that once clung to its skin, but there were still plenty of people in the world who remembered when sex — even non-paid sex — was taboo.

  Search results appeared as a ball hologram floating above the canvas. Sitting on the floor, Chloe was too low to use the box comfortably. She came up onto her knees, put on the slim, black gloves, and pulled the holo apart.

  Using the ball was like picking bits of skin from an orange. Chloe dug and shifted pieces until she found a cluster of similar results relating to the Orion’s use in spas. The result was a 2wiki and seemed to have been added to by many people. Chloe read all the contributors’ remarks, searching for an experience that sounded something like hers, when O had tested her on the Orion a few weeks ago.

  None came close. Most described either a feeling of burning pleasure or a sense of panic at being trapped, consistent with the official symptom-based description in the main entry.

  It made sense. The Orion was designed to tap directly into the brain’s pleasure centers and stimulate them via a weak electrical pulse. It similarly altered brain chemistry by stimulating adrenaline release and lubricating synaptic function in those parts of the brain responsible for dreaming.

  At best, the Orion — when combined with appropriate external stimulation — would simulate a heart-pounding, breathless romp in the sheets … or against a wall, or wherever the user told themselves they wanted to be. Almost all the models, including the one Chloe had used, came paired with a virtual reality rig. You were supposed to strap in, get the brain magic going, and play your favorite VR through goggles and headphones.

  If the VR was porn and if you paired the experience with a digital manipulator, reports suggested it was almost like fucking on laughing gas. Or in a lucid dream, perhaps. You knew you weren’t really doing those things, but didn’t remotely care.

  There were other user reports, detailing an Orion ride as something like torture. The main entry reported that panic reactions were due to a loss of control — the same sensation that, ironically enough, caused unbridled pleasure in the minds and bodies of other users.

  Whether an Orion session was pleasurable or repugnant came down to whether a person enjoyed surrendering their sensations or feared the loss of control.

  The experience was neither for Chloe. Barnes said the company wanted her tested on the Orion to determine her response, and Chloe, unfamiliar with the device, didn’t know what that meant. After some research, she decided O probably wanted to see if she was a pleasure responder or a panic responder.

  But Chloe had turned out to be neither black nor white.

  Rather than losing herself to the electrical signals that were supposed to stimulate her fantasies, she’d found that they’d intrigued her. Rather than floating off into a fugue of erotic pleasures, she’d drifted into something she saw as a great void.

  It felt like meditation, not sex. When she’d come out and removed her goggles to find the digital manipulator between her legs with its digits knuckle-deep in her pussy, Chloe had been surprised, because she hadn’t known it was there.

  Parker hadn’t even asked how things went. He’d simply announced to Chloe’s surprise that
she’d registered six orgasms (four clitoral, two vaginal) then smiled and welcomed her aboard.

  Chloe looked at the porter, projected across the room. He’d taken a seat on a kitchen chair. The nuances were creepy. Why would a hologram sit?

  So it seems less like a hologram.

  Brad’s form was shimmery and semi-transparent, like hanging out with a ghost. Chloe wondered why she didn’t turn it off. Brad was her porter whether she liked it or not, but visual mode was optional.

  Chloe projected Brad because despite the emotional baggage, he was familiar. Beyond the people at O, Chloe had no one in District Zero.

  Somebody, it turned out, was better than nobody.

  “Brad.”

  “I’m not Brad.”

  “Goddammit, Brad.”

  “I’m not Brad, Chloe.”

  “Fine. Has an Orion user ever reported—”

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Of course I’m talking to you.”

  “You didn’t address me, so I couldn’t be sure.”

  “I just fucking said ‘Brad’ twice.”

  “I’m not Brad,” he reminded her.

  “Do I really have to say ‘canvas’ every time?”

  “Well, since you don’t like the name Brad, I suppose you do.”

  Chloe shook like her head. He was always like this. But that wasn’t right; Brad had always been like this, not the porter — who wasn’t, of course, Brad.

  “You’re the only other person in the room … canvas.”

  “I’m not a person.” His voice was almost pouty, as if Chloe had insulted him and he wanted to rub it in.

  “Jesus fucking Christ. Are all porters like you? Because if so, I don’t know that I want this Beam thing to go public. There will be mass suicides, followed by cunty porters deleted across the District.”

  The porter said nothing. Chloe, feeling supremely pissed, said, “Canvas. You’re a cunt.”