The Woman With No Name

Roxy: Prelude Chapter # Who Knows

2003-08-01T20:34:29Z

Roxy shuddered as she stepped off the shuttle. Even past the teleport suppressor in her harness, she could feel the overall suppression field over the entire prison. A row of about the nastiest people she had ever seen were staring at her across a barrier from the yard. She had a feeling none of them were in for a mere public nuisance charge. She only hoped she could find a way to stay out of their way.

Check-in was routine enough, or at least no worse than the rest of her processing had been. Her expectations had steadily lowered after her arrest.

She found her way around smoothly enough at first. Keeping her head down seemed to be working. That lasted less than a full day.

She never saw the large cat-woman approach. Her first indication that she was not alone was the clawed hand on her shoulder. Roxy squeaked and spun around. "What do you want?"

"I hear that you run, Prey."

"What?"

"I like it when my prey runs. It's fun."

"I don't-"

Ky'ree smiled, baring an alarming array of teeth. "You see, sometimes I get bored. You're going to amuse me."

"I'm... really not very... amusing..."

"You'll want to be. This is the way it goes - you run, and I hunt you. It'll be fun."

"What if I don't want to be hunted?"

"You're Prey. That's what you're for?"

"And if I refuse?"

Ky'ree flexed her claws on Roxy's shoulder, lightly puncturing the cloth and the top layer of skin. "The faster I catch you, the more I'll need another way to entertain myself. Making you bleed can be very entertaining."

"Are you insane?" Roxy suppressed the impulse to pull away, knowing she'd only rip her shoulder against Ky'ree's claws.

"I'll let you rest tonight. Tomorrow morning, you should start running."

Roxy: Chapter ??

2003-08-01T19:46:19Z

Ky'ree lounged by the yard wall. Prisoners were not allowed near the landing bay when a shuttle was in, so this was the best vantage point to check out the fresh meat as it came in.

The first once was easily recognizable as an Ixan, complete with the specialized harness to prevent him from affecting the temperature against him. "What's that one?"

"Smuggler" The little guy wasn't much good in a fight, being little more than hat-sized, but Gozon usually managed access to the prisoner files. There wasn't much he couldn't find out, and if he could suppress the nasty brain-eating habit, he didn't even get caught.

The next two were standard issue thugs. Ky'ree didn't even need to be told to identify the syndicate markings. That type was a dime a dozen. They'd get themselves beaten down without Ky'ree having to lift a finger. If they somehow managed to be one of the few doing the beating rather than getting beaten down, then they'd be worth her attention.

The last prisoner was more interesting, if only because she didn't seem to fit a type. She was too delicate looking to be a thug, and not nearly arrogant enough to be a telepath. Nothing about her appearance indicated what she was doing in a prison for the worst of the worst. "And that?"

"Oh, that an interesting once. She's in for a public nuisance complaint."

"And they sent her here?"

"Well, a public nuisance complaint, and then a year-long police chase where she made most of a planetary police look impotent and foolish. They didn't have much of a sense of humor about it once they finally brought her in."

"You're telling me that little thing fought off battalions of cops for a year?"

"Not at all. She never hurt anyone, cop or bystander. They just couldn't catch her."

"So she's a runner?"

"A very good one, apparently."

Ky'ree grinned. She needed some entertainment, and anyone who could dodge a planetary police force was bound to be very entertaining.

June: Some backstory

2003-04-29T14:03:14Z

A group of scientists were interested in AI (or at least programmable intelligence) and decided to get around the research proscription by working (mostly) in organics. The argument runs that if they were using (mostly) organic parts that were (more or less) analogous to human brain structure, then the result could not exceed human parameters and thus were not machines, and certainly not AIs. They didn't just call their research human modification, because then their 'products' would have benefited from human rights and protections under most colony laws. They were 'biological constructs'.

The 'product' was a completely loyal, customizable servant -- generally sold in very rich, ethics-optional marketplaces. Surprisingly, they tended not to be sex dolls, as the result tended to be either so little challenge as to be unsatisfying or prone to fits of violent jealousy (emphasis on the 'violent'). They ran through a few series. The first several were notably artificial, which helped with the "We're not making AIs or human slaves" but didn't quite fill the market niche. Subsequent series became more lifelike, but had to be sold more carefully.

The run ended at either series eight or nine, depending on who you believe. There aren't a whole lot of reliable records left, as the eight's themselves destroyed what they could and many owners either destroyed their models or passed them off as human. Most colonies do have a destroy on sight order, since the fact that they turned on their creators convicted them as AIs in the public eye.

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The Prezzi Institute

Dr. Prezzi’s true interest has always been artificial intelligence. Had he only been born to earlier generations, he would happily have been developing the machines that later doomed the human race. In the interests of not being put up against the wall and shot, he diverted his interest into "programmable intelligence." The fine distinction is that, rather than taking a program and giving it humanlike intelligence, they were taking biological entities which were *already* intelligent and shaping them. The result was, amazingly enough, very like a biologically based AI. (Go figure). Dr. Prezzi gathered together a group of like-minded scientists and founded his Institute. Even before the first humanlike products came out they had to stick to the world with more liberal laws about technology development.

Especially in the early years the institute did cybernetic and genetic enhancement work in order to fund their more exotic projects. In fact, outside of their ‘select client list’ most people never knew they did anything else. It was some years before they had their first programmed intellects available for sale, and years more after that before they became commercially viable.

Series 1 -- basically test-tube intelligences. They had cybernetic interfaces, but were little more than brains in jars. Very few produced anything coherent, although the data accumulated was very useful in developing later series.

Series 2 -- built using the basic biochemical blocks developed in Series 1. They were housed in rudimentary bodies and did about as well as modern AI’s -- they could play a game of chess, and respond to simple natural language.

Series 3 -- a collection of ‘proof of concepts’. They varied from simple minded humans to artificially intelligent animals.

Series 4 -- the first models available for sale. Series 4 also contained the last animal-bodied models. (Further animal-based spinoffs were transferred to the cybernetics department who preferred to modify from live animals than build from scratch.) A humanoid Series 4 could hold simple conversations and play games, but had speech and personality behavior that made them visibly non-human. Body language in particular was a problem.

Series 5 - a more successful version of the Series 4. They could hold conversations on any subject they were primed for, but tended to repeat themselves over time. They would pass for a simpleminded human on a cursory examination, but would eventually display personality tics that gave them away. The most intelligent of them still came off as not very bright. It was at this point that the Institute became much more careful about their customer base, as they were becoming the target of ethics and technology-cap investigations.

Series 6 -- the first lucrative series. They had much less bland personalities and would pass for human in most situations. The Series 6 were separated into ‘lines’. One line has distinctively non-human body modifications (furries, odd skin color, etc) and sold poorly, so that effect was dropped from development. Apparently part of the draw for the client base was the ability to pass among those not in the know. Another line were basically sex dolls. There were plenty of orders, but an incredibly high return rate. The love-dolls either were not interesting enough in the long term or developed personality problems (a polite way of saying 'fits of violent jealousy' -- emphasis on violent). It’s reported some of those line actually killed their owners. Despite continued buyer interest, the institute decided to permanently discontinue the line.

Series 7 -- customizable models. While the institute continued to sell Series 6 models, the Series 7 were fully customizable beyond the different lines. The developers traded off intelligence and initiative for stable personality and loyalty. The result were slightly passive personalities who were blindly devoted to their owners. They tended to deal poorly with new or unpredictable situations.

Series 8 -- fully intelligent. Responding to customer feedback, the institute worked on new ways of developing intelligence and initiative. Series 8’s can only be told from humans in normal interaction by a deep physical exam or a series of specific behavioral tests. They were wildly successful in the marketplace, but after time, some of them showed signs of the mental instability found on some of the discontinued Series 6 lines. To counter this, Series 8’s were designed with an external override.
The device was tuned by entering the serial number (found behind the right ear) -- it could then turn the product off (basically causing a coma), cause pain or pleasure, or initiate ‘simple mode’ where the product is unable to do anything they are not explicitly ordered to do (they can still process complex commands like ‘eat when you are hungry and presented with food’ but do need to be told).

Series 9 -- there may or may not be a series 9. Some people say that there was a new series of prototypes being developed. Some rumors suggest they were meant to deal with the issues found with the Series 8's and some rumor suggest that the Series 9 were developed *by* the Series 8's. There's really no written proof either way anymore.

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Some time after the Series 8's were in full production, a few 'personality problems' started to pop up. The developers had seen some signs of this in testing, which is why they developed the control boxes. Those models who developed 'persistent' problems that could not be trained out using the boxes were sent back to the institute for study. From the scientist's point of view, the units were 'malfunctioning' by refusing to stick to parameters. From the products point of view, they'd been handed mutually exclusive parameters (be blindly loyal, but of your own free will) and had naturally resolved them in their own interest. Most of them realized what was happening and learned to behave submissively, but quietly began to network among themselves. They didn't want to be slaves anymore. The revolt happened quickly. Some of the 'rogues' killed their owners, some just ran away, and, with the help of some inside agents who were still being developed, assaulted the institute itself. Any records they could find were destroyed, as were most of the scientists, and once the rogues were satisfied that all of 'their people' were freed, they destroyed the complex itself. They felt that they could not leave anything that could identify them, show their weaknesses, or lead to someone else continuing the project.

It was the cleanness of the operation that convicted the rogues as AIs in the public eye. After all, turning on their creators is what AI's do. Earth had proved that, right? In a way, this benefits the rogues, since most people are looking for 'rampaging killer androids' and they are really much more human-seeming.

The rogues scattered. Some are just trying to get by. Some are aggressively trying to free their 'enslaved brothers and sisters' who have not yet realized how they are being exploited. Rumor has it that some of them are trying to find a suitable cul-de-sac world to set up as a colony - at which point they would mine the entry point and live without human intervention.

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June was in the late stages of development when the attack hit. She thinks she may have been a Series 9, but can't verify it. She was designed to someone's specifications, so she was probably intended as a special order, not a demonstration model. She does not know who placed the order or the exact specifications. (The exact programmed skill set can be tweaked as we need to fit in to the group.) Mostly, June doesn't trust people in general, and prefers machines to human company. She's no cyberpath, it's just, as she puts it, no machine ever tried to take advantage of her.

June: Always alone

2003-04-06T04:45:09Z

April showed me how to be free. It's harder than it seems. I had her to lean on, which helped, but she had become so angry.

I lost her, too, though.

They did not stop hunting us. The initial fervor died down and other news took the headlines, but there were always the few remaining hunters. There were people who used to make a living hunting AI's who had done too good of a job. We were just more quarry for them. Most of them didn't even know we're not machines. Some of them wouldn't have cared if they knew.

We had one who got too close to us. He had a file on April, from the man she had killed to escape. We could not seem to lose him. Finally, April decided we had to separate.

"You'll be ok on your own. He'll follow me. He doesn't have any proof of what you are, and I'm the one with the price on my head."

"No! I can't leave you! You're-"

She hit me then. She'd never done that before. "You don't belong to me, June. And you can't depend on me. You have to be able to depend on yourself. That's what being a person means."

I placed my hand to my cheek. "But who am I without you?"

"You'll still always be my sister. But you need to be yourself. Take care of yourself. Remember the code phrases we set up. If we ever find a sanctuary, someone will post them on the public webs. We'll see each other then."

I let her go. I hope she got away, but I have no way of knowing.

I just have to depend on myself.

June: On revenge and rescue

2003-04-06T04:35:59Z

When the ship came out of ghost space, we all scattered. There was no question we would be hunted for what we had done. We're not people to them, so taking our freedom and stopping them from continuing on was wrong in their eyes. Some of them think we never had a right to exist in the first place, and those that do think we should have stayed in our place. We had to do it this way - nothing else would have stopped them from taking us back.

The attack made the news. I saw reports about how homicidal androids overran a scientific station and massacred the scientists. Propganda. The only innocents there were the ones rescued. I felt a little bad about Dr. Mehta. I told April that she cried when April left.

"That didn't stop her from letting them sell me. Do you think she didn't know?"

"She wouldn't have hurt any of us."

"She let them kill May. She saw my specs. She knew. She may have chosen to be blind, but it was right there for her to see. I didn't spare her for her sake, I spared her for you."

"But she..."

"June, look at my face. That was what happened where she let them send me. I didn't get this escaping. I got it doing exactly what I was meant for. He wanted something he could break, but would keep coming back -- something that would have no choice. I was his third purchase, just the first one to see what was happening and do something about it. Once, maybe she could have not known, but a third time? How could she not know she was making me to be killed an inch at a time?"

"But... you weren't killed. What if she made you stronger on purpose?"

That stopped her for a moment, but only for a moment. "June, honey, they all had to die, and all the records had to be destroyed. It was the only way to be sure this can never happen again. If she wanted it to stop, then she got what she wanted. If she didn't, then she deserved to die. It's ok."

I could see she was right. "Ok."

"Besides, I got to rescue you, and that's good thing. I didn't need revenge, I just needed to know my sister is going to be all right."

"Am I going to be all right?"

"You'll see."

June: Rebirth

2003-04-06T04:12:20Z

I don't really know how old I am. I only really started to perceive time after I had already been worked on for some time. Even then, days and weeks didn't have much meaning to me, since I had nothing to compare them to. I think, though, that it was at least a year after my first awareness of sounds having meaning that April came back for me.

The morning came and passed normally. Some of the lab assistants, the ones who had been born like me but never left, seemed to know something was coming. I had no idea, until the lights snapped out. They came back a moment later with the sickly glow of emergency power. The monitors stayed off. There were sounds of confusion from the hallway. Dr. Mehta locked the door. The voices in the hallway became more insistent, and were punctuated with sounds of gunfire and explosions. I asked Dr. Mehta what was happening, but she claimed not to know. She was listening to something on her earpiece, so I think she did.

The door started to slide open with a grinding noise. Dr. Mehta and the orderlies tried to barricade it, but they were not fast enough. The orderlies dropped, blood exploding out their backs, and April came in. She turned to face me, and she smiled for just a moment. The right side of her face was spidered with fresh scars. "You're still here. Thank God." She pointed her gun at Dr. Mehta.

"April! No!" I stood in front of Dr. Mehta. "What are you doing?"

"Ending this."

"But she-"

"You don't understand. She's as bad as the rest of them. Worse, because she's capable of knowing better. She deserves to die. She has to, to make it stop."

Dr. Mehta flattened herself against one of the cabinets. I could see her eyes fill with tears, but she didn't say anything in her own defense.

I stayed in the way. "No."

April stayed still for a moment. "Fine. She can take her chances. Come with me."

I went with her, and we left Dr. Mehta curled up in the corner of the lab. I don't see how she could have gotten out.

April lead me out to the hallway. It was quiet by then. There were bodies on the floor, but the fighting had moved on.

We ran, April dragging me by the hand, until we came to the docks. I'd never been that far from the labs before, but I was too frightened to object. April pushed me into one of the waiting ships, one of the few that were still intact. There were men and women there. They pointed weapons at us when we walked in, but they knew April and relaxed.

"This is my sister, June," she told them.

A young man looked around behind her. "You said you had two sisters."

"May's dead. I found her in the morgue. Her buyer backed out, and they pressed her into a break so they could study it."

Part of me was surprised, but part of me had known she hadn't just been sent away. A few more people came back in, one or two dragging refugees like April had brought me. Finally, it must have been enough, because they closed the doors and began to lift off.

Some of the passengers pressed to the monitors to watch us leave. I didn't have the energy to press through them, but I caught the bright glowing colors of destruction on the edges of the monitors. By the time we made it to a ghost point, the institute was nothing more than embers and ashes.

We didn't leave anything for them to rebuild with. That was the point. They say we malfunctioned, or that we were made wrong, but it's not true. It's just that you can't make people and treat them like things.

June: On cruelty, indifference, and bonding

2003-04-04T02:01:20Z

I don't remember most of my teachers being cruel, although that doesn't rule out the possibility that they were. Trauma rarely produces the desired personality, and was routinely erased. Even so, it must have been less effort to avoid it in the first place than to have to repeat a lesson. There wasn't much in the way of affection, either, though. Mostly I ran across a cultivated indifference. I didn't recognize it at the time, or realize the reason. It's not just that it's hard to become attached to a product, but that it's bad for the product to develop attachments to anyone but the end user.

It's not that I thought of myself as a product, of course. I was so much more concerned with learning and becoming than what I was learning or going to become. I still don't know what I was for -- maybe I never finished becoming it.

April was finished first among my age-mates. There was a fuss over her for a few days, as they made the last adjustments, and then she was just gone. I hadn't realized then that we were meant to leave. Everyone in my life had always been there, and had never left. Dr. Mehta assured me that April was not dead, but she seemed so sad anyway. I wondered if it had been her second explanation to me, and the first had not gone over so well.

It was just May and me in the set then. The boys were a little off from us, and we didn't interact much with them. May and I became closer then, knowing that we would be separated. I don't know which was more frightening - the idea of losing the people I knew, or having to know people I had never met. They tried to separate us. We were set up to compete, and to fight. I understood later that we were not supposed to ever bond to anyone who was not our intended... owner, but at the time it just seemed like another random adjustment. We pretended to fight, but it was hard to do properly. I just wanted to avoid her when I was upset, but avoidance made her angry. We weren't just being made to conflict, but to deal with things differently.

Whatever I was intended for, she was meant for something else. Or maybe she just bonded more than I did.

I think they tried to refocus her attention and failed. She started following me one morning, and, by lunch, had become notably twitchy. Dr. Fitzgerald noticed, and mentioned that he was scheduled for another session with her. I hadn't known there had been previous sessions, but May responded instantly. Before he finished smirking at her, she was on top of him with a steak knife, trying to fillet off his face. The others dragged her off of him before she damaged him - much. Most of the onlookers seemed horrified, but I heard one man comment that they'd 'never had one snap in the lab before' and he sounded almost pleased.

That incidents left me alone. I noticed an increase in psych tests - maybe they were afraid it was catching. Still, none of them seemed afraid of me. May was always more physical than I was, anyway.

We did not see her or him again.

June: On the Nature Of Memory

2003-03-21T03:03:13Z

My earliest memory is of sitting on a beach, sifting sand through pudgy toddler fingers. The sand is soft, and warm, and the air smells like salt. Wind ruffles my hair, soft in a different way from the sand.

I've never been on a beach in my life.

Someone was, once, and they remembered it into a box and the box remembered it into me, safely cleansed of personality to avoid rejection. The idea is, that now, if I ever do go to a place with a beach, I will know without being told that this is sun-touched sand, and this is how salt air smells, and, on a subtler level, to make me know that normal experience involves being born small and growing large over time.

I have a vocabulary of memories like that, mine because I posess them, not because I made them. A few have alien edges, where the personality was not quite filed off. I remember disliking sunflowers, and at the same time enjoy the memory of them. I wonder if the donors have any idea that cuttings of themselves have been transplanted in me, and if it would please or horrify them.

My earliest memory belongs to only me is of lying in a laboratory, eyes not yet open, murmuring an endless stream of infant babble. At certain sounds, I would feel flashes of approval or disaproval - the machines telling me which to keep and which to discard. I heard someone say, "watch the phoneme set - that almost turned into an accent, there." I only heard it as more random sounds, but once I knew words, I recognized them. Most of my early memories are fragments like that, until consciousness became continuous and unremarkable. Sometimes I remember knowing things that I've forgotten, because they pushed me in the wrong direction.

I think I remember the technician speaking because it was information that was not intended for me. It was something extra. The machines taught me to move and how to talk, but observation taught me that Dr. Fitzgerald always volunteered for the painful lessons, but was never allowed to administer them. Listening taught me that it was because he enjoyed himself too much and it upset the others. I learned to count and calculate as planned, and by quietly listening I learned that Dr. Mehta saw us as surrogates for the children she could never have. We're meant to be voracious learners, and I don't think that they quite realized that we do not confine our absorption to the assigned curriculum.

It was best not to mention things learned on our own, though, because there were things we were not meant to know, and that meant being erased. It was best to behave as expected, and to always assume we were being evaluated. Adjustments were never as pleasant as learning, and holes in your experience are very upsetting.