The Improbable Rise of Singularity Girl Read online

  Life continued to be busy, and Helen's rats continued pouring data into her mind. It had been a long time since she'd thought about the assassination attempt against Governor Wright. So she was a bit surprised when her meditation was interrupted by a blip "From the Office of the Vice President-elect." She stood up, rolled her head to get rid of the stiffness in her neck, and answered it.

  "Helen Roderick?" asked the woman who popped into existence before her. She was blond, dressed in somber, professional colors, and her pretty features were stern and humorless.

  "Um... That's me."

  "Please hold for the Vice President-elect," was all she said. Then she morphed into the seal of the United States, with the message "Please Stand By" below it. She waited, feeling more and more self-conscious. She considered changing out of her sweats, but decided against it; if he wanted to interrupt her, let him suffer the consequences.

  Finally, the seal morphed into the Vice President-elect, Senator Vincent Albrecht. He was an attractive, athletic man dressed casually in a long-sleeved gray shirt and dark slacks. He gave her an easy smile and said, "Miss Roderick, it's good to see you again."

  "Senator Albrecht," she replied, trying to sound confident. "I've heard you've recently moved up in the world."

  "So have you," he said with admiration, and a wave of shyness washed over Helen. "I meant to stay in touch after that shindig on the zeppelin. What's it been, two years? Things have been a bit busy, especially lately."

  "I heard something about that on the news. By the way, what do I call you? Mister Vice President?"

  "Not for a few more weeks. But you can call me Vincent. People have called me worse."

  In fact, Helen had called him worse. Several times, on election night. But she tried to let that go. "What brings you my humble den?"

  "The President-elect wanted me to convey his appreciation for the work you do here, and for saving his life."

  Helen blushed again. "The assassination plan seemed really far-fetched, and none of those three sounded like they had the sense you'd need to point the gun barrel forward. Anyway, it was really Grabby who deserves the credit."

  Vincent laughed. "I've heard about your ferret spy network."

  "Rats," she corrected him.

  He misunderstood. "I'm sorry. I didn't know you were trying to keep them a secret."

  "What brings you by?" Helen asked.

  "The President-elect is going to be touring the country promoting his Technology Omnibus bill, and he'd like to make your lab one of the stops. Given the work you're doing, it seems ideally suited."

  Helen snickered. "You personally showed up to arrange a tour stop? Don't you have flunkies for that sort of thing?"

  "Like I said, I meant to stay in touch."

  Helen's stomach did a very authentic-feeling somersault. "Well, Vincent, my boss would be the one making that decision. He'll probably have to run it by the university. And I'm honestly not sure the faculty is going to want to support anything from the Wright administration."

  "I doubt we'll ever be too popular among the egghead crowd," the senator said. "We're hoping the tech bill will be sort of a peace offering."

  "The phrase 'empty-headed liberal propagandists-I-mean-professors' has passed through your boss's lips on more than one occasion. Just one of the reasons I voted against him."

  "But if we could just sit down with you and explain everything that our bill accomp--" Vincent's brow furrowed. "Wait. You voted?"

  "I mean, I never voted while I was alive, but now that they say I can't... So I paid someone who wasn't voting to cast a vote on my behalf."

  "You know that's not technically legal," he said, chuckling.

  "Neither is disenfranchising an eligible citizen."

  "As an attorney I think I should point out that -- from a purely legal standpoint -- you are dead."

  "I know, I know. 'Move to Chicago, zombie girl. Dead people vote all the time there.' Thus spake the Grid last time I blogged about it." She tried to sound cheerfully indifferent, but a harsh edge crept into her voice.

  "I'm familiar with the joys of public scrutiny. It helps to think of the Grid as an ill-mannered nine year old. But if you ever decide to challenge your status in court, I know a couple of ferocious lawyers who would take the case. I'd do it myself, but I've got a lot on my plate right now, and honestly, I wouldn't want me as a lawyer."

  Helen thanked him, failing to mention that she had already blown through a pile of law books, and could easily pass the bar exam given the opportunity. She thought it might be impolite.

  "So, will you support me in this?" he finally asked.

  "I'll make sure your proposal gets a fair hearing," she told him. She shook his hand, then flinched at the contact. "Wow!"

  "Yep. It's one of yours. It's really amazing. It feels like I'm in your house, shaking your hand. It's the real world, only with jetpacks."

  "The Synthesis rigs aren't even on the market," Helen said. "How did you get one?"

  "I pulled a few strings."

  "You must have a lot of people dangling strings in front of you right now."

  "I feel like a spoiled kitten," he replied, though he sounded less satisfied than the words would indicate. "Back to the topic at hand. This administration considers technological progress the key to our economic future. The President-elect agreed that this would be a good way to signal that commitment."

  "Have you tried eating something yet?"

  "Strawberries, during the calibration process. Nothing since."

  "Well, if you ever find time, I know a really great restaurant," she told him. Her stomach did another backflip as his eyes lit up. Quiet, tummy. I'm not doing anything inappropriate here. The lab could use friends in Washington, right?

  "That sounds great. I promise to make the time," he said. "Meantime, my boss's staff will be handling the details of the visit."

  Her stomach gurgled a protest. Oh, come on. It's not like one minute we're having dinner and the next minute I'm having an affair with one of the most powerful people in the world. How about I bribe you with a chalupa?

  Deal, her stomach gurgled.

  * * *

  1 Actually, the author believes he stole it from an episode of Kung Fu.

  /////////////////////

  // THE NEXT MINUTE //

  /////////////////////

  Date: December 19, 2036

  "By passing this bill," President-elect Wright intoned, with the warm, revivalist preacher voice that had helped him win the election, "America will once again lead the world in innovation, in science, and in medicine." He stood at a small podium, addressing the packed auditorium with the easy self-assurance of a man who was completely in his element.

  "By passing this bill, we will make the Jakarta cancer vaccine affordable to every American. By passing this bill, we will create research jobs for a hundred thousand of America's best minds, and attract innovators from around the globe. By passing this bill, we will re-ignite the space race by repopulating and expanding our colonies on the Moon and in L2, and by setting our eyes once again toward Mars. By passing this bill, we will complete the transition to clean, abundant energy, shutting down the last of the coal and natural gas plants, and taking 80% of the remaining gasoline-powered cars off the road. By passing this bill, we will finally make pervasive Grid access available to every corner of our great nation."

  Helen watched from backstage, feeling ambivalent. She had her concerns about the bill. She figured it to be 60% good stuff, 40% corporate giveaway. But the bill was popular, polling far ahead of the president who was pushing it, which wasn't unexpected given that Wright had won his office with a mere 39% of the vote in a three-way dogfight.

  In terms of the electoral horse race, the tech bill was brilliant. The bill had persuasive talking points for every constituency and jobs for every state. Only the Neo-Luddite party -- a new, single-issue party that wanted to curtail automated labor and return "real jobs to real Americans" -- had strong objections
.

  Most important to Helen, the bill would mean quite a bit of funding for her lab. So she and the university had swallowed their distaste for President-elect Wright's political agenda and offered to let him stump here. Helen was many things, but "above being bribed" wasn't among them.

  She looked down at her gleaming white meatspace body, an experimental robotic prototype from the MIT labs that her team had hacked to turn into Helen's telepresence puppet. She'd been using it for about a month, and damn but it felt good to be able to walk around the real world. Her fingers were dexterous and covered in tactile sensors, her eyesight a hawk-like 20/2, with some pickup in the infrared and ultraviolet regions. She was in the process of renovating her visual cortex to handle the flood of visual information. Her hearing was excellent, though smell was rudimentary and taste entirely absent. She could even sense magnetic fields and radio waves, though she was still figuring out how to translate them into sensation.

  That is, the body usually felt good. Right now, her stomach was asking, "Why did we agree to do a show-stopping dance number?" She couldn't give it a satisfactory answer, except that it had sounded interesting at the time. But now, with her virtual stomach filled with very real -- well, very metaphorical -- butterflies, that answer seemed unsatisfactory.

  A scuffle broke out somewhere in the upper reaches of the auditorium, and Helen turned to watch. A man wearing a "Real Jobs for Real Americans" t-shirt was shouting, even as security dragged him up the stairs. Helen sent the man's picture to her rats, and before the president had resumed his speech, she knew that his name was Jebediah Martin Taylor, that he had recently been laid off from an integrated circuit facility in Los Angeles, and that he was in the middle of a nasty custody battle with his soon-to-be-ex-wife.

  Stories like his were only getting more common as automation had demolished the market for human labor over the last fifteen years. Even as the economy grew steadily, unemployment now hovered around 27%. A single janitor supervising a few dozen cleaning robots could clean an entire office building in a matter of hours. Fire trucks could drive themselves to a fire, deploy their equipment, and extinguish the flames, often with no human guidance. The proliferation of personal, material-recycling 3D printers were pushing the manufacturers and retailers of cheap plastic crap straight into bankruptcy. The Icarus Field -- a sprawling, ten square mile solar thermal energy plant being assembled to provide most of Las Vegas' power requirements -- was being built by fewer than a hundred laborers, most of whom would merely be telling robots how to do their jobs.

  The big growth industries right now were not lucrative ones: debt counseling, alternative medicine, self-published fiction, and farming for loot in various alts. The last one didn't make much sense to Helen, since workers in that field were in cutthroat competition with huge numbers of gaming bots and unskilled laborers from West Africa. But the looters could at least say they had jobs, and many of them preferred to live their lives in those games anyways.

  As the president finished his remarks, Helen published some of those musings on her blog, and ended it with, "Okay, time to dance."

  To her great relief, she wouldn't be alone onstage; she would be joined in her performance by a senior from the school of dance named Zac Bertstrom. For the last month, he had been patiently teaching her how not to suck. Or at least to suck less. When all else failed, he taught her to hide some of her suckage from the audience. As the stage went dark, she and her partner walked on stage and faced each other.

  The lights brightened around them. The holoprojector hid her at first. Zac made a small gesture with his hand, and the projector displayed row after row of white plastic robots. She stood in the front row, indistinguishable from the others. As her partner began making increasingly elaborate gestures, the other bots mimicked his motions with mechanical precision, with Helen following along as best she could, standing out like a sore thumb.

  As per the choreography, she tripped and fell. Zac stopped the others, and offered her his hand. He led her out of the lineup and into the clearing in front of the other bots. As if trying to tutor her, he would perform a move, then motion for her to copy it. Then he would chain a few moves together, and she would copy that. Finally he was dancing around the stage in a series of practiced, fluid gestures, with Helen a few steps behind. This tended to exaggerate her talents, since she could usually see what she needed to do next. As she danced along, the projectors drew a whisper of a cloud that extended out behind her, slowly converged and thickening.

  Her bot collapsed into a fetal position on the stage floor, and the other bots swiveled their heads to watch her. The cloud continued to thicken around her, until the audience could see a decidedly female form clad in a glowing silver dress. Once again, Zac offered her his hand. Where the robot had fallen, Helen now stood up, wearing a few large pieces of white, plastic jewelry to remind the audience of her old form. The pair danced together for a while, with Helen taking advantage of her body's physical strength to make impressive leaps and spins.

  At the end of the performance, Zac led Helen back to her spot in the lineup. She stepped into her place and turned to the audience, then her partner touched her forehead. The Helen costuming evaporated, leaving the naked plastic skeleton that lay beneath. He led the bots through a few more basic steps, then turned and walked away, leaving the rows of robots unmoving and placid. After a few tense moments, the lights snapped off.

  Helen and Zac took a quick bow, then rushed offstage. There would be a second performance where some dance students showed off their ability to control the puppets, but she wouldn't be involved in that.

  As the next set of dancers walked out onto the stage, Helen made a quick scan of the Grid's reactions to the performance. It seemed to be conflicted as to whether it was a forward-looking if technically lacking showcase of the future of performing arts, or whether Helen Roderick had personally left a flaming bag of poo on Martha Graham's grave. She shut the feeds off.

  Literally every location on Earth was modeled in AltWorld, to some degree of fidelity or other, and there were many different views of it to choose from.1 Helen pulled up the consensus view, in which the dance hall had grown a few hundred thousand extra seats to hold the flashmob that had shown up to watch. She could see Kriti sitting in one of the closest seats, the ones reserved for people who were physically present. Higher up, she saw the Vice President, who had taken a few minutes away from the G30 summit in Beijing to be there.

  Her attention was drawn to Wolf359, who was sitting in the upper balconies. She fired off a message, "Have you come to challenge me to a dance-off?"

  "No."

  Helen waited for clarification, before realizing that none would be forthcoming. "So, what does bring you here?"

  "The closest analogy might be 'curiosity.' I am trying to surmise the purpose of dance."

  "Have you come up with anything?"

  "It appears entirely frivolous."

  "Buzzkill," she sent back. Wolf was really beginning to unnerve her. Over the last few months, their arguments had become increasingly pointed; Wolf had become obsessed with the question of what things were "useful" and what things weren't. Outside the hard sciences, she hadn't gotten it to admit that any human endeavors served a purpose.

  After the second performance, the president of the University got up to excuse the President-elect from the performance, explaining that he was kind of an important guy with places to be. He waited a few seconds for laughter that never came, then turned the assembly over to Dr. Mellings for a speech.

  A liaison for the school tapped Helen on the arm, saying, "The President... sorry, the President-elect would like a word with you."

  She followed the man through the maze of security backstage, until they reached the security zone. The motorcade was waiting, presumably to take the President-elect and his staff to the airport, then on to the next stop. "Please get in the car, Ms. Roderick," said a woman from the Secret Service detail, as she held the limo door open. Then she added,
"The conversation you are about to have is top secret. Recording or conveying any portion of it to third parties is punishable by lifetime imprisonment."

  Helen, not sure what else she could do, closed off public access to her sensory input, and got in the car.

  The President-elect was there, flanked by two Secret Service agents. A man whom Helen didn't recognize sat next to her. "That was a masterful performance, Ms. Roderick," Wright told her. "You have done some astonishing work."

  Helen was too nervous to do more than mumble a quick "Thank you." Whatever the governor wanted to talk to her about, it could be critical to both her and the lab.

  "Please, relax. I just want to ask you a few questions."

  "Go ahead."

  "This body you're... wearing? How strong is it?"

  Helen knew the statistics intimately. "About four times stronger than your average human male. Bench presses about three hundred kilos. Top speed, thirty-seven miles an hour. The battery provides for about three days of normal operations, or a few hours of extreme effort."

  "How long did it take those ballet students to learn to operate theirs?"

  "Hours."

  "How's your hearing?" he said, in the lowest whisper that a person could manage.

  "My hearing is quite good," she replied.

  He whispered a request to her. "The man on my left is Agent Jacobsen. I want you to take his sidearm from him and point it at me."

  "Are you serious?" she asked.

  "Entirely. I want to see if you can catch him off guard. No need to actually shoot me, you understand."

  Helen nodded. In one fluid motion, she slipped her arm in under the agent's coat, pulled the weapon out, dropped the magazine, and pulled back the slide to eject the loaded round. By the time she had the weapon pressed to the Governor's forehead, it was no longer loaded. The second agent reached for his sidearm, but as it came out, Helen snatched it away.

  "Stand down!" Wright barked. "Agents, take your weapons back." The agents looked furious, and Jacobsen seemed thoroughly rattled, but they obeyed. "I think we'll need to add a few of these things to the detail."