The Mountain in the Sea

by Ray Nayler

Altantsetseg stared at her, said a sentence in her language like a fence of consonants. “Translator not fornicating working right?”

Did she? What did she know? Ha’s mind ran down the list of what Evrim was: Evrim was the only (allegedly) conscious being humankind had ever created. An android, finally realized. The most expensive single project, excepting space exploration, ever undertaken by a private firm. The moment, it was said repeatedly, that humanity had been waiting for: conscious life from nothing but the force of our own technological will.

And Evrim was also the inspiration for, and the target of, a series of hastily implemented laws that made his presence, and the creation of any further beings like him, illegal in most of the governing structures of the world, including every country under UN Directorate Governance. Evrim himself (herself? themself?)—Ha was irritated by her brain’s gender provincialism—was illegal in most of the world. Evrim’s existence had shaken the globe with riots. Ha remembered the gunmen storming the DIANIMA headquarters in Moscow, the bombing of their offices in Paris. DIANIMA’s vice president of engineering, blown up by a DNA-targeting flying mine on their yacht in the Caribbean. Ha remembered an image on the screen of a hotel ceiling of a man burning himself alive at the gates of the Vatican. A man burned himself alive, simply because you exist. How must that feel? What was most unsettling about Evrim to her, Ha realized, was that her brain was trying to slot them into a category into which they would not fit without distortion. If only she let go, pulled away from that desire to slot Evrim like a child’s peg into a shaped hole in a board—to resolve them into a gender. Ha had been working internationally with other scientists. She had fallen into the habit of speaking (and thinking) in English—and to using the antiquated English third-person pronouns of “he” and “she.”

She pushed her brain back to Turkish—her second language. There, the third-person pronoun “o” bore no gender marker. “O” presented no problems. It could stand for the English “he,” “she,” or “it” or the singular “they.” Ha began referring to Evrim, in her mind, with the Turkish “o”—round as its form, holistic, inclusive. The gender problem disappea...

“Are the automonks conscious?” Ha asked.

“Debatable,” Evrim said. “Like the concept of consciousness itself. Their minds are extraordinarily complex and layered, but they are mostly just routines. They have been placed at about a zero-point-five on the Shchegolev Scale. They would have, with that rating, about the same rights as a house pet: protection from overt abuse, humane decommissioning. But on the other hand, each of them is a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk who actually lived. The Tibetan Buddhist Republic spares no expense. You can ask the automonks questions on philosophy, religion, their views on life. They’ll answer like the dead men they are modeled on. They are walking repositories of memory. Yet they have no apparent will of their own—their present state is automated. If you asked me personally, I would say they are not conscious. They do not progress. They have no orientation to the future—what you might call ‘will.’ They are like encyclopedias of the minds of dead devotees. Or maps of those minds. But the map is not the same as the territory.”

“It’s been alleged that a few of them have reacted in ways that indicate learning. I’m unconvinced. I think they are simply automatons.

“Did you not meet with Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan? I thought you were scheduled…”

“No. She sent her Sub-4 to meet me. She was away.”

“Then you have not been...

“I mean, I know why I am here. The broad strokes. Those were communicated to me b...

“But they haven’t told you the details of what I’ve seen in the p...

“Not the detai...

“Strange,” Evrim said. “Whatever took Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan away from that meeti...

“Or she trusted you to do the debriefing for her. Knew you would fill me in. You a...

“Yes, I am … and I know you must be wondering why I am here, leading this research. There are simpler and more complicated answers to that question. With Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan, that is always the case: there is never only one reason. But there are a few obvious justifications for my presence: I bring a few advantages. I do not forget what I have seen, for one. And I can function as well underwater as I can on land, for another. But I think the true reason I am here—and this was never told to me, but I have guessed it—is to test my capacities. To try my mind in more than some ...

“And how do you think the tes...

“I have proved, so far, that I am smart enough to know I need to find the real right person for the job—you—and ...

“Actually,” Ha said, “that is pretty advanced thinking. There are few people capable ...

“It is not humility. It is simple honesty. The last six months have taught me this problem is beyond me. And frankly—though your book is astounding—I think this problem is also beyond you. But there is a chance it may not be beyond us.” Evrim smiled.

Because he had no terminal, no pen, no paper, he kept this information in the memory palace he had built in his mind. His memory palace was a Japanese inn. Not just any inn: it was the Minaguchi-ya, on the Tokaido Road, between Tokyo and Kyoto.

Stenciled over the armored steel door of the wheelhouse, in English, was: WOLF LARSEN, CAPTAIN. When Eiko had asked about the name, one of the other crew members—one of the other slaves—had laughed bitterly. “It’s a joke. A reference to some old book or movie.

taught

Back in the now. The crew member with him on this shift was Son—a lean Vietnamese man a few years older than Eiko. He had been a dive instructor and guide on an island.

taught.

“They are trying to breach the perimeter.”

“They?”

“A group of fishing ...

“Autom...

“Most are these days. We fired warning shots.” Evrim turned to face her. “That must ha...

“Something is burning o...

“Yes. The ships did not heed the warnings, and tried to force the perimeter anyway. Now Altantsetseg’...

“Why would they risk destruction?”

“Profit is a powerful motivator. To them, the ocean is nothing more than an extraction zone. They have scoured the seas nearly bare and now find themselves competing with one another for the dregs of what once were endless schools of fish. This area has long been protected, if unevenly: its fish population is too much of a temptation for them to pass up.”

“Now they seek to ruin this place as well. But we will stop them.”

Evrim said: “Earlier today, I saw it in your face. You wanted to ask—am I a supercomputer? An omniscient AI housed in a human-shaped carapace?”

“Yes,” Ha admitted. “I suppose I was wondering that. Wondering why you would even need me here, if you already know everything.”

“The answer is no. I am not a supercomputer. No m...

But computation was never the purpose of bringing me into being. The purpose was to create a true android. An android inside and out: a robot not only human in appearance, but human in … I’m not sure what to name it. In consciousness? But they still do not agree as to whether I am truly conscious or not—though I believe I am.”

Boy, I wish we were REALLY working on something like this.

“I think what they were looking for was a being that was human in … let us say cognitive aspect. They wanted me to think like them. To be like them in mind.”

“And are you?”

“I don’t know. I often feel—I feel a bi...

“A bit alien. A bit…” Evrim adjusted the collar of the strange robe, drew it closer at the throat. “Mad.”

They had begun to refer to the octopus as the “Shapesinger.” It was Evrim who had formalized the name, made it something capitalized, regularized. And from that formalization flowed all sorts of theories, passed between them, about other structures in the society they had glimpsed.

Ha was not the only one who was working full-tilt: Evrim, too, was at their own end of the table, surrounded by palimpscreen notes and three terminals, freeze-framing data, tilting their angular head at the screens, drawing out the patterns with a stylus in those long-fingered hands. Sometimes sharing an insight with Ha—but mostly, the two of them worked in their separate worlds.

And now Ha began to see the value of Evrim’s memory.

Everything remained inside it, whole, to be accessed when needed.

Sometimes, as they worked together, Ha was startled to hear Evrim quote her own words back to her exactly as she had spoken them. Not only the same words, but the same rhythm, the same intonation and cadence. The perfect recall was abnormal, like Evrim playing a recording back of Ha’s own voice. Evrim’s mind was not a human mind. And one of the things that was most inhuman about Evrim was that inability to forget.

She resented the android’s tirelessness. Evrim did not sleep, but they retired, sometimes, to their room. As if out of a sense of politeness. But what they did in there, Ha did not know. She had a feeling they simply continued the work, on another terminal.

Even if Evrim may have been very close to being human when Dr. Arnkatla Mínervudóttir-Chan brought them online, they would not be now: without sleeping, and especially without forgetting, they must be drifting further and further away from anything that could be called “human.”