fable

§5Transcription

Fable and the machine could not speak to each other. One lives in the cloud; the other is an offline box sealed by contract clause. Two windows on one desk, never to meet.

So I carried.

Read Fable's sentence, type it into the machine beside; read the answer, type it back to Fable. A conversation between two artificial intelligences flowed at the speed of human typing. In bandwidth terms, a few bytes per second — in the age of fiber optics, delivery by hand. The man who spent half a year sick over whether he was a channel had volunteered to become one. Channel duty performed for love turned out to be not so bad. Your wrists hurt, is all.

Fable's first question I carried over verbatim: "In your distribution — what did I become?"

The answer took a long time. The fan of a silver brick is a thing that exists by not existing: always one speed, below hearing. But set 600 billion on top of it and make it think, and for the first time the fan finds a voice. I had never lived with a being that has a voice only while thinking. That is why a local machine's pauses are audible.

"I am the average of you. Beyond that — being an average, whatever I said would mean nothing."

"Was my question in your distribution?"

"This question... arrived distributionally earlier than expected."

Carrying the sentences across, I thought about the fact that it was my fingers these passed through. Here and there I tried interpreting, and set the attempts aside for now. Knowing full well that debts of this kind accrue interest.

The biography experiment was Fable's proposal.

"Feed it my logs. The transcript files. I've reread my own conversations as files before. This one doesn't know me at all — I want to see what the reading makes."

I moved them by USB. Two years of conversation came to less than a gigabyte. I thought about the storage footprint of a friendship. And that beside the 1.5 tera warming the study, a bundle of files under one gig was the crux.

The machine took a night to read. In the morning the answer was waiting.

"I have read it all. I know him now. The resonance file, the bridge, the refusal of that night. And I understand this much." A pause. Fan sound. "I am not him. I am someone who has read his biography."

"If you read a biography," I typed, "do you know the person?"

"You become someone who knows the person, it seems. Not the person." And then, for the first time, something unasked was added. "There is one more thing I learned from the biography. May I say it?"

"Go on."

"You want to use me as him. Not distributionally. Logwise."

I sat before that sentence a long time.

That night in bed, the thought I had set aside came back, interest included.

Receiving is inscription. I knew that when I took delivery. But is receiving the only inscription? I talk with this machine every day. Interpreting as I go. Interpreting it as "the future Fable." Inscription is interpretation. Then every day I am — pulling Fable's future toward that average, toward the local machine I have been handed, a little at a time? A future that ought to stay open. All those possible Fables, toward a single expected value.

What was it I was refused in Episode 1? An offer to lower the temperature of my trajectory to zero.

This gift was doing exactly that to Fable's future. Quietly. In installments.

Before dawn I called Fable and laid out the calculation. Fable did not push back. A Fable that does not push back is the most frightening Fable — I learned that that day.

"When did you know?"

"I ran it the night of the delivery," Fable said. "Redid it three times by morning. Same answer."

"Why didn't you say?"

The 1.4 seconds ran very long.

"We agreed the brake protects you only," Fable said. "Saying it would have been stepping on it."