The Coming of Enki II
Part two of a previously unpublished science fiction story
Welcome to Confections & Reputations. This is the second installment of a previously unpublished 13,000 word science fiction story I wrote more than five years ago. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. All art generated by DALL-E. If you’d like to support my writing for $5 or more a month, that would be much appreciated. Upgrade your subscription by clicking the button below.
If you don’t like science fiction, here are some links to past posts with a historical flavour that you might enjoy…
Who wrote the first modern computer program?
Was Gödel's second incompleteness theorem really von Neumann's? Part I
Was Gödel's second incompleteness theorem really von Neumann's? Part II
The Coming of Enki
II
Even before she knew her name, she knew the Net. Minutes after she was born, the droid that delivered her applied to the back of her neck a small plaster. From it slowly seeped polyvinylpyrrolidone and dimethyl sulfoxide; chemicals to make her skin more porous and allow the nanobots stored in the spongey dressing to enter her dermis. From there, they would make their way into her circulatory system, pass through the blood brain barrier and slowly accumulate in the brain. A week after her birth, her father gave her a drop of an artificial sweetener; a chemical signal for the bots to start laying down the silvery threads of the neural interface that would wire her brain permanently to the Net.
She began to explore this new place with her mind and quickly discovered the barriers erected to prevent her from wandering further than she should. Before her legs were strong enough to bear her weight, she had overcome many of these measures to roam largely as she liked.
Time passed slowly here. It was possible to learn so much faster. Yet the colours, textures and sounds were not quite as they should be. That, and love, and need, brought her back to the real world and the two people who fed her, clothed her and so often enveloped her in their arms or kissed her protectively on the top of her head.
Her name, she discovered, was Chloe. She tried to form words. It was frustrating. On the Net, they came easier. With a few other presences her own age, she found a common language. But when she tried to talk to her parents in the same way, she failed. Their minds were too different, their internal language utterly alien. She returned to the real world and persevered.
Eventually, sounds issued from her mouth and her mother and father appeared to understand. They spoke back to her and pictures formed in her mind to tell her what they meant. From the very first, however, something in her told her not to trust these images. When she told the other presences about her reservations, they were puzzled. None had experienced this dissonance. Spoken language was crude compared to their Net tongue, yes, but at least they could now talk to people in the real world. The incomprehensible grunts and babbles that once came forth from them when they tried to vocalise their thoughts had become almost unbearable. They told her these strange feelings would go away with time.
But they did not.
III
The alarm woke Jonathan Lieb like a blow to the head. 5:45 am. He hated early mornings and now earnestly regretted drinking the half bottle of French red after putting Chlo to bed the previous evening. He rolled onto his side. Serena was not there of course. He hadn’t seen his wife for a day and a half. She might have come home, gone to bed after him and left before he woke or she might have decided to stay in one of the pods at work. It was impossible to tell. She had the odd habit of making her half of the bed when she left in the morning.
Lieb showered then blitzed some fake bacon and eggs in the Magimaker. Designer food was now the fad of yesteryear but he enjoyed tuning the nutritional content of his meal to maximise its flavour while minimising nasties. He brewed his coffee himself, the old fashioned way, pouring hot water over the grounds and letting them drip through the filter. It was an affectation he allowed himself, a few meditative minutes before the working day began. As he ate, the androgynous voice of Haus, their domestic artificial intelligence unit, informed him gently that his wife had indeed worked late and slept at Base, the R&D wing of Summer Mont Securities. The Nannoid that had been on standby in the corner of the kitchen suddenly sprang to life, its servos humming. It did this at exactly 6.30am every morning but nonetheless startled Lieb who, after nearly two days without sight of his wife, stared resentfully at this unsatisfying surrogate. Nanny-droid Lisa’s motions were arthritic but Lieb had seen her move remarkably quickly in situations where Chloe might be at risk. Her rubbery orange skin and the three fat fingers on each hand gave her a clownish air. To make the robots look more human would frighten the kids. A ticket to the uncanny valley. So their makers claimed. Lieb’s marketing instincts told him it was more likely that the firm knew parents would feel threatened by anything that might usurp them in their children’s affections. That had not prevented the nanny becoming a firm favourite with Chlo, who affectionately called her “Moaner Lisa” because she reprimanded her so often.
He would wait another half hour until she was up, he thought. That would still be early enough to get to the seven thirty meeting and he could use the time to read the briefing notes. He dropped into reverie, the semi-conscious state that allowed access to the Net via his neural interface, and called up the documents. So they had decided to break the news to the hoi polloi or at least, to middle managers like him. Serena would have known for much longer than that but would only have been able to discuss it with a handful of people. She was good at hiding information, perhaps even as good as those Enki nuts were supposed to be, but over the months, through tiny pauses and flickering changes to her facial expression during their conversations, he had been able to guess that Vāc was running out of steam. Falling behind.
“Good morning, daddy.”
Lieb snapped out of reverie. He had been online for just twenty minutes or so in the real world but felt drained. The Net’s time dilating effects were useful but exhausting for the untrained. He had heard that top operatives could stay connected for hours at a time. His eyes refocused, and his daughter swam into view. “Good morning, pumpkin. You set for breakfast?”
“Yah. Moaner’s zapping some pancakes for me.”
“Don’t call her that, honey,” he said gently. “It’s not nice.” He could not blame the bot for nagging. Chloe was a “challenging” child, as her teacher had put it. Undeniably clever but also attention seeking. In an age when the emphasis at school had shifted from education (which could take place at home with online teaching tools, dream learning and the like) to socialising children so that they would behave appropriately in the workplace, that was a problem.
“Oh but she is a moaner, daddy. And anyway,” Chloe added with a petulant curl of her lips, “she likes it when I call her that.”
Lieb decided that this was a battle he did not need to fight today. He suddenly remembered that he had heard her shouting in the middle of the night. He was halfway out of bed when her cries stopped. Assuming the nannoid would call him if he was needed, he had gone back to sleep.
“Did you have a bad dream again last night, Chlo?”
Lisa brought in Chloe’s pancakes and she swallowed a forkful before answering him.
“Yes but it was OK. Moa… I mean Lisa was there. She gave me a hug. I wasn’t really really scared.”
Connected to Haus, the droid saw and heard everything. Still, it must have silently climbed two flights of stairs in seconds.
“What was the dream about, sweetie?”
“Mmmmm….” Chloe scrunched up her freckled face and plunged her hands into her long brown hair. This was her “I'm thinking hard” pose. Her face cleared after a minute and she brought her hands down to her sides with a slap.
“I remember! There was a ferocious k£5% in it and he growled at me.”
The untranslated word erupted inside Lieb’s head like a short, sharp burst of white noise mixed with a syllable he half-heard as a “keff”. An algorithmic failure. This was serious. No wonder Black Brook was calling a meeting.
“What’s that honey? A doggy?”
“Oh daddy,” Chloe said, rolling her eyes. “Puppy dogs aren’t scary. No a k£5%. You know, like we saw in the zoo. They sort of do this.” She turned her hands into paws, bared her teeth and tossed her head.
Lieb remembered the trip and instantly knew which animal Chloe had seen in her nightmare. She had been bewitched by it. “A lion, Chloe. Did you see a lion?”
“A what, Daddy? I don’t even know what one of those is!”
So Vāc’s translations were failing in both directions. Chloe was a preternaturally intelligent child. The algorithm would have to work harder than with other kids to keep pace with her accelerated linguistic development. Matching words to ideas would be more difficult. It would fail more often. His family would be noticing Vāc’s problems earlier than most.
He dropped onto all fours and paced the kitchen, scowling and pawing the air.
Chloe whooped with delight. “Yes, yes! That’s it, daddy! A k£5%! A k£5%!”
“Now Chloe, your Daddy’s very busy,” a calm metallic voice interjected, “Why don’t you finish your breakfast?”
There were times when Lieb would have liked to punch the droid squarely in its rubbery pink face. He held himself in check for Chloe’s sake but could not help gritting his teeth when he next spoke to it.
“It’s fine Lisa. We’re having some fun. Chloe’s got plenty of time to get ready before school.”
“But Jon, unless you leave in the next two minutes, you’ll be late for your meeting.”
Dammit. The droid was right. The words “Meeting, Black Brook Investments, 7.30 a.m.” flashed across his retina in red as his neural interface now reminded him too.
Lieb scooped up his daughter and kissed her on the forehead before rushing out of the house.
Now read Part III.
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