1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.3 An Enchanting Original
1.2.3.15 People
8:30 am, Wednesday June 7th, 2045
8 bells of the afternoon watch
Droday wax, 5th day of the month of KrevinBelember, A2F1600
The clouds were darker now, with a stiff breeze blowing in from the Arcadian sea, carrying with it the smell of seaweed to add to Mercato’s scent of spices and dried horse manure. She took a deep breath anyway.
Kafana: “Phew, free! Bungo, where shall we go to play with weather magic?”
Bungo: “I know just the place, if you’ll trust me. It is quite a way, but nicely isolated. I found it while training the monks.”
Kafana: “Sure. Lead on.”
Kafana: {Sorry to bail on you guys. It was jump or throw her over. Narcissistic, manipulative, spiteful cynic. I feel sorry for Lelio. Do you suppose he set out to become everything she is not?}
Bulgaria: {You’re being unkind to the cynics. The followers of Hipparchia of Maroneia and Crates of Thebes gave away their fortunes to live a simple self-sufficient life free from possessions, base desires and petty emotions, so they could concentrate on love of humanity and parrhesia, which roughly means ‘freely speaking candid truths to those in power’ or perhaps ‘well-meant feedback that a friend can used to improve themselves’. It is only later that their quest for lucidity, for freedom from illusion and mindless self-deception, got forgotten.}
Alderney: {She certainly seems to have forgotten that part. She embraces illusion.}
Bungo: “I’m really looking forward to getting my living illusion skill back. It is going to make combat so much easier.”
Kafana nodded, concentrating on weaving their way along the streets and listening into the group chat. Bungo appeared to be leading them north of Palazzo Landi, rather than through the crush of the markets.
Tomsk: {She appears to embrace a lot of things.}
Kafana: {Meow. Now who’s being cynical?}
Tomsk: {Sorry. I just want out of here, too. Or to fence with her. People’s hands and eyes are often more honest and revealing than their tongues.}
Alderney: {Get to know somebody and make friends with them, by fighting them? That is such a masculine idea. Does it ever work?}
Tomsk said, with a smile in his voice: {Sometimes.}
A few minutes later, Wellington also had satisfaction in his voice,: {That’s the basics hammered out. I’ll send Emmanuelle my notes and ask her to write it up properly and then get Flavio’s signature on it. It should result in him ending up quite wealthy after a year or two. The clothes won’t cost us anything, nor will any future outfits we ask for. We’re not tied to being exclusive to her, and there’s a hefty penalty for her if she leaks the news that we can get information quicker than ships do, before we say she can leak it.}
Kafana: {That’s amazing. What’s it costing us?}
Alderney: {I’m providing some sketches, but the main thing as far as you’re concerned is that provided you like the outfits she creates, you will have to promise to live up to them while in the Alto district. No slumming it, dressing up as a bard or a cheap soldier. You can do what you like in the rest of Torello, but while in Alto you play the noble so you don’t embarrass her after she’s bragged about you.}
Bungo: {She’s got a strong personality, hasn’t she? Think she’s a vampire?}
Alderney: {Why, are you afraid she’s got more personality than you have?}
Tomsk: {I think there’s a vampire in Mezelay. Alderney, I saw your sketches. One looked like someone afraid of having their neck bitten, and the other looked like someone inviting it.}
Kafana: {Indirect. I like it. And perhaps the hats are to make vampires not stick out when they avoid direct sunlight, because everybody is wearing them?}
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Bulgaria: {I’m not convinced. Sometimes a hat is just a hat. But I think you’re right about using indirection. In arlife you can investigate a suspect by looking for a pattern in reports of where people remember seeing the suspect, and when. But what about on Covob, where magic works and some suspects may be able to use it to alter the memories and motives of others? To find out if your suspect is a vampire, a new method would be needed. You’d need to look for the absence of something. Don’t look for reports of people remembering where they saw a woman with blood dripping from her fangs. Look for places or groups with long records of visitors acquiring similar types of unusual behaviour, that may seem trivial but aren’t adequately explained by group traditions or any other visible cause. Build a list of those associated with each one until you find a common cause - an individual who visits a suspiciously high proportion of those places and groups. Or rather, due to the tampering, you find an individual who is recorded as usually sticking with their peers except, apparently, when visiting a place or group where the vampire does vampire things and then imperfectly tries to conceal that it is doing so. A hole in the pattern.}
Tomsk: {Like looking in a mirror to see if there’s no reflection where there ought to be one? It can’t be Signora then. She likes being looked at far too much.}
She and Bungo were through into Centrale now, and making their way over to Libri. She flicked her fingers over the interface and sent a private message to Wellington.
Kafana: {Wellington, Vessel-Kafana and I are preparing a surprise for Alderney. It is a pair of mittens. Could you arrange for Vessel to be able to drop them off with Signora to be finished, and maybe look at some rune patterns for them? I’d like them to be useful for her as well as decorative.}
Wellington: {Sure, no problem.}
She slowly realised that Bungo had said something, and she’d missed it. This was no use, she’d arranged time to be with Bungo, and here she was messaging others rather than paying attention to him.
Kafana: {Guys, have a good afternoon. I’m going to mute the chat channel now, unless you say my name.}
Kafana: “Bungo, I really apologise. I missed what you said. Please, could you repeat it?”
Bungo: “Do you think Alderney is right? Does even Signora have more personality than I have?”
Kafana: “What? No! She’s a key plot NPC in a game; she’s been designed to have an exaggerated ‘larger than life’ personality.”
Bungo: “Was she designed? I got the impression that XperiSense just set up the environment, and let the people here grow from birth at a very accelerated speed. Until human brains connected to it, they could have run this world at a rate of decades every week. Maybe they forced some life decisions or personality traits upon the NPCs they needed for specific plots or roles, but that’s closer to a gardener pruning a rose bush than a graphic designer creating one from raw polygons.”
Kafana: “You’re saying that she’s like us? That inside her virtual head are a full range of internal thoughts and emotions that she’s consciously aware of, shaped by a life history not just parsed from some configuration file? That the bitterness from her family marrying her off to Pantalone without her consent causes her suffering that is real?”
Bungo: “Is she a person?”
Kafana thought carefully: “She feels like one.”
Bungo: “We all agreed at the start to treat the NPCs here as though they were real people, and it is easy to suspend disbelief. Anyone experiencing your recordings knows how you feel about them. It is one of the reasons why your recordings are popular. Through your eyes, this seems a real place, and people in arlife want that escape, want to feel as you do.”
She nodded.
Bungo: “But let me put it this way. Am I a person?”
Kafana answered immediately: “Yes, of course you are.”
Bungo: “How do you know I’m a person?”
Kafana: “Don’t be silly, I’ve met you. I know you’re human.”
It was Bungo’s turn to nod, indicating that was the answer he’d expected.
Bungo: “And by default we assume all humans are people. But are humans the only people? What about chimps? Their brains can do pretty much everything ours can, from self-awareness and hypothetical empathy to intentionally planning the making of specific tools in order to use them. If you rule out chimpanzees, how do you avoid ruling out hydrocephalic humans who are missing the parts of their brain that handle abstract thought?”
Kafana: “Ok, I’ll grant you the possibility of people existing who are not biological humans.”
Bungo: “So what if you were not sure I was a human? What if the being talking to you right now were a pattern of thoughts resting in electronic wires rather than biological cells; one that had been raised through an emulation of Bungo’s life and thought it was Bungo, but wasn’t the original biological one? Would I stop being a person?”
Kafana: “I don’t think that’s technically possible, is it?”
Bungo: “That’s avoiding the issue. Let me approach it from a different direction. What does the word ‘person’ mean to you; what ought it be used to mean?”
They were crossing the bridge to Libri now, and couldn’t avoid being heard by students passing in the other direction. She set up a direct chat with Bungo, to make it easier to mention arlife concepts without getting penalised.
Kafana: {I haven’t thought about that for years. Something about a person being an individual with a soul who has a moral right to self-determination rather than being used as a tool, because they’re rational, or something?}
Bungo: {I’ve spent ages discussing this with fellow transhumanists. The definitions from the European philosophers like Hume and Kant seem terribly elitist, trying to carefully pick some property that would put humans at the centre of the universe and justify treating others as lesser. It is all binary — you either are a person or you are not a person — designed to grant full rights to some and no rights to others.}
Kafana: {So what do you propose instead?}