The choice of city seemed meaningful. Richmond had been capitol of the Confederacy during the American Civil War, over three centuries before: a genteel, well-preserved town of three million, for nearly ninety years a center for optimized human design research.

“Are we being sent any subtle messages?” Allen asked as we gathered in the suite’s living room. A projection of the Richmond meeting place, the Thomas Jefferson Hotel, floated above the coffee table, severe gray stone and pseudo-Greek architecture.

Bithras regarded us dourly, eyes weary. He had been up all evening communicating with Mars; the travel time for each signal had been almost eight minutes, a total delay of almost sixteen minutes between sending and receiving a reply. He had not revealed any of the details of his conversations yet. “What messages?” he asked.

Allen nodded to me: you explain.

“ Richmond was once a symbol of the failed South,” I said.

“ South America ?” Bithras asked.

“Southern states. They tried to secede from the Union . The North was immensely more powerful. The South suffered for generations after losing a civil war.”

“Not a very clear message,” Bithras said. “I hope they haven’t chosen Richmond just for that reason.”

“Probably not,” Allen said. “What have you heard from Mars?”

Bithras wrinkled his brow and shook his head. “The limits to my discretion are clear. If the deal we agreed to is inadequate… then we agree to nothing. We go home.“

“After coming all this way?” I asked.

“My dear Casseia, the first rule of politics, as in medicine, is ‘Do no harm.’ I do not want to act on my own initiative; the Council tells me they will not tolerate any initiative; so, there will be no initiative.”

“Why summon us to Earth in the first place?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Bithras said. “If I didn’t suspect strongly otherwise, I would call it gross incompetence. But when your adversary’s incompetence puts you at a disadvantage, it is time to think again.

“The Council will make some decisions and get back to me before we leave for Richmond . So, we have tomorrow to ourselves. I suggest we give Alice a break and set up an appointment with Jill.”

“We have a five-minute appointment at twenty-three this evening, broadband ex net, private and encrypted,” Allen said. “Alice and I made arrangements with Jill yesterday… just in case.”

“I’m glad somebody can show initiative,” Bithras said.

I was as curious as anybody to find out what Alice and Jill would discuss.

Jill was the oldest thinking being on Earth, a fabulous figure, the first thinker to achieve bona fide self-awareness, as defined by the Atkins test.

Decades before Jill and Roger Atkins, Alan Turing had proposed the Turing test for equality between human and machine: if in a conversation limited to written communication, where the human could not directly view the correspondents, a person could not tell the difference between a machine and another human, then the machine was itself as intelligent as a human. This subtle and ingenious test neglected to take into account the limits of most humans, however; by the beginning of the twenty-first century, many computers, especially the class of neural net machines becoming known as “thinkers,“ were fooling a great many humans, even experts, in such conversations. Only one expert consistently pierced the veil to see the limited machines behind: Roger Atkins of Stanford University .

Jill outlived Atkins, and became the model for all thinkers built after. Now, even an exported thinker such as Alice could outstrip Jill several times over, but for one crucial quality. Jill had acquired much of her knowledge through experience. She was one hundred and twenty-eight years old.

We paid for the broadband connection between Alice and Jill, agreed to the encryption algorithm, and went to bed.

Sleep on Earth, despite my bichemistry, almost invariably felt heavy. The strain of Earth’s pull on a Martian’s muscles and organs could not be eliminated; it could only be treated. While I felt well enough awake, my sleeping self often drowned, dragged under shallow waters rushing in tides past fantastic, ivory-colored castles on ruby-colored islands.

I climbed or rather glided up the internal spiral of a tower staircase when Bithras shook me rudely awake. I reflexively jerked the covers up, fearing the worst. He pulled his hands back, eyes wide, as if deeply hurt. “No nonsense, Casseia,” he said. “There is a serious problem. Alice woke me. She’s finished her conversation with Jill.”

Allen, Bithras and I sat in our robes in the living room, cradling cups of hot tea. Alice ’s image perched primly on the couch between Bithras and Allen, hands folded on her knees. She spoke with a calm, deliberate voice, describing her encounter with Jill. Allen quietly made notes on his slate.

“The meeting was extraordinary,” Alice began. “Jill allowed me to become her for a time, and to store essential aspects of her experiences in my own memories. I provided her in turn with my own experiences. We divided our five minutes between conversation in deep-level thinker language, transfer of experiences, and cross-diagnostic, to see whether bad syncline searches could occur in any of our neural systems.“

“You allowed Jill to analyze your systems?” Allen asked with some alarm, looking up from his slate.

“Yes.”

“Tell them what she found,” Bithras said.

“This is in a sense proprietary,” Alice said. “Jill could face difficulties if her work is discovered.”

“You have our promise of discretion,” Bithras said. “Casseia? Allen?”

We swore secrecy.

“Jill considers all thinkers to be part of her family. She feels responsible for us, like a mother. When thinkers converse with her, she analyzes us, adding to her own store of knowledge and experience, and determines whether we are functioning properly.”

I detected reticence. Alice did not want to get to the point.

“Tell us, Alice ,” Bithras encouraged.

“I still feel deeply embarrassed by what Jill discovered in me. I am able to fulfill my duties, I am sure, but there may be reason to no longer trust my ultimate performance — ”

Bithras shook his head impatiently. “Jill found evolvons,” he said.

“In Alice ?” Allen asked, lowering his slate.

I sucked in my breath. “What kind?” I asked.

Alice ’s image froze, flickered, and went out. Her voice remained. “I am changing modes of display to better conform with my internal state,” she said. “I will not maintain a cosmetic front. Evolvons exist in my personality configuration. They appear to be original, not implanted after my incept date.”

An evolvon could be nearly any thing or system designed to exist in time, consume energy or memory, and reproduce itself. All living things were evolvons in a sense. Within computers and thinkers, the word usually referred to algorithms or routines not known to be part of the status design or acquired neural configuration — sophisticated viruses.

“Do you know their purpose?” I asked.

“Jill discovered them only by comparing my full configuration with my neural bauplan, my self-known design, and running a trace of her own devising. There are parts of me that are not known to me, and which I have no control over; these parts are not functional in my personality configuration. They have no known utility, but all of them contain reproductive algorithms. They are well-hidden. No traces on Mars revealed their presence.”

“Evolvons,” Allen said, his face pale. “That’s against the law.”

“I have difficulty describing my sensation at making this discovery,” Alice said. I wanted to hold her, but of course she had nothing to hold. Her voice remained level — I had never heard a thinker express negative emotions in speech. But her tone became a shade harsher as she said, “I feel violated.”