“Do the original qube programmers think this kind of process could go very far? I mean, wouldn’t the qubes still be stuck in algorithms?”

“As it turns out, the programmers who first built quantum computers used differing structures, and they ended up creating several different internal operating architectures. So really there are different kinds of qubes, each kind with different forms of cognition—different protocols, algorithms, neural networks. They have brain imitations of various sorts—aspects of what you might call self-awareness, and many other features of consciousness. They’re not simply one design, and in terms of their mentation, they may have started speciating.”

Inspector Genette took over: “We’re seeing clear signs of self-programming in the qubes. Where that may have led is hard to say. But we’re worried, because they don’t have the brain architecture and chemistry that makes us think the way we do. We think very emotionally. Our emotions are crucial to decision making, long-term thinking, memory creation—our overall sense of meaning. Without these abilities we wouldn’t be human. We wouldn’t be able to function as individuals in groups. And yet the qubes don’t have emotions, but are instead thinking by way of different architectures, protocols, physical methods. Thus they have mentalities that are not at all human, even if they are in some sense conscious. And we can’t even be sure that they resemble each other in the ways they’ve emerged into this new state. We don’t know if they think in math or in logic terms, or in a language like English or Chinese. Or if different qubes aren’t different in that way too.”

Swan nodded as she thought it over. If the silly girls had been qubes—the lawn bowler also—that was rather amazing, just in terms of morphology. As to mentation, none of this particularly surprised her. “I talk to Pauline about these issues all the time,” she told them. “But what’s clear to me from those conversations is how crippled the qubes are by these mental absences you speak of. Maybe it is the lack of emotions. There’s so much they can’t do.”

“So it has seemed,” Wahram said after a silence. “But now it looks like they may be generating goals for themselves. Maybe there are some pseudo-emotions there; we don’t know. Probably they still aren’t very wise—more like crickets than dogs. But, you know—we don’t know how our own minds work, in terms of creating the higher levels of consciousness. Since we can’t get inside the qubes to see what’s happening in them, we’re even less sure of them than we are of us. So… it’s a problem.”

“Have you taken some of them apart to see?”

“Yes. But the results are ambiguous. It’s curiously similar to trying to study our own brains—it’s the moment of thought that you want to study, but even if you can find where in the thinking mechanism the thoughts are happening, you can’t be sure what exactly is causing those thoughts, or how they are experienced from the inside. In both cases they involve quantum effects that can’t easily be tracked to a physical source or action.”

“There’s some worry that we set a bad example by doing too much of this kind of thing,” Genette added. “What if they get the idea that it’s all right for them to study us in the same way?”

Swan nodded unhappily, recalling the look in the eyes of the lawn bowler—even in the eyes of the silly girls, now that she was reconsidering them. They had had a look that said they would do almost anything. Or that they didn’t understand what they were saying.

But people had that look all the time.

“So,” Wahram said. “You see our problem. And now it’s getting more urgent, because there’s solid evidence that these qube humanoids were ordered up by other qubes—qubes in boxes or robots, or asteroid frameworks, as was usual.”

“Why would they do that?” Swan asked.

Wahram shrugged.

“Is it bad?” Swan asked, thinking it over. “I mean, they can’t band together into some kind of hive mind creature, because of decoherence. And so ultimately they’re just people with qube minds.”

“People without emotions.”

“There have always been people like that. They get by.”

Wahram squinted. “Actually, they don’t. But look, there’s more.” He looked at Genette, who said to Swan, “The attacks we’ve been investigating, on Terminator and the Ygassdril, both had a qubical involvement. Also, I had that photo you gave me of your lawn bowler couriered to Wang, and he went through his unaffiliated files, and though he couldn’t ID the bowler, he had photos that show your person at a meeting Lakshmi organized in Cleopatra in the year 2302. That’s significant, because the reports of strange behaviors began to appear throughout the system in the years right after that. When all the sightings are correlated and analyzed, they converge back in time and space to that meeting on Venus. We also find that the organization in Los Angeles that ordered the pebble-launching ship is entirely qubical, with the only humans involved located in a kind of board of directors. We also found qubes involved with the construction of the launch mechanism, which we now suspect was built in an unaffiliated shipyard trailing the Vesta group. We found the print order. There are very few humans in those particular shipyards anymore; they’re almost entirely robotic. So it’s at least possible that all this has been done by qubes, with no humans involved at all.”

“Maybe so,” Swan said, “but I have to say right now, that lawn bowler had emotion. It was burning a hole in me with its look! It wanted me to know something. Otherwise why even approach me, why make those incredible shots? It wantedme to know it was there. And desire is definitely an emotion.”

The others there considered this.

Swan went on: “Why do you think it has to be that emotions are biochemical? Couldn’t you have emotions without hormones or blood or anything? Some new affect system that is electrical, or quantum?”

Genette raised a hand as if to stop her: “We don’t know. All we can say is we don’t know what kind of intentionality they have now, because their intentions were very limited when they started. Read the input, run it through algorithms, present the output—that was AI intention before this. So now that it appears that they are intending things, we have to be on our guard. Not only on general principles, as with any new unknown thing, but because some of them are acting bizarrely, while others have already made attacks on us.”

One of the group, a Dr. Tracy, Swan seemed to recall, said, “Maybe living in humanoid bodies has made these qubes emotional by definition. Embodied mind is emotional, let us say—and now they are embodied minds.”

A woman as small as Inspector Genette stood on her chair and said, “I’m still not convinced the qubes have anyhigher-order thinking, including things like intentionality and emotion, which derive from consciousness itself. Despite their incredible calculating speeds, they are still operating by algorithms we gave them, or else derivable subsequent algorithms. Recursive programming can only refine these. They are simple algorithms. Consciousness is somuch more complex a field than that. They can’t build from algorithms to consciousness—”

“Are you sure?” Genette interjected.

The small woman tilted her head in just the way Swan had seen Genette do it. “I thinkso. I don’t see how the higher levels of complexity could evolve from the algorithms they have. They can’t make metaphors; they can barely understand them. They can’t read facial expressions. In skills like these a four-year-old is vastly ahead of them, and an adult human simply a different order of being altogether.”

“This is what we were taught when we were young,” Genette said. “And more importantly, when the qubes were young.”

“But also it’s what we have studied all our lives, and seen with our own two eyes,” the small woman replied somewhat sharply. “And programmed.”