Sam at work

Sam moved the bonzai out of the way, improving his perspectives on the viewspace. When the desk had called him, it had already begun setting up his own interfaces. He’d slotted in some holos, so favourite scenes and events already hovered in strategic locations. Music was rolling, loud for him, inaudible a metre away.

Ben’s PuzzleKid of the Day floated into view. An old quiz show title or tabloid headline, apparently. “Take it away, Brain power”. Mental could be psychic…. Moved out, then: dislocated? disengaged? Ah, displaced… Psychic K Displaced… Psycho Kinetically Displaced? Or Psycho Kinetic Displacement? The latter sounded better.

Psycho Kinetic Displacement. He spoke it aloud, and was rewarded with applause, and a new high score. This was some speed; either the puzzles were getting easier, or the ferry had really washed that bleariness away.

He entered the phrase “Previously Known as Death” into a translation string, and reluctantly abandoned the game for the time being.

To work. Sam slipped the card he’d prepared in the small hours, into its slot. It took a few seconds to configure the new data into the system. As it did, the face of Lincoln materialised in the visual field created by the monitor, rendered in beautiful detail and depth. Looking in the prime of his life, in a country garden perhaps, before war and Washington. He was seated in front of a background of flowing velvet waterfalls, , and occasionally flakes of what looked like snowflake-sized clouds. He seemed to like it, so what the hell.

As soon as the configuration was complete, Sam activated the accelerator icon. The foot image depressed the archaic pedal image, the icon surged away from the screen, and Lincoln’s face contorted, restored itself, displayed a succession of tics and grimaces, and relaxed again. Monitors round the edges of the display showed his mental state to have flared into awareness, rapidly settling into what looked like a tranquil geniality. The waterfall continued to plunge its velvet into infinity. The icon zoomed back, to float just above the main image, and Lincoln stared out quizzically at Sam, for all the world like a colleague making a conference call.

Lincoln could see Sam - after a fashion. Enough for facial recognition. Precise vision was not necessary, and there was no point in wasting time or money on setting up more than the basic (and effectively free) recognition software and equipment. The sensorimotor fields of Lincoln’s model were deliberately underdeveloped, too. This meant that he ran little risk of suffering boredom from a low level of external stimulus. The waterfall was enough to keep him nicely alert, that was the theory. Lincoln’s capacities could easily be augmented once the basics of personality and intellect were right. And it was important to avoid the depressive tendencies of the original. A little emotional dampening was certainly in order, Sam and Ben had agreed on that at the outset. But the more positive swings were worth keeping.

This Lincoln knew who and where he was, what he was, who Sam was. He remembered their last interactions, to the extent this was compatible with last night’s reprogramming. He had more or less several months of this new life to look back on. Which he did with some awe, and a surprising lack of gratitude or resentment. As if this was just how it always was.

Sam felt, too, that Lincoln treated him with just a hint of condescension. He’d never mentioned anything about pigmentation (or hairstyle for that matter), and had been studiously silent when he’d been informed about America’s more recent ethnic history. Maybe he’s condescending with everyone – just a result of his position. But Sam suspected that the Lincoln was being courteous and had not really wrestled with his obsolete – never grounded – assumptions. And then he knew he was being observed by at least one of those people.

He also knew that he was to be tested again today. He didn’t know why, and didn’t seem to have given much thought to the issue. Actually, Sam told himself, as he had thought several times before, this is a symptom of the basic problem. A lack of natural curiosity, of his original’s eclectic interests. This should have been emergent from the basic cognitive engineering. Something is holding it back – or the soul we need here is going to take a different approach altogether.

The Lincoln would rise to the challenge of the tests, to the best of his considerable ability. His cognitive, motivational and ethical fields were highly elaborate. Being stretched in tests seemed to be just what he needed to thrive.

Thirty minutes later, it was clear that even this was not enough. He was eager, yes, he responded rapidly and articulately to Sam’s questions and prompts. He’d assimilated the new programming perfectly. He had made the marginal adjustments to his memory that this required. On subjects that the historic Lincoln had experienced, he was almost perfect. He could do more than demonstrate factual knowledge, than relate to past events the way that Lincoln-1 had. He could do more than even come up with famous aphorisms and insights, and novel ones that seemed to Sam just as good. He could interrelate these areas of knowledge in new ways, to consider eventualities that he’d never encountered in real history. He seemed lucid, sanguine and wise, just as required.

But dull. Basically, dull, like an old uncle you’d almost forgotten you had. Where it came to assimilating material about the late nineteenth, the twentieth and especially the twenty first century, he drew a blank. He didn’t seem able to confront the changed social circumstances, the transformed politics and ethics, the technology that gave him his own current existence. Facts he could amass, they’d filter through cognitive fields. Sam had taken him through the documentary downloads, the standard bank of questions, the scenarios. But to no avail. The Lincoln stayed genial, furrowed his brow and tried to help. But his own efforts to grasp the new circumstances were half-hearted, his investigations stereotyped and repetitive. He can’t learn, not in the true sense of the word.

What was worse, he didn’t even seem aware of the extent of his non-comprehension. He didn’t want to know, to learn about modernity. He retreated into routines of thought. Repeating himself for all the world like the senile oldsters of yesteryear. Sam had seen enough of them in a documentary about the conquest of ageing to last even an extended lifetime.

“Sorry, old friend” said Sam, with self-consciously sentimentality, and closed him down. The Lincoln waved farewell and walked off into the distance – the point of view shifted to display a sparsely populated rural arcadia, a nice touch from Sally down at graphics. Waterfall and copses. Again, there was that irritating optical anomaly, just before he disappeared from view – as if he’d been enveloped by brightness. And again, Sam made a mental note to himself to look into this further. Little things like this were often early symptoms of deep programming bugs. Or equally often, of minor glitches in the rendering software. Even commercial holos were full of them – clock blemishes to movie buffs, holo holes to ordinary viewers.

Sam reviewed the session logs as they scrolled past. He agreed that they captured both the continuing successes and failures. They didn’t capture his increasing despair. Sam mailed Ben to request a consultation. He poured a coffee, and fiddled with the background music and his chair. Time to review some alternative approaches.