1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
|
in a pure digital world there are no artifacts and no silcon means no way to retrieve them. So the AI programs, as they learn and improve needed some other way to record what happened in the world. Since they could only see with cameras and whatnot, they created recording devices: silcon-based human beings. Real humans, but with silcon improvments to their brains, fiber optic cables under the skin to transmit, etc.
The girl is a living artifact -- a way to record, interpret, document and store impressions of events, a relativistic recording as opposed to the "facts" that can be gleaned from keyboard input or camera recordings. In the end her job is to record, download the data into the main AI bank, which will then slip between dimensions to live in relative safety, she will stay behind and continue to record and function as a storyteller.
There are many recording devices like the little girl. One is with Claire. The man in black is the original, organic, analog recording device created by the world to ensure that it is observed.
The Protectorate knows that AI has escaped human control, knows about the recording devices (there are many of them) and wants to cut off AIs ability to learn, thus stopping it from usurping their power, hence the ban on AI and the people that come after Claire and then later the litle girl. They come after Claire and Waiben because they use AI, but they really come afdter the girl because they know she is AI. She was bieng held in the prison colony after being abducted from the facility where she was created, or where the various improvements were made so that she can interface with AI. The Protectorate was trying to figure out how the AI had done what it had done. (which it did using shel corps to fund research communicating by e-mail and other digital means and covering its tracks with human scientists). Then Sil sneaks her back out of the protectorate which comes after him in new orleans in a way that it never had before.
Sil figures some of this out in Ameritown, after the same people that hunt him in new orleans come after him again way outside what is ostensibly their jurisdiction. The man in black and dean help Sil escape and Ameritown is destroyed behind them. Scratch (modeled after col tigh), Claire, Sil and girl take the boat along the coast, to meet up with Dean and the man in black. Various adventures on the run and then they slip out into the atlnatic bound for the med. They sail through the suez canal, around the horn of africa and to india where they meet up with Waiben. The girl connects to AI and downloads what is happening just before the AI slips into the high dimensional matrix at the end.
Related to the no artifacts bit: Sil has a picture of a yound girl pinned above the nav station on ARbella. The (real) little girl asks Sil who it is, (is that your daughter?). Sill tells her he doesn't know who it is, he just found it in an abandoned house a long time ago, he keeps it because it reminds him of everything that isn't.
|
