Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects

Her name is Ana Alvarado, and shes having a bad day. She spent all week preparing for a job interview, the first one in months to reach the videoconference stage, but the recruiters face barely appeared onscreen before he told her that the company has decided to hire someone else. So she sits in front of her computer, wearing her good suit for nothing. She makes a halfhearted attempt to send queries to some other companies and immediately receives automated rejections. After an hour of this, Ana decides she needs some diversion: she opens a Next Dimension window to play her current favorite game, Age of Iridium.

The beachhead is crowded, but her avatar is wearing the coveted mother-of-pearl combat armor, and its not long before some players ask her if she wants to join their fireteam. They cross the combat zone, hazy with the smoke of burning vehicles, and for an hour they work to clear out a stronghold of mantids; its the perfect mission for Anas mood, easy enough that she can be confident of victory but challenging enough that she can derive satisfaction from it. Her teammates are about to accept another mission when a phone window opens up in the corner of Anas video screen. Its a voice call from her friend Robyn, so Ana switches her microphone over to take the call.

Hey Robyn.

Hi Ana. Hows it going?

Ill give you a hint: right now Im playing AoI.

Robyn smiles. Had a rough morning?

You could say that. Ana tells her about the canceled interview.

Well, Ive got some news that might cheer you up. Can you meet me in Data Earth?

Sure, just give me a minute to log out.

Ill be at my place.

Okay, see you soon. Ana excuses herself from the fireteam and closes her Next Dimension window. She logs on to Data Earth, and the window zooms in to her last location, a dance club cut into a giant cliff face. Data Earth has its own gaming continentsElderthorn, Orbis Tertiusbut they arent to Anas taste, so she spends her time here on the social continents. Her avatar is still wearing a party outfit from her last visit; she changes to more conventional clothes and then opens a portal to Robyns home address. A step through and shes in Robyns virtual living room, on a residential aerostat floating above a semicircular waterfall a mile across.

Their avatars hug. So whats up? says Ana.

Blue Gamma is up, says Robyn. We just got another round of funding, so were hiring. I showed your resume around, and everyones excited to meet you.

Me? Because of my vast experience? Ana has only just completed her certificate program in software testing. Robyn taught an introductory class, which is where they met.

Actually, thats exactly it. Its your last job thats got them interested.

Ana spent six years working at a zoo; its closure was the only reason she went back to school. I know things get crazy at a startup, but Im sure you dont need a zookeeper.

Robyn chuckles. Let me show you what were working on. They said I could give you a peek under NDA.

This is a big deal; up until now, Robyn hasnt been able to give any specifics about her work at Blue Gamma. Ana signs the NDA, and Robyn opens a portal. Weve got a private island; come take a look. They walk their avatars through.

Anas half expecting to see a fantastical landscape when the window refreshes, but instead her avatar shows up in what looks at first glance to be a daycare center. On second glance, it looks like a scene from a childrens book: theres a little anthropomorphic tiger cub sliding colored beads along a frame of wires; a panda bear examining a toy car; a cartoon version of a chimpanzee rolling a foam rubber ball.

The onscreen annotations identify them as digients, digital organisms that live in environments like Data Earth, but they dont look like any that Anas seen before. These arent the idealized pets marketed to people who cant commit to a real animal; they lack the picture-perfect cuteness, and their movements are too awkward. Neither do they look like inhabitants of Data Earths biomes: Ana has visited the Pangaea archipelago, seen the unipedal kangaroos and bidirectional snakes that evolved in its various hothouses, and these digients clearly didnt originate there.

This is what Blue Gamma makes? Digients?

Yes, but not ordinary digients. Check it out. Robyns avatar walks over to the chimp rolling the ball and crouches down in front of it. Hi Pongo. Whatcha doing?

Pongo pliy bill, says the digient, startling Ana.

Playing with the ball? Thats great. Can I play too?

No. Pongo bill.

Please?

The chimp looks around and then, never letting go of the ball, toddles over to a scattering of wooden blocks. It nudges one of them in Robyns direction. Robyn pliy blicks. It sits back down. Pongo pliy bill.

Okay then. Robyn walks back over to Ana.What do you think?

Thats amazing. I didnt know digients had come so far.

Its all pretty recent; our dev team hired a couple of PhDs after seeing their conference presentation last year. Now weve got a genomic engine that we call Neuroblast, and it supports more cognitive development than anything else currently out there. These fellows hereshe gestures at the daycare center inhabitantsare the smartest ones weve generated so far.

And youre going to sell them as pets?

Thats the plan. Were going to pitch them as pets you can talk to, teach to do really cool tricks. Theres an unofficial slogan we use in-house: All the fun of monkeys, with none of the poop-throwing.

Ana smiles. Im starting to see where an animal-training background would be handy.

Yeah. We arent always able to get these guys to do what theyre told, and we dont know how much of that is in the genes and how much is just because we arent using the right techniques.

She watches as the panda-shaped digient picks up the toy car with one paw and examines the underside; with its other paw it cautiously bats at the wheels. How much do these digients start out knowing?

Practically nothing. Let me show you. Robyn activates a video screen on one wall of the daycare center; it displays footage of a room decorated in primary colors with a handful of digients lying on the floor. Physically theyre no different from the ones in the daycare center now, but their movements are random, spasmodic. These guys are newly instantiated. It takes them a few months subjective to learn the basics: how to interpret visual stimuli, how to move their limbs, how solid objects behave. We run them in a hothouse during that stage, so it all takes about a week. When theyre ready to learn language and social interaction, we switch to running them in real time. Thats where you would come in.

The panda pushes the toy car back and forth across the floor a few times, and then makes a braying sound, mo mo mo. Ana realizes that the digient is laughing. Robyn continues, I know you studied primate communication in school. Heres a chance to put that to use. What do you think? Are you interested?

Ana hesitates; this is not what she envisioned for herself when she went to college, and for a moment she wonders how it has come to this. As a girl she dreamed of following Fossey and Goodall to Africa; by the time she got out of grad school, there were so few apes left that her best option was to work in a zoo; now shes looking at a job as a trainer of virtual pets. In her career trajectory you can see the diminution of the natural world, writ small.

Snap out of it, she tells herself. It may not be what she had in mind, but this is a job in the software industry, which is what she went back to school for. And training virtual monkeys might actually be more fun than running test suites, so as long as Blue Gamma is offering a decent salary, why not?

His name is Derek Brooks, and hes not happy with his current assignment. Derek designs the avatars for Blue Gammas digients, and normally he enjoys his job, but yesterday the product managers asked him for something he considers a bad idea. He tried to tell them that, but the decision is not his to make, so now he has to figure out how to do a decent job of it.