1.

2
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 inaudible a metre away was rolling.

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.

1.3

To work. Sam laid the card he’d prepared in the small hours, onto its hostspot. 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.