So, let us look at our second card. This card is Fortitude.
Here she is, represented as a woman subduing a lion, stooped to hold the beast by his jaws. The woman is beautiful, the lion is fierce. But this is no beauty and the beast! The woman here is the symbol of the higher intellect, and the lion the lower self, the id, and so Fortitude shows discipline and control, the taming of our inner beasts, our animal selves.
Fortitude is one of the four Cardinal Virtues; see she has a halo, but twisted, lemniscate, like a figure eight, or like the symbol of infinity: the Möbius band of endlessness. She wears a samite robe, edged in Tyrian purple, imperial purple, and a girdle of bronze marked here with a sign like a blend of your numbers 2 and 4, which is the symbol of imperial Jupiter, the god of strength and power, and the alchemists identified Jupiter with the element Tin which alloyed with Copper gives strength to bronze.
The lion, Leo, is a Fire sign, and is the eighth house of the zodiac, and Fortitude is numbered here as the eighth card of the Major Arcana, the innovation of Rider-Waite-Smith, who transposed Strength and Justice under the influence of the Golden Dawn's hermetic teachings the better to align the symbolism of cards and stars.
The Greeks identified Leo as the Nemean Lion, the beast slain as the first task of Hercules the son of Zeus or, again, Jupiter, though the constellation is even older and was identified as a lion by the Egyptians, perhaps because it rises at the flooding of the Nile when the desert lions come to prey on the Upper Kingdom.
Our lion is garlanded in oak leaves and poppy. The oak leaf, in the language of flowers, means "strength", which is another name by which this card is also known; meanwhile, in the same language, the poppy says "sleep" or "oblivion".
The four supporting figures tell a story. In the first, at the top left we see a sculptor with an unfinished block of clay; to the top right, we see he has carved the figure of a man; at the bottom right we see that the figure has come alive, its fists raised in threat or anger; finally, bottom left we see the figure broken on the ground, ready to be returned to base clay so the cycle can begin again.
This story is of being a created thing, a golem, controlled, subdued: a tamed animal, a programmed robot, your destiny written for you.
The card is edged in violet.
This card makes me think of a woman called Charity Smith. A young black woman, of seemingly poor prospects, not pretty, not educated, not rich, not connected, who was offered a deal. She thought she was making her destiny, only to discover that they were making it for her instead.
She met another girl in a bar.
"Why's you even talking to me," Charity asked her after a while.
"No one can frown the way you can. You've scowled all night long. No one can frown like that without having something interesting to say."
And so Charity told her about Secure & Protect Co.
Secure & Protect Co. is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Landis Ltd, which in turn is owned jointly by Waggner and Company and by J. Johnson Associates, and both of them are owned by Llanwelly Holdings, and Llanwelly Holdings, as I'm sure you've guessed, is a front company for one of the more deniable parts of the secret establishment. This one is also one of the older ones, dating back to the World Wars, and trades under the name of the War Office Level Four.
Not, I should hasten to add, that dear Charity knew any of this. An angry and determined young woman, but not one to research the backstory.
Her tale begins at the juvenile offenders' probation service with an offer of recruitment.
"I should never of been there, neither," Charity added. "It was that other bitch what started it, shovin' me like she was all that. I was well within ma rights defendin' meself."
"And they offered you a job?"
"Straight." She glanced away, not wanting to look shy. Then added to reinforce her story: "I reckon they wus lookin' fr'us. 'Cos we knows how to handle ourselves, like. If things looks like they'll get a bit."
"What was the job, then?"
"Henchman."
"Get out!"
"No, straight. Course they call it all 'security' an shit. Big man calls hisself 'security consultant'; says we can work us way up to that, like. He can piss off tho; I ain't sucking no cock to get stripes an' shit. But I'll do the henchman shit, all right. I's money, innit."
"So are you loaded then?"
Charity looks uncomfortable. The remuneration is indeed more than adequate for her needs, even with the generous allowance she pays back to her mam and dada, who'll bank the money but still won't talk to her.
"Do okay," she grudgingly admits. "S'pose you'll be wantin' n'other drink, then."
And she gets them.
"But then," she goes on, "the shit starts."
"What kind of shit?"
"The weird kind. There's five of us, right. Noobies. And they kit us out: uniforms an' shit. Quality. Feels nice. Moves well, don't trip you up or no shit like that. An then they try us out wi the armour."
"Armour? What like knights and swords?"
"Fuck off! Body armour! Stab jacket stuff. Pads on yer arms and shit."
"Oh. Right. That stuff, what is it, Kevlar."
"Like that, only they say it's new, a… sramik they call it."
"A ceramic?"
"Tha's it. Well weird; s'got like wires and veins and shit in it. But s'good, innit; flexible and really fookin' hard. They had this one guy stand up and they like shoots him right in the fookin' chest."
"Jeez!"
"No, he's like totally fine. Well, he's knocked flying an' shit, but he gets hisself up and is all like 'that all the shit you've got?' innee."
"Tell me you ain't lyin'!"
"No s'the god's honest. But that ain't even the weird bit."
"Go on!"
"No, a'm tellin' yo. They've got us all up this armour n'shit, an' then they gets us to try on this helmet, an' i's like made of all the same shit as the rest of it, like, what you say, sir-ram-ic and shit, but it's all, like, Roman lookin'."
"How'd you mean 'Roman'?"
"I's like got flaps for yer ears right and this big disk thing that goes down yer back, but yer main thing is i's got this fuckin' great brush stickin' out the top!"
"Brush, right."
"Straight up. An' I mean straight up. Like a, wassit, a cock…"
"What?"
"A co… the fuckin' bird, ye bitch!"
"Oh… yeah… like a cock!"
They both laughed.
"An' so we're all like, tha's so gay, an' we're no wearin' that shit. An' yer big man says yo put this shit on, yo fuckers, o' we're like so over yo. So this first guy goes, 'okay, I can handle this shit, a'm like secure in ma wassit manhood, right.' So he pick this fucker up and put it on and for a moment he's all like 'I am so' and then next thing he's all down on 'is fuckin' knees an' spewin' his guts, which was well entertainin' I do not think."
"Nice."
"Yo say that again! So we're all 'no way, man, what is all this shit' but ye big man, next thing he's pullin' off the helmet and dragging this guy up all slappin' him on the back and 'i's all a big test an' shit' an' 'yo be fine; yo'll do good in security,' an' 'welcome to the team, ma man,' an' all that. I's total bollocks like, innit. An' then he's getting' the rest of us takin' turns tryin' it on, and showin' us what we had for fuckin' breakfast. Only when i's ma turn, like, I don't get none of that shit. I's just, like, this thing goes click like and i's all me an' the armour an' i's all locked into one thing, right. Like… yo ever see a turtle?"
"A turtle?"
"Like a fookin' tortoise. D'yo ever see one at the zoo like? Or on fookin' Blue Petah on the telly."
"Yes, yeah, I know what a turtle is."
"Well this was like that like. Me, in a turtle suit. With a fuckin' Roman hat on."
"What… what happened next? They must have got it off you?"
"Corse the fookin' got it off me. Do I have a fookin' Roman cock hat on me head? Make some fookin' sense!"
"Yeah, sorry. Of course."
"Nahh, am yankin' ye. Listen, they get this thing on me an' suddenly a'm like all I can hear shit, like heartbeats an' shit, an' then i's like little fookin' pictures in me head: who's stood there, how far they are, who they are, what they're doin'. Suddenly a'm the fookin' Terminator with all this range/threat/target shit.
"An' ye big man, only now I can see 'is like name like i's floating next to him, only i's not, i's just in me head like, but I can like see that he's Germaine Shit-something. I mean he's like Germaine, an' I nearly piss meself. Only, like I can see he's really happy. I mean I can really see it, 'cos this thing is tellin' me, i's like reading his heart rate and eye dilation an' saliva and all that, an' i's tellin' me he's got a proper hard-on for this.
"An' he's all 'try the weapon, try the weapons'."
"Weapons? What d'you mean weapons…"
"Oh 'cos i's all built in an' shit. In the armour. In the pad things on me arms. Like tasers an' shit. Sonic and stuff like that, he says. All electronic. Real shiny. Like a Wii. A'm like a walkin' fookin' Wii. He wanted those other guys to attack me an' shit, just so he could see how I'd take 'em apart.
"An' by tha point I'is pretty sure…"
"Sure? Sure of what?"
"But thens when we gets attacked by, like, the Mister Men, innit."
"When… what? The what?"
Now to be fair to Charity, the two robot creatures that came bursting through the wall did bear a passing resemblance to beloved childhood characters. They were essentially cuboid, supported on a smaller pyramidal base fitted with caterpillar tracks, with almost comical armatures on either side and a huge cartoon face, enormous expressive eyes and a line for a mouth, on the front. At the front left corner of their face, each was embossed with a small neat black logo: some kind of winged staff with a pair of serpents coiled about in double helix. The Caduceus, the helmet fully informed her: not the healing rod of Asclepius, but the Staff of trickster Hermes, or the wand of Raphael. One robot was painted red and the other green.
Green came trundling forwards, its animated eyes wide and the mouth line curving upwards: an expression that instantly conveyed delight.
"Oh wow, lady!" it said. "I'm HAPPY!"
"It said what?"
"Yeah, ah know. It ses 'a'm happy' like i's, what, five. So a'm all 'yeah, man, I'm filled up for ye,' but it's all 'no, lady, HAPPY is my des ig nay shun' 'Cos 'e means 'name', dun't 'e, but a'm all over tha 'cos like ma helmets already changed i's li'l floating name fing from all 'Hostile 1' to 'HAPPY'."
The heads-up display had not just updated the designation tag, but was filling up with threat assessment, weapon data and tactical suggestions. The robot creature was armed with a range of rockets and projectiles and a crude beam weapon; the red one was equipped with a force pressor, which they had used to burst open the corrugated steel wall of Secure and Protect Co's cheap Nissen hut training centre.
Red was twitching back and forward on the spot making growling noises, possibly revving itself up. Its eyes were just two solid black circles the size of tennis balls with a thick black line drawn above; its mouth a horizontal zigzag.
HAPPY performed a sort of mechanical dosey-doe, giving the impression of looking about excitedly. It froze when it saw its companion.
"Oh dear, lady," it said, "this is ANGRY."
"Hostile 2" became "ANGRY" on the helm display.
"So, A's gonna ask: 'is it jus yous or is the rest of th'dwarfs commin'?' but a'd forgot abaat Germaine and the res' o' 'is' boys. An' 'es all 'stan' down or we's goon shoot you up'."
And HAPPY had said: "oh, golly gosh, just look at the size of that gun! Isn't it something!"
And ANGRY had said: "guns I do not like; I do not like guns!"
"An then this 'elmets saying 'git out the fookin' way' and a'm gittin out the fookin way, but i's like i's the armour tha's gittin' it an a'm jus' dragged along inside, right. S'good fing thou, 'cos next fing there's this flamethrower all over."
ANGRY spat a gout of flame towards the trainee guards, while HAPPY cheerily burbled: "oh looky looky, that's very jolly pretty isn't it! But don’t get too close! Oh no, that's something I learned; don't touch if you want to be happy."
"Which kinda meant I had to ask: 'what tha hell are yo on, mister man?'."
And HAPPY had replied: "learning things makes me happy!"
Alan Turing, Britain's wartime code breaker and tragic genius, wrote a paper on artificial intelligences in 1950. It is famous for proposing the "Turing Test", best summarised as: an intelligence is sapient if you cannot tell that it isn't. In the same paper, however, he proposed that rather than building a machine that would simulate the adult human mind, it would be rather better to produce a simpler one to simulate a child's mind… and then to subject it to a course of education. And someone clearly had.
"Looky, looky!" said HAPPY and it fired a rocket-propelled grenade towards the trainees. The blast scattered them in all directions, one of them unmoving.
Incredibly loudly, the rip and roar of machinegun fire cut up the air of the Nissen hut.
"I's Germaine, innit. 'E's pretty hot with the guns, atch-ly. An' 'e's not thick; 'e's shootin' and runnin' for 'is life."
Bizarrely, a line of bullets stuck into ANGRY's body, neither ricocheting nor penetrating but stopping flat at the surface like a nail fired into glue, scarring across his face and left side. It did nothing good for his expression.
"Bullets get in the way! Grr!" said ANGRY. "They get in the way, bullets!"
He careened across the hut spitting out a range of ordinance, mostly towards the fleeing Germaine, though neither Charity nor the remaining trainees were entirely exempt from being targeted.
"Some of it, right, this armour jus' sort o' shrugs off, okay? But the bigger stuff, i's all 'crawl this way!' an' 'jump, jump now!' an' shit."
"Didn't you… couldn't you shoot back? You said there were weapons…?"
"Yeah, an' really piss 'im off? Even my new best tin hat wan't havin' any of that! I's all wiv the 'caution! caution!' and 'scannin' for optimal stra-a-gy' shit."
HAPPY also appeared to be scanning; running in little circles like an excited puppy, although still occasionally firing off a rocket half-heartedly aimed in the direction of one of the trainees who was trying to reach the armaments.
"Lady!" the robot creature came rushing up to where Charity was crouched in partial cover. "Lady! Have you got what we're looking for?"
"And I ain't never been proposition'd like tha before, either!"
"Oh please, please let me scan!"
The green robot extended a kind of aerial from one of its armatures, a pole with feathered fronds at the top. As it came close the helmet irrelevantly highlighted the Caduceus on the lower right corner of HAPPY's front face. HAPPY prodded her with its stick.
"Oh yes! Oh yes! HAPPY has found the contamination."
"Yer what?"
"We must purge and return with any remains!"
And the HAPPY robot brought its weapons to bear.
"An' then, like, the helmet goes 'fook this' and 'panic mode', an' nex fing a'v gone flyin'. Only is not like Superman flyin'; it like bleedin' bein' blown up flyin'."
Charity had been hurled up and backwards by a full pulse of the tractor-pressors in the chest unit and the sonic cannons embedded in the arms. HAPPY tumbled over backwards with an electronic whistle of distress.
The words 'weapon solution found' presented themselves in Charity's awareness.
"Lady! Lady! Are you all right?"
"Like you fookin' care!"
"HAPPY would be most concerned; you are a most interesting subject from whom I wish to learn many interesting things!"
"'Right,' I sez. 'So why the fook do ye want to kill us!'."
To which HAPPY had cheerfully replied: "Oh lady, HAPPY does not want to kill you; but 'orders is orders' as they say."
"As who sez?"
"Ooh, HAPPY has never learned! I should very much like to find out!"
"So I said: 'yo couldn' jus' not kill us all, an' everything!'."
"Oh noes! Given tasks: jobs to do. Success makes a happy HAPPY!"
"Yeah, right, I sez. 'An' failure make an angry ANGRY.' Poor sods."
"So you were sympathising with the killer robot?"
"Yeah. Course. 'Cos i's Pos'tive and Neg'tive feedback, innit? I know that. I's yer basic op-er-rant program'; tha's what Miss Birkett would'a said in Psychology GCSE."
HAPPY and ANGRY were certainly not Thinking Machines, not in the way that, say, the Cardinals and Enumerators of the Azzarine would have recognised anyway. But they were Learning Machines.
Rather than construct an intelligence, they had been given a very basic intuitive interface designed to examine and explore its situation, draw models of the world based on the experience, and then test the model against more data, with a basic feedback mechanism based on reward for correct deductions – HAPPY – or punishment for incorrect ones – ANGRY – and expected from that to build an intelligence for themselves.
"Like Pavlov's Dogs!"
"Is 'e the one with the bell?"
"I think the dogs were trained that there would be food when the bell rang, yes."
"I always thought 'e was a bit of a basta'd."
"Why's that?"
"Rang the bell when there was no dinner, didn' 'e, jus' to see if they'd still sit up an' bark. Basta'd fing to do."
"And the robot?"
"Ha! I was clever, right. Thought I'd try a bit ov the ol' 'Star Trek' shit, right. Asked it if it couldn' like make a 'seption to i's orders, an' shit, as a 'speriment, right."
"No, no. HAPPY learned long time ago: follow orders be happy."
"So I said: 'Yeah, but, couldn'cha just not. Like don'cha have no free will an shit?'."
"Do you?"
"Wha?"
"Do you have free will? If free will is the freedom to make my own choices, then HAPPY makes choices that will make HAPPY happy. Don't you?"
"Uh, I guess. But wha' make you happy's been like programmed inta yer."
"And with you also, I think. HAPPY does not have very much experience and would very much like to learn more, but HAPPY's current hypothesis is that human actions are mostly predicated by learned desire/fear responses programmed by experiences during the early stages of their operation. Like HAPPY and ANGRY."
"Let's just do it! Kill the bitch! Kill the bitch! Let's just do it!"
ANGRY was coming back up the length of the hut towards them.
"'E'd finished off the others, right. I guess, like mebbe one of 'em was still alive; dunno about the others, might av bin knock'd owt. But 'e was after us now. I reckon 'im an' HAPPY had some sort ov link; one knew summat, then the other one did. But that was when he arrived."
"He? Who?"
"The man. The captain. Germaine's boss. Ye know, head of the crew. An' the helmet, it lurves him, it really lurves him. 'An that don' feel real creepy an' shit, 'cos it's all tellin' me I gotta lurve him too and i' jus' feels so right, and so so wrong at th'same time."
"Who was he then? Didn't the helmet tell you?"
"Yeah. Yeah it did. Cap'n Philip Masterman, it called 'im. Tha's not 'is real name; tha's like some W.O.L.4 code name it tagged 'im wiv. There's some techie shit about 'fast mutagen enhancement' an' shit, but you don' wanna know that. All you need to know is 'e's there in 'is shirt an' pants wiv the biggest fookin' rocket launcher on 'is shoulder, like something 'e's pulled off a fookin' tank wiv is bare hands. 'An 'e's got i' pointed at ANGRY."
"Uh oh! Looky looky ANGRY!" warned HAPPY.
ANGRY came to a screeching halt, tipping over a little as it pivoted about to see what HAPPY was staring at.
"Fuck." ANGRY said, somewhat profoundly. "Fuck…"
And then there was a line of fire connecting the red robot with the thing that Charity's helmet was now describing as "terawatt plasma discharge cone" and then there was a lot of little bits of angry shrapnel everywhere. The armour protected her but the blast wave knocked her flat again.
"Wow!" said HAPPY. "That's unexpectedly impressive!" And the robot swiped Masterman flat with a pressor field similar to the one with which they'd broken in.
"So now i's me an' Robbie the Robot. An' there's mebbe the one other guy, bu' we can forgit about 'im. An' 'e's trundlin' up to me wiv like knives an' shit comin' out like 'e's gonna peel me or summat."
"Sorry, lady! I've got to take you out of that bad suit. It is contamination by non-indigenous technology. Very naughty stuff. Maybe I won't have to kill you if I just take it off."
"An' I think, mebbe tha's gonna be okay."
"Maybe I will just have to take your arms and legs and head off…"
"An' now y'know, a'm not so sure."
HAPPY advanced on Charity's prone form.
"An' then Masterman, who I, like, thought was jam a minit ago, e's peelin' 'imself off the floor, isn' 'e. An' 'e sez 'Kill it! Kill it!' An' a'm like all 'I dunno, I dunno that I wanna kill HAPPY', but the helmet's pumping all this shit into ma face, shit about weaknesses and weapons and shit, an' how a'm really gonna die if I don' do this, an' I really don' wanna die' so I jus' does it. I just does it. S'pressor field kills 'is power then co-hear-ant proton beam does his connexions. Sev'red 'is brain box from 'is body."
"Oh lady, I've gotta tell you! That's…" And HAPPY's voice suddenly dropped and became a slurred drawl "That's… very… not… haa...aa…aa…py…" And his face went blank.
"An' tha's when I knew for certains,"
"Knew what?"
"HAPPY was right. This wasn' me makin' it happ'n. This was them. Makin' it happ'n. Makin' it happ'n to me. This was them makin' me their robot, makin' me their bey-aitch. With one fookin' shiny bitch-collar an' yo can bet ye fookin' life they were gonna own my ass now. 'Cos this bitch collar, it don't come off."
"It doesn't? What d'you mean? You said…"
"Yeah. I said I was yankin' yo. This shit don' come off. It can make like i's all no there, like. In tan jib all. Tha's what ye man Germaine says. But it don' go away none."
"It's still there? Still on you?"
"Yeah, an that's how come I knows you's a journalist."
"What?"
"Cos of this thing, this thing in 'ere," she tapped the side of her head, "telling me all sorts o' shit, like yo name and job and shit like all yo credit card rating an shit."
"Hey, now, this is…"
"S'okay, though, 'cos I've like done a thing that like stops yo tape recorder working an shit."
"Look, now, I…"
"So you ain't gonna be tellin no one about this shit, like. But if yo still want ta snog me, that'd be real nice."
"What?"
"Yeah, i's cool for tellin' like when I've pulled an all, innit."
"Oh. Well. Oh."
So Charity got the girl. But the company got her.
