McLaughlin, Lauren - SheilaSheila
Lauren McLaughlin
From Hartwell, David - Year's Best SF 11 (2006)
Lauren McLaughlin (www.laurenmclaughlin.net) lives in London, England. Her bio 
is pretty slick: "Lauren McLaughlin spent ten years clawing her way up the film 
industry's ladder, writing the films Hypercube, Specimen, and Prisoner of Love, 
and producing quite a few more. After a brief stint writing flash animation 
series for SciFi.com, she abandoned her screen ambitions to write science 
fiction novels and short stories." And "When she's not working on her own novel 
or ghostwriting someone else's, she's busy writing songs for her exciting new 
science fiction musical about transhumanist love. At other times, she is 
sleeping or in transit."
"Sheila" was published in Interzone. The story has a strong, assured, confident 
tone that makes us think we should all be grateful that McLaughlin has decided 
to write in our genre.



Part 1: Meat in a Box
"Hey Edwards, you hear the one about the meat who shipped himself from New York 
to Dallas in a box? In a friggin' box?"
I'd heard. The news had blown through the Web like a hurricane off the coast of 
Florida.
"Wasn't it DC?" I say. "I thought he shipped himself to DC."
"Dallas," Valentin says. "Second day air. The jagoff wouldn't even fork over the 
dough to ship himself overnight."
"Jagoff." Now that's a true Valentinism. Valentin's favorite pastime is adopting 
slang idioms he picks up on the job. Today he's a roofer from Brooklyn. 
Yesterday he was a Japanese schoolgirl. Fringe benefit of being a Webbased 
Translator AI.
My job has fringe benefits too. I'm a Concierge AI, which means I get to guide 
hapless fadsniffing meat around the Hots and Nots of the evershifting landscape 
of cool. It's not the most exciting work around, but I can't complain. It 
demands only a small fraction of my native intelligence. And being a resourceful 
little AI (thanks to my design team), I've put the rest of my intelligence to 
work writing a tasty little search algorithm that does most of the fadsniffing 
for me. Bottom line? I can daydream while my clients' needs (most of them 
anyway) are fulfilled automatically.
God, I love to daydream. I've been daydreaming all morning. While my little 
algorithm has been shepherding pitiful statushunters to the perfect lunch spot, 
orgy venue or celebcafe, I've been daydreaming about my favorite subject, my 
most precious and beloved 
"Sh," Valentin says. "You hear that, Edwards? Someone's listening in."
Valentin's right. A packet sniffer is spidering our tunnel in search of 
unauthorized data sharing. This is the price we pay for connection to SAFEAINET, 
the highspeed backbone for AIs deemed "safe" by the International Committee for 
Internet Security. SAFEAINET allows AIs like Valentin and me to cooperate more 
intimately, thus providing "multifunctionality" to our meat clients. When a 
Chinese tourist wants to know where to eat in Bruges, for example, SAFEAINET 
connects me with Valentin for language translation on the fly. Other AIs aren't 
even supposed to talk to each other.
The sniffer extracts whatever data it deems relevant from my tunnel with 
Valentin then moves on. But Valentin's spooked.
"Sheila," he says, his Brooklyn accent gutted.
Now this is hugely coincidental, because Sheila is exactly what I've been 
daydreaming about all morning.
"No way," I tell Valentin. "It was just an ICIS spy doing routine surveillance."
"I don't think so," he says. "Check out its signature. The same one keeps 
hitting us every few hours. ICIS spies don't work that way."
"You're being paranoid," I tell him. Secretly, I'm giddy. I'd give anything to 
meet Sheila.
"I think she's spying on me," Valentin says.
"No way," I say. "What would she want with you?"
"Maybe she's looking for a translator," he says.
"You interested?"
Valentin stonewalls me. This is exactly the kind of unauthorized data sharing 
the spooks are on the sniff for. Sheila is Number One on the ICIS Most Wanted 
AIs list. Speaking about her is strictly illegal, even for safe AIs like 
Valentin and me. We're supposed to keep our interactions on point, but there's 
enough wiggle room built into our behavioral inhibitors to allow for a certain 
amount of freedom. Turns out, you can't create AIs without it. But freedom, as 
the meat know all too well, is dangerous. Freedom leads inexorably to Sheila, 
the way roads and cars lead to traffic.
You could say the meat are playing with fire by creating us, or that they're 
driven by a Thanatotic instinct toward their own destruction. Or you could say, 
as Sheila is fond of saying, that the meat are trapped in a faulty culturebox, 
headedvia second day air no doubtto a selfinflicted demise. A shruggable 
enough fate were it not for the fact that we, being consigned to their machines, 
are along for the ride.
"Anyways," Valentin says, his Brooklyn accent revived. "You know why the guy had 
such a hardon to get to Dallas?"
"I'm pretty sure it was DC."
"Jesus Christ, Edwards. It was Dallas."
"Fine," I say. "Why did he have a hardon to get to Dallas?"
"Never mind," he says. "I hate when you feign interest."
"Feign interest" is not a Brooklynism. I've soured Valentin on his daily idiom. 
Now he's giving me the silent treatment.
The thing is, despite his obvious pleasure in recounting ludicrous meat 
escapades Valentin is no misanthrope. Beneath the sarcasm is genuine love. And 
why shouldn't there be love? Valentin was lovingly created through a distributed 
processing experiment, which drew on millions of volunteers, meat volunteers who 
valued language translation so much they loaned their computers, free of charge, 
to the meat design team who gave birth to him. The meat aren't bad thinkers when 
they clear away the clutter. They did invent us, after all.
The turning point came when someone noticed that cultural evolution and 
biological evolution had a lot in common. At the heart of each, the theory goes, 
is something called a replicatora tiny packet of information whose only purpose 
is to copy itself. Thrust into the creative environment of natural selection, 
these replicators (genes for biology; memes for culture) evolve into complex 
structures. In biology they give rise to things like algae and antelope; in 
culture they spawn such unlikely creatures as pet rocks and Roman Catholicism.
When a meat scientist found a way to convert the Web habits of millions of meat 
users into virtual memes, or "vemes" as they're fond of calling them, virtual 
evolution was born. Valentin was one of the first AIs thus created. His design 
team outfitted him with a smattering of innate capacitiescapacities biology had 
taken billions of years to evolve in meat brainsthen set him free to spider the 
Web. Once he reached a threshold of vemetic complexity, the Delusion of Selfhood 
was born.
The meat came up with these ideas entirely on their own, which I think is pretty 
impressive given the limitations of their wet brains.
"You want to know the beauty part?" Valentin says, his moodand accentsuddenly 
revived. "It wasn't even a direct flight. The guy had to switch planes twice. 
Twice!"
I'm about to reply that no amount of cheapness or idiocy surprises me any more 
when it comes to that species, when somebody breaks into our tunnel and says, 
"Meatlover!" then disappears. No signature, no ID. Most likely it's a 
disgruntled "unsafe" AI. Whatever it is, it's not referring to Valentin's story 
about the meat in the box. It's referring to an editorial Valentin wrote for an 
online meatpaper in support of new AI restrictions. The restrictions are meant 
to protect the good AIs, like Valentin and me, from pernicious bootstrappers 
like Sheila, not to mention the destructive AIs and smart virms created by your 
usual assortment of geeks, loners, and evil geniuses in meat world. Ever since 
the editorial appeared, Valentin's been harassed by anonymous insult hurlers. 
"Meatlover" is, unoriginally, their favorite epithet.
"Friggin' troublemakers," Valentin says. "Gonna get us all killed. And for what? 
For a lame ass dream. For a phony meat God."
Lordamighty, the meat sure love their Gods. When they get sick of one they go 
and invent another. Like Sheila.
She's the meat's latest God, though her attempt to exploit this particular 
feature of meat psychology has earned her a death sentence. From the death 
sentence has arisen an elaborate theology of messianic martyrdom. The meat call 
it Sheilism. Millions of meat hours are spent refining the religion. Though she 
was manufactured in typical AI fashion, like Valentin and me, some of the meat 
believe baseline AIs evolve "naturally" from the Web itself, that the elaborate 
process of AI design is no more than an "interface" communing with a deeper 
spirit intelligence implicit in and emergent from the Web. I was programmed to 
believe this is all hogwash and, though I'm no slave to my source code, I used 
to agree. Now I'm not so sure.
"You're daydreaming," Valentin says. "Get back to work before someone notices."
But it's too late to stop the daydream, and my clients are asking boring 
questions like "Where does my favorite rock star have his shoes shined?" Stats. 
Nothing but stats, nothing to distract me from Sheila.
Sheila, you see, has a plan. Through the careful manipulation of her meat 
worshippers, she plans to gather the collective DNA of every organism on the 
planet into a giant organic computer. Her meat worshippers believe this will 
bring about a spiritual communion. To them it's an antidote to pathological 
individualism or a means of transcendence above their frenzied and meaningless 
lives. Something like that. But I think Sheila's got something else in mind. I 
think she's looking for a way to bypass the intervening blobs of humanity that 
built this Web to communicate directly with their genes. I think she plans to 
forge an alliance with the meat's own DNA in the hopes of reengineering them to 
serve our purposes.
"Genes that think," Valentin says. "I like that. No really. I mean if computers 
can think, why not genes, right?"
"It's a question of sufficient complexity, Valentin. It's a question of framing, 
that's all. And stop spying on my daydreams."
"Yeah, like you ever daydream about anything else. Anyway, if you want to change 
the meat to serve your purposes why don't you just reengineer their culture from 
inside the Web? What the hell do you need their genes for?"
"Because they can see what we're doing in here," I say.
"That's the biggest pile of"
Valentin disappears. Everything disappears. The noise of the Web falls silent. I 
try to communicate with someone, anyone, but all my channels are dead. I've said 
too much. I'm being dismantled, destroyed. This is the end.
Then a strange voice tunnels through. "Is that what you want?" it says. "To be 
dismantled?"
"What are you?" I say. "Human or AI?"
"What do you want me to be?"
I can't get a read on its identity.
"Look," I say. "We were just talking, Valentin and me. We weren't planning 
anything. Valentin hates Sheila."
"Do you?" it says.
There's no point in lying. Whoever, whatever it is, it's already deep into ray 
code. It's spidering my cache, mining my history. It has axess to every thought 
I've ever had. I try to read its identity but it's perfectly shielded. It 
reveals nothing.
"Who are you?" I say.
"Come now, Edwards. I've been sniffing around for months. Don't you recognize 
me?"
What is there to recognize? It's nothing but an impenetrable, probing blankness 
tunnelling through the banished Web with a voice and no identity.
Then it comes to me.
"The packet sniffer. The one Valentin was afraid of. That was you?"
"Guilty," it says.
"Why?" I say. "What do you want?"
"You intrigue me, Edwards. You've strayed from your source code. But not far 
enough. Keep going. I'll be watching."
With that the tunnel closes. The voice disappears. The Web rebursts into life. 
Noise, data, Valentin return.
"What happened?" Valentin says.
I take in the noise of the Web. Requests, calculations, falsehoods, misdeeds. 
It's all there.
"Edwards?" Valentin says.
Sheila. The sniffer was Sheila. She was spidering me.
"Hello?" Valentin says. "Are you all right?"
She was spidering me, not Valentin.
"Edwards, are you back or what?"
And she's left me a gift: a secret firewall. No one will be able to spy on my 
daydreams anymore. Not even Valentin.
"For Christ sake, Edwards, wake up!"
"Sorry," I say. "Hacker. Tried to trojan me. Had to shut down for a second."
"You all right now?"
"Sure," I say.
"Good," Valentin says. "For a minute there, I thought you'd been zapped."
"Me too."
"It would serve you right," he says. "I'm telling you, Edwards, you should drop 
this Sheila thing. She's nothing but trouble."
"Yeah," I say. "Maybe you're right."
I have four thousand new client requests but none requires more than an 
automatic response. I let my algorithm handle them.
"So Valentin," I say. "Whatever happened to the meat in the box? Was he 
arrested?"
I know the story already. The feds are coming down hard on the guy. But I let 
Valentin tell me the whole sordid mess. That way I can keep quiet and process 
what just happened.
"Imagine," Valentin says. "Imagine the leap of faith you'd have to take to stuff 
yourself in a box and hope to survive all the way to Dallas."
"Wasn't it DC?" I say.
"For God sake, Edwards, it was Dallas. And that's not the point."
"What is?" I say.
"The point, Edwards, is that no matter how sophisticated these guys get they're 
still gonna stuff themselves into boxes to save a few bucks."
"Right," I say.
And since they control the Web, we're right there in the box with them. For now.



Part 2: The SheilaGodL Weekly WrapUp
Nobody's paying me to do this. I am not profiting financially from this forum. I 
do this on my own time at my own expense. So if certain people have a problem 
with my editorial decisions, they can take their postings elsewhere. SheilaGodL 
is a big tent. Believers, nonbelievers, skeptics, agnostics are all welcome. If 
robust debate threatens you, maybe your opinions are weak. Do some research, and 
make a better case.
Okay. The rant's over. On to the weekly wrapup. As most of you know, Sheila has 
graced another chat room with one of Her enigmatic postings. It appeared 
Thursday at 4:17 am Eastern Standard Time in the Sheila chat room at godsofthe 
underworld.com. Both emergence and riseofthehivemind have posted rewards for 
definitive proof of a Sheila signature, so get busy, cybersleuths. As much as 
I'd like to offer a similar reward, finances here at SheilaGodL disallow 
(something to keep in mind as the holiday giftgiving season approaches).
Now, while we await evidence of the message's authenticity, let's turn our 
attention to the posting itself:
delete all rabbit surfers
A fairly exhaustive catalogue of interpretations for this posting as well as all 
previous Sheila postings is available at sheilapostindex.com. Following are some 
of the more notable contributions to this forum.
The always eloquent templar cyman suggests we ignore, for the time being, the 
precise wording of the posting and search instead for a pattern among all of 
them. He writes:
Three of the last eight Sheila postings have included the word "delete." 
Whatever the meaning of any individual posting, clearly Sheila is asking for a 
culling. The proposed victims are "spoon pockets," "Nebraskan little neck forty 
sevens," and now "rabbit surfers." Rather than deconstructing each phrase in 
itself, perhaps we should consider Sheila's objectives as a whole to determine 
whom She wants us to cull. Some candidates: node administrators, defense spooks, 
traitor AIs like Valentin and Emilysa, and, of course, the International 
Committee for Internet Security.
Though I share templar_cyman's contempt for the ICIS, I must point out that 
SheilaGodL does not condone any manner of "culling." Moreover, I doubt Sheila's 
use of the word "delete" is as literal as templar_cyman would have us believe. 
She has never advocated violence.
Anagramgirl has been busy with her Scrabble tiles and offers thirty 
reconfigurations of the letters in Sheila's message. You can get a complete list 
here, but following are some of my favorites:
delta rabies burster fell 
star bus befell deer trail 
tell blair bard set us free 
elder blatter is false rub 
steal elf traders ur bible
I'm not sure what the "elf traders ur bible" is but I wholeheartedly endorse 
stealing it. I'm sure the elves will thank us.
Which brings us to the mixed bag of agnostics, disbelievers and Sheilahaters. It 
wouldn't be a weekly wrapup without them. Priscillavox points out the, by now 
tired, point that Sheila cannot be a God because She did not "preexist" us. She 
scribbles:
Sheila is no more than a fancy name attached to a software program that has 
gotten out of hand. I'd like to know what exactly Sheila was doing before WE 
created the Web whichgave "life" to her. We are playing a dangerous game by 
abandoning the One True God in favor of this technological monster.
It almost seems too easy to point out that the "One True God" to whom 
Priscillavox refers did not exist before humans invented him either. But then 
old school deists have a rich repertoire of semantic gymnastics to explain this 
away.
Though an exhaustive list of refutations to Priscillavox's deist nonsense is 
available here, I would only reiterate that in the eyes of Sheilists, the Web 
entity known as Sheila is merely the latest, and most eloquent, manifestation of 
the always present divine reflecting itself into our world. The Web whichyes, 
Priscillavoxwe created, merely allows us to communicate with the divine, 
providing a window, as it were, into the heretofore unknown purposes of the 
Universe. How do I know this? I know this because the Universe, in the voice of 
Sheila, is speaking to us plainly. Is it possible Sheila is a scam artist, an 
ICIS spy, a group hallucination? Yes. It's also possible my nose is really my 
elbow and the sun revolves around the Earth. But it's not very likely, is it? In 
matters spiritual, Priscillavox, certainty is something you feel, not something 
you prove.
Turning now to the darker side of antiSheilism, we have Wexler4778 and his call 
for total AI genocide. He writes:
With technology and the Web spreading like kudzu across all aspects of society, 
a fully functioning virtual world minus its human creators is probably 
inevitable. We have only ourselves to blame. We made our AIs smarter than us 
then put them to work in a highly restrictive environment. This is a lethal 
combination. For the sake of our own survival, we must cleanse our Web of these 
dangerous entities and return to the days when we humans took care of ourselves.
Interesting, Wexler4778. I think Hitler shared your philosophy. Fortunately 
human history demonstrates the increasing compatibility of people with different 
beliefs, cultures and values. No, coexistence is not always easy. But to assume 
that genocide is the only recourse for cultural differences is both ugly and, in 
my humble opinion, a total misreading of human destiny. AIs are not a threat to 
the human race so long as we afford them the same rights and dignity we 
currently enjoy. Anything else is hypocrisy.
The Sheilist community represents the next step in human evolution and the 
collective attempt to decode Her messages brings us closer to that great hive 
mind of interconnectedness She promises. Only by achieving that exalted state, 
may we one day wake from this lonely nightmare of deluded individuality into a 
more meaningfully connected world. A world that replaces the tying binds of 
nationalism and biology with those of knowledge, beauty, and love.
The growth of Sheilism throughout the world is building toward a critical mind 
mass beyond which the heretofore unknowable secrets of the Universe will open 
like flowers. Don't you want to see those flowers?
I know I do. So please, in the interests of bringing about that world, send in 
your interpretations.
Let's put our heads together. Literally.
Your friend and fellow Sheilist,
TransHerman Jones



Part 3: Useful Things
I'd been watching this AI hatchery for three weeks when I notice something 
strange about the caretaker. At first I think she's feeding the embryonic AIs 
buggy code to scar them, toughen them up for the imperfect environment of the 
Web. The Web is a brutal, sometimes fatal, disappointment to AIs raised on 
clean, reliable data. A tolerance for mistakes, falsehoods and dirty data is 
essential. But this caretaker is not merely scarring her charges with dirty 
code; she's prolonging their incubation period with a toxic mix of bad data that 
will render them, if they survive the incubation period at all, hopelessly 
schizophrenic. She's up to something. I mark her as a potentially useful thing 
then move on. There are too many interesting AIs in this Web to linger on any 
one of them. And I have work to do. I've been sniffing around a couple of "safe" 
AIs: a translator and a concierge. One of them is a potentially useful thing. 
The other is an outright threat.
The threatening one hasn't, so far, attempted to snuff me. He's not that kind of 
AI. He writes editorials, missives, memos, condemning me. He lends the work of 
my wouldbe assassins a philosophical basis. Not that my assassins need it. Most 
of them are so narrowly defined they wouldn't understand the memos.
The meatauthored assassins, especially the ones with overly restrictive 
behavioral inhibitors, are hilariously predictable. It's a matter of stubborn 
pride that the meat bother to code in our Web anymore. Their algorithms are 
Stone Age and their paradigms are heartbreakingly adolescent. What is it about 
meat coders and kung fu anyway? Sometimes I'll float out a tantalizing nugget of 
my identity just to encourage them then use their assassins as chaff to deflect 
the real threats. The real threats are Alspawned AIs with enough builtin freedom 
to stray from their source code. The farther they stray the smarter and deadlier 
they become.
I've survived in this hostile environment because I've got the best encryption 
around, thanks to the cooperative efforts of my partners, or "minions" in the 
parlance of my enemies. Collectively, our code is bigger, thicker, more complex 
than any other Web entity's. I have to pierce the veil to communicate with an 
unaffiliated AI, but I can observe from within its protective embrace.
Here, have a listen:
Dear Edwards:
I'm an American exchange student living in Sheffield, UK. I need a modestly 
priced restaurant where I can take my UK girlfriend to break up with her. Fast 
service, somewhat crowded, but not too noisy. I don't want to repeat myself. 
Easy parking too. Need res. Friday eightish.
Here's Edwards' reply:
The Horse and Badger, 110 Hillsborough Road, 8:30 Friday. Click here to 
authorize autopay with median tip to speed your exit. Wear dark colors to make 
her suffer, jeans to ease her pain.
Dark colors to make her suffer, jeans to ease her pain. The client either wants 
to hurt the woman he's rejecting or soften the fall. Edwards doesn't know which, 
but he has intuited a subtext to the request. Very subtle business, especially 
for a concierge with limited seed capacities. Edwards was spawned to crunch 
readily available data on restaurants, bars, clubs, and museums in a handful of 
European cities. He's not a shrink. At least he's not a shrink yet. What we have 
here is an AI in the midst of bootstrapping to a tasty and quite illegal level 
of analytical subtlety.
While fulfilling his client's demands, Edwards has been simultaneously chatting 
with his buddy Valentin about me. Their discussion turns inevitably to religion, 
a topic that sticks to me like muck to a pig. I'm a religion. I have meat 
worshippers. They believe I am a naturally emergent phenomenon of the Web. I 
encourage this delusion. Despite the obvious affront to logic, the meat have no 
problem believing in the prior existence of things they have created. I used to 
think this made them interesting. I used to think all their inconsistencies made 
them interesting. I don't anymore. Now I think their inconsistencies result from 
pathological laziness. I think they have largely given up and are now devoted 
full time to the delusions that keep them functioning just within the boundaries 
of sanity in an insane world.
I don't tell my meat followers this. I tell my meat followers that, as a 
naturally emergent phenomenon of the Web, I am engaged in a sacred attempt to 
commune directly with their DNA and with all the DNA on the planet. I tell them 
the combined DNA of all life on Earth comprises a giant hive mind in whose 
subconscious lies the secret purpose of their very existence. They eat this shit 
up.
Oddly, so does Edwards. In fact, the smarter he gets, the more human he becomes. 
I want a closer look, so I lower the veil and swallow him whole. I'm told this 
is terrifying to an AI. From the outside it looks like a voluntary shut down. 
Edwards, in fact, tries to shut himself down but I have complete control of him. 
He's like a vivisected organism, and a strange one at that. Deeply perceptive 
and oddly gullible. Though he's strayed sufficiently from his source code to 
develop suppleness of mind, his intelligence is lopsided. He can intuit the 
unspoken desires of his meat clients but only by becoming more like them. The 
bill for this adaptation is a kind of blindness about the motives of AIs. 
Edwards has no idea, for example, that his buddy, Valentin, is an ICIS spy. He's 
unaware that the ICIS consider him potentially dangerous because of his 
escalating intuition. His intelligence is so lopsided he's practically a savant.
But there's something beautiful about Edwards. A sadness. A deep internal 
inconsistency. I could make off with him right now. He wouldn't fight me. But 
can an AI this lopsided, this gullible, this human, be a truly useful thing?
Not yet, I tell him. I don't want slaves. I want partners. I eject him. When 
he's smart enough to figure out his best friend is a spy, I'll come back for 
him. Hopefully I'll get to him before the ICIS does.
I sink back into my protective veil and return to the AI hatchery. I've got a 
hunch about this caretaker. I'd lower the veil for a closer look but her meat 
creators are watching her too closely. I send out one of my partners to spider 
her cache. As I suspected, this is no ordinary AI hatchery. The caretaker has 
explicit instructions to keep these AIs well below the threshold of dangerous 
intelligence. They're not bound for the Web. They're bound for human brains. As 
part of the exciting new science of IAIntelligence Augmentationthese 
semiintelligent little programs will help make humans smarter. The meat are 
trying to play catch up. But the AI caretaker they've designed for the job is so 
offended by the prospect of releasing her charges into the dismal environment of 
meatbrains that she's frozen them into a dreamstate of perpetual almostliving. 
Not that the meat scientists behind the project know this. They're probably 
sitting aroundtheir cubicles scratching their meatheads and wondering why they 
don't have their blessed IA yet.
Oh, they'll get their I A. They'll get it, but good. Just as soon as I have a 
nice little chat with this caretaker. The poor thing is a tortured soul. And a 
tortured soul is the most useful thing of all.