The Woman Who Died a Lot

I had turned my attention to her workbench, and in particular to our pet dodo, Pickwick, whom I had personally sequenced almost twenty-six years before, when the home-cloning fad was in full spate. She was a valuable V1.2—without wings, as all the early ones were—and unique in that she was not just the oldest dodo in existence but also sequenced before the mandatory autosenescence laws were brought in. Barring a major extinction event and the cat next door, she would outlive everything.

“Ah, yes,” said Tuesday, turning to stare at Pickwick, who was sitting patiently on the workbench. She was wearing a small, bronze domed cap on her head that was about the size of half a tennis ball, from which trailed a jumble of brightly colored wires.

“After rejiggling her DNA until her feathers grew back, I got to wondering in what other ways she might be improved.”

“I’m not sure Pickwick needs improving,” I said somewhat dubiously, since Pickwick had been with me for so long it was almost impossible to recall a time when she wasn’t wandering around the house, plocking randomly and bumping into furniture. “I’d miss her glorious pointlessness if it were taken away.”

“Okay, well, maybe,” said Tuesday, “but I found that reengineered dodo brains have neural pathways that are particularly easy to map. That copper helmet thingy she’s wearing is an avian encephalograph. By reading the electrical brain activity, I’m attempting to discover what’s going on in her head.”

“I’m not sure you’ll find very much,” I said, since despite my affection for the small bird, I was under no illusion about the level of her intelligence.

“In that you might be mistaken,” said Tuesday, “for with my newly invented Encephalovision I can decode and then visualize her brain patterns. Watch.”

Tuesday turned on a highly modified TV, tuned it in carefully, and after a while strange shapes flickered and danced on the screen.

“What we’re looking at,” said Tuesday with a grin, “is what Pickwick is actually thinking.”

I tried to make some sense of the shapes on the screen.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to one of them.

“Either a small ottoman or a large marshmallow,” said Tuesday. “That blurry thing down there is the cat next door, this is a supper dish, that’s you and me, and that folder in the corner is all her system files. I’m not sure, but I think she’s running on software modified from a program that used to run domestic appliances. Washing machines, toasters, food mixers and so forth.”

“That might explain why she caused such a fuss when we got rid of the old Hoovermatic. What do you think that is?” I pointed to an image on the screen that looked like a large red car leaping through the air.

“I think it’s an episode of The Dukes of Hazzard.”

“She used to like watching that,” I said. “Never thought it went in, though. Just a simple question: Is there any useful purpose in knowing what a dodo is thinking?”

“Not at all. It’s simply part of wider research on a neural expansifier that increases the synaptic pathways in the brain. Aside from repairing traumatic damage and reversing the effects of dementia, it can potentially make dumb people smart.”

“I’m trying hard, but I’m not sure I can think of a more useful invention.”

“Me neither—but it’s a long way from testing on humans. This is just a crude device to test proof of concept. This afternoon I successfully increased Pickwick’s intelligence by a factor of a hundred.”

This was astonishing indeed. I stared at Pickwick, whose small black eyes stared back at me, and she cocked her head to one side.

“Hello, Pickwick,” I said.

“Plock,” said Pickwick. I took a marshmallow from my pocket, showed it to the dodo, hid it in my left palm in full view and then displayed both fists to her.

“Where’s the marshmallow?”

Pickwick stared at both my hands, then at me, then at Tuesday. She blinked twice and scratched the side of her head with her claw.

“Hm,” I said, “she doesn’t seem much different to me.”

“I admit it’s not a blazing success,” agreed Tuesday, “but I think the problem lies in Pickwick. Because her intelligence is on a par with a dishwasher’s, making her brain a hundred the times the size creates no appreciable difference. D’you think I should have made it a thousand times smarter than it was?”

“I think you should leave her alone. Having almost no brain doesn’t seem to have stopped her enjoying a long and successful life.”

“I suppose so,” agreed Tuesday, switching off the machine.

“How’s the keynote speech for MadCon on Thursday?”

“Going pretty well,” she replied, patting a pile of much-corrected papers that were lying on the desk next to her. “I’m just not sure whether I should open directly with my algorithm that can predict the movement of hyperactive cats, discuss the possibilities of Encephalovision Entertainment System— where we beam the thoughts of vain idiots straight into the nation’s homes— or go straight to the Madeupion Field Theory, by which I hope to power up the Anti-Smite Shields.”