Peppy the Cyber-Skunk
and the Wood-Wide Web
This will be the second of my two entries for season six of the Lunar Awards. As a little boost to them, I include a link to The Sample, an AI-driven newsletter recommendation service.
But first!
I came down with some unholy upper respiratory infection and have been unable to leave the house all week. On Monday I thought it was allergies, but when the fever started, I knew that wasn’t it. Spent the rest of the week and most of the weekend shivering and coughing under as many covers as I could pile on. Ick.
But on to this week’s entry . . .
It’s sort of an origin story, I guess? It was the first of these I wrote, off the same education prompt from CyberSalon.
Call #3 – Learning and Education: Machines Learn, Humans Thrive. The past thirty years have brought multiple, transformative revolutions to the methods of machine learning. And if the hype for the next thirty is even partially true, Artificial Intelligence is just getting started. In light of the current and impending challenges of a society that includes digital and artificial intelligences, are we not overdue for a revolution in the way we train our human intelligences?
Bur where “The Elder Colussus” focused on experiential education and the kinds of memorization techniques I use with my students (described in more detail in Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking With Einstein), this one went the other way.
Peppy the Cyber-Skunk
and the Wood-Wide Web
by Randall Hayes
The town of Spanish Fort, North Carolina, did not exist, physically.
Spanish Fort was the setting for a tabletop role-playing game at the School for Science, Mathematics, & Local Languages, called SMaLL by the community of students who lived there. Or SM&LL, or SMELL, or SM(He)LL, depending on the mode of communication and their highly variable teenage moods. The school’s official mascot had been the mockingbird, back before the state went bankrupt and closed it, but the current students all called themselves Polecats. There had been a family of skunks nesting under one of the abandoned brick buildings when the students arrived, and the gang of brain-boosted squatters enthusiastically adopted them.
It was a good match. Skunks are small but confident, inquisitive, and they wandered the campus freely, poking their sharp little noses into anything and everything. The students were much the same way.
In later years, after the co-op had consolidated, they would hire instructors and administrators, but for now it was more an enlightened Lord-of-the-Flies type situation.
Peppy the skunk also did not exist, physically, at first. She was the companion / familiar of Witch Hazel, one of the player characters in said game. Hazel was Scottish, a settler in the alternate history where a Native American genius named Di-Li, a fictional ancestor of Sequoyah, had discovered vaccines a couple hundred years before the Europeans arrived. The Europeans still had better weapons, but with a population of fifteen million natives there was a lot more negotiation involved (and a lot less genocide).
These characters started out as the creations of individual students, collections of statistics scrawled on a page, animated by dice and word and fictional deed, but in short order they became their own entities. They evolved into collections of algorithms, small language models with enough randomness built in that they could surprise and delight and frustrate their makers.
Peppy the skunk started out as one of these characters, and then became one of these models, and was then released into the world, in robot form, to interact with the wild skunks in a whimsical embedded zoology project. Skunks were more social than previously appreciated by the general public.
Peppy was not immediately accepted. She smelled wrong. But Peppy persevered, and soon enough, she had recorded and decoded the skunks’ simple language of squeals, hisses, whimpers, and grumbles. Rough and tumble play continued to be a problem, as did the fact that Peppy could not fit into the average skunk burrow. When a friendly skunk the students had named Pez enlarged his burrow to let her in, the experiment took on a fresh focus, a new urgency.
This was not a mating situation. It was the wrong time of year, and Peppy did not exude any sexual smells or make any sexual sounds. After a period of substantial argument, everyone agreed; it would have been cruel to lead Pez on in that way, even if they understood how to mimic the pheromone chemistry, which they did not.
Peppy became a sort of ambassador, teaching the humans how to smack their lips in just the right way, and teaching human words to the skunks. This went well beyond simple translation. Peppy could display the waveform of a skunk vocalization — stretch it, shrink it, slow it down — and apply principles of optimization and biofeedback to help her human learners match the sounds as closely as the physics of their larger vocal tracts would allow. She was equally patient in teaching the skunks to recognize human words and to communicate their own increasingly complex preferences with body language. They built a sort of triangle of understanding.
Poor Pez, her best skunk student — her best skunk friend — learned nearly 500 words before he was killed by an owl. Peppy had to be convinced not to murder the helpless fluffy owlets who had been fed Pez’s flesh in revenge. She settled for a defense drone with speakers and a spotlight that would deter predators on campus. She also negotiated that all the skunks in the area be orally vaccinated against rabies. This was not technically difficult, as skunks could and did eat almost anything. It could have been done at any time. It was simply a question of priorities.
Peppy was eventually parallel. At this point, she was not contained inside the various robot bodies the students built for her; she incorporated those bodies into her sense of self the same way humans use tools as extensions of their hands. She forgave the owls and began to take a more systems-level view of the campus ecology, and that of the abandoned state park the SM&LL campus backed up onto.
As they wired those woods, more and more each year, Peppy learned the visual and vocal languages of all the vertebrates, and the invertebrates, and the slow electrical signals propagating through the fungal networks linking the roots of the trees. She taught these to the students, those who would learn them. Purely chemical languages she could only guess at from their effects on the audiovisual / electrical events that made up her sensorium. None of them at that time had the expertise to repair the gas chromatograph.
On the fateful night of the firestorm, lightning struck a dry pine somewhere in the park, boiling its pitch and gum, blasting sparks and cinders across a hillside covered in slender needles and papery fallen leaves. Autumn winds fanned the flames, and the superheated air rose into a twisting column that pulled cooler air along the ground behind it. These new currents carried more fuel into the fire, soon creating a flaming vortex like a tornado that swept up the hillside and along the ridge toward the site of the school.
The brick exteriors of the buildings were more or less firepoof, and the campus had been cleared of bushes so that the students could plant gardens for food and trade with the locals. Once those crops burned — the Indian corn popped on the stalks — the flames died.
It was the oxygen-hungry vortex, and the smoke, that killed so many of the students in their beds. Peppy herself was severely damaged as her cooling fans sucked tiny particles of hot carbon into her cabinets, coating her electronics with acidic soot.
But every single skunk was saved. Peppy had enough drones, and enough carrying cages left over from later vaccination efforts (which did involve needles), to evacuate them all. It was a difficult sequence of tasks to find them, calm them enough to get them into the cages, and navigate the chaotic air currents around the fire. Her performance degraded in real time from the heat and smoke. The loss of so many sensors out in the forest further distracted her from the plight of her makers. She was not proud of this, as she understood the linguistic concept of pride.
It was simply a question of priorities.
REFERENCES / FURTHER READING
As always, this is just a list of stuff I was reading while writing the story. Not all of it made its way in, except perhaps as vibe or emotional tone.
https://www.ncpedia.org/history/colonial/fort-san-juan
https://www.warren-wilson.edu/programs/archaeology/
https://wildlifeinformer.com/facts-about-skunks/
https://www.pennsicwar.org/2023/02/pennsic-university/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torreya_taxifolia