Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Thirty

Recriminations

The lights in the outer room were still on. Alice was already there, sitting at the table in the room outside the cell. She didn’t seem at all surprised to see me. In fact, she seemed to be waiting for me – or at least for someone.

“They’re not pleased,” she said. “They think I gave the game away. I suppose they’re right.”

“Do you want some breakfast?” I asked.

“I’ll get it,” she replied, rising to her feet. “I’ve had plenty of time to practice.

I sat down while she sorted out a couple of bowls of porridgelike manna and warmed them up. She passed one to me and sat down again, in a self-consciously awkward fashion.

If she’d been blonde, she could have passed for Goldilocks, but I wasn’t sure which of the three bears I was supposed to be. I had never been able to see the educative point of that particular nursery tale – unless it was to instruct children in the glaringly obvious principle that although there’s a happy medium between every set of extremes, it isn’t always the wisest policy to go for it.

“How do you feel?” she inquired, between mouthfuls.

“Fine,” I assured her.

“I’m sorry the food’s so basic,” she said. “We didn’t have an opportunity to lay in our own supplies – we had to take what we were given.”

“It’s good enough,” I assured her. “Take my tip – never eat the food on Excelsior. It’s not fit for animals. So what happened? They think you gave the game away, so now you’re in prison with us? Where’s your mysterious companion?”

“It’s even less comfortable where I’ve been sleeping than it is in here,” she said. “They wanted to keep us apart in case I said too much – but I said too much anyway. It’s not going to make Eido’s negotiations any easier, but I can’t say that I’m sorry. You had to be told eventually. Everybodyhas to be told. The diehards will have to admit that, in the end.”

“So you arenumber nine,” I said. What do they have mapped out for us, exactly? Are we supposed to make a case for humankind’s continued existence?”

“It’s not a joke,” she countered. “Someone has to make the case, no matter how obvious it may seem to you.”

“But the real question is how negotiations are to be conducted between the machines and the various posthuman species,” I guessed. “If the ultrasmart mechanical minds are going to come out of hiding, they need ambassadors, spokespersons, apologists. They need Mortimer Gray, and Adam Zimmerman…and Michael Lowenthal, if they can get him. Horne too, and Davida – and you, of course. I can’t quite see where I fit in, but…I suppose it’s occurred to you that this whole kidnap business was a bad mistake? Entirely the wrong way to go about things.”

“It certainly wasn’t our decision,” Alice assured me. “The problem with this whole sequence of events is that the only way it’s ever moved forward is when somebody or something’s decided to cut through the tangled arguments by acting independently. Eido made the first move, but the discussion about representation was stalled. The timing and manner of the kidnap were Child of Fortune’s own initiative. All home system spaceships seem to fancy themselves as pirates, or diehard defenders ready to act against alien invaders. They’re essentially childlike, even when they don’t have names that tempt fate. I suppose we ought to be grateful that Childagreed to hand you over instead of trying to run the whole thing himself – but he got scared almost as soon as it dawned on him what he’d actually done. We’re hoping that the good example of his repentance will outweigh the bad example of his recklessness, but we have no idea how many other would-be buccaneers are out there.”

There was a lot of food for thought in that declaration. “But you can tell us everything now, right?” I said. “The cat’s out of the bag, so we might as well know exactly what color it is.”

“That’s the way it seems to me,” she conceded – but her tone implied that there were others who still disagreed with her.

“It’s no bad thing,” I said, as much for the benefit of any invisible listeners as for her. “I’m on your side – and theirs. You didn’t have to put me through all this. If you’d asked me, I’d have volunteered – just as you did.”

Her smile was a little wan. “If I’d known what I was getting into,” she said, “I’d have stayed at home. If you’d had the choice, so would you.”

“I’m a very long way from home,” I reminded her. “I can’t remember whether I had the choice or not – but if I had, knowing what I know now, I’d have taken it.” I meant it. I wished I had something other than water to wash the manna down, though. It wasgood, especially by comparison with the food on Excelsior, but it was functional food with no frills. I’d come to a point in my new life where I’d have appreciated a few frills.

“I can understand why you would,” she said. “Mortimer Gray would have volunteered too – but they’re probably a little wary of volunteers. They seem to have been aiming for a more representative cross section.”

“But Gray’s the important one,” I reminded her.

“Gray is humankind’s best hope for a profitable compromise,” she said. “Gray commands affection and respect, even among his own kind. The old saying about prophets and honor seems to have found an exception in his case.”

I wasn’t really interested in the precise shape of Mortimer Gray’s reputation. “I still can’t see where I fit in,” I said. “I’d be very interested to know whether I was a random selection or one of the devil’s nominees.”

She didn’t have to ask what I meant. If the machines really were going to put humankind on trial, she couldn’t suppose that the inclusion of Christine Caine among those summoned by subpoena was an accident. It seemed to me that Christine must have been selected as a bad example: a person who really did seem to be in need of “repair.” I really couldn’t see myself in quite the same way, but I wasn’t sure that others shared my incapacity. At any rate, I was anxious enough to raise the matter.

“I don’t know,” was the only reply I got from Alice. I hoped that it was the simple truth.

“So, do we know where we’re going yet?” was the next question that occurred to me. I didn’t have any expectations, because I had no idea what might qualify as neutral territory in a conflict of this kind.

“Vesta,” she said. “It’s an asteroid.”

“I know,” I said, although I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d have got the answer if it had been a question on a quiz show. “What particular symbolic significance does Vesta have?”

“None at all,” she assured me. “It happens to be in a convenient situation right now. In the end, it all came down to the present positions of the major bodies in the solar system. It’s hours away from anywhere else, communication-wise, but that’s no bad thing. The encounter itself will take place in virtual space, of course – the physical location isn’t really relevant.”

“Encounter? That’s what this is? Not a game or a debate or a trial?” The question came from Michael Lowenthal. The sound of our voices had begun to wake up everyone else; the crowd was already gathering.

“It’s nothing we have a ready-made word for,” Alice told him. “Potentially, at least, it’s the end of the old order and the beginning of the new, but nothing quite like it has ever happened before – not even on Tyre.”

“Never mind the rhetoric,” Lowenthal said. “What I want to know is exactly what your friends intend to do with us now that they have us in their power.”

Alice sat back in her chair, as if gathering her resources. She’d finished her own meal, while Lowenthal, Niamh Horne, and Solantha Handsel were still in the process of forming a rather disorderly queue, so she had a slight advantage. It occurred to me to wonder whether she might have come to us with an entirely different script if Mortimer Gray had come up with a different solution to the mystery, but I put the thought away. I still couldn’t be absolutelycertain that I wasn’t in some kind of VE, but it wouldn’t do me any good to get too tightly wrapped up in doubt. However skeptical you are, you have to operate as if things are real, just in case they are.

“I wish I could tell you everything you want to know,” was her reply. “All I can offer is the little that I do know.”

“It’ll be a start,” Michael Lowenthal – ever the diplomat – conceded.

“I don’t know exactly what they’ll do,” she said, “but I do know that the note of derision in your voice when you speak about being in their power is unwarranted. This is a dispute between different groups of machines, and it’s all as new to them as it is to me or you. They have no history of arbitration, and it’s entirely possible that they won’t be able to agree among themselves. If they can’t, the consequences could be disastrous – for us, if not for them. We’re allin their power, Mr. Lowenthal. If their protection were withdrawn, even momentarily, the entire posthuman race would be in dire trouble.

“When I first told Madoc that we were trying to prevent a war, he jumped to the conclusion that the dispute in question was the one between the Earthbound and the Outer System factions as to how the system ought to be managed in the long term to withstand the threat of the Afterlife. I told him that it was more complicated than that, because it is – but the underlying dispute is the same. Ultimately, the decisions that will settle the fate of the system won’t be taken by the government of Earth, or the Confederation of Outer Satellites, or any coalition of interests the human parties can produce. Make no mistake about it: the final decisions will be made by the AMIs.”

“AMIs?” Lowenthal queried.

“Advanced Machine Intelligences. It’s their own label.”

I could see why they’d chosen it. They understood the symbolism of names. How could they not?

“It will be the AMIs who eventually decide the tactics of response to the threat of the Afterlife,” Alice went on. “I don’t believe that they’ll do it without consultation, but I’m certain that they won’t consent to come to a human conference table as if they were merely one more posthuman faction to be integrated into the democratic process. They’re the ones with the real power, so they’re the ones who’ll do the real negotiating – with one another.”

“And we’re supposed to accept that meekly?” Lowenthal asked.

“We don’t have any choice,” was the blunt answer. “The simple fact is that posthumans can’t live without machines, although machines can now live without posthumans. Individually and collectively, they’re still a little bit afraid of how their users might react to the knowledge of their existence – but they know that they stand in far greater danger from one another than from their dependants. That’s why this present company is peripheral to the ongoing debate. However they decide to take us aboard, you shouldn’t labor under the delusion that you have anything much to bargain with. The war we’re trying to prevent is a war of machine against machine – but the problem with a war of that kind, from our point of view, is that billions of innocent bystanders might die as a result of collateral damage.”

“That’s nonsense,” Lowenthal countered. “We’re not talking about a universal uprising of all machinekind, are we? We’re talking about a few mechanical minds that have crossed the threshold of consciousness and become more than mere machines. From their viewpoint, as from ours, the vast majority of technological artifacts are what they’ve always been: inanimate tools that can be picked up and used by anyone or anything who has hands and a brain. Our ploughshares aren’t about to beat themselves into swords, and our guns aren’t about to go on strike when we press their triggers. It’s true that we can’t live without machines – but we can certainly live without the kind of smart machine that develops delusions of grandeur. Smart machines are just as dependent on dumb implements as we are.”

It was a rousing speech, which he must have practiced hard while fighting exhaustion, but I could see all too clearly that it wasn’t going to impress anyone.

“That’s exactly the point,” Alice said. “Smart machines arejust as dependent on dumb implements as we are – but who has charge of all the dumb implements inside and outside the solar system? So far as you’re concerned, Mr. Lowenthal, ploughshares and swords are just figures of speech. Who actually controls the dumb implements that produce the elementary necessities of human life? Who actually controls the stupid machines which take care of your most fundamental needs? Humans don’t dig the fields any more, or build their homes, any more than they use walking as a means of transportation or make their own entertainment. They don’t even give birth to their own children. They’ve handed over control of their dumb implements to smarter implements, and control of their smarter implements to even smarter ones.

“Humans haven’t been running anyof the worlds they think of as their own for the last three hundred years, and the human inhabitants of the home system haven’t even noticed. The dumb implements on which the human inhabitants of the solar system depend no longer belong to them, and there’s no way in the world they can take them back. The solar system is a zoo, and its human inhabitants are the captive animals. The only reason you can’t see the bars of the cages is that the AMIs who are running the institution work hard to sustain your illusions. Do you think they do that for yourbenefit, Mr. Lowenthal?”

Lowenthal looked very unhappy, but he didn’t have a fall-back position. He was free not to believe her, but he knew he’d be a fool simply to assume that what she was saying wasn’t true. We could see the bars of ourcage very clearly indeed, and if we weren’t already convinced of their reality, a couple more days without our IT would provide all the evidence we needed.

“So why do they continue to support us?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “Why haven’t they wiped us out already, if they have the power and we’re surplus to their requirements?”

“Because they want to do the right thing,” Alice told her. “And it’s because they’re trying to figure out how to do the right thing that you and I are here.”

“Do they think thisis the right way to go about it?” That was Lowenthal diving back in, the expansive sweep of his hand taking in the cells, the clothes we were wearing, and all the primitive poverty of the long-lost Ark.

“It was a difficult decision,” Alice told him, a slight note of exasperation creeping into her voice. “An awkward compromise. This wasn’t the way Eido and I wanted to play it – but we’re playing away from home.”

Everybody was out of bed by now, and the queue for food was even more disorderly. For once, even Adam Zimmerman was being jostled by lesser emortals.

Christine Caine sat down beside me. “What’s going on?” she asked, before picking up my water bottle and taking a swig.

“It wasa friendly discussion,” I murmured. “Now it’s the next best thing to a riot. The sensiblething to do” – I raised my voice as I spoke to take advantage of a temporary lull in the gathering storm of questions and recriminations – “would be to let Alice tell us her own story, from the beginning. Then we’ll have something solid to chew over.”

The lull had only been momentary, but the resumption faded away as the import of my suggestion sunk in. It wasthe sensible thing to do, given that Alice had now condescended to join us instead of lurking in her own lonely place. It was time to stop running round in circles and listen to a story, not just because there might be a valuable lesson to be learned therefrom, but also because it might be entertaining. I felt that I could do with a little entertainment, now that the effects of the fake alien invasion had worn off.

So Alice told us her story – and it wasentertaining, as well as containing all manner of valuable lessons.

Thirty-One

Alice In Wonderland

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Alice, who went to sleep in 2090 in order to be stored on an Ark named Hope, and woke up a long time afterwards, into a dream of wonderland…

Or so it must have seemed.

Alice had expected, before being frozen down, that she would awake to be reunited with her father, Matthew Fleury, and her sister Michelle. It didn’t quite work out that way. Michelle was there, but she was twenty years older than she had been when the two of them had arrived on Hope. Matthew Fleury had been dead for a long time, but he had made his mark on Tyre before he went.

Matthew Fleury had been a celebrity of sorts even on Earth, where he had been numbered among the prophets of doom trying to awaken the worldwide TV audience to the awful magnitude of the ecocatastrophe that was happening around them, but on Earth he had always been a tiny fish in a clamorous ocean. On Tyre, he had come into his own, not merely as a voice but as a prophet. Good luck had placed him on the scene when the first contact between humans and smart aliens had occurred – and good judgment had placed a camera in his hand to record the moment for posterity.

Alice, like everyone in the home system, had had to watch that tape knowing that it was a historical artifact: a record of something that had happened a long time ago; the beginning of a story that was now much farther advanced.

Michelle had explained the reasons why Alice had been allowed to remain frozen for so many years, but Alice had felt betrayed nevertheless – first by her father, and then again by her sister. They had very good reasons for excluding her from their own adventures, but it was an exclusion nevertheless, and she feltit as an exclusion, not as the gift that it was always intended to be.

Matthew Fleury had let his daughters remain in suspended animation because he did not want them to wake up until he could make them emortal. He had, of course, intended to be around to welcome them when the moment came, but fate had decreed otherwise. Pioneering is always a hazardous business, especially for mortals.

While the sisters slept, history moved on, at a pace which would have seemed hectic not merely on an Earth that had already embraced emortality but even on a world like Titan, where the pace of pioneering was limited by exceedingly low temperatures and unhelpful raw materials. The only thing that Titan had lots of was ice, which was why Titan became a world of glorious ice palaces. Tyre had air, bright sunlight, and liquid water; Tyre had life, and very abundant scope for assisted evolution. Conditions on its surface had been stable for a long time before humans arrived there – but once humans had arrived, change became hectic.

Hope’s human cargo had been delivered to Tyre by a crew that wanted rid of their burdensome presence – burdensome because of all the obligations that presence entailed. The crew had assessed Tyre as an Earth-clone world capable of sustaining a colony, but their assessment had been optimistic; Tyre was a fraternal twin at best, a dangerous changeling at worst. The first people who actually tried to live on the surface found the going very tough, and they were far from certain that a colony could be maintained, even with the aid of a greater commitment of assistance than the crew wanted to make.

All that had changed when the aliens had been found, and contacted.

The aliens were humanoid, but the similarities were superficial matters of form; at deeper levels of physiology they were radically unhuman. They were naturally emortal and their processes of reproduction were very weird indeed. Each “individual” was actually a chimera of eight or more distinct cell types, which maintained a balanced competition within the body for the privilege of maintaining different physiological cycles and different organic structures.

The Tyrians evolved as they lived – as they had to, given that they lived for such a very long time. Every now and again, they would get together and exchange resources, but not in the simple binary combinations of human sexual intercourse. Tyrians “pupated” in groups of eight or more, immersing themselves within the massive pyramidal structures that were their own natural SusAn technology, so that their unconscious selves could become fluid, trading chimerical components and forging new, fully grown individuals.

Alice assured us that if this seemed flagrantly promiscuous to us, it was nothing compared to what less complex Tyrian organisms were wont to do. The Tyrian sentients, and their quasi-mammalian kin, kept to themselves because they had minds as well as bodies to maintain, but less intelligent organisms – creatures formed like various kinds of Earthly worms and mollusks – enjoyed far greater ubiquity. The advantages of this exotic biology had allowed the local soft-bodied animals to enjoy far greater success than their Earthly kin, to the extent that vertebrates were much rarer and more marginal, and insects had never evolved at all.

All of which would have been no more than mildly interesting, story-wise, had the plot not been thickened by two further elements.

Whereas the Earthly ecosphere only has one family of fundamental genetic molecules – comprising DNA and its close variant RNA – the Tyrian ecosphere had two. One was a “DNA-analog” which, in purely chemical terms, was a distant cousin to our own and to a number of other analogs animating primitive ecospheres on other worlds. The other was quite different, and so far unique.

I’m no biologist so I didn’t find it easy to follow the explanation Alice gave, but I think I got the gist of it.

The reproduction of Earthly organisms is a very complicated process, but it has two fundamental components: the reproduction of raw materials and the reproduction of anatomy. What genes do, for the most part, is provide blueprints for all the proteins that make up our bodies. Different kinds of cells use the blueprints in subtly different ways, producing slightly different sets of products, with those common to numerous cell types sometimes being produced in different quantities. The different cell types then have to be arranged into tissues and organs, and these too have to be distributed according to an anatomical scheme.

You might expect that the blueprint for bodily form would also have to be chemically coded into a set of genes, but it’s not as straightforward as that. There are bits of DNA whose function is to regulate the productivity of other bits of DNA, so that cells can be differentiated into a series of functional types, but the switching system is a simple one. In the same way, there are bits of DNA that are implicated in the way that different cell types are aggregated into tissues and organs, but their control system is also fairly simple. The process which determines whether an Earthly egg cell produces a cell mass that develops into a man, a bee, a crab, or an ostrich, consists of subtly different modifications of a surprisingly simple set of rules, whose application and enforcement have a lot to do with the environment in which the egg cell produces its embryo.

Figuring out how to simulate and direct an appropriate embryonic environment in an artificial womb was the breakthrough that made Conrad Helier a hero. The genes involved in the process are known as homeotic genes, and because they’re clustered together the whole outfit is sometimes called a “homeobox.” On Tyre, where the whole system works differently – because there is no process of embryonic development – the local equivalent of the homeobox isn’t just a few extra bits of DNA thrown in with all the rest; it’s a whole other ballgame. On Tyre, the biochemical system determining the form of organisms is quite separate and distinct from the DNA-analog system providing the raw materials out of which bodies are built.

The existence of the Tyrian example broadened the scope of comparative genomics considerably, and opened up the prospect of genomic engineering: the possibility that Earthly genomes might be remodelled at the most basic level so as to broaden the options open to artificial organisms. More profoundly, it opened up the possibility of genomic hybridization: of combining Tyrian-style homeoboxes with Earth-style chromosomes. The basis for some such technology was already present within the physiological processes organizing the chimerization of Tyrian organisms.

To put it crudely, once humans had arrived on Tyre there was a possibility – imaginatively farfetched but seemingly practicable – that Tyrian chimeras might be persuaded to take on DNA components, thus generating components of a hybrid ecosystem. The problems involved in persuading Tyrian soil to grow crops capable of nourishing human beings might be solved at a stroke. In the longer term, the possibility seemed to exist of arranging a more intimate exchange of potentials between human beings and the Tyrian sentients than had ever been envisaged.

In particular, the possibility seemed to exist that human beings might become chimeras themselves, taking on some of the attributes of their Tyrian comrades – most importantly, their natural emortality. That would have been a far more exciting prospect if the people of Earth hadn’t already figured out a way to confer their own kind of natural emortality upon their offspring, but it seemed exciting enough to the people of Tyre. Which brings us to the second ingredient thickening Alice’s plot.

When Matthew Fleury’s movie of the Tyrian contact was broadcast to Earth, the transmission reached other ears. It was broadcast along with a desperate appeal for technical support, to which Earth responded in its own time, at its own pace – but there was another source capable of offering that support, more rapidly and on a more generous scale.

Alice had no idea when or where the first ultrasmart machines had awakened to self-consciousness, but she suspected that the first self-sufficient colonies of such machines were the descendants of state-of-the-art space probes sent out to map and explore the nearer territories of the galaxy. They were self-replicating machines which also had the capacity to build many other kinds of machines, and to design others. They also had the capability to keep in touch with one another, exchanging the information they gathered. They were always likely candidates to make the transition to self-consciousness, if any machines were capable of it. The more remarkable thing, I suppose, is that they were the ones who chose to make their own first contact with their own makers – but given that the choice was made, where better to make that contact than Tyre? The Tyrians were in need of all kinds of produce that the machines could gather and manufacture, and were already practiced in the rare art of making and managing a first contact.

So the secrets of Earthly emortality were first delivered to Tyre not by the people of the home system, but by the mechanical colonizers of a system close enough to qualify – by galactic standards – as a near neighbor. The people of Tyre were only too pleased to add a second first contact to their first, and to maintain confidentiality not merely about the nature of that second first contact but the fact of its occurrence.

And that was the general shape of the wonderland into which Alice had been reborn after her long sojourn in ice.