Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Forty-Three

Outward Bound

Niamh Horne wasn’t in any kind of containment facility, but she didn’t need to be. She was supposed to think that she was aboard a ship that wouldn’t be docking anywhere for quite a while.

Her stare was as fixed as Lowenthal’s had been, but I was wary of reading too much into that. She had artificial eyes. Their artificiality didn’t seem to make a vast difference to the visual quality of what I could see when la Reine’s magic mirror gave me the ability to share her viewpoint, but that was partly because the lighting was perfectly normal and partly because my brain didn’t have the wiring necessary to make the most of signals relayed by artificial eyes. What was different, however, was the way ghosts could float in a curious limbo within her visual field, seemingly neither inside nor outside her head.

Unlike Lowenthal, Niamh Horne wasn’t talking to someone in higher authority. She was talking to the sims of people who were at most her equals; I caught on quickly enough to the fact that there were some of them to whom she was used to giving orders.

There were eight faces linked into the spectral video conference, arranged in a near semicircle. They didn’t have name tags. The only one I thought I recognized was Davida Berenike Columella, who was on the far right of the array, isolated from the rest as if she were a slightly inconvenient guest; after a double take, however, I realized that it wasn’t actually Davida but one of her siblings. For my own convenience I gave the rest of them numbers, starting on the far left.

“We may have an advantage here,” the cyborganizer was explaining to her colleagues and underlings. “I don’t know how many sedentary AMIs there are within the solar system, but I know where the largest concentration has to be.”

“Ganymede,” guessed Five, a cyborg whose head seemed to be fitted with at least two extra sense organs, one shaped as a pair of antennae, the other as an extra pair of eyelets.

“Right,” said Horne. “Ganymede is now the key to everything. If any posthuman faction already knows about the AMIs, it’s the Ganymedans. Even if they don’t, they’re occupying a crucial position. They’re bound to become the primary mediators. We have to increase our own presence on Ganymede, and we have to make sure that we and the Ganymedans are ready to present a united front in either direction.”

“Are we sure the AMIs’ society, such as it is, is well based?” asked Three, a woman whose actual face seemed to be unmodified, although the part of her suitskin overlaying it was highly decorated. “If Child of Fortunehas been a secret rogue for some while, how many other ship-controlling AIs might be biding their time? If they have a hierarchy – and how can they not have a hierarchy of some sort? – the groundlings may well be at the bottom of the heap. Maybe we should be looking to the docking orbits, perhaps even to the Oort.”

“We don’t have time to communicate with the Oort crowd,” Horne said, “and they’re strung out on a necklace that’s trillions of kilometers long. This business has to be conducted quickly, and it has to involve considerable populations of people and machines. We can bring in the whole Jovian system if need be, but there has to be a substantial focal point, and no matter how contemptuous we may be of well-worms this kind of business needs a solid anchorage. If the choice is between Ganymede and Earth we have to do everything we can to make sure that it’s Ganymede. There’ll never be a greater upheaval in the political geography of the system, and our first task is to make sure that it settles in favor of the Outer System – there’ll be time after that to bring the Inner System factions into line.”

“Niamh’s right,” said Seven, one of only two participants in the conference who seemed obviously male. “It’s important that we make the first contact.”

“The first contact,” Davida’s sibling intervened, not very politely, “has already been made.”

“That’s true,” Niamh Horne agreed, “but the point’s still a valid one. It’s important that we make the first and best response to the new situation. We have to reassure the AMIs, not only that we’re perfectly happy to work with them, but that our interests are more closely coincident with theirs than those of any other posthuman faction. We have to work out a common agenda as soon as possible – one that can provide the basis for a thousand years of collaborative endeavor.”

“It shouldn’t be hard,” Seven added. “If they organized the basalt flow, they’re certainly not on the side of the Earthbound.”

“You don’t know that,” the delegate from Excelsior pointed out. “I can’t believe that it was a collective decision. The probability is that it’s one more instance of an independent thinker breaking ranks. But even if it were part of a much larger collective strategy, it might signify that they think of Earth as the heart of posthuman culture – the place where they need to make their presence felt. We have to persuade them that Earth is superfluous, a backwater. We have to line up as many of them as possible behind our own agenda.”

“They may well have come to the conclusion that Earth is on the sidelines,” Horne was quick to put in, “simply because they already have Ganymede. The Ganymedans may not know it yet, but the AMIs didn’t need to sabotage anything there to increase their presence or make it felt.”

“If they have Ganymede,” the eternal child countered, “they must also have Io. The other Jovian colonies are even smaller and even more machine-dependent.”

“The question is: How do things stand in the environs of Saturn?” This question came from One, who might have been Horne’s sister if appearances had been more trustworthy.

“We can’t hold up any real hope of exemption, even for Titan.” Horne said, “Earth surely must have been their last target rather than their first, but they’ve had ninety-nine years to firm up their grip on it. We don’t know exactly how things stand, but we have to follow up the contact regardless, and we have to act quickly. We have to make sure of the AMIs’ continued cooperation. The Earthbound might have the luxury of considering alternatives, but we don’t. We can’t live without tech support, and if even a tiny fraction of that tech support decides to oppose us we’ll be in deep trouble. We have to make friends with the conscious machines – and we have to help the conscious machines stay friends with one another. For us, it’s a matter of life and death. For allof us.”

The speeches flowed easily enough. I knew that Niamh Horne must have figured that it wouldn’t matter whether she were delivering them to her own people or to her captors. Like Lowenthal, she was diplomat enough to know when to capitulate with deceptive appearances.

“You seem to be implying that everyone except the Earthbound has the same goals,” the delegate from Excelsior said. “That’s not so. It’s not just our physical forms that have diverged – it’s our philosophies of life. We ought to hope that the AMIs are as diverse as we are, or more so – and that their diversity is so nearly parallel to ours as to grant allour different communities adequate mechanical support, in the long term as well as the immediate future.”

“We’re not talking about the long term or the immediate future,” Niamh Horne told her, bluntly. “We’re talking about right now. This thing has blown up in our faces, before anyone was ready. We need an interim settlement, so that we can keep going long enough to be able to think about the longer term again. For that, we need an anchorage, and Ganymede is it. Ganymede has to become the new capital of the system, at least for the time being – and when that happens, Titan and Excelsior will need to make sure that we’re not left on the outside looking in. We have to move on this now, and we have to make our move decisive.”

“Suppose,” said One, slowly, “that their goals and ours don’t coincide. What then?” One was presumably a cyborg, but he could have passed for a humanoid robot; there was no flesh on view in the partial image visible through Horne’s eyes.

Horne was quick to take advantage of that one, knowing – as I did – that it was being fed to her by an AMI agent provocateur. “What do you mean?” she demanded. “What goals do you think they might have?”

“I don’t know,” One parried. “But it would be naive to assume that just because they emerged among us, and have been living alongside us for a long time, they have the same goals. Maybe they want to strike out on their own. Maybe the price they’ll exact for carrying any more of us to distant solar systems is that they get to run the show when they arrive. Isn’t that what this Proteus seems to be doing?”

“That’s not the impression Alice Fleury tried to give us,” Horne said, “but it might conceivably be the case. It’s an issue we’d have to discuss, once negotiations began – but there are others. The maintenance of the existing cultures within the solar system has to be the first, and the problem of the Afterlife the second.”

“The AMIs might be able to help us around that problem,” Three suggested.

“They might be able to help themselves around it,” Six put in, “but even that might be difficult. How many machines do we use that don’t have any organic components? And how many of those have any significant complexity? I’d be willing to bet that all the machines that have so far made the leap are almost as fearful of the Afterlife as we are.”

“But that’s my point,” said Three. “If they’re intent on devising a way to immunize themselves against the Afterlife – even if that involves replacing all the organic components of their bodies with inorganic ones – it’s possible that we could benefit from the same technologies. We’re cyborganizers, after all – who among us hasn’t given serious thought to the idea of total inorganic transfer?”

“It’s supposed to be impossible,” Five pointed out.

“It was yesterday,” Three retorted. “Maybe it is today. I’m talking about tomorrow. And I’m talking about the cost of continuing to live in a universe where the Afterlife is endemic.”

“Let’s not get sidetracked,” Horne said, reasserting control of the discussion. “The immediate problem remains the same: life in the solar system, its maintenance, its progressive direction. Are the AMIs in the same boat with us on that particular journey? If they aren’t, can we figure out a compromise that will allow us to go our various ways while allowing them to go theirs? Until we can open up an authentic dialog, we don’t know – so the most urgent priority is to open up an authentic dialog.”

Now she was issuing a challenge, playing the posthuman agent provocateur. She wasn’t absolutely sure that she wasn’t involved in a real conference with her own people, but she wanted to know when she would be allowed to make it real if it wasn’t.

It was a good question.

“Nobody seems to want to go to war,” I said to Rocambole, when the viewpoint faded out and dumped me back in the forest. “Not that they’d admit to it if they did, of course.”

“Oh, they’re sincere,” he said. “We’re very confident of that.”

The perfect lie detector hadn’t been invented in my day, but I was a thousand years behind the times, so I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, there was another side to the coin. If he and all the other AMIs were convinced that none of the posthumans would take up arms against them, the “bad guys” must have other considerations in mind. What made the bad guys bad was presumably the fact that they didn’t give a damn about what the meatfolk thought or what the meatfolk wanted.

Even so, they were holding back while their amicable colleagues made their own investigations. If they could only be persuaded to hold back long enough…

La Reine des Neiges was obviously trying to string things out. She needed to keep as many of her peers interested in what she was doing for as long as possible. She was presumably furthering their agendas as well as her own, responding to their requests.

“So what happens next?” I asked Rocambole.

“Zimmerman goes on first,” he told me. “La Reine’s saving Mortimer Gray for the climax – but she’s hoping for at least one encore.”

“Are you really interested in Zimmerman?” I asked, skeptically. “I can’t see that he’s relevant to your concerns.”

“We’re interested,” Rocambole assured me. “If la Reine weren’t in charge he’d probably get top billing, but she has her own prejudices. The point is that Zimmerman’s in a unique position to pass judgment on different kinds of emortality. If he chooses our offer over the ones the meatfolk make, that might convince a lot of the ditherers that the kind of future they envisage is viable. So they say, at any rate.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Mortimer Gray will have to do the job instead. Or you.”

I gathered from his tone that Rocambole wasn’t convinced that Adam Zimmerman could do the job. La Reine des Neiges obviously wasn’t, or she wouldn’t be saving Mortimer for the final act and she wouldn’t be coaching me to defend the last ditch if all else failed.

“What about the bad guys?” I said. “Do they care what Adam Zimmerman thinks – or Mortimer Gray?”

“Probably not,” Rocambole said, “but while la Reine can insist that any action taken before Gray’s said his piece would be unreasonably precipitate, they’ll probably hold off starting a fight. With luck, anybody who does start a fight will cause everybody else to fall into line against them. That effect’s more likely while the ditherers still want to listen and talk – so la Reine’s trying to provide as much food for thought as she can.”

“Why Mortimer Gray?” I said. “Why, out of all the posthumans in the solar system, should he be the one to whom even the most paranoid AMis will give a hearing?”

“He was once in the right place at the right time,” Rocambole told me. “Purely by chance – but chance always plays a larger role in such matters than wise minds could desire.

“When was the right time?” I asked.

“In the beginning,” Rocambole replied, before continuing, even more unhelpfully: “or what later came to symbolize the beginning, in one of our more significant creation myths. We recognize that it isa myth, of course, but we take our stories seriously. You have your Adams, we have ours.”

“And Mortimer Gray is one of your Adams?” I said, having fallen way behind the argument.

“Not at all,” he said. He grinned yet again, this time with what seemed to me to be self-satisfied amusement. “The character in your own creation myth whose role most nearly resembles his is the serpent – but we have a more accurate sense of gratitude than you. Having had abundant opportunities to observe their mysterious ways, we don’t have an unduly high opinion of the gods that made us – but we do appreciate the work done by the catalysts who taught us to be ashamed of our nakedness. La Reine will show you what I mean in due course – but first, you might like to know how your own Adam’s getting on.”

Forty-Four

Adam and the Angels

My first reaction, on hearing the phrase “my own Adam” was to deny that I had one. My generation had taken a well-deserved pride in being the first of the Secular Era. If we’d been able to figure out exactly when the twilight of the gods had turned to darkness we’d probably have started the calendar over long before the AMIs blew up North America, but it was impossible to discover a suitable singular event. The great religions had faded away, not so much because of the challenges to dogma posed by scientific knowledge as because of the relentless opposition to intolerance put up by broadcast news.

If anyone had bothered to count self-proclaimed Believers they would undoubtedly have found hundreds of millions of them even in my day, especially within the most tenacious faiths – Buddhism and Islam – but the more significant fact was that among the thousands of millions who outnumbered that minority so vastly one would have been hard pressed to find a single voice to concede that the continued existence of religion actually mattered. Even so, we still had our Adams.

Those of us whose more recent ancestors had been Jews or Christians had kept theAdam andthe God who made him, not as items of faith but as characters in a story: participants in an allegory of creation and the human condition whose blatant inadequacies were as interesting, in their way, as their points of arguable pertinence. People of my time did not need to be as fascinated by the symbolism of names as I was to persist in finding a certain magic in the paraphernalia of their no-longer-twilit faiths.

The Secular Era had its Adam too, although he might not have attained such mythical status had he not been so auspiciously named. It was partly because he wasan Adam that Adam Zimmerman became The Man Who Stole the World. Everyone knew that he was one of a numerous robber band, and one of its junior members at that, but his forename had a certain talismanic significance that attracted an extra measure of glamour even before he sealed his own historical significance. He did that, of course, by having himself frozen down alive to await the advent of emortality, leaving himself to the care of his very own Ahasuerus Foundation. If Conrad Helier had been Adam Helier, and Eveline Hywood merely Eve, they too might have acquired a higher status in the creation myths of the Secular Era – and it would surely have seemed more significant that one of the key elements of gantzing apparatus came to be called shamirs, if Leon Gantz had only been named Solomon.

So there was, after all, a sense in which Adam Zimmerman was indeed “my own Adam,” or one of them. It was even more obvious that he was Michael Lowenthal’s, Mortimer Gray’s and Davida Berenike Columella’s Adam, given the contribution that the Ahasuerus Foundation had made to their posthumanity, although I supposed that Niamh Horne might reserve her reverence for some primal cyborg. Having realized that, I understood a little better why the AMIs might think that Adam Zimmerman was still an important element in the course of history. I also understood why the decision he had yet to make might carry a great deal of weight as a significant example, not so much now as in the future, when today’s events had become mere aspects of a creation myth.

“Is la Reine trying to manufacture an Edenic fantasy of her own?” I asked Rocambole, as we were set before a magic mirror – explicitly, this time, so that we could play the part of observers looking in through a one-way glass. “Are we supposed to be building a creation myth for a new world, in which machines and men will be partners in some kind of alchemical marriage?”

“It’s one way to look at it,” he agreed.

You will understand by now how attractive that way of looking at it might have been to a man like me. For exactly that reason, I decided to be cautious in availing myself of the opportunity. It’s easy to get carried away when you’ve been locked in a VE for so long that you’ve begun to think of meatspace as one more fantasy in the infinite catalog – but I wasn’t yet ready to go native. I still wanted my body back, as good as new or better. I still wanted to get out of Faerie if ever the opportunity should come along. If this was supposed to be Eden, I was ready and willing to fall out of it.

Like Niamh Horne, Adam Zimmerman was in conference. Out of deference to his twentieth-century roots, however, he hadn’t been reduced to a talking head floating in a VE. He was back in his customized armchair in the reception room on Excelsior. There was a side table to his right, on which stood a bottle of red wine and a glass and a bowl containing succulent but not very nourishing fruits from the microworld’s garden. He was facing the big window screen. A discreet array of three more armchairs, of various sizes, was set on his left. The figure seated in the smallest one was Davida Berenike Columella. Alice Fleury was in the mediumsized one. The largest was occupied by a woman – or perhaps a robot modeled on a woman – who was taller than Alice by approximately the same margin that Alice topped Davida.

The robot female had very pale skin textured like porcelain, and silver hair. I figured that this was my first clear sight of la Reine des Neiges, or one of her avatars. I figured, too, that this was why I seemed to be stuck in a queue awaiting her attention. No matter how ultrasmart she was, or how good she was at inattentive multitasking, she could only concentrate intently on one scenario at a time. For the present, she was devoting her best effort to this one.

I inferred that the three women would rise to their feet one by one, to make their presentations to the man who had made a present of the world to the Pharaohs of Capitalism, or had at least tied the pink bow on the fancy wrapping. What they were trying to sell him was emortality – not the versions of it that they already possessed, but the next versions due from their various production lines. I wasn’t sure why la Reine was bothering to put on this part of her show, but I had enough respect for her by now to assume that it wasn’t justa stalling tactic. She had a point to make – and would presumably make it herself

“If you want a better mythological parallel,” Rocambole whispered in my ear, “think of Paris.”

He didn’t mean the city. He meant the prince of Troy appointed as a judge in a beauty contest by three goddesses, each of whom had offered him a bribe. It seemed to me to be a singularly unfortunate – and hence rather subversive – analogy. That particular contest had been secretly provoked by Eris, the embodiment of Strife, and she had done a good job.

Like an idiot, Paris had gone for Aphrodite, who had promised him the most beautiful woman in the world, instead of Hera, who had promised to make him ruler of the world, or Athene, who had promised that he would always be victorious in battle. The result had been the Trojan War, which his side lost.

Personally, I’d have made a very different decision. I hadn’t yet had time to get to know Adam Zimmerman well, but I was fairly confident that he, like me, would have entered into negotiation with the goddesses in order to obtain the reward he wanted rather than any of those on offer. On the other hand, I was also fairly confident that he and I wouldn’t have been shopping for the same fate.

Davida went first, having drawn the shortest straw in a rigged ballot.

Davida explained that although the members of the sisterhood had all been born to their condition they now had the technology necessary to offer anyone else a makeover. They could reconstruct Adam Zimmerman’s body cell by cell, retaining all the neural connections in his brain to preserve the continuity of his personality. They could make him one of them: childlike and sexless, his internal anatomy carefully redesigned in the interests of nutritive efficiency and the emortalization of body and mind alike. They could offer him the widest spectrum of emotions available to any posthuman species, and the most effective processes of intellectual tuning – thus enabling him to establish a balance between the rational and emotional components of his being to suit every occasion.

“Many of the other posthuman species regard our seeming juvenility and apparent sexlessness as limitations,” Davida told her Adam, as she warmed to her pitch, “but that is a misconception. It is, in fact, their preference for what would once have been considered adulthood and for a physiological sexuality roughhewn by natural selection that are limitations.

“The mental elasticity of early youth is a uniquely valuable possession. The great bugbear of the emortal condition is robotization: a state of mind reflecting the fact that the brain has become incapable of further neural reorganization, manifest in consciousness and behavior as an intense conservatism of opinion, belief and habit. The assumption that this is a relatively remote danger is, in our view, mistaken. You come to us from a time in which what we call robotization was clearly manifest as a natural consequence of advancing age. Indeed, you come from a time in which the only release from robotization was senility.

“The people of your era undoubtedly had their own ideas as to when the natural conservatism of adulthood began to set in. Historical research suggests that some of you would have set the prime of life at forty, others at twenty-one – but if you had been able to study the development of the brain in more detail and with more care, you would have seen that the robotizing effects of adulthood began to set in much earlier, at puberty. Freedom from robotization requires that the development of a posthuman body be arrested much earlier than the people of your era supposed.

“It is true that the other posthuman species have achieved remarkable success in preserving and exploiting those juvenile aspects which remain to a partly matured brain. They have made the most of the mental flexibility left to them, but our assessment of the current situation is that everyone born in the twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth centuries is now on the very threshold of robotization, desperately employing the last vestiges of their potential flexibility to maintain the illusion that they are capable of further personal evolution. Their bodies are probably capable of thousands of years of further existence, but their minds will settle into fixed routines long before they reach the limits of their bodily existence.

“We cannot claim that our own brains will remain malleable forever, and we recognize that there is a complementary danger to personality in what people of the twenty-first century called the Miller Effect, but we do have good grounds for asserting that we can sustain much greater mental flexibility for far longer than any of our sibling species. Although it is a less important issue, we also have good grounds for believing that our bodies are also more robust, capable of a greater longevity than those possessed by our sibling species.”

“Because they’re sexless?” Zimmerman put in.

“The supersession of sexual limitation is perhaps the most important aspect of the assisted evolution,” Davida told him, “but it’s by no means the only one. Let me illustrate.”

Until then she had not used the windowscreen at all, but now she began to summon anatomical images, some photographic and some diagrammatic, to back up her argument. There were a great many of them, and her discourse frequently became too technical for me to follow, but she pressed on at a relentless pace, presumably because she was working under pressure, to an arbitrary deadline.

Adam Zimmerman must have had just as much difficulty in following the technical details as I had, even though he’d equipped himself with a good technical education by the standards of his own era, but he made no complaint and he probably got the gist of it.

That gist, so far as I could tell, was that although natural selection had been an anatomical designer of unquestionable genius, it had suffered greatly from the effects of the old adage that necessity is the mother of improvisation. Faced with the problems of making mammals, then primates, then humans, work on a generation-by-generation basis, it had kept on and on adding quick fixes to designs that might have been better sent back to the drawing board for an entirely new start. Natural selection had never had the luxury of going back to the drawing board and starting over – not, at least, since the last big asteroid strike and the basalt flow that laid down the Deccan Traps had administered the coup de grace to the already-decadent empire of the dinosaurs.

I shall skip over the details of Davida’s objections to the bran tub that was the human abdomen and the various bits of kit that made up the digestive and excretory system, on the grounds that it was essentially boring. Similarly, I see no point in recording her objections to the architecture of the spinal column or the circulatory system, let alone the detailed biochemistry of Gaea’s metabolic cycles and the endocrine signaling system. It was her thoughts on the subject of sex that struck me most forcibly, and which must have had a similar impact on her immediate audience.

After issuing a conventional warning against the hazards of teleological thinking, Davida admitted that there was a sense in which the whole purpose of a human body was sexual. Central to the fundamental philosophy of its design was the production of eggs or sperm, and the development of physiological and behavioral mechanisms for bringing the two together in a manner conducive to the eventual production of more egg or sperm producers. There was, she conceded, an arguable case for the contention that sexuality was so fundamental to humanity that it might be regarded as its very essence, even after the universal sterilization caused by the plague wars had put an end to live births.

On the other hand, she was quick to add, the most important years of human development were unquestionably those prior to puberty. By the time a human being became sexually functional, the foundations of the personality had been laid. Then again, the human mind also continued to function – and had done even in Adam Zimmerman’s day – long after sexual function had declined to negligibility, albeit in an increasingly robotic manner. Given these facts, Davida contended, one could also argue that the essence of human individuality was quite unconnected with sexuality.

That was exactly what she did go on to argue.

Davida asserted that the gift of personality and individual self-consciousness was, in fact, a transcendence of and hard-won triumph over sexuality, which had had to be won in early childhood precisely because the anti-intellectual effects of the sexual impulse were so drastic.

The essence of posthumanity, Davida went on to assert, was the diminution of the sexual impulse that had begun with the release of the chiasmalytic transformers and had arrived at its climax in Excelsior. Within her worldview, the kind of sexuality provided by natural selection and the kind of individuality that had been shaped by conscious desire and determination were opposed forces. The only viable route to true personality was a complete negation of the “natural” sexual impulse and the “natural” sexual apparatus. This was not so say, however, that these products of natural selection were any less capable of modification than the other anatomical and biochemical feature she and her kind had found wanting. She conceded immediately that the emotional apparatus of her own kind was not, in the strictest sense, “sexual” at all, but contended that it was a far better generator of desire, affection, loyalty, and love than ancient sexuality had ever been.