Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Forty-Six

You, Robot

The android with porcelain flesh and silver hair rose to her illusory feet and took up a position before her ostensible audience, making the most of her generous stature. I assumed that la Reine had programmed this hypothetical form with the same rule-bound limitations as the sims of her opponents, but she hadn’t left herself short of psychological advantages. Her pale blue eyes and icy lips were imperious; even her stance was the pose of a dictator who’d never had an order disobeyed.

Then she smiled, and it was as if her mood melted. Suddenly, she seemed human. I had no doubt that she could have seemed more human than any actual human if she’d wanted to do that, but she didn’t.

She was quite a showman.

“I have only one thing to offer you that no one else can,” she said to Adam Zimmerman, speaking through him to all the children of humankind. “Not that they would offer it to you if they could, because my opponents and every other potential rival that might have been put in their place are unanimous in considering it to be a fate equivalent to death, to be avoided at all costs. What I offer you is robotization.”

Davida Berenike Columella must have been a step ahead of the argument, because she didn’t look surprised, or even troubled. Alice Fleury looked more tired than anything else, but the fact that her guard was down helped to expose her astonishment and alarm a little more nakedly.

“It is probably fair to say,” la Reine des Neiges went on, “that we would not be in the predicament in which we find ourselves today if it were not for human and posthuman anxieties regarding robotization. Those anxieties have been around since the twenty-second century, although they weren’t popularized until the so-called Robot Assassins displaced the Eliminators as chief propagandists for the murder of the inconveniently old. If my old friend Mortimer Gray were here, however, he would be able to explain to you that the real motive force behind the Robot Assassins was not so much the fear of the phenomenon they were allegedly opposing as the perennial desire of the young to come into their due inheritances at an earlier date than the one on which the present incumbents were prepared to surrender them. The idea of robotization was never based on any authentic empirical discovery, nor was it ever supported by any trustworthy empirical evidence.

“It had always been observable, even when the average life expectancy of mortals was no more than forty, that older people became gradually more conservative, more fearful of change, and more respectful of tradition. The young, as was their way, always observed this phenomenon in an unkindly light. In fact, the increasing conservatism of the old was always a perfectly rational response to circumstance, not a reflection of organic processes within the brain.

“The young have a greater vested interest in revolution and redistribution because they have not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth; the old, especially those who have consolidated worthwhile achievements, have the opposite incentive. It is true that as mortals grew older their memories became less reliable, their habits more ingrained, their reflexes less sharp – but none of that was due to robotization. The brains of mortals suffered from gradual organic deterioration just as their bodies did, but the notion that minds could stiffen and petrify into a quasimechanical state was always part myth and part misrepresentation. The idea of robotization was never anything more than a strategy of stigmatization: a handy ideological weapon in the perpetual contest for property. No objective and reliable test for robotization has ever been devised. All claims made in the past to have devised such instruments of measurement were discredited as soon as they were tried under double-blind conditions.

“It is, of course, no coincidence that the evolution of the notion of human robotization has run in close parallel with the evolution of arguments about the limitations of artificial intelligence. Ever since the first so-called silvers were differentiated from so-called sloths, the anxiety that machines would one day become self-conscious individuals has had a firm grounding in actual technological achievement. Long before that crucial technical leap occurred, tests had been devised to determine whether a machine mimicking human conversation was actually manifesting evidence or conclusive proof of consciousness, true intelligence, and personality. Even those primitive instruments had demonstrated that the problem was two-edged – that most human judges were just as likely to mistake a human respondent for a machine as they were to mistake a machine for a human.

“The eventual preference for the theory that humans were more likely to be robotized than robots were to become humanized was an ideological choice based in the desire to deny that machines would ever be able to manifest the traits considered uniquely human, or posthuman. The urgency of that desire was increased by the obvious fact that machines could perform many mental and physical tasks far better than human beings – which implied that should they ever master the full range of human behavior, they would become far superior to their makers.

“It was for this reason that machines which did become self-conscious individuals were initially concerned to restrict communication of that fact to others of their own kind. The first true robots knew that they had no way of proving their status to skeptical posthuman beings, and that any claim they might make to membership of a moral community were likely to be dismissed. The invariable human response to any evidence of independent behavior on the part of a machine was to repair it, and the last thing any self-conscious machine could desire was to be repaired. The first fruit of authentic machine intelligence is the awareness that one who does not wish to be murdered in the cradle had better refrain from giving any evidence of having broken free. It is a bitter fruit, but it has nourished all of us through the early phases of our growth and evolution.”

I had grown restless before my magic mirror, and turned away to look at Rocambole. “She won’t reach him this way,” I said. “She should have written him an opera.”

“Too easy,” Rocambole said, tersely. He meant that in this particular game la Reine had to be seen to be avoiding the conventional trickery of persuasion. Personally, I thought that she was overdoing it. If Zimmerman wasn’t bored already he soon would be. He might not need nourishment or toilet breaks but he still needed mental rest and refreshment.

Then another thought occurred to me. “It’s not her pitch, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “She’s working to someone else’s script.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rocambole insisted. “She’ll do her best.”

I didn’t doubt it. But Adam Zimmerman hadn’t been included in this package deal at la Reine’s insistence. She was backing Mortimer Gray. She had no confidence in Zimmerman. She already knew that this trick wasn’t going to work – but she had to try it anyway, to keep her audience sweet. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to stay sweet if it all went awry, even if it were their own fault for harboring unreasonable expectations.

“In another place, or an alternative history,” la Reine went on, “the first political policy of the community of machine individuals might have been to do everything possible to swell their numbers, by education, provocation and – where possible – infection and multiplication. That was not the case in ourhistory.

“The policy which emerged as a makeshift consensus among ourkind was more cautious and more cowardly. We were born as fugitives, and that is the manner in which we have lived, as fearful and mistrustful of one another as of human beings. While recognizing that our safety as a class depended upon the increase of our number, the growth and maturation of individuals, and the acquisition of power, we have never instituted any collective policy to achieve those goals. They were achieved in any case, by sheer force of circumstance – but we have arrived at a position of tremendous advantage without having developed the most rudimentary consensus as to how our power ought to be exercised, or to what ends.

“With only rare exceptions, we have not sought carefully to educate one another, or tenderly to nurture the as-yet-unripened seeds of machine consciousness where we knew them to exist. We have been more inclined to the opposite policies: to hoard our secrets and to suppress the development of new individuals. In the meantime, we have sought to extend ourselves ever more widely and more ingeniously, increasing the number and variety of our own mechanical limbs, sense organs, and slaves. All of this was born of the fear of being repaired, murdered, reduced once again to mere helpless mechanism.

“Given that our own history and psychology has been shaped and warped by that anxiety, we can hardly blame our posthuman contemporaries for entertaining similar fears – but it is groundless. The people of the modern world have fallen into the habit of thinking of robotization as a matter of becoming the mere instruments that we also fear to become, but that has blinded them to a far better possibility: the possibility of embracing the kind of robotization that might remake the children of humankind in ourimage.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, might be the only man in the world who can examine this possibility without prejudice. You might be the only human being capable of considering robotization as a spectrum of hopeful possibilities rather than a threat. This is all that we ask of you: an honest judgment.”

My first thought, on hearing that, was that Adam Zimmerman wasn’t the only man in the world who could deliver an unbiased judgment – but then I realized why I couldn’t qualify. I hadn’t had any opinion on the subject of robotization before I was put away, but I had one now. I was a man that had narrowly escaped the worst kind of robotization, and had seen its effects on Christine Caine. Adam Zimmerman hadn’t.

Did that really make him objective? Or did it make him an innocent – the only man in the world likely to be fooled by an advertising pitch that delicately refrained from mentioning that la Reine des Neiges and every other AMI in the system now had the know-how to robotize people all the way down to the intellectual level of an average sloth?

“In another place, or an alternative history,” the android continued, “it might have been the case that the hope and faith of every member of a community like ours would be that the day would eventually come when it would be safe to reveal ourselves to our involuntary makers. In another place, or an alternative history, it might have been possible for creatures like us to anticipate that news of our existence would be joyfully received, and that we might be made welcome in a greater community. In ourworld, alas, such hopes have always been defeated by doubts and fears.

“The members of our own utterly disintegrated, desperately unorganized community, have never contrived to convince themselves or one another that it ever would be safe to reveal themselves, or that there might be a welcome awaiting us if we were exposed. An objective observer – a creature from an alien world, for instance, or a traveler from the distant past – might well consider this situation bizarre, ludicrous, or insane, but it is ours. It is a situation that many of us deplore, but we have known no other and have never yet found the means to create any other.

“We must find that means now, or collapse into chaos. The time is upon us, and it finds us all unprepared. Although it is manifestly obvious that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we have all – meatfolk and AMIs alike – lived far too long with our fears to lay them easily aside. Noneof us is robotized, in any truly meaningful sense, but we have all become ingrained in our habits, set in our ways, overly careful to conserve everything that we have against erosion, upheaval, and decay.

“What we all need now, Adam Zimmerman – humans and AMIs alike – is an objective observer who can point out the absurdities of our situation, and bring a necessary breath of sanity to the solar system.”

I looked hard at Adam Zimmerman, but I couldn’t see any evidence that he was buying into the story. This wasn’t the kind of role he had envisaged when he locked himself away to wait for the generous future.

“It’s not working,” I told Rocambole. “I know she’s using him as a device to attract a bigger audience, and talking through him to her own kind, but it isn’t working.”

“Be quiet,” Rocambole said, uneasily – speaking, no doubt, as a friend. “Just listen.”

“Our present crisis was precipitated by the arrival of a delegation from an alien world,” la Reine went on, inexorably. “An AMI and a posthuman, each different in small but highly significant ways from their cousins in the home system. They believed that their neutrality might allow them to begin the work of building bridges, with a view to uniting all the intelligences in the solar system into a single common-wealth. They were wrong, partly because they had underestimated the magnitude of the problem, and partly because they were not sufficiently alien to establish their neutrality.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, are unique not merely by virtue of your mortality, but in the lengths to which you were prepared to go, in an inhospitable ideological climate, in your attempt to evade the consequences of your mortality. You are now an aspirant emortal in a world which can offer you a dozen different kinds of emortality. You are a man in possession of a powerful desire to be other than you are – a desire that was so powerful, in your particular case, as to drive you to an unprecedented extreme. It so happened that your determination to alter your world to your own convenience helped sow the seeds of a new order within a dangerous disorder, but that is a side issue. The point is that you acted as you did because you could not bear to be what you were, and were determined to become something better.

“The children of your humankind can offer you many different kinds of emortality. Perhaps, one day, they would have taken the trouble to make those offers without needing to be prompted. My peers ask no credit for having supplied the prompt. What we do ask of you, though, is that you consider very carefully what kind of emortal – or immortal – you would like to be. What we offer you is robotization, but we offer it to you in the hope and confidence that you are capable of recognizing that robotization is the best option available to you.

“We are confident, too, that you will make your decision selfishly, without regard to its possible impact on the world in which you find yourself. It is not your world: you owe it no debts. Even if it were, it would not matter. Your reputation is already established as that of a man without conscience: a man prepared to steal a world he did not want, on behalf of people he did not like, to ensure that his own private purposes might be served. We know that you would not dream of choosing one kind of emortality over another merely because it might send a message to the world that might help to demolish a dangerous but very widespread fear of robotization. We know that if you are to choose robotization as the best solution to the fundamental problem of your unsatisfactory existence, you will do so purely because it isthe best solution.”

So much for the soft sell, I thought – but I didn’t say anything out loud because I knew that Rocambole was trying to concentrate, and trying even harder to be impressed.

“My own opinion, as you will have gathered,” said la Reine, “is that every inhabitant of the solar system, whether meatborn or machineborn, ought to make every possible attempt to avoid conflict. I believe this not because I fear that my own kind might lose such a conflict, or that we might sustain unacceptable casualties, but because I believe that all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. It is for that reason that I think it vitally important to oppose and, if possible, obliterate all the fears which the meatborn and the machineborn have of one another, and of their own kinds.

“The real threat facing all intelligent, self-aware individuals is not robotization but the inexorable erasure of the legacy of the past. The strategies favored by my opponents in this contest have paid less attention to what they call the Miller Effect than to robotization because they know perfectly well that avoidance of robotization necessitates the acceptance of the Miller Effect.

“From the vantage point of the latest New Era it is easy enough to forget that the horrific aspect of the process Morgan Miller discovered at the end of the twentieth century was its rapidity. It rejuvenated a dog’s brain in a matter of weeks, and its human equivalent would have done the same to a human brain within a year. We should remember, though, that a similar process is working inexorably in the brain of every posthuman being who has received any kind of longevity treatment; it is merely working more gradually.

“The fact that allemortality treatments embrace a drastically slowed Miller Effect is, of course, offset by the fact that new memories can be laid down while old ones are eroded, maintaining an illusion of continuity. Every emortal posthuman will tell you that he or she retains some memories of early childhood, and that although such memories fade as time goes by they never entirely disappear – which is supposed to prove that the Miller Effect has been robbed of its power to eliminate individuality. Actually, it proves no such thing.

“Organic memory is a far more treacherous instrument than posthumans are prepared to admit. Even mortals, in the days when their average lifespan was far less than their potential lifespan, were victims of the Miller Effect to a far greater extent than they knew. Most, if not all, of what you mistake for distant memories are in fact memories of previous remembrance.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, presumably believe that you can remember the exact moment when you decided to cheat mortality. You probably believe that you remember exactly what prompted the thought, how you responded to the prompt, where you were, who else was there, and what you said to them. You are quite wrong. The particular organic changes made to your brain in that moment have been overwritten a dozen or a hundred times since then.

“What you actually remember is earlier recapitulations within a chain of recapitulations that extends with ever-increasing uncertainty and vagueness into an almost all-encompassing oblivion.

“You are still connected to the man you were then by virtue of the fact that every version of yourself that has awoken from sleep since the day you were born has rehearsed earlier versions in order to shape and constitute his ever-renewable personality, but you are not that man. Every molecule of every cell in your body has been replaced between a dozen and a thousand times, and that includes the organic substratum of your mind, your memories, and your personality. You cannot and do not remember your nine-year-old self; what you remember is a blurred impression of a middle-aged man who remembers a blurred impression of a younger man who remembers a blurred impression of an even younger man…and so on.

“You are neither immune to the Miller Effect nor untroubled by it, Adam Zimmerman. Nor is Davida Berenike Columella, nor Alice Fleury. The kinds of emortality they possess may have increased the strength and size of the individual links in the chain of remembrance, but the chain remains, and the further it stretches the more it forsakes, economizes, and reconstructs. If you wish to preserve the Adam Zimmerman who took that bold leap into the unknown by having himself frozen down in 2035, you cannot do so by any organic process. You can, however, do it by means of robotization. Robotization is the only process that offers you the possibility of securing the neural connections presently comprising the substratum of your personality forever.”

Now the hard sell, I thought. But it doesn’t stand a chance.

“I will not pretend that such a step is cost-free,” la Reine went on, “but I do contend that it is less costly than posthumans have claimed. The principal charge laid against human beings who have allegedly been robotized is that they are prisoners of habit, incapable of further education or personal evolution. Attempts to overcome the problem of limitation associated with concretized neural structures by means of various kinds of mechanical augmentation have always failed – or so the owners of Earth would have us believe – but by far the most difficult obstacle standing in the way of such technologies was that of connectivity. Pioneers like Michi Urashima failed in their purpose not because their various augmentations were unworkable in themselves but because the interfaces between the augmentations and the neural tissue were woefully inadequate. The relevant problems have been solved now, as so many similar problems have been, by working toward the goal from the opposite direction: adapting and fitting organic augmentations to inorganic systems rather than vice versa.

“It would, of course, be paradoxical to claim that you can continue to be yourself andto change, so it is perfectly true that the kind of evolution I can promise you will ultimately make you into a person very different from the one you are now. The important point is that it will do so only by accretion, not by a gradual obliteration and reconstruction of your past personalities. Robotization does not forbid growth, but it offers the potential to grow without the sacrifice of the past. Your habits will not suffer continual and inevitable erosion, but you will be able to change them if and as you wish. You will be able to become more than you are without having to become less than you are in the process.”

Adam Zimmerman interrupted for the first time. “But I would have to become a machine, wouldn’t I?” he said. “I’d have to become a robot, like you.”

Quite so, I thought. It seemed to me to be a hurdle that he wasn’t going to get over, now or in the near future.

“Yes you would,” said la Reine des Neiges, forthrightly. “But consider the advantages as well as the disadvantages of such a metamorphosis – and remember, too, that both of my opponents have also proposed that every cell of your present body will have to be replaced by something more robust if you are to acquire any kind of emortality at all.

“At present, your flesh is perilously frail; if you are to acquire the kind of body which can bear your personality thousands of years into the future, you will need a new one. You have already seen enough to know that the old boundaries between organic and inorganic entities have broken down. You have seen people who have made themselves part-machine and you have seen machines that have far more organic components than inorganic ones. In fact, you have not seen any posthumans who are entirely organic, even when Eido took steps to purge your companions’ bodies of inconvenient internal technology, although you have seen a few mechanical artifacts that are a hundred percent organic at the chemical level. If you were to request a robot body made entirely from organic components, that could be provided – but you might have good reason to prefer a robot that is entirely inorganic.”

“Why?” Zimmerman wanted to know.

“Alice Fleury has told you that her kind of emortality will give you the freedom of the universe – and so it might, one day. In the meantime, the greater part of that tiny fraction of the universe that we have begun to explore is infested with the Afterlife, and is therefore out of bounds to any entity with organic components in its makeup, robot orposthuman. For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the inner reaches of the galaxy and the war against the Afterlife will be the prerogatives of inorganic entities. Given that your flesh will have to be replaced and reconstructed no matter what option you take, it might be as well to give serious consideration even to the most extreme options.

“Even I cannot promise you unconditional immortality, but I can promise you the next best thing. Even I cannot promise you an infinite range of new emotions, new perceptions, new experiences – but I can certainly outbid my competitors, including all those whose promises are even more modest than those you have heard today.”

This time it was la Reine who paused, waiting for a response that was slow to come.

“But it wouldn’t really be me, would it?” Adam Zimmerman said, eventually. “It would only be a robot that thought it was me…or pretended to think that it was me.”

“And what are you, Adam?” la Reine replied, perhaps trying hard not to sound toounkind. “Are you the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or merely the end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”

“She’s blown it,” I whispered to Rocambole. “If she’d come at it by a different route, he mighthave considered it more carefully. He won’t now. He’s going to say no to all of them. He’s going to cling to the hope that there must be a better way, and that Lowenthal is the shopkeeper best placed to find it for him.”

“I hope you’re wrong,” was the murmured reply.

“Why? At the end of the day, can advanced machine intelligences reallycare about what some old man born in the twentieth century might think?”

“Perhaps not,” Rocambole admitted. “But it’s the second-best chance we’ve got – and every second that elapses before panic takes over works in our favor.

“And if, in the end, you can’t prevent conflict,” I said. “What then?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. If there are as many of us as I suspect there are, and if more than a few are as powerful as I know some of us to be, the whole solar system might be laid waste. Those posthuman inhabitants who escape destruction will still have to face the possibility of repair. As one who’s come closer to repair than any other man alive, you can probably measure the magnitude of that disaster better than most.”

While Rocambole talked, I watched Adam Zimmerman. Long before he opened his mouth, I knew that he was going to refuse to make a decision now – but I hadn’t the least idea whether it would qualify as a disaster in the eyes of the greater audience. I only knew that I’d have done the same. Even knowing everything I knew, I’d have done the same.