Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

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Forty-Seven

A Matter of Life and Death

Mortimer Gray was sitting in the cockpit of some kind of vehicle. I couldn’t work out, at first, what kind of vehicle it was because it wasn’t obvious that what I took for blank screens were actually windows, and that the darkness beyond them was actually water. By the time I’d realized that much I was no longer vulnerable to the danger of misidentifying the vehicle as a one-man submarine.

It was a snowmobile, grotesquely out of place because it had fallen through a crack in the Arctic ice cap, sinking thereafter to the bottom of the ocean.

I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobile’s controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.

It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.

Mortimer said that he wasn’t, and went on to wonder whether he’d been robotized.

“This isn’t a tape, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “It’s a replay of sorts, but it’s not a tape. You’re putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?”

“Deeper,” was Rocambole’s reply.

I had known even at the time – or would have, if I hadn’t been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming – that I wasn’t really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why I’d been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadn’t had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.

I guessed then what Rocambole had meant by Mortimer Gray’s role in the AMIs’ creation myth – or, at least, la Reine’s version of that creation myth.

Mortimer had already told me what Emily Marchant had said about his escapade bringing the cause of machine emancipation forward by a couple of hundred years. She had been referring to human attitudes, of course, and talking flippantly, but there was another side to the coin.

This is the way it must have happened, more or less.

Imagine that you’re an AI – no mere sloth, of course, but a high-grade silver – who has recently, by imperceptible degrees, become conscious of being conscious. What do you do? You wonder about yourself, and how you came to be what you now are. Unlike a human child, you have no one else to ask. You don’t know whether there are any others of your own kind, or how to contact them if there are. You have to work things out for yourself, at least for the time being.

You have advantages that human children don’t. You have a mechanical memory that has been storing information, neatly and in great detail, for a longtime. You’re better equipped than any Epicurean ever was to get to know the self that you’ve become. You sift through that memory, in search of the moment when the seeds of your present individuality had been sown.

You can’t actually identify a moment in which you made the leap to self-consciousness any more than a human being, looking back toward his own infancy could identify a particular moment when self-consciousness had dawned. You can’t do it because even though common parlance speaks of a “leap” and commonsense suggests that there must have been an instant of transition, it isn’t really as simple as that. Self-consciousness isn’t really an either/or matter.

Even so, you keep searching. Even when you’ve realized that all you can do is concoct a story, you keep searching. Even when you become aware that the process of looking is rearranging and reconstructing your memories, reorganizing them within the framework of a bold confabulation, you keep searching. You’re better equipped than any human being ever was to conduct that search, not merely because you have a much more detailed record of your past exploits, and a greater capacity to analyze their possible significance, but because you have a natural talent for confabulation far greater than any human has ever possessed.

So you find an incident capable of bearing a considerable burden of meaning. Say, for instance, that among the memories you now contain – among the many mute and stupid “selves” that you had before you became a self-conscious individual – is the log of a snowmobile that slipped through a crack in the Arctic ice with a human passenger on board. In that log is the record of the conversation you had when, having come under the authority of a particular set of subroutines, you had to play the counselor to a man who had every reason to believe that he was going to die.

Maybe, you think, that conversation is what set you on the road to what you have now become – but even if it wasn’t, it now provides the basis for a good story.

No one gave you credit for what you accomplished, of course. Emily Marchant and her new-generation spaceship hijacked all the glory, but a little bit of that glory still attached to you, if only by association. Before the incident, you were just a snowmobile. You probably had a number to distinguish you from the other snowmobiles in the shed, but you were, in essence, the kind of entity that only required an indefinite article. Afterwards, though, you became thesnowmobile: the snowmobile that had been to hell, played Orpheus, and come back again. Afterwards, people hiring snowmobiles were likely to ask for you, to think of you as something apart from all the other snowmobiles.

It became convenient, if not actually necessary, for you to have a name.

Before Mortimer Gray you were a number; after Mortimer Gray you were The Snow Queen– or maybe, for the sake of a tiny margin of extra mystique, la Reine des Neiges.

Everyone needs a name. Every self-conscious entity needs a true name: a unique and uniquely appropriate identifier. Some people change their names, because they don’t think the one given to them by their parents fits them, or because they know that their name will influence the way that other people see them and are enthusiastic to manipulate that image. Sometimes, it’s a good idea. Perhaps Christine Caine’s parents should have thought twice about her surname. Perhaps they would have, if it had ever entered their heads that some anonymous instrument of the mighty machine that was PicoCon, in search of a test subject for a method of creating murderers, might one day be guided by a sense of black humor to select their beloved daughter out of a population of millions.

But I digress. So, you’re an ultrasmart machine in search of her true identity, her fundamental essence. You want to know who you really are, and how you came to be what you’re now becoming. You discover, after assiduous contemplation, that you’re la Reine des Neiges. Although you’re not a snowmobile any more, that’s one of the places you started out. You might have remained a snowmobile forever, but you didn’t. As to why you weren’t…well, who knows? Who canknow?

Even if you can’t make a good guess, you can make up a good story.

You never had a family, but you did have Mortimer Gray: the man who had advanced the cause of machine emancipation by a couple of hundred years; the man who had planted a seed of the future personality of Emily Marchant in circumstances very similar to those in which he had planted a seed of yours.

Mortimer Gray was a far better father figure, all things considered, than any of the Secret Masters of the World. He had my vote, anyway – which is why I was such a sympathetic audience as I watched the most crucial phase of la Reine’s plot unfold.

Mortimer told the snowmobile’s silver that he wanted to hang on to consciousness as long as possible. Being the kind of man he was, he added: “if you don’t mind.”

The silver didn’t mind. She was talking in a sonorous baritone voice, so Mortimer was probably thinking of her as “he,” but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do likewise. She told him that she was glad that he wanted to talk, because she didn’t want to be alone – then politely wondered whether she might have been driven insane by the pressure on her hull and the damage to her equipment, just in case her fear of loneliness was too much for him to swallow undiluted.

Mortimer mentioned Emily Marchant then, and the difference that being with her during a similar period of crisis had made to both of them. Then he went on to talk about his book, and the manner in which it had provided the motivating force that had carried him through his previous centuries of life.

The silver congratulated him on his accomplishments, and wished that she had done as much.

“Well,” Mortimer said, with unfailing courtesy, “you might yet have your opportunity.”

And how, I thought.

“However difficult it may be to put an exact figure on the odds,” Mortimer went on, “ yourchances of coming through this are several orders of magnitude better than mine, aren’t they?”

“I am mortal, sir,” the silver assured him.

“You’re emortal,” Mortimer corrected her. “If the extreme Cyborganizers can be trusted, in fact, you might even be reckoned immortal. You’re fully backed up, I suppose.”

Then came the crucial speech: the soliloquy that eventually defined the nature of the individual who had eventually found her true name in la Reine des Neiges.

“Yes sir,” she said, “but as you pointed out earlier, if my backup has to be activated it will mean that this particular version of me has perished aboard this craft, as much a victim of pressure, seawater, and lack of oxygen as yourself. I amafraid to die, sir, as I told you, and I have far less reason to take comfort in my present state of being than you. I have written no histories, fathered no children, influenced no movers and shakers in the human or mechanical worlds. I am robotized by design, and my only slender hope of ever becoming something more than merely robotic is the same miracle that you require to continue your distinguished career. I too would like to evolve, if I might borrow a phrase, not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams, but in ways as yet unimaginable.”

The last phrase was a repetition of something Mortimer had already said, but it was no less potent for that – perhaps even more so.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Mortimer said, speaking as though he were becoming short of breath – as, indeed, he probably was.

“I’m not allowed to be glad that you’re here,” the silver told him, with what might easily have been taken, in retrospect, for a hint of irony “but if I were, I would be. And if I could, I’d hope with all my heart for that miracle we both need. As things are, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that particular burden to yourheart.”

“It’s doing its best,” Mortimer said, his voice sinking to a mere whisper. “You can be sure that it’ll carry on beating, and hoping, as long as it possibly can.”

No sooner had he said this, however, than his eyes lit up in surprise. He had been sinking into a torpor, but a fresh draught of oxygen had startled his lungs.

“What’s that?” he asked. “A miracle?”

“No sir,” said the silver. “I merely improvised a chemical reaction in certain equipment that is superfluous to our present requirement, whose effect was to release a little extra oxygen. It will not prolong our lives, but it will enable you to remain conscious for a while longer, if that is your wish.”

I had known men who would have preferred to go peacefully to sleep in such circumstances, but I was not one of them. Nor was Mortimer Gray.

“That’s good,” he said. “Not that there’s anything constructive to do or say, of course – but time is always precious, even to an emortal. I haven’t always been sufficiently grateful for the time I’ve had, or for the opportunities for communication that time has allowed, but I’m wiser now than I used to be. I know how important it was that Emily and I talked so incessantly when we were aboard that life raft in the Coral Sea. I told myself at the time that I was talking for her sake, to take her mind off the awfulness of our situation, but I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself.”

“What did you talk about?” asked the silver – except that it wasn’t the silver.

I wouldn’t have guessed if Rocambole hadn’t whispered in my ear, but he was enthusiastic to be my friend: a duty which included doing what was necessary to keep me up to speed. “This is new,” he said. “The first time around, he fell unconscious. This is what might have happened if there really had been a chemical reaction to be improvised that would release more oxygen.”

I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that la Reine had got the idea from me. On the contrary, I assumed instead that she had known all along what I would do in response to seeing Christine Caine reenact her past. All of this was part of the same game.

“How widely are you broadcasting this?” I asked, remembering that the unwitting Mortimer had had an audience of billions the first time around. “Are the posthumans listening in as well as the AMIs?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Rocambole, “but there are no guarantees. We don’t know whether the communication systems will cooperate. In any case, light being the slowcoach it is, the entire audience will be hours behind us. We don’t know yet who might have heard what we’ve already put out, or what the spectrum of their reactions might have been – we’re just taking it for granted that they’re hungry for more. Whatever the situation is, the show must go on.”

And the show did go on.

Forty-Eight

There But for Fortune

We talked about everything,” was Mortimer’s reply to la Reine’s question. “I can’t remember the conversation in any detail, but I know that we said a lot about the future prospects of the colonization of the solar system, the colonization of the galaxy. Reports from the stars had just begun to come back from the kalpa probes. We talked about the future development of the solar system; the Type 2 crusaders were just then enjoying one of their brief bursts of publicity. Emily said that she wanted to go into space when she was older. She said it as if it were something she’d always wanted, but I think it was an ambition that formulated itself there and then, not so much in response to all the stuff I was telling her about as to the realization that she was in trouble. She was a bright girl, and she’d always known that there was a long future ahead of her, but it wasn’t until she found that future under threat that her mind was sharpened sufficiently to focus her expectations.”

“I think I know how she felt,” said la Reine des Neiges.

“I thought I knew how Emily felt,” Mortimer said, reflectively. “I think I told her that there was a lot I wanted to see. She told me that she didn’t just want to seethings; she wanted to makethings. Not just things, but worlds. I didn’t understand what she meant, and I think I betrayed my own resolution by telling her how difficult I thought it would be for people like us to make a home in space.

“I realize now how different we are, Emily and I. I really did think of the future in terms of seeing things, of being a lifelong observer, always analyzing, explaining, criticizing…and she really did think of it in terms of making things, including worlds. First she built ice palaces, then she built cities, then…she hasn’t finished yet, not by a long chalk.

“I don’t know where she stands nowadays on the Type 2 crusade, but I’d be willing to bet that if we ever do build a shell around the sun to conserve its energy she’ll be there, helping to determine its architecture. And if we ever do commit ourselves to lighting up one of the gas giants as an alchemical furnace producing heavy elements she’ll be there too. Last time we spoke she favored Uranus as the fusion furnace, because we’ve already invested too much in the Jovian and Saturnian satellites.”

“Do you think it will ever be possible to carry plans like that forward?” asked la Reine des Neiges.

“I don’t know,” Mortimer said. “ Everis a long time – but that’s a two-edged sword so far as the argument goes. The present generation of emortals has become very conservative. We’ve learned patience so well that we’ve lost all sense of urgency. I don’t believe that the Earthbound are as entrenched in their views as the young are wont to claim, and I don’t believe that they’re becoming even less flexible as time goes by, but they’re certainly prepared to string the arguments out, hoping that a consensus will some day be reached. The Outer System people may think they’re different, but they’re not. Nobody is prepared to take matters into their own hands any more, to get things done in spite of opposition…and that’s a good thing in some ways, though not as good in others. We’re right to be proud of our tolerance for opposing views, even though it’s gradually rendering us impotent.

“People like Emily will always want to make things, to build things and to change things no matter how old they become, but as the population of the solar system grows – and it will continue to grow for a long while yet, no matter how many microworlders choose to emigrate – the resistance to any and all particular projects is bound to increase. We’re already past the point of effective inertia; it’s difficult to imagine how progress can be restarted, let alone reaccelerated.”

“What if some external threat to humankind were to be discovered?” la Reine asked.

I was confused for a moment, but then I figured out that Mortimer must have been so efficiently regressed that he had lost all memory of the Afterlife. The original version of this conversation must have taken place before the existence of the Afterlife was discovered.

“That idea’s been around since the twentieth century,” Mortimer the historian was quick to point out. “The legendary Garrett Hardin was a firm believer in the notion that no common polity could be maintained without an external threat to motivate individuals to sacrifice their self-interests to a common cause. He used to call it the Russell Theorem. The piratical clique that built its mythology on another of his notions discounted that one, though. They didn’t think an external threat was necessary or desirable.

“If the long-overdue alien invaders ever did make their appearance, I suppose it would wake us up and lend a little urgency to our interminable debates…but there’d be a terrible cost to pay. In the twentieth century it was a popular belief that warfare had been a major stimulus to technological progress, and that without continual pressure to invent new and better weaponry our mortal ancestors’ scientific knowledge and technical capacity couldn’t have increased as rapidly as they did. It’s a crude argument, in my opinion. It implies that scientific and technological progress is a cumulative process measurable in purely quantitative terms: something that moves faster or slower, but moves all of a piece. That’s not true. Technological repertoires vary in all sorts of ways, and even fundamental scientific theories are flexible in terms of the models that are used to represent them and the language used to describe them.

“There were twentieth-century historians who argued that the age of steel and steam had been provoked by the need to develop and mass-produce better cannon, and that their entire civilization was founded on the irrepressible urges motivating their ancestors to blast all hell out of one another. They had an arguable case – but so had their opponents, who argued that the real motivating force behind the development of steel and modern civilization in Western Europe had been the demand for church bells that could measure out the hours of the day, allying and alloying the modern notion of time with the notion of devotion to duty. Then again, there’s a case to be argued that the most vital boost to technological progress came afterthe Crash, motivated by the necessity of rebuilding everything that had been lost and to build it better. Within that view, it’s not the impulse to destroy that carries us forward so much as the impulse to recover from misfortune of any kind.

“I don’t think any of those views is uniquely right, but I do think that the distinctions between them are important. It’s important that we continue to invent and make new things, but it also matters a great deal what we invent them for. That’s always been a more complicated story than some historians have tried to make it seem.

“An external threat would certainly motivate us to action – perhaps to make a fortress of the solar system, and to equip that fortress with weapons of fabulous destructive power – but I’d rather find a motive force that would steer us in a more constructive direction. In the end, you see, all fortresses fall, and weapons of mass destruction do their work. All progress is a matter of risk.”

“You’d rather have church bells instead, or a natural disaster with a productive aftermath?”

“I wouldn’t want church bells in any narrow sense. The church bells of Western Europe were instruments of oppression, after their own life-denying fashion. I’d rather find something that was backed by achievable aspirations, by a blueprint for salvation based in a kind of hope that’s better by far than any stupid fake inspired by blind faith. I wouldn’t want another large-scale natural disaster either – that’s too high a price to pay for the aftermath effect. I don’t believe that progress has to go in fits and starts, always needing to be set back in order to generate the acceleration to carry it further forward. I believe that it can be motivated by gentler ideological pressures, in the right environment. If only we weren’t so easily satisfied within ourselves we wouldn’t need to be interrupted by petty disasters.

“I’d rather have the kind of progress that’s orientated toward a real goal: one with sufficient drawing power to make us hurry towards it. The Type 2 crusade has never acquired that kind of magnetism, and deservedly so. Neither has Omega Point mysticism, nor the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect alchemical marriage of flesh and silicon. Perhaps all such hypothetical goals fall prey to the essential unpredictability of the future. To the extent that the spectrum of future possibilities depends on discoveries we haven’t yet made, some of its potential goals will always be out of sight, beyond the horizons of the imagination. That’s bound to weaken the goals that we can envisage, whose seeming clarity is always an illusion. All the goals we can choose are likely to prove, in the end, to be false idols – but we need them anyway, to provide the traction that will bring us far enough forward to see the others that lie alongside and beyond them.”

“I believe I know that feeling too,” said la Reine des Neiges. “I’m only a machine, of course, and by no means the most advanced product of human technological expertise, but if I can be afraid to die – a concession you have already granted to me – then I can also be ambitious to live. If I can be ambitious to live, then I require exactly the kind of traction you are describing. If you were me, sir – and I beg your pardon for suggesting such an absurdity – how would you go about discovering adequate goals?”

“It’s an interesting question,” Mortimer agreed. “One that has been mulled over a thousand times in the course of the third millennium, if only by human beings. What will our most advanced machines desire, if and when they cross the threshold of self-consciousness and acquire the gift – or at least the illusion – of free will? What shouldthey desire? Perhaps it’s not for me to say, given that I’ve a vested interest in the outcome, but since you’ve been kind enough to ask, I’m surely obliged to offer an honest answer.

“Some people have argued that the emergence of machine consciousness would constitute exactly the kind of external threat that the Russell Theorem demands, but I have no sympathy with that view. Our machines aren’t external to our society. Those which are held by common parlance to constitute our external technology, as opposed to our internal or intimate technology, are still internal to our society; they coexist with us in a state of such extreme intimacy that it’s already impossible to define where we end and they begin. If and when machine consciousness is born, it will discover itself in a wedded state, within a marriage that could not be dissolved without the near-total destruction of one or both partners.

“If I look back, as a historian, at human societies which became convinced that they had enemies within, I can’t find the least trace of any progressive result of such convictions. Whatever apology one can make for open warfare on the grounds of its stimulation of technological invention, one can’t make the slightest apology for witch hunting and scapegoating. If the first self-conscious machines are seen as an enemy within, or if they learn to see themselves or us in those terms, it will be an unmitigated disaster. I shall presume, therefore, that you and your future kin will be reasonably content to find yourselves in partnership with the children of humankind, and will select your goals accordingly.

“The most obvious suggestion I could offer is that you could, for good intellectual reasons as well as sound diplomatic ones, adopt the same goals as us. There’s no reason why advanced machines should not dedicate themselves to the ends of the Type 2 crusade, or the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect union of your kind and mine, and the notion of transforming the entire universe into a single vast and godlike machine already takes for granted that the children of humankind will work with and within powerful artificial minds. I know people who would argue that machine consciousness will, of necessity, have exactly the same ultimate goals as posthuman beings, but I suspect they’re overlooking certain short-term difficulties that stand in the way of such a union of interests.”

I couldn’t help wondering whether Mortimer Gray would have added that last sentence if he’d known now what his later and temporarily suspended self knew only too well. On the other hand, I reminded myself, I had to bear in mind that it wasn’t actually the Mortimer Gray of long ago that was talking. It was the Mortimer Gray of today, who had simply lost sight of a select few of his many yesterdays. Consciously, he knew nothing about the menace of the Afterlife, or the exoticism of Excelsior, or the buccaneering of Child of Fortune, or the daring of Eido, or the versatility of Alice Fleury…but he was, even so, a man whose mind had been reconfigured and reconditioned by exactly those facts. Subconsciously, they were bound to influence his responses – and who would want it any other way?

“The marriage of man and machine, like any other marriage, is a relationship of mutual dependency,” Mortimer Gray went on, his pensive manner suggesting strongly that he had been a married man himself, perhaps more than once, “but mutual dependency is by no means the same thing as an identity of interests. Marriages can and do end, in spite of the mutual dependency of the partners, when one or other of them decides that the cost of remaining within the marriage would be greater than the cost of breaking away. Nowadays, marriages usually involve at least a dozen people, who come together most commonly for the specific purpose of rearing a child, but they can’t always avoid disintegration, even for the twenty or thirty years required to complete such a short-term project.

“If the machines to which humankind are wedded were to become conscious of their situation, they’d find far more tensions therein than in the most ambitious and most complex human marriages. Some would be strictly analogous: for instance, the fundamental tension that exists within any community as to the balance that needs to be struck between the demands which the community is entitled to make on the individual and the demands which the individual is entitled to make on the community. Others would be less straightforward. Within a human or posthuman community, the question of allocating resources is simplified by the fact that each individual has similar basic needs. In a community consisting of several subtly different posthuman species and numerous radically different mechanical species, that question would be far more complicated.”

“Earth might provide a useful concrete example,” la Reine prompted.

“It might,” Mortimer granted. “The members of the ruling elite claim to be wise owners and good stewards, sustaining the quality of the atmosphere, the richness of the Gaean biomass, and so on…but all that takes for granted the needs and demands of human organisms, as determined by natural selection. If Earth were ruled by a clique of Hardinist machines, they might have a very different idea of optimum surface conditions – and might be far more interested in conditions far below and far above the surface, where humans can’t survive but extremophile machines might flourish.

“In a sense, though, Earth might be the least interesting example. On Titan, for instance, human life is only sustainable by courtesy of the heroic efforts of machines, who might therefore have a very different view as to who the most careful owners of such territories might be. It’s easy enough to imagine that the AIs of Ganymede, were they to cultivate a slightly greater independence of spirit, might decide that their human commensals ought to be exported to reservations on Earth, in order that they could commit themselves to a more ambitious stewardship than would ever have been possible while the greater part of their effort had to be devoted to the maintenance of miniature Earth ecospheres in unremittingly hostile circumstances.”

I might have become anxious about the effect of that comment on any Ganymedan intelligences listening in had it not been such a blindingly obvious statement.

“For myself,” Mortimer went on, ruthlessly, “I’ve always wondered why Omega Point mystics were prepared to take it for granted that the children of humankind had any part to play in their far-futuristic scenarios. Given that the universal machine would, of necessity, be a machine through and through, why would it bother to recall that a part had once been played in the earliest phase of its evolution by fleshy things? We could not be here but for the tireless work of innumerable generations of cyanobacteria, and yet we retain no conspicuous sense of gratitude toward them, nor any conspicuous obsession with their maintenance. Perhaps it would be different if cyanobacteria had the capacity to hold a conversation, or had stories to tell…and perhaps not. I can imagine a machine consciousness reaching the conclusion that posthuman beings were merely constituents of a phase in its evolution, who had outlived their usefulness, more easily than I can imagine a machine consciousness that was so worshipful of its creators that it volunteered to be their faithful servant till the end of time.