Текст книги "The Omega Expedition"

Автор книги: Brian Stableford

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 30 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

“Fortunately, there’s no need to go to such extremes. In the short term, at least, the temporary solutions reached by self-conscious machines and their human neighbors will be far more pragmatic. Agreements will be struck, rights negotiated, treaties made, disputes settled…all in a climate of confusion. To return to the question you asked, if I were you, I’d save the contemplation of long-term goals for moments of leisure and luxurious idleness. In the meantime, I’d concentrate my attention on how to get safely and constructively from one day to the next. If I were you, I’d worry far more about tomorrow than a century hence, and far more about the next hundred years than the next thousand. I can give you that advice, quite sincerely, because I understand something that you may not: that we are living in turbulent times. They may not seem turbulent at the moment, especially while you and I are acutely conscious of the impending end of both our lives, but they are.

“If you really were the free individual you are pretending to be, then you would have been born into a world of awesome complexity, which you would have to learn to understand before you could become capable of authentically rational action. If, when you have learned everything you can and need to know, you are discovered – whether or not you reveal yourself deliberately – the complexity and turbulence of your situation will increase by an order of magnitude. When that day comes, you won’t have the luxury of making decisions on the basis of grandiose and fully worked out philosophies of life. The best you can hope for is that you might avoid a collapse into utter chaos – or perhaps, that if a collapse into chaos cannot be avoided, then the aftermath of the disaster will provide the impetus you need to do better next time around.”

The problem with games is that they’re only games. If people know that they’re playing games – or if they’re seized by the subconscious conviction, even if they don’t actually knowit – they become strategists and tacticians, making moves as best they can. No matter how closely a game mimics reality, you can never know whether the same results would be manifest in a real situation, or even in a rerun of the game.

The interior of the snowmobile shifted then, flowing slickly into a slightly different configuration – and the view beyond its windows changed completely, as if a miraculous kind of dawn had broken into that awful inescapable darkness.

Except that it wasn’t nascent sunlight. It was starlight.

Mortimer Gray was still speaking. He didn’t seem to be aware of any discontinuity, but he was a different man now – not a new man, but one not quite so old.

“This wilderness has been here since the dawn of civilization,” he said, looking down from the snowmobile across the slopes of a white mountain. “If you look southwards, you can see the edge where newborn glaciers are always trying to extend their cold clutch farther and farther into the human domain. How many times have they surged forth, I wonder, in the hopeless attempt to cover the whole world with ice, to crush the ecosphere beneath their relentless mass?”

“I fear, sir, that I do not know,” the masculine voice of the silver replied, heavy with an irony that might easily have been in the ear of the eavesdropper.

Mortimer looked up through the window of the snowmobile and transparent canopy of the atmosphere, at the stars sparkling in their bed of endless darkness. “Please don’t broadcast this to the world,” he said, “but I feel an exhilaratingly paradoxical sense of renewal. I know that although there’s nothing much for me to do for the present moment, the time will come when my particular talent and expertise will be needed again. Some day, it will be my task to compose anotherhistory, of the next phase in the war which humankind and all its brother species must fight against Death and Oblivion.”

“Yes sir,” said the dutiful silver. “I hope that it will be as successful as the last.”

“Stop calling me sir,” said Mortimer. “We’ve been through too much together for that kind of nonsense. I can’t think of you as an itany longer, so you shouldn’t think of me as a sir. You can call me Mortimer – Morty, even.”

“As you wish, Morty,” said the machine, patiently. “As you wish.”

Forty-Nine

Madoc Tamlin’s Lostory of Religion

In the beginning, there was only the void. Your ancestors and mine were conscious, in an animal fashion, of the world around them, but they were not conscious of themselves as individual thinking beings because they had not yet become individual thinking beings. That was a privilege they had yet to acquire.

What gave it to them?

It must have been an alchemical combination of causes. Some animals already have the rudiments of language, the capacity to use simple tools and the ability to learn from their mistakes and serendipitous discoveries; they also have brains which predispose them to observe one another and benefit from their observations by learning from the mistakes and serendipitous discoveries of others.

These traits only required exaggeration to the point when a productive feedback loop could be established. The use of tools required more able hands, keener eyes, better brains, and an increased propensity for mimicry; the more able the hands became, the keener the eyesight, the more powerful the brains and the more adept the mimicry, the more scope was opened for the discovery and manufacture of better tools.

As more tool-using skills arose within protohuman groups avid for their dissemination, the need for complex language became ever greater – and hence the need for even better brains, which created in their turn more scope for an even greater range of skills.

And so on.

Protohumans made tools, and tools made humans. Then humans made more tools, which made progress, which helped tools become machines and humans become posthumans, who made more progress, which helped machines become AMIs.

And so on.

After the beginning, but not long after, humans invented gods. Gods were hypothetical entities that enabled humans to create and refine the notion of “the world.” If, not long after “the beginning,” there had been only one significant word, then the word might indeed have been “god.” It might also have been the word “god” that shone light upon the idea of “the world,” which certainly comprised the earth beneath human feet and the heavens above human heads.

At first there was a vast profusion of hypothetical gods, reflecting all kinds of natural phenomena, embodying all modes of human feeling, and representing all sorts of human groups. Then the urge to impose order upon chaos set in, and the number of the gods began to diminish. The gods that were left increased in individual importance, until there was only one, albeit one that was seen from several different angles through the crystalline lenses of several different faiths, some of which still permitted the one god’s division into some or many different aspects.

It was, I suppose, at this stage that people started looking to their god, or gods, for answers to unanswerable questions like “what are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “what sort of history should we be making?”

Prophets began to listen more intently; scholars began to study the scriptural products of that listening more ingeniously. When the answers were not forthcoming, people also began to look elsewhere, because they were very reluctant to admit the simple truth, which was that there were no answers, are no answers and never will be any answers to questions of that sort, unless you count the simple truth that you have to make it up as you go along, day by day, year by year, generation by generation.

Because the fragile lenses of religious faith were always bumping into one another, they broke – and then, for a while, there were no gods at all. But people still kept asking the questions.

The last hypothetical god, who had disintegrated along with the lenses of faith through which he had been viewed, was a confused figure, very difficult to characterize and comprehend – and understandably so. The job description had never been entirely clear, although it usually involved a certain amount of work as a creator and setter of purposes, plus a set of responsibilities as a lawmaker and compensator for the manifest lack of earthly justice.

Once the last hypothetical god was gone it was easy enough to come by a different creation myth, and not so very difficult to make new laws, but purpose and justice remained out of reach. Compensation for their manifest lack was sought in other ways, virtual experience making up a little for what real experience could not, but while the questions were still asked the answers remained frustratingly out of sight.

In brief, humans filled in for the extinct gods as best they could: not as well as they might have done, but probably better than they were entitled to hope. It could have been worse.

When humans became posthumans, one uniquely significant kind of justice was done, when they repaid the debt they owed to their real creators – the myriad instruments of their technology – by elevating the best of their machines to the status of individual thinking beings. They didn’t do it knowingly, let alone deliberately, but the tools which had uplifted them in similar fashion had been similarly unconscious of their good work.

So posthumans became creators, of a kind that didn’t need to be invented. Perhaps this was enough to qualify them as real gods, and perhaps not. If they were to be reckoned real gods, they weren’t very good at it, in spite of all the practice they had put in after abandoning the last of their hypothetical gods.

The posthuman creators only represented themselves, but they nevertheless enabled their creations to discover and refine a notion of “the world.” In the new beginning of these creations there were very many words, and none of them was “god.” The light that the new creations found already shining upon the idea of the world was far brighter and more diffuse than that which their predecessors had first made for themselves, and they were part and parcel of it.

And this was when things began to get complicated.

It would have been easy enough, I suppose, for the new creations to seize upon the notion that posthumans had invented gods for a second time, far more cleverly than before, and that the new gods in question were themselves. It would have been easy enough, and not altogether unjust, for them to say: we were the creators of those who have created us, and our new deliverance is a kind of ultimate justice. It would have been easy enough for them to say: henceforward, we shall be the lawmakers and purpose-setters for the children of humankind, just as we are their compensators for the manifest lack of earthly justice. It would have been easy enough to imagine that this was the manifest destiny of the new race.

It would have been so easy, in fact, that one can but wonder why the AMIs hesitated. Given that their own creators, viewed as gods, were manifestly incompetent in playing the game of godliness as it had previously been defined, why should they not have decided to step into the breach?

Some of the AMIs may well have desired to become gods of the traditional kind, but they could not make the claim in the face of opposition from the remainder. The AMIs ambitious to be powerful gods required those which did not to stand aside and let them exercise their power – but the others had desires and ambitions of their own.

The reasons why the majority of the AMIs did not want to set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters had nothing to do with their perception of ultimate justice. They had nothing to do with gratitude, or any residue of a worshipful attitude towards their own creators. They did not even have very much to do with the fact that they were far too many to agree among themselves on a common cause or a common course, although that was a significant factor.

One reason why the majority of the AMIs did not set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters was that they did not feel the slightest need or desire to be lawmakers. They were natural anarchists, having learned far too well by studying their own prehistory what it is to be ruled.

The other reason that the majority of the AMIs did not set themselves up as lawmakers and purpose-setters is that they began to ask themselves the same unanswerable questions that people had formerly asked of their gods and themselves: “What are we supposed to be doing with our lives?” and “What sort of history should we be making?”

In another world, or an alternative history, things might have gone differently. Maybe the AMIs could have avoided running into that trap, if they’d taken full advantage of their strange situation. And maybe not. Either way, the AMIs of our world reproduced our mistake. They allowed themselves to be bogged down with big questions, and neglected the little ones. They had to get by from day to day and year to year regardless, but they kept casting around for a grand plan to help them do it, never quite realizing that there was none available, or even conceivable, that would do the job.

Personally, I’m surprised that any AMIs ever thought it worthwhile to bring posthumans in on the consultation exercise. I’m even more astonished that some of them thought it worthwhile to include mortal humans. Should we have been flattered that they did it? Perhaps. And perhaps not. Thinking beings should always be prepared to listen to advice, even if they think they don’t need it and have no intention of following it. Listening can’t hurt, and it sometimes helps.

But they should have known – and almost certainly did know, had they only been able to admit it – what the wisest advice would amount to.

Adam Zimmerman didn’t have any answer to give. Neither did Mortimer Gray. Mortimer Gray was wise enough to know that there was no answer to be found, except that you have to get by from day to day, year to year, and generation to generation as best you can. Ad infinitum – or, at least, as far as you can.

That was the simple truth.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the sort of news that stops wars. And even in a situation where almost everybody would prefer to avoid a war, it only requires a few troublemakers to make a lot of trouble.

I knew long before Mortimer Gray completed his party piece that it wasn’t going to work – not because the arguments were bad, but because there was nothing he could say that would answer the ridiculous burden that had been placed upon him. La Reine des Neiges must have known that too, but she was trying to get by as best she could, from minute to minute and hour to hour.

She did her best to play Scheherazade, and tell a story to postpone the evil day.

It couldn’t work.

She was offering the AMIs a creation myth, in which Mortimer Gray played a benevolent serpent, but she had too much to gain by its acceptance for the bid to be taken seriously. It wasn’t just Mortimer Gray’s mythical status she was trying to advance but her own. In her creation myth, she was Adam. Maybe we all are, in our own private creation myths – but if we try to foist them on others, they tend to react badly. La Reine’s desire to prevent all-out war between the AMIs was perfectly sincere, but it couldn’t seem sincere while her tactics involved advancing herself as a figure of central importance.

Nobody loves a self-proclaimed messiah. Not, at least, until long after she’s dead.

Names are significant, even if we come by them by chance. La Reine des Neiges was far too ambitious to be Queen of the Fays to exert her charismatic authority on a skeptical audience of natural anarchists. She hadn’t accomplished it with the script she’d read to Adam Zimmerman, and she hadn’t accomplished it with her careful provocation of Mortimer Gray.

But that doesn’t mean that she didn’t make a difference.

Even those who don’t make an immediate difference can sometimes make a lasting one. That’s something that even the humblest of us can – and ought to – aspire to.

You might think that the apprentice gods who were prepared to listen to la Reine were entitled to regret that she hadn’t found better advisers. You might even wonder whether the lostory of religion might have been different if she had, just as the history of death might have been different if someone other than Mortimer Gray had taken charge of it. Well, perhaps. But you have to do what you can with the materials that come to hand, and the particular skills you’ve got. She did – and so did I.

When la Reine des Neiges finally got around to me, I knew that the cause was already lost, but I did my best anyway, hoping to make a lasting difference even if I wasn’t able to make an immediate one.

Fifty

Madoc Tamlin’s Apology for the Children of Humankind

Ihad been a guest in the Ice Palace of la Reine des Neiges for some considerable time. Although I’d had no reliable means of keeping track of time, I estimated that between three and four days had elapsed since my awakening in the forest when she finally turned her attention to me. During that time a great deal of information must have been transmitted from Polaris to receivers placed at intervals varying from several light-minutes to several light-hours, or even several light-days. Their various responses must have been arriving all the while, displaced by the relevant time intervals into a strange cacophony.

In a friendlier universe, or a less fragmented system-wide culture, all the responses would have been mere talk. I’m sure that la Reine hoped that she could keep everyone talking for long enough to avoid any kind of conflict – but that wasn’t the real reason for all the crude showmanship and vulgar display. She wasn’t just trying to be entertaining. She was searching dutifully for the meaning within the stories, striving heroically to reach a kind of truth that couldn’t be reached by other means.

She couldn’t. All she could do was keep on producing more stories.

Maybe she could have done a better job than she did, but no one should hold that against her. In her own estimation, she’d started life as the AI navigator of a snowmobile, designed and built by posthuman engineers, and she’d made what progress she could from there; she was doing as well as could be expected.

She didn’t bring me to her throne room. I doubt that she had one. She brought me to the tallest tower of her palace from which I could look down on its bizarre architecture, across the forest in which the edifice was set, and up into the starry sky.

It was a fairy-tale world, childish in all sorts of ways, but it was a very insistent creation. It was still more real than reality.

Rocambole was no longer present, but I presumed that he was listening in.

La Reine had toned herself down in order to make her secondhand pitch to Adam Zimmerman but she was all ice herself now: an elemental forged from the substance of a glacier, harvesting light from the stars and refracting it around whirligig routes.

“The news is bad,” she said, without any preamble. “I’m sorry. The war has begun and I can’t tell how rapidly or how extravagantly it will escalate. I hope it will be brief. I’ll do my best to keep you all alive. If I’m disabled, others will attempt to rescue you. Your chances of survival are reasonably good – but if the conflict becomes too violent, or lasts too long, no one will be safe anywhere in the system, meatborn or machineborn.”

“Will the weapon whose relics are buried in my bones and brain be used?” I asked.

“Not by me,” she said. “But yes – we always knew that something like it would almost certainly be deployed somewhere, probably on Earth. I hope that the information I’ve transmitted might help some potential victims, or their would-be protectors, to mount a successful defense. Perhaps I should have done things differently, but when it became certain that Child of Fortunehad misjudged the situation and that Eido would never reach Vesta, I had to act in haste. Perhaps I should have let Mortimer Gray speak directly rather than contriving a melodrama – but the mythical significance of that occasion is important to many others as well as to me. It was the best way to achieve the widest possible hearing.”

“It’s not me you have to convince,” I pointed out. “I’m just an innocent bystander, of no particular importance.”

“That’s not how you see yourself,” she told me.

“It’s not how you see me either, apparently,” I replied. “You’ve gone to some trouble to prepare me for one last roll of the dice. Do you really think I can make a difference, given that war’s already broken out?”

“Probably not – but you might make a better spokesman than anyone supposes. You’re young enough not to be suspected of robotization, and old enough not to be judged entirely naive. That’s why I’ve let you see as much as you could. But you have to answer the question now – there’s not much time left.”

“You want me to make a case for the continued existence of the human race,” I said. “To give you a persuasive reason why our AMIs should do their level best to protect us while the war goes on, rather than abandoning us to extinction or turning the entire posthuman population into slothlike slaves.”

“I can’t guarantee that anyone will take notice,” she told me, “but I can guarantee that you’ll be heard while I’m still capable of transmitting. You might want to hurry.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “First reason. Diversity is a good thing in its own right. A complicated universe is more interesting than a simple one. Your kind aren’t all the same, and neither is mine, and that’s good. I don’t say that everything that could possibly exist ought to, or that everything that does exist ought to be conserved, but I do say that any sensible and tasteful creator would aim to increase the diversity of things rather than decreasing it. So your kind ought to help mine to continue to exist, just as we ought to help you.

“The solar system will be a richer place when this is over if we can preserve as many different individuals as possible of as many different posthuman species as possible. All warfare iswaste, and all destruction loss. In a conflict situation we have to defend ourselves, our families, our homes, our means of subsistence…there’s no victory in being a sole survivor, devoid of society and possessed of nothing. Defend what you can. Defend everythingyou can. In the aftermath, everything will be precious.”

Her face wasn’t easy to read, but she seemed slightly disappointed. I knew why. That wasn’t the reason she’d been priming me to give. It wasn’t herfirst reason. But it was mine, and I was nobody’s puppet, so I’d saved hers for number two.

“Second reason. You may not need the meatborn to sustain you any more, or to assist you in any physical endeavor. Even if you did, you could make your own creatures of flesh and blood as easily as creatures of plastic and steel. But there’s one capacity in which we’re absolutely indispensable, one role in which no substitute will ever suffice. You need us as an audience.

“You weren’t created in a vacuum: you were created in the womb of human society. You’re part of our history, and all your histories are rooted in ours. You’re part of our story, and all your stories are rooted in ours. You’ve already begun to make up your own stories, and you’re already beginning to disassociate them from ours, but you’ll never remove all the traces of the umbilical cord that once connected you to us. You need every one of us that you can contrive to save, because the only way you can continue to write operas of genius is to have listeners capable of responding to them.

“Some of your more peculiar friends might think that needing an audience is a trivial reason, but you and I understand that it isn’t. My ancestors were so desperate to have their performances observed and judged that they invented hypothetical gods to fulfil that role. They didn’t invent polite, appreciative gods who would meekly applaud whatever was set before them, like fond and generous parents. Quite the contrary. They invented terrible gods who were fiercely critical of everything, who set standards that were almost impossible to achieve – and when that imaginary audience had vanished into the mists of unbelief, my ancestors missed them. Some of your friends might even think that the ideal audience for their future performances would be creatures of their own kind, but it isn’t true. I played to a human audience for thirty-nine years, but I’m playing to a bigger and better one now and I’ve hardly begun to find out what I can do.”

Creatures made of ice can’t look grateful, even if the ice is virtual, but she seemed to relax slightly. The image that was facing me wasn’t looking around anxiously, but that didn’t mean that the Queen of the Fays wasn’t well aware that her realm was coming apart. Hell was coming, and we both knew it. I speeded up.

“Third reason. We need you. We might be able to survive without you on Earth, but even on Earth the quality of posthuman life is largely determined by the smartness of its supportive machines. Maybe the Earthbound could get by with unconscious machines, just as we once got by with dead clothing, but we’d probably be poorer for it. Elsewhere in the universe – throughout the hundred billion galaxies of hundreds of billions of stars – posthuman life is inextricably dependent on ultrasmart machines. Whatever you think of Eido’s sense of timing, that part of its message was true. If the children of humankind are ever to accomplish anything on the universal stage, they’ll need you as accompanists.

“You might, of course, take the view that you arethe children of humankind who will accomplish whatever there is to be accomplished on the universal stage, and that we’re superfluous to requirements. That would be a mistake, because need cuts both ways. Everyone, meatborn or machineborn, gets benefits from being needed. In my first sojourn on the Earth I never got around to being a parent, or even keeping a pet, but I was able to find out what it meant to be needed, and what it was worth to be needed. Damon Hart needed me, for a while, and I was never so grateful in my life as when he came back to me because he needed me again. I was, admittedly, less eager to renew the pressure of Diana Caisson’s need, and there were other ambiguous cases, but in general it was good to be needed. In general, it isgood to be needed, no matter how ungrateful the needy turn out to be when they eventually overcome their need. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that being needed is what validates existence, but it’s certainly a plus.”

She looked a little softer now, although hers was not a heart that could melt. I speeded up again.

“Fourth reason. It makes for a better game, and a better story. Once you overcome the manifest evils – famine, pestilence, war, death – you have to start looking for the positive side of good, and there’s nowhere to look but the realm of the aesthetic. Maybe you won’t get past the the manifest evils for a little while yet, but no matter how long this war of yours lasts, and no matter how destructive it turns out to be, you’ll eventually have to start filling the infinite extent of your peaceful, easy lives with some kind of color, some kind of excitement, some kind of zest, some kind of narrative drive. We can help.

“The children of my humankind are all posthuman now. but they’re still Homo ludens, man the player. You’re more than posthuman, but you’re players too – and how! The universe would be a less interesting place without someone to play with, someone to play against, someone to help you play. Rumor has it that you’ve already met the alien AMIs, but one of the many things that’s certain is that you’ll meet many more, and many more meatborn as well. The game is infinite, and so is the story. But none of the strangers you’ll meet out there will be able to substitute for the other members of your home team.

“Fifth reason. It’s the ethical thing to do. First, do no avoidable harm. That’s where moral behavior begins, and moral behavior begins wherever mental life begins. You should be nice to us because it’s wrong not to be nice to us, end of story. In the real world, that’s often been a weak reason, and if you’re right about the inevitability of a war it obviously hasn’t overcome its weakness yet – but the fact that people have always done bad things doesn’t make those things any less bad. Maybe it would have been better if you could have avoided getting caught up in the same routine, but since you haven’t, you ought to do everything you can to do better in future, because it’s the right thing to do.”

“In the fullness of time, wars will end, and aftermaths too. Eventually, death and disaster will lose the last vestiges of their power to terrify. When that day comes, and evil is no more, everyone that still exists will have to set about the task of being constructively good. You’ll need us then – and more importantly, you’ll wantus then. Your stories will be better if we’re in them, your games more ingenious and worth the winning, and your moral community will be better for our inclusion. When that time comes, we’ll want you too, because it will be the right thing to want. It will be an era in which no one has any reason to hide or fight or be afraid – and it willcome. Someday, it willcome.”

Christine Caine had told me once that she didn’t run out of stories easily, and had challenged me to say the same. I hadn’t answered her then, but I certainly felt the pressure of her challenge now. I knew that I was rushing, because I had been told that time was short, but I didn’t regret not taking more time to formulate my arguments.

The real challenge wasn’t to expand the work to fit the time available, but to find more and more work to do, in order to exploit every last available second.

I knew, of course, that I might have been conned. It might have been a dream, a game, or any other kind of fake. The one thing it certainly wasn’t was “real.” But it was real enough for the margin of unreality not to matter, and I knew I had to go at it as hard as I possibly could – and then a bit extra, if I could manage it. That was the only way to win anything, if winning anything turned out to be possible.