A Grey Moon Over China (12 page)

During waking hours in the caverns over the coming months she watched me constantly, with eyes that seemed to hint at some secret we shared. I felt it, too: that there was some connection between us that ran deeper than acquaintance or even blood, deeper than any bond I’d ever experienced. Yet I avoided her whenever I could.

Several times I also had the feeling that she knew Kip and Rosler, though I couldn’t imagine how that could be.

Kip himself made friends everywhere on the island. He took his meals around the cooking fires in the upper cavern, then after dinner played against the soldiers with a deck of cards I’d given him. He never said a word. Polaski ignored him, although I hadn’t forgotten his reaction to Kip that first day. I couldn’t tell whether Kip had forgotten or not.

At night Kip played his flute, and sometimes I rode up in the elevators just to listen. His music had a power beyond his years, melancholy and sad in the chilly air. The tunes would start with a slow lament that drifted out across the cavern, then deftly answer their own echoes with lullabies I always thought I knew.

W
ake up.”

A whisper next to my ear.

“Eddie.”

I woke to find Chan sitting by my cot, running a hand across my forehead.

“You slept a long time,” she said.

“Not really,” I said, “I hardly slept. I should have been up sooner, though.”

“No, nothing’s so important.” She pushed her hair back and her high cheekbones caught the dim light from the corridor. She ran a hand down under the sheets.

I pulled the blankets higher and she put her hands back in her lap.

“You do look tired,” she said.

“Mm.”

“Polaski wants to see us.”

“Oh? More table-pounding.” Over a year in the caverns and still with every day Polaski became more and more fixated on our eventual departure, more demanding of the troops working for us, and more difficult to control.

“You’d rather be exploding your little batteries, hm?”

“It might cheer up the dungeons a little. God knows they need it.” I was looking around at the stone chamber, trying to remember what was bothering me.

“I dreamed about going home,” I said at last.

“Oh. You can’t, can you?”

“No, I just dream about it.” I kissed the palm of her hand. “You neither.”

“There’s been nowhere to go, really, after my parents tried going back to Kowloon. All those years after the British, and they thought they could go home . . . Anyway, no.”

There were times I wanted Chan so badly I could hardly breathe. I pulled her out of the chair.

“Take off your clothes.”

She was soft and supple, smooth like satin, and her thighs were slick and
her lips moist, and I wanted to fill her up and swallow her and crush her against me, drown in her and never come back . . .

W
e met Polaski in a corner of the south manufacturing chamber, a quarter-square-mile of barrel-vaulted rock with a string of magnesium lights on the roof. We were walled in on two sides by rock, on the others by wooden pallets that cast shadows across the table.

Polaski leaned against a wall with his hands in his pockets. Tyrone Elliot, who’d taken charge of work on the island, sat where he could be in the light without having to look at it.

Madhu Patel sat wrapped in an Army blanket, frowning and blinking into the light. Chan and I sat at the far end from Polaski. I was bouncing an old rivet on the table, wanting to get it over with.

Bolton didn’t come to the meetings, staying with his new teams instead. It wasn’t clear what the teams were for, except that he’d staffed them with Special Operations troops from among the Shorts. They kept to themselves.

Pham came and went and was difficult when she was there. Polaski had assigned her to improving the troops’ hand-to-hand combat skills, though no one really believed they’d be needed. She was very good at it, in any case.

Anne Miller came if the mood suited her. She spent most of her time with the computers she and Chan had appropriated. But that morning she came and began speaking even as she walked in.

“I’d like to start, so I can finish.”

She sat down in the shadows and continued without looking up.

“I have test drones out—you’ll see them in the corridors. Keep them from flying into the elevators, please, because they’ll become confused by the motion and hit the floor and ceiling.”

This was all delivered with abrupt condescension. She stared at the far wall and drummed her fingers. She made us uneasy, and she had yet to explain her reasons for being there. But she was building the drones.

Elliot slid his chair forward to see her better.

“That doesn’t sound real smart,” he said.

“They are extremely intelligent. They simply haven’t been trained yet.”

“So? How smart are they? As smart as our other MI?”

“Don’t ever compare them to computers, Mr. Elliot! They are survey drones, and they have human intelligence.”

“I thought MI was smarter than humans.”

“It is
not.
MI is useless. The drones will be far more powerful—because they’ll have the one trait that makes us human and gives us our own power. I believe Mr. Torres can tell you what that is, from his time at China Lake?”

“Awareness,” I said. “Come on, Anne, let’s keep it moving.”

“No. Any thinking machine is aware—humans are
self
-aware, and that is technically a very much more difficult procedure to construct.”

Elliot snorted. “You talk like humans are a matter of getting the wires plugged in right. You don’t just construct people, lady.”

“Mr. Elliot, if I go into a lab and assemble DNA according to the human map, grow it in a womb, and bring it out as a child and nurture it to adulthood, is that natural or manufactured intelligence?”

“It’s never been done.”

“It will be within the year. Well?”

“Okay, it’s human. It was human DNA.”

“And if I construct it slightly differently, so that the brain is the same but it comes out on wheels?”

“That’s
cold
, lady.”

“Well?”

“All right! I get your point.”

“And if furthermore I take a pile of neurons and build a human brain? Is that an artifact, Mr. Elliot?”

“Fine!”

Madhu Patel pounded a crutch against the table.

“You’ve made your point, my dear. I, for one, am in awe that Allah has allowed us to see the secret behind His great mystery. He has shown us much trust, and we must be careful how we use it.”

Silence.

“So how
do
you construct it?” said Elliot, interested despite himself. “This self-awareness?”

“We construct it by giving the drones a memory so sensitive that it records their own internal events—unlike MI, which only records external events. Then, like us, they can record their own streams-of-consciousness for later review.

“Note that none of us is aware of having thoughts as we have them—we are too busy having the thoughts to be aware of the fact that they are occurring. But afterwards—perhaps only hundredths of a second afterwards—we can scrutinize our having had those thoughts by looking in memory, and later still we can scrutinize
that
scrutiny, and so on, until we put together a picture of the creature that must be doing the scrutinizing.

“So it is a trick—we can actually only see what we were an instant ago. But we are so fast at it that we are then able to project what we must be like
this
instant, and so we seem to see ourselves. Because of that one small twist we are able to gain new knowledge, then by knowing that that knowledge exists, construct a still higher-order layer of knowledge, and so on until we are so many orders of magnitude more powerful than other devices that we seem
qualitatively
different. Hence your objection, Mr. Elliot. Do not make the same mistake with the drones.”

“So,” said Chan after a minute, “there wouldn’t be any difference between these self-aware drones and a human being?”

“None.”

We’d had this part of the conversation before, but this time her answer caught my attention. And left me uneasy.

“And,” Chan went on, “you think you’ll succeed in building this kind of human intelligence?”

“Apparently you don’t understand, Katherine—I have already built it. That problem is no longer of interest. The issue is now the drones’ evolution.”

Patel sat up straighter, and Elliot frowned.

“The drones we send out,” she said, “will not be the ones that perform the work. They will be generalists: torpedo-shaped machines with good perception but few manipulators, which they will use to construct other drones better adapted to the conditions they find. Then as the need arises, that second generation will build still more.”

“And what is this about evolution?”

“That should be obvious. For the first time in history, we will be in a position to witness conscious evolution.”

“That’s right,” said Polaski, speaking up for the first time. “That’s how they’ll handle the alien threat, isn’t that right?”

“What?”
I stared at him. Was he mocking her? “Jesus, Polaski, stick to politics.”

“He is absolutely right,” said Miller. “The drones’ goal is to secure habitats, and they will need to be extremely aggressive in its pursuit. Especially in the face of a threat. It is that quality, of course, that made us successful ourselves.”

She stood up to leave.

“So, Mr. Elliot. For all your squeamishness, building intelligent drones is not an issue. It is what they will become that is interesting.”

She left.

The silence that followed was broken by a shrill voice across the chamber.

“So what happen to you, Ice-Lady? They throw you out, hah?”

Pham’s sandals slapped against the stone floor and she slid past Polaski
to drop down in a chair at the table. She began shaking a foot under the table, so that her head jogged rhythmically as her eyes roamed around the room. She was in some ways a stunning young woman, with full lips and penetrating black eyes set in angular features. She’d cut her hair back from her face and her neck all the way around, leaving herself looking strikingly naked and open.

The roar of an explosion ripped through the chamber. The table skidded on the floor and the pallets swayed.

No one reacted except Patel, who for an instant looked helpless and afraid.

An acrid stench filled the air.

“Torres,” said Elliot. “What the hell you blowing up down here, anyway?”

“Power cells.” He stared. “We can’t let anyone see the insides of those things, Tyrone, and no matter how strong I make the cases people are going to cut them open. So I’m seeding the cores to blow if they’re breached. The engineers have a contest to see who can get in. No go.”

Patel rapped on the table.

“You will make it perfectly clear on the outside of this thing what will happen if it is opened, Eduardo. This will not be a game for the poor auto mechanic in Mali who wishes to build one for his family.”

“In forty-two languages, plus pictograms, all in red.”

“Yes.”

“Even if it blows up they’ll figure it out,” said Chan. “No expense is going to be spared reverse-engineering the thing.”

“True,” I said, “but even if they do, I’ve built another surprise into them that’ll buy us another year or two when we need it. No one here needs to know what it is, though. The red herrings are more important.”

Pham was watching me. I looked away, but when I looked back a few seconds later she was still watching.

“Herrings?” said Elliot.

“Hah!” said Patel. “Fish! That is very good—‘red fish.’ Yes, we are being most clever. I am placing orders for every available lot of cobalt and thallium on the market, and we will continue to make a convincingly energetic effort to corner their markets entirely, even though they are desperately expensive commodities, and even though we have no use for them whatsoever.” He beamed and nodded around the table.

“Then Eduardo here will sprinkle traces into his boxes, and the world will be deceived. Which reminds me, Katherine, I am going to need very large sums of cash soon . . .”

He went on, having changed the subject very smoothly to cover my surprise. Cobalt and thallium weren’t red herrings at all: They were key components. The red herrings were bauxite and cadmium. Was Patel that cagey on principle, or was there someone at the table he didn’t trust?

Polaski cleared his throat.

“All right, listen up. You people know that our deal for Patel’s marketing help is to let foreigners build ships for another sixty thousand. We agreed because those sixty thousand are going to be the richest bastards in the world, and are going to end up on our side against the rest of the bastards who want to snuff us for the plans.”

Pham stood up and pushed her way around the table the long way. She ran a hand across my cheek and up through my hair as she passed. Polaski raised an eyebrow at me.