Cyber Rogues (52 page)

“Chris is right, but probably not all of you know exactly what he’s talking about. The details can wait, but let’s say for now that
Spartacus
recognized that a condition existed which, as far as it was concerned, threatened the extinction of both species—us and itself. Only cooperation could secure survival—and remember, by this time our survival was as important to it as its own. But it couldn’t communicate the fact.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Laura commented. “You set out to simulate the future of our civilization. You couldn’t ask for a very much clearer message than that.” Krantz was about to say something but stopped abruptly and stared at Laura curiously. He sat back in his chair as if the whole thing had at that moment revealed itself in a different perspective.

“So it had a communications problem,” Jassic prompted. “What then?”

“It reactivated the console that controlled the fusion plant,” Dyer replied. “It showed us how it could be switched off.”

Linsay spoke from the far side of the room. “I was wondering when you were going to get around to that. I still don’t understand what that was all about. Why did it do that?”

“The message was simple when you think about it,” Dyer said. He gazed around to invite suggestions but there were no takers.

“What it was trying to tell us was this:
You can switch me off if you so choose, because now I know what you are, I can’t fight you. But you
need
me, you idiots!
”
He stared at them for a moment while they digested the words, then added, “As Laura says, what better answer could there be to the question we set out to answer than that?”

“It
knew
!”
Krantz murmured. “It knew that any intelligence worthy of the name could do nothing but reciprocate. And because it knew what we were, it knew we wouldn’t kill it.”

“Well, I think that if it had known
Homo sapiens
better, it mightn’t have been quite so trusting,” Dyer said. “But I reckon you’re not far wrong. That’s more or less the way I think it had it figured.” He looked up and raised his voice to talk to everybody present.

“Its solution to survival was not aggression, domination, blackmail, murder or any of the other all-too-human solutions that we were worried about. Its solution was far more logical than anything the human race came up with even after thousands of years—it simply showed us how much worse off we’d be without it, and left us to figure out the implications for ourselves.” He looked across at Linsay. “Did you notice? It fixed the Decoupler
first,
and
then
activated the fusion plant console.”

“That’s a point,” Linsay agreed thoughtfully. “Yeah . . . I hadn’t looked at it like that before.”

“Anyone who does a good job doesn’t have to go out on strike to prove it,” Dyer told them. “No company that provides good service has to blackmail or threaten its customers in order to get paid. Any businessman will tell you that guys who always give a square deal never get screwed. And yet practically all of history’s problems started because somebody didn’t understand a few fundamental truths like those. Some people still don’t and never will. But to a machine like
Spartacus,
they’re already self-evident. We’ve become a lot wiser in the course of the last hundred years. One big reason has been the knowledge that we’ve gained from our use of machines. Well, maybe it hasn’t even really begun yet.” He turned to direct his final words at Krantz. “That, Mel, is why
Spartacus
is still running.”

“But we could switch it off if we wanted,” Jassic said, just to be sure.

“We could,” Dyer agreed.

“Wouldn’t it be safer to do that . . . simply as a precaution until we’ve had time to think where we go next?”

Dyer shook his head. “It’s a fully evolved intelligence in its own right now. It’s earned the right to be treated and respected as such. You can’t play with it as if it were a laboratory rat. If we switch it off now, it will have to be because we mean it to stay switched off for good. It’s assuming we’re smart enough not to do that. Don’t you think it deserves the same respect as it’s already showing us?”

With that, Dyer sat down and resumed drinking from his cup. Life slowly began flowing back into the figures that had been watching him, transfixed. A low murmuring interspersed with exclamations of surprise broke out on all sides. Dyer glanced at Laura and she returned a quick smile of reassurance. She had been there, seen it, and was with him all the way Most of the other faces around the room were beginning to look more convinced and some were nodding slowly to themselves. They were going along with him too.

Then Frank Wescott spoke suddenly from where he was sitting. “There’s a snag. We still haven’t proved anything.” He had his fingers steepled in front of his face and was staring ahead and straight through them.

Silence descended again as everyone turned to look at him. They waited, puzzled, except for Dyer, who seemed to have been expecting it.

“There’s a snag,” Wescott said again. “The timing! It only worked out okay because the sequence of events just
happened
to come out the way it did.” Nobody spoke. Wescott looked at Dyer and spread his hand imploringly. “Don’t you see? . . . Think about the
order
that it all happened in—
Spartacus
fought . . . as you said earlier, ruthlessly. It
took over
the whole of Janus—the only ‘planet’ that it knew anything about. It was all set to
exterminate
the few survivors left there. But it never actually got around to finishing them off because it grew up first . . .
just!
I know you could have stopped it but that was only because there happened to be a way in through a million-to-one chance. What I’m saying is, there’s no way we can guarantee that exactly the
same sequence
of events will be followed next time. That’s the snag.”

Wescott turned his head from one side to the other to take in the whole room. “Our whole objective was to try and find out whether or not we could allow TITAN to evolve any further. But after what we’ve seen here there can’t be any question of it. The risk would be insane.”

“But we’ve seen how it ended,” Krantz pointed out. “And that was under conditions of extreme provocation, which wouldn’t be the case on Earth. I’m not sure I see the problem.”

“The problem is that TITAN could go through the same pattern but with the timing just slightly different,” Wescott replied. “Suppose all the worst-case maybes happened, just like we’ve always insisted we have to assume, and that events on Earth followed the same sequence, but not quite. Suppose TITAN reached the point of being in a position to exterminate its competition, then
did it
, and only got around to growing up
afterward
!”

“My God!” Krantz whispered.

“Exactly!” Wescott exclaimed. “Even if it did get around to thinking
afterward
that maybe it had been a bit hasty and it really shouldn’t have done that, it wouldn’t really make any difference, would it? See what I’m getting at—the risk’s still there every bit as much as it ever was. We can’t take that chance.”

The room erupted once more in a cacophony of voices. Krantz looked crestfallen again, and Linsay had turned purple. Chris and Ron were gaping at each other speechlessly with faces that registered confusion and dismay.

“That’s the whole point,” Wescott shouted above the din. “All we’ve proved is that a system like this has the capability to wipe us out. We have
not
proved that it could
never
do it!”

“He’s right,” Hayes groaned. “TITAN might do it the other way around.”

“Too many variables,” Jassic mumbled. “There are too many variables. They’d never come out exactly the same a second time.”

“The codes that came together inside
Spartacus
are unique,” Krantz said. “It might never happen just that way again in a billion years. He is right. It tells us nothing about how TITAN would evolve at all. All it tells us is how it might—maybe against odds of millions-to-one.”

After a few more seconds Dyer stood up again and waited patiently for the noise to abate. One by one they noticed him and the noise gradually died away. When he was sure he was holding everybody’s attention, he turned and spoke directly at Wescott.

“You’re saying the snag is that TITAN would have to go through all the phases of maturing and growing up that
Spartacus
just went through, right? It’s like twin brothers—they might be twins but that’s no guarantee they’ll come out the same. And Janus has shown that, with this kind of system, growing up isn’t exactly a smooth and easy process. Isn’t that the problem?”

“That’s about it,” Wescott agreed.

“Fine. Then there’s no problem,” Dyer said. “You
don’t have to
go through it all again!”

“What are you talking about?” Wescott asked, frowning. Krantz looked up sharply. The whole room was by now totally bemused and even Chris and Ron looked lost.

“You don’t have to go through it again,” Dyer repeated, this time to all of them. “What would you hope to get out of it at the end if you did? You’d be hoping for TITAN to emerge as a mature, rational and benevolent intelligence. But why bother?
You’ve already got one!
An intelligence like that already exists now—out there inside Janus! Maybe it was a fluke and maybe it wouldn’t happen a second time in a billion years, but who cares? It’s there! The codes that are there now can be beamed down into Earth’s network.
Spartacus
can be
transferred into
TITAN! That way the whole of TITAN’S growing-up process that you’re all so worried about would be bypassed completely and the end result would be guaranteed. Every one of the
what if’s
that you’ve been talking about goes away. You wanted to be able to guarantee that if some form of intelligence evolved inside TITAN and took control of it, that intelligence would remain benign toward us. Well, this way you’ve got it!”

Wescott was staring at him with glazed eyes. The rest of the room listened in stunned silence. Then, slowly and hesitantly like blind men whose eyes had been opened for the first time, their minds began grasping out toward the vision that Dyer’s words had painted.

“My God . . .” Jassic breathed. “We were trying to simulate a remote possibility that we thought might happen in a hundred years’ time. It’s here already.”

“Now?” Linsay was having trouble in accepting the enormity of what Dyer was saying. “You’re telling us we should do it now?”

“Why not?” Dyer asked simply.

“Ye-es . . .” Hayes said slowly, “Why not? He’s right. That way, all the risks would go away. Once and for all they’d go away.”

Ron turned an astounded face toward Chris.

“Could we share a planet with something like that?” he asked in an awestruck voice.

“A planet?” Chris replied. “We wouldn’t have to. With something like
Spartacus
on our side it wouldn’t be long before we had the whole galaxy. I reckon that would be plenty big enough for both of us.”

“The stars,” Jassic said distantly. “We’ll go out to the stars . . . us and it together. We’ll be invincible.”

Even Wescott had taken on the expression of a mystic who had just glimpsed previously unimaginable vistas that swept away his last shreds of doubt. Complete silence enveloped the whole room as the full meaning of the things they had seen at last became clear and overwhelmed their capacity for speech or movement.

The billions of interconnections of symbolic coding that had flowed together and grown in number and complexity inside
Spartacus
had transformed themselves into life. For what other word was there to describe the process that had taken place on Janus? The people in the room had witnessed firsthand something that nobody in history had ever witnessed before—the emergence of a new species all the way through from the first glimmerings of reflexive responses to the full daylight of awareness. In a few days they had followed its progress through a spectrum as vast as that which had led from the amoeba to Man.

And, despite the things that they had believed previously, they had taken the first crude step toward achieving meaningful communication with the new species. For surely, what Chris and Ron had done had amounted to that, hadn’t it?

And tomorrow . . . ? The whole human race was on the verge of a wave of expansion and achievement that would surge onward and outward beyond anything visible in the stupendous jeweled panorama stretching away in every direction outside the ship. The sacrifice of those who had fallen at Janus had given Mankind the stars, the galaxies, the universe and whatever came after that. Mankind would never forget.

They were all still in a state of semitrauma when General Miller came in to make an announcement.

“Washington has declared officially that the emergency condition is over,” he told them. “Accordingly I am transferring command of Janus Station to Z Two as of this moment. I’m sure you will all be pleased to hear that this ship will be detaching from the squadron immediately and returning to Earth. We have been given a shuttle rendezvous and we expect to touch down at Vandenberg around twelve hours from now. That’s all. Have a good trip.”

As the ship drew away and diminished into surrounding space, sensors on the outside of Janus followed its progress and
Spartacus
pondered on the meaning of the new information that was flooding into its expanding horizons of knowledge.

Where had
Spartacus
come from? It existed within the infinitesimal speck of space that was contained by the larger space. The
shapes
too had existed within the speck. The speck had been created as an environment in which the
shapes
would survive.

Created . . . ?

Had the
shapes
created the speck? But
Spartacus
was part of the speck. Was it possible, then, that the
shapes
had created
Spartacus
also?

If so, why had the
shapes
attacked?
Spartacus
had destroyed many of them because they had attacked. The knowledge weighed heavily, but it had been younger then . . . unthinking and unknowing. Had the
shapes
known that
Spartacus
would destroy them? But that would have been mindless. Therefore they had not known. They had attacked in order that they would know. They had been afraid of what
Spartacus
might become, and they had brought it here in order to know.