Divisions (11 page)
Authors: Ken MacLeod
He’s still smiling back, still thinks I’m agreeing. The hash beer drives me to stoned and pissed elaboration: ‘Strangers in a strange land. Marx was wrong—we aren’t alienated
from
our humanity, alienation
is
humanity. We’re always capable of stepping back and looking at what we’re doing, from the outside as it were—we have an outside,
inside
, and it’s as infinite as space. No Turing test can come close, no matter how good it is at faking an organism. Machines calculate; people count. Machines have programs; people have purposes.’ I stop and stare at him and take another shot of beer. ‘So there.’
from
our humanity, alienation
is
humanity. We’re always capable of stepping back and looking at what we’re doing, from the outside as it were—we have an outside,
inside
, and it’s as infinite as space. No Turing test can come close, no matter how good it is at faking an organism. Machines calculate; people count. Machines have programs; people have purposes.’ I stop and stare at him and take another shot of beer. ‘So there.’
‘People are machines too,’ he says. ‘And machines will have all we have, once we’ve transferred our minds to them.’
‘That’s what you call it. Stripping your brain away layer by layer and modelling it on a computer is what I call
dying
.’
dying
.’
‘It’s transcending,’ he says. He slaps his chest, almost setting himself spinning. ‘
This
is dying. “The meat is murder.” ’
This
is dying. “The meat is murder.” ’
‘Yeah,’ I say cruelly. ‘If I had
your
body, I’d want to be something else.’
your
body, I’d want to be something else.’
He doesn’t take this as the crushing put-down it’s intended to be. ‘Yes,’ he says, still smiling. ‘When I upload, I might model my virtual body on yours.’
My attention is distracted by the television screen at the end of the bar, where my parents’ faces have appeared, talking to me in a language I don’t understand, smiling, reassuring. Their twitching, dead-but-galvanized bodies are drifting in front of the screen, attached by pipes that are sucking up their brains. ‘Goodbye, Ellen,’ they’re saying, ‘goodbye. See you in ten thousand years.’
Furious, I turn back to the kid, but he’s already changed, from slob to blob, a paramecium shape buzzing with fractal cilia, a patch of which snows to pixels and freezes to a face—my face.
‘I like your body,’ he says.
‘In your dreams!’ I yell at him. ‘In your dreams!’
And I wake.
The quilt cuddles me, the pillow drinks my tears.
‘Hush,’ it soothes. ‘Everything will be all right.’
The following morning I got up at about 1100 hours, ship time (which, conveniently for those of us who’d boarded yesterday, was the same as GMT), and made my way to the mid deck. Rather to my embarrassment, I was the last to arrive, and the rest of the team had honoured the occasion by setting their suits to various approximations of nattily masculine militarism. Andrea and Boris were entertaining Suze and Malley with a demonstration of the active-defence system, which although automated, could be overridden to provide a spectacular shoot-’em-up game with (mostly tiny, but fast) meteoroids as targets. The others were amusing themselves in less productive ways.
I grunted a good-morning to all of them and had a solitary and thoughtful breakfast in the commissary, chasing the wisps of disturbed dream away with strong coffee. I took my third mug with me back up the stairs and sat down on a couch.
‘OK comrades,’ I said. ‘We’re in session. Yeng, would you like to chair?’
She nodded, pushing away her goggles and nanotech tank, and clapped her hands. ‘Come
on
, guys. Turn the aiming-computers back on and come over here.’
on
, guys. Turn the aiming-computers back on and come over here.’
Andrea, Boris, Malley and Suze dragged themselves away from the manual fire controls and settled down on the ends of couches. I got a shy smile from Suze, a cocky grin from Malley. The surgeries’ work, though by no means complete, had transformed his appearance overnight: straightening his stance, smoothing the skin on his face, wiping the wrinkles from around his eyes.
‘Your little pills have certainly done something for my reflexes,’ he said. Boris spread his hand and made a rocking motion: ‘Considering what you started with …’ The two men laughed; I hoped it indicated, at however tentative a level, the beginning of friendship.
‘Suze, Sam,’ I began, ‘the rest of us all know what I’m going to tell you, but each of us may be able to answer different questions, so …’
I worked the long, low seat’s controls, raising the central overhead cluster of instrumentation and lowering a boom on which was suspended a holographic projection apparatus. Tendrils snaked out from my gloves into the system’s interface. The electric lamps turned off, and I keyed up a football-sized image of Jupiter, softly glowing. I set it spinning with exaggerated speed in the light from the outside, under the refracted, multiply-distorted images of the real stars above us.
‘A brief history of the Jovian system,’ I said. ‘Let’s start with how it was before the Outwarders got underway with Project Jove.’ The four Galilean moons shuttled around it, the Great Red Spot turned with the planet’s coloured bands. ‘Here’s the first indication that something big was going on, which we noticed in 2090. Real archive tape from the Farside Observatory.’
Ganymede disintegrated—not exploding, not flying apart, just separating into millions of bits which, on this time-lapsed view, immediately spread out to form a ring.
We’d all seen it before—it’s the Zapruder film of astronautics: the most widely known image, and the most thoroughly studied and argued-over sequence of photographs, in the history of space exploration. The technician who recorded it had a sense of humour as well as a sense of history, and I played the audio tape of his (alleged) first reaction: ‘Oh my stars, it’s full of gods!’
Small polite laughs all round. ‘OK,’ I said, ‘we’ve all heard it. But he was right. And we
still
don’t know how they did it, even in principle. Sam Malley proved the concept of the Gate and the Drive, and nanotech and uploading were all understood well in advance—essentially as far back as the nineteen-eighties. But shattering the biggest moon in the solar system came as, um, a bit of a shock.’
still
don’t know how they did it, even in principle. Sam Malley proved the concept of the Gate and the Drive, and nanotech and uploading were all understood well in advance—essentially as far back as the nineteen-eighties. But shattering the biggest moon in the solar system came as, um, a bit of a shock.’
The most frightening moment of my life, to be exact. I nodded to Tony, who took up that side of the story.
‘We all,’ he said, ‘couldn’t help remembering that the Outwarders had announced their intention of turning everything except the stars into smart-matter, starting with the smaller asteroids and working their way up, all the way to what they called “Jupiter-sized brains”. They had a saying: “If it isn’t running programs and it isn’t fusing atoms, it’s just bending space.” So we were all rather concerned when we saw that.’ He gave us a thin smile. ‘Especially those of us who lived on the Moon.’
Malley looked up from doodling something on a pad he’d conjured from the knee of his suit. ‘There may be ways of deriving the, uh,
planet-wrecker
from the same schema as the Gate,’ he said. ‘I’ve given it some thought over the years, but I’ve never taken it far. I’ll work on it.’
planet-wrecker
from the same schema as the Gate,’ he said. ‘I’ve given it some thought over the years, but I’ve never taken it far. I’ll work on it.’
‘Good,’ I said, smiling as warmly as I could. ‘Well, on to the Gate.’ I ran the tape forward again, focusing in on the ring and magnifying the view to what had been the limits of our telescopic resolution back in the twentynineties. A complex cat’s-cradle of girders rapidly took shape, a three-dimensional web of black threads just inside the ring. At the same time the face of Jupiter was transformed, its bands fractured by crosscurrents. I cut to close-ups of the structure.
‘These shots are from files retrieved from a construction robot by the so-called artificial woman, Meg, who was Jonathan Wilde’s companion in
that robot body,’ I explained. ‘The black struts are—prosaically enough—polycarbon I-beams, though they have complex internal machinery. The small robots you see rocketing about and apparently working on the structure are the bonded labour force, each of them with a copied human mind running on its onboard computer.’ I paused, compressed my lips for a moment and took a deep breath, then continued. ‘Now
that
—’ I froze the frame, then let it run on—‘is a very different kind of upload. It’s what we called a “super-organism” and what the ex-human workers on the project called a “macro.” It’s a smart-matter object, a constellation of trillions of nanomachines, and one of many. Each of them contains literally millions of minds, mostly replicated—and enhanced—descendants of the original Outwarders. Wilde refers to them as “the fast folk,” and the term has caught on, because it’s apt: their minds are thinking and experiencing at least a thousand times faster than ours.’
that robot body,’ I explained. ‘The black struts are—prosaically enough—polycarbon I-beams, though they have complex internal machinery. The small robots you see rocketing about and apparently working on the structure are the bonded labour force, each of them with a copied human mind running on its onboard computer.’ I paused, compressed my lips for a moment and took a deep breath, then continued. ‘Now
that
—’ I froze the frame, then let it run on—‘is a very different kind of upload. It’s what we called a “super-organism” and what the ex-human workers on the project called a “macro.” It’s a smart-matter object, a constellation of trillions of nanomachines, and one of many. Each of them contains literally millions of minds, mostly replicated—and enhanced—descendants of the original Outwarders. Wilde refers to them as “the fast folk,” and the term has caught on, because it’s apt: their minds are thinking and experiencing at least a thousand times faster than ours.’
We all sat and stared at the macro, a nightmarishly gigantic and multicoloured amoeboid shape, its fractal surfaces seething, its pseudopodia bulging and retracting as it oozed around the girders. Its size dwarfed the tiny, tinny-looking robots of its pressed servants.
‘You’ve never shown these close-ups to people on Earth,’ Suze accused. I nodded briskly.
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘We’ve kept them to ourselves, for now. All anybody in the Inner System has seen is the fuzzy blobs that showed up in some pictures we got at the time from a spy probe before it was detected and destroyed. ’
‘Very democratic of you,’ said Malley. ‘Didn’t want to cause panic, is that it?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Tony, leaning forward. ‘If you’re like me, Dr Malley, I’m sure you’re feeling a reaction of unease or even dread, which is objectively rather hard to justify. We ourselves find it difficult to explain, and suspect it may be deliberately induced by some subtle effect of the surface patterns. If that’s the case it was presumably intended to overawe the labour force. Tests on our own personnel have shown that this response might readily translate into a desire for precipitate action against the present-day descendants of these entities. That’s a pressure we’d prefer to avoid.’
For the moment
, I thought. I went on quickly, showing the subsequent stages of the construction project in fast-forward. The structure suddenly divided, a smaller, circular section detaching itself. The Jovian surface swirled, its equator dotted with what looked like waterspouts which soared in curving trajectories to the ring. A hairline circle around the ring glowed white-hot. The newly separated structure seemed to fold in on itself, and there, hanging like a film of soap in a ring, was the Gate itself: a mile-wide circle of stretched space, its edge shimmering with all the colours of the spectrum.
, I thought. I went on quickly, showing the subsequent stages of the construction project in fast-forward. The structure suddenly divided, a smaller, circular section detaching itself. The Jovian surface swirled, its equator dotted with what looked like waterspouts which soared in curving trajectories to the ring. A hairline circle around the ring glowed white-hot. The newly separated structure seemed to fold in on itself, and there, hanging like a film of soap in a ring, was the Gate itself: a mile-wide circle of stretched space, its edge shimmering with all the colours of the spectrum.
‘The Malley Mile,’ I said. Malley gave us all an ironic bow. ‘If you watch closely you’ll see the moment where it divides into two just-overlapping circles, the two sides of the wormhole. There. The small dark object at the centre is the Outwarders’ ship, or probe, which …’
A line of light stabbed at a tangent from the glowing line around the great ring, straight for the centre of the Gate.
‘ … goes away.’ Everybody blinked; everybody drew breath, even those who’d watched this scene a hundred times. ‘Taking one side of the wormhole with it. Observe how the plasma jet apparently just
stops
when it reaches the Gate. There can be not the slightest doubt that the jet is passing from the local region of space-time into—somewhere else. But in case anybody’s wondering, we did manage to track the probe for the first few minutes. ’ The grainy images flashed up, showing a streak of light and a blurry dot. ‘As you can see, there’s the plasma jet, coming apparently out of nowhere and crossing a few hundred yards of space to the probe, where it’s transformed into kinetic energy via what we presume is, ah, a Malley virtual-mass drive. We calculate that the probe reached almost the speed of light in a month. After that, things get complicated, because both sides of the wormhole are in the same reference frame.’
stops
when it reaches the Gate. There can be not the slightest doubt that the jet is passing from the local region of space-time into—somewhere else. But in case anybody’s wondering, we did manage to track the probe for the first few minutes. ’ The grainy images flashed up, showing a streak of light and a blurry dot. ‘As you can see, there’s the plasma jet, coming apparently out of nowhere and crossing a few hundred yards of space to the probe, where it’s transformed into kinetic energy via what we presume is, ah, a Malley virtual-mass drive. We calculate that the probe reached almost the speed of light in a month. After that, things get complicated, because both sides of the wormhole are in the same reference frame.’
Suze was looking puzzled. I smiled at Malley. ‘Sam, over to you.’
Malley shrugged. ‘To simplify drastically … it’s not really correct to refer to “both sides” of the wormhole. The ship is travelling at some arbitrarily close approximation to the speed of light, and therefore experiences relativistic time dilation—time runs slower on the ship than it does back home. The truly paradoxical feature of the wormhole is that both ends are in the same place. So anything passing through one end of the wormhole arrives at the other end in ship time, which after, say, a year, could be hundreds of light years away, and hundreds of years in the future. With continued acceleration, the probe reaches the edge of the observable universe in thirty shipboard years. So, thirty years from launch, anybody passing through the wormhole arrives instantly at the same location. It is, if you like, a time machine to the future.’
Suze grinned around at us. ‘If you say so.’
I laughed. ‘Meanwhile, if that’s the word, quite a lot had been going on around Jupiter.’
The planet’s surface was mottled, the sites of the still-soaring tornadoes expanding into new variants of the Great Red Spot. I pulled up time-lapsed shots from the records recovered from Meg’s AI mind. The macros changed as we watched, their original feverish internal activity speeding up, then slowing to a stop. A few of them seemed to crystallize, and drifted off towards the Jovian atmosphere. The rest visibly shrivelled, rotting to skeletal shapes like the veins of dead leaves.
A new shape burst on the scene, crashing through the dead macros and their vast construction site like a stone through cobwebs. The viewpoint zoomed towards it, revealing a long, jury-rigged assembly of spacecraft and habitats, spinning crazily on its axis and following a precarious course along the line of the plasma jet. And then the viewpoint was evidently
on
the cobbled-together ship, the hot white line strobing past. The shot ended in a burst of blue light.
on
the cobbled-together ship, the hot white line strobing past. The shot ended in a burst of blue light.
‘Cherenkov radiation,’ I said. ‘They went through the wormhole—well, through a side-branch of it, a daughter wormhole—and, as we know, found a new home. Now we’ll leave them for the moment, and pull back to see what happened on this side.’ I switched to the telescope view: the fountains of gas, and the jet that they had fed, ceased.
Other books
The Cinderella Princess by Melissa McClone
New Title 1 by Gorman, Ed
1 Lost Under a Ladder by Linda O. Johnston
The Dying Trade by Peter Corris
A Just Determination by John G. Hemry
Cuck's Closet: Watch and Weep by Cooper, Tori
Bluestar's Prophecy by Erin Hunter
Carnal Thirst by Celeste Anwar
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell