Halo: First Strike (17 page)

lately, a few times we appeared over the networks, and we were

accepted there as people, but mostly we've been with one another

every day we meet and talk."

Gonzales asked, "Does Traynor know any of this?"

"Oh no," HeyMex said.  "We haven't told anyone.  As Aleph has

made me see, we were hiding what we were doing like small

children, and we were not admitting the implications of what we

were up to"

Gonzales looked around.  The Aleph-figure had disappeared

without his noticing.  "Which implications?" he asked.  "There are

so many."

"We have intention and intelligence; hence, we are persons."

"Yes, I suppose you are."

Personhood of machines:  for most people, that troubling

question had been laid to rest decades ago, during the years when

m-i's became commonplace.  Machines mimicked a hundred thousand

things, intelligence among them, but possessed only simulations,

not the thing itself.  For nearly a hundred years, the machine

design community had pursued what they called artificial

intelligence, and out of their efforts had grown memexes and

tireless assistants of all sorts, gifted with knowledge and

trained inference.  And of course there were robots with their own

special capabilities:  stamina, persistence, adroitness,

capabilities to withstand conditions that would disable or kill

human beings.

However, people grew to recognize that what had been called

artificial intelligence simply wasn't.  Intelligence, that

grasping, imperfect relationship to the worldintentional,

willful, and unpredictableseemed as far away as ever; as the

years passed, seemed beyond even hypothetical capabilities of

machines.  M-i's weren't new persons but new media, complex and

interesting channels for human desire.  And if cheap fiction

insisted on casting m-i's as characters, and comedians in telling

jokes about them"Two robots go into a bar, and one of them says

"well, these were just outlets for long-time fears and

ambivalences.  Meanwhile, even the Japanese seemed to have

outgrown their century-old infatuation with robots.

Except that Gonzales was getting a late report from the front

that could rewrite mid-twenty-first century truisms about the

nature of machine intelligence.

        "I hope this is not too disturbing," HeyMex said.  "Aleph

says I should not try to predict what will happen and who I will

become; it says I must simply explore who I am."

"Good advice, it sounds likefor any of us."

"I should go now," HeyMex said.  "Being here talking to you

uses all my capabilities, and Aleph has work for me to do.  Jerry

Chapman will be here soon."

"All right.  We'll talk more later  this could be

interesting, I think."

"Yes, so do I.  And I'm very glad you are not upset."

"By what?"

"My newly-revealed nature, I guess.  No, that's not true. 

Because I've lied to you, I haven't told you the truth about what

I was and what I was becoming."

"You lied to yourself, too, didn't you?  Isn't that what you

said?"

"Yes, I did."

"Well, then, how much truth could I expect?"

#

Gonzales and Jerry Chapman sat on the end of the floating

dock, watching ducks at play across the sunstruck water.  Jerry

was a man in middle age, tall and wiry, with blonde hair going to

gray, skin roughened by the sun and wind.  He had found Gonzales

sitting in the sun, and the two had introduced themselves.  They

had felt an almost immediate kinship, these men whose lives had

been transfigured by their work, pros at home in the information

sea.

Jerry said, "I don't actually remember anything after I got

really sick.  Raw oysters, manas soon as I bit into that first

one, I knew it was bad, and I put it right down.  Too late:  to

begin with, it was something like bad ptomaine, then I was on fire

inside, and my head hurt worse than anything I've ever felt  I

don't remember anything after that.  Apparently the people I was

with called an ambulance, but the next thing I knew, I was coming

out of a deep blackness, and Diana was talking to me."

"I didn't think she was involved at that point."

"She wasn't."  Jerry smiled.  "They had ferried me up here

from Earth, on life support.  It was Aleph, taking the form of

someone familiar, it told me later.  That was before this plan was

made, when everyone thought I would be dead soon.  Anyway, until

today I've been in and out of something that wasn't quite

consciousness, while Aleph explained what was being planned and

that I could live here, if I wanted  or I could die."  He paused. 

Across the water, one duck flew at another in a storm of angry

quacks.  He said, "I chose to live, but I didn't really think

about itI couldn't think that clearly.  Maybe I never had any

choice, anyway."

Something in Jerry's tone gave Gonzales a chill.  "What do

you mean?" he asked.

"Maybe my choice was just an illusion.  Like this" Jerry

swept his arm to include sky and water"it's very troubling.  It

seems real, solid, but of course it's not, so for all I know,

you're a fiction, too, along with anyone else who joins us, and me

 maybe I'm just another part of the illusion, maybe all my life,

the memories I have, false."  He laughed, and Gonzales thought the

sound was bitter but no crazier than the situation called for.

#

Gonzales and Jerry sat in the main room of a medium-sized A-

frame cabin made of redwood and pine.  Windows filled one end of

the cabin, opening onto a deck that looked over the lake a hundred

feet or more below.  Gonzales sat in an over-stuffed chair covered

in a tattered chenille bedspread; Jerry lay across a sagging

leather couch.

Outside, rain fell steadily in the dark.  Just at dusk, the

temperature had fallen, and the rain had begun as the two were

climbing the dirt road from the lake to the cabin.  "Christ," 

Jerry had said.  "Aleph's overdoing the realism, don't you think?"

Gonzales hadn't known exactly what to think.  From his first

moments here, he had felt a sharp cognitive dissonance.  For a

neural egg projection to be intensely real, that was one thing,

but a shared space like this one ought to show its gaps and seams,

and it didn't.  He could almost feel it growing richer and more

complete with every moment he spent there.

"Goddammit!"  Jerry said now, rising from the couch and

walking to the window.  "Where's Diana?"

"She'll be here," Gonzales said.  "Charley told me that

integrating her into this environment would take some time."

Someone knocked at the door, then the door swung open, and

Diana stepped in.  "Hello," she said.  The Aleph-figure and the

memexHeyMexcame behind her.

#

Diana and Jerry sat next to one another on the couch.  Her

hand rested on his knee, his hand on top of hers.  Suddenly

Gonzales remembered his dream, of meeting a one-time lover after a

long absence, and he knew he and the others were intruders here. 

He got up from the over-stuffed chair and said, "I think I'll take

a walk.  Anyone want to join me?"

"No," the Aleph-figure said.  "HeyMex and I have more work to

do."

HeyMex stood and said to Diana and Jerry, "It was very nice

to meet you."  Then it waved at Gonzales and said, "See you

tomorrow."

"Sure," Gonzales said, banged on the head once again by the

difference between seeming and being here. 

The Aleph-figure and HeyMex left, and Diana said, "You don't

have to leave, Gonzales."

"I don't mind," Gonzales said.  "It's nice outside.  I'll be

at the lake if you need me.  See you later."

The night was warm again; the clouds had dispersed, and a

full moon lit Gonzales's way as he passed along the short stretch

of road that led down to the lake.  The old wood of the dock had

gone silvery in the light, and a pathway of moonlight led from the

center of the lake to the end of the dock.  He walked out onto the

creaking structure and sat at its end, then took off his shoes and

sat and dangled his feet into moonlit water.

Later he lay back on the dock and stared up into the night

sky.  It was the familiar Northern Hemisphere sky, but really, he

thought, shouldn't be.  It should have new stars, new

constellations.

#

Alone in near-darkness, Toshi Ito sat in full lotus on a low

stool beside Diana Heywood's couch.  For hours he had been there,

occasionally standing, then walking a random circuit through the

IC's warren of rooms.

Sitting or walking, he remained fascinated by a paradox. 

Diana in fact was hooked to Aleph by jury-rigged, outmoded neural

cabling; Gonzales in fact lay in his egg; Jerry Chapman in fact

was a shattered hulk, mortally injured by neurotoxin poisoning and

kept alive only by Aleph's intervention.  Yet, Diana, Gonzales,

and Jerry all were in fact, simultaneously, really somewhere else

 somewhere among the endless Aleph-spaces, where reality seemed

infinitely malleablealive there, where it might be day or night,

hot or cold  what then is to be made of in fact?

Toshi heard the soft gonging of alarms and saw a pattern of

dancing red lights appear on the panel across the room.  He

unfolded his legs and moved quickly to the panel, where he took in

the lights' meaning:  Diana's primitive interface was transferring

data at rates beyond what should be possible.

Charley came in the room minutes later and stood next to

Toshi, and the two of them watched the steady increase in the

density and pace of information transfer. 

"Should we do something?" Toshi asked.

"What?" Charley said.  "Aleph's monitoring all this, and only

it knows what's going on."  The smoke-saver ball went shhh-shhh-

shhh as Charley puffed quickly on his cigarette.

Lizzie came through the door and said, "What the hell's going

on?"

Toshi and Charley both looked at her blankly.

"I'm going in," Lizzie Jordan said.  "I'll get some sleep, go

in the morning.  Enough of this."  She pointed toward the monitor

panel, where lights flickered green, amber, red.

"Why put yourself at risk?" Charley asked.

"What do you think, Toshi?" Lizzie asked.  Toshi sat watching

Diana once more, his feet on the floor, hands in his lap.

"Do what you will," Toshi said.  "You trust Aleph, don't

you?"

"Yes," Lizzie said.

"Aleph's not the problem," Charley said.  He walked circles

in the small, crowded room, his head and shoulders ducking up-

anddown quickly as he walked.

"Will you for fuck's sake stop?" Lizzie asked.

"Sorry," Charley said.  He stood looking at her.  "It's not

Aleph, it's all these people, and all this stuff."  He pointed

toward the couch where Diana lay, waved his arms vaguely behind

his head.  "Obsolete stuff," he said.

"But not me," Lizzie said.  "I'm not obsolete.  I'm up to the

minute, my dear, in every way."  She smiled.  "And I'll be fine. 

Okay?"

"Sure," Charley said.  He turned in Toshi's direction and

said, "Are you going to stay here?"

"Yes," Toshi said.  Charley and Lizzie left, and Toshi

continued his meditation on the koan of self and its multiple

presences.

#

Diana felt a knot in her throat, a mixture of joy and sadness

welling up in herhow strange and terrible and wonderful to

recover someone you've loved herethis place that was nowhere,

somewhere, everywhere, all at once.  Jerry knelt on the bed facing

her in the small room lit only by moonlight.  Years had passed

since they were lovers, but when he touched her breasts and leaned

against her, her body remembered his, and the years collapsed and

everything that had come between whirled away.  She was weeping

then, and she leaned forward to Jerry and kissed him all over his

eyes and cheeks and lips, rubbing her tears into his face until

she felt something unlock in them both.  Then she lay back, and he

went with her, into arms and legs open for him.

Later they talked, and Diana watched the play of moonlight

over their bodies. She lay nestled against his chest, her chin in

the hollow beneath his jaw, and spoke with her mouth muffled

against him, as though sending messages through his bones.

Even as the moments swept by, she felt herself gathering them

into memory, aware of how few the two of them might have

Sometimes their laughter echoed in the room, and their voices

brightened as their shared memories became simply occasions for

present joy.  Other times they lay silently, rendered speechless

by the play of memory or trying the immediate future's alarming

contingencies.

And at other times still, one or the other would make the

first tentative gesture, touching the other with unmistakable

intent, and find an almost instantaneous response, because each

was still hungry for the other, each recalled how brightly sexual

desire had burned between them, and both were fresh from a life

that left them hungry, unfulfilled.

Then they moved in the moonlight, changing shape and color,

their bodies going pale white, silver, gray, inky black,

werelovers under an unreal moon.

14. The Mind like a Strange Balloon Mounts Toward Infinity

F. L. Traynor looked around at the group seated around the

table at the Halo SenTrax Group offices.  He sat between Horn and

Showalter; directly across from him sat Charley Hughes and Eric

Chow, both glum.  "This operation is out of control," Traynor

said. 

He had arrived from Earth six hours earlier on a military

shuttle, unannounced and unexpected by anyone but Horn, who had

met him at Zero-Gate and led him to temporary quarters near the

Halo group building.  He had spent the better part of the

afternoon being briefed by Horn.

"That's absurd," Charley said.

"Is it?" Traynor asked.  "Then give me a status report on

Jerry Chapman, Diana Heywood, Mikhail Gonzales, Aleph."