Spin (54 page)

“As long as Diane doesn’t need urgent attention. When do you want to start?”

His turned his head. The diamond-specked pupils of his eyes glittered in the strange light.

“Now would not be too soon,” he said.

The Martians, Jason said, were not the simple, peaceful, pastoral people Wun had led (or allowed) us to believe they were.

It was true that they weren’t especially warlike—the Five Republics had settled their political differences almost a millennium ago—and they were “pastoral” in the sense that they devoted most of their resources to agriculture. But nor were they “simple” in any sense of the word. They were, as Jase had pointed out, past masters of the art of synthetic biology. Their civilization had been founded on it. We had built them a habitable planet with biotech tools, and there had never been a Martian generation that didn’t understand the function and potential uses of DNA.

If their large-scale technology was sometimes crude— Wun’s spacecraft, for instance, had been almost primitive, a Newtonian cannonball—it was because of their radically constrained natural resources. Mars was a world without oil or coal, supporting a fragile water- and nitrogen-starved ecosystem. A profligate, lush industrial base like the Earth’s could never have existed on Wun’s planet. On Mars, most human effort was devoted to producing sufficient food for a strictly controlled population. Biotechnology served this purpose admirably. Smoke-stack industries did not.

“Wun told you this?” I asked, as rain fell continuously and the afternoon ebbed.

“He confided in me, yes, though most of what he said was already implicit in the archives.”

Rust-colored light from the window reflected from Jason’s blind, altered eyes.

“But he could have been lying.”

“I don’t know that he ever
lied
, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth.”

The microscopic replicators Wun had carried to Earth were cutting-edge synthetic biology. They were fully capable of doing everything Wun promised they would do. In fact they were more sophisticated than Wun had been willing to admit.

Among the replicators’ unacknowledged functions was a hidden second subchannel for communicating among themselves and with their point of origin. Wun hadn’t said whether this was conventional narrowband radio or something technologically more exotic—the latter, Jase suspected. In any case, it required a receiver more advanced than anything we could build on Earth. It required, Wun had said, a
biological
receiver. A modified human nervous system.

“You
volunteered
for this?”

“I would have. If anyone had asked. But the only reason Wun confided in me was that he feared for his life from the day he arrived on Earth. He harbored no illusions about human venality or power politics. He needed someone he could trust to take custody of his pharmacopoeia, if anything happened to him. Someone who understood the purpose of it. He never proposed that I become a receiver. The modification only works on a Fourth—remember what I said? The longevity treatment is a platform. It runs other applications. This is one of them.”

“You did this to yourself
on purpose
?”

“I injected myself with the substance after he died. It wasn’t traumatic and it had no immediate effect. Remember, Tyler, there was no way for communication from the replicators to penetrate a fully functioning Spin membrane. What I gave myself was a
latent
ability.”

“Why do it, then?”

“Because I didn’t want to die in a condition of ignorance. We all assumed, if the Spin ended, we’d be dead within days or hours. The sole advantage to Wun’s modification was that in those last days or hours, as long as I lasted, I would be in intimate contact with a database almost as large as the galaxy itself. I would know as nearly as anyone on Earth
could
know who the Hypothetical were and why they had done this to us.”

I thought,
And do you know that now
? But maybe he did. Maybe that was what he wanted to communicate before he lost the ability to speak, why he wanted me to make a recording of it. “Did Wun know you might do this?”

“No, and I doubt he would have approved… although he was running the same application himself.”

“Was he? It didn’t show.”

“It wouldn’t. Remember: what’s happening to me—to my body, to my brain—that’s not the application.” He turned his sightless eyes toward me. “That’s a malfunction.”

The replicators had been launched from Earth and had flourished in the outer solar system, far from the sun. (Had the Hypotheticals noticed this, and had they blamed the Earth for what was in fact a Martian intervention? Was that, as E.D. had implied, what the sly Martians had intended all along? Jason didn’t say—I presumed he didn’t know.)

In time the replicators spread to the nearest stars and beyond… eventually far beyond. The replicator colonies were invisible at astronomical distances, but if you had mapped them onto a grid of our local stellar neighborhood you would have seen a continually expanding cloud of them, a glacially slow explosion of artificial life.

The replicators were not immortal. As individual entities they lived, reproduced, and eventually died. What remained in place was the network they built: a coral reef of gated, interconnected nodes in which novel data accumulated and drained toward the network’s point of origin.

“The last time we talked,” I reminded Jase, “you said there was a problem. You said the replicator population was dying back.”

“They encountered something no one had planned for.”

“What was that, Jase?”

He was silent a few moments, as if gathering his thoughts.

“We assumed,” he said, “that when we launched the replicators we were introducing something new to the universe, a wholly new kind of artificial life. That assumption was naive. We—human beings, terrestrial or Martian—weren’t the first sentient species to evolve in our galaxy. Far from it. In fact there’s nothing particularly unusual about us. Virtually everything we’ve done in our brief history has been done before, somewhere, by someone else.”

“You’re telling me the replicators ran into other replicators?”

“An
ecology
of replicators. The stars are a jungle, Tyler. Fuller of life man we ever imagined.”

I tried to picture the process as Jason described it:

Far beyond the Spin-sequestered Earth, far beyond the solar system—so deep in space that the sun itself is only one more star in a crowded sky—a replicator seed alights on a dusty fragment of ice and begins to reproduce. It initiates the same cycle of growth, specialization, observation, communication, and reproduction that has taken place countless times during its ancestors’ slow migrations. Maybe it reaches maturity; maybe it even begins to pump out microbursts of data; but this time, the cycle is interrupted.

Something has sensed the replicator’s presence. Something hungry.

The predator (Jase explained) is another kind of semiorganic autocatalytic feedback system—another colony of self-reproducing cellular mechanisms, as much machine as biology—and the predator is plugged into its own network, this one older and vastly larger than anything the terrestrial replicators have had time to construct during their exodus from Earth. The predator is more highly evolved than its prey: its subroutines for nutrient-seeking and resource-utilization have been honed over billions of years. The terrestrial replicator colony, blind and incapable of fleeing, is promptly eaten.

But “eaten” carries a special meaning here. The predator wants more than the sophisticated carbonaceous molecules of which the replicator’s mature form is composed, useful as these might be. Far more interesting to the predator is the replicator’s
meaning
, the functions and strategies written into its reproductive templates. It adopts from these what it considers potentially valuable; then it reorganizes and exploits the replicator colony for its own purposes. The colony does not die but is absorbed, ontologically devoured, subsumed along with its brethren into a larger, more complex, and vastly older interstellar hierarchy.

It is not the first nor the last such device to be so absorbed.

“Replicator networks,” Jason said, “are one of the things sentient civilizations tend to produce. Given the inherent difficulty of sublight-speed travel as a way of exploring the galaxy, most technological cultures eventually settle for an expanding grid of von Neumann machines—which is what the replicators are—that costs nothing to maintain and generates a trickle of scientific information that expands exponentially over historical time.”

“Okay,” I said, “I understand that. The Martian replicators aren’t unique. They ran into what you call an ecology—”

“A von Neumann ecology.” (After the twentieth-century mathematician John von Neumann, who first suggested the possibility of self-reproducing machines.)

“A von Neumann ecology, and they were absorbed by it. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the Hypotheticals or the Spin.”

Jason pursed his lips impatiently. “Tyler, no. You don’t understand. The Hypotheticals
are
the von Neumann ecology. They’re one and the same.”

At this point I had to step back and reconsider exactly who was in the room with me.

It looked like Jase. But everything he’d said was casting that into doubt.

“Are you communicating with this… entity? Now, I mean? As we speak?”

“I don’t know if you’d call it communication. Communication works two ways. This doesn’t, not in the sense you’re implying. And real communication wouldn’t be quite so overwhelming. This
is
. Especially at night. The input is moderated during daylight hours, presumably because solar radiation washes out the signal.”

“At night the signal is stronger”

“Maybe the word ‘signal’ is misleading, too. A signal is what the original replicators were designed to transmit. What I receive is coming in on the same carrier wave, and it does convey information, but it’s active, not passive. It’s trying to do to me what it’s done to every other node in the network. In effect, Ty, it’s trying to acquire and reprogram my nervous system.”

So there
was
a third entity in the room. Me, Jase—and the Hypotheticals, who were eating him alive.

“Can they do that? Reprogram your nervous system?”

“Not
successfully
, no. To them I look like one more node in the replicator network. The biotechnology I injected into myself is sensitive to their manipulation, but not in the ways they anticipate. Because they don’t perceive me as a biological entity, all they can do is kill me.”

“Is there any way to screen this signal or interfere with it?”

“None that I know of. If the Martians had such a technique they neglected to include the information in their archives.”

The window in Jason’s room faced west. The roseate glow now penetrating the room was the waning sun, obscured by clouds.

“But they’re with you now. Talking to you.”

“They.
It
. We need a better pronoun. The entire von Neumann ecology is a single entity. It thinks its own slow thoughts and makes its own plans. But many of its trillions of parts are also autonomous individuals, often competing with each other, quicker to act than the network as a whole and vastly more intelligent than any single human being. The Spin membrane, for instance—”

“The Spin membrane is an
individual
?”

“In every important sense, yes. Its ultimate goals are derived from the network, but it evaluates events and makes autonomous choices. It’s more complex than we ever dreamed, Ty. We all assumed the membrane was either
on
or
off
, like a light switch, like binary code. Not true. It has
many
states.
Many
purposes. Many degrees of permeability, for instance. We’ve known for years that it can transit a spacecraft and repel an asteroid. But it has subtler capabilities even than that. That’s why we haven’t been overwhelmed with solar radiation in the last few days. The membrane is still giving us a certain level of protection.”

“I don’t know the casualty numbers, Jase, but there must be thousands of people in this city alone who have lost family since the Spin stopped. I would be very reluctant to tell them they’re being ‘protected.’”

“But they are. In general if not in particular. The Spin membrane isn’t God—it can’t see the sparrow fall. It can, however, prevent the sparrow from being cooked with lethal ultraviolet light.”

“To what end?”

At that he frowned. “I can’t quite grasp,” he began, “or maybe I can’t quite
translate
—”

There was a knock at the door. Carol entered with an armful of linen. I switched off the recorder and set it aside. Carol’s expression was grim.

“Clean sheets?” I asked.

“Restraints,” she said curtly. The linen had been cut into strips. “For when the convulsions start.”

She nodded at the window, the lengthening daylight.

“Thank you,” Jason said gently. “Tyler, if you need a break, this would be the time. But don’t be too long.”

I looked in on Diane, who was between episodes, sleeping. I thought about the Martian drug I had administered to her (the “basic Fourth,” as Jase had called it), semi-intelligent molecules about to do battle with her body’s overwhelming load of CVWS bacteria, microscopic battalions mustering to repair and rebuild her, unless her body was too weakened to withstand the strain of the transformation.

I kissed her forehead and said gentle words she probably couldn’t hear. Then I left her bedroom and went downstairs and out onto the lawn of the Big House, stealing a moment for myself.

The rain had finally stopped—abruptly, completely—and the air was fresher than it had been all day. The sky was deep blue at the zenith. A few tattered thunderheads cloaked the monstrous sun where it touched the western horizon. Raindrops stood on every blade of grass, tiny amber pearls.