The Omega Expedition (20 page)

The last addendum was phrased as a jokey offhand comment, but I guessed that she’d actually researched that too.

The consensus in our time had been that AIs could never become conscious because there were fundamental limitations in inorganic neural networks —
fundamental
meaning right down at the atomic and subatomic levels. No matter how rapid they were as calculators, nor how capacious they became as datastores, nor how how clever they became at animating human-seeming sims, they would always be automata, according to the best human brains around. Consciousness, according to the dominant view, was something that could only emerge in organic systems, and was precarious even there. What I’d found out about the history of emortality suggested that the same opinion was still dominant — although my reflexive tendency to treat any popular opinion with derision reminded me that there were ideological reasons why “the best human brains” might want to believe that they could never be equaled or surpassed.

“The modern opinion seems to be that it’s far easier for organic brains to become robotized — reduced to mere automata — than it is for automata to acquire the creative, conflicted, and multilayered messiness that’s the fount of consciousness,” I said to Christine.

“Unless and until the people of the glorious thirty-third century actually find a reliable way of detecting and measuring consciousness, it’ll probably remain a matter of opinion,” she retorted. “The ships they use in the outer system have to take much longer trips and they have to be much more versatile, so they have to be a lot smarter too.
That
thing just sits around in an orbital parking lot waiting for people to shuttle up out of the gravity well. It’s a glorified cab that hops back and forth between Earth, Luna, and their neighboring microworlds. The ships they use outside the belt have to be capable of operating on the surfaces of icebound satellites and in the outer atmospheres of gas giants. They have to be extremely smart — and it isn’t just outer system equipment that has to be smart. The people busy terraforming Venus and mining Mercury have much smarter AIs at their disposal than the people on Earth. Outer System AIs could have played a much larger part in the Gaean Restoration, if the Earthbound hadn’t refused them the chance. The Earthbound are afraid of them.”

Are they?
I wondered.
Or is it just that they won’t pay the asking price for equipment designed and manufactured in the outer system
. I knew that there was an AI “metropolis” on Ganymede, where the outer system ships and interstellar probes were mostly built, but I hadn’t carried my research beyond the merest matters of fact. I made a mental note to make a more careful investigation of the balance of trade between the Hardinist Cabal and the Confederation.

There was nothing more to watch, and we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for our introduction to the ambassadors from Earth, so we turned away from the window.

“Have you looked at Venus?” Christine asked me.

“No,” I said, “but I’ve seen picture-postcard views of Titan and Ganymede. Just like old science fiction tapes. Curiously nostalgic, in a way. I used to know someone who worked on that kind of imagery, until he sold out to PicoCon.”

“Damon Hart,” she guessed. It was the first indication I’d had that she’d been researching me, and that she’d seen the tape of my first conversation with Davida. It was oddly disturbing, although I was aware of the absurdity of thinking that my privacy had been invaded.

“Yes,” I conceded, dully. “Damon Hart.”

“Conrad Helier’s heir. Eveline Hywood’s too. Quite a start in life.”

I knew that Christine had been put away before Hywood hit the headlines as the supposed inventor of para-DNA, and long before para-DNA was anything but a few black blobs carelessly discarded in the Pacific in the unfulfilled hope that it might be misidentified as a natural product. She’d been digging — and now she was fishing. Somehow, it didn’t seem as understandable that she should be interested in me as it was that I should be interested in her. She was the crazy one.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was a real privilege to have known him, I think. I can’t quite shake the suspicion that he had something to do with my being put away, though — and if he didn’t, he doesn’t seem to have lifted a finger to get me out, even though he was firmly established in the Inner Circle long before he died. I still can’t remember…but I have this
gut feeling
.””

She’d probably have continued probing if we hadn’t been interrupted, but we were. Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were obviously keen to get on; they couldn’t have lingered more than a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries with the sisterhood’s welcoming committee before hopping back into yet another glorified white corpuscle and speeding through Excelsior’s bloodstream to us.

Sixteen

The Men from Earth

M
ichael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray were so keen to see us, in fact, that they were practically elbowing one another out of the way as they approached. They both headed directly for me, but that might have been because Christine, gripped by a sudden fit of modesty, had dropped back to a position almost directly behind me.

Davida Berenike Columella tried to catch up with them in order to make the introductions, but Lowenthal wouldn’t wait for her. He introduced Gray, although that was hardly necessary, and his two other companions. One of them was a soberly clad male named Jean de Comeau, whose title I didn’t catch because I was too busy concentrating my attention on the one who obviously wasn’t a UN bureaucrat: a female named Solantha Handsel.

Solantha Handsel had enough hardware built into her smartsuit — and probably into her own flesh — to give the appearance of being half-robot. It seemed to me that she might as well have had the word “bodyguard” stenciled on her flat but muscular chest.

It occurred to me that traveling with a bodyguard might be a social status thing — a matter of mere ornamentation — but my paranoia wasn’t prepared to let me make the assumption. Nor was it prepared to write off the cyborg as an item of intimidatory showmanship. What my paranoia said was that if Michael Lowenthal had brought a minder with him, he expected to need minding. Maybe the sisters weren’t as harmless as they seemed, and maybe he was anxious about

Christine Caine’s reputation, but the more worrying possibility was that he had cause to be worried about Niamh Horne’s yet-to-arrive entourage, or that he thought he had cause to be worried about me.

I’m not quite sure how it happened, but while I was busy formulating these thoughts Lowenthal cut me out from the crowd with well-trained expertise and somehow contrived — perhaps with Solantha Handsel’s aid — to establish an invisible
cordon sanitaire
around us.

“Welcome back, Mr. Tamlin,” he said, smiling broadly. “I understand that you used to work for us.”

“Only as a subcontractor,” I assured him, without bothering to quibble about the use of the word
us
. “Why, do you think you owe me money?”

He laughed politely. “If we did,” he said, “the compound interest would have inflated it into a tidy sum by now. Unfortunately, we have no record of it, and the credit balance in your own accounts was sequestered long ago to pay for your incarceration.”

“That’s just the accounts you know about,” I told him. I figured that if he wanted to imply that I was seriously poor, I might as well fight back. “It’ll need some serious investigation to find out about the others. Not that I can compete with Christine, of course. She’s got all those royalties owing to her for
Bad Karma
.”

He must have known that I was fishing. “We don’t have a copy of it, I’m afraid,” he assured me. “Mortimer may be able to turn one up. He spends a lot of time in the mountains — even more than he used to, now that their contents have been even more extensively trashed than they were before. We do, however, have copies of some of
your
old tapes, along with other data. All discarded by publicly accessible datastores, I fear. It seemed very unlikely to the custodians of our history that the items in question would ever be required again.”

“But you squirreled it away regardless,” I said. I tried to maintain a light tone as I said: “I don’t suppose you know why I was put into SusAn in the first place? I seem to have mislaid the memory.”

He didn’t seem surprised by the question — but he did seem slightly suspicious, as if he didn’t believe that I’d lost the memory and didn’t mind my knowing it. “That’s an intriguing mystery,” he said, blandly. “We don’t have any record of your conviction for a crime. As I said, our financial records show that your existing credit was seized to pay for the upkeep of your frozen body. Damon Hart neglected to make any provision for that purpose — but that was probably a genuine oversight.”

I couldn’t believe that he’d use a phrase like “probably a genuine oversight” unless he intended to imply the opposite, or that he’d have mentioned Damon Hart at all unless he too was fishing for information. In which case, I deduced, he probably didn’t have the faintest idea why I’d been put away — although he was certainly interested in finding out.

“I suppose I ought to be glad that I was looked after so well, even though my credit ran out,” I said. “I seem to have slept through at least two major disasters — I do hope that I haven’t been revived on the eve of a third.”

He didn’t laugh at that suggestion. “This is a far better world than the one you left behind, in terms of the existential opportunities it presents,” he assured me. “We’ll be happy to help you in any way we can to adapt yourself to it, if that’s your wish.”

“Did you know Damon Hart personally?” I asked, abruptly.

“Slightly,” Lowenthal admitted. “It’s not surprising that he never mentioned you in conversation, but I can’t find any reference to you in the files he left behind. It’s almost as if someone deleted you from the record of his life — and from all the other records to which he had access.”

It was obvious that he didn’t mean “almost as if” at all, and that he thought the someone in question must have been Damon.

“It must be easy enough for a person as unimportant as me to be forgotten,” I said, trying to match his bland tone. “Damon was my friend for twenty years, but he lived for three hundred more after I was frozen down. He must have become a completely different person. I expect he forgot about such trivialities as my upkeep long before he died.”

“Perhaps so,” Lowenthal agreed, insincerely. I took note of the fact that although Solantha Handsel seemed perfectly relaxed she was still within arm’s reach, and the way she occasionally glanced at me was neither unwary nor incurious. If Lowenthal knew more about me than he was prepared to say, or even if he merely had more cause to be suspicious than he was prepared to reveal, what he knew or suspected seemed to be enough to put him on his guard.

“I understand that the delegation from the Outer System will be here soon,” I said, mildly. “I’m looking forward to meeting them — all the more so now I’ve seen
your
cyborganizer.”

“I’m looking forward to it too,” Lowenthal assured me. I didn’t believe him. Solantha Handsel seemed to be about to say something — perhaps to deny that she was a cyborganizer in the strictest sense of the term — but she shut up as soon as it became clear that her boss had more to say.

“To be perfectly frank,” Lowenthal went on, seeming to me to be speaking anything but frankly, “it’s good to have an excuse to meet Niamh face to face. All kinds of problems seem to get in the way of people like her traveling to Earth, or people like me visiting Titan. This little party should provide a very valuable opportunity for a frank and informal exchange of views. To be honest, that’s the real reason I’m here — and presumably the real reason for her presence. But that’s not to say that I’m not interested to meet you, and Adam Zimmerman too. My offer of useful employment is perfectly sincere, and I hope that you’ll accept it.”

“I haven’t made up my mind,” I told him. “Maybe I’ll wait to see what Adam decides. And Christine, of course. We true humans may need to stick together for a while, until we figure out exactly what’s what.”

He condescended to laugh at that — and having made whatever point he had intended to make, he passed on, leaving me to face the curiosity of Mortimer Gray.

“I’m delighted to meet you,” the historian said, with what seemed like touching honesty after Lowenthal’s practiced diplomatic manner. “It’s not often one has the opportunity to meet a witness to history as remote as yours.”

“There are thousands more just over the way,” I reminded him. “Although you might need to let some of them lie for a few decades more, until they ripen to the appropriate remoteness.”

He actually blushed. “I’m sorry,” he said, just as honestly. “Michael told me what happened to you. It must be a terrible shock, to have been
forgotten
like that.”

“The shock,” I told him, drily, “is in being remembered. Everyone tells me that I’ve been lucky, because there are so many more possibilities open to me nowadays.”

“That’s true, of course,” he conceded, “but I can understand why you might think you’ve paid a heavy price for the privilege. To be separated from everyone and everything you knew, and not even to know why…it must be difficult. You’ll adjust, though. Michael and I belong to the last generation raised by mortal parents, so we understand loss a little better than the generation which came after us. We’ve also lived through major catastrophes — the Coral Sea Disaster, the North American Basalt Flow — so we have a better understanding of grief and its associated emotions than we might have expected or wished for. You and I aren’t so very different, even though you’ve yet to decide which particular form of posthumanity to embrace. You’re very young, by our standards. In time, you’ll adapt fully to the new Earth, no matter how strange it may seem at first. By the time you’re my age…”

“I haven’t made up my mind whether to go to Earth,” I told him, figuring that it was about time I interrupted. “May I ask you a question about something that’s been troubling me?”