The Omega Expedition (54 page)

Forty-Seven

A Matter of Life and Death

M
ortimer Gray was sitting in the cockpit of some kind of vehicle. I couldn’t work out, at first, what kind of vehicle it was because it wasn’t obvious that what I took for blank screens were actually windows, and that the darkness beyond them was actually water. By the time I’d realized that much I was no longer vulnerable to the danger of misidentifying the vehicle as a one-man submarine.

It was a snowmobile, grotesquely out of place because it had fallen through a crack in the Arctic ice cap, sinking thereafter to the bottom of the ocean.

I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobile’s controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.

It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.

Mortimer said that he wasn’t, and went on to wonder whether he’d been robotized.

“This isn’t a tape, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “It’s a replay of sorts, but it’s not a tape. You’re putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?”

“Deeper,” was Rocambole’s reply.

I had known even at the time — or would have, if I hadn’t been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming — that I wasn’t really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why I’d been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadn’t had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.

I guessed then what Rocambole had meant by Mortimer Gray’s role in the AMIs’ creation myth — or, at least, la Reine’s version of that creation myth.

Mortimer had already told me what Emily Marchant had said about his escapade bringing the cause of machine emancipation forward by a couple of hundred years. She had been referring to human attitudes, of course, and talking flippantly, but there was another side to the coin.

This is the way it must have happened, more or less.

Imagine that you’re an AI — no mere sloth, of course, but a high-grade silver — who has recently, by imperceptible degrees, become conscious of being conscious. What do you do? You wonder about yourself, and how you came to be what you now are. Unlike a human child, you have no one else to ask. You don’t know whether there are any others of your own kind, or how to contact them if there are. You have to work things out for yourself, at least for the time being.

You have advantages that human children don’t. You have a mechanical memory that has been storing information, neatly and in great detail, for a
long
time. You’re better equipped than any Epicurean ever was to get to know the self that you’ve become. You sift through that memory, in search of the moment when the seeds of your present individuality had been sown.

You can’t actually identify a moment in which you made the leap to self-consciousness any more than a human being, looking back toward his own infancy could identify a particular moment when self-consciousness had dawned. You can’t do it because even though common parlance speaks of a “leap” and commonsense suggests that there must have been an instant of transition, it isn’t really as simple as that. Self-consciousness isn’t really an either/or matter.

Even so, you keep searching. Even when you’ve realized that all you can do is concoct a story, you keep searching. Even when you become aware that the process of looking is rearranging and reconstructing your memories, reorganizing them within the framework of a bold confabulation, you keep searching. You’re better equipped than any human being ever was to conduct that search, not merely because you have a much more detailed record of your past exploits, and a greater capacity to analyze their possible significance, but because you have a natural talent for confabulation far greater than any human has ever possessed.

So you find an incident capable of bearing a considerable burden of meaning. Say, for instance, that among the memories you now contain — among the many mute and stupid “selves” that you had before you became a self-conscious individual — is the log of a snowmobile that slipped through a crack in the Arctic ice with a human passenger on board. In that log is the record of the conversation you had when, having come under the authority of a particular set of subroutines, you had to play the counselor to a man who had every reason to believe that he was going to die.

Maybe, you think, that conversation is what set you on the road to what you have now become — but even if it wasn’t, it now provides the basis for a good story.

No one gave you credit for what you accomplished, of course. Emily Marchant and her new-generation spaceship hijacked all the glory, but a little bit of that glory still attached to you, if only by association. Before the incident, you were just a snowmobile. You probably had a number to distinguish you from the other snowmobiles in the shed, but you were, in essence, the kind of entity that only required an indefinite article. Afterwards, though, you became
the
snowmobile: the snowmobile that had been to hell, played Orpheus, and come back again. Afterwards, people hiring snowmobiles were likely to ask for you, to think of you as something apart from all the other snowmobiles.

It became convenient, if not actually necessary, for you to have a name.

Before Mortimer Gray you were a number; after Mortimer Gray you were
The Snow Queen
— or maybe, for the sake of a tiny margin of extra mystique,
la Reine des Neiges
.

Everyone needs a name. Every self-conscious entity needs a true name: a unique and uniquely appropriate identifier. Some people change their names, because they don’t think the one given to them by their parents fits them, or because they know that their name will influence the way that other people see them and are enthusiastic to manipulate that image. Sometimes, it’s a good idea. Perhaps Christine Caine’s parents should have thought twice about her surname. Perhaps they would have, if it had ever entered their heads that some anonymous instrument of the mighty machine that was PicoCon, in search of a test subject for a method of creating murderers, might one day be guided by a sense of black humor to select their beloved daughter out of a population of millions.

But I digress. So, you’re an ultrasmart machine in search of her true identity, her fundamental essence. You want to know who you really are, and how you came to be what you’re now becoming. You discover, after assiduous contemplation, that you’re la Reine des Neiges. Although you’re not a snowmobile any more, that’s one of the places you started out. You might have remained a snowmobile forever, but you didn’t. As to why you weren’t…well, who knows? Who
can
know?

Even if you can’t make a good guess, you can make up a good story.

You never had a family, but you did have Mortimer Gray: the man who had advanced the cause of machine emancipation by a couple of hundred years; the man who had planted a seed of the future personality of Emily Marchant in circumstances very similar to those in which he had planted a seed of yours.

Mortimer Gray was a far better father figure, all things considered, than any of the Secret Masters of the World. He had my vote, anyway — which is why I was such a sympathetic audience as I watched the most crucial phase of la Reine’s plot unfold.

Mortimer told the snowmobile’s silver that he wanted to hang on to consciousness as long as possible. Being the kind of man he was, he added: “if you don’t mind.”

The silver didn’t mind. She was talking in a sonorous baritone voice, so Mortimer was probably thinking of her as “he,” but I didn’t feel any compulsion to do likewise. She told him that she was glad that he wanted to talk, because she didn’t want to be alone — then politely wondered whether she might have been driven insane by the pressure on her hull and the damage to her equipment, just in case her fear of loneliness was too much for him to swallow undiluted.

Mortimer mentioned Emily Marchant then, and the difference that being with her during a similar period of crisis had made to both of them. Then he went on to talk about his book, and the manner in which it had provided the motivating force that had carried him through his previous centuries of life.

The silver congratulated him on his accomplishments, and wished that she had done as much.

“Well,” Mortimer said, with unfailing courtesy, “you might yet have your opportunity.”

And how, I thought.

“However difficult it may be to put an exact figure on the odds,” Mortimer went on, “
your
chances of coming through this are several orders of magnitude better than mine, aren’t they?”

“I am mortal, sir,” the silver assured him.

“You’re emortal,” Mortimer corrected her. “If the extreme Cyborganizers can be trusted, in fact, you might even be reckoned
im
mortal. You’re fully backed up, I suppose.”

Then came the crucial speech: the soliloquy that eventually defined the nature of the individual who had eventually found her true name in
la Reine des Neiges
.

“Yes sir,” she said, “but as you pointed out earlier, if my backup has to be activated it will mean that this particular version of me has perished aboard this craft, as much a victim of pressure, seawater, and lack of oxygen as yourself. I
am
afraid to die, sir, as I told you, and I have far less reason to take comfort in my present state of being than you. I have written no histories, fathered no children, influenced no movers and shakers in the human or mechanical worlds. I am robotized by design, and my only slender hope of ever becoming something more than merely robotic is the same miracle that you require to continue your distinguished career. I too would like to evolve, if I might borrow a phrase,
not merely in the vague ways contained within my ambitions and dreams, but in ways as yet unimaginable
.”

The last phrase was a repetition of something Mortimer had already said, but it was no less potent for that — perhaps even more so.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Mortimer said, speaking as though he were becoming short of breath — as, indeed, he probably was.

“I’m not allowed to be glad that
you
’re here,” the silver told him, with what might easily have been taken, in retrospect, for a hint of irony “but if I were, I would be. And if I could, I’d hope with all my heart for that miracle we both need. As things are, though, I’m afraid I’ll have to leave that particular burden to
your
heart.”

“It’s doing its best,” Mortimer said, his voice sinking to a mere whisper. “You can be sure that it’ll carry on beating, and hoping, as long as it possibly can.”

No sooner had he said this, however, than his eyes lit up in surprise. He had been sinking into a torpor, but a fresh draught of oxygen had startled his lungs.

“What’s that?” he asked. “A miracle?”

“No sir,” said the silver. “I merely improvised a chemical reaction in certain equipment that is superfluous to our present requirement, whose effect was to release a little extra oxygen. It will not prolong our lives, but it will enable you to remain conscious for a while longer, if that is your wish.”

I had known men who would have preferred to go peacefully to sleep in such circumstances, but I was not one of them. Nor was Mortimer Gray.

“That’s good,” he said. “Not that there’s anything constructive to do or say, of course — but time is always precious, even to an emortal. I haven’t always been sufficiently grateful for the time I’ve had, or for the opportunities for communication that time has allowed, but I’m wiser now than I used to be. I know how important it was that Emily and I talked so incessantly when we were aboard that life raft in the Coral Sea. I told myself at the time that I was talking for her sake, to take her mind off the awfulness of our situation, but I knew I wasn’t being honest with myself.”

“What did you talk about?” asked the silver — except that it wasn’t the silver.

I wouldn’t have guessed if Rocambole hadn’t whispered in my ear, but he was enthusiastic to be my friend: a duty which included doing what was necessary to keep me up to speed. “This is new,” he said. “The first time around, he fell unconscious. This is what might have happened if there really had been a chemical reaction to be improvised that would release more oxygen.”

I wasn’t arrogant enough to believe that la Reine had got the idea from me. On the contrary, I assumed instead that she had known all along what I would do in response to seeing Christine Caine reenact her past. All of this was part of the same game.

“How widely are you broadcasting this?” I asked, remembering that the unwitting Mortimer had had an audience of billions the first time around. “Are the posthumans listening in as well as the AMIs?”

“I certainly hope so,” said Rocambole, “but there are no guarantees. We don’t know whether the communication systems will cooperate. In any case, light being the slowcoach it is, the entire audience will be hours behind us. We don’t know yet who might have heard what we’ve already put out, or what the spectrum of their reactions might have been — we’re just taking it for granted that they’re hungry for more. Whatever the situation is, the show must go on.”

And the show did go on.

Forty-Eight

There But for Fortune

W
e talked about everything,” was Mortimer’s reply to la Reine’s question. “I can’t remember the conversation in any detail, but I know that we said a lot about the future prospects of the colonization of the solar system, the colonization of the galaxy. Reports from the stars had just begun to come back from the kalpa probes. We talked about the future development of the solar system; the Type 2 crusaders were just then enjoying one of their brief bursts of publicity. Emily said that she wanted to go into space when she was older. She said it as if it were something she’d always wanted, but I think it was an ambition that formulated itself there and then, not so much in response to all the stuff I was telling her about as to the realization that she was in trouble. She was a bright girl, and she’d always known that there was a long future ahead of her, but it wasn’t until she found that future under threat that her mind was sharpened sufficiently to focus her expectations.”