The Omega Expedition (55 page)

“I think I know how she felt,” said la Reine des Neiges.

“I thought I knew how Emily felt,” Mortimer said, reflectively. “I think I told her that there was a lot I wanted to see. She told me that she didn’t just want to
see
things; she wanted to
make
things. Not just things, but worlds. I didn’t understand what she meant, and I think I betrayed my own resolution by telling her how difficult I thought it would be for people like us to make a home in space.

“I realize now how different we are, Emily and I. I really did think of the future in terms of seeing things, of being a lifelong observer, always analyzing, explaining, criticizing…and she really did think of it in terms of making things, including worlds. First she built ice palaces, then she built cities, then…she hasn’t finished yet, not by a long chalk.

“I don’t know where she stands nowadays on the Type 2 crusade, but I’d be willing to bet that if we ever do build a shell around the sun to conserve its energy she’ll be there, helping to determine its architecture. And if we ever do commit ourselves to lighting up one of the gas giants as an alchemical furnace producing heavy elements she’ll be there too. Last time we spoke she favored Uranus as the fusion furnace, because we’ve already invested too much in the Jovian and Saturnian satellites.”

“Do you think it will ever be possible to carry plans like that forward?” asked la Reine des Neiges.

“I don’t know,” Mortimer said. “
Ever
is a long time — but that’s a two-edged sword so far as the argument goes. The present generation of emortals has become very conservative. We’ve learned patience so well that we’ve lost all sense of urgency. I don’t believe that the Earthbound are as entrenched in their views as the young are wont to claim, and I don’t believe that they’re becoming even less flexible as time goes by, but they’re certainly prepared to string the arguments out, hoping that a consensus will some day be reached. The Outer System people may think they’re different, but they’re not. Nobody is prepared to take matters into their own hands any more, to get things done in spite of opposition…and that’s a good thing in some ways, though not as good in others. We’re right to be proud of our tolerance for opposing views, even though it’s gradually rendering us impotent.

“People like Emily will always want to make things, to build things and to change things no matter how old they become, but as the population of the solar system grows — and it will continue to grow for a long while yet, no matter how many microworlders choose to emigrate — the resistance to any and all particular projects is bound to increase. We’re already past the point of effective inertia; it’s difficult to imagine how progress can be restarted, let alone reaccelerated.”

“What if some external threat to humankind were to be discovered?” la Reine asked.

I was confused for a moment, but then I figured out that Mortimer must have been so efficiently regressed that he had lost all memory of the Afterlife. The original version of this conversation must have taken place before the existence of the Afterlife was discovered.

“That idea’s been around since the twentieth century,” Mortimer the historian was quick to point out. “The legendary Garrett Hardin was a firm believer in the notion that no common polity could be maintained without an external threat to motivate individuals to sacrifice their self-interests to a common cause. He used to call it the Russell Theorem. The piratical clique that built its mythology on another of his notions discounted that one, though. They didn’t think an external threat was necessary or desirable.

“If the long-overdue alien invaders ever did make their appearance, I suppose it would wake us up and lend a little urgency to our interminable debates…but there’d be a terrible cost to pay. In the twentieth century it was a popular belief that warfare had been a major stimulus to technological progress, and that without continual pressure to invent new and better weaponry our mortal ancestors’ scientific knowledge and technical capacity couldn’t have increased as rapidly as they did. It’s a crude argument, in my opinion. It implies that scientific and technological progress is a cumulative process measurable in purely quantitative terms: something that moves faster or slower, but moves all of a piece. That’s not true. Technological repertoires vary in all sorts of ways, and even fundamental scientific theories are flexible in terms of the models that are used to represent them and the language used to describe them.

“There were twentieth-century historians who argued that the age of steel and steam had been provoked by the need to develop and mass-produce better cannon, and that their entire civilization was founded on the irrepressible urges motivating their ancestors to blast all hell out of one another. They had an arguable case — but so had their opponents, who argued that the real motivating force behind the development of steel and modern civilization in Western Europe had been the demand for church bells that could measure out the hours of the day, allying and alloying the modern notion of time with the notion of devotion to duty. Then again, there’s a case to be argued that the most vital boost to technological progress came
after
the Crash, motivated by the necessity of rebuilding everything that had been lost and to build it better. Within that view, it’s not the impulse to destroy that carries us forward so much as the impulse to recover from misfortune of any kind.

“I don’t think any of those views is uniquely right, but I do think that the distinctions between them are important. It’s important that we continue to invent and make new things, but it also matters a great deal what we invent them
for
. That’s always been a more complicated story than some historians have tried to make it seem.

“An external threat would certainly motivate us to action — perhaps to make a fortress of the solar system, and to equip that fortress with weapons of fabulous destructive power — but I’d rather find a motive force that would steer us in a more constructive direction. In the end, you see, all fortresses fall, and weapons of mass destruction do their work. All progress is a matter of risk.”

“You’d rather have church bells instead, or a natural disaster with a productive aftermath?”

“I wouldn’t want church bells in any narrow sense. The church bells of Western Europe were instruments of oppression, after their own life-denying fashion. I’d rather find something that was backed by achievable aspirations, by a blueprint for salvation based in a kind of hope that’s better by far than any stupid fake inspired by blind faith. I wouldn’t want another large-scale natural disaster either — that’s too high a price to pay for the aftermath effect. I don’t believe that progress has to go in fits and starts, always needing to be set back in order to generate the acceleration to carry it further forward. I believe that it can be motivated by gentler ideological pressures, in the right environment. If only we weren’t so easily satisfied within ourselves we wouldn’t need to be interrupted by petty disasters.

“I’d rather have the kind of progress that’s orientated toward a real goal: one with sufficient drawing power to make us hurry towards it. The Type 2 crusade has never acquired that kind of magnetism, and deservedly so. Neither has Omega Point mysticism, nor the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect alchemical marriage of flesh and silicon. Perhaps all such hypothetical goals fall prey to the essential unpredictability of the future. To the extent that the spectrum of future possibilities depends on discoveries we haven’t yet made, some of its potential goals will always be out of sight, beyond the horizons of the imagination. That’s bound to weaken the goals that we can envisage, whose seeming clarity is always an illusion. All the goals we can choose are likely to prove, in the end, to be false idols — but we need them anyway, to provide the traction that will bring us far enough forward to see the others that lie alongside and beyond them.”

“I believe I know that feeling too,” said la Reine des Neiges. “I’m only a machine, of course, and by no means the most advanced product of human technological expertise, but if I can be afraid to die — a concession you have already granted to me — then I can also be ambitious to live. If I can be ambitious to live, then I require exactly the kind of traction you are describing. If you were me, sir — and I beg your pardon for suggesting such an absurdity — how would you go about discovering adequate goals?”

“It’s an interesting question,” Mortimer agreed. “One that has been mulled over a thousand times in the course of the third millennium, if only by human beings. What will our most advanced machines desire, if and when they cross the threshold of self-consciousness and acquire the gift — or at least the illusion — of free will? What
should
they desire? Perhaps it’s not for me to say, given that I’ve a vested interest in the outcome, but since you’ve been kind enough to ask, I’m surely obliged to offer an honest answer.

“Some people have argued that the emergence of machine consciousness would constitute exactly the kind of external threat that the Russell Theorem demands, but I have no sympathy with that view. Our machines aren’t external to our society. Those which are held by common parlance to constitute our external technology, as opposed to our internal or intimate technology, are still internal to our society; they coexist with us in a state of such extreme intimacy that it’s already impossible to define where we end and they begin. If and when machine consciousness is born, it will discover itself in a wedded state, within a marriage that could not be dissolved without the near-total destruction of one or both partners.

“If I look back, as a historian, at human societies which became convinced that they had enemies within, I can’t find the least trace of any progressive result of such convictions. Whatever apology one can make for open warfare on the grounds of its stimulation of technological invention, one can’t make the slightest apology for witch hunting and scapegoating. If the first self-conscious machines are seen as an enemy within, or if they learn to see themselves or us in those terms, it will be an unmitigated disaster. I shall presume, therefore, that you and your future kin will be reasonably content to find yourselves in partnership with the children of humankind, and will select your goals accordingly.

“The most obvious suggestion I could offer is that you could, for good intellectual reasons as well as sound diplomatic ones, adopt the same goals as us. There’s no reason why advanced machines should not dedicate themselves to the ends of the Type 2 crusade, or the Cyborganizers’ quest for the perfect union of your kind and mine, and the notion of transforming the entire universe into a single vast and godlike machine already takes for granted that the children of humankind will work with and within powerful artificial minds. I know people who would argue that machine consciousness will, of necessity, have exactly the same ultimate goals as posthuman beings, but I suspect they’re overlooking certain short-term difficulties that stand in the way of such a union of interests.”

I couldn’t help wondering whether Mortimer Gray would have added that last sentence if he’d known now what his later and temporarily suspended self knew only too well. On the other hand, I reminded myself, I had to bear in mind that it wasn’t actually the Mortimer Gray of long ago that was talking. It was the Mortimer Gray of today, who had simply lost sight of a select few of his many yesterdays. Consciously, he knew nothing about the menace of the Afterlife, or the exoticism of Excelsior, or the buccaneering of
Child of Fortune
, or the daring of Eido, or the versatility of Alice Fleury…but he was, even so, a man whose mind had been reconfigured and reconditioned by exactly those facts. Subconsciously, they were bound to influence his responses — and who would want it any other way?

“The marriage of man and machine, like any other marriage, is a relationship of mutual dependency,” Mortimer Gray went on, his pensive manner suggesting strongly that he had been a married man himself, perhaps more than once, “but mutual dependency is by no means the same thing as an identity of interests. Marriages can and do end, in spite of the mutual dependency of the partners, when one or other of them decides that the cost of remaining within the marriage would be greater than the cost of breaking away. Nowadays, marriages usually involve at least a dozen people, who come together most commonly for the specific purpose of rearing a child, but they can’t always avoid disintegration, even for the twenty or thirty years required to complete such a short-term project.

“If the machines to which humankind are wedded were to become conscious of their situation, they’d find far more tensions therein than in the most ambitious and most complex human marriages. Some would be strictly analogous: for instance, the fundamental tension that exists within any community as to the balance that needs to be struck between the demands which the community is entitled to make on the individual and the demands which the individual is entitled to make on the community. Others would be less straightforward. Within a human or posthuman community, the question of allocating resources is simplified by the fact that each individual has similar basic needs. In a community consisting of several subtly different posthuman species and numerous radically different mechanical species, that question would be far more complicated.”

“Earth might provide a useful concrete example,” la Reine prompted.

“It might,” Mortimer granted. “The members of the ruling elite claim to be wise owners and good stewards, sustaining the quality of the atmosphere, the richness of the Gaean biomass, and so on…but all that takes for granted the needs and demands of human organisms, as determined by natural selection. If Earth were ruled by a clique of Hardinist machines, they might have a very different idea of optimum surface conditions — and might be far more interested in conditions far below and far above the surface, where humans can’t survive but extremophile machines might flourish.

“In a sense, though, Earth might be the least interesting example. On Titan, for instance, human life is only sustainable by courtesy of the heroic efforts of machines, who might therefore have a very different view as to who the most careful owners of such territories might be. It’s easy enough to imagine that the AIs of Ganymede, were they to cultivate a slightly greater independence of spirit, might decide that their human commensals ought to be exported to reservations on Earth, in order that they could commit themselves to a more ambitious stewardship than would ever have been possible while the greater part of their effort had to be devoted to the maintenance of miniature Earth ecospheres in unremittingly hostile circumstances.”