Triggers (41 page)

Yes, there were unpleasant memories, too, but it came to her—it came to
everyone
—that there was no need to add to their number. How much better it was to share contented, positive,
happy
memories—and the best way to ensure that most of the new ones recorded from now on were just that was to help rather than hurt, to share rather than hoard, to support rather than belittle, and, of course, to love rather than hate.

“
MR.
Secretary?” said a uniformed aide coming into the conference room aboard
Pteranodon.

“Yes?” replied Peter Muilenburg.

“We’re on station above Pearl Harbor and circling. The commander invites you up to the cockpit. He says the view should be spectacular.”

Muilenburg got out of his swivel chair, walked past the long table,
and exited the room. He took the staircase to the upper deck, entered the cockpit, and stood with one arm on the back of the commander’s chair and the other on the back of the copilot’s.

The sky was brightening. He watched from high above as the sun climbed up from the gently curving ocean horizon, spilling color and warmth and light all around.

“Beautiful,” Muilenburg said, when he’d seen his fill. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” replied the commander. “Perfect day for an operation, isn’t it?”

The secretary of defense replied, “I’m aborting Counterpunch.”

“But sir!” said the navigator, who hadn’t been looking out the window, hadn’t yet gazed upon the dawn, hadn’t yet seen the light. “The president said you have to go through with it.”

Muilenburg shook his head, “As my son would say, ‘Let’s not, and say we did.’”

“Peter,” said the commander, turning now in his seat, “you don’t have a son.”

“True,” replied Muilenburg. “But someone I know—or, at least, I know
now
—does.”

SUSAN
had never heard the term before, or, if she had, it hadn’t registered; it was nowhere in her memory. Indeed, it was, she discovered, absent from most people’s memories:
the Singularity.
But some knew it, and so now she did, too: the moment at which machine intelligence would supposedly exceed human intelligence, sparking lightning-fast technological progress that would leave plain old
Homo sapiens
far behind.

But what the partisans of the Singularity had glossed over was that machines were
not
getting more intelligent as time went on; they had
zero
intelligence and no consciousness, and no matter how fast they got at crunching numbers, they were still
empty.

And yet the predicted surge
had
come: the vast, all-encompassing, world-changing
whooosh
of accelerating power. It was a chain reaction, an unstoppable cascade. But rather than machines, it was human beings
amplifying each other, the wisdom of crowds writ large, the society of minds spreading far and wide.

To know everything, to understand all, to appreciate the totality of nature, of literature, of mathematics, of the arts. And to be free, at last, of duplicity and mendacity, of concerns about reputation, of establishing hierarchies, of all the game playing that had gone with petty individuality. It liberated so much of the intellect, so much energy—and it brought
peace.

Susan Dawson didn’t regret the old life she’d lived—a life she, and everyone, would always remember—but this new existence was so much greater, so much more fulfilling, so much more stimulating.

And it had only just begun.

IT’S
an odd coincidence, the gestalt thinks, that here, at the end of November, if you start the day with sunrise in Washington, DC, the last place to see the dawn, twenty-four hours later, is a group of storied islands.

But odd coincidences abound in geography. For instance, those islands, out in the Pacific, happen to straddle the equator, and they are on the same meridian as the crater at Chicxulub, formed when an asteroid slammed into Earth sixty-five million years ago, triggering the worldwide climate change that killed the dinosaurs and paved the way for the ascent of mammals.

Finally, though, the archipelago Charles Darwin arrived at in 1835 is being kissed by the nascent day. Here now great tortoises—those from each island boasting a distinctive shell—are rousing from their sleep, their blood warming with the arrival of the sun. Here now the calls of finches—those from each island sporting a distinctive beak—herald the dawn. Here now black iguanas, the world’s only extant marine lizards, slip into a sea stained orange and pink by the rising daystar.

And here now all those who call the Galápagos home, as well as the
visiting biologists and geologists and science-oriented tourists, join in, the last group to fuse with the collective. It is appropriate, judges the gestalt, that the place that taught the human race the most about evolution is the site of the completion of humanity’s transcendence into its next stage of existence.

Darwin’s closing words from
The Origin of Species
swirl through the collective consciousness:

The gestalt recasts the words ever so slightly: there is indeed grandeur in this view of life, with its combined power breathing now as one, and that, while this planet completes its most recent cycle according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning a new form most beautiful and most wonderful has now evolved.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Robert J. Sawyer’s novel
FlashForward
was the basis for the ABC TV series of the same name. He is one of only eight writers ever to win all three of the world’s top awards for best science fiction novel of the year: the Hugo (which he won for
Hominids),
the Nebula (which he won for
The Terminal Experiment),
and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award (which he won for
Mindscan).
According to the
Locus Index to Science Fiction Awards,
he has won more awards for his novels than anyone else in the history of the science fiction and fantasy fields.

In total, Rob has won forty-six national and international awards for his fiction, including twelve Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Awards (“Auroras”), as well as
Analog
magazine’s Analytical Laboratory Award,
Science Fiction Chronicle
’s Reader Award, and the Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award, all for best short story of the year.

Rob has won the world’s largest cash prize for SF writing, Spain’s 6,000-euro Premio UPC de Ciencia Ficción, an unprecedented three times. He’s also won the Hal Clement Award (for
Watch,
the middle volume of his WWW trilogy) and a trio of Japanese Seiun Awards for Best Foreign Novel of the Year (for
End of an Era, Frameshift,
and
Illegal Alien),
as well as China’s Galaxy Award for “Most Popular Foreign Science Fiction Writer.”

In addition, he’s received an honorary doctorate from Laurentian University and the Alumni Award of Distinction from Ryerson University.
Quill & Quire,
the Canadian publishing trade journal, calls him “one of the thirty most influential, innovative, and just plain powerful people in Canadian publishing.”

Rob lives in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, with his wife, poet Carolyn Clink. His website and blog are at
sfwriter.com
, and on Twitter and Facebook he’s
RobertJSawyer
.