Malley stalked over to the stairwell and went down to the commissary. Suze rose, looked at me anxiously, shrugged and followed him.
‘Meeting’s over,’ Yeng said. She glanced around, unsure how to take what had happened, then decided to look on the bright side. ‘Time we all had some lunch.’
Lunch was usually a relaxed occasion. This one wasn’t. We hung around the smaller tables in the commissary in ones and twos. Suze was with Malley on one side of the room, I with Tony on the other. All the talking was in low voices.
‘Think we’ve blown it?’ Tony asked.
I shrugged. ‘Callisto’s buzzing with talk about the bombardment. We couldn’t have kept it from him, not without isolation that would’ve made him suspicious and—non-cooperative!’
Tony stroked his beard, and looked searchingly at me. ‘Suppose we’re wrong,’ he said softly. ‘When I think about what we’re proposing to do—well, between you and me, Ellen, I sometimes have qualms about it myself. Suppose the Jovians
aren’t
flatlines, suppose they really are conscious, just like you and me but far better, with a deeper and richer inner life. After all, they may have naturally evolved away from the earlier Jovians, and they’re no longer some kind of new releases of the old mad uploads, but a new species, a new flesh. Wouldn’t that make the impact event like, say, some troop of chimps using rocks to beat out the brains of the first humans?’
I fought down my dismayed surprise at this incipient flinch, this
line wobble
as the old comrades would say, coming from—of all people—my security officer and oldest ally. I fought down my indignation. If Tony had qualms, then certainly others would, too, and he was doing me a favour by expressing them.
‘All the more reason to do it,’ I said, clapping his shoulder fraternally. ‘Look where not doing it got the chimps.’
We understood each other perfectly. In our two hundred years of acquaintance, we had never had a sexual relationship (not counting quick drunk fucks, of course). He just wasn’t my type, nor I his. But in every other way we knew each other quite intimately. Not that we agreed on everything, at least not at once, but we knew how to get agreement or agree to differ. We knew how each other’s minds worked.
I knew what was going on in Tony’s, right now. Although he intellectually accepted the true knowledge, he had never been
taken
by it—unlike me, to whom it had struck home with the force of a revelation.
The true knowledge … the phrase is an English translation of a Korean expression meaning ‘modern enlightenment’. Its originators, a group of Japanese and Korean ‘contract employees’ (inaccurate Korean translation, this time, of the English term ‘bonded labourers’) had acquired their modern enlightenment from battered, ancient editions of the works of Stirner, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Dietzgen, Darwin, and Spencer, which made up the entire philosophical content of their labour-camp library. (Twentieth-century philosophy and science had been excluded by their employers as decadent or subversive—I forget which.) With staggering diligence, they had taken these works—which they ironically treated as the last word in modern thought—and synthesized from them, and from their own bitter experiences, the first socialist philosophy based on totally pessimistic and cynical conclusions about human nature.
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we we eat, and
we
eat
everything
.
All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.
This is the true knowledge.
On this rock we had built our church. We had founded our idealism on the most nihilistic implications of science, our socialism on crass self-interest, our peace on our capacity for mutual destruction, and our liberty on determinism. We had replaced morality with convention, bravery with safety, frugality with plenty, philosophy with science, stoicism with anaesthetics and piety with immortality. The universal acid of the true knowledge had burned away a world of words, and exposed a universe of things.
Things we could use.
‘It’s the Rapture for nerds!’
Now that’s a breath of fresh air, I think, and turn to see who’s come up with this well aimed sneer at the Singularity. It’s a guy bumping alongside me, a slender man with straight black hair gelled to a quiff, a sharp beard modelled on Lenin’s, a slim gentle face and darting dark eyes. He’s enjoying the laughter he’s spread on our side, the discomfited smiles on the other.
It’s 2065 and we’re back in the wreck-deck, but the recreation area is now much expanded, as is the space station, which has just been boosted to a higher orbit. We are here to celebrate that work’s completion. There must be hundreds of people here. To begin with we were one big crowd, but as the arguments have gone on we have, almost literally, drifted apart. We have polarized to opposite sides of the deck.
The arguments have been going on for years, but we’ve always worked together. The two sides, of which those here are a small sample, are loosely based on two waves of space settlement. The first lot had peaked in the twenty-forties, and consisted of pioneer settlers and the forces in Earth Defence who’d gone over to the Fall Revolution. The second lot had come up in the late twenty-fifties, and early twenty-sixties, and were the product of a quite different process: a deliberate abandonment of Earth by technicians, engineers and scientists—and the desperate rich—who had developed an increasingly advanced technology and launch capability in increasingly isolated and beleaguered enclaves. They’d shot their bolt in the catastrophically botched and counter-productive ‘Space Movement coup’ of 2059.
They still have stuff coming up, though, and all along they’ve been using bonded labourers—criminals making restitution, mostly, and political and military prisoners from the losing side in the Fall Revolution and subsequent conflicts—to build and defend their infrastructure, in space and on the ground. To us, this seems little better than slavery, not to mention a sneaky undercutting of the Space Movement’s traditional private-enterprise
or voluntary-labour ethos. To them, it’s payback for the long years of repression before the Revolution, and for their continuing harassment by the fragmented governments and frantic peoples of Earth.
Understandably, they have no interest in using the now-enormous and self-sufficient space presence to aid those from whose ignorant wrath they’ve barely escaped. We, from the first wave of idealistic or avaricious colonists, are convinced that aiding Earth is exactly the way to overcome that ignorant wrath.
We call ourselves: the first settlers, the Earth tendency, the beautiful people, the star warriors.
We call the others: the others, the outsiders, the nerds, the new lot.
The others call us: the Earth-Tenders, the greenies, the commies, the mundanes, the dirt-farmers, the Space Family Robinson.
The others call themselves: the Outwarders, the Singularity Gang, the Futurists, the post-humans.
Their dream is the Singularity. Ours is the Galactic Empire, or the Federation, or whatever. It makes them laugh.
And right now we’re laughing at them, or at least the dozens of people within earshot of this man’s gibe are laughing at a roughly equal and opposite group of Outwarders.
‘That stuff is just
stupid
,’ he goes on. ‘I can’t understand how anybody ever fell for the idea that a computer model of the brain is the same as the brain. Talk about mechanical materialism! It’s about becoming a machine, it’s death, and wanting it is
sick
.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you knew you were about to die,’ says the nearest Outwarder, a young man (but we all look young, now) who doesn’t match our favourite nerd stereotype because he’s eschewed the coke-and-pizza diet for a different Outwarder vice: body building. He floats, tanned and oiled and naked, in a slow-spinning lotus posture, doing something dynamic and clever with the squirted stream of his drink. ‘We already have back-ups of people who got killed guarding Canaveral, you know that?’
He catches a wobbling sphere of liquid in his lips, and swallows it, his next rotation bringing up a questioning smile.
‘And you’re going to run them?’ I ask.
‘Sure,’ he tells us. ‘As soon as we have a few bugs out of the virtual-environment software.’
The man beside me laughs. ‘So your slave soldiers get promised paradise when they die! Stay with that idea, guys, it worked for Mohammed.’
This second religious allusion leads the oiled man to ask, challengingly, ‘Have you ever read anything on the strong-AI resurrectionist position? Even something classic, like
The Physics of Immortality
?’
‘Nah,’ says the bearded man. ‘Life’s too short!’
The Outwarder stops his rotation with a perfectly-timed toss of his empty drink-bulb, and looks coldly at my sniggering face.
‘Here’s a thought from it,’ he says. ‘Brief enough for you: refusing to accept intelligent robots as
people
is equivalent to racism.’
‘So?’ says the man at my side. ‘So I’m a racist. A
human
racist.’
‘Fine by me,’ I chip in, knowing that the Outwarder is playing the racism card with my dark skin in mind. He scowls at me.
‘Here’s another—claiming that human selves can’t be implemented on computers is tantamount to accepting death, for everybody, forever. Is that so fine by you?’
‘I can live with it,’ I say. The man beside me gives an appreciative chuckle, and adds:
‘If you allow us to live.’
The Outwarder smiles, looks around at the jostle of his fellows, then back at us.
‘Of course we’ll allow you to live,’ he says. ‘On wildlife reserves, like the other interesting animals. Some of us may prefer to think of you as pets. Sentimental post-humans will no doubt campaign for “human rights”—it’ll be one of those fluffy causes, like old-growth forests and spotted owls. Wouldn’t it be much better to join us, and be as gods?’
Something twists inside me. Everything is suddenly clear. I have what I later understand as the beginning of the true knowledge.
‘We
are
as gods!’ I snarl. ‘
We
are the top predator here.
You
can become machines if you like, but then you’ll be dead, and we’ll be alive, and we’ll
treat
you as machines. If we can’t use you, we’ll smash you up!’
‘If you can,’ he says.
I look straight back at him. ‘If we can.’
He makes a dismissive gesture, and turns away.
The man beside me performs a mid-air somersault, and floats before me, grinning, arms spread. He seems to think he’s just given me a fly-past salute.
‘That was good,’ he says.
‘Hey, I liked what you said,’ I tell him. ‘“The Rapture for nerds.” ’
We laugh like it’s an old, shared joke, and introduce ourselves. His name is Tony Girard, and he’s on the space station’s management board, responsible for keeping an eye on the Outwarder component of its inhabitants. The liaison is important—the just-completed boosting of the station has been done with the new rocket engines, which look like they’ve been injection-moulded from diamond, and are nanofactured by the Outwarders. But he can’t help getting into arguments with them.
‘They say we’re evil,’ he says. ‘I tell them we are.’
‘But we’re not!’ I protest.
‘Not from our point of view. We are from theirs. Reactionaries, counter
evo
lutionaries, pulling back from the next stage in human development.’
‘Yeah—extinction!’
I think about being evil. To them, I realize, we are indeed bad and harmful, but—and the thought catches my breath—we are not bad and harmful to
ourselves
, and that is all that matters,
to us
. So as long as we are actually achieving our own good, it doesn’t matter how evil we are to our enemies. Our Federation will be, to them, the evil empire, the domain of dark lords; and I will be a dark lady in it. Humanity is indeed evil, from any non-human point of view. I hug my human wickedness in a shiver of delight.
I tell Tony some of this, and he nods.
‘It’s very liberating,’ he says. ‘Wearing the black hats.’ He draws, spins and cocks an imaginary six-gun. (Like all of us, he has a real one on his hip.) ‘Saves you a lot of soul-searching. As long as you avoid hitting your own side, you’re doing the right thing.’