‘Perhaps we’re the Indians. The natives.’
Tony likes this. ‘That’s right,’ he says. ‘Doomed but brave. A drag on the wheels of progress. Shooting arrows at the iron horses of Manifest Destiny.’
‘They are such mechanists,’ I say.
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘That’s why I like to wind them up.’
I laugh so much I find myself clinging to him, and later that day-cycle we have the first ever of our quick drunk fucks.
I smiled at Tony, perhaps more warmly than usual, and stood up and caught Yeng’s eye, then flicked a glance to the table where Malley and Suze were sitting head-to-head. Yeng nodded. We each picked up our trays and wandered over.
‘Mind if we sit down?’
Malley looked up, looked at Suze. ‘Not at all,’ he said.
I sat down beside Malley, and Yeng slipped on to the bench beside Suze and flashed her a quick smile. Suze looked down at her plate, then up.
‘Sam and I have a question for you,’ said Suze. ‘I’m Union, he’s non-co, and it turns out we both have the same question. Independently.’
‘OK,’ I said.
‘Would you be willing to at least
try
to contact the Jovians, before destroying them? Would you at least try to come to some arrangement?’
The idea of contact with the Jovians made my skin crawl; but I also felt its attractions. The danger appealed to my recklessness, my hatred of the Jovians fuelled my curiosity about what they were really like, and, above all,
we needed Malley’s cooperation to get through the Malley Mile. That was the bottom line.
Yeng looked about to speak. My look signalled her to be quiet.
‘We’d consider it,’ I said. ‘I can’t speak for the Division, of course, but I wouldn’t say it’s ruled out. Why?’
‘I’d feel a lot happier about working with you,’ Malley said, ‘if I knew for sure the Jovians really were a threat to us. A clear and present danger. And opening communication with them is the only way to find out.’
Suze nodded agreement. ‘When the folks back home find out what you’re doing, which they will—and you
are
going to let them know before the event, aren’t you?—I think
they’d
like to know for sure, as well. It would be a rotten shame to wipe out things—even if they
are
just things—that could help us, and that could turn out to be the only friends we have in the whole universe. Like, what if they are gods, but gods on
our
side?’
So Suze was an appeaser, I thought sadly. I wondered again if she’d somehow been sent to spy on me, and dismissed the thought, again.
‘All right,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it.’
‘How?’ asked Malley.
‘Shortly after we get back,’ I said, ‘a fleet of remote probes is due to begin descent into the Jovian atmosphere—essentially to spy, to get a clearer and closer view of what the comets are going to hit. Their telemetry—radio, radar, laser—could easily be adapted for a first stab at communication. I’ll put as strong a case as I can for doing it, and you and Suze can argue for it too, if you think that’ll help.’
Yeng’s eyes flashed surprise; disagreement scored her brow.
‘It’s dangerous!’ she said.
‘Sure it is,’ I said. ‘But if anyone can build the firewalls, it’s you. There must be contingency plans somewhere, hardware and software designs, right?’
She nodded reluctantly. ‘Good guess.’
It was more than a guess, but Yeng didn’t need to know that I knew more than I needed to know.
‘So go to it,’ I said. ‘Let’s make some good use of our nine days.’ I turned to Malley. ‘And you’ll help us with the wormhole?’
‘If you do as you say, yes.’ He picked up his pipe and ran its stem across his upper lip, inhaling gently through his nose, then put it down. ‘I’ll start work on it now—I mean, I can hardly help thinking about it. When we arrive I’ll use all the research facilities you’ve promised me, and
if
you lot show some indication of having made a sincere attempt to avoid … war, because that’s what it is, then I’ll share my results with you.’
‘It’s a deal,’ I told him. Malley nodded; Suze smiled back at me; Yeng looked vaguely puzzled. ‘We have a plan,’ I added, for her benefit.
‘I have a lot of plans,’ Yeng said. ‘This is great! Such a challenge!’ She grinned at me, her sweet, small face lighting up. ‘Don’t you worry, Ellen May, you’ll have the best protection possible.’
She jumped up and almost ran up the spiral stair, so eager was she to start work on her anti-virus software design.
‘What did she mean?’ Malley asked. ‘Why should it be you who opens communication?’
I knocked back my now-cold coffee. ‘Same reason. I went to get you,’ I said. ‘If somebody proposes and pushes some daft, dangerous idea, it’s only fair that they should have the fun of trying it out.’
Malley gave me an odd look. ‘You must get through a lot of leading cadre that way.’
‘We don’t have “leading cadre”,’ said Suze.
‘In the Division, we do,’ I said. ‘Only we don’t lead from behind.’ Suze looked so concerned that I had to relent.
‘We do take back-ups,’ I assured her.
Back-ups were controversial. After I’d left Malley talking to Andrea about the available recorded observations of the wormhole gate, and left Suze talking to Tony about
her
interests and observations, I sat and drank more coffee and worried about back-ups.
There were several methods, in principle, of taking back-ups: noninvasive scanning techniques for the living, smart-matter infusions for the dying or newly dead. The end result of all of them was a stored snapshot of the brain’s state, down to the last neuron and synapse. This state could be replicated in a ‘blank’ brain, usually but not necessarily that of a forced-grown clone of the original. The Outwarders had perfected this process long ago, back in the twenty-fifties, and we’d learned it from them. They’d subsequently perfected the far trickier task of ‘running’ the copied mind, advancing the recorded brain-state from its final instant to the next instant, and the next … whether in control of a robot body, or in a virtual environment, or in some combination of both. This they called uploading, and this we did not do. It required the cooperation of autonomous artificial intelligence, and it had a logic of its own which led—unless interrupted by main force—to the Singularity, the Rapture of the nerds as Tony had called it.
Because: once the mind was out of the meat, once it was running in silicon rather than carbon, and surrounded with artificial intelligences that could give it every assistance, there was nothing to stop its running a thousand times faster, and expanding its capabilities—its available knowledge, its sensorium, its memory storage and access—just by
plugging more stuff in
. The uploaded mind could be upgraded, and every upgrade made the next
more feasible, and quicker to implement. That way led to runaway artificial intelligence excursion: Singularity.
The Outwarders had regarded this as no bad thing, and the supplanting of humanity as long overdue. We, the ones who’d intended, for whatever reason, to remain human, might even have been convinced. The haunting thought that uploads had no thoughts, no souls; that they were flatlines, mindless emulations of the mind, that subjectivity was (as the finder Shin Se-Ha had wryly said) ‘an emergent property of carbon’, might have come to seem absurd even to us; were it not for the fact that the supposed super-humans had almost all, to all appearances, gone mad; and the exceptions, the survivors of Project Jove who became the Jovians, had gone bad.
Bad for us, anyway.
The experience, and the long, low-level conflict that followed, had hardened our first quibbles and quarrels with the Outwarders (way back when they’d been of the same flesh as ourselves) into a theory which—as Malley had pointed out—was embarrassingly like an ideology: machines don’t think, they calculate; only people count; uploads are flatlines, and copies are not originals.
Which, for anyone contemplating taking a back-up, was a disturbing thought. For anyone who woke up to find that they
were
a copy taken from a back-up, it was even more disturbing.
So I had been told; and soon enough, if my proposed encounter with the new Jovian entities went badly, I would know for myself.
Or rather … somebody else would, somebody just like me, with my name, my face, my memories, including my memory of thinking this very thought. I wished her well.
Up on the command deck Malley was sitting in an acceleration couch with its back tilted up to make a seat. Yeng sat in a similarly adjusted couch several yards away. In front of each of them was a computer interface screen of a type standard throughout the Union and the Division. It was made of two sheets of thin, tough glass, about three feet by two, with a quarter-inch thick layer of multicoloured liquid between them. The multicoloured liquid was nothing but clear water swarming with nanomachines, which scurried about and held up fine particles in various colours, according to instructions transmitted by chemical and electrical impulses, thus forming the graphics, the moving pictures, and the text.
Malley’s screen was blank except for a scrolling block of text. His fingers moved along the pad angled at the base of the screen. I couldn’t distinguish whether he was writing or reading, or whether the symbols on the screen were our data or his calculations. His pipe jutted from the corner of his
mouth, and small puffs of smoke rose from it every few seconds, each puff drifting gently upwards until the current from the ventilation whipped it away. I knew better than to talk to him, and I doubt he would have talked back.
Yeng, however, looked up at me and seemed eager to discuss what she was doing. She shifted on her seat and motioned to me to sit down. There was plenty of room, though I took up more of it than Yeng did.
One of the advantages that this kind of computer had over the old-fashioned, and dangerously vulnerable, electronic computer was that it doubled as an engineering workshop and biochemical laboratory. You could physically isolate a little box—a fixel, it was called—on the screen, and set up an entire nanofacturing complex. It might be too small to see, but it was a small matter to get the rest of the screen to display what was going on.
The screen I was looking at displayed a line along the top, and a dozen or so columns. Yeng pointed. ‘Latest variant of their radio transmission,’ she said. ‘Signal lasts ten seconds. I’m testing it against an array of input devices—radio, television, radar receiver, mechanical computers of various sizes that might pick it up accidentally—even human visual pigments. Running.’
The message was played, in a silent and invisible pulse represented by a wavefront advancing from the line at the top of the screen to the top of the array of columns. All the devices handled it—or completely failed to react to it—except one, whose column started flashing. Yeng cleared the rest and enlarged that view. Trapped in the circuits of a miniaturized version of our standard radar input, the signal had set up a standing-wave pattern which, as soon as Yeng connected the radar with a clutch of nanocomputers, duly propagated into them and burnt them out.
‘Nasty,’ I said. ‘They’re hacking babbages now. That’s new.’
Yeng smiled. ‘Indeed, but I think I can see a way to neutralize it.’ She tagged the message, and moved on to a fixel containing a complex organic molecule, large numbers of which had recently been detected escaping from the Jovian atmosphere. That molecule turned out to have the interesting property of jamming the gears of one of our hull-maintenance nanobots.
‘Hmm,’ said Yeng, sucking the end of a strand of her long blue-black hair. ‘Must have picked on something of ours that drifted the other way. Unless the meshing is accidental, which seems unlikely.’ She called up a 3-D model of the gearing mechanism. ‘Hmm,’ she said again. I decided it was time to leave her alone.
‘Messages for you,’ Yeng said.
It was the morning of the fourth day out. We had settled into a routine. There wasn’t much for the crew to do, apart from reading, watching moving
pictures, looking out at the stars, playing games or music and trying to seduce Suze into the constant slow dance of our convoluted relationships. Malley was now engrossed in studying recorded observations of the wormhole Gate, gazing for hours at the strange images, then departing to stare at a sheet of paper which was, very gradually, filling up with pencilled equations. Yeng was working her way through decades of predesigned anti-viral software, updating the programs, throwing them into battle with trapped Outwarder viruses (some of them computer viruses, some of them almost literally biological viruses, molecular engines of destruction) and breeding from the survivors. (And
that
Darwinian process had to be watched, too—for what better way to infiltrate a system than to subtly direct, through manipulating the virus attacks, the evolution of its anti-infiltration software?)
She’d just taken a break to check our mailbox. The few unavoidable real-time communications, mostly on arrival and departure, were handled more directly, through the comms rig—though even there the defensive barriers had to be active. The mailbox was for less-urgent or personal messages, and each of them went through a cryptographic quarantine whose processing kept billions of nanotech babbages busy for seconds on end. She passed me a small vial containing a culture of nanomachines on which the incoming laser communications had been recorded and decrypted.