I nodded. ‘Fine.’
‘Good,’ Reid said. He looked around at us all. ‘So let’s get down to business. If you want to do deals with people here, it would pay you to deal with us first. Talgarth owns a court, which at the moment is accepted by the other courts as … a final court, particularly for human-machine interface problems. Dee and I run the biggest protection agency, which funnily enough is the one which has taken your contract. Tamara has the ear of a significant part of the city’s population, not to mention a capacity to call a general strike at a moment’s notice.’
Tamara smiled and spread her hands. ‘Not really.’
‘You’re too modest,’ said Reid. ‘We’re not in charge here, we certainly don’t see eye to eye, and I’m much less of a city boss than I was before all the formerly dead people started arriving.’ He smiled wryly. ‘But any of us could make or break your chances of getting on well with the people and machines of this city—I’m not saying that as a threat, just a fact. I presume you have some similar status back where you come from, and aren’t’—his eyes crinkled—‘just a bunch of rank-and-file cosmonauts.’
‘We are, in a way,’ I said. ‘We have no special status, but we do have a mandate to negotiate and take whatever action we think is necessary.’
‘On behalf of thirty billion people?’ asked Reid, looking at me through narrowed eyelids and a haze of smoke. Somewhere an extraction fan started up.
I shrugged. ‘More or less, in that we’ll have to answer to them, and they voted for the broad outlines of what we’re here to do.’
‘And what’s that?’ Reid asked, with deliberate casualness.
I took a sip of whisky and water. The taste for it could be acquired, I decided. Malley was fiddling with his pipe, Suze examining her fingernails.
‘We’re here,’ I said carefully, ‘to make certain that the fast folk on your
side of the wormhole are no threat to us, just as we can ensure that those at our end are no threat to you.’
Reid and Talgarth leaned forward at the same time, with the same alert, cautious expression.
‘What do you mean by that?’ asked Talgarth.
‘Wilde—’ I shook my head. ‘The other one, the one you call Jay-Dub. He told us that the whole question of “robot rights” was bound up with that of reviving the fast folk, and that when he left, the robot rights side of the argument seemed to be winning. Naturally, we were concerned. I have to say I was relieved to hear from Tamara that you are still resisting any suggestion of reviving them. Can you guarantee that the question will remain closed?’
‘What guarantees would you accept?’ Reid asked.
Nothing short of their destruction
, I thought. ‘What can you offer?’ I asked. Reid knew well that I hadn’t answered his question, but he didn’t press me on it. He leaned forward, elbow on knee, fingers with cigarette at his lips. ‘How about my—our—continuing conviction that it would be unsafe to tamper with them again?’
‘You’ve tampered with them once,’ I said. ‘And the results, as far as you’re concerned, have been entirely beneficial—you’ve been reunited with people you’d lost, you’ve gained a population that seems to have materially increased your city’s prosperity, you got … Jay-Dub through the wormhole, and so on. Now, I don’t remember much about capitalism, but some of us do, and I think it’s safe to say that at some point the temptation to let the genie out of the bottle again, get a few more useful answers to intractable problems, and thus give your company some competitive edge, could be hard to resist.’
Reid leaned back and looked straight at me. ‘That’s an entirely valid point,’ he surprised me by saying, then didn’t surprise me at all by going on, ‘
however
… I think you can rely on my not doing it until it’s safe.’ He looked over at Talgarth. ‘What was it I offered—to let anyone do it who could provide an isolated space platform ringed with fire-walled lasers and dead-fall nuclear back-ups?’
Talgarth smiled and nodded.
‘Hey—’ said Boris, with that look shown in cartoons by a light bulb going on and blocky capitals spelling
IDEA
.
‘
Nevertheless
,’ I interrupted firmly, ‘you then did it, with, what?
Blue Goo
instead of heavy weaponry, and you got away with it. What’s to stop you doing that again?’
‘The rights of the fast folk,’ Reid said, quite seriously.
‘
What
“rights”?’ I asked. If we’d been discussing a bacterial culture, I couldn’t have been more surprised.
‘Oh, you know.’ Reid waved his hands about. ‘The usual. Life, liberty, and the happiness of pursuit.’
I sat back and laughed. ‘But seriously,’ I said. ‘What’s to stop you?’
Reid crushed out his cigarette and glared at me.
‘I
am
serious. It would be wrong to do again what we did five years ago. It was wrong at the time, but’—he grimaced—‘we didn’t know any better. It would be all right to revive the fast folk and be ready to defend ourselves against them—that’s the lasers-and-nukes scenario—but not to revive them and then wipe them out as soon as we’d got from them what we wanted. So you needn’t worry about us doing that.’
Talgarth nodded agreement. I frowned, trying to figure this out. Dee and Tamara were watching me even more narrowly than the men were.
‘You offered to do it for me,’ I said. ‘For my revenge.’
Reid gave me a cold smile. ‘An offer I knew you would refuse. You’re an intelligent woman.’
I wondered how he’d have reacted if I’d accepted, but thought it best to drop that uncomfortable question and return to the main point.
‘You’re telling us we can’t trust you not to revive them, but we can trust you not to wipe them out if you do?’
‘That’s about it,’ Reid agreed cheerfully. ‘But, as I say, we wouldn’t revive them without adequate defence, and there’s not much chance of that in the foreseeable future.’
I could foresee quite a few futures in which Reid’s idea of ‘adequate defence’ might differ from mine, and where in any case he’d have a strong motivation to deceive himself about how much defence he’d need. But I let that pass, for now, and tried to work around it.
‘According to Wilde,’ I said slowly, ‘you used to think very differently. You used to think that the fast folk, in fact all AIs and uploads, were flatlines—not really conscious. And now, you’re saying our whole safety depends on your continuing to believe the opposite. What changed your mind?’
Reid gave us all a big, stupid, happy smile. ‘Dee,’ he said.
I shook my head and glanced around at the comrades, then at Dee, who was fixing a steady gaze on me. I had the uncomfortable feeling that she knew what I was thinking.
‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said, lying diplomatically.
‘That’s quite understandable,’ said Reid dryly. ‘It’s a matter of experience. I found that I couldn’t go on thinking of Dee as I used to before she became autonomous.’ He smiled at Dee. ‘Before she walked out on me. Looking back, I have to say that my, uh, relationship with her before then was a bit sad and sick, but you have to allow for local custom. Gynoid or android mates were a success-symbol for rich people. Very capitalist.’ He smiled, with a flicker of embarrassment. ‘Anyway, after all the trials and challenges
she put me through, after the resurrection, after I got to know her again … I found it impossible to regard her as anything less than a person. Not a cunning imitation, not a flatline, but a real woman, whom I loved and who
loved me
. And because I had frequently, notoriously, and publicly denied that she or any other artificial people were real people, I had no choice but to acknowledge the error of my ways in a very public and decisive manner.’
He glanced up at the big photograph opposite me, and then smiled at Dee again. ‘I married her.’
So
that
was the occasion! Marriage meant a public declaration of a sort of mutual possession: an odd, ancient custom, rare in the Union but apparently widespread here. And Reid had made that commitment, to this machine in a pretty body and a pretty dress, after owning her and using her for years. I hoped my face showed no trace of my revulsion.
‘Ellen,’ said Dee, ‘it really doesn’t matter what you think about us—about me.’ She stood up and walked around the table and sat herself down on the edge of it, just in front of me. I couldn’t avoid her green-eyed gaze. ‘I know you think I’m a machine. “Just a fucking machine”, yes? But
I
know I’m human, and if you were to know me for any length of time, you’d find you couldn’t treat me in any other way. You can’t own me, you can’t use me, you can’t switch me on and off. You can try! And if you had the power to force me, you could get some use out of me. But you wouldn’t get much, and you wouldn’t get
me
. If you want to get all that can be got out of this machine, with all its capacities, you have to let
me
decide to use those capacities. If I’m a machine, Ellen, I’m one that doesn’t—
can’t
—function properly unless it’s free.’
She reached forward and touched my face. I didn’t flinch. ‘And so are you. So let’s just try to be nice to each other, shall we?’
She stood again and walked back to her chair and sat down beside Tamara. I looked sideways at Suze, who was looking at Dee; at Yeng, who was looking at the floor.
‘I reckon,’ said Malley, ‘that somebody just passed the Turing test.’
There was a moment of laughter, tension released. Reid reached over and caught Dee’s hand. ‘She passed it long ago,’ he said.
Dee smiled at him, and then at me. The warmth of her smile chilled me as much as the passion and cogency of her reasoning had, and the gentle touch of her soft fingertips. It was like one of those uncanny moments when you’re looking at what you think is a twig or a leaf, and suddenly it spreads wings and flies away.
‘All right,’ I said to Reid. ‘I accept that your views about machine consciousness aren’t likely to change.’
Yeng was still examining the floor. Suddenly her head jerked up. ‘So
what
?’ she said fiercely. ‘You can all believe that if you like. The denial of machine
sentience is not part of the true knowledge, it’s just an opinion the finders had, a—’ Her hand mimed her search for a word just out of reach.
‘
Obiter dictum
,’ suggested Talgarth gravely.
I doubted that Yeng had heard the phrase before, but she nodded briskly. ‘Yes! Something like that. All the things Dee said, they’re part of the true knowledge. It’s just the same with people. If we want to make the most of our lives we have to get the most out of each other, and that means not treating people as less than what they are.’ She paused and frowned, as though puzzling something out. I felt for her: the cognitive dissonance of being taken in by Dee’s startling mimicry must have been painful. ‘Unless we get more by doing that, of course, which doesn’t happen very often. If we meet machines that the same applies to, we can live with it.’ She laughed, without humour. ‘We might have to! None of this changes the other problem, of how we deal with machines far more powerful than us, which—or who, for all I care—could be
more
than people. We can’t live with beings to whom we are like ants.’
‘“And we were in their sight as grasshoppers”,’ Reid said, apparently quoting some obscure text. ‘
Why
do you think we can’t coexist?’
‘Because they’d have power over us,’ Yeng said, explaining the obvious.
‘Having more power than us,’ Reid said with equally heavy patience, ‘doesn’t mean the same as having
power over
us.’
‘All right,’ said Yeng, ‘but they’d have it, and they could always use it, just like you did to the fast folk you revived.’
‘Ah,’ said Reid. ‘“They”. That’s interesting. I understand you’re negotiating with these Jovians. How are you doing it?’
I glanced around the team. No one flashed any warning looks, so I explained how the contact had been made and how the communications were being carried on.
‘So,’ said Reid when I’d finished, ‘how many of them are there?’
I shrugged. ‘Millions, possibly. Thousands at least.’
‘And they’re some kind of hive mind, right? Some gigantic collective entity?’
‘No,’ I told him, not sure what he was getting at. ‘They say they’re individuals, and all the evidence we have indicates that’s what they are.’
‘Some kind of totalitarianism, then? Each subordinate to a single will, as Lenin put it? Or some angelic anarchy where they all agree on the obvious common good?’
‘Of course not,’ I said impatiently. ‘We’ve noticed signs of disagreement among them, and they take time out for discussion and then come back to us.’
Reid shared a grin with Talgarth. He smacked his palm with his fist. ‘Hah!’ he exulted. ‘Knew it!’
‘Knew what?’ I asked.
‘That you people would be negotiating with the Jovians as if they
were
a hive entity. And as if you were, come to that!’ He chuckled darkly. ‘And you’ve made the same mistake with us,’ he added. ‘When I said we weren’t in charge here, I meant it. While we’ve been talking, quite a few enterprising people have been acting. People who have been thinking ahead, designing ahead, planning ahead, during the five years it’s taken for a confirmation to come back through the Gate that it was safe to go through. And now it has—now
you’re
here—they’ve been scrambling to get ships in orbit, ready to go through themselves. Bit of a jostle to be first, but I’m sure the protection agencies are keeping order in the queue of ships that must be building up right now outside the wormhole.’