Fractions (81 page)

Daughter wormholes. You know about daughter wormholes. I didn't.

‘That's what we've come out of,' Meg explained. ‘Reid set it up.'

I and all the other robots were clinging to the side of the starship, like third-class passengers to a Third World train. The ship had irrupted into a completely different part of space and neatly inserted itself into orbit above a planet. Behind us the daughter wormhole, whatever that was, dwindled to a trashy bangle. The Solar System, presumably, was on the other side of it. On this side –

‘Goddess fucking wept,' I said. ‘We left Earth for this?' I'd been kind of hoping for the
big planet
, the planet of my dreams.

‘It's habitable,' Meg said. She was manifesting in my sight as an external entity. She capered about on the hull, her diaphanous shift fluttering in an imaginary slipstream. Real-world physics was never a strong point with succubi.

‘Habitable?' I had found a line-feed. Data was coming in, pasting labels on the forward view Meg had patched us into. ‘It's like a warmed-over Mars. It's actually losing atmosphere as we speak.'

‘Don't exaggerate,' Meg said. ‘It'll be all right once we've terraformed it some more.'

Terraformed it? Holy shit.

‘With what?' I asked. I switched off the external view and stared at a simulation of this new sun's family. ‘There's just this planet, two small ones further in, and a few million goddam rocks! Not
one
gas giant! What are we going to do – suck Saturn through the wormhole?'

‘If you up the res a bit,' Meg said patiently, ‘you'll see that what this system lost out in gas giants, it gained in ice and a real thick and tasty
comet-cloud.
'

Centuries of being bombarded with milkshake; by the time it got through the atmosphere, baked Alaska.

‘Fucking great,' I said.

 

‘You can't come inside,' Reid said. He was addressing the robots, on the television, from the same table as I'd seen him at a year earlier. Around him was what looked to me the biggest, emptiest interior space I'd seen in a long time. Real space, too. ‘There simply isn't room. I'm trying to set up a virtual conference. It'll be ready in an hour, or whenever Support Services gets the network connections sorted out.' His smile told us he was on our side, in the unending struggle between Users and Support. ‘Meanwhile, just lock your grippers and hang on in there. Check out a video or shag your succubus or something. You'll know when we're ready.'

 

The virtual conference was held in an impressive virtual venue, loosely based on Tienanmen Square; Reid, appearing on a large screen at the front, in the position of the Chairman. Thousands of three-dimensional renderings of people – prisoners and succubi – stood in the square, talking freely amongst themselves for the first time. Some of them must have been in the solitude of their onboard minds for years; others present were prisoners who'd not died and been uploaded, but had served their time in their own bodies – around the ship and habitats rather than the wormhole's environs, I guessed. These still-embodied people were also, in reality, dispersed around the ship, but were telepresent with the rest of us.

When Reid spoke, his voice carried perfectly. Everyone heard it as if they were a few metres from him.

‘We've done it!' he said. ‘We've reached a new world, under a new sun. We did it by our own efforts, of our own free will. Some may say that the macros did it, but I say we used them like any other tool. And when our tools turned in our hands, we discarded them. We can be proud.

‘You all have another reason to be proud. You've all earned your freedom. I never promised you this, but I give it to you now. A new world, a clean slate. You're all free, and together we'll live in freedom.'

Everybody around me shouted a cheer that overloaded the system and appeared momentarily on the sky as giant letters: ‘AAAAAAAAHHHHH'. I myself was unmoved, partly because I wasn't a prisoner, and partly because I could see that Reid had little choice in the matter. If there were to be slaves here, they would have to be machines.

Reid waited for the din to subside, and smiled.

‘Thank you. And now, my friends…We're here not as agents of some company, or as refugees. We've brought with us, I assure you, all that we'll need to make New Mars not just habitable, but better than Earth. We've brought the genetic information to seed this planet, over time, with a rich diversity of life. We have the technology to make our lives as long as we desire. And we've brought the dead, who will live again, with us.

‘I'll talk about the dead in a moment. But first, let me tell you about yourselves. Most of you are, of course, among the dead, but unlike the great majority of the dead, you are still in a sense alive. Your minds, and your characters, have developed and, if you ask me –' he smiled ‘–
improved
since your deaths. Furthermore, for the bodies of every one of you – I've checked – we have not just the stored information in the bank, but actual genetic material, frozen cells. Over the next months and years…'

He paused. We all leaned forward slightly.

‘We'll have to do something about the calendar,' he said, in a stage aside. Everybody laughed.

‘OK, the good news is, we'll be able to download you back to clones of your own bodies. In the case of the succubi, any bodies you choose, although I'd recommend the ones you're, ah, modelled on, for the sake of –'

Whatever he said next was completely lost in a tumult of applause. To my amazement I found myself yelling, hugging Meg, clapping complete strangers on the back and leaping in the imaginary air.

Eventually the crowd quietened down. I began to understand Reid's reasons for setting up this event, rather than broadcasting to us all in our individual machines – he wanted to create a shared occasion of common memory. This was his speech – to the assembled masses, I thought with a grin – in the plaza after the revolution, his founding moment of the new world's history. Something to tell our grandchildren. (I had a passing concern for the future offspring of some – most? – of us, whose mothers would have no memories of childhood or mothers of their own. A continuity of caring hands, literally reaching back to the pre-human, would be broken. Reid was founding not just a new world, but a new species, New Martians indeed.)

‘About the dead. Many of us here may have loved ones or friends among them – I know I have – and may be anxious to see them again. And so we shall, but not for a long time. Growing clones quickly to maturity, and impressing on their brains the imprint of your memories and personalities is possible with the technology we have to hand. Resurrecting the bodies and personalities of the dead from their smart-matter storage is not. It can be done, but only with the help of the fast folk, whose stored structures would have to be revived first…'

The crowd's response, this time, was a noise I'd never heard before: a hoarse sigh, a grinding of teeth, a shifting of feet – a collective snarl. Once more, I too was to my surprise caught up in it, bristling at the thought of the macro-organic monsters whose madness had trapped me for months. But in those months, which hadn't been months to me, I had learned something. Something vital, which I couldn't remember. Reid's speech resumed, interrupting my puzzled thoughts.

‘I'm talking, of course, of the templates of the fast folk – posthuman and AI – as they were at the beginning, not the bizzare entities they became. Even so, I agree entirely that the risk is too great. We must work towards being able to control, or at least contain, their development. The same goes for any form of artificial intelligence capable of improving itself. We will do it. The day will come when we control the Singularity, as we've learned to control the flame on the heath, the lightning of the sky and the nuclear fire of the stars! Until that day, they stay in the storage media, and with them…the dead sleep.'

We all sighed, in relief and regret.

‘Until that day,' he went on, ‘we're here for good. Our course through the Malley Mile, which led us to this world and not somewhere less favourable, was plotted by some of the fast folk who escaped the general madness. For a time. We can't rely on them now, and until we can, there's no way back. New Mars is our world, and our only world. We'll make it a great one!

‘And now,' Reid concluded, with a huge grin that reminded me of my old friend, and made me love him again, ‘we have work to do!'

 

We had a while to wait before there was anything for us to do. The daughter wormhole, spun off from the main course of the probe's passage, had been open for some weeks before our ship had come through. Replicators and assemblers had been sent through in advance, and their initial work was already taking shape on the ground and among the system's scattered metallic rocks. From these asteroids they would send a second generation of machines out to the comet-cloud, where a third generation would nudge the comets inward to be mined and farmed.

The ship itself, for all its apparent inelegance, had a modular design which would allow most of it to descend, section by section, to the surface. There was no provision for ascent. The ship's sections would become a base-camp, incorporated in the city as it grew.

The city would be grown by dumb-mass robots and smart-matter assemblers, following not a design but a set of spontaneous-ordering rules and constraints. These had been worked out by smart, fast minds in the early days of the project. They had expected to share in a much better-organised expedition than the one Reid had cobbled together out of prisoners and guards and – for all I knew – out of shanghaied innocent dead like myself. The fast folk had therefore made provision for a greater human and machine population than we would be able to sustain. Whether their quirks were humour or error we never knew.

The reckless anarchy of the projected social system may have had its immediate origin in the rough justice of the Mutual Protection Company's rule-book, but I suspect that Reid's rules, in turn, were rooted in the libertarian texts with which I'd once tried to warp his mind.

But I anticipate.

 

Reid talked to me personally before we were all offered work contracts. He looked forward to meeting me again in my human form, explained reasonably enough that it wouldn't be available for a year or two yet, and that in the meantime he wanted me to work – as an independent contractor, just like all the others – on an important project. I'd have lots of (genuinely) non-human robots and other machinery to supervise, loads of kudos and money to earn, and best of all a bigger computer to live in, with more scope for virtual recreation and freedom to communicate with others. We could set up shared worlds, enjoying a human equivalent of the macro trips…

‘Great,' I said; and my CPU (the whole thing and its peripherals turned out to be, when removed from the robot, about the size of my first digital watch) was packed along with many others, drogue-dropped to the surface and plugged into a new, shiny and robust machine. Meg, whose increased intelligence never got in the way of her continued embarrassing devotion, selected a house and landscape and got to work editing them into an enjoyable place to live, while I got on with my work in what I was pleased to call the real world.

I built the Stone Canal.

The city's other canals, ring and radial and capillary, were for transport. This one would be for more than that. It was to be the city's main source of water (other than rain) and the water would come from space. Comets, broken up in advance, would be guided in to crash on the range we called the Madreporite Mountains, about a hundred kilometres from the city. Much of the water from the cometary ice would evaporate. This wasn't a problem: we wanted it in the atmosphere. The runoff would flow into the Stone Canal. Its main significance wasn't so much the water, however, as what could be extracted from it.

For tens of kilometres along and under its banks, beginning at the Sieve Plates – a system of dams – at the foot of the mountains, pipes and pumps and machinery were to extract from the cometary water all the minerals and organic molecules it contained. These would then be fed into what we called ‘plants' – basically solar-powered, smart-matter chemical processing units, concentrating the useful material for subsequent harvesting. (You can see why we called them ‘plants'.)

The planning and exploration took me months, long before the first soil-moving machinery rolled out of the automatic factories on the edge of the city. Towards the end of those months I had a visit from Reid.

 

We lived, Meg and I, in a virtual valley. Our house was on the slope of one side, and down below was a small village, with a pub. The village and its inhabitants were, frankly, wallpaper, although the barman could be induced to respond to questioning about the day's news. (I took a childish pleasure in measuring the difficulty of my questions by the depth of his frown, as somewhere a database search crunched away.)