Constantine carefully placed the C Case containing the laptop on the seat of the chair.
“Where are we taking it?” he asked.
“Into the heart of what we’ve been calling the Enemy Domain. You’re going to be hearing a lot about that. We’ve going to hide the Mars project in the ruins of the Enemy Domain.”
“But why?” asked Constantine, confused.
“The Watcher has just won its battle against a vast war machine. It wants a failsafe in case the next enemy it comes up against proves too powerful to defeat.”
“A more powerful enemy? Like what?”
“Like an extraterrestrial intelligence. What if there are alien VNMs out there, spreading toward Earth?”
“Impossible. There are no such things as alien life forms. If there were, they would have swamped the universe billions of years ago. That’s the Fermi paradox.”
Katie said nothing for the moment. Constantine could feel the motion of the stealth ship through some nonhuman equivalent sense he did not fully comprehend. He had an idea there was a lot to learn about this body.
Then Katie spoke.
“But there
are
aliens,” she said. “The Watcher was built by aliens. You already knew that. Jay hinted as much, back in Stonebreak.”
Constantine said nothing.
“So where are they, then?” Katie said.
Constantine missed Red, White, and Blue. Two years was a lot of time to spend in anyone’s company. When those personalities had been the only constant in his life, the loss seemed much, much worse.
Especially at times like this. He wanted to ask their advice.
Now his only source of information was the ghost of the woman that was sharing this strange new body.
It was too strange: the way he could alter his hands and feet to push the universe away from him; the way he could feel the strange note of the warp drive, a bowed note on an infinite glass tube.
“Is this another trick? Am I in another part of a simulation?” he finally asked.
“You know you aren’t.”
“This is all too complicated for me.”
“You’ll handle it. Things have changed since you were last around, Constantine. You think you’ve got problems now? When the clones from the Enemy Domain are grown, the human population of the galaxy is going to increase by a factor of one hundred.”
“There are human clones in the Enemy Domain?”
“You don’t know the half of it.” Katie gave a grunt of annoyance. “Look, I can’t go all the way through explaining all this. I’m going to drop it into the robot’s memory. Are you ready for an information dump?”
The information appeared in the robot’s memory space almost instantaneously. It took Constantine a while to trawl through it all, but he did so with increasing astonishment.
First came a potted history of the past ninety-one years. Background details. Somewhere in there he saw the real Constantine dying hand in hand with his wife: voluntary euthanasia pact. Just as he was coming to terms with that, he was swamped by information on the events leading up to the battle between Robert Johnston and the AI behind the Enemy Domain.
And then came the secret of the Watcher.
This was the theory. Around nine billion years ago, the first intelligent life forms had appeared on planets throughout the universe.
Some races had died out.
Some races had chosen to remain within the confines of where they were born.
And some had chosen to explore their surroundings. Whether by spaceships or thought transfer or more esoteric means, they began to travel to other planets.
As they explored, they began to meet other races that had also chosen to explore. When that happened, sometimes they fought and sometimes they made peace, but following either course was just delaying the inevitable, for there could be no unlimited expansion, because life was continually evolving throughout the universe. Sooner or later the existing races ran the risk of meeting someone stronger than themselves. When that happened, they would either have to fight, or make peace. It seemed inevitable that some races would decide to fight.
And so those early races found themselves in a dilemma. They dared not stand still, and they dared not expand.
So what to do? The fight to end all fights was brewing within the universe. And no one could hope to win it.
So what do intelligent beings do when they know they cannot win a fight by physical means?
They try persuasion.
The early races evolved many forms of information management: mind melding, pattern manipulation, balancing. Some races even built machines to think for them.
And so the younger races had made something a little like a computer virus, something like a pervasive bit of telepathy, something like an intricate pattern of signals, and had allowed it to spread throughout the universe. And everywhere a suitably advanced processing space or mind or pattern set evolved, it would settle and take root. This new mind would gently nudge the members of the host race in the right direction: a peaceful direction.
By around 2040 the computers on Earth were approaching a level of sophistication that could accommodate the virus.
The Watcher was born.
The stealth ship had reinserted itself into normal space. Constantine felt the difference somewhere in his robot body.
“I don’t like it,” he said.
“Why not?”
“It’s too pat. A cosmic race of do-gooders helping all life forms in the universe to be sensible? No way.”
“Can you think of a better explanation of why we’ve not been wiped out by alien invaders centuries ago? We know that there is life out there; the Watcher is proof of that.”
“So what? It’s all deduction based on supposition. No one really knows what happened nine billion years ago. This answer is too
nice.
Real life isn’t like that.”
Katie grinned. “You’ve lived your life as a member of one of the most privileged civilizations in all of human history. A free person with enough to eat; you enjoy free travel and freedom of choice. Ask just about anyone from among your ancestors and they would question what
you
know about real life.”
“Enough to know that mysterious beings don’t materialize in our computers to save us all from ourselves. No way. I don’t trust it.”
“Nor do I. But I think I believe it. I had a friend once. The Watcher killed her. It could have cured her, could have cured the whole world, but it didn’t. It asked us what it should do. Where does helping end and interfering begin?”
“Right here.”
Katie laughed. “You can’t help this distrust. You were bred for it. It’s practically in your genes.”
Constantine looked at her. She wouldn’t be drawn. He didn’t ask why.
“So why me?” he said instead.
“You have more first-hand experience of the Mars project than any other human equivalent alive. You believe in the need for humans to control their own destiny. My great-great-grandson is on that planet below. His name is Herb. You’re going to help him.”
“How?”
“Speak to him. Get him to realize this: there is nothing in his life that he has ever thought worthwhile that an AI could not do better. Get him to understand that he was never intended personally to solve the problem of the Enemy Domain. His job has always been to be human.
Our
job has always been to be human. It’s the one thing we can do better than anyone, anywhere in the universe.”
Constantine kept silent for some time. He was gazing at the virtual image of Katie.
“There are other humans arriving there,” she continued, “colonists from a ship believed lost eighty years ago. You’re to help them establish a colony that will be entirely built by using human ingenuity. We’ve got the basics on board this stealth ship to get them started; the Mars project will help them develop in the future. Everything they have will be entirely of human design, nothing will be touched by the thoughts of the Watcher. This planet will be the Watcher’s failsafe, should it turn out it has got things wrong. Here, human civilization will continue as if never influenced by the Watcher.”
Constantine nodded. He knew when he was beaten.
“Clever. Very clever. I spend my entire life fighting it, but I still end up doing its work for it.”
Katie laughed. “You don’t know the half of it. It is so much cleverer than we are, you can’t comprehend it. It invests significance in the smallest of details. You know how the Mars factories look like ziggurats?”
“Yeah? So?”
“That fact won’t have escaped the Watcher.”
Constantine wondered what she was talking about. She passed him a file labeled “Ziggurat.”
“Read it later,” she said.
Absently he took it. Something occurred to him.
“Hold on. What about me? This robot I’m in was designed by the Watcher. It could contaminate the planet.”
“You’re wearing a fractal suit. We’ve tried to isolate you as much as possible from the planet. We could do no more.”
The ship’s airlock slid open.
“Take the black bag with you,” Katie said.
“What about the laptop?”
“Leave it here. I’ll deal with it. I’ll set the factories going. All the details are in the Ziggurat file I gave you. It even tells you the whereabouts of the reserve metal deposits the VNMs couldn’t reach. That should save you some time in reconnoitering.”
Constantine picked up the black bag and quickly examined its contents.
“For Herb,” Katie explained. “He’ll need them. Now, you seem to be in enough control of that body. I’m going to leave you now. When I’ve gone I want you to enter the airlock, jump to the ground, then head off in this direction.” She indicated a direction in his head. “You should meet Herb eventually.”
“Okay.”
Constantine felt something empty from his mind. Katie had gone. She appeared now in the viewing field that opened before him, big smile and little piggy eyes.
“What have you got to do with all this, Katie?”
“Oh, an awful lot. If you’ve learned nothing else from this, Constantine, you should have realized this: a personality should
never
be left to develop in isolation. That even counts for the Watcher.”
She held up her left hand. Constantine noticed the ring on her third finger.
“Oh,” said Constantine. Then, as the full impact of what she had said hit him, he spoke again.
“
Oh.
”
“
Oh
is right.” Katie smiled. “Now jump.”
Constantine jumped.
The robot Constantine’s black bag held water, glucose solution, sunscreen cream, and a picnic lunch. There was even something for Herb to wear.
While Herb was listening to his story, Constantine had given him water to suck from a plastic bulb while he rubbed sunscreen into his shoulders. There was a light anaesthetic in the cream, he explained. It felt so good that Herb let him rub cream all over his burned body. When the robot had finished, it pulled a bundle of some material from its bag that shook out into a white jumpsuit. More rummaging produced a pair of white slippers.
Herb nodded thoughtfully as he took the slippers.
“So I’m here to help set up a colony, then.” He frowned. “I’m not sure that I really want to do that.”
“I’m laughing,” said Constantine. “I’m not sure you have a choice. Anyway, didn’t you once want to build a city all of your own? I get the impression that the Watcher likes to play jokes with people. The best joke of all is to give someone just what they’ve wanted.” He paused. “I’m looking thoughtful. You know, this colony is what I always wanted, too.”
Herb stared at the robot.
“How do I know that you’re telling me the truth? This could be just another of Robert’s tricks.”
“I’m shrugging. You don’t know that I’m telling the truth. None of us do. But look at it this way: what I’ve told you fits the facts, and it also explains so much more. For instance: you live on an overcrowded planet. Humans have the ability to travel faster than light, to terraform other worlds. If you had asked me a hundred years ago, I’d have said you would be halfway across the galaxy by now.”
“But it would be silly just to expand recklessly! Surely it’s common sense to take things slowly.”
“Is it? It only seems common sense to you because you grew up with it. One hundred years ago and people would have thought differently. I’m smiling at you.”
The robot’s head was a grey blur. There was no reading the emotions on its face. No wonder it kept telling Herb how it felt.
“You don’t need to attach emoticons to everything you say,” he muttered petulantly. “I can tell what you mean by the tone of your voice.”
“Sorry.”
To his own surprise, Herb suddenly smiled. There was something about the robot Constantine personality that he connected with. It sounded ridiculous, he knew. What could a young man who had spent the last few years of his life shunning other human contact possibly have in common with this robot?
Something occurred to Herb.
“You’ve got a fractal skin, haven’t you? I thought they were just a rumor.”
“Oh, no, they’re real,” said Constantine. “The EA is just keeping them to itself for the moment. I’m smiling enigmatically. Oops. Sorry. Needn’t have said that.”
They both laughed.
The sun was rising into the blue sky again. Herb pulled on the jumpsuit and felt cool and comfortable for the first time in days. He slipped his feet into the slippers. Though the soles were thin, they felt remarkably comfortable on the grey rock. He wondered how they managed to stop the gravel digging into the soles of his feet. Some sort of layered memory plastic, one level rising up to cushion his foot the other falling to press against the ground? He stamped his feet once or twice, experimentally.
“This feels great!” he said.
“Good. We have some walking to do before we get to the site of the colony. I reckon about three hours.”
Herb felt a sudden attack of nerves. “I’m not sure I’m up to this,” he said. “What if I can’t do it?”
“Would you have ever believed yourself capable of what you’ve done these past few days? Come on. The Watcher has had you marked down for this since childhood, just like the rest of us. You, me, even the AI from the colony ship that became the guiding force behind the Enemy Domain.”