Rifters 2 - Maelstrom (56 page)

Why did I choose something as mind-bogglingly common as sulfur for a bottleneck element? I was trying to make a point about carrying capacity in ecological systems: life is greedy, and if you give it long enough,
anything
can become limiting. Besides, any primitive microbe from a hydrothermal environment
is
likely to have a serious sulfur-dependency problem. (The specialists in the audience will notice that I carefully avoided making ßehemoth an obligate sulfur-reducer; I actually envision the little mother's metabolism as being more akin to that of the giant sulfide-consuming microbes reported by Schulz
et al.
¹⁸
.)

Bottom line, most of ßehemoth's traits have real-world precedents. Whether evolution could actually pack all those attributes into a package 250 nanometers across is a whole different issue, of course. Still. Look at all the stuff that fits into Batman's utility belt.

Guilt Trip:

The idea of behavior-modification technology is old stuff in fiction; Burgess'
A Clockwork Orange
is an obvious example. In
Maelstrom
I've taken a stab at rediscovering that wheel by explicitly tweaking genes and neurochemistry.

As far as I know, the existence of the "Minsky receptors" that Alice Jovellanos mentions has yet to be confirmed. Something like them, however, must be seated in the frontal cortex where human conscience and morality (such as they are) reside
^19
,
20
. At the very least, certain types of frontal-lobe damage have a tendency to turn good God-fearing folk into sociopaths.

I imagine that Ken Lubin's murder reflex is wired into the neural circuitry described by R. Davidson
et al.
²¹
The conceit of using tweaked parasite genes to program such behaviour came to me when I was teaching an undergraduate course in animal ecology. The parasites mentioned in
Maelstrom
are real, and have a lot of company
^22
,
23
. One fly-eating fungus hijacks its victim's nervous system just before killing it, forcing it to fly to an upside-down perch and orient its abdomen at an optimum angle for spore disperal. An ant-fluke called
Dicrocoelium
takes control of its host each night, riding it to the top of a convenient stalk of grass and freezing it there until morning in hopes that some other hapless host will eat it. And yes,
Toxoplasma
really does cause rats to lose their fear of cats (and in some cases, actually to be
attracted
to the smell of cat urine). It is also found in about half the members of
our
species. This stuff is straight out of
The Puppet Masters
, folks. There's even a substantial amount of evidence to suggest that sex itself evolved primarily as a countermeasure against parasite attacks
²⁴
.

Anemone/Maelstrom

First, the Wilderness. The Internet is already more like a wildlife habitat than you might expect. Internet "storms" were first described in 1997
²⁵
, which makes them old news: nowadays you can link to "weather maps" of Internet meteorology
²⁶
, updated several times daily. (Once again, my far-flung futuristic foresight has proven wonderfully adept at predicting the past. The last time was when
Starfish
predicted submarine ecotours to deep-sea rifts within fifty years, only to have such tours advertised in the real world by 1999.)

Those of you who have taken an undergraduate physiology course may remember the
power law
. It's a surface-area-to-volume relationship that governs living systems from whole food webs right down to the capillaries of shrews—essentially a pattern typical of self-organizing systems (i.e., biological) systems. As it turns out, the World Wide Web itself appears to be evolving in concordance with this law
²⁷
. Something to think about…

Second, the Wildlife. These days it's hardly necessary to cite references on the subject of "artificial life": a web search on the phrase (or on "cellular automata") will demonstrate how massively the field has exploded over the past ten years. That subset of e-life which goes by the name "Anemone" is admittedly a bit more speculative, and based upon two premises. The first is that simple systems, in aggregate, display emergent behaviors beyond the capability of their individual parts. This is pretty much self-evident within a body—who'd deny that a brain is smarter than an individual neuron, for example?—but the principal extends even to aggregations of completely
unconnected
individuals. A school of fish or a flock of birds can be thought of, in effect, as a diffuse neural net
^28
,
29
.

A related premise is that lineages with genetically-determined behavior would be able to pass a Turing test if they evolved fast enough. This won't be hard to swallow for anyone familiar with how sophisticated such behaviour can be; we do, after all, live in a world where ants practice animal husbandry, birds follow orthodome routes to navigate halfway around the world, and honeybees convey sophisticated travel instructions by wiggling their asses at each other. Skeptics might want to read any of E. O. Wilson's books on sociobiology, or an old Scientific American article by John Holland
³⁰
. It's way out of date, but it clearly conveys the principals behind genetic algorithms.

Finally, anyone who treats the phrase "group selection" as an obscenity (I admit they're right, most of the time) might first want to check out D.S. Wilson's review article of the subject in
Skeptic
³¹

Smart Gels

Research on the construction of thinking meat has proceeded apace since
Starfish
came out. Recent research is thumbnailed in "Neurons and silicon get intimate", by Robert "no-not-
that
-Robert" Service
³²
. More conventional neural nets are literally in the driver's seat: Carnegie Mellon's ALVINN program (which I mentioned briefly in the references to
Starfish
) has now moved moved onto the highway, where neural nets have autonomously taken ninety-mile jaunts on public highways, at speeds up to 70mph. They learned to drive by watching people at the same task. It took them less than five minutes.

We still can’t be sure exactly what neural nets actually learn when we train them. Paradigm cock-ups of the sort that made my "head cheeses" betray their masters have happened in real life. One infamous military neural net taught itself to distinguish between various ambient light conditions, while all along its humans thought they were teaching it to recognize tanks
³³
.

Ganzfeld Interrogation

Back in
Starfish
I cited Roger Penrose's quantum-consciousness theory to justify the rudimentary psi-powers of the rifters. Here in
Maelstrom
Lubin uses the same trick to interrogate Achilles Desjardins. In the interest of full disclosure I should admit that Penrose's theory has come under serious attack from a guy called Tegmark
³⁴
: the quantum-mind afficionados have rallied
³⁵
, but things may be looking a bit iffier on the quantum-consciousness front these days. What can you do.

Haunted by Happiness

Lenie Clarke's "hallucinations" are loosely based on
Bonnet's Syndrome
³⁶
, a malady which sometimes results from macular degeneration. The brain really does compensate for loss of visual input by inserting images from visual memory into the gaps. In real life, Bonnet's Syndrome tends to occur in elderly patients, and is frequently associated with bereavement; the hallucinations are more-or-less seamlessly incorporated into the visual environment (as opposed to the picture-in-picture format Lenie experienced).

Finally…

If you want a more luminous taste of all this stuff, check out my Rifter website. It's at www.rifters.com

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