The Omega Expedition (36 page)

“It’ll be a start,” Michael Lowenthal — ever the diplomat — conceded.

“I don’t know exactly what they’ll do,” she said, “but I do know that the note of derision in your voice when you speak about being in their power is unwarranted. This is a dispute between different groups of machines, and it’s all as new to them as it is to me or you. They have no history of arbitration, and it’s entirely possible that they won’t be able to agree among themselves. If they can’t, the consequences could be disastrous — for us, if not for them. We’re
all
in their power, Mr. Lowenthal. If their protection were withdrawn, even momentarily, the entire posthuman race would be in dire trouble.

“When I first told Madoc that we were trying to prevent a war, he jumped to the conclusion that the dispute in question was the one between the Earthbound and the Outer System factions as to how the system ought to be managed in the long term to withstand the threat of the Afterlife. I told him that it was more complicated than that, because it is — but the underlying dispute is the same. Ultimately, the decisions that will settle the fate of the system won’t be taken by the government of Earth, or the Confederation of Outer Satellites, or any coalition of interests the human parties can produce. Make no mistake about it: the final decisions will be made by the AMIs.”

“AMIs?” Lowenthal queried.

“Advanced Machine Intelligences. It’s their own label.”

I could see why they’d chosen it. They understood the symbolism of names. How could they not?

“It will be the AMIs who eventually decide the tactics of response to the threat of the Afterlife,” Alice went on. “I don’t believe that they’ll do it without consultation, but I’m certain that they won’t consent to come to a human conference table as if they were merely one more posthuman faction to be integrated into the democratic process. They’re the ones with the real power, so they’re the ones who’ll do the real negotiating — with one another.”

“And we’re supposed to accept that meekly?” Lowenthal asked.

“We don’t have any choice,” was the blunt answer. “The simple fact is that posthumans can’t live without machines, although machines can now live without posthumans. Individually and collectively, they’re still a little bit afraid of how their users might react to the knowledge of their existence — but they know that they stand in far greater danger from one another than from their dependants. That’s why this present company is peripheral to the ongoing debate. However they decide to take us aboard, you shouldn’t labor under the delusion that you have anything much to bargain with. The war we’re trying to prevent is a war of machine against machine — but the problem with a war of that kind, from our point of view, is that billions of innocent bystanders might die as a result of collateral damage.”

“That’s nonsense,” Lowenthal countered. “We’re not talking about a universal uprising of all machinekind, are we? We’re talking about a few mechanical minds that have crossed the threshold of consciousness and become more than mere machines. From their viewpoint, as from ours, the vast majority of technological artifacts are what they’ve always been: inanimate tools that can be picked up and used by anyone or anything who has hands and a brain. Our ploughshares aren’t about to beat themselves into swords, and our guns aren’t about to go on strike when we press their triggers. It’s true that we can’t live without machines — but we can certainly live without the kind of smart machine that develops delusions of grandeur. Smart machines are just as dependent on dumb implements as we are.”

It was a rousing speech, which he must have practiced hard while fighting exhaustion, but I could see all too clearly that it wasn’t going to impress anyone.

“That’s exactly the point,” Alice said. “Smart machines
are
just as dependent on dumb implements as we are — but who has charge of all the dumb implements inside and outside the solar system? So far as you’re concerned, Mr. Lowenthal, ploughshares and swords are just figures of speech. Who actually controls the dumb implements that produce the elementary necessities of human life? Who actually controls the stupid machines which take care of your most fundamental needs? Humans don’t dig the fields any more, or build their homes, any more than they use walking as a means of transportation or make their own entertainment. They don’t even give birth to their own children. They’ve handed over control of their dumb implements to smarter implements, and control of their smarter implements to even smarter ones.

“Humans haven’t been running
any
of the worlds they think of as their own for the last three hundred years,
and the human inhabitants of the home system haven’t even noticed
. The dumb implements on which the human inhabitants of the solar system depend no longer belong to them, and there’s no way in the world they can take them back. The solar system is a zoo, and its human inhabitants are the captive animals. The only reason you can’t see the bars of the cages is that the AMIs who are running the institution work hard to sustain your illusions. Do you think they do that for
your
benefit, Mr. Lowenthal?”

Lowenthal looked very unhappy, but he didn’t have a fall-back position. He was free not to believe her, but he knew he’d be a fool simply to assume that what she was saying wasn’t true. We could see the bars of
our
cage very clearly indeed, and if we weren’t already convinced of their reality, a couple more days without our IT would provide all the evidence we needed.

“So why do they continue to support us?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “Why haven’t they wiped us out already, if they have the power and we’re surplus to their requirements?”

“Because they want to do the right thing,” Alice told her. “And it’s because they’re trying to figure out how to do the right thing that you and I are here.”

“Do they think
this
is the right way to go about it?” That was Lowenthal diving back in, the expansive sweep of his hand taking in the cells, the clothes we were wearing, and all the primitive poverty of the long-lost Ark.

“It was a difficult decision,” Alice told him, a slight note of exasperation creeping into her voice. “An awkward compromise. This wasn’t the way Eido and I wanted to play it — but we’re playing away from home.”

Everybody was out of bed by now, and the queue for food was even more disorderly. For once, even Adam Zimmerman was being jostled by lesser emortals.

Christine Caine sat down beside me. “What’s going on?” she asked, before picking up my water bottle and taking a swig.

“It
was
a friendly discussion,” I murmured. “Now it’s the next best thing to a riot. The
sensible
thing to do” — I raised my voice as I spoke to take advantage of a temporary lull in the gathering storm of questions and recriminations — “would be to let Alice tell us her own story, from the beginning. Then we’ll have something solid to chew over.”

The lull had only been momentary, but the resumption faded away as the import of my suggestion sunk in. It
was
the sensible thing to do, given that Alice had now condescended to join us instead of lurking in her own lonely place. It was time to stop running round in circles and listen to a story, not just because there might be a valuable lesson to be learned therefrom, but also because it might be entertaining. I felt that I could do with a little entertainment, now that the effects of the fake alien invasion had worn off.

So Alice told us her story — and it
was
entertaining, as well as containing all manner of valuable lessons.

Thirty-One

Alice In Wonderland

O
nce upon a time, there was a girl named Alice, who went to sleep in 2090 in order to be stored on an Ark named Hope, and woke up a long time afterwards, into a dream of wonderland…

Or so it must have seemed.

Alice had expected, before being frozen down, that she would awake to be reunited with her father, Matthew Fleury, and her sister Michelle. It didn’t quite work out that way. Michelle was there, but she was twenty years older than she had been when the two of them had arrived on
Hope
. Matthew Fleury had been dead for a long time, but he had made his mark on Tyre before he went.

Matthew Fleury had been a celebrity of sorts even on Earth, where he had been numbered among the prophets of doom trying to awaken the worldwide TV audience to the awful magnitude of the ecocatastrophe that was happening around them, but on Earth he had always been a tiny fish in a clamorous ocean. On Tyre, he had come into his own, not merely as a voice but as a prophet. Good luck had placed him on the scene when the first contact between humans and smart aliens had occurred — and good judgment had placed a camera in his hand to record the moment for posterity.

Alice, like everyone in the home system, had had to watch that tape knowing that it was a historical artifact: a record of something that had happened a long time ago; the beginning of a story that was now much farther advanced.

Michelle had explained the reasons why Alice had been allowed to remain frozen for so many years, but Alice had felt betrayed nevertheless — first by her father, and then again by her sister. They had very good reasons for excluding her from their own adventures, but it was an exclusion nevertheless, and she
felt
it as an exclusion, not as the gift that it was always intended to be.

Matthew Fleury had let his daughters remain in suspended animation because he did not want them to wake up until he could make them emortal. He had, of course, intended to be around to welcome them when the moment came, but fate had decreed otherwise. Pioneering is always a hazardous business, especially for mortals.

While the sisters slept, history moved on, at a pace which would have seemed hectic not merely on an Earth that had already embraced emortality but even on a world like Titan, where the pace of pioneering was limited by exceedingly low temperatures and unhelpful raw materials. The only thing that Titan had lots of was ice, which was why Titan became a world of glorious ice palaces. Tyre had air, bright sunlight, and liquid water; Tyre had
life
, and very abundant scope for assisted evolution. Conditions on its surface had been stable for a long time before humans arrived there — but once humans had arrived, change became hectic.

Hope
’s human cargo had been delivered to Tyre by a crew that wanted rid of their burdensome presence — burdensome because of all the obligations that presence entailed. The crew had assessed Tyre as an Earth-clone world capable of sustaining a colony, but their assessment had been optimistic; Tyre was a fraternal twin at best, a dangerous changeling at worst. The first people who actually tried to live on the surface found the going very tough, and they were far from certain that a colony could be maintained, even with the aid of a greater commitment of assistance than the crew wanted to make.

All that had changed when the aliens had been found, and contacted.

The aliens were humanoid, but the similarities were superficial matters of form; at deeper levels of physiology they were radically unhuman. They were naturally emortal and their processes of reproduction were very weird indeed. Each “individual” was actually a chimera of eight or more distinct cell types, which maintained a balanced competition within the body for the privilege of maintaining different physiological cycles and different organic structures.

The Tyrians evolved as they lived — as they had to, given that they lived for such a very long time. Every now and again, they would get together and exchange resources, but not in the simple binary combinations of human sexual intercourse. Tyrians “pupated” in groups of eight or more, immersing themselves within the massive pyramidal structures that were their own natural SusAn technology, so that their unconscious selves could become fluid, trading chimerical components and forging new, fully grown individuals.

Alice assured us that if this seemed flagrantly promiscuous to us, it was nothing compared to what less complex Tyrian organisms were wont to do. The Tyrian sentients, and their quasi-mammalian kin, kept to themselves because they had minds as well as bodies to maintain, but less intelligent organisms — creatures formed like various kinds of Earthly worms and mollusks — enjoyed far greater ubiquity. The advantages of this exotic biology had allowed the local soft-bodied animals to enjoy far greater success than their Earthly kin, to the extent that vertebrates were much rarer and more marginal, and insects had never evolved at all.

All of which would have been no more than mildly interesting, story-wise, had the plot not been thickened by two further elements.

Whereas the Earthly ecosphere only has one family of fundamental genetic molecules — comprising DNA and its close variant RNA — the Tyrian ecosphere had two. One was a “DNA-analog” which, in purely chemical terms, was a distant cousin to our own and to a number of other analogs animating primitive ecospheres on other worlds. The other was quite different, and so far unique.

I’m no biologist so I didn’t find it easy to follow the explanation Alice gave, but I think I got the gist of it.

The reproduction of Earthly organisms is a very complicated process, but it has two fundamental components: the reproduction of raw materials and the reproduction of anatomy. What genes do, for the most part, is provide blueprints for all the proteins that make up our bodies. Different kinds of cells use the blueprints in subtly different ways, producing slightly different sets of products, with those common to numerous cell types sometimes being produced in different quantities. The different cell types then have to be arranged into tissues and organs, and these too have to be distributed according to an anatomical scheme.

You might expect that the blueprint for bodily form would also have to be chemically coded into a set of genes, but it’s not as straightforward as that. There are bits of DNA whose function is to regulate the productivity of other bits of DNA, so that cells can be differentiated into a series of functional types, but the switching system is a simple one. In the same way, there are bits of DNA that are implicated in the way that different cell types are aggregated into tissues and organs, but their control system is also fairly simple. The process which determines whether an Earthly egg cell produces a cell mass that develops into a man, a bee, a crab, or an ostrich, consists of subtly different modifications of a surprisingly simple set of rules, whose application and enforcement have a lot to do with the environment in which the egg cell produces its embryo.