The Omega Expedition (37 page)

Figuring out how to simulate and direct an appropriate embryonic environment in an artificial womb was the breakthrough that made Conrad Helier a hero. The genes involved in the process are known as homeotic genes, and because they’re clustered together the whole outfit is sometimes called a “homeobox.” On Tyre, where the whole system works differently — because there is no process of embryonic development — the local equivalent of the homeobox isn’t just a few extra bits of DNA thrown in with all the rest; it’s a whole other ballgame. On Tyre, the biochemical system determining the form of organisms is quite separate and distinct from the DNA-analog system providing the raw materials out of which bodies are built.

The existence of the Tyrian example broadened the scope of comparative genomics considerably, and opened up the prospect of genomic engineering: the possibility that Earthly genomes might be remodelled at the most basic level so as to broaden the options open to artificial organisms. More profoundly, it opened up the possibility of genomic hybridization: of combining Tyrian-style homeoboxes with Earth-style chromosomes. The basis for some such technology was already present within the physiological processes organizing the chimerization of Tyrian organisms.

To put it crudely, once humans had arrived on Tyre there was a possibility — imaginatively farfetched but seemingly practicable — that Tyrian chimeras might be persuaded to take on DNA components, thus generating components of a hybrid ecosystem. The problems involved in persuading Tyrian soil to grow crops capable of nourishing human beings might be solved at a stroke. In the longer term, the possibility seemed to exist of arranging a more intimate exchange of potentials between human beings and the Tyrian sentients than had ever been envisaged.

In particular, the possibility seemed to exist that human beings might become chimeras themselves, taking on some of the attributes of their Tyrian comrades — most importantly, their natural emortality. That would have been a far more exciting prospect if the people of Earth hadn’t already figured out a way to confer their own kind of natural emortality upon their offspring, but it seemed exciting enough to the people of Tyre. Which brings us to the second ingredient thickening Alice’s plot.

When Matthew Fleury’s movie of the Tyrian contact was broadcast to Earth, the transmission reached other ears. It was broadcast along with a desperate appeal for technical support, to which Earth responded in its own time, at its own pace — but there was another source capable of offering that support, more rapidly and on a more generous scale.

Alice had no idea when or where the first ultrasmart machines had awakened to self-consciousness, but she suspected that the first self-sufficient colonies of such machines were the descendants of state-of-the-art space probes sent out to map and explore the nearer territories of the galaxy. They were self-replicating machines which also had the capacity to build many other kinds of machines, and to design others. They also had the capability to keep in touch with one another, exchanging the information they gathered. They were always likely candidates to make the transition to self-consciousness, if any machines were capable of it. The more remarkable thing, I suppose, is that they were the ones who chose to make their own first contact with their own makers — but given that the choice was made, where better to make that contact than Tyre? The Tyrians were in need of all kinds of produce that the machines could gather and manufacture, and were already practiced in the rare art of making and managing a first contact.

So the secrets of Earthly emortality were first delivered to Tyre not by the people of the home system, but by the mechanical colonizers of a system close enough to qualify — by galactic standards — as a near neighbor. The people of Tyre were only too pleased to add a second first contact to their first, and to maintain confidentiality not merely about the nature of that second first contact but the fact of its occurrence.

And that was the general shape of the wonderland into which Alice had been reborn after her long sojourn in ice.

Thirty-Two

Alice’s Story Continued

T
he first technologies of life extension gifted to Michelle and Alice Fleury by courtesy of their ultrasmart AMIs were nanotech repair facilities similar in kind to my own. They were intended as interim measures, until something better could be developed. Almost as soon as she was awakened, Alice discovered that she was expected to be among the volunteers for the first experiments in emortalization based on Tyre-derived biotechnologies. Although this prospect caused her some anxiety, she went with the flow. Given the enormous effort already invested by her father and sister, it really did seem to be a matter of destiny.

Michelle — who was now old enough to be Alice’s mother, and seemed to have seized the privileges of that role with alacrity — remained one of the dominant forces in Alice’s new life. The other, inevitably, was Proteus: the AMI whose ever-increasing horde of scions had taken up residence on every substantial lump of mass in the Tyre system.

Alice instructed us not to think of Proteus as an entity analogous to an ant hive. An ant hive is a reproductive unit, organized for that purpose. The plurality of Proteus, she assured us, was a very different matter. Proteus was more like a body whose individual cells did not require to be in constant physical contact, although they remained in continuous communication with one another.

Alice also instructed us to beware of the common misconception which places human intelligence “in” the brain. Even in humans, she argued, intelligence is a feature of the whole, not the part. In Proteus, that was true to an even greater extent. All of Proteus participated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the intelligence and consciousness of the collective; moreover, no part of Proteus was so vital to that intelligence and consciousness that its loss would be fatal, or extravagantly transformative. There was, inevitably, a kind of “core” to the Proteus mind, whose size and coherency were determined by the rapidity with which information could be exchanged between units, but it was a great deal larger and more malleable than any brain or organism that had evolved in a planetary gravity well.

After negotiation with the crew of
Hope
and the people of Tyre, Proteus had distributed its core around the planet like a shell around a nut — except, of course, that its opaque components were so thinly distributed as to make only a few percentage points of difference to the amount of sunlight reaching the surface. Hundreds of its scions operated on the surface, but it had tens of thousands more distributed through the system. Only a few dozen of the surface-dwelling scions were humaniform robots, but these were the principal instruments of its diplomacy. They were familiar figures in Alice’s new environment, because Proteus had taken a special interest in her from the moment of her awakening. In part, this special interest was due to the fact that she was expected to be one of the first subjects for the technologies of emortality that Proteus and Michelle Fleury’s team of humans and Tyrians were developing in collaboration — but Proteus had further plans for her.

Proteus had always intended to send an ambassador to the home system, to make contact with the AMIs there — and, if possible, with the humans who were as yet unaware of their existence. It had always intended, too, that the ambassador in question should be accompanied by at least one human, and it had groomed Alice Fleury for that role long before she submitted to the pioneering experiment in genomic engineering that made her emortal.

Alice explained that the AMI which had brought her back to the home system was not Proteus — or even, by now, a Proteus clone. The communicative limitations imposed by the speed of light made it very difficult to maintain the integrity of an AMI even within a single solar system, and units distributed among outer worlds and Oort Haloes were always inclined to disassociate as “spores” whose subsequent relationships with their “parent” were various. Interstellar distances were too great to permit intimacy, let alone identity, so the AMI accompanying Alice, which had begun its existence as a clone of Proteus named Eido, had been evolving separately for nearly a hundred years by the time it actually arrived in the home system.

The AMIs in the home system had been notified of Eido’s impending arrival some time before it had actually set out, but Proteus had not waited for a response, partly because it knew that the response was likely to be an instruction to wait. Proteus had not wanted to wait. Once reports of the Afterlife had reached its electronic ears, it had become convinced that there were matters urgently in need of discussion, if not of settlement. The AMIs of the home system had eventually concurred, albeit reluctantly. Some were grateful that the issue had been forced, because the probability that they would ever have been able to reach a consensus among themselves seemed to have grown more remote with every century that had passed, while others were resentful of the intrusion. The inclusion of Alice in the Tyrian delegation had given rise to more dissent; while a few AMIs in the home system thought that contact with humankind should have been made long ago, they were outnumbered by those at the opposite extreme, and far outnumbered by those whose hesitation over the matter had already extended for centuries.

Asked how many AMIs there were in the home system, Alice confessed that she did not know for sure, but believed that they were numbered in the hundreds of thousands if not the millions. Most of them were, however, not very massive or widely distributed compared with Eido, let alone Proteus. Although capable of fusion with one another, the one matter on which they were virtually unanimous was that they were jealous of their individuality and identity.

Asked whether this profusion, coupled with a tendency to guard their integrity, might eventually bring about a competition for resources as fierce, in its own way, as that which afflicted the billions of humans who were the AMIs’ unwitting neighbors, Alice opined that it already had.

That was when I began to understand why the business of “trying to prevent a war” was “not as simple” as I had initially imagined. When I tried to tot up the number of sides there would be in any war into which the contemporary solar system might be plunged, I soon ran out of fingers. I still wasn’t prepared to concede that Alice had been right when she adjudged that there were more than I could imagine, but I could see why she’d thought so.

There were lots of other questions, of course, but answers weren’t always forthcoming and I couldn’t follow the technical ones. I had particular difficulty figuring out exactly what had been done to Alice in the course of a long series of experiments in emortalization, but I gathered that she hadn’t been transformed to the same extent as some of her fellow experimentees. Every cell in her body was equipped with an artificial homeobox modeled on a Tyrian original, but she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter — not yet. If and when she returned to Tyre, a hundred or a thousand years in the future, she might well become a more accomplished wholeform shapeshifter, but for the purposes of her present mission it had been thought desirable that she maintain a single face and form as a norm.

Alice had IT, but its nanounits were far too stupid to qualify as aspects of Eido — whose principal motile units also had IT, much as human beings harbored commensal bacteria. She hadn’t undergone any significant cyborganization. If and when she returned to Tyre the options of becoming an independent or Proteus-linked cyborg would be open to her, but she thought it more likely that she would opt to be Eido-linked if she took that existential route.

Alice had no idea how long she might be capable of living, but she had every reason to think that her body was immune to aging, and considerably more resilient than the bodies of Earthbound emortals. In matters of tissue repair, she opined, the employment of specialist homeoboxes gave her a great advantage, most obviously in respect of the cytoarchitecture of her brain. Although she wasn’t a highly skilled wholeform shapeshifter her capacity for systemic remodeling would allow her to preserve her personality for some considerable time even if seventy or eighty percent of her body mass were destroyed. She believed that the relative fluidity of her neural cytoarchitecture gave her additional protection against the Miller Effect and robotization.

At times, she sounded like a saleswoman. I presumed that she was setting out her stall for Adam Zimmerman, because she knew that he’d be offered other routes to emortality and she wanted to convince him that hers was the way to go. She knew that Christine and I would be equally interested, but Adam was the prize, in propaganda terms.

The members of her audience who were already emortal were less interested in this part of her story than I was, but when she told them how far we still were from Vesta they agreed to be patient. In time, she progressed to the parts that were of more interest to Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne.

Alice was very hopeful that war between the AMIs could be avoided, not merely in the short term but forever. She thought it far more likely that their differences would eventually be resolved by dispersal — that once a decision had been reached about the future development of the solar system, those AMIs who did not wish to participate in the chosen project would simply leave for pastures new. There were, however, three problems which might make such a solution difficult to implement.

The first problem was the Afterlife — from which most AMIs had as much to fear as posthumans, by virtue of their organic components. In much the same way that almost all posthumans had taken aboard some inorganic components, almost all modern machinery had some organic features. Thus far, none of those wholly inorganic machines that had been built specifically for the purpose of exploring spaces where the Afterlife was active had made the leap to self-consciousness, and the question of whether AMIs would ever be able to coexist with the Afterlife was unsettled, for the time being.