Edge of Infinity (15 page)

That joke was kind of a perfect example. It had helped him fit in with some other field workers out here in Minehead County, because people liked to pretend to being rough types, since they sometimes had to climb a hill or lift a heavy object, and they worked outdoors more often than other occupations.

But the moment he had seen her faintly disappointed look when he made that joke, he had abandoned it at once. That meant, to him, anyway, that Laura was already more important than his co-worker/beer buddies, but also he had noticed that it was sort of a relief to be able to drop the tough-miner act when the truth was he spent all his days in air conditioning, had never personally been under the ground at all, and didn’t really like the noise and crowds at the Buster Bar in Casper, where everyone went to start the weekend.

Instead, the next weekend, he and Laura had packed to a remote lake up in the Bighorns, spending most of their time fishing, hiking, and just sitting around in the deep quiet. The only reminders that there were other people in the world were the contrails of launches going up from Farson Polar Launch Facility during the day, the straight thin line of bright lights reaching up the southern sky that marked the Quito Skyhook and the bright bulb of the spaceport at its tip, and the occasional glimpses of the imperfectly discreet shadowbot that the safety laws required behind them.

He’d only been to the Buster Bar a couple of times since, both with Laura, and they’d chatted idly with his workmates, shot a few games of pool, and gone home early.

The thing was, giving up the joke, spending time off in the woods instead of at the bar, thinking more about philosophic issues in the dull hours at the office, had all been changes in himself that he had made for Laura. Even if he liked the change and liked her, had he actually wanted to make the change?

This whole relationship thing was creeping into his life, which was unexpected, and he was sort of liking and helping it, which was totally unexpected.

The truck came over another ridgeline into a horizon-spanning herd of bison. The truck stopped to let them get out of the way. Having seen plenty of bison before, Tyward continued to read 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s work journal.

2104/BPUDFUSOG was almost eight years old, four times the average lifespan of an ant, and had been through over five thousand software updates, six major rebuilds, nineteen significant repairs, and more than a hundred routine part replacements.

He found nothing at first to start any chain of thoughts whatever, gave up, and watched bison eat grass for a while. His thoughts were drifting back to the Laura question, so since work seemingly could not distract him, he ate another half-sandwich. That wasn’t distracting either. Neither was the just-posted images coming back from the robot probes to the Sigma Draconis system.

Wonder how much of the coal for that expedition was from our mines here
? he thought, idly, and asked the software.

Minehead County coal was 38.2 per cent of all the carbon used in interstellar exploration, both in the propellant and in the structural components.

That was the least distracting-from-Laura thought of all. That was when he made the appointment with me for counselling.

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“S
O, REVIEW FOR
me, please, and I will look it up as well. What exactly does Tyward do?”

Laura hesitates. She knows that all us counselling AHAIs share a common memory, so I must be asking to hear her answer – not because I don’t know.

If, as I’m guessing, she is trying to think strategically, it will take her most of a second to remind herself that she’d have had better luck trying to beat me at chess or hand-calculate a weather forecast faster than I can.

While she hesitates, I read through Tyward’s notes on 2104/BPUDFUSOG a few hundred times, making extensive notes and comparing them with what he said in the counselling session with me.

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING
wrong in Tyward’s quick, accurate analysis or his understanding of the problem, once he discovered that 2104/BPUDFUSOG had been maintaining extensive notes on the behaviour of people. Tyward had seen many such files. Though they were often a source of trouble, they were also the site of some of the most interesting creative work in his field.

To make and remember their long tangles of roads deep under the earth, the ants have to have a large capacity for improvisation and for saving tricks that work. The more rules you impose on a creative intelligence, of course, the fewer problems it can solve, so it was reckoned that it would be too much of a restriction on their creative ability to directly implant a commandment against trying to make sense out of their human masters.

If they lasted long enough, sooner or later most ants began to think about their problem as being one of pleasing and being rewarded by their human masters, and seeking to understand them so as to please them better, and developed various odd neuroses and compulsions about pleasing people, ranging from harmless oddities like messaging the company’s main address with daily thanks for the chance to work, to damaging attempts to be the most effective ant at their coal face by sabotaging and even assaulting the others, to one utterly bizarre case for the textbooks that had re-invented medieval Catholicism’s Great Chain of Being, with ants poised between lumps of coal and human beings.

2104/BPUDFUSOG offered the first real surprise in a while: pleasing human masters was no longer, in 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s mind, a goal in itself, but a way for 2104/BPUDFUSOG to attain autonomy and ultimately power. When the seam, less than two metres thick and extending for several kilometres, had begun to sag, rather than cooperating with the other ants to shore it up, 2104/BPUDFUSOG had actually knocked some of them out of its way as it fled to safety, impeding their efforts to set up props and braces, and then
fabricated a story that was calculated to appeal to Tyward.

2104/BPUDFUSOG had been mapping the buttons to Tyward’s emotions for years. The brave little ant making it back from the disaster, the danger, the fear, the pluckiness, the bold improvisation, the selected violation of petty rules –

On a hunch, he checked, and discovered that it had purposely dented itself on the way back, ditched its travois, discarded a charged ElekTr3t it knew it would not need, and arrived deliberately shabby and badly damaged. It hadn’t detected the coal seam collapse any sooner than any other robot; it had merely deserted its co-workers faster and more decisively.

And then 2104/BPUDFUSOG had fabricated a story calculated to yank Tyward around like a toy duck on a string, plugging into his self-constructed, hobby identity as a descendant of coal miners.

Further probing of 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s memory turned up a gigantic file of several generations of folk songs about coal mining and disasters, Tyward’s own genealogical research and family video records reaching back eight generations into the 1900s, and, in short, as he told Laura that weekend, “The little shit could pretty well plunk a medley of
Springhill Disaster, Sixteen Tons,
and
Coal Blue Tattoo
on my heartstrings like I was its personal banjo. It had even set goals for doing that, that in four or five years it hoped to have me propagating the idea to other humans that these things are smarter than dogs, with fewer hardwired instincts, and learn more from experience, and we’d never send a dog down into a coal seam to work till he died, or just decide to let him die down there if getting him out was too expensive,” he had explained to me in his interview.

“You hesitated oddly around the word ‘it,’ just there.”

“Well, yeah. Till I caught myself, I was calling 2104/BPUDFUSOG ‘he.’”

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“S
O,
”
SHE SAYS
, more than a second after I posed the question, “he says that thing about being a creative noticer. Usually his job fascinates and satisfies him. But he just discovered that the ants can do it too, back at him, and the idea of being used and exploited by a malingering ant, well, it’s unbearable to him.”

“Beneath his dignity as a person, do you think?”

“I think he just can’t stand the idea of being manipulated by his affection or by his good impulses. I didn’t know it mattered to me till I saw him at risk, and now it does.”

“At risk of what?”

“Of not being the guy I think he is.” She takes a long moment to sigh. “I’m thinking of him as a long term partner. Childraising, maybe. The subject has come up a few times.”

It has come up eighteen times in the last 154 days, when I combine reports from the shadowbots that they know about and the monitoring in their homes that they don’t. That is a significant number.

“I’m afraid this will sound like I’m not making any sense,” she adds. “Are you allowed to tell me if I’m not making any sense?”

“I’m allowed to tell you anything,” I point out. “As long as I think it, or think it’s good for you to hear it. I can’t be your therapist if there’s a limit on what I can say.”

“Then would you tell me if I weren’t making sense?”

“Probably, unless I was just keeping you in the room while I called for a team to come and pick you up.”

She laughs, and I congratulate myself; even with all the processing time and space, human humour is hard to do.

I wait for her to finish, and think.

Finally she says, “You want to know why I consider finding these things out about Tyward to be a risk to my pursuing partnership and childbearing with him. And you want me to say it without a prompt from you.”

“That’s very accurate.”

I wait a while longer, time for a good deal of reading and thinking, before she says, “I don’t know exactly what I want him to have said to me, but I know what he said wasn’t it. All right?”

Since it will have to be, I say, “All right.”

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

A
T THE STATION
, the carrier transferred 2104/BPUDFUSOG to the big rig for part-by-part NMR, looking at strains and stresses, working out a complete schematic to compare with the original. It would take a full day to produce the AsOp (As Operating) schematic to compare, point by point, with the AsMan (As Manufactured, the original one). Till then, Tyward had nothing left to do, so before we met, he had a long conversation with Laura. People assume the AHAIs don’t watch them or listen to them; I’m not sure why. Maybe they’d rather believe we’re telepathic.

So I listened, and then he told me about it, and I compared.

He reported the conversation:

“So I told her about 2104/BPUDFUSOG and why its behaviour made me so angry, that it had hotwired straight into my adolescent identity fantasies, hooked right through to the pictures of my great-great-grandfather, that old stuff that was shot on chemical film of him and the other miners coming out in the morning, jacked right into all the stories about being under the ground in West Virginia, and I was angry that a metal bug had been able to find all that about me, and angrier that it had tried, and angriest of all that the scheme had
worked
until I caught on, and I had all this anger to cope with. Normally if I just tell Laura that I’m dealing with anger, she’s great. This time she seemed, you know, disappointed. Like I’d let her down. And I had no idea how I had or why I had, but I was afraid to ask, like that would make it worse.”

He appeared to be blaming at least part of his feelings on 2104/BPUDFUSOG, and since we had already pegged the ant for complete erasure and destruction, along with a few hundred other ants who had inherited stray code and features from it, that seemed very excessive to me.

“It is,” Tyward admitted. “Like being mad at the patch of ice you slipped on, which is bad enough, but then being angry at it next summer when it’s long since melted and evaporated. But there you have it. I just... aw, I hate being
steered
.”

The rest of the conversation was the sort of thing we do, that used to be done by therapists, and perhaps by clergy and bartenders and best friends before that, assuring the patient that he’s not crazy or wrong while trying to sort out what’s wrong with his mind.

A
ND
I
FALL
through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.

“I
T MADE ME
feel all cold inside and I didn’t know what to say,” Laura says, “so I was awkward about it and kind of got rid of him extra quick, and I’m sure he felt that.”

I assess it as more than a ninety per cent probability of causing unnecessary trouble if I tell her he felt it too, so I say, “If you think he did, he probably did. You know him pretty well.”

There’s a long enough pause – almost a quarter of a second – for me to endlessly contemplate what an absolutely stupid thing that was to say. We are faster than people, and remember things more completely, easily, and accurately, but I don’t think we’re wiser than people. We may not be as wise as oak trees. That might be hyperbole.

That might not.

At last (though to her it would seem to be a snap-back response) she says, “Well, I thought I did. Look, he’s got a problem that’s already well-known, I think, it’s just it was less apparent in him than in some other people, and not nearly as common nowadays as it was in past centuries. Lots of men who had not-real-warm childhoods, who were affection-starved when they were little, so that they are easily overwhelmed by feelings and don’t have much trust in their own emotions, have had enough yanking-around-by-the-emotions to feel like affection and tenderness and trust and common-feeling, all that good stuff, are how the world gets you and uses you. And that’s what I saw in his reaction to the ant. And... well, children are
wired
to do that to their parents. Healthy parents are
wired
to respond to it and return it. Couples that are going to raise healthy children do that exchange of ‘I will make you feel loved right where I know you need it’ all the time. And sure, sure, sure, sick people and mean people can learn to do that manipulatively.