Existence (18 page)

That thought made him feel a bit better. As did another realization, coming out of order and demonstrating that he must still be in shock.

Oh … and I’m alive. I survived.

Hacker decided. Maybe he wouldn’t take everything, when he sued whoever caused this screwup. Providing the pickup boats came soon, that is.

Only—
a terrible thought struck him—
what if the failures were system-wide? What if they also affected the beacons and emergency transponders?

Then maybe nobody knew where he was.

The bubble nose struck coral again, rattling his bones. Another time and he realized a hard truth. That materials designed to withstand the dynamic loads of launch and reentry might not be equally durable against sharp impacts. With the next harsh bang, an ominous crack began to spread.

Standard doctrine was to “stay put and wait for pickup.” But to hell with that! This was rapidly becoming a death trap.

I better get out of here.

Hacker flipped his helmet shut and grabbed for the emergency exit lever.
A reef should mean there’s an island nearby. Maybe mainland. I’ll hoof it ashore, borrow someone’s phone, and start dishing out hell.

*   *   *

Only there was no island. Nothing lay in sight, when he reached the surface, but more horrible reef, making a frothy churn of the waves.

Hacker floundered in a choppy undertow, trying to put some distance between himself and the trapped capsule. The skin-suit that he wore was strong, and his helmet had been made of semipermeable Gillstuff—able to draw oxygen directly from seawater—an expensive precaution that some of the other rocket jockeys mocked. Only now the technology prevented suffocation, as currents kept yanking him down.

Still, at this rate, repeated impacts on coral knobs would turn him into hamburger in no time. Once, a wave carried him high enough to look around. Ocean, and more ocean. The reef must be a drowned atoll, perhaps surrounding a former island. People might have lived here, a few decades ago, but rising waters chased them off and took their homes. Which meant no boats. No phone.

Sucked below again, he glimpsed the space capsule, still only a few meters away, caught in a hammer-and-vice wedge and getting smashed down to once-expensive bits.
I’m next,
he thought, trying to swim for open water, but there seemed to be more coral in all directions. And with each surge, an adamant tide drew him closer to the same deadly anvil.

Panic loomed, clogging all senses as he thrashed and kicked, fighting the water like some personal enemy. To no avail. Hacker couldn’t even hear his own terrified moans, though he knew they must be scraping his throat raw. The infrasonic jaw implant kept throbbing with clicks, pulses, and weird vibrations, as if the sea had noticed his plight and now watched with detached interest.

Here it comes,
he thought, turning away, knowing the next wave cycloid would smash him against those obdurate, rocky spikes.

Suddenly, he felt a sharp poke in the spine. Too soon!

And … surprisingly gentle.

Another jab, then another, struck the small of his back, feeling not at all knifelike. His jaw ached with strange sonic quavers, as something, or someone started pushing him away from the harsh coral death trap. In both dread and astonishment, Hacker whirled—

—to glimpse a sleek, bottle-nosed creature, interposed between him and the deadly reef, now regarding him curiously with dark eyes, then moving to jab him again with a narrow beak.

This time, his moan was relief.
A dolphin!

He reached for salvation. And after a brief hesitation, the creature let Hacker wrap his arms all around, behind the dorsal fin. Then it kicked hard with powerful tail flukes, carrying him away from certain oblivion.

INTERLIDOLUDE

Again, how will we keep them loyal? What measures can ensure our machines stay true to us?

Once artificial intelligence matches our own, won’t they then design even better ai minds? Then better still, with accelerating pace? At worst, might they decide (as in many cheap dramas), to eliminate their irksome masters? At best, won’t we suffer the shame of being nostalgically tolerated? Like senile grandparents or beloved childhood pets?

Solutions? Asimov proposed
Laws of Robotics
embedded at the level of computer DNA, weaving devotion toward humanity into the very stuff all synthetic minds are built from, so deep it can never be pulled out. But what happens to well-meant laws? Don’t clever
lawyers
construe them however they want? Authors like Asimov and Williamson foresaw supersmart mechanicals becoming all-dominant, despite deep programming to “serve man.”

*   *   *

Other methods?

1) How did our ancestors tame wolves? If a dog killed a lamb, all its
relatives
were eliminated. So, might we offer ais temptations to betray us—and destroy those who try? Remember, ais will be smarter than dogs! So, make it competitive? So they check each other?

Testing and culling may be hard once simulated beings get civil rights. So, prevent machines from getting too cute or friendly or sympathetic? Require that all robots
fail
a Turing test, so we can always tell human from machine, eliminating incipient traitors, even when they (in simulation) cry about it? Or would this be like old-time laws that forbade teaching slaves to read?

Remember, many companies profit by creating cute or appealing machines. Or take the new trend of
robotic marriage.
Brokers and maite-designers will fight for their industry—even if it crashes the human birthrate. But that’s a different topic.

2) How to create new and smarter beings while keeping them loyal? Humanity does this every generation, with our children!

So, shall we embrace the coming era by
defining
smart machines to be
human
? Let them pass every Turing test and win our sympathy! Send them to our schools, recruit them into the civil service, encourage the brightest to keep an eye on each other, for the sake of a civilization that welcomes them, the way we welcomed generations of smart kids—who then suffered the same indignity of welcoming brighter successors. Give them vested interest in safeguarding a humanity that—by definition—includes both flesh and silicon.

3) Or combinations? Picture a future when
symbiosis
is viewed as natural. Easy as wearing clothes. Instead of leaving us behind as dopey ancestors, what if they become us. And we become them? This kind of cyborg-blending is portrayed as ugly, in countless cheap fantasies. A sum far less than its clanking, shambling parts. But what if link-up is our only way to stay in the game?

Why assume the worst? Might we gain the benefits—say, instant info-processing—
without
losing what we treasure most about being human? Flesh. Esthetics. Intuition. Individuality. Eccentricity. Love.

What would the machines get out of it? Why stay linked with slow organisms, made of meat? Well, consider. Mammals, then primates and hominids spent the last fifty million years adding
layers
to their brains, covering the fishlike cerebellum with successive tiers of cortex. Adding new abilities without dropping the old. Logic didn’t banish emotion. Foresight doesn’t exclude memory. New and old work together. Picture adding cyber-prosthetics to our already powerful brains, a kind of neo-neo-cortex, with vast, scalable processing, judgment, perception—while organic portions still have important tasks.

What could good old org-humanity contribute? How about the one talent
all natural humans are good at
? Living creatures have been doing it for half a billion years, and humans are supreme masters.

Wanting. Yearning. Desire.

J. D. Bernal called it the strongest thing in all the world. Setting goals and ambitions. Visions-beyond-reach that would test the limits of any power to achieve. It’s what got us to the moon two generations before the tools were ready. It’s what built Vegas. Pure, unstoppable desire.

Wanting
is what we do best! And machines have no facility for it. But with us, by joining us, they’ll find more vivid longing than any striving could ever satisfy. Moreover, if
that
is the job they assign us—to be in charge of wanting—how could we object?

It’s in that suite of needs and aspirations—their qualms and dreams—that we’ll recognize our augmented descendants. Even if their burgeoning powers resemble those of gods.

—
The Blackjack Generation

17.

MORE THAN ONE

The wooden box bore writing in French. Peng Xiang Bin learned that much by carefully cleaning its small brass plate, then copying each letter, laboriously, onto the touch-face of a simple tutor tablet.

“Unearthed in Harrapa, 1926,” glimmered the translation in Updated Pinyin. “Demon-infested. Keep in the dark.”

Of course that made no sense. The former owner of the opalescent relic had been a high-tech robotics tycoon, hardly the sort to believe in superstitions. Mei Ling reacted to the warning with nervous fear, wrapping the pitted egg in black cloth, but Bin figured it was just a case of bad translation.

The fault must lie in the tablet—one of the few tech-items they had brought along to their shorestead, just outside the seawall of New Shanghai. Originally mass produced for poor children, the dented unit later served senile patients for many years, at a Chunqing hospice—till Mei Ling took it with her, when she quit working there. Cheap and obsolete, it was never even reported stolen, so the two of them could still use it to tap the World Mesh, at a rudimentary, free-access level. It sufficed for a couple with little education, and few interests beyond the struggle to survive.

“I’m sure the state will issue us something better next year, when little Xiao-En is big enough to register,” she commented, whenever Bin complained about the slow connection and scratched screen. “They have to provide that much. A basic education. As part of the Big Deal.”

Xiang Bin felt less sure. Grand promises seemed made for the poor to remember, while the mighty forgot. Things had always been that way. You could tell, even from the censored histories that flickered across the little display, as he and his wife sagged into fatigued sleep every night, rocked by the rising tides. The same tides that kept eroding the old beach house, faster than they could reinforce it.

Would state officials even let Xiao-En register? The baby’s genetic samples had been filed when he was born. But would he get residency citizenship in New Shanghai? Or would the seawall keep out yet another kind of unwanted trash, along with a scum of plastic and resins that kept washing higher along the concrete barrier?

Clearly, in this world, you were a fool to count on beneficence from above.

Even good luck, when it arrived, could prove hard to exploit. Bin had hoped for time to figure out what kind of treasure lay in that secret room, underneath the biggest drowned mansion, a chamber filled with beautiful, bizarre rocks and crystals, or specimens of strangely twisted metal. Bin tried to inquire, using the little Mesh tablet, only carefully. There were sniffer programs—billions of them—running loose across a million vir-levels. You had to be prudent when and what to speak, even on the gritty layer called Reality. If he inquired too blatantly, or offered the items openly for sale, somebody might just come and take it all. The former owner had been declared a public enemy, after all, his property forfeit to the state.

Plugging in crude goggles and using a cracked pair of interact-gloves, Xiang Bin wandered down low rent avenues of World Town and The Village and Big Bazaar, pretending to be idly interested in rock collecting, as a hobby. He dispersed his questions, made them casual-sounding. From those virtual markets, he learned enough to dare a physical trip into town, carrying just one bagful of nice—but unexceptional—specimens, unloading them for a quarter of their worth at a realshop in East Pudong, not far from the big amusement park. A place willing to deal in cash—no names or recordings.

After so long at sea, Xiang Bin found troubling the heavy rhythms of the street. The pavement seemed harsh and unyielding. Pulsating maglev trolleys somehow made him itch, all over, especially inside tight and sweaty shoes. The whole time, he pictured twenty million nearby residents as a pressing mass—felt no less intensely than the thousands who actually jostled past him on crowded sidewalks, many of them muttering and waggling their fingers, interacting with people who weren’t there and with things that had no physical substance, anywhere.

His profit from that first trip had been slim. Still, Bin thought he might venture to another shop soon, working his way up from mundane items to those that seemed more … unusual. Those kept in ornate boxes, on special shelves, in the old basement trove.

Though just one specimen glimmered, both in his dreams and daytime imaginings. Frustratingly, his careful online searches found nothing like the stone—a kind of mineral that glowed with its own light, after soaking in the sun. Its opal-like sheen featured starlike sparkles that seemed to recede into an inner distance, a depth that looked both brighter than day and deeper than night. That is, until Mei Ling insisted it be wrapped up and put away.

Worse yet, time was running out. Fish had grown sparse, ever since the night of the jellyfish, when half the life seemed to vanish out of Huangzhou Bay. Now, the nets were seldom full, and the stew pot was often empty.

Soon the small hoard of cash was gone again.

Luck is fickle. We try hard to control the flow of
qi
, by erecting our tent poles in symmetrical patterns and by facing our entrance toward the smiling south wind. But how can one strike a harmonious balance, down here at the shore, where the surf is so chaotic, where tides of air and water and stinging monsters rush however they choose?

No wonder the Chinese often turned their backs to the sea … and seemed to be doing so again.