Godlike Machines (12 page)

I started to see it. “So you want to mount a quick and dirty expedition, violating the planetary-protection aspects of the sentience laws, prove there’s no significant mind down there, and get the clearance to move in the digging machines. Right?” And I saw how Bill Dzik, Miriam, and Michael Poole exchanged unhappy glances. There was dissension in the team over the morality of all this, a crack I might be able to exploit. “Why do you need this so badly?” I asked.

So they told me. It was a saga of interplanetary ambition. But at the root of it, as is always the case, was money-or the lack of it.

III

Negotiation

Harry Poole said, “You know our business, Jovik. Our worm-hole engineering is laying down rapid-transit routes through the System, which will open up a whole family of worlds to colonization and development. But we have grander ambitions than that.”

I asked, “What ambitions? Starships?”

“That and more,” Michael Poole said. “For the last few decades we’ve been working on an experimental ship being built in the orbit of Jupiter ...”

And he told me about his precious
Cauchy.
By dragging a wormhole portal around a circuit light-years across, the GUTship
Cauchy
would establish a wormhole bridge-not across space-but across fifteen centuries, to the future. So, having already connected the worlds of humanity with his wormhole subway System, Michael Poole now hoped to short-circuit past and future themselves. I looked at him with new respect, and some fear. The man was a genius, or mad.

“But,” I said, “to fund such dreams you need money.”

Harry said, “Jovik, you need to understand that a mega-engineering business like ours is a ferocious devourer of cash. It’s been this way since the days of the pioneering railway builders back in the nineteenth century. We fund each new project with the profit of our previous ventures and with fresh investment—but that investment is closely related to the success of the earlier schemes.”

“Ah. And you’re stumbling. Yes? And this is all to do with Saturn.”

Harry sighed. “The Saturn transit was a logical development. The trouble is, nobody needs to go there. Saturn pales beside Jupiter! Saturn has ice moons; well, there are plenty in orbit around Jupiter. Saturn’s atmosphere could be mined, but so can Jupiter’s, at half the distance from Earth.”

Miriam said, “Saturn also lacks Jupiter’s ferociously energetic external environment, which we’re tapping ourselves in the manufacture of the
Cauchy.”

“Fascinating,” I lied. “You’re an engineer too, then?”

“A physicist,” she replied, awkward. She sat next to Michael Poole but apart from him. I wondered if there was anything deeper between them.

“The point,” said Harry, “is that there’s nothing at Saturn you’d want to go there for—no reason for our expensive wormhole link to be used. Nothing except—”

“Titan,” I said.

“If we can’t get down there legally, we need somebody to break us through the security protocols and get us down there.”

“So you turned to me.”

“The last resort,” said Bill Dzik with disgust in his voice.

“We tried your colleagues,” Miriam said. “They all said no.”

“Well, that’s typical of that bunch of prigs.”

Harry, always a diplomat, smiled at me. “So we’re having to bend a few pettifogging rules, but you have to see the vision, man, you have to see the greater good. And it’s a chance for you to return to Titan, Jovik. Think of it as an opportunity.”

“The question is, what’s in it for me? You know I’ve come close to the editing suites before. Why should I take the risk of helping you now?”

“Because,” Harry said, “if you don’t you’ll
certainly
face a reboot.” So now we came to the dirty stuff. Harry took over; he was clearly the key operator in this little cabal, with the other engineer types uncomfortably out of their depth. “We know about your sideline.”

With a sinking feeling I asked, “What sideline?”

And he used his Virtual display to show me. There went one of my doctored probes arrowing into Titan’s thick air, a silver needle that stood out against the murky organic backdrop, supposedly on a routine monitoring mission but in fact with a quite different objective.

There are pockets of liquid water to be found just under Titan’s surface, frozen-over crater lakes, kept warm for a few thousand years by the residual heat of the impacts that created them. My probe now shot straight through the icy carapace of one of those crater lakes, and into the liquid water beneath. Harry fast-forwarded, and we watched the probe’s ascent module push its way out of the lake and up into the air, on its way to my colleagues’ base on Enceladus.

“You’re sampling the subsurface life from the lakes,” Harry said sternly. “And selling the results.”

I shrugged; there was no point denying it. “I guess you know the background. The creatures down there are related to Earth life, but very distantly. Different numbers of amino acids, or something—
I
don’t know. The tiniest samples are gold dust to the biochemists, a whole new toolkit for designer drugs and genetic manipulation ...” I had one get-out. “You’ll have trouble proving this. By now there won’t be a trace of our probes left on the surface.” Which was true; one of the many ill-understood aspects of Titan was that probes sent down to its surface quickly failed and disappeared, perhaps as a result of some kind of geological resurfacing.

Harry treated that with the contempt it deserved. “We have full records. Images. Samples of the material you stole from Titan. Even a sworn statement by one of your partners.”

I flared at that, “Who?” But, of course, it didn’t matter.

Harry said sweetly. “The point is the sheer illegality— and committed by you, a curator, whose job is precisely to guard against such things. If this gets to your bosses, it will be the editing suite for you, my friend.”

“So that’s it. Blackmail.” I did my best to inject some moralistic contempt into my voice. And it worked; Michael, Miriam, Bill wouldn’t meet my eyes.

But it didn’t wash with Harry. “Not the word I’d use. But that’s pretty much it, yes. So what’s it to be? Are you with us? Will you lead us to Titan?”

I wasn’t about to give in yet. I got to my feet suddenly; to my gratification they all flinched back. “At least let me think about it. You haven’t even offered me that coffee.”

Michael glanced at Harry, who pointed at a dispenser on a stand near my couch. “Use that one.”

There were other dispensers in the cabin; why that particular one? I filed away the question and walked over to the dispenser. At a command it produced a mug of what smelled like coffee. I sipped it gratefully and took a step across the floor towards the transparent dome.

“Hold it,” Michael snapped.

“I just want to take in the view.”

Miriam said, “OK, but don’t touch anything. Follow that yellow path.”

I grinned at her. “Don’t
touch
anything? What am I, contagious?” I wasn’t sure what was going on, but probing away at these little mysteries had to help. “Please. Walk with me. Show me what you mean.”

Miriam hesitated for a heartbeat. Then, with an expression of deep distaste, she got to her feet. She was taller than I was, and lithe, strong-looking.

We walked together across the lifedome, a half-sphere 100 meters wide. Couches, control panels and data entry and retrieval ports were clustered around the geometric centre of the dome; the rest of the transparent floor area was divided up by shoulder-high partitions into lab areas, a galley, a gym, a sleeping area and shower. The layout looked obsessively plain and functional to me. This was the vessel of a man who lived for work, and only that; if this was Michael Poole’s ship it was a bleak portrait.

We reached the curving hull. Glancing down I could see the ship’s spine, a complex column a couple of kilometers long leading to the lode of asteroid ice used for reaction mass by GUTdrive module within. And all around us wormhole Interfaces drifted like snowflakes, while intraSystem traffic passed endlessly through the great gateways.

“All this is a manifestation of your lover’s vision,” I said to Miriam, who stood by me.

“Michael’s not my lover,” she shot back, irritated. The electric-blue light of the exotic matter frames shone on her cheekbones.

“I don’t even know your name,” I said.

“Berg,” she said reluctantly. “Miriam Berg.”

“Believe it or not, I’m not a criminal. I’m no hero, and I don’t pretend to be. I just want to get through my life, and have a little fun on the way. I shouldn’t be here, and nor should you.” Deliberately I reached for her shoulder. A bit of physical contact might break through that reserve.

But my fingers
passed through
her shoulder, breaking up into a mist of pixels until they were clear of her flesh, and then reformed. I felt only a distant ache in my head.

I stared at Miriam Berg. “What have you done to me?”

“I’m sorry,” she said gravely.

I sat on my couch once more—my couch, a Virtual projection like me, the only one in the dome I wouldn’t have fallen through, and sipped a coffee from my Virtual dispenser, the only one that I could touch.

It was, predictably, Harry Poole’s scheme. “Just in case the arm-twisting over the sample-stealing from Titan wasn’t enough.”

“I’m a Virtual copy,” I said.

“Strictly speaking, an identity backup ...”

I had heard of identity backups, but could never afford one myself, nor indeed fancied it much. Before undertaking some hazardous jaunt you could download a copy of yourself into a secure memory store. If you were severely injured or even killed, the backup could be loaded into a restored body, or a vat-grown cloned copy, or allowed to live on in some Virtual environment. You would lose the memories you had acquired after the backup was made, but that was better than non-existence . .. That was the theory. In my opinion it was an indulgence of the rich; you saw backup Virtuals appearing like ghosts at the funerals of their originals, distastefully lapping up the sentiment.

And besides the backup could never be
you,
the you who had died; only a copy could live on. That was the idea that started to terrify me now. I am no fool, and imaginative to a fault.

Harry watched me taking this in.

I could barely ask the question: “What about me? The original. Did I die?”

“No,” Harry said. “The real you is in the hold, suspended. We took the backup after you were already unconscious.”

So that explained the ache at the back of my neck: that was where they had jacked into my nervous system. I got up and paced around. “And if I refuse to help? You’re a pack of crooks and hypocrites, but I can’t believe you’re deliberate killers.”

Michael would have answered, but Harry held up his hand, unperturbed. “Look, it needn’t be that way. If you agree to work with us,
you
, the Virtual you, will be loaded back into the prime version. You’ll have full memories of the whole episode.”

“But I won’t be
me.”
I felt rage building. “I mean, the copy sitting here,
I
won’t exist anymore—anymore than I existed a couple of hours ago, when you activated me.” That was another strange and terrifying thought, “
I
will have to die! And that’s even if I cooperate. Great deal you’re offering. Well, into Lethe with you. If you’re going to kill
me
anyway I’ll find a way to hurt you. I’ll get into your systems like a virus.
You can’t control me.”

“But I can.” Harry clicked his fingers.

And in an instant everything changed. The four of them had gathered by Harry’s couch, the furthest from me. I had been standing; now I was sitting. And beyond the curved wall of the transparent dome, I saw that we had drifted into Earth’s night.

“How long?” I whispered.

“Twenty minutes,” Harry said carelessly. “Of course I can control you. You have an off switch. So which is it to be? Permanent extinction for all your copies, or survival as a trace memory in your host?” His grin hardened, and his young-old face was cold.

So the
Hermit Crab
wheeled in space, seeking out the wormhole Interface that led to Saturn. And I, or rather
he
who had briefly believed he was me, submitted to a downloading back into his primary, myself.

He, the identity copy, died to save my life. I salute him.

IV

Wormhole

Released from my cell of suspended animation, embittered, angry, I chose to be alone. I walked to the very rim of the lifedome, where the transparent carapace met the solid floor. Looking down I could see the flaring of superheated, ionised steam pouring from the GUTdrive nozzles. The engine, as you would expect, was one of Poole’s own designs. “GUT” stands for “Grand Unified Theory,” the system which describes the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single super-force. This is creation physics. Thus men like Michael Poole use the energies which once drove the expansion of the universe itself for the triviality of pushing forward their steam rockets.

Soon the
Hermit Crab
drove us into the mouth of the wormhole that led to the Saturn system. We flew lifedome first at the wormhole Interface, so it was as if the electric-blue tetrahedral frame came down on us from the zenith. It was quite beautiful, a sculpture of light. Those electric blue struts were beams of exotic matter, a manifestation of a kind of antigravity field that kept this throat in space and time from collapsing. Every so often you would see the glimmer of a triangular face, a sheen of golden light filtering through from Saturn’s dim halls.

The frame bore down, widening in my view, and fell around us, obscuring the view of Earth and Earthport. Now I was looking up into a kind of tunnel, picked out by the flaring of sheets of light. This was a flaw in spacetime itself; the flashing I saw was the resolution of that tremendous strain into exotic particles and radiations. The ship thrust deeper into the wormhole. Fragments of blue-white light swam from a vanishing point directly above my head and swarmed down the spacetime walls. There was a genuine sensation of speed, of limitless, uncontrollable velocity. The ship shuddered and banged, the lifedome creaked like a tin shack, and I thought I could hear that elderly GUTdrive screaming with the strain. I gripped a rail and tried not to cower.