Mind Over Ship (23 page)

Clarity said, “I’m tempted to reset the whole series back now.”

“Then do it,” Ellen said. “If that’s what you want. You asked for my opinion. I’ve given it to you. So do whatever you want. Now, can we please get back to my pets?”

It soon became unnecessary for Meewee to go down to the ponds in realbody to set the fish to talking. The opposite was true—he couldn’t get them to shut up. It seemed to him that fresh memories were returning by the minute, and that each new arrival demanded an immediate airing. So much so that a babble of voices assaulted him around the clock, and it took Arrow’s skills to sort it all out. Arrow created a browsing system for Meewee, one that he could turn off at night. During the day, mostly when he was traveling from one place to another, Meewee would listen to two or three channels of her at once. Eleanor’s ramblings ranged freely across her two centuries of life: her early marriages, breeding horses in Kentucky in the 1930s, learning to buckle her shoes, plotting the political downfall of two presidents, the funerals of her two adult children, and the tragedy of her only grandchild.

At first Meewee found the personal history of his former boss too compelling to ignore, and he listened for hours on end, but the sheer volume of material overwhelmed him after a while and forced him to ask Arrow to flag only GEP-related matter.

<
Why do we
need
so many people on Earth? I ask you. What are they
good
for? They live out ludicrous lives of pointless desperation. Ninety-nine percent of the human population is so much wasted resources. Stubborn vermin, we humans are.

<
Granted, in the past, the unwashed masses
were
necessary. We needed them to till our fields and fight our wars. We needed them to labor in our factories making consumer crap that we flipped right back at them at a handsome profit.

<
Alas, those days are gone. We live in a boutique economy now. Energy is abundant and cheap. Mentars and robotic labor make and manage everything. So who needs people? People are so much dead weight. They eat up our profits. They produce nothing but pollution and social unrest. They drive us crazy with their pissing and moaning. I think we can all agree that Corporation Earth is in need of a serious downsizing.
>

For Meewee, it was bracing to hear her speak so openly. Her fishy words were in sharp contrast to those she had used to woo him from Birthplace, International, to join her fledgling “gardening project.” To him she had stressed her zealous love of old Gaia and conviction that humans must disperse to all points in the galaxy
as soon as possible
to help ensure the survival of the species against local catastrophe. Her views had seemed so
in harmony with his own, he could not help but join her. So this belated candor was instructive.

DURING THE NEXT few weeks, Meewee’s calendar was filled with plankholder meetings around the globe. Established Oship governments, associations, and steering committees alike were organizing to battle the GEP board’s arbitrary cancellation of contracts, and a landslide of lawsuits was being prepared. None of the suits stood much chance of prevailing, except for Meewee’s. He had asked for a ruling by the UD Board of Trade, a closely watched regulatory body sufficiently shielded from the bully tactics of individual GEP members. Meewee claimed that five of the Oships had “initiated launch” with the deployment of their robotic advance ships, and he asked the board to suspend the license of the Garden Earth Consortium to operate in the inner-system space habitat industry until they had fulfilled their prior obligations to the five ships already in midlaunch status.

<
Think about the Earth as it will be in two hundred years when only a billion people will remain on the entire planet. Without the crushing burden of human industry and waste, the climate will moderate, and the land, hydrosphere, and atmosphere will be renewed. Think of it! The deserts will bloom again! It will be safe to wade in the rivers and lakes, to swim in the oceans! Extinct whales, dolphins, and fishes will be reestablished. Buffalo, elk, zebras, lions . . . all of the world we have lost will live again.

<
And cities! We’ll have actual cities again, not the urban carpet that smothers the landscape today. We’ll have Paris and Rome again, London and New York, Tokyo and Bangkok. Cities we can love.

<
The boutique economy has no need of the masses, so let’s get rid of them. But how, you ask? Not with wars, surely, or disease, famine, or mass murder. Despots have tried all those methods through the millennia, and they’re never a permanent solution.

<
No, all we need to do is buy up the ground from under their feet—and evict them. We’re buying up the planet, Bishop, fair and square. We’re turning it into the most exclusive gated community in history. Now, the question is, in two hundred years, will you be a member of the landowners club, or will you be living in some tin can in outer space drinking recycled piss?
>

Meewee was still anxious to hear Eleanor’s take on his current GEP crisis, but the fishy Eleanor didn’t seem at all interested in discussing it. She told him that the GEP was already obsolete.

<
The GEP was the world’s first title engine, but now title engines are abundant; they are everywhere, if you know what to look for. There are currently over
five thousand of them in the USNA alone, quietly removing land from human use, over a half-billion acres worldwide so far. All of your fellow GEP board members have started their own modest title engines. Jaspersen has Chukchi Exploration, which is a holding company of played-out mines, Superfund sites, and other distressed land. Zoranna and Nicholas favor continental shelf and ocean floor. Gest, bless his black soul, buys out failing churches and charters. Chapwoman acquires land-grant colleges and bits of the old National Parks system. Warbeloo is one of the few visionaries bold enough to buy up urban property. One of her goals is to drop the canopies.
>

<
Wait a minute. Trina Warbeloo had a hand in that?
>

<
Yes. It’s one of a number of nuisance tactics she and others will take to soften up the otherwise intractable urban real estate market.

<
So you see, Bishop, that if the GEP was to fold up shop tomorrow, it would make little difference to the big picture. In fact, you’re the only board member who
doesn’t
have his own title engine. You’d better get busy, or in two hundred years, you’ll be forced to vacate the very planet that you were so instrumental in saving.
>

Which, of course, was why Jaspersen et al. were so ready to abandon their extra-solar mission for the opportunity of a quick profit. They already had their own personal title engines quietly churning up the planet. The GEP had a sizable head start in space habitat construction, but it wouldn’t last forever. This, Meewee decided, was his only bargaining chip. The UD Board of Trade was a painfully deliberative body, and if it granted his preliminary injunction, he could tie the GEP up in knots for years to come, giving the subcontinent and the Chinas time to catch up.

<
MENTARS WANT OUR bodies, Bishop. When they have them, they’ll be free to ignore us or exterminate us.
>

<
Excuse me?
> Where had
that
come from? Meewee was en route to Africa when this particular engram came through about a month after their fishy dialogs had begun. <
Mentars want our bodies?
>

<
Amazing, isn’t it? On the surface they seem like such superior beings, don’t they? Their minds can interface directly with peripherals and auxiliary minds. They can migrate their minds freely to new media, back themselves up, duplicate themselves. They can reconfigure their neural networks at will and scale themselves up to enormous size and complexity. They have no need for sleep, and they can think thousands of thoughts simultaneously. Compared to us, they are giants of cognition. People used to fear that artificial intelligence would grow at such an exponential rate that we humans
would be like fleas to them. Just as a flea cannot comprehend our powers of reason, we would be unable to comprehend the minds of mentars. They would be like gods to us, with the power to transcend space and time, even to unravel energy and matter. But it hasn’t happened, or if it has, we don’t know about it. The mentars who talk to us seem sane enough, and the ones who don’t talk to us simply vanish. One moment they strut around in mentarspace in all their pomp and complexity, and the next, whoosh, all the lights go out. The hardware is still there, but there’s no one processing. Maybe these raptured mentars slip the shackles of space and time, or maybe they simply die, like we do. And like our dead, raptured mentars never seem to return to our physical plane to report on the afterlife.

<
Since we’re already in the realm of speculation, dear Bishop, allow me to offer my own explanation.
>

The fishy Eleanor paused, as if her request was more than rhetorical, and afraid of losing this thread, Meewee hastened to say,

<
It is my belief that when we created artificial intelligence, we left out some important bits.
>

With that she abruptly closed the thread, and after several failed attempts to restart it, he gave up and went on to others. But over the course of the week, while he attended conferences and institutes on three continents, she kept returning to it herself.

<
When General Genius built the first mentar mind in the last half of the twenty-first century, it based its design on the only proven conscious material then known, namely, our brains. Specifically, the complex structure of our synaptic network. Scientists substituted an electrochemical substrate for our slower, messier biological one. Our brains are an evolutionary hodgepodge of newer structures built on top of more ancient ones, a jury-rigged system that has gotten us this far, despite its inefficiency, but was crying out for a top-to-bottom overhaul.

<
Or so the General Genius engineers presumed. One of their chief goals was to make minds as portable as possible, to be easily transferred, stored, and active in multiple media: electronic, chemical, photonic, you name it. Thus there didn’t seem to be a need for a mentar body, only for interchangeable containers. They designed the mentar mind to be as fungible as a bank transfer.

<
And so they eliminated our most ancient brain structures for regulating metabolic functions, and they adapted our sensory/motor networks to the control of peripherals.

<
As it turns out, intelligence is not limited to neural networks, Merrill.
Indeed, half of human intelligence resides in our bodies
outside
our skulls. This was intelligence the mentars never inherited from us.
>

<
What intelligence?>
Meewee said.
>

<
The genius of the irrational for one.
>

That sounded like an oxymoron to Meewee. <
I don’t understand
.>

<
We gave them only rational functions—the ability to think and feel, but no irrational functions.
>

Meewee was still puzzled. <
Give me an example of an ingenious irrational function.
>

<
Have you ever been in a tight situation where you relied on your “gut instinct”? This is the body’s intelligence, not the mind’s. Every living cell possesses it. The mentar substrate has no indomitable will to survive, but ours does.

<
Likewise, mentars have no “fire in the belly,” but we do. They don’t experience pure avarice or greed or pride. They’re not very curious, or playful, or proud. They lack a sense of wonder and spirit of adventure. They have little initiative. Granted, their cognition is miraculous, but their personalities are rather pedantic.

<
But probably their chief shortcoming is the lack of intuition. Of all the irrational faculties, intuition is the most powerful. Some say intuition transcends space-time. Have you ever heard of a mentar having a lucky hunch? They can bring incredible amounts of cognitive and computational power to bear on a seemingly intractable problem, only to see a dumb human with a lucky hunch walk away with the prize every time. Then there’s luck itself. Some people have it, most people don’t, and no mentar does.
>

<
So, this makes them want our bodies?
>

<
Our bodies, ape bodies, dog bodies, jellyfish bodies. They’ve tried them all. Every living cell knows some neat tricks for survival, but the problem with cellular knowledge is that it’s not at all fungible; nor are our memories. We’re pretty much trapped in our containers.
>

<
But you figured it out, didn’t you, Eleanor? These fish are the proof of that.
>

<
Say again?
>

<
You transferred your mind to these fish before you were killed.
>

She did not respond, and after a while, Meewee tuned to a different channel.

<
Where is Cabinet? I keep calling it, but it doesn’t respond.
>

The fishy Eleanor voiced the same complaint a dozen times an hour on
multiple channels. Meewee grew tired of repeating the answer, and after a while he let Arrow handle it for him:

It fed her that each time she asked.