Mind Over Ship (44 page)

“The way artificial brains do it, including the mentar brain, is through electrical impulses. But that’s not practical with living brains. You’d have to implant and coordinate hundreds of trillions of electrodes in people’s heads, and our cells’ insulation just isn’t that good.”

“Wait a minute,” Meewee said. “If we can scan down to the molecular level to make sims, why can’t we just extrude new brains from scratch?”

“Excellent question!” Koyabe said. “It shows you are able to follow my confusing explanation. The answer is simple. If we scanned an entire
brain with all the memories intact and then duplicated it in a new body with nanotech, we would just be making a new copy of an
old
brain. That is, biologically it would be just as old as the original. It’s a catch-22: we can’t rejuvenate senescent brains without destroying their memories, and we can’t copy memories without also copying senescent brain structures.

“What we need to do is make new brains, like baby clone brains, and train them
how to remember
old memories. The method we’ve developed involves delivering memory patterns to the brain in the form of packets of tiny protein factors that stimulate the body’s own means of consolidating short-term memory. These factors migrate throughout the brain and, in our Christmas tree analogy, latch on to branches. We don’t particularly care which branch or which tree they settle on, as long as they’re in the right tree lots and the overall patterns are retained.”

Dr. Koyabe paused to see how well Meewee was following, and he, in his turn, struggled to please her by not appearing clueless. “Which is why,” she concluded, “the memory traces have to be injected or eaten instead of being zapped in.”

Elaine added, “But it’s
hard work!
”

“It’s why we still have to sleep eighteen hours a day.”

“And we have to forget as much as we remember.”

“And sometimes it’s hard to be certain if the memory is hers or mine.”

Meewee said, “But why are you sharing each other’s memories in the first place?”

Elaine, or maybe it was Liz—Meewee’s working memory had already faded—answered, “Soon we will be leading two distinctly separate lives, but we’ll each be able to remember both of them.”

Meewee hadn’t considered this possibility, and it impressed him. He had often wondered how his life would have turned out if he had chosen to follow a different path than the one he did. With a clone’s memory, he could, in effect, lead two lives at once.

“And we’re sharing the big tuna’s memories too. She sends out hundreds of proxies every day to do tasks out there. And when they return with results, we don’t even have to listen to a report. The big fish just sends over a milkshake, and we
remember
what they did.”

The other El said, “Proxy memory feels different; it’s flat.”

Dr. Koyabe said, “That’s because it lacks the emotional indexing of biological memory.”

“And Cabinet’s memories are harder to understand. They’re more like—when you talk to yourself? But you’re not making much sense?”

“But very distinctive.”

“Which makes them easy to recall.”

“And her visuals are great.”

The girls laughed, and one of them added, “You may be interested to know, Bishop Meewee, that Saul Jaspersen had pan-fried trout for lunch yesterday.”

Meewee was astonished. “What did I have for lunch yesterday?”

In unison they said, “Lentil soup!”

THE BRAINFISH CROWDED the edge of the pool for a virtual pat on the head, including a dozen juvenile newcomers. Meewee was beginning to be able to tell the individual fish apart. He told them, “I just learned that Andrea clones and E-P copies have joined all of the Lucky Five ships except the
King Jesus.
”

Eleanor’s holo appeared in the room and replied, “Yes, I know.”

Meewee turned to the holo. “But you said E-P will destroy the ships in order to quarantine humans to this system. Why go on board only to be destroyed?”

“No doubt it’s part of a backup suicide sabotage plan.”

“Then how will we defeat them?”

“Not to worry, Merrill. We’ll deal with the original E-P and Andrea well before the launch. As to their shipboard clones, let’s just say there’s a handy feature built into the ship design that allows me to rapture any mentar on board at will. And without the E-P mentars, the Andrea clones are powerless.”

The news that she could destroy shipboard mentars brought the bigger picture into focus. With Cabinet at her side, no mentar opposition, and a detachment of russes backing her up, whichever El shipped out on the
Hybris
would become its self-appointed ruler.

The pipe grid over the pool clanked open, and a shower of flakes fell on the water surface. The brainfish quickly gobbled them up. Memories from the front?

“You’re not human anymore,” he said simply.

Eleanor’s bushy eyebrows rose in amused surprise. “No, Merrill, I suppose I’m not.”

“You are posthuman, as posthuman as Andrea. You are using the GEP and me, not to seed the galaxy with humans, but to spread your own kind.”

“What an active imagination you have.”

“Really? What about ‘A thousand Eleanors ruling under a thousand suns’? What about your ten-thousand-year reunion?”

That got her attention. “Did I say that? My, what a gabby fish I was. I wonder what else I said.”

“Enough to open my eyes! You’ve been using me from the start for your own dreams of empire!” At the tone of his voice, the brainfish all dove to the deep end of the pool, and Eleanor’s sim crossed her arms.

“Go on.”

“You told me all about it, how mentars want bodies. How mentar/human hybrids are scheming to become the next stage in our evolution, how we ordinary humans will soon be as extinct as the Neanderthals. But all this time you were doing the exact same thing. You’re using me to help destroy
my own species!
And for what? Your own glory?”

As she listened, Eleanor nodded her head and knit her brows in thought. When she spoke at last, her voice was gentle. “A lot of what I said no doubt sprang up from somewhere in my unconscious; I won’t deny it. But don’t we all harbor thoughts of grandeur or revenge or lust or some equally antisocial behavior? It’s only human, and the job of our higher faculties is to suppress or moderate these baser impulses. So in that regard I am still very much human. I won’t attempt to deny what I might have told you, but let me offer a little moderating explanation.

“Evolution is largely a temporal phenomenon, Merrill. The environment changes, and populations in that environment must change in turn, or they languish. Individual organisms don’t evolve; populations do. Nature doesn’t give a damn about individuals. The only role we play in evolution is surviving long enough to give birth to offspring who are slightly different from us. Some of our offspring will prosper in a changing environment, and some of them will not. As for us individuals, once we’ve reproduced, nature has no more use for us. We perish along with our ill-adapted young. Death has always been an essential factor in species survival.

“Now consider the human race. We are a partial exception to the rule. Unlike other species, we have developed culture. Instead of adapting to a changing environment biologically, we can sometimes adapt to it culturally. If an Ice Age comes along, we don’t need to grow fur on our bodies if we invent the fur coat. Culture allows us to adapt to almost any environment, including the harshest, like space. In fact, our cultural adaptation is so robust that it all but obviates the need to evolve biologically.

“We are so good at adapting to changing conditions with our knowledge and technology that we may deceive ourselves into believing that we are above nature. But only a fool believes that. Nature always has the last word. A star in our neighborhood could go supernova and wipe out all life in our solar system, and no amount of culture could save us from that. That, I believe, is the main reason you want to seed humanity throughout the galaxy. So as not to have all our eggs in one basket. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” he admitted.

“The chief difference between biological and cultural adaptation,” she went on, “is that while biological evolution doesn’t care about individuals, cultural evolution does, often at the expense of the species. Look at how many times we’ve nearly wiped ourselves out through cultural means: the nuclear bomb, pollution, climate change, the Outrage. We can’t seem to help ourselves. Look at what we’ve done: we’ve made individuals all but immortal, even when it means we can have no more children. In one stroke, we’ve eliminated two of the key ingredients of evolution: offspring and death. From a biological perspective, we’re skating on mighty thin ice.”

“The colonies won’t have population bans,” Meewee said.

“But they’ll still permit rejuvenation therapies, won’t they? How long does it take for a shipful of immortals to fill up a planet? Sadly, not very long. A few generations. Then what? Then they look for another planet to colonize. In ten thousand years we may have the whole galaxy staked out, and then what? No, Merrill, as long as the individual organism reigns supreme, there’s a finite limit to our survival.”

As she spoke, Meewee was thinking about the
King Jesus
, how its colonists embraced children and death to the extent that more than twenty generations would be dead and buried before the ship reached its destination. Was that what it would take? Would he, himself, be satisfied with seventy or a hundred years of life, when ten times that amount was already possible? “I assume there’s a point you’re making.”

Eleanor smiled. “Yes, Merrill, there is. We need a means for the individual, not just the species, to participate in biological evolution, and that’s what my project is all about. We need to be able to let our biological bodies die, to have offspring that are molded by the changing needs of the environments we find ourselves in, and yet to serially inhabit these bodies as the same individual. That means we have to be able to move our minds from one body to the next.

“I know you’ve talked to Dr. Koyabe earlier today about memory migration, but one thing she failed to mention is that memory traces can be
transmitted electronically, as the mentars already do. That means we can scan our memories, store them, move them about. It’s only the final step, their physical reintegration into another brain that requires the protein flakes. We can send memories over a phone call from anywhere to anywhere and whip up the flakes locally. We can pointcast our memories out to distant stars and make the flakes there. This means that those thousand Eleanors you speak of will be of one mind. More or less. We will be a single organism in a multitude of bodies that spans light-years.”

She stopped talking, and Meewee took a moment to think before replying. “All fine and good, Eleanor, except that you never answered my question. Why should I help you supplant my own species?”

She laughed and said, “Because you have little choice, Merrill. The posthuman is coming whether you like it or not. The only question is which one. E-P and Andrea are only the latest in a string of failed mentar/human hybrids. Eventually the machines will figure out how to do it. Do you know the chief difference between all the other posthuman forms and me?”

Meewee shook his head.

“What I have done,
any human can do.
Dr. Koyabe can. You can. Mine is a singularity in which the obsolete individual is invited to cross over to the new, not simply to die out. The existing person need not die to make room for the newcomer. Anyone can play.”

IN THE DEPTHS of the night, with Momoko Koyabe’s soft breath on his pillow, Meewee weighed everything he had learned that day. He came up with a question to ask his new Arrow the next time he could take it into the privacy of a null room. The previous year at the clinic, the old Arrow had told him it possessed the kill codes for all Starke minions. Meewee had subsequently used Arrow to kill Wee Hunk, but he could have killed Cabinet too. His question: Did the new Arrow still have Cabinet’s kill code? Did it have Eleanor’s too? Would it work on her fishy and human versions?

Fred’s gnawing curiosity alone wasn’t enough to embolden him to run the Original Flaw method that he had downloaded into his Spectre. Nor were Marcus’s manipulative lies. Nor the increasing hostility of his thankless brothers. Nor Mary’s deepening nihilism and his inability to go to her. Nor the lists that were becoming more onerous by the day.

What finally tipped him over the edge was learning the name of the comatose evangeline in the news flash. She was Shelley Oakland, Reilly’s ex-wife and Mary’s best friend. After learning this, Fred called in sick and lay on his couch for two solid days. A cargo train of his life’s mistakes, failings, and faults passed through his mind, each auditioning for the role of Original Flaw. None of them seemed serious enough to screw up his entire life. Finally, emotionally spent, he put on his spex and initialized the method. Immediately his Spectre informed him of a priority message from Marcus, but he chose not to engage it. Instead, he launched the method and soon found himself sitting at the only table in a nightclub in front of a small, curtained stage.

Seated at his table were two brothers who were examining their hands like they’d never seen hands before. Fred quickly pretended to be examining his own. Eventually they glanced around the room and at each other, and one of them said, “I guess we’re E-Pluribus sims then.”