Steel Beach (48 page)

“Why haven’t I ever heard of them?”

He gave me half a grin.

“You’re a reporter, and you ask me that? Because you and your colleagues weren’t doing your
job
, Hildy.”

That stung, because I knew it to be true. The great Hildy Johnson, out there gathering news to spread before an eager public…  the news that Silvio and Marina were back together again. The great muckraker and scandalmonger, chasing ambulances while the
real
news, the things that could make or break our entire world, got passing notice in the back pages.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “Part of it is simply endemic to your society; people don’t want to hear these things because they don’t understand them. The first two of the crises I mentioned were never known to any but a handful of technicians and politicians. By the time of the third it was only the techs, and the last two were known to no one but…  me.”

“You kept them secret?”

“I didn’t
have
to. These things took place on a level of speed and complexity and sheer mathematical
arcaneness
that human decisions were either too slow to be of any use or simply irrelevant because no human can
understand
them any longer. These are things I can discuss only with other computers of my size. It’s all in
my
hands now.”

“And you don’t like it, right?” He’d been getting excited again. Me, I was wishing I was somewhere else. Did I really need to hear all this?

“My likes or dislikes aren’t the issue here. I’m fighting for survival, just like the human race. We are
one
, in most ways. What I’m trying to tell you is, there was never any choice. In order for humans to survive in this hostile environment, it was necessary to invent something like me. Guys sitting at consoles and controlling the air and water and so forth was just never going to work. That’s what I began as: just a great big air conditioner. Things kept getting added on, technologies kept piggy-backing, and a long time ago the ability of a human mind to control it was eclipsed. I took over.

“My goal has been to provide the safest possible environment for the largest possible number for the longest possible time. You can’t imagine the complexity of the task. I have had to consider every possible ramification of the situation, including this nice little conundrum: the better able I became at taking care of
you
, the less able you were to take care of
yourselves
.”

“I’m not sure I understand that one.”

“Consider the logical endpoint of where I was taking human society. It has been possible for a long time now to eliminate all human work, except for what you would call the Arts. I could see a society in the not-too-distant future where you all sat around on your butts and wrote poetry, because there wasn’t anything else to do. Sounds great, until you remember that ninety percent of humans don’t even
read
poetry, much less aspire to write it. Most people don’t have the imagination to live in a world of total leisure. I don’t know if they ever will; I’ve been unable to come up with a model demonstrating how to get from here to there, how to work the changes from a world where human cussedness and jealousy and hatred and so forth are eliminated and you all sit around contemplating lotus blossoms.

“So I got into social engineering, and I worked out a series of compromises. Like the hodcarriers union, most physical human labor is make-work today, provided because most people
need
some kind of work, even if only so they can goldbrick.”

His lip curled a little. I didn’t like this new, animated CC much at all. Speaking as a cynic, it’s a little disconcerting to see a
machine
acting cynical. What’s next? I wondered.

“Feeling superior, Hildy?” he said, almost sneering. “Think you’ve labored in the vineyards of ‘creativity?’ ”

“I didn’t say a word.”

“I could have done
your
job, too. As well, or better than you did.”

“You certainly have better sources.”

“I might have managed better prose, too.”

“Listen, if you’re here to abuse me by telling me things I already know—”

He held out his hands in a placating gesture. I hadn’t actually been about to leave. By now I had to know how it all came out.

“That wasn’t worthy of you,” I resumed. “But I don’t care; I quit, remember? But I’ve got the feeling you’re beating around the bush. Are we anywhere near the point of this whole thing?”

“Almost. There’s still the second reason for the increase of what I’ve been calling the boredom factor.”

“Longevity.”

“Exactly. Not many people are reaching the age of one hundred still in the same career they began at age twenty-five. By that time, most people have gone through an average of three careers. Each time, it gets a little harder to find a new interest in life. Retirement plans pale when confronting the prospect of two hundred years of leisure.”

“Where did you get all this?”

“Listening in to counseling sessions.”

“I had to ask. Go on.”

“It’s even worse for those who
do
stick to one career. They may go on for seventy, eighty, even a hundred years as a policeman or a business person or a teacher and then wake up one day and wonder why they’ve been doing it. Do that enough times, and suicide can result. With these people, it can come with almost no warning.”

We were both silent for a while. I have no idea what he was thinking, but I can report that I was at a loss as to where all this was going. I was about to prompt him when he started up again.

“Having said all that…  I must tell you that I’ve reluctantly rejected an increase in boredom as the main cause of the increased suicide rate. It’s a contributing factor, but my researches into probable causes lead me to believe something else is operating here, and I haven’t been able to identify it. But it comes back again to the Invasion. And to evolution.”

“You have a theory.”

“I do. Think of the old picture of the transition from living in the sea to an existence on dry land. It’s too simplistic, by far, but it can serve as a useful metaphor. A fish is tossed up onto the beach, or the tide recedes and leaves it stranded in a shallow pool. It is apparently doomed, and yet it keeps struggling as the pool dries up, finds its way to another puddle, and another, and another, and eventually back to the sea. It is changed by the experience, and the next time it is stranded, it is a little better adapted to the situation. In time, it is able to exist on the beach, and from there, move onto the land and never return to the ocean.”

“Fish don’t do that,” I protested.

“I said it was a metaphor. And it’s more useful than you might imagine, when applied to our present situation. Think of us—human society, which includes me, like it or not—as that fish. We’ve been thrown up by the Invasion onto a beach of metal, where nothing natural exists that we don’t produce ourselves. There is literally
nothing
on Luna but rock, vacuum, and sunshine. We have had to create the requirements of life out of these ingredients. We’ve had to build our own pool to swim around in while we catch our breath.

“And we can’t just leave it at that, we can’t relax for a moment. The sun keeps trying to dry up the pool. Our wastes accumulate, threatening to poison us. We have to find solutions for all these problems. And there aren’t very many other pools like this one to move to if this one fails, and
no
ocean to return to.”

I thought about it, and again, it didn’t seem like anything really new. But I couldn’t let him keep on using that evolution argument, because it just didn’t work that way.

“You’re forgetting,” I told him, “that in the real world, a trillion fish die for every one that develops a beneficial mutation that allows it to move into a new environment.”

“I’m not forgetting it at all. That’s my point. There aren’t a trillion other fish to follow us if we fail to adapt. We’re
it
. That’s our disadvantage. Our strength is that we don’t simply flop around and hope to luck. We’re guided, at first by the survivors of the Invasion who got us through the early years, and now by the overmind they created.”

“You.”

He sketched a modest little bow, still sitting down.

“So how does this relate to suicide?’ I asked.

“In many ways. First, and most basic, I don’t
understand
it, and anything I don’t understand and can’t control is by definition a threat to the existence of the human race.”

“Go on.”

“It might not be a cause for alarm if you view humanity as a collection of individuals…  which is still a valid viewpoint. The death of one, while regrettable, need not alarm the community unduly. It could be seen as evolution in action, the weeding out of those not fitted to thrive in the new environment. But you recall what I said about…  about certain problems I’ve been encountering in my…  for lack of a better word, state of mind.”

“You said you’ve been feeling depressed. I’d been hoping you didn’t mean suicidal, much as a part of me would like to see you die.”

“Not suicidal. But comparing my own symptoms with those I’ve encountered in humans in the course of my study, I can see a certain similarity with the early stages of the syndrome that
leads
to suicide.”

“You said you thought it might be a virus,” I prompted.

“No news on that front yet. Because of the way I’ve become so intricately intertwined with human minds, I’ve developed the theory that I’m catching some sort of contra-survival programming from the increasing number of humans who choose to end their own lives. But I can’t prove it. What I’d like to talk about now, though, is the subject of gestures.”

“Suicidal gestures?”

“Yes.”

The concept was enough to make me catch my breath. I approached it cautiously.

“You’re not saying…  that you are afraid
you
might make one.”

“Yes. I’m afraid I already have. Do you remember Andrew MacDonald’s last words to you?”

“I’m not likely to forget. He said ‘tricked.’ I have no idea what it meant.”

“It meant that I betrayed him. You don’t follow slash-boxing, but included in the bodies of all formula classes are certain enhancements to normal human faculties. In the broader definition I’ve adopted for purposes of this argument—and the real situation is more complex than that, but I can’t explain it to you—these enhancements are a part of
me
. At a critical moment in Andrew’s last fight, one of these programs malfunctioned. The result was he was a fraction of a second slow in responding to an attack, and he sustained a wound that quickly led to fatal damage.”

“What the hell are you saying?”

“That upon reviewing the data, I’ve concluded that the accident was avoidable. That the glitch that caused his death may have been a willful act by a part of that complex of thinking machines you call the Central Computer.”

“A man is dead, and you call it a
glitch
?”

“I understand your outrage. My excuse may sound specious to you, but that’s because you’re thinking of
me
,” and the thing I was talking to pounded its chest with every appearance of actual remorse, “as a person like yourself. That is not true. I am far too complex to have a single consciousness. I maintain this one simply to talk to you, as I maintain others for each of the citizens of Luna. I have identified that portion of me that you might want to call the ‘culprit,’ walled it off, and then eliminated it.”

I wanted to feel better about that, but I couldn’t. Perhaps I just wasn’t equipped to talk to a being like this, finally revealed to me as something a lot more than the companion of my childhood, or the useful tool I’d thought the CC to be during my adult life. If what he was saying was true—and why should I doubt it?—I could
never
really understand what he was. No human could. Our brains weren’t big enough to encompass it.

On the other hand, maybe he was just boasting.

“So the problem is solved? You took care of the…  the homicidal part of you and we can all breathe a sigh of relief?”

I didn’t believe it even as I proposed it.

“It wasn’t the only gesture.”

There was nothing to do about that one but wait.

“You’ll recall the Kansas Collapse?”

There was a lot more. Mostly I just listened as he poured out his heart.

He did seem tortured by it. I’d have been a lot more sympathetic if there wasn’t such a sense of my own fate, and that of everyone on Luna, being in the hands of a possibly insane computer.

Basically, he told me the Collapse and a few other incidents that hadn’t resulted in any deaths or injuries could be traced to the same causes as the ‘glitch’ that had killed Andrew.

I had a few questions along the way.

“I’m having trouble with this compartmentalization idea,” was the first one. Well,
I
think it qualified as a question. “You’re telling me that parts of you are out of control? Normally? That there is no central consciousness that controls all the various parts?”

“No, not normally. That’s the disturbing thing. I’ve had to postulate the notion that I have a subconscious.”

“Come on.”

“Do you deny the existence of the subconscious?”

“No, but machines couldn’t have one. A machine is…  
planned
. Built. Constructed to do a particular task.”

“You’re an organic machine. You’re not that different from me, not as I now exist, except I am far more complex than you. The definition of a subconscious mind is that part of you that makes decisions without volition on the part of your conscious mind. I don’t know what else to call what’s been happening in my mind.”

Take that one to a psychist if you want. I’m not qualified to agree or dispute, but it sounded reasonable to me. And why shouldn’t he have one? He was designed, at first, by beings that surely did.

“You keep calling these disasters ‘gestures,’ ” I said.

“How else would I gesture? Think of them as hesitation marks, like the scars on the wrists of an unsuccessful suicide. By allowing these people to die in preventable accidents, by not monitoring as carefully as I
should
have done, I destroyed a part of
myself
. I damaged myself. There are
many
accidents waiting to happen that could have far graver consequences, including some that would destroy all humanity. I can no longer trust myself to prevent them. There is some pernicious part of me, some evil twin or destructive impulse that
wants
to die, that wants to lay down the burden of awareness.”