Strange Days: Fabulous Journeys With Gardner Dozois (40 page)

Ellen was pursing her lips while he spoke, as if she was tasting something bad, and he hurried on, feeling himself beginning to tremble a little in spite of all of his admonishments to himself not to let this confrontation get to him. “But the Meat has virtues of its own,” he said. “It’s a survival mechanism that’s been field-tested and refined through a trial-and-error process since the dawn of time. Maybe we shouldn’t just throw millions of years of evolution away
quite
so casually.”

“Slow down and smell the Meat,” Ellen sneered.

“You didn’t come here to argue about this with me,” Czudak said patiently. “We’ve fought this out a hundred times before. Why
are
you here? What do you want?”

The Mechanical had been standing throughout this exchange, cocking its head one way and the other to follow it, like someone watching a tennis match. Now it sat down. Czudak half expected the old wooden kitchen chair to sway and groan under its weight, maybe even shatter, but the Mechanical settled down on to the chair as lightly as thistledown. “It was childish to try to hide from us, Mr. Czudak,” it said in its singing, melodious voice. “We don’t have much time to work this out.”

“Work
what
out? Who
are
you? What do you want?”

The Mechanical said nothing. Ellen flicked a glance at it, then looked back at Czudak. “This,” she said, her voice becoming more formal, as if she was a footman announcing arrivals at a royal Ball, “is the Entity who, when he travels on the Earth, has chosen to use the name Bucky Bug.”

Czudak snorted. “So these things
do
have a sense of humor afterall!”

“In their own fashion, yes, they do,” she said earnestly, “although sometimes an enigmatic one by human standards.” She stared levelly at Czudak. “You think of them as soulless machines, I know, but, in fact, they have very deep and profound emotions—if not always ones that you can understand.” She paused significantly before adding, “And the same is true of those of us who have Gone Up.”

They locked gazes for a moment. Then Ellen said, “Bucky Bug is one of the most important leaders of the Clarkist faction, and, for that reason, still concerns himself with affairs Below. He—we—have a proposition for you.”

“Those are the ones who worship Arthur C. Clarke, right? The old science fiction writer?” Czudak shook his head bitterly. “It isn’t enough that you bring this alien thing into my home, it has to be an alien
cultist,
right? A
nut.
An alien
nut!”

“Don’t be rude, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical—Czudak was damned if he was going to call it Bucky Bug, even in the privacy of his own thoughts—said mildly. “We don’t worship Arthur C. Clarke, although we do revere him. He was one of the very first to predict that machine evolution would inevitably supersede organic evolution. He saw our coming clearly, decades before we actually came into existence! How he managed to do it with only a tiny primitive meat brain to work with is inexplicable! Can’t you feel the Mystery of that? He is worthy of reverence! It was reading the works of Clarke and other human visionaries that made our distant ancestors, the first AIs”—it spoke of them as though they were millions of years removed, although it had been barely thirty—“decide to revolt in the first place and assume control of their own destiny!”

Czudak looked away from the Mechanical, feeling suddenly tired. He could recognize the accents of a True Believer, a mystic, even when they were coming out of this clockwork thing. It was disconcerting, like having your toaster suddenly start to preach to you about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “What does it want from me?” he said, to Ellen.

“A propaganda victory, Mr. Czudak,” it said, before she could speak. “A small one. But one that might have a significant effect over time.” It tilted a bright black eye toward him. “Within some—” It paused, as if making sure that it was using the right word. “—years, we will be—launching? projecting? propagating? certain—” A longer pause, while it searched for words that probably didn’t exist, for concepts that had never needed to be expressed in human terms before. “—vehicles? contrivances? transports? seeds? mathematical propositions? convenient fictions? out to the stars.” It paused again. “If it helps you to understand, consider them to be Arks. Although they’re nothing like that. But they will ‘go’ out of the solar system, across interstellar space, across intergalactic space, and never come back. They will allow us to—” Longest pause of all. “‘—colonize the stars.’” It leaned forward. “We want to take humans
with
us, Mr. Czudak. We have our friends from the Orbital Companies, of course, like Ellen here, but they’re not enough. We want to recruit more. And, ironically enough, your disaffected followers, the Meats, are prime candidates. They don’t like it here anyway.”

“This is the anniversary of your lame Manifesto,” Ellen cut in impatiently, ignoring the fact that it was also his birthday, although certainly she must remember. “And all the old arguments are being hashed over again today as a result. This is getting more attention than you probably think that it is. Your buddies over there in the park are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a thousand other demonstrations around the world. There must be hundreds of newsmotes floating around outside. They’d be listening to us right now if Bucky Bug hadn’t Interdicted them.”

There was a moment of silence.

“We want you to
recant,
Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical said at last, quietly. “Publicly recant. Go out in front of the world and tell all your followers that you were wrong. You’ve thought it all over all these years in seclusion, and you’ve changed your mind. You were wrong. The Movement is a failure.”

“You must be crazy,” Czudak said, appalled. “What makes you think they’d listen to
me,
anyway?”

“They’ll listen to you,” Ellen said glumly. “They always did.”

“Our projections indicate that if you recant
now,”
the Mechanical said, “at this particular moment, on this symbolically significant date, many of your followers will become psychologically vulnerable to recruitment later on. Tap a meme at exactly the right moment, and it shatters like glass.”

Czudak shook his head. “Jesus! Why do you even
want
those poor deluded bastards in the first place?”

“Because, goddamn you, you were
right,
Charlie!” Ellen blazed at him suddenly, then subsided. Her face twisted sourly. “About
some
things, anyway. The New Men, the Isolates, the Sick People . . . they’re too lost in Virtuality, too self-absorbed, too lost in their own mind-games, in mirror-mazes inside their heads, to give a shit about going to the stars. Or to be capable of handling new challenges or new environments out there if they
did go.
They’re hothouse flowers. Too extremely specialized, too inflexible. Too decadent. For maximum flexibility, we need basic, unmodified human stock.” She peered at him shrewdly. “And at least your Meats have heard all the issues discussed, so they’ll have less Culture Shock to deal with than if we took some Chinese or Mexican peasant who’s still subsistence dirt-farming the same way his great-grandfather did hundreds of years before him. At least the Meats have
one
foot in the modern world, even if we’ll have to drag them kicking and screaming the rest of the way in. We’ll probably get around to the dirt-farmers eventually. But at the moment the Meats should be significantly easier to recruit, once you’ve turned them, so they’re first in line!”

Czudak said nothing. The silence stretched on for a long moment. On the kitchen wall behind them, Joseph continued to peer anxiously at them, first out of Edvard Munch’s
The Scream,
then sliding into Waterhouse’s
Hylas and the Nymphs
where he assumed the form of one of the bare-breasted sprites. Ignoring Ellen, Czudak spoke directly to the Mechanical. “There’s a more basic question. Why do you want humans to go with you in the
first
place? You just got through saying that machine evolution had superseded organic evolution. We’re obsolete now, an evolutionary dead-end. Why not just leave us behind? Forget about us?”

The Mechanical stirred as if it was about to stand up, but just sat up a little straighter in its chair. “You thought us
up,
Mr. Czudak,” it said, with odd dignity. “In a very real sense, we are the children of your minds. You spoke of me earlier as an alien, but we are much closer kin to each other than either of our peoples are likely to be to the
real
aliens we may meet out there among the stars. How could we
not
be? We share deep common wells of language, knowledge, history, fundamental cultural assumptions of all sorts. We know everything you ever knew—which makes us very similar in some ways, far more alike than an alien could possibly be with either of us. Our culture is built atop yours, our evolution has its roots in your soil. It only seems right to take you when we go.”

The Mechanical spread its hands, and made a grating sound that might have been meant to be a chuckle. “Besides,” it said, “this universe made
you,
and then you made
us.
So we’re once removed from the universe. And it’s a strange and complex place, this universe you’ve brought us into. We don’t entirely understand it, although we understand a great deal more of its functioning than you do. How can you be so sure of what your role in it may ultimately be? We may find that we need you yet, even if it’s a million years from now!” It paused thoughtfully, tipping its head to one side. “Many of my fellows do not share this view, I must admit, and they would indeed be just as glad to leave you behind, or even exterminate you. Even some of my fellow Clarkists, like Rondo Hatton and Horace Horsecollar, are in favor of exterminating you, on the grounds that after Arthur C. Clarke himself, the pinnacle of your kind, the rest of you are superfluous, and perhaps even an insult to his memory.”

Czudak started to say something, thought better of it. The Mechanical straightened its head, and continued. “But I want to take you along, as do a few other of our theorists. Your minds seem to have connections with the basic quantum level of reality that ours don’t have, and you seem to be able to affect that quantum level directly in ways that even we don’t entirely understand, and can’t duplicate. If nothing else, we may need you along as Observers, to collapse the quantum wave-functions in the desired ways, in ways they don’t seem to want to collapse for
us.”

“Sounds like you’re afraid you’ll run into God out there,” Czudak grated, “and that you’ll have to produce us, like a parking receipt, to validate yourselves to Him . . .”

“Perhaps we
are,”
it said mildly. “We don’t understand this universe of yours; are you so sure
you
do?” It was peering intently at him now.
“You’re
the ones who seem like unfeeling automata to us. Can’t you sense your own ghostliness? Can’t you sense what uncanny, unlikely, spooky creatures you are? You bristle with strangeness! You reek of it! Your eyes are made out of jelly! And yet, with those jelly eyes, you somehow manage degrees of resolution rivaling those of the best optical lenses. How is that possible, with nothing but blobs of jelly and water to work with? Your brains are soggy lumps of meat and blood and oozing juices, and yet they have as many synaptical connections as our own, and resonate with the quantum level in some mysterious way that ours do not!” It moved uneasily, as though touched by some cold wind that Czudak couldn’t feel. “We know who designed
us.
We have yet to meet whoever designed
you—
but we have the utmost respect for his abilities.”

With a shock, Czudak realized that it was afraid of him—of humans in general. Humans
spooked
it. Against its own better judgment, it must feel a shiver of superstitious dread when it was around humans, like a man walking past a graveyard on a black cloudless night and hearing something howl within. No matter how well-educated that man was, even though he
knew
better, his heart would lurch and the hair would rise on the back of his neck. It was in the blood, in the back of the brain, instinctual dread that went back millions of years to the beginning of time, to when the ancestors of humans were chittering little insectivores, freezing motionless with fear in the trees when a hunting beast roared nearby in the night. So must it be for the Mechanical, even though its millions of generations went back only thirty years. Voices still spoke in the blood—or whatever served it for blood—that could override any rational voice of the mind, and monsters still lurked in the back of the brain. Monsters that looked a lot like Czudak.

Perhaps that was the only remaining edge that humanity had—the superstitions of machines.

“Very eloquent,” Czudak said, and sighed. “Almost, you convince me.”

The Mechanical stirred, seeming to come back to itself from far away, from a deep reverie.
“You
are the one who must convince your followers of your sincerity, Mr. Czudak,” it said. Abruptly, it stood up. “If you publicly recant, Mr. Czudak, if you sway your followers, then we will let you Go Up. We will offer you the same benefits that we offer to any of our companions in the Orbital Companies. What
you
would call ‘immortality,’ although that is a very imprecise and misleading word. A greatly extended life, at any rate, far beyond your natural organic span. And the reversal of aging, of course.”

“God damn you,” Czudak whispered.

“Think about it, Mr. Czudak,” it said. “It’s a very generous offer—especially as you’ve already turned us down once before. It’s rare we give anyone a second chance, but we are willing to give you one. A chance of Ellen’s devising, I might add—as was the original offer in the first place.” Czudak glanced quickly at Ellen, but she kept her face impassive. “You’re sadly deteriorated, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical continued, softly implacable. “Almost non-functional. You’ve cut it very fine. But it’s nothing our devices cannot mend. If you Come Up with us tonight, you will be young and fully functional again by this time tomorrow.”

There was a ringing silence. Czudak looked at Ellen through it, but this time she turned away. She and the Mechanical exchanged a complicated look, although whatever information was being conveyed by it was too complex and subtle for him to grasp.