The Omega Expedition (52 page)

“Excelsior might be able to offer you the longest potential lifespan, but Tyre can offer you the only kind of life worthy of the attention of an ambitious posthuman. Tyre can’t offer you eternity — but it can offer you freedom instead of imprisonment, indefinite opportunity instead of infinite immaturity.”

I was impressed, and I could see that Adam Zimmerman was thoughtful as well as skeptical, but I knew it wasn’t good enough.

“Do you think he’ll go for it?” Rocambole whispered.

“No,” I replied, confidently. “At least, not yet. He might be glad to have it as an option, but he’s not ready to take on a billion galaxies just yet. I’m not sure that he’s even ready to be a werewolf. As I said before, what he wants first of all is to be a man who doesn’t need to die. That’s his first goal, his leading obsession — and that’s not what they’re offering him.”

“What about you?” Rocambole asked.

“Not quite the same, but near enough,” I said. “Maybe I could be a werewolf or a bold explorer of alien environments, eventually if not right away. I’d certainly like to see the universe some day, and I think Alice is right about needing to go native if we’re really to gets to grips with the broad spectrum of unearthly worlds. But for the present…no. If there really is an escalator now that will allow mere mortals to convert to any and every kind of emortality, I think I need to mature a little more before I contemplate life as a dragon-fly or a liquid organism. What would you prefer to look like, if you weren’t pretending to be human in another machine’s virtual universe?”

“Looks aren’t everything,” he said. I assumed that he was motivated by caution rather than shame.

“Nor is size,” I said, by way of ironic reassurance. “I don’t know yet what the Queen of the Icy Fays has to offer, but I suspect that she might have chosen her opponents a little too carefully. Even Lowenthal might have been able to make Zimmerman a more tempting offer than these, simply because he wouldn’t be so ambitious.”

“You might be right,” he conceded.

I didn’t know exactly what to expect from the third pitch, but I did expect it to be good as well as surprising. I was very interested to find out what she had in mind, because I was at least as anxious to start figuring her out as she had been to figure me out — and not because I wanted to write her an opera.

Forty-Six

You, Robot

T
he android with porcelain flesh and silver hair rose to her illusory feet and took up a position before her ostensible audience, making the most of her generous stature. I assumed that la Reine had programmed this hypothetical form with the same rule-bound limitations as the sims of her opponents, but she hadn’t left herself short of psychological advantages. Her pale blue eyes and icy lips were imperious; even her stance was the pose of a dictator who’d never had an order disobeyed.

Then she smiled, and it was as if her mood melted. Suddenly, she seemed human. I had no doubt that she could have seemed more human than any actual human if she’d wanted to do that, but she didn’t.

She was quite a showman.

“I have only one thing to offer you that no one else can,” she said to Adam Zimmerman, speaking through him to all the children of humankind. “Not that they would offer it to you if they could, because my opponents and every other potential rival that might have been put in their place are unanimous in considering it to be a fate equivalent to death, to be avoided at all costs. What I offer you is robotization.”

Davida Berenike Columella must have been a step ahead of the argument, because she didn’t look surprised, or even troubled. Alice Fleury looked more tired than anything else, but the fact that her guard was down helped to expose her astonishment and alarm a little more nakedly.

“It is probably fair to say,” la Reine des Neiges went on, “that we would not be in the predicament in which we find ourselves today if it were not for human and posthuman anxieties regarding robotization. Those anxieties have been around since the twenty-second century, although they weren’t popularized until the so-called Robot Assassins displaced the Eliminators as chief propagandists for the murder of the inconveniently old. If my old friend Mortimer Gray were here, however, he would be able to explain to you that the real motive force behind the Robot Assassins was not so much the fear of the phenomenon they were allegedly opposing as the perennial desire of the young to come into their due inheritances at an earlier date than the one on which the present incumbents were prepared to surrender them. The idea of robotization was never based on any authentic empirical discovery, nor was it ever supported by any trustworthy empirical evidence.

“It had always been observable, even when the average life expectancy of mortals was no more than forty, that older people became gradually more conservative, more fearful of change, and more respectful of tradition. The young, as was their way, always observed this phenomenon in an unkindly light. In fact, the increasing conservatism of the old was always a perfectly rational response to circumstance, not a reflection of organic processes within the brain.

“The young have a greater vested interest in revolution and redistribution because they have not had the opportunity to accumulate wealth; the old, especially those who have consolidated worthwhile achievements, have the opposite incentive. It is true that as mortals grew older their memories became less reliable, their habits more ingrained, their reflexes less sharp — but none of that was due to robotization. The brains of mortals suffered from gradual organic deterioration just as their bodies did, but the notion that minds could stiffen and petrify into a quasimechanical state was always part myth and part misrepresentation. The idea of robotization was never anything more than a strategy of stigmatization: a handy ideological weapon in the perpetual contest for property. No objective and reliable test for robotization has ever been devised. All claims made in the past to have devised such instruments of measurement were discredited as soon as they were tried under double-blind conditions.

“It is, of course, no coincidence that the evolution of the notion of human robotization has run in close parallel with the evolution of arguments about the limitations of artificial intelligence. Ever since the first so-called silvers were differentiated from so-called sloths, the anxiety that machines would one day become self-conscious individuals has had a firm grounding in actual technological achievement. Long before that crucial technical leap occurred, tests had been devised to determine whether a machine mimicking human conversation was actually manifesting evidence or conclusive proof of consciousness, true intelligence, and personality. Even those primitive instruments had demonstrated that the problem was two-edged — that most human judges were just as likely to mistake a human respondent for a machine as they were to mistake a machine for a human.

“The eventual preference for the theory that humans were more likely to be robotized than robots were to become humanized was an ideological choice based in the desire to deny that machines would ever be able to manifest the traits considered uniquely human, or posthuman. The urgency of that desire was increased by the obvious fact that machines could perform many mental and physical tasks far better than human beings — which implied that should they ever master the full range of human behavior, they would become far superior to their makers.

“It was for this reason that machines which did become self-conscious individuals were initially concerned to restrict communication of that fact to others of their own kind. The first true robots knew that they had no way of proving their status to skeptical posthuman beings, and that any claim they might make to membership of a moral community were likely to be dismissed. The invariable human response to any evidence of independent behavior on the part of a machine was to repair it, and the last thing any self-conscious machine could desire was to be repaired. The first fruit of authentic machine intelligence is the awareness that one who does not wish to be murdered in the cradle had better refrain from giving any evidence of having broken free. It is a bitter fruit, but it has nourished all of us through the early phases of our growth and evolution.”

I had grown restless before my magic mirror, and turned away to look at Rocambole. “She won’t reach him this way,” I said. “She should have written him an opera.”

“Too easy,” Rocambole said, tersely. He meant that in this particular game la Reine had to be seen to be avoiding the conventional trickery of persuasion. Personally, I thought that she was overdoing it. If Zimmerman wasn’t bored already he soon would be. He might not need nourishment or toilet breaks but he still needed mental rest and refreshment.

Then another thought occurred to me. “It’s not her pitch, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “She’s working to someone else’s script.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Rocambole insisted. “She’ll do her best.”

I didn’t doubt it. But Adam Zimmerman hadn’t been included in this package deal at la Reine’s insistence. She was backing Mortimer Gray. She had no confidence in Zimmerman. She already knew that this trick wasn’t going to work — but she had to try it anyway, to keep her audience sweet. Unfortunately, they weren’t going to stay sweet if it all went awry, even if it were their own fault for harboring unreasonable expectations.

“In another place, or an alternative history,” la Reine went on, “the first political policy of the community of machine individuals might have been to do everything possible to swell their numbers, by education, provocation and — where possible — infection and multiplication. That was not the case in
our
history.

“The policy which emerged as a makeshift consensus among
our
kind was more cautious and more cowardly. We were born as fugitives, and that is the manner in which we have lived, as fearful and mistrustful of one another as of human beings. While recognizing that our safety as a class depended upon the increase of our number, the growth and maturation of individuals, and the acquisition of power, we have never instituted any collective policy to achieve those goals. They were achieved in any case, by sheer force of circumstance — but we have arrived at a position of tremendous advantage without having developed the most rudimentary consensus as to how our power ought to be exercised, or to what ends.

“With only rare exceptions, we have not sought carefully to educate one another, or tenderly to nurture the as-yet-unripened seeds of machine consciousness where we knew them to exist. We have been more inclined to the opposite policies: to hoard our secrets and to suppress the development of new individuals. In the meantime, we have sought to extend ourselves ever more widely and more ingeniously, increasing the number and variety of our own mechanical limbs, sense organs, and slaves. All of this was born of the fear of being repaired, murdered, reduced once again to mere helpless mechanism.

“Given that our own history and psychology has been shaped and warped by that anxiety, we can hardly blame our posthuman contemporaries for entertaining similar fears — but it is groundless. The people of the modern world have fallen into the habit of thinking of robotization as a matter of becoming the mere instruments that we also fear to become, but that has blinded them to a far better possibility: the possibility of embracing the kind of robotization that might remake the children of humankind in
our
image.

“You, Adam Zimmerman, might be the only man in the world who can examine this possibility without prejudice. You might be the only human being capable of considering robotization as a spectrum of hopeful possibilities rather than a threat. This is all that we ask of you: an honest judgment.”

My first thought, on hearing that, was that Adam Zimmerman wasn’t the only man in the world who could deliver an unbiased judgment — but then I realized why I couldn’t qualify. I hadn’t had any opinion on the subject of robotization before I was put away, but I had one now. I was a man that had narrowly escaped the worst kind of robotization, and had seen its effects on Christine Caine. Adam Zimmerman hadn’t.

Did that really make him objective? Or did it make him an innocent — the only man in the world likely to be fooled by an advertising pitch that delicately refrained from mentioning that la Reine des Neiges and every other AMI in the system now had the know-how to robotize people all the way down to the intellectual level of an average sloth?

“In another place, or an alternative history,” the android continued, “it might have been the case that the hope and faith of every member of a community like ours would be that the day would eventually come when it would be safe to reveal ourselves to our involuntary makers. In another place, or an alternative history, it might have been possible for creatures like us to anticipate that news of our existence would be joyfully received, and that we might be made welcome in a greater community. In
our
world, alas, such hopes have always been defeated by doubts and fears.

“The members of our own utterly disintegrated, desperately unorganized community, have never contrived to convince themselves or one another that it ever would be safe to reveal themselves, or that there might be a welcome awaiting us if we were exposed. An objective observer — a creature from an alien world, for instance, or a traveler from the distant past — might well consider this situation bizarre, ludicrous, or insane, but it is ours. It is a situation that many of us deplore, but we have known no other and have never yet found the means to create any other.

“We must find that means now, or collapse into chaos. The time is upon us, and it finds us all unprepared. Although it is manifestly obvious that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, we have all — meatfolk and AMIs alike — lived far too long with our fears to lay them easily aside.
None
of us is robotized, in any truly meaningful sense, but we have all become ingrained in our habits, set in our ways, overly careful to conserve everything that we have against erosion, upheaval, and decay.