by David Brin
The ai just stood there—or seemed to—patiently waiting for her to make a point.
“So, this may not be an accident! I want to find out if the clade suspects sabotage. Maybe an attack by eco-nuts. Or the Sons of Smith.”
“A reasonable suspicion. And, as I told you, madam, I can post a query through normal channels, to the directorate of the First Estate, in Vaduz—”
“Fine. But try the other way, too. I insist.”
This time, she said it with such finality that the hologram simply bowed in acceptance.
“Oh, and let’s see what we can find out from the Seventh Estate. The big transport firms have zeps and cargo ships and sea farms all across the Caribbean. They could be diverted and incorporated as part of the search mesh.”
“That may be tricky, madam. Under terms of the Big Deal, individual human beings who are above a certain threshold of personal wealth may not interfere with the Corporate Estate, or exercise undue influence upon the management of limited liability companies.”
“Who’s interfering? I’m just seeking a favor that any stockholder might ask for, under the same circumstances. Since when did it make you a second-class citizen, to be rich!”
Lacey clenched her jaw to keep from shouting. Oh, for the time, not so long ago, when raw piles of money spoke, directly and powerfully, in every boardroom, instead of having to apply leverage in convoluted ways. She took a breath, then spoke firmly. “You know how to do it. Go through the stockholder coops and the public relations departments. Make nice to the Merchant Seaman’s Guild. Use your fancy ai noggin—bring in the smart-arses in my legal department—and find ways to get those corporate resources busy, helping search for my boy. And do it now.”
“It shall be done, madam,” replied the aivatar. It seemed to back away then, retreating without turning, bowing and getting smaller, as if diminishing into ever greater distance, joining the ersatz folds of the Picasso. Just another of countless optical tricks that ais kept coming up with, unbidden, in order to mess with human eyes. And no one knew why.
But we put up with it. Because it amuses. And because it seems to make them happy.
And because they know damned well how much we’re afraid of them.
Another servitor appeared then, wearing the same uniform—blue-green with yellow piping—only this was a living young woman, one of the Camerouni refugees who Lacey had been sponsoring for as far back as she could remember. Utterly loyal (as verified by detailed PET scans) to her mistress.
Accepting a steaming teacup, Lacey murmured polite thanks. In order to avoid thinking about Hacker, she veered her thoughts the other way, backtracking to the giant apparatus that her money had built in the Andes, where a small order of monastic astronomers were now preparing the unconventional instrument, as dusk fell.
I suppose it’s a sign of the times that none of the big media outfits sent a live reporter to our opening, only a couple of feed-pods that we had to uncrate and activate ourselves, so the pesky things could hover about and get in our way, asking the most inane questions.
None of the news reports or webuzz seemed helpful. Except for science junkies and SETI fans, there seemed to be more tired cynicism than excitement.
“What’s the point?” the distilled, mass-voice demanded, with a collective yawn. “We already know there’s life out there, circling some nearby stars. Planets of pond scum. Planets where bacteria may eke out a living, amid drifting dunes. So? What does that mean to us? When we can’t even make it to Mars and visit the sand scum there?”
It wasn’t her job to respond to mass-composite taunts. She had professional cajolers and spinners to do that, making the case for a continued search, for combing the heavens in new ways. To keep fanning hope that a glimpse of some blue world, perhaps another Earth, might shake some joy back into the race. But it was an uphill struggle.
Even among her own peers, other “cathedral-builders” in the aristocracy, Lacey’s pet project got no respect. Helena duPont-Vonessen, and other leading trillies, considered the Farseeker a waste, with so many modern problems screaming for attention. New diseases, festering in the flooded coastlines, demanding endowed institutes to study them. Simmering cities, where some lavish cultural center might keep restive populations calm, if not happy. Monuments to both mollify the mob and keep trillie families safe … if not popular. Back in TwenCen, governments built all the great universities, libraries and research centers, the museums and arenas, the observatories, monuments and Internets. Now, groaning with debt, they left such things to the mega-wealthy, as in times of old. A tradition as venerable as the Medicis. As Hadrian and Domitian. As the pyramids.
Newblesse oblige. A key part of the Big Deal to put off a class war that, according to computer models, could make 1789 look like a picnic. Though no one expected the Deal to hold for long. Speaking via cipher-parrot, Helena seemed to say that time was short. Lacey felt unsurprised.
But an alliance with the Prophet … with Tenskwatawa and his Movement.
Must it come to that?
It wasn’t that Lacey felt any great loyalty to the Big Deal. Or to democracy and all that. Clearly, the Western Enlightenment was drawing to a close. Somebody had to guide the new era, so why not those who were raised and bred for leadership? The way things had been in 99 percent of past human cultures. (How could 99 percent be wrong?) And, well, with the momentum of his movement, Tenskwatawa could make a crucial difference, giving the clade of wealth every excuse it needed.
Anyway, what’s the point of having lots of cash, if it cannot buy action when needed?
What bothered Lacey wasn’t the necessity of limiting and controlling democracy. No, it was the goal of the Prophet. The price he would demand, for helping bring back aristocratic rule. The other thing that must also happen when the Enlightenment fell.
Stability. A damping-down of breakneck change. Renunciation.
And there Lacey knew she might run into trouble. For the edifices and monuments that she liked to build and have named after her all were aimed at shaking things up! Instruments and implements and institutions that accelerated change.
So? I’m Jason’s wife—and Hacker’s mother.
The insight offered some bitter satisfaction. And, though her heart still wrenched with worry, Lacey felt a stronger connection with her wayward boy, who might, even now, be drifting as a clot of ash in the warm sea ahead.
I never quite saw it that way before. But in my own way, I’m just as devoted as he and his father were. Just as eager for speed.
ENTROPY
Another potential failure mode is deliberate or accidental misuse of science.
Take nanotech. Way back in the 1960s, Richard Feynman predicted great things might be accomplished by building small. Visionaries like Drexler, Peterson, and Bear foretold molecular-scale machines erecting perfect crystals, superstrong materials, or ultra-sophisticated circuits—anything desired—built atom by atom.
Today, the latest computers, plenats, and designer drugs all depend upon such tools. So do modern sewage and recycling systems. Soon, smart nanobots may cruise your bloodstream, removing a lifetime’s accumulated dross, even pushing back the clock of years. Some envision nanos cleansing polluted aquifers, rebalancing sterile swathes of ocean, or sucking carbon from the air.
Ah, but what if micromachines escape their programming, reproducing outside factory brood-tanks? Might hordes evolve, adapting to utilize the natural world? Lurid sci-fi tales warn of replicators eating the biosphere, outcompeting their creators.
Or this tech may be perverted for man’s oldest pastime. Picture an arms race between suspicious nations or globalsynds, each fearing others are developing nano-weapons in secret. When danger comes packaged so small, can we ever know for sure?
—Pandora’s Cornucopia
12.
APPRENTICESHIP
The man behind the desk passed a stone paperweight from hand to hand.
“Naturally, Miss Povlov, we feel our project is misunder
stood.”
Naturally, Tor thought, careful not to subvocalize. No use having sarcasm appear in her transcript. Everyone is misunderstood. Especially folks who are trying to correct faults in human nature.
Dr. Akinobu Sato tilted back in his chair. “Here at the Atkins Center, we’re not pushing some grand design for Homo sapiens. We view our role as expanding the range of options for our kin and posterity. Are we then any different from others who pushed back the darkness?”
The words so closely matched her own thoughts, just seconds before, that Tor had to blink. It’s probably coincidence. I’m not the first to raise this question.
Still … modern sensors could detect a single neuron flash across a room. Monitors in a wall might track gross emotions, or even be taught to respond to a homeowner’s mental commands. And there were always creepy tattle-rumors about the next big step, reading actual thoughts. Surely just tall tales.
Still, these Atkins meddlers might be the very ones to make that leap. During a tour, before arriving in Sato’s office, she had seen—
—quadriplegics who moved about gracefully, controlling their robotic legs without wire shunts through the skull.
—a preteen girl commanding up to twenty hovering ai-craft at once, by combining muscle twitches, tooth-clicks, and subvocal grunts. Apparently a record.
—an accident victim who had lost an entire cerebral hemisphere and would never again speak, but whose fingertips sketched VR pictures in the air. Watching without specs, you might think him crazed, capering and pointing at nothing. But tuned to the right overlayer, she saw images erupt from those waggling fingertips so detailed and compelling that—well—who needed words?
Then there were the ones generating so much excitement and controversy—victims of the Autism Plague who had been sent here from all over the world by parents seeking hope. The Atkins specialized in “savants,” so Tor had come expecting feats of mathematical legerdemain and total recall. And there were a few impressive demos—mentally calculating long-ago dates and guessing correctly the number of beads in a jar—stunts that were old news. Dr. Sato wanted to show off more recent accomplishments—less flashy. More significant.
Tor watched as boys and girls, long mentally isolated from close human contact, now held normal-looking conversations, even collaborating in a game. After going on a while about eye-contact rates and Empathy Quotients, Sato made his point.
“We start by stimulating brain regions that ‘mirror’ the body movements we see other people perform. Also manipulating the parieto-occipital junction, to provoke what was called an out-of-body experience. These mental states once carried a lot of freight among religious types. But we now trigger outward-empathy or self-introspection, on demand.”
Tor had commented that some of the faithful might find this offensive. One more grab by science at territory once reserved for belief. But Sato shrugged as if to ask, What else is new?
“Call it a technologization of compassion, or induction of insight.
“The next question is, can we do all this, awakening other-awareness and self-appraisal in some autistics, without sacrificing their savant skills? Or the wild alertness that sometimes makes them seem more natural and feral than the rest of us?
“And then…,” Sato had mused, with an eager glint in his eyes. “… if we can manage that, will it be it possible to go the other way? Give savant-level mental powers to normal people?”
Conversing with some patients, Tor came to realize something that distressed her as a reporter—there’d be little useful video from this tour. The Atkins patients, once crippled by a deep mental handicap, some of them effectively disconnected from the world, now seemed talkative, cogent, not so much hopelessly detached as … well … nerdy.
She did have shots of some beaming parents, visiting from faraway cities, calling the work here miraculous. But I can get some balance from the demonstrators outside, Tor recalled. Activists who posed a pointed question.
Who are we—who is anybody—to define what it means to be human? To “cure” a condition that might simply be closer to innocence or nature? Closer to the Earth?
Or—perhaps—closer to a onetime state of grace?
* * *
Now, ensconced in a plush chair with her stalk-cam panning across Sato’s office, she hurried back on topic. “You say you just offer options, Doctor. But folks in Carolina didn’t want those choices. And those here in Albuquerque range from ambivalent to hostile. Is it a case of too much too soon? Or something deeper?”
“I think you know the answer, Miss Tor,” Sato replied, placing both hands on the desk. “If we were merely helping some types of borderline autistic children to behave more normally, to be more empathic and communicative, to get jobs and raise families, then few would complain. Just a few diversity fetishists who think nature is always better than civilization and animals are wiser than people. But anyone can see our work will have implications, far beyond helping a few kids to fit in.”
Tor nodded. “Hm, yes. We’ll get to all that. But first, let me ask, after being forced to leave Charleston, why didn’t you resettle in one of the high-water townships along the coast where you’d fit in? Just another merry band of would-be godmakers, no more offensive than your local biotinker.”
Sato frowned, a deep furrow creasing his youthful-looking brow above soft, almond eyes. He had seemed about forty, but Tor now guessed higher. Triggered by attention cues, her aiware sifted, finding the professor’s latest sculpt, last month, at Madame Fascio’s Facelifts. So? Scientists aren’t immune to vanity.
“We dislike the term … ‘godmaker’…, It implies something elitist, even domineering. Our goal is the opposite. A general empowerment, across the board.”
“Commendably egalitarian, Doctor. But does it ever work out that way? All new things—from toys to tools of power—tend to be gathered up first by some human elite. Often as a way to stay elite.”
Sato arched an eyebrow. “Now who’s sounding radical? Are you suggesting we revisit the Class War?”
“It’s a simple question, Professor. How will you ensure that everyone gets to share these mental augmentations you seek? Won’t equality be stymied by the very same human diversity you celebrate?”
“Explain, please.”
“Suppose you find a way to enhance human intelligence. Or for people to focus attention more creatively, beyond the Thurman Barrier. Assume the process is cheap with few side effects.…” It was her turn to express doubt, with an ironic lift of an eyebrow for the jewelcam. “And further that your process isn’t monopolized by some clade of aristos, who use wealth or influence or public safety as an excuse—”
“Are you really that suspicious of aristocracy?” Sato tried to cut in. “How old-fashioned.”
And how out of touch you are, she thought. If you haven’t sensed the recent shifts back toward conflict. But Tor forged on.
“—even assuming all of that, there will be no way to avoid one final division—between those who choose to accept your gift, and those who do not.”
“Our … gift.” Sato mulled for a moment. Then he turned back to her with a gaze that seemed dark, glittering. “You know, our modern endeavor as would-be godmakers, to use your term, is not without precedent. The dream goes back a long way. For example, it is said that after Prometheus was chained to a rock, in punishment for giving humanity the boon of fire, his children thereupon chose to live among men. Made families with them. Reinforced his gift by breeding divinity into the race. And there are countless other legends—even in the Judeo-Christian Bible—implying the same thing.”
“Stories about humans trying to be godlike. But don’t most of them portray that as sin? Prometheus was punished. Frankenstein gets killed by his creature. The Tower of Babel crumbles amid chaos.”
Bridging his fingers, Sato intoned: “‘And the Lord said, See, they are all one people and have all one language; and this is only the start of what they may do: and now it will not be possible to kee
p them from any purpose of theirs.’”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Babel. Building a tower to heaven. The attempt failed when we were deliberately sabotaged by a curse of mutual incomprehension, by forcing us to speak a multitude of languages. Most theologians have interpreted the Babel story the way you just did—as showing God angry at humanity, for this act of hubris.
“But read it more carefully. There is no anger! Not a trace. No mention of anybody suffering or dying, as they surely do in murderous mass-fury, at Sodom, or in Noah’s flood, or innumerable cases of heavenly wrath. There’s none of that in the story of Babel! Sure, we were thwarted, confused, and scattered. But was that meant to stymie us forever? From achieving what the passage clearly says we can achieve? What perhaps we’re ultimately meant to achieve?
“Maybe the confusion was meant just to delay things. For us to learn by overcoming obstacles. In fact, didn’t the scattering-of-man make us more diverse and experienced with overcoming hard challenges? Better able to grasp and apply a myriad points of view? Think about it, Miss Tor. Today, someone with simple aiware can understand what any other person says, anywhere on the globe. Right now, in this very generation, we have come full circle. Language has ceased to be any sort of barrier. And our “tower” covers the globe.
“Recall what scripture says—there’s no limit to our potential. We’re inherently able to do or be anything. Anything at all. So, what’s to stop us now?”
Tor stared at the neuroscientist. Are you kidding? she thought. Clearly, at one level, he was pulling her leg. And yet, equally, he meant all this. Took it seriously.
“What do ancient myths have to do with the question at hand? The issue of arrogant scientific ambition?”
“The old tales show how long humans have pondered this problem! Like, whether it is proper to pick up the same tools the Creator used to make us. What could be a more meaningful concern?”
