Existence

by David Brin

  Not the Naderites, though. They love all this.

  Stuck in between—torn by both hope and worry—would be Ortega’s constituency. On the one hand, alien knowledge should offer plenty of new business opportunities for the lucky and agile. On the other hand … even supposing all went well, if terrific new alien concepts and technologies arrived, delivering a million benefits without unleashing serious side effects … even then, lots of corporate entities would see their goods and services and market positions rendered obsolete. Why, just a few improvements in nano-tech might make it possible to at last produce home fabricators—letting citizens create almost any product from raw materials right in the kitchen or garage. A boon … unless your job or portfolio depends on manufacturing. Or shipping goods. In fact, half the companies in every stock market might wither. No wonder he seemed nervous.

  Yet, it turned out that Ortega had another purpose entirely.

  “Have you heard what they are planning to do, Mrs. Donaldson-Sander? They intend to use operant conditioning. That means using rewards and punishments, in a crude attempt to implement behavior modification on the alien entities residing inside!”

  Lacey clamped down to keep from giggling over an unforgivable pun that leaped to mind.

  Shall we teach Pavlovian dogs to SETI-up and beg?

  Fortunately, the man didn’t notice her brief grunt.

  “Can you believe the arrogance? The unbelievable vanity! Assuming all our difficulties in communication are their fault, not ours? Employing barbarously inhospitable methods to force them to meet our primitive standards of conduct!”

  Despite his overwrought passion, Lacey felt impressed—and perhaps a little ashamed. She had been ready—twice in a few seconds—to assign unsavory motives to this man, when his true reason for being upset was idealistic. A matter of graciousness and courtesy.

  “Well, the aliens do seem a bit out of control. Pushing and jostling. Interrupting each other, so that almost nothing decipherable or clear makes it to the surface. It’s hard to see how that could be our fault.”

  “Exactly.” Ortega nodded vigorously. “It is hard to see with our primitive minds. And yet, how could it not be our fault? A vast and sophisticated galactic civilization, experienced at hundreds of past contact situations, must know what it’s doing! Certainly compared to inexperienced and immature Earthlings. They are probably being very patient with us, waiting for us to figure out something simple.”

  Lacey pondered. Something simple … that those sophisticated minds can’t just explain to us? Why not simply lay it all out, plainly, in clear language and illustrated without ambiguity?

  Of course, that has also long been the reasonable person’s complaint toward God.

  She stopped herself from mentioning one possibility that was rising—slowly but steadily—in the worldwide betting pool. The aliens’ chaotic, uncooperative behavior might be explained if the stone-from-space were actually a hoax. In that case, it would likely be programmed to delay any actual conversation for as long as possible, messing with nine billion human heads while never actually getting down to specifics. In fact, the wager market had divided the category into several subplots, depending on whether the purpose of the fraud was to “unite humanity,” or “scare us into a dictatorship,” or “pull a financial scam,” or simply to throw the biggest prank of all time.

  Oh, sure, lots of experts declared that the Livingstone Object couldn’t be a hoax. Much of its technology was beyond humanity’s current abilities. But only by a bit—maybe just a couple of decades in crystal technology, for example. Almost daily, some company or government or amsci group declared: Hey! We’ve figured out how to do this part of what the Artifact does!

  It was an especially big driver of activity in the Industry of Lies.

  I hear Peter Playmount is pushing an epic cinemavirt into production, in which the hero will be a chunk of space crystal, saved from some dark conspiracy by a bunch of brave kids.…

  “The Contact Team is clearly out of control down there.” Simon Ortega gestured at the group on the other side of the glass, pressing his point. “The International Supervisory Commission won’t interfere with their mad scheme to torture the alien travelers into cooperating.”

  The man unfolded a clipboard of the old-fashioned variety, with a single sheet of paper attached. “A group of us are circulating a petition, to either let us into that room, or to broaden the Contact Team, or else at least to give us some kind of presence in there, to make our views known!”

  Lacey glanced over the page. A large fraction of the advisers had already signed. There seemed little possibility of harm. In fact, why not? She was reaching for the ink-pen that Ortega offered …

  … when one of her earrings chimed. A phone call, urgent of course—she had made clear to her secretaries and du-ai-nas that only top priority messages should get through. A soft, cyber whisper spoke the name “Gloria Harrigan.” It was Hacker’s personal attorney.

  “Would you excuse me please?” she asked Ortega. “This call is very important.” Her voice was on the verge of cracking as she turned away, while squeezing the earring. “Yes?”

  “Madam Donaldson-Sander? Is that you?”

  “Of course it is.” As if anyone else would be answering this encrypted channel. “Is there news from the search?”

  “Yes, madam. A crew has found Hacker’s capsule, or what’s left of it.”

  Lacey felt both hot and cold. Vision started growing blurry.

  “Wait, please. I said that badly. The capsule was in scattered pieces, but there are no traces of human … That is, an expert examined the latch and declared it must have been deliberately opened, from the inside!

  “So, there is strong reason to believe Hacker left before the container was destroyed. That, plus the lack of any fresh human bio-traces in the area, suggests he departed on his own power, protected and sustained by the very best survival suit money can buy.”

  Gloria spilled all of that so rapidly Lacey had trouble keeping up, grasping at the meaning, until it was repeated several times.

  “Mark is on the scene right now. He asked me to pass on the good news, and promises that he will call you personally within the hour.”

  Lacey, nodded, trying hard to see this as good news. She swallowed a few times before subvocalizing a question.

  “So, what happens next?”

  “The search will continue, madam. Please understand, the location is quite some distance away from his expected landing point, which is why things took so long. Also, we had been counting on finding radar and sonar reflections from the shell. Now it’s clear why that didn’t happen.

  “But we’re dialed in at last! He can have only gone a few dozen kilometers, max, swimming under his own power or drifting with the local currents. So we’ll just draw in all our resources to that small patch of sea. There should be results almost any time now.”

  It took a great effort to speak at all, let alone maintain a lifetime habit of civility.

  “Thank you, Gloria. Please thank ever … everyone.”

  It was no use. There were no further words. She pinched the earring to end the call, then pinched again, as it tried to hurriedly report on waiting messages from important people—like the head of the Naderite coalition and the director of her Chilean planet-hunter observatory, and …

  No. Prioritize. First sign Ortega’s petition, so the honor-driven but pesty little man would go away … then focus … focus on some important matter, such as the report from her spy in the Alps. Or else immerse yourself in the brilliantly entertaining blather being spewed by your hired genius. Profnoo would appreciate a little attention.

  One thing Lacey would not do was dwell overmuch on the news. On hope.

  Anyway, what lurked in her mind below the surface was something beyond hope. Perhaps even insultingly so. She could not shake an intense feeling—perhaps rising out of wishful thinking, or even hysterical denial—that Hacker was not only alive, but safe somehow.
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  Perhaps even having fun.

  Wouldn’t that be just like him?

  The suspicion had some basis in experience.

  He would always get in touch with me whenever there was trouble. On the other hand, Hacker generally ignored his mother when things were interesting or going well, neglecting to call if he was having the time of his life.

  ENTROPY

  Suppose we manage to avoid the worst calamities. The world-wreckers, extinction-makers, and civilization-destroyers. And let’s say no black holes gobble the Earth. No big wars pound us back to the dark ages. Eco-collapse is averted and the economic system is kept alive.

  Let’s further imagine that we’re not alone in achieving this miraculous endurance. That many other intelligent life forms also manage to escape the worst pitfalls and survive their awkward adolescence. Well, there are still plenty of ways that some promising sapient species might rise up, looking skyward with high hopes, and yet—even so—fail to achieve its potential. What traps might await us because we are smart?

  Take one of the earliest and greatest human innovations—specialization. Even way back when we lived in caves and huts, there was division of effort. Top hunters hunted, expert gatherers gathered, and skilled technicians spent long hours by the riverbank, fashioning intricate baskets and stone blades. When farming created a surplus that could be stored, markets arose, along with kings and priests, who allocated extra food to subsidize carpenters and masons, scribes and calendar-keeping astronomers. Of course, the priests and kings kept the best share. Isn’t administration also a specialty? And so, a few soon dominated many, across 99 percent of history.

  Eventually though, skill and knowledge spread, increasing that precious surplus, letting more people read, write, invent … which created more wealth, allowing more specialization and so on, until only a few remained on the land, and those farmers were mostly well-educated specialists, too.

  In the West, one trend spanned the whole twentieth century: a steady professionalization of everything. By the end of the millennium, almost everything a husband and wife used to do for their family had been packaged as a product or service, provided by either the market or the state. And in return? A pilot had merely to pilot and a firefighter just fought fires. The professor simply professed and a dentist had only to dent. Benefits abounded. Productivity skyrocketed. Cheap goods flowed across the globe. Middle-class citizens ate strawberries in winter, flown from the other hemisphere. Science burgeoned, as the amount that people knew expanded even faster than the pile of things they owned.

  And that is where—to some of us—things started to look worrisome.

  Let me take you back quite a ways, to the other end of a long lifetime, before the explosive expansion of cybernetics, before the Mesh and Web and Net, all the way back to the 1970s, when I first studied at Caltech. Often, late at night, my classmates and I pondered the dour logic of specialization. After reaping the benefits for many generations, it seemed clear that a crisis loomed.

  You see, science kept making discoveries at an accelerating clip. Already, a researcher had to keep learning ever-increasing amounts, in order to discover more. It seemed that just keeping up would force each of us to focus on ever narrower fields of study, forsaking the forest in order to zero in on tiny portions of a single tree. Eventually, new generations of students might spend half a lifetime learning enough to start a thesis. And even then, how to tell if someone else was duplicating your effort, across the world or down the hall?

  That prospect—having to know more and more about less and less—seemed daunting. Unavoidable. There seemed to be no way out …

  … until, almost overnight, we veered in a new direction! Our civ evaded that crisis with a technological side step that seemed so obvious, so easy and graceful that few even noticed or commented. There were so many exciting aspects to the Internet Age, after all. The old fear of narrow overspecialization suddenly seemed quaint, as biologists started collaborating with physicists and cross-disciplinary partnerships abounded. Instead of being vexed by overspecialized terminology, experts conversed excitedly, more than ever!

  Today, hardly anybody speaks of the danger that fretted us so. It’s been replaced by the opposite concern—one that we’ll get to next time.

  * * *

  Only first consider this.

  Sure, we may have escaped the specialization trap, for now, but will everyone else manage the same trick, out there across the stars? Our solution now seems obvious—to surf the tsunami! To meet the flood of knowledge with eager, eclectic agility. Refusing to be constrained by official classifications, we let knowledge bounce and jostle into new forms, supplementing professional skill with tides of zealous amateurism.

  But don’t take it for granted! The approach may not be repeated elsewhere. Not if it emerged out of some rare quality of our smartmonkey natures. Or pure luck.

  Nor would it have been allowed in most human cultures! Which of our past military or commercial or hereditary empires would have unleashed something as powerful as the Internet, letting it spread—unfettered and free—to every tower and hovel? Or allow so many skilled tasks to be performed by the unlicensed?

  One can imagine countless other species—and our own fragile renaissance—faltering back into the dour scenario that we students mulled, those gloomy nights. Slipping into an endless, grinding cycle, where specialization—once a friend—becomes the worst enemy of wisdom.

  —Pandora’s Cornucopia

  32.

  HOMECOMING

  By the third day after his crash-landing at sea, Hacker started earning his meals. In part out of sheer boredom—he grew restless simply being fed by the tribe of strange dolphins, like some helpless infant.

  Also, as that day stretched into a fourth, fifth, and so on, he felt a strange and growing sense that—for better or for worse—this was his tribe. At least for the time being.

  So he pitched in whenever the group harvested dinner, by helping to hold the fishing net, trying not to flinch as the beaters drove schools of fish straight toward him—a great mass of silver and blue darts that seemed almost like a giant creature in its own right, thrashing against the deadly mesh, as well as his facemask and hands. Each time, Hacker’s jaw throbbed from the intense, subsonic noise of the struggle—and from high power click-scans of the cetaceans, both stunning and caressing their prey. That complex, multichannel song seemed to combine genuine empathy for the fish with an almost catlike enjoyment of their predicament.

  I guess it has a lot to do with whether you’re the hunter, or hunted. I had no idea the sea could be so noisy, or musical. Or that life down here was so … relentless.

  This was no Disney underwater world. In comparison, the forest deer and rabbits had long stretches of peace. But down here? You watched your back all the time.

  Or rather, you listened. The texture of vibrations surrounded and stroked Hacker, in ways that it never did ashore—lapping against him with complex, interweaving songs of danger, opportunity, and distant struggle. Of course the implant in his jaw was one reason for this heightened sensitivity. With his eardrums still clamped from the day of the rocket launch, it provided an alternative route for sound, far more similar to dolphin hearing.

  Then there were those silly games that Mother used to play when we were kids. Treating us as her personal science experiments.

  Not that he had any real complaints. Lacey would get excited about some new development and recruit the boys as willing—or sometimes grudging—subjects. When she learned that human beings could be taught echolocation, she sent her sons stumbling around in blindfolds, clicking their tongues just so, listening for reflected echoes off sofas and walls … even servants stationed around the room. It proved possible to navigate that way—with a lot of bumps and stumbles. Hacker even found the knack handy as a party trick, later in life.

  But who would imagine I’d wind up using it in a place like this?

  Even the dolphins seemed surprised by his crud
e ability. Several of them spent extra time with Hacker, patiently tutoring him, like a slow toddler learning to walk.

  In return he helped by checking every member of the pod, from fluke to rostrum, using his ungloved hands to clean sores and remove parasites. Especially bothersome were drifting flecks of plastic, that neither sank nor biodegraded, but got caught in body crevices, even at the roots of every dolphin tooth. He found himself doing the chore daily—also carefully combing gunk out of the gill fronds that surrounded his helmet. But the stuff kept coming back. Sometimes swirling clouds of plastic bits and beads would turn the crystal waters hazy and bleak.

  How can anything live in this? he wondered while kicking along with his companions, over a seabed that was littered with manmade dross everywhere they went.

  Yet, Hacker felt he was getting the hang of life out here. His early fear of drowning, or getting battered by harsh currents, faded in time, as did the claustrophobia of living encased by a survival suit. Once again, he made a mental note to invest in the company that manufactured it. That is, if he ever made it back to that world.

  At night he felt more relaxed than he had in years, perhaps ever, dozing while the dolphins’ clickety gossip seemed to flow up his jaw and into his dreams. By the fifth or sixth morning, and increasingly on each that followed, he felt closer to understanding their way of communicating.

  I once saw a dolphin expert—on some nature show—say these creatures are merely bright animals, who had powers mimicry and precocious logic skill, maybe some basic semantics, at the level of a chimp, but little more. He said the evidence disproved all those old wish fantasies about dolphins actually having culture and language.

  What a dope!

  Hacker felt confirmed in his longstanding belief that so-called experts often lack the common sense to see what’s right in front of them.