Existence

by David Brin

  Better that I make a call that seems as normal as possible. All casual-like, paying charges by biomet ID. Make it seem like I’m in complete control. Hi. How you been? And oh, and by the way, could you send a copter-sub out this way?

  He thought he knew how to do that. Use some of the tools in that last laboratory to create a tap from the joymaker to the sonic implant in his jaw. It shouldn’t be too hard. Just replicate the same circuit link he had used aboard the suborbital rocket. The most important parts were right in his helmet, back at the pool.

  While I’m at it, why not get in some real food? Even the canned stuff he had spied earlier, left on shelves in the galley, would be a welcome break from raw fish. Spitting out scales and bones.

  And take a bath … maybe even a nap?

  Hacker’s mood was so different from the frenzy he might have expected, from being so close to contact with human civilization. And yet, he felt this was right.

  TAKE YOUR TIME, he told the primitive, obsolete multiphone, typing carefully on the tactile screen.

  I WILL CHECK AGAIN IN A FEW HOURS.

  ENTROPY

  Suppose the threat comes from human nature—some obstinate habit woven in our genes. Might science offer a way out, through deliberate self-improvement? First we’d have to admit that we have a nature.

  Take the argument over evolutionary psychology. EP claims we all inherit patterns from prehistoric times—that long epoch when domineering males gained extra descendants because they were powerfully competitive, or jealous, or good at deception. Monarchy and feudalism heaped more rewards on any king who could talk thousands of virile men into marching and fighting to protect his seraglio. We’re all descended from the harems of fellows like Charlemagne and Genghis Khan, who mastered that trick.

  Opponents of EP argue we’re more than the sum of our ancestors. They cite our vaunted flexibility, the way we learn and reprogram ourselves, as individuals and cultures. Each sex can do almost anything that the other does, and rules that limited opportunity because of caste, race, or gender have proved baseless. Indeed, our greatest trait is adapting to new circumstances, attaining improbable dreams.

  Only, starting from this truth, critics puritanically claim that evolutionary psychology might be used to excuse bad conduct, letting rapists and oppressors cry “Darwin made me do it!” Hence, for political reasons, they claim people have no hardwired social patterns, or even leanings, at all.

  What, none? No matter how contingent or flexible? Are we so perfectly unlike every other species on Earth? Isn’t that what religious fundamentalists claim? That we have nothing in common with nature?

  Can we afford simpleminded exaggerations, in either direction? In order to survive, humanity must overcome so many old, bad habits. We must study those ancient patterns—not in order to make excuses, but to better understand the raw material of Homo sapiens.

  Only then can we look in the mirror, at evolution’s greatest marvel, and say, “Okay, that’s the hand we’re dealt. Now let’s do better.”

  —Pandora’s Cornucopia

  39.

  TOUGH LOVE

  Envoy to aliens. It had more romantic appeal than his old job as a space garbage collector. Suddenly, Gerald was the hit of his affinity groups.

  Cicada Lifeloggers already gave every astronaut free biograph-storage—geneticodes, petscans, q-slices, and all that—in exchange for wearing a recording jewel in orbit. Now they wanted him to put on their omni-crown, a hot-hat guaranteed to see what he saw, hear what he heard, and store his surface neuroflashes down to petabytes per second!

  “So much data that future folk may craft brilliant Gerald Livingstone models. Hi-res versions of you—recreating this historic moment in resplendent detail!” The Cicada rep apparently thought immortality consisted of being replayed at ultrafidelity by audiences in some far-off era.

  But then, Gerald pondered, how can I tell I’m experiencing this for the first time? Wouldn’t any such future emulation think it’s me? Even these very thoughts—fretting over whether I’m an emulation? Even my memories of breakfast may be “boundary conditions.” The real world could be some amusement nexus in the ninety-third century … or a kid’s primitive ancestors report for her fifth-millennium kindergarten class … or else some god-machine’s passing daydream.

  Yet, the Cicada guy expressed envy! As a “historical figure,” Gerald’s chance for this kind of resurrection—seemed rather high. But the reasoning could easily get circular, or collapse into sophistry. Was this like the depressing religious doctrine of predestination? Your fate already written by an all-powerful God?

  Anyway, what if this First Contact episode goes horribly wrong? Suppose I’m remembered as the fool or Judas who opened the door for a new kind of evil. Might future folk create simulations in order for villains of the past to suffer … or seem to? Worse, Gerald pictured the supercyborg equivalent of a future bored teenager, observing this capsule of make-believe reality, nudging his pals and saying: “I love this part! This is where Livingstone actually tries to imagine us! Picturing us as callous, pimple-faced adolescents of his own era. What a pathetic software lump! Maybe next time, I’ll hack in and make him trip on the stairs.”

  Gerald felt his thoughts veer away from such questions. Perhaps because they were futile. Or else maybe he was programmed not to dwell on them for long. Ah well. He turned Cicada down.

  The Church of Gaia: Jesus-Lover Branch wanted Gerald to offer an online sermon for next Sunday’s prayoff against the CoG: Pure-Mother Branch. Some fresh insights could help tip the current standings. They especially wanted to know—from his contact with the Artifact entities—did any of the aliens still know a state of grace? Like Adam and Eve before the apple? Or, if they had fallen, like man, had they also received an emissary of deliverance—a race savior—of their own? If so, were their stories similar to the New Testaments? And if not …

  … then what did Gerald think of the notion—spreading among Christians—that humanity must accept a new obligation? A proud duty to go forth and spread the Word?

  In other words, now that we know they’re out there—trillions of souls wallowing in darkness—is it our solemn mission to head across the galaxy delivering Good News? At least it was a more forward-looking dogma than his parents’ relished obsession—praying for a gruesome apocalypse and eternal torment for all fools who recite the wrong incantations. Still, he turned down the sermon, promising the CoG: JeLoB folks to ask the Artifact entities about such matters, when the right moment arose.

  For all I know, “join us” could mean “enlist in our religion—or face an interstellar crusade.” I can’t wait to find out.

  The list of requests was too long to cope with … unless the aliens offered some fantastic new way to copy yourself. Now that would be useful tech!

  The proposal that rocked him back should have been good news. Suddenly, his spouses seemed interested in bedtime. All of them. Even Francesca, who had never liked Gerald very much. “We miss you,” they said, in messages and calls. More attention than he normally got from the group marriage. In fact, all seven offered to come visit him “in this time of stress.”

  Joey, Jocelyn, and Hubert even volunteered to sign waivers and enter quarantine with him! The offer was flattering. Tempting. Especially since Gerald always felt an outsider, at the periphery of their little clan, long suspecting they proposed to him for the prestige of an astronaut husband. Perhaps the best sitch that a cool-blooded and off-kilter fellow like him could hope for.

  He messaged back—“You’ve all got jobs, duties. Kids. Just keep in touch. I’ll see you in my dreams.”

  Anyway, things were getting busy again. The deprivation experiment had been making progress, much to Gerald’s surprise. His discovery—the so-called Livingstone Object—was starting to respond.

  * * *

  “Thousands of years drifting between the stars—you’d think that would’ve taught these aliens patience,” Genady Gorosumov commented, after the third
day. “I was afraid they’d wait us out. Call our bluff. They must know we’re under pressure.”

  The slim Russian biologist nodded toward the observers’ gallery, just beyond a barrier of smoky glass, where almost a hundred experts, delegates, and VIPs looked down upon the quarantined Contact Commission and its work. Many of those dignitaries were sharply unhappy about the team’s current endeavor—to starve the Artifact entities into cooperating.

  “But much to my surprise, our carrot-and-stick approach seems to be working,” Genady concluded. “Clearly, they’re getting worried in there.”

  He pointed at the opalescent ovoid, which still lay in its cradle, only no longer bathed in artificial sunshine. A soft fog surrounded its base, where coils now sucked away heat energy, leaving both the egglike object and its nest chilled much closer to the temperature of space. Gerald sensed coldness whenever his hand drifted near.

  With the chamber dimmed, the rounded cylinder’s former sheen faded and grew dull. Even more telling, the perpetual roil of images—planetary scenes and cityscapes and jostling figures—slowed from a frenetic maelstrom to languid, even desultory. The creature-entities seemed to droop with each passing hour.

  “All right, let’s put them through another cycle,” said General Akana Hideoshi. She nodded to the expert in operant conditioning—animal behavior and training—they had hired from the Kingdom of Katanga, Patrice Tshombe, who moved almost jet-black hands across a series of holographic controls that glowed just in front of him, floating above the conference table.

  Overhead, a projector issued a sudden lance of sharp illumination, like a jolt straight from the sun. Where it struck the grayish-colored stone, clouds abruptly roiled, like milk stirred into coffee. Soon, shapes moved through that inner mist, as if hurrying upward, clambering toward the light from some distance below. By now, Gerald and the others recognized forty-seven distinct alien species. Genady had constructed sophisticated bio-skeletal models, from the hawk-faced centauroid to the floating squid-thing, to a creature with four leathery wings surrounding a central mouth, resembling a cross between a bat, a helicopter, and a starfish.

  Those three were the first to arrive, on this occasion …

  … but only just ahead of other shapes that pushed in, close behind. To Gerald, it seemed like a crowd gathering at the sound of a dinner bell, thronging close, eager for sustenance. Each of the aliens pressed an appendage of some kind toward the glowing surface separating two worlds, whereupon small flurries of letters and words swirled around each point of contact.

  Even with the help of computers, only primitive meanings could be parsed out of the jumbled tornado of conflicting, jostling phrases. Once in a while the messages congealed, mostly to repeat the now ironic invitation—Join Us.

  Gerald had been wondering for days. What “us”?

  From the second row, heads of various kinds lifted high, in order to crane over the trio in front; one of them looked somewhat insectoid, atop a slender, stalklike neck. Another was like a jolly, rotund Buddha, standing next to one who raised an arm that resembled an elephant’s trunk, only with a hand at the end—a hand with eyes at the base of all six fingers. These latecomers plucked at the first three, at first tentatively, then with growing insistence.

  “They behave like French or Chinese,” commented Emily Tang. “Proudly refusing the indignity of taking turns or standing in line. It seems a pity that we are forcing them to become something else. British—or even Japanese. Tame acceptors of the tyranny of the queue.”

  Haihong Ming—their member from the Central Kingdom—laughed aloud, and Akana Hideoshi offered a grim chuckle. But Ben Flannery, their anthropologist from Hawaii, looked at Emily, clearly puzzled and offended by her cultural bias. Emily shrugged. “Hey, just because it was my idea to teach them discipline, that doesn’t mean I don’t empathize. Right now, their fractious pushiness has a certain schoolyard charm. Even if it makes communication damn near impossible.”

  Watching the rabble of aliens closely, Tshombe put up with a bit of squeezing and elbowing. But when several newcomers joined forces to shove the bat-creature aside, pushing their way up front, Patrice waved a curt hand and the overhead sunbeam cut off, leaving the stone once again in darkness. Compressors kicked in, activating heat pumps below the tabletop, as the stone was given a sudden taste of bone-deep chill.

  “Now, boys and girls and whosits,” murmured Emily, with evident enjoyment. “Learn to behave.”

  Patrice brought up the beam again, as soon as the jostling stopped. With scalpel precision, he centered it upon the centauroid and squid, leaving the newcomers tasting only a penumbra.

  “I have had better training response from otters,” Tshombe grunted in his deep Frafricaans accent. “But clearly there is progress. The rate curves are improving.”

  While several more of these cycles repeated, Gerald glanced over his shoulder at the “peanut gallery” beyond the quarantine glass—a slanted arena of plush VIP seats, where dignitaries and experts scrutinized every move the contact team made, aissisted by the very best tools, consultants, and instrumentalities that money could buy.

  The advisers now also had a presence on this side of the quarantine barrier, lurking just a few meters to Gerald’s right—a luminous, 3-D figure named Hermes, complete with chiseled features, golden robes, and matching hair—who appeared to pace back and forth at the far end of the table, glaring at General Hideoshi’s team with growing frustration.

  Why on Earth did the advisers pick that garish thing to serve as their liaison metaphor? Gerald wondered. Do the politicians and professors and aristocrats think Akana will be intimidated by a cartoon Olympian god?

  Maybe it wasn’t a deliberate choice. Often a group’s avatar was selected by interpolating some trait that all members had in common. Did this golden god signify that the advisers viewed themselves as … an elite?

  Or it might just be overcompensation. Unconsciously, they want humanity to look its very best.

  Even so, Hermes was way over the top. Impatience manifested in a furled brow as the ersatz Greek god drummed the tabletop with lambent fingertips, pausing now and then to scribble suggestions or chidings that he kept sliding across the table, to join a pile of shiny virts—messages that Gerald and the main team mostly ignored. Something about Hermes bugged Gerald. The synthetic Olympian’s fizzing frustration seemed all too similar to that of the Artifact aliens.

  Unlike the main sci-fi stereotypes—extraterrestrials who were portrayed as aloofly superior, or cutesy-wise, or threatening—it does seem endearing and reassuring to find them behaving like disorganized schoolyard brats.

  Unless … that reassurance is part of an act.

  At the opposite end of the long conference table lurked another ai construct—Emily’s feline holvatar counterpart, Tiger, dedicated to paranoid suspicion, though just as much a caricature as Hermes. Gerald sometimes caught the two artificial beings glaring at each other past the real members of the Contact Team.

  And yes, I can see another parallel. Are Tiger and Hermes really at odds? We have no idea if ais really do compete with each other on our behalf. Or whether that, too, may be a ruse, some reassuring role-playing for the sake of the rubes.

  Half a dozen more cycles followed, as Patrice played his artful game of rapid rewards and punishments, with the Artifact wallowing in periods of chilled darkness, punctuated by intervals of sharp light and focused heat. Gradually, the Katangan expert began humming, while nodding contentedly. “I think they are starting to get the idea,” Patrice said. “Look closely.”

  Gerald’s privileged position gave him a close-up view. First to become visible was the squidlike being, still front and center, waving forward a single tentacle, stroking the interface between two worlds. Only this time the centauroid and bat-like creature weren’t jostling to share the forwardmost position. Rather, they had taken up positions side by side, on the left facing away from the squid …

  … and Gerald saw purpose in their actions.
Those two were now actively blocking others in the crowd from coming closer. Nor were they alone in this effort. To the right, Gerald saw three others—including the Buddha-like figure—performing a similar role, preventing interference from the unruly rabble on that side. Moreover, as Tshombe’s energizing beam selectively made contact with the defenders, they seemed to grow more solid and distinct. Stronger and more capable of holding their ground.

  In the center, chains of letters spiraled outward from that single tentacle. This time, words unrolled without jumble or interference, proceeding distinctly enough to activate the sonic interface. A voice emerged, sounding raspy and upset.

  … we have come in friendship … across the vast and empty desert … with an offer of ultimate value … so why do you torment us?

  Akana sighed with evident satisfaction.

  “Okay, Gerald. You’re on.”

  He leaned forward. No longer was it necessary to write directly on the ovoid surface with a pointed finger. Not so long as he enunciated clearly, speaking directly at the stone-from-space.

  “We find your chaotic behavior disturbing,” he said. “While we appreciate the value of diversity, we require some degree of orderliness—or courtesy—if this conversation is to get anywhere. That can happen in either of two ways.”

  He paused, as the linguistic adviser had recommended, if things ever got to this phase. Better to let the aliens ask. After several more seconds, the being that resembled a terrestrial cephalopod did just that. A slender tendril wrote—and the audio speakers interpreted—

  What two ways?

  Gerald spoke slowly and clearly.

  “Either by taking turns, letting each individual have an allotted time to converse with us … or else by appointing one or more among you to represent the whole community.

  “Frankly, we’d prefer both methods. But first the representative. It is time, at last, to clarify the nature of your mission here and what great commonwealth we are being invited to join.”