Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures

by Ed Finn

  Thus Avi’s precursors came about: experiments in the university’s frigid AI development labs while the air burned outside. Finally you came up with the idea that an AI capable of learning could only acquire an ethical compass the way children do. So you and I became parents to the robots that would eventually give birth to Avi. The final development took us from pre-Avi-187 to Avi and his conjoined twin Bhimu. They were our babies. But you were the one who took Avi-Bhimu home with you every night, took them to work, to classes, to demonstrations, to children’s birthday parties.

  Avi-Bhimu’s Walker Index earned each of them an Electronic Person identity chip, but an EP is only the lowest common denominator among the top-class AIs. What we’ve done, what you did, really, is to create a new class of artificial intelligence altogether: an ultrAI. Whether ultrAIs are sentient in the way we understand it, we don’t yet know. They are free to learn and grow, yet grounded in years-long ethical training resulting from close contact with the same group of humans. There are only two ultrAIs in the entire universe, Avi and Bhimu. You might say the great worldnet AIs, the distributed Interweb intelligences, are just as complex and unpredictable, but Avi and Bhimu are so much closer to us, bound as they are in their metal-ceramic bodies, with bioware networks rather like our nerves. AIs are indeed alien; we know now we cannot download human consciousness into an AI because the physicality matters—but I have to admit that one of the reasons I can’t spend more time in immer with Avi is because every step he takes up a rock wall makes my heart jump like an over-worried parent.

  Now—I say now, despite the four-year time lag—Avi’s been behaving oddly. The reports he sends back are cryptic and terse. He is sending us images and data, but he’s stopped chatting, and his tone has changed. No explanation as to the odd dancing steps, no streaming feed of his thought process as he makes hypotheses and tests them, which he’s designed to do. I can’t quite put my finger on it but it feels as though he is preoccupied. His neural activity is faster and more intense than we’ve ever recorded, which means he’s learning at a prodigious rate. We’ve sent queries of course, but we won’t have the answers for another eight years. So we must draw our own conclusions.

  I wish we had Bhimu with us to help us understand him.

  Kranti:

  Have we really discovered life on Shikasta b?

  One thing we know about life is that living things have a larger phase space of possibilities. A stone falling down a cliff is limited by gravity. But a mountain goat can step to the side, he can go up or down.

  That is why one of the things Avi has been doing is looking for apparent violations of physical law. This is not at all easy. He has found crystalline formations inside some of the caves and tunnels—but you cannot look at entropy alone. Order is also found in nonliving things. In my field we say information inscribes matter. But when something is alive, the information flow is top-down causal. So we need to see whether flow of information becomes—alive—when its causal structure is determined by the largest scale on which it can have a distinct form.

  What Avi found was a mat of lindymotes, the lava dust that—now we know to look for it—is everywhere in Shiprock Canyon. The recurring dust devil we call Dusty Woman leaves layers of dust on the rocky surfaces as she dances. The dust is everywhere, even in the caves and tunnels. It is basically silica dust, crystalline fragments with hydrocarbons mixed in.

  Avi found a mat of this stuff on the base of some of the rock formations. During a lull in the wind, it moved up a rock face, very slightly. That could just be some small-scale atmospheric vortex, but he’s recorded the same thing multiple times, in different wind and weather conditions, from dead still air to gales. The vortex event was the strangest. I was there, looking through Avi’s eyes, and I saw the Dusty Woman start dancing. Avi was recording the wind speed and gradient, and I saw the Dusty Woman pause—yes, pause, in the middle of the dance. Imagine it, in the light of Avi’s headlamps: the wind still blowing, but the dust formation holding.

  There are so many possible non-life scenarios for this phenomenon. The first thought in my mind was liquid helium II—in spite of its peculiar behavior, it is not alive. So we can’t discount the possibility of a non-life explanation.

  We have been discussing all this nonstop until we get tired. In the evenings we sit with bottles of beer or cups of chai and watch the city skyline. There are the searchlights arcing through the polluted air. In the distance are the Citadel towers like multicolored candles. Chirag plays our stories back to us.

  The lindymotes lay on the rock face to rest. They felt the stirrings, small and large, and rearranged themselves. They were flung into a dance by great vortices of air, and they went whirling. When the whirling stopped as the wind died, the lindymotes felt the magnetic field lines shift and change, and held their place for a moment before falling slowly down on to the surface.

  “We are playing!” said some of the lindymotes.

  “We are being played with,” said others in wonder.

  “We are becoming something,” said some of the lindymotes.

  “We are making something,” said others.

  And so they knew they were themselves, tiny and separate, but together they were Dusty Woman.

  One of the things I learned from my grandfather is that you cannot separate life from its environment. Understand an environment well enough, and you will understand what kind of life might arise there. Environment is the matrix that works with the life force to generate life-forms. That is how the environment becomes aware of itself, when it intra-acts at different scales. So I try to keep my mind open to possibility, even when my imagination comes up with something fantastic, so later on I can apply the constraints that are needed. Imagination has an even larger phase space of possibility than life. Sometimes in the immersphere I feel I am slipping away from Earth itself. It is scary but also exciting.

  Annie:

  Today I am a little shaky. I was stopped by a cop last night. I was walking back through campus at close to midnight when it found me. Its swiveling eyes locked on me, and the voice, gravelly and machine-like, said: Stop. Do Not Move. It scanned me top to bottom with the blue light. The cops can make mistakes. But it found me in its database and I was released. Some of my friends are convinced that the so-called mistakes are deliberate, used as a cover-up to kill leaders of the resistance. My colleague Laura was one of the “mistakes.” Nobody was punished for her death. The AI tribunal pronounced the cop guilty of an interpretation error, and it was wiped. And that was the end of it. I’ve heard drone killings are better because they are swift—you have no time to be afraid. The drones are so small that you only notice them, if at all, when you are about to die.

  Okay, deep breath. I am alive, I am alive. And what about life on Shikasta 464b?

  I think a non-life explanation is the most likely. Magnetism is the most obvious thing to consider. Shikasta 464b has a roughly octupolar magnetic field that doesn’t do much to protect it from its star’s solar wind. The peculiar magnetic field, I believe, is due to the extreme heat of the dayside, which causes magma to upwell from the interior onto the surface, dragging with it denser magnetic minerals in long wisps and tendrils. This also causes the local variations in the magnetic field in both space and time.

  I’ve looked at Avi’s analysis of the dust fragments. Lots of silica and basalt grains, and—magnetite crystals! Not surprising that the dust moves around in response to the variations in the local magnetic field. There is so much magnetic material churning close to the surface of Shikasta b that the local fields must be shifting all the time. This would result in magnetic dust moving in weird ways, like Avi has observed. A relatively mundane non-life explanation for Dusty Woman’s behavior. Of course, as Kranti points out, the environment shapes the possibilities for life. It would hardly be surprising that if life exists on this world, it would take advantage of the peculiar magnetic field distribution.

  So. How would life adapt to magnetism, especially to com
plex and ever-changing magnetic fields? We have magnetotactic bacteria on Earth, and birds that migrate based on the little crystals in their skulls. But navigation wouldn’t be much use when the magnetic fields are so weirdly distorted, when they change all the time.

  The three of us have been talking about a new idea that is beginning to take shape. Our old questions: (a) What separates life from non-life? (b) Why is it that so many indigenous cultures regard the universe itself as alive? I think of my grandmother’s string games during winter nights. Her fingers working. The constellations shifting from one to another. My favorite is Two Coyotes Running Away From Each Other. Her fingers and the strings between them hold the cosmos in a way I can’t articulate.

  This is what we are thinking: that there is no clear boundary between life and non-life as biologists define it. The answer to “what is life?” depends on your context. My people, like Kranti’s people, knew long ago that the universe is connected, every bit linked with every other bit, and even the bits changing form and purpose all the time. This is not mere mysticism—it is consistent with science. If science had not started as a reductionist enterprise through an accident of history, this idea would be familiar. Over the last few days the three of us have been mapping “information channels” or “communication pathways,” although we are not certain these are the same thing. We started with a diagram of a human—there are stabilizing negative feedback loops within each organ for homeostasis, but from organ to organ these pathways connect, forming even larger meta-loops. But because humans are open systems, the pathways connect outside us, to the biosphere itself. They connect with the negative and positive feedback loops of the ocean (breathable oxygen, thank you, phytoplankton) and climate as a whole, as well as human-human interactions. Zoom out beyond the biosphere and the density of connections thins out, but the threads are still there—solar irradiation providing light and heat, cosmic rays influencing mutations, magnetic fields, gravitational fields reaching out through space between planet and star, planet and planet. Zoom in, into the human body, down to the cells, down to the protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei, and the pathways are there, tangled and dense. There may be some kind of fractal self-similarity governing the scale change. If we draw this “loop diagram” for a part of our biosphere, what do we see? The densest loops are those within living organisms, because they must have stabilizing feedbacks to allow for steady states, for homeostasis. “But even rocks have these,” I told Kranti and Chirag exultantly. Rocks “communicate” through the laws of physics and geology—they sense gravity, they are subject to heat and pressure, they participate in cycles at long and short scales, from weathering to the carbonate silicate cycle, for example. “Their loops are just not as dense.”

  So then what is life, and what is not-life, depends on what cutoff choice you make in communication loop density. There is no a priori distinction between life and non-life.

  Still, it would be nice to have life that will talk back to us! Or at least to Avi. If we truly find life on Shikasta 464b, Avi’s position will become delicate. He will no longer be a highly sophisticated measuring instrument, but an alien communicating with potential native life-forms. We have spent years talking about the ethics of the situation, considering how we represent peoples at the receiving end of colonization. You designed Avi’s protocols for what he should do if we were to find life. But you also put in enough leeway for Avi to develop in his own way—I am beginning to recognize some of your fierce independence in Avi’s strange behavior.

  Of course we wonder about Bhimu all the time. The twins, one on Shikasta 464b and one on Earth, each developing according to his environment. You took Bhimu away for safekeeping; it’s what cost you your life.

  I’m taking advantage of the armistice and a plane trip voucher to fly out to Delhi. But first I’m going home to Window Rock for a few days. There are places where life on the rez has become impossible because of the heat and the advance of the sand dunes, but we’ve found pocket habitats, we’ve learned to adapt. The coal mines have closed. We are working toward 100 percent renewable energy. Life is rough and difficult, due to the long drought in an already dry land, but adversity has brought the old ways to the surface again. The heat madness has not erupted among us as much as in the world outside our borders. The Southern Federation wants us to join them but many of our people are resisting. There have been incursions from the west, skirmishes on the borders. Refugees coming in from the south, they say, tore down the old Wall between the United States and Mexico with their bare hands. With bleeding hands they moved up in a wave through El Paso, and were turned back with gunfire.

  It’s been a year since I visited, and in that time so much has changed. Cousin Phil is involved in the Resistance, working on disabling drones. He tells me his DADS can get several of them in one sweep. They drop from the sky like flakes of ash, he says. Uncle Bill’s new wind farm is taking off. Lindy’s working on a desert farming project. I need to see them; I need a Blessing Way ceremony. I need to remember what it means to call a place home, before I leave.

  Kranti:

  Are you listening? Are you listening?

  I hear that voice in a dream. Like a bird calling, again and again. It is me. Are you listening? I cannot remember if I have dreamed that dream again and again, or if it is just a memory of the first time. Who is speaking to me? Is it you, or someone else? What is it I have not listened to?

  There is so much I do not know. I feel awkward when people praise me. Actually sometimes I feel angry. It is like they are saying, how surprising that you know so much, Adivasi girl. An embarrassed laugh—I thought Adivasi girls could only be maids. Very good ones, no offense. But a Ph.D. scientist. Well, genius can appear at random, anywhere. Besides, she went to a Corporation school. They should put all tribal children in those schools. Look at what the illiterate terrorist junglees are doing ….

  They used to hold me up as an example of what a good Adivasi should be like. They stopped when I started supporting my people’s fight against the corpocracy. Then I was called ungrateful, hypocritical, and worse names. But there are more interesting things in the world than angry, ignorant people, so I turn away from them and I think: everything in Nature communicates, whether through language, or signs, or signals. Even matter, dead matter speaks through physical law, the interrelationships of variables. I have tried to listen, that is why I wonder about the dream. What is it I have not listened to? Is it Avi speaking to me? Is it you?

  When I told Chirag and Annie about my dream, Chirag was quiet for a bit. Then he said:

  “Do you think it was Bhimu?”

  I was surprised. Bhimu, calling me in a dream! Chirag looked embarrassed, then admitted he has had recurring dreams that Bhimu is calling him. In the dreams he is wandering through mountains and deserts, following her voice, convinced she will lead him to you. When he is awake he thinks of her lying in pieces deep inside some forest, her bioware torn apart.

  “Just as likely,” Annie says, “that she is growing up somewhere in the hills, or in a desert among nomads, perfectly safe.” We have been waiting, listening for Bhimu, all these years.

  Some weeks ago, Annie and I had made up a story about Dusty Woman writing in dust on the canyon walls—Shikastan graffiti. Recently we have been seeing dust patterns, both dynamic and stationary, that seem to be telling us something. I know humans can deceive themselves—hubris is powerful. So I learn humility; as the indigenous peoples have always known, humility before Nature tempers our delusions. We junglees don’t have a word for Nature—that is a foreign word, a separation word. But you know what I mean.

  What is Shiprock Canyon telling us? Its shapes and passageways, its corridors and caves are all mapped now, and we are getting a sense of how strongly the winds blow over it, and the thin vortices that form in certain areas. There are dust ripples like writing on sloping walls, what Chirag calls “the calligraphy of the wind.” This inorganic material cannot by itself be alive.

  Avi has
also been doing flybys. He will rise suddenly over the canyon, turning slowly, scanning and sensing the magnetic fields, wind speed, visibility. I have realized that he has been increasing the range with each flyby, mapping the larger terrain within which Shiprock Canyon is embedded. And the data he’s collecting—if we are right—could mean something spectacular.

  Saguaro lived deep beneath the canyon, in the darkest places. He was slow, sleepy with the years. Time flowed for him like cooling lava. He could not see, but he had visions. He sensed rivers and pools of fire, and the deadly cold beyond. The heat below and the cold above fed his body, which was shot through with long cables of exobacteria, sipping electrons and passing them along. The passageways in which he lay had been shaped by magnetism and geological forces, so the biocables that were artery and vein, nerve and sinew for him, were likewise arranged in response to the ambient magnetism. He lay and dreamed.

  Annie: