by Wil McCarthy
And why, I ask myself now, was my respect for him not higher in the first place? Why do we do that, project averageness onto so many of the people we meet? Even people whose accomplishments are clearly beyond the ordinary? Cave man baggage, I'm sure, but some days you have to wonder how many cave men got their heads bashed in for it.
Wallich's talent for divided attention did not manifest in the rest of the crew, alas. Staring blankly, speaking and gesturing into the empty air became familiar symptoms, a lunacy all our own. Not unknown among spaceship crews, I learned, but here was an unusual concentration of talents, for the most part torn from very full professional and intellectual lives which refused to sever cleanly. Twice I stumbled—literally—across Renata Baucum's form drifting through the wardroom like an epilleptic husk, her attention drawn off into la-la land in midtransit.
“Watch it,” I told her the second time as I disentangled my arms from her waist. “I don't know what you're working on, but I wish you'd go do it in your quarters. You're a navigational hazard.”
Behind the palm-sized lenses of the zee-spec, her eyes focused on me momentarily. “That little yellow thing took up a lot less space than you.” Her tone was acerbic.
I nodded curtly. “Thank you, I'll put that in tonight's broadcast.”
Oh yeah, we were friends all right. It didn't help that I'd cupped her breast in my hands at some point in our slow collision. It didn't help that her long hair came undone and floated past my nose, smelling of apple-scented soap. It didn't help that her expression barely flickered, barely reacted to me at all, or that she took my advice, retreating to her berth and closing the door in my face.
She didn't even have the decency to slam it.
TEN:
Games of Life
“Allocation looks fine,” I said, studying my instruments for any datum to disprove the statement. This was a minor course correction, a mere thirty-second burn of the engines, but the way Wallich ran us through our paces, you'd think we were crash landing on the surface of the sun.
“Immune system nominal, no activity,” Tosca Lehne's voice joined in.
“Nav solution confirmed,” Baucum said. “Not that I know squat about it.”
“Reactor performance looks to be plus point four-eight sigma,” said Davenroy, her image crowded up next to Rapisardi's in a little corner window of my zee-spec. “Map that to engine performance, though, and the confidence factor is only point six, because the dispersion on a cold engine is a lot higher than one that's been fired recently. Plus or minus a second and a half in burn time, let's call it.”
“Acknowledged,” said Wallich. “Contamination?”
Rapisardi's image shook its head. “None, sir. You are go for burn.”
“Well goody. I love this part.”
Grinning, Wallich worked his panel for a moment, gave the order, and then the engines were humming and I went from weightless to hanging-upside-down in my seat. Not serious acceleration by any means, but after more than a week of weightlessness, I would have preferred it in the other direction. My face, puffy with fluid already, puffed further. My feet tingled.
Wallich watched his numbers. “Ten seconds, good, fifteen. Right down the groove. Twenty... and... twenty-five... and... that's all.” Weightlessness returned. “Beautiful, beautiful. I'd say we should do this more often, but keep hitting them like that and we won't need to.”
He chuckled.
“So, Captain,” I said, turning fully toward him and zooming in slightly on his face, “Floral asteroids tomorrow?”
“And Gladholders, you bet. Real food!”
He chuckled again.
“Strasheim, will you bloody cut it out?” The voice was Baucum's. I turned.
“Hmm?”
“Fish in a tank,” she said. “This constant observation, it's enough to drive a person insane. And the way you edit this stuff; you strip away all the context, particularly your own questions, and make it look like there's this giant conversation going on all the time. But it's your conversation, not ours, and I'm bloody sick of it.”
I stopped recording, watched her for a few moments. “What conversation should we be having?”
She snorted, shook her head a little. “Wrong question, freund. You should be asking, 'who is the primary beneficiary of these reports?'“
“And the answer is?”
Her shrug was elaborate and slow, with an expression to match. “I don't know. Your personal agenda dictates what slice of reality the audience is exposed to. I keep asking myself why you're here, but that question never seems to occur to you. That's all I have to say.”
Darren Wallich's laugh seemed to startle her. We both turned, saw him looking back at us with a fatherly expression, amusement and annoyance and a tinge of genuine warning. “All right, you two,” he said. “Fun's over. Strasheim, I want you to interview this woman for not less than thirty minutes, camera off, mind open. Baucum, whatever bug is up your ass, I want you to dig it out and show it to our mission correspondent, here. Believe it or not, we really do have business to conduct, and this spurious feuding is not only bad for morale, but potentially hazardous. Are we clear on this? Baucum? We can't afford the distraction.”
She frowned, pressed her teeth together for a moment. “Yeah. Fine.”
“Strasheim?”
“It's perfectly all right with me,” I said, shrugging. “I've been wanting to know her better anyway.” Um... seeing Baucum's expression, I knew right away it was the wrong thing to say. My chagrin was short-lived, though—every damn thing I said around her was somehow the wrong thing, and if she wanted to get worked up about it, well, that was pretty much her own problem. I stared her down. “Meet me in the ballroom in ten minutes, all right? Time enough to get your thoughts together.”
And with that, I unstrapped myself, kicked off from my chair, and sailed between her and Wallich to the exit hatch. Jinacio's quarters were a pretty confined, nose-to-nose sort of space, and I thought maybe I should brush my teeth first.
~~~
“Let's get this over with,” she said, pulling partway into the berth and then wedging herself in the doorway. The body language here was interesting: I was fully inside, trapped, as it were, while she was free to leave at any time. Too, she was putting distance between us, and explicitly denying that the door would be closed. There is no need for privacy, freund, but you will hear me out before you leave. But for all that, she was still in the room with me, close enough that I could feel the heat of her body, smell her breath mingling with mine in the air between us.
Oddly, she had brushed her teeth as well.
“So, what are we here to discuss?” I asked, offering her a handshake, which she accepted with some reluctance.
“I don't know. I haven't decided.”
“No? You've accused me of dictating an agenda. What agenda, exactly? What is it you think I'm misleading people about?”
She frowned, suddenly vague and uncertain. She waved a hand. “It isn't you, exactly. You're more of a symptom. It's just that everyone seems so sure about everything; about the mission, about the Mycosystem, about the Immunity itself. It's like there's this mass consensus, that the only possible solutions are the exact ones we're currently focused on. Placing these detectors is so important because every supposition we've made is right, and every alternative viewpoint is wrong.”
Her spacer-blue eyes met mine, and for once they were more sympathetic than hostile. “You're so party line in your outlook, and you don't even see that in yourself, because you're totally immersed. I don't know how to explain it to you, but I've studied technogenic lebenforms my whole adult life, and there's a lot more going on there than people are willing to admit. People come up against a barrier of willful ignorance, and they just stop. No, we can't try this. No, we can't think about that. No, no, no, we simply don't have the wherewithal. But we throw together an elaborate mission like this on twelve months' notice. Doesn't that strike you as odd?”
“I don't know,” I
said honestly.
“Well it does me.”
She stopped then, looking at me, not seeming to have anything else to say. Well, okay, but Wallich had ordered me to drag this out for a full half hour. And anyway, Baucum was still blocking my exit.
“You say there's more going on in TGL,” I tried, “than people are aware of. What exactly do you mean by that?”
She smiled wanly. “That's extremely difficult to articulate. Subtleties you can't appreciate, not because you're stupid but because you lack the background to make sense of them. Even within my own community, within the circles that study TGL with—supposedly—mathematical rigor, certain observations are just swept under the rug because they don't fit our preconceptions.”
“Humans on Earth?” I asked.
She looked startled. “Where did you hear about that?”
I smiled. “I have an ear for rumors. That's one that never quite seems to die.”
“Well, that wasn't quite what I was thinking of, but yes, it's a fine example. Are there humans still living in the Mycosystem? Ask anyone and they'll tell you no, of course not, the mycora would have eaten them decades ago. But study the sensor data, and suddenly you're not so sure. Structures that might be villages, heat sources that might be fires or mamallian metabolisms grouped together. It's all so far away, we can never be sure what we're seeing. Maybe the Mycosystem generates these structures itself; it's not nearly so homogenous or random as people seem to think. You know the term 'emergent behavior?' Small actions repeated a million times over, with decidedly macroscopic results. Our bodies aren't lumps of undifferentiated flesh, and the Mycosystem is not a lump of undifferentiated mycora. Are there human beings in it? I don't know. But I've never found a colleague willing even to discuss it.”
I scratched my chin, cleared my throat, thought about what she was saying. Cameras off, mind open. Humans in the Mycosystem, more than just a silly rumor? Maybe. Maybe. The thought was unsettling. But Baucum's tone was beginning to bother me as well; too much like the Temples' propaganda, more anger than true scientific indifference. How open was her mind?
“Okay,” I said, “that was my example. What was yours going to be?”
“The game of life,” she replied, then hesitated. Not trusting? Not sure of my ability to comprehend?
“Hmm?”
“Hmm. Well. Are you familiar with the concept of a cellular automaton?”
“Like a spreadsheet,” I said, nodding. “I hear the terminology sometimes on the network, in all sorts of contexts. It's a tool, a kind of geometric language, like if you could somehow speak in two dimensions.”
She relaxed visibly. “Or three, yes. Each cell of the spreadsheet holds an equation whose inputs are the outputs of neighboring cells. The game of Othello is a simple example—black, white, or empty; place one piece, change one value, and all the others change. But while Othello and Go and your typical financial or analytical spreadsheet will stop right there, in the general sense that first wave of changes will drive a second wave, and that will drive a third and fourth, and so on. So you have the potential for self-perpetuating event systems.”
“Okay,” I said, slowly wrapping my head around that concept. It seemed clear enough, though I'd missed the connection to TGL, the Mycosystem, or anything else we'd been talking about.
“Okay,” she agreed. “Now imagine a spreadsheet, or a Go board, where each cell can contain only two possible answers: on or off. No colors; either there's a stone in that space, or there isn't. Now imagine that the rule is, a cell will be turned on if three of its immediate neighbors are currently on, and it'll be turned off if fewer than two or more than three of its neighbors are on.”
I thought about that. “Um, okay.”
She shrugged. “Well, that's it. That's the whole thing. Imagine that 'on' means 'alive' and 'off' means 'dead,' and you have the Game of Life. Conway's 20th century mathematical curiosity, but it's still in use today. For obvious reasons.”
“Obvious?”
In lieu of reply, she flashed me an animation window, a black background seething and boiling with patterns of white dots. Instinctively, I recoiled, but of course the image moved with me, suspended in the air an arm's reach away.
“Very pretty,” I said, fixing the image in three-space, pinning it a few centimeters off the bulkhead. “This is it?”
“Yup.”
Presently, the roiling died down, the dots on the screen settling into a pattern of fixed ovals and flickering crosses. It didn't take much watching to see that this was a ground state of some sort, a permanent condition from which the game could not escape. But off on the left side of the window was a thin black stripe set with icons. A control panel? I touched one of the symbols, and a new random pattern of dots appeared and resumed that awful convecting motion.
God, it really did look like a TGL bloom. Again, though, the motions died away into tiny repeating structures.
“Interesting,” I said.
She nodded.
“How faithful a model is it, though?”
“Not very,” she admitted. “That particular sim is pretty flexible, though. You can play with the parameters, archive patterns with interesting behavior... It looks enough like the real thing to be worthy of study, in the same way that our forbears used ink drops and water tanks for the simplified study of atmospheres. Serious study, I mean, with peer review and all that. Experimentation by analogy can draw us off in peculiar dead ends, so it pays to be vigilant; I've personally fooled dozens of TGL experts with inorganic chemical solutions. They think they're seeing a primitive alga or mycorum at work, instead of sucrate of lime, or silicate of soda.... The carbonates tend to form closed cells, while sulfates and phosphates produce large tubular structures. Either way, though, you get not only the forms of life but close simulacra of the functional microstructure. Really, these solutions form bodies that grow, interact, reproduce and wither, to the point you'd just swear they were alive. But it's just blank chemistry, the emergent behavior of closed or oscillating reaction loops involving extremely simple molecules. Self-organization without metabolism, like crystal growth. Like patterns in the frost.
“Of course, if you pursue the inorganic angle far enough, you get to the clay problem, which tends to lead people in the opposite direction. In clay you have these tiny particles, these silicate fines easily as small as an amino acid or RNA nucleotide, and they have some particular qualities. Density, dielectric constant, capacitance... Static electricity plays a tremendous role at these scales, so you get interactions, and eventually you get chains of particles with, I guess you'd say, mutually compatible properties. You get two- and three-dimensional complexes as well, but their behavior is less interesting. The point is that the one-dimensional chains will serve as templates for their own replication. Eventually, you get a highly ordered clay composed of repeating submicroscopic features.”
I felt a chill. “Living mud?”
Smiling, she shook her head. “Oh, no. On this end you've got self-organization and replication at the molecular level, but the emergent behavior is gone. The chains perpetuate themselves, but they don't actually do anything. Well, maybe they served as the original templates for life, organic matter clinging to the particles and forced to chain up in the same ways. But amino and nucleic acids will polymerize spontanteously, so Occam's razor eliminates the clay as a necessary step. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of things out there that look like life but aren't really.
“TGL is the real thing; it eats, sorts, metabolizes, reproduces. Doesn't die, per se, without prompting, but then a lot of organic life is technically immortal as well. Death is a tool of evolution, you see, but when evolution can take place within the living organism, it becomes a nonissue. And think of the emergent characteristics of bacterial mats: not much going on there. In terms of its interactions, TGL is more akin to reefs and anthills.
“As for cellular automaton models, I think they cry out for more attention than Immunity circles gen
erally give them. Metaphor is a true and righteous way to approach understanding, damn it, and when you're too timid to examine your subjects first-hand...” She looked at me skeptically. “To you, I probably sound like a fanatic.”
I shrugged. “We all have our issues. I've listened to whackos with ideas like this, but they don't talk the way you do.” I nodded sideways at the Game of Life window, which of course she couldn't see. “Whackos don't perform controlled experiments.”
“You surprise me,” she said, still studying my face as if trying to find me somewhere behind it.
“Likewise. Is examining the Mycosystem first-hand your reason for coming on this mission? A personal grudge, a chance to show up your timid peers?”
“It's part of why I agreed to it, yes. As we approach the infested regions, Rapisardi and I will be busy with our measurements. This mission is all about fear and pride and politics, but if we just open our eyes, there's a lot of science to be done while we're at it. Maybe not world-shattering in and of itself, but the Immunity is in desperate need of a wake-up call.”
Wake-up call. I mulled the term over in my mind. Archaic: a telephone signal from one person to another. Time to get moving, freund. Had alarm clocks supplanted the practice? No, surely alarm clocks had existed for hundreds of years, much longer than telephones. So it must have been the personal contact that mattered, the exchange of human voices. As with my own job.
