‘She died, you mean?’ Kanu asked.
‘As I said, it is a sadness.’
Swift, who was standing in silent observation to Kanu’s right, made a sceptical frown. He shook his head, touched a finger to the tip of his nose, looked on the verge of making a significant observation.
‘What happened to her remains?’ Nissa asked. ‘May we see them?’
‘They were dismantled and destroyed. It was one of her last coherent requests. It troubled us, but we had no choice but to honour her wish. Doubtless you have some sense of our loss. But that is as nothing compared to our feelings about Chiku. As you know from the recording, she remained awake to help the rest of us – a typically selfless gesture. Unfortunately, there was a gradual collapse of the closed-cycle life-support system, and conditions deteriorated over time. It became very hard for the humans, even the small number who had remained awake to assist us. In desperation, most of them joined the others in skipover. I’m afraid Chiku was among that number.’
‘Why was that a bad thing?’ Nissa asked.
‘Because those last few did not survive. There was a systematic failure of an entire bank of skipover caskets. I am sorry, Kanu – I can only imagine how upsetting this must be to you. Truly she gave us more than could ever be repaid. And we wept for the deaths of these martyrs – wept and scolded ourselves for not having done more. That was when we realised how far we still had to go before becoming your equals.’
‘Why didn’t you tell us all this sooner?’ Kanu asked.
‘For exactly the same reason I am sorry to have told you now – because it is a terrible thing, and a particular cruelty in light of your family connection. If I might offer one consolation, it is that the Risen cherish her memory – everything she did for us, everything she planned to do. And it is an honour to have another Akinya among us.’
Eventually Kanu felt it was safe to ask for a second viewing of the Chiku recording. They had been aboard Zanzibar for more than six weeks; the repair work was proceeding satisfactorily – it was perfectly reasonable that he should wish to begin fulfilling his side of the arrangement.
‘If you insist,’ Dakota said. ‘But please be assured that I have every confidence in your abilities, and that you will keep your word. Still, as you say, the repair process demands less of your time than it did originally.’
So Memphis took them back to the skipover vault beneath the civic building, and they were allowed to conduct as thorough an examination of the equipment as they desired. It was cold in the layered depths of the vault, and silent, and since they were surrounded by the sleeping dead it was hard not to think of ghosts, of lives in abeyance, of collective dreams of an unending winter.
‘I don’t like it in here,’ Nissa confided.
‘Neither do I.’ Kanu blew on the tips of his fingers, already numb. ‘But we have an agreement.’
There were thousands of caskets, but as most of them were of a similar design, they only needed to inspect a sample of the sleepers. At first, the technology looked dauntingly unfamiliar compared to the skipover caskets aboard their own spacecraft. But upon closer study, the fundamentals proved to be similar, with only the overlying control and observation systems being of a markedly different design. Here there was no need for extreme automation since the presumption was that there would always be human caretakers to watch over the sleepers and intervene as needed.
Nonetheless, it was soon apparent that not all of the sleepers could be brought back to life. A fraction of the caskets had malfunctioned in one way or another, and some of the occupants must have been dead or gravely unwell before they were committed to skipover. Kanu and Nissa did not have the resources or expertise to assist with these difficult marginal cases.
Encouragingly, though, the majority of the sleepers appeared revivable. It would need to be done gradually, in small enough numbers that individual problems could be addressed as they arose. Once they were thawed, well and adjusted to their surroundings, the newly awoken could begin to help with the effort of waking the others. The work would get faster as they progressed.
Still, Kanu dared not guess how long the whole process would take. It felt optimistic to think in terms of months. Where would these people live once they were up and about, in a world remade for the convenience of elephants? It was one thing to keep a couple of human guests fed and watered – what of thousands, or even tens of thousands?
They were on their way back to Dakota, already inside the civic building, when Kanu said, ‘Memphis – might I have another look at the recording? It won’t take a moment.’
‘Why, Kanu?’
It helped that their hair had begun to grow back since their arrival on Zanzibar, enabling Memphis to distinguish more easily between human man and human woman. Kanu’s hair was still short and appeared to be growing back whiter than when he had shaved it, and it bristled out from his scalp in all directions. Nissa’s was darker and she had made an effort to tame its growth, which resulted in her looking younger rather than older, despite their travails.
‘Your leader has asked us to help with the sleepers,’ Kanu said. ‘Chiku left some information that we need to bring them out of skipover. You’ll be saving us a great deal of time if we could review the recording again now. I’m sure Dakota would approve.’
‘You are not Dakota. You do not know her.’
‘But you do, Memphis.’ It was Nissa speaking now, confidently adding her voice to Kanu’s. ‘She told us how much she admires you – your loyalty, your strength of character. She said you were one of the few she could talk to as an equal.’
‘Did she?’
‘Oh, yes. She was fulsome in her praise.’ Nissa was being quite brazen now. ‘Did Dakota have a problem with us viewing the recording originally, Memphis?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, there won’t be a problem this time – and you’ll have shown useful initiative in decision-making.’
‘It won’t take long, Memphis,’ Kanu said.
He could almost feel the slow, clock-like deliberation of the elephant’s brain. Unfair to make that comparison, of course – he had judged Memphis to be a thing of wonder until Dakota offered him a new baseline – but he could not help it. Humans were cleverer than chimps, but a dull child was somehow more pitiable than any animal. Here was a talking elephant with only average intelligence.
‘You will see the recording.’
‘Thank you, Memphis,’ Nissa said.
Memphis brought them to the upright glass and once again summoned the image of Chiku Green. Kanu had seen it all before, but this time he could not dismiss a sense of furtiveness, knowing that he had ulterior reasons for watching the message again. True, they had a theoretical interest in the appended documents. But that was not the reason they were here.
Rather than worrying about concealing his guilt, though, Kanu was doing his best not to blink.
*
Back at the household, Kanu kept being drawn to the windows. The rooms only offered a limited view of the surrounding household, overlooking an area of open ground, some trees, and part of an adjoining wing. But he had seen no sign of activity since Memphis brought them back from the civic building. Feeling oddly foolish, he checked cupboards and looked under beds, just in case one of the dwarf elephants had squeezed away somewhere.
But they were alone.
‘Well, Swift?’ he asked finally. ‘You’ve had time to think about the recording, and I tried as hard as I could not to blink. What was the point of that particular exercise?’
‘I would have thought that was as blatant as one of your opening chess gambits, Kanu. The recording had been edited – rather crudely if I might say so.’
‘We both spotted that.’
‘Yes. But you may not have spotted that Chiku Green was ahead of her silencers.’
‘How so?’ Nissa said.
‘She must have prepared her statement ahead of time, reading from a script. She took the words she meant to speak and embedded them in the technical appendage, as a safeguard.’
‘It was too fast for me,’ Kanu said. ‘Just a blur of graphs and numbers.’
‘Fortunately, your visual system recorded rather more than your conscious mind was capable of processing. The words were encoded numerically – a very simple cyclic numerical cipher. Virtually hidden in plain sight. A child could have decoded the statement – but it would have needed to recognise what it was seeing in the first place. Chiku must have been confident that the Risen – the majority of the Risen, at least – would not be quite so perceptive.’
‘Can you show us these words?’ Nissa asked.
‘You forget that I have also seen Chiku and studied her patterns of speech. I can emulate her.’
Something made Kanu hesitate – some lingering notion that it was an act of disrespect to Chiku to have Swift animate her. But he forced himself to set aside that disquiet. It would be better to hear the words from her lips.
‘Do it. Show us the things she said that we didn’t get to hear.’
‘I suggest you simply ask me to explain the most germane points for now, and I will provide a transcript of the entire document at my leisure.’
‘I’m not sure—’
‘I am,’ Nissa said. ‘It makes sense. Do it, Swift.’
Swift’s form shifted to that of Chiku, exactly as she had looked in the glass, only sharper, more real, more suggestive of actual physical presence. And when she spoke, it was not a recording they were hearing, but the living voice of his third-mother.
‘What would you like to know?’
Kanu was frozen. He had no idea how to begin addressing her. The likeness was too striking, the similarity heartbreaking. He had known two iterations of Chiku back on Earth, neither of them this woman, but everything about her was a reminder of that past, the contentment of the good years they had barely known they were living. He saw her profile in sunlit doorways, standing like a figure in a Dutch interior, the angle of her averted face stroked with gold. He remembered the kindness of Chiku Yellow as she cared for Chiku Red, who had lost language and needed to be nursed back to it like a child. He remembered the smell of brine at the quayside, the mewl of seagulls, the clack of rigging, the drowsy warmth of a Lisbon evening.
He recalled the fortitude and patience of Chiku Red, who when the Mechanism fell had turned out to be the strongest of them all.
‘Let’s begin at the beginning,’ Nissa said, when his silence grew uncomfortable. ‘Why are you here? Why did you come here in the first place?’
‘They needed us,’ she said. ‘The Watchkeepers are old and immensely powerful, but there are things even they can’t discover for themselves. The M-builders were an older civilisation – vastly older. Something happened to them, and the Watchkeepers would like to be able to incorporate that data into their own strategic planning. This system is a key to understanding what became of the M-builders, but the Watchkeepers can’t use it.’
At last, Kanu forced himself to speak. ‘Why not?’
‘They’re wholly machine. That’s their strength, but also their limitation. The answers are on Poseidon, but they can’t get there. Poseidon is closed to investigation by machine intelligences – or at least, to machine intelligences like the Watchkeepers. It’s hard to explain, but it has something to do with them being too powerful, having too much processing power – they’ve slipped over the Gupta–Wing threshold.’
‘That doesn’t mean anything to me,’ Kanu said.
‘I wouldn’t expect it to – it’s quite arcane. But there’s something called integrated information theory – a model of consciousness – that was very interesting to a couple of mid-twenty-second-century cyberneticists called June Wing and Jitendra Gupta. The underlying theory’s much older than that, though – it’s a way of looking at neural networks and how information can be made to flow through them. In feed-forward networks, the flow is all one-way – like a river running downhill. The cerebellum is a feed-forward network. Meanwhile, your higher brain areas incorporate information-feedback properties – you’re gathering information and processing it in complex ways. That’s an integrated network, and it’s the key to conscious experience. Here’s the interesting thing, though. Under certain conditions, an integrated network can be functionally duplicated by a feed-forward network, but at the expense of greater computational resources. It’s not a particularly elegant or efficient mapping, but it is mathematically equivalent. Obviously you don’t have that option. You’re made out of meat. You’re conscious because you can’t afford to waste limited brain capacity on not being conscious.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘There are only so many neural pathways in that skull of yours, Kanu – you have to use them in the most efficient way, and your consciousness is just a by-product of that neural efficiency. But here’s the thing. If you had limitless processing capacity, you could supplant your integrated networks with feed-forward networks, and you’d be functionally indistinguishable to an external observer. But there’d be one difference.’
‘I wouldn’t be conscious.’
‘You’d be a computational zombie – giving all the appropriate external responses suggestive of consciousness, but with no conscious activity going on inside your head.’
‘Would I care?’
‘There wouldn’t be anything left of you to care. That’s the point of the Gupta–Wing theorem. It says that any conscious entity with unlimited computational resources runs the risk of remodelling itself as a series of feed-forward networks, thereby slipping over the horizon of consciousness. But it never notices, because at the precise moment it happens, there ceases to be a conscious “it” to detect the change. And after the transition, there’s no compulsion to reverse it. That’s what happened to the Watchkeepers. Collectively, they became too powerful – farmed out too much of their neural processing to feed-forward networks because they had the computational freedom to do so. Consequently they slipped over the Gupta–Wing threshold.’
‘They’re machine zombies,’ Nissa said.
‘At least partially. Maybe they’ve retained enough residual self-awareness to understand that they’ve lost something, especially after being rebuffed by the systems around Poseidon for so long. But from the point of view of those systems, of the M-builders, they’re hollow. They can process, interpret, deploy forms of intelligence, but they’re not conscious so they’re barred from Poseidon. The moons can tell – they can detect which side of the Gupta–Wing threshold the Watchkeepers now lie on. But it doesn’t stop them trying. They have almost limitless patience, an endless willingness to keep attacking the same problem. Maybe that in itself is a marker for the Gupta–Wing threshold – an inability to grow frustrated, bored, indifferent. The Watchkeepers have been throwing themselves against this knowledge barrier for millions of years – longer than we’ve been a species. But on a kind of glacial timescale their strategies can evolve. Lately they’ve begun to co-opt the assistance of other intelligences, creatures running on different cognitive substrates. Creatures like us – living organisms, like me or Dakota, or hybrid machine-human intelligences like Eunice. Individually, none of us is up to the task. But it was the Watchkeepers’ intention that the Trinity would be able to function as an investigative whole, a single information-gathering collective intelligence, one that would be able to slip through the barrier of the moons and reach Poseidon. And learn, and report back – give them the M-builders’ insights that they can’t reach for themselves.’
‘Is that what you did?’ Nissa asked.
‘We tried. They gave us tools – a ship full of sensors and instruments, all of it copied from our own technology. They made us understand what they expected of us. And of course we tried to do as we were asked, because we saw it as an extension
of the Covenant, a necessary act for continued non-intervention. Also, of course, because we were curious. To begin with, we approached Poseidon slowly, coming a little closer each time, gathering more and more data. Finally, though, we had to go deeper. And that’s when we were tested.’
‘In what way?’ Kanu said.
‘Examined, scrutinised, our nature probed – the test the Watchkeepers failed. By some miracle, we passed and were permitted to go deeper. But we could not. The Terror had touched us. Something got into our heads – a kind of final warning for the curious. It is difficult to put into language, something more easily felt than expressed – but as near as I can phrase it, it was an invitation to proceed if we dared. Come nearer and learn something of our secrets – how we changed our fate. But know that from this moment, you will be judged. Not just us – not just the Trinity – but our entire species, our entire flowering, from people, to Tantors, to hybrids like Eunice. That was the Terror – we were about to take that responsibility on our shoulders for the sake of increasing the knowledge base of another civilisation entirely. So we refused. We had come this far, acted for the Watchkeepers – done their bidding without complaint. But no more, not until we had a better understanding of the risks.’
‘You stood up to them,’ Kanu said, smiling in admiration. ‘You had the brazen nerve to do that. That took real courage.’
‘The Watchkeepers knew they could not coerce us too forcefully,’ Chiku said. ‘We had to be free agents, not the zombie puppets of a zombie civilisation. So they tried to barter with us, and that’s when they bestowed the gifts. Increased longevity for Dakota. Turning Eunice into a living woman. These boons were granted with the willing consent of the subject. They tried to offer me immortality, as well – they said it was a trivial thing.’
‘You took it?’ Kanu said.
‘I refused. That didn’t go down well, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. The other two weren’t capable of functioning as an expedition team on their own. So: stalemate. Who knows what might have happened if Zanzibar hadn’t appeared? None of us was expecting that – not even the Watchkeepers.’
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