“I know, and I had no intention of mentioning that.”
“Sorry. No offense, Juan. I am apt to talk too much. Sometimes it gets kind of lonesome where I am. Never mind! What I want developed for Fireball is an entirely different breed of cat—anyhow, when I’m in it. You see, I want it able to include me in its works.”
* * * *
As the robot made the attachments for new Guthrie, he started to ask, “Say, what about—” and braked himself.
“Have you a question?” purred the information screen.
“No, nothing. Proceed.”
When he was fully linked and integrated, he put his inquiry to the system. It was prudent to begin with a few simple, straightforward retrievals. Direct access to the whole, possession of its capabilities, could be overwhelming at first. Insofar as human language was able to describe what he now did, it felt as if he called some fact out of his ordinary memory, a date or an address or the color of a woman’s eyes.
The hypercomputer identified his desire by class and switched it through the appropriate circuits. If need be, retrieval could have scanned databases around the planet. Examination of every logical implication could have brought in other mainframes equally far-flung. As was, the information called for got back to Guthrie in a few milliseconds.
Yes, progress was being made in artificial intelligence, though news of it hadn’t been in the updatings he got in North America. He’d had too much else to learn, about everyday matters and how they had changed during the years in which he lay oblivious.
He found that the forefront of advance was no longer in Fireball’s laboratories. His idea of incorporating himself, as occasion warranted, in the core of his company’s cybernetics, had been so successful as to give him second thoughts. While he didn’t forbid further research along these lines, he stopped helping it out, and it languished.
Elsewhere, however, workers had been following his lead in earnest, notably at Technofutures in Europe and Hermes Communications in Astrebourg. They had made considerable progress. It would doubtless have been more if they also had had a download to work with. But neither of the two others who were still extant was interested. Uwimana was entirely given over to his own scientific endeavors, he had become cosmophysics personified. Nguyen was lost in whatever the mysteries were on which she meditated.
As for making a new one, hardly anybody agreed to serve as the subject-original. “I wouldn’t like being a machine. Nor would a copy of my mind.” The few volunteers were judged unsuitable, on this or that account.
Still, the hardware that could handle a download was buildable, as witness what was already in existence. Could you and your computers write a program for it that would operate like a downloaded personality? If so, you would have reached the Holy Grail, artificial intelligence fully conscious and limited only by the capabilities of the systems to which it was coupled.
Algorithm after algorithm had been devised, tried, found wanting, revised, tried again, ultimately discarded. Lately, though, another idea had been gaining ground. The mind was partly algorithmic, true, but not totally. You must take quantum effects into account—especially, it seemed, Bell’s inequality and the energy of the vacuum. Nothing supernatural; yet the observer and the observed were one, the cause had roots in the effect, Ouroboros made of himself a ring. On that basis, you might be able to map onto a material configuration that which nature had done in the course of megayears of evolution.
Once you were on the right track, with the computer power you had nowadays, you should soon capture the prize. Then what?
Guthrie turned from that question. He had more urgent concerns. For a while he exercised, regaining the skills of godlike intellect. He constructed elaborate differential equations and solved them. He modeled three large organic molecules and let them react. He explored fractal realms of such dizzying beauty that it was a wrench to leave them.
But he must. After about half a real-time hour, two billion microseconds, he gave himself to his proper task. It was infinitely more difficult. In the course of a night he achieved a bare skeleton of completion.
However, it ought to serve. He had scanned every record of any event that had impinged on Anson Guthrie, which Anson Guthrie should directly or indirectly have been aware of, in the past twenty-three years. He had organized them, evaluated them, chosen among them. Some he put in his personal permanent memory, those that would naturally have stamped themselves there. They were comparatively few; his neural network didn’t have much more storage capacity than his living brain had had. A larger number he abstracted and made into general background; for instance, he’d have remembered who the most prominent figures were in the history of those decades, and something about what each one did, but not many details. The majority he rejected. They were the kind of thing you noticed and quickly forgot, and afterward retrieved from a notebook or a database if perchance you wanted to.
Throughout that effort he was conscious of nothing else. He was transcendent; he was process, ongoingness. When finally it was over, he must fight the urge to seek elsewhere, to enter anew into that cold ecstasy. Piece by piece, he disengaged his controlling consciousness from the net. He called for disconnection.
As always, an immediate feeling of immeasurable loss gave way to dullness. His merely humanlike mind needed to assimilate what had poured in. It needed rest, subactivation, the drowse and flickers of dream which answered to the sleep his living body had so often welcomed. But he’d better see if there was any business he must attend to first.
He went personally back to his sanctum. At least the robot body into which he had been transferred did not ache, was not tired. He could savor the smooth surge of strides, their soft fall upon carpeting, the susurrus and scents—piney at the moment—breezing from ventilator panels.
His private office here in the main building was large but otherwise unostentatious. Objects filled a case, souvenirs, trophies, gifts from friends now dead, the sort of clutter that even a ghost can accumulate. He noticed a few that were not there when he returned from Alpha Centauri. He didn’t know anything about them, how they came to his other self or why they had seemed worth keeping. Trivia like that didn’t get into company records or news stories, and he had never kept a diary. One of them could easily trip him up, if somebody else knew about it. He must be careful to avoid mention of them, or evade any remark he heard.
The robot having no need to sit, he took stance behind his desk, which was itself an anachronism for the likes of him, and touched his phone. Message from Dolores Almeida Candamo, please call back as soon as possible, never mind the hour. “Damn,” he muttered, and instigated the search.
Fireball’s general director of Earthside operations was at home, already awake. He remembered her as a vivacious young communications engineer. She and her fiancé had advanced their wedding date so he could attend in person before he left; Fireball couldn’t spare both Guthries for that, but “It’s the same spirit,” she’d laughed. His review had told him of her subsequent career and prepared him for the gray hair and the face still comely. It had not told him how they normally spoke to one another. Given the psychodynamics, he had estimated the usage; into this calculation he vectored his intuition.
“Good morning!” she exclaimed in Spanish. “Welcome home, chief! I’m sorry I missed your arrival yesterday.”
“You didn’t miss much.” he answered in English, then changed over to her mother tongue. “Does something urgently need me?”
“Ay de mi, what doesn’t? You really should not have gone to North America. We were hideously anxious about you, and—”
“And you survived. Fireball did. How many times have you heard me say, any outfit that needs micromanagement from the top should be put out of its misery at once? What’s the matter?”
He saw that his curtness hurt. Well, he couldn’t risk a friendlier manner, not till he had felt his way around for a while and learned some of the nuances. She closed the visor of practicality. “First, t
his entire business of cooperating with the Avantists, after everything they have done to us. I have been in the middle of an uproar, these past several days.”
“I expect you would have. They wonder if I have betrayed them, and why and just how. Please listen. You understand—don’t you? —I could not go into detail in any public announcement. That could have triggered the very horrors I want to prevent, or could at least have given the enemy warning enough that he could hide.
“We will have a conference of directors shortly, and I will lay out the facts for you. What happened is that my contacts with the Chaotics led me to the discovery that a fanatical underground exists, independent of the decent majority and not only in North America. I held my nose, figuratively speaking, and got in cautious touch, indirect at first, with the Sepo. Its members aren’t all monsters, you know. Most of them, too, are reasonably honorable people, doing a job they see as necessary. They had leads of their own. Everything pointed toward infiltration of Fireball and other private organizations. Not massive; we would harm only ourselves by a witch hunt; but in key positions— Think what a weapon a single spaceship is, simply by itself. Think of the consequences to us if something happens, maybe on a genocidal scale, that we might have prevented. I am making the best of a bad bargain.”
Almeida bit her lip. “Our spokespeople have been saying, much the same things, at my orders. But in the absence of anything more definite, fear feeds on itself.”
“I know. We shall have our definite words and actions soon, I promise. Meanwhile, what else is important?”
“The mahatmas and their crowds, blockading Hyderabad Compound. You have heard. Trying to force us to subsidize their cult. Sub has an idea for persuading them to disperse peacefully, but he wants to discuss it with you first.”
“Uh, Sub?”
She gave him a quizzical look, as if seeking an expression on his turret. “Subrahmanyan.”
“Oh, yes.” Subrahmanyan Rao, chief of South Asian operations. Pause. Think. Make a sigh. “Pardon me. Dolores, I have had no rest since my return and precious little before then. I’m tired to the point of stupidity. Can you appreciate that an overload will exhaust any mind, even one that is a program? Give me some hours. Hold the fort for me that much longer. I know you can.”
Almeida’s countenance softened. “Yes. I will, somehow. Call me when you feel ready. Rest well, chief.” Her image disappeared.
Guthrie stood a moment alone. He need only command “No interruptions,” and time himself to rouse after a sufficient while. No. Not quite yet.
The system conveyed his call by untappable lines, northward around the curve of the planet to Futuro. The hour was equally early in that capital, but Sayre was in his office at Security Police national headquarters. It took a few minutes to make certain that communication was isolated. That it occurred should surprise nobody after the news of the past week. The content was what required secrecy.
“Logging in,” Guthrie said in English. “What’s new?”
The undistinguished features thrust forward in the screen. “How’s it going for you?”
“It goes, more or less. I’ll shortly have to make a full report on the conspiracy to my consortes.”
“It’s still under preparation for you, including evidence. Don’t worry, you’ll have it in time.”
“Evidence. . . . What’s any worth, in this electronic nanotech day and age?”
Sayre smiled. “That’s why we need you on the scene, Anson. Your personality, your convincingness.”
“It’s ‘Sr. Guthrie’ to you, Sayre.” The other stiffened, swallowed, and made no retort. “What I want to know is how things are at your end.”
“We are hard at work.” Excitement dissolved coldness, word by word. “I’ve just received a report that the program decided was worth my personal attention. Yesterday evening the Regent of the Homesteaders’ Association spent three hours in the quivira in Portland, West Coast. She hadn’t been to a quivira as far back as her dossier, goes. And she’s a close friend of. . . Guthrie’s. Is this significant?”
“M-m, I dunno. What do you plan to do?”
“Have her brought in and quizzed, of course.”
The robot voice went slow, with a clanging in it as of iron. “Sayre, listen. If your agents lay one filthy hand on that lady, you and I are through.”
The face gaped. “What? Wait a minute—” Recovering: “All right, she is a friend and you keep . . . primitive loyalties. But—”
“Be quiet. Hear me. I’m persuaded Xuan was essentially right. I know how that was done, but I am, and I don’t want to see your cause go under, because every alternative is a flaming lot worse. So I’m going along with this pious fraud of the great nihilist conspiracy, in order that we can nail my other self before he takes back Fireball, which is just about the last force that can bail you out. I’ll have to lead up to the bailout gradually, and admitting that maybe I overestimated the danger won’t help, but never mind now. Do you understand that this is what I understand?
“Okay. Now you, for your part, understand that I don’t have to like the situation, and under all circumstances there is some shit I will not eat. You will leave old Esther Blum alone, do you hear? Unless she’s lost her wits since last I saw her, she’s taken care anyway not to have any knowledge that’d help you especially. But whether or no, she is not for the likes of you to come near. If you do, you’re dead. Got me?”
Sayre trembled. His cheeks were a mottled white. “You’re pretty arrogant, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. My style. And if you’d changed me out of it, I wouldn’t be much use to you, would I? Have you anything else to tell me? No? Muy bien, we’ll keep in touch as agreed. Remember, I have ways of knowing what happens to my friends. Bastante.”
Guthrie cut off.
For a while longer he stood silent. A viewscreen gave a look across Quito, through high-altitude clarity to Andean peaks rearing out of dusk into sunlight. The city below this tower was waking lively. Hereabouts it was altogether modern. The noble ancient buildings around the Plaza Independencia and the traditional residential quarters were at a distance, oases. Yet they were not museum pieces but where people met, did business, ate, drank, celebrated, flirted, loafed, loved, gardened, slept, begot children, reared them, and finally died. Thus had Juliana wanted growth to go, after the launchport made growth inevitable. Thus had he seen to it, also after her death. That was her right. She had been in on things from the beginning, hadn’t she?
* * * *
18
Database
J
erry Bowen and his dream occupied a two-room apartment in south Chicago. He kept it scrupulously clean but scarcely neat, what with books heaped everywhere, drawing board, desk buried under bescrawled papers, high-powered PC left over from better days. When the Guthries called on him he made coffee, a brand they suspected he could ill afford, and talk ranged widely. Their purpose was to get personally acquainted, a little, now that they had gained some familiarity with his plans and specs, while for his part he was a visionary, not a monomaniac.
Nevertheless, spaceflight inevitably dominated the conversation, which soon turned to its history. He had been there. He not only remembered the glory years, Moon landings and more, he had met many of their heroes and heroines, astronauts, cosmonauts, engineers, entrepreneurs who tried and failed and tried again. Through the twilight that followed he had taken what work in the industry he could find, and on the side designed his own spacecraft, which were never built, and kept on dreaming with the likes of Clarke, Bussard, O’Neill, Forward, Matloff, Hunter, Woodcock, Friesen, the Hudsons. Though he could have grown bitter, in fact he did not forget how to laugh.
The Guthries felt slightly shy about inviting him to their hotel suite a few days later. “I don’t believe a man’s virility has anything to do with the size of his bank account,” Anson growled, “but does Jerry know that? He might think we want to overawe him, and he’s a proud old rooster.”
�
�I doubt he’ll give a damn about the surroundings,” Juliana decided; and they phoned.
Bowen arrived punctually. Outside, wind blustered, driving clouds before it whose shadows scythed over roofs and streets. From the room a small park was visible. Yellow with fall, trees tossed their boughs in the streaming air. Dead leaves scurried from them. It was as if all nature were on trek.
When Bowen had taken off his hat and coat, the Guthries saw how he shivered. Restraint snapped across. “Well?” he demanded. “What news?”
“As far as we’re concerned,” Anson told him, “it’s go.”
Bowen gasped. The thin frame lurched. Juliana took his arm. “Easy, there, cobber,” she murmured. “Sit down.” She guided him to an armchair.
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