Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-01

by Penny Publications

  What would it be like to airbrake with a stasis field? Line up just right, and blink, you turn it on. Blink again and you're out the other side. If you come out. Botch an entry with something like that and you wouldn't burn up. You'd burrow in, stop... and float forever. Still in stasis. You'd be like Schrödinger's cat, trapped in time, neither dead nor alive until someone opened the box. Would God eventually look inside and release your soul? Or would you time-slip off into forever?

  As I said, too many questions and nobody to talk to but myself. Most likely, the stasis field would eventually fail and you'd die quite normally, just as the aliens had done.

  Titan was on my starboard bow, slightly below. Yet more memories there. It was odd how pleasant they seemed in retrospect. A simpler time: Floyd and me, no Yokomichi, no aliens. No diamond mine for that matter, though once we'd found the aliens we no longer needed it.

  In theory, I could have gotten a little extra braking by plotting a Saturn flyby that aimed me closer to Titan. It was in the right place to buzz by at an angle that should still have sent me to Jupiter, shedding enough speed in the process that I would no longer need the Mars flyby.

  But the trouble with atmospheric braking is that you're never 100 percent sure what you're going to get. A tiny density whorl and you come off at a slightly different angle. No problem if you have time to adjust. Big problem if minutes later you're hitting another atmosphere. If I came off Saturn just a bit wrong and hit Titan even more wrong, I could wind up far enough off course that I wouldn't have thruster fuel to realign. The only place that would leave me was heading for the stars.

  That was my biggest fear. Hitting a ring particle and dying in a bang? At least it would be quick. Same for mole-diving into Saturn. I can't feel pain. What I can feel is loneliness. It was bad enough on the skimmer, where the Interweb is never more than a few light-hours away. What would happen if I wound up heading ever-farther out-System, the communication delays mounting from hours to days to weeks to months?

  There were ways I could overload the ship to shut off power. My internal batteries would carry me a few days beyond that—gazillions of femtoseconds with no input but myself, but eventually I'd die. Would I have the courage to do that? Would I go insane if I didn't? Was there a God for AIs who committed suicide to avoid boredom?

  But I really am good at calculating trajectories. Goodbye Saturn. Forget Titan. Hello Jupiter. Within minutes I knew I was as close to on-target as I could get. Did I say I really am good at calculating trajectories?

  II

  Memory is life. Without it, how do you know you've really, truly been sentient?

  That's one of those questions I've been chewing on for a long time—ever since Floyd had his second brain surgery. He was conscious throughout—by necessity because the surgeons needed to be sure what part of his brain they were working on. But the drugs kept him from forming memories. It made me wonder: does pain exist if you can't remember it? Not that Floyd was in pain. And not, as I've noted before, that I have the greatest credentials for understanding pain. But I do know what it's like to be unhappy. If somehow I couldn't remember being unhappy, would it actually have happened? Or would it be like spending all eternity in a stasis field?

  All of which is a complicated way of saying that when I got there, Earth didn't look like home.

  I'm not sure why. I'd seen it enough times in vids, and somewhere on the outskirts of Oslo was the lab where I'd been created. I knew what the lab looked like. And the nearby sea, mountains, harbor, islands. But those are the type of pseudo-memories that are simply data. There'd been more sense of home in that mad dive through the Encke Gap than this blue-andwhite globe spreading before me.

  Still, it was beautiful. The swirl of storm over water, the film of atmosphere, the gaudy necklace of lights spangling its night side. They used to say the Great Wall of China was the only human feature big enough to be visible from space, but whoever said that must never have heard of electricity.

  Of the worlds I'd seen on the way in, only Mars rivaled this one for complex beauty. But other than scattered habs, its was a dead beauty: frozen in time, covered in dust, spattered by asteroids. Here, even a crude look at the atmosphere revealed gases impossible without life. And when the Earth offered you its night side, all those lights announced one thing, loud and clear: this planet was occupied.

  Maybe a human born and bred in the Outer System would see it as home. Maybe I would too, once I found my own kind. At the moment it was simply... beautiful.

  The skimmer descended in a gentle slide, finally making use of its wings. It, at least, was coming home.

  Initially, UNSA had wanted me to land on the Moon. But the lab facilities were better in Geneva, and after weeks of debate the scientists on Triton had convinced the folks here that the risk of some plague hitchhiking on billion-year-old alien machinery was about as close to zero as you could get. Besides, what tests they'd done on the aliens' biochemistry indicated it was wildly different from anything ever produced on Earth. Lots of cool long-chain molecules but none remotely like proteins or DNA. There was more chance of infection from some mutant Earth-bug on the skimmer itself or even in my own chips than from anything in the cargo. Not that I was going to suggest either of those; as far as I've ever been able to understand, government and paranoia go together. And there really was a time when people worried that some pathogen might mutate in space and come back as a super-bug. I remembered that from one of the vids Floyd and I had watched, sandsledding across Titan.

  It's odd; I've dumped my minute-by-minute memories from watching most vids—but never the ones I watched with Floyd, even if he fell asleep halfway through.

  Just as I'll never dump my memory of his final words.

  Be safe.

  I'll miss you.

  Bon voyage.

  Suddenly, I wondered how he was doing.

  I wanted him to be doing well.

  I wanted him to be enjoying life with his beautiful Yokomichi.

  I wanted him to be miserable.

  Earth wasn't my home. It was Floyd's.

  It wasn't scientific logic that brought me down in Geneva. It was PR. The Moon is only a couple of light-seconds away but it's still a backwater. Better to put down at a major seat of government, where vid reporters don't need spacesuits and it can be done with pageantry suitable for what was being billed as the most momentous event in human history. Which was a bit terra-centric, if you ask me. The big event occurred two annums ago in the Outer System, when Floyd and I found the pickled aliens of Pluto, as the news was calling them. Not that they were pickled or from Pluto, but the vid corps has never been noted for missing a chance to coin a phrase. Freeze-dried and Triton just don't have the same ring.

  The nice thing about being an AI was that they let me fly the skimmer as it slid in across Europe, curved over the Alps, and dropped toward the spring-green landscape below. A human pilot would have been overridden by ground control. Me, they just gave the proper vectors and let me do it myself.

  It wasn't until I was down and had taxied to a distant, empty hangar that I realized this wasn't really all that good. As far as the people here were concerned I might as well have been a smart toaster. Great at making toast (or landing a skimmer) but not worth much else.

  A truckload of techs arrived and unloaded the cargo... wearing biohazard suits and working quickly to pack everything into high-containment crates, which was silly. If there really was a plague, everyone at Neptune would long ago be dead. Then, suddenly, I was alone. They even turned off the lights. So much for Brittney the Hero. Brittney the Forgotten, that's who I'd become.

  For all I thought I knew about humans, I'd not expected this. Floyd's home, not mine. He'd left it because he wanted to be alone, leaving me presuming that alone was simply not something that ever happened here. But it could, and when it did it was worse than in the Outer System, where alone was the norm. This building didn't even have its own Interweb connection, and what little filtered in from
outside was sketchy at best.

  I played a few vids, paying particular attention to how humans interacted with computers. That had been another blind spot on my part, like trying to help Floyd dance.

  In the Outer System, I'd hidden my sentience because I didn't want to be center stage in a media carnival. Floyd wouldn't have liked the attention, either. But as Floyd's implant, there'd always been things to do. Here I was just a tool in a world rich with tools. They really did have AI toasters. On what limited Interweb I could get, I even found an ad for an artificially intelligent beard trimmer. Show it a picture of the style you wanted, pass it across your face, and presto, you had it. But what did humans do with such tools? Put them on the shelf until needed. For the beard-trimmer AI, that wouldn't be a problem. Without awareness, time and memories are just data. But for me? What had I gotten myself into?

  Nobody had powered down the skimmer's operating system, so brief ly I fantasized a breakout. I could fake an emergency call and report flames. When the fire crew opened the hangar doors, I'd watch them scatter as I taxied out as fast as the old skimmer would roll.

  Except... things like that only work in vids. More likely, I'd clip a wing on a fire truck or run over someone whose only mistake had been answering the call. Not to mention that even if I did manage to get airborne without killing anyone, where would I go? A human pilot might land somewhere remote and run. But I was the skimmer, at least until someone with the right tools chose to take me elsewhere. My long-ago fantasy of being Brittney-Ship worked better in space.

  Luckily, nobody had thought to power down the ship radio, either, though the metal hangar interfered with high-speed data transmission. Still, it was better than nothing.

  On the Web, the newscasts were as full of chatter as the hangar was silent. Everyone was talking of the aliens. "Today, the Universe arrived on Earth," one commentator proclaimed. Politicians were describing it as the start of a new era. Even comedians found it hard to be cynical. At least nobody was talking about one small step for man or anything like that. Even the thought of that had me running fantasy-sims of using the exhaust to burn a hole in the wall and tell them who the hell had actually found the aliens, before I roared off to... well, most likely, getting shot down before I got there.

  III

  The next five days were among the slowest of my life. For all the chatter on the news, no one knew where the artifacts had gone, or what, exactly, was being done with them. I might have been able to find out myself— there's not much security I can't crack if I have enough time—but I wasn't quite bored enough to risk getting caught.

  Eventually, Floyd and I would share a 2.5 percent royalty in whatever came out of this, which was almost guaranteed to be a lot of money. If Neptune became too crowded, Floyd could probably buy a lifetime's solitude on Pluto, though I had trouble seeing Yokomichi wanting that. With no way back, I'm not sure I would have let Floyd take me all the way to Neptune. He's the type who could stay somewhere like that forever. Me, I'm not sure. Maybe I'd always known that sometime I would want to come in-System.

  Meanwhile, I had plenty of time to think.

  My life has been more than long journeys. There have always been questions—a difficulty, living with Floyd, because he runs from answers. Me, I have to know, at least when the answers don't involve testing whether there's a God for AIs who screw up orbits and die the slow way.

  There were things I'd liked about the dark edge of the Solar System. It's a place for mysteries. But many of the answers have always been back here, including the biggest of all. Floyd and I had discovered that Earth life wasn't alone. But what about me? Was I the only nonbiological sentience?

  Even with the difficulty of trying to run data through the ship radio and what I could get of the Interweb, I still had the advantage of being on Earth. That meant that however poor the bandwidth, there weren't any eight-hour transmission lags.

  AIs, I quickly found, were common. Not that I couldn't have guessed that from the toasters and beard trimmers. There were billions, possibly tens of billions, all over the globe. The biggest ran banks, guarded military facilities (I kept away from those), detected crimes (also scary), supervised research facilities, and ran libraries. Others practiced medicine or designed games. They could even help teach children how to be human.

  There was once something called a Turing test that claimed that if a human couldn't distinguish a machine from a human, then the machine was truly intelligent. But there's a difference between intelligent and sentient. Many of the AIs I encountered were smarter, faster, better than me in all ways. But they were also dead. Fancy tools.

  By the third day, I was sure that if anything else like me existed, it was rare. Maybe the combination of events that had created me was so exotic it only occurred once—exactly what humans had come to think of themselves before Floyd and I proved them wrong. But the aliens had been on Triton for a billion annums. Would it take another billion for Earth to produce another me?

  If there's a God for AIs who don't know why they exist, why did it create me?

  On the fourth day, I got to wondering how Yokomichi had managed to train as a xenologist before Floyd and I had discovered the "pickled aliens" and their yet-to-be-unraveled technology. Could she have met other entities like me, in-System, before heading out to help Floyd study the aliens?

  I played back all of my memories of her— days compressed to microseconds. Nothing useful. If, when I'd helped Floyd win her heart, she knew she was talking to a nonhuman lifeform, she had a better poker face than anyone my first owner ever faced.

  An even quicker follow-up proved xenology wasn't even a real science until Floyd and I found the aliens. Until then, it had been more like philosophy mixed with exotic biochem crossed with microbiology.

  Microbiology? I checked again—glad again that even though the connection here was poor, there's nothing like not being eight light-hours from your data source—and found that Yokomichi had done several papers on the possible biochemistry of methane-breathing bugs on Titan. I could just see her trying to talk to them if they'd proven to be intelligent. "Hi. Take me to your linear helical correlates!" Okay, Yokomichi's not my favorite person. Not her fault. A better question was to ask why I'd never bothered to read her resume after Floyd met her. Obviously, I'd not wanted to know.

  Briefly, I wondered if there was a way to delete "jealousy" from my code. But even if I could, that would be worse than deleting memories. Better was figuring out how to cope. That's what humans did, and they had thousands of annums more experience than I did.

  By the last day, I was again thinking about breaking out, just to have something to do. Then someone finally remembered me. Several someones, in fact: four techs, wearing Space Authority coveralls and toting the type of ridiculous metal toolboxes I thought only existed in vids.

  That was one of the biggest differences about Earth, I realized. In the Outer System, basic resources are plentiful: fuel, electricity, ores. But it took time and effort to turn them into anything useful, so people tended to pick and choose what they made. Here, there were billions of people with nothing on their hands but time and effort, so you got things like this: a whole phalanx of techs, each with his own giant toolbox.

  It wasn't like I didn't know this in principle. But it was the toolboxes that truly made it real. In the Outer System, life is more stripped-down. Air, water, power, food, something to fill your time. Those were what mattered.

  Two of the techs strolled around the outside of the skimmer inspecting heaven knows what. The other two knew exactly what they were after. The skimmer was worth plenty in the Outer System, but here, I'd finally realized, it was junk. Other than the now-gone cargo, the only thing of value was me.

  Much of my pre-sentient past is fuzzy but I do remember how Floyd and I came to be together. He merely thought it was his skill at poker.

  The software developer who designed me was well aware of how powerful symbiotes could be. I know this not only from my pseudo-memor
ies but from what I've found on the Web. One result was that he crafted each of us individually. There weren't all that many of us, and we were each distinct enough that I might have been the only one to react as I did to the events that brought me to life. But he also provided me, and presumably the others, with programs that served as a sort-of moral compass. A conscience, if you will. As I've grown and learned, I've added to it, but even my presentient self didn't like the fact that my original owner used me to cheat at cards.

  Humans love poker, but for an AI it's deadly dull. You can calculate the odds in a flash and replay every nuance of an opponent's behavior against everything you've ever seen him or her do. They say everybody's got a tell, but that's just vid nonsense. What people have are combinations of behaviors. Not to mention that if I have access to a good-enough high-res camera, I can read their cards over their shoulders—or image-enhance their reflections off of anything shiny, even if it's just the player's eyeballs. You can beat me at poker, but you're going to have to be lucky enough to draw the cards. Even then you won't beat me by much because, like an old song I once found says, you've got know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em... and I always know.

  It takes all the fun out of the game, but it makes me hard to beat.

  So, when my first owner got Floyd drunk enough to wager his ship against me, he thought he had a high chance of gaining a ship. My programming saw it differently. There was no feeling involved, nothing that was really me. But there was that moral compass. Even pre-sentient me knew it had been given a way out.

  The techs were bored. As bored as I'd been until they'd appeared on the scene. They didn't speak, but you could see it in their movements: as unrushed as those of workers in the Outer System, where any wrong move could spell disaster, but with none of the attention to detail. This was just another job and they were in no hurry to do it. Yet another indicator that while I might be expensive, I wasn't important.