Judgement

by Fergus Bannon

  'The point is that even augmented I can monitor no more than twenty partial analogues of myself. And all those analogues have the same intellectual limitations and cultural biases as myself. In all you told twelve people about your theories. Each of those met on average fifty-four people between then and the assassination attempt. Coded messages could have been passed to over six hundred people. My analogues checked Stallard and the other eleven for any written messages or any clearly significant verbal communications. They drew a blank.'

  A look of disbelief appeared on her face. 'It turns out Stallard passed the data onto his wife, and it was she who passed it on to Rouse. She put Rouse on standby for 'executive action' against the person or organisation that Stallard would indicate at a given time and place.'

  'The supermarket?'

  'Yes, at 8.30 pm every other day for an indefinite period.'

  'You didn't hear Stallard pass this information to his wife?'

  'That's where my cultural bias came in. He whispered it in her ear while they were making love. I'm a little prudish and anyway I take no pleasure in voyeurism. My analogue naturally felt the same way. It skipped over the audio-visual analysis of their lovemaking. Of course the full information is still there in the database. We could listen to their conversation now if you like.'

  I shook my head. 'I guess I have the same cultural biases.'

  Verity looked at me reflectively. 'There are certain other cultural biases I've had to overcome.'

  I suddenly felt very cold. It scared me that she was willing to tell me so much. 'What others?'

  'Killing,' she said. 'The execution of the guilty. And that's what I must do now.' She turned to look at the tanks, at the frozen and defenceless figures of Rouse and Stallard.

  'But that would be murder,' I heard myself say.

  CHAPTER 20

  Ana, kata and in New York

  The fabulous beast lay open, ready for finer dissection. My eyes the cutting edge, I moved them a fraction and the layers shifted, revealing huge arteries and veins through which tiny red and white bodies sped, stopping and starting in time with the pulsations of its great electronic heart. Another minute movement and I saw the labyrinthine convolutions of its bowels, filled with the slow moving slurry of millions, which was finally bleached and scalded by chemicals and pushed sluggishly out into the river.

  I looked deeper now and saw the billions of tiny neurones permeating every fibre of the creature, bringing it warmth and light and information. This time the beat was faster, suffusing the city with energy sixty times a second.

  Finally I looked in the interior crevices, in the nooks and crannies of the creature. There I saw them in their millions, the teeming parasites that cannibalised the beast, tearing it down and rebuilding, always changing. Like a fat caterpillar, stung by a wasp that had laid its eggs deep in its nourishing flesh, the city was undergoing ruthless exploitation.

  'It's hard not to think of it as alive when you see it like that.' Verity had returned at last. In an instant the view-tanks had reassembled into their discrete units. She indicated a coffee pot and cups on a side table. I had not noticed them appear. Again the hotel's logo was evident.

  I sipped the coffee. It tasted perfecto ordinary.

  Thank God something was.

  'And in a sense it is alive, you know. Put in any kind of feedback loop and you open the door to the possibility of consciousness. The city has a network of computers that monitor all types of things, from traffic flow to weather and fuel and power stocks. It's quite sophisticated.'

  I put the cup down and wondered what was coming next.

  She'd left me alone for quite a while. Verity had made no secret of her shock at the assassination attempt. I guess she'd let her analogues run unexamined for too long, while her core being, made up of optical cables though it might be, had sought succour by talking to me. Powerful, but hurt and lonely, she had needed to talk to someone.

  The view tanks had been rejigged for my education and amusement. The tanks had coalesced, enfolding me in a 3-space tableau. By moving my head I could change not the 3-space, but the 4-space perspective. Movement would always be necessary because of my retinal limitations, but my brain would automatically integrate my changing viewpoint, giving some meaning to what I saw.

  I had naturally shied away at trying this but she had assured me that this time closing my eyes would shut it all out. If I wanted it gone for good all I had to say was 'Stop'.

  I had held my head rock steady for a long time, and indeed had felt more than a tinge of nausea when at last I dared to move it a fraction. But it wasn't long before the information junky in me had triumphed over the wimp. This was knowledge in its purest, most total form.

  'Can you imagine what the city thinks about, how it feels about its world? What it imagines the Great Scheme of things to be?' Verity had so far shown no propensity for smalltalk. This was leading up to something.

  'No.'

  'Life is really all a question of perspectives. Everybody and everything has a different viewpoint, some of them breathtakingly different. It's like religion; on Earth there are perhaps a thousand different religions, with maybe several thousand more subsets, like catholicism and protestantism are subsets of Christianity. All are struggling to get some kind of handle on the greater issues, the whys and wherefores of existence. Perhaps by integrating the perspectives, building a whole out of the mess of beliefs, then it's possible a meaningful and enriching new philosophy could be constructed.'

  That I could appreciate. 'Sure. Whenever someone's tried to turn me on to religion, Jehovah's Witnesses and that kind of thing, I've always tried to ascertain their attitudes to other religions and philosophies. I figure the more tolerant they are of other viewpoints the more truth there may be in theirs.'

  Verity nodded vigorously. I couldn't help noticing how difficult it was for her to close her lips over her upper teeth. It made the skin tighter over her cheekbones, making her face look gaunt. I blinked the thought away, trying to concentrate on what she was saying.

  'Religions are notoriously intolerant. Each arrogantly asserts that their viewpoint is the truth. Everyone else is deluded.'

  'You're pretty intolerant yourself, it seems. Why must you kill these men? And why have you already killed so many others?'

  She nodded glumly. Reaching across to the table, she poured herself a cup of coffee. She really is here, I thought, not reflected from somewhere else. Maybe I should try to kill her myself. Was she good? Was she evil? I really didn't know.

  In two nests of view tanks behind her I could see Rouse and Stallard going about their lives. Rouse was lecturing about military intelligence to some Air Force recruits. Stallard was preparing his budget for the next year.

  Both must have considered the possibility that Verity had escaped the blast and had tracked them down, but neither showed fear or trepidation. That The Truth was continuing to broadcast could hardly be conducive to their peace of mind.

  As I watched, a young Langley apparatchik in shirtsleeves entered Stallard's room. Stallard, ever polite, raised his eyebrows and smiled despite the interruption. The sound suddenly swelled and I could hear Stallard say: 'Yes, David?'

  David, who looked like he was fresh out of college, almost came to attention as he said: 'It's Channel 3 of The Truth, sir. It's broadcasting something which concerns you, sir.'

  Stallard closed his eyes for a second, then tapped at his keyboard. As he did so the view tank split in two, the new segment spinning round to show the broadcast from over his shoulder. I realised with a jolt that one of the figures on the screen was me. Battered and haggard I was explaining things to Stallard in Drake Penitentiary. I had thought the week in jail had chilled me out and so was surprised at the stridency in my voice. Stallard, apparently disbelieving, kept trying to calm me down.

  As the scene in the tank then changed to what was presumably his own bedroom, the colour drained out of Stallard's face. After one wide shot to give the scene some co
ntext the viewpoint changed so that the camera seemed to be looking up out of a pillow at the two magnified faces which filled the screen. Stallard's instructions to his wife, interspersed though they were with the noises of their lovemaking, were clear. I felt sick.

  'It had to be done,' I heard Verity say. The scene changed again and I was watching Lotte Stallard, now in another bedroom, pass on his message to Rouse. In the view tank which showed Stallard, I caught the horror on his face just before he pressed his hands to his face, covering his eyes.

  'My God,' I gasped.

  As Stallard put his arms on the desk and lay his head down on them, I turned to Verity. 'Why has he got to die? He was only doing what he thought he had too, what he thought was right. What he made his wife do was awful, but it worked and it was probably the only thing that would have worked!'

  'He's too dangerous to be allowed to live and we've no time to rehabilitate him.'

  'I don't understand.'

  She put the coffee cup down and sat back in her chair. She looked down at her hands resting on her lap. 'I was trying to tell you earlier with my clumsy metaphors. Only by absorbing all viewpoints can we glimpse the real truth, cosmically as well as in simple human terms. The beings I've mentioned, the ones whose technology I use, have been doing just that for hundreds of millions of years, on a pan-galactic scale—integrating all the viewpoints of all the different species.

  'And just imagine the viewpoints they can share. Cloud beings on gas planets, whole weather systems with a consciousness, beings of crystal and rock, wind and water. Even worlds themselves can be conscious to a degree. And all these billions of species of animals and plants and myriad other lifeforms, all brought together in a fusion of perspectives.'

  'Fusion? How do they fuse?'

  'By transferring duplicates of their neural systems onto huge conglomerate computers. Like the model of my brain used for constructing analogues. Except self-awareness isn't left out. But it goes much further than that. The viewpoints that are assimilated aren't just from individuals, but are themselves the integration of all the members of their species and perhaps all the other species on their planets as well.'

  I thought I was beginning to understand. 'Are you saying these supercomputers or whatever they are, want us to fuse with them?'

  'No. That's the last thing they want. In fact they would much rather destroy us altogether.'

  'They can't do that!'

  'Why not? They created us.'

  'Says who?'

  'I'm not saying they joined up the actual atoms that made the first biomolecule. That would be counterproductive, considering as they're after new and unexpected viewpoints. They would be programming in their own biases. But they did help things along when the ecology got too stable.'

  'How?'

  'Mass extinctions. Five of them, in the last 600 million years.'

  'Jesus Christ!' I was out of my seat and pacing round the shagpile. 'How could they do it?'

  Verity's eyes went hard. 'Not as quickly and viciously as us, that's for sure!'

  'How do you mean?'

  'I'll come to that. The fourth extinction was 250 million years ago. It wiped out 90% of species. The fifth, 66 million years ago destroyed 75% including the dinosaurs. Each time the process took nearly five thousand years.'

  'But who actually did it? You couldn't have been around then.'

  'The Cloud.'

  'Was that the thing in St. Louis?'

  'A part of it.' I couldn't help shuddering. 'The Cloud is what does all the physical work for me. It's like a robot, although it’s actually more complex than most lifeforms. And infinitely more flexible than any of them.'

  Tensing, guessing what would happen next, I opened my mouth to tell her 'No', but the thing was already there. I stepped quickly back as it loomed above me like towering cumulus, coruscations of colour sweeping across its surface. Try to focus on its rippling surface, and all you saw were millions of tiny hairs, some of them caked with dirt.

  One side billowed out, narrowing into a pseudopod that enveloped the coffee pot, leaving only the spout. It gave me a refill.

  'Touch it,' Verity said.

  'No.'

  'Touch it!' I could tell she wasn't kidding.

  Cautiously I leaned forward and the cloud shifted some of the dirty bits out of the way, like it was cleaning a patch for me. The clear white surface I touched was soft and yielding and just like...

  'Cotton wool!'

  'Yes, but it can also be diamond hard or razor sharp. Whatever it wants.'

  'It or you?'

  'Me, up to a point. Then it.' The way she said it made me think she wasn't so pally with the damn thing either.

  'Think of it as a multipurpose tool and weapon. A really smart machine gun say. It'll let you use it for doing things its programming allows. If not...'

  'It could turn on you?'

  'Yes,Yes, but it'd give me warning.'

  'And you're saying this...Cloud caused those extinctions?'

  'Yes. I think if you look closely you can see what look like fine hairs on its body, but it goes much further than that. It's like a branching structure, each splitting into finer and finer sections. Each tiny section has its own little computer. The intersections keep branching past the microscopic levels down to molecular limits. The Cloud can split into semi-autonomous units to perform its functions. The smaller the unit the faster it can move. At its lowest level are the molecular assembly factories. These have minuscule arms which move back and forth up to about a million times a second.'

  'You mean nanotechnology?'

  'Yes. Parts of it are scavenger systems that pluck its raw materials out of the air, atoms of carbon and oxygen and so on. Or it can get them out of the ground by extending its tiny arms through the spaces between molecules. It reassembles the molecules to form copies of itself or make up just about anything it likes. That stuff that looks like dirt is just the component parts of whatever it's building. It eats real dirt.'

  I was familiar with the concept: build one tiny molecular factory, which then builds another, and so on until you had millions of them, which then all suddenly changed over to the construction of something else. Hey presto, vat-grown cars.

  'How did it cause these extinctions?'

  'It didn't actually kill anything. It assembled thousand of virus-sized, self-replicating machines that could get into the bodies of all the plants and animals. The machines entered the germ cells, attaching themselves to the DNA strands and pulling their way along it until they got to the sections covering potency. Those it reduced. Not totally, but just enough to ensure elimination of a species within a couple of hundred generations.'

  'How come they left man alone?'

  'They'd only do their stuff if the sequence matched their target descriptors. In this technology, even the viruses are smart!'

  .

  'This reduction in reproductive capacities, is that what's going to happen to us?'

  'I'm afraid not. The Cloud could afford nothing so leisurely. I think now we are talking mass killing. Perhaps another tailored virus, with a time delay of a year or so before it became lethal. That way it'd be very widely spread before anyone knew it was there. The Cloud would then go in to mop up the survivors in a more macroscopic way.'

  'Like it did with those Mob people in Las Vegas?'

  She nodded.

  'But why? Mankind can't be that bad. At least we don't kill as readily and on such a scale as it does.'

  'Yes, we do. That's the problem. There's a sixth extinction going on at the moment, and it's man-made. Nearly half the species on Earth have become extinct over the last two hundred years, and the rate is increasing.

  'And then there’s species like the dolphins, or the gorillas — they're the ones we should be protecting, learning from, integrating with. And we kill them. None of the relatively gentle potency reduction techniques the Cloud uses.'

  'So that's why you're going to kill us.'

  'I'm not going
to do it. But yes, that's why the Cloud has to act quickly. Gorillas and dolphins are some of the front-runners in the next evolutionary round. They don't have much time left.

  'But the Cloud has other motives.' As Verity shifted her position I glanced at the tank showing Stallard. The man was alone in his office and there were tears in his eyes. Verity, following my gaze, hesitated. 'We'll deal with him and Rouse in a minute. The only difficulty will be in choosing which way they die. Fire, blast, asphyxiation, impact. All would be appropriate.

  'If we were left alone we'd probably destroy ourselves, but we'd take lots of species with us. Nuclear war, a runaway greenhouse effect, algal blooms, whatever. But we've already messed up in so many other ways.

  'For example, overpopulated though the Earth is, it’s still possible to support all life. Nobody has to starve or die of thirst. Eleven million children die each year from preventable illnesses. Two million alone from the dehydrating effects of diarrhoea. Each treatable with a sugar and salt solution costing about twenty-five cents. Five hundred thousand dollars to save two million little lives. That's a fraction of the cost of a single jet fighter.'

  For the first time there was colour in her cheeks. 'And what about diseases in adults? What about the tens of millions who die from starvation every year? The global spending on weaponry in just two weeks is enough to eradicate starvation for a whole year. And it isn't just the indifference of governments that's the problem. Look at the West, at the States for example. There's over a million dollar millionaires here.'

  'But Africa, places like that. They're so far away,' I found myself forced into the position of an apologist for something for which there was no excuse.

  'But everybody knows about it! How many news pictures have you seen of starving people? You and everyone else choose to ignore it. Man seems infinitely capable of suppressing identification with the suffering of others.'

  'We can't help it. It’s a simple failure of imagination. Maybe that's just the way we are.'

  'Exactly!'

  'But we're getting better.'

  'Are we? Foreign aid is decreasing as far as I'm aware. And they're spending even more money on weapons. It's more conventional than nuclear, but it's still weapons. Tens of millions of people, the vast majority of them civilians, still die every year in wars.'