by Hammond, Ray
Two hundred and ten kilometres further into space, SATMAN 36, the regional Orbital Management Station maintained and operated by TOMS, registered the loss of communications handshake from LAT-6 and dumped its real-time mirror copy of LAT-6’s activities in a laserburst containing 782 terabytes of information to LAT-7, six miles to the south. LAT-7 acknowledged receipt and took over the control of 7,458,711 vehicles, 11,610 roadside displays, 15,041 traffic lights and 4,794 controlled crossings. The handover took two milliseconds and the drivers and pedestrians below were unaware of the glitch.
Then the navigation sensors on SATMAN 36 reported that the failed LAT-6 was rolling out of orbit, dipping dangerously close to the approved path of a high-speed orbiting satellite operated by the Pakistani government for a purpose claimed to be atmospheric research. SATMAN 36 observed LAT-6’s descent and, when the critical line was crossed, automatically issued instructions for the satellite to self-destruct before NASA’s ASAT anti-satellite systems were triggered and intervened with a destructive laserburst that would invalidate all insurance claims for the satellite’s loss.
LAT-6 fired its emergency thrusters, heading for re-entry and automatic incineration as ordered.
LAT-7 continued to manage the central LA traffic it had inherited from LAT-6 as well as its own south LA vehicles for a further eleven minutes. But it too had suffered ten times more memory leaks overnight than its specifications allowed for. Then, just as it was about to slow the Santa Monica Freeway traffic down to 45.82 m.p.h., all on-board processing froze.
SATMAN 36, holding an updated mirror copy of TAMI data from LAT-7, then had to make a choice between managing the traffic below or the spacecraft in orbit. The artificial intelligence algorithms prioritized the management of the highly valuable orbiting assets, in particular the satellites that were managing air-traffic movements, at the expense of their terrestrial counterparts.
When the control signals vanished, fail-safe cut-outs operated inside 7,458,702 vehicles, emitting audible warning signals before braking and slowing the vehicles to a controlled straight-line stop within thirty yards. The whole of the Greater Los Angeles road network came to an immediate standstill.
Inside nine vehicles, the fail-safe systems malfunctioned. The most serious incident occurred on the junction of the elevated San Diego Freeway and Airport Boulevard. Aboard a southbound sixty-six-ton, thirty-two-wheel, twin-tank gasoline trailer-rig travelling at the prescribed 52.896 m.p.h., the automatic fail-safe system did not engage. The driver had been changing his clothes in the cubicle behind the front seats at the time. The truck continued in a straight line into a stationary van ferrying six children to elementary school, then jackknifed to the right, crossed the safety lane, crashed through the parapet of the elevated freeway and landed on top of a Boeing 797 passenger aircraft waiting to taxi onto the recently extended main LAX runway for take-off The aircraft and the tanker erupted into a giant ball of flame.
In other parts of the city the wholly quadrirotal Angelenos suffered instant impotence and many attempted to restart their vehicles, assume manual control and drive off the freeways in the safety lanes. There were 571 collisions and six old-fashioned ‘freeway fever’ killings in the first thirty minutes following the control failure.
*
‘I want you to think of your favourite beach on Hope Island,’ Theresa Keane began, selecting an image she knew would be popular. The graduate students were scattered around the study in her home. As part of the package designed to lure her from the rarefied air of Cambridge, Massachusetts to Hope Island, the dean of the new university had secured permission for her to use one of the much-coveted white villas set on the lower mountain slopes overlooking Hope Town. This morning Professor Keane had opened the wide glass doors that led out to a large stone terrace and a view of the distant town and the emerald bay beyond. Small green and blue humming birds darted between the luxuriant Browallia, bussu palms, Escallonia, poinsettias and castor-oil plants that she had cultivated. When she was alone in this room she often compared it to the musty, cramped accommodation for which she had been so grateful when she had secured her first tenured seat at Trinity College in Dublin fifteen years before.
‘I want you to imagine that a hurricane strikes your favourite beach and lifts every grain of sand into the air. It forms a giant swirling cloud over this island and out across the oceans in all directions.’
She waited as they created the model in their heads.
‘Now I want you to think of the beaches on the other islands that are our neighbours: Cuba, the Turks and Caicos Islands, Jamaica, the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. Simultaneously, hurricanes hit all those beaches and funnel all that sand into the air in vast clouds that stretch right across the Caribbean.’
They nodded as they made the mental construction.
‘Now, more hurricanes appear in the Keys, in Florida, in Miami, Palm Beach, Naples and Tampa. Then on Stinson Beach north of San Francisco, or Long Beach in LA, or the beaches at Cape Cod, or the wonderful sands of Samoa, Goa Beach in India, Phuket in Thailand or Bondi Beach in Australia. I want you to run through all of the beaches you’ve ever seen, lift the sand into the air, make vast, dense clouds of sand all over the world.’
She waited again as the twenty-six postgraduate students who were crammed into her room rooted around in their memories for beach scenes that could serve as visual aids.
‘Imagine the amount of sand on those beaches. Think of the number of grains there might be. I want you to think of those hurricanes merging, the clouds of sand becoming one. I want you to imagine that cloud and all those grains of sand.’
Again she waited as they assembled a mental language with which to approach her concepts.
‘How many grains do you think you might have? A hundred billion, a trillion, a quintillion, a duodecillion?’
She paused again.
‘One thing we do know – there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our own planet. Our galaxy alone has over one hundred billion.’
Theresa Keane knew that this was not new material to some of them, but she wanted them all to start from the same place. As a computer scientist she would normally have expressed such large numbers as powers, but this was a diverse group that required her visual diglossia. Professor Walczack’s frequent urgings for cohesion across all disciplines had fired her imagination and she had invited biologists, evolutionary psychologists, linguistic neuroscientists and geneticists to join her own students in the seminar series.
‘There are ten galaxies – not stars, galaxies – for every human on this planet! Think about it – ten whole galaxies for each of you and ten for every other single person.’
She paused again.
‘And each of the billions of stars in each of those galaxies are all separated by an average of four light years. Or five hundred billion, billion miles. This is the human dilemma.’
‘What about binary twins?’ asked a lanky Scots materials physicist with a prominent Adam’s apple and watery blue eyes. He was part of the Phoebus Project research team.
Theresa smiled at him. ‘You’re right, Martin. Many of the stars are twins. I was thinking of single-star systems that might support planets.’
She allowed them to think on a little longer as she sipped her tea. She imagined them constructing mental images of vast swarms of stellar dust in which every speck was a star.
‘We now know that many of those trillions of billions of stars support planets – some of them possibly oases of benign atmospheres, gentle warmth and abundant water like our own glorious Earth. Humankind has now explored its own world. We have discovered and probed the other planets in our solar system and we know what lies immediately beyond. But if we know one thing about our species, it is that we will never stop expanding. We can see so many of those stars; they tantalize us. If it is true that our planet is merely a cosmological crèche for our species, how, then, do we take the next step?’
&n
bsp; ‘We m-m-m-must go to the stars,’ averred Robert, her stammering research fellow and, secretly, her most ardent admirer.
‘We must, Robert, but humans cannot travel at a speed that allows that. How many of you have what you consider to be an accurate scale model of our solar system and our nearest neighbouring stars in your mind – our physicists, astronomers and other supraterrestrialists excluded?’
Theresa looked around the group of young men and women adorning the chairs, sofas, arms, floors, stools and walls of the study. Only one of them raised a hand.
‘Do you?’ she asked Lisa, a gifted young proteomicist from Argentina. ‘In that case you can help me. We’re going back to school, Grade Six or thereabouts. We all do these experiments when we’re young and we all forget them. It’s not comfortable information to retain. Now then . . .’
She turned to a fruit bowl placed on a low table beside her comfortable chair. She picked up an orange and held it up before them.
‘This orange will be our sun,’ she smiled as she held it on the fingertips of her right hand. ‘What is it – about four inches in diameter? That’s about ten centimetres for the metric among you. Now . . .’
She turned back to the fruit bowl and picked something up. They couldn’t make out what it was until she held it up between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand beside the orange.
‘This dried pea is our own Earth and it’s about a third of an inch in diameter – that’s nine millimetres – and, as you have already guessed, these bodies are approximately to scale. Now, Lisa, take this pea and show us roughly how far the Earth is from the sun at this same scale.’
Lisa pushed herself up from the floor and swept her long black hair back over her shoulders. She took the pea from the professor’s fingers and looked around the room. She threaded her way through the bodies draped across the furniture and the carpet and turned at the open French windows. She held up the pea.
‘Keep going,’ said Theresa, waving her student out of the room. Lisa walked backwards into the sunshine, holding the pea up between her fingertips.
‘Keep going,’ called Theresa. ‘More . . . more. There.’
Lisa stopped at the far end of the terrace, beside a low table that Theresa had placed as a marker.
‘That’s thirty-six feet, about ten metres or if, like me, you’re very, very Irish, eighteen bandles. That pea out there is us, and this orange in my hand is the sun.’
They looked from one to the other.
‘Now, working on the same scale, who will stand up and tell me where the star closest to us, Proxima Centauri, would be located out there?’
Theresa stood up and all of them – except the three astronomers, feeling cocky in the pit of their sofa – stood also and gazed out onto the cultivated sunlit slopes that led down to Hope Town a mile away to the south-west. Lisa remained at the edge of the terrace, the pea held in her right hand.
‘Well?’ asked Theresa from the back of the group. She knew none of them would know. She hadn’t known for sure herself until she did the research.
‘Th-Th-The Town Hall,’ guessed Robert, pointing at the small clock tower jutting above the low roof-line of the town. His doctorate was in speech interfaces.
‘No. Further.’
‘Three hundred miles out in the Caribbean,’ hazarded a cognitive neuroscientist, keen to get it over.
‘No. Further.’
‘M-M-Mexico,’ offered Robert gamely.
Theresa stepped forward to stand amongst them. She pointed out to sea.
‘The next landfall out there is Panama,’ she told her class, enjoying her demonstration, ‘on the other side of the Caribbean Sea. That’s nine hundred miles away. If you kept going another nine hundred miles, across the Canal Zone, and then out into the Pacific until you reached the Galapagos Islands, an archipelago with special meaning for the evolutionary psychologists here, that’s where Proxima Centauri would be. Again, about the same size as this orange.’
They turned back to her. She seated them with a smile and tucked her long floral skirt under her legs as she lowered herself into her armchair. She waited a few moments for them to get comfortable again and for Lisa to return with the pea and resume her place on the carpet, her back propped against a wall.
‘Forgive the high-school experiment,’ she requested. ‘But it is easy to forget the scale of our local solar environment, even though particle physics suggests such concepts. If I held up the orange again and said it was a helium atom, we know that its pair of electrons would go around it at a distance of about five kilometres. Matter obeys the natural laws of physics throughout the universe.
‘Despite this, every image of our solar system you may see – in film, magazines and books – is grossly distorted in scale. You can visit science exploratoriums and you still won’t see any accurate sort of scale models. It is as though there is a conspiracy to pretend we live in a space that is more manageable, more human.
‘NASA, Hollywood, TV producers and popular magazines have been selling us lies for over fifty years. When the Americans went to the moon it wasn’t one of the greatest steps for Mankind, it turned out to be one of the most disappointing. We didn’t discover another living world, it wasn’t a step towards further space travel. It was a hard collision with the brick wall of truth. There is nothing out there worth going to, or at least nothing worthwhile that is even remotely within reach. Our culture tells us differently because we cannot bear to face the truth. Every model we see of the solar system is grossly telescoped and distorted. Every movie that projects the idea of manned space travel or that heralds yet another contact with alien intelligence lies to us about the real difficulties of space travel or the odds of such an encounter or its nature if it were ever to happen. We have no language with which to consider such ideas realistically.
‘Let’s look at the facts, now that Lisa has helped us develop a better scale model. In our present physical form we cannot travel at the speed of light, nor even at a speed that approaches it. Our fastest spacecraft today would take ten thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri, our Sun’s nearest neighbour, which we have today imagined as being located eighteen hundred miles away in the Pacific. On the same scale, the centre of the Milky Way, our own small outer galaxy and only one of billions of galaxies in the universe, is about twelve million miles away from this orange!’
She lifted the orange again and paused as they tried to take in this information.
‘Even if we could travel magically at one quarter of the speed of light it would take us three hundred years to reach the nearest solar system that we know to have planets – and the same time to come home again. So what is to be done?’
‘Unmanned probes,’ suggested one.
‘Targeted radio messages,’ submitted another.
‘Suspended animation,’ ventured a third.
Theresa held up a hand. ‘None of those solves the problem,’ she maintained. ‘It would seem as if the times and distances of our universe are inhuman. They are beyond human comprehension and all biological timescales. Are we to give up?’
Her question was rhetorical and they all knew it.
‘No, we are not,’ she declared. ‘The next step for our species is to emerge from our biological envelopes, to free our virtual consciousness and our temporal perceptions from the tyranny of our fragile mammalian support systems and fleeting earthly lifespan. Then we shall be ready for our virtuality to travel at the speed of light to meet the others who share our universe.’
They were quiet.
‘This is the topic of our tutorial today and later I will describe progress with our efforts to transfer human neural experience to machine storage. But I will begin by describing some tools that we are developing for the observation and measurement of non-biologically-dependent consciousness in the little boys and girls we are creating in our Anagenesis Experiment.’
*
Joe Tinkler added semi-skimmed milk to his room-service muesli and sliced fresh banana
and looked down at the leisurely flow of traffic and pedestrians in the Avenue Wilson six storeys below. He checked his LifeWatch. It was still the middle of the morning rush hour. Geneva seemed so small, so tame, so ordered, after Manhattan.
He had arrived early on the previous afternoon and, after checking into the suite at the Hotel President Wilson that had been reserved for him by the World Bank, he had showered, changed and gone on a walking tour of the city. He’d been to Europe several times before, but never to Geneva or anywhere else in Switzerland.
Even though it was a working day the old city was quiet. Prosperous-looking men and women walked sedately along the lakeside promenade, enjoying the midsummer sunshine. Well-dressed nannies pushed child buggies and chatted in muted tones to their friends beneath the luxuriant trees of the Quai Wilson and the Mon Repos waterside gardens.
On the promenade Joe marvelled at the Alpine clarity of Lake Leman and the majesty of Mount Jura rising behind the town. He stopped to examine a metal triangle and a notice board. On top of a metal pole a small ball, perhaps two inches in diameter, represented the Earth. Joe followed the English-language instructions and put his eye to the hole bored through the centre of the sphere. On the other side of the wide harbour – really an embouchement, where the Rhône emptied into the lake – Joe saw a sphere that represented the sun. This distant ball was actually five yards in diameter, but it appeared the same size as the little Earth. Joe peered through the hole again and then stood up once more. He had never appreciated how tiny and how far away the Earth really was from the sun.
Then he crossed the busy road to enter the city’s main commercial district. Even here, activity was muted. The shops were elegant, the prices high, the atmosphere discreet. Joe could feel money in the air. He realized that the Swiss existed by an invisible process of long-term quiet money making more long-term quiet money. Joe’s own world of Wall Street and dealing screens, of money frantically competing to make money on marginal spreads, seemed frenetic and vulgar in comparison. Here and there he came upon carpenters and labourers for whom personal physical output was still linked to income, but as he walked through the city he realized that his current sense of unreality was not only the result of jet lag and the time change – he had used his viewpers’ anti-jet lag technology to reduce that – but of entering a society in which most of wealth-generation had long been virtual.
