Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “We will send in hundreds of moles, thousands maybe. Each mole will make most of its own decisions down there, learning as it goes. But we can communicate with it through the pipe it leaves behind. We’re also experimenting with sonar and electromagnetic pulses, so the moles can communicate with each other even without a direct connection.”

  Sonia said, “So they will hear each other digging away in the rock. A whole community, tunneling, tunneling.”

  “That’s the idea,” Shelley said. The overall design was straightforward. The moles wouldn’t be going terribly deep, and wouldn’t face challenging temperatures or pressures; the materials technology we needed was well within the envelope of experience of the mining industry. “And the smartness, of course, is trivial.”

  Makaay asked, “And what about power?”

  Shelley nodded at me. “That’s where Michael’s expertise comes in.” She tapped that glowing spark at the heart of her conceptual mole. “This is a Higgs-energy reactor, the most concentrated energy source we have. The mole’s heart will be a cube the size of a sugar lump, which will deliver it enough energy to tunnel through ten thousand kilometers—that’s our design goal, we may achieve more.”

  Tom turned to me. “You can build such things, the sugar lumps?”

  I said, “We can take them off the shelf, almost. We’ve been working toward such devices for a long time, Tom. For a while we’ve been good at making very small, very smart gadgets. So if you can make a power source equally compact you have a powerful technology. . . .”

  Now that power supplies were catching up with miniaturization, the agencies and companies I consulted for were developing, among other things, miniature robotic engineers designed to go places humans couldn’t, such as to check out undersea pipes and cables, or the interiors of antiquated nuclear reactors. The space community was designing a new generation of unmanned exploratory robots, swarms of them the size of oranges or smaller, which could be scattered on the surface of Mars, or in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter, or sent swimming in the ice-cloaked seas of Europa. These tiny probes would work for years, individually and cooperatively, smart enough even to design their own science programs on the spot. Even on Earth tiny distributed sentiences were even making new kinds of science possible. You could spray smart motes around a forest, let them self-organize, and begin to gather data, in three dimensions and real time, on the detailed behavior of macro-climates and macro-ecologies across a significant volume. All of this would be enabled by Higgs technology, by grains of an energy field that had once caused the universe itself to expand, each providing years of power.

  Tom seemed impressed despite himself. Perhaps he did have some engineer’s genes in him after all.

  With most components coming off the shelf, Ruud Makaay thought it would be possible to have some kind of field trial up and running within mere weeks. Earth Inc. took on immense projects, but it was a nimble organization, it seemed, capable of reacting quickly.

  The discussion descended into technicalities.

  Vander, prompted by Gea, pressed Shelley with some tough questions.

  Shelley handled most of it, though we had to flag some issues to resolve later. Most of the problems Vander and Gea raised came from the fact that the design was still at a conceptual level, and Shelley just didn’t have the depth of detail yet. I couldn’t see that any showstoppers emerged, however.

  Vander, as he spoke, had a strange way of sitting, alternately lounging then coming bolt upright, startling you. It was the way you might behave if you were alone, not in company. And that shock of blue hair made him hard to take seriously, despite the sharpness of his mind.

  I suspected that Vander’s problem came from that ill-advised genetic engineering, performed long before he was born. Changing the color of his hair was one thing, but I was pretty sure Mr. and Mrs. Guthrie had taken the opportunity to upgrade little Vander’s IQ as well. The problem with that was what the neuro-anatomists and behavioral geneticists called pleiotropy: most genes perform more than one function, and that’s certainly true of the complexes of genes that seem to control levels of intelligence. So you could boost IQ, but we still weren’t smart enough to avert unwelcome side effects. It was an irony that only parents not smart enough to be able to grasp this in the first place would inflict such risky genetic meddling on their unborn children. Poor Vander.

  Tom seemed fascinated by Vander, his peculiar, twitchy manner, his uncertain voice. I thought he ought to be grateful Morag and I hadn’t been so dumb as to do this to him.

  When the technical questions ran down, Sonia leaned forward. “You said these moles will be smart enough to make their own choices. How smart?”

  Shelley checked a softscreen. “Each mole will be three times as smart as a human. But in a narrow way. Specialized.”

  Sonia said, “But smart machines have a way of thinking for themselves, don’t they? Military systems are generally kept dumb, you know. Everybody jokes that they are even dumber than the brass. But you can see why they have to be that way. You don’t want a weapon system or a piece of armor to be thinking about what it should do; you want it to do what you tell it, the instant you tell it. And now we’re going to let loose a swarm of these super-smart moles into the crust of the planet? How do you know they will do what they’re supposed to do?”

  Shelley said evenly, “Because it will be in their own best interests. A mole is designed for burrowing, for laying tunnels, for talking to its fellows. It will be as natural as walking, talking, hugging a child is for you. The mole won’t want to do anything else. And as for the greater goal, each mole will be smart enough to understand the greater mission, the impelling problem. We’ll put each one through an education program to make sure.”

  Sonia said, “OK, but they can still make choices, can’t they?”

  “Sonia, I understand your concerns, but I wouldn’t worry about it,” Shelley said. “To us this is a detail. Motivation engineering is a well-established discipline—in fact a subset of animism, Vander’s speciality.”

  Sonia couldn’t have looked less reassured. But I knew Shelley was right. There were actually philosophical arguments that endowing our machines with all this sentience and self-awareness was morally wrong, especially since their choice was usually limited, their freedom illusory. And I remembered my own helpless suspicions when first confronted with Gea. But there was nothing to fear from our artificial sentiences: despite our innate worries, the ghost of Frankenstein was laid long ago.

  Makaay called a bio break. We pushed our seats back from the table and dispersed.

  Tom and Sonia approached me. Tom had a mug of coffee; the vapor curled up convincingly from his virtual mug, and it struck me as odd that I couldn’t smell the cinnamon.

  Tom said, “Dad, these are seriously scary people you’re dealing with here.”

  “You mean EI?”

  “Have you never heard of Cephalonia?”

  I repressed the urge to snap back. “Of course I have. But they’re on our side here, Tom. Potentially anyhow.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  Actually I understood his suspicion of EI, even if it struck me as naÏve. Now that the old oil companies had been defanged and the nuclear power industry had cleaned up its act, the geoengineers had taken the place of those traditional mad-scientist bad guys in the popular imagination. How could their huge projects be made accountable? Couldn’t the accumulation of such power be an end in itself for the unscrupulous? And so on. I sympathized. Maybe at heart I was still a twentysomething rebel myself. The trouble was, I couldn’t see any other way to save the world than to deal with the devil.

  “We live in complicated times, Tom.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Ruud Makaay touched my arm. “Michael, I’m sorry to take you away from your son. But there’s somebody here who wants to meet you . . .”

  It was another VR presence, of a bulky, business-suited man, sweating heavily. “Hey, Mike. I bet you don’t recognize me.”r />
  I did, but he was such an incongruous presence I took a moment to place the name. “Jack Joy. The Swimmer.”

  He made a shooting-the-gun gesture at me with one fat hand. “We shared a plane journey together.”

  “How could I forget?”

  “Listen, you’re surprised to see me here, right?”

  I shrugged. “Of course I am.”

  “After our talk on the plane, you never used that card I gave you.” I tried to apologize, but he waved it away. “No matter. I’m a curious guy,” Jack said. “And you interested me. You told me about your kid in Siberia, remember. After that I looked up about those gas deposits, and the danger, and all of that. And then I heard from a friend of a friend that you were involved in some kind of scheme to stabilize them. I was intrigued. So I found you.”

  “How?”

  “Through your brother John.” He grinned. “I never met him before, but he’s a Swimmer, too. Did you know that?”

  Lethe. “I suppose I suspected.”

  “Anyhow, through him, to you, and here I am. And I’ve been watching the show. Very interesting.”

  “I hope you don’t mind me inviting Mr. Joy,” Makaay said, but he had nothing to apologize for. He had warned us in advance that we would be monitored by others in his organization, and by representatives of potential supporters and sponsors and the like.

  I said, “It’s fine. But I don’t see what interest the Swimmers have in a project like this.”

  Jack shook his head. “Oh ye of little faith. You really should look us up, Mike. I’m here to see if we can help, we Swimmers.”

  “You? You want to support the stabilization project?”

  He shrugged, as if graciously accepting my gratitude. “Any way we can, if we think it’s the right thing to do. We have deep pockets, actually. You might be surprised.”

  “But why would you want to?”

  “Because it’s serious, if you’re right about these damn gas deposits blowing their stack. We’re pragmatists, OK? We don’t believe in denial. Your brother is a pragmatist, too. And also we may be able to act long before our various governments and intergovernmental bodies and all the rest of the bureaucratic mound on top of us get their thumbs out of each other’s asses. You may need us, Mike,” he said with a kind of overweight persuasiveness.

  “Michael,” I said. “Call me Michael.”

  “Actually Mr. Joy may be right,” Ruud Makaay said smoothly. “We are critically short of funding. We need money to develop the concept to the point where the governments will give us money to develop the concept. . . .” He shook his head. “It’s a vicious circle, an old story, I’m afraid.”

  VR Jack said, “We want to be your friends, we really do. I’ll be waiting.” And with a nod to both of us he disappeared.

  Tom approached me. “More complications, Dad? How long a spoon do you need to sup with the likes of him?”

  Makaay called us back to order. Confused by Jack’s intervention I took my seat again.

  Shelley presented the next logical level of our tentative design.

  She showed how moles, inserted into the earth and dispersing from some central point, would fan out, spreading their narrow tunnels behind them as they did so. Some of the moles would move around circumferential arcs as well as radially, so that a multiply connected network, rather like a three-dimensional spiderweb, would develop within the hydrate beds.

  “The network will grow incrementally,” Shelley said. “We have to follow a phased approach, simply because it’s going to take time to ramp up the industrial capacity to churn out all those moles, all those condensers and collectors. And besides, nobody has ever run a pipe network on anything like this scale before. The moles will take some time to figure out the best way to do it.”

  This was the modern approach to engineering. You let your machines, loaded with as much smartness as possible, figure things out for themselves, and then learn from the way they did it. That way, not only was there a good chance you’d end up with an optimal design at the finish, but you could expect that at every stage you would move from one optimum configuration to another. It was like climbing a hill, Shelley said, in such a way that you didn’t just aim for the peak but at every stage took the best path available.

  “So in the end,” Tom said, “it will all merge together into a single vast cap of silicon brain embedded in the floor of the polar ocean. Talk about hubris!”

  Ruud Makaay said ruefully, “Believe me, that word is already carved on my tombstone. All I can say is that we geoengineers would never take on a project like this if there was any choice.”

  “But there is no choice,” Gea said in her small, absurd voice.

  Tom said, “There’s still something I don’t get. I’m no engineer, but I do recall some high-school thermodynamics. You’re keeping those hydrate deposits cool; you’re pumping all the heat out with your liquid nitrogen. But where is all that heat going to? It can’t just disappear, can it?”

  “It certainly can’t,” said Shelley.

  Shelley patiently explained that our mechanism would end up dumping its heat into the ocean, and the air.

  “This will be the hardest part of the sell, I fear,” Makaay said. “Because it is going to be very hard for our paymasters to understand.”

  “Well, there’s no magic involved,” Shelley said. “All that heat has to go somewhere.” But the net injection of heat into the environment would be trivial compared to the catastrophic rise in temperature that would result if the hydrates’ vast store of greenhouse gases were released to do their worst. And anyhow we could always mitigate the effects of any heat injection with albedo control. . . . It was a necessary evil, Shelley said.

  Sonia said, “I don’t think I understand.”

  Tom laughed. “They’re going to pump all that heat out of the hydrate layers and into the air. The whole point is to stop the world from heating up. But to do that we’re going to have to make the problem worse. What a joke.”

  The Gea robot said, “There are many aspects of the present predicament of mankind that are ironic. It is indeed all a vast joke. Ha ha.” And she rolled back and forth, friction sparks cascading.

  Chapter 33

  Alia, seeking a way forward, sought the Transcendence.

  When she called, the strange constellation of minds gathered around her. To rejoin the Transcendence was easy, even here, on the hive-world. Once you had been a part of the Transcendence, you never really left it; it was always in the background of your life, always waiting to take you in once more.

  It was exactly like an addiction, Alia thought uneasily.

  But now she sensed a kind of restlessness. The Transcendence, aware of its own imperfections and incompleteness, struggled to be born—and laced through it all was that nagging guilt over the bloodiness of the past from which it was emerging.

  She looked back at herself, Alia, her own nuggetlike awareness embedded in the greater whole. To be part of the Transcendence was to be overwhelmed by perspectives, human and superhuman, that overlapped and clashed. On one level she struggled to maintain her sense of identity and purpose, and to unravel her doubts about the Redemption—but at the same time she was faintly ashamed of herself. Who was she to question the mass mind around her, which had been gracious enough to accept her, and which was in turn founded on the wisdom of others far older and wiser than she was? Even now, unready as she felt, she could simply give herself up to the greater whole. She could put aside Alia, like a memory of childhood; she could immerse herself in the Transcendence, and never surface again. . . .

  Which was what it wanted, she realized. For her nagging questions, lodged deep within its own consciousness, made the Transcendence uncomfortable. She couldn’t take credit for causing this conflict within the Transcendence, but her questions were opening wounds, sharpening a conflict that already existed.

  But she clung to herself, like a defiant child who wouldn’t say sorry. This was a genuine dilemma for the Trans
cendence, and she had a duty to keep asking her questions: What is the true purpose of the Redemption? What is its ultimate goal? What does it cost? And—how far will you take it?

  The constellations of pinpoint minds seemed to swim around her—and then they came together with a shocking rush. She saw a human face, a small, round, worn face, with eyes like bits of diamond.

  And she heard a voice, resounding inside her head. “You won’t give up, will you, child?”

  “I only want—”

  “What you want doesn’t matter. What the Transcendence wants is for your doubts to be replaced by certainty. For, you see, it seeks certainty itself. You know that the impulse for Redemption comes from the communities of the undying. And so you must meet the undying, the oldest of all. You must meet me. My name is Leropa. Find me.”

  “Where?”

  Suddenly Alia surfaced from the Transcendence.

  She was back in her own body, back on Reath’s shuttle. She lay on a couch. Reath and Drea hovered over her, concerned. But the three Campocs had backed against a partition, huddled together like frightened children. It struck her that joining the Transcendence was like being ill.

  And that strange face, Leropa’s face, hovered in the air before her. Alia cried out. It was as if she had woken, but her nightmare still haunted her.

  It, she, Leropa, glanced dismissively at the Campocs. “They can hear me, with their little web of minds. I’m invisible to the others.”

  Alia struggled to sit up. “Where must I go? Tell me.”

  “Earth,” the woman said.

  And then the face was gone—not broken up or dispersed, simply gone from Alia’s field of view, as if she had turned her head away.

  Had any of it happened? Had this strange woman Leropa really come swimming out of the Transcendence to address her? Had she really talked of Earth?

  The Campocs remained jammed up against each other, trembling, watching her fearfully, and Drea stared at her, baffled, concerned.