K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  The gravity seemed slightly wrong, and I wondered what version of Earth this was. I took another sniff of the air, and felt my blood racing.

  "Jan, I—" A tremendous dark shadow fell upon us. I ducked involuntarily, looked up. "Shit!" I said.

  The thing ceased its motion, hung above us without falling. It was black. It was enormous. It was the thing diagrammed by the K-machine that had manifested its image in the library catalog screen. I wanted to throw myself face down on the ground, cover my head. A ghost of electricity flimmered about its dark form, the great tree-trunk shape of its holds, its engines, its fuel tanks, whatever those immense black spheres might be. I crouched on one knee, brought up my right arm.

  "Augie, dude!" Jan stood beside me, grinning happily. She grabbed my lethal hand, gave it a shake. "No need to make a knee, just family here. And friends. Oh, and good old Hanger up there."

  It still felt as if the terrible mass plunged down at us, about to smash our flesh and bones to pulp. The Hanged Man stayed put overhead, despite the illusion, like a very low thundercloud made of black metal and alive with lightning. I dropped my arm, and Jan's hand fell with it. Maybelline uttered a caustic cough, followed by a snigger. I must have offended her at some time. Maybe breaking up her tryst with the Adamski vegetable. Maybe snatching Lune away from her hopeless infatuation. I bared my teeth at her, halfway between a snarl and a conciliatory smile. She rolled her eyes and said to Jan, "Do we really have to take him?"

  "Take me?"

  "I hope you've got your toothbrush packed, bro," Jan said. Her tattoo, Sylvie, winked at me, put her tiny fingers between tiny lips, emitted a high-pitched whistle. The red-gold plate we stood on left the ground and drifted smoothly upward toward the vessel's darkness. "You're off for a ride in a starship."

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SgrA*: 1996, Aged Fifty-Two

  Examination season approaches. As he switches off his overhead projector, his students shuffle anxiously in their seats, wanting to know nothing other than clues toward what will be on the paper. One or two of them, it's true, possess a spark of initiative and enthusiasm for what he still finds himself calling, with a suitably ironic cough, the life of the mind. But then, as Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living, and by God, these poor little devils are going to be examined within an inch of their lives in this age of economic rationalism and education geared ever more tightly to the requirements of a workforce that ever more swiftly will need no workers at all. Computers, they'll do it for you. They'll mark your multichoice exams, they'll weld your new Suzuki, and type your next essay after downloading it from the World Wide Web, they'll handle import and export of nations in a trice, they'll fuck up your credit card and ruin your rating without pausing for breath, without taking a sick day. Christ! I've seen the future, he thinks, and it's out of work.

  "Okay, people." Formal lecture done, he steps out for the last few minutes from behind the lectern, man of the people, no technological barrier of sound system and overhead projectors for these few minutes. Facing them, he runs his fingers in a sort of reflex nervousness through his thinning hair. No need for nervousness, he's been doing this for years. Maybe it's that cute coffee-colored babe in the second row who's throwing him off his stride. He allows himself to glance at her, nod slightly. There's a definite resemblance to Moon Ku, he can't deny it. What an imbecile! Still mooning over Moon, even if he can't bear to talk to her for more than five minutes, the tormenting and twisting and entirely predestined loops of their flagellating conversation laid up in advance like the entrapping circuits of a maze, like the many-plied bad moves in a chess game that a computer might avoid in its blind quest through search space, while the poor benighted human player blunders on, trapped by those first injudicious moves of pawn and knight. By main force he brings himself back to focus. "Let's talk some ontology."

  Of course, some jackass jumps up with an objection based on solipsism, an idea he seems to think he's invented even though he's patently filched it from a sci-fi writer. "Why should I even believe in all you zombies?" the kid says, smirking.

  "You believe in me, I'll believe in you," he says. "The Unicorn's Bargain." They look at him numbly, for the most part. Maybe they don't know what a unicorn is. No, that's unlikely, most of them have their damned noses stuck in one fat, vacuous, fantasy trilogy after another, nothing but dragons and feisty princesses and more unicorns than you can poke a helical horn at. "It's a quote from Lewis Carroll, the noted logician," he tells them wearily. "It's also a sort of ontological corollary of Gricean implicature, which we discussed briefly several months ago. A Lewis Carrollary, if you like." It's a terrible pun; in evidence, nobody laughs. Moon would have laughed, or at least sniggered.

  One of the few eager beavers is insistent. "But like, suppose some creep goes, 'You're a real asshole,' and you go, 'No, you're the asshole," and you like want to obliterate the dude, well, doesn't that..." The words ebb away, and whatever fraction of thought lay behind them disperses into the conditioned air. Outside, he knows, there is a wintry August chill on the breeze. He hunches his shoulders slightly, imagining stepping outside into the quadrangle, bare branches of the few trees snapping in the wind. A shot of Scotch would go down very nicely. But he needs to stay alert. There's a pile of essays on his desk in his cramped, shared office space, waiting for him to drag his Husserlian intentionality across their dismal pages. At least these days most of the repetitive gibberish and constellations of category errors are legible, banged out on the dot-matrix and laser printers that have replaced the typewriters that replaced the appalling scrawl most students of his own day had inflicted upon their long-suffering tutors. He says, "Solipsism is not an option. The world is not your dream. It's not even the shared dream of everyone in this room. That particular dead end—"

  "How can you be so sure?" Shit, what's her name? It's not Moon. What's in a name? Ontology recapitulates philology. "What test," she goes on relentlessly, "can we apply to our construction of the world, to our experience of others, like, what operational test, you know, would disprove solipsism?" She closes her pink lips, regards him solemnly. There is no venom in her question. He has grown accustomed to the expectation of a barb. Has grown accustomed, indeed, to responding with one still sharper and more brutal. But that was then. This is... not-then. If p and not-p, then any q at all logically follows. Talk about solipsism. Talk about Lewis Carroll.

  He wonders if he is losing his mind. Distraction is one thing, obsession is another altogether. If distraction is p, and obsession is q...

  "I'll see your solipsism," he says with an artful smile, "and raise you panpsychist emergent stochastic constructivism."

  This time they all stare at him as if he's just taken off his trousers and danced a jig in front of the class. Calm down, he cautions himself. These are freshmen, it's their first bloody year at university, even if the end of their first year is now near at hand, their testing time. Poor little lambs.

  "Never mind," he says in a buoyant tone. "It won't be on the exam. What will be on the exam are the views of Plato and Descartes concerning—"

  "Just a moment," another student says. Flattened New Zealand schwa vowels; a Kiwi, certainly. "You're saying we sort of... collude... in creating reality?" Big kid, Maori genes there, looks like a rugby player, broken nose, but there is no rule that says jocks have to be stupid. High probability, good Bayesian priors, no certainty. The kid—Jonathan something?—is saying, "The only common basis we could have for, you know, having this conversation is if we live in a shared world. I mean, one that came before any of us. We evolved in the real world, we're adapted to it, it's absolute superstitious bullshit to think it could be the other way around."

  "But Foucault says—" another kid begins, but now he's snapped to attention and waves for silence.

  "Okay, Jonathan, good point. But what if the shared world is like one of those MUDs you kids spend all your time playing in when you're not getting whacked on ecstasy?" Someone hisses. "I'm seriou
s. Suppose the world we're experiencing is some kind of humongous computer simulation in a cosmos that's completely different from this one. Maybe it's got more dimensions. Or maybe it's this universe in a thousand billion years time. Imagine that. Intelligence has taken over matter completely and rewritten the rules. Maybe the creatures in that far future amuse themselves by reconstructing their own history, and that's us. Or they just make up some new worlds and populate them with a few billion emulated minds and bodies, and that's us." He pauses, lets them think about it. Maybe some of them do. The Foucault fan is looking disgusted, and seems to have flipped open a newspaper. The coffee girl—young woman—is thoughtful. The jock named Jonathan is ready to explode.

  "You're saying we're just the shadows in Plato's cave, right?" It is a penetrating remark. This boy has been doing some reading. "So what, Doc? Lots of people think some God created the world." One beefy hand slaps down on the writing bench folded over his lap. The loud crack wakes some of them up. "If we're in a multiuser domain, it's exactly the same. We can't tell if we're the pieces in some game, just deluding ourselves we're playing it instead of being played. I mean," the kid rises in his place, hulkingly, at the end of his aisle, "if this is all just a simulation, why shouldn't I just come down there and smash your head open like a fucking coconut?"

  Audible gasps. He steps forward from the lectern, narrows his eyes at the young man. "I don't appreciate threats, Mr. Wilson." Amazing how the name comes to his lips when he needs it. "Even in a gedanken."

  Lazily, the kid sits back down, not even slightly discountenanced. "See? Even the imaginary threat of violence cuts through the bullshit. The world's real. That's ontology enough for me, dude. Next topic."

  He sighs. "Kick the stone. Thus you and Dr. Johnson refute Berkeley. How delightfully simple. How simply delightful." He needs that Scotch. The kid is right, of course. Three thousand years and more of arcane bullshit and tortuous logic-chopping. What the hell's the point? It's a job, dude, he mocks himself. It's a paycheck. He glances at his watch, and the date catches his eye for the second time today. Time to wrap this up anyway. But he can't leave things dangling like this. In a rush, he says, "I believe your real concern, the concern we all feel, is less a matter of ontological vertigo and more one of ethics. The problem with smashing somebody's skull to prove a point is that outside a lucid dream you can't be sure you're only pretending an action in a simulated arena. Listen, here's the bottom line. If people in the far future do somehow create a simulated world and move themselves into it, or they create fake people to live there, there's only one rational and ethically prudent way to go about it." He pauses. They are restless, delving in their bags. "Build a whole array of customized universes, share them out among those of like mind. Put up firewalls between them. Tailor them to whatever standards appeal to those choosing to live within them. No fuss, no strife—" No Moon.

  "That's apartheid, isn't it," the beautiful young woman says reproachfully. "We won't kill the Jews and the Gypsies and the Arabs and the blacks, let's just shove them off into some imaginary world where the sight of them no longer offends us."

  "No, no," he cries vehemently, "of course that's not what I—" But amid the rustling of paper and the slamming of books and the clatter of seats springing up as students begin to straggle out at the end of the hour, his voice is lost. He shrugs, steps back behind the lectern, looks for his briefcase and its copy of Frank Tipler's new book, The Physics of Immortality, mailed to him by Emily in Sydney. No hard feelings. For a moment, he places his face in his hands. Happy birthday, dude. When he looks up, the room is empty.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Ruth

  Sometimes Ruth Seebeck felt like a kindergarten teacher surrounded by gaudy toys. A knitted snake wriggled across the floor from her mail-drop Schwelle toward the escritoire, a large white envelope clamped in its woolly mouth. Ruth suppressed a smile, found a blunt-edged letter opener, tore the seal, drew out a crisp sheet headed in gold embossed cursive script. Great heavens, the self-indulgence of the woman! Yes, Juni was mistress of an entire world smogged to choking point in her wretched floating nano-gadgets, her offogs, so there was scant effort involved. It would be the work of a moment, of a word—of a thought, very nearly—to run up whatever fancy item of self-amusement took her caprice. Ruth rattled the heavy sheet, reading the invitation, looked away, frowned. Actually, she told herself reflectively, that wasn't quite it. The offogs in Juni's world might assemble a sort of temporary faux of this document out of their own substance, but it would not endure passage through a Schwelle to another cognate Earth. This had been compiled with molecular assemblers, or—amazing thought—Juni had sat down with a fountain pen and written it on paper by hand.

  My dearest Sister

  You are cordially invited to a T-party, to be held tomorrow afternoon in the Thyme Garden. I do hope everyone will come. Please bring an amusement to share with your fellow revelers. Dress in costume (I shall be coming as a Faerie!) or if you'd rather, as you are. All shall have prizes!

  I do hope to see you there tomorrow, along with every one of our brothers and sisters. Of course you may bring a friend!

  Your loving sister, Juni Seebeck

  Ruth placed her invitation to one side, shook her head minutely. A Faerie. How precious! A Tegmark-levels party, at this moment of impending crisis. Her family was corroding like the inner workings of an old clock left too long unwound. She sighed, rose, called a handful of her assistants, and set off down the empty corridor to her nexus collection point.

  The most recent Deformer trophy lay stretched and inanimate but carefully restrained on an autopsy table close to her array of tools. A robot like an especially mobile Calder mobile, all wire coat hangers and boxes, clattered and jangled to her. Ruth took her white lab coat, drew it over her neat afternoon-wear. A drawer slid open, disclosed surgical gloves and mask; she slipped them on, dismissed the machine. Through the eyepieces of the mask, she dispassionately examined the motionless, terrifyingly dangerous thing on the table. After a moment's study, she found a scalpel and took its face off.

  Time to learn as much as she could of what the damnable thing and those who manipulated it understood concerning recent developments in the Seebeck family. She twisted its neck cruelly, clamped the head in place. With probes positioned as delicately and exactly as acupuncture needles, she closed down potential pathways in the spine. When she had done all she could to protect herself and ensure the thing's responsiveness, she switched some of its brain back on.

  Of course, it shrieked most foully. Ruth observed with quiet satisfaction that she had not recoiled in the slightest, although muscles in her chest, bowels, and throat tightened. A touch with another probe hushed the racket.

  "Speak to me and tell the truth," she said. "Tell me: What is the number and clade formation of your principal Opponents in the Contest?"

  With plain reluctance, the Kurzweil spiritual machine told her, "Two of three, and two of two, and one each of two." It ground its fake teeth.

  "A certain ambiguity attends this response." Ruth performed an excruciation. "Which are the three, the two, the one each?"

  Answers came grudgingly, but they came. "The three are Rocks, each of Solid, and Augurs, each of Liquid."

  "Yes, Earth and Water, and?"

  "Two are Warriors of the Gaseous Realm."

  "Air," Ruth said.

  "If you will. Two are Warriors of the Energy Realm."

  "We call that realm Fire."

  "You may call it what you wish, witch, bitch."

  "Indeed I may, and do. Keep a civil tongue in your mouth. But wait, you have no mouth." She made it scream. After a time, a robot assistant crossed to the table, dabbed at the faceless face with tissues. "You have not completed your roster, I think."

  The thing gasped and groaned, as if it were alive, as if it were human, as if it possessed in truth and not merely in name some spiritual call upon her sympathy. She had seen the work these foul things did. When it quieten
ed, it added reluctantly, "One is an Augur, of the Gaseous Realm. One more is a Rock, of the Energy Realm."

  Ruth regarded it reflectively. So they knew already. "That makes twelve, not eleven."

  The dead machine said in a tone of flattened fury, "Update—One is correct."

  "Provide the identities of these opponents."

  "You know them. You're one of them."

  She made it scream again. It broke both legs against its restraints. "Provide the clade table of your principle Opponents."

  "You are Ruth Seebeck, a Rock."

  "This is correct. Continue."

  "Ember Seebeck, Warrior. Toby Seebeck, Rock. Maybelline Seebeck, Warrior. Avril Seebeck, Augur. Juni Seebeck, Rock. Decius Seebeck, Augur. Jules Seebeck, Augur. Septimus Seebeck, Rock. Marchmain Seebeck, Augur. Janine Seebeck, Warrior."

  "Still only eleven."

  It cried out in a fury.

  "Curse your jackass ears! Update—August Seebeck, Warrior."

  "Ah, so this much is known to you. And if to you, to all of your number, via contagion."

  The faceless face tried to scowl, by heavens. "This is a calumny!" She touched it once, twice. It leapt against the metal bands. "He lay in hiding in the shielded place. Now he carries the X-caliber scar. The letter and spirit of the Accord are breached."

  Ruth felt her own lips twist. This was not a convenient line of investigation. She said, with a prod, "You neglected to specify Realms. Never mind. Now we come to the interesting part of this conversation. Tell me without prevarication the equivalent names and stations of our principal Opponents." She made a calculated move with a probe.

  The machine, stretched powerless upon her table, cursed her vilely, and all her clade with her. "Begone, soulless churl." But it started to speak, and Ruth listened with the greatest interest. Finally it fell silent once more. It seemed unlikely that the thing would provide her any more insight into the range of its apprehension. She shut it down completely, took the top off its head, and went to work taming it and bending it to her purposes.