Engineering Infinity

by Charles Stross

  "They built her that way," Lars reminded her, "because they thought the planetary exploration program would be more politically sustainable if the people out there doing it could attract fans on Earth. And my god, they were right. We had a hell of a fight to bring the six of them back to Earth and put them on useful projects; even today almost half the population wants to watch new exploration shows with the humaniforms bouncing around on some useless rock out in space."

  "It makes me think she's not really human," Stephanie said. "You took away everything she was made for and everything she lived for - yet she came back here and married you. That's not a person. A real person couldn't do that."

  "A person without much choice can do all kinds of things." He fastened his clean tunic. "We married each other to establish that the six of them were persons and citizens. Otherwise the corporations would've used humaniform technology to make billions of slaves. Can you imagine beings like Nicole spending six hundred years as a nanny, a butler, or a sex toy?"

  "She says she likes to work."

  "She likes to exercise her abilities, which are those of a very capable oceanographer and marine biologist. She'll enjoy figuring out why all this crap is growing in the ocean - "

  "I wish you could just order her to fix it."

  "As a bureaucrat, I might like that, but as a person who was once married to that person, I don't want obedience, I want her best work, things I'd never have thought to ask for that solve problems I didn't know were problems."

  "But you hate surprises. And she has every reason to hate you and you don't know why she's helping instead."

  "I was a reasonably decent husband for a guy who started late without a clue. As for why humaniforms live with us, work with us, and don't seem to be too pissed off that we took them away from the environments they were made for - well, they seem to like us. They've all been married to plain old biological people. Nicole herself has had two husbands since me. She'll probably have a good solid twenty more, in the next few centuries. She likes people. And you'd have to be a jerk not to like her, once you get to know her." He hugged Stephanie. "Look, she's beautiful, she'll live a long time, and she can go places we can't. Otherwise she's about as superior to us as a really great athlete combined with a pretty smart scientist. Haven't you ever met any humaniforms before today?"

  "No, I haven't. Think about it, Lars, when would I? I got the reporting job straight out of school, and by that time you were already courting me. My parents were high level bureaucrats in West Africa, which isn't a very important province; it was just Dad's good luck that you knew him from school, but we weren't anywhere near the social level where the humaniforms circulate. And I'm not sure I'd have taken the chance to meet one if I could. To tell you the truth I'm scared of them. They creep me out."

  "All right. Well, you've got the biggest opportunity of your life right now, to report this story." His voice was strangely cold; the small and frightened person inside her could not turn to him for the usual comfort, and she felt horribly alone, looking into his matter-of-fact, judging eyes. "So you can bail on the opportunity, right now, and I'll find someone who can talk to Nicole to record this story. Or you can get over feeling 'creepy' and talk with her. Drop the job or drop the feeling, Stephanie."

  He's scared I'll drop the job. That decided her. "All right. I'll learn to deal with her." But she's so beautiful and Lars slept with her for ten years. A ten-year marriage couldn't have been just to prove a legal point, a month would have done that. Why didn't I realize that till now? "At least I'll try."

  He looked like he tasted something bad. "You're meeting a remarkable person, not undertaking an ordeal. Have you paid any attention to any accurate source about humaniforms or just to the junky, scary stuff in the media?"

  That hurt. "Lars, okay, obviously you think I'm a bigot or a phobe, so what should I know about Nicole?"

  "Mostly how much she's like you - smart but not freakishly smart, with more empathy, emotional stability and sense of duty than most people have. That fusor in her chest, her ability to adjust her sensations to stay comfortable and sensitive, that body made of materials that tolerate very wide temperature and pH ranges - that's a spec sheet, that's not her. If you prick her, she won't bleed, she'll block the pain. If you tickle her, she'll laugh because she likes to laugh. She'd be hard to poison but hydrofluoric acid would work, and she'd die."

  "See, but what bothers me is, 'And if you wrong her, shall she not revenge?' Lars, you took away the job she loved and was born to do, and -"

  "You'd feel she was more of a person if she said, 'All you fleshy bastards can just die?'"

  "Maybe." Stephanie sighed. "I still think of her as a fast computer running smart software inside a tough, pretty mannequin. I wish she'd never -"

  Nicole knocked on their door. "No need to come up on the deck but there's something you urgently need to see."

  They wore their parkas hood down and without hats through Clarke's unheated corridors, but slipped out of them in the bathygraphy room. "It's easiest to see on the combined display, over here," Nicole said, "but the truth is it's so plain that a World War II destroyer's sonar could have picked it up. All the meson scanning, x-ray boundary analysers, and phase-shifted sonar just add more vivid detail. Now just look." Stephanie leaned forward to peer into the holographic barrel.

  Beside her, Lars said, "What the hell are those? And how big are they?"

  Stephanie found the scales and legends. In an almost perfectly circular area about four hundred kilometres across, a bull's-eye in the much bigger circle of mat, arranged in equilateral triangles about a kilometre and a half on a side, towers two kilometres high and a hundred meters across reared up from the ocean floor. "Hunh," Stephanie said, "how big is a redwood?"

  "Good comparison," Nicole said. "Because up at the top these things, that green mist in the holo represents crowns - or one big canopy, I guess - of filaments, some as thick as your thigh, some thinner than your hair," Nicole said. "At a guess, they're the roots for upside-down trees."

  "Upside-down trees?"

  "Well, not trees per se, but that canopy looks like a feeding structure attached to those trunks, if that's what you want to call them, and since it's all more than a kilometre below the surface, it's not leaves. So a trunk with roots on top is an upside down tree, at least till we have a better name. Anyway, I'm going to swim down and have a look."

  Lars looked like he'd been kicked in the stomach. "You most certainly are not - "

  "I'm not under your direction," Nicole pointed out. "And I want to know what's going on down there, and I'm more capable than any robot. I'll just throw my deepwater bag together, and dive."

  Lars looked up at the ceiling, thinking. "The publicity situation is already a mess. If we wait for a robot, that will look bad, but if we lose one of the best-loved humaniforms, it will look worse. We have no idea what's going on down there, and if we let you go -"

  "You won't be letting me anything," Nicole said. "I'm a citizen, my contract is with the Oceanographic Institute and they have a separate one with the company that operates Clarke. Nothing stops me from just going over the side. Do you want to have been consulted or not?"

  "I do," Stephanie said. "Time for an interview before you dive in?"

  "Sure," Nicole said. "Well, Lars, do you want your wife to write that you were dithering?"

  Lars shrugged. "It's something to do while everything spins out of control." He stared down into the holo image of the huge structures on the bottom of the ocean, squeezing his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger. "A surprise with big stakes and a good chance of guessing wrong. I hate those."

  Nicole looked away. "Stephanie, I know it's miserable for you up top, and once I'm up there I'm just going to dive over the side, so if you don't mind sitting in a corner of my cabin while I pack -"

  "If I can stick my autorec to the wall -"

  "Sure. Then just run up with me to shoot vid of me going over the side. You'll only have to be
out in the freezing weather for a few seconds."

  Nicole's cabin completely overthrew Stephanie's expectation of Spartan pragmatism. Space she saved by having no clothes and needing no bed enabled a wild chaos of piles of books, tools, instruments, and papers. Every wall was covered by paste-on screens, displaying a rotating profusion of scenery from all over the solar system, pictures of ex-husbands and families, major awards, and the other five humaniforms. The physical chaos of the floor was exceeded only by the informational chaos of the walls. Stephanie had to smile.

  Nicole said, "What?"

  "Oh, just noticing that this is a place where somebody works with a passion," Stephanie said. That I didn't expect from a robot.

  Nicole nodded. "I wish I'd been designed to sleep; night watches in here are lonely. I think that spot by the bathroom door will work for your autorec. Fire away."

  Tip her off guard. "Do the oceans ever bore you?"

  "I've been down in every ocean the solar system's still got," Nicole said, "and walked the dry bottoms of the ones that're gone, and a thousand years would not suffice to see just the cool parts of one."

  Great answer, they'll quote that everywhere. Now the bread and butter. "For the record, what's going into that bag and what are you going to do?"

  "Sampling tools, suction gadgets to capture fluids, blades and drills for solids, containers for everything. Acoustic, gamma, meson, and positron scanners. I'm going to strap lights on my forehead and forearms, fill my lungs with diving fluid, turn my temperature up, and dive down through the canopy. Then I'll cut pieces off these upside-down trees, drill holes, bring back stuff to analyse, and look around in general."

  "Any idea what you're going to look for?"

  "I'd like to know where all the sea life that was here went," Nicole said. "Because of the iron fertilization, there were immense populations of everything from microbes up to whales around here, and there haven't been any migrations or any population increases in the adjacent uncontaminated areas. Maybe two million marine mammals and six billion fish and sharks are gone, and god knows how many invertebrates, along with four hundred billion tons of plant life. I'm pretty sure they're dead, but where are all the bodies?"

  "No idea?"

  "Biomass is energy and whatever that is down there required a lot of energy to make. Beyond that, I try to keep an open mind and just tell the world to surprise me."

  Another great answer. Now something for the personal interest. "Here's what people are going to ask me - what's she really like?"

  Nicole slipped the last tool into the bag and started strapping a utility light and tool holster to her left arm. "Hunh. I really like surprises, the deep wild turn over the world kind. I do know what you mean, but honestly, how would I know what I'm like? That happens out there with everyone else, and in here, there isn't anyone to compare to." Nicole hesitated, looked at her directly, and said, "You're not very comfortable talking to a humaniform, are you?" She pulled the lighted helmet onto her head and fastened the chin strap.

  "Have my questions been too blunt?"

  "Well, many times, people talk to me bluntly for the same reason they talk to any machine bluntly, because it's not a person," she said. "People swear at a screwdriver because they don't care what the screwdriver thinks of them."

  Whoa, that one made me squirm. Turn it around. "And you do care what I think of you."

  Nicole nodded, as if reaching inside herself for the answer. "I do; I usually care what people think of me."

  "That's a pretty good argument that you're a person. Welcome to the club."

  Nicole surprised her by laughing. "Wow, I'm oversensitive today, and not in a way I can adjust." She stepped carefully over a couple of construction-block-sized instruments and surprised Stephanie with a warm, tight hug.

  I'd've thought she'd feel like a heated couch, but this is nice. She stroked the bare skin of Nicole's shoulder: like nubbly fabric, softer than raw silk but not as slick as satin. Stephanie felt at once that Nicole's skin was as sensitive, as responsive, as easy to feel as her own. When Nicole kissed her cheek, the lips felt warm, and slightly rough. "We'll be friends. You'll see. Right now I have to run."

  "Of course. Don't let me use up your daylight."

  Nicole smiled, shaking her head. "Now, as a reporter -"

  "Duh, of course, it's always dark down there."

  Out on the deck, Stephanie recorded Nicole putting the tube into her mouth and inhaling diving fluid; it looked like watery brown pudding. Then Nicole calmly stuck the needle into her abdominal cavity, then her sinuses, filling all with the same goo. She had body cavities to give her a normal speaking voice, to process repair materials in the field, and be normally proportioned without having to haul excess weight; for ocean-bottom work, being fluid-filled prevented her from collapsing.

  Filled with fluid, Nicole couldn't speak, so she waved with a merry smile, and flipped over the side in a dive. The big splash flung up green and black gunk, which slid down Clarke's side. Alone and cold, Stephanie went back below.

  "How'd it go?" Lars asked, after they had both been quietly working in their cabin for more than an hour.

  "I think it's going to be easier than I imagined," Stephanie said. "You're right, she's hard not to like." The memory of Nicole's warm, different texture, and the strength of those arms holding her, was distracting, but very pleasant.

  They had eaten dinner, and darkness had long since fallen, when texts popped up on their screens. Nicole had returned, and they would meet her in the conference room with the other scientists in twenty minutes. "I bet she doesn't want anyone recording how she removes diving fluid," Stephanie said.

  "Nicole always said she felt about it like human women feel about changing a tampon - no big deal but too messy for public. She can collapse each cavity completely in one stroke, so in three quick motions, she clears her lungs through her mouth, her sinuses through her nose, and her abdominal -"

  "Gosh, I'm looking forward to her presentation."

  At the meeting, Nicole looked like the kid who just had a perfect Christmas. "All right, I'm scared and worried, and I'll explain why in a second, but what I just found is so awesome - like in the really old sense, the way Nix Olympica is awesome - that I hope you'll forgive me for babbling. First of all, those vertical structures are mostly made out of calcium hydroxylapatite, with a highly complex internal structure."

  Someone said, "Bone."

  "Exactly. The towers are gigantic bones. The root-canopy above is a huge digestive organ, which did its damnedest to digest me. Luckily nothing it excreted was a me-solvent. So we have tree trunks, which are bones; and roots, which are stomachs, intestines, and livers, floating in a cloud above them. Two kilometres high and growing on an exceptionally cold and deep abyssal plain, across an area the size of Pennsylvania, and I think it might all be one big organism; definitely a lot of the tubes in the canopy hook to more than one trunk. Everyone will now please experience some real awe and surprise, okay?"

  Lars's expression was flat, drawn, almost angry. "You said you are worried and scared."

  "Two kilometre high bones with a curtain of guts floating above them sounds like plenty to worry about to me," Stephanie said.

  Lars turned his Shut up, you're just a reporter glare on her - actually it wasn't easy to tell it from shut up, you're just my wife, Stephanie thought spitefully.

  Nicole winked at her, startling her into silence more effectively than Lars's glare. "Well," Nicole said, "When I drilled cores, I found the outer walls are riddled with little tubes and pockets, and what's in them is chopped Earth life. Seafood salad, you might call it, bugs and fish and seaweed and whales, all pretty much blenderized and packed in. That's where some of the marine life went - ground up and stuffed into those pockets in the bone. Incidentally, Stephanie, at a guess, the three vanished people from that capsized yacht very likely ended up in there, too, so you may want to watch how you break this news until someone talks to their families. Anyway, there's roughl
y a twenty meter thick wall, according to the positron activation scan, that's all that pocketed bone. Inside that, which I couldn't drill to, and the positrons couldn't penetrate to, the acoustic probes showed drastic changes of density, and NMR plus meson tomography eventually teased out what's in the middle layer and the core.

  "The middle layer is larger and smaller alternating chambers, all about seventy meters from the outer wall to the inner wall, laced with reinforcing struts of more bone. The larger chambers, which extend about 80 meters in the direction of the trunk, contain very high purity hydrogen peroxide, which is so unstable around biological material that there must be a special coating or something on the inner surfaces of those chambers to keep it from dissociating violently. Between hydrogen peroxide chambers, there are smaller forty-five-meter-long chambers filled with a mix of twenty percent toluene, seventy percent octane, and ten percent heptane - whoever said gasoline, that's it. And the core is a two meter thick bone wall surrounding an empty -"

  The intercom hooted the signal for an emergency announcement. "This is the captain. Bathygraphy room wants you all to know that the imaging is showing all those big structures are now floating upwards, pushing right up through that canopy. They all let loose at once, and they're rising at about a meter and a half per second, so they'll be breaking the surface here in about twenty minutes. We can't run two hundred kilometres in the thirty minutes before they surface - all we can do is try to dodge the big towers as they float up and keep our intakes clear of all that canopy gunk. I know you'll want to observe whatever's happening; please be careful in moving around the ship and remember that we could have a sudden collision with one of those huge things. They seem to be staying upright as they rise, and if that continues there should be space between them."

  "They'll be at the surface in twenty minutes?" Nicole said. "Come on, people, grab your parkas and come up and see this!"

  Most of the scientists stood, but Lars gestured for them to sit. "We have work to do, don't we? Alerting the rest of the planet, making sure they know what's going on so that if we don't make it they have our information? And perhaps deciding what we should do? Shouldn't we -"