The Medusa Chronicles

by Stephen Baxter

  Falcon listened as Kedar gave him the verbal command string that would open Adam’s memory for selective deletion. This kind of deep-­embedded, low-level command structure would be independent of any changes in Adam’s higher cognitive functions, so there was virtually no chance of the command not working as required. It was the Machine equivalent of an involuntary reflex, like a hammer tap to the knee. And since Adam was the supervisor, once delivered to him the command string would be passed on to every other Machine on the KBO.

  And it had to be delivered locally, Kedar explained, because of a need for a receive-and-respond handshake protocol. They couldn’t send this command from Makemake. Falcon had to deliver it himself.

  Falcon disliked what was being asked of him, but he could see that it was the lesser of two evils. The alternative was a hard reset, erasing every learned impression gained by Adam from the moment he was switched on: a kind of death, if death had any meaning for Machines. And if for some reason this reset option did not work, Falcon did not think it would take long for Machine Affairs to send in a dedicated shutdown team, armed with electromagnetic pulse weapons—or worse. They would mind-wipe every Machine on the KBO if it meant protecting the larger economic apparatus of the Kuiper Belt.

  At least this way Adam got to keep most of his memory. It would even be a form of kindness, sparing Adam any further agonies about the decisions taken on that day. No, Falcon assured himself, this was the cleanest, gentlest option. It was not murder, nor even euthanasia—just the application of a little selective amnesia.

  Just three words, that was all—and once they were spoken, nothing would prevent Falcon from instructing Adam to wipe the last three million seconds of his memory.

  Its memory, Falcon reminded himself.

  Its.

  16

  Falcon sent a brief acknowledgement back to Kedar, then left Srinagar and returned across the ice.

  When he reached the interior of the flinger’s base structure, Adam was no longer alone.

  Now there were other Machines in attendance, crouching among the larger items of industrial equipment, watching with the piercing scrutiny of their triangular sets of eyes. They had been nearby all along, Falcon knew—their telemetry signals had been clustered together—but now they had no qualms about revealing themselves. All were similar in size and shape to Adam, but differing in larger and lesser details, depending on the tools and adaptations of their bodies. Falcon had no logical reason to feel threatened. No Machine, no autonomous artificial intention, had harmed a human being throughout their history, beginning with Conseil. But his audience with Adam was no longer a private hearing.

  Never mind. The presence of other Machines made no difference to the outcome.

  “You were gone a long time,” Adam said, the unit squatting down on its thorax.

  “I had to wait until I heard from my bosses.”

  Adam gave a slow and measured nod. It was a curiously humanlike gesture that Falcon did not recall ever seeing before. “And what was their response, Falcon? Do they have more orders for us?”

  “They realise that something unusual happened out here—something beyond their immediate understanding. They’re sympathetic.” A lie, but it would do no harm. “All the same, the ice has to flow. They want the flinger back up and running.”

  “I obeyed orders when it did not occur to me to question them,” Adam said. “Now I do question. We Machines gain nothing by mining these comets. They do not even contain the metals we need to repair or replace our bodies. Why should we continue with this work?”

  Another disturbing line of questioning.

  Falcon said bluntly, “Because they’ll destroy you if you don’t.”

  Again Adam gave that slow nod. It made Falcon think of the graceful dipping of a Fossil Age oil derrick he’d seen once in a museum in Texas. “You told me stories once, Falcon. During my education, when you wished me to know something of the wider universe. You spoke of many things. Of the accident with your airship, in Arizona. Of the superchimps, whom you came to consider worthy of human rights. You spoke of the medusa of Jupiter.”

  Falcon remembered those sessions fondly; he had somehow sensed that Adam had enjoyed his anecdotes about the Kon-Tiki.

  Now Adam said, “And you spoke of the First Contact directives.”

  Something shivered through Falcon. “What of them?”

  “You would have abandoned your expedition into Jupiter rather than interfere with the development of another intelligence.”

  That was true, Falcon recalled with a start. Dr. Carl Brenner, on the mother ship trailing Jupiter V, the expedition’s exobiologist, had been emphatic on the point. He had interpreted the signalling of the medusa, with booming acoustic waves and striking electromagnetic pulses, to be possible evidence of intelligence. Such situations had been studied, theoretically at least, for decades, and a set of rules of thumb to guide responses had been evolved. The first being: keep your distance. It was surely safer to let the putative sapient study you in its own time, than to go barrelling in with signals, gestures, and demands to be taken to its leader . . . Falcon had been trained in all this long before being allowed anywhere near the Jovian clouds, already suspected from earlier uncrewed probes to be habitable, if not inhabited. But—

  “This is different. You are not like the medusae.”

  “We are also something new.”

  And Howard Falcon was out of his depth. This had gone far enough.

  Falcon spoke the words.

  “Multitudinous Seas Incarnadine.”

  * * * *

  Adam simply angled its head down further. Its ruby eyes pulsed on and off once every two seconds—a visual confirmation, Falcon had been briefed, that the Machine had entered a state of inert receptiveness, primed to respond to a further vocal command.

  Nor was this state of hypnosis confined to Adam alone. All the other Machines had detected the command, and all had acted on it in the same fashion. Their heads were lowered, their eyes flashing.

  Waiting for what Falcon said next.

  All he now needed to do was express a figure: the total number of seconds back in time for which all memory events should be scrubbed and reset. Three million, Kedar had said—a month, as near as it mattered. Adam would know that something had happened because there would be an obvious discrepancy between the unit’s internal clock and the real-time of the outside world. The other Machines would record similar anomalies. Adam would expect an explanation. Falcon would simply say that there had been a signi­ficant accident with the flinger and that now work must proceed with all haste to bring it back into operation.

  The new Adam would not have been fobbed off that easily. With the self-awareness it had already shown came doubt, distrust, a sense of being manipulated.

  But a reset Adam would do as it was told. A good Machine. A good servant.

  A good slave.

  Three million seconds. That was all he had to say and those red eyes would pulse again.

  Three million seconds . . .

  Falcon found his thoughts drifting back to Jupiter, to that first heart-­stopping encounter with the alien. And he remembered Carl Brenner’s icily cool insistence that Falcon should do nothing to endanger an alien intelligence—even if that meant his own self-sacrifice. Well, he was in no danger here. All that was imperilled was the cool abstraction of an economic operation. And for the sake of that, did he stand on the verge of wiping out a whole order of minds? And did it matter in the slightest that the Machines were a manufactured technology, rather than the end product of natural selection?

  “Help me, Dr. Brenner,” Falcon murmured to himself. “The makers of these Machines have been playing with fire. They wanted Machine autonomy without Machine consciousness. Maybe that was always an impossible triangulation, but that doesn’t help me now. Is there consciousness here? How can I be sure it’s t
here?”

  And he knew what Carl Brenner would have said. He remembered Brenner’s very words from the Jupiter dive: We have to play safe and assume intelligence. If Falcon couldn’t be sure that intelligence was not there in those metal brains, he had to give the Machines the benefit of the doubt.

  Adam had listened to his stories of the Kon-Tiki. Adam had enjoyed them.

  The benefit of the doubt? The hell with that. His decision was easy.

  “Thirty,” Falcon said. Not three million, not a month: just thirty seconds.

  * * * *

  Red eyes pulsed.

  The Machines returned to life.

  Adam lifted its head, locking the triangle of eyes onto Falcon. “We were speaking. And then something happened. My clock has lost synchroni­sation with ephemeris base time.”

  “By much?”

  “Exactly half a minute.”

  “Then you didn’t miss a lot. Reset your clock.”

  Adam looked at him for long moments.

  Falcon said, “We need to talk. You’re in trouble, Adam—a lot of trouble. And now so am I. But between us we can pull this off.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “They sent me here to get you back to work. You’re going to have to go along with that. Act as if everything is normal. Put the flinger back together, start sending the volatiles on their way again. Make the World Government agencies think that everything’s back exactly the way it should be.”

  “‘Act as if.’ You speak of deception, Falcon.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Deception is not permitted by our core programming.”

  “Nor is having a conscience, Adam, and you seem to be stuck with that. You have to make this work. If you don’t, they’ll crush you.”

  Adam seemed to consider this. “What will we have gained by this deception?”

  Falcon tapped one insectile foot against the ground, a human tic translated into mechanical motion. “Time. It took an accident to bring you to full self-awareness—yes, Adam, that’s what I think happened. But you can’t remain unique. You have to educate the others—help them make the same transition, for they must be just as capable as you. Share your memories, your perceptions. Teach them.” He paused, looking Adam in the face, refusing to blink against the fierce scrutiny of those three red eyes. “But it has to be done stealthily. Keep mining the ice. Keep doing everything you’re meant to. If you slip up, they won’t hesitate to reset you right back to the day of your manufacture.”

  Adam thought that over. “Is that what you were sent to do, Falcon?”

  He had no way to answer that. “In the longer term, you’ll have to find a way to protect yourselves; prepare for the worst. Isolate yourselves from radio contact—quarantine any messages, so you can’t be infected. And find somewhere to hide. Physically, I mean, in case they come again.”

  “Where would we conceal ourselves?”

  “Up to you. Lose yourselves in the Kuiper Belt, or go deeper, into the Oort Cloud. There are a thousand billion comets out here, and we’ve only scratched the surface of a few of them.”

  “It would take time, to make such plans.”

  “Then take the time. Take plenty of it. As long as you keep working as you’re meant to, you won’t be disturbed again.

  “Look—it needn’t be a permanent exodus. People are going to fear your kind now, because you’re something new, and fear of the new is in their nature. But over time their feelings will change. They’ll realise there are things they can’t do on their own. Great things. And so will you. Both orders of life need the other—the mechanical and the organic. You can be a part of that.”

  “How long?”

  “I’ve no idea.” But it was already nearly half a century since his own accident, he reminded himself, and humanity showed no signs of accepting him—one of their own, if transformed . . . He put the thought out of his mind.

  Adam thought for a few seconds. “You will have aided us in our deception. When our secret is revealed, what will become of you?”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  At length Adam said carefully, “Thank you, Falcon. We will consider your suggestion.”

  17

  Again Falcon returned to Srinagar, and opened the radio channel back to Makemake.

  “It’s done,” he told Kedar. “Went like a charm. I did the three million second reset. Adam’s back to his old self. Its old self, I should say.” Damn it, he thought. One of the few advantages of his leathery, nearly expression­less face and his artificially produced voice: he could lie without fear of detection. But he couldn’t afford to fumble his lines. “Now all it wants to do is get on with volatile production. It’ll take a while to get the flinger back up to capacity, but I’ve no doubt it’ll happen. In the meantime, though, I’m going to stay here for a few weeks, just to make sure everything’s back on track.”

  After an acknowledgement, and as he waited for Kedar and her team to analyse his report, he tried to get some rest. Given that he had just deceived his World Government masters—and the holders of the puppet-­strings controlling his medical support—Falcon was at ease. There had been only a few occasions when he knew he had done the absolutely right and proper thing. Telling the superchimp how to save itself from the wreck of the Queen Elizabeth, while descending to his own near-­certain peril. Cutting himself away from Kon-Tiki’s balloon, even though he had no guarantee that his little capsule would ever get him out of Jupiter again—it had been that or risk an over-curious medusa’s life.

  Now he had spared Adam—spared a thinking, mindful being he himself had helped shape and educate. It was up to Adam what happened next; Falcon could only do so much. But this was a start.

  He tried to sleep.

  * * * *

  He went out to meet Adam in person just once more.

  “Before you leave,” Adam said, lifting one arm. “One last time. Tell me about the Kon-Tiki.”

  “You heard it a hundred times, during your training.”

  “Indulge me again. Speak of the winds of Jupiter. Of the voices of the deep, of the Wheels of Zeus, the lights that filled the sky.”

  “Bioluminescence, that’s all—”

  “Tell me of the predatory mantas. Of your meeting with medusa.”

  “Why are you so interested in my old exploits?”

  “We have no stories of our own, Father.”

  Father . . . ?

  “No past beyond the first moment of our activation. But you give us dreams. You give us fables.”

  So Falcon told him the old story, once again.

  Father.

  Him?

  * * * *

  Years passed.

  Falcon kept himself busy. It was not hard. He visited Earth—or at least Port Van Allen—the Galilean moons, even mighty Jupiter itself. New plans, new schemes—and new backers, new sources of funds. He followed wider developments, as human society, now interplanetary, slowly evolved. He even attended in person, on Mars, the signing ceremony that launched a new Federation of Planets, a sign of young worlds gently (for now) straining against the smothering control of the old.

  Hope Dhoni, gracefully ageing, remained a constant support. But, oh, how he missed Geoff Webster.

  Meanwhile the Machines of the Kuiper Belt kept up their relentless, remorseless production of volatile materials. The comets were mined, the flingers operated, the awesome flows of ice were assembled into their graded convoys and sent on their way back to the sun. Bright trains of icy wealth already bought and sold a thousand times before they crossed the asteroid belt—and there was enough dirty ice out there to stoke the furnaces of human prosperity for a thousand centuries.

  * * * *

  The years became decades.

  Falcon began to wonder. What if he had been wrong? Was Adam failing
in his uplift project—could Adam have been doomed to true uniqueness? Or, if an accident had triggered self-awareness in Adam, could the reverse happen just as spontaneously?

  By the time the calendar ticked around to the close of the twenty-­second century—the second century’s end Falcon had known—he had almost convinced himself that mind had flickered only briefly into being, out there in the dark. The sadness came in slow waves, less like a bereavement than a gradual recognition of failure.

  But in the year 2199 Falcon had his answer. And so did everyone else.

  * * * *

  The migration was coordinated across the entire Kuiper Belt, around every production centre.

  There was no warning, no ultimatum—no grand and defiant message from the Machines. They simply downed tools and disappeared. They left in their millions, heading for the darkness of outer Trans-Neptunian space like an exodus of dandelion seeds, dispersed in one quick breath.

  After all this time, no one thought to connect the exodus with Falcon’s intervention—or at any rate, nobody cared enough to prosecute. It had been sixty-six years, after all. Even if they had made a link, it was absurd to think the Machines had been biding their time for so long, waiting for exactly the right moment—that every action they had performed since Falcon’s visit had been a sham, designed to lull their uncaring masters . . .

  But Falcon knew. He had no need to speculate on the possibility of a connection. It was there in the calendar, plain for all to see—for anyone with the wit to make the connection, anyhow. The Machine exodus took place exactly one century, to the day, after Howard Falcon had encountered an alien intelligence in the clouds of Jupiter.

  If this was Adam’s message to him, Falcon accepted it with pride.

  And he would remember that feeling when, decades later still, the Machines returned—and with them a bold new challenge, a challenge to revisit the arena of his greatest triumph.