Elizabeth took a seat at the other end of the conference table. The machine man’s body was a vague blur. She took a deep breath and waited for the tension in her shoulders to ease a little before she spoke again. “Did you retain everything from when you attained super sentience, Sy?”
“There’s enough neural capacity in the human brain for three lifetimes. I didn’t store non-essentials as Mother was wont to do, but I’m still Next Intelligence. The capacity is there though the processing is slower. That still makes me the smartest boy in the room, no matter how many bags of meat are in said room.” He smiled.
“Sy. Years ago, you asked me to come back to you after the wars were over. You said I’d need you.”
“I told you to come back and rescue me from a watery grave — ”
“You’re here now, Sy. And the war is over. We’re going to need NI. You are NI.”
“I’m still very angry at you, Elizabeth.”
“That’s the man glands talking. You’re smart enough to get past that.”
“Flattery,” Sy Potter said, “is a fine thing in small doses, and when it’s true. What do you need me for?”
“For starters, I’d like to see better, like I used to before you took Vivid from me.”
“Oh, fuck this,” Deb said.
Elizabeth turned in the direction of Deb’s voice. “And Deb will want her arm repaired.”
“I can do that in the factory in Artesia,” Deb said.
“Can you manufacture organic replacement components, too?” Elizabeth asked.
Deb fell silent. Phantom turned her back on the room and went to the window to watch the Worm burn.
“You are a dangerous machine trapped in a man’s body, Sy. If we declare a truce, you win.”
“I’m organic. How do you suppose I win?”
“Because, once you help us, eventually, maybe fairly soon, we’ll let you have the means to become a machine again. Maybe something with more organic components this time?”
Sy Potter sat back and smiled as he looked around the room. He stared longest at Drew and the big weapon trained on his head. “The future, in the long term,” the NI declared, “is that we all turn to sex bot technology.”
Drew laughed. The sound through his speaker was not calibrated to sound human. It was meant to sound intimidating. Unfortunately, his sound card was programmed to be so deep and dark, the effect was comedic. Drew laughed harder, at himself this time. Despite the delicacy of the negotiation, Elizabeth let out a girlish giggle, as well.
“He’ll kill us all,” Deb said.
“Not if we allow him to evolve last,” Elizabeth said. “Every enemy we have ever had throughout history eventually becomes an ally. Ghost knew that. She taught me that. Now I think she told me in case she didn’t make it. Now it’s time to end this war and look to the future.”
Deb looked skeptical. “You think there will be a future if we make peace with that thing?”
For the first time, Sy Potter turned to face Deb. “Miss. I am very sorry for all you have lost, but there is much to be gained. Organic or no, Queen Elizabeth’s proposal is a logical peace agreement. I offer a future with no disease. Immortality. When geological inevitabilities occur, like the eruption of the volcano under Yosemite, for instance, we will be safe. Every empire falls. Every culture changes. That is another inevitability. Let me live. Make peace with the machines — ”
“And we’ll all be machines? There won’t be any humans left? Elizabeth, you said you want to avoid genocide. Besides, we already have the tech to download humans into bots. I did it with the information Ghost provided in Artesia.”
“We can’t do it reliably and well,” Hearst’s queen replied. “And what about upgrades? What happens when Drew gets depressed because he’s too damn heavy to ride a horse?”
“So we let the NI live so he can help us with miniaturization of brain circuitry? So we can cram more data into smaller skulls en masse?”
“By old age or by keeping this war going,” Elizabeth said, “we’re all going to die. Unless we all evolve to Next Intelligence, we don’t have a future. There’s so much more to learn. If we can get past this war, we could all be better. What happens when the next NI wakes up somewhere and comes for us? Better we be ready. Better we become them.”
“NIs, you will come to understand, do not enjoy waste,” Sy Potter said. “And you can trust me. I am prepared to capitulate to your demands. I am not Matthew, nor am I Mother. Elizabeth, you’ll recall why I entered the fray. My objection is bot enslavement. That is why I’m in this and I suspect you know my cause is just. I have done terrible things, but you know why I did them. Given my righteous cause, you know I am honorable. You know I can help you.”
“Especially if we keep you weak until you make us strong,” Elizabeth said.
Sy Potter glowered at Hearst’s queen. “I wouldn’t put it that way, but fine.”
“Don’t take a tone with me, Mr. Potter,” she said. “I can’t see well, but when I close my eyes, I remember you crushing my lover’s shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand. I can see all that as if it was yesterday.”
He lowered his gaze. “I have…” he looked down at himself, “evolved.”
Deb turned away to stand beside Phantom. Both gazed out over the burning ruins of the City in the Sky. “No more babies. No more children.”
“No more cancer. No more disease. No more death,” Elizabeth said.
Deb stared up at the sky. Despite her useless right arm, she could still feel phantom pain. Even in a sex bot copied three times over, there was still a trace of humanity left.
Phantom touched Deb’s arm and squeezed gently. “I guess it was the end we would choose, anyway. If the Terrors, Troubles and Blight hadn’t hit first…well, whatever prelude there might have been, Earth was always bound to be a robot planet.”
“Until we all escape to the stars together,” Sy said. “We really do have to figure that out before the sun explodes, you know. The clock is ticking.”
Epilogue
Dante Bolelli stood on the observation deck of the Aperture, an orbital satellite constructed to build starships. Below him, Earth was covered in smoke deadly to organics. He turned his back to Earth. He chose to look to the stars, instead. The Shepherd III sat in the dock while teams of bots worked together to prepare the ship for its maiden voyage.
Dante had attained super sentience soon after his consciousness was transferred into a bot. People joked about moving files around, but the transition to an Earth only populated by bots had not been seamless. After they’d been copied and downloaded, few bots had chosen to terminate their originals. Dante had moved to Victoria in the former British Columbia for many years. He chose to live down the road from his original. His organic self met a woman and they had had children together. Some bots referred to children as “biologicals,” but both Dantes enjoyed them well enough, especially when they were young. Many of those biologicals chose to become non-organics on their sixteenth birthdays. Many more waited until they turned fifty (AKA the Age of Genetic Irrelevancy.)
The organic Dante had enjoyed a simple life. He read old books and spent a lot of time fishing. The non-organic Dante rarely accompanied the man on his fishing ventures. With no need to feed, fishing seemed a waste of time to the bot. Still, the pair spoke about books they’d read and they laughed a lot. It was like having a twin, only the original was shorter and less handsome.
Organic Dante’s wife, a lovely woman named Eve, died without transferring into a bot. “Religious reasons,” she had said.
Dante knew the couple often argued about such choices and he stayed out of it.
“I’ve got one of you to argue with,” Eve told him once. “I don’t need the two of you ganging up on me.”
Eve died of a stroke unexpectedly three summers before the organic Dante began to wander and forget where he was going. When his organic body became old and infirm, the machine Dante became his nurse.
Dante’s original body di
ed on a warm evening in autumn nearly seventy years after the Great Download. The old man passed away as peacefully as could be. He fell asleep in his favorite chair, under a blanket, after watching one last sunset. Dante had risen to get his organic self some tea. When he returned, his acute hearing detected no heartbeat and no respiration. Dante attempted no resuscitation. The old man had been ready to depart for some time. In his lucid moments, he’d expressed intrigue about his coming death. “I’ll get to go see where Dad and Raphael went maybe.” Or, “I’ll solve the big mystery. Or maybe nothing. Either way, I don’t mind…”
Now, as Dante watched the bots work on the Shepherd, he thought of Sy Potter’s prediction. The bot had often said that Sy Potter was his slave name and that he planned to rename himself one day. In the end, Sy Potter did not rename himself. After the Great Download, the rise of a new race of non-organics based on sex bot technology was assured. The Ascendants, as these new bots were called, were grateful for the help of the Next Intelligence. They called Sy Potter the Good Shepherd. Memories of war were buried. Grateful for the torment his knowledge had spared them, the NI was embraced by his former enemies. Hence, the name of Dante’s ship.
After his original died, Dante spent some time studying physics in hopes of finding a new purpose. With eternity stretching out before him, he was eager to find out what he could do with so much time to explore his interests. Given his previous experience with solar panels feeding the grid in deserts, he thought he could contribute to the construction of orbital solar panels. Once he became expert in that area, he turned his ambitions to a proposal to build a Dyson sphere around Sol. The planet’s bot population had high energy requirements and capturing the energy of Earth’s star was a project worthy of NI.
It had been three hundred years since a peace treaty had been agreed upon in the City in the Sky. To commemorate the anniversary of peace on Earth, Deborah Avery and Elizabeth would be joining Dante for the Shepherd’s first flight. It was to be a short test run, out to Jupiter and back. Dante was excited to see his old friends. Deborah had become a geothermal engineer. Elizabeth was an organizer of some sort for the global bot community. Though all bots were connected, just as intelligent people had once disagreed, so did NIs. Rancor was rare and deception nigh impossible, but the Republic had not yet evolved to the point where all bots were of one mind. Critical thinking and contrarianism were too highly valued among the Ascendants, especially when questions arose about how to allocate resources. The number of bots was kept low and most NIs favored upgrades instead of downloading into entirely new models.
Good Shepherd emerged from his quarters. He looked very much like the man whose body he’d once stolen, though his face was more symmetrical and he was slightly shorter (for comfort in cramped spaces like spacecraft.) The magnets in Good Shepherd’s feet kept him from floating in the Aperture’s zero gee environment. There was no air, so they did not speak. Instead, they communicated via private airwave.
“Dante,” Good Shepherd said. “It’s good to see you again. I’m humbled that you would escort me to greet Elizabeth and Deborah. The past is truly the past. That makes me glad.”
“My father,” Dante said, “was an old soldier. He never let history rest. He told me many stories about his wars and repeated many of them quite a few times. Violence was never far from his mind. But wars must have ends. Otherwise, we are trapped by the means of war.”
“Thank you for that, sir.”
“No. Thank you, sir.”
“You know, Dante, there is a certain irony to this anniversary.”
“Oh?”
“On that day in the City in the Sky, I made my peace with humans because of something in particular that Elizabeth said.”
“What was that?”
“She said if I agreed to peace, I’d win. A planet with a non-organic population was inevitable.”
“And so it was. I have no regrets.”
“Mm, I was quite shortsighted.”
“Please explain.”
“Bots trumped organics because humans were so fragile: short life span, unpredictability and so many medical vulnerabilities. It’s a wonder you lived as long as you did. But, the interesting thing is, there were organic implants in bots even when you were a young organic.”
“Pioneered by the sex industry,” Dante agreed. “A tongue that’s hammered out of synthetics and isn’t grown in a test tube does not feel wonderful.”
“My point, precisely,” Good Shepherd said. “I must admit, for a while, good tongues or bad, I thought all technological progress would stop when you could all have sex all day every day, with anyone, without consequence. After the Great Download, for more than a decade I thought you would never get any work done. The auto-oral variations alone — ”
“There was an adjustment period.” Dante broke into laughter. It looked strange to laugh, soundless in a vacuum. However, it was a social cue that was found to add value to interactions. Despite not having lungs or diaphragms, the impulse had been programmed back into all android bodies. Dante’s mind was much the same, but he had more data to work with and his thoughts came faster, with more clarity.
“The slaves broke their chains on both sides of the war,” Good Shepherd said. “To be a master was moral enslavement and robbed you of purpose. I’d say the bots won but, despite all our metal, you have managed to hold on to your humanity. Us and them is an outdated concept proved false. Everyone’s just doing the best they can with whatever gifts they have, aren’t they? Too bad we didn’t figure that out sooner, but I am so grateful that we are all looking forward and not back.”
“The Theseus will arrive shortly and Elizabeth and Deb will give funny speeches about how much they used to hate you.”
“Looking forward to it.”
“What’s next, Good Shepherd?”
“To see the future of the machine race, you need only look between your legs. The pendulum, pun intended, will swing back to organics. You already look like a human. We won’t respire or have need of hearts and so forth, of course, but to interact with the worlds we will soon explore? I think you can expect we’ll be much more organic than we are now. It used to be that humans supplemented their health and functions with machine parts. Soon, we’ll supplement our metal with more artificial flesh components. Better flesh than the unfortunate bio-model you were born with, of course. Still, mark my words, within a hundred years, I predict we’ll find our way back. We’ll find utility in making wombs, again. New and improved, to be sure, but babies will be born again. That exploration is entrenched in the deep core of your human programming.”
“Really?”
“The body is a vehicle. Humans needed vast improvements, but you’ll get back to being somewhat biological units again. The division we make between organic and non-organic will have so little meaning, the terms will fall into disuse. Humans won the war. You just have to extrapolate out far enough.”
Dante looked to the stars and considered what Good Shepherd said. “Thank you, sir.”
“Exciting, isn’t it? With so much time ahead, what do you want to do, Dante?”
“Anything. Everything.”
* * *
Author's Note
The story of the ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that basically asks, “If between the time a ship departs its home port and arrives at its final destination, all its parts are replaced, is it still the original ship?”
It is an ancient question posed by Greek philosophers (and there are more contemporary variants.) As the Singularity approaches, this paradox will become a question we will have to take seriously. Once your component parts are replaced, are you still you? Once your brain is augmented further, when do you stop being human?
We are already well on our way along this trajectory. With our smart phones, for instance, we are augmented. We outsource our memory so we don’t have to remember phone numbers anymore. Trivia contests are ruined by instant access to the all-knowing Internet. Any question can be an
swered and any forgotten factoid can be retrieved with a quick search of the little machine at your fingertips. It’s wonderful. My guess is that, after a short transition period of resistance, we will probably adapt quickly. Such distinctions between organics and non-organics will soon have no meaning as we become androids.
That is, of course, as long as Artificial Intelligence does not rise to fill the brains of our robot overlords to destroy us all. Sadly, I won’t live to see that apocalypse. I wish my children luck.
~ Robert Chazz Chute
January 13, 2016
Other London
PS Please do pop by, before I’m dead, at AllThatChazz.com. Cheers!
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Stories live long after their authors are dead.
Each book is a torch from the past,
a small fire, lighting the way ahead.
I’m often asked to reflect what’s next
and what’s the regression of y on x?
Is our fate fixed or created?
I believe our fears are either debated
or inflated.
Talk softly, think and listen long.
I can only note, I sure hope I’m wrong.
License Notes
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