Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  I didn’t need telling twice. We moved away towards the GUT engine, taking the light with us. The hole in the ground, still just visible in the glow of our suit lamps, looked a little like one of the ethane lakes on the surface, with that metallic monolith beside it. But every so often I could make out that elusive golden-brown glimmer. I said, “It looks like a facet of one of your wormhole Interfaces, Poole.”

  “Not a bad observation,” Poole said. “And I have a feeling that’s exactly what we’re looking at. Harry?”

  “Yeah.” Harry was hesitating. “I wish you had a better sensor suite down there. I’m relying on instruments woven into your suits, internal diagnostic tools in the GUT engine, some stray neutrino leakage up here . .. Yes, I think we’re seeing products of stressed spacetime. There are some interesting optical effects too-light lensed by a distorted gravity field.”

  “So it’s a wormhole interface?” Miriam asked.

  “If it is,” Poole said, “it’s far beyond the clumsy monstrosities we construct in Jovian orbit. And whatever is on the other side of that barrier, my guess is it’s not on Titan .. .”

  “Watch out,” Miriam said.

  A spider came scuttling past us towards the hole. It paused at the lip, as if puzzled that the hole was open. Then it tipped forward, just as the spider we rode into the volcano had dipped into the caldera, and slid head first through that sheet of darkness. It was as if it had fallen into a pool of oil that closed over the spider without a ripple.

  “I wouldn’t recommend following,” Harry said. “The radiations in there are deadly, suit or no suit; you couldn’t survive the passage.”

  “Lethe,” Michael Poole said. He was actually disappointed.

  “So are we done here?” I asked.

  Poole snapped, “I’ll tell you something, Emry, I’m glad you’re here. Every time we come to an obstacle and you just want to give up, it just goads me into trying to find a way forward.”

  “There is no way forward,” I said. “It’s lethal. Harry said so.”

  “We can’t go on,” Miriam agreed. “But how about a probe? Something radiation-hardened, a controlling AI—with luck we could just drop it in there and let it report back.”

  “That would work,” Poole said. Without hesitation the two of them walked over to the GUT engine, and began prying at it.

  For redundancy the engine had two control units. Miriam and Poole detached one of these. Containing a sensor suite, processing capabilities, a memory store, it was a white-walled box the size of a suitcase. Within this unit and its twin sibling were stored the identity backups that had been taken of us before our ride into Titan’s atmosphere. The little box was even capable of projecting Virtuals; Harry’s sharp image was being projected right now by the GUT engine hardware, rather than through a pooling of our suits’ systems as before.

  The box was small enough just to be dropped through the interface, and hardened against radiation. It would survive a passage through the wormhole—though none of us could say if it would survive what lay on the other side. And it had transmitting and receiving capabilities. Harry believed its signals would make it back through the interface, though probably scrambled by gravitational distortion and other effects, but he was confident he could construct decoding algorithms from a few test signals. The unit was perfectly equipped to serve as a probe through the hatch, save for one thing. What the control box didn’t have was intelligence.

  Michael Poole stroked its surface with a gloved hand. “We’re sending it into an entirely unknown situation. It’s going to have to work autonomously, to figure out its environment, work out some kind of sensor sweep, before it can even figure out how to talk to us and ask us for direction. Running a GUT engine is a pretty simple and predictable job; the AI in there isn’t capable of handling an exploration like these.”

  “But,” I said, “it carries in its store backups of four human intellects-mine, dead Bill, and you two geniuses. What a shame we can’t all ride along with it!”

  My sarcasm failed to evoke the expected reaction. Poole and Miriam looked at each other, electrified. Miriam shook her head. “Jovik, you’re like some idiot savant. You keep on coming up with such ideas. I think you’re actually far smarter than you allow yourself to be.”

  I said honestly, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “The idea you’ve suggested to them,” Harry said gently, “is to revive one of the dormant identity-backup copies in the unit’s store, and use that as the controlling intelligence.”

  As always when they hit on some new idea Poole and Miriam were like two eager kids. Poole said, “It’s going to be a shock to wake up, to move straight from Titan entry to this point. It would be least disconcerting if we projected a full human animus.”

  “You’re telling me,” said the head of Harry Poole.

  “And some enclosing environment,” Miriam said. “Just a suit? No, to be adrift in space brings in problems with vertigo. I’d have trouble with that.”

  “The lifedome of the Crab,” Poole said. “That would be straightforward enough to simulate to an adequate degree. And a good platform for observation. The power would be sufficient to sustain that for a few hours at least...”

  “Yes.” Miriam grinned. “Our observer will feel safe. I’ll get to work on it...”

  I asked, “So you’re planning to project a Virtual copy of one of us through the wormhole. And how will you get him or her back?”

  They looked at me. “That won’t be possible,” Poole said. “The unit will be lost. It’s possible we could transmit back a copy of the memories the Virtual accrues on the other side-integrate them somehow with the backup in the GUT engine’s other store—”

  “No,” Harry said regretfully. “The data rate through that interface would never allow even that. For the copy in there it’s a one way trip.”

  “Well, that’s entirely against the sentience laws,” I put in. They ignored me.

  Poole said, “That’s settled, then. The question is, who? Which of the four of us are you going to wake up from cyber-sleep and send into the unknown?”

  I noticed that Harry’s disembodied floating head looked away, as if he were avoiding the question.

  Poole and Miriam looked at each other. Miriam said, “Either of us would go. Right?”

  “Of course.”

  “But we should give it to Bill,” Miriam said firmly.

  “Yeah. There’s no other choice. Bill’s gone, and we can’t bring his stored backup home with us ... We should let his backup have the privilege of doing this. It will make the sacrifice worthwhile.”

  I stared at them. “This is the way you treat your friend? By killing him, then reviving a backup and sending it to another certain death?”

  Poole glared at me. “Bill won’t see it that way, believe me. You and a man like Bill Dzik have nothing in common, Emry. Don’t judge him by your standards.”

  “Fine. Just don’t send me.”

  “Oh, I won’t. You don’t deserve it.”

  It took them only a few more minutes to prepare for the experiment. The control pack didn’t need any physical modifications, and it didn’t take Miriam long to program instructions into its limited onboard intelligence. She provided it with a short orientation message, in the hope that Virtual Bill wouldn’t be left entirely bewildered at the sudden transition he would experience.

  Poole picked up the pack with his gloved hands, and walked towards the interface, or as close as Harry advised him to get. Then Poole hefted the pack over his head. “Good luck, Bill.” He threw the pack towards the interface, or rather pushed it; its weight was low but its inertia was just as it would have been on Earth, and besides Poole had to fight against the resistance of the syrupy sea. For a while it looked as if the pack might fall short. “I should have practiced a couple of times,” Poole said ruefully. “Never was any use at physical sports.”

  But he got it about right. The pack clipped the rim of the hole, then tumble
d forward and fell slowly, dreamlike, through that black surface. As it disappeared autumn gold glimmered around it.

  Then we had to wait, the three of us plus Harry. I began to wish that we had agreed some time limit; obsessives like Poole and Miriam were capable of standing there for hours before admitting failure.

  In the event it was only minutes before a scratchy voice sounded in our suit helmets. “Harry? Can you hear me?”

  “Yes!” Harry called, grinning. “Yes, I hear you. The reception ought to get better, the clean-up algorithms are still working. Are you all right?”

  “Well, I’m sitting in the Crab lifedome. It’s kind of a shock to find myself here, after bracing my butt to enter Titan. Your little orientation show helped, Miriam.”

  Poole asked, “What do you see?”

  “The sky is ... strange.”

  Miriam was looking puzzled. She turned and looked at Harry. “That’s not all that’s strange. That’s not Bill!”

  “Indeed not,” came the voice from the other side of the hole. “I am Michael Poole.”

  XIV

  Virtual

  So, while a suddenly revived Michael Poole floated around in other-space, the original Poole and his not-lover Miriam Berg engaged in a furious row with Harry.

  Poole stormed over to the GUT engine’s remaining control pack, and checked the memory’s contents. It didn’t contain backup copies of the four of us; it contained only one ultra-high-fidelity copy of Michael Poole himself. I could not decide which scared me more: the idea that no copies of myself existed in that glistening white box, or the belief I had entertained previously that there had. I am prone to existential doubt, and am uncomfortable with such notions.

  But such subtleties were beyond Michael Poole in his anger. “Miriam, I swear I knew nothing about this.”

  “Oh, I believe you.”

  They both turned on the older Poole. “Harry?” Michael snapped. “What in Lethe is this?”

  Disembodied-head Harry looked shifty, but he was going to brazen it out. “As far as I’m concerned there’s nothing to apologize for. The storage available on the Crab was always limited, and it was worse in the gondola. Michael’s my son. Of course I’m going to protect him above others. What would you do? I’m sorry, Miriam, but—”

  “You aren’t sorry at all,” Miriam snapped. “And you’re a cold-hearted bastard. You knowingly sent a backup of your son, who you say you’re trying to protect, through that worm-hole to die!”

  Harry looked uncomfortable. “It’s just a copy. There are other backups, earlier copies—”

  “Lethe, Dad,” Michael Poole said, and he walked away, bunching his fists. I wondered how many similar collisions with his father the man had had to suffer in the course of his life.

  “What’s done is done,” came a whisper. And they all quit their bickering, because it was Michael Poole who had spoken-the backup Poole, the one recently revived, the one beyond the spacetime barrier. “I know I don’t have much time. I’ll try to project some imagery back...”

  Harry, probably gratefully, popped out of existence, thus vacating the available processing capacity, though I was sure his original would be monitoring us from the Crab.

  Poole murmured to Miriam, “You speak to him. Might be easier for him than me.”

  She clearly found this idea distressing. But she said, “All right.”

  Gradually images built up in the air before us, limited views, grainy with pixels, flickering.

  And we saw Virtual Poole’s strange sky.

  The Virtual Crab floated over a small object-like an ice moon, like one of Titan’s Saturnian siblings, pale and peppered with worn impact craters. I saw how its surface was punctured with holes, perfectly round and black. These looked like our hatch; the probe we had despatched must have emerged from one of them. Things that looked like our spiders toiled to and fro between the holes, travelling between mounds of some kind of supplies. They were too distant to see clearly. All this was bathed in a pale yellow light, diffuse and without shadows.

  The original Poole said, “You think those other interfaces connect up to the rest of Titan?”

  “I’d think so,” Miriam said. “This can’t be the only deep-sea methane-generation chamber. Passing through the worm-holes and back again would be a way for the spiders to unify their operations across the moon.”

  “So the interface we found, set in the outer curved surface of Titan’s core, is one of a set that matches another set on the outer curved surface of that ice moon. The curvature would seem to flip over when you passed through.”

  This struck me as remarkable, a paradox difficult to grasp, but Poole was a wormhole engineer, and used to the subtleties of spacetime manipulated and twisted through higher dimensions; slapping two convex surfaces together was evidently child’s play to him, conceptually.

  Miriam asked Virtual Poole, “But where are you? That’s an ice moon, a common object. Could be anywhere in the universe. Could even be in some corner of our own System.”

  Poole’s Virtual copy said, his voice a whispery, channel-distorted rasp, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Miriam. Look up.”

  The viewpoint swivelled, and we saw Virtual Poole’s sky.

  A huge, distorted sun hung above us. Planetoids hung sprinkled before its face, showing phases from crescents to half-moons, and some were entirely black, fly-speck eclipses against the face of the monster. Beyond the limb of the sun more stars hung, but they were also swollen, pale beasts, their misshapen discs visible. And the space between the stars did not look entirely black to me, but a faint, deep crimson with a pattern, a network of threads and knots. It reminded me of what I saw when I closed my eyes.

  “What a sky,” Poole murmured.

  “Michael, you’re far from home,” Miriam called.

  Virtual Poole replied, “Yes. Those stars don’t fit our main sequence. And their spectra are simple-few heavy elements. They’re more like the protostars of our own early universe, I think: the first generation, formed of not much more than the hydrogen and helium that came out of the Big Bang.”

  “No metals,” observed Miriam Berg.

  “I’ll send through the data I’m collecting—”

  “Getting it, son,” came Harry Poole’s voice.

  The others let Virtual Poole speak. His words, the careful observations delivered by a man so far from home, or at least by a construct that felt as if it were a man, were impressive in their courage.

  “This is not our universe,” he whispered. “I think that’s clear. This one is young, and small-according to the curvature of spacetime, only a few million light years across. Probably not big enough to accommodate our Local Group of galaxies.”

  “A pocket universe, maybe,” Miriam said. “An appendix from our own.”

  “I can’t believe the things you have been calling ‘spiders’ originated here,” the Virtual said. “You said it, Miriam. No metals here, not in this entire cosmos. That’s why they were scavenging metals from probes, meteorites.”

  “They came from somewhere else, then,” Poole said. “There was nothing strange in the elemental abundance we recorded in the spider samples we studied. So they come from elsewhere in our own universe. The pocket universe is just a transit interchange. Like Earthport.”

  The Virtual said, “Yes. And maybe behind these other moons in my sky lie gateways to other Titans-other sustained ecologies, maybe with different biological bases. Other experiments.”

  Miriam said, “So if metals are so essential for the spiders, why not have supplies brought to them through the interchange?”

  “Maybe they did, once,” the Virtual said. “Maybe things broke down. There’s a sense of age here, Miriam. This is a young cosmos maybe, but I think this is an old place ...”

  The real Poole murmured, “It makes sense. The time axis in the baby universe needn’t be isomorphic with ours. A million years over there, a billion years here.”

  The Virtual whispered, “Those spider
s have been toiling at their task on Titan a long, long time. Whoever manufactured them, or bred them, left them behind a long time ago, and they’ve been alone ever since. Just doing their best to keep going. Looking at them, I get the impression they aren’t too bright. Just functional.”

  “But they did a good job,” Miriam said.

  “That they did.”

  “But why?” I blurted out. “What’s the purpose of all this, the nurturing of an ecology on Titan for billions of years—and perhaps similar on a thousand other worlds?”

  “I think I have an idea,” Virtual Poole whispered. “I never even landed on Titan, remember. Perhaps, coming at all this so suddenly, while the rest of you have worked through stages of discovery, I see it different...

  “Just as this pocket universe is a junction, so maybe Titan is a junction, a haven where different domains of life can coexist. You’ve found the native ammono fish, the CHON sponges that may originate in the inner system, perhaps even coming from Earth, and the silanes from Triton and beyond. Maybe there are other families to find if you had time to look.

  All these kinds of life, arising from different environments—but all with one thing in common. All born of planets, and of skies and seas, in worlds warmed by stars.

  “But the stars won’t last forever. In the future the universe will change, until it resembles our own time even less than our universe resembles this young dwarf cosmos. What then? Look, if you were concerned about preserving life, all forms of life, into the very furthest future, then perhaps you would promote—”

  “Cooperation,” said Miriam Berg.

  “You got it. Maybe Titan is a kind of prototype of an ecology where life forms of such different origins can mix, find ways of using each other to survive—”

  “And ultimately merge, somehow,” Miriam said. “Well, it’s happened before. Each of us is a community with once-disparate and very different life forms toiling away in each of our cells. It’s a lovely vision, Michael.”

  “And plausible,” his original self said gruffly. “Anyhow it’s a hypothesis that will do until something better comes along.”