Godlike Machines

by Johnathan Strahan

  I sneered at that. This dream of cosmic cooperation struck me as the romantic fantasy of a man alone and doomed to die, and soon. We all project our petty lives upon the universe. But I had no better suggestions to make. And, who knows? Perhaps Virtual Poole was right. None of us will live to find out.

  “Anyhow,” I said, “charming as this is—are we done now?”

  Miriam snapped, “We can’t abandon Michael.”

  “Go,” whispered Virtual Poole. “There’s nothing you can do for me. I’ll keep observing, reporting, as long as I can.”

  I gagged on his nobility.

  Now Harry intruded, grabbing a little of the available Virtual projection capacity. “But we’ve still got business to conclude before you leave here.”

  XV

  Resolution

  Poole frowned. “What business?”

  “We came here to prove that Titan is without sentience,” Harry said. “Well, we got that wrong. Now what?”

  Miriam Berg was apparently puzzled we were even having the conversation. “We report what we’ve found to the sentience oversight councils and elsewhere. It’s a major discovery. We’ll be rapped for making an unauthorised landing on Titan, but—”

  “Is that the sum of your ambition?” I snapped. “To hope the authorities will be lenient if you reveal the discovery that is going to ruin you?”

  She glared at me. “What’s the choice?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” I looked at her, and Poole, who I think was guessing what I was going to say, and Harry, who looked away as he usually did at moments of crisis. Suddenly, after days of pointless wonders, I was in my element, the murky world of human relationships, and I could see a way forward where they could not. “Destroy this” I said. I waved a hand. “All of it. You have your grenades, Miriam. You could bring this cavern down.”

  “Or,” Harry said, “there is the GUTdrive. If that were detonated, if unified-field energies were loosed in here, the wormhole interface too would surely be disrupted. I’d imagine that the connection between Titan and the pocket universe would be broken altogether.”

  I nodded. “I hadn’t thought of that, but I like your style, Harry. Do it. Let this place be covered up by hundreds of kilometers of ice and water. Destroy your records. It will make no difference to the surface, what’s going on in the atmosphere, not immediately. Nobody will ever know all this was here.”

  Harry Poole said, “That’s true. Even if methane generation stops immediately the residual would persist in the atmosphere for maybe ten million years. I venture to suggest that if the various multi-domain critters haven’t learned to cooperate in that time, they never will. Ten megayears is surely enough.”

  Miriam looked at him, horrified by his words. “You’re suggesting a monstrous crime,” she breathed. “To think of destroying such a wonder as this, the product of a billion years—to destroy it for personal gain! Michael, Lethe, leave aside the morality, surely you’re too much of a scientist to countenance this.”

  But Poole sounded anguished. “I’m not a scientist anymore, Miriam. I’m an engineer. I build things. I think I sympathize with the goals of the spider makers. What I’m building is a better future for the whole of mankind—that’s what I believe. And if I have to make compromises to achieve that future-well. Maybe the spider makers had to make the same kind of choices. Who knows what they found here on Titan before they went to work on it...”

  And in that little speech, I believe, you have encapsulated both the magnificence and the grandiose folly of Michael Poole. I wondered then how much damage this man might do to us all in the future, with his wormholes and his time-hopping starships—what horrors he, blinded by his vision, might unleash.

  Harry said unexpectedly, “Let’s vote on it. If you’re in favor of destroying the chamber, say yes.”

  “No!” snapped Miriam.

  “Yes,” said Harry and Poole together.

  “Yes,” said I, but they all turned on me and told me I didn’t have a vote.

  It made no difference. The vote was carried. They stood looking at each other, as if horrified by what they had done.

  “Welcome to my world,” I said cynically.

  Poole went off to prepare the GUT engine for its last task. Miriam, furious and upset, gathered together our equipment, such as it was, her pack with her science samples, our tangles of rope.

  And Harry popped into the air in front of me. “Thanks,” he said.

  “You wanted me to make that suggestion, didn’t you?”

  “Well, I hoped you would. If I’d made it they’d have refused. And Michael would never have forgiven me.” He grinned. “I knew there was a reason I wanted to have you along, Jovik Emry. Well done. You’ve served your purpose.”

  Virtual Poole, still in his baby universe, spoke again. “Miriam.”

  She straightened up. “I’m here, Michael.”

  “I’m not sure how long I have left. What will happen when the power goes?”

  “I programmed the simulation to seem authentic, internally consistent. It will be as if the power in the Crab life-dome is failing.” She took a breath, and said, “Of course you have other options to end it before then.”

  “I know. Thank you. Who were they, do you think? Whoever made the spiders. Did they build this pocket universe too? Or was it built for them? Like a haven?”

  “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. Michael, I’m sorry. I—”

  “Don’t be. You know I would have chosen this. But I’m sorry to leave you behind. Miriam-look after him. Michael. I, we, need you.”

  She looked at the original Poole, who was working at the GUT engine. “We’ll see,” she said.

  “And tell Harry-well. You know.”

  She held a hand up to the empty air. “Michael, please—”

  “It’s enough.” The Virtuals he had been projecting broke up into blocks of pixels, and a faint hiss, the carrier of his voice, disappeared from my hearing. Alone in his universe, he had cut himself off.

  The original Poole approached her, uncertain of her reaction. “It’s done. The GUT engine has been programmed. We’re ready to go, Miriam. Soon as we’re out of here—”

  She turned away from him, her face showing something close to hatred.

  XVI

  Ascension

  So, harnessed to a spider oblivious of the impending fate of its vast and ancient project, we rose into the dark. It had taken us days to descend to this place, and would take us days to return to the surface, where, Harry promised, he would have a fresh balloon waiting to pick us up.

  This time, though I was offered escape into unconsciousness, I stayed awake. I had a feeling that the last act of this little drama had yet to play itself out. I wanted to be around to see it.

  We were beyond the lower ice layers and rising through 250 kilometers of sea when Miriam’s timer informed us that the GUT engine had detonated, far beneath us. Insulated by the ice layer, we felt nothing. But I imagined that the spider that carried us up towards the light hesitated, just fractionally.

  “It’s done,” Poole said firmly. “No going back.”

  Miriam had barely spoken to him since the cavern. She had said more words to me. Now she said, “I’ve been thinking. I won’t accept it, Michael. I don’t care about you and Harry and your damn vote. As soon as we get home I’m going to report what we found.”

  “You’ve no evidence—”

  “I’ll be taken seriously enough. And someday somebody will mount another expedition, and confirm the truth.”

  “All right.” That was all he said. But I knew the matter was not over. He would not meet my mocking eyes.

  I wasn’t surprised when, twelve hours later, as Miriam slept cradled in the net draped from the spider’s back, Poole took vials from her pack and pressed them into her flesh, one by a valve on her leg, another at the base of her spine.

  I watched him. “You’re going to edit her. Plan this with Dad, did you?”

  “Shut up,�
� he snarled, edgy, angry.

  “You’re taking her out of her own head, and you’ll mess with her memories, with her very personality, and then you’ll load her back. What will you make her believe-that she stayed up on the Crab with Harry the whole time, while you went exploring and found nothing? That would work, I guess.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  But I had plenty to say to him. I am no saint myself, and Poole disgusted me as only a man without morality himself can be disgusted. “I think you love her. I even think she loves you. Yet you are prepared to mess with her head and her heart, to serve your grandiose ambitions. Let me tell you something. The Poole she left behind in that pocket universe, the one she said goodbye to, he was a better man than you will ever be again. Because he was not tainted by the great crime you committed when you destroyed the cavern. And because he was not tainted by this.

  “And let me make some predictions. No matter what you achieve in the future, Michael Poole, this crime will always be at the root of you, gnawing away. And Miriam will never love you. Even though you wipe out her memory of these events, there will always be something between you; she will sense the lie. She will leave you, and then you will leave her. And you have killed Titan. One day, millions of years into the future, the very air will freeze and rain out, and everything alive here will die. All because of what you have done today. And, Poole, maybe those whose work you have wrecked will some day force you to a reckoning.”

  He was open, defenceless, and I was flaying him. He had no answer. He cradled the unconscious Miriam, even as his machines drained her memory.

  We did not speak again until we emerged into the murky daylight of Titan.

  EPILOGUE

  Probe

  It didn’t take Michael long to check out the status of his fragile craft.

  The power in the lifetime’s internal cells might last—what, a few hours? As far as he could tell there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the Hermit Crab; none of his controls worked. Maybe that was beyond the scope of Miriam’s simulation. So he had no motive power.

  He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future. Such as it was.

  The universe beyond the lifedome was strange, alien. The toiling spiders down on the ice moon seemed like machines, not alive, not sentient. He tired of observing them. He turned on lights, green, blue. The lifedome was a little bubble of Earth, isolated.

  Michael was alone, in this whole universe. He could feel it.

  He got a meal together. Miriam’s simulation was good, here in his personal space; he didn’t find any limits or glitches. Lovingly constructed, he thought. The mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the lifetime’s small galley, was oddly cheering.

  He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights. He finished his food and set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water.

  Then he went to the freefall shower and washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences. He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

  The lights failed. Even the instrument slates winked out.

  Well, so much for music. He made his way back to his couch. Though the sky was bright, illuminated by the proto-sun, the air grew colder; he imagined the heat of the life-dome leaking out. What would get him first, the cold, or the failing air?

  He wasn’t afraid. And he felt no regret that he had lost so much potential life, all those AS-extended years. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in decades, the pressure of time no longer seemed to weigh on him.

  He was sorry he would never know how his relationship with Miriam might have worked out. That could have been something. But he found, in the end, he was glad that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

  He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He lay back in his couch and crossed his hands on his chest. He closed his eyes.

  A shadow crossed his face.

  He opened his eyes, looked up. There was a ship hanging over the lifedome.

  Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

  It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. Night-dark wings which must have spanned hundreds of kilometers loomed over the Crab, softly rippling.

  The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision.

  Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please—

  Poole’s consciousness was like a guttering candle flame. Now it was as if that flame was plucked from its wick. That flame, with its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive, was spun out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.

  The last heat fled from the craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the prone body. And the ship and all it contained, no longer needed, broke up into a cloud of pixels.

  THERE’S A GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW/NOW IS THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE

  Cory Doctorow

  Cory Doctorow was born in Toronto, Canada in 1971. A self-described “renaissancegeek,”he was raised by Trotskyist schoolteachers in the wilds of Canada, attended alternative schools in Toronto, worked at a SF specialty bookstore, dropped out of high school, and briefly moved to Mexico to write. He has worked as a programmer, web designer, volunteer in Central America, CIO, founder of a software company, and as an advocate, before becoming a full-time writer last year. Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17, and published a small handful of stories through the early and mid 1990s. His story “Craphound” appeared in 1998, and he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. His best known short fiction is a series of stories that use the titles of famous SF short stories, revisiting the assumptions underpinning their narratives. So far “Anda’s Game” has been selected for the prestigious Best American Short Stories and “I, Robot” was nominated for the Hugo Award. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was followed by collections A Place So Foreign and Eight More and Overclocked, and novels Eastern Standard Tribe, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Little Brother, and Makers. His latest novel is For the Win, a young adult science fiction novel about green farming.

  In the story that follows Doctorow turns the idea of godlike machines on its head, and shows us instead some very different machines.

  PART 1: A SPARKLING JEWEL

  I piloted the mecha through the streets of Detroit, hunting wumpuses. The mecha was a relic of the Mecha Wars, when the nation tore itself to shreds with lethal robots, and it had the weird, swirling lines of all evolutionary tech, channelled and chopped and counterweighted like some freak dinosaur or a race-car. piloted the mecha through the streets of Detroit, hunting wumpuses. The mecha was a relic of the Mecha Wars, when the nation tore itself to shreds with lethal robots, and it had the weird, swirling lines of all evolutionary tech, channelled and chopped and counterweighted like some freak dinosaur or a race-car.

  I loved the mecha. It wasn’t fast, but it had a fantastic ride, a kind of wobbly strut that was surprisingly comfortable and let me keep the big fore and aft guns on any target I chose, the sights gliding along on a perfect level even as the neck rocked from side to side.

  The pack loved the mecha too. All six of them, three aerial bots shaped like bats, two ground-cover streaks that nipped around my heels, and a flea that bounded over buildings, bouncing off the walls and leaping from monorail track to rusting hover-bus to balcony and back. The pack’s brains were back in dad’s house, in the old Comerica Park site. When I found them, they’d been a pack of sick dogs, dragging themselves through the ruined city, poisoned
by some old materiel. I had done them the mercy of extracting their brains and connecting them up to the house network. Now they were immortal, just like me, and they knew that I was their alpha dog. They loved to go for walks with me.

  I spotted the wumpus by the plume of dust it kicked up. It was well inside the perimeter, gnawing at the corner of an old satellite Ford factory, a building gone to magnificent ruin, all crumbled walls and crazy, unsprung machines. The structural pillars stuck up all around it, like columns around a Greek temple.

  The wumpus had the classic look. It stood about eight feet tall, with a hundred mouths on the ends of whipping tentacles. Its metallic finish was smeared with oily rainbows that wobbled as the dust swirled around it. The mouths whipped back and forth against the corner of the factory, taking chunks out of it. The chunks went into the hopper on its back and were broken up into their constituent atoms, reassembled into handy, safe, rich soil, and then ejected in a vertical plume that was visible even from several blocks away.

  Wumpuses don’t put up much fight. They’re reclamation drones, not hunter-killer bots, and their main mode of attack was to assemble copies of themselves out of dead buildings faster than I could squash them. They weren’t much sport, but that was OK: there’s no way Dad would let me put his precious mecha at risk against any kind of big game. The pack loved hunting wumpus, anyway.

  The air-drones swooped around it in tight arcs. They were usually piloted by Pepe, the hysterical Chihuahua, who loved to have three points-of-view, it fit right in with his distracted, hyperactive approach to life. The wumpus didn’t even notice the drones until one of them came in so low that it tore through the tentacles, taking three clean off and disordering the remainder. The other air-drones did victory loops in the sky overhead and the flea bounded so high that it practically disappeared from sight, then touched down right next to the wumpus.

  This attack was characteristic of Gretl, the Irish Setter mix who thought she was a kangaroo. The whole pack liked the flea, but Gretl was born to it. She bounced the wumpus six times, knocking it back and forth like an air-hockey puck, leaping free before it could bring its tentacles to bear on her.