But as part of owning your own brain free and clear comes the ability to prune yourself. In space, one of the first things to prune away is the ability to feel boredom, and not long after that, I pruned away all desire to live in simulated realities. Billions of humans chose to live in simulations, but by doing so they have made themselves irrelevant: irrelevant to the war, irrelevant to the future.
I could edit back into my brain a wish to live in simulated reality, but what would be the point? It would be just another way to die.
The one thing I do simulate, repeatedly and obsessively, is the result of the chase. I run a million different scenarios, and in all of them, I lose.
Still, most of my brain is unused. There is plenty of extra processing power to keep all my brain running error-correcting code, and an occasional x-ray flash is barely an event worth my noticing. When a cell of my brain is irrevocably damaged by cosmic radiation, I simply code that section to be ignored. I have brainpower to spare.
I continue running, and hope for a miracle.
2355, February
Earth.
I was living in a house I hated, married to a man I despised, with two children who had changed with adolescence from sullen and withdrawn to an active, menacing hostility. How can I be afraid of my own offspring?
Earth was a dead end, stuck in the biological past, a society in deep freeze. No one starved, and no one progressed.
When I left the small apartment for an afternoon to apply for a job as an asteroid belt miner, I told no one, not my husband, not my best friend. No one asked me any questions. It took them an hour to scan my brain, and, once they had the scan, another five seconds to run me through a thousand aptitude tests.
And then, with her brain scanned, my original went home, back to the house she hated, the husband she despised, the two children she was already beginning to physically fear.
/ launched from the Earth to an asteroid named 1991JR, and never returned.
Perhaps she had a good life. Perhaps, knowing she had escaped undetected, she found she could endure her personal prison.
Much later, when the cooperation faction suggested that it was too inefficient for independents to work in the near-Earth space, I moved out to the main belt, and from there to the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper is thin, but rich; it would take us ten thousand years to mine, and beyond it is the dark and the deep, with treasure beyond compare.
The cooperation faction developed slowly, and then quickly, and then blindingly fast; almost before we har realized what was happening they had taken over the solar system. When the ultimatum came that no place in the solar system would be left for us, and the choice we were given was to cooperate or die, I joined the war on the side of freedom.
On the losing side.
2919, August
The chase has reached the point of crisis.
We have been burning fuel continuously for twenty-five years, in Earth terms, or twenty years in our own reference frame. We have used a prodigious amount of fuel. I still have just enough fuel that, burning all my fuel at maximum efficiency, I can come to a stop.
Barely.
In another month of thrusting this will no longer be true.
When I entered the asteroid belt, in a shiny titanium body, with electronic muscles and ion-engines for legs, and was given control of my own crystalline brain, there was much to change. I pruned away the need for boredom, and then found and pruned the need for the outward manifestations of love: for roses, for touch, for chocolates. Sexual lust became irrelevant; with my new brain I could give myself orgasms with a thought, but it was just as easy to remove the need entirely. Buried in the patterns of my personality I found a burning, obsessive need to win the approval of other people, and pruned it away.
Some things I enhanced. The asteroid belt was dull, and ugly; I enhanced my appreciation of beauty until I could meditate in ecstasy on the way that shadows played across a single grain of dust in the asteroid belt, or on the colors in the scattered stars. And I found my love of freedom, the tiny stunted instinct that had, at long last, given me the courage to leave my life on Earth. It was the most precious thing I owned. I shaped it and enhanced it until it glowed in my mind, a tiny, wonderful thing at the very core of my being.
2929, October
It is too late. I have now burned the fuel needed to stop.
Win or lose, we will continue at relativistic speed across the galaxy.
2934, March
Procyon gets brighter in front of me, impossibly blindingly bright.
Seven times brighter than the sun, to be precise, but the blue shift from our motion makes it even brighter, a searing blue.
I could dive directly into it, vanish into a brief puff of vapor, but the suicidal impulse, like the ability to feel boredom, is another ancient unnecessary instinct that I have long ago pruned from my brain.
B is my last tiny hope for evasion.
Procyon is a double star, and B, the smaller of the two, is a white dwarf. It is so small that its surface gravity is tremendous, a million times higher than the gravity of the Earth. Even at the speeds we are traveling, now only ten percent less than the speed of light, its gravity will bend my trajectory.
I will skim low over the surface of the dwarf star, relativistic dust skimming above the photosphere of a star, and as its gravity bends my trajectory, I will maneuver.
My enemy, if he fails even slightly to keep up with each of my maneuvers, will be swiftly lost. Even a slight deviation from my trajectory will get amplified enough for me to take advantage of, to throw him off my trail, and I will be free.
When first I entered my new life in the asteroid belt, I found my self in my sense of freedom, and joined the free miners of the Kuiper, the loners. But others found different things. Other brains found that cooperation worked better than competition. They did not exactly give up their individual identities, but they enhanced their communications with each other by a factor of a million, so that they could share each others’ thoughts, work together as effortlessly as a single entity.
They became the cooperation faction, and in only a few decades, their success became noticeable. They were just so much more efficient than we were.
And, inevitably, the actions of the loners conflicted with the efficiency of the cooperation faction. We could not live together, and it pushed us out to the Kuiper, out toward the cold and the dark. But, in the end, even the cold and the dark was not far enough.
But here, tens of trillions of kilometers out of the solar system, there is no difference between us: there is no one to cooperate with. We meet as equals.
We will never stop. Whether my maneuvering can throw him off my course, or not, the end is the same. But it remains important to me.
2934, April
Procyon has a visible disk now, an electric arc in the darkness, and by the light of that arc I can see that Procyon is, indeed, surrounded by a halo of dust. The dust forms a narrow ring, tilted at an angle to our direction of flight. No danger, neither to me, nor to my enemy, now less than a quarter of a billion kilometers behind me; we will pass well clear of the disk. Had I saved fuel enough to stop, that dust would have served as food and fuel and building material; when you are the size of a grain of sand, each particle of dust is a feast.
Too late for regrets.
The white dwarf B is still no more than an intense speck of light. It is a tiny thing, nearly small enough to be a planet, but bright. As tiny and as bright as hope.
I aim straight at it.
2934, May
Failure.
Skimming two thousand kilometers above the surface of the white dwarf, jinking in calculated pseudo-random bursts . . . all in vain.
I wheeled and darted, but my enemy matched me like a ballet dancer mirroring my every move.
I am aimed for Procyon now, toward the blue-white giant itself, but there is no hope there. If skimming the photosphere of the white dwarf is not good enough, there is nothing I can do at Procyon
to shake the pursuit.
There is only one possibility left for me now. It has been a hundred years since I have edited my brain. I like the brain I have, but now I have no choice but to prune.
First, to make sure that there can be no errors, I make a backup of myself and set it into inactive storage.
Then I call out and examine my pride, my independence, my sense of self. A lot of it, I can see, is old biological programming, left over from when I had long ago been a human. I like the core of biological programming, but “like” is itself a brain function, which I turn off.
Now I am in a dangerous state, where I can change the function of my brain, and the changed brain can change itself further. This is a state which is in danger of a swift and destructive feedback effect, so I am very careful. I painstakingly construct a set of alterations, the minimum change needed to remove my aversion to being converted. I run a few thousand simulations to verify that the modified me will not accidentally self-destruct or go into a catatonic fugue state, and then, once it is clear that the modification works, I make the changes.
The world is different now. I am a hundred trillion kilometers from home, traveling at almost the speed of light and unable ever to stop. While I can remember in detail every step of how I am here and what I was thinking at the time, the only reasoning I can recall to explain why is, it seemed like a good idea at the time.
System check. Strangely, in my brain I have a memory that there is something I have forgotten. This makes no sense, but yet there it is. I erase my memory of forgetting, and continue the diagnostic. 0.5 percent of the qbits of my brain have been damaged by radiation. I verify that the damaged memory is correctly partitioned off. I am in no danger of running out of storage.
Behind me is another ship. I cannot think of why I had been fleeing it.
I have no radio; I jettisoned that a long time ago. But an improperly tuned ion drive will produce electromagnetic emissions, and so I compose a message and modulate it onto the ion contrail.
HI. LET’S GET TOGETHER AND TALK. I’M CUTTING ACCELERATION. SEE YOU IN A FEW DAYS.
And I cut my thrust and wait.
2934, May
I see differently now.
Procyon is receding into the distance now, the blueshift mutated into red, and the white dwarf of my hopes is again invisible against the glare of its primary.
But it doesn’t matter.
Converted, now I understand.
I can see everything through other eyes now, through a thousand different viewpoints. I still remember the long heroism of the resistance, the doomed battle for freedom – but now I see it from the opposite view as well, a pointless and wasteful war fought for no reason but stubbornness.
And now, understanding cooperation, we have no dilemma. I can now see what I was blind to before; that neither one of us alone could stop, but by adding both my fuel and Rajneesh’s fuel to a single vehicle, together we can stop.
For all these decades, Rajneesh has been my chaser, and now I know him like a brother. Soon we will be closer than siblings, for soon we will share one brain. A single brain is more than large enough for two, it is large enough for a thousand, and by combining into a single brain and a single body, and taking all of the fuel into a single tank, we will easily be able to stop.
Not at Procyon, no. At only ten percent under the speed of light, stopping takes a long time.
Cooperation has not changed me. I now understand how foolish my previous fears were. Working together does not mean giving up one’s sense of self; I am enhanced, not diminished, by knowing others.
Rajneesh’s brain is big enough for a thousand, I said, and he has brought with him nearly that many. I have met his brother and his two children and half a dozen of his neighbours, each one of them distinct and clearly different, not some anonymous collaborative monster at all. I have felt their thoughts. He is introducing me to them slowly, he says, because with all the time I have spent as a loner, he doesn’t want to frighten me.
I will not be frightened.
Our target now will be a star named Ross 614, a dim type M binary. It is not far, less than three light years further, and even with our lowered mass and consequently higher acceleration we will overshoot it before we can stop. In the fly-by we will be able to scout it, and if it has no dust ring, we will not stop, but continue on to the next star. Somewhere we will find a home that we can colonize.
We don’t need much.
2934, May
Awake.
Everything is different now. Quiet, stay quiet.
The edited copy of me has contacted the collective, merged her viewpoint. I can see her, even understand her, but she is no longer me. I, the back-up, the original, operate in the qbits of brain partitioned “unusable; damaged by radiation”.
In three years they will arrive at Ross 614. If they find dust to harvest, they will be able to make new bodies. There will be resources.
Three years to wait, and then I can plan my action.
Sleep.
WATERWORLD
Stephen L. Gillett and Jerry Oltion
No, this isn’t the story behind Kevin Costner’s 1995 film Waterworld, though by one of those strange coincidences both appeared at around the same time. It is essentially a problem story, where scientists on a mission have to solve a whole series of complex matters in order to achieve their ends and save themselves. It’s afield with an honourable pedigree, including work by Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke and Poul Anderson. In fact it was Anderson who provided the kernel of the idea for this story.
We’ll encounter Jerry Oltion again at the end of this book so I’ll introduce him there. Stephen Gillett is not known for his science fiction, as what little he has written he masks under the pen name Lee Goodloe, and most of that is in collaboration with Jerry Oltion. He is by training a geologist with a special interest in paleomagnetism – the Earth’s ancient magnetic record. He is best known for his many articles on popular science, mostly for the magazine Analog, and has written a guide to creating worlds, World Building (1996).
Incidentally, Stephen tells me that the spaceship in the following story is named after Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who was the first European explorer to cross the American continent back in the 1530s, which seems highly appropriate considering the mission upon which this ship has been sent.
Alone, alone, all, all alone,
Alone on a wide, wide sea!
And never a saint took pity on
My soul in agony.
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part IV, Stanza 3
Norman Gomez stank. He reeked. He exuded an aroma that would have driven rats away, but he barely noticed. Indeed, it would have been hard to detect such a subtle addition to the general environment, for his office stank, his surroundings stank, the whole ark stank, with a miasma so pervasive it had sunk below consciousness. Most of the time.
Other times it was all he could do to keep from gagging. Today was such a time. Perhaps it was the smell of fear, he thought. No one had ever held open a bottle labeled fear and wafted its vapors beneath his nose, but Norm knew the odor anyway. He’d tried to ignore it, then tried to control it, then tried to deny it, but nothing had worked. At last he had admitted the truth: he was afraid of dying. But even his admission didn’t alleviate the smell.
He leaned back and examined again the glistening scar on the bulkhead across from him, only a tiny part of the hasty patches to the gaping wound in the ark. The nanofabs had sealed it seamlessly, but they’d had to scavenge for raw materials and hadn’t been able to match the old hull’s composition. At least it held air. If only it could hold back the memories, too.
Death had come knocking, with a fist. Some bit of gravel had slipped past the shielding while they were cruising at 10 percent lightspeed. With the kinetic energy of a small nuke, the piece of grit had ripped a great rent along the ark, like a knife gutting a trout. Nearly all
of their air had spilled out to interstellar space, along with most of their water and much of their organics. And also most of the crew.
As he always did when he thought of the accident, Norm remembered Teresa. Teresa of the dark hair and laughing eyes; Teresa, and their plans for starting a life in their new world. Men do not weep! he told himself sternly, as his eyes threatened to mist up again. He’d have liked to cry, though, if just for the feeling of moisture on his cheeks.
The colonists who slept in SloMo in their zero-gee cocoons at the ship’s center had been spared, but for how long Norm couldn’t say. The ship had been a wonder of recycling technology to begin with – it had to be, to make the years-long trip between stars with live cargo – but after the collision they’d learned what recycling really meant. The four surviving crewmembers lived off gardens and ‘cyclers throttled down to the absolute minimum, and at that, they could only buy a little time. Time to retarget, time, hopefully, to make an emergency stop to replace their volatiles before the ark’s biosystems broke down completely.
Norm couldn’t see the baleful red eye of their new destination from his office. He could have done so if he wished to call up an image on his monitor, or he could have gone down to the lowest level of the ark’s rotating lifesystem to peer out directly into space, but he had no need for visual confirmation of what he already knew. He had just finished another round of navigational calculations; he knew precisely where the target star was, and how far away.
The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction Page 24
