by Jo Zebedee
“We’re half dead without our computers, our power.”
Xie Fei nodded. “Our power is safe, and so the lilypads are safe too – our food, water purification units, light, heat.”
Madeleine nodded. “Shall we take the battle to them?”
“No. Not least because they may be intelligent. But… this mission is the culmination of the Chinese Century. It must succeed. Our intention was to colonise Grey from east shore to west.”
“Then we need to know if the spherics have an electromagnetic signature.”
Xie Fei nodded. “Fetch Hu Min. We three are taking a trip to the seashore. Have Hor Namhong record everything we do, in the visual spectrum, infra-red and ultraviolet, and beyond. I want a complete electromagnetic record of the next few hours.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Make an analysis.”
On the seashore, feet in the waves, the trio stood a hundred metres from the edge of the roiling mass, the bass frequencies making innumerable sand grains vibrate in ever-changing Chladni patterns. Xie Fei set up a sophisticated com-eye, her intention to make the first full assessment of the electromagnetic state of the spheric mass.
It was evening. High cirrus drifted across a pale blue sky. And as she waited for the results to come in she saw a shining dot, like a satellite on Earth, that brightened, turned yellow, became larger.
Xie Fei gasped. They all did. As the Mei-lu fell it broke into pieces heated orange, yellow and white by the friction of the atmosphere, until, like a swarm of incandescent insects, it passed overhead, drifted east, then faded. Xie Fei heard the faintest hiss and crackle through her bass-defeating earpieces – the noise of the starship breaking up, turning into meteors, departing Grey forever.
Xie Fei, at first too shocked to move, wailed, then turned to face the spherics. “I will defeat you!” she yelled. “I will make this land ours!”
*
An aura of quiet desperation fell across the Grey lilypads. Attacked, marooned, the five hundred felt like animals, their technology stolen, destroyed, as if the rest of their lives would be lived with stone tools, clubs and petty tribal resentment. The loss of the starship seemed to have propelled them centuries into the past. Marooned…
Xie Fei and Madeleine gave speeches. Madeleine, whose responsibility was social, took charge, reorganising the lilypad populations into groups of one hundred, creating sub-committees, devolving power, reassuring everyone that she and Xie Fei were alive and confident. In this way she hoped to quell the possibility of anxiety, even despair, which she knew could ruin their chances of survival. Everybody received a new role, for which they had to train. Nobody was ignored, nobody left to wither. The Captain’s Committee however remained a duo.
Technologically, there was little they could do. Power units were electromagnetically sheathed, as were life support units. Standalone computer units were protected too. The main mode of communication changed from com to speech. The colony, that before had been bathed in electromagnetic waves, now knew only water waves.
And then, as Xie Fei contemplated her impotence in the face of a trillion spherics, she had an idea.
She located I Fu-en, the technologist in charge of androids, a young man with an aptitude for encouraging the autonomous beings. Pointing to the android (tall, slender, white and unclothed) who had manufactured the bass defeating earpieces, she said, “They have electromagnetic sense organs in their brains, do they not?”
I Fu-en nodded. “Modelled on the iron-swaddled organelles set deep inside pigeon brains,” he replied. “Also they have a sense organ sensitive to gravity, and one sensitive to moisture.”
“Where was…”
“Liang-xin.”
The android’s name meant conscience. Xie Fei hesitated, the remainder of her sentence unspoken. “Androids are not conscious like us, are they?” she asked.
I Fu-en shook his head. “It’s thought no artificial conscious entity has ever been created. But that’s what everyone wanted – an absence of competition, you might say.”
“But we don’t know for certain that none are conscious?”
“How could we? They aren’t human.”
Xie Fei nodded, pondered, then finished her original question. “Where was Liang-xin when the first electromagnetic storm struck?”
“Deep in the bowels of a lilypad, luckily, along with many of the Von Neumanns.”
“Shielded by good fortune from the storm.”
I Fu-en nodded. “A quarter of our Von Neumanns didn’t survive, and a number of androids, also many mini-androids.”
“Can Liang-xin alter the frequency of the waves that it receives and transmits?”
“Yes.”
Xie Fei pondered further. The results of the assessment of the state of the spheric mass indicated that they existed in a rich electromagnetic environment, albeit tuned to a frequency precise and narrow.
“Modify Liang-xin,” she said, “so that it receives and transmits only at the spheric frequency.”
I Fu-en nodded, a grin on his face. “You think they’ll consider it one of them?”
“Possibly. At the moment I do not care. The important thing is to get an entity controlled by us operational outside earthed shielding. Without that, we are powerless.”
“Limiting the bandwidth that much will drastically reduce Liang-xin’s sensory-“
“The important thing is our flexibility. I will not be bullied back to the Stone Age by the spherics. We survive here, understood?”
The grin departed I Fu-en’s face.
*
Xie Fei found herself inspired by I Fu-en’s accidental remark concerning human and android consciousness. With Madeleine she discussed their options.
“Could we ever be certain that an android was conscious?” she asked.
Madeleine replied, “I don’t think we could be one hundred percent certain, no. We know every other human being in the world is conscious because we’re all the same – we all evolved together, in social groups. You could argue that consciousness doesn’t exist inside us, inside our brains – it’s somewhere in the spaces between us.”
“No isolated, solitary baby could ever become conscious?”
“Only through social interaction.”
“But androids interact socially, with us and with each other.”
Madeleine nodded. “But they’re never isolated from each other as we are. Your internal mental monologue can be heard only by you. There’s no direct link to anybody else, only an indirect one through language, gesture, emotion. But androids are all linked. And for a reason – to stop them becoming conscious by accident, as we did, in societies. That was the origin, the moral origin of their extra sense organs.”
“I believe the spherics may be intelligent,” Xie Fei mused. “If not, they may approximate intelligence as a gestalt entity. That electromagnetic storm could have been an instinctive reaction, scratching an itch, or it could have been a planned assault. Bringing down the starship need not have been murder… or it might have been.”
“But you think they might be conscious?”
Xie Fei stood up and stretched, then relaxed. “I do not know,” she sighed. “As you pointed out, it may be impossible to tell. But if they are, we can communicate with them, explain who we are, plead our case. And remember – if the spherics are intelligent, if they are artificial for instance, they will already have experience of conscious beings – their makers.”
Madeleine gasped, a hand at her mouth. “But…”
“Do not tell anybody of my idea.”
“Artificial…” Madeleine said.
Xie Fei nodded. “What will they have seen? What communal memories might exist in their electromagnetic ocean?”
*
Liang-xin’s electromagnetic sense received, but also, unlike the five human senses, it transmitted in a limited manner. It was Xie Fei’s hope that the android would be able to detect, if nothing
of the meaning, at least something of the form and complexity of the spherics’ electromagnetic environment, without being detected as an outsider.
An air of desperation lingered over the colony. This was a marooning like no other in human history. They had to make the colony (as Xie Fei now insisted on calling it for reasons of morale) work for the foreseeable future.
“And we must give this settlement a name,” she said, at the end of a comprehensive speech. Naming the lilypad cluster would help the colonists identify with it, think of it as home. “Suggestions will be put forward and we shall all vote. My suggestion is yi-bian-dao, to lean exclusively to one side – us, I mean, not the planet as a whole.”
In the end the colonists voted for LilyGrey, Madeleine’s suggestion.
Xie Fei, I Fu-en and Hu Min accompanied Liang-xin to the seashore on its first exploratory trip. Dawn came and went. For some hours they waited, half expecting a third electromagnetic storm to destroy the android, but when, as noon passed, nothing happened they decided to give Liang-xin free rein.
“Reach out,” Xie Fei said. “Sense whatever you can.”
Liang-xin took a few steps forward. Xie Fei turned her gaze to distant hills where the spherics roiled a hundred metres deep; millions upon millions already in view, delicately bouncing, a monochrome sheet at that distance though tinted yellow by the sun. And the bass groan of the spherics beat against her skin. She folded her arms, waiting, impatient, trying to ignore the planet-wide thunder.
I Fu-en turned to Xie Fei. “What if the spherics only have one sense?” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“What if they cannot see, hear, smell, or even feel with their outer skins. I found little or nothing that suggested nerve endings. Suppose those external nodules are their sense organ – electromagnetic only.”
Xie Fei shrugged. “They could still be intelligent.”
“We create our conscious selves from the impressions we receive through our senses. We create our abstract, social world, in which we live almost as if we had souls.”
“You surely do not believe in the existence of souls?” Xie Fei said.
I Fu-en shook his head. “But it may be a necessary illusion for conscious entities. Have you wondered whether or not the spherics noticed the disappearance of all those kin taken and dissected by Hu Min?”
“No… I have not wondered that.”
“I have.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
I Fu-en pointed at Liang-xin. “It returns.”
Xie Fei assumed this was her answer. Turning to Liang-xin she said, “What have you discovered?”
Liang-xin paused, hesitated in a way almost human – a copied gesture, Xie Fei knew. Then it replied, “Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“There is an environment out there, but it is monotonous.”
*
Liang-xin spent twenty five minutes in the middle of the night destroying the Von Neumann machines. It made a start annihilating the other androids before a scientist reached it. As the pair fought, I Fu-en appeared, alerted by the noise; he took a knife and sliced through the android’s neck cabling. It became inutile at once.
At the subsequent inquiry, Xie Fei said, “Liang-xin was sent to destroy the Von Neumanns.”
I Fu-en replied, “Possibly… possibly.”
“You think otherwise?”
“How could it be otherwise?” Madeleine added.
I Fu-en gave the grin that so annoyed certain of his colleagues. “What exactly did Liang-xin say? ‘There is an environment out there, but it is monotonous.’ Notice that it did not say electromagnetic environment.”
“Your point?” Xie Fei asked.
“The spherics certainly did something to influence Liang-xin, but how could they have communicated with it so early? We do not even know if meaningful communication is possible. No, Liang-xin experienced something abstract that turned it against the Von Neumanns.”
“Without the Von Neumanns our manufacturing capacity is almost nothing,” Madeleine said. Fear lay in her face.
I Fu-en nodded. “But we do remain viable. I am with Xie Fei – the flexibility, the viability of LilyGrey is all important, its meat growers, its hydroponics…”
“But Liang-xin?” Xie Fei insisted.
I Fu-en turned to face her. “I believe the choice of target was significant. I believe Liang-xin chose the Von Neumanns because of their manufacturing capacity. It saw something in the spherics’ electromagnetic environment-“
“But what?” Xie Fei interrupted.
“Liang-xin would almost certainly not act against humans. It would have known how important the Von Neumann machines were to LilyGrey. But it was not conscious. It was, effectively, an animal. I think it saw the animal nature of the spherics and identified with that nature. I think it saw the demise of the starship recorded in the electromagnetic environment. I think it saw a presentiment of our own demise, here, soon.”
Xie Fei was shocked by this. For some moments she, as everybody else, could not speak. Then she said, “It was… hypnotised?”
“Something like that. Its brain was turned – flipped. Like a religious conversion. A madness, almost. I’m sorry, Xie Fei…”
A young woman ran into the inquiry room; Xie Fei turned to her at once, sensing peril. “What, Eleanor?”
“Hor Namhong and Hu Min have declared an independent lilypad!” Eleanor ran up to Xie Fei and handed over a slip of plastic, on which sentences had been written in ordinary ink.
We, Hor Namhong and Hu Min, along with forty nine other members of this colony – listed below – declare lack of confidence in the leadership of the Captains’ Council. We therefore declare ourselves independent. This lilypad is now renamed New Angkor. We two are the New Angkor Council. We have reassigned all the androids on our lilypad to us.
Xie Fei showed what she really felt on her face. Crushed, appalled, she sagged back in her chair, rubbing the palms of her hands against her cropped scalp. Then she flopped. Sighed.
Madeleine said, “We can’t allow dissent. We’ll have to get over there and take back-”
“We shall have to allow dissent,” Xie Fei declared. “We are being pushed backwards by events, we are becoming savages.” She took a deep breath, then lifted her head to face the dozens watching her. “A hundred years of political quietude on the starship, then this? Are we so afraid of uncertainty that we fragment beneath the storm?”
Madeleine said, “If we accept what Hor Namhong and Hu Min have done-“
“If we don’t there may be bloodshed. That we avoid, at all costs. There are five hundred of us here and we are marooned twenty two light years from Earth with no chance of rescue. No… we negotiate with Hor Namhong and Hu Min. Who is to say they will not be reasonable? They know the stakes. But we shall have no reduction in our numbers on this planet, for any reason.”
Tears in her eyes, Madeleine said, “Alas that Qu Lei-lei isn’t here.”
*
In private, Xie Fei discussed events with I Fu-en.
“If you are elected to the LilyGrey Captains’ Committee, will you swear loyalty to us within the boundaries of scientific reason?”
I Fu-en nodded. “But Madeleine seems weak compared with you. It appears that she defers to you.”
Xie Fei shook her head. “My public persona is decisive and unemotional. Madeleine’s public persona is conciliatory. That is deliberate. We are different people in private.”
“Is that how it works?”
“Groups of people larger than one hundred and fifty require vertical organisation – and thus leaders,” Xie Fei explained. “The genius of Qu Lei-lei was the multi-skilled council system, discouraging the tendency to idolise lone leaders. But that system, in a society of our numbers, means we have to perform a certain kind of acting in public. I have the same feelings that Madeleine has. You will get used to acting.”
I Fu-en nod
ded.
“Now go and speak with Madeleine, and ask her exactly the same questions you asked me. And, I Fu-en…?”
“Yes?”
“There will be further splits. Expect one new council per lilypad. Do not be concerned – we have the advantage of momentum.”
Xie Fei watched him depart. She sat still for a while as the rest of the inquiry departed, until she sat alone in the chamber. I Fu-en’s position, she realised, turned on a semantic nicety. Yes, she had allowed him leeway, letting his mind run free, pushing boundaries, but what if he was wrong? She agreed with his assessment of Liang-xin but wondered if his conclusion was correct.
And then she had an idea.
When all was said and done, she could not trust Liang-xin, nor any android. She could trust many of her colleagues, her friends, but not all. Yet she automatically trusted herself. Suppose she could experience the spherics electromagnetic environment as had Liang-xin?
She analysed the manufacture of the bass-defeating earpieces, discovering their algorithm, assessing their efficacy, then setting up a computer hub to manufacture a pair of eyepieces and a pair of earpieces. When they were made, she sought Madeleine and I Fu-en.
“These,” she explained, “will allow me to experience the electromagnetic environment, the eyepieces shutting out all external light but transmitting false-colour images in the visible spectrum matching what they detect electromagnetically. Similarly, these earpieces will shut out all extraneous sound whilst converting electromagnetic waves on the spheric frequency into audible sound.”
“But these sensors cannot be earthed,” I Fu-en said.
“A risk we have no option but to take.”
“You’re planning to walk on land with these?”
Xie Fei nodded.
Madeline laughed, a hint of mockery in her voice. “You’re trying to be a hero. Is this because of the New Angkor lilypad?”
“Of course not! I am a conscious human being. Liang-xin was not conscious. I will be able to assess the spherics meaningfully.“
“You’ll need an experimental control,” Madeleine pointed out.
Xie Fei nodded. That was true. She remained silent.
