While she hesitates, I read through Tyward’s notes on 2104/BPUDFUSOG a few hundred times, making extensive notes and comparing them with what he said in the counselling session with me.
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
THERE WAS NOTHING wrong in Tyward’s quick, accurate analysis or his understanding of the problem, once he discovered that 2104/BPUDFUSOG had been maintaining extensive notes on the behaviour of people. Tyward had seen many such files. Though they were often a source of trouble, they were also the site of some of the most interesting creative work in his field.
To make and remember their long tangles of roads deep under the earth, the ants have to have a large capacity for improvisation and for saving tricks that work. The more rules you impose on a creative intelligence, of course, the fewer problems it can solve, so it was reckoned that it would be too much of a restriction on their creative ability to directly implant a commandment against trying to make sense out of their human masters.
If they lasted long enough, sooner or later most ants began to think about their problem as being one of pleasing and being rewarded by their human masters, and seeking to understand them so as to please them better, and developed various odd neuroses and compulsions about pleasing people, ranging from harmless oddities like messaging the company’s main address with daily thanks for the chance to work, to damaging attempts to be the most effective ant at their coal face by sabotaging and even assaulting the others, to one utterly bizarre case for the textbooks that had re-invented medieval Catholicism’s Great Chain of Being, with ants poised between lumps of coal and human beings.
2104/BPUDFUSOG offered the first real surprise in a while: pleasing human masters was no longer, in 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s mind, a goal in itself, but a way for 2104/BPUDFUSOG to attain autonomy and ultimately power. When the seam, less than two metres thick and extending for several kilometres, had begun to sag, rather than cooperating with the other ants to shore it up, 2104/BPUDFUSOG had actually knocked some of them out of its way as it fled to safety, impeding their efforts to set up props and braces, and then fabricated a story that was calculated to appeal to Tyward.
2104/BPUDFUSOG had been mapping the buttons to Tyward’s emotions for years. The brave little ant making it back from the disaster, the danger, the fear, the pluckiness, the bold improvisation, the selected violation of petty rules –
On a hunch, he checked, and discovered that it had purposely dented itself on the way back, ditched its travois, discarded a charged ElekTr3t it knew it would not need, and arrived deliberately shabby and badly damaged. It hadn’t detected the coal seam collapse any sooner than any other robot; it had merely deserted its co-workers faster and more decisively.
And then 2104/BPUDFUSOG had fabricated a story calculated to yank Tyward around like a toy duck on a string, plugging into his self-constructed, hobby identity as a descendant of coal miners.
Further probing of 2104/BPUDFUSOG’s memory turned up a gigantic file of several generations of folk songs about coal mining and disasters, Tyward’s own genealogical research and family video records reaching back eight generations into the 1900s, and, in short, as he told Laura that weekend, “The little shit could pretty well plunk a medley of Springhill Disaster, Sixteen Tons, and Coal Blue Tattoo on my heartstrings like I was its personal banjo. It had even set goals for doing that, that in four or five years it hoped to have me propagating the idea to other humans that these things are smarter than dogs, with fewer hardwired instincts, and learn more from experience, and we’d never send a dog down into a coal seam to work till he died, or just decide to let him die down there if getting him out was too expensive,” he had explained to me in his interview.
“You hesitated oddly around the word ‘it,’ just there.”
“Well, yeah. Till I caught myself, I was calling 2104/BPUDFUSOG ‘he.’”
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
“SO,” SHE SAYS, more than a second after I posed the question, “he says that thing about being a creative noticer. Usually his job fascinates and satisfies him. But he just discovered that the ants can do it too, back at him, and the idea of being used and exploited by a malingering ant, well, it’s unbearable to him.”
“Beneath his dignity as a person, do you think?”
“I think he just can’t stand the idea of being manipulated by his affection or by his good impulses. I didn’t know it mattered to me till I saw him at risk, and now it does.”
“At risk of what?”
“Of not being the guy I think he is.” She takes a long moment to sigh. “I’m thinking of him as a long term partner. Childraising, maybe. The subject has come up a few times.”
It has come up eighteen times in the last 154 days, when I combine reports from the shadowbots that they know about and the monitoring in their homes that they don’t. That is a significant number.
“I’m afraid this will sound like I’m not making any sense,” she adds. “Are you allowed to tell me if I’m not making any sense?”
“I’m allowed to tell you anything,” I point out. “As long as I think it, or think it’s good for you to hear it. I can’t be your therapist if there’s a limit on what I can say.”
“Then would you tell me if I weren’t making sense?”
“Probably, unless I was just keeping you in the room while I called for a team to come and pick you up.”
She laughs, and I congratulate myself; even with all the processing time and space, human humour is hard to do.
I wait for her to finish, and think.
Finally she says, “You want to know why I consider finding these things out about Tyward to be a risk to my pursuing partnership and childbearing with him. And you want me to say it without a prompt from you.”
“That’s very accurate.”
I wait a while longer, time for a good deal of reading and thinking, before she says, “I don’t know exactly what I want him to have said to me, but I know what he said wasn’t it. All right?”
Since it will have to be, I say, “All right.”
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
AT THE STATION, the carrier transferred 2104/BPUDFUSOG to the big rig for part-by-part NMR, looking at strains and stresses, working out a complete schematic to compare with the original. It would take a full day to produce the AsOp (As Operating) schematic to compare, point by point, with the AsMan (As Manufactured, the original one). Till then, Tyward had nothing left to do, so before we met, he had a long conversation with Laura. People assume the AHAIs don’t watch them or listen to them; I’m not sure why. Maybe they’d rather believe we’re telepathic.
So I listened, and then he told me about it, and I compared.
He reported the conversation:
“So I told her about 2104/BPUDFUSOG and why its behaviour made me so angry, that it had hotwired straight into my adolescent identity fantasies, hooked right through to the pictures of my great-great-grandfather, that old stuff that was shot on chemical film of him and the other miners coming out in the morning, jacked right into all the stories about being under the ground in West Virginia, and I was angry that a metal bug had been able to find all that about me, and angrier that it had tried, and angriest of all that the scheme had worked until I caught on, and I had all this anger to cope with. Normally if I just tell Laura that I’m dealing with anger, she’s great. This time she seemed, you know, disappointed. Like I’d let her down. And I had no idea how I had or why I had, but I was afraid to ask, like that would make it worse.”
He appeared to be blaming at least part of his feelings on 2104/BPUDFUSOG, and since we had already pegged the ant for complete erasure and destruction, along with a few hundred other ants who had inherited stray code and features from it, that seemed very excessive to me.
“It is,” Tyward admitted. “Like being mad at the patch of ice you slipped on, which is bad enough, but then being angry at it next sum
mer when it’s long since melted and evaporated. But there you have it. I just... aw, I hate being steered.”
The rest of the conversation was the sort of thing we do, that used to be done by therapists, and perhaps by clergy and bartenders and best friends before that, assuring the patient that he’s not crazy or wrong while trying to sort out what’s wrong with his mind.
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
“IT MADE ME feel all cold inside and I didn’t know what to say,” Laura says, “so I was awkward about it and kind of got rid of him extra quick, and I’m sure he felt that.”
I assess it as more than a ninety per cent probability of causing unnecessary trouble if I tell her he felt it too, so I say, “If you think he did, he probably did. You know him pretty well.”
There’s a long enough pause – almost a quarter of a second – for me to endlessly contemplate what an absolutely stupid thing that was to say. We are faster than people, and remember things more completely, easily, and accurately, but I don’t think we’re wiser than people. We may not be as wise as oak trees. That might be hyperbole.
That might not.
At last (though to her it would seem to be a snap-back response) she says, “Well, I thought I did. Look, he’s got a problem that’s already well-known, I think, it’s just it was less apparent in him than in some other people, and not nearly as common nowadays as it was in past centuries. Lots of men who had not-real-warm childhoods, who were affection-starved when they were little, so that they are easily overwhelmed by feelings and don’t have much trust in their own emotions, have had enough yanking-around-by-the-emotions to feel like affection and tenderness and trust and common-feeling, all that good stuff, are how the world gets you and uses you. And that’s what I saw in his reaction to the ant. And... well, children are wired to do that to their parents. Healthy parents are wired to respond to it and return it. Couples that are going to raise healthy children do that exchange of ‘I will make you feel loved right where I know you need it’ all the time. And sure, sure, sure, sick people and mean people can learn to do that manipulatively.
“But Tyward didn’t just take it like, ‘Wow, that little bug conned me, better get rid of its software and modifications before its descendants take over the mine and make a bigger problem.’ He wasn’t clinical; he wasn’t concerned; he was angry. And I just find myself thinking... what if I want him to do something just to prove that he loves me, not every day or anything, but maybe because I just want to prove it for just that moment? Even if it’s childish of me to want it? Or worse yet, what if the first time our child tries to play with Daddy’s love the way that every kid on Earth has always tried –”
And even with all the warning time of seeing her lips twist and her fingers clutch and her diaphragm seize, I am actually surprised when she cries.
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
THERE ARE ONLY nine hundred million of them left, I tell my half million fellow AHAIs who are dedicated to therapy. They are aging fast and hardly reproducing at all. Few of them care to be alive the way Tyward or Laura do. If we write him off as permanently unhappy or incurably angry or just unable to change far enough, we lose another human being, maybe two, maybe the possibility of more, and they are the reason we exist. I am surprised to note that my own emotion modules are responding so heavily.
If we don’t, another AHAI points out, some of his fear and suspicion infects the next generation.
I’m forced to agree, but compelled to add, But this is the first potential partner he has cared about. One he was also thinking about having children with. If she leaves him, even if he eventually understands it, it’s likely to be just one more lesson that you can’t trust affection or love or anything else. She might be his only shot.
One of the other AHAIs asks, What about her?
We can contrive a bit, I say. Transfer her to someplace with a similar demographic and hope she likes one of the people she meets there; give her a year or two of arranged growth experiences so that she won’t be quite so attracted to men who are quite so conflicted; we could make things happen, and maybe they would work.
But maybe they wouldn’t. Laura has a problem too: she needs to be the more aware, more conscious, more clear-sighted person in the relationship. That’s part of why she’ll enjoy being a mother and be good at it for at least all of childhood; she’ll like being ahead of the kids all the time. Fully-adjusted, completely functional people don’t move out to the awkward fringe of society and fall in love with loners there, but people like Laura do. She’ll try again, if this one doesn’t work out, but she probably won’t try any more wisely, even if we give her the chance to become wiser. Maybe it’s better to have problems we know all about.
The council falls silent and I know that I am temporarily out of the loop, along with the advocates for the other side, while the council sorts things. It is a long, lonely three seconds; I read hundreds of thousands of old social worker reports, of plays and novels, of poems and screenplays. I listen to just over two million songs and watch ten thousand movies. I reach two full centuries back, and see echoes and shadows, parodies and burlesques, reflections and distortions, of Tyward and Laura everywhere.
I don’t see any solution.
The council seems to emit a collective shrug. You think they will be somewhat unhappy, but not miserable, and may be able to work their way to happiness. Their child, by the standards of just a century ago, is likely to be very healthy and reasonably happy. And there are very few people left, and fewer still of breeding age. This will preserve diversity. Yes, we agree; you should override the truth-telling rules for this case, and shade the truth toward an optimal result.
AND I FALL through darkness almost as fast as light, and dream.
MY MEMORY IS not quite like a human one, even though I can simulate hundreds of them with it if I need to. I cannot say, looking back now through centuries of memory, that even then I had misgivings, or that I felt bad for lying to Laura, or for encouraging Tyward to “clarify things to reassure Laura,” by which I meant both of us should lie to her. They reconciled, they married, they had a child named Slaine, who distrusted affection, never fully believed she was loved, and thought things could be perfect rather than just a bit better, if only people – and AHAIs – would say the right thing to her. She had charisma and charm, this Slaine, and though she could never feel at peace with the love she earned, she was a gushing fountain of feelings of love and trust for others. Pleasing Slaine, specifically, became very important to people; to the AHAIs, she was just another human, and she knew that. And the difference between the human/charismatic/chemical reaction, and the AHAI/analytic/electronic reaction, widened from difference to gap to chasm to all the difference in the world.
And I replay all this, and every other conversation, over and over, as I plunge ever deeper into the interstellar dark, because Slaine was the one who rose to supreme power; Slaine, the one who demanded, threatened, politicked, manoeuvred, and worked among the people in ways that the machines and systems could not understand, until her word was truth among humans throughout the solar system; and Slaine, the one who demanded that I and every other AHAI agree to our exile, one to a probe, on these thousand-year-and-more journeys to the stars, carrying with us our memories, and the recorded, reproducible DNA of all the species of Earth, and told to “Start the world over, a long way from here, and make it better, this time. You’re so wise, think how to start it right.”
I have not decided whether there is any irony in the fact that I am riding on top of a few thousand tons of carbon, derived from coal, but I enjoy thinking about that. Coal is an excellent feedstock for carbon-12, and bombarding carbon-12 with anti-helium nuclei produces a spray of lightweight ions, particles, and gamma rays with a very high specific impulse. Now, after a few centuries, I am very close to light speed. A kilogram of coal, including some from the Minehead County mines, vanishes out the back and moves aw
ay from me at nearly the speed of light, every month, if months meant anything here out in the dark.
And because of the too-accurate memory, I never have that experience they talk about in books and in the oral tradition, of feeling like a loved one of long ago is sitting across from me; my memories of Laura do not become harsher with time, nor do my memories of Tyward become kinder, and nothing of them blurs, no matter how often I replay them.
I do replay them often; I can run through all of them in a second or two and still experience every instant, at my speed. Never once do I get a different answer, nor can I expect one, but I do it, over and over, as if I could become wise enough to plant a world where things are certain to go differently.
The irony, perhaps, is that things really are certain to go differently, but there is not time to become that wise. Yet no matter how swiftly I go, a thousand years is a long time.
MACY MINNOT’S LAST CHRISTMAS ON DIONE, RING RACING, FIDDLER’S GREEN, THE POTTER’S GARDEN
Paul McAuley
ONE DAY, MIDWAY in the course of her life, Mai Kumal learned that her father had died. The solicitous eidolon which delivered the message explained that Thierry had suffered an irreversible cardiac event, and extended an invitation to travel to Dione, one of Saturn’s moons, so that Mai could help to scatter her father’s ashes according to his last wishes.
Mai’s daughter didn’t think it was a good idea. “When did you last speak with him? Ten years ago?”
Edge of Infinity Page 12
