Except for A4.
It did its best. Lange could see the apical cluster spin in its housing, doing its utmost to track the other arms. He could see the arm hesitate now and then, as if distracted by some invisible bauble in the middle distance. It reached, grabbed, pulled. Always a half beat behind. Medusa staggered forward, its rhythm just a little off-balance.
“It’s getting better,” Sansa said from the void beyond virt. “Used to track all the other arms to keep in sync. Now it’s figured out it only needs to track Three and Five.”
He blinked against a momentary break in the feed. “Not even half a meter per second.”
“Still pretty good, under the circumstances.”
Lange unplugged. The murky abyss vanished; the grimy, cabled confines of Mission Control reasserted themselves. “Let’s crank clock speed on A4. If it’s taking its lead from the other arms, the least we can do is give it faster reflexes to help it keep up.”
“Okay.”
He pursed his lips. “I’m kind of surprised the other arms aren’t better at compensating.”
“They would be, if A4 was a tetch more predictable. It’s response times aren’t consistent between strokes.”
“Any idea why?”
“Working on it,” Sansa said. “The obvious physical damage, of course, but there’s something else. Keeps returning an Unidentified Error.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. It’s hurting. It just doesn’t know why.”
“I MEAN, THIS could be it,” Lange said, and waited.
“Uh huh,” Raimund replied two and a half seconds later.
“No more renewal pending. No more how can you waste money looking for aliens when everything’s turning to shit here on Earth. No way they can shut us down if this pays off. We can get you out of that shithole and back up here. Get the whole band together again.”
“Sounds great.”—after a pause that seemed way longer than the usual Earth/Luna lag.
Lange rolled his eyes. “Try to control your excitement.”
“Sorry. It’s just, it’s not much to go on.”
“It’s more than we ever had before.”
“That’s kind of my point. Eighteen months poking around up there, and what have we found?”
“Complex organics. By the tonne.”
“No sign of an ecosystem. No metabolic signatures.”
“Come on, Ray. We’ve only surveyed 6% of the seabed.”
“Which, statistically, should be more than enough to detect life. If it was up there.”
“Not if it’s really patchy. Not if it’s limited to a few smokers. Not if it’s built on a novel molecular template, in which case it wouldn’t even register on the usual tests. You wouldn’t even know it was there unless you bumped into it.” It was an old argument. The whole relationship had had a half-full/half-empty vibe to it since Day One.
“What does Sansa say?” Raimund wondered.
“Basically not to get my hopes up.”
“Good advice.”
“Jesus, Ray.” Lange spread his hands. “What are you saying? We shouldn’t even check it out?”
“Of course you should. But no matter how great it would be to get us all back up there, you know what would be even better? Getting you back down here. Someplace you can actually open a window.”
“Yeah. Might be more appealing if the weather didn’t try to kill you whenever you did that.”
“At the very least it would be nice to fuck again without a three-second time lag.”
“Two point five. Teledildonics has come a long way.”
“So did you,” Raimund told him. “Maybe it’s time you came back.”
“WELL THIS IS just dandy. We’re going backwards.”
“Off-course, anyway,” Sansa admitted. “You know how A4 started tracking all the other arms—”
“And then narrowed it to two. Right.”
“It’s tracking all five again. Sometimes. Not always.”
“What? You cranked the clock, right?”
“I didn’t have to.” And at Lange’s look: “Far as I can tell A4 made that call on its own. Boosted its own reflexes to compensate for the damage. System latency for that arm’s below 200msec now.”
“And yet we’re going slower.” Lange grabbed a VisoR off the wall, booted up the time machine. The Enceladus Ocean swallowed him whole.
The data stream had cleaned itself up somewhat, thanks to the robot’s ongoing autoministrations. Lange’s eyes opened onto a 3D composite of sonar and EM and infrared that stripped away the void, showed him the things lurking within. Gashes in the seabed flickered like red mouths, set alight by thermal gradients amplified beyond all reason. Magnetic field lines emerged from the bedrock and arced away in perfect luminous formation, the aura of a dynamo reaching all the way to Saturn. Medusa bent those contours around it into a bright knot, bleeding off some infinitesimal fraction of the great generator’s output for its own use. Lange damped the enhancements, reduced the robot from a riot of false color down to dim gunmetal on a twilit seascape.
Every step was a stumble now. Medusa moved like an insect with half its legs gone, indomitable, incomplete. A4 was barely in sync. When it pulled its weight, it was slow and late to the party; when it didn’t, it just—poked the water, seemingly at random.
“It’s not getting any codes that would explain this,” Sansa said, invisibly close.
Enough of this third-person shit. Lange clicked on A4’s apical cluster, felt a brief disorienting flip-flop: suddenly he was inside, looking out from the tip of the arm.
“Skip the boring stuff. Show me the anomalies.”
Time accelerated, braked: A4 was panning from one arm to another, pausing a moment on each. Tacticals hovered lower-right, reported pings fired and not returned.
Blur, brake: a dim shape in the distance, an igneous extrusion of seabed festooned with pores and spicules. Its texture was subtly disturbing for some reason Lange couldn’t put his finger on. A4 couldn’t stop staring at it; it held the focus until its more disciplined peers dragged the robot out of range.
Blur, brake: a strip of basalt body-slammed by some tectonic event into a knife-edged ridge. Clathrate icicles erupted from its surface; Medusa’s palette painted them sapphire and set them glowing.
“It tends to focus on objects with a fractal dimension of 2.5 to 2.9,” Sansa told him. “Starts losing interest around 2.8.”
“Any idea why?”
“No functional significance I can see. Doesn’t map onto any potential life signatures, no association with tectonic hazards— no more than anything else in this damn ocean, at least. I ran a search using the Haussdorf parameters; closest hits I got were polyhedral flakes and Jackson Pollock paintings.”
“So what are we looking at?”
“Aesthetics,” Sansa said.
“Very funny.”
“If you look very closely,” she said, “you’ll see I’m not laughing.”
He pulled off the VisoR. She wasn’t.
“Aesthetics,” Lange repeated.
“For want of a better word.”
“You’re saying, what. A4 just likes certain shapes.”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
He let that sink in. “Fuck off.”
“It coincides with the latency drop: network isolation, increased clock speed, increased coherence.”
“Decreased performance.”
“Which is also a trait of information systems when con—”
Lange held up a hand. “Do not say that word.”
After a moment, he added: “Decreased performance is also a hallmark of information systems so stupid they forget what they’ve learned and go back to tracking five arms instead of two.”
“I don’t think that’s what happened. The tracking parameters changed. I think—”
The hand again. “If you say Mirror Test—”
“Wouldn’t dream of it. Because it’s not. But if you suddenly woke up and saw you we
re connected to a bunch of other things that looked like you, wouldn’t you try to talk to them?”
“I spent most of my life surrounded by things that look like me. I came up here so I wouldn’t have to.”
“I estimated a normalized Phi,” Sansa said.
Lange closed his eyes. “Of course you did.”
“I zeroed out the damage we could account for and looked at the residuals. Stirred in latency and some integration metrics I ballparked from the diagnostic tests.”
He didn’t ask. She told him anyway. “Zero point nine two.”
“So Medusa is conscious.”
“Not all of it. Just the arm.”
“Still. That’s what you’re saying.”
“That’s what the data say.”
“Your unidentified error.”
Her nose twitched; the equivalent of a shrug. “There’s no explicit error code for existential suffering.”
“If there was,” Lange said, “I’d be returning it right now.” He took a breath, let it out. “You know we have to shut it down, right?”
“It’s sapient, Lange. There’s someone in there.”
He nodded. “And whoever they are, they’re grinding the whole system to a halt. We’ve got sixty-nine hours before the clock runs down, and we’re going the wrong way. We’ll make better progress without a navel-gazing ball and chain pulling us off course.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Because awareness plus needs equals rights. Isn’t that the way it goes? Isn’t that why you and I are persons?”
“What needs? A4 doesn’t care whether it lives or dies.”
“You’re sure of that, are you? You talked to it?”
“It can’t care. It doesn’t have a limbic system.”
“It’s got imperatives though, right? Mission priorities. Maybe that’s not technically an instinct or a need but it might as well be. And one of the classic definitions of suffering is imposed suppression of natural behaviors. Keeping A4 from fulfilling its programmed tasks is like taking a bird that migrates halfway around the world and locking her up in a cage.”
“Sansa. It’s free to pursue its mission priorities right now. It’s completely fucking them up.”
“It’s a newborn. It’s still learning.”
Lange couldn’t resist. “You’re sure of that, are you? You talked to it?”
“I could. We could.”
“How? Did it teach itself Hoo-Man while we weren’t looking? It doesn’t talk except in status reports and error codes and those things are all—”
“Subconscious?” Sansa suggested.
“You said it yourself. No error code for existential suffering.”
“So give it one. Teach it to talk.”
“It wouldn’t change anything. It wouldn’t mean anything.”
“Why not?”
“Because you can inject Natural Language routines into any old bot and it’ll pass a Turing Test just fine. NL routines are just statistical flowcharts. There’s no comprehension. You think you’ll be proving something just because you can get Medusa to say it hurts instead of packet loss? Even if there’s someone in there—”
“There is, Lange. If we were talking about meat you wouldn’t deny it for an instant.”
“Fine. How do you connect the flowchart to the ghost? How does the ghost affect the code?”
“I don’t know, Lange. Seems to just sort itself out for the rest of us.”
“It’s an emergent property. You’re seriously suggesting that a magnetic field can reach back and change the magnet?”
“Why else did A4 develop such an interest in watching the scenery?”
“Because the same architecture that generates the q-field also generates weird maladaptive behaviors. It’s no big secret.”
“Right. Everything’s correlation, nothing’s causal, and we’re the exception why, exactly? Because we happened to wake up first?”
“Because we do have needs, Sansa. Because we care whether we live or die, and we as a society have decided that Suffering Is Not A Good Thing.”
“Lange—”
He cut her off. “No. I’m sorry. The decision’s been made.”
She fell silent for a moment or two.
“Well, you’re right about that at least,” she said, and vanished.
“I CAN’T FUCKING believe it. She got a restraining order.”
Raimund blinked. “What?”
“I got a memo from ICRAE. I am not to deprecate or deactivate Medusa or any autonomous or semiautonomous component thereof pending a review of potential emergent personhood. They’ve even suspended repairs on the router. High-bandwidth reintegration with the larger system might decohere the local entity.” Lange clenched his fists. “I can’t believe she went behind my back.”
“But it is conscious, right?”
“It’s an arm. You know the synapse count on one of those DPNs? Not even corvid level. Barely even a cat.”
“Cats can’t suffer?”
“A4 can’t suffer. You can’t suffer if you’re not afraid of anything, if you don’t want any—Jesus, Ray, you know this.”
“I’m sorry. Yeah, I know it. Intellectually. It’s just, you know. AI’s generally do have fears and wants.” Raimund grinned out of one side of his mouth. “I always thought that was funny, you know? We spend a hundred years making all those movies and virts about robots rising up and AIs bootstrapping into gods— and then we decide the best way to keep them from doing that is to give them all survival instincts. What could possibly go right?”
Almost against his will, Lange felt himself smile.
He shut it down. “I’ve never seen her so passionate about something. I didn’t even know she could be.”
“Yeah, well—” a hiss of sunspot static— “that’s the thing about neuromorphics. Everything’s emergent. Give ’em an imperative that barely crosses the line into instinct and they grow a whole damned amygdala out of it.”
“Still better than the alternative.” Lange shook his head. “You know what really pisses me off? The order was timestamped while we were still arguing. She went behind my back, and she went before we’d even talked about it. Before I even knew.”
“Wow. It’s almost like she knew what you’d say in advance.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing.” Raimund shrugged across four hundred thousand kilometers. “Except maybe, never get into an argument with anyone who thinks ten times as fast as you.”
“Faster isn’t smarter. She just crams ten times the bullshit into the same time frame.”
“Hey, be thankful she can’t up her clock any more than that. Think of the bullshit you’d be wading through if she ever came off the leash.”
Lange nudged the gain to try and clear the static, nudged it back when it only made things worse. “Damn thing’s barely crawling now, and half the time it’s not even crawling in the right direction. At this rate it doesn’t matter whether we saw aliens or not. Clock runs down before we can find out.”
“Apply for an extension. It’s only reasonable, given the circumstances.”
“I have. They said it looked like an exotic mineral formation.” Lange raised his eyes to Heaven: Take me now, Lord. “Everything’s gone to shit since NASA went under. All these new guys care about are their stockholders and the monkeywrenchers and all those idiots screaming that Enceladus is just a cover for Zero-Pointers building their Space Ark so they can fuck off to Mars.” He gently banged his head against the display. “God damn that bitch.”
“You ever think it might not even be about Medusa?”
Lange straightened.
“I mean, what are the odds?” Snow sparkled across Raimund’s face. “We spend a year and a half coming up empty and then, just before the money stops, you encounter something that might change everything. Then Medusa gets kicked way off-station, who knows how long it’ll take to get back. Now you can’t even repair the r
outer, so it’ll take even longer. That’s a string of really bad luck that just might stretch the mission past its expiry date, all over a couple of frames of enhanced imagery that might not be anything at all.”
Lange frowned. “You saying she faked it?”
“Course not. Not deliberately, anyway. But, you know. What’s faked, these days? Every byte Medusa puts out has been juiced and jacked before anyone even sees it, right? Everything’s false colors and Fourier transforms. And we are looking for signs of life. It only makes sense to enhance elements consistent with that. It’s not malicious. It’s not even counter to conditioning. It’s just— we all develop biases. For years Sansa’s prime directive has been further the mission. Maybe she doesn’t want to see it end any more than you do.”
“But she warned me against reading too much into it.”
“So her ass is covered. Still doesn’t mean she didn’t know exactly how many dots she needed to show before you added a few of your own. Connected them.”
“So she’s a mind reader now.”
“She doesn’t need to read your mind. She only needs to know you a little better than you know yourself.” That lopsided grin again. “And sweetie, don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s not exactly a high bar to clear.”
UP THE WELL, down the line, back in time.
Medusa lurched and twitched across the seabed, kicking up particles far too jagged to qualify as mud. Like flecks of mica, Lange thought, or tiny shards of broken bone. No soft organic rainfall here. No accumulation of dead biomass rotted to bits during some long slow descent from the euphotic zone. This was pure uncut seabed, ground to powdered glass by the relentless deforming squeeze and shear of tidal gravity. Enceladus was Saturn’s own personal stress ball.
Autorepair hadn’t been able to fix A4’s hardline before Sansa’s restraining order stopped it from trying. It shouldn’t have mattered. Multi-armed, multi-brained, multiply-redundant, Medusa should have been able to lose half its appendages with only moderate loss of functionality. A cut cable was nothing. The system should be compensating way better than this.
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