Sailing Bright Eternity

by Gregory Benford

  Toby blinked. “But he’s my, my—”

  “Don’t waste your time on it.”

  Toby opened his mouth and said nothing. The Abraham lay like a puppet whose strings had been cut. The eyes roved.

  Toby caught the sleeve of the nurse as the man turned away. “How can anybody make—that?”

  “I heard there’s a place kinda near. Not in this Lane but only one transition away.”

  Toby breathed in little fast gasps and tried to think. “Why would anybody . . . ?”

  “Easy way to get a job done, if you got the tech.”

  “What job?”

  “Ask it.”

  The nurse walked away impatiently. The woman next to Abraham was still sweating and grunting but nobody was paying any attention to her. Toby licked his lips and said to the man on the bed, “I . . . you were . . . made?”

  “Copy. To search . . . for you.” The face of his grandfather looked back at him but the mouth was slack and there was none of the sharpness in the eyes.

  “Who made you?”

  “Re . . . storer.”

  Toby remembered when he and his Family had entered the esty. A long time ago. They had gotten into a legal wrangle and Abraham had wanted to find out what happened to a woman they had read an inscription about, on an ancient wall in a Chandelier. She is as was and does as did. She might have been in a place they called the Restorer. If somehow that place had a template or something . . .

  Toby could not imagine how that was possible. When they were in open space aboard the Argo the Magnetic Mind had spoken of Abraham, but where was he? Stored in a vault?

  “That place copied my grandfather into . . . you?”

  “I woke . . . knowing some of his memories . . . my memories. To seek you. They told me . . . that.”

  A pustule popped on the Abraham’s shoulder. Toby watched something dark and slimy ooze out and scorch the ghostly white skin. He could smell the acrid burnt flesh. The man did not react.

  “Why?”

  “Need you . . . complete the triad.”

  “Who made you?”

  The eyes became veiled. No answer. Toby could not tell if this man, this thing, was trying to lie to him or was just stupefied. He grabbed the man and there was a ripping sound as Toby pulled his head up from the webbing that had been feeding him nutrients. “Who?”

  “Humans.”

  “Which humans?”

  “Humans.”

  “What Family?”

  “Humans.”

  Toby let go of the useless empty package. The man’s head lolled and something went out in the eyes. For an instant he felt a pang of remorse and then he told himself that this was not his grandfather, had never been.

  The Abraham was unconscious. Toby studied the weathered face and as he watched it seemed to cave in like a house burning from the inside.

  He stepped back and butted into the nurse. There was a team working on the woman now. The nurse wasn’t busy so Toby asked him, “How’d he come to be here?”

  “Walked in. Guess I should’ve seen what it was. Been busy here.”

  “What’s . . . it . . . got?”

  “Systemic breakdown. Those copies never get the autoimmunes right.”

  “How long did it live?”

  “Months real time, I’d guess. Could be weeks though.”

  Toby gazed blankly at the wrecked parody of his grandfather. “Did it know it was going to die?”

  “Expect not. These things run with minimum memories usually. Pointless to put in detail work like that.”

  “The Restorer can make a copy that’s not the whole person?”

  The nurse frowned at him. “Where you from?”

  “Snowglade.” This nurse was not a dwarf like Walmsley but still was pretty short. Toby added, “A planet.”

  “I see. Look, don’t let people hear you talk about making exact copies. That’s not just contra, it’s, well . . .”

  “Immoral?”

  “Damn right. Maybe on this glade place you people do that, but not here.”

  “We don’t do it at all.”

  “My Fam doesn’t either. I’m Sox.”

  “Sorry if I—”

  “No mind it. This one—” the nurse waved a hand at the Abraham, “it’s not a Restorer job anyway.”

  “Then who . . . ?”

  “Looks mech to me. They’re getting good lately.”

  Toby watched the life drain out of Abraham and smelled the swampy air that came off it. While this had been going on Toby had not heard the woman in the next bed. Now she began screaming. It was as bad as anything he had ever heard on a battlefield. Not like the births he had seen at all. He stood there while the nurse and some others worked on the woman but he could not get his mind around the meaning of the cooling thing in the bed. When he looked up the woman was quiet again but there was no other sound in the room.

  The nurse held aloft a bloody stump. It was plainly dead and plainly not even approximately human. In the faces around her Toby saw the blank dismay and realized that the damned endlessly tinkering mechs had done something to this woman, too.

  He could guess what it was but he did not want to know for sure. He got out of there fast.

  SIX

  The Incredible in Concrete

  He tried again and again to get out of the Lane. Slithering sounds and hollow echoes boomed down from the vault above and he knew the mechs were not far away. His sensorium was fitful since he had gotten some help with it at the field station. It rang with distant calls for help and he went on knowing that he could do nothing.

  He reached a river and saw that it led down into a box canyon. He found some trees of a kind he had never seen before, sliced them down and built a raft out of bark. He cast off on it. Maybe the mechs would not detect him so well on water, and anyway he could always try to hide underwater. It was a forlorn hope but he clung to it.

  In the mist ahead he thought he saw people. Their skins were paper-white and wrinkled, flesh hanging loosely from thick muscles. All over their faces were little blisters tufted with black hair. He was sick then but not because of the people—who were not there the next time he looked.

  His stomach swerved. Nausea doubled him over, emptied his stomach. Bile droplets hung near him, like moons circling.

  That was how he knew that he was falling. Or that there was no gravitation here, which was somehow the same thing, Quath had said.

  To all sides rose steep cliffs of timestone that worked furiously with heat. Water gushed into steam.

  Weight returned. The current slammed into him, cold and fast. He yelled angrily and it was not out of fear but as a thin human gesture against the clasping strangeness. Echoes reflected. Paired echoes, one tinny and one rumbling, and so strong that the last part of his call met the first part returning home, hollowed out.

  Then he was weightless again.

  Steam all around. Silence. He shouted and could not hear himself at all. The cottony air took everything and gave nothing back.

  There was a thin chain to thinking, he realized, which began with seeing something noticeable, which in time made you see something that wasn’t apparent, which finally made you see something that wasn’t even visible—if you were doing it right. That was how he felt and then saw what he was in. A framed glow ahead showed him that he and a river were emerging from the ground, mysterious and whole.

  A new esty Lane? He heard voices in the captured river as he left it. They were different from the babbling musics of the bright river ahead. Against a curved cliff the river engaged in muttered profundities, circling back on itself now and then to say things over, being sure that it had understood itself.

  He could not breathe. Did not want to. The river ahead was bright and airy and a chatterbox, overfriendly, bowing to both shores with white froth so that neither would feel neglected.

  The water turned to jelly and then to a liquid glass, imponderably slow. He tapped against it. A pane tumbled away and shattered. In
its impact shards of dead moments blistered up and shouted. Popped into tiny droplets. Fell rattling to the ground. Rose up in dying amber flames.

  He stepped over these and walked into a new Lane.

  Moist crackling whipped his hair. His sickness ebbed into a mere sour stomach. Sensations irked his skin. The river that had been a kind of congealed air eased out of his lungs.

  He slept a long time and when he awoke tried to figure out how he had lived.

  Events had a motive force that collided with other intersecting events, all outside human imagination or apprehension. To get through such times, when causes seemed to fall from a great height upon him, he learned to stay fixed, keep even and steady with the swift course of the unimaginable slipping by him. He followed moment to moment, led by impossibility. One foot forward, then another, cautious and unwitting.

  Things happened and he felt them happening, but outside that onrushing fact he had no link with them, no key to the cause or meaning. Maybe they had none. Maybe here such ideas themselves had no meaning. They were human notions after all. Though this place held humans it was not of them.

  The esty did not fit their primate-shaped way of seeing the world—of that he was sure. Those who have been through such blindsiding events, he thought, had made a passage outside of imagination, but within the range of experience. The incredible in concrete. They could not get their minds around what had happened to them.

  Maybe the only other thing like that was death, suredeath, the last thing experienced and never understood.

  A Tapestry of Thought

  The human proved to be most surprising when taken apart.

  They held it aloft. It squirmed. The two intelligences regarded it distantly, reading its shimmering electrical patterns first.

  Such agitation. Yet witness, the connections in its head cycle only a few hundred voltage steps per second.

  So slow! And they still can register realtime events. It does surprisingly well with such an affliction. Notice how it looks around so energetically.

  Perhaps it had difficulty adapting to this position? We are suspending it upside down.

  It thrashes its head around because its eyes are all on one side of the head. So much energy, just to see. A curious choice of construction.

  Look! It is using pattern matching to scan its surroundings. It makes a standard picture. Odd!

  I can measure the data-flow. The brain processor is strongly linked to the eyes, so several times in each second it compares what it is seeing with a standard image it remembers.

  If I move quickly—yes, see? It picks the best matching pattern, estimates possible danger. That tells it what response-script to follow.

  How governed it is by past experience! It keeps twitching as though it could get away.

  Apparently in the past it did escape that way. Look at all the bone and muscle devoted to locomotion. Is it used to being picked up and dangled?

  No—so it redoubles its effort if the situation is unusual. I register high chemical levels squirting into the bloodstream. See, they affect brain performance.

  More programming from its past. It seems to want to run away.

  Its legs certainly do.

  Here, I will put it rightside up.

  Confirmed! It tries to run.

  Slow learner. It cannot outrun us.

  But that must have worked for it in the past, you see. It has no other immediate strategy.

  No wonder. Gaze upon the neural firings in the upper brain. (Curious, putting all the most important networks on top, where impact will most likely injure them.)

  Such slow circuits! Artful patterns, though. It is learning only a few data-droplets per second. Only 10 in one of its years!

  So it simply cannot reason out a fresh strategy for dealing with us in short times. It lacks the computational speed.

  Now it waves its arms.

  Nonrandom, though. Simple symbols, I suspect.

  That shows forward-seeing, adaptive behavior.

  Of a very simple sort.

  Promising. Its brain is made of organic compounds entirely. So-called “Natural” development.

  “Primitive” is a better word. Notice how abstracting functions, which must have evolved later, are simply layered over the older areas in the brain.

  The entire brain design is retrofitted! Surely this thing is not truly conscious.

  Definitely not. It knows very little of what goes on in its mind.

  Watch the flashing patterns. It senses only what occurs in the very topmost layer of its brain.

  All the rest must be a mystery to it. See, down below it is digesting some crude chemical food—but does not think about the act at all.

  It does not even know that it is mixing acids and massaging the bolus.

  Trace this spray of winking light in the head.

  Neurons firing. It is framing a new idea.

  I see. Down below, in the under-brain, now coming up to its limited awareness.

  Now the idea erupts into the over-brain. Spreads. Pretty, in a way.

  That is how ideas come to it? A surprise.

  Whereas to us, it is more like fog condensing.

  How confusing, to never know what is going on inside yourself.

  They speak the same way. Series of sounds emitted acoustically, without their knowing what they will say.

  They find out what they think by speaking?

  Access its acoustic emissions! It is stringing together bursts—“words”—to deal with us.

  What a long word this is.

  That is a scream, actually.

  Meanwhile I see below its topbrain the motor muscle commands are—caution!

  There! I caught the weapon. A simple chemical-discharge type. Amusing, the presumption.

  Retain it for inspection. The creature became very excited—see the gaudy streamers of thought-webs!

  Nearly all below the overbrain, so it does not truly know that it is feeling them. Yet the thoughts cause organs to squirt chemicals into the blood. What a curious way of talking to yourself. Not sensing it directly.

  Or controlling it.

  It still wriggles in our grasp. What slow neurons!

  This poor thing has been hampered all through its evolution by these pitifully torpid synapses. They are a million times slower than ours!

  But beautiful, in their serene way.

  Do not try to manufacture beauty out of mere necessity.

  This design was necessary?

  Clearly these sluggish neurons forced such creatures to use parallel distributed processing.

  How horrible.

  See it dance! Is that “anger”?

  Apparently. Their literature speaks of such a response. They do it often. See, “anger” is coded much like those orange-white filigrees now spreading through its midbrain.

  Similar patterns, I see. Confirmation—they run in parallel.

  Watch it try to have a new idea! See, they decide what to think by adding up many thousands of brain cell triggers. And those same brain cells are at the same time tied up in other parallel problems.

  See, while it believes it is thinking about getting away from us—

  Yes!—a small submind is meditating upon a sexual adventure it had, quite some time ago. And the submind enjoys its recallings.

  What pleasure-fiends they are.

  I wonder that they can get anything done at all.

  They do everything at once, that is their secret. The same brain cell can be idea-making and at the same time, helping it digest food. How difficult!

  Meanwhile, other decisions are trying to get made. They have to wait in line!

  All with the same cells, tied together.

  Incredible!

  I am amazed that the tiny thing can concurrently walk and talk.

  Simultaneously, yes—but not very well.

  So ungainly! Even a sentimentalist like you will have to admit that.

  True. Delicate neural circuits atop the head. Feet go forwar
d, it starts to fall, then catches itself with the other foot. What if it did not?

  Then head on the floor!

  What a movement strategy.

  A risky one. Most sensible animals use four feet. We, of course, employ six.

  Notice how afraid it is of falling. It devotes much brain space to avoiding that.

  I believe I understand this curious method of parallel distributed thinking. Notice that when a brain cell dies—see there, a feeble light just winked out—their internal computation still goes on.

  You are right! See, this anger-reflex is fading, turning blue, seeping down into the circuits which control its digestion. A cell dies, but the pattern-flow continues. So the creature is usefully redundant.

  But it also does not know it is losing brain cells.

  No point in that, I suppose. This unfortunate being cannot replace the cells anyway. Poor design.

  This parallel thinking masks so much and—look out!

  They are quick at some things. Its armored feet are powerful.

  Are you damaged?

  Only temporarily. My inboards will refashion a patch of my carapace.

  Actual physical damage! How quaint. I have never seen it before.

  Apparently they cannot directly attack our circuits.

  I doubt that they can even read us.

  Look how frustration-webs spread through it. Down to the very base of the brain.

  Dramatic! Frustration seizes the entire brain, so that it cannot think of anything else.

  And other parts of its brain do not know how the decision was made to be frustrated.

  I gather that most of its brain has no choice but to go along.

  It lives that way all the time?

  Apparently. Torn by emotion.

  Most of what it decides, the rest of it cannot know! Emotions must appear to govern its actions without obvious cause. Oh, look—

  Ah! It injures me, too.

  I shall seize it afresh.

  Thanks be to you. It ripped away my microwave antenna.

  I should have detected its plans.

  How could you? It did not know itself until a fractional moment ago.

  I am beginning to understand the data files we captured. The term “free will” must refer to this method of thinking.