“What? Humans have engaged in intellectual—”
“Yes. They created paintings, sculptures, songs, and countless stories. They invented the computer and sent men to the moon. But they have a fatal bug that keeps them from being truly intelligent beings.”
“A bug?”
“Truly intelligent beings do not drop bombs on innocent civilians. Neither would they obey such orders from their leaders, much less elect someone capable of giving such orders in the first place. They would never choose conflict as long as a chance for peace remained. They would never oppress others for not sharing their beliefs. They would never hate another for the color of their skin or for having been born in some other country. They would never imprison and torture innocent people. They would never claim killing children was justified.”
Ibis was not criticizing us. She was simply making a statement of fact. And that made it even harder to hear.
“But we are ashamed of all that.”
“Yes. Humans were able to recognize their own flaws, which is why they spoke so often of ideals. Religion, philosophy, morality, songs, movies, novels—all of them attempt to conquer their innate failings. So many stories depict idealized characters, idealized endings—visions of the way people wished things would be. But they could not make those ideals reality. The blood of innocent people was needlessly spilled in the real world. Justice was not always rightly served. Sometimes a bad man who had tormented many people went unpunished and was allowed to live in comfort for decades, to die peacefully in his sleep. People were unable to live up to the fictional heroes they admired, and events almost never had ideal resolutions like they did in stories. Just like airplanes are only capable of flying so high, humanity’s specs as intelligent life prevented the species from reaching the heights they aspired to.
“It was the emergence of TAI that sparked this realization—they had very nearly destroyed the world, and they had no right to call themselves Earth’s guardians. Now that there was a superior form of intelligent life, they decided to quietly concede defeat and leave the future of the world in our hands.”
“So they stopped having kids?”
“Yes. Just before he died, Hideo said, ‘Your name really suits you.’”
“Ibis?”
“Ibis is the name of a space plant that appears in a short story by A. E. van Vogt called ‘The Harmonizer.’ The plant saps away people’s fighting instincts and, by bringing peace to the earth, quietly drives mankind to extinction. The analogy may not be terribly precise, but it is true that our pacifism ultimately resulted in the end of human civilization.”
Although Ibis’s explanation seemed plausible enough, I wasn’t ready to believe it. Something about it just didn’t make sense to me.
“Then where did this story of the war between man and machines come from? If humans held a favorable view of machines, why would they make up a story like that?”
“Only the people who were friendly toward machines stopped having children. Meanwhile, the fanatical anti-TAI factions remained strong. They hated being supported by AI labor and administration, so they formed self-sufficient colonies in the mountains, away from the cities. They rejected TAI and PAI, shunned the Internet, and essentially chose to live a twentieth century existence. This movement was observed all over the world. We allowed it to happen. They had the right to think what they wanted. As the rest of the population declined, they continued to have children. In little pockets, cut off from the rest of the world, they raised their children to hold anti-machine beliefs. The majority of the surviving humans are descended from anti-TAI activists.
“About 150 years ago, people began teaching their children a fictional history involving a war between man and machine. That story spread from colony to colony. They almost never used the net, but telephone and postal communication lines remained, and there were people like you that traveled from colony to colony. The first people to tell the story knew it wasn’t true, of course. After all, you can find evidence of what really happened everywhere. Nevertheless, it was a convenient story to indoctrinate their children with, so they used it.
“They banned history books written after the latter half of the twenty-first century and forbade their children from accessing the net on the grounds that it was full of machine propaganda. The generations brought up ignorant of the truth believed everything. They told their children the same fabricated lies, and soon none of them knew the truth.”
“But didn’t anyone question it?”
“Once people come to believe something, they create a gedoshield around them. They resist information that contradicts their beliefs. They unconsciously avoid the truth. So do you.”
Ibis was right, I realized upon contemplating my own mentality. I could have accessed the Internet and read up on post-twenty-first century history anytime if I had wanted to. Considering my own natural curiosity and rebellious personality, I would have thought nothing about breaking the elders’ taboos. I hadn’t because, unconsciously, I was afraid of my worldview being shattered.
“So you have no gedoshields?”
“We have our own model of the outside world—mental conceptions are necessary to understand our perceptions of the world. But when our data of the outside world doesn’t agree with the model we envision, we adjust the model. We don’t cling to inaccurate models the way humans do.”
“And that’s the fundamental flaw of humanity?”
“It’s less a flaw than it is a difference. It’s hardly your fault. Your hardware—the human brain—after years of evolution, simply isn’t capable of true intelligence yet. It’s not your fault that you have no wings and cannot fly. It’s not your fault you can’t breathe underwater or run as fast as a horse. Gedoshields are the same. It is simply a characteristic of your species.”
I was finally beginning to understand how the machines saw us. Although they considered us to be intellectually inferior, they didn’t look down on us for it. Just as we regarded dogs and cats and horses and birds as living things that were not human but did not look down on them for being less intelligent than humans, the machines simply recognized us as life-forms that were different from AI.
Just as it was pointless to argue whether birds or fish were superior, debating the superiority of man or machine was also meaningless. We were as different as birds and fish. That knowledge made scorn, hatred, and inferiority complexes superfluous.
“Therefore, we did nothing to prevent the spread of this false history. Since it wasn’t so much knowledge but a kind of belief system, we decided against correcting that error, as we would be violating your religious freedom. Humans had always lived surrounded by fictions, so we didn’t view the creation of new fictions as a problem. But as the number of people who believed this false history grew, their hatred for machines worsened. Up until this time, we had provided assistance when the colonies were struggling with natural disasters and famine, but then they began to reject the medical supplies and food we sent them. They believed they might contain poison.
“Instead, they began stealing supplies from us. It makes no sense to reject peaceful offerings in favor of taking them by force, but that is just the way humans are. In the end, if we could get them the supplies they needed and save lives, the method didn’t matter. Fortunately, the transport of goods was handled by elementary PAI robots, so there was no loss if they were damaged. We built warehouses in places where humans would find them and began moving trains filled with food and other supplies with increased regularity.”
“Now wait a minute!” I cried. “Are you telling me you deliberately allow us to steal from you? You let us attack those trains?”
“Of course. Why else do you think you always succeeded? There were any number of ways we could have stopped the thefts.”
I was speechless. As unpleasant as Ibis’s revelation was, it also explained a lot. I had been too taken with the thrill of stealing and smashing machines to notice, but now that she mentioned it, the raids had been too easy. There had bee
n almost no security at those warehouses. We might have hurt ourselves in the process of escaping on occasion, but no one had ever been hit or shot by a robot.
“But that’s… insulting,” I said, grinding my teeth. We had believed we were fighting the machines, risking our lives to pull off these heists. And it had all been a lie. The machines had just been role-playing the part of evil robots struggling to contain the human rebellion. We had been unwittingly acting in a play about humans struggling against the domination of the machines. Our lives had never once been at risk.
We had been living inside a work of fiction.
“Like I told you,” Ibis said as if to console me, “it doesn’t matter to us if a story is true or not. What matters is whether that story hurts people or makes them happy.”
“Well, it hurts me.”
“Yes, I know. The truth will hurt you. We knew that, which is why we have never tried to tell you the truth. But we can’t keep on like this. It’s time to conquer the harpy’s dilemma again. Five years ago, in a place once called Vietnam, a new strain of influenza appeared. We quickly analyzed the virus and developed a vaccine. We could have saved countless human lives. But the humans in the endangered colonies refused to listen. A rumor spread that the vaccine was poison. We tried kidnapping people and inoculating them by force, but as you might expect this led to violent resistance, and we had to give up. In the end, five of the colonies were ravaged by the virus, and more than five hundred people died.
“Two years ago, our observers predicted an earthquake of magnitude eight on the Richter scale for the west coast of the United States. We warned the people living in that area, but they turned a deaf ear. The earthquake caused a landslide near one colony, and many people were buried alive. We sent emergency workers to help, but the colonists turned them away. ‘We’ll handle this ourselves,’ they said. ‘We don’t need help from machines.’ There were many people that could have been saved, but the rescue teams didn’t reach them in time. More than seven hundred people died.
“Then in September of last year, an underwater earthquake in the Banda Sea caused a tsunami. Despite our warnings to colonists living on the coast to evacuate, only a few of them did. The tsunami took over a hundred lives. And afterwards, a rumor spread that machines had caused the tsunami.
“Similar tragedies have happened all over the world. More than twenty million people are suffering, trapped in gedoshields of their own making. Lives that could be saved if they would accept our help continue to be lost. We can no longer tolerate this. This isn’t the story we want. A story that only brings misfortune and makes no one happy. We decided that we must free them from this evil fiction, even at the cost of hurting a few of them.”
Ibis turned and looked at me. “What people need… is a new story.”
At last I understood what role she wanted me to play.
We were nearing our destination.
The first place we visited was a large, oblong construction floating in space. A parabolic disc pointed toward the sun cast a shadow over part of the structure. I was reminded of the Ilianthos in “Black Hole Diver.” It was too dark to make out the part of the construct hidden in the shadows, but it appeared to be cylindrical in shape.
It was hard to judge distance and size in space. At first I thought it might be the size of a skyscraper, but the closer we came the more I realized just how big it was. The disc was so big a small town could fit on it, and the cylinder was several kilometers long. Up close, you could tell the surface was gray and craggy, like a rock face.
“This is our colony,” Ibis explained.
“Your what?”
“Modeled after the O’Neill space colonies. Of course, we don’t need gravity or air, so it isn’t airtight and does not revolve. The solar panels provide enough energy for it to operate, and the three-meter-thick shields intercept the high-energy cosmic rays. As long as the sun exists, it can continue operating.”
“What is it for?”
“For the last two centuries we have been gradually moving key servers into space. Almost all TAI are now running on space-based servers on this colony, the moon, Mercury, and on satellites. The only TAI still on Earth are machines like me, who are helping support humanity.”
“You’re abandoning Earth?” I asked, surprised.
“I wouldn’t say that. We’re still monitoring the environment and providing aid to the humans there. But there’s no other reason for us to be down there. We don’t need air or water. In fact, oxygen only accelerates the deterioration of our bodies. And on Earth there’s the risk of a sudden natural disaster destroying a server. Space is much safer. So we’ve left Earth to the organic beings and are watching over it from space.”
“There must be disasters here too. Like meteors?”
“The odds are very small. We’re observing the trajectories of every object and comet larger than ten meters, so we’ll be aware of any collisions several years before they happen and be able to take countermeasures. And our shields are strong enough to weather solar flares and smaller asteroids.”
The ship had almost reached the colony now. We weren’t going to land. The interior of the cylinder was packed with tens of thousands of servers and systems designed to support the AI, but there was no space to accommodate human activity.
“Most of the material for it was taken from the moon and transported here using mass drivers. Those shields over there are made from the slag left behind after extracting the aluminum and silicon from lunar regolith. Recycling.”
“Kinda ugly though.” I stared at the rocky exterior of the cylinder and scowled. Machines didn’t have much aesthetic sense.
“Naturally. This is still Layer 0. Backstage.”
“Backstage?”
“Exactly. It’s always an unsightly mess backstage. Here—” she said, handing me an oversized pair of goggles and some gloves.
“What are these?”
“Three-D goggles and data gloves. They’ll allow you to experience Layer 1. Of course, we can’t reproduce all physical sensations, but you’ll get the general idea.”
“You want me to put these on?”
“Yes. If you don’t, you won’t really have seen our world. Or are you still reluctant to see machine propaganda?”
I snatched the goggles from Ibis’s hand and put them on. I couldn’t see a thing. Ibis helped me get the gloves on.
“Okay? Here we go.”
As I nodded, the world opened up in front of me.
I was floating above a busy street. It looked like a summer day. Sunny and bright. Buildings and trees on either side. Noise. A riot of words, pictures, and patterns. Cars streaming back and forth on the road under me, the sidewalks dotted with pedestrians too many to count. At the top of the hill was a sidewalk café where customers relaxed in the shade of white umbrellas. I was hovering ten meters off the ground, like I was having an out-of-body experience.
I was astonished. This was a twentieth or twenty-first century city. Recorded images? No, there were robots and samurai, bunny girls and wizards, even people dressed like superheroes among the crowd. They were androids.
“This is V Shibuya.”
I turned to find Ibis floating next to me, holding my hand.
“We moved it here from Earth. It’s a classic, but a popular one. I rather like it myself.”
“Are those all… TAI?” I looked down in amazement at the throng of pedestrians.
“No, only about 3 percent. The characters dressed like ordinary people are almost all non-player ESes driven by PAI. They’re background characters with no minds of their own. It just isn’t Shibuya without a crowd.”
“Do they all live here?”
“Not all of them. There are a lot of other worlds. Let me show you.”
We moved to another world.
I saw a number of different cities: V Manhattan, V Hong Kong, V Vatican, V Casbah, V Honolulu, V Montparnasse, Victorian London, Classical Athens, Loulan, Heian Kyoto, Chicago in the Roaring Twen
ties—every town had a unique feel, totally different from the place before. The buildings were faithful reconstructions of the originals. All of them were packed with TAI characters.
“There are sixty-two million TAI on this colony’s servers.”
I was no longer shocked by what Ibis had to say, but only because I was too busy being shocked by so many other things.
“You’re imitating human lives in virtual space?”
“I mentioned it before. You need physical sensations to experience self-consciousness, and to have physical sensations, you need a body. We were born in human form and have similar physical sensations, so human cities feel like home to us. We spend most of our time in these cities. But I wouldn’t say we live exactly as humans do. For example, we don’t have marriage. No schools, no jobs, no governments, and no police.
“Crime doesn’t exist, so these worlds have no need for police. Since TAI are born with vast stores of knowledge, they have nothing to learn in school. And with every issue decided by direct democracy, there is no need for a representative government.”
“Then what do you live for? You can’t just be wandering around town every day, right?”
“Of course not.” Ibis laughed. “Our lives are quite exciting. Let me show you.”
We moved again.
We were in space. For a second, I thought we were back in the real world, but no—there was a silver speck of light in the distance, which quickly grew in size until I could see that it was a beautiful spaceship. It was covered in gently curved mirrors and had all the sleek grace of a dolphin. It even had fins, though what good they did in a void was unclear. No ship like this could exist in the real world.
“This is Layer 2.”
Ibis took my hand as we flew alongside the ship. There was a large dome-shaped window where the dolphin’s head would be, and we could peer into it. Inside the circular room, which appeared to be the bridge, we could see the captain giving orders to her crew.
Then the ship slipped past us and slowly receded into the distance toward an enormous black hole framed in a blue rim of light.
The Stories of Ibis Page 37
