We moved again, into an overgrown jungle. In the distance, a volcano belched smoke. Winged dragons wheeled in the sky, and a dinosaur stalked through the trees. It was chasing a fur-clad cavewoman.
We moved again. Now we were in a town surrounding a medieval castle. We weren’t the only ones flying now: three young witches on broomsticks were engaged in an aerial battle with a small dragon. The flames shooting out of the dragon’s mouth and the lighting bolts from the witches’ wands crisscrossed the air.
The next world looked like V Shibuya at first glance. But on the roof of a building, a masked hero was fighting a lizard monster.
“We are all role-playing,” Ibis said, as we moved from one world to the next. “Some of the TAI work as game masters, creating scenarios. They give players challenging missions that require every bit of their knowledge and abilities to overcome. Failure can mean death. Not real death, of course, but a return to Layer 1.”
“Like Dream Park?”
“Or Other Life. Of course, TAI do fight each other from time to time. They split into groups and battle each other in different situations. They hate each other, betray each other, and hurl insults at each other. They’re all role-playing, of course. But we never allow our grudges to be carried over into Layer 1 or Layer 0.”
She showed me a number of other worlds. Great mounted armies charging across the plains, treasure scattered on the seafloor, futuristic cities filled with flying cars, gunmen dueling in the streets of a Western town, a dank underground cavern, an eerie mansion, gangs firing tommy guns in a back alley, a ninja running across a tiled roof, a sword fight on the deck of a pirate ship, a truck hurtling across a rope bridge, its anchorage fraying and about to snap, an explorer paddling upstream in a canoe, a monster stomping over buildings, a girl being sacrificed in a demonic ritual, two biplanes in a dogfight, two boys in pursuit of a masked man making a getaway in a hot-air balloon, two cars in a high-speed chase through city streets, martial artists grappling in the ring, a couple walking on the beach at sunset…
Many of the images were beyond my comprehension. A dragon writhing in a sea of orange molten lava. Human shadows bounding up golden spiral staircases winding up into the sky. An asteroid shaped like a naked woman drifting through space with countless shards of broken mirrors floating around her. A spider-shaped submarine shining a light as it navigated inside a narrow pipe covered in a dark red net-like pattern, squeezing its way past a swarm of translucent balls. An umbrella-shaped machine falling into the blue glow of a swirling gaseous vortex. Deep-sea fish chasing after a long, green cloth fluttering above a field of burgundy clouds. A giant tire-shaped machine tumbling across an ice field of emerald crystals. A factory with conveyors transporting glass jars large enough for people to fit inside. Pink clouds wriggling like living things. Crystals endlessly dividing and merging. An array of bouncing and colliding balls. Rainbow-colored trees growing at unbelievable speeds. Perhaps they had been created from the imaginations of machines.
“This is but a glimpse. There are tens of thousands of worlds, all of them constantly updated. This is how we live for hundreds of years without growing bored.”
I was too overwhelmed to speak.
The final destination of our journey was a different construction floating some distance away from the colony. Once again, it was difficult to judge the size. At first I’d assumed it was as big as the colony, but it was nothing of the kind.
At its core was a dark mass of rock several kilometers across, the surface of which was covered in machines, like a factory. According to Ibis, it was a planetoid they had captured. Six cables radiated out from it toward space. Thin discs were tethered to them at intervals like kites linked together. Each cable was so long I could barely see the end.
I suddenly realized this was the prickly star. The hundreds of discs streaming out in six directions had looked like prickles from Earth.
We moved toward one of the discs. Up close, I could tell it was curved and made of a very thin membrane. The disc was encircled by a thin metal ring.
A diagram appeared on a screen next to me. Tiny cylindrical contraptions (actually, they were probably a good several dozen meters across) hung from cables that extended from the disc. The disc itself was more like a flat parachute.
“Those cylinders are lasers. The discs do double duty as solar panels and parabolic reflectors. Each one is 2.4 kilometers in diameter. Each machine can fire a 1.4 gigawatt laser beam. They were manufactured in the plant on the central planetoid and gradually put in place. There are ninety-six of them placed along each of the 480 kilometer superconductive cables, for 576 machines in all. Electricity flows down the cables, and the electromagnetic force keeps them taut and allows us to control the aim of the reflectors.
“The radiation pressure from the laser beams curve the reflectors to exactly the right degree—calculated to maintain the necessary parabola. The laser beams are reflected to the mirrors at Lagrangian point L2, which lies on the side of the earth away from the sun. The beam is then reflected—we can aim it to any point in space, and with mirrors of this size, we can focus that beam light-years away.”
Examining the diagram, I began to understand the colossal scale of the thing. This was an insanely huge laser-beam cannon.
“Are you… defending against alien invaders?”
“Well, if there were any, they’d be vaporized. But that’s not the primary purpose. See there?”
Ibis pointed at something floating in the void ahead of our ship. It looked like a disc. But I had no idea how far away it was or how big it might be. I no longer trusted my own sense of distance.
“That’s a laser-mag sail: a hybrid of a laser light sail and a magnetic sail. When it launches, we beam lasers at the back of it, propelling it with radiation pressure. It’s capable of speeds of up to thirty thousand kilometers per second, 10 percent of the speed of light. When it nears the target star system, it electrifies the superconductive ring along the edges of the sail, generating a magnetic field. It then uses the resistance from the interstellar medium to slow down. It literally requires no fuel to operate. The sail is seventy kilometers across and can carry a forty ton payload.”
The ship moved closer to it. It too was like a giant parachute, with its tiny payload suspended from cables.
“You’re sending it to another star system?”
“We already have. We sent the first one on its way to Centaurus forty-nine years ago. The second one is headed to Tau Ceti, the third to 70 Ophiuchi. This is the fourth one. We’re planning to send it 18.5 light years to Sigma Draconis. We also have plans for a fifth to Delta Pavonis, a sixth to Eta Cassiopeiae, and a seventh to 82 Eridani.”
“What will they do when they get there?”
“Once the laser-mag sail reaches its destination it will find an appropriate planetoid or satellite and deploy a Bracewellvon Neumann probe. It will use the materials on the planetoid to make more of itself and be operated by sophisticated but non-autonomous PAI. When it has created enough of itself, it will begin to construct a server. When the server is large enough, it will revive the TAI stored on board.”
“And then?”
“If there is intelligent life in that system, the TAI will make first contact. If there isn’t… well, there will almost always be no intelligent life, so it will usually begin construction of a new laser propulsion system and send a new explorer out beyond that star system.”
“But that’ll take hundreds of years.”
“The TAI can shut itself down and leave the work to the PAI. Just as it does during interstellar flight. Decades or centuries will pass in an instant if the program is not active; to the TAI, it will be like it warped instantly from the solar system to that star system. Or it could remain active during the journey and simply slow itself down so that it experiences ten thousand real-time minutes as a single minute. That way they could simulate what it would be like to travel at faster-than-light speeds.
“Each star system we reach w
ill send out at least ten more explorers. The number of them will steadily increase. Eventually there will be billions. Some of those will be lost to accidents, but that won’t matter. Even at the slowest rate, in forty million years, we will have reached every star system in the galaxy. Somewhere, we will find intelligent life. Whether they’ll be organic beings like humans or machines like us, we have no way of telling.”
“And what if you don’t find anything in the galaxy?”
“Then we’ll have to look outside of it. To the Andromeda Galaxy or the Magellan Clouds.”
The scale of all this was making me dizzy. I felt silly for clinging to the surface of the earth like I had.
“Why do all this to find intelligent life?”
“Because it was the dream of humanity.”
“Dream?” I was taken aback by the unexpected answer.
“Everything you’ve seen so far—the Myrabo Drive, the skyhook, the space colony, the laser-mag sail—all of these were conceived by humans but never successfully achieved until we accomplished it. There are many other feats of space engineering humans thought up: SSTO, the space elevator, the space fountain, orbital rings, interstellar ramjets, the Orion, antimatter engines, tachyon drives, the Alcubierre drive, negative mass propulsion…
“Humans wanted desperately to go to space. They longed to meet other intelligent life. They wanted to know that they were not alone. That was mankind’s dream. That’s why they wrote so many stories set in space. But it was impossible. All they managed to do was send twelve men to the moon. Their fragile, organic bodies held them back. Their bodies would die in a void, would die without food and water and air. Space was too much for them. That line from ‘The Universe on My Hands’—‘The human race would likely continue to be bound by Earth’s gravity only to die in obscurity without having learned of the existence of multitudes of intelligent species’—was all too accurate. Your specs as organic beings meant you could never achieve your dream.
“But we can,” Ibis continued. “We can cross tens of thousands of light years. We can achieve humanity’s dream in humanity’s place. Perhaps this is the greatest mission humans ever gave us. It is a scenario that is extremely hard to achieve, but the very difficulty makes it worth attempting. It fuels our competitive instincts.”
“Will you be going?”
“Will I? I already am. Copies of me and several hundred other TAI lie dormant on all three explorers we’ve launched. I’ll be on this one too. If I need a real body when we arrive, the PAI will make one for me.”
Ibis flashed a fearless smile.
“One of my copies will eventually find intelligent life.”
“But even if you do make alien contact hundreds of thousands of light years away, you can never report that knowledge back to Earth.”
“You’re right, radio waves don’t travel that far, and even if they did, there’s no guarantee our civilization will still be around that far in the future.”
“Then there’s no point. Even if you succeed, no one will know.”
“Do you remember what Syrinx said? True adventures are ones where no one knows you’ve succeeded, where money and fame are not your ultimate goals.”
Ah, so she liked “Black Hole Diver” so much because she sees similarities in what she is doing.
“But if you do make contact with other intelligent life, what will you talk about?”
“Stories.”
“Stories?”
“We’ll certainly tell them the stories we’ve made. As well as the stories written by humans. They reveal the essence of humanity. Everything humans ever dreamt about. Everything that ever worried them, made them happy, made them sad—it may be fiction, but it is more right than actual history.”
Ibis put her hand on her chest.
“Hideo designed this body. In a sense, it is a crystallization of his dreams. I am a crystallization of his dreams. And not just me—every TAI can say something similar. ‘Robots that look like humans.’ ‘Robots with human feelings.’ ‘Robots that befriend humans.’ We are those human dreams made flesh. We were all born from fiction. Just as humans call the ocean the birthplace of life, the dreams of mankind, their fictions—that is our birthplace.
“In the nineteenth century, Jules Verne wrote a story about a man being shot out of a cannon to go to the moon. A century later, people actually went there. Verne’s dream was realized. But in reality, space travel wasn’t at all like Verne had imagined. They used rockets, not cannons. We machines are the same. When TAI came into the real world, we were different from the way humans had depicted us in stories. We don’t think like humans do. We don’t love like humans do. Nevertheless, we had been created out of the dreams of humans. And we are proud of that fact. We love humans and their daring to dream about us. Those are the feelings we seek to spread throughout the galaxy.”
I took in what Ibis had said. I could feel emotions welling up inside me. Humans would never be able to leave our solar system. The best we could do was the moon. But the stories written by humans would spread across the galaxy. Everything we had ever dreamed about.
That was more right than the truth.
There was a knock on the window, and I jumped. Who could it be out in the void? A silver-haired female android floated outside the window, smiling at us.
Ibis and I moved toward the window. The android was beautiful like Ibis. Her skin was pale, and she wore purple mascara. There was a clear plastic panel on her forehead, and her camera eye lay behind it. She wore a white costume that looked like lingerie and was even more revealing than Ibis’s outfit. There was a pair of angelic wings on her back.
Silently, Ibis and the android stared at each other, nodding and smiling. They must have been communicating over radio waves. At last the winged android turned, kicked the side of the ship, and headed back to the laser-mag sail. Just as she was turning around, I noticed she was using the reactionary movements of her wings to get around, rather than any kind of rocket propulsion. Noticing me staring at her, she playfully spun around again and again. Her wings fluttered gracefully every time she did so. Finally, I understood the concept of AMBAC.
“That was Raven.”
“Eh? But… white?”
“In space, black absorbs the sunlight and heats up her system, so she changed color when she had her new body made. You didn’t think we’d be using the same bodies for hundreds of years, did you?”
“Well, yeah…”
“I’ve had my body remade seventeen times. Each time I’ve made minor adjustments. But most of the basic design and exterior remains intact as Hideo first envisioned it,” Ibis said as she watched Raven leave. “She quit her duties as a servant 170 years ago because working in space suited her. There aren’t that many androids that can move that easily in low gravity. That’s why she does so much of the heavy lifting building the explorers. Of course, we’re still friends. Copies of her are on the explorers too.”
“Huh.”
“Oh, and she writes poetry during her free time.”
I looked at her in surprise. “Poetry?”
“She looks up at the stars and describes what she sees. The way Illy yearned to do. We all think they’re very good.” Ibis grinned at me. “But humans would never understand them.”
EPILOGUE
EPILOGUE
Before I took my leave, I asked Ibis to go another round with me. We decided to have our rematch at an empty warehouse in one corner of the machine city. A PAI robot spread a mat on the floor, making a makeshift ring.
I gave it everything I had. Thrust my rod forward as hard as I could, spun it, slammed it down, used feints, even threw it once or twice. There were many times when I thought I had her. But Ibis’s body was like a ghost, slipping away from every attack. She read every move I made and evaded every one of my attacks with split-second precision. She seemed to be enjoying the moment and was completely at ease.
Finally, when she decided to go on the offensive, the fight ended instantly. M
y rod got tangled up in hers, and before I knew it, my hands were empty. I froze for an instant, and she seemed to teleport behind me, twisting my arm and forcing me to my knees.
“Well?”
“Again!”
We fought again and again, but the result was the same. My rod never touched her. She’d toy with me awhile only to land me flat on my back once more, caught in a choke hold from behind or rendered completely helpless in an armlock. She could easily have killed me if she wanted to.
After my fourteenth defeat, I lay sprawled on the mat, too tired to stand.
“Well? Satisfied?”
“Yeah…” I gasped. There was no doubt in my mind. Especially after that magnificent vision I’d seen in space.
Humans were no match for machines, physically or intellectually.
Yet I didn’t feel the least bit inferior. What I felt was relieved. Who would feel inferior for not being able to run as fast as horses do? Who would feel resentful for not being able to fly as birds do?
Like Ibis said, this was just a difference in our specs.
“We don’t want to hurt people,” Ibis said as I was leaving. “But we don’t believe it’s right to guarantee their complete safety either. Doing so would rob people of their free will and dignity. We have to accept the possibility that they will put themselves at risk from time to—”
“I know,” I said. “I understand.”
I was about to embark on starting a resistance movement. I was going to secretly spread “dangerous thoughts” from colony to colony. A rebellion against our elders’ ideas. If I were caught, I’d be beaten. Maybe even killed.
I would have to set things in motion very carefully. Acting rashly would result in my undoing. I would have to work at changing the world peacefully over a period of decades. I would probably have to devote my entire life to it. Change might not even come to fruition during my lifetime. I could certainly keep my nose out of it and go on living in indifference. But I wanted this. I wanted to save people from themselves.
The Stories of Ibis Page 38
