by John Barnes
He takes another bite of the sushi—funny thing, the Japanese spent a fortune developing all sorts of amenities for their unit, which is sitting down there at the end of Truss Two empty and powered down. They sent up five crews for a few months each, and then got bored or something, leaving behind the tissue culture tanks that let you grow pieces of fish without having to grow the whole fish.
The stuff isn’t bad, and it’s at least variety from the usual sandwiches.
The Japanese gave up. The Chinese flew some missions into low orbit, and they still do. The Russians are long gone from space, and the French make three flights a year—they treat the Euromodule as sort of a hotel room, where their guys sleep between fixing robots, or on their way to and from their tiny moonbase while they assemble their ships here. Last time they didn’t even bother with that, just went straight from low Earth orbit to the moon.
And as for his own country… Louie is it, and he’s mostly here for publicity.
Yet the solar system is now crawling with humanity’s robots. Not counting all the replicators that were built there before they shut that experiment down, there are hundreds of little crawlers exploring the moon.
Louie just noticed the other day that one of the many relays on the station was handling traffic for the University of Wyoming Lunar Rover and the Ralston-Purina Checkerboard Lunar Orbiter. It turned out that the former was a senior engineering-school project and the latter a breakfast cereal promotion, where they claimed they’d buy you a square foot of the moon (a very safe promotion, because the UN has put all claims except those within one kilometer of a permanently crewed facility into abeyance) and send you a picture of it.
Where his crew of eight walked a hundred miles or so across the face of Mars, there is now a robot railway that drags a camera back and forth, toward the Martian North Pole and back, sending a continuous picture that a few million people on Earth display on the TVs that hang on their bedroom walls. Even Mars is already getting to be less popular than the view from the Jupiter Orbiter Feed, which Louie has, right now, in his sleeping quarters.
He looks down at the Earth below him. So far it doesn’t look any different. You can no more see an extinct species or a too-warm ocean than you can tell that there are no longer any dark-skinned people in Europe as it rolls away below him. And certainly sixty-five years or so of pictures from up this high have made the sight of Earth from space familiar….
Well, hell with it. He still likes the way the old planet looks. He holds up a squeeze bulb of Kirin—another great Japanese innovation—in a toast to her. She’s pretty battered around the edges, but he still likes to see her like this. It’s not his job to decide whether or not he’s too expensive to maintain up here. If they’re willing to send him, he’s willing to stay.
As he takes a sip of the beer, he thinks of Carla, and the notion that he is thinking of her just after looking at the battered old planet nearly sends the beer squirting out his nose. She’d love that comparison.
They haven’t talked in almost a month and it’s still forty minutes till the next observation. Moreover he happens to look decent, so he might as well take advantage of it. From where the terminator line is on the Earth, it’s about three o’clock in the afternoon in the western Pacific, and the weather is clear. Chances are MyBoat is surfaced and taking phone calls.
He shifts around to face the camera and screen and dials her number. It rings a couple of times and then she answers it on voice only, so his first thought is that she’s getting it over a Very Low Frequency receiver and the signal is going to be lousy—he was really looking forward to seeing her face—then she laughs. “Oh, it’s you, Louie. Let me get a towel on.”
“For what?” he says. Caught her sunbathing; it figures.
“So the tabloids can’t do another story about perverted astronauts looking at their naked ex-wives over the phone and talking nasty, that’s why. You’ve got an image to protect, Captain America.”
“They promoted me a long time ago,” he reminds her.
“You’ll always be Captain America to me,” she says, and the screen comes on. “Is there news or is this just a hello call?”
“Oh, just a hello. Timed to get a look at your body, of course.”
She grins and moves as if to flash him. One of the several counselors they’d gone to had pointed out to them that they were both “socially retarded, as tends to be common in bright people, and that’s why you act like a couple of teenagers around each other.” It took Louie and Carla days to realize the counselor thought there was something wrong with it.
He gives her his best construction-worker whistle. She asks, “So they’re keeping you busy for once, you bottomless pit for taxes, you?”
“Yeah. Although to tell you the truth, I’m starting to wonder if I’m actually doing anyone any good by being up here.”
“Not your worry, love, it’s really not. We’ve talked about all this before. If it weren’t for the scientists, the whole world might as well disappear up its own virtual-reality asshole. If there’s no exploration, that’s just what will happen. And robots do not explore, they just go and look. Somebody’s got to be there to feel like bold Cortez upon a peak in Darien.”
“You’re quoting poetry at me again.”
“Well, it’s not a dirty limerick, so I’m sure you haven’t heard it before, but yes, I have been exposing you to poetry. It’s part of that continuing process that ran through our courtship and marriage, love—you know, eating with utensils, washing yourself—say, speaking of which, you’re looking pretty spruce today. You must be doing a lot of interviews or something.”
He tells her about reading the data and the graphs. She tells him about getting her old job back, and “better yet, being allowed to do it on remote. So I’ll probably be looking at that data myself.”
“Well, if you like, I’ll be happy to download it to you.”
“Please do.”
He pushes a couple of buttons, and the data is transmitted. They talk a little longer, but there isn’t much to talk about, so they hang up quickly.
An hour later, Carla calls Louie back. “Are the numbers really that high?”
“I didn’t really know they were high. They’re just numbers to me. They went up fast for a couple of days but they’ve been pretty steady since.” He grabs a terminal and types on it for a moment. “Yeah, those are the numbers.”
“No wonder they’re getting so excited about it. That’s really high, Louie.”
“Well, that would explain why they’ve been asking me to downplay it while I talk to this kid from UT. I’m supposed to sound the way old-fashioned airplane pilots did when they told you ‘Well, we’ve got a little turbulence here and maybe a bit of engine failure, but I just wanted you folks to know that I expect to be on time or a bit before, except of course for that little old piece of wing that just dropped off.’ They might at least have told me that when I was saying there was nothing to panic about, I was lying.”
“Well, until my department gets it figured out, they still won’t know what these people ought to be panicking about, you know. And anyway, I’m not so sure that panicking will do them any good.”
“So next time I have to go play Serious Scientist again with the kid from Texas, it won’t be unjustified if I suddenly say, ‘Jesus, these numbers are high. Let’s cut the crap, we’re in deep shit, we’re all going to die!’”
She giggles. “Oh, a little unjustified, but think how much excitement it’s going to cause the PR types. And most of them just don’t have enough adventure in their lives.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that. Well, take care… I still kinda miss you, you know.”
“I’ve been known to miss you too. Let’s make that date for sure—when you get back down, we’ll get together and have some sex and some fun, then get on each other’s nerves so we can remember why we both live in tin cans hundreds of miles from anyone else.”
She’s still teasing, but it’s getting near th
e mark, and Louie doesn’t want to get into any emotional things this particular time. So he says, “Well, then, it’s a date. You take care,” and she says, “Take care,” and they hang up.
He looks at his schedule and it’s still twenty minutes until he has to pretend he knows what he’s talking about with that damned kid. He stretches out, letting himself float free in the observation bubble—the nearest thing to a spacewalk without a suit you can do, if you ignore the glass walls on all sides just a foot or two away—and lets himself run through the list of all the things he’s supposed to do when and if there’s time. Unfortunately, most of them are fully up to date, and the ones that are not are just pointless duplicates of ground-based work.
Not unlike the pointless duplicate of ground-based work that he’s supposed to do in the next few minutes…. He really wishes he could stop thinking like that. He looks out at the big old Earth rolling by underneath, and admits to himself that he’s such a cranky old bastard it’s no wonder that he’s lonely, or that he has trouble admitting it.
Well, he hasn’t powered up the telepresence unit on the moon in ages. If they ever start serious lunar operations again (instead of going along as passengers with the French—god, it kills Louie, three times a year, to see the French go to the moon, not even a country anymore but just a state in the USE, and maybe one time out of three they take along an American astronaut as a passenger!)—if ever that big stupid clumsy nation of Louie’s gets it together enough to get back out there, it is very likely going to be Louie who drives the robots to get the American moonbase opened back up.
He sets the timer, pulls on a scalpnet, muffs, and goggles like an ordinary XV rig (except that the muffs are equipped with an alarm so that if anything goes wrong in the station he will hear it), slides his arms into sensor gloves, plugs the feedback into the jack behind his ear, and codes in.
His eyes open on the Sea of Storms, and he stands up in his robot body. He looks down to see the unnaturally thin limbs—the antimatter power source is inside the long metal “torso” and the motors are located at the joints, not needing the leverage that real muscles do, so that for every practical purpose he’s a walking skeleton, with a body that looks like a flexible gas hose and arms and legs like those on one of those men made out of muffler parts that used to stand in front of car repair shops when he was a kid.
He walks out of the little cave where the telepresence robot is parked—it returns there automatically when anyone is done with it, so that he imagines that on the lunar surface, at the end of a busy shift (if there ever is one), twenty or thirty robots might suddenly stop what they are doing and all walk back to the cave to stand against the walls—must be spooky to watch them do that.
The light here is flat and harsh, the shadows and sky black. There’s nothing that isn’t familiar from a thousand training tapes; this is where lunar mining experiments were conducted, and where a nice job was done of demonstrating that the “ores” available on the moon are just plain rock, so low-grade that it’s always cheaper to make the stuff on Earth and ship it up, even though you’re fighting a lot more gravity. But at least while the experiments were going on, there were people walking around up here, next to the robots….
Now there’s something that hasn’t been tried out lately—the “replicators” —the experiment with little robots who look like Tonka trucks with arms. They have a little hopper in which they can melt a rock sample and then do what amounts to slow isotope separation, eventually breaking it into its constituent elements, so that where there was a hopper full of rock, there are now little ingots of all the solids, and little glass “bottles” of the gases and liquids, that go into making a replicator. The replicators then meet up with each other and swap pieces of material around until one of them has the materials to make a copy of itself. It sits down, does that, and where there were ten replicators gathering materials, there are now eleven.
The idea was that no matter how expensive it was to build the first batch of replicators, after that they would breed like sheep or cattle, and by turning on a software cue you could make them drive into the facility at Moonbase and keep offloading materials; eventually only a tiny fraction of materials extracted would go into replication, and you’d have an unending procession of replicators bringing gifts of oxygen, iron, aluminum, whatever.
The replicators were made in deliberate imitation of life, which is highly efficient at spreading itself around, binding energy from sunlight, and extracting scarce elements from abundant minerals. The exchange deal was self-reprogramming; whatever was scarce, they would seek to get more of by returning to places where it was easy to get it, by randomly perturbing some of their own instructions to try out different strategies, and by “bargaining” with each other.
In practice it turned out differently. The replicators replicated just fine, but the parallel processor system that controlled them at Moonbase turned out to be subject to a force no one had thought of—the market.
The first sign of trouble was when gallium became a medium of exchange. Of all the elements needed, the traces of gallium needed for some of the semiconductors were the hardest to get; very quickly the replicators learned that if you had gallium you could trade it for anything else. Many of them began to drive right past everything else, looking only for gallium-bearing minerals, until in short order most of them were carrying only gallium, plus the mix of elements that were found in the two minerals that contained it.
There was no one for them to “buy” the other things they needed from—until a couple of the replicators innovated and set up the “fortyniner’s store.” That is, they began to pay other robots—using gallium to do so—to go out and mine exclusively for the materials the other ones wanted to buy.
Predictably, in hindsight, two events followed quickly. One isolated replicator struck a relatively rich vein of gallium-bearing ore (though nothing anyone would have bothered with on Earth) and in short order the other replicators had followed it there, organizing a “gallium rush.” As gallium flooded the market, there was a period of rapid inflation, leading to all sorts of distant speculative ventures—some of the replicators had gotten as far away as three hundred kilometers.
This all collapsed when about half of them sat down to have “children”; much of the gallium that had flooded the market was now tied up in replicators, and a price collapse and “depression” followed. Many of the faraway replicators shut down because there was no profitable way of returning to base.
Somewhere out there, one of them hit on the perturbation that made a mess of things. It attacked, disassembled, and devoured several of the other replicators, eventually producing copies of its cannibal self. Another replicator dealt with the problem by reprogramming other replicators to bring their extracted ores to it; they dubbed that one the “slavemaster,” and discovered that the slavemaster had organized a defense against the cannibals, built around using the slaves in teams.
Moreover, they began to virus each other’s software, and to invent defenses against the viruses (that strange boomtalk word for replicating software, with its purely negative connotations, seemed perfectly appropriate in this case). As defenses improved, viruses that attacked defenses appeared—the scientists began to refer to that as “machine AIDS”—and suppressor software to protect the defenses, in turn, mutated until it began to attack everything else—for some obscure reason, an old scientist dubbed that “industrial ARTS.” There was, in effect, a health-care problem—most machines ran well below optimum because the code driving them had gotten so long and complicated.
Moreover, since they all had access to each other’s software, very shortly there were several teams of cannibal slavemasters out there in the boondocks, competing with each other but mining almost nothing, all infected with and spreading machine AIDS and industrial ARTS.
Matters came to a head when two of the dominant teams wiped out the others (eating and converting them in the process), combined forces, and came back into Moonbase
to attack the “forty-niner’s store” in force; the merchants saw them coming, copied the software where needed, and fought a kind of epic battle on the plains before the fascinated eyes of the cyberneticists.
Then one sample replicator, pulled out for examination and tests, turned up with part of a solar-wind monitoring station in its guts. A quick check showed that the system as a whole had become conscious enough to realize that the prohibition on consuming other man-made objects kept it from getting some first-rate metals, and it had managed to hack around the prohibition by introducing industrial ARTS into the software protection of the main system.
They stopped it just hours from the point where it might have eaten Moonbase; if they hadn’t, it would have destroyed everything except itself, then populated the moon with robot vermin beyond any control.
Now, as Louie comes around to the site of the great battle, he sees old number N743P, chief of the merchants, sitting where “he” froze when the system was shut down, surrounded by dozens of slaves with empty hoppers. Some wag has painted United Left insignia on the slaves and arranged them in a circle as if they were picketing N743P.
Louie wonders idly if it might not be better to have switched them all back on and told them about all the good metal over at the French base—no, that’s petty, and the fact is that he likes the individual French astronauts who pass through the space station. It’s hardly their fault that Louie’s nation isn’t keeping up, and France is the last bastion of any kind of liberalism in Europe; many of them are almost pathetically eager to tell Louie, or someone, that they wish they could get out from under Brussels, and that they were against the Expulsion.
He kneels to look it over; N743P doesn’t look any different (apart from its tag) than any other robot. At least they hadn’t discovered conspicuous consumption yet, though it looked like this fellow was about to invent the futures market.
