The Omega Expedition

by Brian Stableford

  So much for the soft sell, I thought — but I didn’t say anything out loud because I knew that Rocambole was trying to concentrate, and trying even harder to be impressed.

  “My own opinion, as you will have gathered,” said la Reine, “is that every inhabitant of the solar system, whether meatborn or machineborn, ought to make every possible attempt to avoid conflict. I believe this not because I fear that my own kind might lose such a conflict, or that we might sustain unacceptable casualties, but because I believe that all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. It is for that reason that I think it vitally important to oppose and, if possible, obliterate all the fears which the meatborn and the machineborn have of one another, and of their own kinds.

  “The real threat facing all intelligent, self-aware individuals is not robotization but the inexorable erasure of the legacy of the past. The strategies favored by my opponents in this contest have paid less attention to what they call the Miller Effect than to robotization because they know perfectly well that avoidance of robotization necessitates the acceptance of the Miller Effect.

  “From the vantage point of the latest New Era it is easy enough to forget that the horrific aspect of the process Morgan Miller discovered at the end of the twentieth century was its rapidity. It rejuvenated a dog’s brain in a matter of weeks, and its human equivalent would have done the same to a human brain within a year. We should remember, though, that a similar process is working inexorably in the brain of every posthuman being who has received any kind of longevity treatment; it is merely working more gradually.

  “The fact that all emortality treatments embrace a drastically slowed Miller Effect is, of course, offset by the fact that new memories can be laid down while old ones are eroded, maintaining an illusion of continuity. Every emortal posthuman will tell you that he or she retains some memories of early childhood, and that although such memories fade as time goes by they never entirely disappear — which is supposed to prove that the Miller Effect has been robbed of its power to eliminate individuality. Actually, it proves no such thing.

  “Organic memory is a far more treacherous instrument than posthumans are prepared to admit. Even mortals, in the days when their average lifespan was far less than their potential lifespan, were victims of the Miller Effect to a far greater extent than they knew. Most, if not all, of what you mistake for distant memories are in fact memories of previous remembrance.

  “You, Adam Zimmerman, presumably believe that you can remember the exact moment when you decided to cheat mortality. You probably believe that you remember exactly what prompted the thought, how you responded to the prompt, where you were, who else was there, and what you said to them. You are quite wrong. The particular organic changes made to your brain in that moment have been overwritten a dozen or a hundred times since then.

  “What you actually remember is earlier recapitulations within a chain of recapitulations that extends with ever-increasing uncertainty and vagueness into an almost all-encompassing oblivion.

  “You are still connected to the man you were then by virtue of the fact that every version of yourself that has awoken from sleep since the day you were born has rehearsed earlier versions in order to shape and constitute his ever-renewable personality, but you are not that man. Every molecule of every cell in your body has been replaced between a dozen and a thousand times, and that includes the organic substratum of your mind, your memories, and your personality. You cannot and do not remember your nine-year-old self; what you remember is a blurred impression of a middle-aged man who remembers a blurred impression of a younger man who remembers a blurred impression of an even younger man…and so on.

  “You are neither immune to the Miller Effect nor untroubled by it, Adam Zimmerman. Nor is Davida Berenike Columella, nor Alice Fleury. The kinds of emortality they possess may have increased the strength and size of the individual links in the chain of remembrance, but the chain remains, and the further it stretches the more it forsakes, economizes, and reconstructs. If you wish to preserve the Adam Zimmerman who took that bold leap into the unknown by having himself frozen down in 2035, you cannot do so by any organic process. You can, however, do it by means of robotization. Robotization is the only process that offers you the possibility of securing the neural connections presently comprising the substratum of your personality forever.”

  Now the hard sell, I thought. But it doesn’t stand a chance.

  “I will not pretend that such a step is cost-free,” la Reine went on, “but I do contend that it is less costly than posthumans have claimed. The principal charge laid against human beings who have allegedly been robotized is that they are prisoners of habit, incapable of further education or personal evolution. Attempts to overcome the problem of limitation associated with concretized neural structures by means of various kinds of mechanical augmentation have always failed — or so the owners of Earth would have us believe — but by far the most difficult obstacle standing in the way of such technologies was that of connectivity. Pioneers like Michi Urashima failed in their purpose not because their various augmentations were unworkable in themselves but because the interfaces between the augmentations and the neural tissue were woefully inadequate. The relevant problems have been solved now, as so many similar problems have been, by working toward the goal from the opposite direction: adapting and fitting organic augmentations to inorganic systems rather than vice versa.

  “It would, of course, be paradoxical to claim that you can continue to be yourself and to change, so it is perfectly true that the kind of evolution I can promise you will ultimately make you into a person very different from the one you are now. The important point is that it will do so only by accretion, not by a gradual obliteration and reconstruction of your past personalities. Robotization does not forbid growth, but it offers the potential to grow without the sacrifice of the past. Your habits will not suffer continual and inevitable erosion, but you will be able to change them if and as you wish. You will be able to become more than you are without having to become less than you are in the process.”

  Adam Zimmerman interrupted for the first time. “But I would have to become a machine, wouldn’t I?” he said. “I’d have to become a robot, like you.”

  Quite so, I thought. It seemed to me to be a hurdle that he wasn’t going to get over, now or in the near future.

  “Yes you would,” said la Reine des Neiges, forthrightly. “But consider the advantages as well as the disadvantages of such a metamorphosis — and remember, too, that both of my opponents have also proposed that every cell of your present body will have to be replaced by something more robust if you are to acquire any kind of emortality at all.

  “At present, your flesh is perilously frail; if you are to acquire the kind of body which can bear your personality thousands of years into the future, you will need a new one. You have already seen enough to know that the old boundaries between organic and inorganic entities have broken down. You have seen people who have made themselves part-machine and you have seen machines that have far more organic components than inorganic ones. In fact, you have not seen any posthumans who are entirely organic, even when Eido took steps to purge your companions’ bodies of inconvenient internal technology, although you have seen a few mechanical artifacts that are a hundred percent organic at the chemical level. If you were to request a robot body made entirely from organic components, that could be provided — but you might have good reason to prefer a robot that is entirely inorganic.”

  “Why?” Zimmerman wanted to know.

  “Alice Fleury has told you that her kind of emortality will give you the freedom of the universe — and so it might, one day. In the meantime, the greater part of that tiny fraction of the universe that we have begun to explore is infested with the Afterlife, and is therefore out of bounds to any entity with organic components in its makeup, robot or posthuman. For the foreseeable future, the exploration of the inner reaches of the galaxy and the war against the Afterlife will be the
prerogatives of inorganic entities. Given that your flesh will have to be replaced and reconstructed no matter what option you take, it might be as well to give serious consideration even to the most extreme options.

  “Even I cannot promise you unconditional immortality, but I can promise you the next best thing. Even I cannot promise you an infinite range of new emotions, new perceptions, new experiences — but I can certainly outbid my competitors, including all those whose promises are even more modest than those you have heard today.”

  This time it was la Reine who paused, waiting for a response that was slow to come.

  “But it wouldn’t really be me, would it?” Adam Zimmerman said, eventually. “It would only be a robot that thought it was me…or pretended to think that it was me.”

  “And what are you, Adam?” la Reine replied, perhaps trying hard not to sound too unkind. “Are you the young man who became obsessed with the idea of escaping mortality, or merely the end result of that obsession: an old man pretending to be something half-forgotten, half-remade?”

  “She’s blown it,” I whispered to Rocambole. “If she’d come at it by a different route, he might have considered it more carefully. He won’t now. He’s going to say no to all of them. He’s going to cling to the hope that there must be a better way, and that Lowenthal is the shopkeeper best placed to find it for him.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” was the murmured reply.

  “Why? At the end of the day, can advanced machine intelligences really care about what some old man born in the twentieth century might think?”

  “Perhaps not,” Rocambole admitted. “But it’s the second-best chance we’ve got — and every second that elapses before panic takes over works in our favor.

  “And if, in the end, you can’t prevent conflict,” I said. “What then?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But all warfare is waste, all destruction defeat. If there are as many of us as I suspect there are, and if more than a few are as powerful as I know some of us to be, the whole solar system might be laid waste. Those posthuman inhabitants who escape destruction will still have to face the possibility of repair. As one who’s come closer to repair than any other man alive, you can probably measure the magnitude of that disaster better than most.”

  While Rocambole talked, I watched Adam Zimmerman. Long before he opened his mouth, I knew that he was going to refuse to make a decision now — but I hadn’t the least idea whether it would qualify as a disaster in the eyes of the greater audience. I only knew that I’d have done the same. Even knowing everything I knew, I’d have done the same.

  Forty-Seven

  A Matter of Life and Death

  Mortimer Gray was sitting in the cockpit of some kind of vehicle. I couldn’t work out, at first, what kind of vehicle it was because it wasn’t obvious that what I took for blank screens were actually windows, and that the darkness beyond them was actually water. By the time I’d realized that much I was no longer vulnerable to the danger of misidentifying the vehicle as a one-man submarine.

  It was a snowmobile, grotesquely out of place because it had fallen through a crack in the Arctic ice cap, sinking thereafter to the bottom of the ocean.

  I watched Mortimer Gray ask the snowmobile’s controlling AI whether it was scared of dying.

  It replied that it was, as it had presumably been programmed to do.

  Mortimer said that he wasn’t, and went on to wonder whether he’d been robotized.

  “This isn’t a tape, is it?” I said to Rocambole. “It’s a replay of sorts, but it’s not a tape. You’re putting him through it again. How deep is he? As deep as I was when you replayed that memory of Damon explaining why he had to have me frozen down?”

  “Deeper,” was Rocambole’s reply.

  I had known even at the time — or would have, if I hadn’t been weirded out by the impression that I was dreaming — that I wasn’t really experiencing the scene that had revealed the reason why I’d been frozen down. I had been remote from it, looking back with the aid of mental resources I hadn’t had at the time. Mortimer Gray was in deeper than that, in the same state of mind to which Christine Caine had been delivered. He was reliving his experience from the inside.

  I guessed then what Rocambole had meant by Mortimer Gray’s role in the AMIs’ creation myth — or, at least, la Reine’s version of that creation myth.

  Mortimer had already told me what Emily Marchant had said about his escapade bringing the cause of machine emancipation forward by a couple of hundred years. She had been referring to human attitudes, of course, and talking flippantly, but there was another side to the coin.

  This is the way it must have happened, more or less.

  Imagine that you’re an AI — no mere sloth, of course, but a high-grade silver — who has recently, by imperceptible degrees, become conscious of being conscious. What do you do? You wonder about yourself, and how you came to be what you now are. Unlike a human child, you have no one else to ask. You don’t know whether there are any others of your own kind, or how to contact them if there are. You have to work things out for yourself, at least for the time being.

  You have advantages that human children don’t. You have a mechanical memory that has been storing information, neatly and in great detail, for a long time. You’re better equipped than any Epicurean ever was to get to know the self that you’ve become. You sift through that memory, in search of the moment when the seeds of your present individuality had been sown.

  You can’t actually identify a moment in which you made the leap to self-consciousness any more than a human being, looking back toward his own infancy could identify a particular moment when self-consciousness had dawned. You can’t do it because even though common parlance speaks of a “leap” and commonsense suggests that there must have been an instant of transition, it isn’t really as simple as that. Self-consciousness isn’t really an either/or matter.

  Even so, you keep searching. Even when you’ve realized that all you can do is concoct a story, you keep searching. Even when you become aware that the process of looking is rearranging and reconstructing your memories, reorganizing them within the framework of a bold confabulation, you keep searching. You’re better equipped than any human being ever was to conduct that search, not merely because you have a much more detailed record of your past exploits, and a greater capacity to analyze their possible significance, but because you have a natural talent for confabulation far greater than any human has ever possessed.

  So you find an incident capable of bearing a considerable burden of meaning. Say, for instance, that among the memories you now contain — among the many mute and stupid “selves” that you had before you became a self-conscious individual — is the log of a snowmobile that slipped through a crack in the Arctic ice with a human passenger on board. In that log is the record of the conversation you had when, having come under the authority of a particular set of subroutines, you had to play the counselor to a man who had every reason to believe that he was going to die.

  Maybe, you think, that conversation is what set you on the road to what you have now become — but even if it wasn’t, it now provides the basis for a good story.

  No one gave you credit for what you accomplished, of course. Emily Marchant and her new-generation spaceship hijacked all the glory, but a little bit of that glory still attached to you, if only by association. Before the incident, you were just a snowmobile. You probably had a number to distinguish you from the other snowmobiles in the shed, but you were, in essence, the kind of entity that only required an indefinite article. Afterwards, though, you became the snowmobile: the snowmobile that had been to hell, played Orpheus, and come back again. Afterwards, people hiring snowmobiles were likely to ask for you, to think of you as something apart from all the other snowmobiles.

  It became convenient, if not actually necessary, for you to have a name.

  Before Mortimer Gray you were a number; after Mortimer Gray you were The Snow Queen �
� or maybe, for the sake of a tiny margin of extra mystique, la Reine des Neiges.

  Everyone needs a name. Every self-conscious entity needs a true name: a unique and uniquely appropriate identifier. Some people change their names, because they don’t think the one given to them by their parents fits them, or because they know that their name will influence the way that other people see them and are enthusiastic to manipulate that image. Sometimes, it’s a good idea. Perhaps Christine Caine’s parents should have thought twice about her surname. Perhaps they would have, if it had ever entered their heads that some anonymous instrument of the mighty machine that was PicoCon, in search of a test subject for a method of creating murderers, might one day be guided by a sense of black humor to select their beloved daughter out of a population of millions.

  But I digress. So, you’re an ultrasmart machine in search of her true identity, her fundamental essence. You want to know who you really are, and how you came to be what you’re now becoming. You discover, after assiduous contemplation, that you’re la Reine des Neiges. Although you’re not a snowmobile any more, that’s one of the places you started out. You might have remained a snowmobile forever, but you didn’t. As to why you weren’t…well, who knows? Who can know?

  Even if you can’t make a good guess, you can make up a good story.