Live Without a Net

by Lou Anders

  “You damned toothy ratdogs aren’t going anywhere.”

  A squad of humans had come stealthily upon Pertinax and Chellapilla while their attentions were engaged by the lobe. With rifles leveled at their heads, the wardens had no recourse but to raise their hands in surrender.

  Two men came to bind the wardens. The one dealing with Chellapilla twisted her arms cruelly behind her, causing her to squeal. Maddened by the sound, Pertinax broke free and hurled himself at one of the gunbearers. But a rifle stock connected with his skull, and he knew only blackness.

  When Pertinax awoke, night had fallen. He found himself with limbs bound, lying in a cage improvised from thick branches rammed deep into the soil and lashed together. He struggled to rise, and thus attracted the attentions of his fellow captives.

  Similarly bound, Chellapilla squirmed across the grass to her mate. “Oh, Perty, I’m so glad you’re awake! We were afraid you had a concussion.”

  “No, I’m fine. And you?”

  “Just sore. Once you were knocked out, they didn’t really hurt me further.”

  Sylvanus’s sad voice reached Pertinax, as well. “Welcome back, my lad. We’re in a fine mess now, and it’s all my fault for underestimating the harmful intentions of these savages.”

  Firelight flared up some meters away, accompanied by the roar of a human crowd. “Where are we?”

  “We’re on the town green,” said Chellapilla. “The humans are celebrating their victory over us. They slaughtered our kangemu and are roasting them for a feast.”

  “Barbarians!”

  Tanselle spoke. “Cimabue and I are here, as well, Pertinax, but he did not escape so easily as you. They clubbed him viciously when he fought back. Now his breathing is erratic, and he won’t respond.”

  “We have to do something!”

  “But what?” inquired Sylvanus.

  “The least we can do,” said Chellapilla, “is inform the tropospheric mind of our troubles and the threat from rogue lobe infection. Maybe the mind will know what to do.”

  Pertinax considered this proposal. “That’s a sound idea, Chell. But I suspect our pigeons have already served as appetizers.” He paused as an idea struck him. “But I know a way to reach the mind. First I need to be free. You three will have to chew my ropes off.”

  Shielded by darkness, without any guards to note their activities and interfere (how helpless the humans must have deemed them!), his three fellows quickly chewed through Pertinax’s bonds with their sturdy teeth and powerful jaws. His first action after massaging his limbs back into a semblance of strength was to take off his robe and stuff it with dirt and grass into a rough recumbent dummy that would satisfy a cursory head count. Then, employing his own untaxed jaw muscles, he beavered his way out of the cage.

  “Be careful, Perty!” whispered Chellapilla, but Pertinax did not pause to reply.

  Naked, dashing low across the yard from shadow to shadow, Pertinax reached one of the tethered balloons without being detected. Nearby stood a giant ceramic pot with a poorly fitting lid. Shards of light and sound escaped from the pot, betokening the presence of a malignant rogue lobe within. Plainly, infection of the tropospheric mind was imminent. This realization hastened Pertinax’s actions.

  First he kicked up the feed on one balloon’s colony of methanogens. That vehicle began to tug even more heartily at its tethers. Moving among the other balloons, Pertinax disabled them by snapping their nutrient feedlines. At the very least, this would delay the assault on the mind.

  Pertinax leaped on board the lone functional balloon and cast off. He rose swiftly to the height of several meters before he was spotted. Shouts filled the night. Something whizzed by Pertinax’s head, and he ducked. A barbed projectile from one of the compressed-air guns. Pertinax doubted the weapons possessed enough force to harm him or the balloon at this altitude, but he remained hunkered down for a few more minutes nonetheless.

  Would the humans take revenge on their remaining captives? Pertinax couldn’t spare the energy for worry. He had a mission to complete.

  Within the space of fifteen minutes, Pertinax floated among the lowest clouds, the nearest gauzy interface to the tropospheric mind. Their dampness subtly enwrapped him, until he was soaked and shivering. His head seemed to attract a thicker constellation of fog… .

  A small auroral screen opened up in the sky not four meters from Pertinax. He could smell the scorched molecules associated with the display.

  Don Corleone appeared on the screen: one or more of the resident AIs taking a form deemed familiar from Pertinax’s recent past viewing records.

  “You have done well to bring us this information, steward. We will now enforce our justice on the humans.”

  Pertinax’s teeth chattered. “Puh-please try to spare my companions.”

  The representative of the tropospheric mind did not deign to reply, and the screen winked out in a frazzle of sparks.

  The nighted sky grew darker, if such was possible. Ominous rumbles sounded from the west. Winds began to rise.

  The mind was marshaling a storm. A lightning storm. And Pertinax was riding a bomb.

  Pertinax frantically shut off the feeder line to the methanogens. The balloon began to descend, but all too slowly for Pertinax’s peace of mind.

  The first lightning strike impacted the ground far below, after seeming to sizzle right past Pertinax’s nose. He knew the bolt must have been farther off than that, but anywhere closer than the next bioregion was too close.

  Now shafts of fire began to rain down at supernatural frequency. Turbulence rocked the gondola. Thunder deafened him. Pertinax’s throat felt raw, and he realized he had been shouting for help from the balloon or the mind or anyone else who might be around to hear.

  Now the cascade of lighting was nigh incessant, one deadly strike after another on the Overclockers’ village. Pertinax knew he could stay no longer with the deadly balloon. But the ground was still some hundred meters away.

  Pertinax jumped.

  Behind him the balloon exploded.

  Pertinax spread out his arms, transforming the big loose flaps of skin anchored from armpits to ankles into wings, wings derived from one of his ancestral strains, the sciuroptera.

  After spiraling downward with some control, despite the gusts, Pertinax landed lightly, on an open patch of ground near a wooden sign that announced the CITY LIMITS OF CHICAGO.

  He had arrived just in time for the twister.

  Illuminated intermittently by the slackening lightning, the stygian funnel shape tracked onto land from across the lake and stepped into the human settlement, moving in an intelligent and programmatic fashion among the buildings.

  Even at this distance, the wind threatened to pull Pertinax off his feet. He scrambled for a nearby tree and held on to its trunk for dear life.

  At last, though, the destruction wreaked by the tropospheric mind ended, with the twister evaporating in a coordinated manner from bottom to top.

  Pertinax ran back toward the town green.

  The many fires caused by the lightning had been effectively doused by the wet cyclone, but still buildings smoldered. Not one stone seemed atop another, nor plank joined to plank. The few Overclocker survivors were too dazed or busy to interfere with Pertinax.

  Seared streaks marked the town green, and huge divots had been wrenched up by the twister. Windblown litter made running difficult.

  But a circle of lawn around the cage holding the wardens was immaculate, having been excluded from electrical blasts and then cradled in a deliberate eye of the winds.

  “Is everyone all right?”

  “Perty! You did it! Yes, we’re all fine. Even Cimabue is finally coming around.”

  Within a short time all were freed. Pertinax clutched Chellapilla to him.

  Sylvanus surveyed the devastation, clucking his tongue ruefully. “Such a tragedy. Well, I expect that once we relocate the remnant population, we can wean them off our help and back up to some kind of agrarian se
lf-sufficiency in just a few generations.”

  Pertinax felt now an even greater urgency to engender a heir or two with Chellapilla. The demands on the stewards of this beloved planet required new blood to sustain their mission down the years.

  “Chell, have you decided about our child?”

  “Absolutely, Perty. I’m ready. I’ve even thought of a name.”

  “Oh?”

  “Boy or girl, it will have to be Storm!”

  Adam Roberts is the author of three novels—Salt (2000), On (2001), and Stone (2002)—as well as a host of academic writings, most of which examine the nineteenth century and science fiction. He is a Reader in Nineteenth-Century Literature in the English Department of Royal Holloway, University of London. He lives with his partner and baby girl.

  NEW MODEL COMPUTER

  Adam Roberts

  The subject spreads itself out along the entire circumference of the circle, the centre of which has been abandoned by the ego. At the centre is the desiring-machine, the celibate machine of the eternal return.

  —DELEUZE AND GUATTARI,Anti-Oedipus

  1.

  Time began forty ago. Space reaches from minus seven point six ten-tothetwelfth to plus four point three. One ago, a new stretch was added to positive space, which was no inconsiderable achievement.

  The machine intelligences who live here often query the nature of these coordinates. Red, with whom our story today is mostly concerned, was young, and accordingly inquisitive. Perhaps youth and inquisitiveness do not automatically go together. But in this case they did.

  “So when we say ‘time began forty ago,’” he inquired, “what are the limits of what we mean? What happened forty-one ago?”

  This, of course, is the natural question to ask, the question that is, in one form or another, at the root of all philosophy. And it was asked for the most natural reason there is: because Red wanted to know the answer. It had not bothered him overmuch until the question framed itself, but once he had asked the question, he very much wanted to know the answer. So do you.

  He was talking to two fellows, one of whom was older than he, and the other who was the same age but of greater complexity and knowledge. The first was called Gero, the second, Epistem. “Of course,” said Gero, “the question occurs. But the world is the limit of what is, of everything that is the case. Forty is the limit backwards of what is the case.”

  “Of course,” said Epistem.

  If we had to pick out one phrase that most concisely characterizes the culture of these machine intelligences, it would be “of course.” Conversation is strewn with this phrase. Most of the culture of these beings followed as a matter of course from the postulate immediately preceding it. They did not, naturally, say these two particular English words; but their equivalent single phoneme has been translated in this way.

  But Red was not satisfied. Would you be satisfied with such an answer? “But something must have happened? Can we not intuit what happened?”

  “We could,” said Gero, with no tone of affirmation in his voice. “Of course, such a process of intuition would be extremely suppositious.”

  “It would, of course,” confirmed Epistem, “amount to an admixture of fantasy and extrapolation.”

  “Nevertheless,” Red insisted, “has anybody undertaken the extrapolation? It would be interesting to know the answer to the question.”

  “Of course it would,” Epistem agreed.

  “But the labor involved in such continual supposition would be too great,” countered Gero. “The mental labor involved. It would be too great for one person, and probably too great even for a team working at great length.”

  This was the answer with which Red had to be satisfied; but he was not satisfied with it. He resolved, after a lengthy portion of further inquiry, to try to construct a computer to help in the solution. He would apply his considerable inductive powers, the powers he and his people were blessed with in abundance, and build a device that could undertake an intuitive and imaginative labor for which his type was less well suited.

  2.

  What is it like, this place where these machine intelligences live?

  It is bright. The light is much more pervasive than in our world. Splinters of it find their way into every crevice. Even the shadow fans like a prism in a range of shades. Everything is very spacious, very large, accommodating. Speaking frankly, it makes our world (which is very far away from such splendor of light) seem poky and dark.

  Time passes here, and it is hard to quantify the differences between the passage of time on this machine world and our experience of the passage of time. It is a difference of poetry rather than physics, perhaps. The machine-being inhabitants of this world enjoy the light and the space. The plateaus on which they live are quick with light.

  3.

  Red decided to build a device that was not, essentially, machinelike. He wanted to build a computer fundamentally organic rather than mechanic. He could not determine whether this had been attempted before; even Gero, who was much older than he, could not remember.

  “There is nobody alive today who remembers so far back as forty,” he said to Gero one day.

  “Of course not,” Gero replied. This is the same word as before, translated slightly differently to fit the English context.

  “Generations come and pass away, and new generations come,” said Red. “But the whole of a generation dies, and a new generation is born entire.” He was simply describing the natural history of his world. “But cannot experience be passed from generation to generation?”

  “Data can be passed in the way you describe, of course,” said Gero. “But, it goes without saying [the same word, again] that this is not the same thing as experience.”

  “None of the data from forty ago helps us determine what happened before forty ago?” pressed Red.

  “Young Red,” said Gero, not unkindly. “If I were as young as you, and possessed twice the intellectual capacity, and three times the persistence, I might begin to attempt the necessary intuiting and extrapolation. But, of course I am old, and of course I am easily tired. It goes without saying.”

  Later, Red addressed Epistem: “I am building a type of computer.”

  “Really?” The word used here is the same as for “of course,” but the business of translation into English requires variety of expression in a way that the language of the machine-beings does not.

  “I thought that an organic device, one grown, might be able to undertake a portion of the intuiting and extrapolation that would be required in calculating an answer to my question.”

  “Ingenious,” said Epistem. “And how are you growing it?”

  “I’ve built a single cell, on a microscale, and seeded it with an iterative component; but the ingenuity, for which I very happily take credit (it was hard enough work!) is in designing the iterative component to shape the growth of the organism so that elements become specialized. As it grows, its corpora will diversify.”

  “I see,” said Epistem. He was genuinely impressed. “And this is how you would stop it becoming nothing more than a mess, a pool of organic tar and soup.” The two words he used that have here been translated as “tar” and “soup” did not mean either of these things in the original, although this is close enough to give a flavor of what he was talking about.

  “Exactly.”

  “And you have decided upon the various specializations?”

  “Of course. What is needed is a computing organ, which I call brain; this will undertake the actual intuiting and extrapolation. All the rest of the design”—he gestured at the diagram, sending thrills of light and color spilling from him in his excitement—“is really here to support and augment the brain. Here to supply it with the necessary organic feed and drainage, here to supply it with data input and to manipulate its environment.”

  “You copy the logic of machine-life in some ways,” observed Epistem. “Redundancy, for instance: two of these appendages, and two of these. And here, a
nd here. Does it really need two of all these things?”

  “No,” conceded Red. “I suppose not. Perhaps I have not worked hard enough at my own intuition, and have simply proceeded logically from what is all around me, effectively copying machine forms. And yet, are such forms not successful? I could,” he mused, “start with a new design, a radically organic design.” In his mind, he had a hazily intuited-through notion of a jellylike blob, a trembling and pulsating sac of froggy gray and green. “But,” he said, dismissing the notion from his machine consciousness, “the culture of organic growth is already under way. It would be too time consuming to undo it.”

  4.

  Red’s New Model Computer did not prosper. The first growth-culture simply died away, and the second also. The third started growing, coalescing into a coil of brown, like a string of oil paint circling out of a paint tube and starting to bud, but then it malfunctioned in some obscure way, splurging cancerously and grotesquely in a short space of time into a knuckled mass of disease. Red irradiated it with that form of sunshine which is killing to that type of life, although machine-beings suffer no ill effects from the wavelength whatsoever. It is harmless to them.

  One disadvantage with organic life, Red realized, was that it is wickedly slow to mature. A whole generation of machine beings could rise up within a decimal of one; the three failed cultures of his single, individual organic computer had taken nearly the whole of one to work through.

  He tried again.

  5.

  Time began forty-one ago, and the machine-life was on the move. Space was to be extended farther, pushing out into the realm of the positive once again, and the whole generation of intelligences living on this world concerted their energies to do so. Several of them visited Red, to press-gang him into the effort.

  “You must abandon this organic computer project of yours,” Epistem admonished him. “You waste your energy; it is not efficient at all. Of course your energies would be better utilized in the common project. Let us all extend space! Forget time, think of space—space, after all, is where we live.”