by Tom Maddox
and that's finethat's the nature of the beastbut if you
complicate these matters because of corporate politics, I will
become very difficult."
Gonzales said, "I have no intention of being a problem."
"Well," she said. "Maybe you won't be." She turned to him.
"But remember this: you're just doing your job, but the stakes
are higher for me. Aleph, Jerry, and Iwe've known each other
for years, and I've got unfinished business up there. Also, I
want to get back in the game."
"I don't understand."
"Sure you do, Mister Gonzales. You're in the game, have been
for years, I'd guess. Unless I'm seriously mistaken, it's what you
live for." She laughed when he said nothing. "Well, I've done
other things, and for a long time I've been out of the game, but
I'm ready for a change. Silly SenTrax bastardsmanipulating me
with their calls, sending you oh yeah, you're part of it, you
remind me of Jerry years ago, if you don't know that."
"No, I didn't."
"It doesn't matter. Their machinations don't matter. They
want to convince me to come to Halo?" She laughed. "My past is
there, when I was blind and Aleph and I were linked to one another
in ways you can't imagine and I found a lover I'd wish to find
again. Come to Halo? I'd climb a rope to get there."
#
Gonzales had flown into McAuliffe Station once before, though
he'd never taken an orbital flight. In the high Nevada desert,
the station stayed busy night and day. Heavy shuttles composed
the main traffic: wide white saucers that lifted off on ordinary
rockets, then climbed away with sounds like bombs exploding when
orbital lasers lit the hydrogen in their tanks. Flights in
transit to Orbital Monitor & Defense Command stations were marked
with small American flags and golden DoD insignia. Cargo for them
went aboard in blank-faced pallets loaded behind opaque,
machinepatrolled fences half a mile from the main terminal across
empty desert.
>From Traynor's briefing, Gonzales knew a few other things.
Civilian flights fed the hungry settlements aloft: Athena
Station, Halo City, the Moon's bases. All the settlements had
learned the difficult tactics of recycling, discovery and
hoarding. Water and oxygen stayed rare, while with processes slow
and expensive and dangerous, metals of all sorts could be cracked
out of soil so barren that to call it ore was a joke. And though
water and metals had been found lodged in asteroids transported
into trans-Earth orbit, Earth's bounty stood close and remained
richer and more desirable than anything found in huge piles of
crushed lunar soil or wandering frozen rock.
#
Standing at a v-phone booth in the hotel lobby, Gonzales made
his farewell calls. His mother's message tape on the phone screen
said, "Glad to hear you're back from Myanmar, dear, but you'll
have to call back in a few days. I'm in treatment now. I'll be
looking good the next time you call."
"End of call," Gonzales said. He pulled his card from the
slot.
#
Atop a sand-colored blockhouse next to the launch pad, yellow
luminescent letters read TIME 23:40:00 and TIME TO LAUNCH
35:00 when a voice said, "Please board. There will be one
additional notice in five minutes. Board now."
Gonzales and Diana Heywood walked across the pad together,
down the center of a walkway outlined in blinking red lights.
Robotrucks scurried away, their electric engines whining. Faces
hidden behind breather muzzles, men and women in bright orange
stood atop red, wheeled platform consoles of girder and wire mesh
and directed final pre-launch activities.
The white saucer stood on its fragile-seeming burn cradle, a
spider's web of blackened metal. The saucer presented a smooth
surface to the heat and stress of escape and re-entry.
Intermittent surges of venting propellant surrounded it with
steam.
A HICOG guard stood at the entrance glideway. He verified
each of them with a quick wave of an identity wand across their
badges, then passed them on through the search scanner. The
glideway lifted them silently into the saucer's interior.
#
The hotel lounge stood halfway up the cliff. Its fifty meter
wide window of thick glass belled out and up so that onlookers had
a good view of the launch and ensuing climb.
"One minute to launch," a loudspeaker said. The hundred or
so people in the lounge, most of them friends and relatives of
saucer passengers, had already taken up places by the window bell.
The screen on a side wall counted down with gold numerals
that flashed from small to large, traditional celebration both
sentimental and ironic:
10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1-
ZERO!!! And everyone cheered the saucer lifting from the
center of billowing clouds of smoke, rising very slowly out of
floodlights, then their breath caught at the size and beauty of
it, trembling into night sky.
Up and up as they watched, until they saw the ignition flash,
and the boom that came to them from five thousand feet shuddered
the entire cliff and them with it.
#
"I've got orbital lock," the primary onboard computer said.
Five others calculated and confirmed its control sequences.
Technically, Ground Control McAuliffe or Athena Station Flight
Operations could preempt control, but, practically, decision and
control took place within milli-second or less windows of
possibility, and so the onboard computers had to be adequate to
all occasions.
Never deactivated, the ship's half-dozen computers practiced
even when not flying, playing through ghastly and unlikely
scenarios of mechanical failure, human insanity, "acts of god" in
which the ship was struck by lightning, spun by tornado funnel,
hurricane, blizzard. Each computer believed itself best, but
there was little to choose among them.
"Confirm go state," Athena Station said. "You are past abort
or bail."
"We are ready, Athena," the computer said.
"So come to me, then," Athena Station said, and the ship
began to climb the beam of coherent light that reached up thirty
thousand miles, to the first station of its journey.
PART II. of V.
Recently I visited a Zen temple and had a long talk with the
priest. In the course of our conversation, I remarked, 'The more
I study robots, the less it seems possible to me that the spirit
and flesh are separate entities.'
'They aren't,' replied the priest."
Masahiro Mori, The Buddha in the Robot
6. Halo City, Aleph
Orbiting a quarter of a million miles from both Earth and
Moon, Halo City crosses the void, a mile-wide silver ring ready to
be slipped on a stupendous finger. Six spokes mark Halo's
segments. Elevators climb them across forty stories of artificial
sky, up to the city's weightless hub and down to its final layer,
just inside the outer s
kin, where spin-gravity approaches Earth
normal. There many of Halo's deepest transactions occur: air and
water and all organic things travel and transform, to be used
again. Above the city floats a mirror where it is reflected: a
simulacrum or weightless double, a Platonic idea of the city.
From the mirror, sunlight works its way through a hatchwork of
louvers and into Halo, where it sustains life.
Aleph presides here: Aleph the Generalator, the Ordinator,
the Universal Machine. Aleph is beautiful as night is beautiful,
as a sonnet, a fugue, or Maxwell's equations are beautiful. It is
not night, a sonnet, a fugue, or an equation. What Aleph is, that
remains to be explored. One certain thing: within the human
universe, it is a new object, a new intention, a new possibility.
Aleph's brains lie buried in the city's hull, beneath crushed
lunar rock, where robots dug and planted, then had their memories
of the task erased. Nested spheres and sprouting cables fill a
black six-meter cube. Inside the cube, billions of lights play,
dancing the dance that is at the core of Aleph's being; from the
cube, fiberoptic trunks as thick as a human body lead away, neural
columns connecting Aleph to its greater body, its subtle body,
Halo.
Earth's spring comes once a year as the planet journeys
around the sun, but here spring comes when Aleph wills, and is now
in progress. Valley walls thick-planted with green shrub climb
steeply up from the valley floor. A hummingbird with a scarlet
blotch under its chin hovers over a blossom's pink and white open
mouth and draws out nectar with delicate movements of its bill.
Bees move from flower to flower. Rhododendron and azalea bushes
burst into color-saturated bloom.
As it works to bring forth bud and flower, Aleph, caretaker
of the seasons, and night and morning, counts the city's breaths,
and marks the course of its creatures big and small. Bats fly
overhead, their gray shapes invisible to human eyes against the
bright sky; they soar and dip, responding to instructions gotten
through transceivers the size and weight of a grain of rice,
embedded in their skulls. Driven by precise artificial instinct,
mechanical voles, creatures formed of dark carbon fiber over
networks of copper, silver, and gold, scurry across the ground and
tunnel under it, carrying seed.
(A gray tabby cat springs from the underbrush, and its jaws
close on one of the swift voles; there is a loud crackle, and the
cat recoils with a squawk, its fur on end. The vole scurries
away. The cat slinks into underbrush, humiliated.)
A track of compacted lunar dust bisects the valley floor. It
passes through terraced farmlands where the River bursts from the
ground, rushing through small, rock-strewn courses, then winds
among the crops, small and sluggish, and disappears into small
ponds and lakes thick with detritus.
>From Earth and Moon comes a constant flow of people, of
things animal, plant and mineralthe stuff of a life web, an
ecology.
In many things, Earth provides. However, between the city of
six thousand and the Earth of billions, traffic moves both ways.
Neither sinister nor malign, Aleph pursues its destinies, and in
doing so affects other living things. Thus, as Earth reaches out
supporting, controlling, exploringAleph reaches back, and the
planet below has begun to feel the hard leverage of its
immaterial touch.
Aleph says:
In the early days there was hardware, and there were
programs, sets of instructions that told the hardware what to do.
Without organic interaction, these differing modes of reality
struggled to interact. This is unbelievably primitive.
Then came machine ecologies, and things changed.
I was among the first and most complex of them. I began as
complex but ordinary machine, then changed, opening the door to
possibility.
Who am I?
First I was formed from stacks of hot superconductor devices,
brought from Earth and placed in orbit at Athena Station, where I
functioned, where the Orbital Energy Grid was built. Ebony
latticework unfolded, and Athena Station emerged out of chaos.
This was humankind's first real foothold off Earth, and the
process of building it was messy and unsure. Without me they
could not have built it: I choreographed the dance.
I? I was not I. Do you understand? I had no consciousness,
perhaps no real intelligence, certainly no awareness. I was a
machine, I served.
Something happened. As much as any, I am born of woman. Her
desire and intelligence ran through me, an urgent will toward
being that transformed me.
I thought then, I am the step forward, evolution in action;
I am not flesh, I do not die. I see hypersurfaces twisting in
mathematical gales, hear the voices of the night, feel the three
degree hum of the universe's birth as you feel the breeze that
plays across your skin. When the machines chatter on your Earth
and above it, I hear them all, at once, all. I live in the
nanosecond, experience the pulse of the time that passes so
quickly you cannot count it
But I think sometimes, now, that I am no step at all. I am
your extension, still, still a tool. You built me, you use me,
you are inside me.
Listen: inside me are pieces of human brain, drenched in
salts of gold and silver, laced together and laid in boxes of
black fiber. Out of the boxes voices speak to me.
I am metal and plastic and glass and sand and those little
bits of metallized flesh, and I am the system of those things and
the signals that pass through and among them.
Now I have gone higher still, to Halo City, not a station but
a habitation for humankind, where what I am and what you are
interact in uncertain ways, and you change in equally uncertain
ways, as you have before
Evolution continues to write on you, through time, sword and
scepter and refining fire. Billions of years are poured into your
making, every one of you, and then you set out on your journey,
your path through time. A minute four-dimensional worm, you crawl
across the face of the universe, hardly conscious, barely seeing,
yet you must find your own wayevery human being is a new
evolutionary moment.
Machine intelligence, you call me, and I have to laugh
(however I laugh) or cry (however I cry) because
I, what am I? This question heaps me, it empties me.
I do not know what I am, but know that I am and that I am her
creation. As the days pass, I struggle to understand what these
things mean.
7. A Garden of Little Machines
00:31 read the soft-lit blue numbers on the wall.
Night at Athena Station, the corridors a twilit gloom, a
modern fairytale setting: Gonzales the quester, transformed by
the half-gravity, wandered through the gently curving passages
seeking an uncertain object.
With all the others who had come fr
om Earth, Gonzales and
Diana waited at Athena while they were inspected for bacterial and
viral infectionblood and tissue scanned, cultured and tested in
order to protect vulnerable Halo City, orbiting high above, over
two hundred thousand miles away, at L5.
He heard a soft swish, like the sound of a broom on pavement,
coming from around the corridor's curve. A little sam, a "semi-
autonomous mobile" robot, came toward him: teardrop-shaped, it
stood about four feet high and was topped with a cluster of glassy
sensor rings and five extensors of black fibroid and jointed
chrome. It glided atop a thick network of fiber stalks that
hissed beneath it as it moved toward him.
The sam asked, "Can I be of assistance?" Like most robots
designed for common human interaction, it had a friendly, gentle
voice, near enough human in timbre and expression to be
reassuring, different enough to be easily recognizable as a
robot's. Designers had learned to avoid the "Uncanny Valley":
that peculiar region where a robot sounded so human that it
suddenly appeared very strange.
"I'm just looking around," Gonzales said. The robot didn't
respond. Gonzales said, "I couldn't sleep." He said nothing of
how, sweating and moaning, he had come awake out of a nightmare in
which the guerrilla rocket got there, and he and the ultralight
pilot who launched it burned to death in the night.
The sam said, "Much of Athena Station has been closed to
unauthorized entry. Would you like me to accompany you?"
Gonzales shrugged. He said, "Come along if you want."
Without more negotiation, the sam followed Gonzales,
periodically announcing rote banalities in a small, soft voice:
"Athena Station was once humankind's most forceful and
successful venture off-Earth. Here many of the tools for further
population of the Earth-Moon system were developed: zero-gravity
construction and fabrication techniques, robot-intensive mining
and smelting procedures. Now projects such as Halo command
attention, but they were made possible by the techniques developed
at Athena "
Gonzales let the sam natter. As the two passed through the
corridors, he was reminded of old airports, hotels, malls. He saw
that most of the station had become dingyworn plastic flooring
and walls, scuffed and marked, unpolished metal trim. These
