Halo

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