Halo

by Tom Maddox

  dulled and scarred materials and scenes had been meant to be seen

  and used only when new, fresh from architect's plan and builder's

  hands, never after having suffered the necessary abrasion of human

  contact. All around were logos of vanished firms (McDonald's,

  Coca-Cola), along with those of famed multi-nationalsLunar-

  Bechtel's crescent, SenTrax's sunburst.

  Gonzales felt a ghost-story chill as he realized that this

  entire endeavor, indeed all others like it, had been conceived out

  of late-twentieth century corporate and governmental hubris, and

  so, necessarily, should be regarded with suspicion, as should

  anything from the days when it seemed humankind had turned on all

  living things like an insane father coming into the bedroom late

  at night with an axe.

  The stories were part of every schoolchild's moral and

  intellectual catechism. Toxic chemical and radioactive wastes had

  bubbled up from the ground and the seas as lame efforts at

  disposal foundered on the simple passage of time. Stable

  ecosystems had been altered or destroyed without thought for

  anything past the moment's advantage, and species died so quickly

  biologists were hard pressed to keep the recordswrite in the

  Domesday Book now, mourn later. Temperature norms and

  concentrations of vital gases in the atmosphere had fluctuated in

  alarming manner, as though Gaia herself had been taken to the

  fever point.

  Historians marked the Dolphin Catastrophe as the breakpoint,

  the year 2006 as the time of the change. More than ten thousand

  dolphins floated onto the Florida coast near Boca Raton. Crippled

  and twitching, they nosed into the surf and beached themselves in

  front of horrified sunbathers, and there they died, as doctors and

  volunteers watched, weeping and raging against the chemical spill

  that was killing the dolphins, millions of gallons of toxic waste

  carried on Gulf Stream currents. Along with the thousands of

  volunteers, most of whom could do little but mourn the dead, info-

  nets around the world converged on the scene, and billions

  watched, asking, why all together? why now? And to most it

  seemed that the mammals had come together in intelligent, silent

  protest. Finally, shamed and guilty, humanity had looked at its

  planet like a drunk waking up in a slum hotel and asked itself,

  how did I get here? The conclusion had been plain: unless

  humanity really had lost its collective mind, at some point it had

  to agree: enough.

  Standing in the shadowy corridor of a space station more than

  thirty thousand miles above Earth's surface, Gonzales thought how

  difficult it all remained. Though all nations served the letter

  of international laws that put Earth's welfare before their

  interests, and Preservationists roamed all of the world's

  habitatsthey had "friends of the court" status in all nations

  and served as advocates for endangered speciesthe war to save

  Earth from humankind was not over. Grasping, corrupt, self-

  centered, the human species always threatened to overwhelm its

  habitats and itself with careless, powerful gestures and simple

  greed.

  However, though this station, like most all of humankind's

  settlements aloftthe settlements on the Moon and Mars, the

  Orbital Energy Grid, Halo Cityhad been conceived in the bad old

  twentieth century, they were sustained as products of New

  Millennium consciousness: contrite, chastened, careful.

  He walked on.

  #

  The junction just ahead of Gonzales and the sam was marked by

  blinking red lights. From around the corner came the sounds of

  scurrying small things. "What's up?" Gonzales asked.

  "Follow me," the sam said. "We must not cross the marker, but

  we can stand and watch."

  A large group of sams, identical to the one next to Gonzales,

  filled the hallway beyond. Some tried to work their way through

  informal mazes of furniture and stacked junk, coils of wire and

  angle-iron and the like; others worked to assist sams that had

  gotten tangled in the sections of the maze. Still others shifted

  pieces of the maze to one side. Amid clicking extensors and

  banging metal, the sams labored patiently, mostly unsuccessfully.

  Gonzales was reminded of old twentieth century films satirizing

  assembly lines, robots, machines in general.

  "A nursery," the sam said. "This group nears completion of

  its education. This"it pointed with an extensor toward the

  struggling robots"is the prerequisite to training. As small

  children must mature in their development, they must learn the

  essentials of perception, motion, and coordination. At the same

  time they memorize the ten thousand axioms of common sense, and

  then they can develop their linguistic capabilities; at present

  they have a vocabulary of approximately one thousand words of

  SimSpeech."

  "What about thinking?" Gonzales asked. "Where do they learn

  to do that?"

  "That comes later, if at all. For sams as well as humans,

  thinking is one of the least important things the mind does."

  The two watched for some time, then Gonzales said, "I don't

  need any company," and walked on. When he looked back, he saw the

  sam remained motionless, fascinated by the progress of its

  fellows.

  Gonzales returned to his small room, where a night-light

  glowed softly, and returned to bed. He fell asleep quickly, oddly

  comforted by thinking about the robots busy at their school.

  8. Halo City

  Blue jump-suited Halo personnel led Gonzales and Diana

  through the micro-gravity environments at Halo's Zero-Gate, then

  to an elevator at the hub of Spoke 6, where Tia Showalter,

  Director SenTrax Halo Group, and her assistant, Horn, were waiting

  for them. The shuttle had arrived at Halo an hour before, late

  afternoon local time, and its passengers had waited impatiently as

  it went through docking and clearance procedures, all eager to

  leave the ship after a week spent climbing the long path from

  Athena Station to the city.

  Showalter was just under six feet tall, and had green eyes

  above broad Slavic cheekbones, a wide mouth and pointed chin. Her

  fine brown hair was cut short in a style Gonzales later discovered

  was common to many long-term Halo residents, for convenience in

  micro-gravity environments. Gonzales knew that as director of a

  major SenTrax operation, she had to be wily and tough.

  Horn was a tight-lipped, sallow-skinned man in his

  fifties, skinny and anxious, with iron-gray hair pulled tight

  against his skull in a kind of bun. The man spoke some variety of

  New YorkeseGonzales didn't know which, but he could feel the

  harsh nasal tones beneath his skin.

  The warning gong sounded, then the elevator's vault-like

  doors slid closed with a great hiss, locking in more than a

  hundred people for the trip from axis to rim. Above their heads

  the wall screen read SOLAR FLARE CONDITION GREEN. The elevator

  dropped into one of the city's spokes li
ke a shell into the barrel

  of a gun, down a tube a quarter of a mile long and into a well of

  increasing gravity.

  Against one wall, a group of sams were clustered around a

  charge-point, black leads extended to the aluminum post. They

  stood silent and motionlesstalking among themselves? Gonzales

  wondered.

  Horn saw where Gonzales was looking and said, "We'd like to

  assign each of you a sam for your stay in Halo."

  "Really?" Gonzales said.

  Diana said, "No thank you." Quickly.

  Right, Gonzales thought. No point in putting ourselves under

  surveillance. He said, "I'll pass, too."

  Horn paused, looking a bit miffed, as if he wanted to argue.

  He said, "Very well. Then be sure you always wear the

  communication and i.d. module you were given when you came off the

  shuttle." He held up his own wrist to show the small bracelet, a

  closed loop of plain silver that bulged just slightly with the

  electronics inside. "If you have a problem, just yell and help

  will be on the way. Or if you have a question, just state it.

  Someone will answerAleph or one of its communications demons."

  Gonzales asked, "Yeah, they told us that. Are we monitored

  at all times?"

  Showalter said, "Yes. In fact, there's a real-time hologram

  in Operations that shows everyone's movements, not just visitors

  but residents as well."

  "Seems an invasion of privacy," Gonzales said.

  Horn said, "We don't look at it that way. If you can't

  accept such simple necessities, Halo will be most uncomfortable

  for you." He smiled. "Not that you're likely to be here for

  long."

  Gonzales said, "I can't imagine people putting up with total

  surveillance for long, frankly."

  Horn said, "It seems to us a small price to pay for an

  unpolluted world shared to the benefit of all."

  Showalter looked from Horn to Gonzales. She said, "We are a

  far island in a hostile place. We cannot afford some of your

  illusions: the independence of the self, unconstrained free will

  those sorts of things."

  A shutter retracted from a window ten meters square as the

  elevator entered the living ring's inner space. Far below lay

  sun-lit valleys thick-planted with trees and shrubs and flowers,

  broken by one barren space where grayish slurries squirted out of

  huge pipe ends to flow across scarred metal.

  "Our city," Showalter said.

  #

  Eight people were gathered around a u-shaped table of beige

  silica foam. Showalter sat at the center of the u, with Horn to

  her immediate right, Gonzales and Diana beyond him. To her left

  were a youngish woman, then two men in late middle age, one white,

  one black.

  At the open end of the u, the table fronted a screen that

  covered its entire wall, floor to ceiling. The screen had been

  lit when Gonzales and Diana arrived, showing another room where an

  indeterminate number of people sat on couches, chairs, or slouched

  on cushions on the floor.

  Showalter said, "Let me introduce you all to one another.

  Everyone has met Horn, my assistant. Next to him are Doctor Diana

  Heywood and Mikhail Gonzales, who arrived yesterday." They both

  smiled and nodded.

  "Lizzie Jordan," Showalter said, pointing to the woman to her

  left. "Hi," Lizzie said. She was blonde, thin, with high

  cheekbones; she had a smear of gold dust inset below her left eye

  and wore rough beta-cloth overalls gapped to show part of a tattoo

  between her breastsa twining green stem. Showalter said,

  "Lizzie heads the Interface Collective, and thus will be the

  person you'll be working with most closely. The people you see on

  the screen are also members of the collective. They have a

  proprietary interest in all matters pertaining to Aleph and Halo

  and have the right to be present at inter-group meetings, and to

  speak to whatever issues are entertained there."

  Diana said, "I understand."

  Gonzales nodded. He knew from Traynor's Advisor that

  communal decision-making was the norm at Halo, but he hadn't

  imagined it would be so thoroughgoing.

  "Next to Lizzie is Doctor Charley Hughes," Showalter said.

  "He will be doing the surgical procedure to upgrade your neural

  sockets, Doctor Heywood." The man said, "Hello" and looked

  intently at Gonzales and Diana. His sparse gray hair stood up in

  spikes; his face was pale, thin, deeply-lined. He had been

  smoking constantly since they arrived, one hand cupping a

  cigarillo, the other supporting the smoke-saver ball at the

  cigarillo's burning end.

  "And Doctor Eric Chow," she said. The black man next to

  Charley Hughes smiled. Chow was a big man with hands the size of

  small shovels; he had a round face, very dark skin, a broad nose

  and big lips; he wore his hair cropped short. Showalter said, "He

  heads the Neuro-Ontic Studies Group and is Doctor Hughes's primary

  consultant on the treatment planned for Jerry Chapman."

  She paused and turned to the screen showing the IC members.

  A window opened at the left side of the screen, and a figure

  appeared. Its arms and torso were clothed in gold; its face

  shimmered with a formless brightness. Around its head and

  shoulders, a nimbus flared, red, blue, yellow, and green.

  "Hello, everyone" the figure said. "And welcome, Doctor and

  Mister Gonzales. I am a localized manifestation of Alepha

  simulacrum for your convenience and mine."

  Gonzales noticed that next to him, Diana was smiling, while

  all around him there was silence, as all in the room and on the

  screen were intently watching the screen.

  #

  The IC's viewing window had closed, but the simulacrum's

  portion remainedin it, the creature of light sat watching.

  Showalter, Horn, Diana, Lizzie, Charley, and Gonzales sat around

  the table.

  Showalter said, "This is Chow's meeting, and I won't say

  much in it. However, I should remind you of certain realities.

  This project does not have high priority in the overall context of

  SenTrax's responsibilities to Halo City; thus, while we support

  this experiment's humanitarian goals, we are not prepared to delay

  other projects."

  Horn said, "We cannot divert a significant amount of people

  to promulgation and we are not or do not want to encourage any

  behaviors which might adversely impact other SenTrax outcomes."

  Lizzie laughed, and Gonzales, poker-faced, looked at her and

  thought, yeah, this guy's laughable all right. Gonzales

  recognized the performative chatter of the bureaucratic ape, a

  mixture of scrambled syntax and pretentious buzzwordslanguage

  meant to manipulate or mindfuck, not enlighten or amuse.

  Horn, frowning at Lizzie, said, "If the operation becomes

  problematized, threatening to seriously impact other more

  essentialized Halo priorities, then we require immediate

  resolution through proper SenTrax procedures."

  Showalter said, "If you screw up, we shut you down." She

  nodded to Horn, and they both
stood and left.

  Lizzie said, "You notice they held off on the heavy stuff

  until the collective had cleared the screen."

  Charley asked, "Do you want to call them on it? They're in

  violation of the group's compact."

  "No," she said. "I expected all that." She looked at Diana

  and Gonzales and said, "Doctor Chow, your show."

  "Thank you," Chow said. His voice was oddly high-pitched for

  such a big man; Gonzales had been expecting something on the order

  of a basso profundo. Chow said, "In the late twentieth century,

  the idea emerged of a person's identity as something

  transferrable. People spoke, in the idiom of the time, of

  'downloading' a person." On the screen, where the IC had been,

  appeared a cartoon drawing of a nude woman, her expression

  stunned, the top of her skull covered with a metal cap. From the

  cap a thick metal cable led to a large black cabinet faced with

  arrays of blinking lights.

  "Absurd," Chow said, and the woman disappeared. "To see why,

  let us ask, what is a person? Is it a pure spirit, fluid in a jar

  that one can decant into the proper container? Hardly. It is a

  dynamic field made of thousands of disparate elements, held in a

  loose sack of skin that perambulates the universe at large. And

  of course it is perceptions, histories, possibilities, actions,

  and the states and affects pertaining to all these.

  "I can be found in the motion of my hand" He spread his

  fingers like a magician about to materialize a coin or colored

  scarf, and on the screen, the hand and its motion were doubled.

  "And in my own perceptions of the handfor instance, from within,

  through proprioceptors. And of course I see I." Chow turned and

  held his hand in front of his face. He dropped his hand in a

  chopping motion, and the screen cleared. "And I am that which

  thinks about, talks about, and remembers the hand and has the

  special relation of ownership to it. I am also the will to use

  that hand." He held the hand in front of his face, made a

  clenched fist. "So, to download even a portion of I would be to

  download all these things and their entire somatic context.

  "Also, of course, I am that which has my experiences, stored

  as motor possibilities, recalled as memory, dream, manifest as

  characteristic ways of being and knowing. To download I would

  require duplicating this fluid chaos.

  "Downloading the I thus becomes a most daunting task, perhaps