Divergence a-3

by Tony Ballantyne

  “It’s so dry and broken,” she said. “It makes me think of bones rubbing together.”

  “Bones?” said Fiona. “No. Sloppy sentimentalism. Look, there it is.”

  Eva guessed that they were looking across what had once been the basement of a building; she saw a set of stone steps climbing into the air nearby, and she wondered who had once skipped down them, and for what purpose. Now the building was long gone and they stood at the edge of what looked like a silver pond of VNMs, silver insects the size of Eva’s hand, waving their feelers in the air. And yet the pond was contracting while bulging at the center. A silver column was rising into the air, made up of the swarming insects climbing over one another to get the very center of the pool. The column rose until it was roughly twice Eva’s height, and then the top began to swell. The pond at the base was shrinking away to nothing, leaving the dirty tiled floor of the basement exposed, and now there was only a metal flower, its stalk thinning as the top bulged larger and larger.

  “What is it?” whispered Eva to Ivan, filled with an uneasy thrill. It was a robot dandelion, a metal puffball. The silver flower flashed brightly under the hot sun. Eva felt a strange lump inside her stomach, an edge of excitement. This was why she had come to the RFS: the Watcher thought it controlled everything, and yet it had not counted on this. This was a new sort of life, emerging from the broken past of the industrial world, this was…

  “It’s nothing,” said Ivan, woodenly, and Eva felt her hopes come tumbling down. For once, he didn’t seem to notice her distress. “I’ve seen this before,” he said, “it’s a—”

  “It isn’t nothing,” said Fiona angrily. “Watch. You haven’t seen what happens next.”

  The top of the flower was growing larger as the stalk grew ever thinner; every VNM present seemed to be trying to climb to the center of the growing puffball, climbing over the bodies of those around it in order to achieve its aim. The stalk grew thinner and thinner, till the inevitable happened.

  “Now!” breathed Fiona as the dandelion began to tilt ever so slightly to one side, and then, falling faster and faster, it smashed to the ground and burst apart in a spray of silver bodies. They began to scatter, running apart in a widening circle.

  Eva flinched as they came towards her, a chittering tide of silver bodies. Ivan put a hand on her arm.

  “Don’t worry, they won’t harm you.”

  “They’d strip your cart apart without a moment’s hesitation, though.” Fiona laughed nervously. The silver creatures were skittering past her sandaled feet, and it was obvious that she herself was not quite convinced that they were safe. “Good job you moved it well back.”

  Eva nodded and bent her knee slightly, lifting one foot off the ground a little. She could feel the whispery brush of delicate feelers against her ankles; she could hear the pitter-patter of feet on the tiny pieces of broken concrete, and she felt nauseated.

  “Look,” said Fiona, “here’s Julian and Emily and Will. Let me introduce you.”

  Eva and Ivan exchanged glances as the three strangers approached from the other side of the basement. They were all in their fifties, Eva guessed, about the same age as Fiona. She had met lots of their type in the RFS: well educated, with good jobs back in the surveillance world, with just enough character to see themselves as different from others but not enough to accept their similarities.

  “Julian,” said Fiona, “I’d like to introduce you to Eva. She’s from England.”

  A handsome man with greying temples held out his hand. “Whereabouts?” he asked with genuine interest.

  “All over,” said Eva. “I lived the last thirty years in the North West Conurbation.”

  “Ah yes.” Julian nodded. “The green needle. We took the kids up to see that when it first started growing. To think how far VNMs have progressed.”

  “And this is Ivan,” continued Fiona. “He’s Russian.”

  “Good to meet you, Ivan,” said Julian. “What do you think about this, then? Emily here thinks it’s a signaling device.”

  “It’s not,” said Ivan. “It’s a Conway event.”

  “Really? That’s interesting,” said Julian, and Eva flushed angrily to see how quickly he dismissed her friend. He waved a hand at the other two. “This is Emily, and this is Will.”

  Two more people shook hands. The tide of silver machines that clittered past their ankles was thinning. Fiona could not abide a lull in the conversation. “And where do you live now, Eva?” she asked.

  “What’s a Conway event, Ivan?” Eva asked deliberately.

  Ivan wore a sulky look. “It is quite a common occurrence with these sort of devices,” he said, ignoring Julian and the others. “Sometimes the units get locked into a dynamic equilibrium—”

  “Look!” interrupted Will. “That one’s wearing a jacket!” He pointed to one of the machines scuttling by. There was a flash of white on its back.

  “Gosh,” said Emily, kneeling down and reaching out to catch hold of the machine. It snickered past her; she was too hesitant to get a proper grip on it. “Camouflage?”

  “No,” said Ivan, “venumb.”

  “You told me about those,” said Eva loudly. If Ivan wasn’t going to shine, she was damn well going to do the showing off for him. “Is that birch bark?”

  “I think so,” said Ivan, picking up the little creature. “When metal is in short supply, these machines are programmed to adapt.”

  Julian leaned closer. “Do you mind?” he said, taking the little machine from Ivan. He held it by the body, its legs waving as it sought purchase with anything available. “Yes, it is birch,” he said as if there had been some doubt. He shook his head. “Things are getting worse. They programmed these things to interfere with the natural environment…”

  “No,” said Ivan, “this is almost an evolved process. New forms of life are thriving in the RFS all the time. VNMs are abandoned to replicate here unchecked. The errors in progressive generations are not corrected by outside organizations, as they would be in the surveillance world. These venumbs are occurring more and more frequently. No one could have ever thought that VNMs would interact with plants.”

  Julian let go of the creature and watched as it scuttled off.

  Fiona looked at her watch. “Three more minutes until the plant re-forms. The signaling pulse must have a period of about five minutes thirty-three seconds.”

  Her attitude annoyed Eva. “Weren’t you going to tell us what a Conway event is, Ivan?” she said in a loud voice.

  “I was…”

  “So, where do you live now, Eva?” interrupted Julian.

  Ivan gave a shrug. “Excuse me, Eva, I have something I want to try.” He walked off from the group, stamping down the stone steps into the basement where the flower had grown. He was fiddling with the device he had taken from his tool kit.

  “Be careful, Ivan!” she called. “They’ll be coming back soon. They will fill that basement with you in it.”

  “I will be okay,” said Ivan.

  Eva didn’t really blame him for abandoning her.

  Julian was staring at her, and she felt some of the old embarrassment at being in company creeping back. She didn’t know what to say, so she answered his question.

  “We live in Narkomfin 128. It’s a communal building about fifty kilometers from here.”

  Julian tilted his head at that.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Eva.

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “No it’s not. Why do you look like that?”

  “No reason,” said Julian, “just silly rumors. Narkomfin 128 is quite well known, isn’t it? There are lot of handicapped people there, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” said Eva, “a lot of incurables. And then there are the elderly, and the alcoholics that don’t want to be cured, and the children with—”

  “A lot of MTPH addicts, too, I hear.” For a moment Julian looked as if he was going to say something more, then he thought better of it and changed the sub
ject. “We’re from Saolim. Have you heard of it?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve heard of it,” and at that she relaxed as she saw Ivan come stumping back up the steps.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Yes.” He gazed blankly down into the dusty pit below.

  “Here they come again,” said Fiona.

  The tide had turned again. Already silver machines were scuttling back, tumbling down the walls of the basement, heading towards the site of the flower. Ivan wore that sulky look of hurt pride that Eva knew only too well.

  “What have you done?” she whispered. Ivan didn’t reply, and Eva realized that she had the eyes of the group fixed upon her.

  “Ivan builds robots,” she said, as if that explained everything. For a moment, she felt as if she had to justify his behavior, and maybe excuse him.

  More and more VNMs flowed past. They noticed others that were wearing birch jackets.

  “A Conway event,” said Ivan suddenly, and to no one in particular, “is named after John Conway’s game of life. In this game, cells operating according to a few simple rules can exhibit incredibly complex behavior. From the early days of their use, it has been noted that VNMs following rules insufficiently defined for their environment can become locked in a dynamic equilibrium. Essentially, they get caught in a loop.”

  He seemed to be reciting someone else’s words, Eva noted. Though Ivan’s English was excellent, this was not his usual style of speech.

  The machines had now formed a silver pool again in the depression. The middle was beginning to bulge and rise as they headed towards the center, striving to climb to that point three meters up in the air. Ivan continued speaking. “Think of a VNM designed to grow into a building. How might you program its prototype? Like this, I think. If you were the VNM, first, make enough copies of yourself. Next, find the foundations and spread yourself out over them to make a floor.”

  He waved his hands in illustration, spreading his fingers wide and drawing a big circle in the air.

  “You see? Now, when you have done that, climb up a height of, say, three meters to where the next floor would be. Spread yourself out again, and keep going like this until the building is done. This would work fine if you had other separate VNMs building the foundations and raising a frame for you. But what if those other VNMs are not present, or what if your own VNM should get lost? What if it was to find itself all alone, perhaps here in the RFS?”

  The silver stalk had grown considerably now; the bulge was already forming on the top as the VNMs climbed up to a next floor that did not exist. Ivan frowned and looked around the brick-strewn landscape.

  “Maybe that same VNM would wander the industrial wasteland, making copies of itself until eventually it had enough. Then it would search for the foundations of a building that did not exist.”

  He pointed downwards to the rippled concrete floor of the basement, once again exposed.

  “But that floor down there is solid enough. Maybe this is the foundation it has been seeking? So then it searches for the next floor up. There is no frame, so it climbs up over copies of itself, until every creature is climbing over every other one, trying to get as high as possible, but the pedestal becomes too thin, and the machines fall and, believing themselves on the next floor up, spread out to find a space that needs covering. Not finding it they rise yet again, and the process repeats and repeats itself until…”

  There was a cracking noise, like ice freezing. The silver flower was changing color, the change rising from the base, the material of the VNMs altering subtly, metal crystals growing and realigning. A few scraps of birch bark fluttered to the ground.

  Ivan continued softly.

  “…until someone who understands what is going on, having worked with VNMs in his younger days, recognizes the model that has repeated its hopeless task for all these months in the wasteland, then looks up the completion code, and sends it to those hapless machines…”

  They all looked at the silver flower, frozen in position, its head rising from the broken black rubble of the basement to reflect the hot yellow sun straight into their eyes. Fiona moved her lips slowly, searching for the right words.

  “You’ve killed it,” she said.

  Wake up! You keep dreaming of this. Why do you think you are Eva? Who keeps giving you these dreams?

  Are they lodged in your psyche? Part of what DIANA did to you? Or are they a reminder of your lost soul? Are you borrowing Eva’s feelings to remind yourself what emotions are like?

  Eva stamped her way across the broken ground, heading back to the britzka. She could feel the accusing gazes of Fiona and the rest on her back, and it made her angry. Unfairly, she began taking it out on Ivan.

  “They come across here with their big intentions and their rules for how this country should be run, and none of them could even operate a bloody hammer. And when they meet someone who actually knows what he’s doing, someone who can operate machinery, they treat him like he’s some sort of idiot.”

  Ivan said nothing; he calmly climbed back into the britzka and gazed down the potholed road ahead.

  “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” said Eva. “Aren’t you going to say something?”

  “Please don’t patronize me, Eva,” said Ivan. “Do you think I am not aware? Do you think I need you to point all this out to me?”

  Eva blushed.

  But I’m not Eva, I’m Judy. Why do I keep dreaming of this woman? Now I’m even on a ship that bears her name. I used the meta-intelligence to look around the Eva Rye. I can see every living being on this ship, but there is something else, too. Something that inhabits the ship but is not alive.

  But what is life, anyway? Is it just a Conway event?

  Eva and Ivan were rolling home through the awakening smell of growing grass that rose up around the Narkomfin, through the buzz of machinery and the sound of nervous giggling as one of the handicapped ran out from the side of the road. And there was the sweet sound of a cello playing at the edge of evening. Eva recognized the music made by Hilde, child prodigy, gifted resident of Narkomfin 128.

  “It looked alive,” insisted Eva. “It looked alive.”

  “It was just a result of initial conditions, Eva,” answered Ivan solemnly. “A few simple rules can produce systems of astonishing complexity.”

  “I know.”

  Ivan waved to a group of people who stood by the side of the road. He shouted something in Russian to them. They laughed in response.

  “Oh, Eva, why so sad? Come on, we are home. Look, there is Katya waiting for me.”

  Down the road, Ivan’s daughter sat in her wheelchair, her boyfriend, Paul, standing at her side.

  “Come on, Eva, we have just a few days left together, and you are worrying about a metal flower. That sort of thing is inevitable when you have VNMs. What’s the matter?”

  Eva gazed at nothing.

  “What’s the matter?” he repeated. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No.” Eva bit her lip. “Yes. I don’t know. I’m sad that you are leaving here.”

  “Come with me.”

  “I can’t. I can’t return to the surveillance world. You know that. You stay here with me.”

  “No, I have Katya to think about. I need to take her home.”

  “See? We are both prisoners of circumstance.”

  “This is life.”

  “I know.”

  She sighed bitterly. “There is no choice. There is no free will. I thought so once, but the Watcher proved me wrong. It asked me questions, decided how it should operate on this planet, but the questions were loaded. I had no choice in how I answered them.”

  “There is always a choice.”

  “No, there is not, Ivan. You Russians, with your icons and the Holy Mother and your sentimentality. Out in the middle of this emptiness you hear the echo of your thoughts, and you think it the still small voice of calm. Here you can believe in the soul and free will, yet all there is, is the mechanism t
icking away in your skull…”

  Ivan frowned. “No, Eva. That is not right. Yes, there is a mechanism that produces your thoughts, but that does not mean that everything is fixed.”

  “You have to believe that, Ivan, but it’s not true. It’s like this…”

  She lowered her head, as if utterly exhausted. Ivan waited patiently for her to speak.

  “Back in England,” she began slowly, “I remember seeing an antique narrow boat in a museum. Most of it—ninety-eight percent of it—was given over to cargo, to profit. This was how the owners made a living, carrying cargo up and down the canals. So much of the boat was given over to cargo that their living quarters were all cramped into one end. They were tiny: the steering part, the kitchen, the cupboards, everything that was not profitable, was cramped into a tiny nook at one end.”

  The britzka rocked as it bumped to a halt. The smell of frying onions, drifting out from the open windows of the grey Narkomfin, was like a friendly spirit in the cooling air.

  “I thought it terrible that they should live so,” she continued. “The bed was the worst thing, a tiny board laid out over the space where the pilot would stand during the daytime. A man, a woman, and their child would sleep at night in a space so small they couldn’t stretch out but would have to curl around each other like spoons. They literally couldn’t turn over in their sleep, it was so small. And in the morning they would lift that bed board and then use the space beneath it to cook breakfast.”

  She smiled slightly, registering the smell of onions. Then she fixed Ivan with an intense look.

  “And I was struck by the way people were forced to live in such dreadful conditions by the prevailing economic forces of the time. There was land available for all, for food and space, but it wasn’t shared out equally. People had to sleep—that’s what really struck me— sleep like that, because that was the way the country was run then, with everyone seeking to find work and make a profit to survive. And that was because humans are destined to compete with each other, and that’s because of the way they evolved, and…and…and suddenly it struck me that, in a way, it’s written in the fundamental makeup of the universe that matter attracts, and molecules replicate, and life evolves and competes, and one of the means of such competition is profit. Just think of that, how capitalism and the rise of the big organizations are as much a part of the inevitable consequences of the big bang as are atoms and stars and life itself.”