We Think, Therefore We Are

by Peter Crowther

  Raves for Peter Crowther’s Anthologies:

  “The overall standard of quality is very high . . . It’s a very good book. It’s practically a miracle for a mass-market paperback anthology.”

  —SF Site for Mars Probes

  “From Ray Bradbury’s gentle tale of love’s conquest of fear (‘The Love Affair’), never before published in the United States, to Michael Moorcock’s ebullient homage to the Mars fiction of Leigh Brackett (‘The Lost Sorceress of the Silent Citadel’), the sixteen original stories in this collection capture the eternal fascination with the red planet.”

  —Library Journal for Mars Probes

  “Constellations is an excellent original anthology, and it certainly displays the richness of contemporary British SF to great effect. The quality and variety of the stories matches the quality and variety of the names in the Table of Contents.”—Locus for Constellations

  “Every year or two Peter Crowther edits a major anthology for DAW Books on an extraterrestrial theme, and his latest, Forbidden Planets, is very impressive.”

  —Locus for Forbidden Planets

  Also Available from DAW Books:

  Mystery Date, edited by Denise Little

  First dates—the worst possible times in your life or the opening steps on the path to a wonderful new future? What happens when someone you have never met before turns out not to be who or what he or she claims to be? It’s just a date, what could go wrong? Here are seventeen encounters, from authors such as Kristine Katherine Rusch, Nancy Springer, Laura Resnick, and Jody Lynn Nye that answer these questions. From a childhood board game called “Blind Date” that seems to come shockingly true . . . to a mythological answer to Internet predators . . . to a woman cursed to see the truth about her dates when she imbibes a little wine . . . to an enchanting translator bent on avenging victims of war crimes . . . to a young man hearing a very special voice from an unplugged stereo system . . . these are just some of the tales that may lead to happily ever after—or no ever after at all . . . .

  Fellowship Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Kerrie Hughes

  The true strength of a story lies in its characters and in both the ties that bind them together and the events that drive them apart. Perhaps the most famous example of this in fantasy is The Fellowship of The Ring. But such fellowships are key to many fantasy and science fiction stories. Now thirteen top tale-spinners—Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Alan Dean Foster, Russell Davis, and Alexander Potter, among others—offer their own unique looks at fellowships from: a girl who finds her best friend through a portal to another world . . . to four special families linked by blood and magical talent . . . to two youths ripped away from all they know and faced with a terrifying fate that they can only survive together . . . to a man who must pay the price for leaving his childhood comrade to face death alone. . . .

  The Future We Wish We Had, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Rebecca Lickiss

  In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, many things that were predicted in the science fiction stories of the twentieth century have become an accepted part of everyday life, and many other possibilities have not yet been realized but hopefully will be one day. For everyone who thought that by now they’d be motoring along the skyways in a personal jet car, or who assumed we’d have established bases on the Moon and Mars, or that we would have conquered disease, slowed the aging process to a crawl, or eliminated war, social injustice, and economic inequity, here are sixteen stories of futures that might someday be ours or our children’s, from Esther Friesner, Sarah Hoyt, Kevin J. Anderson, Irene Radford, Dave Freer, and Dean Wesley Smith, among others.

  Copyright © 2009 by Tekno Books and Peter Crowther.

  eISBN : 978-1-440-64437-5

  All Rights Reserved.

  DAW Book Collectors No. 1462.

  DAW Books is distributed by Penguin Group (USA).

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

  All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  First Printing, January

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Introduction copyright © 2009 by Paul McAuley

  “Tempest 43,” copyright © 2009 by Stephen Baxter

  “The Highway Code,” copyright © 2009 by Brian Stableford

  “Salvage Rites,” copyright © 2009 by Eric Brown

  “The Kamikaze Code,” copyright © 2009 by James Lovegrove

  “Adam Robots,” copyright © 2009 by Adam Roberts

  “Seeds,” copyright © 2009 by Tony Ballantyne

  “Lost Places of the Earth,” copyright © 2009 by Steven Utley

  “The Chinese Room,” copyright © 2009 by Marly Youmans

  “Three Princesses,” copyright © 2009 by Robert Reed

  “The New Cyberiad,” copyright © 2009 by Paul Di Filippo

  “That Laugh,” copyright © 2009 by Patrick O’Leary

  “Alles In Ordnung,” copyright © 2009 by Garry Kilworth

  “Sweats,” copyright © 2009 by Keith Brooke

  “Some Fast Thinking Needed,” copyright © 2009 by Ian Watson

  “Dragon King of the Eastern Sea,” copyright © 2009 by Chris Roberson

  Introduction

  The field of artificial intelligence research was born at a conference held at Dartmouth College in the summer of 1956; participants included luminaries of the first generation of AI scientists who believed that it would be possible to create a machine that matched or exceeded human intelligence in less than twenty years, and founded laboratories and research programs that would dominate the field for decades to come. In the same year, the film Forbidden Planet made a star of Robby the Robot. A metallic version of The Tempest’s obedient sprite, Ariel, Robby was a charming and intelligent servant who could speak 187 languages, possessed a replicator that could make diamonds, and was incapable of harming human beings because he was bound by the Laws of Robotics. In short, he was the epitome of one of the best-known and enduring tropes of science fiction’s Golden Age.

  “Robot” entered the English language via Czech writer Karl Capek’s 1921 play R.U.R., or Rossom’s Universal Robots. Capek’s robots (from the Czech robota , meaning compulsory labor) were actually artificial but biologically based humans, but after the term was adopted into English, it was usually applied to machines. And in SF stories, robots were not only equipped with electronic, positronic, or mechanical imitations of the human brain, but they were also almost always humanoid in form. Despite Isaac Asimov’s claim that he and editor John W. Campbell, Jr., developed the famous Three Laws of Robotics in the early 1940s to counter technophobic tales of rampaging robots, most of the early stories about robots were pretty sympathetic examinations of the ethical and philosophical problems of creating artificial, intelligent versions of human beings. For every Golden Age tale of a robot lusting after its inventor’s daughter or planning to take over the world, there were many more about robots faithfully serving their creators or sacrificing themselves to save human lives, humans falling in love with robots, robots coming to terms with the fact that they would never quite be as good as their creators, or aspiring to become like and be accepted as
human beings.

  It wasn’t until after the Second World War that attitudes toward robots and other forms of artificial intelligence in SF began to reflect both fears that governments could use technology to manipulate and control individuals and populations and a growing ambivalence toward science that gave us both antibiotics and the atomic bomb. The 1950s saw the publication of a swarm of technophilic stories about rebellious robots, homicidal robots, or robots masquerading as or being mistaken for human beings with diabolic or disastrous consequences. Even stories in which robots used their powers for the common good could be chillingly ambiguous. In the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), a flying saucer lands in Washington, D.C., and discharges two passengers. One, an impassive, impressively imposing and indestructible robot, Gort, protects the flying saucer from attacks by the U.S. Army while the other, a human-seeming alien, Klaatu, attempts to deliver his message to the world’s leaders. In a famous twist, Klaatu reveals that he’s the servant and Gort is the master, and Earth will be reduced to a burned-out cinder unless its people renounce all violence and submit to the rule of robots like Gort. That universal peace can be achieved only through threat of destruction and constant policing by implacable machines says a lot about the political climate of the 1950s; that these all-powerful machines will take the shape of humanoid robots says a lot about the anthropomorphic bias that for a while blinded SF writers to the fact that computers were far better hosts for artificial intelligence than mechanical men like Robby the Robot.

  SF writers somehow missed out on the beginning of the computer boom. In 1951, when “Klaatu barada nikto” entered the pop culture lexicon, EDVAC, the first fully fledged stored-program computer design, became operational at Los Alamos. By 1956, when the term “artificial intelligence” was coined at Dartmouth and Robby the Robot was being signed up for his second film, room-filling racks of vacuum tubes were being replaced by book-sized boards of transistors. But as far as SF writers of the 1940s and 1950s were concerned, positronic robot brains weren’t computers but artificial replicas of human brains; computers were gigantic and immobile racks of vacuum tubes and looms of wiring. It didn’t occur to them that computers were infinitely adaptable tools that could be shrunk to fit inside metal skulls or almost anywhere else, or that the reign of the humanoid robot was almost over.

  These days, those old-school mechanical men mostly survive as kitsch pop-culture artifacts like the stamped-tin and plastic collectables that ornament my bookshelves. A few humanoid robots are employed as Disneyland attractions or act as experimental interfaces for expert systems, but roboticists haven’t yet cracked the “uncanny valley” effect—the more closely a robot mimics a human, the more its nonhuman characteristics stand out, which is why most humanoid robots are as appealing and unsettling as walking corpses (conversely, the humanlike characteristics of robots like Robby, which only approximate the human form, stand out and elicit empathy). SF that uses robots and androids to explore what it means to be human, including much of the oeuvre of Philip K. Dick, inhabits the valley of the uncanny.

  Out in the real world, there are plenty of robots making cars in assembly plants, clearing minefields, exploring the Solar System, and performing routine maintenance work in the cores of nuclear reactors, but none look much like human beings, and all are controlled by computers and computer software. Some robots are nothing but software, thriving in the virtual ecologies of the Internet. They bounce misdirected email with insincere apologies or crawl spiderlike from node to node, scanning millions upon millions of pages and compiling associative lists that we access every time we type words or phrases into search engines. Or they search for and infect insufficiently protected computers with parasitic codes that turn their hosts into zombies, enrolling them in a network of slave computers that hackers can use to email millions of pieces of spam, or blackmail companies with denial-of-service attacks.

  True AI has proven much harder to achieve than predicted in the summer of 1956. No machine intelligence has yet surpassed that of a human being or even passed the Turing Test, but there are shards and sparks of artificial intelligence in expert systems and data miners, in the predictive text features of cell phones and the fuzzy logic of washing machines, the behavior of secondary characters in video games, or the software used by Amazon.com that suggests, after you’ve bought a copy of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, that you might also like to buy a CD of Holst’s Planets Suite. Computers are getting faster; software is getting smarter. Sooner rather later, say the indefatigable prophets of true AI, a computer or a loosely connected cloud of software or intelligent agents out in the Internet is going to become, by accident or design, self-aware.

  Maybe hyperintelligent self-aware computers will enslave us, as in The Matrix, or start World War III in an attempt to wipe us out, as in The Terminator. Maybe, as in Philip K. Dick’s Vulcan’s Hammer, Frederik Pohl’s Man-Plus, Greg Bear’s Eon and Iain M. Banks’s “Culture” novels, AIs will benevolently (and perhaps invisibly) guide and sustain civilization. Maybe, as in William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, godlike AIs inhabiting cyberspace will be mostly indifferent to us, touching on the lives of only few humans recruited to help them pursue their remote agendas.

  Or maybe they’ll change everything forever, and in ways impossible to predict.

  Most SF writers used to believe that the pinnacle of the evolution of artificial intelligence would be the creation of robots that looked and thought just like us. A robot who served generations of one family is finally rewarded with recognition as being fully human in Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man;” in the film AI, based on Brian Aldiss’s story “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” a little boy robot longs, like Pinocchio, to become a real little boy. Most believe now that it’s much more likely that true AI will create intellects vast, cool, and even if not actually unsympathetic, then certainly completely alien to our own.

  Building on the idea that the first true AIs would quickly bootstrap their intelligence to unimaginable levels, Vernor Vinge, who’s both a computer scientist and a SF writer, has suggested that true AIs will rapidly accelerate technological progress, outstripping the ability of human beings to comprehend or usefully participate in it. Beyond a point he named the Singularity, everything will have changed so radically that we can’t begin to imagine what it would be like, any more than we can see what lies beyond the event horizon of a black hole. History as we know it would have come to an end. The human species would be either wiped out, or co-opted and transformed and elevated into a heaven of pure information. And it would be the end of all comprehensible stories about the future.

  So far, we don’t know if this rapture of the geeks is as inevitable as its adherents claim. Maybe it will turn out to be about as real as the Montanists and Amaurians, the Y2K “crisis,” and sundry other millenarian panics and beliefs. Maybe there are limits to thinking big; maybe AI will never get out of John Searle’s Chinese Room. But even if we are heading toward some kind of Singularity with unstoppable momentum, we still have a little time to create fictional speculations and entertainments about the future of AI, such as the stories you’ll find here, crammed with rebellious AIs, giant robots like unto gods, gung-ho robot explorers and much more, when you turn the page.

  Paul McAuley

  London, October 2007

  Tempest 43

  Stephen Baxter

  From the air, Freddie caught the first glimpse of the rocket that was to carry her into space.

  The plane descended toward a strip of flat coastal savannah. The land glimmered with standing water, despite crumbling concrete levees that lined the coast, a defense against the risen sea. This was Kourou, Guiana, the old European launch center, on the eastern coast of South America. It was only a few hundred kilometers north of the mouth of the Amazon. Inland, the hills were entirely covered by swaying soya plants.

  Freddie couldn’t believe she was here. She’d only rarely traveled far from Winchester, the English city where she’d been born, a
nd Southampton, where she worked. She’d certainly never flown before, hardly anybody traveled far let alone flew, and she had a deep phobic sense of the liters of noxious gases spewing from the plane’s exhaust.

  But now the plane banked, and there was her spaceship, a white delta-wing standing on its tail, and she gasped.

  Antony Allen, the UN bureaucrat who had recruited her for this unlikely assignment, misread her mood. Fifty-something, sleek, corporate, with a blunt Chicago accent, he smiled reassuringly. “Don’t be afraid.”

  The plane came down on a short smart-concrete runway. Allen hurried Freddie onto a little electric bus that drove her straight to a docking port at the base of the shuttle, without her touching the South American ground or even smelling the air.

  And before she knew it, she was lying on her back on an immense foam-filled couch, held in place by thick padded bars. The ship smelled of electricity and, oddly, of new carpets. A screen before her showed a view down the shuttle’s elegant flank to the scarred ground.

  Allen strapped in beside her. “Do you prefer a countdown? It’s optional. We’re actually the only humans aboard. Whether you find that reassuring or not depends on your faith in technology, I suppose.”

  “I can’t believe I’m doing this. It’s so—archaic! I feel I’m locked into an AxysCorp instrumentality.”

  He didn’t seem to appreciate the sharpness of her tone. Perhaps he’d prefer to be able to patronize her. “This shuttle’s got nothing to do with AxysCorp, which was broken up long ago.”

  “I know that.”

  “And you’re a historian of the Heroic Solution. That’s why you’re here, as I couldn’t find anybody better qualified to help resolve this problem on Tempest 43. So look on it as field work. Brace yourself.”