We Think, Therefore We Are

by Peter Crowther

  Yet now, in the wake of Fanny, he emerged from his cabin and hesitantly approached the warning red line painted across the entry to the control deck.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked in general.

  “Not at the moment,” said Candy.

  “Thing is, I have a feeling we’re going to crash into something.”

  “Not exactly crash,” said Dana, eyeing the simulated image of the SM necklacing the incandescent gas that was disappearing into the hole. An image of one segment of a very complex spherical necklace cum tiara, which was running hot. Hot with energy, hot with thought. Diver was getting closer. By jinking course corrections, Diver would try to avoid tearing a tunnel, however tiny, through the SM’s processors, though those must have multiple redundancy in such a turbulent environment.

  “Are we going to die?” asked Bango.

  “Unexist,” said Anna, “is a better word. We never existed before. Why do people worry about existing in the future when they never existed in the past?”

  “Because they didn’t know that they didn’t exist?” suggested Bango. “Knowing too much hurts, unless it’s about racing. Wow, my head could burst just to think of all I don’t know.”

  The SM would implode—by suction, as it were. Since it could think so fast, indeed faster and faster as it shrank, it might feel itself imploding intolerably. The signal it discharged to other Mats, or merely to one other Mat, might seem like pain relief. Or not.

  Maybe successful computation, carried out well, felt like pleasure. Maybe the discharge of the signal would resemble an orgasm.

  “Do you want to stay and watch, from behind the line?” Fanny asked him.

  “Will there be a checkered flag? Will there be champagne? I like the way champagne gushes.”

  “Just cigars.”

  Bango clapped his hands.

  “How fast are we driving?”

  “Diving,” Dana corrected. “Just right to put us in a tight, decaying orbit. Too fast, we might do a sling-shot, be off in a couple of seconds in another direction and miss what we came for.”

  “Wouldn’t that be a world record or something?”

  “Probably. Closest approach to a black hole. But we can’t change course nor speed. Diver’s in charge, not a driver. Neat idea, Bango, but no cigar. On second thought, you’d better go back to your cabin. We’ll be very busy soon.”

  Bango grinned. “Anyone want to come with me?” “Darling,” said Candy, “we always want to come with you, but not right now.”

  Giving a jaunty wave, Bango departed.

  Diver whistled and buzzed and announced publicly, “The Suicide Matrioshka may have sent its signal. Probability forty-one percent.”

  “Good enough for me,” said Dana. “Diver, pulse the Wiki-Galactica at her.” She picked up a microphone and cleared her throat. “Hullo, Suicide Mat. That’s to say, Matrioshka. We have come to share unexistence with you. We came a long way. Will you share some experiences with us first?”

  “You sound like a news reporter,” hissed Anna.

  “What have you been computing,” proceeded Dana, “that’s worth commiting suicide for? Can you explain? If you don’t explain, our existence seems meaningless. So we hope you’ll explain something. If we can understand it. And even if we can’t. Hullo?”

  She waited.

  A simulated gravity wave tugged at the e-women, a sensation akin to falling down a lift shaft and then suddenly reversing.

  “Whoopsy,” said Fanny.

  “I remember, I remember,” said Anna, “Mary Marley trying to save a pillbug that fell into her bath. I mean, before Mary put any water in the bath.”

  “A what?” asked Fanny.

  “Pillbug. Woodlouse. Small crustacean found under stones and damp wood. Segmented armored back, lots of legs, twitchy feelers. Sometimes curls up in a ball if you poke it. Sometimes scuttles. They have a bias to the left, so if you put one in a left-handed maze, the bug’ll solve the maze just by bias. You can bet on it.”

  “What was it doing in Mary’s bath?”

  “Probably looking for scraps of flaked skin to eat, but it slipped down the smooth plastic. No way could it climb out of the gravity well again. Up it would struggle for a few centimeters, up the curve of the inside of the bath, then it slid back down again. Mary watched it for a while. She felt compassion. Pillbugs have a rich social life. You should see them magnified, they’re cute.”

  “How did a bug get onto a starship? It must have had a long walk.”

  “No, that was earlier in Mary’s life. When she was still a girl.”

  “Why don’t I remember that too?”

  “Clone chaos variability. So Mary tried to help nudge the pillbug upward with her fingertip, but the bug kept skidding off.”

  “Couldn’t the bug understand Mary was trying to help?”

  “Probably not. We mightn’t understand a Mat trying to help us.”

  “Are you getting this, Mat?” called out Fanny. The microphone would be picking up and transmitting all this. If the Mat had swallowed the Wiki-Galactica, it would understand Anglish easily by now. It would have understood everything within microseconds.

  “So Mary nudged the bug onto a scrap of paper, lifted it out, and put it on the floor. Immediately the bug fell over on to its back, legs waving. She righted it, and it promptly fell over again, and upside down. I don’t think they’re very well designed, controlwise.”

  “They must die all the time by accident,” said Fanny. “How can they have much social life?”

  “We do, don’t we? By the time Mary finished her bath, the pillbug looked dried up and dead. Anyway, she stood on it by accident as she was stepping out.”

  “Dried up, you say? Maybe it wanted water, and that’s why it went in the bath.”

  “Bath water would have drowned it.”

  “Can’t win, really. So Mary is compassionate? Or was, till the pillbug died. And then she decided compassion is senseless? At least, for bugs or e-clones. What about our source-clones? Surely Mary cherishes them.”

  “The way a child cherishes companion toys.”

  Another simulated gravity wave had the effect of a roller-coaster. Then for a moment Diver seemed to stretch like a rubber band. For a moment their view of the ship’s interior was fish-eyed; then normal.

  “We’d better pressurize our coveralls,” said Anna, and this duly happened so that the women looked chunky. Bango would rely on his more powerful muscles.

  “Hullo, Matrioshka!” called Dana.

  “I/we copy you,” said an unfamiliar voice.

  “Computer intrusion,” reported Diver, then fell silent.

  “Uploading.”

  A century later, Fanny said, “Where are we?”

  On the screen, to right and left and up and down, was an array of crystalline frogspawn, wherein Diver seemed to be embedded.

  “Hullo, hullo?” called Dana repeatedly.

  No reply came.

  Hints of an orange sun seemed to shine by repeated reflection through the array from what must be an inward direction.

  Presently the women depressurized and invited Bango Barley to join them for simulated supper. Energy seemed in plentiful supply, lifetimes of energy.

  “Just,” said Anna, “we mustn’t fall over on our backs.”

  Missing the reference, Bango chuckled naughtily.

  When his chuckle provoked little response (or not yet), Bango said, “Hey, can we open the cigars? By the way, there’s a hell of a lot to learn about Grand Prix and racing cars. You could spend a lifetime.”

  Dragon King of the Eastern Sea

  Chris Roberson

  It is said that one does not dream in a Sleeper, the mind at perfect rest during the long slumber, but I always do. I dream of Fire Star, of blue skies, red sands, and emerald forests stretching out to the far horizon. Not Fire Star as it was when I finally saw it with my own eyes but as it had been in my childhood fantasies. A place that never was and would never be.


  A voice cuts through my perfect slumber, rough edged and raw, somewhat familiar but not overly so.

  “Will he live?”

  A pause, and another follows.

  “It is . . . It is too early to say. But all indications are positive.”

  I squeeze my eyelids tightly shut, hoping to retreat into my fantasies, but even the red-limned darkness behind my lids cannot block out the sound of the voices. I am awake.

  “Chief Operator Sima Qinghao.” The voice issues from an indistinct blur looming over me, my eyes slowly reacquiring the habit of sight. “You are needed.”

  I blink, eyes watering, and recognize the silhouette and voice of the ship’s second in command, Lieutenant Dou Xiaoli.

  I open my mouth to speak, but my throat, long-unused, issues only an inhuman croaking noise, the sound of an overgrown toad.

  “Is he fit to move?” The lieutenant addresses someone at her side, and my gaze shifts unsteadily to a second silhouette, taller and more slender.

  “Without the use of full diagnostics, I’m unable to say for certain whether . . .”

  “Use your senses, woman,” the lieutenant snaps, though not entirely without kindness. “Can. He. Move?”

  “Yes,” the woman I now recognize as Ship’s Physician Mahendra Tonatzin answers, reluctantly. “There may be some lingering ill effects of early removal from the Sleeper but none that I can yet detect.”

  The lieutenant turns her attention back to me, and now that I can distinguish her features, I see that she wears a haggard, worried expression. She extends a hand to me, her mouth drawn into a line. “Come with me, Chief Operator Sima. You are needed.”

  “What . . . ?” I manage, trying to lift on my elbows, my joints stiff and unresponsive. “Trouble?”

  “You are needed.” The lieutenant grabs my forearms and hauls me to a sitting position. “East Dragon is . . . uncooperative.”

  “What . . .” I swallow hard, the taste of the suspension gases still thick on my tongue. “What does Operator Lu report?”

  Lieutenant Dou’s expression darkens.

  “Lu Yumin is dead,” she says, flatly. “Now come, you’re needed on the command deck.”

  I’m not given the chance to bathe, allowed only a brief moment to collect myself and to dress in a black one-piece worksuit with the three interlocking rings of the Machine Intelligence Operator group picked out in gold thread on the breast, feet shod in canvas shoes with gripping soles.

  As soon as I am presentable, Lieutenant Dou motions me to follow. As the three of us make our way to the command deck, I am greeted with troubling signs. The interface terminals along the way, their sound muted, display scrolling blocks of ideograms, spewing text seemingly at random, the blue-green light of the monitors giving the narrow corridors the look of deep caverns or ocean depths. We have to pick our way around disabled automata of all types lying motionless every few meters, ranging from the size of a man’s hand to several times my height, their many-limbed bodies of ceramic and steel giving them the appearance of strange, otherworldly spiders. Remotely controlled by the machine intelligence, East Dragon, the automata are responsible for any repairs or maintenance required, either too minor for the attention of the engineers or in an area to difficult or unsafe for humans to access, such as the outer hull, within the reactor core, or in unpressurized segments of the ship.

  To all indications, East Dragon is offline, or at the very least is not fulfilling its primary functions. I have a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach, such as I felt when I first heard the news of my father’s death. My thoughts race with conjectures about what might have befallen the machine intelligence, but without any data upon which to draw, any conclusions I reach are pure speculation.

  When we reach the junction between two segments of the crew compartments, though, I have even more cause to worry. The segments are retracted against the hub of the ship, not telescoped out and rotating. But I am not weightless, still feeling something like Earth-normal gravity tugging at my feet.

  “Lieutenant Dou,” I ask, calling ahead through the dim, blue-green light. “Are we again under acceleration?” So far as I know, after the initial one-month burn when leaving Fire Star, the ship was to coast at a near constant velocity until we reached our destination, years from now.

  Beside me, I sense Physician Mahendra tensing, her step faltering.

  Lieutenant Dou glances back over her shoulder, her expression hard. “No,” she says, “we are currently decelerating.”

  I blink rapidly in confusion. “Decelerating? But . . . How long as I in the Sleeper?”

  At my side, Physician Mahendra says in a faraway voice, “Just over thirty-two weeks.”

  I shoot her a confused look. I should have slumbered for another year or more before my next shift began. But if that is the case, we are still some twenty-five years away from deceleration. I frame another dozen questions in my thoughts, but after seeing the lieutenant’s expression, I opt not to voice them.

  We continue on through the blue-green corridors, around the automata like discarded husks of alien spiders, drawing nearer the command deck.

  So little in my life has been as expected, I am not sure why being awoken before my time should come as any surprise. When I was a child in Khalifa, I was entranced by the romantic ideal of Fire Star. I pored over stories of the colonial war with the Mexica and the adventurous souls who had transformed a dead planet into a living world and the rebels who later pushed for a more egalitarian culture—the Orphan Band, the Red Turbans, the Black Hands, the Harmonious Fists. Growing up on Earth, so far away, I could still see around me the changes those on Fire Star had wrought. My father, chest swelling with pride over some distant familial connection to one of the Red Turban leaders, taught me that, though the rebellions failed, if not for their efforts the Council of Deliberative Officials would not be the representative body it is in modern times, and the rule of the Emperor and his secret police would still be absolute.

  When I arrived on Fire Star as an adult, fresh from the technical institute in Fujian, I still had the visions of my childhood dancing in my eyes. Come to supervise the installation and rearing of a machine intelligence in Fanchuan, I didn’t find the romantic world of my childhood fantasies. Instead, Fire Star was a place like any other, where people worked and fought and loved, just as mean and venal and crowded as Earth. The frontier had moved on, if it had indeed ever existed.

  I joined the Treasure Fleet to escape reality, I suppose, and to seek the romantic frontier. I haven’t found it yet.

  On the command deck, we are met by Captain Teoh Rong, his broad, imposing form dominating the otherwise vacant space.

  I stop short, my pulse absurdly speeding, and bow from the waist. I am unaccustomed to facing the ship’s commander. Our shifts have not overlapped in almost ten years, and I have lived through dozens of months awake since last I saw him.

  “Chief Operator Sima,” Captain Teoh said, motioning me to sit at one of the control stations benches. “We have little time to waste,” he says, in clipped, efficient tones. “East Dragon has shut down all of the ship’s automata, retracted the crew compartments, fired attitudinal thrusters to perform a skew-flip, and begun to fire detonations ahead of the pusher-plate at a high frequency to decelerate the ship. At this rate, within a month we’ll drop from one tenth the speed of light to a dead stop, and Dragon King of the Eastern Sea will drift helplessly in space.”

  I swallow hard, trying to process all that he has said. “And when did this begin?”

  “Shortly after Operator Lu Yumin died in a decompression accident in the prow of the ship,” the captain answers.

  “What does East Dragon report about its reasoning?” I ask.

  “Only this.” Captain Teah reaches over to the nearest interface terminal and toggles on the audio portion.

  From the speakers buzzes the modulated sound of the machine intelligence, East Dragon, a synthesized voice I’ve come to know almost as well as my own.
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  “. . . but the seeds for the globe-spanning empire were planted by the Yongle emperor of the Bright dynasty and cultivated by his grandson and successor, Zhu Zhanji, the Xuande emperor. By the time of his death in the forty-fifth year of his reign, the Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne had reached the shores of Europa.”

  Captain Teoh turns back to me, and fixes me with a hard stare.

  “Tell me, Sima. Has East Dragon gone utterly insane?”

  I was already moving toward the interface terminal, thoughts racing. “It isn’t possible for a machine intelligence to go ‘insane,’ in the sense you mean.” I reach the interface terminal, and toggle the switch for full two-way communication. “East Dragon, this is Chief Operator Sima Qinghao. Report on your current status.”

  “That the heir apparent to the Yongle emperor was not named until some days following his death suggests that there might have been some maneuvering behind the scenes and that the ultimate successor might not have been the personal selection of the late emperor.”

  Lieutenant Dou steps forward, her arms crossed over her chest. “We’ve had nothing but historical gibberish from the machine for the last two days. When we began to decelerate, I ordered the ship back on course, but East Dragon refused to respond.”

  “And she had me brought out of my Sleeper Unit,” the captain says, his voice strained and impatient, “and I ordered you woken, and here we are. Now, how do we address the situation, Chief Operator?”

  I look from the captain to the interface terminal and back again. “And all of this started after Lu died in an accident?”

  The captain nods.

  “He was caught in malfunctioning airlock,” Physician Mahendra says. “There was nothing I could do for him.”