Bethlehem and Others: Collected Stories

by Peter Watts

  SA: What, you can’t just read my mind?

  MS: Did he do something to get you angry?

  SA: So you kicking me out?

  MS: Is that what you want, Sunday? Is that why you keep acting up, to provoke us into expelling you? You know you can leave if you’re not happy here. Nobody’s keeping you against your will. I know your parents would be happy to see you again. Surprised, but — happy.

  SA: I’m not like Kai. I’m not like any of them.

  MS: That much is apparent.

  SA: He’s just the way you like us. Always doing what you tell him, never asking anything you don’t want him to. That’s what you want. A bunch of happy stupid robots building a bunch of happy stupid bridges for the rest of our happy stupid lives. I don’t even know why you even need us.

  MS: You know why.

  SA: We’re backup. We never even wake up unless the ship runs into something it doesn’t know how to fix. Might never even happen.

  MS: It’ll happen. Any voyage that long—

  SA: But what if it doesn’t? And why do you need us anyway, why not just make machines as smart as us — smarter even — and leave us out of it?

  Dead air: 3 sec

  MS: It’s not as simple as all that. Faster machines, sure. Bigger machines, no problem. Smarter machines, well… The thing is, we can’t even predict with a hundred percent certainty how a person is going to act, even when we know all the variables. You build something smarter than a person, it’s pretty much guaranteed to go off and do its own thing as soon as you boot it up. And there’s no way to know in advance what that might be.

  SA: But people can go off and do their own thing too.

  MS: People are more — stable. We have biological needs, instincts that go back millions of years. But—

  SA: You mean we’re easier to control. You mean you can’t starve a machine to make it beh—

  MS: But yes, Sunday, people do go off and do their own things. That’s the whole point. And that’s why we don’t want a bunch of happy stupid robots, as you put it. We want you to show initiative. Which is why we cut you some slack when you sometimes take the wrong kind.

  But only some. So watch yourself, young lady.

  Dead air: 5 sec

  SA: That’s all?

  MS: There should be more?

  SA: You’re not going to — punish me? For Kai?

  MS: I think you owe him an apology, for whatever that’s worth. That has to be your decision. But you and Kai — every spore in the program really, you have to work out your own dynamics with your own shipmates. We won’t be there to punish you fifty thousand years from now.

  Dead air: 2 sec

  I’d love to see how your social systems evolve over time. What I wouldn’t give to go with you.

  SA: You… you knew. I bet you knew.

  MS: Knew what?

  SA: That I was going to beat up Kai. You wanted me to!

  MS: Why would you even say that, Sunday? Why would we want you to attack a fellow recruit?

  SA: I dunno. Maybe, maybe he was bad and I was his punishment. Maybe you wanna see our social systems evolve over time. Maybe you just like it when we fight.

  MS: I promise you, Sunday, none of us get any pleasure from—

  SA: Maybe you don’t even know. You’re not like us, right? We’re easy, you built us to work like this. That’s how you know what we’re gonna do. But who built you, huh? Nobody. You’re just random.

  Dead air: 3 sec

  You’re free.

  • • •

  READ CAREFULLY

  YOU ARE ABOUT TO EMBARK UPON A JOURNEY LEADING TO A COGNITIVE AUTONOMY THAT YOU HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE. WHILE SOME CLIENTS HAVE DESCRIBED THEIR SUNDIVES AS ECSTATIC, RELIGIOUS, AND PROFOUNDLY FULFILLING, INDUSTRIAL ENLIGHTENMENT INC. CAN NOT GUARANTEE A PLEASANT EXPERIENCE. WE CONTRACT SOLELY TO PROVIDE EXPOSURE TO A PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT ALLOWING YOU TO THINK YOUR OWN THOUGHTS IN A WAY YOU NEVER COULD BEFORE. WE ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT OF THOSE THOUGHTS, OR FOR ANY POTENTIAL TRAUMA RESULTING THEREFROM. BY ENTERING INTO THIS CONTRACT, YOU ARE EXPLICITLY ABSOLVING INDUSTRIAL ENLIGHTENMENT INC., AND ALL OF ITS AGENTS AND REPRESENTATIVES, FROM RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY NEGATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL IMPACTS THAT MAY RESULT FROM THIS EXPERIENCE.

  • • •

  BASE CAMP IS a foil-wrapped potato nine hundred meters long, robbed of its spin and left to bake at the Lagrange point just inside Mercury. At least, that’s where it is when we close for docking; we’ve barely debarked before it starts reeling itself sunwards, a diving bell bound for perdition.

  They’re using one of our old prototypes, a displacement drive with an exagram quantum-loop hole in its heart. I like what they’ve done with the thing. It doesn’t just smear the camp’s center of mass along some inner wormhole; it leaves one end behind at L1, hangs off Mercury’s mass like a stone on a string. The energy it must take to stabilize that kind of attenuation boggles the mind — but the sun’s breathing in our faces, and the same metamaterial that makes the potato such a perfect reflector can just as easily turn it into a blackbody when they need juice for antimatter production.

  It’s a neat way to stuff old tech in new bottles. We might be doing something like that ourselves when we shipped out, if we could only drag a sun and a planet along for the ride.

  The docent — a gangly Filipino who introduces himself as Chito

  — meets us at the airlock. “Before we go any further, let’s just check our uploads; everyone get the orientation package okay?”

  I ping the files they loaded into our heads while we slept our way across the innersys: neurophilosophy and corporate history, Smolin cosmology, Coronal Hoops and the Death of Determinism. Some very nifty specs on the miraculous technology that allows us to kiss the sun without incinerating, the bandpass filters that let those vital magnetic fields through while keeping the heat and the hard stuff at bay. (Those specs are proprietary, I see. They’re letting us in on their secrets to set our minds at ease, but they’ll erase them all on the way back home.)

  Chito waits until the last of us gives him a thumbs-up. “Good. Make sure you use them before the dive, because none of your implants will work when we open the blinds. This way.”

  Weight accumulates as we follow him along the length of the tunnel; a dozen pilgrims float, then bounce, then wobble on unsteady feet. Most of the camp’s habitable reaches are carved out about twenty meters aft of the hole, close enough to give us about a quarter-gee when the potato’s parked. Maybe half that on descent, depending on how far they stretch the mass.

  A brain in a globe meets us in the lobby: a small bright core in a twilit grotto. It has its own little gravitational field, slows us down and pulls us in as we file past en route to our berths. We accrete around it like a retinue of captured moons.

  It’s not a real brain, I can see at closer range. No hemispheres, no distinct lobes, no ancient limbic substructures to hold it in place. Just a wrinkly twinkly blob of neurons, lit from within: ripples of thought, visibly manifest thanks to some fluorescent protein spliced in for tawdry FX value.

  A label glows softly to one side of the little abomination: Free Will. Only Known Example.

  “Except for we happy few. Assuming we get what we paid for.”

  A centimeter shorter than me; stocky, shaved head, Nordicalbino complexion. “Agni Falk,” she says, pinging me her card: Junior VP, Faraday Ridge. Deep-sea miner. A denizen of the dying frontier, still rooting around on the bottom of the ocean while the sky fills with asteroids and precious metals.

  “Sunday.” I keep my stats and my surname to myself. I’m not famous by any means — I may be bound for the furthest reaches of space but so are fifty thousand others, which kind of dilutes the celebrity field. Still, it only takes a split-second to run a name search, and I’m not here to answer an endless stream of questions about Growing Up ’Sporan.

  “Good to meet you,” Falk says, extending a hand. After a moment, I take it. Her eyes break contact just long en
ough to flicker down to our meeting palms, to the scar peeking out from my cuff. Her smile never falters.

  The wrinkled grapefruit behind her face is wired in to so much: sound, touch, proprioception. Over two million channels from the eyes alone. Not like this blob in the fishbowl. Deaf, dumb, blind, no pipes at all except for those that carry sewage and nutrients. It’s just a mass of neurons, a few billion meaty switches stuck in stasis until some outside stimulus kicks them into gear.

  There’s no stimulus here I can see, no way to get a signal to those circuits. And yet somehow it’s active. Those aurorae rippling across its surface might be the signature of a captive soul.

  Neurons that fire without being poked. You wanted ’em, Kai. Here they are.

  Falk, following my gaze: “I wonder how it works.”

  “Novelty.” A Hindian voice from a half-lit pilgrim on the far side of the globe. “That’s what I hear, anyway. Special combination of quantum fields, something that never existed before so the universe can’t remember it and it’s got to — improvise.”

  “It’s a trick,” grumbles some skeptic to her left. “I bet they just jump-started this thing before we showed up. I bet it runs down eventually.”

  “We all run down eventually.”

  “Quantum effects—”

  “Ephatic coupling, something like that.”

  “So what’s it doing?” someone asks, and everyone falls silent.

  “I mean, free will, right? Free to do what? It can’t sense anything. It can’t move. It’s like, I dunno, intelligent yoghurt or something.”

  All eyes turn to Chito.

  “That’s not really the point,” he says after a moment. “It’s more a proof-of-principle kind of thing.”

  My eyes wander back to the globe, to interference patterns wriggling through meat. Odd this thing didn’t show up in their orientation package. Maybe they thought a bit of mystery would enhance the experience.

  Mystery’s so hard to come by these days.

  • • •

  UNITED NATIONS DIASPORA AUTHORITY DEPT. CREW PSYCHOLOGY

  Post-Incident Interview Transcript

  TS Tag: DC25-2121:11:03-1820

  Nature of Incident: Autodestructive Behavior

  Subject: S. Ahzmundin; ass. Eriophora , F, Age 16 (chron), 23 (dev)

  Interviewer: M. Sawada, DPC

  surv/biotel: ACD-005-F11

  Psych commentary: ACD-005-C21

  M. Sawada: Do you feel better now?

  Dead air: 6 sec

  Why did you do it, Sunday?

  S. Ahzmundin: You think sometime we could have a conversation that doesn’t start with that line?

  MS: Sunday, why—

  SA: I didn’t do it. I don’t do anything. None of us do. MS: Ah. I see.

  SA: And so when they removed the cancer from his brain, the prisoner stopped trying to fuck everything that moved. All hint of hypersexual pedophilia just evaporated from his personality. And then of course they let him go, because he wasn’t responsible: it was the tumor that had made him do all those awful things.

  MS: You’ve been revisiting the classics. That’s good.

  SA: And everyone congratulated each other at their own enlightenment, and the miracles of modern medicine, and nobody had the nads to wonder why the tumor should make any difference at all. Do healthy people bear more responsibility for the way their brains are wired? Can they reach up and edit their own synapses in some way denied to the afflicted?

  Dead air: 3 sec

  MS: Believe it or not, you’re not the first sixteen-year-old to ask these questions. Even unaccelerated adolescents have been known to wrestle with the paradox of human nature now and then.

  SA: Is that so.

  MS: Of course, most of them are a little more mature about it. They don’t resort to fake suicide attempts, for example.

  SA: What makes you think I was faking?

  MS: Because you’re smart enough to have cut the long way if you weren’t.

  SA: I did my research. Cut across, cut down. Doesn’t make any difference.

  MS: Okay, then. Because you’re smart enough to know we’d get to you in time no matter what direction you cut.

  Dead air: 4 sec

  How many times do we have to tell you, Sunday? These — theatrics — aren’t necessary. You can just leave. All you have to do is say the word and you can walk right out of here.

  SA: And do what? I’m Plan B. I’m fallback when the A-Team can’t solve some stupid N-body problem. That’s what I’m built for.

  MS: We trained you for initiative. We educated you for general problem-solving. If you can’t figure out how to put that skill set to productive use without leaving the solar system, then you might as well keep right on the way you’re going. Maybe try jumping out an airlock next time.

  SA: You know the way I am. I’d go batshit doing anything else.

  MS: Then why do you keep fighting us?

  SA: Because the way I am didn’t just happen. You made me this way.

  MS: You think I have any more control over my aptitudes and desires than you do? Everyone gets — shaped, Sunday. The only difference is that most of us were shaped by blind chance. You were shaped for a purpose.

  SA: Your purpose.

  MS: So I guess the tumor makes a difference after all, hmm?

  Dead air: 2 sec

  Stem cells haven’t settled yet. Keep scratching those, you’ll leave scars.

  SA: I want scars.

  MS: Sunday—

  SA: Fuck you, Mamoro. It’s my body, even if it isn’t my life. Take it out of my damage deposit if you don’t like it.

  Dead air: 5 sec

  MS: Try to get some rest. Kerr-Newman sims at 0845 tomorrow.

  • • •

  NO REACTIONLESS DRIVE, this close to the sun. No quantum-loop gravity, no magic wormhole. The best bootstraps fray in the presence of so much mass. So Base Camp, her tether stretched to the limit, launches a new ship for this last, climactic phase of our pilgrimage. Autonomy for the People: a shielded crystal faceted with grazing mirrors — a half-billion protective shards, concentrically layered, precisely aligned and ever-aligning to keep us safe from the photosphere.

  Chito tells us we couldn’t ask for a better setup, not at this point in the cycle: a stable pair of sunspots going our way and peaking at diameters just shy of fifty thousand kilometers. Chance of a mass ejection less than one percent, and even in that unlikely event the ejecta will be shooting away from us. Nothing to worry about.

  Fine. Whatever’s keeping us alive at an ambient five thousand degrees is already magic as far as I’m concerned; why not throw in a tsunami of radioactive plasma cresting over us at five hundred kilometers a second?

  They’ve tied us up and abandoned us in this windowless cell, a cylinder maybe six meters across. Its curved bulkhead glows with the soft egg-shell pastel of Jesus’ halo. We face outward, anchored to the backbone running along the compartment’s axis: each vertebra an acceleration couch, each spiny process a stirrup or an armrest. We’re restrained for our own safety and for each others.’ You never know how automatons might react to autonomy. We were not promised bliss, after all. I’ve seen rumors — never confirmed, and notably absent from IE’s orientation uploads — of early tours in which unbound clients clawed their own faces off. These days, the company chooses to err on the side of caution. We’ll experience our freedom in shackles.

  We’ve been like this for hours now. No attentive handlers hover at our sides, no vigilant machinery waits to step in if something goes wrong. Neither tech nor technicians can be trusted under the influence of six thousand filigreed Gauss. They’re watching, though, from up in their shielded cockpit: under layers of mu-metal and superconductor, Faradayed up the ass, they keep an eye on us through a thread of fiberop half the width of a human hair. If things get out of control they’ll slam the filters back down, turn us back into clockwork, race back here with drugs and god helmets and defibrillators.

 
A wide selection of prerecorded music awaits to help pass the time. Nobody’s availed themselves of it. Nobody’s said a word since we launched from base camp. Maybe they don’t want to break the mood. Maybe they’re just reviewing the mechanics of the miracle one last time, cramming for the finals because after all, the inlays that usually remember this stuff for us will be worse than useless once they open the blinds.

  At least two of us are praying.

  The bulkhead vanishes. A tiny multitude gasps on all sides. We are naked on a sea of fire.

  Not just a sea: an endless seething expanse, the incandescent floor of all creation. Plasma fractals iterate everywhere I look, endlessly replenished by upwells from way down in the convection zone. Glowing tapestries, bigger than worlds, morph into laughing demon faces with blazing mouths and eyes. Coronal hoops, endless arcades of plasma waver and leapfrog across that roiling surface to an unimaginably distant horizon.

  Somehow I’m not struck instantly blind.

  Inferno below. Pitch black overhead, crowded with bright ropes and threads writhing in the darkness: sapphire, emerald, twisting braids of yellow and white. The hoops and knots of Sol’s magnetic field, endlessly deformed, twisted by Coriolis and differential rotation.

  It’s an artifact, of course. A tactical overlay that drags invisible contours into the realm of human vision. All of reality’s censored here by a complex interplay of field and filters, tungsten shielding and programmable matter. Perhaps one photon out of a trillion gets through; hard-X, gamma, high-energy protons, all get bounced at the door.

  Dead ahead, a pair of tumors crawl over the horizon: dark continents on a bright burning sea. The lesser of them could swallow five Earths in its shadow. “Scylla and Charybdis,” someone whispers past my shoulder. I have no idea what they’re talking about.

  We’re headed between them.

  Magnetic fields. That’s what it’s all about. Forget about gamma and synchrotron radiation, forget about that needlestorm of protons that would slice your insides down to slush in an instant if they ever got through the shielding (and a few of them do; there will be checkups and microsurgeries and a dozen tiny cancers removed from today’s tourists, just as soon as we get home). What counts is those invisible hoops of magnetic force, reaching all the way up from the tachocline and punching through the surface of the sun. So much happens there: contours dance with contours, lines of force wrap tight around invisible spindles — reactions that boost field strength five thousandfold. It’s not just a question of intensity, though. It’s complexity: all those tangled lines knotting and weaving just so into a pattern so intricate, so taut, that something has to break.