They laughed.
“No real people would spend all day pretending to a stranger that they were robots,” Swan objected. “You must be robots.”
“The oddest things are most likely to be true,” the second one said. “It’s a well-recognized test in Bible exegesis. They think Jesus probably did curse a fig tree, or else why have the story in there?”
More laughter. They really were silly girls. Maybe you could make a robot think only up to the level of a twelve-year-old.
But the way they swam. The way they walked. These were hard things to do; or so it seemed.
“This is weird,” she said to herself, pleased. She had thought it was going to be easy.
As she walked into a knee-deep area of the pool, they stared up at her frankly, as she had stared at them.
“Ooh, nice legs,” the third one said. “Nice body.”
“Thank you,” Swan said, over the moans of the other two. The feminine one exclaimed, “No, that’s not all right to say, some people are offended by comments about the aesthetic impacts of their bodies on others!”
“I’m not,” Swan offered.
“All right, good then,” said the feminine one.
“I was only being polite,” said the third one.
“You were being forward. You had no idea whether it was polite or not.”
“It was just a compliment. There’s no reason to be overfine about such things. If you stray over limits, people will simply assume you don’t know the protocols of their culture but are well-intentioned nevertheless.”
“People will, but how do you know this person isn’t a simulacrum, sent here to test us?”
And they laughed till they choked, splashing each other all the while. Swan joined the splashing, then sat in the water and ottered around them for a while. Then she seized the third one to her and kissed it on the mouth. The nondescript kissed back for a second, then pulled away. “Hey what’s this! I don’t know you well enough for this, I don’t think!”
“So what? Didn’t you like it?” And Swan kissed it again, followed its twists away, feeling its tongue be surprised to be touched by another tongue.
Pulling away, the nondescript said, “Hey! Hey! Hey! Stop!”
The feminine one had stood up and taken a step toward them, as if to intervene, and Swan turned and pushed her off her feet, so that she splashed hard into the shallow water. “What are you doing!” the girl cried fearfully, and Swan popped her on the mouth with a left jab. Immediately the girl’s head flew back and her mouth started to bleed, and she cried out and rushed away. The two nondescripts splashed between her and Swan, blocking Swan from her, shouting at Swan to get back. Swan raised her fists and howled as she pummeled them, and they splashed backward to get away from her, amazed and appalled. Swan stopped following them, and after they climbed out of the pool they stopped and huddled together, looking back at her, the hurt one holding her mouth. Red blood.
Swan put her hands on her hips and stared at them. “Pretty interesting,” she said. “But I don’t like being fooled.” She slogged through the water toward her clothes.
She walked back around the cylinder, looking up at a herd of wild horses and kissing her sore knuckles, thinking it over. She wasn’t sure what kind of things she had spent the day with. That was strange.
When she got back to their hilltop yurts, she waited until Genette and she were again the last two up, and then she said, “I ran into a trio of people today who claimed to be artificial people. Androids with qube brains.”
Genette stared at her. “You did?”
“I did.”
“So what did you do?”
“Well, I beat the shit out of them.”
“You did?”
“A little bit, one of them, yes. But she had it coming.”
“Because?”
“Because they were fooling with me.”
“Isn’t that kind of like what you do in your abramovics?”
“Not at all. I never fool people, that would be theater. An abramovic is not theater.”
“Well, maybe they weren’t either,” Genette said, frowning. “This has to be looked into. There have been reports on Venus and Mars of various incidents like this. Rumors of qube humanoids, sometimes acting oddly. We’ve started keeping an eye out. Some of these people have been tagged and are being tracked.”
“So there really are such things?”
“I think so, yes. We’ve scanned some, and then of course it’s obvious. But we don’t know much more at this point.”
“But why would anyone do it?”
“Don’t know. But if there were qubes that were mobile, and moving around without being noticed, it would explain quite a few things that have happened. So I’ll have my team take a look at these people you met.”
“I think they were people,” Swan said. “They were putting on an act.”
“You think they were real people, pretending to be simulacra? As some kind of theater?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Why would a person get in a box and pretend to be a mechanical chess player? It’s an old dream. A kind of theater.”
“Maybe. But I’m going to look into it anyway, because of these odd things happening.”
“Fine,” Swan said. “But I think they were people. Anyway, say they weren’t. What’s the problem with these things, if things they are?”
“The problem is qubes getting out in the world, moving around and doing things. What are they doing? What are they supposed to be doing? Who’s making them? And since there is a qube component to the attacks we’ve seen, we have to wonder, do these things have anything to do with that? Are some of them involved?”
“Hmm,” Swan said.
“Maybe they all come to one question,” the inspector said. “Why are the qubes changing?”
Lists (7)
inadvertent fracking—failed seal—bad lock—bad luck—hyperbaric spark fire—carbon monoxide buildup—carbon dioxide buildup—design flaw—engine housing crack—sudden air loss—solar flare—fuel impurity—metal fatigue—mental fatigue—lightning strike—meteorite strike—accidental critical mass—brake failure—dropped tool—tripped and fell—coolant loss—manufacturing flaw—programming error—human error—containment failure—battery fire—distraction—AI malfeasance—sabotage—bad decision—crossed wires—recreational mental impairment—cosmic ray impact—
(from The Journal of Space Accidents vol. 297, 2308)
Extracts (8)
Charlotte Shortback’s periodizing system was very influential. Of course, the idea of periodization itself is controversial and even suspect, as it seems often to be a matter of squinting hard and waving one’s hands in belletristic fashion to make sock puppet myths out of the dense “buzzing and blooming confusion” of the documented past. Nevertheless, there do seem to be differences in human life between, for instance, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, or the Enlightenment and the Postmodern; and whether these differences were caused by changes in modes of production, structures of feeling, scientific paradigms, dynastic succession, technological progress, or cultural metamorphosis, it almost doesn’t matter. The shapes invoked make a pattern, they tell a story that people can follow.
Thus for a long time there was a widely agreed-upon periodization schema that included the feudal period and the Renaissance, followed by the Early Modern (seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), the Modern (nineteen and twentieth), and the Postmodern (twentieth and twenty-first)—after which a new name was most definitely needed. For a long time this need generated competing new systems, and that competition, along with the generally microfine narratology of the historians of the time, combined to foil the invention of any new system that was as universally agreed-upon as the old one had been. It was only in the last years of the twenty-third century that Charlotte Shortback offered to the historical community her own periodization scheme, for what was by now the “long postmodern” so endlessly bemoaned
at conferences. Hers was partly a joke, she later claimed, but it has become influential since then despite that, or even perhaps because of it.
For Shortback, the long postmodern was to be divided like this:
The Dithering: 2005 to 2060. From the end of the postmodern (Charlotte’s date derived from the UN announcement of climate change) to the fall into crisis. These were wasted years.
The Crisis: 2060 to 2130. Disappearance of Arctic summer ice, irreversible permafrost melt and methane release, and unavoidable commitment to major sea rise. In these years all the bad trends converged in “perfect storm” fashion, leading to a rise in average global temperature of five K, and sea level rise of five meters—and as a result, in the 2120s, food shortages, mass riots, catastrophic death on all continents, and an immense spike in the extinction rate of other species. Early lunar bases, scientific stations on Mars.
The Turnaround: 2130 to 2160. Verteswandel (Shortback’s famous “mutation of values”), followed by revolutions; strong AI; self-replicating factories; terraforming of Mars begun; fusion power; strong synthetic biology; climate modification efforts, including the disastrous Little Ice Age of 2142–54; space elevators on Earth and Mars; fast space propulsion; the space diaspora begun; the Mondragon Accord signed. And thus:
The Accelerando: 2160 to 2220. Full application of all the new technological powers, including human longevity increases; terraforming of Mars and subsequent Martian revolution; full diaspora into solar system; hollowing of the terraria; start of the terraforming of Venus; the construction of Terminator; and Mars joining the Mondragon Accord.
The Ritard: 2220 to 2270. Reasons for the slowing of the Accelerando are debated, but historians have pointed to the completion of Mars’s terraforming, its withdrawal from the Mondragon and increasing isolationism, the occupation of all the best terrarium candidates, and the nearly total human entrainment of the solar system’s easily available helium, nitrogen, rare earths, fossil fuels, and photosynthesis. It was also becoming clear that the longevity project was encountering problems, and was not completely distributed in any case. Recently some historians have pointed out that this was also the time when quantum computers reached thirty qubits and were combined with petaflop classical computers to make qubes—their point being that qubes have not yet been demonstrated to improve the function of already fast AIs, while the decoherence problems inherent in quantum computing may have helped create conditions for the next period:
The Balkanization: 2270 to 2320. Mars-Earth tension, aggression, and cold war for control of the solar system; Mars isolationism; Venus internal strife; decision in the Jovian moons to terraform their big three; proliferation of the unaffiliated terraria, and the disappearance of many populations behind “event horizons”; influence of qubes; volatile shortages pinching harder, causing hoarding, then tribalism; tragedy of the commons redux; splintering into widespread “self-sufficient” enclave city-states.
The term “hyperbalkanization” Shortback considers just an artifact of overheated rhetoric in cultural studies.
She has said, however, that a significant prolongation of the Balkanization could perhaps lead to a period worse than the Ritard, or even the Crisis—perhaps a time that could be called the Atomization, or the Dissolution.
She tells a story about how once in a talk she suggested that the entirety of the last millennium could be called the late feudal period, and afterward a man came up to her and said, “What makes you think it’s late?”
But what happened in 2312 suggests that the twenty-fourth century will mark a turn
IAPETUS
Iapetus looks like a walnut, because it is squashed at the poles, and has a prominent equatorial bulge, both quite visible from space. Why is it squashed at the poles? At one point it was melted and became a big water drop rotating rapidly, its days only seventeen hours long; something passing by set it spinning like a top. It froze while still spinning. So, why the prominent equatorial bulge? No one knows. Some aspect of the freezing of water drop to ice ball, most agree, some kind of surge or excess. But it’s something saturnologists still argue about.
Whatever caused it, the bulge immediately suggested itself as an obvious location for a city, as it could serve as something like a High Street peninsula running all the way around the moon. The city was concentrated at first on the hemisphere facing Saturn, which looms overhead four times larger than Luna from Earth. This was felt worth having in one’s sky, especially since Iapetus’s orbit is at a seventeen-degree tilt from the plane of Saturn’s rings, giving it a perpetually changing view of the gorgeous mobile. Almost all the other moons see the rings only edge-on. From the Iapetus bulge one also has a view down to the rest of the moon’s surface, twelve or sixteen kilometers lower than the bulge, so there is always a broad icescape below to balance the sublime ringed pearl above.
What color the moon’s surface is depends on where you are looking, because the leading hemisphere of Iapetus is quite black, while the trailing hemisphere is extremely white. This stark discrepancy, noted by Cassini in October of 1671 when he discovered Iapetus, is a result of the moon being tidally locked. The same hemisphere always leads the charge into the night, and black dust shed by the retrograde moon Phoebe (the other one out of the plane of the rings) therefore always falls on that side. In four billion years the dust has accumulated to a depth of only a few centimeters. Meanwhile the trailing hemisphere of the moon, gathering frost from the ice subliming off the darker leading side, is among the whitest ice in the whole system. The result is a two-toned moon, the only one in the solar system.
When people came to occupy Iapetus, the top of the equatorial band was smoothed and fitted with a rock-and-aluminum foundation. They then began to use seashell genes to shape the structures of the equatorial city. Some of the flat top of the bulge has been left open for spaceport runways and the like, but most of the bulge is now covered by a long clear gallery tent, placed over buildings that line the great boulevard of the High Street, alternating with farms, parks, gardens, and forests. As the air under the tent is always kept warm, the interior architecture can be very open, with Saturn often left visible, framed by gaps in ceilings and roofs. Seashell biomimicry allowed the builders to extract and deploy calcium under mantles, and these soft living tissues were genetically engineered to shapes that allowed the architects to layer bioceramic stuctures one on the next, building structure on structure, like corals, until the area under the tent by now is almost full. Like most bioceramics structures, the beveled and layered shapes have been induced to produce scalloping, fanning, notching, and other conchological features, so that the buildings look like great seashells stacked one on the next. Sydney is often referenced because of its iconic opera house, but in fact the bulge now looks more like a Great Barrier Reef made of scallops layered and everywhere holed, as if by tube worms, to let in the view of Saturn overhead.
On the black hemisphere, Cassini Regio, the bulge bisects an area where people once upon a time went out in hoppers or rovers and blew the black dust away to make patterns out of exposed white ice. Anytime you can easily make such a contrast in the landscape, people have written out their thoughts for the universe to read. Before the Saturn League was formed, when the first arrivals from Mars had come for Titan’s nitrogen, and were exploring the other moons as well for whatever else might be plundered and taken back to the red planet, people had come here and etched white out of the black. An exhalation no stronger than a leaf blower’s would do the job, and soon great fields of Cassini Regio were covered like Newspaper Rock with petroglyphs. There were white-on-black figures in abstract patterns, beasts, stick people, Kokopellis, writing in many different alphabets, portraits, landscape features, trees and other plants; on and on it went. Later some entire areas were cleared completely to white and then painted with collected black dust to a greater or lesser depth, achieving shadings that had a sometimes trompe l’oeil depth of field, proportioned for viewing such that they looked normal when viewed f
rom the bulge, with others designed to be viewed from space.
Graffiti on Iapetus! Later it was declared a mistake and a scandal, a moral stupidity, even a crime, in any case disgusting; and there were calls for the entirety of Cassini Regio to be reblacked. Someday it may happen, but don’t hold your breath, for the truth is we are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us. All landscape art reminds us: we live in a tabula rasa, and must write on it. It is our world, and its beauty is entirely inside our heads. Even today people will sometimes go out over the horizon and scuff their initials in the dust.
WAHRAM AT HOME
Wahram returned to Saturn a haunted androgyn. Despite all his theories, he was still in the tunnel. He tried to get back into the pseudoiterative of his life on Iapetus, and indeed in some ways it was easy; it wasn’t a life he was ever going to forget. For a day or two it was possible to feel odd to be in a city you hadn’t been in for years and yet magically wake up knowing right where to go, the little grocery around the corner where you could get fresh bread and milk and all that; then the intervening years sloughed away and it was just home again. Off for the walk to work, down the long esplanade by the north window wall, overlooking the immense drop down the slope of the bulge. Black-tipped whites at the border of the Cassini region: a vast Chinese landscape painting, black brush tips on white paper. At the notch of one little small square, the council offices were up in a squat clear-walled tower, offices with lots of people he knew; it was like dropping back into an earlier reincarnation. He could reenact it meticulously; he could perform it like an actor in a play set in the previous century; he could make it a daily devotional, live ordinary life as a déjà vu that he invoked himself—but no.
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