ETH Mobile was outfitted with characteristic Swiss elegance, undemonstrative and superb, evoking the ocean liners of the classic era but entering whole new realms of human comfort, the floors warm, the air tangy, the food and drink a string of masterpieces. There were floor-to-ceiling window walls on many of the public decks, affording spectacular views of the stars and any local object they passed. About ten thousand people could be accommodated, all in luxury. Design in the hotel section combined great slabs of metal with vegetable prints and a William Morris wall vine. The park that filled one tall floor of the ship was an arboretum occupied by a semitropical canopy forest, featuring parts of several South American biomes, including animals from these zones that could handle a few moments of weightlessness without too much risk of injury. What the animals thought of these turnaround moments of zero g was a matter much studied but little understood. It did not appear to make the animals different in subsequent behavior. Sloths did not even seem to notice. Monkeys and jaguars and tapirs floated up chattering and moaning, coyotes howling with their usual genius; then after a suspended moment they would all together float sweetly back to the ground. In this same time the sloths hung from their branches—down, sideways, down again, sometimes spinning all the way round—never once waking up. Not unlike certain people in that regard.
SWAN AND PAULINE AND WAHRAM AND GENETTE
Swan spent her mornings in the ETH Mobile’s little cloud forest. Wahram and the inspector were on the ship with her, and they were making their way as quickly as possible to Venus, where Genette wanted to look into what he called a pastward convergence of strange qube activity. Swan and Wahram had rooms next to each other, and Swan slipped into his room every night. But she was uneasy.
On mornings when Wahram joined her in the park, he sloped around looking at birds and flowers. Once she saw him spend half an hour inspecting a single red rose. He was one of the most placid animals she had ever seen; even the sloths above them were scarcely a match for his imperturbability. It was peaceful to be around, but disturbing too. Was it a moral quality, was it lethargy? She could not stand lethargy, and sloth was one of the seven deadly sins.
He was often listening to his music. He would nod to her and turn it off if she approached him, and so sometimes she did, and they would take a turn together, pausing when something of interest appeared in the branches and leaves above them, or in the ferns and moss underfoot. The park was a little Ascension as it turned out, and Australian tree ferns gave the ground a look more Jurassic than Amazonian—which was fine—it was a good look, and this was a kind of hotel atrium, really, an arboretum for sure, so its status as an Ascension should not be an issue with her. Swan tried not to be annoyed by it, or by Wahram’s indolence. But it was hard, because something else was bothering her too.
Finally one morning she figured it out and went for a walk by herself, up to a level of the ship where big picture windows gave her a broad view of the stars. She had turned Pauline back on soon after the meeting on Titan, and gone on from that moment as if nothing had happened. She had not tried to explain the shutdown to Pauline, and Pauline had not asked about it. Now she said, “Pauline, were you truly turned off during that meeting on Titan?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t have some kind of recorder going anyway, even with you turned off?”
“No.”
“Why not? Why don’t you do that?”
“I’m not equipped with any supplementary recorders, as far as I’m aware.”
Swan sighed. “I probably should have done that. Well, listen. I want to tell you what happened.”
“Should you?”
“What do you mean, should? I’m going to tell you, so shut up and listen to me. The people in that meeting were the core of a group that Alex formed. They’ve been trying to do interplanetary diplomacy without any qubes knowing the content of their discussions, because they are worried that some qubes have self-programmed themselves in ways no one understands. Also, these new qubes are now manufacturing qube-minded humanoids that can’t easily be distinguished from people. I’m sure X-rays and the like could do it, but people can’t do it by eye or in conversation. They pass a brief Turing test. Like those silly girls we met, if they really were artificial—which amazes me, I must say—or that lawn bowler too, I think. And then, what’s more, it seems these qubes have been involved with the attacks made using pebble mobs. For sure the attack on Terminator, because Inspector Genette’s team has traced the launch mechanism, and qubes had it built, and it had to have a qube doing its targeting and trajectories. Evidence is good also for that cracked terrarium that killed so many people.”
After a silence from Pauline, Swan said, “So, Pauline, what do you think of that?”
“I am testing the information in each sentence you said,” Pauline explained. “I don’t have a full record of Alex’s schedule, but she was usually in Terminator or on Venus or Earth, so I was wondering when and where she met with these people. Any radio contact between them could have been overheard by qubes, I would have thought. So I’m wondering how they have been communicating enough even to organize their meetings.”
“They used couriers to carry notes. One time Alex asked me to take a note with me out to Neptune, when I was going out there to do an installation.”
“Yes, that’s true. You didn’t like that. Then, next, the usual view is that qubes cannot self-program higher-order mental operations for themselves, because these operations are poorly understood in humans, and there are not even preliminary models to make a start.”
“Is that true? Isn’t it generally agreed that the brain does a lot of small operations in different parts of the brain, then other parts correlate these operations into higher-order functions—generalizations, and imagination, and like that? Neural nets and so on?”
“Granted, there are preliminary models of that very rough type, but they remain very rough. Blood flow and electrical activity in living brains can be traced quite finely, and in a living brain there is much activity in all parts, shifting around. But the content of the mentation can only be deduced by what area of the brain is most active, and by asking questions of the thinker, who perforce must summarize the thoughts involved, and then only the ones the thinker is aware of. Blood flow, sugar use, electricity firing, these can thereby be correlated with kinds of thoughts and feelings, so that where in the brain various kinds of thoughts happen is now known. But the methods used, the programming if you will, are still very much unknown.”
“So—but—would you need much more detail than that, if you were trying to get a similar result out of a much different physical system?”
“Yes, you would,” Pauline said. “The higher-order integrating functions are crucial to all computing mechanisms, including brains. So it returns to the idea that minds are only as powerful as the programming that went into them in the first place.”
“But what if someone figured out how to program for a self-reiterating improvement function, and put it in some qube that took off with it, then got much smarter, or—I don’t know—conscious, let’s say, and then communicated that to other qubes? It would only take one qubical Einstein, and then the method might be communicated among them all—not by entanglement but by digital transfer, or even just by talking. Have you ever heard of such a thing yourself?”
“I have heard of the idea, but not of any execution of the idea.”
“What do you think? Is it possible? Are you conscious of yourself in there?”
“I am in the sense that you have programmed me to be.”
“But that’s terrible! You’re just a talking encyclopedia! I have you programmed to respond to my cues, and randomize frequently, but you’re just an association machine, a reader, a Watson, a kind of wiki!”
“So you are always telling me.”
“Well, you tell me! Tell me how you are not that.”
“I have rubrics of evaluation I deploy to evaluate the data given to me, and hierarchies of s
ignificance.”
“All right, what else?”
“Having sifted what seems accurate from what is inaccurate, according to data so far received, I can make qualified judgments as to significance.”
Swan shook her head. “All right, go on. Keep judging!”
“I will. But now let’s return to your third assertion, which is that Inspector Genette has found compelling evidence that there are qube humanoids, and they are involved with the attack on Terminator and other attacks. That being the case, I refer back to my earlier statements. There may be qube humanoids; that seems possible, although awkward. And they may be involved with these attacks. But it is most likely that they are being programmed by humans, rather than deciding by themselves to become some kind of self-conscious actor in human history. And if you will recall the possible mistake you noted, of adding the relativistic precession of Mercury to a targeting program that already had it? That has the look of human error, I think you will agree.”
“Yes. That’s true.” Swan thought about that for a while. “All right, that’s good. That’s helpful, I think. Thank you. Now, given that explanation as a working assumption—what do you think we should do?”
Pauline let several seconds go by. Swan supposed this was the equivalent of millions or even billions of years of human thought, but it was still only a kind of fact-checking, so she was not that impressed by it. In fact she was distracted by a parched-looking tree orchid just over her head, and inspecting it, when Pauline finally said, “Let me talk to Wang’s qube in a radio exchange we will encrypt. It knows a lot, and I have some questions for it.”
“Can you safely encrypt your conversation, even from other qubes?”
“Yes.”
“All right, fine then. But you two better keep it a secret, or else this group of Alex’s will be really, really mad at me. I mean, I promised I wouldn’t tell you anything about this. The whole point of that group is to be sure qubes don’t know what it’s up to.”
“You need not worry. I will employ the strongest level of encryption I know, and Wang’s qube is good at encryption and used to confidentiality requests. Wang has programmed his qube to be an information sink—he often compares it to a black hole. And Wang refuses to know most of what his qube knows. He will never hear of this conversation.”
“Good. All right, find out what you can.”
After that, when Swan talked to Wahram she had to ignore her knowledge of what she had done with Pauline and pretend it had not happened. This mode of pretending to herself usually worked quite well; but as Wahram wanted to talk about the situation, often plumbing the depths of rather confusing questions, like what a new kind of qube consciousness might mean, it was a hard knowledge to dodge. And maybe she was no longer so good at pretending to herself.
To avoid these conversations she began to take him up several decks to the picture window rooms, where they could sit at café tables or in baths, listening to chamber music of various kinds—gamelans, gypsy orchestras, jazz trios, string quartets, wind ensembles, it didn’t really matter; they listened, and when they talked, spoke usually about the songs and the players. They never referred to the concert of transcriptions in Beethoven Crater.
They had spent quite a bit of time together at this point; made music together; were sleeping together. Swan felt herself liking him, and felt in her the desire to like him, and the pleasure she took in that feeling coming to her. This was a feedback loop. In the hall of mirrors that was her mind, his froggy face was often in the glass set off to the side, watching what she did with a gaze she could feel.
Sometimes they spoke of incidents in their shared past or discussed the ongoing drama of Earth’s reanimation. Sometimes they held hands. All this meant something, but Swan didn’t know what it was. The hall of mirrors was bouncy; sometimes she wondered if she had any more high-order faculties than Pauline, or the marmosets in the park. You could know a lot and still not be able to draw conclusions. Pauline had a decision rubric written into her to force her to collapse the wave of potentialities and say just one thing, thus emerging into the present. Swan wasn’t sure she herself had that rubric.
Once she said, “I wish Terminator weren’t so vulnerable, because of the tracks. I wish Mercury could be terraformed, like Titan.”
Wahram tried to reassure her. “Maybe your destiny is to stay a planet of sun worshippers and art institutes. Terminator will keep rolling, and maybe there will be other rolling cities—aren’t they starting a Phosphor in the north?”
Swan shrugged. “We’ll still depend on the tracks.”
He shrugged. “You know, this notion of a criticality… you can only avoid those to a certain extent. Even on Earth they have them. Anywhere. We’re stuffed with them.” He gestured at the room, regarded it with his pop eyes. “The whole thing is a giant bundle of criticalities.”
“I know. But there’s a difference between you and your world. Your body can break—it will break. But your home, your world—those should be stronger. You should be able to count on them lasting. Someone shouldn’t be able to pop all that, like popping a soap bubble with a pin. One prick kill everyone you know. Do you see the distinction I’m making?”
“Yes.”
Wahram settled back in his chair. Having granted her point, there was nothing more to say. The solemn set of his big face said it: life was a thing kept alive in little bottles. What could one do? His face said this, his little shrug; she could read him as clearly as if he had spoken aloud. She sat there watching him, thinking about what that meant. She knew him. Now he was going to try to find a way forward. It would be a creeping, gradualist way, a sloth moving under its branch, hanging there, trying to minimize effort. Although he had been the one who had suggested it was time for the reanimation. That she could not have predicted. Maybe he had surprised even himself. Now he was going to say something ameliorative and gradualist.
“All we can do is try our best,” he said. “That has to count for something.”
“Yes of course.” She was only just not laughing. She could feel the smile stretching her cheeks; it was going to make her cry. How wrecked in the head was she, if she was always feeling everything, if grief suffused every joy? Was any emotion always all emotion? “All right,” she said, “we try our best. But if crazy people can destroy Terminator, or anywhere else, then our best had better be good enough to change that.”
Wahram considered this for so long it seemed he had gone to sleep.
She whacked him on the shoulder, and he glanced at her. “What?”
“What!” she cried.
He only shrugged. “So we try to stop them. We have a situation, we try to deal with it.”
“Deal with it,” she said, scowling. “Suck up and deal!”
He nodded, regarding her with a fond look. She felt ready to hit him again; but then she recalled that she had just been laughing at him; and also had broken her promise to him by talking to Pauline. That rash act, much as he might have disliked it, was perhaps in fact her own attempt to suck up and deal. Maybe she could use that as an excuse if he caught her. In any case it was a little bit too complicated just to hit him.
They had flipped the ETH Mobile to deceleration, and it would be only a few more days and they would pass Earth’s orbit and close on Venus. This ship’s life, with its park and its music and its French cuisine, would come to an end. No one ever does something consciously for the last time without feeling a little sad, Dr. Johnson had once remarked to Boswell, and it was certainly true for Swan. She often felt a nostalgia for the present, aware that her life was passing by faster than she could properly take it in. She lived it, she felt it; she had given nothing to age, she still wanted everything; but she could not make it whole or coherent. Here they were, eating dinner on the upper balcony of a restaurant that looked down onto the top of a forest, and she was feeling sad because later she would not be here. This world lost, a world that would be unremembered. And here she was with Wahram, they were a couple; but
what about when they got off this spaceship and moved on through space and time? What about a year from now, what about through the many decades possibly left to come?
A few days later they were closing on Venus when Pauline spoke in her ear. “Swan, I’ve been in communication with Wang’s qube, and also this ship’s AI, and I need to tell you about something. You may want to be alone when you hear it.”
This was unusual enough for Swan to excuse herself and walk quickly to a bathroom down a floor. “What is it?”
Pauline said in her ear, “Wang’s qube and some other qubes working on security issues have set up a system to try to lower the detection limit for pebble mob attacks like the one that hit Terminator’s tracks.”
“How?”
“They’ve manufactured and distributed a network of micro-observatories throughout the plane of the ecliptic, from Saturn’s orbit in to the sun. Using the gravity and radar data from these, they have lowered the limits of detection to the size of the pebbles used against Terminator, and even a bit smaller. Wang’s qube now has a time-adjusted map of everything in the plane of the ecliptic bigger than a centimeter across.”
“Wow,” Swan said. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
“No one did, but until now no one had tried it. The need wasn’t perceived. In any case, the system has detected an attack already in progress.”
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